Calin on Sat, 5 Oct 2002 16:48:03 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> the last documenta as we knew them |
The latest Documenta raised, like no other art event before, quite some reactions on this list. That is due I guess to a certain convergence between social analysis, media criticism and artistic practice. Cross-domain inter-contamination is a good sign - it means communication; and a bad sign - it means that specialized activities are vanishing under the pressure of syncretism. The most obvious sign that the Roman Empire was on the brink of the collapse has been the disappearance of the artisans, with their strait, narrow, and reliable practice. Anyway, although being out of the agenda by now, and also out of debate, maybe there is some interest for this retrospective of what might be the last Documenta, as we know it. Text to be published in Romanian version in the art magazine Balkon (wwww.balkon.ro). ******************************************* 1. Documenta XI surfaced into the public attention in a period of radicalisation in the world's politics and economy. Therefore the appointment of a non-European, non-Caucasian Artistic Director was perceived as an obvious statement for change. After a long (and probably internally very active) period of total media silence, this statement was enforced by a series of events called platforms - that is the conferences in Vienna, New Delhi, Berlin, St. Lucia, Lagos. From that moment on my legitimate interest for the upcoming event started to be tainted with bits of doubt. No matter how much I appreciate colloquia, conferences, workshops and other types of gatherings of peers around hot/cold issues, they are in the end a common place, a circuit, and - as I just said - a gathering of peers. By just moving one of them to Lagos, in an exotic place, this closed medium was not generating more effectiveness beyond a particular circle. And why "Platforms"? This is another common place of the 90s, exhausted by a leftist intellectual discourse so much indebted to the Delleuze - Guattari concepts preparing what we discovered lately to be the globalisation. I know that platforms sound a bit better that the "Plateaux of Mankind" trumpeted by Harald Szeeman in the Venice Biennial, but it sounds as arrogant as that. So, the curatorial team started by building platforms, then invited to climb there a few luminaries of the world thinking, in order to contemplate together whatever was supposed to be the platform number five, the exhibition. Packaged with a dogmatic persistence as being just one of the platforms, the eleventh Documenta was heading in the direction pointed at by the previous one, also very busy in re-branding the exhibition into the pre-text of a larger conglomerate of topics and media. This is not a bad thing in itself - it depends on how this conglomerate is structured. Which brings a more general question: what should one expect from (yet another) Documenta? Considering the fact that this is a mass event - one should expect entertainment (in the sense of emotional fulfillment). Considering that this is a massive (infrastructurally speaking) event - one should expect experiment. When (and only when) entertainment and experiment are covered, one can expect the introduction of reflection. There is no line separating those three elements, which must be organically imbedded in the whole. Ideally, a visitor at Documenta - be it a doctor going out with the family for a smart weekend, or a PhD in art and philosophy - must leave with the feeling that it was a stimulating experience in more that one way - it opened new prospective on life, it gave a sense of cultural continuity, and it induced a sense of disruption. It is only fair to ask immediately what are the difficulties implied by such an enterprise. They can be all summed in the magic term of management: scale management, content management, shock management, boredom management. How to please the high and the low brow with the same means, how to accommodate the needs of so many people, how to combine the information overload and the suspension of disbelief. 2. It is interesting to see how were all those challenges assumed by the curatorial team in terms of the treatment of space. As it is known by now, Documenta's main venue is the Fredericianum - where the vision of the whole show is summed up into a statement. At least that is what the logic of urban circulation and architectural symbolism implies. The core energy of the building was dedicated to an endless piece by Hanne Darboven, whose flat and un-engaging conceptualism was indulged on the three levels of the rotunda. The main areas of the ground floor were dedicated to pieces reviving the sentimental painterly installations raving in the 70s (Doris Salcedo, Chohreh Feyzdjou). Further on, an insensitively large space was dedicated to a failure by Alfredo Jaar (who tried to combine political comment with spiritual revelation); and to a drop-dead-boring so-called media installation by Ecke Bonk, pretentiously extending in wall projections digitalized excerpts from the German dictionary of the brothers Grimm. Not to speak about the (as usual) intellectually useless and visually incomprehensible contribution of Maria Eichorn, which got a rather large room, while it could have fit in a passageway with the same result (since it is basically a narrative speculation on economic mechanisms). Meanwhile, predictable hits like the installation of Shirin Neshat are forced into spaces that make the relationship audience - projection literally a torture. The same goes for the pieces of two debutantes - Zirina Bhimji and Yang Fudong - whose lyrical films are hard to cope with unless crowding in dramatic conditions in tiny corridor-like rooms without air. If those last cases might be explained by pure negligence, the misunderstanding of space necessities is striking in the case of Chantal Ackerman, whose multi- screen films (one of the most substantial experiments with non-linear cinema that I experienced lately) need in order to make sense precisely the generosity of area that they were refused here. In the Documenta-Halle, the same spatial hierarchy is undermining the effectiveness of the experience. No matter how much I sympathise with the Palestinian people and how much I consider that the tragedy happening in the Middle-East has to be relentlessly in focus, I do not see how would this agenda be helped by the fact that about 30% of this building is dedicated to the installation of Fareed Armaly & Rashid Mashrawi. If packaged differently, this documentation of the Palestinian spiritual and geographical confinement would have been gaining impact. Meanwhile, works by Johan van der Keuken, Gaston A. Ancelovici and other filmmakers with an interesting saying were stashed on monitors, in a traffic area strongly lit through the glass walls. The same bizarre unfairness works at least in one more case, this time in the more generously used Biding-Brauerei: the fascinating movies of Igloolik Isuma Productions (www.igloolik.ca - an Inuit film company aiming at the preservation of the oral narratives of this community in face of modernisation, says the catalogue), are delivered on a row of monitors hung along the passageway, like in a train station. No wonder that comments were made about this Documenta being a gathering of National Geographic and Descovery Channel movies; but this was not due to the material on offer, but to the manner in which it is displayed. Space distribution being a statement in itself, one should look also at the way in which the three locations articulate a discourse. It becomes rather clear retrospectively that the Documenta-Halle was supposed to inherit some of the functions established by the previous edition - as a documentation centre. But this space is also significant for two types of segregation that operate in the whole event. One is media-based: While relying heavily on such topics as archiving, accumulation of data, processing of information, the curators did not see and use the digital media, and namely the internet as specific tools which could not only build artistic discourses on these principles, but which can also offer that reflexive component mentioned above. Establishing an information centre is what any culture house is doing nowadays; more could have been expected form such a mega-event in terms of integrating digital data access and digital art formats into the exhibition's flow and body. The second segregation is concerning - unexpectedly - the political commitments of the curators. By making the same Halle a "platform" for the third world, a certain topical coherence was attained, but at the same time also a strange sense of marginalisation. I would have liked to see the educational videos of Le Groupe Amos (working on educational topics with grass roots organisations from Congo) at the place of Darboven's autistic piece. Or Pascal Martine Tayou's multi-media installation (one of the best pieces in the show and a real jump forward in the poetics of this artist) traded for the otherwise notable work of On Kawara (also in Fredericianum). In the same line, one must notice the treatment of the Kulturbanhof - a sort of banlieue of the manifestation, where artists already present in the show elsewhere are replayed, from a different point of view, maybe, but so unnecessarily (the cases of David Goldblatt, Isa Genzken, Kendell Geers, Mona Hatoum). While a piece with a strong statement, like the one made by the Italian group Multiplicity on the humanitarian catastrophe produced by the sinking of a refugee boat between Sicily and Malta is relegated to the attic. 3. Obviously my taste and those of the curators are not a match - why should they? But the enhanced attention towards old ways of treating conceptualism and installation art was not sustained by reflective bodies of historical contextualization. And it cannot be justified by the fact that those specific works were issued in cultures where they could have been perceived as statements of political resistance. In the end - there is no good political art - there is only good art. On the other hand, the political commitment - when substantiated aesthetically - was displayed as a detail. The new and endearing pieces of work were few, and sometimes relegated to unjustified places. I had a few moments of fun, and a few revelations. I liked the ideas of Simparch and the skate-bowl multi-media sculpture that they developed. I enjoyed the kinetics of the totem installation made by Nari Ward - a simple way of saying that gods and demons are still working in our post-colonial confusion. I tried to spend more time with Eija-Liisa Ahtila's polymorphous stories and with the intensely poetic images of Craigie Horsfield. Wiliam Eggelstone, Dieter Roth and Constant fascinated me again. I enjoyed - for different reasons - the pieces of Fiona Tan and of Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas. But all this was happening in extreme conditions - due to a trivial detail, unexpected in an environment so luxurious and so much focused on humane needs: the lack of air conditioning! If that was a symbolic statement, it succeeded in deed to make the Documenta flannerie into an oppressive and suffocating experience. If it wasn't meant to be so - it certainly ruined a lot of that mixture entertainment - revelation - reflection I see at the bottom rock of such an event. But in the end of the day I didn't leave Kassel with any feeling of exultation and with no news to chew on, except the certitude that the formats used in Documenta XI were unfortunate, obliterating the content and rejecting the aha erlebinss we are all looking for. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net