“Our dominance is supreme and our isolation is profound.” These words, taken from N. Scott Momaday’s essay, “A Storyteller and His Art,” pronounce the condition of modern man, some four hours into the sprawling 14-hour institutional excavation that comprises Dimitris Athiridis’ exergue – on documenta 14. One might be tempted to read into the aphorism something more fundamental and innate to the human condition and its necessary pursuit of aesthetic ideals, just as one might seek to isolate from its supremacy and profundity the question of technology and its totalizing influences. For the steadfast curatorial team behind the 14th edition of the documenta exhibition, neither approach quite hits the mark, as the conspiring forces around them seek, whether wilfully or obtusely, to disentangle the exhibition from its purported aim of balancing “between the love for art and the engagement for society.” When neither aesthete nor activist are convinced of its utility, where does the money flow from?
This conundrum lends exergue’s proceedings an air of frustration, even as the film’s fly-on-the-wall approach and virtually unobstructed access into the machinations of documenta 14’s realization provide an enthralling and even overwhelming experience for the art economy’s outsiders. Training his camera on its artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, Athiridis embarks upon a two-year odyssey tracing the curatorial and financing processes of the exhibition, from its rocky inception in 2015 as a proposal for two host cities — the first and thus far only attempt in its 70-year history — to the multiple crises of coordination and budget deficits that threatened to derail its opening in 2017. As the film’s main subject apart from the documenta itself, Szymczyk exudes little of the self-importance associated with the tastemakers of culture: having previously served as chief curator of the Kunsthalle Basel, the lithe and mostly soft-spoken Pole appears almost obstinate in his sincere ambitions to anchor at the documenta a site of transformative potential. “Things need to be radically redefined,” goes the prevailing sentiment shared among his team.
Among the myriad difficulties they encounter along the way, some of them Herculean, is the issue of what it means exactly to be radical, or if the documenta’s institutional framework can indeed serve such a function. The documenta’s origins, as an instrument of soft power wielded against the Cold War’s losers, closely mirror the German state’s present economic interests; funding and exhibiting artists from the global South therefore becomes a matter of political expediency, while the suggestion to expand documenta beyond its home city of Kassel to Athens — now a metonym for Germany’s predatory regime of fiscal austerity over the Greeks during the Eurozone crisis — is inevitably met with outcry and smear campaigns. Yet the sheer openness envisioned by Szymczyk’s collaborators, whose ranks include the likes of Dieter Roelstraete and Paul B. Preciado, also invites charges of bourgeois gentrification. Insofar as its critiques of contemporary capitalism go unnoticed except by the few privileged enough to attend, the documenta’s global ambit appears with each passing day to fade into sharp irrelevance.
By virtue of its sheer duration, exergue (the second longest non-experimental documentary so far, just after Peter Watkins’ Resan) devotes little time to moral pontification, allowing the multiplicity of exchanges to speak for themselves. Internal curatorial meetings, negotiations with sponsors and participating museums, scouting trips to Beirut, Johannesburg, Kolkata: laying bare the grueling realities of an art world in perpetual decline, Athiridis also places this world in conversation with the more pressing incursions of political disarray, with neofascism and neoliberalism being the two most vehement currents against freedom and expression. While more apparently successful in resisting the former, Szymczyk and co. are quick to remind us of their intertwined conditions, that “fear is the common currency of neoliberalism, precisely because it can [more easily capitalize on] desire and unbound joy.” No easy answer inheres — a fact true of art, but now equally illustrative of art’s wider place in its ecosystem of curators, financiers, producers, and spectators. exergue, whose title denotes a space or inscription on a coin that inscribes a symbolic value beyond its practical worth, may ultimately be both futile in stemming the depreciation of hope and necessary as a document of hope’s tenuous possibility.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
Comments are closed.