I MAINTAIN A CONSISTENT PANADA-BEAR SHAPE: DOCUMENTA 12

Steven Kado

So, I just watched True Stories and have finally gotten around to adding my 2 cents to what Flint had to say about Documenta 12 earlier.

This week I picked up the September issue of Frieze and inside: several reviews of Documenta 12! Among them: Helen Molesworth's really really amazing review of the whole thing. What am I going to say? Pretty much: why don't you just read her two-pager next time you pass a newstand that sells art magazines? What really hit home with me in Molesworth's article was her appraisal that the entire curatorial approach of D12 was based on an autocratic and frankly idealist notion of pure experience that is not only hard to believe in contemporary times, but really tough to deal with in large mega-art shows. Although she doesn't go into it quite this hard in the article the idea is, that seeking to access pure experience, or 'being' is a symptom of our feelings of impotence in the face of the 'second nature' of society, culture and technology that we have built to discipline and order actual nature. In case you weren't here in the 1600's we built second nature (which now so terrifies us) because in the face of nature and the nascent Copernican cosmos we were truly and utterly impotent on a universal level. This reactionary quest, then, is founded twice on the fear of accepting what is our lot in creation: to be just dirt on a rock in a world we can't really understand or control. At D12 the art was presented with no information other than name, title and date and the list of artists was only released on the day the exhibition opened. You were meant, I suppose, to just 'encounter' the works. However, this was complicated by an extremely trying series of exhibition "techniques" many of which seemed mainly to just be poor oversights, maybe you could purely experience the art if you could handle the humidity in the terrible pavilion building, if you could even see the art in either the murky darkness or the glare of spotlights and if the heavy handed juxtapositions didn't exhaust you.

This contrasts drastically with Documenta 11, which was a really different deal. Whether for better of for worse, D11 brought a large volume of heterogeneous discourse together in an endless series of public debates and discussions. While the exhibition itself was still gigantic, unwieldy and challenging to actually take in (and seemed to have a lot more 'name brand' work too), it left me with the sense that there was a large, rhetorical point being made with the whole effort. By having a series of platforms, lots of published debates and so forth a larger point was being made about process, democracy and individual involvement. D12, on the other hand, told you to show up and then said: "you, look at art."

And ultimately, the work that most tightly addressed this (and I'm embarrassed to say it took reading that review in Frieze to make me see why) was Peter Friedl's. So far as I could tell in three different venues he showed us:
1 - a selection of his drawings from childhood
2 - a taxidermically stuffed giraffe and
3 - a video of a tiger, in a baroque hall, attacking a toy boa constrictor.
No single contribution of his seemed to really have anything to do with each other, let alone anything else: you were just there, experiencing the fact that you were in a room with a moth-eaten giraffe carcass. There you were: and there was the art. Or you were upstairs in a room full of childhood drawings: ok. Or you were in a kind of palace looking at a funny video where giant cats are acting like house cats: I like cats. Does it all add up to something? No. If it did, so goes the logic of D12, it would be distracting from each work's individual power to communicate. If that's the case then, why bother having a large exhibition in the first place? To me, Friedl really got straight to the blank cynicism of being in a big omnibus type exhibition like this, with dizzying amounts of material around to try and break down and take in and little or no overarching reason presented why any of it is there or why you should really bother other than 'it is art to look at'. It didn't help that usually the exhibition design itself was so poor that even getting that far, perceiving the art with sense organs, was a challenge most of the time (I don't mean to keep on with that but...) Of my own experience at Documenta 12 I have to say that I thought both Flint and I would have more to say: but instead all we had to say really was "That was a fucking amazing Agnes Martin, let's get a pizza."

That said: I'm still not sure what sure which approach of the two Documentas I've been to was ultimately more sinister. While D12 is presenting a deep lie that connects to weird and vaguely fascistic impulses: you can have unmediated access to experience (and students pay only 18 euros per day to have this privilege). D11 produced a process where essentially reams of consultation and discussion were produced for the sake of having 'the fairness process' enacted so that we could stamp the curatorial process as democratic and make a point that 'no one voice can be said to prevail', doesn't that rob discord and discussion of it's fundamental purpose to reduce it to function? What's worse? Focusing on a lie that we as individuals can still, despite the world we live in, have unmediated interactions with 'art'. Or initiating debate only to harvest it for it's rhetorical form? Anyway, despite lousy service the Pizza I got in Kassel was sensational, Flint had the pasta.

Veneer Magazine from September 5, 2007