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Suitcases of rubbish on the beaches of Europe

Toward an end of world weariness

Helen Grace
Eyeline 88
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Day 1 in Kassel for documenta 14 was spent getting lost, racing around obscure outlying venues, packing in as much art as we could before my companion took the six-hour trip back to Amsterdam that night. By Day 2, I found myself footsore and slumping on the stairs of the Neue Galerie, almost unable to face more art. It turns out, you cannot sit on these stairs, it is a health and safety issue, it blocks traffic flow in the event of a fire, so I was briskly moved on by an attendant.

‘But I’m exhausted!’ I protested. Unfazed by yet another case of art fatigue, he quietly pointed me to an area of the Neue Galerie where it is possible to sit without being moved on—a side corridor, lined with classical figures, the entrance to which is guarded by two superb Benin bronzes.¹

 

And this detour, disrupting the straightforward pathway I had planned, giving me pause in my world weariness, somehow opened up the whole exhibition, leading me through its ‘Learning from Greece’ theme, from a non-European direction. The Benin bronzes, are, along with the Parthenon marbles, at the heart of calls for cultural restitution that challenge the ethics of collecting in Western museums—and of their authority too.

 

The historical legacy of this is ‘brought home’ in a precise way in the juxtaposition of the stunning Benin bronzes with the late nineteenth century Carl Friedrich Echtermeier’s allegorical ‘national types’—monumental sculptures of women, embodying the classical Canon of Polykleitos,² the very foundation of Greek sculptural proportion and ideal form to this day. The Benin figures formally unpick that tradition, with works like them underpinning the emergence of modernism... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi. Curtain made from reindeer skulls and metal wire, 300 x 450cm. Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost) Kassel. Photograph Mathias Völzke.

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi. Curtain made from reindeer skulls and metal wire, 300 x 450cm. Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost) Kassel. Photograph Mathias Völzke.

Carl Friedrich Echtermeier, National Figures, England, 1882. Marble. Neue Galerie, Kassel. Photograph ©Helen Grace.

Carl Friedrich Echtermeier, National Figures, England, 1882. Marble. Neue Galerie, Kassel. Photograph ©Helen Grace.