Established in 1955 in a war-scarred city a stone’s throw from the ideological border with Soviet-occupied East Germany, Documenta has the ambitious role of surveying the art production of the last five years and setting new trends for contemporary art. The weight of this perennial survey exhibition comes from the long period of research and preparation that precedes it, unique in the instantaneous world of contemporary art, with inclusion in Documenta a milestone and dream come true in the life of all but the most famous artists.

This time round the responsibility of providing the world with the most up to date and prophetic visions of the contemporary imagination fell to Rome and New York-based curator Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev and her team of ‘core agents’. Her strategy has involved commissioning 100 thoughts from the world’s leading minds, extending the definition of the contemporary by including works by non-living artists from the classical avant-garde, and mixing up art and non-art, with scientists and philosophers listed as exhibitors.  With the ‘brain’ of the exhibition located in the neo-classical Fridericianum, Documenta 13 has also colonised many of the usually quiet provincial city’s museums, occupied a deserted house, modernist hotel and the outbuildings of the railway station, and scattered itself around Karslaue Park, for a summer-long celebration of contemporary art.  

While side-stepping the impossible expectations of the art world with the aphoristic one-liner that ‘the concept is to have no concept’, there are nevertheless important hints in this year’s Documenta as to where contemporary art may be headed. The curatorial statement is peppered with references to post-humanist thought, a radical branch of eco-philosophy that puts the non-human at the centre and represents a significant challenge to the individualist and anthropocentric assumptions of the art world. Musing that she tried to create an exhibition that her dog would like and imagining how a meteorite would experience Documenta may have sent ripples of laughter through the pack, with one non-vegetarian curator tweeting #documenta_13 ‘Whoops, I think I just ate a post-humanist friend’, but behind the scenes contemporary art is sure to already be hard at work on the ecological turn announced in Kassel.

Although there are some striking similarities between Documenta and the Olympic Games, one important difference, which also distinguishes it from the Venice Biennial, is that it’s not meant to be about competition between national teams, but the realisation of a big global idea. That being said, it’s hard to resist the temptation to count the appearances of artists from particular countries and from a Hungarian perspective 13 has turned out to be a lucky number, with a total of three Hungarian artists participating quite prominently in the exhibition. The art scene of neighbouring Austria by comparison was visibly smarting from their resounding null points, while Croatia was represented again by Sanja Iveković, for whom this is the third Documenta appearance in a row.

Practically the first art object visitors encounter on progressing through the main venue of the Fridericianum, not counting the light breeze blowing through several empty rooms on the ground floor - a dematerialised and perhaps also appropriately ‘post-humanist’ work by British artist Ryan Gander – is Czechoslovak Radio 1968 by the artist best known to his Hungarian audience as Tamás St.Auby. The conceptual artist, who regularly exhibits with subtle variations on his name, this time appearing as St.Turba, shows a work consisting of a brick with sulphur strips, referring to the bricks that the people of Prague wrapped in paper and pretended to listen to as an act of creative resistance to the Soviet occupation. The fact that the work was first made in 69, but since then regularly remade as an ‘unlimited multiple’, is indicated by arranging two pieces next to each other, commenting on the role of the art object for an artist who works primarily with ideas.

Hidden away in one of the dozens of wooden huts dotted around Kassel’s grand park is an understated mechanical installation by Attila Csörgő. Simultaneously scientific and meditative, Squaring the Circle sets out to solve a metaphysical conundrum using the elegant means of geometry and contemporary art. While Csörgő’s is one of the more satisfying mini-pavilions, overall the experience of navigating the extensive park to track down each work in its own individual hut may be an unwelcome distraction, begging the question why these predominantly white-cube works could not instead have been brought together in one place.

One of the most visible and eye catching works in the whole of Documenta is István Csakány’s The Sewing Room. With a hanger all to itself in the northern wing of the Hauptbahnhof, the artist has produced an impressive wooden environment consisting of several rows of carved industrial sewing machines complete with cables. The work chimes with the post-industrial atmosphere of the site and is rich in references to lost cultures of work, as suggested by the blue Mao suits hanging by the machines. Overall there are so many routes through the three hundred plus works in this mega-exhibition that, in keeping with the multiplicity of contemporary artistic experience, everyone is free to choose their own path through the maze of Documenta, complete with inevitable dead-ends and moments of unexpected enlightenment.
   

Istvan Csakany, The Sewing Room, 2012