documenta - OFF
June 2022
I wish I had taken a photograph.
Every day on my way to an exhibition of the documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, I passed a man.
Although I was in fact only two days in the city, for its contemporary art engagement, to run from space to space and try to see as much as possible while knowing I won't have enough time to see it all or deeply. But somehow I kept crossing this man's path so often that it felt like a recurring everyday encounter for weeks - a familiar and solid constant of an everyday life. And yet it all only happened in passing.
He was performing for everyone and no-one, repeating what could have been religious scriptures from a large, worn-off book. The one you only find in antiquities because no-one writes that much for a one-issue book anymore in a time of Netflix appropriate sized adaptation of grandeur stories.
I wanted to talk to him, understand what his readings were all about, asking him what he wanted his accidental spectators of his urban stage to take away from what he was sharing. And he had a lot to say, to share, and make heard. But I didn’t know how to engage him - as a stranger, a performer, a prophet? After all he wasn't part of the expansive exhibition landscape the documenta presents and which spreads out over multiple venues and spaces throughout the whole city. He wasn't part of a strategy, of a system or a platform, mediated and approachable within its framework. With no label, no timeline nor an explanation to his appearance - art world style.
And thus, there is no rule to that kind of engagement and usage of public space. Suddenly one has to figure it out oneself - to understand it with what the framework itself or himself is willing to share.
It is interesting to think of the formalisation of art, the way we understand and read it through the lens of a system and a preconceived idea the minute we step into the white cube or engage with a work that is declared as belonging to the white cube and therefore represents a specific curatorial idea which somehow must be understood in that way. It is digestible.
But he wasn’t, his action, presentation, performance was not digestible. He is the parasite that recognises another.
I am glad I didn't take a photograph.
His voice was mesmerising. A dark, soothing melody, made of experience and confidence because it has been tested and perfected for its purpose. The German language is not necessarily regarded as beautiful, my feeling is, because it doesn’t do well as an accent in other languages and it is hardly spoken anywhere else in the world and of course there is that strict and bureaucratic undertone… But the German in German can be spoken in a unique philosophical way, a flowing and dramatic rhythm. He did exactly that.
Slightly bowed over his heavy looking book, half reading, half speaking from memory or improvisation. Not standing still, not performing for anyone's gaze in particular but constantly moving in small steps from direction to direction, following the sound of his own words. His interaction was not with anyone, no passers-by, not the city, not anything but the written word formed into vibration. The occasional comments from people went unnoticed and yet he decided to use the urban environment as his stage, decided to share his voice with the world, even though it's “just” Kassel’s inner city, little known beyond documenta’ s 100 days of contemporary art every five years.
Nothing suggested that he is asking for monetary recognition. Maybe he is the city’s own troubadour and I am the parasite coming to his city for two days acting as if everything I see is art that needs to be consumed, understood and seen in the conjunction of documenta and the international art canon.
His performance somehow made everything else make sense.