Mark von Schlegell
Anchored by an actual Mayan crystal skull lodged in a Plexiglas pedestal, a quiet retrospective of German conceptualist Hanne Darboven significantly occupied three floors of Documenta11, now just ended in Kassel, Germany. Darboven’s cryptic, handwritten lists, hung absurdly in hundreds of frames across many meters of curving wall, rose into the surrounding exhibition as a kind of architectural music of the mind, silent and without pretense. Darboven presented a perseverance of the artistic self against the ability of institutional forms to contain it—compounded to the tenth degree by the crystal skull (one of only a handful of such antiquities known, whose carving, archaeologists claim, took place over entire generations, and whose most powerful properties, paranormalists believe, are still undetectable). It was to the credit of the exhibition that this small retrospective fit seamlessly as symbolic centerpiece into a context of international art concerned with global, geo-political struggle.
The art press reacted to Documenta11 with various art-historical overviews. One narrative had political radicalism, with the aid of institutions like Documenta, gaining the ground it lost in the ’90s and seeking an alternative to the increasingly jaded positioning of the international gallery world. Another more widespread view had the galleries and their “International Art Fairs” engineering the survival of painting and sculpture in the face of an increasingly monotone wash of digitized propaganda experienced within institutions. The exhibition, whose halls were not unadorned with aura-rich objects of art-world power, gained energy from this dialectic, so that works from both inside and outside the art market were able to resist such categorizations. For all its successes and failures, curator and poet Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta11_Platform5: Exhibition was able to do away with many of the perplexing boundaries that contemporary art finds erected between itself and the “outside world.”
The familiar style of Raymond Pettibon, for instance, shone with a freedom that has long been gathering dust in the white cubes. Papering the stone interior of a small chapel-like gallery with vibrant doodles satirizing American militarism with near libertarian intensity, Pettibon drew on the threatened tradition of the American underground, reminding the viewer that there are living United Stateses—as well as Asias, Mexicos, Germanies, Africas, Irelands, Israels, and Palestines—currently endangered.
In the context of too much “Middle-Eastern” art tending toward one-sided propaganda (emitting, at times, noxious whiffs of anti-Semitism), Walid Ra’ad’s Atlas Group inserted fictional histories paradoxically more real than the scores of actual documentaries on display. Offering up anomalies imaginatively garnered from recent historical events, such as the already obscure Lebanese Civil War and the Iran/Contra hostage crisis, Ra’ad’s conceptual-historical eccentricities achieved more interesting effects than can be articulated here. The Atlas Group’s car bomb collages and cryptically developed “found” footage simultaneously revealed and deconstructed dozens of histories—ethnic, artistic, religious, academic—by means of delicate, beautifully conceptualized fictions.
The wider themes of Documenta11—globalization, the struggles of the “third world,” the survival of the avant-garde—intertwined with each work on display, but rarely drowned their individualities. In the exhibition’s catalogue, Enwezor and his curatorial team explicitly reference Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, the much-discussed tome presenting the new globalism as an Empire-entity without center whose “horizontal,” virtual networks can be successfully disrupted by “vertical,” instantaneous resistances. But whereas Hardt and Negri’s valuable structural efforts outline the development of a pervasive political and economic omni-centrality, Documenta11 was able to present vital singularities in the midst of its generalizing, global reach.
One might easily find instances where that reach itself, in particular the lack of formal variety in its video and photographic gaze, led to a documentarianism promoting the techno-realism of Empire’s virtual enlightenment. American Alan Sekula’s massive photo-mapping of harbors and the shipping industry, for example, threatened to drown its own recordings of the ordinary, working sea in the never-compromised, unself-conscious realism with which it was shot. Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s three-screen digital film, The House (2002), enforced effect-transcendence to the benefit of the suburban existentialism the artist’s earlier work more successfully imploded; and Iranian Shirin Neshat’s somber films exploited Orientalist fantasies without critical engagement.
Yet image technology, when coupled with specific focus, formal experimentation, and deadpan historicism—like Lorna Simpson’s multi-screened observation of two passing lives in New York City, timed with humor, precision, and coincidence; Steve McQueen’s slow-rolling, abstract Caribbean narratives, in which documentary focus bled into gentle allegory; or James Coleman's slide projections of artificially performed stereotypes—proved well able to condition interruptions in the surrounding flows of generality. Alfredo Jaar’s agit-prop installation, Lament of the Images (2002), brought viewers before a blinding white screen in an otherwise unlit room, anti-monumentalizing the media blackouts in post-Gulf War journalism. In a direct and violent reversal of the white cube, the work’s minimalist stab displaced visitors, silhouetted and blinded, onto the backlot of pseudo-globalism.
What would most likely have constituted hits in an exhibition more overtly tied to gallery power in contemporary Western art often proved disappointing. Candida Höfer’s potentially interesting observation of Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais drowned its conceptualism in glossy, precious surface. Luc Tuymans’ fine, mannerist canvases, ingeniously positioned between Sigmar Polke, Alex Katz, and fashion culture, gave off, in the context, an uncomfortable commodity-sheen.
It was a pity that Western artists experimenting with the form and value boundaries of painting, in particular, were excluded. But European sculptors, drawing on the still-vital material activism of Documenta hero Joseph Beuys, were able to shine. Near the outskirts of Kassel, Thomas Hirschhorn boldly lay a claim to the abandoned vistas of “public space” with his Bataille Monument (2002). Hirschhorn’s Georges Bataille-celebrating compound—complete with TV studio, gallery, library, and café—was constructed from cheap, local materials with the aid and collective ingenuity of collaborators from the surrounding community. It transformed the low-income, immigrant-housing district it occupied into an activated center of expression, never condescending or exploiting. If Hirschhorn’s piece will inevitably lose its edge in the eventual reproduction and celebration that an art career demands, for several months of 2002, it was a living thing—a monument constructed and surviving by the collective energy of mutually supporting artists, friends, and citizens.
Enwezor and his team of international curators previously completed four Documenta platforms (lectures, conferences, and festivals—not exhibitions) at widely varying points on the globe with, as Enwezor writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, an “intent . . . to enlarge the space of critical debates of contemporary artistic discourse today.” Thankfully, Platform5: Exhibition gave space and time to artistic practice itself. One encountered a near-unmappable terrain of resistances separated with only gentle monasticism from their outside histories.
As monarchism and industrialism leave their architectures vacant, a once-in-five-year institution like Documenta can enact the kind of moral authority and political exemption enjoyed by medieval religion, with grandeur and productive seriousness. The fact that it can do so only temporarily allows it to resist committing to the hegemonic structures making it possible. It should serve as praise for the curators that four months of sprawling shelter for politically engaged art production in 2002 came more as a planetary warning than an art-historical achievement. Art, like so many of the living traditions that Documenta11 presented as encompassed in the term, could do well to perceive itself as an active, political struggle in need of relief, protection, and outlet.
Planned long before 9/11, but everywhere addressing it, Documenta11 offered a quiet spectacle of hundreds of individuals and collectives from around the planet who’ve been engaged in global crisis for decades—preserving threatened traditions, confusing art-historical hegemonies, engaging actualities, eager to participate in the histories from which art is too often exempted. Despite the wealth of photographic evidences of 20th-century apocalypses on hand, one experienced a near-hallowed regard for peaceful, creative activity accepting, reacting to, and remaking the world as it is. Strolling down Documenta’s hallways, resting one’s feet on its benches, sitting in its rainy cafés, one encountered different answers to that nebbish question of whether and how politics belong in art—but it was everywhere in evidence that art belongs in politics.
Mark von Schlegell divides his time writing and teaching in Los Angeles and Cologne. His science fiction and criticism can be found in odd places the world over. This was the first Documenta exhibition he’d ever seen.
