READING DOCUMENTA X

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

LEISURE & ARTS

Reading documenta x

By Anne Midgette  

7 July 1997 

Kassel, Germany -- This is not an article in a newspaper. For the duration of documenta x, billed as "the world's largest exhibition of contemporary art" (through Sept. 28), it is a work of art.

In this work, I am pursuing my own inquiry into documenta x's challenge to the temporal and spatial limitations of the conventional "exhibition." Rather than confining works to the traditional museum venue of the Museum Fridericianum, director Catherine David has spread the show throughout the city: Works appear in underpasses, in the train station, along the pedestrian zone. Documenta x also breaks free of traditional definitions of museum art to include theater, film, lectures, television, posters and, of course, the Internet (on-line works can be accessed through http://www.documenta.de).

Documenta x effectively defines a work of art simply as a means of expression (which applies to my work). Its emphasis is on the process or the fact of expression, rather than the object created (this applies rather less to my work, since I have chosen to use the conventional medium of the English language, straitjacketed within a traditional, externally imposed format: 900 words of prose, deadline June 23). On the other hand, my work is subversive, inscribing documenta x's call to "rearticulate progressive thought" (catalog, p. 634) into an arch-conservative, traditional institution (a newspaper) that, however, functions in both an urban and a global context (urbanism and globalization being two of the many dominant themes of this sprawling, 120-plus-artist show).

Global, impermanent and boundary-less, the Internet is the perfect medium and metaphor for this exhibition. Spending a couple of hours here feels not unlike spending the same amount of time on-line: You are exposed to much new information, of varying degrees of quality, from excellent to indifferent, with various "links" leading you from one place to another, enabling you to mimic the process of analytic thought, through which one idea leads to another, without coming to any kind of conclusion or release.

The works themselves reflect this same "Internet intellectualism," hyperlinking information for its own sake. Even many of the off-line works function as "sites," composed of a multiplicity of objects linked conceptually rather than physically. In works like Marcel Broodthaer's 1972 "Section Publicite du Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles" or Gerhard Richter's "Atlas," the links, the artist's decision to include or juxtapose, have more significance than the objects themselves. "Atlas," a huge and impressive work in progress since 1962, is a compendium of photographs, from landscapes to newspaper clippings, documenting various facets of the world and the artist's life -- but the point is not whether the photographs themselves are any good (some are, some aren't).

Mr. Broodthaer (d. 1976) and Mr. Richter are Grand Old Men; both played significant roles in past documentas. By including the old guard as well as young blood, Ms. David indicated another of her programs: to examine the context of postwar contemporary art, loosely allied with the history of documenta, which began in 1955 and has occurred every four or five years since.

In fact, what this approach created was a powerful sense of nostalgia. Works by such documentary photographers as Walker Evans or Ed van der Elsken created a pull toward the past and a strong qualitative contrast with such modern successors as Jeff Wall (who displayed huge black-and-white images in addition to a couple of his signature light boxes). Helen Levitt's 1940s video of the streets of Harlem drew, and kept, a far larger crowd than Dan Graham's video installation in the next room. The prevalence of photographs was itself an expression of nostalgia; in this show, where traditional painting was virtually taboo, photography was one of the few conventional media that was still permissible. Marc Pataut's small images of a shantytown near Paris, or Lothar Baumgarten's photographs of the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela, evoked an old family album.

In the current work, I am challenging the one boundary that documenta x has left unquestioned by blurring the distinction between artist and art critic -- hatred of the press being the one constant in the shifting scale of ethico-aesthetic values that here find expression. It follows that my impressions of the show in this work can have none of the pretensions to authority -- nor to accuracy -- that they would have if this were merely an article in a newspaper. Therefore, these are only subjective reactions: I liked the idea of exhibiting older artists along with the younger artists they influenced; and I liked the twist Christian Philipp Mueller gave this with his homage to Walter de Maria and Joseph Beuys, "Balancing Act." I liked the womb-like darkness of the video screening rooms, and I liked the way William Kentridge got away with near-traditional values such as draftsmanship and open metaphor in his film "Felix in Exile," dealing with memory and apartheid in South Africa. And I was moved by architect Aldo van Eyck's "site," less even for its depictions of his own works than for its compilations of texts and a variety of images from around the world. With his observations, Mr. van Eyck demonstrated a keen eye for detail and an artistic intelligence of a kind I "personally" value, and illustrated the fact that such concepts as urbanization and globalization can, after all, transcend the realm of the merely programmatic to express such declasse elements as spirituality and hope.

But what I responded to, here, were explanatory texts mounted on a wall. Whether a strength or a weakness, this is an undeniable characteristic of this documenta: Its ideas are better expressed in texts than in its nonverbal works of art. The 10-pound catalog presents a vast and motley array of writings literary and philosophical, articles on social history and politics, urban development and Antigone (to name a few topics). Yet despite its unwieldiness, it conveys a spark, a current of excitement I didn't get from most of the pieces in the exhibition. In a show predicated on the idea that traditional forms of artistic expression are obsolete, texts have a privileged position -- precisely because, by resorting to a common, old-fashioned means of communication, language, they have retained their ability to articulate, where a nonverbal "art work" that has abandoned such traditional grammars may fall silent after its first blunt, halting expression of purpose.

Hence, my decision to create a text discussing art firmly inscribes this current work within documenta x's horizons -- while appropriating and subverting those horizons to further my own artistic program.