Samuel Beckett once decreed that the artist’s charge is to “find a form that accommodates the mess.” Goodness knows this task is perpetually challenging, especially in this imperiled moment for humankind. As the twilight of neoliberalism threatens to send us careening into sectarian violence across the globe by exacerbating socioeconomic disparities, an urgent question remains: what power can art exert within the institutional parameters of our contemporary cultural hegemony?
Across 14 hours, Dimitris Athiridis’s exergue – on documenta 14 (2024) provides one possible answer to this query. The film chronicles the two-year planning and execution of the fourteenth edition of documenta, the quinquennial modern art exhibition established in Western Europe after the end of World War II. Under the leadership of artistic director Adam Szymczyk, the two-city show—hosted in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece—engendered a host of controversy from the German press and political class, including accusations of exoticizing Greece at the height of its economic crisis and charges of negligent overspending on behalf of its planning committee.
Yet Athiridis is less interested in tabloid sensationalism than in the quotidian processes Szymczyk and his curatorial team engage in to marry their theoretical ambitions with the practical obstacles of negotiating with various artists and institutions. “The work is the death mask of the idea,” Szymczyk quips in the film’s eleventh chapter, but Athiridis’s film is anything but morbid despite the dire backdrop of Fascism’s resurgence throughout the West. Cross-cutting between extensive discussions and intricate performances, the film is a vibrant correlative to the show’s generative aspirations to problematize tiers of power within a globalized conception of artmaking.
The title’s significance is revealed near the film’s end, which unspools across the show’s opening day. By accentuating the labor otherwise occluded in documenta 14’s reception, Athiridis’s film ultimately contributes to a historiography informed, but not dictated, by the monodic drone of a capitalist ballad.
Nick Kouhi: Your films are character-driven, though exergue – on documenta 14 is your first to center around a subject who isn’t Greek. What qualities draw you to such eclectic figures as Terry Papadinas, Yiannis Boutaris, and Adam Szymczyk?
Dimitris Athiridis: My interest in film comes from my interest in characters, in the same sense that literature is mainly about characters. There is no literature without characters. That’s the way I understand storytelling. I don't make films about issues or topics. I make films about people, about characters who have a strong want or mission, which is the beginning of every story: a character who wants to do something, like Adam wants to do documenta. I was not interested in making a film about documenta, I was intrigued first in the character and then in his backstory; the world that he travels in is the world I would like to explore.
My previous film, One Step Ahead [2012], was about quite a complicated character because he was an ex-alcoholic winemaker who, after he got self-awareness, also acquired social awareness. And he was a candidate for mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece. So I followed him through his campaign. Again, it was a character with a mission giving us a glimpse into a political battle amidst a financial crisis.
My first film, T4 Trouble and the Self-Admiration Society [2009], was also about a charismatic character, who was also quite complicated because he was a huge musical talent who was never recognized. But he had many personal issues. Anyway, his mission at that point was to find a drummer to play with. The backstory was the Greek Civil War, issues of child abuse and, of course, the death or aging of the rock era. I always start with my interest in people and what I call existential adventures.
NK: In this film, Adam only acknowledges the camera a couple of times. By-and-large, it seems that he's got a lot more on his plate and he seems to be carrying himself in a very dignified way. There’s a very disarming moment in the last chapter of the film where you see a part of him that's markedly more vulnerable than we've seen throughout the rest of the film. Did you ever run into any obstacles or difficulties in capturing these more vulnerable moments?
DA: No, there were no obstacles in that sense. I was following Adam and this team for two years. And I work alone. There was no film crew anywhere in the room except for some large gatherings where I used a second camera. After a while, they got used to me, as we had created this relationship based on mutual trust. I was considered like a member of the team, like a chronicler of the endeavor. I was just there as a person.
Documenta 14 was an adventure, as it faced many obstacles and there was a lot of suffering. Adam is a very kind and well composed person, through this procedure he was quite decent. Toward the end of the film, I think he deserved to express his frustration and anger, which was not toward someone specific. He was expressing his own frustration against this system, career, institutional position, relations of power. When I watched this scene in the edit room, it reminded me of Angelus Novus, the painting by Paul Klee. If you know this painting, which is like an angel who is lost and terrified with what is happening in the world, you know it is Adam as a person trapped between all the institutional and political levers.
NK: That's an interesting visual touchstone because the film itself is drawing a lot of explicit connections to pre-existing art. Not just painting, but also writing and cinema. I wanted to ask you about one particular piece of archival footage that you used in the film, which is the film that Adam is watching in the 13th chapter. What is that film and can you speak a little bit to the significance of it in relation to your film?
DA: This film is called Italiani brava gente [Attack and Retreat, 1964], which is, of course, a film that at that moment Adam put on his iPad. It was a very well-known Italian film from the ‘60s. [It was made] to prove that when the Germans and Italians invaded Russia, Italians were not as fascist as the Germans. But that night, Adam was just sitting there and putting songs in his iPad. And then he chose to play that particular scene of the film where the Russian hostages are forced by German soldiers to sing the "Internationale" up to the moment that they command them to stop using their guns. Adam was singing along with the hostages in Russian. Not to forget: Adam was raised in Poland in the ‘70s, when Russian was taught in school. That scene gave me a way to make a poetic transition to the next one, where we see Franco "Bifo" Berardi, the philosopher, lecturing about Internationalism against growing fascism. All these connotations come together effortlessly.
NK: Your film has such a rich array of different indexes that reinforce this greater dialectic between Europe’s past and present. Can you speak about the level of research you and your team conducted to generate this dialectic?
DA: Well, it took us quite a time.The first year after filming, after the end of documenta, I worked with the editor George Kravaritis, who was mostly occupied on logging and transcribing because he had this amazing talent of watching a film and writing dialogue.
We had 800 hours of footage, mostly quite dense dialogues. I mean, in most cases it was about deep, profound meanings. It’s not like, “Hi, how are you doing?” You can imagine how artists and curators and philosophers talk. I was doing archival research and making mental connections, artistic connections, thinking about transitions, how this rich material and complicated story could be tamed.
Documenta 14 as an exhibition and Documenta as an institute already had this rich historical context. In a way, everything was already there and related in the context of the exhibition. I had to find the right format to bring that in the timeline, the right strings which lead to loose associations—a form of dialectics, continuity, transitions. That created a cinematic language that I felt was relevant also to the topic of the film: observing an artistic process.
NK: The film is largely chronological, but there are moments where we leap ahead in the timeline. I'm thinking specifically about a moment early in the film where we see Adam get out of the car. He has a ski mask on and we're not quite certain what he's doing until much later. When you were structuring the film, did you look at the footage and then think to yourself, “Oh, I want this to generate a little more ambivalence or ambiguity in the audience”?
DA: When you edit observational material sometimes you are not sure that you have captured all the necessary information that can solve exposition problems. In the editing, we found that sometimes it is easier to move freely in time so that the viewer can understand the right order of events without the use of voice-overs, explanations, and other non-observational devices. The non-chronological order was necessary to simplify the narration and not use a complicated, stylish device. Actually, I have to say that when I was editing the film, I just went one way. I never went back, if you believe it or not, because I was in such a hurry to go through this material because it was huge. It felt more like writing, how would I narrate my own experience of observing this process and how I also learned from it.
My initial proposal to the producers was to make a two-hour film. That was my plan because I would be a crazy person if I went to a producer and said, “Look, I want to make a 14-hour observational film.” There was no way and I wasn't thinking about a 14-hour film during filming. But filming the making of a mega exhibition for two years produces a lot of footage. Things were so complex and interesting, and I just couldn't stop filming.
When we started editing, we were faced with this problem that stories kept coming up in different ways from different angles. So I went to my producers and said, “Look, there is something growing here. You have to see it. I think there's much more than a two-hour film. This could be like a series or something.” And I'm grateful that they agreed and we had the chance to explore this narration space. They gave me the artistic freedom to do it, which is only appropriate for a film about documenta.
NK: When you were making the film, Greece was experiencing a very severe economic crisis. How did that crisis impact you in terms of securing funding, or were you able to keep the budget in check by limiting yourself to a one-man crew?
DA: The one-man crew was not only a low-budget idea, it was mostly an artistic or disciplinary decision. It is the way I prefer to work as it is the only way to have access to tiny meeting rooms or more intimate moments after hours. But in general, observational non-scripted filming is sometimes faced with budget problems, as it is not easy to budget an unknown procedure. But again, principal photography was not that expensive. It was only me and my travels.
The film's producers were determined to support the project. Of course, when we decided to expand to another format, there were some decisions to be made. Bold decisions. That also was a reason for some delays, together with the pandemic. So we lost two-and-a-half years in the process.
At some point, I invited my producer to watch the first seven chapters. He said, “I'm very proud. It's amazing work. I am not quite sure what to do with it but keep on.” I'm very grateful that they kept on supporting it. It's an independent production because it was not funded by anyone else but Faliro House. It's essentially a very personal project for all of us. For Adam, for Christos, Konstantakopoulos from Faliro, and for me. It's like a personal bet.
NK: The film’s soundtrack hosts an impressive roster of musicians, from Jack Halikias to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. How did you approach integrating music into a project as expansive and discursive as exergue – on documenta 14? And how did this approach differ from a more music-centric film like T4 Trouble and the Self Admiration Society?
DA: My first film was about Terry Papadinas, who was a musician and he provided all the music. There was no need to find music. But the thing is that I have this habit of wanting to have the music before I edit. I start to edit on the music. I don't add the music as a soundtrack. Music is integral. It's a narrative tool. It's very precise to the mood, the rhythm of the film, and the emotions, as it creates its own space. And It relates in many different ways—sensually or intellectually.
In this film, it was very clear that it wouldn't be possible for one composer or one kind of music style to represent the multitude and complexity of this project. Because there were so many references coming in—from different eras, from different places, from different moods—and music that was already there, performed by artists of documenta, or music that Adam himself listened to at the time. So, as they say, there are only two styles of music: good and bad music. We tried to choose the good music.
NK: That seems to be a generally pretty good rule of thumb. Adam performs in a couple of sequences as well. It’s fascinating to see a different facet of his personality where he still acts as part of an ensemble.
DA: Are you referring to this scene where he plays the piano? He participated in a project by Hiwa K, a documenta 14 artist, a performance exploring identity and learning issues. Adam had never touched the piano before! In the first scenes of this sequence, you can see that I'm the one who undertook the responsibility of teaching him how to play these two chords. Then they went on and performed this song before an audience in Kassel. Adam just had the courage and the will to participate. He put himself in the trial to learn how to play the piano. Sometimes he misses a beat, but it doesn't matter. We don't notice. The feeling is there and the will to learn new skills.
NK: Thinking about other forms of creative expression, I’m curious to learn more about your process in deciding which of the 160 artists featured in documenta you’d highlight in the film. There seems to be particular emotional and thematic significance afforded to Marta Minjín’s The Parthenon of Books [2017] and Daniel Knorr’s Expiration Movement [2017].
DA: There were more than 1,500 artworks presented in documenta 14 and around 600 of them are presented in the film. But the film is not only about presenting artworks. I was more interested in the artistic and curatorial process that produced the exhibition. I was lucky that I could film a lot of these early discussions between Adam and invited artists, and elaborate and follow through until the exhibition of these works.
The ones you are referring to are certainly some of the central pieces of the exhibition—the public monumental ones, like Marta Minujin's Parthenon of Books, Daniel Knorr's Expirational Movement, Olu Oguibe's Monument for Strangers and Refugees, The Mill of Blood by Antonio Vega Macotela, just to mention a few. But like the exhibition, artworks are not presented in a random array. All of them contribute to building a narrative.
NK: The film premiered at this year’s Berlinale, which was shaped by controversy surrounding the institution’s complicity within the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Now in New York, there is a counter-festival being programmed in protest of Lincoln Center’s zionist board members. As someone whose film directly contends with the nuance of creating politically provocative art within neoliberal institutions, what changes have you perceived in the ecosystem for global artists compared to when documenta 14 was held, and do you believe artists can navigate this ecosystem to create formally generative and politically salient work?
DA: There was a moment in Greece during the junta's brutal regime when all art, songs, and literature had to be approved by a censor committee. It was interesting to see how songwriters and poets disguised their political work into love songs. Well, there is a moment in the film, a lecture by the philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi, where he says that labor, art, and our knowledge are the content, and that capitalism and power are the form. But power is also a regime of visibility and invisibility. One has to understand this and has to make a choice if he wants to be visible or invisible. I believe that art is stronger when it is visible.
Exergue - on documenta 14 screens this afternoon, October 12, and tomorrow October 13, as part of the 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival.
