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The next Documenta has three leitmotifs. The second is devoted to the question, ‘What is bare life?’ Roger M. Buergel has described it as follows: ‘What is bare life?’ underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to it – a freedom for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, the world in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation. But what does that mean for its audiences?’ METROPOLIS M asked two critics to give their initial reactions.

I – Jennifer Allen Bare Life? Barely

It’s hard to respond to Roger M. Buergel’s take on the concept of ‘bare life’. Introduced by Walter Benjamin in his essay on violence, bare life is linked to the law’s sovereignty in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. I: Il potere soverano e la nuda vita (1995). Agamben defines sovereignty as the power to declare the state of exception, where bare life is bred, only to be extinguished with impunity. His study considers many figures that could be legally killed: the homo sacer of ancient Roman law; the Jew in the Nazi concentration camp; the ‘brain-dead’ coma patient. Recently, the terrorist suspect – the key word is suspect – has emerged as a bare life that can be freely executed in the state of exception created by the global war on terror.What is missing from Buergel’s text: There is no bare life without a sovereign power (from a monarch to a state expert) that decides the exceptions to the law. The total exposure of bare life is inseparable from total impunity. By omitting the law, Buergel’s description is vague in relation to the present. The case of Jean Charles de Menezes – an electrician mistaken for a suicide bomber and shot by London police – demonstrates that anyone can be a homo sacer in the war on terror. Buergel attributes bare life to the part of existence where ‘no measure of security will protect us’; in fact, exceptional security measures gave rise to a dominant form of bare life. The Lebanese citizens accidentally killed in Israel’s battle to defend itself against Hezbollah show that the Menezes case can easily escalate; after all, Israel was not at war with Lebanon. Equally urgent today are refugees sans papiers who can be freely extinguished insofar as their disappearance is hard to detect. More troubling is the relationship of Buergel’s description to the past, especially the history of Germany, where Documenta 12 takes place. For Agamben, the Nazis realized bare life in a fusion of life (bios) and politics; the concentration camp, not the city, is the biopolitical paradigm for the West, even welfare states. While Buergel links the camp and torture to the ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘political dimension’ of bare life, there is a failure to acknowledge the singularity of the Nazi period and its impact on the biopolitics of democratic states. Moreover, according to Agamben, bare life marks both a failure of politics and a border that politics cannot cross, due to the state of exception. The Nazis stripped Jews of their citizenship (thus, the camp were not prisons). Today, bare lives in the Guantánamo detention camp cannot be touched by politics, not even by the US Supreme Court. Buergel’s description seems to trivialize such phenomena by appealing to the ‘lyrical’, ‘ecstatic’ side of bare life. In Agamben’s study, the only dimension that could be thus construed is sado-masochism, an unwritten contract that allows one partner to inflict injury on another. While alluding to sexuality, Buergel links bare life to ‘absolute exposure’, ‘infinite pleasure’, ‘a freedom’ in human relations, to nature and the world. Bare life comes to mean just about anything, from a concentration camp to a walk in the woods. Bare life becomes lifestyle.For Buergel, art dissolves the ‘radical separation’ between the apocalyptic and the lyrical, subjection and liberation, the camp inmate and the exhibitionist. This claim suggests that art and artists are not only more autonomous than sovereign powers but also capable of eliminating the borders between Buergel’s many manifestations of bare life, like a universal currency equating pain and pleasure. Artists do enjoy freedom of expression – exceptions to censorship that allow them to ‘kill’ audiences morally with impunity – but artistic autonomy in a democratic state is not like bare life in a state of exception. Many artworks give visibility to bare life, especially the refugee; yet insofar as such works are ‘political’, they loose their grasp on what they would save, since bare life lies beyond politico-juridical interventions. Again: the problem is Buergel’s failure to clarify the role of the law. Artworks in which bare life crystallizes in relation to a state of exception are rare.One example is Atelier van Lieshout’s Constitution (2001). Drawn up for AVL-Ville (2001), Constitution resembles the charter of a democracy, with a difference: AVL’s founding laws were absolute. AVL-Ville boasted every element of a nation-state – from currency to sanitation – but no legislation beyond Constitution, nor police and judges to enforce it. Article 11 states that people must solve their conflicts or leave the compound. AVL-Ville was not a break-away state, nor a parallel mini-state, but claimed itself as the state of exception to the Netherlands and Dutch laws. AVL-Ville was the only place where there were no exceptions; the exception was the rule; everything was possible. By eliminating the state of exception to its own laws, AVL eliminated the sovereign power’s right to declare one. AVL-Ville gave rise to a form of bare life because there was no mediation to protect or control the body. For Agamben, Sade’s biopolitical pamphlet ‘Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains’ (1785) presents human physiological functions as pure politics – a crucial part of AVL-Ville. From the open Compostoilet (2001) to Modular Multi-Women Bed (1997), AVL’s installations codify and collectivize the most intimate functions: shitting, sleeping, having sex. Like Sade, AVL-Ville presented a collective organization of human life based upon bare life. Another example is Carsten Höller’s The Baudouin/Boudewijn Experiment. A deliberate, non-fatalistic, large-scale group experiment in deviation (2001), which took place inside Brussels’s Atomium from 10:00 am on 27 September until 10:00 am on 28 September 2001. One hundred volunteers stepped out of ‘their usual, productive lives for one day’. Beyond minimal comforts, nothing was planned for them. The experiment was inspired by the late H.M. Baudouin, King of Belgium, who was declared incapable of governing the country for twenty-four hours on 4 April 1990. The monarch was due to sign a law legalizing abortion, which, like all laws decided by the Belgian parliament, must be ceremonially signed to come into effect. But King Baudouin did not want to sign. The government discovered a paragraph in the constitution stating that the royal signature is not required when the king is deemed incapable of governing, a provision for exceptional circumstances, such as the mental illness of the ruler. In a compromise reached between the government and the king, the monarch was declared incapable of ruling for long enough to pass the law without his signature. The Baudouin/Boudewijn Experiment captures a complex manifestation of bare life. First, the Belgian abortion law creates bare life with the foetus that can be extinguished with impunity, like the brain-dead patient. Second, in the state of exception declared by the Belgian government, the king is reduced to a form of bare life by losing his sacred ceremonial status as a monarch. Third, there was an exceptional compromise between the government and the king, who was not ill (both parties suggesting that insanity was a reason not to sign the law). Höller put his civilian volunteers in an exceptional state of exception, as if they were kings with two lives who could give up the ‘royal’ status thus attributed to their common lives. The experiment neutralized the sovereign power’s right to declare the state of exception by making it the collective right of any citizen. Since nothing that occurred in the Atomium was recorded for history, the experiment honoured the absence of mediation that separates bare life from the rest.

II – Paul GrootAgamben, Heidegger or Pirandello?

Art, along with many other things, is ultimately an unspoken agreement to keep everything neat and tidy. Art sets out to show us the Creation as a relatively painless process. Consequently, Documenta leader Roger M. Buergel’s idea of presenting his exhibition in the light of ‘bare life’ is surprisingly revolutionary. Buergel has taken the term (originally la nuda vita in Italian) from the book by Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). In it, the Italian philosopher and aesthetician studies pure human suffering, the naked life of concentration camps, the human condition in its most perverse manifestation. This is no easy subject, but in Agamben’s case, you might almost say that there is happily an escape in the canons of philosophy, in this case in Hannah Arendt and her studies of the ultimate example of nuda vita – the holocaust and Auschwitz. Agamben is a final bastion of a non-compromising aesthetic that imagines itself in direct contact with classical philosophy. His philosophical position has never let go of Martin Heidegger, the 20th century’s most controversial philosopher, who was a major influence on Agamben and on whom the Italian based his earliest work. Heidegger, almost a cliché of the introspective philosopher, was an aesthete who was rather mistaken about the intentions of the Nazis. It was a political miscalculation from which the reception of his work would never recover. At the first Documentas, initially intended to confront the German public with international art, notably modernism, Heidegger’s philosophy was still cast in a very poor light. Indeed, many perceived the exhibitions as a welcome antidote to Heidegger’s focus on the local atmosphere of the German nation, which sometimes huddled very close indeed to the Nazis’ Blut und Boden theory. Personally, I enjoy reading Heidegger, but it is strange to suddenly, albeit indirectly, see this controversial thinker showing up as a patron saint for the Documenta. In itself, it is time for this philosopher, who spent his life so close to Kassel, to be brought into the picture. But the question remains: why now? Are the previous Documentas’ sources of inspiration – lots of foreign modernism, with a healthy dose of Kantian morality and Hegelian massage – now truly exhausted, so that Heidegger, with a burnishing southern blow-dry from Agamben, is needed to infuse Kassel with new zeal? And can a controversial, mystical philosopher, against whose thinking the Documenta was more or less originally established, authoritatively and convincingly illuminate the art of today? Buergel is of course aware of such misgivings, but apparently, Agamben’s bare truth puts raw reality in a framework that creates sufficient distance from this long-maligned mystical source. Buergel is also working with two other themes: modernism today and education. He seems, however, to want to reserve them for the eventuality that art might not be able to handle the raw approach of ‘bare life’. He is not really convinced by the fairy tale that you can literally translate life into art. And he is right. Do Jan Fabre’s beetles drenched in ballpoint blue really explain the ultimate puzzle of life itself? Artistically speaking, can you ever take the raw cries of the martyrs of Guantánamo Bay literally? Buergel knows that the symbol will always reign as the determining factor in art. He wants naked life, but knows better than anyone that the symbolic silence of the white canvas truly can express the bloody reality of real life.Buergel’s bearing gives the impression that what has far too long been the closed, self-reflective image of art and art history has no future and is due for a radical dismantling. The artistic canon has become too transparent, and he has been alarmed by attempts at its annexation by the other cultural phenomena that seem to be taking over art. He is therefore retreating into the aesthetics of Agamben and Heidegger. Here he finds a way to rescue art, without severing the nerves that connect it to the outside world. By explaining ‘existence’ by way of ‘those who exist’, Heidegger referred philosophy back to life itself, without actually taking on the real confrontation, and this is also the case with Buergel. Naturally, for the time being, experiments are possible, but it does not strike me as self-evident that his efforts will be truly heroic. In the meantime, there are opportunities enough. Read, for example, the once much-discussed studies by the metabletics (the psychology of history) pioneer J.H. van den Berg, on the opened body (1959) and the closed body (1961). They would be splendid points of discourse for the Documenta. As would, by the way, George Bataille’s texts on the body, not as an anatomical concept, but as a body that is tormented and tortured. What would we think of a master class based on texts by Marquis de Sade, illustrating live demonstrations of the newest surgical techniques? If these images are too gruesome for the new Documenta chief, then he could certainly make something of Agamben’s nuda vita itself. For however deeply engaged his above-board approach to human suffering, the term is nonetheless a play on Luigi Pirandello’s novella, La vita nuda, with its immortal first sentence: ‘Un morto, che pure e un morto, caro mio, vuole anche lui la sua casa.’ (A dead person…, even he wants a home of his own.) This is the naked truth of life, not in the bloody images of today’s media, but in the detached irony of a masterful writer in a direct encounter with the absurdity of art and life. Pirandello, and of course Ionesco and Beckett in his wake, translated the incomprehensible horrors of naked life into the absurdity of art. The truth of the opened body, which is naked life itself, is processed into a closed art form. The alternately closed, opened and abandoned body then operates as a comic trio that finishes off gruesome reality with terrible jokes. We shall see if Buergel also dares to take on that side of Agamben’s naked truth.