Re: [-empyre-] Documenta reviews : forward from Patrick Deegan

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello Brett -

You ask an interesting question:

> the
> problem I'd really like to know more about relates to whether the 
> exhibition represents a sort of "steady state" for current conceptual 
> and postmodern art (and curatorial) practices - i.e. the primary and 
> fully normal expectation is that white cube art and major fairs *should* 
> challenge the expectations of the white cube. (Or challenge other 
> modalities of representation - refer the "Disrupting Narratives" show at 
> the Tate...) Thus, making "challenge" itself the conventional and 
> possibly conservative norm of our current period. Of course, arguable, 
> but if so I'd love to hear if any are the signs of escape from this 
> conventionality. (Accusations of which I think I was reading in earlier 
> posts...)

Well, that sort of paradoxically conservative norm has certainly 
functioned in the past (it has been called "repressive tolerance," 
neutralizing pluralism, etc.). After the last Documenta, in an article 
called "Liar's Poker," I made such an argument about the work by Thomas 
Hirshhorn, and I compared its mollifying proposal of ever more varied 
touristic spectatorship to the political interventionism of a social 
movement like the No Border Network. What's interesting, for me anyway, 
is to make the conflicts in society explicit, to ask about the limits of 
both artistic and social forms, to dramatize and rupture those limits, 
and then to replay all that in discourse, in an attempt to get 
somewhere, to transform not only the institutions, but above all the way 
one inhabits or moves through them. This would constitute "signs of 
escape." My impression is that Ai Weiwei is trying to evoke something 
like that with his project, I think he tried to send a huge multiple 
living question mark from China to the Western art world, but without 
critical intervention, without some kind of tension and debate over the 
meaning of the gestures and actions, you get nothing at all, just a kind 
of complacent indifference, a standard disruption of the whiteness in 
the cube. And this Documenta is really characterized by complacent 
indifference. It's tongue-tied, it's Art w/o Language. The entire 
critical debate that could have been brought from the magazines project 
into the public space just dilutes into aesthetic leisure: "The 
documenta 12 magazines will provide an interested public with the 
knowledge required to be able to move competently and therefore 
leisurely through the space of the exhibition." (Roger M. Buergel)

So I think you're right, discussions and lists like this - and maybe 
parts of the wider network of magazines, if anyone becomes motivated or 
angry enough - will have to provide the spark that is missing from the 
show itself. In that sense, I would like to second your other question:

>  I would for one would love to
> hear from you on the grounds above, both white cube, and how the distant 
> event is being read in China as mediated by online discourse and the 
> internet... or other...

best, Brian