"Unbuilt Roads," edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. (Courtesy Hatje Cantz Publishers)

Documenta has a really nice history of attracting projects from artists that turn out to be too unwieldy or costly to realize, some of which are almost certainly designed to fail, like Alina Szapocznikow's plan to make a double-sized Rolls Royce out of marble for the 1972 edition of the show. (The organizers told her they didn't have the money and Rolls Royce politely declined sponsoring the sculpture, which she termed “completely useless, and a reflection of the god of supreme luxury." Her correspondence with various people about the project has since been exhibited in various shows.)

Over at Art Agenda, Filipa Ramos reports that this year's Documenta has at least two ambitious failed projects of its own. Here's Ms. Ramos:

In the same building, on the first floor, visitors are presented with two walls covered with letters from official organizations that once more address the Artistic Director, this time to answer her proposal of nominating the earth’s atmosphere for UNESCO’s World Heritage List (a project of the American artist Amy Balkin). The epic, yet failed, attempt to transport El Chaco meteorite to Kassel, undertaken by the Argentinean duo Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg, is also widely documented by various exchanges.

Artists, just file those away for when Han Ulrich Obrist publishes another compendium of unrealized projects.

Artist Talk: “Subjective Histories of Sculpture: Josephine Meckseper”
Josephine Meckseper’s elaborate installations, photographs and videos explore the relationship between politics and consumer culture, particularly with respect to fashion and advertising, and the homogenizing effects of capitalism. Ms. Meckseper is next up in this lecture series, organized in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, which aims to present histories that question convention and offer alternative ways for understanding the evolution of sculpture. —Rozalia Jovanovic
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, 7 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11

Opening: Lorraine O'Grady, "New Worlds," at Alexander Gray Associates
Lorraine O'Grady's second show at Alexander Gray features a new video work alongside her 1991 photo series "BodyGround," which has been re-formatted in 2012. The video, Landscape (Western Hemisphere), is a surrealistic depiction of the artist's hair transformed into landscape over the course of 18 minutes. —Michael H. Miller
Alexander Gray Associates, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 215, New York, 6-8 p.m.

THURSDAY APRIL 12

Performance: Lil B at the New Museum.
The popular, critically acclaimed and weirdly prolific rapper Lil B hits the New Museum as part of its "Get Weird" series. — Dan Duray
The New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, 6:30 p.m.

FRIDAY, APRIL 13

Opening: Tony Matelli, "Windows, Walls and Mirrors," at Leo Koenig Inc.
Tony Matelli takes over both Koenig galleries for his fourth solo show at the gallery. Known for his deceptively lifelike sculptures, Mr. Matelli will present a sculpture called Josh (2010) that shows a young man in shorts, slowly levitating from the ground, his head stuck strangely to the floor. It's a Duane Hanson gone beautifully surreal. Also on view will be some of the artist's "Mirror Paintings," which he makes by drawing various messages in urethane affixed to mirrored glass. The resulting works look as though someone has scrawled messages by clearing away dust. "I like this idea of seeing yourself beneath all these layers of other people's touch," the artist told R.C. Baker recently. —Andrew Russeth
Leo Koenig Inc., 541 and 545 West 23rd Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Performance: Grouper and Julianna Barwick at the Guggenheim Museum
As part of its Divine Ricochet series, the Guggenheim focuses on two young women--Grouper (the alias of Liz Harris) and Julianna Barwick--who perform solo and create long-form ambient sound collages, Ms. Harris with tape loops and found recordings, Ms. Barwick with her voice. If you've never heard music performed live in the Guggenheim rotunda, "divine ricochet" is a pretty good description of what you can expect. —M.H.M.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, $27, doors at 8:30 p.m., performances begin at 10:00 p.m.

SATURDAY, APRIL 14

Opening: Malick Sidibé at Agnès B. Galerie Boutique
French fashion designer agnès b. celebrates the one-year anniversary of her downtown gallery with a show devoted to the work of legendary Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, whose remarkable portraits of people and documentation of parties in pre-independence Mali (before 1960) and the decades that followed are alternately fragile, handsome and pleasure-suffused triumphs of the medium. —A.R.
Agnès B. Galerie Boutique, 50 Howard Street, New York, 6–9 p.m.

Screening and Conversation: Adam Curtis and Hans Ulrich Obrist
For the closing of Adam Curtis’s exhibition “Adam Curtis: The Desperate Edge of Now,” which was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and designed by Liam Gillick, the filmmaker will give a talk interpolated with film footage. Though he’s not an artist, since the early ‘90s Mr. Curtis has created films and documentaries for the BBC, which use historic fragments recorded on film and video reassembled in an attempt to reflect on the present. After the talk, Hans Ulrich Obrist joins the filmmaker in conversation. —R.J.
e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York, 5 p.m.

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, APRIL 14 AND 15

Performance: MoMA PS1 Salutes Kraftwerk
Techno pioneers Juan Atkins and Francois K pay tribute to Kraftwerk at PS1 this weekend, a warm-up for the Warm Ups as the weather, er, becomes higher in temperature. It's not the MoMA retrospective, but it's probably the best you're going to get. —D.D.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, 3-6 p.m.

Collection of 'do it' publications. (Courtesy Independent Curators International)

In 1993, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier met up at Cafe Select in Paris and came up with an idea for an exhibition that would be called "Do It." They would invite artists like Marina Abramovic, John Baldessari and Dara Birnbaum to contribute a set of instructions that could then be interpreted by other artists the way a musical score written by one composer is performed by other musicians. All three artists were interested in instruction, interpretation and translation as artistic principles. "'Do It' is less concerned with copies, images, or reproductions of artworks," said Mr. Obrist in a 1996 introduction on e-flux, "than with human interpretation." Almost 20 years later, 300 artists have contributed "officially" and there have been numerous "unofficial" productions worldwide, which inspired Mr. Obrist and Independent Curators International (ICI) to start compiling documentation on the evolution of the exhibition.

"Starting last fall we began compiling this 'Do It' archive," Fran Giarratano, the exhibitions manager at ICI, told The Observer, "which was everything that ICI had in its records and everything that Hans Ulrich Obrist had in his records."

ICI toured a North American version of the show from 1998-2001. "So we have a lot of documentation of that exhibition in particular," said Ms. Giarratano, "and Hans Ulrich Obrist had a lot about the other 'Do Its' that happened." But hearing through word of mouth about other exhibitions that were taking place unofficially, they decided to open the call to anyone who wanted to submit.

The documentation will be a compendium of articles, pictures and instructions as well as any new instructions that have been created based on the original format. "In Taipei, an artist interpreted Nam June Paik's instructions," said Ms. Giarratano. "In Boise, Idaho, some students interpreted Liam Gillick's, and in Toronto in 2006, there was a spin-off exhibition called 'Do Me.'"

The book will be published by ICI and another co-publisher (they're currently in talks with several) in 2013, on the occasion of the exhibition's 20th anniversary, in a projected run of 5,000, which will be published in conjunction with a staging of the exhibition.

And while they will be commissioning artists to create new work for the book, the names of which they couldn't reveal as the artists have yet to be asked, some of the original instructions give a sense of what to expect. Marina Abramovic's contribution to the manual for the exhibition, as seen via e-flux.com, was called Spirit Cooking and called in part for the following:

Mix Fresh Milk From The Breast
With Fresh Milk Of The Sperm
Drink on Earthquake Nights

Matthew Barney's contribution, Events to be Organized, reads like the storyboard of a film script that opens with the following directive: "Marti walks forward camera from top curve of phase 8 formation carrying two helium-filled miniature blimps." Louise Bourgeois's is untitled and calls for nothing more than stopping and smiling at a stranger when walking.

Those interested in contributing should contact Alex Kleiman, Research Assistant at ICI, at alex@curatorsintl.org or 212.254.8200 x126.