“Documenta itself started as a postmortem on fascism, particularly the Nazi’s erasure of art history in service of a narrative considered more desirable. On my first afternoon there, a tour guide told me that the exhibition’s founder, Arnold Bode, wanted to “use art as a tool to restore the feelings and minds of the people.” He may have wanted to restore more than that, because in 1955, when he inaugurated the exhibition in his hometown of Kassel, the city was still being rebuilt. Kassel had been the site of a Nazi tank plant, and the city and its inhabitants were all but completely eviscerated by strategic Allied bombs between 1942 and 1945. Today, the city center is so bland that the most noticeable features are a Pizza Hut and a TJ Maxx. It doesn’t strike one immediately, nor after three days, as a site for global art-world tourism, but restoration can be another mode of erasure, and the entire event preserves a kind of normalcy through understatedness, with artwork quietly installed in storefronts and local businesses, hidden in public parks, former train stations, and municipal buildings, and snuck into the galleries of local museum collections, all with casual paper labels.”