1/21/2015 Frieze Magazine | Archive | Documenta 11 Documenta 11 About this article Documenta 11 Published on 09/09/02 By Thomas McEvilley Each of artistic director Okwui Enwezor’s six co-curators - Sarat Maharaj, Octavio Zaya, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez and Mark Nash - spoke briefly, followed by Enwezor himself. Maharaj identified the point of art today as ‘knowledge production’ and the point of this exhibition as ‘thinking the other’; Nash declared that the exhibition aimed to explore ‘issues of dislocation and migration’ (‘We’re all becoming transnational subjects’, he observed); Ghez stressed the unusual fact that as many as 70% of the works in the show were made explicitly for the Back to the main site occasion; Basualdo spoke of ‘establishing a new geography, or topology, of culture’; and Bauer spoke of ‘deterritorialization’. Finally, Enwezor began his reflections by referring to Chinua Achebe’s classic novel of pre-colonial Africa Things Fall Apart (1958). He spoke of the emergence of post-colonial identity, and said that he and his colleagues had aimed at something much larger than an art exhibition: they were seeking to find out what comes after imperialism. These remarks were significant because Documenta, along with the Venice Biennale, is one of the foremost venues at which the current cultural politics of the art world is laid out. In a sense the agenda proclaimed by these curators gave one a sense of déjà vu; or rather, it seemed not exactly to usher in a new era but to set a seal on an era first announced long ago. The multicultural agenda for Documenta may be said to have begun with Harald Szeeman’s ground-breaking Documenta 5 in 1972. In that show (which the brochure on the history of Documenta issued by the current show describes as ‘strongly polarized’) Szeeman included many works not from the academic mainstream of Western contemporary art. This was the exhibition for which James Lee Byars recommended to Szeeman the title ‘The Five Continent Documenta’ - historically important as the first recorded mention of the idea of a truly global exhibition; and although Szeeman did not go all the way in that direction, he made significant advances. (He waited until his Venice Biennale in 1984, however, to include Western outsider artist Howard Finster as the representative of the United States.) So the question of globalism was first raised - though not fully resolved - a full http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/documenta_112/ 1/9 1/21/2015 Frieze Magazine | Archive | Documenta 11 30 years ago. The issue really came out in the open almost 20 years ago with the Primitivism controversy of 1984-5, the same year in which Szeeman included Finster in the Venice Biennale. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had mounted a show called ‘“Primitivism” in 20th-century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’. There was harsh criticism of the fact that artists of the so-called ‘Third World’ (that is, the previously colonized world) were used as footnotes to Western Modernist art history, rather than being recognized as having identities of their own. 1 The controversy went on for the better part of a year, becoming heated at times, and attracted considerable attention. Subsequently the dominant approach to these issues seemed to have been permanently shifted in favour of an increasing recognition of non-Western cultures. This change was most clearly embodied by Jean-Hubert Martin’s show ‘Les Magiciens de la terre’ at the Centre Pompidou in 1989 - 13 years ago. There works by 50 Western and 50 non-Western artists were shown together in a neutral, non-hierarchical way which let the various cultures involved speak for themselves rather than as marginalia to Western art history. In the following decade many shows around the world pushed the globalist agenda in a variety of directions. Exhibitions of contemporary African art, of Indian and South-east Asian art, of Latin American and Native American artists and of other previously excluded traditions sprang up all over and were greeted with much enthusiasm. So there is nothing exactly new about organizing a show around post-colonial issues. Nevertheless, in recent years a feeling has been spreading (especially with the brief flurry of excitement about the supposed return of traditional ideas of Beauty) that somehow all the Postmodernist fuss about the disintegration of social and cultural meanings accompanying the rearrangement of the geopolitical structure in the post- colonial era was already over, when in fact it had only been announced and not - until now anyway - nailed firmly into place in the world’s leading international survey of contemporary art. In recent years enthusiasm for these issues has waned; the current state of affairs will become clear partly through reactions to this show. Talking the talk the way the curators of Documenta 11 did at the opening press conference - about disregarding or deliberately overleaping traditional boundaries (not just those of art but also those of the social reality of the Western contemporary art world) - raised the issue of also walking the walk. A quick look at the numbers is instructive. There are http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/documenta_112/ 2/9 1/21/2015 Frieze Magazine | Archive | Documenta 11 ambiguities in counting nationalities: what, for example, about an artist born in one country who has spent most of his or her life in another and intends to continue living there? But on a rough count with no claim to methodological perfection, it seems that 25 artists can be described as from the United States (far more than from any other country), 34 from western Europe and 6 more from the former USSR, 14 from Africa, 16 from Asia and 9 from Latin America. (Some artist collectives are not counted here because of ambiguities.) On this basis it seems that the early reports that this would be the first Documenta in which the majority of artists came from outside Europe and the US are not quite accurate - Asia and Latin America in particular are a little thin. In terms of gender issues, there seem to be 32 women artists, including those in groups - comprising about 20% of the total. Is that quite enough? More than a decade ago, when an earlier Documenta was in the planning stages, the show’s artistic director was advised, ‘Be sure you have at least 30% women’. His reply, in effect, was: ‘Only Americans think that way. In Europe we care only about quality not about quotas.’ He ended up with only about 20% and was widely criticized in the press for what was perceived as an insubstantial representation of women. Today, from the point of view of the many Americans who are aware that the majority of art students for at least the last decade have been women, 50% seems an appropriate number. But, considering Documenta as a European institution that is still evolving, 35% might seem OK. Instead we get about 20% again. With regard to age, the oldest artist, Louise Bourgeois, was 91; the youngest, Giuseppe Gabellone, 29. The average age was 52. The show, like the press conference, was vast. It has variously been reported as including between 118 and 180 artists, depending on whether the members of collectives are counted separately (I arrived at 165), and contained a generous selection of works by each artist. Most of the work was found in four major venues - the Fridericianum, the Binding Brewery, the Kulturbahnhof and the Documenta Halle, with a few outdoor pieces across the field from the Orangerie and elsewhere. It seemed that certain themes were associated with certain venues - or at least that they dominated within them - and the curators’ brief remarks were useful in situating them. The show in the Fridericianum - the first one visited by most spectators and usually regarded as the central or defining venue - did not really seem much concerned with ‘thinking the other’; rather, it was a kind of celebration of the theme that ‘things fall apart’. Many of the works shown there http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/documenta_112/ 3/9 1/21/2015 Frieze Magazine | Archive | Documenta 11 seemed to suggest that inherited modes of constructing meanings - both verbal and visual - had been dismantled; traditional vocabularies had disintegrated and most of the artists showed no anxiety about this, making, it seems, little if any attempt to put them back together again in either old or new forms. In general there was, if not an actual celebration of the fact that things have in some senses fallen apart, at least a cheerful acceptance of the situation. The central artist of the whole show was perhaps Hanne Darboven, a canny strategic move in several ways. For one thing it was a polite tip of the hat to classical Euro-American Conceptualism, which was still allowed to hold centre stage before attention veered off in every other direction; for another, the elevation of a white woman artist to this status may have been an attempt to settle the still tempestuous aftermath of Enwezor’s second Johannesburg Biennial, which was riven by disputes about his attitude toward white South African women artists. 2 In any case, Darboven’s work filled all three floors of the curved back central segment of the Fridericianum - traditionally the most prestigious venue. Thousands of small, framed pages had been typed with fundamental units of vocabulary without ever managing to construct any meaning out of them. Over and over again the unseen hands on the typewriter counted to ten in English, then in German, then in Arabic numerals and so on.