documenta marketing guy talk, Kassel
trying to destroy the brand to some extent as the brand had come to overshadow the art
there are many different design identities > deliberate obfuscation of brand rather than a meaningful chaos or corporate branding // the Owl could very easily have ended up everywhere > marketing guy was working “an anti-owl campaign”, haha
at least 10% more visitors in the first week > how does that fit with destroying the brand? // the confusion works as a kind of marketing // contrasts with the commercial order of Art Basel or the nationalist order of Venice > Documenta is the only place of disruption
documenta being in Athens has been criticised as a form of cultural colonisation // lots of effort put into preventing this > public education bits started six months before opening / funding, concept, artist representation etc. were all treated equally
important to go to Athens > can you talk about the global contemporary from a safe place like Kassel // Athens as a metaphor for the global south
what can art contribute to making the world better place
"we do not want [documenta] to be just a spectacle" but if you want to make a political statement you want to take as many people with you, and so there is a balancing act in the type of work exhibited
“THERE IS ROOM FOR IDEALISM IN CONTEMPORARY ART”
Neue Neue Galerie
Echoing and reconfiguring the old post office as a nexus of distribution, the artists featured here work with the axes between Kassel and Athens as lines of departure and arrival. The art on view explores the labor of dissemination—by mail, on horseback, through bodies or rituals. The concept of redistribution broadens to encompass larger questions about the production of history, of how certain political conditions form a canon that in turn produces certain types of artistic labor. Many of the artworks featured in the main hall, on the mezzanine, and on the top floor (which once served as an employee canteen and rest area) generate critical ideas about intersections in history, articulating the site as a continuously evolving and dissolving heterotopia.
Theo Eshetu, Atlas Fractured, 2017
many layers: (1) ground (banner); (2) person projected over mask structure of the ground; and (3) image projected upon that person’s face
sound (occasionally) lines up with one of the projected images
you can discern the individual layers but they seem to add up to more than what is there
From the didactic:
Projected onto an original banner that once decorated the facade of the Ethologishces Museum in Berlin-Dahlem (a predecessor of the highly controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin), that was then cut into pieces, thus creating a “new world order,” new figures are super-imposed on the kind of masks that have long represented continents and with the them the geopolitical division of the world.
Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Things That Bend, 2017
nuance is an overtone of memory it is part of a mnemonic trace it can be traced inside images mnemonic images technical images nuance should not be mistaken as color of an image it is a mechanism that operates within images it is the things that bend the fine things the hands that bend slices of lungs that leave from the mouth