Documenta 1

Michael Gibbs finds an exhibition that is very much of our times

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Documentall, the first to be curated by a non-European, is primarily
concerned with expressing a critical discourse that addresses art as global
culture. While the previous Documenta certainly raised the intellectual
profile of what is arguably the world's most important exhibition of
contemporary art, it tended to privilege the late 60s as its key reference.
JUL-AUG 02 / ART MONTHLY e/28
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Raqs.......... . .d . Documentall, with 70% new work, is decidedly of
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Collective our times, reflecting on a world that many see as
2828'N/7715'E:: having radically changed during the last five years,
2001/2002. An particularly after the events of September 11, 2001.
Installation on the
Coordinates of Nowhere is this more apparent than in the hefty cat-
Everyday Life-Delhi alogue which opens with several pages of news pho-
2002 tographs illustrating the global conflicts and
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tensions of recent years.
The exhibition in Kassel was preceded by four
'Platforms' held in Vienna/Berlin, New Delhi, the
Caribbean island of St Lucia and Lagos, in which
artistic director Okwui Enwezor and his team of six
co-curators (Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer,
Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and
Octavio Zoya) organised workshops and pubjlic.sym-
posia that probed such contemporary problems as
democracy, transnational justice, processes of truth
and reconciliation, creolisation and African processes
of urbanisation. While most of the visitors to Kassel
will be coming to view art rather than take part.in
sociopolitical debates, much of the art shown in the
exhibition's several locations is clearly informed by
issues that until now have been generally deemed to
be beyond art's purview. The Kassel location (and
the Documenta tradition itself) reminds us that the
European notion of aesthetics is grounded in Ger-
man idealism, How, then, to incorporate art from
other cultures that supposedly lack this conscious-
ness? Jan Hoet included quite a few non-western
artists in his edition of Documenta, but the aim was
perhaps little more than simply to add a bit of
colour, a touch of the carnivalesque. Another solu-
tion is to drop the notion of art altogether, in favour
of cultural practice in general, with the focus on col-
laboration, project and process rather than aesthetic
attitudes and discrete objects.
Documentall steers a careful course between
these two opposing views, riding the tension between
the foreign and the familiar. Sometimes it veers
towards a multicultural extravaganza, a celebration
of the previously excluded Other. While there are
aspects that reveal a sort of National Ge6graphic
approach, such as the documentary photographs of
urban conditions.in New Delhi and South Africa
or the videos of Inuit life in northern Canada, the
curators have clearly made every effort to engage in a
dialogue with other cultures and to examine the var-
ied and fluid relationships between sociopolitical and
aesthetic discourses, to follow links and to acknow-
ledge transitions in order to create a third space, an
in-between where forces from without meet forces
from within. Artistic practices from the periphery are
thus drawn into the centre, but at the same time
there is a recognition that this centre (of European
hegemony) no longer holds. Even the western con-
cept of multiculturalism seems woefully inadequate
in these times of radical dislocations, ruptures,
migrations and increasing urbanisation. Postcolonial
conditions are effecting an extra-territoriality that
depends more on access to global networks than on
geographical entities. As Enwezor writes in his cata-
logue introduction, 'The postcolonial today is a world
of proximities. It is a world of nearness, not an else-
where.' Not only peoples but art too seems to have
entered into a closely-knit diaspora. Fareed Armaly's
detailed documentary project about the Palestinian
diaspora, From/To, 2002, with its multiple lines of
migration, provides just such a model for art's cur-
rent condition, its sense of alienation and nostalgia
under the new global conditions determining the
ineluctable progress of its history.
African and Asian artists reside and work in New
York, London, Brussels and Amsterdam, producing
transcultural hybrids that are often more lively and
engaging than the work of western artists immured
in their own traditions. Indeed, with the exception of
the always politically committed work of Leon Golub
or the streetwise drawings of Raymond Pettibon,
painting is distinguished in Documentall by its
paucity. Artists from other cultures, notably the
258 /,ART MONTHLY / JUL-AUG 02 2
Ivory Coast, have access to a cosmology that-seems
infinitely richer than the bankrupt legacies of west-
ern Modernism. We are accustomed to viewing
African art and culture through western eyes, but
what happens when an artist living in Benin contem-
plates the history of western art, in particular the
work of Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars, and
combines this with an exhaustive presentation of
magazine articles, books and cultural artefacts?
Georges Ad6agbo's work represents creolisation at
its best, expressing an exuberance that is markedly
lacking from the over-concocted attempts at multi-
cultural references in the outdoor installations by
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ren6e Green.
The African presence ih Documentall is a verita-
ble flood, perhaps to compensate for centuries of
neglect. Meschac Gaba presents two robms from his
ongoing Museum of Contemporary African Art, the
library and the museum shop. The library consists of
Gaba's entire collection of books on just about every-
thing, which are available for reading in the large
space of the Documenta Hallen, which also houses
banks of computer and video monitors devoted to the
display of information concerning distributive justice
(an internet ptoject by the Croatian artist Andreja
Kuluncic) and grass roots activist groups from Sene-
gal, Congo and Hamburg. In foregrounding what
Maharaj calls 'epistemological engines' generating
the production of knowledge, these activities and
strategies expand the notion of art to include a vari-
ety of social and cultural projects.
In the West we are used to knowledge being codi-
fled in the form of books and archives to be perused
at a leisurely pace (as in Thomas Hirschhorn's mon-
ument to Georges Bataille incongruously sited in the
Kassel suburbs or Ecke Bonk's installation display-
ing the covers of every volume of every edition of the
standard German dictionary begun by the Brothers
Grimm in 1838), but the imperative of events and
rapid change would seem to favour the less static
Documentall is decidedly of our
times, reflecting on a world that
many see as having radically
changed during the last five years,
particularly after the events of
September 11, 2001.
mode of instant documentation afforded by video,
photography and the Internet. The Raqs Media Col-
lective has developed a participatory website that
allows visitors to experience the urban conditions of
New Delhi, while the Singapore-based tsunamii.net
explores the concept of 'web-walking', following the
geographical network route from the exhibition in
Kassel to the Documenta webserver in Kiel, a physi-
cal distance of more than 400 kilometres.
Documenting the global flow of goods and infor-
mation under the new capitalist order is also the
subject of Allan Sekula's Pish Story, 1987-95, which
specifically investigates the heterotopic conditions
of maritime trade by means of factual photographic
and textual documentation. Other documentary pro-
jects in Documentall include the Milan-based group
Multiplicity's investigation of the sinking of a ship
full of refugees in the Mediterranean in 1996, Lorna
Simpson's study of everyday life experienced by two
women in New York, shown on 31 monitors, and an
engaging compilation of footage about the
Handsworth riots in Birmingham in 1986 put togeth-
er by the London-based Black Audio Film Collective.
In the face of so many disturbing facts, however,
there is some relief in the fictional documents pro-
duced by the Lebanese Atlas Group, which link ref-
erences to that country's war-torn history to such
mundane information as the results of horse races
and makes of cars.
With many works in Documentall reminding us
'of the hardship of human existence and of the injus-
tides perpetrated by dictatorial regimes during the
last half-century, there is a sehse that laughter and
irony are politically incorrect in such a context.
Luckily there's Kutlug Ataman's hilarious four-
screen interview with a suburban London woman
whose' hobby is breeding flowers, and Feng Mengbo's
over-the-top computer shooter game into which the
artist has inserted his own image. Yinka Shonibare's
subversive tableau of 18th-century European aristo-
crats gallivanting in African costumes and perform-
ing sexual acts is likewise a nicely sardonic
comment on postcdlonial hybridisation.
The conceptual mode of art from the 70s is repre-
sented by three of its chief practitioners - Stanley
Brouwn, On Kawara and Hanne Darboven - but the
dryness and the universalising ethos of their work,
partibularly Kawara's One Million Years, 1970-2002,
performed live by two speakers in a glass cage,
comes across as rather pointless and self-indulgent
in the face of all the more pressing world problems
JUL-AUG 02 / ART MONTHLY / 258
94-11 tli N
3
Many of the artists come from societies that
have been devastated by conflict and repressive
regimes. It is their turn to colonise us, to infect us
with the desire for change. We can no longer
afford the luxury of a disinterested aesthetics.
addressed in this Documenta. Meanwhile Fiona
Tan's contemporary filmic homage to August
Sander's 20s photographs of German 'types' belies
the notion of objective classification, while an even
fuller scope is given to subjectivity in Ben Kinmont's
project recording the views of a large cross section
of Kassel citizens on the things that they consider
important in their lives and the question whether
these things can be considered as art. Envelopes
containing their answers are being distributed to
Documentall visitors.
Amidst all the reflection on serious concerns,
this year's Documenta has not followed the previ-
ous edition's somewhat puritan eschewal of the
spectacular. Cerith Wyn Evans' Morse code driven
disco-ball, Asymptote's infinitely mirrored projec-
tions onto vacuum-formed plastic, or Ken Lum's
presentation of a fairground hall of mirrors
inscribed with first-person narratives of depression
are suitably ludic, but the prize for lucidity must go
to Alfredo Jaar who brings together Nelson Man-
dela, Bill Gates and America's war on Afghanistan
in a highly-charged, eloquent and physical com-
ment on the disappearance of images. Here, as in a
few other works like Mona Hatoum's wired-up elec-
trical domestic appliances or the short films by the
Iranian filmmakers Shirin Neshat and Seifollah
Samadian, spectacle unites with reflection to pro-
duce an effect akin to the sublime.
Large-scale ruins can also convey a spectacular
effect, whether of a life totally devoted to creation
258 / ART MONTHLY / JUL-AUG 02
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Dieter Roth
Large Table Ruin
1970-98
C 1,
4
(as in the case of the late Dieter Roth's chaotic
room-sized Large Table Ruin), or of a bankrupt
modernity (as in Atelier Kozaric's jam-packed mau-
soleum of modernist sculpture). If western moderni-
tys utopia has fallen into dystopia, it may be left to
non-western artists to attempt the task of redemp-
tion and retrieval. The Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa,
for example, has remodelled Havana's ruined urban
structures into playful modernist utopias, some of
which perhaps allude to Constant's Situationist-
inspired New Babylon project, which receives an
extensive showing in the Kulturbahnhof. On the floor
directly under Constant, Bodys Isek Kingelez pre-
sents a flamboyant, phantasmagoric city ingeniously
made from discarded packaging, which is then
tellingly juxtaposed with the unrepentant Mod-
ernism of Isa Genzken's minimalist glassy maquettes
of new buildings for Berlin. What is actually getting
built on the ground, however, can be even more
shocking - as witness David Goldblatt's photographs
documenting white suburbs and extravagant real
estate developments, like the full-scale simulation of
a Tuscan town for a hotel and casino complex cur-
rently underway in South Africa.
Documentall presents many sites of contestation,
whether in terms of cultural identity, geography or
social history. The world is having to come to terms
with globalisation, which means that the old centres
and certainties are losing their hold. Anachronisms
are emerging at the same time as new visions and
imperatives. Themes that were long a staple in west-
ern art - personal expression, mythology - are being
revised and rewritten from a more hybrid cultural
perspective. Practices of resistance and activism can
find refuge in art and enrich art as well, make it more
responsive. Many of the artists in Documental 1 come
from societies that have been devastated by conflict
and repressive regimes. For them, and perhaps for us
too now that wvestern society has its recent ruins, art
can hold the promise of redemption, maybe even of
utopia. It is their turn to colonise us, to infect us with
the desire for change. We can no longer afford the
luxury of a disinterested aesthetics. The huge array
of other maps and territories displayed at Documen-
tall represents a daunting challenge to our ways of
thinking about art and culture. Above all, it is the
6thical issues raised and discussed by the exhibition
that should occasion the most thought. I
Documentall_Platform5 is at various venues in
Kassel until September 15.
Michael Gibbs is an artist and a critic based in
Amsterdam.
JUL-AUG 02/ ART MONTHLY / -258 5 -
David Goldblatt
Jo'burg Intersections
1999-2002
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TITLE: Documenta 11/1
SOURCE: Art Monthly no258 Jl/Ag 2002
WN: 0218204398001
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