Argentine artist builds likeness of the Acropolis with books

A book is not a brick and won't build a house, but if inventively used can function as elegant cladding.

This is the proposal of Argentine artist Marta Minujín, who has constructed a likeness of the Acropolis at a 100-day art exhibition in the German city of Kassel.

Installed in a city square where Nazis in 1933 burned 2,000 books, Minujín's temporary sculpture - known as The Parthenon of Books - at Documenta 14 is partially clad in banned books.

Among the books wrapped like processed meat to the vertical steel columns are George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), an evergreen tale of state power that was banned in communist Russia and democratic America, and Dan Brown's airport thriller Da Vinci Code (2003), which was banned in Lebanon.

It is reckoned that up to 100,000 formerly or currently banned books will be needed to complete the cladding process.

Viewing Minujín's outdoor work, I wondered whether her idea could be repurposed to speak to our own history. Could we construct a Union Buildings out of books banned just in South Africa? Quite likely.

Archie Dick, a professor of information science at the University of Pretoria, said 100 books were on a banned list when the National Party came to power in 1948.

That number grew substantially in the 1950s: from 400 in 1950 to 1,400 in 1955.

A decade late, in 1965, a total of 702 publications were banned in that year alone.

Among the authors banned by apartheid censors were Peter Abrahams, James Baldwin, Jane Gool, Nadine Gordimer, Langston Hughes, James Matthews, Nelson Mandela and Richard Rive.

Like bannings, book burnings are an unavoidable part of our cultural history.

Initially it was pornographic material that was destroyed by the state, revealed Dick in a 2012 study, but this later extended to political works.

Books remain a potent symbol for enacting ideas and wounding.

In 2010 a Johannesburg court prevented Muslim activist Mohammed Vawda from burning Bibles in response to a proposed Koran burning in Florida, US.

Last year student protesters damaged 100 books in a fire at the University of the Witwatersrand's Wartenweiler Library.

In Durban students set fire to the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Howard College law library.

Its holdings include a book about the global protests and bannings that met Monty Python's satirical film Life of Brian (1979).

• Documenta 14 runs until September 17. To donate to Minujín's project, e-mail books@documenta.de