Starting Points: 'Documenta'
'Documenta' is one of Europe's most long-awaited artistic events. Held every five years, it has changed radically since it was first launched in 1955. 'Documenta' was the brainchild of Arnold Bode, a painter and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel. Seeking to contribute to the regeneration of German culture, Bode organized the first three exhibits. His aim, as the name indicates, was to document the artistic panorama extending across previous years. The first exhibit had a great deal to rescue; holding a modern art exhibit had much to show and tell in a country where the Nazi regime had forbidden modern art some years before, classifying it as 'degenerate art'.
* By SEBASTIAN LOPEZ
Documenta has enjoyed great success from the start, a success that can also be attributed to the spectacular manner in which the works were displayed in the Fridericianum Museum, still in ruins after being bombed during the Second World War. However, the imposing installation alone did not catapult Documenta into the limelight. The City of Kassel, located on the fringe separating East and West Germany, added a political character to the new art venture. Post-war conditions were not the only thing being negotiated then. The 'hot spots' of the Cold War were also being established, the sites where politics and arts in the Euro-American tradition would flourish. Several Documenta openly promoted the visual arts of the North American 'conquerors', in keeping with what many European museums were also doing.
The documentary spirit of Documenta no longer exists. Ever since Documenta 5 (1972), directed by Harald Szeemann, the mega-show became a presentation of reality. Documenta 6 (1977), with its unexpected focus on film, photography, and video, continued this trend. The more recent documenta events have added more individual and idiosyncratic concepts. The ninth documenta (1992), under the direction of the Belgian Jean Hoet, naively attempted to illustrate art's autonomy, in an age when the commonly held belief already was that such autonomy does not exist. Documenta 10 (1997), directed by the French Catherine David, was not only the first time a woman managed the monumental enterprise, it also had a well-pondered and highly theoretical premise, much more visible in its enormous catalogue than in the exhibition itself.
Politics of the exhibition
The exhibit never generously displayed the artistic production of other continents. Basically, Documenta has been a showing of European and North American art, in spite of the significant work created by artists from other continents since the fifties, to focus only on the period of Documenta's existence. Like a thermometer of sorts, Documenta was always intent on measuring the master's temperature in order to gauge the warmth or coolness of his subjects. Europe steadily began showing less interest in non-Western modern art during the end of the 1980s. As a result, and for the first time ever, some Documenta directors began visiting other continents to examine their artistic production. The arrogant declarations they left in their wake still ripple through many of these countries: 'There is no modern art in this country'. If, sporadically at best, an Asian artist had indeed emerged - for example, Bhupen Khakhar during Documenta 9 - the overwhelming presence of artists from Europe and the United States effectively obscured his presence. Today, as ex-Director Szeemann is applauded as the champion of the Venice Biennial for his 'daring' display of Chinese artists in 1999, we realise that, ultimately, the only way to recover and revert back to a 'show' of work that has been carried out single-handedly in peripheral regions for many years, is for the big museums, galleries, and art collectors to rally behind it. As a matter of fact, the Chinese artists launched by Szeeman in Venice formed part of a Swiss collection.
Documenta 11 promises to be different. Okwui Enwezor, its new Director, is of Nigerian origin. He has conquered his position in the art world through his work as the editor of Nka magazine, published in New York. Enwezor also organized the first exhibition of African photography at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and directed the second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997.
The exhibition is due to open on 8 June 2002, yet Documenta itself has already begun. Under Enwezor's artistic guidance, the structure has been devised as a series of five Platforms, each 'constructed' in a different world city. In effect, Platform 1 already took place last March in the City of Vienna (and will be continued in Berlin next October). Platform 2 took place in New Delhi between 7 and 21 May. Platform 3 will be in Santa Lucia, Platform 4 in Lagos, and Platform 5 in Kassel.
These Platforms are not exhibitions in the conventional sense, though occasionally they may display some artists and works of art. Called 'discursive sites' by their organizers, they are meeting points for discussion in which the themes of concern and debate in the artistic world are meant to converge. Many such themes may not even be mentioned in contemporary art journals, which are currently more concerned with trends and success, and are closer to the interests of commercial art galleries than to the subjects that are leaving profound traces on the art of the present. Platform 5 in Kassel will undoubtedly include an enormous array of art works. This is inevitable, but the spirit of Documenta 11, thriving on a 'network of relationships, collaborations, discussion, and small events', as its organizers point out, has already been established.
Introducing the notion of time within the concept and the event, the Platforms are attempting to incorporate 'research as part of the exhibition initiative itself'. Going beyond the notion of an art exhibition as an event with a limited, inscrutable, and self-determined scope in time, the structure of Documenta 11 'seeks to invigorate the public sphere and its potential for dialogue and creative discussion'.
The themes
The Platforms are constructed around the following themes: Democracy Unrealised (Vienna and Berlin); Creolité and Creolization (St. Lucia) and Under Siege: Four African Cities: Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, and Lagos (Lagos).
Platform 2, which took place in New Delhi, brought together curators, politicians, philosophers, lawyers, activists, and artists among others under the theme Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Process of Truth and Reconciliation. The title itself already provided one of the guiding forces of the Symposium. Mahatma Gandhi entitled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth; through 'experiments with truth', he focused on the complex relationship between truth, justice, and representation as manifested in two of the most significant experiences he underwent, namely the time he spent in India and his decisive journey to South Africa.
This Platform took into consideration several legal processes undertaken by various countries in order to examine both the nature of a state's violence against its own people or against other people, and the conflicts that give rise to cases of genocide and serious violations of fundamental human rights. The trauma surrounding loss and its impact on the collective mentality have made it necessary to develop other mechanisms that might help to build a credible bridge between legal forms of justice, on the one hand, and the need that victims have to be heard and to have their testimony introduced as evidence into historical records, on the other.
The response to this search for viable bridges has resulted in the creation of various 'truth commissions' in certain parts of the world. What happens, though, when truth commissions or legal processes are incapable of curing the wounds that so often continue to divide the societies in which such mechanisms are activated? Platform 2 was dedicated to discussing the overall interest in the workings of these commissions on the part of academics, non governmental organizations, museums, and the mass media, as well as to addressing an emerging category in the humanities directed at studying the human memory.
While the Holocaust or the Shoa continue to be the embodiment of how a state can commit crimes and violence against its people and its opposers, their singular character is seriously being challenged by other cases of systematic state violence and repression, such as those of South Africa, Argentina, Cambodia, Rwanda, Chile, Guatemala, Chad, Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo, Belgium, France, Northern Ireland, Kurdistan, the United States and Mexico.
In the past decades, the details of the violent actions perpetrated by states have been confronted based on two assumptions: one hinges on the secular use of the law, and the other on the ambiguous religious ethics of 'truth and reconciliation' as privileged sites to highlight state violations and those who commit them. As the Symposium made clear, the methods used by the law and the 'Truth Commissions' are not symmetrical; instead, they are diametrically opposed. Examples from South Africa make this difference abundantly clear. For many of the victims, the inexpressible power and violence wielded by the State was so overwhelming that its very representation required the victims' voices, kernals to sow a space within the narrow construct of the law that render the truth capable of being grasped by the public's imagination.
While academics and the law focus on the intricacies of trauma and testimony, works of art and literature give shape to the residual effects of these histories. The variety of their expressions has flourished gradually in recent years, although conjuring them has not always been easy. At times, works of art bearing witness to individual or collective histories adopt forms of contemporary art with a desire to distance themselves from the monuments and memorials that traditionally embody the national heritage. Conversely, there are artists who deconstruct the representations of such monuments in order to show how a series of thematic units has been forged, more than serving to unify, with the intention of functioning through the separation of the national communities they attempt to unite.
Fostering discussion topics like those just mentioned, and the others to be developed in the course of the coming months at the next Platforms, Documenta 11 creates a space that attempts to question today's themes. Re-evaluating, at the same time, the methodology of mega-shows, Documenta is one of the most clear and historical examples of these displays. Surprisingly, by coming full circle, Documenta 11 attempts to link up with the first 1955 Documenta, which, according to its curators, was not only interested 'in matters pertaining to the aesthetic value of the arts, but also to social and political survival'. *
Sebastian Lopez, MA is director of The Gate Foundation, Amsterdam. He is also currently a guest lecturer at the Department of Art History, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
E-mail: info@gatefoundation.nl