dear empyres!
-thanx christina for a succinct summary of the documenta-experience....
On Jul 25, 2007, at 10:35, christina mcphee wrote:
-empyre list members, your disappointment, even rage, over the lack
of representation, reacts against a casual nonchalence which emanates
from a curatorial/ organizational attitude, which is not directed
against any one periphery, but really against all such, in the name
of universality and migration of form.
How and why is the withholding of content, or dumbing down of the art
experience, happening in this exhibition? It was
a very emotionally exhausting, depressing place to be. What is going
on here? and why should anyone care?
I was a week before the pixel/paper events in Kassel, and just want to
add a few brief personal feelings, even more than "observations" to
what christina has written. I think christina is entirely right in
pointing out that the issue of national representation is not the
issue at all at this documenta. The point seems indeed to be
"universality and migration of form" (without context). It does give
you a strange feeling when walking around the exhibition after having
put some effort into commenting on one (or some people even on more
than one) of the supposed 'themes' of documenta - like the question
"is modernity our antiquity?", when indeed in the exhibition it
becomes devastatingly clear that all this has been reduced to pure
formalism and decontextualised mash-up without purpose or orientation.
One might speculate on a kind of suggestion of an a-historical
condition; post the the post-historical; maybe a revival of
universalist valuelessness, or many other titillating ideas. But after
two days of seeing room after room filled with sometimes great,
sometimes boring, sometimes revolting work, it was clear that there
simply is no concept at all, not even an anti-concept, just pure
arbitrariness, reflecting only a complete conceptual laziness on the
part of the curators.
Frans Haks, the always provocative director of the Groningen Museum in
The Netherlands, used to say about his shows that he thought (fondly)
of the average visitor as going through his exhibitions as they would
go through the supermarket for daily grocery shopping. The work
displayed should reveal itself to the casual flaneur in a moment's
notice. Haks deliberately sought the boundaries of art and design,
especially interior design, and introduced a.o. the Alessi design
products to the Dutch haute-bourgeois consumers. In this feat he
realised his highest aim, to dissolve the difference between the
museum and the shopping mall (needless to say the museum shop sells a
complete line of Alessi products still today...).
It seems that the casual flaneur of Haks' museum (at the time a highly
productive provocation), has been transported now to the documenta,
which in the process seems to have been transformed into a completely
decontextualised and a-historical shopping mall of contemporary art -
just that this time there is no provocation or scandal, it is simply
matter-of-fact.
oh well, better luck next time...
bests,
eric
p.s. - maybe the right question to ask is what still distincts
documenta from the art fairs of Cologne and Basel, except that you
can't buy the documenta works on the spot?
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