Passionate Crises
Passionate Crises
Documenta 12 Manual
1. The Chrystal Palace
‘Weltkunstaustellung’ is the German word for the Documenta, and perhaps that is the best description of this art event which in size and scope approaches that of the world fairs of the 19th century. The exhibition in Kassel likes to call itself the ‘Hundred Day Museum’, but with a budget of €19 million and 651,000 visitors attending the last edition in 2001, the event is more like ‘The Biggest Show on Earth’.‘World art fair’ – artistic director Roger M. Buergel will not gainsay that. Whereas in the past the Documenta wanted nothing to do with the mass event it has now become and therefore neglected to take necessary measures to properly manage the crowds, Beurgel frankly admits that a mega event must satisfy certain requirements intrinsic to such events. To accommodate the public he has created an exhibition architecture he can totally control. In the garden of the Orangerie, a Crystal Palace has been erected out of a large series of interconnected glasshouses. Eighty percent of the exhibition will take place here, in a complex especially built for the occasion.Buergel does not want to make use of facilities that were created during previous Documentas, such as a radically altered station (documenta X) and a brewery (documenta 11). He calls them unsuitable for exhibiting art, and even uses the word ‘incorrect’. ‘We must uphold the promise of the new,’ he said in an interview with the German press. That’s why the spanking new €3 million pavilion, full of light and suffused with the future. The colour of the floor is a curious red, reminiscent of the equally eye-catching velvet curtains that Buergel hung up in what he termed the ‘unmanageable’ exhibition space of Witte de With during the Rotterdam edition of Die Regierung two years ago.A glasshouse is no ordinary exhibition architecture. Buergel has chosen to no longer ‘hide’ the exhibition in the oldest public museum and temple of enlightenment on the European continent (the Fridericianum) and to free the exhibition from the tradition of the Western ‘white cube’ with its historical ballast and hermetic discourse. In a ‘Sandbergian’ manner, he is opening his exhibition to the surrounding city. And not just to the city – the entire world will enter the exhibition via the pavilion. Buergel’s Crystal Palace refers to the eponymous complex of glasshouses created by Joseph Paxton in London’s Hyde Park, where the first world fairs were organized in 1851. ‘The Great Exhibition’ is known as the mother of all shows, where the whole world was on display in a manner that was as marvellous as it was inventive. Millions of people came to the spectacle, which was midway between a fair, an educational presentation, an art exhibition and a fata morgana. Buergel’s flamboyant wink of the eye to the world fair at London’s Crystal Palace is not without irony. Apart from the fact that his Documenta glasshouse is rather insignificant in comparison with the gigantic palace in London, the art world considered that first world fair to be a degenerate form of exhibition-making, or to put it bluntly, the last show in the world that a contemporary curator would want to emulate. Ever since Walter Benjamin, the Crystal Palace has been seen as the birthplace of the spectacle economy, and therefore the harbinger of the amusement park, Disneyland, disneyfication, commercialization, increasing slickness and whatever else in the way of contemporary cultural harm. In line with this, Peter Sloterdijk, in his recent book Im Weltinnenraums des Kapitals, calls the Crystal Palace the ultimate metaphor for our stifling, transplanted existence in the contemporary capitalistic global economy, in which the lives of all of us have been subordinated to all-embracing biopolitics, and little remains for us but to live as hothouse plants. Considering this contrast between a hothouse that enriches life and one that stifles it, how should we interpret Buergel’s little glass art palace? Will Kassel be the exhibition of an incorrigible optimist, who almost naïvely believes in broad human potential as it was measured in 19th century London, or are we being served up the most critical Documenta ever presented in Kassel, with Sloterdijkian reporting on the excesses of a globalized world and the hothouse as a cutting metaphor for the world’s condition?
2. The Learning Factory
Documenta is the plural form of documentum, Latin for lesson, example, warning. The word is derived from docere, which stands for teaching, instructing, informing, but also for showing and telling. Ernst Schuh, assistant to the first Documenta director, Arnold Bode, in the 50s, noted: ‘The most important task of the enterprise (Documenta) is to instruct people.’Buergel has announced several times that ‘Bildung’, or educational development, will be an integral part of the exhibition. The magazine project, in which approximately ninety magazines from all over the world are participating, is a prominent example of this. According to d12 magazine editor-in-chief Georg Schöllhammer, three hundred articles have already been published on the three leitmotifs of document 12 released prior to the exhibition: modernity, bare life and education, about which METROPOLIS M also wrote last autumn (Expanding Academy, # 4/2006 and Naked, # 5/2006). The magazine project is meant to provide an intellectual foundation for the professional audience worldwide. Buergel has made it known, however, that the discourse in professional journals, including the material in three special magazines he is publishing together with Schöllhammer as a catalogue, inspire the exhibition but do not instruct it. The relationship must be seen in terms of ‘korrespondenz’. Buergel is convinced that a contemporary curator must organize and educate his public, not only on the international, professional level, as in the magazine project, but also locally. He has assembled a ‘Beirat’, or advisory council, comprising forty people from all sections of Kassel society, which for the past year has met on Thursdays to discuss the three themes, their local interpretation, and eventual activities.These are indeed symbolic gestures, just a drop in the ocean compared to the confrontation with the uninformed hordes that will arrive in Kassel this summer. Yet Buergel is certain of the success of his educational mission. Don’t expect him to come up with an exhibition that merely amuses – he wants an exhibition that ‘emancipates’. It is time, as he asserted in a lecture, to teach Europe a lesson. ‘Europe is provincial and poorly informed, in contrast to Asia and Latin America, where people know more about Europe and its traditions than Europe itself. I would like to confront the public with its own ignorance, and its totally mistaken assumption that Europe is still somehow or other the centre.’ Europe must enter into debate with the rest of the world while it is still possible. ‘People have a vague fear that something is being taken from them, but are too weak to push their own potential forward and actually take part in a debate.’ Time is running out.Yet documenta 12 is the opposite of an educational presentation. Like every curator, Buergel abhors the use of art as the ‘representation’ or ‘illustration’ of theory. The Bildung that Buergel champions is of a different order, based on people’s self-motivation and their capacity to find connections independently. In Kassel, therefore, you will find none of the usual guided tours, leading the public from highlight to highlight, or the suggestion of any art historical, cultural or geopolitical context replete with appropriate viewing instructions. Every definition of context reduces art to an illustration of that context, and this is precisely what must be avoided. The only thing that should be stimulated is the effectiveness of the art itself. Buergel describes Kassel as a ‘machine for producing differences of opinion’, which because of its scale, the many parties and interests involved, has throughout the years always offered a challenging chaos. He methodically exploits the ‘differences of opinion’ in an exhibition plan that puts the art and the public in a situation of ‘detachment’ – via the glasshouse, the selection of the art and the split up layout. With Buergel, each artwork becomes an asylum seeker in a strange, uprooted environment, longing for integration.[1]The process of overstepping one’s limits, whereby one can no longer fall back on knowledge, reputations and representations, is not without its risk. Buergel surmises that his ‘unbounded’ exhibition approach might elicit ‘questions’, even ‘aggression’. Here and there along the route are spaces without art, serving as places for relaxation and reflection, where people can talk with each other or discuss the exhibited works with a team of guides. Artists will provide the interior design.documenta 12 will be a demanding exhibition, with much unknown art from all over the world that will only be sparingly clarified and explained. It is this urge for aesthetic reflection, this refusal to be helpful in an easy manner, which makes the exhibition political. Buergel: ‘Politics in a “beautiful” exhibition is not a contradiction. For me, politics is not showing starving children in Africa, but hauling people out of their ossification and getting them to take responsibility for the world. For the world and for themselves. And then, in the best case scenario, people will arrive at another level – like with good sex.’
3. The Tradition: d1 and d10
The logo of documenta 12 suggests that this edition will be the same as all the others, the 12th in line, scored with stripes. Number thirteen will follow in five years from now. Yet for Buergel in particular, one Documenta is not equal to the other. He hates the Documenta of Jan Hoet, which he dismisses as a fun factory devoid of ideas. Neither is he charmed by Harald Szeeman, who, ‘poisoned by the contemporary’, as he says, made an exhibition in which only the newest of the new had a place. He would rather measure his exhibition against that of Catherine David, who with her ‘retroperspectives’ offered a ‘genealogy of the contemporary’, in which she attempted to readjust our view of art through the past, the roots of our understanding of art.Of the previous eleven Documentas, the first one, by Arnolf Bode, is his favourite. Bode set up basic principles for that exhibition which for Buergel are still (or once again) current. In 1955, Bode laid out the first exhibition as part of the Bundesgartenschau, a kind of Floriade to which three million people came, contained within the partial ruin that the Museum Fridericianum then was. In his article ‘Der Ursprung’ (The Origins), published in the 50 Jahre documenta catalogue in 2005 and reprinted in the first documenta magazine, Modernity!, which appeared this March, Buergel writes about the first Documenta. It was meant to bring the vulnerable, or rather, ‘bare’ German postwar public in contact with international modernism, which had been declared ‘entarted’ by the Nazis. The art world wanted to show its loyalty to the modern project simultaneously with Kassel’s postwar reconstruction, but this did not occur without a struggle. It led to many discussions, with the result that the exhibition was not just any exhibition, but an attempt, as Buergel writes, to form a civic society out of the still vulnerable postwar public.Buergel lauds Bode’s sophisticated Inszenierung, or mise-en-scène of the history of modernism, suggesting a continuity by highlighting the breaks that characterize it. In a radical interplay between the art, the space and the visitor, a public space was constructed that was devoted to aesthetics, instead of functioning as a representation of the nation, religion, or politics. ‘Here there was nothing to understand, in the true sense, no preoccupations, which is precisely why it is possible and essential to talk about everything, to communicate about everything.’Buergel speaks of Bode as he speaks of his own exhibition, which he likewise wants to use so that ‘a community actually learns how to see, understand and develop itself as a community’. The Documenta is ‘an ontological laboratory in which to display, create and emphasize an ethics of coexistence’. With Bode, this radical exhibition model worked best in the rooms where the works almost seemed to float in the air on special hanging constructions made by Friedrich Kiesler (whom Buergel is also going to use). Buergel writes: ‘This environment, which put architecture, art and audience on equal terms, was able to stimulate precisely the kind of sensory collaboration that leads visitors out of themselves and connects them with a reality they are unable grasp, a reality in which there are no borders or fixed points of reference, no beginning and no end; a reality where, to put it simply, subject/object relations come under scrutiny.’ In Der Ursprung, Buergel eloquently and precisely describes his own Kuratorische Bestimmung, or curatorial goal, and reveals himself to be a thoroughly convinced modernist, who, beyond postmodernism, chooses the future – a better future, with a fitting ethical undertone. Buergel’s missionary approach, along with a feeling for aesthetics that has a strong Western bias (even though this is supplemented by a good deal of non-Western art), makes documenta 12 an exhibition that testifies to our supposedly lost feeling for citizenship and civic duty, as the modernistic avant-garde had long proposed. More like a kind of mayor than an artistic director of an exhibition, he calls out to us, the rather spoiled and bored art crowd: Change the world, start by changing yourself!
Domeniek Ruyters
