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Unlearning from Europe

Notes on documenta 14

David Corbet
Eyeline 88
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How best to structure an essay about such a dispersed and elusive entity as documenta 14, spread across two distant cities and scores of venues? If form follows function, it presages a sprawling, out-of-control, poorly-signposted essay—an amalgam of impressions, detours, accidental discoveries, passing conversations, venues not found, lessons learned and unlearned.1
Part of the difficulty, or conversely the allure of documenta, is its sheer complexity, and this entails more than the geographical. Apart from the exhibits, each edition of the famed quinquennial features an ever-expanding public program of forums, performances, screenings and participatory actions. In 2017 this was titled The Parliament of Bodies, devised by queer theorist and writer Paul B. Preciado, encompassing thirty-four ‘Exercises of Freedom’ in Athens’s Parko Eleftherias, and six so-called ‘Open Form Societies’, alongside many other actions, described thus,
… a dissonant and yet synchronic practice of heteroglossia and heterogeneity. Nomadic and performative, working as a stateless heterotopia by means of multiplication and displacement, the Parliament of Bodies acts within the spaces of the exhibition as well as within spaces of both cities (theaters, associations, studios, squares…) that are experimenting with new forms of sovereignty beyond the norm.2

Admirable sentiments, but it is hard not to smile at such convoluted language—and such statements have been reviled by several writers as the kind of thing that alienates ‘ordinary’ people from contemporary art. Arguably more accessible has been an excellent two-year discursive/publishing platform across four issues of Athens-based journal South as a State of Mind (founded and edited by Marina Fokidis in 2012),3 a documenta 14 daybook and documenta 14 reader. Add to these the main event—the Public Exhibition—across forty-seven exhibition venues in Athens... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Maria Eichhorn, Unlawfully acquired books from Jewish ownership. Installation view, Neue Galerie, Kassel, documenta 14. © Maria Eichhorn/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017. Photograph Mathias Völzke.

Maria Eichhorn, Unlawfully acquired books from Jewish ownership. Installation view, Neue Galerie, Kassel, documenta 14. © Maria Eichhorn/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017. Photograph Mathias Völzke.

Beau Dick, installation view, documenta Halle, Kassel, documenta 14. Photograph Roman März

Beau Dick, installation view, documenta Halle, Kassel, documenta 14. Photograph Roman März