Documenta 13: Kassel’s art offerings

Last weekend we headed north to visit Documenta 13, Kassel’s big contemporary art spectacle. Started in the aftermath of World War II, when Germany’s creative scene was looking for a way to recover from the snoozefest that constituted approved Third Reich art, Documenta takes over this city every five years for 100 days.

Documenta (or dOCUMENTA, as it often appears) is spread out over much of the city of Kassel, with exhibits in several buildings around town (including the train station and a nazi bunker) and all throughout a very large park (Karlsaue). We spent two full days exploring the art and probably saw less than half of it.

The installations in the park are individual pieces of art, many housed in purpose-built little structures. It’s a bit of a walk from one to the next, and we rarely knew what to expect when we arrived at each one. Sometimes we were delighted by what we found; other pieces left us with that “Come on, really?” feeling that sometimes accompanies conceptual art (particularly conceptual art that relies too heavily on ‘found objects’ like string and piles of trash).

Some of the highlights of Documenta 13 for us (listed by their numbers on the Documenta map):

• 22: Massimo Bartolini’s hypnotic wave
• 37: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s sound installation in the woods
• 82: the story of a Picasso in Palestine
• 98: an exhibition about artists in the Vietnam war
• 105: Marcos Lutyens and Raimundas Malasauskas’s optical illusiony interior
• 119: MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho’s vision of the future
• 147: Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium
• 155: Anri Sala’s clock
• 156: Charlotte Salomon‘s gouaches
• 188: Yan Lei’s 360 paintings

Kassel itself was a bit of a non-event; it came off as a rather typical small German city, with all the usual parts yet nothing much to distinguish itself. Or perhaps we weren’t looking in the right places?

Documenta 13 is on through 16 September 2012. Have you seen it?