Documentation and Reenactment

Viewers were invited to discover geological drawings and diagrams of cosmic constellations on walls. Display cases contained documentation of collective body exercises that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Carefully framed black and white photographs showed people dancing on a beach (Fig. 11.1). The monumental handpainted diagram on the back wall representing the score of a performance workshop that combined dance and ecology, however, did not fit in with the surrounding minimalistic exhibition design (Fig. 11.2). The documents on display conveyed the ideas of Anna and Lawrence Halprin who conceived of dance as integral to forming a new relationship with the environment. The faded photographs of the group were reminiscent of even older rituals familiar from the early twentieth-century Lebensreform (life reform) movement. This documentation was complemented by discolored film footage and accompanied by a display of Lawrence Halprin's system of creative methodology, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (1969), developed in close collaboration with his partner Anna Halprin.

I describe a display curated for the 2017 documenta, which took place in Athens and Kassel (Figs. 11.2 and 11.3). It was a show shaped by numerous historical positions, garnering both criticism and controversy on several occasions. These positions were invoked in a way that avoided a clear answer to the question of whether to reactivate them in order to bring historical positions into the present. Scores, schemata, and documentation served as forms of art that, in their limitation and modesty, radically questioned concepts of representation and presence (Fig. 11.4). One could speak of a demonstration of failure brought on by invoking extinct languages of utopian maxims.