It looks like the monumental temple standing imposingly at the Acropolis in Athens. But this replica in central Germany is not built with marble, but books that have been or remain banned.
“The Parthenon of Books” is the main showpiece at this year’s Documenta -the cult contemporary art show held once every five years in the university town of Kassel. The work by Argentine artist Marta Minujin is a plea against all forms of censorship. Minujin, 74, a pop art icon in South America, has described it as “the most political” of her works.
In fact, the “Parthenon of Books” stands at the same site where, in 1933, Nazis set in flames books by Jewish or Marxist writers. Fast forward eight decades and there is a team of volunteers wearing hard hats gathering at the foot of a crane, preparing to lift more books onto the installation.
Composed of as many as 100,000 banned books from all over the world, the work is erected on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, where some two thousand books were burned during the so-called “Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist” (Campaign against the Un-German Spirit). In 1941, the Fridericianum—which was still being used as a library at the time—was engulfed in flames during an Allied bombing attack, and another collection of some 350,000 books was lost. Minujín’s The Parthenon of Books traces its origins to an installation titled El Partenón de libros, which was realized in 1983, shortly after the collapse of the civilian-military dictatorship in Argentina, and presented the very books that had been banned by the ruling junta.
Preparations for the “Parthenon of Books” began last year, when Minujin launched an appeal to collect up to 100,000 books. Nineteen students at Kassel University had also helped to draw up an inventory of banned books, listing some 70,000 that span “the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago to apartheid South Africa,” said art historian Florian Gassner. Finally, Minujin and the Documenta team shortlisted 170 titles.
In all, 100,000 copies of 170 titles cover the columns, each individually wrapped in a plastic bag to shield it from the capricious German weather. In a few minutes, a copy of “The First Circle” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would find its place on one of the 46 columns formed by metal grills which are in turn covered with books. The Russian writer’s novel joins bestsellers including “The Bible”, “The Satanic Verses”, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Little Prince”.
“The work has exactly the same dimensions as the Parthenon – 70 metres (230 feet) in length, 31 metres in breadth and 10 metres in height,” one of Documenta’s curators, Pierre Bal-Blanc, told AFP.
The Frenchman said the art installation at Friedrichsplatz also has a “slightly slanted orientation which gives a more impressive presence, because you get a side view of it rather than a frontal view.”
The showpiece’s reference to ancient Greece is not pure chance.
This year’s edition of Documenta, which attracted 905,000 people in 2012, is taking place simultaneously in another city – Athens. Since April 8th, the Greek capital with its underground emerging art scene has been busy with the exhibitions, concerts, films and performances linked to Documenta.
And from June 10th, the show, known for rejecting commercialism in favour of the quirky and groundbreaking, returns to its birth place, Kassel, where it will feature works from 160 artists until September 17th.