Documenta 12 [II]

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Απο τους NY Times και τον συντροφο HOLLAND COTTER:

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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.
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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

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The curators’ self-described intention was to bust up the modernist “white cube” gallery model. I’m all for such sabotage, if an art-friendly alternative can be found. The pavilion is not one. It’s a deadening, trivializing space that turns the show’s distinguishing qualities — it is portentous but subdued — into a disadvantage.

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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.
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hat’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.