At the foot of the sombre, massive castle Wilhelmshöhe, which authoritatively overlooks the old city of Kassel from its high hill, lies a typical Asian landscape. A cascade of muddy terraces has been carved out of the green hillside, and the basins filled with water and young rice plants gleam like exotic jewels in the green Schlosspark. The intervention is by the Thai artist Sakarin Krue-On, who with this grand gesture draws attention to both the landscape of the park and the departure points of the twelfth documenta. At first sight, the traditional Eastern rice fields seem totally incompatible with the surrounding English gardens. On the other hand, a park like this, one of the high points of eighteenth century English landscape architecture in Europe, has been filled with ‘exotics’ from its very beginning. By now, the castle’s park has some 500 varieties of trees from all over the world. Sakarin’s rice field couples this colonial context with contemporary discussions about immigrants. And whether the delicate rice plants will be able to survive their German asylum or not – the question of why they are there has been posed in a compellingly symbolic fashion.
Sakarin’s work also stands as a symbol for the fundamental question behind this documenta: has non-Western art finally shed its aura of ‘exoticness’? For if there is one thing that stands out about this documenta – whether you walk through the Fridericianum, the Documenta Halle, the Aue Pavilion, the Neue Galerie or the museum in the castle, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe – it’s that art from all over the world is being shown here, from the Middle East to Russia, from Asia to Africa, from Eastern Europe to South America. The three questions that Roger Buergel and his wife Ruth Noack, the artistic directors of the documenta, have formulated as leitmotifs for the exhibition – Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? What is to be done? – moreover give their option for global art a conceptual framework, suggesting that ‘modernity’ has become an historical category, substantiated by a network of mythologies, that has just as many interpretations as it has sources. This ‘modern antiquity’ is in our genes and has many mutations, not all of which have taken place in the West. What we ‘should do’ on the basis of this is no longer directed from an authoritarian West European historical canon, but lies within the framework of global cultural and political issues. At the same time, these questions serve the twofold goal formulated for the documenta at its inauguration: retrospection and prognosis.
Private Mythology
The documenta is a product of the Cold War. Not without reason does it take place in Kassel, on the border of the former DDR and BRD. The dual purpose of the documenta, organized for the first time in 1955 by Arnold Bode, was on the one hand to exhibit the modern art that had been declared entartet in Nazi Germany, and on the other to map the state of affairs of contemporary art in the West. An exhibition that balances between ‘Vergangenheitsbearbeitung und Zukunftsdeterminante’ (processing history and determining the future), as Harald Kimpel asserts.[1] After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new direction for the documenta became possible, where the principal focus was no longer on Western art (a term that comes from the rhetoric of the Cold War) but on so-called ‘global art’. Catherine David, the first female director of documenta, did this from the perspective of Vergangenheitsbearbeitung, or processing history – her documenta was an essay on the canon of contemporary art – and Okwui Enwezor, the first black and ‘non-Western’ artistic director, took a logical next step with an exhibition oriented toward Zukunftsdeterminante, or determining the future, with his essay on world art. Seen in that light, the choice of Roger Buergel and his wife Ruth Noack as directors can be called conservative. Although both have had experience as makers of international exhibitions, their names are in fact primarily known in German speaking countries, due respectively to their contributions to politically engaged and feminist art. The couple’s appointment initially raised fears that the progressive, international course taken by their predecessors would not be continued. This scepticism proved unfounded, for Buergel and Noack have indeed presented a documenta that gives serious consideration to international art on a global scale.
Yet a critical comment is in order, for hardly any context is provided in this exhibition. The curators apparently consider geopolitical categories and hierarchies to be politically incorrect in our contemporary multicultural society – by which their documenta directly controverts that of Catherine David ten years ago. Art = art, seems to be the democratic message, no matter where and when it is made. Through the intentional lack of context, however, the fact that this art is still being presented within a Western context is virtually ignored. The national setup of that other mega-exposition, the Venice Biennale, is often considered passé nowadays, but this year the art in the Biennale’s non-Western pavilions gains a curious honesty in comparison to the all-purpose veneer on the art at the documenta.
The criticism most often heard during the press reception was the subjectivity of this documenta and the curators’ corresponding ‘private mythology’, as an art journalist for the Süddeutsche Zeitung described it.[2] The curators’ personal preferences indeed have put a strong stamp on this exhibition, which more or less can be divided into four categories: abstract art (John McCracken, Charlotte Posenenske), politically engaged art (Kerry James Marschall, Ahlam Shibli), feminist art (old heroines like Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler), and finally, the above-mentioned global art (with favourites like the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, or the African artist Romuald Hazoumé). In this context, ‘private’ also means that the curators seem to have expressly ignored the official canon of contemporary art, with its internationally recognized names. The fact that most of them are absent in this documenta is a decided attempt to modify art history through artists and art movements that the curators feel have been ‘forgotten’ or given too little attention.
There are two problems with this approach: first of all, a number of artists represented by more work have unintentionally been declared the new heroes; and secondly, Buergel and Noack have stuck closely to the standard categories of the official canon: abstraction, conceptualism, engagement and feminism. In this respect, they seem like bourgeois dropouts who rebel against the standards and values of their parents without actually breaking free. As a result, we inadvertently start comparing the choices made by Buergel and Noack with those of the institutional art world, and come to the conclusion that this documenta often does focus on second rate characters. John McCracken’s abstract sculptures are not on a par with the works of a Donald Judd – which are obviously missing. And although Mary Kelly may have played a productive role in American feminist art of the 70s, nothing legitimizes the large amount of space that has been dedicated to her work. One can appreciate this methodical refusal to show the ‘big names’ sponsored by the art world and its market, but here the balance has tipped, raising the question: When does the rewriting of history turn into its opposite, the falsification of history? Buergel and Noack’s antiauthoritarian idea has led to a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach, which at best is intriguing, but often arrogantly arbitrary as well.
Exhibition Models
Yet the exhibition has been successful in many ways. From its very beginning, the documenta has not only been about the works which are exhibited but also about the art of exhibiting, and the artistic directors of this documenta take that tradition seriously. Almost every one of its showplaces experiments with a different kind of exhibition model. The Fridericianum, a building that embodies the eighteenth century and marks the beginning of the modern museum, takes a strictly museological approach, offering an aesthetically polished presentation, as does the largely semi-darkened 19th-century Neue Galerie. The Documenta Halle – renamed the building of the twentieth century – represents itself as a Gesammtkunstwerk, which in turn is different from the hypermodern sheds of the Aue Pavilions expressly constructed for this occasion, where art is brought together according to the chaotic principle of today’s Kunstmesse. Finally, in Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, contemporary art is confronted with historic works from the collection, following the current exhibition model of artistic dialogue.
As in every documenta, you also find brilliant works. In the Fridericianum, besides the splendid performance Floor of the Forest by choreographer Trisha Brown, there is an installation by Haroun Farocki which maps the complexity of contemporary media reality by using computer software and camera techniques to filter images of the last World Cup finals on a series of nine screens. All of these techniques are used by football professionals to analyze matches, but the way Farocki puts them together produces a disturbing image of total surveillance. In the lobby of the Documenta Halle, there are tables at which you can don headphones and watch artistic ‘reportages’ that penetratingly investigate various aspects of the war in Iraq – for example, the four-hour long performance-like documentary in which the court cases at Guantánamo Bay are re-enacted on the basis of the actual ‘scripts’, so that the legal absurdities and the shocking lack of transparency in the entire process become unpleasantly obvious. In the Neue Galerie, Harvey Keitel – in sneakers – plays an extremely artificial but impressive classic hero who conducts a Shakespearian-sounding monologue – an indictment against the war by James Coleman, who refuses to give any further information about the piece. And then there is the poignant video installation by Amar Kanwar about the raping of women during conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India – at once a political and a poetic reflection of Indian culture in general. Much more than the nostalgic activist work of arch-feminist Mary Kelly, this installation makes clear that the struggle for women’s rights is by no means over everywhere in the world.
In the Aue Pavilions, what especially catches the eye are the African and Chinese contributions, such as the enormous refugee boat by Romuald Hazoumé, dramatically entitled Dream, or the painted scrolls by Lu Hao, who uses traditional Chinese painting techniques to give a critical rendition of the urban design and architectural changes made in Beijing for the upcoming Olympic Games. Another bespoke Chinese work is by the artist Ai Weiwei, who has put a total of 1001 antique Chinese chairs at the disposal of the public, spread throughout all of the documenta locations. The chairs are symbolically linked to 1001 Chinese from all levels of society, whom the artist has brought to Kassel, a soziale Skulptur strongly reminiscent of the 7000 oak trees that Beuys planted during documenta 7 – and a counterpart to that other work referring to migration, Sakarin Krue-On’s rice field in the Schlosspark.
All in all, this documenta, as Janneke Wesseling writes, has ‘great surprises and high points’, but also ‘low points and incomprehensible choices’.[3] Which is a rather more nuanced judgment than ‘the worst documenta ever’, as some people maintained at the opening. It makes you wonder whether terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ indeed are adequate for describing any documenta. Naturally, there are good and less good exhibitions, but all curators of the documenta take a well-considered artistic standpoint. Whether it be the popular approach of Jan Hoet, the intellectual attitude of Catherine David, or the antiauthoritarian stance of Buergel and Noack, once every five years something is presented to the public that has been deeply reflected upon. That reflection may be provoked by principles to which you might be adamantly opposed, but every documenta, including this one, is a challenge that can be taken seriously.
Opening
