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Documenta is always a bit weighty. Perhaps it’s the length of time – five years – between each exhibition that impregnates it with gravity. Since 1955, seriousness has been built into each curatorial programme, and this year is no exception. Directed by Roger M. Buergel and curated by Ruth Noack, the 12th edition seeks to answer three undeniably serious questions, termed ‘leitmotifs’: is modernity our antiquity?; what is bare life?; and, education: what is to be done? These leitmotifs frame the context of Documenta’s five venues, numerous public projects in the city of Kassel and 100 days of cinema, performance, lecture and discussion programmes.





Buergel and Noack’s questions have a familiar ring to them. From the Italian theorist, Giorgio Agamben, they have borrowed the concept of life conditioned by the state and biology. They have also returned to the internationally inclusive structure of Documenta 11’s platforms to examine recent work through the filter of political art from the 1960s and 70s, alongside works from antiquity. One can draw two conclusions from these references: activism relies on visual and sensorial guidance; and universal themes in art have always been informed by the conditions of their making. Like this year’s Venice Biennale, curated by Robert Storr, Documenta’s subtext alludes to ongoing concurrent regional, national and international conflicts, like the war in Iraq or the recent trials on Rwanda. Unlike Venice, however, Documenta has not been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny over its political aims. If their allusiveness is a strategy, then well done. If not, as I suspect, one can only blame Documenta’s reputation.





MUSEUM FRIDERICIANUM
Here, Noack sets out the exhibition’s historical and formal trajectory by positing a new canon of conceptual art. At least, I assume that this is Noack’s intention, given her previous feminist writing and exhibitions. On the second floor she has placed documentation of Graciela Carnevale’s October 7, 1968 installation in Buenos Aires, Cycle of Experimental Art – in which Carnevale imprisoned unsuspecting gallery visitors on the anniversary of Che Guevara’s capture in Bolivia – near Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forest (2007) – a suspended grid composed of ropes and clothing that dancers move in and out of, essentially dressing and undressing – and Lee Lozano’s duo of industrial paintings, Switch and Clash (both from 1965). In the most unserious turn of the exhibition, Lozano’s paintings physically surround (and nearly suffocate) a small Gerhard Richter painting, Betty (1977). Noack’s point, which is picked up elsewhere in the exhibition, is that there is another story emerging from this period that will include new players, many of them women, and may be relocated from New York. The sculptural presence of Mera Schendel, Bla Koláová and Tanaka Atsuko, working in rope, plastic and light bulbs, respectively, further affirms her stance. Iole de Freitas’ Untitled (2007), a mass of tumbling swirls of bent steel and polycarbonate panels, Sheela Gowda’s reams of blood-red cord, And Tell Him of My Pain (1998), and Anatoli Osmolovsky’s bronze model tanks, entitled Hardware (2006), are fascinating in this context. Like many of the 150 or so artists on show, they have not been given the kind of international exposure their work merits.

DOCUMENTA-HALLE
Save for a few works, Documenta’s central space is devoted to the magazine show. Last year the organisers invited nearly 100 art publications to convene in Kassel and discuss the exhibition. Along with a presentation by each publication, they created three magazines to address the questions posed by the exhibition. It is likely that this section will be overlooked by most visitors, after all it is row upon row of magazines splayed across tables, but it may be the most externally engaged act undertaken by a major exhibition in some time. They treat the art press as a constituent for ideas, not just art. In a time of debate and concerns about the role of the media, the possibility of new voices emerging from the periphery of the media’s ranks is intriguing.

AUE-PAVILION
The exhibition’s temporary purpose-built venue feels cavernous and unwieldy. There are too many large-scale installations packed in, one after another, without a logical sequence. Lu Hao’s scrolls documenting the architecture of Beijing’s main artery, Chang’an Avenue, Saâdane Afif’s13 glossy black guitars and amplifiers, Black Chords Play Lyrics (2007), Romuald Hazoumé’s canister boat, Dream (2007) and Mladen Stilinovi’s whimsical assemblage, The Exploration of the Dead (1984-1990), are jammed into the hangar and forced to compete for space and attention. The specific resonance of each – particularly Hazoumé’s – is lost. Even Ai Weiwei’s mammoth effort, Fairytale (2007), in which he invited 1,001 Chinese citizens to visit Documenta, symbolised by 1,001 wooden stools from his collection of Quing dynasty antiques, is fragmented by the space. The stools should function as symbols of inclusion or magnitude, but instead look like voyeuristic props for the tour discussion groups, the strangely titled Circles of Enlightenment.

NEUE GALERIE AND SCHLOSS WILHELMSHÖHE
The exhibition regains its footing in these two venues. The former articulates a conversation between old and new, or the Agamben-inspired opposition: sanctioned and disallowed. This is perceptible in Nasreen Mohamedi’s diaries of manic dots and lines and her formal drawings, which are paired with the recognisable minimalism of Agnes Martin and textiles from Mali. The message is clear: the sanctioning of some art is coexistent and dependent upon the disavowal of other forms of art. Unlike in the Aue Pavilion, the idea works here, if only because line, shape, form and texture are offered as the terms of consideration, rather than nationality or gender.

In the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, videos like Dias and Riedweg’s insipid take on ritual, Funk Staden (2007), and Danica Dakic’s expansive use of panorama with nineteenth-century wallpaper and German teenagers, El Dorado (2007), intervene in the museum’s permanent collection. Here, the curators challenge their programme by including seventeenth-century Mogul miniatures, Persian calligraphy and illustration, Indian colonial painting and Katsushika Hokusai’s design work. Finally, the questions-cum-leitmotifs, which seemed useless at first and boorishly academic throughout the exhibition, resurface to address fallen dynasties, false assumptions and the need to search continually for new options, whether the arena be art or world affairs. Though cohesive, the process of Documenta 11 to reach this point was long and drawn out.

COURTNEY J. MARTIN

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