![\"Ressler_What_Is_Democracy_02\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO04_Mesch_Ressler_What_Is_Democracy_02-1.jpg\")
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What Is Democracy?<\/em>, 2009, video still and installation view, Antidoron. The EMST Collection<\/em>, Fridericianum, Kassel, 2017.
Photos: Oliver Ressler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Artists who attempt to address the status of democracy in our time directly, using conventional definitions or those that have to do exclusively with political institutions and globalism, seem not to contribute as much to current discourse, as often happens with literal art\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, art in which the subject matter is presented in an explicit or crass way, usually as a direct and illusionistic referent. For example, Swiss artist Oliver Ressler\u2019s multi-channel video installation What is Democracy<\/em> (2007\u200a\u2013\u200a08), an homage to the slick look of contemporary television journalism, addressed the issue head-on: accompanying a sequence of colourful images of various national flags unfurling in the wind and then burning to tatters were voice-over statements by interviewees of various national origins regarding their definitions of democracy. Other monitors displayed lengthy and consid\u00adered proclamations on the question by philosophers and activists. Created long before the 2016 elections, this work already seems dated; in the Brexit\/Trump era, Western nationalism has been reinstrumentalized by the oligarchs for yet another round of self-enrichment. Deliberating on Ressler\u2019s compilation of progressive reconsiderations of nation and democracy (but knowing the outcomes of 2016), we are left with the unpleasant realization that we\u2019ve been had. The progressive critique of neoliberalism seems again to have failed to ignite change and reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other artists gauge the fragile status of democracy by homing in on the ethics of representing the figures of the migrant, the refugee, and the trauma survivor\u200a\u2014\u200abodies that are intra-national or otherwise abandoned by nation or community. Consider, for example, When We Were Exhaling Images <\/em>by the Iraqi artist Hiwa K: a collaborative, large-scale outdoor sculpture made of repurposed sewer pipes. The work addresses the crisis and bodily dispossession of the forced migration of refugees but expands this experience by including the participation of local design students in Kassel, who Hiwa K considers co-authors of the work. The students helped outfit the interior of the pipes with furniture and other objects, and also occupied them for stretches of time during the documenta exhibition. Local performance is then integral to this work. The Ghanian artist Ibrahim Mahama\u2019s Check Point<\/em> series of architectural coverings are fashioned from the jute sacks that are used in Ghana to transport cocoa, beans, coffee, and charcoal for export to wealthier economies; these are stitched together by collaborators who are also migrants, a category of worker who also handles these sacks or units of exchange in Africa. In gestures akin to Christo\u2019s, Mahama drapes entire buildings with jute to make visible this hidden labour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emily Jacir\u2019s and Andrea Bowers\u2019s constructed memorials to lost communities were also key works at last summer\u2019s documenta. Each artist contributed work dedicated to bearing witness to those who have disappeared or who chose to navigate treacherous national borders in search of a better livelihood. Jacir\u2019s 2001 Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948<\/em> consists of embroidered tents and an elaborate record book of participants who collaborated in realizing the project. Bowers memorializes the otherwise-forgotten dead in her epic, ninety-six-foot-wide drawing No Olvidado<\/em> (2010), which lists the names of Mexican migrants who lost their lives in crossing the Mexico\u200a\u2013\u200aU.S. border. Monument for Strangers and Refugees,<\/em> an obelisque by Nigerian-American artist Olu Oguibe installed in a public square in Kassel, is emblazoned in several languages with the biblical text \u201cI was a stranger and you took me in.\u201d Oguibe thus provides a counterpoint to current political debates and public opinion in Germany concerning the settling of Syrian and other refugees. The actual individuals remain hidden and unnamed, but Oguibe presents a voice for the refugee as a subject who articulates an ethical vision of inclusion and community, which is at the same time a moral imperative for a functioning democratic society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The figure of transience and rootlessness in a world of nation-states has become a crucial testing ground for public discourse on democracy, for, in addition to the loaded question of how to represent the body of the displaced, works such as Mahama\u2019s, Bowers\u2019s, and Oguibe\u2019s critique current notions of what constitutes a democratic society or community. Arguably, these artists generate a democracy effect in asking us as viewers to confront our own understanding of lived democracy\u200a\u2014\u200aof belonging and of sharing a commitment to community needs as they arise. I use the term \u201cdemocracy effect\u201d to suggest that even in being asked to think about how we are attentive to the needs of community, we enter a frame of mind that is itself democratic, an older philosophical idea that I\u2019ll return to later. We might even talk about the rise of a critical mass of contemporary art that is concerned with the ethics of lived democracy. The displaced thinkers of the exiled Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, advocated for such an ethics in their belief that culture (and aesthetics) must carry within it the remembrance of the immensity of human suffering. Noam Chomsky and George Yancy recently reconnected to this idea and under\u00adscored that the possibility of social change \u00adhinges upon the capacity to witness and empathize with suffering that we ourselves do not know.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - George Yancy and Noam Chomsky, \u201cNoam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union,\u201d <\/strong>New York Times<\/em>, July 5, 2017, <nyti.ms\/2uLm59j>.<\/span>By educating the viewer about empathy for others, and refiguring our relationship with the needs and concerns of new communities as they are presently being \u00adformed, many current artists concern themselves with the democracy effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is further evidence of the spirit of witnessing by artists of note, many themselves survivors of trauma of various types and many of them women. They are only now emerging\u200a\u2014\u200anot as historical victims of the Third Reich, but as resilient heroes, or as artists who address the subtle undercurrent of anti-Semitism. The work of persecuted Jewish artists of the Nazi period were also on view at documenta this summer, which introduced their art to a broader public and rescued them from obscurity. Sedje H\u00e9mon, a Dutch-Jewish Holocaust survivor and a trained violinist, found that she could no longer play the instrument after she was liberated from the camps. She instead devoted herself to remarkable abstract compositions. Her abstract compositions from the 1960s and after double as highly imaginative musical scores for the music that she loved but could no longer perform acoustically. Contemporary artists McDermott & McGough\u2019s series of memorial paintings are dedicated to homosexuals who were killed in the Nazi camps. They inscribe and obliterate almost exact copies of the repugnant Nazi paintings that depict \u201cGerman manhood\u201d or Adolph Hitler with inscriptions of the names and biographies of gay men who were Nazi victims. The obscuring of these paintings begins to instead describe bodies that the programmatic and genocidal imagining of male identity in Nazi propaganda would not allow. McDermott & McGough\u2019s artworks might in fact serve as tools for the enlightened and critical art-historical study of official paintings of the Nazi era, for in them the names and identities of those whom Nazi icons attempted to erase from visual codes\u200a\u2014\u200aand from physical reality\u200a\u2014\u200aare, at least in part, recovered. This is art that leads us to think about larger communities, both historical and current, of which we are part, and to empathize with others within them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n No less significantly, and quite unfortunately, documenta also put on public view the insensitive geopolitical assumptions of the exhibition organizers\u200a\u2014\u200aand by extension the major funder of the event, the Federal Republic of Germany\u200a\u2014\u200aregarding the exhibition as a major international collaboration with Athens. The Greek city seemed to be positioned not as an equal cultural partner, but as a hub of the Global South lacking artistic sophistication of its own. Very few Greek curators were chosen to work with the Kassel-based director of the exhibition, Adam Szymczyk, who instead travelled frequently to Athens with a number of Germany-based assistants in tow (in fact, just fourteen percent of his curatorial team were Greek art professionals). Surely the tensions between Greece and the E.U. concerning Greek debt, controlled by mostly German multinational banks, along with the hardships imposed by E.U. austerity measures and its refusal to forgive the Greek debt, added another layer of tension to these exhibition arrangements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As has been reported in the art press, the EMST, or the national contemporary art museum in Athens, celebrated its first public exhibition in its new space in the fall of 2016, after more than twelve years of renovation delays which kept the building vacant and closed to the public. With the documenta exhibition in spring of 2017 all galleries of the building were utilized for the first time. Visiting exhibitions now continue in the building\u2019s temporary spaces, and the installation of the EMST\u2019s permanent collection is now planned for 2018.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Caroline Elbaor, \u201cThe National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens Partially Opens After a 12-Year Wait,\u201d artnet<\/em> (November 7, 2016), <artnt.cm\/2z4PpfQ>. See also the EMST website at: <bit.ly\/2j5AcCL>.<\/span> It is to be assumed that it was Szymczyk\u2019s idea to transport 230 works by seventy Greek and other international artists from the EMST permanent collectio, and to install them in the Fridericianum, usually a central building of the Kassel exhibition. During documenta the EMST building instead housed Szymczyk\u2019s selection of Kassel documenta artists, many of whom designed an additional work for the Athens venue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This art swap was certainly a grand endeavour that made it possible for exhibition visitors unable to travel to Greece to see Greek modernism en masse. One work perfectly suited to the German venue was an elaborate tableau vivant installation by the famed Greek post-war artist Vlassis Caniaris, Hopscotch<\/em>, part of his \u201cImmigrant <\/em>Serie\u201d 1971\u201376). Caniaris had worked on this piece during the time he was in residence in West Germany on a DAAD scholarship, and it was shown in a number of West German galleries and institutions at the time. In his art Caniaris frequently commented on Greece\u2019s turbulent social and political developments, particularly during the junta years of 1967 to 1974, when he relocated to West Germany. This and other of his works of the 1960s obliquely addressed labour immigration policy and the Greek relationship with the German Gastarbeiter<\/em> (guest worker) program, which welcomed migrant workers from southern and eastern Europe, including Greece and Turkey, to work in the booming West German economy. In his installation, Caniaris, nominally a guest worker himself, presents migration\/immigration as a kind of hopscotch game (chalked on the floor) of German labour policy details that his assemblages of human figures appear to try to decipher. The mostly downward class mobility of such displacement is only one element that Caniaris considers in this artwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2017, Hopscotch<\/em> recapitulated the history of the asymmetrical economic dealings between Germany and Greece that formed a backdrop to this edition of documenta. It must be noted that the EMST was not open to the Greek public for almost a decade because of Greece\u2019s ongoing financial crisis\u200a\u2014\u200aa cultural situation that is a direct consequence of Greece\u2019s present indebtedness to Germany. In 2016 alone, Germany is reported to have \u00adearned \u20ac1.3 billion from Greek-associated interest payments and debt-buying programs, but the profiteering on Greek debt goes back to 2009, when the crisis began.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Monika Pallenberg and Lana Clements, \u201cHow Merkel\u2019s Germany Profits from Greek Debt Misery,\u201d Express <\/em>(U.K.), July 13, 2017, <bit.ly\/2o70utq>. Green Party analysts and politicians have repeatedly demanded that the government return any profit on interest to Greece, which Merkel\u2019s Ministry of Finance has refused.<\/span> One wonders if the total cost of relocating a portion of the EMST\u2019s permanent collection to Kassel, and of transporting works to Athens, might have come close to the sum required for the public unveiling in Athens of the permanent collection of this ambitious museum of contemporary Greek art, but this was a road not taken by Szymczyk. The reports of documenta 2017\u2019s budgetary shortfall of some \u20ac7 million and its hasty bailout by the city of Kassel and the state of Hessen led some journalists to observe that Szymczyk\u2019s \u201clearning from Athens\u201d had not extended to fiscal matters. The Athenian Parthenon as an icon of the origins of democracy was often to be found in Kassel, most obviously in Argentine artist Marta Minuj\u00edn\u2019s architecturally-shaped installation The Parthenon of Books<\/em>, which featured donated books banned from various countries throughout history. Minuj\u00edn positioned her structure on a site where the Nazis had once held a book burning, directly in front of the Fridericianum, one of the oldest museums in Europe and itself a neoclassical emulation of classical Greek architecture. This juxtaposition pointed to Germany\u2019s aesthetic debt to Greece, one that should have merited the exchange of a gift of similar permanence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the engagement of recent art with democracy in decline attempts to recover art as a psychic and therapeutic engine, and, with it, returns to older notions of human progress and the necessity of a shared notion of social cooperation and the civic good. These are both ideas put forward by John Dewey, twentieth-century American philosopher and educational reformer. Dewey understood that the perpetuation and strengthening of democracy relied not so much on a system of government, but on an ethics and a frame of mind that had to do with a guided sense of identity grounded in civil society and in membership in a community that is responsible in addressing its own social needs. He thought that this frame of mind should be provided by enlightened and empowering teachers. He also considered it central to the perpetuation and strengthening of democracy. Critical and progressive art of the present positions us to think about the interconnectedness of the human communities of which we are all now part\u200a\u2014\u200aeven the most transient ones, such as those of the displaced and the marginalized. Perhaps art of the present moment offers a watershed reckoning with its own pedagogical and political possibilities. <\/p>\n![\"Ibrahim_Mahama_Check](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO04_Mesch_Ibrahim_Mahama_Check-Point-Sekondi-Loco-1-scaled.jpg\")
Check Point Sekondi Loco. 1901-2030. 2016-2017<\/em>, documenta 14, Torwache, Kassel, 2016-2017.
Photo : Ibrahim Mahama<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"McDermott_](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO04_Mesch_McDermott_-McGough_AlfredVlebach-1-scaled.jpg\")
Alfred Vlebach, (homosexual), Died July 9th, 1941, Sachsonhausen Concentration Camp, 1946<\/em>, 2001.
Photo: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"When_We_Were_Exhaling_Images\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO04_Mesch_Hiwa_When-We-Were-Exhaling-Images-1-scaled.jpg\")
When We Were Exhaling Images<\/em>, documenta 14, Friedrichsplatz, Kassel, 2017.
Photo : Mathias V\u00f6lzke, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Bowers_No_Olvidado\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO04_Mesch_AndreaBowers_No-Olvidado-1-scaled.jpg\")
No Olvidado<\/em>, 2010, vue d\u2019installation | installation view, Antidoron. The EMST Collection<\/em>, Fridericianum, Kassel, 2017.
Photo : Mathias V\u00f6lzke, courtesy of Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n