Michael Gibbs finds an exhibition that is very much of our times
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X S" S C : ::: E :n Xg ::0E f ;Xt f;:g;;f0fffry: dS0S :u S: : 11 il!ll | S S0gi0f )Nt = , ......................... f;; f f ;;: n; X i X Nii y )V E f .=., v ' X= yS25 = ELy D= ffr ; ! f _,. !.:.'i ....... ,,.S .j,: .S= ', S Trffff f iES:yS ;ff) E | V00 00000009 /S *:-=ES,S,,,=:_=,:BrS= _ __ .................................................................................. ^'h ... :0 4 S .1/1 Documentall, the first to be curated by a non-European, is primarily concerned with expressing a critical discourse that addresses art as global culture. While the previous Documenta certainly raised the intellectual profile of what is arguably the world's most important exhibition of contemporary art, it tended to privilege the late 60s as its key reference. JUL-AUG 02 / ART MONTHLY e/28 ................-................ .................. tsunamii.net alpha 3.3 2001 ... . ........... ......... J. Raqs.......... . .d . Documentall, with 70% new work, is decidedly of Raqs Media Collective our times, reflecting on a world that many see as 2828'N/7715'E:: having radically changed during the last five years, 2001/2002. An particularly after the events of September 11, 2001. Installation on the Coordinates of Nowhere is this more apparent than in the hefty cat- Everyday Life-Delhi alogue which opens with several pages of news pho- 2002 tographs illustrating the global conflicts and ................. .... ............... tensions of recent years. The exhibition in Kassel was preceded by four 'Platforms' held in Vienna/Berlin, New Delhi, the Caribbean island of St Lucia and Lagos, in which artistic director Okwui Enwezor and his team of six co-curators (Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zoya) organised workshops and pubjlic.sym- posia that probed such contemporary problems as democracy, transnational justice, processes of truth and reconciliation, creolisation and African processes of urbanisation. While most of the visitors to Kassel will be coming to view art rather than take part.in sociopolitical debates, much of the art shown in the exhibition's several locations is clearly informed by issues that until now have been generally deemed to be beyond art's purview. The Kassel location (and the Documenta tradition itself) reminds us that the European notion of aesthetics is grounded in Ger- man idealism, How, then, to incorporate art from other cultures that supposedly lack this conscious- ness? Jan Hoet included quite a few non-western artists in his edition of Documenta, but the aim was perhaps little more than simply to add a bit of colour, a touch of the carnivalesque. Another solu- tion is to drop the notion of art altogether, in favour of cultural practice in general, with the focus on col- laboration, project and process rather than aesthetic attitudes and discrete objects. Documentall steers a careful course between these two opposing views, riding the tension between the foreign and the familiar. Sometimes it veers towards a multicultural extravaganza, a celebration of the previously excluded Other. While there are aspects that reveal a sort of National Ge6graphic approach, such as the documentary photographs of urban conditions.in New Delhi and South Africa or the videos of Inuit life in northern Canada, the curators have clearly made every effort to engage in a dialogue with other cultures and to examine the var- ied and fluid relationships between sociopolitical and aesthetic discourses, to follow links and to acknow- ledge transitions in order to create a third space, an in-between where forces from without meet forces from within. Artistic practices from the periphery are thus drawn into the centre, but at the same time there is a recognition that this centre (of European hegemony) no longer holds. Even the western con- cept of multiculturalism seems woefully inadequate in these times of radical dislocations, ruptures, migrations and increasing urbanisation. Postcolonial conditions are effecting an extra-territoriality that depends more on access to global networks than on geographical entities. As Enwezor writes in his cata- logue introduction, 'The postcolonial today is a world of proximities. It is a world of nearness, not an else- where.' Not only peoples but art too seems to have entered into a closely-knit diaspora. Fareed Armaly's detailed documentary project about the Palestinian diaspora, From/To, 2002, with its multiple lines of migration, provides just such a model for art's cur- rent condition, its sense of alienation and nostalgia under the new global conditions determining the ineluctable progress of its history. African and Asian artists reside and work in New York, London, Brussels and Amsterdam, producing transcultural hybrids that are often more lively and engaging than the work of western artists immured in their own traditions. Indeed, with the exception of the always politically committed work of Leon Golub or the streetwise drawings of Raymond Pettibon, painting is distinguished in Documentall by its paucity. Artists from other cultures, notably the 258 /,ART MONTHLY / JUL-AUG 02 2 Ivory Coast, have access to a cosmology that-seems infinitely richer than the bankrupt legacies of west- ern Modernism. We are accustomed to viewing African art and culture through western eyes, but what happens when an artist living in Benin contem- plates the history of western art, in particular the work of Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars, and combines this with an exhaustive presentation of magazine articles, books and cultural artefacts? Georges Ad6agbo's work represents creolisation at its best, expressing an exuberance that is markedly lacking from the over-concocted attempts at multi- cultural references in the outdoor installations by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ren6e Green. The African presence ih Documentall is a verita- ble flood, perhaps to compensate for centuries of neglect. Meschac Gaba presents two robms from his ongoing Museum of Contemporary African Art, the library and the museum shop. The library consists of Gaba's entire collection of books on just about every- thing, which are available for reading in the large space of the Documenta Hallen, which also houses banks of computer and video monitors devoted to the display of information concerning distributive justice (an internet ptoject by the Croatian artist Andreja Kuluncic) and grass roots activist groups from Sene- gal, Congo and Hamburg. In foregrounding what Maharaj calls 'epistemological engines' generating the production of knowledge, these activities and strategies expand the notion of art to include a vari- ety of social and cultural projects. In the West we are used to knowledge being codi- fled in the form of books and archives to be perused at a leisurely pace (as in Thomas Hirschhorn's mon- ument to Georges Bataille incongruously sited in the Kassel suburbs or Ecke Bonk's installation display- ing the covers of every volume of every edition of the standard German dictionary begun by the Brothers Grimm in 1838), but the imperative of events and rapid change would seem to favour the less static Documentall is decidedly of our times, reflecting on a world that many see as having radically changed during the last five years, particularly after the events of September 11, 2001. mode of instant documentation afforded by video, photography and the Internet. The Raqs Media Col- lective has developed a participatory website that allows visitors to experience the urban conditions of New Delhi, while the Singapore-based tsunamii.net explores the concept of 'web-walking', following the geographical network route from the exhibition in Kassel to the Documenta webserver in Kiel, a physi- cal distance of more than 400 kilometres. Documenting the global flow of goods and infor- mation under the new capitalist order is also the subject of Allan Sekula's Pish Story, 1987-95, which specifically investigates the heterotopic conditions of maritime trade by means of factual photographic and textual documentation. Other documentary pro- jects in Documentall include the Milan-based group Multiplicity's investigation of the sinking of a ship full of refugees in the Mediterranean in 1996, Lorna Simpson's study of everyday life experienced by two women in New York, shown on 31 monitors, and an engaging compilation of footage about the Handsworth riots in Birmingham in 1986 put togeth- er by the London-based Black Audio Film Collective. In the face of so many disturbing facts, however, there is some relief in the fictional documents pro- duced by the Lebanese Atlas Group, which link ref- erences to that country's war-torn history to such mundane information as the results of horse races and makes of cars. With many works in Documentall reminding us 'of the hardship of human existence and of the injus- tides perpetrated by dictatorial regimes during the last half-century, there is a sehse that laughter and irony are politically incorrect in such a context. Luckily there's Kutlug Ataman's hilarious four- screen interview with a suburban London woman whose' hobby is breeding flowers, and Feng Mengbo's over-the-top computer shooter game into which the artist has inserted his own image. Yinka Shonibare's subversive tableau of 18th-century European aristo- crats gallivanting in African costumes and perform- ing sexual acts is likewise a nicely sardonic comment on postcdlonial hybridisation. The conceptual mode of art from the 70s is repre- sented by three of its chief practitioners - Stanley Brouwn, On Kawara and Hanne Darboven - but the dryness and the universalising ethos of their work, partibularly Kawara's One Million Years, 1970-2002, performed live by two speakers in a glass cage, comes across as rather pointless and self-indulgent in the face of all the more pressing world problems JUL-AUG 02 / ART MONTHLY / 258 94-11 tli N 3 Many of the artists come from societies that have been devastated by conflict and repressive regimes. It is their turn to colonise us, to infect us with the desire for change. We can no longer afford the luxury of a disinterested aesthetics. addressed in this Documenta. Meanwhile Fiona Tan's contemporary filmic homage to August Sander's 20s photographs of German 'types' belies the notion of objective classification, while an even fuller scope is given to subjectivity in Ben Kinmont's project recording the views of a large cross section of Kassel citizens on the things that they consider important in their lives and the question whether these things can be considered as art. Envelopes containing their answers are being distributed to Documentall visitors. Amidst all the reflection on serious concerns, this year's Documenta has not followed the previ- ous edition's somewhat puritan eschewal of the spectacular. Cerith Wyn Evans' Morse code driven disco-ball, Asymptote's infinitely mirrored projec- tions onto vacuum-formed plastic, or Ken Lum's presentation of a fairground hall of mirrors inscribed with first-person narratives of depression are suitably ludic, but the prize for lucidity must go to Alfredo Jaar who brings together Nelson Man- dela, Bill Gates and America's war on Afghanistan in a highly-charged, eloquent and physical com- ment on the disappearance of images. Here, as in a few other works like Mona Hatoum's wired-up elec- trical domestic appliances or the short films by the Iranian filmmakers Shirin Neshat and Seifollah Samadian, spectacle unites with reflection to pro- duce an effect akin to the sublime. Large-scale ruins can also convey a spectacular effect, whether of a life totally devoted to creation 258 / ART MONTHLY / JUL-AUG 02 .......I..... ........... ...................... Dieter Roth Large Table Ruin 1970-98 C 1, 4 (as in the case of the late Dieter Roth's chaotic room-sized Large Table Ruin), or of a bankrupt modernity (as in Atelier Kozaric's jam-packed mau- soleum of modernist sculpture). If western moderni- tys utopia has fallen into dystopia, it may be left to non-western artists to attempt the task of redemp- tion and retrieval. The Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa, for example, has remodelled Havana's ruined urban structures into playful modernist utopias, some of which perhaps allude to Constant's Situationist- inspired New Babylon project, which receives an extensive showing in the Kulturbahnhof. On the floor directly under Constant, Bodys Isek Kingelez pre- sents a flamboyant, phantasmagoric city ingeniously made from discarded packaging, which is then tellingly juxtaposed with the unrepentant Mod- ernism of Isa Genzken's minimalist glassy maquettes of new buildings for Berlin. What is actually getting built on the ground, however, can be even more shocking - as witness David Goldblatt's photographs documenting white suburbs and extravagant real estate developments, like the full-scale simulation of a Tuscan town for a hotel and casino complex cur- rently underway in South Africa. Documentall presents many sites of contestation, whether in terms of cultural identity, geography or social history. The world is having to come to terms with globalisation, which means that the old centres and certainties are losing their hold. Anachronisms are emerging at the same time as new visions and imperatives. Themes that were long a staple in west- ern art - personal expression, mythology - are being revised and rewritten from a more hybrid cultural perspective. Practices of resistance and activism can find refuge in art and enrich art as well, make it more responsive. Many of the artists in Documental 1 come from societies that have been devastated by conflict and repressive regimes. For them, and perhaps for us too now that wvestern society has its recent ruins, art can hold the promise of redemption, maybe even of utopia. It is their turn to colonise us, to infect us with the desire for change. We can no longer afford the luxury of a disinterested aesthetics. The huge array of other maps and territories displayed at Documen- tall represents a daunting challenge to our ways of thinking about art and culture. Above all, it is the 6thical issues raised and discussed by the exhibition that should occasion the most thought. I Documentall_Platform5 is at various venues in Kassel until September 15. Michael Gibbs is an artist and a critic based in Amsterdam. JUL-AUG 02/ ART MONTHLY / -258 5 - David Goldblatt Jo'burg Intersections 1999-2002 .. .... .............. ........... ....... COPYRIGHT INFORMATION TITLE: Documenta 11/1 SOURCE: Art Monthly no258 Jl/Ag 2002 WN: 0218204398001 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.. Copyright 1982-2002 The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.