Pushing The Boundaries

Documenta is one of the art world’s most anticipated and provocative events. Marianna Cerini finds out what all the fuss is about

- Marianna Cerini

TRYING TO BREACH THE DEFENSIVE PR wall of Germany’s biggest contemporary art show feels like an impossible task. Efforts to arrange an interview with the artistic director of Documenta 14, Adam Szymczyk, go nowhere. The Polish curator, I’m told, is reticent about talking to the media in the run-up to the 100-day art event. Szymczyk has been busy cultivating an aura of mystery around this sprawling show, which comes round every five years, ever since he took the helm in 2013. There is no advance list of artists. Details of the venues are incomplete. E-mails to the press team go unanswered until eventually I get a brief reply saying that the curatorial team is “simply too busy to take any call or offer any comment”.

This, of course, is all part of the game. It’s this type of studied indifference that has made Documenta one of the most anticipated, and at times confusing, entries in the international art calendar since it began in 1955.

Dubbed the “100-day museum”, Documenta was founded by Kassel native Arnold Bode in the aftermath of World War II. His hope was to restore cultural life in the city—the centre of which had been flattened by Allied bombs in 1943—and to reconnect his country with the rest of the world through art.

An architect, painter, designer and curator, Bode was banned by the Nazis from making and teaching art. He saw Documenta as a chance to bring back the “degenerate” art that had been either shunned or destroyed by the Nazis, but he also wanted to confront audiences with notions of creativity from the countries that had been their enemies.

The exhibition began as a way to provoke and experiment and it has continued to do so for six decades. In the process, it has helped to shape the cultural identity of Kassel, located on the Fulda River in central Germany.