![]() The show is mounted every five years under the direction of a single curator. It doesn’t strike one immediately, nor after three days, as a site for global art-world tourism, but restoration can be another mode of erasure, and the entire event preserves a kind of normalcy through understatedness, with artwork quietly installed in storefronts and local businesses, hidden in public parks, former train stations, and municipal buildings, and snuck into the galleries of local museum collections, all with casual paper labels. Today, the city center is so bland that the most noticeable features are a Pizza Hut and a TJ Maxx. Kassel had been the site of a Nazi tank plant, and the city and its inhabitants were all but completely eviscerated by strategic Allied bombs between 19. ![]() ![]() On my first afternoon there, a tour guide told me that the exhibition’s founder, Arnold Bode, wanted to “use art as a tool to restore the feelings and minds of the people.” He may have wanted to restore more than that, because in 1955, when he inaugurated the exhibition in his hometown of Kassel, the city was still being rebuilt. I hadn’t slept since I woke up in New York twenty-four hours earlier and knew I would have to stay awake for another full day once I got to Kassel for Documenta 14.ĭ ocumenta itself started as a postmortem on fascism, particularly the Nazi’s erasure of art history in service of a narrative considered more desir able. Information about my delayed train was echoing incoherently from the platform loudspeaker. I could glean from the summary text of the first results that the saying is a verified myth it turns out there are no benefits to fascism. The Google results for “he made the trains run on time” were loading slowly on my phone because the Wi-Fi wasn’t really working at the Frankfurt train station.
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