Playlist
Gentle Giant - I Lost My Head
Fehlfarben - Xenophonie
Day three and back to Kassel to our free parking spot, used on Saturday, then, up to the Friedrichsplatz and into the queue for the main gallery, the Museum Fredericianum, one of the oldest public museums in Europe - opened in 1779...
We were soon inside and the first exhibit was invisible...
This was Ryan Gander;'s "I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull)" - a light breeze flowing through the building's entire ground floor...
...very welcome on this hot September day...
In one of the rooms on the right, another piece I particularly enjoyed was Ceal Floyer's "'Til I Get It Right" - an empty white room in which a never-ending tape loop is playing...
Created from the refrain of Tammy Wynette's song of the same title, the words "falling in love" have been removed from a one line extract to leave Ms Wynette's clear tones advising, over and over, "I'll just keep on 'til I get it right"...
We had a quick look into the rotunda, which housed "the brain" but couldn't see anything which attracted so moved on...
...upstairs for Hannah Rygen's tapestries from the 1930's...
In another room, fabio Mauri's work was enjoyed - including his "Schermi", especially "The End"...
...as was Doreen Reid Nakamarra's work...
A room of scientific experiments by Anton Zellinger was keeping everyone happy in an interactive stylee...
...while another highlight was the work of Korbinian Aigner - a priest, who, while imprisoned at Dachau Concentration Camp, developed four new strains of apple, KZ-1 to 4 (KZ being the German abbreviation for Concentration Camp...
Between the early 1910s and the 1960s, he created around 900 postcard size drawings of apples and pears...
KZ-3 is still grown today and was renamed the Korbinian apple in the 1980's...
Back through the science room...
..and past Alighiero Boetti's 1971 work "Mappa"...
...to the room housing works by the octogenarian New Yorker, Ida Applebroog...
These works are from her personal archive - unseen for 30 to 40 years...
The installation included reproduction sof many of the pieces for people to take away as souvenirs, while, at the start of Documenta, five people walked around Kassel wearing some of the sandwich boards shown here and in the pictures later in this entry...
Another highlight was the work of Llyn Foulkes - both the film of him singing and playing "The Machine" in Kassel at the start of the Documenta...
...and his impressive, almost 3D, artworks...
On to enjoy the unlikely named Sopheap Pich's wall frames, entitled "Seven Parts Relief"...
And the art just kept on impressing...
Mariam Ghani's split screen depiction of the Fredericianum gallery (which was badly damaged in WWII) alongside the Dar ul-Aman Palace in Kabul was striking - combined as it was with some excellent avant-garde piano work and an involving spoken commentary...
...while Godshka Macuga's digital collage (which has a counterpart in Kabul) "Of What Is, That It Is; Of What Is Not, That It Is Not", drew the viewers in...
Our final work of the morning visit was Kader Attia's slideshow and display of African artefacts entitled "The Repair"...
We headed back to the Orangerie for an installation which had been closed yesterday...
...shown in the planetarium...
This was a very disappointing piece by Jeronimo Voss, "Eternity Through the Stars" - which we had to sit through three times to fully view due to projector problems...
Far more entertaining was the very tall guy ahead of us clattering his head on the emergency exit sign as we left the room...
Ouch...
At the Documenta shop the postcards were back in stock and a set was procured...
...followed by the now ubiquitous Kaffee und Kuchen...
Then, to the Documenta Halle...
For me, there was nothing here which did not impress...
Gustav Metzger's "Too Extreme" - drawings displayed below velvet cloths to mirror the fact that he had hidden them away for many years after their completion, during his "auto-destructive period"..
Kristina Buch's butterfly cocoons - the by product of her butterfly exhibition outside the hall...
One of my favourite rooms, Etel Adnan's beautiful colourful abstracts of Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco...
...outside of which hung three massive canvasses by Julie Mehretu...
In Yan Lei's "Limited Art Project" there were 360 paintings, one for each day in the Chinese calendar...
As Documenta progresses through its 100 days, the artist removes paintings and has them sprayed over at a car plant near Kassel in monochrome finish and places them back in the room...
Another of my favourite exhibits...
Down into the main hall and a retrospective of the works of Thomas Bayrle...
...including a small pig in a corner...
...and "praying" engines...
Also impressive was Nalini Malani's 11 minute installation "In Search of Vanished Blood" which involved video projection, five rotating cylinders, spotlights and a loud and exciting soundtrack...
I really enjoyed Moon and Jeon's "retrospective from the future" entitled "News form Nowhere" which involved a split screen film "El fin del mundo"...
...and descriptions, diagrams, scientific demonstrations and artefacts from an imagined future...
In the early afternoon, Jorg and Ansem arrived to join us...
...and, having spent some more time in the Documenta Halle showing Ansem my favourites, we made our way to the nearby Natural Science Museum in the Ottoneum...
Ansem liked the "gold" bars made from earth...
..and I took this pic of a unicorn for unicorn loving Xenia...
These look like books...
...but they're made of wood not paper...
The staircase afforded a good shot...
...and a real book and some seeds also entertained...
Back to the Fredericianum and Ansem wondered about Julio' Gonzalez's pieces - originally shown at Documenta II in 1959...
His favourite was this - which I cannot identify from the guide book...
We also liked Michael Rakowitz's "What Dust Will Rise"...
..and, of course, Pratchaya Phinthong's "Sleeping Sickness", comprising two dead tsetse flies, a fertile female and a sterile male, on a plinth, in a glass box...
The artist works in Africa to try and eradicate Sleeping Sickness by means other than irradiating the male flies to sterilise them...
Back to Ida Appelbroog's room...
...and Ansem took some time to chose some souvenirs...
One last walk through the breeze on the ground floor...
..and then out into the sun, walking past Seth Price's clothes collection...
...and up to the unlikely venue of the unused top floor of the C&A department store...
As we climbed the stairs we heard the sound of something like the most annoying noisy neighbours you could imagine...
But, once inside, I was captivated by both the pounding rhythms and subtle inflections of Cevdet Erek's sound installation, "Room of Rhythms"...
Another favourite piece for me...
So, we started yesterday with noise and we ended today with noise...
Your correspondent was a little worn out by the time we returned to Jorg and Yvonne's...
Jorg was looking good...
...as were Yvonne and Xenia...
The Exec Producer enjoyed a joke with Teja...
Xenia's hair started to dry...
Teja donned his 3D glasses to entertain...
...and hit his mum...
...while father and son posed for the camera...
..and investigated their own antique piece...
I am not yet 64...
And so the day and the visit drew to a close..
One more portrait...
...and it was all over...
Another excellent day...
Highlight of the Day : Art, art and more art...
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