"Give Me Athens to Stand on, and I Can Move the Art World": A Reading of documenta 14 in Athens, 8 April–16 July 2017

documenta is a large-scale exhibition that since its inception in 1955 has documented, reconfigured, and reinterpreted the contemporary. In Spring 2017, it adopted Athens as a secondary home along with Kassel. documenta is a name invented for an exhibition that documents the present time and space, while at the same time making art and proposing ways of perceiving it. Its permanent home in Kassel was for decades a provincial city at the frontier of the Eastern Bloc. Over time, however, Kassel became the place where contemporary art found a suitable forum to challenge expectations and activate a range of new ways to perceive art. In its history, documenta has evoked viewer participation in multiple ways and has reinvented itself. It faced protests (in documenta 6, protests followed the inclusion of official artists from East Germany); it included participatory works that even reshaped the landscape itself (Joseph Beuys's 7,000 oaks in documenta 7); it moved from Eurocentric to global under the directorship of Okwui Enwezor (documenta 11), though always remaining a diagnostic record of the current status of Western and global art. With an underlining aim to document the theoretical discourse of art as well as social changes, it reached out to bordering disciplines, utilizing archives, literature, and archival photos, and brought these other media into a dialogue with art; consequently, the premediated and organized conversed with the instinctive and subjective. What happened in Athens this year was therefore not unexpected. It was actually the natural next step, and this partial relocation should not be considered an unanticipated occasion.

When it was announced that the 14th edition of documenta would come to Athens, which, like Kassel, was also a city in the margins, the wider art community of Greece anticipated momentous negotiations in the relationship of art and viewers, in the relationship of international art and local artists, and in diverse methods of curating. Since the mid-1960s, Greece has been searching for such negotiations that have proven to be either a fueling force for Greek artists or, less frequently, a bravely organized strategy to expose Greek art to the international scene. In 1965, Tony Spiteris organized the Παναθήναια της συγχρόνου γλυπτικής (Panathenea of world sculpture), bringing to Athens the titans of this weighty form of art, commencing a discourse between modernity and the place where sculpture had such an important past, while also offering modern art the place to analogize with the spirit of Athens. In 1985, Nelli Mysirli and Haris Kambouridis investigated the reverberations between Greek and international art in the exhibition Μνήμες—αναπλάσεις—αναζητήσεις (Reminiscences—reformations—quests), which commenced Melina Mercouri's ongoing European Capital of Culture program. In 1988, Cultural Geometry, an exhibition of the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, brought stimulating works by artists such as Jeff Coons, Dan Graham, and Robert Smithson to meet the spirit of Athens. It was an attempt to generate discussion about geometric thought and its manifestation in art, while also facilitating globalization. Organized by Jeffrey Deitch, a curator of international stature, Cultural Geometry had a tremendous effect on the Greek art scene (Deitch and Halley 1998). In 2003, Christos Joachimides organized Outlook, the largest international exhibition to date in Greece, and included such names as Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, William Kentridge, and Damien Hirst. In its disparity of exhibition venues, its unprecedented cost, its considerable number of visitors, but also its artistic director's aim to instigate a reaction for the visitor, Outlook should be seen as a precursor to documenta 14. Then, in 2007, the Athens Biennale Destroy Athens, curated by Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio, and Augustine Zenakos, mobilized hundreds of journalists and critics and engaged visitors in alternative ways to converse with art. And finally, documenta 14—a big institution that despite its anti-institutional rhetoric remains a big institution—contemplated curating, viewing, and the course of art. Like the previous landmark exhibitions in Greece, documenta converses with Athens, "the proverbial cradle of that same European civilization that has reached its present state of exhaustion," as Adam Szymczyk...