{"id":3150,"date":"2018-05-16T22:21:11","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T20:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/?p=3150"},"modified":"2018-07-05T18:07:22","modified_gmt":"2018-07-05T16:07:22","slug":"americans-in-athens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/?p=3150","title":{"rendered":"Americans in Athens"},"content":{"rendered":"

A claim: Social practice is site specific. When art operates as social practice, its forms, meanings, and possibilities of communicability are dependent upon particular social groups and settings, and are not always able to be moved<\/i>. Here, we take social practice as a body of work in which an artist deploys his or her social position as artist<\/i> in order to generate financial, institutional, and logistical support for a project that materially benefits other, non-art world, folk.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Social practice can encompass a range of artistic activities, taking the form of community service(s), dialogic encounters, social justice initiatives, speculative economies, public awareness campaigns, social welfare programs, et cetera. The phrase \u201csocial practice\u201d has been called a \u201cWest Coast term\u201d by curator Nato Thompson, whose 2011 Creative Time exhibition Living as Form<\/i> was one of the most visible efforts at canon formation for this genre in the visual arts.2<\/sup><\/a> Already in the mid-2000s, however, performance studies scholar Shannon Jackson was writing on the term \u201csocial practice\u201d not as geographically-rooted, but as a concept that emerged at the disciplinary intersection of visual arts, (postdramatic) theater, and activism.3<\/sup><\/a> Linguistically, the term seems to originate in German-language art criticism of the mid-1990s, with particular energy around the activities of Austrian collective Wochenklausur.4<\/sup><\/a> And Wochenklausur\u2019s increased visibility in the United States during the early 2000s offers one possible trajectory for the term\u2019s adoption with regards to U.S.-based practices.<\/p>\n

Commonly, the forms and meanings of social practice have been linked to an individual artist<\/i>, as a sort of brand identity. Thomas Hirschhorn, for example, deploys the Frankfurt School and high culture in the service of marginalized communities on the outskirts of city centers; his works are presumed to be equally intelligible in a Paris banlieu (Mus\u00e9e Pr\u00e9caire Albinet<\/i>, 2004) and a Bronx housing project (Gramsci Monument<\/i>, 2013). Tania Bruguera uses pedagogy and collectivism to give voice to the disenfranchised, whether Cuban artists and dissidents (Arte de Conducta<\/i>, 2002\u201309; Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/i>, 2009) or immigrants sans papiers<\/i> in Queens (Immigrant Movement International<\/i>, 2011\u201316). What often gets lost in the critical and art historical response to these projects is that they can be more or less convincing, more or less successful, in different social situations. So, then, a normative claim: As social practice art comprises an ever-growing share of international mega-exhibitions, organizers and participants will have to grapple with challenges of translation and duration, with the possibility that social practice may demand that each artist root his or her practice in a single locale. Or, with the possibility that (acknowledging, of course, the protean make-up of any given community) authorship of social practice must be accorded to the collective. Otherwise, the Volk<\/i> are merely a social practice artist\u2019s material.5<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

This essay takes the case of artworks presented in Athens, Greece, as part of the 2017 documenta exhibition, which was split between Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. For, as Lutz Hengst has noted, it remains a question \u201cwhether the division of . . . documenta [14] between two main venues, Athens in addition to Kassel, can embody a renunciation of Eurocentrism; or whether other, location-aware forms serve to better make visible asymmetries between population groups as a global problem per se, and also in themselves mostly heterogeneous contemporary cultures.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

William Pope.L\u2019s Whispering Campaign<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Trying valiantly to find the \u201cwhispering\u201d works by Chicago-based artist William Pope.L, doubly intrigued after reading a laudatory review:<\/p>\n

\u201can especially lovely piece, effectively penetrating the viewer\u2019s psyche.<\/p>\n

(At one moment, I thought I was hearing voices in my head.)\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

But, like so much of documenta in Athens, failing to find the artwork was more rewarding.<\/p>\n

Standing beneath the equestrian statue of King Constantine I<\/i>: a group of three adults, from two continents (North America, Europe), plus two tiny children, in the public park Pedion tou Areas, one of the sites for William Pope.L\u2019s Whispering Campaign<\/i>. But somehow they had arrived from the wrong direction. On documenta\u2019s map, Whispering Campaign<\/i> was just inside the park at this monument to Greek history. But the group walked the long way through the park, entering at Evelpidon Street, where a miniature tent city housed rough sleepers. Some of the tent city\u2019s inhabitants appeared to be migrants from outside Greece; some (both native Greek and foreign) were visibly using drugs; there also appeared to be prostitution occurring.8<\/sup><\/a> Farther along was Constantine I. The group climbed his platform and stood quietly, hearing nothing. After poking around the bushes, looking for speakers hidden there, they stared expectantly at each passerby, waiting for them to linger and confide \u201celliptical yet biting aphorisms about race and color.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a> A lone man in exercise gear seemed to pause, but no one was sure how to activate the work \u2014 was the jogger even a part of it? Someone suggested approaching the police officer in the corner of the plaza, to ask: \u201cWhere is the art?\u201d<\/p>\n

Pope.L\u2019s Whispering Campaign<\/i> was described as a multi-site sound piece of live performances and recorded voices, a sort of eavesdropping on Athens\u2019 subliminal life. Its \u201csocial\u201d component came in part during the process of making, when Pope.L asked Athens natives to speak about their city. The social also arose in the work\u2019s reception, as murmured messages allowed Athens psychogeographies to infiltrate the consciousness of urban dwellers and documenta visitors. Ideally, the work offered a disembodied and, more importantly, non-localizable monologue that absorbed visitors into the \u201cminor\u201d historical narratives valued by Athens natives.10<\/sup><\/a> The work thus seemed to target art world visitors rather than locals, with its trilingual murmurings oftentimes literally translating for non-Greek-speaking viewers. In contrast, the Kassel portion of Pope.L\u2019s work seemed to rely more on literary texts such as Grimm\u2019s fairy tales, perhaps reflecting the perceived familiarity of German culture versus a relatively unknown Greece, needing to be accessed ethnographically.<\/p>\n

Whispering Campaign<\/i> seemed to demand a certain attentiveness to its setting, especially given that some commentators understood it precisely as \u201ca new work to address the liminal status of refugees and immigrants, specifically for documenta 14.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a> Indeed, one could understand the entire Athens portion of documenta 14 as a site specific gesture on the part of artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his international team of curators. Szymczyk stated that holding part of documenta in Athens was a direct response to perceptions of \u201cpower dynamics of a crumbling Europe,\u201d as well as to \u201cpressing issues of migration, citizenship and identity.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a> Yet many of the documenta venues and sites participated in bolstering traditional symbols of national power, in their most hackneyed nineteenth-century form, with the opera house, the neoclassical cemetery, the antique stadium operating as symbols of cultural excellence \u2013 metonymically extending to political might.<\/p>\n

But of course Athens itself had different ideas. While critic Amandas Ong noted the presence of \u201cCrapumenta\u201d graffiti, \u201cDOCUMENTA14 fuck off!\u201d was another favorite seen plastered on walls across the city, particularly at the edges of official venues: Athens\u2019 unconscious.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

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Fig. 1: “DOCUMENTA 14 FUCK OFF” poster by diarriktes on wall outside Documenta exhibition at Athens Polytechnic, Athens, Greece, May 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

And while found vocalizations of Whispering Campaign<\/i> purported to offer just such a view of Athens\u2019 unconscious, the work\u2019s locations were also predominantly institutions of \u201chigh\u201d culture: Greece\u2019s National Museum of Contemporary Art; the Athens Conservatory; and the Megaron concert hall, which hosts opera and ballet and is located adjacent to the U.S. embassy.14<\/sup><\/a> Even the outdoor sites for Whispering Campaign<\/i> \u2013 for example, the late-Hellenistic\/early Roman-era Panathenaic Stadium and the 19th-century First Cemetery of Athens \u2013 alerted documenta visitors to Greece\u2019s cultural patrimony.<\/p>\n

Whispering Campaign<\/i>\u2019s presence in Pedion tou Areos park offered something different, with a tent city of migrants and drug users mere meters away from a heroic statue of a Greek monarch. The park is situated on the spot where 19th-century revolutionaries fomented an independence movement that brought King Otto I (originally German) to the helm of the Greek state. At the spot where Pope.L\u2019s Whispering Campaign<\/i> was marked on the documenta map, the park featured a statue of King Constantine I (originally Danish-Russian), the country\u2019s acting ruler during Greece\u2019s Megali Idea [Great Idea] of territorial gain. The Megali Idea was an exercise in hubris that resulted in a devastating loss to Turkish forces in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919\u20131922. This defeat ushered in a bi-national ethnic cleansing that marked Greece\u2019s \u201cfirst\u201d refugee crisis, as Anatolian Greeks (marked not by language or ethnicity but by the Greek Orthodox religion) flooded into the country from Izmir\/Smyrna and beyond. Meanwhile, Hellenic Turks (similarly identified by their religion, as Moslem) were kicked out of Greece and returned to their Turkish \u201chomeland.\u201d15<\/sup><\/a> With the contemporary refugee \u201ccrisis\u201d \u2013 pressures on an economically weakened Greek state, European Union directives guiding actions of the local police, and a Turkey-E.U. agreement sending thousands of refugees \u201cback across the Aegean\u201d16<\/sup><\/a> \u2013 there are echoes of this earlier treaty. A Europe cleansed of Moslems. Greece as a staging ground for the ebb and flow required to make this vision of Europe a reality.<\/p>\n

At documenta, the Pedion tou Areos park participated in signifying the Greek nation for a foreign audience, but not because it spurred a newfound appreciation for the modern history of the nation. In failing to hear the Whispering Campaign<\/i>, one could still stumble upon Greece\u2019s crises of unalleviated migration, homelessness, and addiction \u2013 an encounter with the tent city in Pedion tou Areos was itself a microcosm of precisely the \u201cpressing issues\u201d documenta sought to address, though one absent from any official map.<\/p>\n

Pope.L\u2019s project succeeded because it failed; the work was not, it seems, intended to foreground the specific dissonances visible in Pedion tou Areos. And it failed because Pope.L applied a trope of social practice \u2013 a performative collision of grand narrative history and lived experience, in which contemporary lives were displayed with the same gravitas as a country\u2019s myths \u2013 in a setting with which he was unfamiliar. One can imagine a nearly identical work by Pope.L set in the United States, with performances and sound recordings drawn from historical sources and contemporary voices, installed alongside a statue of George Washington, at the National Mall, in Arlington Cemetery, at the National Gallery of Art, et cetera. And \u2013 for better or worse \u2013 given Pope.L\u2019s identity as African American, these sound installations would have been understood as a pointed critique of normative (white) American history.17<\/sup><\/a> (Even more so at present, given tensions over historical statuary, monuments, and memorials.) This would not necessarily be a successful artwork itself, but one steeped in lived histories of place and space: Washington, D.C., as a capital city constructed in large part by enslaved Afro-descendents. For socially-engaged artworks to work, one seems to require a certain familiarity with local histories, a familiarity lacking in Pope.L\u2019s Athens work, despite good intentions and a relatively lengthy research phase.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that an artist must work from personal experience, or in the role of representing some aspect of identity. But to create a \u201csocial practice,\u201d the artist must know what things signify<\/i> for people, the local instinctive response to a phrase, a site, an image, that comes from familiarity, even intimacy, with a given social setting, its lifeways, its habitus.18<\/sup><\/a> Part of what social practice often ends up doing is an act of translation between a selected subculture and the art world, typically unfamiliar with that subculture (another point of critique lies in the problem of what counts as subculture versus mainstream for that art audience, but that is beyond the bounds of this essay). Social practice is about blurring social practices of the art world with social practices that seem to lie outside it, and the artist must be fluent in both. In Athens, a lack of fluency weakened the artwork, neutralizing its aims.<\/p>\n

Rick Lowe\u2019s Victoria Square Project<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

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Fig. 2: Visitors standing on the corner near Rick Lowe’s Victoria Square Project, Athens, Greece, May 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

Meandering through an L-shaped pedestrian street not far from Victoria Square: <\/i>the same group of five, plus one more, a Malian migrant traversing Athens without proper papers. Now our merry band was two tiny children plus four adults from three continents (North America, Europe, Africa). The goal had been to eat grilled octopus, but an incongruous glassy gallery space caught the eye \u2013 a corner storefront diagonal to a small restaurant and little else. It was a documenta work, by American artist Rick Lowe.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 3: Rick Lowe, Victoria Square Project, Athens Greece, May 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

At the moment, it housed an exhibition of Ukrainian embroidery (from the private collections of \u201cdistinguished Ukrainian folk artists\u201d Daria Stasiouk and Diana Novak) and a Tanzanian woman doing piecework in the window, a sort of living mannequin who seemed amused at the whole endeavor \u2013 and who was just as much on display as the embroideries around her. Rick Lowe was there to meet an Albanian man for a game of chess. The man does not speak English, and Lowe does not speak Albanian, so they came together on the chessboard, an event Lowe described in glowing terms as fulfilling the aims of his work.<\/p>\n

In contrast to Pope.L, Rick Lowe\u2019s work was more recognizable as social practice, as a work that activated an underused space via art in order to drive community formation and economic growth. The gallery\u2019s location was chosen based on its proximity to Victoria Square, a central Athens plaza frequented by migrants, and also a site of open-air drug use \u2013 as with Pedion tou Areos park, one often encounters drug use and migrants together in Athens, since the public spaces that feel available for migrants are often sites visibly<\/i> less patrolled by the state apparatus.<\/p>\n

Lowe\u2019s gallery hosted events and temporary installations, many focused on refugee and immigrant communities in Athens. The project also included a neighborhood newsletter of sorts, a bilingual documenta-published, weekly newspaper that profiled local business owners and reported small news from the area. The publication seemed to enact Lowe\u2019s desire for his gallery to be welcomed into the neighborhood, and also offered a low-key \u201cbuy local\u201d effort, a squishy attempt to address the economically downtrodden state of the city. Lowe\u2019s work was thus obviously engaged with local twinned crises: simultaneously addressing lack of social support systems for migrants, and Greece\u2019s economic fragility. Yet the very means Lowe introduced to address these issues were not local, operating instead through a generic mode of so-called social practice.<\/p>\n

Lowe described the Victoria Square Project<\/i> as a \u201csocial sculpture.\u201d19<\/sup><\/a> The nod to Joseph Beuys is apt, since Beuys offered a similarly vague and dislocated form of \u201cthe social\u201d that initially operated from his particular, ambiguous position in postwar Germany, but gave way to a broadly utopian scheme. Beuys\u2019 work consistently took a seeming specificity of experience, of history, and converted it to the generic, as with his shamanistic invocations of the German military body qua<\/i> body.20<\/sup><\/a> In Beuys\u2019 formulation this body became something itself vulnerable and able to be rescued; the body was thus reducible to a blood-filled, breathing being succored in \u201cfat and felt,\u201d rather than an active a political agent in the particular context of World War II-era Germany. Likewise, for all his involvement in German party politics throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Beuys ultimately sublimated pernicious questions of social conflict into generic Romantic proclamations of creativity as panacea: \u201cJeder Mensch ist ein K\u00fcnstler.\u201d21<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In these feints at political work, Beuys demonstrated a capacity to recognize and energize nascent forces, at least in a context he knew well. When he harnessed the burgeoning student movement around the D\u00fcsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1967 to found the short-lived Deutsche Studentenpartei, he demonstrated a savvy understanding of the hyper-local conditions that can drive political activity. However, as time went on, and especially in an art context, such efforts became illustrative and allegorical. For documenta 5 in 1972, Beuys presented Boxkampf f\u00fcr direkte Demokratie<\/i> [Boxing Match for Direct Democracy], in which he publicly boxed against art student Abraham David Christian Moebuss, performing the bellicose triumph of direct democracy over the parliamentary system.22<\/sup><\/a> Meanwhile, a \u201crose for democracy\u201d anchored Beuys\u2019 \u201cOffice of the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendum\u201d in documenta\u2019s Museum Fridericianum, a symbolic and avowedly aesthetic gesture unmoored from any specific local concerns. Furthermore these gestures are, as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has pointed out, compensatory: \u201cthe loss of the grounding of culture in ritual and hence the destruction of the legitimacy and credibility of religion . . . were compensated now by an artistic reaction formation that attempt[ed] to reinvigorate the ritualistic dimension of artistic practices and performances by imbuing the artist with the public role of the priest, the shaman, the redeemer of spirituality.\u201d23<\/sup><\/a> In postwar Germany, Beuys granted politics the discarded hallmarks of religious theatricality \u2013 a boxing match standing in for the liturgy and a rose as banal substitute for the crucifix \u2013 but suppressed actual political content.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 4: Rick Lowe playing dominoes with unnamed Albanian man in front of Victoria Square Project; unnamed woman does textile work in window behind them, Athens, Greece, May 2017<\/p><\/div>\n

A compensatory gesture also haunted Rick Lowe\u2019s Victoria Square Project<\/i>, which displayed a similar sort of generic engagement with its setting, with some indistinct idea of \u201cthe social.\u201d In the formulation of Victoria Square Project<\/i>, the setting was Athens, which \u2013 at least in global clich\u00e9s \u2013 signifies migration, which signifies negotiating difference. Lowe spoke of his pleasure at the spontaneous cross-cultural interactions that arose at Victoria Square Project<\/i>: as an example, he described regularly playing dominoes with an Albanian man. Yet as documenta curator Monika Szewczyk describes, Lowe\u2019s best-known project, the Houston-based Project Row Houses, comes with an almost identical (readymade) story: Lowe\u2019s \u201cmentor, the artist, scavenger, and local [Houston] sage Jesse Lott\u201d comes to play dominoes regularly at Lowe\u2019s ongoing Houston-based social artwork, Project Row Houses<\/i>.24<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Thus Lowe transplanted a model of social interactions from Houston to the Athens Victoria Square Project<\/i>, offering viewers\/participants a blueprint for positive \u2013 and sometimes scripted \u2013 social engagement with people unlike themselves.25<\/sup><\/a> And what more poetic way to negotiate difference than a wordless game of strategy in which victory comes with an utterance? In this sense, the chess game was as allegorical and empty as Beuys\u2019 rose. This anecdote asserts a high modernist claim to universality, with \u201cthe social\u201d as a vaguely humanitarian affect felt around the globe. Is a mute board game the new black square? But of course there is substantial difference between a dominoes match between two men who share a multitude of cultural references (though perhaps divergent access to opportunity) and the same native tongue, and a chess game whose defining quality is the utter impossibility of dialogue.<\/p>\n

Lowe\u2019s best-known work, Project Row Houses<\/i> (1993\u2013), is also resolutely compensatory, as an arts-funded social welfare organization centered in a low-income, predominantly African American community of Houston that acts an umbrella organization for activities including art residencies, site-specific installations, community arts programming, housing for young mothers, and a Community Development Corporation constructing affordable rentals. This work draws upon financial support from governmental entities such as National Endowment for the Arts, corporations such as Home Depot, private foundations, and wealthy families such as the Menils; the figure of \u201cartist as visionary\u201d in this newly-imagined public role as a channel, diverting wealth from its current unequal distribution, to trickle furtively towards areas of need. This mode of artmaking, social practice, compensates for the loss of a \u201csocial safety net,\u201d the loss of the legitimacy and credibility of the state in the face of contemporary economic \u201crealities.\u201d If wealth is concentrated in the hands of would-be art patrons, social practice artists transform patronage into something different.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 5: “\u0397 DOCUMENTA 14 \u0395\u038a\u039d\u0391\u0399 \u039c\u0399\u0391 \u039c\u0391\u039b\u0391\u039a\u038a\u0391” poster by diarriktes on wall outside Documenta exhibition at Athens Polytechnic, Athens, Greece, May 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

In Athens, there was a sense that Documenta itself operated as an exploitative model of social practice, as a tragically unfocused and even immoral performance of the economic imbalance of power between Greece and Germany. For Greek curator iLiana Fokianaki, \u201cThe binary between north and south Europe is a profitable one for a \u2018classical\u2019 institution such as Documenta to exploit. Athens is just the place to experiment, after its seven very public years of financial chaos.\u201d26<\/sup><\/a> But as former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis countered, \u201cThe point is not that they [Documenta] came but rather how they came to Athens, whom they went to bed with (metaphorically), and how they used a seemingly progressive left-wing critique of what is happening in Greece to willingly or unwillingly propagate the very process that is causing the country\u2019s crisis. In the name of seeking solutions they became part of the problem.\u201d27<\/sup><\/a> One of the poetically lucid posters condemning Documenta proposed a similar critique of the art world\u2019s \u201canthropological\u201d approach to Athens, with the exhibition offering \u201ca psychogeography of a city in crisis.\u201d28<\/sup><\/a> Variously condemning a roster of figures including Documenta 14 curator Adam Szymczyk, Athens mayor Giorgos Kaminis, and Documenta\u2019s curator of public programs, Paul B. Preciado, the poster mentioned only a single artist: Rick Lowe. For the authors of the poster, Lowe\u2019s work seemed emblematic of the exhibition as a whole: \u201cVictoria Square is the topos<\/i> where prospector [also, pejoratively, bargain hunter, or gold digger] Rick Lowe seeks the ties that bind art and the new entrepreneurship.\u201d29<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

If social practice necessitates the artist as visionary, there is a crucial difference between the Beuysian figure of the shaman and the social practice artist\u2019s requirement to be finding or representing \u201cthe people.\u201d It is not as a lone shaman retreating to his studio, but as a priest with his wayward flock that the social practice artist acts, guiding a quasi-congregation towards the salvation of art world monies. Social practice art uses people as materials, and it is validated through the identities and attributes of the people who are its subjects \u2013 or objects.30<\/sup><\/a> It almost doesn\u2019t matter which form the artwork takes (interviews, parties, a storefront gallery, a dice game), so long as it somehow involves people who are not already inhabitants of the \u201cart world.\u201d On the other hand, with social practices, the identities of the people involved can also come to be meaningless, with the only criterion of social practice is that it involve someone \u2013 anyone \u2013 who is not already in that art world.31<\/sup><\/a> Thus the transposition of the dominoes opponent, from a local Houston sage to a wordless Albanian man in Athens.<\/p>\n

EU \/ US<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s telling that two North American artists working in social practice floundered at a temporary mega-exhibition in Europe. With its robust social welfare systems, dense cities, and comparatively generous state funding for the arts, the European Union seems a natural setting for social practices. Thus, the ability to effect collisions between art and \u201cthe social\u201d benefits from a number of sympathetic organizations and funding streams that are practically non-existent in the United States. In the U.S., social practice artists are more likely to draw upon grants and funding from private foundations, businesses, and corporations, as Rick Lowe has done with his Houston-based Project Row Houses<\/i>.32<\/sup><\/a> In the U.S., the tensions of neoliberal society thus constitute the very forms and conditions of possibility for social practice art. On the one hand, it is thus difficult to avoid a certain generality or superficiality in social practice art which is itself supported (financially, institutionally) by the very economic machinations and social hierarchies it purports to address.33<\/sup><\/a> But the best social practice art focuses intently on these conditions, making the precise mechanisms of financial flows and privileged access to political agency the material of the artworks. And perhaps this was what felt lacking in these Athens works by William Pope.L and Rick Lowe, that in transposing their mode of art making from the United States to Europe, these tensions fell away.<\/p>\n

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1<\/sup><\/a> Miwon Kwon has described a subset of site-specific works in almost precisely this way: \u201cconsider[ing] another alternative model of site specificity . . . the site is not simply a geographical location or architectural setting but a network of social relations, a community. . . . The artist and his sponsors envision the art work as an integral extension of the community rather than an intrusive contribution from elsewhere.\u201d Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge 2002, p. 5\u20136. We would, however, differentiate Kwon\u2019s emphasis on the \u201cmediation of the sponsoring institution\u201d from more recent efforts (since the early 2000s) by artists to bypass<\/i> established institutions and form their own, parallel social organizations, as with Theaster Gates\u2019 Rebuild Foundation and Tania Bruguera\u2019s Immigrant Movement International. Cf. Adrian Anagnost, Formation: Social Practice and the Work of Theaster Gates, in: Art Journal, Vol. 78, Summer 2019. See also Aimee Chang, The Artist and the City: New Models for Creative Public Practice, in: Transforma: New Orleans 2005\u20102010. New Orleans 2010, p. 11; Joshua Decter, Art and the Cultural Contradictions of Urban Regeneration, Social Justice and Sustainability: Transforma Projects and Prospect.1 in Post-Katrina New Orleans, in: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry Vol. 22 Autumn\/Winter 2009, p. 16\u201334; and Diane Solway, The Change Agent, in: W Magazine, June\/July 2013, p. 22, 91\u2013101.<\/p>\n

2<\/sup><\/a> Nato Thompson, Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991\u20132011. New York 2012, p. 19.<\/p>\n

3<\/sup><\/a> See Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York 2011, especially p. 11\u201314, 17\u201319. On the various terms adopted by academic homes that have incubated this type of work, see Chang 2010.<\/i><\/p>\n

4<\/sup><\/a> On the origins of this term in German-language art criticism, and on specific U.S.-based links to Wochenklausur, see also Anagnost 2019.<\/p>\n

5<\/sup><\/a> Anagnost 2019.<\/p>\n

6<\/sup><\/a> Lutz Hengst, Editorial: Die documenta (14) \u2013 Horizonte und Perspektiven einer Ausstellung, in: Kunsttexte Vol. 4, 2017. URL: https:\/\/edoc.hu-berlin.de\/bitstream\/handle\/18452\/19480\/editorial.pdf<\/a> [28.03.2018].<\/p>\n

7<\/sup><\/a> Kimberly Bradley, In Athens, Documenta 14 Throws Out the Blockbuster Art Show Formula \u2014 But Falls Flat, in: Artsy.com, April 10th, 2017. URL: https:\/\/www.artsy.net\/article\/artsy-editorial-athens-documenta-14-skips-art-world-spectacle-falls-flat<\/a> [26.07.2017].<\/p>\n

8<\/sup><\/a> Alexandros Gaglias, Pedion tou Areos: The Epitome of Greek Mismanagement, in: Kathimerini.gr, June 26th, 2015. URL: http:\/\/www.ekathimerini.com\/198415\/article\/ekathimerini\/community\/pedion-tou-areos-the-epitome-of-greek-mismanagement<\/a> [26.07.2017] Stratos Karakasidis, \u0397 \u03c0\u03bf\u03c1\u03bd\u03b5\u03af\u03b1 \u03ba\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c4\u03b1 \u03bd\u03b1\u03c1\u03ba\u03c9\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u03ac \u03b5\u03af\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c0\u03b9\u03b1 \u03ba\u03bf\u03bc\u03bc\u03ac\u03c4\u03b9 \u03c4\u03bf\u03c5 \u03a0\u03b5\u03b4\u03af\u03bf\u03c5 \u03c4\u03bf\u03c5 \u0391\u03c1\u03b5\u03c9\u03c2 [Prostitution and Drugs Are Now Part of the Pedion tou Areos], in: \u0397 \u039a\u03b1\u03b8\u03b7\u03bc\u03b5\u03c1\u03b9\u03bd\u03ae, July 16th, 2016. URL: http:\/\/www.kathimerini.gr\/823597\/article\/epikairothta\/ellada\/h-porneia-kai-ta-narkwtika-einai-pia-kommati-toy-pedioy-toy-arews<\/a> [26.07.2017] The authors can attest to this.<\/p>\n

9<\/sup><\/a> Roberta Smith, The Expansive Provocateur Pope.L, in Smaller, Potent Doses, in: The New York Times, June 29th, 2017. URL: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/06\/29\/arts\/design\/the-expansive-provocateur-popel-in-smaller-potent-doses.html<\/a> [26.07.2017] Other accounts give the subject of the whispers as \u201cfragments of Greek myths\u201d in Athens and \u201cthe musings of a flaneur taking in each city\u201d in Athens and Kassel. For the former, see Amandas Ong, The Successes and Failures of Documenta in Athens, in: Apollo, May 16th, 2017. URL: https:\/\/www.apollo-magazine.com\/the-successes-and-failures-of-documenta-in-athens<\/a> [26.07.2017] On the latter, see Nate Freeman, Careful Whisper: Pope.L Discusses His Documenta Sound Work, Hidden Across Kassel, in: ARTnews, June 8th, 2017. URL: http:\/\/www.artnews.com\/2017\/06\/08\/careful-whisper-pope-l-discusses-his-documenta-sound-work-hidden-across-kassel<\/a> [26.07.2017].<\/p>\n

10<\/sup><\/a> \u201cThere are characters in both cities that are worth writing about, and Pope.L, who was born in New Jersey in 1955, has learned about them with the help of locals and native speakers, and encoded them into information to be whispered. The totality could be understood as a minor history of the two documenta 14 cities.\u201d Monika Szewczyk, Pope.L, in: Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (eds.), documenta 14: Daybook. New York: 2017.<\/p>\n

11<\/sup><\/a> Production\/Exhibition Grant \u2014 Pope.L: Whispering\u00a0Campaign, in: VIA Art Fund, June 29th, 2017. URL: http:\/\/viaartfund.org\/grants\/pope-l-whispering-campaign<\/a> [26.07.2017]<\/p>\n

12<\/sup><\/a> Ong 2017. <\/i>See also Anthi Argyriou, Can Art Respond Authentically to the Refugee Crisis? A Critical Overview from Greece, in: ArtSlant, August 25th, 2016. URL: https:\/\/www.artslant.com\/trn\/articles\/show\/46417<\/a> [26.07.2017].<\/p>\n

13<\/sup><\/a> Or, in the words of Lutz Hengst, \u201c . . . zahlreiche Dissonanzen mit lokalen Akteuren sind publik geworden,\u201d perhaps as a direct result of the fact that: \u201cAdam Szymczyk hingegen hinterl\u00e4sst zumindest nachtr\u00e4glich den etwas entt\u00e4uschenden Eindruck, an lokalen Folgen relativ desinteressiert gewesen zu sein.\u201d Lutz Hengst, Hypertrophien an historischer Hanglage: Itinerar und Nachbemerkung zur documenta 14 in Kassel, in: Kunsttexte, Vol. 4, 2017. URL: https:\/\/edoc.hu-berlin.de\/bitstream\/handle\/18452\/19477\/hengst.pdf<\/a> [28.03.2018].<\/p>\n

14<\/sup><\/a> The institutional spaces seem to have been selected from the list of documenta partners\/venues, as enumerated in Documenta 14 Introduces Institutional Partners in Athens \u2014 And Venues of the Exhibition, in: Biennial Foundation, March 26th, 2017. URL: http:\/\/www.biennialfoundation.org\/2017\/03\/documenta-14-introduces-institutional-partners-in-athens-and-venues-of-the-exhibition<\/a> [26.07.2017].<\/p>\n

15<\/sup><\/a> VI. Convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, in: Treaty of Peace with Turkey, and Other Instruments; Signed at Lausanne on July 24, 1923. London 1923, p. 175-186. See also Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge 2006; and Lynn M. Tesser, Ethnic Cleansing and the European Union: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Security, Memory and Ethnography. New York 2013.<\/p>\n

16<\/sup><\/a> Jennifer Rankin, EU Strikes Deal with Turkey to Send Back Refugees, in: The Guardian, March 18th, 2016. URL: https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2016\/mar\/18\/eu-strikes-deal-with-turkey-to-send-back-refugees-from-greece<\/a> [20.01.2018] Patrick Kingsley, Refugee Crisis: What Does the EU’s Deal with Turkey Mean? in: The Guardian, March 18th, 2016. URL: https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2016\/mar\/18\/eu-deal-turkey-migrants-refugees-q-and-a<\/a> [20.01.2018].<\/p>\n

17<\/sup><\/a> On Pope.L\u2019s resistance to readings of his work as pre-framed, or over-determined, by identity, see William Pope.L, Bocio, in: Mark H. C. Bessire (ed.), William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America. Cambridge 2002, p. 70\u201373, first presented as William Pope.L, Bocio, paper presented at: Issues in African Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, March 25th, 2000. See also Mark H.C. Bessire, The Friendliest Black Artist in America, in Bessire 2002; and Chapter 5 of Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge 2007.<\/p>\n

18<\/sup><\/a> This is sometimes even, as Molly Warnock has insisted, a prerequisite for visual recognition itself. Responding to Sebastian Egenhofer\u2019s discussion of Gestalt in Martin Kippenberger\u2019s paintings, Warnock argued that Gestalt must be considered with regards to cultural specificity; in Kippenberger\u2019s paintings, certain passages of pink paint only emerge as the figures of pork medallions upon a background within the specific West German context for which those objects are legible. Sebastian Egenhofer, Thoughts about Kippenberger, paper presented at: Narrating European Art 1945\/1989, Department of Art History, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, February 9th\u201311th, 2012. Similarly, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh would identify Joseph Beuys\u2019 \u201cuse of sausages, brown paint, domestic and medical objects, the peculiar hybrid between the wounded corporeal matter and the industrial object\u201d as rooted in \u201cthe peculiar transitory moment of the lower Rhine regions suspended between artisanal and industrial forms of production embedded in an agricultural or rural environment that still permeated everyday life into the postwar period.\u201d However, Buchloh continues, \u201cit is also important to recognize that it is precisely the conventionality with which Beuys, or shall we say his interpreters, reinvests in the gesture of the found object, reinvests in the gesture of the serialization of the ready-made, the matter, the procedure, and repositions them in nodes of metaphorical meaning that makes Beuys and others of national superiority. Or if one wants to flip that argument, I would say that makes him an artist of regional interest.\u201d Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Reconsidering Beuys: Once Again, in: Gene Ray (ed.), Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy. New York 2001, p. 86.<\/p>\n

19<\/sup><\/a> See URL: http:\/\/victoriasquareproject.gr<\/a>.<\/p>\n

20<\/sup><\/a> On Beuys\u2019 leveling of the sovereign and the abject in the body of the \u201csacrificial figure,\u201d see Rosalind Krauss, N: No to . . . Joseph Beuys, in: Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (eds.), Formless: A User\u2019s Guide. New York 1997, p. 143\u2013146. See also Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol, Preliminary Notes for a Critique, in: Artforum Vol. 18, January 1980, p. 35\u201343, reprinted in Ray 2001, p. 199\u2013211. In Buchloh\u2019s reappraisal of Beuys\u2019 work in the same volume, he admits that, while \u201cearlier Beuys interpreters wanted to construct him in terms of a transhistorical genius by arguing that his work could be most adequately associated, and compared with, figures such as Leonardo Da Vinci or the tradition of German Romanticism,\u201d that \u201cthese interpretive models[, though] still operative . . . have now given way to an almost exclusive concern with Beuys as the first German, if not the first European artist, to have incorporated reflections on recent political German history.\u201d Buchloh 2001, p. 76. However, Buchloh continues to argue that, \u201cBeuys from the very beginning . . . insisted on folding formal parameters that artists of both the historical avant-garde as much as those of the postwar neo-avant-garde had defined as formal, as structural, as antimetaphorical, as antinarrative, back into the parameter of the mythical. . . . [Beuys] metaphorically reverted backward into humanism.\u201d Buchloh 2001, p. 82.<\/p>\n

21<\/sup><\/a> On the \u201cgeneric\u201d quality of Beuys\u2019 work, Buchloh has claimed that, \u201cBeuys’ model of meaning exchanges specificity of perceptual structure and formal organization for generality, that is, verifiable conditions of procedure, matter, material, and formal organization for unverifiable pretences for the works, more or less infinite range of readings.\u201d Buchloh 2001, 84.<\/p>\n

22<\/sup><\/a> Andrea Gyorody, The Medium and the Message: Art and Politics in the Work of Joseph Beuys, in: The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, Vol. 7, What was Politics in 68? A Special Issue on the West German Sixties, 2014, p. 117\u2013137. See also Cara Jordan, The Evolution of Social Sculpture in the United States: Joseph Beuys and the Work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe, in: Public Art Dialogue Vol. 3, 2013, p. 144\u201367.<\/p>\n

23<\/sup><\/a> Buchloh 2001, p. 88.<\/p>\n

24<\/sup><\/a> Monika Szewczyk, Rick Lowe, in: Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (eds.) documenta 14: Daybook. New York 2017.<\/p>\n

25<\/sup><\/a> Already in 2004, critic Claire Bishop offered a stinging critique of this model of \u201cimmanent togetherness.\u201d Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, in: October, Vol. 110, Fall 2004, p. 51\u201379.<\/p>\n

26<\/sup><\/a> iLiana Fokianaki and Yanis Varoufakis, \u201cWe Come Bearing Gifts\u201d \u2014 iLiana Fokianaki and Yanis Varoufakis on Documenta 14 Athens, in: Art-agenda, June 7th, 2017. URL: http:\/\/www.art-agenda.com\/reviews\/d14\/<\/a> [21.04.2018].<\/p>\n

27<\/sup><\/a> Fokianaki and Varoufakis 2017.<\/p>\n

28<\/sup><\/a> diarriktes, \u0397 documenta 14 \u03b5\u03af\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9 \u03bc\u03b9\u03b1 \u03bc\u03b1\u03bb\u03b1\u03ba\u03af\u03b1, in: \u0394\u03b9\u03b1\u03c1\u03c1\u03ae\u03ba\u03c4(\u03c1\u03b9)\u03b5\u03c2 \u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u03a6\u03bf\u03b9\u03c4\u03b7\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae\u03c2 \u039a\u03bf\u03c5\u03bb\u03c4\u03bf\u03cd\u03c1\u03b1\u03c2, May 24th, 2017. URL: https:\/\/diarriktes.wordpress.com\/2017\/05\/24\/documenta14-fuck-off\/<\/a> [21.04.2018].<\/p>\n

29<\/sup><\/a> diarriktes 2017.<\/p>\n

30<\/sup><\/a> See also Anagnost 2019.<\/p>\n

31<\/sup><\/a> Or, as Lutz Hengst has described of documenta 14\u2019s efforts to depart from Eurocentrism \u2014 or, we would say, to depart from a Eurocentrism wholly defined in terms of Central and Western Europe, with Greece and Eastern Europe as stand-ins for the Global South \u2014 it remains a subject within art discourse as well as within broader social contexts, \u201cwo und wie ‘das Volk’ zu suchen und zu repr\u00e4sentieren.\u201d Hengst, Editorial. See also Kwon 2002, p. 138\u2013142.<\/p>\n

32<\/sup><\/a> See Vicki Goldberg, In Houston, Rebuilding by Creating, in: The New York Times, July 16th, 1995.<\/p>\n

33<\/sup><\/a> See Adrian Anagnost, Parasitism and Contemporary Art, in: Pamela Fraser and Roger Rothman (eds.), Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction. New York 2017, p. 79\u201396.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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