documenta 14

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.

Daniel Knorr: Materialization / Documenta 14 Athens. Installation and performance with found objects and video at Athens Conservatoire (Odeion), Athens (Greece). April 6, 2017. In his performance, Daniel Knorr pastes pieces of scrap materials to the pages of his artist book, which he sells at EUR 80 a piece, to fund his work Expiration Movement Manifest.

Knorr’s production line creating the “litter press” books makes for quite a contrast with that over 500 years ago.

For more on large-scale book art installations.

*The Parthenon of Books*, 1983/2017
Marta Minujín
Kassel, Germany

In her note in BookRiot, Nikki Steele takes Brian Dettmer’s TED talk remark that books are created to relate to our human scale and builds on it elegantly, if all too briefly, by bringing together the installation works “Literature versus Traffic”, “Scanner”, “Book Cell”, “Singularity”, “Biographies” and “Contemporaries”. She’s not the first to provide a Pinterest– or Flickr-style burst of “ooh, look at this”, but unlike her predecessors, she makes the point worth pondering: this art that is not on a human scale evokes wonder and awe.

This challenges and expands on Dettmer’s point that people are disturbed by book art because we think of the book as a body, a living thing. As John Milton said, “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself”. That was in the context of book licensing laws that led to the confiscation and destruction of unlicensed books. Still, Milton would probably react as angrily to individual works of book art, and he might view the installations as if they were on the scale of the massacre of the Waldensians in the Piedmont.

Dettmer’s justification of book art that books “also have the potential to continue to grow and to continue to become new things”, that “books really are alive”, leaves us still squirming on the hook when Steele asks, “what happens when artists explode the scale and take books much, much larger?”. If you think cutting up or destroying a book is sacrilegious, what is your reaction to the 10,000 splayed in the streets of Melbourne by Luzinterruptus or the equal number cast by Alicia Martín into frozen defenestrations in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain or the even greater number in Marta Minujín’s The Parthenon of Books, installed for documenta in Kassel, Germany?

Miltonic eruption? Or Steele-ish delight, awe and love of the art?

Let’s raise the stakes and confusion. What if the books used in the single-volume work and installations were the Koran, the Bible or the Torah? Art and ethics are rarely happy bedfellows. Is there such a thing as “responsible art” that does not run afoul of the principle of the creative spirit or the integrity of art? Is art wholly without cultural, ethical or social contextual obligations?

This is why I like book art. It provokes just by coming into being. Its existence and appreciation are hard won.

Links on large-scale book art installations:

Thilo Folkerts and Rodney Latourelle

Brian Goggin

Rune Guneriussen

Samuel Levi Jones