Documenta’s artistic director this time out is 39-year-old Okwui Enwezor, a passionate, globe-trotting Nigerian-born curator who lives mostly in the United States. He’s got a fairly plausible theory that the current artistic climate is one of postcolonialism–in which, he says, “globalization means the terrible nearness of distant places.” In his Documenta, just under half the 116 artists come from outside the usual Euro-American roster of eligibles.
Nevertheless, the work of art that most embodies this Documenta–where art works are spread throughout the city–is by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. In the yard of a housing project inhabited largely by Turkish immigrants, Hirschhorn has thrown up a snack bar, a bookshop, a big outdoor sculpture of some tree trunks and a lit-tle exhibition room of books, maps and press clippings dedicated to the late French writer and cultural “outlaw” Georges Bataille. “Bataille Monument” is made in Hirschhorn’s trademark proletarian ad-lib style: shantytown carpentry crudely reinforced with packing tape and decorated with graffiti. Although its precise point is anybody’s guess, “Monument’s” heart is with the project residents, who’ve survived, like Bataille, only by transgressing borders.
Most of the art in Documenta is more traditionally housed in a neoclassical museum, in a kunsthalle that’s part of a train station rechristened the “Kulturbahnhof” and in an old brewery. You can see everything from journalistic photographs of apartheid-era South African suburbs to the chicly banal and indifferent oil paintings of Belgian Luc Tuymans, a favorite on the current scene. Much of the art is filled with words. One artist was overheard telling a viewer at the preview, “You have to read the text, then you will understand the piece.” Never in the history of contemporary-art shows have so many viewers been asked to read so much while standing on such unforgiving concrete floors.
What physical heft and visceral oomph Documenta has is provided by the caged, fabric-covered heads of American sculptor Louise Bourgeois (born in 1911!) and the big, brusque semiabstract paintings of Ouattara Watts, a native of Cote d’Ivoire. Otherwise, the show is almost too big to get your mind around–not in the number of artists, but in the square footage to cover and the time spent. This critic was intensely at it from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. and barely managed a peek at the videos.
According to Enwezor, all this dense and arcane art is supposed to prompt you to rethink your political positions on such major issues as immigration and war-crimes tribunals. And that’s where the disconnect creeps in. Documenta was conceived back in the mid-1950s as a way to use modern art to help bring Germany back into polite society, so to speak. Eventually, it became an economic and public-relations phenomenon. More than 500,000 people will visit Documenta before it closes Sept. 15. Most of them will be looking for a little educated fun, or at least some visual pleasure. But Enwezor says bluntly, “Our work is not about esthetics.” Which means that what the city fathers think Documenta is doing and what Enwezor thinks Documenta is doing are poles apart. Case in point: multinational corporations take a lot of hits in Documenta, though Volkswagen is a primary sponsor and Documenta personnel ride around happily in its cars. And hardly any of the art in Kassel lives up to the huge political burden placed upon it. With Enwezor’s attempt to get art to act as a rebuttal to the G8’s style of globalization, Documenta has turned itself into a clever, but only occasionally convincing, Didactamenta.
