Daniel Knorr’s Expiration Movement (2017), an installation work for Documenta 14 held in Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece, received good coverage in The Art Newspaper:
Knorr’s work in Greece, meanwhile, entails collecting discarded objects from the streets of Athens, then inserting and pressing them into books. They will be sold during the show and will finance the production of the smoke in the Fridericianum in Kassel.
Julia Michalska, “No smoke without fire: Documenta 14 unveils first work in Kassel; A smoking chimney billows for the start of the quinquennial event, The Art Newspaper, 3rd April 2017.
Romanian Knorr is known for his eyebrow-raising political installations such as STASI Stones (made of Stasi documents pulped à la Dieter Roth, mixed with water and oil, and then displayed in Berlin). Those “litter press” books sold to finance the smoke machine atop the Fridericianum, built in 1779, one of the oldest public museums in the world, and host to documenta since 1955) further secure the added accolade “book artist”.
Like the many layers of meaning that book art can convey, smoke billowing from a chimney in Europe, in particular Germany, evokes several responses: concentration camps, book burning, a pope’s election. Also, books incorporating Athens’ litter allude to the protracted socioeconomic difficulties Greece has had in its relationship with the EU, again in particular Germany (both the debt and refugee crises). Knorr’s work has much in common with the atmospherics of the work of another eyebrow-raising artist, Anselm Kiefer, well-known for his book art.
Knorr’s production line creating the “litter press” books makes for quite a contrast with that over 500 years ago.
Books On Books 