This post was originally published on artnews.com
How much is a Parthenon replica that’s laden with thousands of old books worth? A lot, perhaps, if you consider that those tomes’ pages contain a wealth of knowledge, and a lot more if you take into account its monetary value as an artwork.
That piece, by the artist Marta Minujín, was one of the iconic works of Documenta 14, the 2017 edition of the famed art exhibition that takes place once every five years in Kassel, Germany. But the work’s price became a sticking point during the preparations for this art festival, which notoriously went over budget by a reported 6 million euros, spurring handwringing and an official investigation into Documenta’s then CEO, who was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing.
How this exhibition got itself into financial trouble is one subject of Dimitris Athiridis’s exergue – on documenta 14, a vital documentary about the show that is making its US premiere tonight at the New York Film Festival. Arthiridis, who spent several years tracking the curators as they put together their ambitious festival, allows footage of behind-the-scenes meetings about money to play out at length, and the Minujín piece, titled The Parthenon of Books (2017) and installed in Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz, features centrally in one such sequence shot in 2016, about a year before Documenta 14 opened.
During that sequence, the six-person curatorial team, led by artistic director Adam Szymczyk, sits before a projector screen, dissecting a PowerPoint about the money required to mount a bunch of artworks planned. At that time, Minujín’s required 582,500 euros, some 295,000 of which was needed to support the scaffolding alone. “Couldn’t we just build an actual Parthenon for that money?” muses one attendee. Athiridis’s camera zooms close to that whopping six-figure—a much bigger one than what was required to realize most of the projects in this nearly $40 million exhibition—until it becomes a pixelated set of numbers, as if to ask: Can you believe this?
Here’s where I should note that exergue is itself an epic project whose ambitions parallel those of Document 14, a show so big that it was equally divided, for the first time, between its home base of Kassel and Athens. This meeting occurs roughly 8 hours into Athiridis’s 14-hour documentary, and by this point, viewers are treated to a flotilla of tense gatherings like this one in which Szymczyk and his team haggle over the artist list, the funding allotted to each of the 150 or so participants, and the contents of the show. But despite all that comes before this scene, I was shocked to bear witness to it. Watching it felt like seeing something I wasn’t meant to see.
When it comes to biennials, the secret of how the sausage is made is kept confidential: what we are meant to focus on, generally, is the art, not the money required to mount it. But for reasons both conceptual and political, Documenta 14’s leader, Szymczyk, wanted people to think about all that went on behind the scenes. The exhibition was “shared among its visitors and artists, readers and writers, as well as all those whose work made it happen,” as his curatorial team put it. That makes exergue a radical act of transparency that befits this show’s ethos. It suggests that art exhibitions are more than just objects, curators, and galleries—even when their organizers may not want that to be the case.
In some ways, exergue is a portrait of Szymczyk, a stony Polish-born curator with a wiry build and a dry sense of humor. Prior to Documenta, he led the Kunsthalle Basel, a taste-making Swiss museum that regularly spins emerging artists into bona fide stars. Yet Arthiridis does not make much of Szymczyk’s celebrity. Instead, he makes Szymczyk appear like a regular dude, showing him dragging a carry-on around European airports and lounging at home in sweatpants and sandals.
The sole bit of myth-building about Szymczyk here comes in the form of a New York Times article that brands him a “Superstar Among Curators.” Arthiridis is instead more focused on Szymczyk’s fraught attempts not to play into the cult of curation that so often accompanies biennial-style shows like Documenta.
There’s a scene where the critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie asks Szymczyk if he’ll speak for a diary she is writing for Artforum. Szymczyk, who exhibits an open hostility toward the art press throughout this film, declines, telling her that Artforum is part of the art-world “alliance” that is “trying to defend the system, which is showing signs of death.” (Never mind that Szymczyk has had his byline in Artforum.) These are the kinds of comments that the public doesn’t get to see; Arthiridis’s camera never shies away.
Perhaps that’s why Arthiridis was credited as Documenta 14’s official cinematographer. (Arthirdis’s preferred term for himself was “curator-at-small,” an inverse of the more common title “curator-at-large,” which was given to Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung for this exhibition.) Between 2015 and 2017, he accompanied Szymczyk on his curatorial expeditions far and wide, jetting from Tirana to Beirut to Johannesburg with his camera in tow. As Arthiridis represents it, in all these foreign locales, Szymczyk sticks out like a sore thumb.
One shot shows Szymczyk standing on a train rumbling across India. He’s en route to visit the artist K. G. Subramanyan, who he’ll end up putting in the show, but for now, he looks out at plots of land that whiz by in the distance. It seems unlikely that any of the seated passengers shown alongside him will ever visit Documenta 14, or even hear of it—and this despite the conviction of his team that the show really is for the general public, and not the philosophers and scholars quoted constantly by the curators.
Rather than making that critique himself, however, Arthiridis lets his camera do the work for him. He very rarely interacts with his subjects on-screen, and he often presents scenes in lengthy, unvarnished takes, working in the observational tradition pioneered by Frederick Wiseman, another documentarian known for making features whose runtimes regularly run past three hours. You’re left with the impression that producing this Documenta was an intellectually rich experience that was more than occasionally grueling to endure. In that way, Arthiridis lets viewers become like Documenta workers themselves, granting them access to documents and discussions that would otherwise be off-limits to most.
The documentary is explicitly political, invoking, as a backdrop to Documenta 14, the election of Donald Trump in the US, the destruction of Palmyra by ISIS, and the Greek debt crisis that inspired the exhibition itself. Szymczyk himself set out with the goal of curating a leftist exhibition that denounced capitalism, fascism, colonialism, and racism. Titled “Learning from Athens,” his exhibition subtly indicted Germany’s government for bailing out Greece in its time of need, then ultimately profiting from it. But the exhibition could not change anything, and Arthiridis’s usage of news footage related to the rise of autocrats and a surge in virulent anti-immigrant sentiment around the world, but specifically in Germany, suggests that Szymczyk’s ideas were fundamentally at odds with the world at large, whether he knew it or not.
exergue anatomizes how this well-meaning experiment frayed at its seams more and more as the opening drew near. As this film reveals, the spiraling cost of staging the show in two places, not one, was known to Szymczyk and his curators, yet they seem to have done little to staunch this monetary bleed. Szymczyk had been chosen to curate Documenta on the basis that his exhibition would be sited both in Kassel and elsewhere; he just seems not to have expected so many production fees and bureaucratic hurdles, particularly when it came to putting part of the exhibition at EMST, Athens’s national museum of contemporary art, which was new at the time. “I don’t think there will be a deficit,” Szymczyk says in one meeting here. And if there is a deficit, he explains to his team, someone on the financial side will stop them from moving forward.
He was wrong. In 2017, Kassel’s newspaper, HNA, reported that Documenta 14 had a budgetary deficit that ran to millions of euros. The HNA report contained no shortage of errors: it referred, for example, to a six-figure cost to transport a Rebecca Belmore marble tent to Athens, but according to Szymczyk, that sum was only four figures, and Canada footed the bill for $500,000 cost needed to fabricate the work. Still, this investigation led German politicians to pillory the show for having misused taxpayer money toward such extravagant ends. “People don’t want to focus on the exhibition anymore,” Szymczyk laments at one point in exergue. “They want to focus on money.”
Such were the pitfalls of mounting Documenta 14. This was an exhibition about debt and financial loss that ended up generating quite a few money issues of its own, and a show whose curators wanted transparency but weren’t always willing to grant press requests for it. exergue presents Documenta as an institution uncertain of its own status in the world. (That sentiment feels all the more significant today in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding Documenta 15 in 2022, which faced widespread allegations of antisemitism. The controversy has continued to follow Documenta as it plans its 16th edition, which is still without an artistic director because its selection committee resigned en masse last year.)
This thrilling documentary even nods to these contradictions at various points. There’s one sequence in which an organization pulls funding from Documenta months before the opening, sending Szymczyk and the other curators into a tailspin. Which organization? How much in funding? One of the curators, preferring not to say in Arthiridis’s presence, shuts him out and turns this open colloquy into a closed-door meeting. Even for art exhibitions that let people in on their planning, as Szymczyk frequently did in the form of workshops and other events, there are apparently limits to what can be public knowledge.