Zeitschrift

für Kunstgeschichte
Journal of Art History
Revue d’histoire de l’art
Rivista di Storia dell’Arte

4.2018
Jahrgang 81

debatte
The Summer
of Art 2017

I N H A LT
441 E DI TOR IA L
442 A B S T R A C T S
445 D E B AT T E
The Summer of Art 2017 (continuation)
445 Eleonora Vratskidou: Courbet at documenta 14 –
Charity and Other Alternative Economies
461 AU F S ÄT Z E
461 Monica Juneja: “A very civil idea …” Art History,
Transculturation, and World-Making – With and
Beyond the Nation
486 T H E M E N S C H W E R P U N K T :
ÖKONOM I E N DE S S O Z IA L E N
Gastherausgeberinnen: Eva Ehninger und
Magdalena Nieslony
486 Eva Ehninger und Magdalena Nieslony: Einleitung:
Der Marktwert der Kapitalismuskritik. Ein Dilemma
der Gegenwartskunst
499 Elisabeth Fritz: Wirksame Kunst. Spektakel als kritische
Form und soziale Praxis
519 Larne Abse Gogarty: Feeling and Form in Mark
Bradford’s American Pavilion
538 Tom Holert: Für eine meta-ethische Wende.
Anmerkungen zur neueren Verantwortungsästhetik
555 Tomasz Załuski: Reworking Effectiveness: Art as a
Politic of Redistribution – Some Remarks from a
Polish Perspective
575 Antje Krause-Wahl: Ökonomien der sozialen Medien –
Bildpolitik und Gemeinschaftsbildung in den digitalen
Netzwerken der Gegenwartskunst
588 Marina Vishmidt: Anomaly and Autonomy: On the
Currency of the Exception in the Value Relations of
Contemporary Art
601 BUCHBESPRECHUNGEN
601 Michael Grandmontagne und Tobias Kunz (Hg.),
Skulptur um 1300 zwischen Köln und Paris
(Rezensiert von Gerhard Lutz)
606 Gisela Probst, Die Memoria der Herren von Lichten-
berg in Neuweiler (Elsass). Adelphus-Teppiche,
Hochgrab Ludwigs V. († 1471), Heiliges Grab (1478),
Glasmalereien (Rezensiert von Anna Rapp Buri)
611 Vlad Ionescu, Pneumatology. An Inquiry into the
Representation of Wind, Air and Breath
(Rezensiert von Linn Burchert)
618 Adressen der Autorinnen und Autoren
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DE BAT T E
The Summer of Art 2017 (continuation)
Eleonora Vratskidou
Courbet at documenta 14 – Charity and
Other Alternative Economies
In the last documenta, the Neue Galerie occupied
the key position traditionally reserved for the Frid-
ericianum since the creation of the show in Kas-
sel in 1955. For the fourteenth iteration of the ex-
hibition, the Fridericianum was instead entirely
dedicated to showcasing the collection of the
Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, a
choice that marked a significant shift in the estab-
lished hierarchies of documenta exhibition spaces.
Among the thirty-five venues of documenta 14 in
Kassel, the Neue Galerie was not only by far the
largest, but also the one with the highest concen-
tration of historical art, and as such a privileged
site for curatorial statements. Curatorial agency
was here, in other words, the least mediated by the
involvement of living artists.
The show at the gallery was remarkable in many
ways. One could only be impressed by the density
of the aesthetic and semantic threads that flowed
through the two stories of the museum and the
basement, forming a multi-layered narrative ma-
trix. Described as the primary seat of the exhibi-
tion’s memory and historical consciousness,1 the
show registered forgotten incidents of oppression
and resistance, of looting and trauma, conjuring
the legacies of European colonialism and World
War II ; it entangled local and global histories
around the inception of the documenta project it-
self and revisited the tense story of Greek-German
relations since the eighteenth century through a
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
focused Kassel-Athens perspective – one partic-
ularly compelling to the practitioners of transna-
tional history or histoire croisée. The stakes of this
particular venue were in many senses historio-
graphical, more likely to seduce humanities schol-
ars rather than the presentist, trading actors of the
art world – let alone lay audiences.
Nonetheless, the complexity of this highly in-
tersected curatorial construct was at times dimin-
ished by this same curatorial impulse. At the start
of a crucial parcours, the visitor stumbled upon
imposed readings and a didactic rhetoric that one
rarely encounters in contemporary art shows of
this kind. At least, this is how I felt when I came
across the first pieces of textual curatorial address
in the venue, starting with a caption accompany-
ing a sketch by Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877) in
the inaugural room. Courbet’s graphite drawing,
after his painting Alms from a Beggar at Ornans
(L’aumône d’un mendiant à Ornans, 1868, figs. 1
and 2), depicts a gaunt old man on the open road,
a beggar, as identified in the title, who despite his
own miserable state offers a coin to a barefooted
boy, under the eye of his breastfeeding mother sit-
ting next to the meager belongings of the family.
The caption reads: “This drawing was made by the
French realist master Gustave Courbet as a pre-
paratory sketch for a major painting titled Alms
from a Beggar at Ornans (1868), now housed in the
Burrell Collection in Glasgow. Courbet’s treatment
445
1 Gustave Courbet, Alms from a beggar at Ornans (L’aumône
d’un mendiant à Ornans), 1868, graphite on paper. Kassel,
Neue Galerie during documenta 14
of the iconography of misery and poverty – a cru-
cial element in the phase of his artistic develop-
ment that inspired him to ‘invent’ realism – can
perhaps be read as a meditation on generosity and
the power of sharing and solidarity: a prophetic
intimation of the need to invent alternate econo-
mies or break the economic stranglehold on hu-
man existence.” 2
The prescriptive tone of this caption hit a nerve.
Bearing in mind the political engagement of doc-
umenta 14, also conceived as a gesture of solidar-
ity toward crisis-ridden Greece, I could not help
transposing the scene – described as a token of
the “power of solidarity” – to the context of the
current refugee reception crisis in Europe, dur-
ing which discourses and practices of solidarity
have assumed an unprecedented prominence, par-
ticularly in Greece.3 By analogy, I pictured crisis-
ridden Greece as the old beggar and the massive
446
2 Gustave Courbet, Alms from a beggar at Ornans (L’aumône
d’un mendiant à Ornans), 1868, oil on canvas. Kassel, Neue
Galerie during documenta 14
numbers of refugees and asylum seekers cross-
ing the Turkish borders, fleeing war atrocities and
persecution, as the indigent homeless family. My
own imagined caption was some cynical subtext
fueled by the shortcomings of EU migration poli-
cies: “Try at least to show solidarity with the weak-
est. Stand up for each other since there is no exter-
nal help to be expected.” An economy crafted upon
altruistic abnegation: was this what documenta
envisioned as an alternative in the current auster-
ity-torn political setting? And even if there can un-
deniably be a ‘power in sharing’, is this really what
Courbet’s drawing is about? Recovering from my
heated ruminations and moving around the room
to discover the rest of the exhibits, it gradually oc-
curred to me that all the works brought together at
the outset of the show were seeking to explore an
array of alternative economies and dissident forms
of exchange.
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
 This will be a focused take on documenta 14: an
analysis that departs from a single exhibited work
and its immediate surroundings but expands to
comment on the larger curatorial endeavor of the
exhibition and examine the function and incon-
gruities embedded in its radical public rhetoric.
In the first part of this paper, I will work through
my initial bewilderment and reflect on the ways
in which Courbet’s drawing was relevant for the
curatorial argument. I will argue that within the
universe of documenta 14 the image is emblem-
atic of an ideal of a lateral solidarity devoid of the
power imbalance typically involved in the act of
helping others. In the second part, I will propose
a close reading of the room as a whole, in order to
demonstrate its programmatic character. I con-
tend that around the ostensibly meager Courbet in
the opening room of the Neue Galerie were artic-
ulated some of the core concepts and aspirations
of the overall curatorial project of documenta 14:
namely, solidarity, hospitality, participatory action,
and modes of resistance to what is perceived as the
‘neoliberal condition’. It might sound exaggerated
to assert that the opening room of the gallery op-
erated as a synecdochic evocation of the exhibition
itself (a bit like the ‘Brain’ of dOCUMENTA  [13]
in the Rotunda of the Fridericianum). I do claim,
however, that in this room lay one of the ‘brains’
of the highly complex, twin-bodied organism of
documenta 14, which unfurled across Athens and
Kassel from April to September 2017.4 As a pivotal
threshold into the show, I argue that the arrange-
ment in the room can be read as a secret manual to
the exhibition itself.
I. Why Courbet and why this Particular one?
Courbet’s contemporaries, too, recognized a pro-
phetic potential in Alms from a Beggar at Ornans
but remained less optimistic than the documenta
curators. The republican critic Jules Castagnary
(1830 – 1880), Courbet’s friend and one of the stron-
gest advocates of his art, perceived in the work a
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
“bizarre presentiment de l’avenir”: “Ce pauvre fai-
sant l’aumône à un pauvre, n’est-ce pas la conclu-
sion des grands désastres financiers et industri-
els?” (“The poor giving alms to the poor: is this
not the conclusion of great financial and industrial
disaster?”).5 Where Castagnary sees a conclusion,
the documenta curators perceive an opening, both
for the venue and for a reflexive engagement with
alternative economies.
It needs to be noted that the work is in many
ways a conclusive one. Completed in 1868, it comes
as the very last in a series of paintings that make
up Courbet’s critical confrontation with the so-
cio-political realities of his time in his art, start-
ing in the late 1840s with the Stonebreakers (1849)
and A Burial at Ornans (1850) and spanning until
the mid-1860s. Alms from a Beggar summons the
exhaustion of Courbet’s socialist engagement in
painting, while in the late 1850s his attention turns
toward an exploration of the more abstract and
formal qualities of landscape painting. Strongly
disliked upon its presentation at the Parisian Sa-
lon of 1868, harshly criticized for its coarse style,
and extensively caricatured, the painting does not
count among Courbet’s happiest moments, even
for the painter’s most committed supporters.6 The
work has remained little known and even less ex-
hibited (to my knowledge it has never been shown
outside the United Kingdom since its purchase by
Sir William Burrell from George Petit in 1923).7 In
this respect, it seems unclear on what grounds ex-
actly the work qualifies as a “major painting” by
Courbet, as stated in the caption text.8 If docu-
menta was to showcase a Courbet, why did it have
to be this one?
II. South-to-South Relations:
A Model of Horizontal Connectivity
In 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels launched the tenet that
would become the backbone of left-wing criti-
cism on philanthropy: “philanthropists, humani-
447
tarians, improvers of the condition of the working
class, organisers of charity” pertain to this “part of
the bourgeoisie […] desirous of redressing social
grievances in order to secure the continued exis-
tence of bourgeois society”.9 In his The Soul of Man
Under Socialism (1891), Oscar Wilde was even more
harsh on the ambiguous nature of the exchange es-
tablished in the act of charity and the counterpro-
ductive psychological dynamic that it establishes
between benefactor and beneficiary. Wilde sees
charity as degrading, generating resentment rather
than gratitude. As he provocatively explains: “the
best amongst the poor are never grateful. They
are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and re-
bellious […] Why should they be grateful for the
crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?” 10 – a
tension that has been artfully staged recently in
Ruben Östlund’s film The Square (2017).
But what if charity comes not from the ‘rich
man’; not from above, but from below, from those
who are themselves destitute, from those who are
also in need? What if charity is free of the social
asymmetry that typically characterizes the par-
ties concerned? Courbet’s L’Aumône d’un mendiant
seems to be offering precisely such a scenario –
hence its relevance for the curatorial discourse de-
veloped at documenta 14. Courbet’s image propo-
ses an alternative to class-ridden charity grounded
upon inequality. As such, it exemplifies documenta
14’s engagement in the celebration of horizontal, la-
teral connectivity and solidarity, particularly in
terms of ‘South-to-South’ relations. This position
was reiterated intensely throughout the exhibition.
It could be seen, for instance, in references to his-
torical events such as the Bandung Conference in
1955, which loudly proclaimed solidarity amongst
former colonized countries in Africa and Asia – a
watershed event for postcolonial consciousness; or
in the ways in which artists from the Global South
engaged in dialogue with each other, as in the case
of the Aboriginal painter Gordon Hookey (b. 1961),
who in addressing the colonial history of Australia
in his large-scale mural exhibited in Kassel (Neue
Neue Galerie) drew on the series of paintings on
448
the colonial history of Zaire by his Congolese col-
league Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu (1947 – 1981?),
presented in Athens (Benaki Museum).
To consider Courbet’s image a symbol of lat-
eral solidarity and of unsuppressed joy in sharing
implies nonetheless a somewhat reductive read-
ing of it. Take a look at the almost drunken atti-
tude, the awkward, unsteady, wide-legged pos-
ture of the beggar, or at the sullen expression of the
mother who is mistrustfully observing the scene,
and whose round face perfectly replicates the head
of the dog in front of her – I fully adhere to Linda
Nochlin’s observation that the painting highlights
“the most unlovely aspects of misery as a univer-
sal social condition afflicting men and women, old
and young, dogs as well as humans”.11 It is diffi-
cult to recognize here any empowering engage-
ment, the happiness in either giving or receiving,
or any celebration of generosity. As for the child,
the immediate beneficiary of the beggar’s good
deed, his attitude is, again, ambiguous. Much de-
pends on the way one interprets the gesture of his
bent arm against his mouth and nose. Benedict
Nicolson (and much of the earlier literature) reads
the gesture as a blowing of a kiss to the beggar,12
while Linda Nochlin offers a much more plausi-
ble interpretation of the child’s attitude as an effort
to “shield his nose from the beggar’s rank odor”.13
The latter reading would of course problematize
the scene sufficiently to save Courbet from the sin
of “Dickensian sentimentality” of which Nicolson
accuses him.14 The boy accepts an offering from
someone whose bodily presence he cannot physi-
cally stand. The crux of the depicted scene, I be-
lieve, is not the offering gesture of the beggar but
the child’s unfiltered reaction – opening his one
arm to the beggar and protecting himself with the
other; accepting and negating at the same time. As
such, I would rather see the scene as a tribute to
the tensions and complexities of any act of giving
and receiving. A reading of Courbet as a moral-
izer preaching acts of noble abnegation fails to ac-
knowledge the captured perplexity of the depicted
encounter and, more broadly, the inherent asym-
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
 metries underlying any kind of exchange, even
in the most balanced equation. Disregard for this
complexity in favour of a superficially prescriptive
rhetoric of solidarity is precisely what fueled scep-
ticism toward the pact that this documenta was
proposing to make with its visitors.
Alms from a Beggar is not Courbet’s first paint-
ing on the theme of charity. An earlier signifi-
cant example is Young Ladies of the Village, Giv-
ing Alms to a Cowherd (Les Demoiselles du Village,
1851), representing Courbet’s sisters, fashionably
dressed, offering a piece of pie to a barefoot peas-
ant girl herding cattle, a scene set in the rural land-
scape of Courbet’s native Doubs region. The act of
charity depicted here is – as with any act of char-
ity – not free of ambiguities and has given rise to
diverging readings. Timothy Clark interprets the
work as part of a series in which Courbet seeks to
reflect on his family’s social status, evolving from
peasantry to respectable bourgeoisie of Ornans.
Presenting his sisters as “indulging in that most
bourgeois of pastimes, charity”,15 Courbet ascribes
to them a position defined by their distance from
the lower classes, hence able to help them. This
stance would fall, in the final analysis, under the
Marxist criticism of charity.
Diane Lesko, on the other hand, reads the alms-
giving scene as a symbolic gesture of social soli-
darity and reconciliation between the (rural) bour-
geoisie and the peasantry in the aftermath of the
failed revolution of 1848 – a period of intense
cleavage and peasant revolts. She further detects in
the work a latent barb against the Emperor Louis
Napoléon, who, once in power after the coup d’état
of 1851, bluntly betrayed his exile writings in fa-
vour of a land-sharing system that would alleviate
poverty. In 1851, Courbet was still envisioning “a
united rural front of bourgeois and peasant” that
“would change the power structure of France”.16
Some fifteen years later in Alms from a Beggar,
the protagonists of the charity-stage are redefined
and the social chasm between almsgiver and recip-
ient is suppressed: the lower classes seem to have
been left to themselves. The representation of a
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
ragged beggar giving charity to an even more dis-
tressed mother and her offspring could – follow-
ing the same logic – be read as a disillusioned and
ironic comment about the possibility of any social
reconciliation between classes, marking an end to
Courbet’s painterly engagement with socialism.
Capturing what at first glance might be read as an
act of solidarity, the work delivers rather Courbet’s
astute assessment of the fruitless attempts at social
reconciliation that would soon lead to the violence
of the Parisian Commune.
III. Courbet as a Founding Father
This was the first appearance of a work by Cour-
bet at a documenta show – despite Germany’s spe-
cial affinities to the painter.17 Courbet was essen-
tial to the curatorial project of documenta 14, as
the starting point of an artistic genealogy that the
exhibition wished to ascribe to itself; his work per-
mitted it to reclaim the sources of an art with po-
litical implications as a medium of social criti-
cism and resistance. The curators of documenta
14 chose to return to the foundational moment of
Courbet’s realism and the context which nour-
ished the idea that art can bring about social
change, ultimately grounding the documenta en-
deavour in the utopian social thought of the En-
lightenment.18 Besides, realism as an ‘idiom’ had
been investigated intensely in the last documenta,
from the various historical versions of Socialist Re-
alism to Arthur Żmijewski’s Realism (2017), a dis-
concerting video installation featuring amputees.
Courbet appears thus as a relevant founding fig-
ure for the exhibition, along with Arnold Bode, the
founding father of documenta, as an institution.
On the upper floor of the museum, Bode’s role in
the pre- and post-war artistic and intellectual mi-
lieu of Kassel was shrewdly revisited against the
global political and economic conjecture that
marked the inception of documenta in the 1950s.19
Courbet’s presence was thus crucial, albeit in
the humble form of a sketch. Though restrictive
449
3 Ernst Barlach, Russian beggar woman II (Russische Bettlerin II), 1907, bronze, installation view. Kassel, Neue Galerie during
documenta 14
loan conditions prevented the curatorial team
from including the actual painting in the show,20
the choice of the drawing is significant in many
ways (to which I will also return later). Given the
accompanying caption, it becomes clear that the
curatorial interest lay primarily in the subject
matter rather than, for instance, in the rich lay-
ers of meanings attributed to Courbet’s pictorial-
ity. Courbet seemed to be above all reclaimed as
a painter of ideas – a choice that echoes Pierre-Jo-
seph Proudhon’s most reductive understanding of
the social function of art.21
IV. The Begging Theme
In her article on Courbet and the representation of
misery in nineteenth-century art, published in the
first documenta 14 issue of South Magazine, the
late Linda Nochlin pleads for an inclusive consid-
eration of art with political implications, which
takes as its subjects “indigent and marginalized
450
human beings”.22 She acknowledges such political
concerns amongst artists, long ignored by main-
stream art history, as an equally valid “way of be-
ing of one’s times, of being modern” as that of an
art focused on “vanguard formal priorities” and
a modernism understood primarily in aesthetic
terms.23 Nochlin’s plea is largely acknowledged
in the Neue Galerie. Next to the French master’s
sketch stands Ernst Barlach’s sculpture The Rus-
sian Beggar Woman II (1907, fig. 3). The latter in-
troduces, though, a quite different perspective on
the theme of beggary. Perfectly folded into her-
self, Barlach’s woman is a mere registering of mis-
ery and humility, a fatalist acceptance of a posi-
tion from which there seems to be no possible way
out. There is no doubt that art depicting misery
and social injustice should be taken into account
in art-historical inquiry. The crucial question is
how precisely misery is represented, with what in-
tentions, by whom, and for whom. Nochlin’s anal-
ysis does not problematize the fact that the indi-
gent and the dispossessed are largely represented
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
4 Installation view. Kassel, Neue Galerie during documenta 14
as passive, rarely given agency, and appeal princi-
pally to mechanisms of compassion that fail to ad-
dress social inequality as a structural phenome-
non in the evolving capitalist system.24 Barlach’s
sculpture is a good case in point – the work is in-
deed among those Barlach beggar figures of whom
Bertolt Brecht remained skeptical, unlike the con-
testatory stance he recognized and appreciated
in Russian Beggar with Bowl (1906, Dresden, SKD
Albertinum).25 Set against Barlach’s prostrate beg-
gar, then, Courbet’s atypical charity scene can take
on an empowering potential.
The show at the Neue Galerie actually opened
with a threefold exposition of the begging theme.
Alongside Courbet’s drawing and Barlach’s sculp-
ture, on the other side of the entrance to the room,
the begging gesture was replayed in Tomislav Go-
tovac’s performance piece Begging (Can You Spare
Me a Dime? Thank You! The Begging Artist), staged
in Zagreb in 1980 (documented through a series
of photos and a poster). The charity theme comes
through, then, as active solidarity in Courbet, as
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
self-abandonment in Barlach, and, finally, in Goto-
vac, as a subversive artist’s gesture that comments
ironically on the specific condition of the artistic
profession and its appeal to exceptionalism (in for-
mer Yugoslavia and beyond). If the first two – Bar-
lach and Courbet – can be paired to form a strong
contrast, Gotovac’s performance evokes instead a
sub-theme of the room, regarding the relation of
art to money.
V. Alternative Economies:
The Soviet and the Christian Model
The celebration of horizontal solidarity in Cour-
bet’s work announces an interest in alternative
economic systems. The first one to be evoked was
the socialist economy of the Soviet Union – the
first state-planned economy in modern times,
based on the abolition of private property. Moving
clockwise in the room, Courbet’s drawing was fol-
lowed by two works by the Russian painter Pavel
451
5 Installation view. Kassel, Neue Galerie during documenta 14
Filonov (1883 – 1941), one of the many persecuted
artists of the Eastern Bloc countries that were pre-
sented in documenta 14.26 The link between Cour-
bet and Filonov, not obvious at first sight, inter-
estingly suggests an often-neglected lineage, since
Courbet was one of the rare Western artists vener-
ated in the USSR and conjured as a model for the
creation of proletarian art.27
Filonov’s GOELRO (1931) refers to Lenin’s ex-
emplary plan for the electrification of the country,
a cornerstone for the development of the national
economy and of heavy industry in particular.
Lenin’s plan gained a legendary status in the pop-
ular imagination and solidified the Soviet ideol-
ogy of social change as going hand-in-hand with
technological progress. The painting figures the
revolutionary leader standing with open palms on
a dense grid of red lines and geometrical shapes,
suggesting the vast rural areas of the USSR unified
through electric wires and power plants. GOELRO
was accompanied by Filonov’s Workers (1915 –
1916), a painting dated before the Revolution of 1917,
452
which depicts a series of gorilla-like androids mov-
ing in circles in a confined urban space, evoking
the inescapable character of the work chain and
the deadening nature of repetitive manual labour.
Should one understand the juxtaposition of the
two works by Filonov as a before-and-after illus-
tration of the Revolution, from dehumanizing cap-
italism in Workers to the luminous economic pro-
gram of Lenin as the engine for the creation of a
communist society based on equality and justice?
The correlation of the two paintings could also po-
tentially bring to mind the forced labour of Gu-
lag prisoners employed for the implementation of
Lenin’s electrification program, completed eleven
years after its inception in 1920.28 Does the social-
ist economy as restaged here function as a model
of an alternative economy, or rather as an anti-
model?
I cherish the ambiguity and move on to the next
wall, on which other admonitions against the evil
of capitalism were to be found, deriving this time
from the Christian tradition (although the link
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
 between Soviet thought and Christian ethics is
deeply rooted,29 the step here was more of a long
shot). The work constellation exhibited suggested
a more radical way of dealing with money, consist-
ing in no less than ‘shunning’ it, just as Saint An-
thony shuns gold in the two small wooden panels
by North Italian masters Niccolò di Pietro Gerini
(1340 – 1414) and Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi
(1406 – 1486). As explained in the accompanying
caption, the depicted mound of gold is “the most
abstract, iconographically speaking, but to our
contemporary eyes […] obviously also the most
topical and easily recognisable” 30 among the many
guises adopted by the Devil in his efforts to tempt
the Egyptian hermit.
The visual evocations of Saint Anthony – paired
with a long excerpt from Gustave Flaubert’s literary
account of his temptations in the Reader 31 – elicit
associations with the figure of Diogenes, revis-
ited through Étienne Baudet’s (c 1638 – 1711) etching
6 Plan of the first room of the Neue Galerie. Kassel, documenta 14
Paysage avec Diogène after Nicolas Poussin (1701) in
the inaugural room of the EMST in Athens, as well
as with the fasting Buddha of the Gandhara sculp- ignoring the nuances between the symbolic mean-
tures exhibited at the rear of the Neue Galerie. All ings of gold in the monastic tradition and our
three figures exemplify culturally diverse forms of contemporary money culture – but the very com-
asceticism and abstention from material posses- position of the quartet seems ill-conceived.
sions, as an individual practice. As such, they form The two works by David Schutter were based not
the ground against which the intersubjective mode on the pieces exhibited here, but on a panel with
of economic disinterest in Courbet’s beggar is to be the same theme by another little-known Italian
read. master, Bernardo Parentino (c 1437 – 1531), held at
By far the oldest paintings in the show, the two the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. Schutter’s
early Renaissance panels depicting Saint Anthony pictorial output builds on an intense and highly
tempted by gold were paired with two contem- conditioned dialogue with past masters, from the
porary ‘renditions’ of the motif, David Schutter’s Renaissance to the nineteenth century. It relies on
gray monochromatic paintings (fig. 5). The caption a long-term, meticulous visual and mnemonic en-
text grouped the four works together and restored gagement with works by specific masters, held in
a straightforward didactic rhetoric: “This quartet particular collections or museums (as cyphered in
forms the centrepiece of a room devoted to socio- his acronym-like titles, here for instance: DP P 587
economic reflection, addressing not just the entan- PR and DP 588 PR ).33 The concrete, material ‘orig-
glement of art and money, but the necessity of its inals’ from which the painter departs for his own
‘shunning’ on a planetary scale.” 32 Not only does works cannot thus simply be held as interchange-
this last claim stretch the limits of absurdity; not able, for the sake of the concept, with any other
only are the presented works employed in a purely work that might share the same iconography. Even
illustrative manner to support prescriptive claims – if Schutter often selects as his ‘originals’ works

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 453

7 Installation view. Kassel, Neue Galerie during documenta 14
with “brooding political meaning”,34 the core of his
praxis offers a reflection on pictorial representa-
tion, colour, and texture, on the workings of mem-
ory and on processes of distancing, with regard to
art-historical traditions. Both Monika Szewczyk
and Dieter Roelstraete, curators of documenta 14,
had collaborated with the Chicago-based painter
in previous shows, exploring precisely these as-
pects of his work.35 Here, though, as part of the
central quartet of the opening room of the Neue
Galerie, the self-reflexive approach on the phe-
nomenology of painting conveyed by Schutter’s
works was dismissed in favor of “socio-economic
reflection”.
Most interestingly, the unnuanced curatorial
rhetoric and the one-to-one correspondence of
art and politics that characterize the caption texts
stood under the tutelary spirit of Marcel Brood-
thaers. His book Magie: Art et politique (1973) was
exhibited in a slim vitrine in the northwest corner
of the room. Broodthaers’ book points shrewdly to
454
the inherent contradictions and impasses of politi-
cally engaged art – a response to Joseph Beuys then
(back in the 1970s) and now, in this very venue,
where Beuys’ presence – as a permanent exhibit of
the Neue Galerie – had been drastically reduced.36
As for the question of the ‘entanglement of art
and money’, a sub-theme of the alternative-econ-
omies key line of argument, this was more overtly
addressed by Ashley Hans Scheirl’s works at the
opposite side of the room (sharing the side with
Courbet, fig. 7). Scheirl’s painting Golden Shower
(L’Origine du monde, 2017) evokes Courbet’s no-
torious homonymous work (L’Origine du monde,
1866, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and brings us back to
the French master, closing thus a first circle of cor-
respondences.
Despite its being in my view a forced construc-
tion, the quartet of Schutter and the Italian mas-
ters actually offered a perfect mirroring of Scheirl’s
constellation of works, replicating its gray and
gold chromatic tones and tracing thus a diago-
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
nal connecting line between the two walls (figs. 6
and 7). One could almost assert that the theme of
art and money was translated into a colour equa-
tion, where gray stood for art (as in Schutter’s pic-
torial subtlety) and gold stood for money (as in the
gilded frames of the early Renaissance panels, in
the golden layers that depict gold inside them, and
in Scheirl’s coins and golden balls).
The golden-gray axis of the art-and-money sub-
theme cut across a second axis, which I will call
here the axis of the handwritten, which con-
nected Courbet’s drawing to the works by Cor-
nelius Cardew and Pierre Klossowski. My ear-
lier comment on the choice of Courbet’s sketch
over the painting was not to imply that the spe-
cific aesthetic nature of the drawing remained un-
attended in the arrangement of the opening room.
The graphic quality of Courbet’s sketch was repli-
cated in the central vitrine carrying manuscripts,
notebooks, and musical scores by the experimental
composer Cornelius Cardew, and rebounded on
the opposite wall, in the handwritten pages deliv-
ering the Laws of hospitality by Pierre Klossowski
(figs. 4 and 6). This appraisal of handwritten aes-
thetics formed within the room a connecting
thread that was also of a semantic nature, tracing
a cardinal line of thought within the larger narra-
tive of alternative economies. The works by Cour-
bet, Cardew, and Klossowski all point to particular
forms of exchange that run counter to the ratio-
nal, standardized character of financial transac-
tions and are based on the principles of expendi-
ture, asymmetry, and non-calculated return. They
all explore the theme of non-reciprocity. If the two
alternative economies discussed above (the Soviet
and the Christian) have already been historically
tested, this new set of works addressed more un-
conventional, utopian practices. Moreover, along
with lateral solidarity, the works by Klossowski
and Cardew introduce two further seminal no-
tions underlying the curatorial endeavour of docu-
menta 14: those of hospitality and participatory ac-
tion.
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
VI. Solidarity – Hospitality –
Participatory Action
Let us turn first to Klossowski. The constellation
of works exhibited on the last wall in the room in-
vited its viewers to discover yet another dissident
economy in La monnaie vivante (Paris, 1970), an
illustrated book co-authored by the French nov-
elist, theorist, and painter of Polish origin Pierre
Klossowski (1905 – 2001) and the photographer
and filmmaker Pierre Zucca (1943 – 1995). Al-
though the book was represented solely by Zuc-
ca’s evocative photographs, with no reference to
the accompanying text by Klossowski, it is actu-
ally the latter: an unorthodox, somewhat her-
metic treatise on economics, that is equally or
even more relevant here. Seeking to assuage the
‘ravages’ inflicted by industrial civilization on af-
fective life (or, more accurately, to use against in-
dustrial civilization its own novel kind of per-
versions), Klossowski builds on the thought of
Marquis de Sade and Charles Fourier to pro-
pose an alternative system of economic exchange
based on the human body as a new form of cur-
rency. His economy traffics in physical drives
(pulsions) and emotions. After the communist
and the Christian tradition, French philosophi-
cal libertarian thought now enters into play. More
radical by far than the two economies discussed
above, Klossowski’s model not only reverses clas-
sical economic theories based on standard, mea-
surable forms of reciprocity, but also subverts the
very disjunction between subject and object, in-
ert and living, animate and inanimate.37 If, in the
first economic universe revisited here, that of the
Soviet Union, what was at stake was the abolition
of private property, Klossowski argues for the ex-
propriation of the body itself: for the abolition of
individual, subjective ownership of the body – in
other words, its de-subjectification.
Zucca’s photographs were exhibited together
with another piece of Klossowski’s prose, a fac-
simile of the Laws of hospitality extracted from
his novel Roberte ce soir (1953), the first part of his
455
fictional trilogy Les lois de l’hospitalité (1953, 1959,
1960). The laws of hospitality delivered in Klos-
sowski’s novel have gained new prominence since
Jacques Derrida’s analysis in his lectures pub-
lished under the title De l’hospitalité (1997), an
extract of which reappeared as the closing piece
of documenta 14’s Reader.38 The theme of hospi-
tality, too, evokes an economy in the sense of the
management of the house (or the nation) vis-à-
vis its guests, its foreigners, its others. Like the
pulsional economy of La monnaie vivante and
Courbet’s alms from a beggar, the particular un-
derstanding of hospitality offered by Klossowski
(and Derrida) implies an exchange based not on
calculated reciprocity but on expenditure, on ex-
cess of openness and generosity. It invokes the en-
counter with the guest/the stranger/the other as
an ultimately self-transformative or even self-lib-
erating moment. “The master of this house […]
waits anxiously at the gate for the stranger he
will see appear like a liberator upon the horizon.
And catching a first glimpse of him in the dis-
tance, though he be still far off, the master will
call out to him, ‘Come in quickly, my happiness is
at stake’.” 39
Hospitality as a transformative or transitional
experience is also in a sense an economy for the
production of the future. Hospitality is an econ-
omy of historical change (or utopia), triggered by
the arrival of the stranger who is invited to pene-
trate from outside the family/the home/the nation.
The laws of hospitality impose moreover not simply
an ‘accidental’, but a ‘substantial’, an ‘absolute’ re-
lation with the stranger: “the master becoming one
with the stranger, his relationship with you who
have just set foot here were now but a relationship
of one with oneself. To this end the host translates
himself into the actual guest.” 40  elements; they function not as representations of
Framed and placed under glass on the wall of the
room, Klossowski’s laws of hospitality transposed
the visitor to the infamous guest bedroom of Oc-
tave and Roberte in Roberte ce soir, where Roberte’s
body – the expenditure of Roberte’s body and af-
fect – is the medium that transforms the guest into
456
host and the host into guest. Like Octave’s guests,
we, guests of documenta, were summoned to take
over the exhibition, to become master of it and to
inhabit it like our own home, to merge into it as in
a ‘relationship of one with oneself’. The space pro-
vided for the actualization of this possibility in
documenta 14 was most prominently the participa-
tory forum of the Parliament of Bodies, the exten-
sive program of public events curated by Paul Beat-
riz Preciado to accompany the exhibition.
In close relation to Klossowski’s laws of hospital-
ity stood the content of the long vitrine at the very
centre of the room. As in a precious ark, therein lay
musical scores, manuscripts, and notebooks by the
English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936 – 1981),
both from his experimental phase and from his
later conversion to social realism and political mil-
itancy.41 Most prominent amongst them was the
original score of the Treatise (1963 – 1967), a piece
of central significance for the show, which was
replicated on the window walls of the documenta
Halle. The piece dates from Cardew’s engagement
in his co-founded Scratch Orchestra (1969 – 1974),
a musical ensemble or rather a collective, includ-
ing both professional musicians and amateurs. The
Scratch Orchestra experimented with forms of
shared authorship, set against the traditional com-
poser-interpreter divide, and fostered an equal in-
volvement of all participants, even in the invention
of a notational system.
Cardew’s legacy, as well as that of the other fa-
voured composer of the show, the Greek Jani
Christou (1926 – 1970), constitute another major
reference point for documenta 14’s curatorial proj-
ect. The scores of both composers, amply exhibited
across Athens and Kassel, transcend traditional
music notation to incorporate images and graphic
a fixed (musical) content but rather as freely in-
terpretable scripts capable of generating perfor-
mances with unpredictable outcomes.42 As such,
they inform the understanding of the exhibition
itself as an open-ended “common action” acces-
sible to any participant. As artistic director Adam
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
 Szymczyk explains in his opening statement in VII. “Kassel transitioning into Athens.
documenta 14’s Reader: Athens mutating into Kassel”
“[…] our aim and interest has been in turning
documenta 14 into a continuum of aesthetic, eco- The generous understanding of hospitality as a
nomic, political, and social experimentation. […] self-transformative experience was instrumental
‘Continuum’ a term borrowed from twentieth-cen- for the transformation of documenta itself. Adam
tury Greek composer Jani Christou, describes an Szymczyk sought to de-centre the exhibition from
open form of common action, a score for activities its traditional seat, to abandon the role of host in
that may occur over an undefined period of time, Kassel to become a guest in the Greek capital. As
engaging different actors and their contributions Paul B. Preciado put it: “Kassel transitioning into
without a prescribed scenario. The Continuum Athens. Athens mutating into Kassel.” 44 Natu-
thus became a model that allowed us to receive and rally, documenta’s quest for hospitality in Athens
work with artists invited to documenta 14 […] In- was highly conditioned, starting from the very fact
stead of infantilizing and quantifying the audience, that, in this case, the guest, or the one who adopts
documenta 14 hopes to empower the visitors as the the position of the guest – that is, the one who is
true owners of documenta, each holding a share supposed to be welcomed and sheltered without
in a common undertaking, together with its mak- even asking their name (according to the absolute
ers, the organizers of documenta 14, alongside the law of hospitality, as Derrida would have it); the
artists and other participants. Only in this way can one who comes without being expected or antici-
documenta strive to become a participatory ex- pated and can potentially change everything – ar-
perience, and an exercise in presentist democracy, rives bearing the very ‘rules’ on which to plot the
rather than one based on the representative capac- encounter. Be that as it may, the laws of hospitality
ity of legitimate elected officials – the organizers hanging above the visitors’ heads in the inaugural
and artists they alone invited.” 43 room of the Neue Galerie invited us to inhabit an
If one were to devise another form of economy institution that itself sought hospitality elsewhere.
in the content of the central vitrine of the room, We were, then, guests of a guest, absorbed in a
this would be an economy of inclusive creative ac- mise-en-abîme that endlessly blurred the roles of
tion, an economy of collectives. The reflection on guest and host, of master and stranger, repeating
alternative economies inaugurating the venue ul- a constant alternating of positions, a continuous
timately delivers an ethics of the encounter with ‘self-othering’ or mutation. The participative expe-
the other (in the broad understanding of hospital- rience of the exhibition as a collective, on the one
ity), as well as a model for experiencing the exhibi- hand, and the realm of institutional handlings that
tion itself as an open collective – an economy, then, made the exhibition possible across Athens and
of the exhibition itself. Set at one of its strategic Kassel, on the other, were constantly superposed.
thresholds, the opening room of the Neue Galerie The making of the exhibition was proposed as a
functioned thus as a kind of ciphered manual to model for experiencing the exhibition itself. There
the exhibition, destined to prepare its audiences for was a sincere attempt (hostile observers would say
the envisioned ‘exercise in presentist democracy’. “naïve”) to create overlapping or continuity be-
tween the two realms, which stands for me as one
of the most salient aspects of documenta 14.
I do believe that a very central part of the signifi-
cance of this exhibition lay precisely in this gesture
of displacement from Kassel to Athens, so bold
and rich in meaning. I also believe that the actual

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 457

making of the exhibition involved an equally rich
experience of a constant blurring of position, of
day-to-day shifts from host to guest, from guest
to host, where involved actors – from the artis-
tic director to the gallery attendants – could live
through the tensions, asymmetries, negotiations,
and continual adjustments, that is, all the neces-
sary perversions of the absolute law of hospitality
preached by Klossowski, Derrida, and in the open-
ing room of Neue Galerie.
But what about the visitors to the exhibition?
They may have experienced a similar richness in
the public programs or in the trip between Athens
and Kassel (for those who could afford it), but the
transitioning experience discussed above definitely
faded and became inaccessible in a staged venue
like the Neue Galerie. The very conception of the
venue runs counter to the curatorial intention to
A version of this paper has been presented at the conference
The Aesthetics of Social Equality: Avant-Garde, Populisms
and the People, organized at the Higher School of Econom-
ics in Moscow (10 – 11 May 2018). I am very grateful to Sa-
beth Buchmann, Nanne Buurman, Eduardo Cadava, Panos
Kompatsiaris, Sarah Wilson, Ulf Wuggenig, Michael Zim-
mermann as well as to Angela Gioti and Spyros Petritakis
for their valuable comments.
1 Neue Galerie, documenta 14, URL : http://www.docu-
menta14.de/en/venues/21726/neue-galerie (date of last
access 28 May 2018).
2 Caption text, also published on the documenta 14 web-
site: Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877), documenta 14, URL :
http://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/21961/gustave-
courbet (date of last access 28 May 2018). The drawing
belongs to the collection of the Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. According to
the collection catalogue, it is not a “preparatory sketch”,
but rather a drawing executed “for publication in L’Album
Autographique—L’Art à Paris en 1868, a kind of Salon
picture-book which illustrated favourite paintings of that
year”, Gustave Courbet, 116. Alms for a Beggar at Ornans,
in: Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (ed.), Drawings from
the Clark Art Institute, New Haven 1964, vol. 1, 68.
3 See indicatively Theodoros Rakopoulos, Resonance of
solidarity: Meanings of a local concept in anti-austerity
Greece, in: Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32, 2014,
313 – 337; idem, The solidarity economy in the Greek crisis:
Movementality, economic democracy and social repro-
458
turn the exhibition into a horizontal assembly of
equal actors, as it remains in essence highly ex-
clusive. The claim of participation, the promise of
immersion and imminence, are met here in their
sharpest challenge: not so much because the Neue
Galerie – like a number of other venues – was con-
ceived as a traditional museum show with no room
for the embodied spectatorship advocated in Klos-
sowski’s work, but because cutting through the
unnuanced didactic rhetoric and accessing the ac-
tuality of the works and the fine complexity of the
exhibition’s message required arduous decipher-
ing, even for informed audiences. In my case, for
instance, the display of the Neue Galerie did trig-
ger an effort to decipher, but this was due to frus-
tration rather than to an inspiring ‘push’. Perhaps
manuals sometimes work like this – a successful
incident of ‘unlearning’? 45
duction, in: Keith Hart (ed.), Economy for and against
democracy, London 2015, 161 – 181; Katerina Rozakou, So-
cialities of solidarity: Revisiting the gift taboo in times of
crises, in: Social Anthropology 24, 2016, 185 – 199.
4 A similarly programmatic room was to be found on the
ground floor of the National Museum of Contemporary
Art (EMST), one of the central venues of documenta 14
in Athens. For an analysis, see the introductory note
by Ursula Frohne and Michael F. Zimmermann to this
debate. The reading of meta-arrangements across Ath-
ens and Kassel appears particularly compelling, since
dealing with reciprocal, multi-spatial curatorial con-
structs calls for new approaches and scales of analysis.
5 Jules Castagnary, Salons, 1857 – 1870, Paris 1892, vol. 1, 288.
6 On the painting and its reception, see mainly Benedict
Nicolson, Courbet’s ‘L’Aumône d’un Mendiant’, in: The
Burlington Magazine 104, 1962, 73 – 75. At least seven dif-
ferent caricatures of Courbet’s painting have been regis-
tered. See Charles Léger (ed.), Courbet selon les caricatures
et les images, Paris 1920, 79–82 and supplement; Klaus
Herding, Courbets Modernität im Spiegel der Karika-
tur, in: Courbet und Deutschland (exh. cat. Hamburger
Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut), ed. by
Werner Hofmann, Cologne 1978, 502.
7 Vivien Hamilton, L’Aumône d’un Mendiant à Ornans,
in: The National Inventory of Continental European
Paintings, URL : https://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=82981
&sos=0 (date of last access 28 May 2018).
8 In the German version of the caption, the work is rather
qualified as a “großes Gemälde”, an expression which sug-
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
 gests dimensions rather than art-historical significance.
Caption text, also published on the documenta 14 website:
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), documenta 14, URL:
http://www.documenta14.de/de/artists/21961/gustave-
courbet (date of last access 28 May 2018).
9 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Mani-
festo, Harmondsworth 1967, 113. Most interestingly, they
cite as a typical example of this stance Philosophie de la
Misère (1846) by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Courbet’s clos-
est intellectual partner.
10 Oscar Wilde, The soul of man under socialism, London
2012, 28.
11 Linda Nochlin, Representing misery: Courbet’s Beggar
Woman, in: South as a State of Mind 1, 2015, 204.
12 Nicolson 1962 (as note 6), 74.
13 Nochlin 2015 (as note 11), 199.
14 Nicolson 1962 (as note 6), 75.
15 Timothy Clark, Image of the people: Gustave Courbet and
the 1848 revolution, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1999,
114.
16 Diane Lesko, From genre to allegory in Gustave Cour-
bet’s ‘Les Demoiselles de Village’, in: Art Journal 38, 1979,
171–177, here 176.
17 See indicatively exh. cat. Courbet und Deutschland 1978
(as note 6). Courbet’s success in Germany during his life
has been instrumental for his recognition in France itself
(and beyond).
18 On this larger tradition of aesthetic thought, see mainly
Neil McWilliam, Dreams of happiness: Social art and the
French Left, 1830 – 1850, Princeton, NJ 1993.
19 The history of Kassel’s contemporary art venue was
indeed taken as a point of reference in an astonishing
number of ways in the latest realization of the show,
some more pertinent than others. In the entry on Stanley
Whitney in the Daybook, documenta 14’s publication on
the participant artists, Courbet’s legendary The Artist’s
Studio (1855) – mentioned as a point of comparison for
the work of the African American painter – was qualified
in its relation to the founding date of 1955 (“completed
precisely one century before the first documenta”). The
two foundational references – Courbet and the first doc-
umenta – were here brought together. Monika Szewczyk,
Stanley Whitney (Αugust 23), in: Quinn Latimer and
Adam Szymczyk (eds.), documenta 14: Daybook, Munich/
London/New York 2017, unpaginated.
20 Oral interview with Marina Fokidis, 31 May 2018.
21 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et sa desti-
nation sociale, Paris 1868, 371: “dans toute œuvre d’art on
doit considérer en premier lieu l’idée même de l’œuvre,
son but pratique, et en second lieu l’exécution: les EF-
FETS avant les moyens; le CONTENU avant le conte-
nant; la PENSÉΕ avant la réalisation”. See also, McWil-
liam 1993 (as note 18), 334–338, and for an in-depth study,
James Henry Rubin, Realism and social vision in Courbet
and Proudhon, Princeton, NJ 1980.
22 Nochlin 2015 (as note 11), 199.
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
23 Ibidem, 205.
24 In this respect, see the discussion of McWilliam 1993 (as
note 18), 315 – 333.
25 Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn, Brecht on art and politics,
London/New York 2003, 319 – 320.
26 In the immediate vicinity of the examined works, cases in
point are the Russian sculptor Vadim Sidur (1924 – 1986),
the Polish painter Andrzej Wróblewski (1927 – 1957), the
film and performance artist of former Yugoslavia Tomis-
lav Gotovac (1937 – 2010), the Cuban painter and sculptor
Antonio Vidal (1928 – 2013), and, most importantly, the
still living Albanian painter Edi Hila (b. 1944), whose
works were scattered across several venues in both Ath-
ens and Kassel. Showing the works of the latter as sam-
ples of an Albanian modernism in Athens, in particular,
was an ingenious gesture, given the significant presence
and the still largely xenophobic treatment of Albanian
immigrants in Greece, the first significant flow of ethnic
migration into the country, starting in the 1990s.
27 A circular letter issued in 1924 by the Association of Art-
ists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) on “The Immedi-
ate Tasks” of the group postulates: “Let the tragic figure
of Courbet serve as the best prototype and reminder of
the aims and tasks that contemporary art is called on
to resolve”, cited in: John Bowlt (ed.), Russian art of the
avant-garde: Theory and criticism 1902 – 1934, New York
1976, 270.
28 Sonja D. Schmid, Producing power: The pre-Chernobyl
history of the Soviet nuclear industry, London/Cam-
bridge, Mass. 2015, 229, n. 22.
29 I think for instance of the impact of Nikolai Fedorov’s
writings on Alexander Bogdanov regarding debates
around immortality. In this regard, see most recently Bo-
ris Groys (ed.), Russian Cosmism, New York/Cambridge,
Mass./London 2018.
30 Caption text accompanying the works in the room, also
published on the documenta 14 website: Giovanni di
ser Giovanni Guidi (1406 – 1486), documenta 14, URL:
http://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/21966/giovanni-
di-ser-giovanni-guidi (date of last access 28 May 2018).
31 Gustave Flaubert, The temptation of Saint Anthony,
in: Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (eds.), The
documenta 14 Reader, Munich/London/New York 2017,
251–267.
32 Caption text accompanying Giovanni di ser Giovanni
Guidi (as note 30).
33 As Dieter Roelstraete mentions in his entry on Schutter
in the Daybook, the two paintings presented here “act
as deposits of the artist’s memory of having spent long
days just looking at two works by the early Renaissance
painter Parentino now housed at the Galleria Doria
Pamphilj in Rome”, Dieter Roelstraete, David Schutter,
in: Latimer and Szymczyk 2017 (as note 19), unpaginated.
34 Roelstraete (as note 33). See for instance his renditions
based on five portraits by Franz Hals (c 1580 – 1666) rep-
resenting Dutch investors of the East India Company,
459
 such as Pieter van den Broeke, actors of a new colonial
power; these works were presented in the exhibition
Glove in Hand, at the Galerie Aurel Scheibler in Berlin,
in 2015.
35 See, mainly, the individual show David Schutter Rendi-
tion, curated by Monika Szewczyk at the Logan Center,
University of Chicago (15 February – 31 March 2013), as
well as Schutter’s participation in Dieter Roelstraete’s ex-
hibition The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (9 November
2013 – 9 March 2014).
36 The room of the Neue Galerie devoted to his works at the
core of the ground-floor exhibition was fenced off with a
cordon.
37 On La Monnaie Vivante and Klossowski’s conception of
a libidinal economy, see mainly Eleanor Kaufman, The
delirium of praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault,
Klossowski, Baltimore 2001, 84–129. For the last point
in particular, see page 114. On Klossowski’s work more
broadly, and his graphic work in particular, see Anthony
Spira and Sarah Wilson (eds.), Pierre Klossowski, Ostfil-
dern/New York 2006.
38 Derrida was indeed another conceptual hero of docu-
menta 14, for his notions of both hospitality and iterability.
See Adam Szymczyk, Iterability and Otherness – Learn-
ing and Working from Athens, in: Latimer and Szymczyk
2017 (as note 31), 17–42; Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufour-
mantelle, Of hospitality, in: ibidem, 657–672.
39 Pierre Klossowski, The laws of hospitality, caption text.
English translation of the handwritten French text hang-
ing on the wall of the room framed under glass. Also
available online: Pierre Zucca (1943–1995), documenta
14, URL: http://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/16249/
pierre-zucca (date of last access 28 May 2018).
40 Klossowski, The laws of hospitality (as note 39), emphasis
added.
41 The interest in Klossowski as well as his connection to
Cardew is due to documenta 14’s curator Pierre Bal-Blanc,
who has been intensely engaging the legacy of the French
philosopher since 2005. In his travelling performance ex-
hibition La monnaie vivante/Living currency, inspired by
Klossowski’s homonymous text – first staged in Paris in
2006 and further presented in Leuven (2007), Tate Mod-
ern in London (2008), Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw
(2010), and in the Berlin Biennale (2010) – the then direc-
tor of the Contemporary Arts Centre in Brétigny, Paris,
had already used music by Cardew. To my knowledge
this is the first attempt to think together Klossowski’s
pulsional economy and Cardew’s ideal of the collective
and the open form. On the performance exhibition cu-
rated by Pierre Bal-Blanc, see Elisabeth Lebovici, The
death of the audience: A conversation with Pierre Bal-
Blanc, in: e-flux journal 13, 2010, URL: http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/13/61325/the-death-of-the-audience-a-
conversation-with-pierre-bal-blanc/ (date of last access
28 May 2018) and Claire Bishop, Delegated performance:
Outsourcing authenticity, in: October 140, 2012, 91 – 112,
here 105 – 111.
42 On Cardew, Christou, and the role of musical scores in
the exhibition, see Hendrik Folkerts, Keeping score: No-
tation, embodiment, and liveness, in: South as a State of
Mind 2, 2016, 150 – 169.
43 Szymczyk 2017 (as note 38), 22, 34, 36 – 37.
44 Paul B. Preciado, The apatride exhibition, in: e-flux
conversations, last modified 10 April 2017, URL: https://
conversations.e-f lux.com/t/paul-b-preciado-the-ap-
atride-exhibition/6392 (date of last access 5 September
2018).
45 This elusive critical ideal, broadly inspired by post-colo-
nial theory, was central to the curatorial project: the Pub-
lic Education activities of documenta 14 were assembled
under the title ‘uneducation’. On the concept and the
methodologies adopted, see Szymczyk 2017 (as note 38),
36 – 37, and the website: URL: https://www.documenta14.
de/en/public-education/ (date of last access 5 September
2018).

Photo Credits: 1 screenshot from the documenta 14 website, URL: http://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/21961/

gustave-courbet (date of last access 28 August 2017). – 2 screenshot from the documenta 14 website, URL: http://
www.documenta14.de/en/south/3_representing_misery_courbet_s_beggar_woman (date of last access 28 August
2017). — 3 screenshot from the documenta 14 website, URL: http://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/21955/ernst-
barlach (date of last access 28 May 2018). — 4, 5, 7 photographs by the author. — 6 designed by the author.

460 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

A B S T R AC T S
Eleonora Vratskidou
Courbet at documenta 14 – Charity and Other
Alternative Economies
This essay departs from documenta 14’s read-
ing of Gustave Courbet’s drawing  Alms from a
Beggar at Ornans (1868) in the opening room of
the Neue Galerie in Kassel and seeks to unravel
the complex aesthetic and semantic web drawn
across the exhibits in the room in relation to the
drawing. Based on this close reading, the article
critically engages with some of the core concepts
of documenta 14’s curatorial project including
solidarity, hospitality, alternative economies,
and non-reciprocal forms of exchange, in order
to reflect on the discrepancies embedded in the
radical public rhetoric of the show.
Monica Juneja
“A very civil idea …”
Art History, Transculturation, and World-
Making – With and Beyond the Nation
Must a global art history follow the logic of eco-
nomic globalization or does it call for an alter-
native conception of critical globality to be able
to effectively theorize relationships of connec-
tivity that encompass disparities as well as con-
tradictions? This article investigates the poten-
tial of transculturation as a method to address
a number of the pressing questions faced by art
history in the wake of the ‘global turn’. It be-
gins by tracing the genealogies of approaches
that sought to incorporate the ‘world’ within the
scope of the discipline a century ago and que-
ries the epistemic legacies of this historiographic
move. By shifting the focus of enquiry beyond
442
Euro-America, it looks for a way through which
the practice of art history can translate the in-
tellectual insights of non-European experiences
into globally intelligible analyses.
Elisabeth Fritz
Wirksame Kunst. Spektakel als kritische Form
und soziale Praxis
Whereas the spectacle is traditionally regarded
in contrast to socio-political engagement, this
contribution examines how recent activist art
projects tend to challenge this opposition. Build-
ing on a historical and theoretical reconstruc-
tion of the actual tensions between concepts of
social and aesthetic critique, the article proposes
a more neutral, descriptive usage of the term
‘spectacle’ and analyzes the critical potential of
spectacular strategies in contemporary art based
on case studies (Alfredo Jaar, Center for Politi-
cal Beauty, Yvon Chabrowski). In this context
the creation of normatively ambivalent situa-
tions as well as a self-reflective move that scru-
tinizes the idea of political critique in art per se,
are described as central characteristics of a criti-
cal approach.
Larne Abse Gogarty
Feeling and Form in Mark Bradford’s
American Pavilion
Mark Bradford describes his practice as “social
abstraction”, defined as “abstract art with a social
or political context clinging to the edges”. The ar-
ticle addresses Bradford’s exhibition Tomorrow is
Another Day at the American Pavilion at the 2017
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
Venice Biennale and considers the artist’s claim
through the critical reception of his work along-
side central debates within the history of mod-
ernism. It then explores how dispossession and
racialization can be figured in relation to modern-
ist myths such as the grid. Finally, in addressing
the “social” in Bradford’s practice, the study ques-
tions the collaboration Bradford embarked on
with Rio Terà dei Pensieri, an organisation sup-
porting the reintegration of prisoners and people
under criminal judgment in Venice, arguing that
the reformism of that project cuts against Brad-
ford’s use of myth as a mode of resistance.
Tom Holert
Für eine meta-ethische Wende. Anmerkungen
zur neueren Verantwortungsästhetik
Dating back to the early 2000s, a much discussed
‘ethical turn’ of the discourse of contemporary art
has affected (and continues to infect) the entire
field, from art practice, to curating, to criticism, to
education, to the business of art. This turn – which
arguably resumes one of the steadfast dialectical
features of modernism as such – has caused deep
schisms between defenders of art’s autonomy and
those who see art as increasingly obliged to en-
gage in moral, social, and political issues – due to
claimed urgencies of the contemporary condition.
The essay ponders various conceptual and philo-
sophical underpinnings of this ethical conjuncture
and makes a plea for an aesthetics of responsibility
in opposition to the neoliberal responsibilization
palpable in contemporary art and culture.
Tomasz Załuski
Reworking Effectiveness. Art as a Politic of
Redistribution – Some Remarks from a Polish
Perspective
The article critically reworks the issue of the so-
cial impact of art in terms of its ‘effectiveness’
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018
of art’; it shows art’s general economy by taking
into account a number of ambivalences, difficul-
ties, and deficiencies related to art activities that
turn towards the social, political, economic, and
cultural exterior of the field of artistic produc-
tion. Finally, it tries to mount a careful, complex,
and balanced defense of their potentials. Re-
framing and grounding the discussion on artis-
tic activism in selected concepts from political
theory, the author argues that if artistic practices
are to be socially effective, art needs to be under-
stood and practiced as a politic of redistribution.
A way of practicing such a politic is to be sought
in understanding and performing action as sus-
ceptible to interception. This entails responsibil-
ity for the usage of an action, for co-actions that
accompany it, and for potential alliances with in-
tercepting subjects.
Antje Krause-Wahl
Ökonomien der sozialen Medien – Bildpolitik
und Gemeinschaftsbildung in den digitalen
Netzwerken der Gegenwartskunst
Following debates on participation and the re-
lationship between art and politics as a central
question of contemporary art, this essay dis-
cusses networked communities in the visual
cultures of ‘Post-Internet Art’. For DIS and Ju-
liana Huxtable digital communities are both
the topic of their installations and pictures and
part of their artistic activities within the inter-
net: the blog DIS Magazine and the tumblr blog
Blue-Lip-Black-Witch-Cunt. In comparing their
artistic practice with network-like communi-
cation in magazines of the 1970s, the essay ar-
gues that it is not a central concern of post-in-
ternet art how network images may subvert the
economy of images in the net. Rather this kind
of art demonstrates the effects of networks, in
which participation causes singularity instead
of community.
443
Marina Vishmidt
Anomaly and Autonomy: On the Currency
of the Exception in the Value Relations of
Contemporary Art
This essay is concerned with tracing the politi-
cal dimensions of the ‘anomaly’  – in a period
when the structuring conditions that the term
refers to emerge rather as the ‘new normal’,
even as historical continuities come to light and
reveal that little is altogether new. We can see
this in debates on whether contemporary art
444
is exceptional or exemplary in a political econ-
omy characterised by the precarity of labour
and life amidst relentless commodification. In
this light, the article attends to the epistemic
‘economies’ of the rule and the exception, in
order to foreground debates over value produc-
tion in Marxist feminist and ecological theories
of reproductive labour, with some attention as
well to critical theories of race. This is an at-
tempt to ground the status of the anomalous as
a key means for the politics of artistic work and
labour in the present.
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018