The New York Times: HOLLAND COTTER on DOCUMENTA
Asking Serious Questions in a Very Quiet Voice
The format of the Biennale as a profusion of national pavilions is set; Münster is medium-specific. Documenta has no such restrictions. It’s a contemporary show, but it can encompass all sorts of material. This year’s edition includes 16th-century Islamic calligraphy, Central Asian embroidery and a stuffed giraffe.
It can also take any shape a curator wants to give it. Traditionally the show has been the brainchild of a single person. There are two this time: Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, a husband-and-wife team, who issued the kind of airy-weighty preview teasers that left you ready to hate what was to come. (European “serious” often reads as pretentious to an American ear. It’s a cultural thing.)
In any case, the show sustains its reputation for being an idiosyncratic, concept-driven affair. You go to glamorous, sun-splashed Venice to party, gaze and graze; you come to gray, pleasureless Kassel to think.
Documenta 12 asks us to do a lot of thinking: about mortality, about the obsolescence of modernity, about how to live an ethical life through art. But it advances its questions quietly, and a bit too quietly: the resulting low visual impact is a major flaw. The show is every bit as socially engaged as its video-heavy 2002 predecessor, but packages its politics in a different way, in unmonumental objects and installations by undersung, not to say unknown, artists.
Many art-world insiders didn’t have a clue in advance who had been picked for the show. And after the list was announced, they basically still didn’t know, so unfamiliar were many of the names. Apart from Gerhard Richter, with a small 1977 portrait; Agnes Martin, with one painting; and the California-based John McCracken, there are relatively few Euro-American A-list figures in sight.
This is far and away the most interesting feature of Documenta 12. By being almost perversely esoteric, at least by Western market standards, it takes the usual “international” roundup in another direction, away from the New York-London-Berlin trade route. In the process it delivers something approximating a truly global array.
With around 150 participants, the roster is fairly modest in size, but its geographic range stretches from the Canadian Arctic (with the Inuit painter Annie Pootoogook) to Southeast Asia (with the Singapore-born Simryn Gill, who now lives in Australia). It includes several artists from India and more than a dozen from Africa, not all of them predictable choices, as they are this year in Venice.
Latin America and Eastern Europe, and in particular the avant-garde movements there after World War II, have a significant presence in a show that defines “contemporary” as a state of mind rather than as a date, and that at least makes a gesture toward acknowledging modernity as an intercultural phenomenon, not an export from the West.
All this is in principle good. Also good is the suggestion of an awareness that “unknown” is a relative term. The Beijing-based Conceptualist Ai Weiwei may not ring corporate bells in New York, but he is a figure of Warholian celebrity in China and a major force in that country’s neocapitalist vanguard culture.
As if to make the point that that culture will eventually be our culture too, Mr. Ai intends to take 1,001 Chinese visitors to Kassel before the show closes on Sept. 23. Antique Qing dynasty chairs (which Mr. Ai collects) are spread throughout the Aue-Pavilion, the largest of Documenta’s five exhibition sites, awaiting their arrival.
As for the pavilion itself, designed by the Paris architectural firm Lacaton & Vassal, it’s a catastrophe, and one of the main reasons the whole business comes across as visually thin and disjointed. Press materials call the chain of boxy containers the Crystal Palace. But with its undivided space, brown concrete floors and cheesy blackout curtains, it resembles a run-on storage shed, and nothing looks good in it.
A second first-time location, the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, is more inviting. An 18th-century palace high on a hill over the city, it offers formal gardens, panoramic views and an enchanting approach by public tram through woods and fields. It also houses an impressive fine-art collection that makes it an apt setting for Documenta’s selection of Islamic calligraphy and miniatures.
Culturally, the presence of such works has symbolic meaning for a German city with a large Muslim immigrant population. Aesthetically, the linear patterns of the written scripts, and the stories of conflict and devotion that the miniatures tell, correspond, however indirectly, to similar elements in contemporary work.
You can see the correspondence most clearly in an installation at a third building, the Neue Galerie. There, 1,954 geometric collages inscribed with numbers by the Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) hang within sight of a delicate, grid-based painting by Agnes Martin from a decade later. And between the two comes a sublime ensemble of linear drawings from the 1970s by the Pakistan-born Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90), accompanied by a few of Ms. Mohamedi’s tiny, handwritten notebooks.
These three women lived thousands of miles apart and were almost certainly unfamiliar with one another’s work, yet they shared a visual language that had very different meanings for each. It is worth noting that more than half the artists in Documenta 12 are women, most of them alive, well and hard at work. Of the 15 artists from the United States, 11 are women, which must set some kind of record for an establishment survey. When is somebody going to write the history of modern art as the shared history it is, with men and women equal participants?
No sharing is without a political dimension. This idea is spelled right out at the Fridericianum Museum, the main Documenta site in the center of Kassel, in a magnetic installation of archival materials. They document the 1960s work of the Argentine artist Graciela Carnevale and the activist collective called Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, with which she was associated.
In the same gallery are photographs of a provocative 1979 public performance piece by Sanja Ivekovic, who simulated masturbation on the balcony of her apartment in Belgrade as a parade honoring President Tito marched through the street below. (She was spotted by the police and told to cease and desist.) They are joined by images of disruptive public performances by Jiri Kovanda in Prague and intimately private ones by Ion Grigorescu in Bucharest. And in an adjoining room there are periodic live performances by 12 dancers of a 1971 Trisha Brown piece to a Grateful Dead song. Together they send a message about art as a way of performing politics, a way for the individual to engage with a larger culture and with history.
Nor is such connecting a thing of the past. The show has its share of the now fashionable kiosks inviting viewers to plop down on pillows, watch videos together and, presumably, chat about what they see. A lot less tired-looking, though, is a film project by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski that hints at what such interactions can bring.
For the film, titled “Them” and installed at the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, a youth center some distance from downtown Kassel, Mr. Zmijewski asked four groups of Polish citizens, from conservative Roman Catholics to radical Marxists, to meet and debate their political convictions in the form of a communally executed paint-and-paper mural.
The exchanges started light: an older woman paints a church; a younger one cuts through the paper to open its doors. Nice touch, everyone agrees. But pretty soon the painting, cutting and collaging grow vehement, with repeated defacings and erasings matched by verbal confrontations until, at the end, the mural is trashed. The result is an acting out of Joseph Beuys’s famous statement that “everyone is an artist” and an example of political art that further divides rather than unites people, leaving them more mutually hostile than ever.
Art and politics take more conventional forms in paintings by Juan Davila and Kerry James Marshall, two of several artists who reappear throughout the show. (Mr. McCracken, Zoe Leonard, Lee Lozano (1930-99), Gerwald Rocknenschaub and Mira Schendel are others.) Mr. Davila, born in Chile and now living in Australia, produces cryptically allegorical visions of a world at the end of its moral tether. Mr. Marshall, born in Birmingham, Ala., during the civil rights era, addresses the complicated and compromised position of African-Americans today in pictures of direct but subtle force. In a show intent on destabilizing stardom, he comes through as a star.
There are others. The Indian collagist C. K. Rajan; the Beninese sculptor Romuald Hazoumé; Jo Spence (1932-94), documenting her furious battle with cancer; Cosima von Bonin, with her blank, goofy, templelike installation; Atul Dodiya, with an illustrated book of poetry wrapping around a room; Bela Kolarova, with jewel-like assemblages from the 1960s; Florian Pumhosl, with his spare evocation of utopian painting of the past; Charlotte Posenenske (1930-85), with sculptures shaped like heating ducts; Ms. Leonard, with dozens of photographs of shop window displays and sidewalk sales, evidence of how cultural worlds at once come together and dissolve before our eyes.
None of these artists, except for Mr. Hazoumé, with a full-size boat made of plastic fuel canisters, does large-scale, theatrically punchy work. (And some of the most elaborate pieces, like James Coleman’s film “Retake With Evidence,” were terrible.) But then, most of the art seems to have been selected precisely not to stand out, but to mesh with everything else, to subordinate individual effects to a never-quite-defined whole, to make a large show that feels like a small show, a group show that comes across as a single piece.
This curatorial ideal was distilled in an installation by Ms. Carnevale. Filling a gallery, it includes sheets of ripped plastic tacked to the wall; a salon-style hanging of photographs of found abstract patterns; videos that allude, in a funny, offhanded way, to the war in Iraq; and film projectors that project only light.
It’s obvious that something is going on here, but what? There were no instructions, no statements, no polemics, no signature style. You wouldn’t know you were looking at the work of a single artist unless you asked. Visitors wandered into the gallery, scoped out the situation and looked confused. Most moved on fairly quickly; a few settled down to see what, if anything, would happen.
That’s the dynamic of Documenta 12 as a whole. Does it work? In the end, no. The first time through, its combination of new names and forms generates an excitement of discovery. It’s so great not to see everyone you’ve seen everywhere else. On a return visit the surprise has diminished, and the installation starts to look too porous; the curatorial ideas too obvious, pedantic and confining; the work too small, private, underdone, done-before.
I felt no desire to make a third visit (though I did), particularly to the deeply depressing Crystal Palace. And yet I came away with something that lasted: an impression that I’d never seen an exhibition quite like this before, a big, important show that offered so clear an alternative to bigness, that redefined importance in so dramatic a way. That may not be nearly enough for so prestigious an event, but if you think about it, it’s a lot.
The format of the Biennale as a profusion of national pavilions is set; Münster is medium-specific. Documenta has no such restrictions. It’s a contemporary show, but it can encompass all sorts of material. This year’s edition includes 16th-century Islamic calligraphy, Central Asian embroidery and a stuffed giraffe.
It can also take any shape a curator wants to give it. Traditionally the show has been the brainchild of a single person. There are two this time: Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, a husband-and-wife team, who issued the kind of airy-weighty preview teasers that left you ready to hate what was to come. (European “serious” often reads as pretentious to an American ear. It’s a cultural thing.)
In any case, the show sustains its reputation for being an idiosyncratic, concept-driven affair. You go to glamorous, sun-splashed Venice to party, gaze and graze; you come to gray, pleasureless Kassel to think.
Documenta 12 asks us to do a lot of thinking: about mortality, about the obsolescence of modernity, about how to live an ethical life through art. But it advances its questions quietly, and a bit too quietly: the resulting low visual impact is a major flaw. The show is every bit as socially engaged as its video-heavy 2002 predecessor, but packages its politics in a different way, in unmonumental objects and installations by undersung, not to say unknown, artists.
Many art-world insiders didn’t have a clue in advance who had been picked for the show. And after the list was announced, they basically still didn’t know, so unfamiliar were many of the names. Apart from Gerhard Richter, with a small 1977 portrait; Agnes Martin, with one painting; and the California-based John McCracken, there are relatively few Euro-American A-list figures in sight.
This is far and away the most interesting feature of Documenta 12. By being almost perversely esoteric, at least by Western market standards, it takes the usual “international” roundup in another direction, away from the New York-London-Berlin trade route. In the process it delivers something approximating a truly global array.
With around 150 participants, the roster is fairly modest in size, but its geographic range stretches from the Canadian Arctic (with the Inuit painter Annie Pootoogook) to Southeast Asia (with the Singapore-born Simryn Gill, who now lives in Australia). It includes several artists from India and more than a dozen from Africa, not all of them predictable choices, as they are this year in Venice.
Latin America and Eastern Europe, and in particular the avant-garde movements there after World War II, have a significant presence in a show that defines “contemporary” as a state of mind rather than as a date, and that at least makes a gesture toward acknowledging modernity as an intercultural phenomenon, not an export from the West.
All this is in principle good. Also good is the suggestion of an awareness that “unknown” is a relative term. The Beijing-based Conceptualist Ai Weiwei may not ring corporate bells in New York, but he is a figure of Warholian celebrity in China and a major force in that country’s neocapitalist vanguard culture.
As if to make the point that that culture will eventually be our culture too, Mr. Ai intends to take 1,001 Chinese visitors to Kassel before the show closes on Sept. 23. Antique Qing dynasty chairs (which Mr. Ai collects) are spread throughout the Aue-Pavilion, the largest of Documenta’s five exhibition sites, awaiting their arrival.
As for the pavilion itself, designed by the Paris architectural firm Lacaton & Vassal, it’s a catastrophe, and one of the main reasons the whole business comes across as visually thin and disjointed. Press materials call the chain of boxy containers the Crystal Palace. But with its undivided space, brown concrete floors and cheesy blackout curtains, it resembles a run-on storage shed, and nothing looks good in it.
A second first-time location, the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, is more inviting. An 18th-century palace high on a hill over the city, it offers formal gardens, panoramic views and an enchanting approach by public tram through woods and fields. It also houses an impressive fine-art collection that makes it an apt setting for Documenta’s selection of Islamic calligraphy and miniatures.
Culturally, the presence of such works has symbolic meaning for a German city with a large Muslim immigrant population. Aesthetically, the linear patterns of the written scripts, and the stories of conflict and devotion that the miniatures tell, correspond, however indirectly, to similar elements in contemporary work.
You can see the correspondence most clearly in an installation at a third building, the Neue Galerie. There, 1,954 geometric collages inscribed with numbers by the Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) hang within sight of a delicate, grid-based painting by Agnes Martin from a decade later. And between the two comes a sublime ensemble of linear drawings from the 1970s by the Pakistan-born Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90), accompanied by a few of Ms. Mohamedi’s tiny, handwritten notebooks.
These three women lived thousands of miles apart and were almost certainly unfamiliar with one another’s work, yet they shared a visual language that had very different meanings for each. It is worth noting that more than half the artists in Documenta 12 are women, most of them alive, well and hard at work. Of the 15 artists from the United States, 11 are women, which must set some kind of record for an establishment survey. When is somebody going to write the history of modern art as the shared history it is, with men and women equal participants?
No sharing is without a political dimension. This idea is spelled right out at the Fridericianum Museum, the main Documenta site in the center of Kassel, in a magnetic installation of archival materials. They document the 1960s work of the Argentine artist Graciela Carnevale and the activist collective called Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, with which she was associated.
In the same gallery are photographs of a provocative 1979 public performance piece by Sanja Ivekovic, who simulated masturbation on the balcony of her apartment in Belgrade as a parade honoring President Tito marched through the street below. (She was spotted by the police and told to cease and desist.) They are joined by images of disruptive public performances by Jiri Kovanda in Prague and intimately private ones by Ion Grigorescu in Bucharest. And in an adjoining room there are periodic live performances by 12 dancers of a 1971 Trisha Brown piece to a Grateful Dead song. Together they send a message about art as a way of performing politics, a way for the individual to engage with a larger culture and with history.
Nor is such connecting a thing of the past. The show has its share of the now fashionable kiosks inviting viewers to plop down on pillows, watch videos together and, presumably, chat about what they see. A lot less tired-looking, though, is a film project by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski that hints at what such interactions can bring.
For the film, titled “Them” and installed at the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, a youth center some distance from downtown Kassel, Mr. Zmijewski asked four groups of Polish citizens, from conservative Roman Catholics to radical Marxists, to meet and debate their political convictions in the form of a communally executed paint-and-paper mural.
The exchanges started light: an older woman paints a church; a younger one cuts through the paper to open its doors. Nice touch, everyone agrees. But pretty soon the painting, cutting and collaging grow vehement, with repeated defacings and erasings matched by verbal confrontations until, at the end, the mural is trashed. The result is an acting out of Joseph Beuys’s famous statement that “everyone is an artist” and an example of political art that further divides rather than unites people, leaving them more mutually hostile than ever.
Art and politics take more conventional forms in paintings by Juan Davila and Kerry James Marshall, two of several artists who reappear throughout the show. (Mr. McCracken, Zoe Leonard, Lee Lozano (1930-99), Gerwald Rocknenschaub and Mira Schendel are others.) Mr. Davila, born in Chile and now living in Australia, produces cryptically allegorical visions of a world at the end of its moral tether. Mr. Marshall, born in Birmingham, Ala., during the civil rights era, addresses the complicated and compromised position of African-Americans today in pictures of direct but subtle force. In a show intent on destabilizing stardom, he comes through as a star.
There are others. The Indian collagist C. K. Rajan; the Beninese sculptor Romuald Hazoumé; Jo Spence (1932-94), documenting her furious battle with cancer; Cosima von Bonin, with her blank, goofy, templelike installation; Atul Dodiya, with an illustrated book of poetry wrapping around a room; Bela Kolarova, with jewel-like assemblages from the 1960s; Florian Pumhosl, with his spare evocation of utopian painting of the past; Charlotte Posenenske (1930-85), with sculptures shaped like heating ducts; Ms. Leonard, with dozens of photographs of shop window displays and sidewalk sales, evidence of how cultural worlds at once come together and dissolve before our eyes.
None of these artists, except for Mr. Hazoumé, with a full-size boat made of plastic fuel canisters, does large-scale, theatrically punchy work. (And some of the most elaborate pieces, like James Coleman’s film “Retake With Evidence,” were terrible.) But then, most of the art seems to have been selected precisely not to stand out, but to mesh with everything else, to subordinate individual effects to a never-quite-defined whole, to make a large show that feels like a small show, a group show that comes across as a single piece.
This curatorial ideal was distilled in an installation by Ms. Carnevale. Filling a gallery, it includes sheets of ripped plastic tacked to the wall; a salon-style hanging of photographs of found abstract patterns; videos that allude, in a funny, offhanded way, to the war in Iraq; and film projectors that project only light.
It’s obvious that something is going on here, but what? There were no instructions, no statements, no polemics, no signature style. You wouldn’t know you were looking at the work of a single artist unless you asked. Visitors wandered into the gallery, scoped out the situation and looked confused. Most moved on fairly quickly; a few settled down to see what, if anything, would happen.
That’s the dynamic of Documenta 12 as a whole. Does it work? In the end, no. The first time through, its combination of new names and forms generates an excitement of discovery. It’s so great not to see everyone you’ve seen everywhere else. On a return visit the surprise has diminished, and the installation starts to look too porous; the curatorial ideas too obvious, pedantic and confining; the work too small, private, underdone, done-before.
I felt no desire to make a third visit (though I did), particularly to the deeply depressing Crystal Palace. And yet I came away with something that lasted: an impression that I’d never seen an exhibition quite like this before, a big, important show that offered so clear an alternative to bigness, that redefined importance in so dramatic a way. That may not be nearly enough for so prestigious an event, but if you think about it, it’s a lot.
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