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Exhibition Review: “Native American Art at Documenta 14 and
the Issue of Democracy”
Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece (April-July, 2017)
Claudia Mesch
Arizona State University
As democracy seems to be faltering in a number of places around the globe,
the current political moment raises questions about how art might serve as a means
and mechanism through which democracy can be forcefully reasserted. The dual
documenta exhibitions in Kassel and Athens in the summer of 2017 seemed to
question the relationship between art and democracy, as well as that between Global
North and Global South, which the exhibition ambitiously seemed to want to unite.
Held every five years since 1955, the well-funded exhibition came to showcase
advanced and challenging art of the West; it became associated with a 1970s agenda
of moving art into life and thereby expanding democracy.
Democracy continued to be a preoccupation for Documenta in 2017.
Among other points of emphasis, the 2017 Documenta foregrounded historical
and emerging artists who engaged with democracy in dynamic ways. Many
experimented with producing a kind of democracy effect, or with critical thinking
about the shifting communities of which we are part during an era of instability and
globalization backlash. Native artists engaged with the representation of specific
indigenous peoples who have been marginalized subjects in western exhibition
spaces. These new representations not only destabilize western art institutions, but
also assert the right of Native people to access the cultural realm of high art as a
cultural and intellectual resource that offers ways to work through generational and
other shared trauma that has resulted from brutal colonialist persecution.
Taken together, art by these artists suggests that trauma has become central
to recent political art that takes on the issue of democracy. The democracy effect
has to do with asserting the migrant and indigenous persons not only as an image
or body but also as a subject who uses art to construct a wider community. It also
has to do with the revival of oppressed or forgotten traditions that seek to revise
Claudia Mesch: cmesch@asu.edu
Copyright © 2019 (Claudia Mesch). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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the institutional boundaries of western art. In a recent book C. Fred Alford argues
that beyond individual trauma, group trauma also exists. The latter results when
a hegemonic social group restricts other groups’ access to what he calls “cultural
resources [that] a society provides its members to ward off trauma.”1 His list of
these possibly withheld cultural resources includes education, a sense of a coherent
community, philosophy, religion, music and last but not least, art. Trauma can also be
intergenerational and passed on when an older generation is unable to communicate
its trauma, or as he says, “when the way it [the older generation] speaks and the way
it acts are at odds.”2 He suggests that there is an inherently political dimension to
the experience of trauma and that knowledge can result from historical and group
trauma.
As an icon of the origins of democracy, the Athenian Parthenon was
frequently referenced in Kassel, most obviously in an installation by the Argentine
artist Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books (originally installed in Buenos Aires in
1983) which featured donated books banned from various countries throughout
history. Minujín positioned her structure on a site where the Nazis had once
held a book burning, directly in front of the Kassel Fridericianum, one of the
oldest museums in Europe and itself a neoclassical emulation of classical Greek
architecture. This juxtaposition pointed to Germany’s aesthetic debt to Greece, one
that should have merited the exchange of a gift of similar permanence. It instead
foregrounded the fact of Greece’s ongoing financial crisis—a cultural situation that
is a direct consequence of Greece’s present indebtedness to Germany. Unfortunately
the tensions between Greece and the E.U. concerning Greek debt, controlled by
mostly German multinational banks, along with the hardships imposed by E.U.
austerity measures and its refusal to forgive the Greek debt, added a further layer of
tension to documenta’s complex exhibition arrangements.
The figure of transience and rootlessness in a world of nation-states has
become a crucial testing ground for public discourse on democracy, for, in addition
to the loaded question of how to represent the body of the displaced, recent art
critiques current notions of what constitutes a democratic society or community.
Arguably, these artists generate a democracy effect in asking us as viewers to
confront our own understanding of lived democracy—of belonging and of sharing
a commitment to community needs as they arise. I use the term “democracy effect”
to suggest that in being asked to think about how we are to be attentive to the needs
of community we enter a frame of mind that is itself democratic. We might even
talk about the rise of a critical mass of contemporary art that is concerned with the
ethics of lived democracy. The displaced thinkers of the exiled Frankfurt School,
Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, advocated for such an ethics in their belief
that culture (and aesthetics) must carry within it the remembrance of the immensity
of human suffering. Noam Chomsky and George Yancy recently reconnected to
this idea and underscored that the possibility of social change hinges upon the

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capacity to witness and empathize with suffering that we ourselves do not know.3 By
educating the viewer about empathy for others and refiguring our relationship with
the needs and concerns of new communities as they are presently being formed,
these current artists concern themselves with the democracy effect.
New art by Native artists evidences a pedagogical engagement with this
democracy effect, focusing it on the revisionist histories of colonialist expansion
and the trauma it continues to generate. The contributions to Documenta by the
Native curator Candice Hopkins, and Native artists Beau Dick and the collective
Postcommodity, underscored the historical trauma and “colonial aphasia” that
resulted from “extractive colonialism,” that is, from the expansionist and genocidal
drive for capital in North America in the nineteenth century.4 Their scholarship and
artwork forward a revisionist history of westward expansion, one that also revives
forms of indigenous art and accompanying Native knowledge systems that western
empiricism actively sought to erase over centuries. In foregrounding the language
of storytelling and oral history Hopkins’ revisionist scholarship declines to conform
to the language of conventional historical discourse. Hopkins describes the most
dramatic moment of North American colonialism, the “gold rush” on the Lingít
Aaní, the land of the Tlingit and Tagish people, also known as the Yukon territory,
from 1896 to 1899. The artists Beau Dick and in the Postcommodity collective also
cast a critical eye upon the (western) art gallery and museum, key institutions that
have formulated and policed the canon and boundaries of western culture since the
nineteenth century. State policies such as the Indian Act of 1876 (Canada) facilitated
the extraction of natural resources of various kinds during the historical period of
colonialist expansion, and are manifested to the present day. Last year, on March 26,
2018, prime minister Justin Trudeau delivered an official “statement of exoneration”
to the descendants of six Tsilhqot’in war chiefs who were executed in 1864. The
exoneration related to what Anglos have called the “Chilcotin War” in 1864, when
the Tsilhqot’in killed Anglos who they’d discovered in the process of constructing
roads on their land; in response the British Columbian colonial government arrested
and executed their chiefs.
Last year’s Ottawa ceremony could only take place after decades of activism
that urged reconciliation and improved relations between federal governments and
indigenous people that it had displaced and abandoned or worse during the modern
era. This activism includes the actions of the artist and master carver Beau Dick.
Dick, a hereditary chief from the Namgis First Nation (and sadly, who passed away
in July 2017), had in 2014 culminated days of travel across all of Canada with the
ancient ritual action of breaking a copper (which is the cutting or breaking of a
traditional copper shield) on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The breaking of a copper
is part of a traditional shaming ritual which, as Dick explained, “is a challenge, it is
also a shaming, and it is also about banishment.”5 In reviving this almost forgotten
ritual of the Northwest coast, Dick made clear that his point wasn’t protest but

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Postcommodity, The Ears Between Worlds are Always Speaking, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Athens, 2017, photo
by the author

rather to trigger a “waking up [of] consciousness” about old colonial and economic
relations between federal governments and First Nations communities which had
their origin in colonial extraction campaigns and its consequences, such as the
Tsilhqot’in executions of 1864. In a display of cooperation and shared experience
with the trauma of colonialism, Giindajin HaawastiGuujaaw, a master carver of the
Haida Nation, had provided the copper for Dick’s ceremony. In his contribution to
documenta in Kassel, Dick carefully arranged three intact coppers among the masks
and figures from his “Undersea Kingdom” series of 2016-17. The masks in his
installation depict Raven, Bear, Big and little Whale, and Dzunuk’wa among other
figures in Kwakwaka’wakw cosmology.6 The coppers are then material reminders of
the Namgis Nation’s demand for Anglos to come to terms with the violent history
of colonialist destruction and genocide. Beau Dick positions these artifacts and
instruments in the galleries of documenta, claiming a space for indigenous objects
within the institution of western art. The masks’ and the coppers’ status as both
non-art and art challenges the traditional boundaries or limits of the art institution.
Perhaps these masks, like other objects Dick has placed in previous exhibitions, were
also returned to Alert Bay and danced for a final time before they were ceremonially
burned.
The U.S.-Southwest-based artists’ collective Postcommodity completed a
site-specific sound installation in Athens titled The Ears Between Worlds Are Always
Speaking. The installation was situated in and around the ancient ruins of Aristotle’s
Lyceum, itself positioned between the Athens Conservatory of Music, the Athens

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War Museum, and the Hellenic Armed Forces Officers Club. For eight hours
each day, interspersed with periods of silence, two Long Range Acoustic Devices
(LRADs) broadcast this two-channel “hyperdirectional opera” sung and spoken in
several languages, and combined music from Greece and the Southwest. The type
of “hyperdirectional” speakers installed by Postcommodity are electronics originally
developed by the military for psychological and other types of warfare but which
the collective appropriates and deploys differently. Postcommodity appropriates this
technology, once used to vanquish marginalized people, to illuminate the plight of
the displaced “during a time of the greatest mass migration in history,” as the group
has stated.7 The opera’s libretto focuses on stories of “long-walk” migrations and
forced displacements from around the world and throughout history, and therefore
open the work to oral and indigenous histories. The visitor makes her way about
this ancient site of the Lyceum, transversing where Aristotle’s ancient “Peripatetic
School” also walked the same gardens and developed new forms of knowledge.
She moves between the sounds of oral histories, song or “narratives of selfdetermination” in this space spoken by subjects whose trauma formerly silenced and
marginalized them.8 Postcommodity thus encourages but does not require a dialogic
pedagogical moment that opens to indigenous knowledge systems; no material trace
of Postcommodity’s intervention is left at this ancient site. They use the ephemeral,
non-material medium of sound to propose a radical expansion of the boundaries of
western knowledge systems.
Perhaps the engagement of recent art with migration, colonialism, or with
democracy in decline in both historic and present-day manifestations, attempts to
recover art as a psychic and therapeutic engine and, with it, returns to older notions
of human progress and the necessity of a shared notion of social cooperation
and the civic good. John Dewey, twentieth-century American philosopher
and educational reformer, forwarded these ideas. Dewey understood that the
perpetuation of democracy relied not so much on a system of government, but on
an ethics and a guided sense of identity grounded in civil society and in membership
in a community that is responsible and responsive in addressing social needs. He
thought that this frame of mind should be provided by enlightened and empowering
teachers. He also considered this ideology central to the strengthening of
democracy. Critical and progressive art of the present positions us to think about the
interconnectedness of the human communities of which we are all now part—even
those of the displaced and marginalized that are arguably among the most transient.
Perhaps the art that I’ve discussed here also offers a critical reckoning with its own
political possibilities.
1 C. Fred Alford, Trauma, Culture, and PTSD (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 2.
2 Ibid., 3.
3 George Yancy and Noam Chomsky, “Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union,”

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New York Times, July 5, 2017.
4 Candice Hopkins, “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” The
documenta 14 Reader, Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk, eds. (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2017), 219-250;
for the term “colonial aphasia” see pp. 239-40.
5 Martha Troian, “Copper broken on Parliament Hill in First Nations shaming ceremony,” CBC News
(July 27, 2014): http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/copper-broken-on-parliament-hill-in-firstnations-shaming-ceremony-1.2719175.
6 Wall labels in documenta Hall, Kassel; documenta 14: Daybook (Munich: Prestel, 2017), August 15th
entry.
7 documenta 14: Daybook entry
8 Ibid.