First Look: Hazoume Romuald @ Documenta 12

Is modernity our antiquity? Hazoume Romuald proffers an answer.

The morning after the night before.

With revelers still wandering the streets of Kassel from the opening party last night, Documenta 12 is just a few hours away from officially opening to the public. Here's a photo op from earlier in the week of the artists selected for this year's event. I've uploaded a fairly large file, so click on it to enlarge if you want to better see who's who. While I managed a sneak preview of several venues yesterday, Walter Robinson has written quite a comprehensive piece for ArtNet so click through for his first impressions and I'll fill you in with more in the coming days.

Is modernity our antiquity? The answer is nigh.

Documenta 12 doesn't officially open till the weekend, but a number of works have been erected in public spaces here in Kassel and they're already drawing interest from locals and early arrivals. This afternoon I ran out to have a look at Shipwreck and Workers (version 3) (pictured) by Allan Sekula at the Herkules (mentioned in my last post). The work comprises a progression of large photograghs, several of which can be seen here to right of the Wasserspiel. Sekula hails from Erie, PA and was also heavily featured in Documenta 11.

Unfortunately, the rain that plagued the opening days of the Venice Biennale seems to have followed the art mob north and moments ago began bucketing down in droves as I waited for my tram back into town from Schloss Wilhelmshöhe. With more of the same forecast throughout the weekend, let's hope King Roger's Plastic Palace isn't made of cotton candy.

Blackberry permitting, I'll duly keep you posted. Tschüss.

1 down, 2 to go.

As the art hoards head north from Venice to Basel this week, the citizens of Kassel are enjoying one last moment of calm before the onslaught begins on their own city, with the opening of Documenta 12 this weekend.

Several readers have asked advice on what else there is to do in Kassel beyond Documenta, with the standard reply being, "Nothing," but I beg to differ. Kassel's museums offer a cabinet of curiosities well worth pursuing when you need a break from the newest and latest at Documenta. While The German Wallpaper Museum may not be to everyone's liking, the home of the Brothers Grimm is a short walk from main Documenta venues, offering a welcome respite. Across the street from the Grimms is the Neue Gallery, featuring perhaps Joseph Beuys best known work, The Pack, 1969 (above), as well as many landmark German paintings from the late 20th century.

Even closer to Documenta is the rather fabulous Museum of Natural History in the Ottoneum. You'll pass it daily walking from the Museum Fridericianum to L'Orangerie, but few of Document's 650,000 viewers will ever step into this marvelous little museum of wonders.

Also worth a diversion is Schloss Wilhelmshöhe on the edge of town, which houses the Old Masters Gallery. Choose a Wednesday or Sunday and you'll experience one of the great marvels of eighteenth century mechanical engineering, as you watch the Wasserspiel cascade down the mountain in it's half hour trek from the Herkules statue on the summit, finishing in a 52 meter jet of water in the gardens of the Schloss.

Unlike Venice and Basel, opening night in Kassel is a public event, with a grand party for the entire city kicking off Friday night.

Is modernity our antiquity? Finally, we'll learn the truth according to Roger & Ruth this weekend. See you there.

Zeitraum Rising

I've just realised I haven't given you an update on MusesumZeitraum's progress in some time. Too busy debating the great issues. Here's a shot of Klaus Richter in the Leipzig foundry where our fabulous new staircase is being fabricated. When installed, this sculptural wonder will lead up from the ground floor galleries to the photographic rooms.

Is modernity our antiquity? Not at MuseumZeitraum, where modernity remains the order of the day.

When men were men and Beuys was Beuys. Documenta 12 enjoys the shade of D7.

With the opening of Documenta 12 just a month away, I ventured out west to Kassel last week to visit King Roger and Queen Ruth and gaze upon their majestic new Plastic Palace on the grounds of L’Orangerie. If you don’t mind the distant roar of generators and compressors keeping the air conditioning flowing, and you ignore the implications for Documenta 12’s carbon footprint, it’s a spectacular sight, even without the art installed.

It is not possible in my experience, however, to visit Kassel without feeling the overwhelming presence of an installation that returns to life this time every year, that of Joseph Beuys 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks). Planting of the trees began at Documenta 7 in 1982 and continued for five years with support from the Dia Foundation, with the last of the 7000 planted at D8.

25 years on, the oaks are reaching a more graceful maturity than most of us. And hopefully, with the buds open and the leaves growing to fullness this month, Prince Joseph’s grand gesture will be busy converting King Roger’s carbon dioxide output back into fresh clean oxygen.

One of my favourite gifts for artist friends is to pass along a handful of acorns from these sacred oaks after a trip to Kassel. I’ve even been known to hop off the train to spend an hour collecting acorns before jumping on the next train when my travels take me through Kassel. This year I loaded up a shoe-box full from around the University and have been busy wrapping them up and posting them out. The notion of the artist’s seed spreading across the globe even after death is terribly modernist, I know, but all credit to Prince Joseph for such a far-sighted effort.

Is modernity our antiquity? In this case, sadly yes. What is bare life? Prince Joseph’s seed – the acorn – I believe. Was tun? Plant trees, King Roger, to repent for your sins!

"Controversy is normal with us"

Documenta 12 artistic director Roger M. Buergel offers members of the press a guided tour of exhibition venues earlier today in Kassel.

Buergel made clear he has won the argument with architect Jean Philippe Vassal that I've been reporting on in recent days and the Plastic Palace will be fully air conditioned. Roger pointedly told the press, "The architecture has to subordinate itself to the art." As to such high-brow concerns as his leitmotif, Is modernity our antiquity? we'll get back to that after the gossip dies downs.

Documenta 12: better pack your Hawaiian Tropic

Last week I gave you a first look at the new Plastic Pavilion rising before Kassel’s Orangerie for Documenta 12 this summer. This week I can confirm rumours circulating around the city that artistic director Roger Buergel isn’t altogether happy with the pavilion's architects, Jean-Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton.

Die Süddeutsche Zeitung is running an interview with the French team today in which they take the position that the structures should live and breathe Kassel's natural climate. Roger's not so sure.

"The problem is not the form of the pavilion," explains Vassal. "It's the system. One should feel the atmosphere of fresh air in the [Karlsaue] park, close to the river. In the summer, the Karlsaue should become a resting place that is as natural as possible and understood as part of the exterior. The climate should be felt inside, too, in a way that's different from the traditional museum. . . A greenhouse should not be sealed off."

Buergel, on the other hand is panicking that hanging art works -- many on loan from institutional collections -- in a hot and sweaty greenhouse all summer may not make him the most popular director among conservation staff. Word has it there are already threats of works being pulled from the show.

The architects argue the system meets Buergel's concept of an India-inspired "palm grove" where guests can congregate and discuss art and society, while Buergel is insisting his metaphor is being taken a little too far.

"The most important factor for the museum climate is the sweat of each individual visitor," Vassal says. "There, a purely artificial atmosphere becomes a problem. If Buergel has an image in mind of people sitting under trees in India, then he should think about what kind of architecture comes closest to this image."

Is modernity our antiquity, Roger asks? It will be soon enough if he starts shipping home Ruschas and Richters left faded, blistered and cracking from a summer in the sun.

Was tun? A way forward.

Over the past two months I've been deliberating Documenta 12's leitmotif, Is modernity our antiquity? I've argued that both modernity and antiquity are little more than linear, if substantial, events in the West's ongoing Terror of History. This terror has now engulfed all the world's reaches, but there are those still defiant in their determination not to sink into the cultural morass that is the West's making. I offered the example of Aboriginal Australia, one culture whose preoccupation with place has allowed them to maintain a certain remove from this Terror of History and from the all-consuming linearity of time.

A performance staged last month at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, offers perhaps the most compelling way forward, one involving neither modernity, nor antiquity, but an acceptance of the Aboriginal world-view transcendent of time, fixated rather on the universality of space. Here several of Australia's leading jazz musicians perform traditional manikay (song) with songmen from the Ngukurr community, along the Roper River in south-east Arnhem Land. In singing the songs of their ancestors, songs whose origins anthropologists date back some 40,000 years, these songmen and their jazz cohorts join together to renew the very birth of our human existence, a humbling and thought-provoking thing to experience, even if only on YouTube.

Documenta 12 wonders, is modernity our antiquity? Yes, and we have Andy and GoogleNation to thank.

Regular readers will notice several changes in our blog over the past week, with the inclusion in our right-hand column of a live news diary covering breaking events in the art world, and rotating videos relating to both Leipzig and the art scene at large. These are brought to you courtesy of Google and YouTube. The news pre-set is for stories on documenta 12, but you can click on any of the other listed keywords, including biennale, louvre and museumzeitraum to find out what's happening in these worlds.

In the lead-up to Documenta this summer, we've been discussing Roger and Ruth's leitmotifs, is modernity our antiquity?, what is bare life? and was tun?

One of my contentions has been that the breakdown of modernity has come about through the collapse of its power structures, mostly recently and most significantly through the rise of the internet. Constantly evolving technologies such as these services all contribute to an increase in the reach and voice of the individual at the expense the traditional gatekeepers of the canon, creating a certain paradox: in a mass global society, the power and importance of the individual grows, rather than diminishes. For individuals in what were formerly the planets outer reaches, the web has democratised access to the structures and machinations of power to an extent previously unimagined. Little more than 20 years after the art world 'discovered' there was an 'outside' and 'periphery', they've suddenly found it's gone. With the playing field flattened in our postcolonial/internet age, there is only the centre to be fought over and for the artist, the ensuing chaos to decipher. Where once the internet merely informed the political process, it now has the immense capability of wholly transforming it.

Documenta 12 rises before the Orangerie

With all our talk of Documenta 12's leitmotifs in recent weeks - Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? Was tun? - it's easy to forget there's real work being done to ready Kassel for the grand opening, just two months away. Here's a first look at the temporary galleries, or Plastic Palace as it's being called, on the beautiful grounds of the Orangerie.

Documenta 12 asks, “Is modernity our antiquity?” MZL wonders, maybe it’s rocket science after all.

Three years after the publication of Albert Einstein’s seminal Special Theory of Relativity (1905), his mentor and one-time teacher, Hermann Minkowski, gave a lecture in Cologne elaborating on his former student’s findings, beginning with the proclamation that,

Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

What Minkowski couldn’t predict was how painfully long it would take for our Newtonian belief in fixed time to actually fade into mere shadows. As the twentieth century unfolded, fixed time only became more entrenched, largely because it proved so useful a tool in promoting our singular march toward Progress.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, there are cultures for whom space and time never suffered the humiliation of separation, Aboriginal Australia chief among them. Here the Dreaming maintains a union of the two, where there is only place to consider.

Einstein would seem to concur, once stating, “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.” To remove Einstein’s theory from the theoretical and prove it, of course, meant doing things like sending a twenty-year-old identical twin off in a rocket at very nearly the speed of light for two years (in his time), and have him return to find his brother a very old man living comfortably in Tucson, Arizona with the rest of the feeble old scientists who had shot him off into the ether seventy years earlier (in their time) in the first place.

The truth that rested in his theory of relativity also provided the unwanted proof of what an oily calm modern man had been sailing headlong into, somewhere en route ordaining the rest of the world should run adrift with him.

Despite the lingering influence of those such as Heidegger — with his modified Newtonian view of the present — it should have been apparent that in a world of space-time, the past, the present and the future all do exist quite simultaneously.

What modern man failed to realise Einstein was saying, was that time and space aren’t fixed or readily determinable; they are, in fact, infinitely variable. And while they do exist in a relative sense, there is nothing absolute in their nature. They are instead interwoven, making one quite inseparable from the other. So time exists for me in the space I occupy, and time exists for you in the space you occupy, but there are no grounds for the worn-out belief that time exists commonly and universally for the both of us.

That which modern man has known and thought of as time for so long is certainly no less real than the printing press or the motor car, but nor is it any less a product of his own invention.

Returning to Roger and Ruth’s question, “Is modernity our antiquity?” then, in terms of the world-view they perpetuate they could just as well be one in same. The failed linearity of time is inherent and intrinsic to both.

An Easter greetings.

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Catedral Metropolitana, Mexico City, 1897. Albumen silver print, 23 x 18 cm, WF901020.

Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? Was tun? Worthy questions for this Easter season. More on these leitmotifs posed by the Documenta 12 team next week.

In the meantime, what a nutty world we live in when British soldiers leave their Iranian captors on BA business class, in new suits, with handsome show-bags in hand? Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in rabbit ears and a bushy tail. A pr coup or not, it was worth the chuckle heard round the world.

A warm Easter greetings to all.

Was Tun? A video reply from Yusuf Islam.

In recent weeks I've been deliberating the Documenta 12 team's first leitmotif "Is modernity our antiquity?" As regular readers will know, I've taken the position that the Terror of History, as the late University of Chicago Professor Mircea Eliade coined it, leaves the question somewhat in tatters. While the team has also raised the more insightful question, "Which modernity and whose antiquity?", this line of questioning still marginalises those cultures wholly and voluntarily outside the Western paradigm.

On this rather beautiful spring morning here in Leipzig, I have decided to address the question today by simply shutting down my Powerbook and going for a walk. I leave you with something you'll likely enjoy much more than my usual pontification: a prayer for peace. Here Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) performs Heaven / Where True Love Goes at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, 11 December 2006.

Documenta 12 asks, "Is modernity our antiquity?" MZL wonders, or is it our Hotel California?

In deliberating the first of three leitmotifs posed by the Documenta team, "Is modernity our antiquity?", I've left little doubt in recent posts my feeling that modernity has come to its rightful end, just as antiquity did well before it, but the broader and more relevant question remains, have we actually escaped modernity or has it become our inescapable Hotel California? (At least not hearing the Eagles sing it again is escapable. I've chosen here a version by the Gypsy Kings while you ponder the question for 5 minutes, 47 seconds.)

Antiquity may be the basis of much that we in the West do and believe in, but it is not a universal paradigm, to the extent that modernity is. Every culture not only experiences a varying degree of impact from Western antiquity, but posseses its own distinct antiquity to reference as well. On the other hand, dead or alive, modernity remains as ubiquitous and unrelenting a force as ever across all the world's cultural boundaries (discussed in my previous posts), however late it might have arrived to some.

What is bare life? Was ist das bloße Leben?

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Nietzsche 306P, 1897. 370 x 280 x 100 mm.

In recent posts I've been examining the first of three leitmotifs posed by the Documenta 12 team, "Is modernity our antiquity?" If I may, I'd like to skip ahead to the second question for a moment, "What is bare life?" as further means of addressing the first.

In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown, often attributed to his contraction of syphilis, resulting in his admission to various clinics before he was moved to Naumburg, where his mother looked after him until her death in 1897. At this point his sister Elisabeth shifted him to Weimar, where she continued his care, as well as promoting his legacy and allowing the occasional audience with guests until his death in 1900.

It was in Weimar that Johann Dieter Wassmann briefly visited Nietzsche, but finding only a shell of a man he returned home to produce this work, depicting simply and eloquently the empty collar of the man, an organ stop with the name 'Nietzsche' printed on it, and an opium-stained bone apothecary spoon; a life stripped bare. These objects are placed against a dappled blue wall, reflecting Nietzsche's penchant for blue-lensed spectacles.

Johann's ability to take the contemporary moment of his visit with Nietzsche and so confidently convert it into the iconography of modernism speaks legions about the raw vitality of the modern movement at the dawn of the 20th century. In no time, however, modernity fell victim to the second law of thermodynamics, with entropy holding sway, but it was not until the close of the century that we realised the paradigm had simply collapsed en route.

Today it is essentially modernity stripped bare that we address as artists and curators, an ongoing post-mortem of abject failure. So in this sense is modernity our antiquity? The answer is not so clear.

Is modernity our antiquity? A video reply.

In tackling the question, "Is modernity our antiquity?" posed by the Documenta 12 team, I thought it might do, while we're still in the early stages of our discussion, to offer the podium to the Monty Python gang for a short reply with their immortal sketch Art Gallery.

Is modernity our antiquity? A prologue.

In the first of a series, we invite writers to comment on the three leitmotifs posed by the Documenta 12 team. Here, Abigali von Bibra provides a short prologue to the question: Is modernity our antiquity? Abigail von Bibra teaches linguistics in Paris. She is writing a history of Prussian gender roles.

Every generation has its defining moments. The death of a leader. The collapse of commerce. The emergence of a nation from war. In due course, these events come to form a special kind of ground zero for the generations that follow. The chronicle of these and still lesser events falls together in what is at best a connect-the-dots manner, with one event crudely linked to the next. The picture that emerges is our skeletal image of history -- a working sketch held in general agreement upon which ‘definitive’ histories are then forged (yes, a double entendre). With these simple drawings in hand, the interpreters get down to business, over-painting their canvases in rich hues of red or yellow or white or black or whichever colour -- in whatever form and density -- the interpreter’s school of thought believes is relevant amid the cross-currents and undertows of the era. In this fashion, a portrait of history comes into being, with no two quite the same.

The Battle of Leipzig is one such defining moment, not just for Napoleon and Europe, but as well for three generations of Saxon cabinet-makers whose lives spanned the 19th century. The latter of the three -- Johann Dieter Wassmann – would come to pioneer early German modernism, but it is The Battle of Leipzig that most clearly informs his craft. These art works are boxed curiosities, falling somewhere between wunderkammern and Joseph Cornell, but what Johann’s boxes house are the anxieties of an era in which changes in science, medicine, industry and political philosophy have moved beyond the salons of noblemen and academics, engulfing the very real lives of the peasantry and guild classes.

Through this collection of boxes -- a collection which was once exhibited under the title ‘Bleeding Napoleon’ -- a portrait emerges in which we see a man not overly rapt with all that was taking place around him. Circumstance and good fortune made him witness to the worst and best the century had to offer, but the works themselves reflect a more focused concern. From the busy playfulness of his early pieces, to the spare elegance of his final efforts, these ‘worlds in a small room,’ as one critic has called them, are tinged with regret for what Johann perceived as the senseless separation of space (read here as Nature) from time, an apprehension that is no less endemic to our own age.

The Battle of Leipzig is an ominous moment on which to build a narrative, but it is a widely shared narrative, so much so that numerous writers and historians through the years have posited this catastrophic battle as the birth of modernity itself.

Book-ended by Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign the previous winter, and his defeat at Waterloo two years later, the battle is sometimes brushed past as a mere footnote on the road to Napoleon’s defeat. It was a bit more than that: this three-day engagement in 1813 was the greatest and bloodiest single battle of the 19th century. Never before in the history of mankind and never again until the First World War did half a million troops come face to face on the battlefield. The build-up began in the early weeks of October, the French and Allied armies assembling along a sixteen mile front east and southeast of the city. On the 16th of the month the first shots were fired; 72 hours later, Napoleon and his few remaining troops were fleeing for Paris. During this bat of an eye, 94,000 combatant casualties were incurred and 30,000 French troops were taken prisoner -- half on the battlefield, the remainder plucked from the hospitals of Leipzig. In addition, untold civilian casualties were inflicted by the vagaries of artillery used so close to an urban population.

If there had been any doubt previously, there was little doubt by 19 October 1813 that the modern era was fully upon us.

Q: Is modernity our antiquity? A: Like dah, Roger.

Pictured: recent restoration work at the Bauhaus, Dessau. Photo: Sophie Vogt.

In the first of their three leitmotifs, Documenta 12's co-directors Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack pose the question: Is modernity our antiquity? In a weighty TASCHEN mag just out titled Modernity? they ask magazine editors from around the world to pursue this question as it relates to their own cultural and historical circumstance.

To quote from the editorial to the first issue of the magazine: Which Modernity and whose Antiquity?, "The history of modernity can be told in many different ways. The authors featured in this issue therefore write about specific, local modernities, trace their dislocated or interrupted developments, explore counter- or parallel models of modernity in which undeveloped or unintended transitions and unexpected connections between spaces and practices come to light."

As an institution devoted to furthering our understanding of one of great pioneers of the early modernist movement -- Johann Dieter Wassmann -- we will be pursuing this question ourselves in coming weeks here on the MuseumZeitraum blog, while looking at the relevance of such questions in the context of our current post-colonial era.

Readers comments are willkomen!

Documenta 12... at your newstand now!

Last week I attended the launch at Vienna's Secession of Documenta 12's first magazine, Modernity?, not to be confused with Modern Maturity in case your news agent just looks at you clueless. If he doesn't already have it right up there next to Architectural Digest, you may need to explain to him that as the platform for this year's D12, artistic director Roger M. Buergel (pictured centre) and his partner Ruth Noack are using the medium of the magazine to prefigure three questions -- or leitmotifs as they describe them -- that the exhibition itself will address this summer in Kassel:

Is modernity our antiquity?
(Ist die Moderne unsere Antike?)
What is bare life?
(Was ist das bloße Leben?)
What is to be done?
(Was tun?)

If he's still not impressed, you might add that ninety-one editors from around the world were asked to respond to these questions, with this handsome tome published by TASCHEN the result. The latter two questions will be explored in the next two issues, Life! and Education, which he should be ordering for display in April and May, respectively.

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig will also be weighing into the debate in the coming months, so do stayed tuned for that cherished, if a little out-of-kilter perspective you've all come to know and love.