artintelligence

We spent just two days at Documenta 12 before getting out of town to visit more interesting exhibitions. During our time in Kassel we trawled through Museum Fridericianum, Aue-Pavillon, Documenta Halle, Neue Galerie, and Schloß Wilhelmshöhe, which is pretty well everything. This year’s Documenta was quite as big as the 2002 Documenta, but the 2002 exhibition was beautifully curated and I remember I spent five days savouring the work. This year the experience was highly disappointing almost to the point of insult. If you really have to go and see for yourself, then try to get through the Fridericianum and the Aue-Pavillon in one day, by then you should be ready to leave town as soon as possible. We headed off to Karlsruhe to ZKM and I would recommend that, because it was richer even than Muenster (which is definitely good) which we went to later.

The curators responsible for the Documenta 12 debacle are the husband and wife team Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack. If they are celebrated by the curatorial community for their whimsical and woolly-minded concoction, that will only serve to confirm the degeneration of the institutions supposedly gatekeeping contemporary art. The thematisation of the exhibition is not immediately apparent because the set themes are vague to the point of nonexistence, for example: ‘What is bare life’. It is almost as if a ‘theme’ such as this was formulated by the curators while they were in a trance, perhaps this is Surrealist automatism applied to curation; if so it doesn’t work very well. The problem was not solved by supplying not simply a catalogue but, instead, a whole series of books wherein a plethora of texts (not written by the curators) were assembled in what appears to be a desperate attempt to ‘explain’ each theme at enormous length. The problem was not solved for me because I did not travel to all the way to Kassel to buy a stack of books.

Looking beyond the nonsense phrases posing as curatorial intentionality one leitmotif evident in the exhibition is grunge chic, evident in a significant number of works on show, in the typography chosen for Documenta 12, the styrofoam signage and in the careless approach to the exhibition’s hanging (photo) and choice of works (photo). There is good grunge and bad grunge, however. Grunge is good when it genuinely points to an intersection of art and everyday life. Grunge becomes bad when it is hypocritical, when it is a pseudo-transgressive flag flown by fundamentally bourgeois people to indicate that they at one with the developing world and that their taste is anti-capitalist; when in fact they are doing nothing to deconstruct the elitism that is the bedrock of the fine art system.

Buergel and Noack’s Documenta appears very much as an attempt to leverage the alchemical capacity of the fine art system to transform grunge into gold: a capability epitomised by the fact that Duchamp’s urinal Fountain, 1917 recently sold at auction for over one million dollars.

Instead of deconstructing the endemic elitism of fine art in this Documenta, Buergel and Noack are flaunting the alleged ineffability of art, articulating a fundamentally romanticist position that supports notions such as the elite status of the individual genius and the immaculate preciousness of the objects associated with such genius. One can detect this romantic, aestheticism in the title of a previous exhibition curated by Buergel and Noack for the Generali Foundation ‘Things we don’t Understand’, 2000 (Generali). What their title really means is ‘things that people who are not especially culturally elevated don’t understand’. Buergel and Noack are wrapped up in a mystification of art that can be traced back to German Romanticism and nineteenth century Symbolism and doesn’t really have too much credibility in the twenty-first century — except at the level of monetization.

Detail from a work by Cosima von Bonin at Fridericianum, Documenta 12 with an obligatory plastic bag to underscore its grunge credentials. This kind of gesture has become so common it is more cliche than ‘transgression’. It was fine in the 1980s and 90s but today artists need to subvert grunge, perhaps in the manner of Isa Genzken who is represented in this year’s Venice Biennale filling the German Pavillion with a fascinating grunge installation that could be read as driven by a narrative concerning the ‘death of art’. And Genzken’s spin on sculptural grunge in the 2007 Muenster Sculpture Project is equally interesting.

Making selections of art and hanging that art according to impulses that are beyond words, beyond sense means that one can (and perhaps should) curate a major international exhibition in a quasi-stupor. And attempting to subtantiate such ineffable behaviour with a stack of books only underscores the convoluted and contradictory cognitive processes informing Documenta 12. The conflicted mentality behind Documenta 12 was evident in that as soon as one spotted the grunge theme in this exhibition one could also see Buergel and Noak blowing their grunge credibility by steeping a great deal of the material in this tangled show under the mantel of the Museum (via the prolific use of vitrines for example) apparently in order to give it High Cultural credibility. The co-existence of grunge with a High Cultural mode of hanging in this Documenta seems to underscore the points I was making above.

And as I write in frustration and anger after being subjected to this mess of an exhibition I wonder if I becoming a Fine Art Philistine like most people? And is that a good or a bad development? Read, for example, this interesting review of the local population of Kassel’s response to the 19 million euro ($25.5 million, £13 million) extravaganza in the Independent. I share Tony Paterson’s sympathy for Lotty Rosenfeld, whose work is of interest, but at the same time one has to admit that there is something very wrong with this exhibition, and perhaps with contemporary fine art in general. With regard to the critical reception of Documenta 12, I also draw your attention to Adrian Searle’s interesting take on the exhibition in the Guardian. And the Telegraph’s Richard Dorment agrees, for once, with Searle (Telegraph). Another interesting perspective is offered by Berin Golonu at stretcher.org. Golonu emphasises the failure of the curators to provide information on the works shown (one of their pretentious goals was for the work on show to be ‘educational’). But one wonders about work that needs such crutches to heave itself into animation. It is certainly the case that the intended didacticism of this exhibition was a crashing failure in both form and content.

There were also premonitions of failure, for example, Kurtenscharfer.net predicted a critical panning for Documenta 12 as early as 25 April 2007. Kurtenscharfer’s prediction was based on pre-exhibition interviews with the press in which Roger M. Buergel, in particular, revealed himself as elitist, superficial and contemptuous. Another even earlier premonition was reported 5 July 2005 by Jerry Saltz writing for the Village Voice who encountered Buergel at a dinner party on the occasion of the opening of the 2005 Venice Biennale. Saltz notes: “if a comment made over dinner in Venice by its curator, Roger Buergel, is any indication, Documenta could be truly bad. After I casually remarked that, ‘After all, big exhibitions are about the art,’ Buergel narrowed his eyes and sternly countered, ‘No. Exhibitions are about ideas.’ Ennui filled my heart as I stood up and excused myself” (Saltz).

Of the very few interesting pieces we have seen on our trawl through room after room of Documenta mediocrity are works by Harun Farocki and Imogen Stidworthy which are quite simply outstanding against a background of considerable curatorial confusion and clutter.

Noack and Buergel tried to put on an exhibition focused on the Third World, but they only succeeded in giving visitors to Documenta an extremely poor representation of Third World art. Why is it for example that the exhibition ‘Thermocline of Art - New Asian Waves’ currently showing at the ZKM gallery in Karlsruhe could be so extremely good whereas Noack and Buergel’s selections were so egregious? The obvious reason is because the curator(s) of Thermocline chose artists who already had some profile within the art community. Buergel and Noack tried to go one better by giving us new names. Now that would be fine if they had been tough in their selection and supportive in their hanging of the new blood but what happened instead is that both the selection and the hanging were generally incoherent. For example, I am not particularly aware of the work of Congolese artist Bill Kouelany but his Thomas Hirschhorn-like cardboard ‘brick wall’ with bits of torn off newpaper headlines stuck on, plus grunge embroidery, plus an uneventful video was …, well I will leave the judgement up to you: have a look at the images (photo) (video clip). Then multiply that experience a hundred times and you’ll get a feel for the show.

It has been noted that grunge can have credibility. But what we are speaking about in Documenta 12 is grunge that is so banal that it points to a situation where we may as well forget about selecting work for an exhibition and simply exhibit everything and anything. But that would have been an inspiring curatorial strategy, better than taking stuff that was fairly ordinary and presenting it to us as if it were gold. One would celebrate this Documenta if the curators had, for example, used the considerable funds at their disposal to give out cellphones with camera and video to people in the Third World and invited them to message images to a central server. That would have been so much more ambitious and inspiring than the dreary didacticism of this exhibition.

Apparently the curators were pretentious and patronising enough to state that one of their curatorial goals was to ‘educate the audience’. I think the audience could educate the curators. But of course curators are so much more important and informed than the mere viewer. Decades after Roland Barthes’ announcement of the ‘birth of the reader’ out of the ‘death of the author’ the viewer-reader is still at the the lowest rung of the art ladder. As for ‘education’ I wonder whether a vitrine full of miscellany or a ten hour video (there was at least one of those in the Documenta Halle) can be called art. VIDEO 1 shows a vitrine of work by David Aradeon entitled Movement of Forms, Antecedents of Afro-Brazilian Spaces, 2007. It consists of photographs, watercolour reproductions, architectural drawings on perspex, audio CDs. The video provides some sense of the uninspiring nature of viewing such material.

Of course we all know now that after Duchamp’s Readymade anything that is placed in an art gallery is art, but is that really a good thing? Personally I don’t think it is when it doesn’t possess a great deal of aesthetic impact. For example, a video that is ten hours long or interminable vitrines of miscellany or books taken apart and pinned on the wall do not work especially well in a gallery situation, especially one in which there are a large number of exhibits. Most video artists have enough compassion for the viewer to make their works no longer than fifteen minutes long. If the art gallery is the ultimate frame for art, if it effectively defines what is and is not art, then artists need to take that into account. Artists (and curators) need to understand what works best within the gallery situation — and vitrines filled with photos and ten hour long videos don’t really function that well. Such things may contain some valuable information, but unless they can communicate their message to the viewer-reader within a relatively short time-frame then they probably should not be in an art gallery.

One can contrast David Aradeon’s vitrine, which was frankly tedious within an art gallery context, with Simryn Gill’s more aesthetically successful approach to a vitrine-like presentation: Throwback-Remade Internal Systems from a Model 1313 Tata Truck Circa 1985, 2007 (VIDEO 2 ). Unlike Aradeon’s interminable photographs Gill’s work is a remarkable sculptural artefact that translates car engine components into organic materials using termite mound soils, river clay, laterite, seashells, fruit skins (banana, mango, mango-steen), leaves, (bohi, sea almond, durian), coconut bark and fibre, areca nut casings, kapok, lalang grass, banana trunk, bougainvillea flowers, gelatine glue, dammar resin, and milk. Gill’s museum-like presentation works because it is a fascinating and innovative contribution to the genre of sculpture. I’m not sure what Aredeon’s motley collection of snapshots and watercolours can be called.