C101 Article
Kassel and Frankfurt : Documenta 11 and
Manifesta 4
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Artur Barrio: Situação,
Orrhhhh... ou..5.000 T.E. ...len...New York City, 1969,
performance; photo Cesar Carneiro; courtesy the artist/Documenta
11
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Documenta11 is well worth seeing
and is of vital importance from an Irish perspective. Indeed, it
is great news for Ireland that postcolonial issues have come to
the fore in the art world and that it is now officially accepted
that artists can create cutting-edge art anywhere in the world without
needing to gravitate to the centre to 'make it'. On the other hand,
it is still necessary to travel, e.g. to Kassel to see the fifth
platform of this mammoth Documenta, which began eighteen months
ago with interdisciplinary conferences on democracy, truth, creolisation
and African cities in Vienna, New Delhi, St. Lucia and Lagos respectively.
Now comes the bad news: despite the vital
position that Ireland holds (or so we would like to believe) as
historically the first postcolonial country, as mediator between
Europe and the emerging world in this regard, as a vibrant centre
of postcolonial studies and a country where there is hardly an artist
who does not reflect on these issues, Ireland was snubbed, excluded,
once more marginalised by not being listed among either the marginalised
or the established, exhibited alongside one another in Kassel.
The Irish participation is down by 50%. While James Coleman and
Samuel Beckett were shown by Catherine David in 1997, this time
only Coleman made it to Kassel - however, with two pieces and in
a prominent position. Come to think of it, in the lecture programme
there is another Irish entry (with almost as Irish a name as my
own), a Tobias Klaus from "University Dublin" - from where? One
of those who should have been included in that lecture programme
made sense of it all for me when I heard him soon after Documenta
opened, but in a different place. In his closing address of the
James Joyce Conference in Trieste, Terry Eagleton spoke of three
stages through which postcolonial countries go. To paraphrase what
he said, initially, one finds much in common with other countries
in the same boat, tries to make sense and is obsessed with the trauma.
In the second stage, one wishes to leave it all behind. History
is embarrassing and one would rather concentrate on getting on with
things. Only in the third stage is one really free - which means
also free to revisit the issues.
At this point, our second-stage postcolonialism apparently distances
us from whoever is in the first stage - or them from us. This Documenta
is theirs, with every contested border featuring somewhere (Mexico/USA,
the Palestinian territories, etc. etc.) Are we, is this government
too embarrassed by the postcolonial issues, which artists feel compelled
to address or free to address, to do more to promote art from Ireland?
The overall consensus internationally seems to be that Ireland has
been appeased - definitely not big news. It appears then that despite
giving the chosen issues of postcolonialism (and therefore research
and debate) great prominence by considering the platforms part of
Documenta, Okwui Enwezor, artistic director and political scientist
(!) did not do his research thoroughly. It would have been as part
of a platform or as venue for one that Ireland needed to come in.
At the opening, Enwezor called Harald Szeemann
and Catherine David "bookends." These points of reference were everywhere
in evidence - not always to the advantage of Documenta11. Szeemann,
who has always valued obsession, attitude and commitment in art,
is the curator of the most highly acclaimed exhibition in Documenta's
history to date. In 1972, he included in his (the first) concept
exhibition nonart material like science fiction, advertising and
kitsch. In his most recent Venice Biennale he, like Enwezor,
revisited the 1960s leftish roots with Deleuze and Guattari's 1000
Plateaux. Enwezor's platforms were understood geographically,
taking in the first four platform venues before building up to the
only art exhibition, the culmination, i.e. the Documenta,
in what is presumably perceived as the 'centre'. One can conclude
that platforms and rhizomes are popular, but almost a contradiction
in terms if the task is to create the most important contemporary
art exhibition going.
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Georges Adéagbo:
"Explorer and explorers confronting the history of exploration"!...The
theatre of the world, 2002,
mixed media, installation view; photo Werner Maschmann;
courtesy the artist/Documenta 11
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Moreover, Kassel is a centre with a difference: almost destroyed
in WWII, it found itself in a postwar no man's land in the border
region between the two Germanys. Arnold Bode created Documenta in
1955, certainly as a tourist attraction, but in the first instance
as a political gesture of atonement. He wished to show the Western
world (on whose unnoticed fringes the event took place) that the
historic lesson had been learnt and that there was some hope, therefore,
that Germany might in time enter the Western world again. Formerly
villified modernism needed to be seen. It also served well to show
imaginative responses to how shattered and de-centred the world
was. From the beginning, Documenta has developed a powerfully political
character, an anti-imperialist and anti-chauvinist history, despite
finding itself now geographically in the centre of (Western) Europe.
Lectures and discussions instigated by Enwezor and his team are
also in the best Documenta tradition, that of the Documenta artist-par-excellence,
Joseph Beuys. His migration workshop and office for direct democracy
(1977) not only discussed postcolonialism and (European) peripheries,
it also included the (then topical) Irish perspective.
The most recent and maybe strongest antecedent
for Enwezor is the other 'bookend', Catherine David's Documenta
X. David showed committed art, political issues, architectural
utopias, etc., much of which is currently in evidence, too. But
she was strongly criticised for this and accused of being anti-aesthetic
or anti-sensual. I could hardly find having a rice dish cooked for
me by Matthew Ngui an unsensual experience. In Enwezor's exhibition,
the most sensually engaging piece is Artur Barrio's ground-coffee
installation with fresh bread stacked into a corner like one of
Beuys' fat corners. One gets the impression that Enwezor had considerably
fewer problems with an uncompromising stance (e.g., when he chose
not to use the Neue Gallerie, because he wanted a Beuys installation
removed that could not be touched). His Documenta initially also
seems to be better received than David's. This begs the question
of which postcolonial territory remains to be more contested, Nigeria
or the female.
Enwezor shows a historical Documenta. Georges
Adéagbo's installation on 'Explorers' contains a portrait (almost
an icon) of Harald Szeemann and various references to Beuys, in
effect spelling out Documenta history. The main way in which time
is addressed, however, is in Hanne Darboven's massive installation
of her usual small frames covering the walls of the vertical axis
of the main building, the Fridericianum, spanning three floors.
Beuys' honey pump in the same central space was more inspiring.
The printouts of spelled-out numbers lose the point that time-consuming
writing in her older work had made
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Left:
Dieter Roth: Large table ruin, 1970-98, installation
view, mixed media;
photo Werner Maschmann; courtesy Sammlung Hauser und Wirth/Documenta
11;
Right:Glenn Ligon: Untitled (stranger in the village/crowd)
#2, 2000,
mixed media on paper; courtesy D'Amelio Terras Gallery, New
York/Documenta 11
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Jef Geys' contribution and many other videos
are, of course, engaged with time. The Belgian artist (reminiscent
of Jan Dibbets' work) videoed a museum display in Day and Night
and Day and... On Kawara's One Million Years is also
present. One has seen this and Darboven's frames before. That does
not mean, however, that older work should have been excluded. Two
of the high points of David's 1997 Documenta were Beckett's Quad
and Helen Levitt's films showing New York life in the 1930s
and 40s.
Similarly, Enwezor would have been well
advised to show Robert Flaherty's wonderful early documentary Nanook
of the North (USA, 1921), instead of a weaker colour version
in the format of an Inuit soap opera from 1994/5 by Igloolik Isuma
Productions, entitled Nunavut (our land). The makers claim
that Flaherty misrepresented the Inuit by imposing Western ethnographic
and narrative conventions. The question is what is worse, being
'Western' and spending 16 months with the Inuit in order to film
their daily lives or being Inuit and applying the Western narrative
convention of the soap opera in an attempt to recreate life as it
may have been in 1945 and then still believing in greater authenticity.
There is much anthropological documentation and even documented
social work - too much.
Enwezor clearly stated at the opening that
with a four-year-long preparatory phase, the Documenta could not
be prognostic and had to be diagnostic - Documenta, indeed. Many
things need to be documented, like a covered-up asylum-seekers'
ship disaster off Sicily, complete with meteorological satellite
images (Multiplicity). Much work is courageous, credible and politically
educational in the best possible sense - and often, this even leads
to positive aesthetic consequences. Unfortunately, not every video
with somebody telling their life story and (in particular) not every
quotidian photograph is incisive. Isa Genzken's photos taken from
Der Spiegel magazine are interesting (again historical) and
Ryuji Miyamoto's pictures of partly collapsed façades in his Kobe
series are fascinating, but Michael Ashkin's pictures of run-down
US backwaters are as banal as many others, like Ennadre's tearful
hugs following 11th September. Santu Mofokeng's touristy self-portraits
at Auschwitz are quite tasteless. So much photography tried to come
close to August Sander's classic anthropological portraits that
it would have been much more incisive to exhibit some of them alongside
a pared-down contemporary selection with artists like Fiona Tan.
Maybe the dull impression, which some of the photographs gave, was
partly due to the display. This is a very orderly and museological
Documenta, confined almost exclusively to interior spaces. Enwezor
is certainly avoiding the spectacle of Documenta 9, but he surprisingly
does not enter public spaces, which have traditionally been the
locus of much commitment work. Could this be because a second-hand
clothes shop in a pedestrian underpath like the one which was part
of David's exhibition or anything similarly chaotic would have given
the impression of a bazaar and affirmed cultural stereotypes about
postcolonial countries? Enwezor wished to avoid that impression
at all cost. An interesting chiasmus is at play here: disorder,
colourful multiplicity and even the ephemeral are left to the Westerners
like Raymond Pettibon, whose collaged wall paintings brought Kassel
close to 'KA-BUL'. There are quite a few artists' rooms, either
as studio (Atelier Kozaric), with an archive-like Sanja Ivekovi's
Searching for My Mother's Number, where one could research
Yugoslavian history, or as installation, as in Dieter Roth's case:
Large Table Ruin 1970-98 - undisputed master of the genre.
Among the non-Westerners, only Adéagbo exhibited such an installation,
which could remind one of ethnographic museums - not surprisingly,
this is outsider art. Is the museological display needed to borrow
credibility or to be sanctioned by institutions, in which one (presumably)
no longer believes?
While artists in the West continue to be
inspired by the 'exotic', postcolonial artists continue to approach
a 'western' (minimalist) canon. When indeed there was colourful
'native' painting, as in Frédéric Bruly Bouabré's case, the small
drawings are neatly framed and displayed in rows. Minimalist approaches
were even in evidence when the topics were disturbing, like human-rights
violations. Tania Bruguera, for example, informed in sober writing
and then sent the viewers through a dark corridor, where suddenly
blinding white light was switched on and, while it was impossible
to see or move, somebody released the safety catch of a gun - a
very serious Documenta.
Only contained in the neat frame of the
video screen was there occasionally a bazaar-like atmosphere - often
when border crossings were the theme and a certain unease was present.
The ultimate border-crossing in postcolonial terms was also achieved
a few times, for example when Pierre Huygue from France showed a
piece on coloured New York youths, when an Israeli artist Eyal Sivan
contributed a video on Rwanda and when Kutlug Ataman from Turkey
addressed The Four Seasons of Veronica Read.
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Yinka Shonibare: Gallantry
and Criminal Conversation, 2002, installation view,
mixed media; photo Richard Kasiewicz;
courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London/Documenta 11
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Even before the opening, Yinka Shonibare's
piece was widely considered as a key element of Enwezor's show,
due to their common Nigerian roots and previous collaborations.
The large installation features Shonibare's signature dresses cut
like colonisers' clothes, but made of colourful African fabrics
(of Indian origin). Gallantry and Criminal Conversation is
the title of what is an arrangement of mannequins in these clothes,
headlessly copulating in various positions. It is wittily unclear
who is meant, the stereotypically lustful 'natives' or the colonisers,
who perceived the natives to be of loose morals and did worse themselves
as sex tourists. The latter is more likely, as the scene includes
a hovering chariot and matching cases. But maybe the matter should
be left unresolved, as cross-fertilisation would be another way
of formulating the chiasmus, mentioned earlier - and a nice motto
for the exhibition as a whole, complete with a nod and a wink to
the Chapman brothers, the 'western' canon of recent art.
Committed and political art is often obliged
to use language. Issues of identity so central in a postcolonial
world are also inevitably bound up with language. In addition, Enwezor
also studied literature in New York and is a poet, critic and editor.
Language therefore is and needs to be ubiquitous in Documenta11
- even in painting. Glenn Ligon's painting Stranger featured
extracts from James Baldwin's essay Stranger in the Village.
Language as something unfolding in time already contains reference
to history. Ecke Bonk's installation of 428 title pages of successive
editions of the etymological Deutsches Wörterbuch by the
Grimm brothers (since 1852 and in different states of yellowing)
heightened the sense of linguistic historicity. Darboven and On
Kawara have been mentioned. It is here that James Coleman's projection
piece Initials comes in. We hear a boy with a lovely but
very lonely Irish accent spelling and reading with difficulty a
disjointed text. The fragments include "why do you gaze? / say it
... / from hollow of throat to hollow of ear ... / and return to
words ... / unfolding in a time - now." One needs time for this
Documenta. Art is work, necessarily troublesome.
Only after my return did I find out about
what seems to be a - in many ways redeeming - key contribution to
Documenta11: Thomas Hirschhorn's Bataille Monument. In a
very marginalised part of Kassel he had residents, who were paid
to help him, erect a shed complete with bar, library and TV studio
for regular local broadcasts. This urban experiment started well
in advance of the exhibition and it already seems to be a success,
contributing to the social fabric of the area. Here marginality
is not in the first instance geographical. Here, more than in shunning
the Baroque (think: colonial) park, which usually is a centrepiece
of Documenta, does Enwezor really promote critical thinking about
the art world.
The many videos, life stories and those
works which deliberately disappoint the outdated expectation to
perceive or even understand art in a flash make the overworked viewer
- it has to be confessed - sigh in relief when in a new Documenta
venue, a renovated brewery, a skateboarder is first heard overhead
and then seen while using a sculptural skate bowl (by Simparch)
for something akin to play. When about the only reference to erotic
encounters in this sizeable exhibition of art is entitled criminal
conversation; it would appear that Enwezor is not far from entering
the austere second stage of post-colonialism. Despite The Commitments'
assertions (who remembers?) that the Irish are the blacks of Europe,
we will probably have to wait for stage three, though, to be included
in a more appropriate way - or else adopt a more proactive stance
ourselves. In the meantime, the insights, which Enwezor's Documenta
provides, give much food for thought.
Manifesta 4
If the male curator, the prescribed venue
and predetermined issues were slightly problematic for and in this
Documenta, Manifesta 4 had it all in this postbiennial era.
The event that calls itself the European Biennial of Contemporary
Art was curated this time by three young women, Iara Boubnova (Russian,
based in Bulgaria), Nuria Enguita Mayo (Spanish) and Stéphanie Moisdon
Trembley (French). On their travels they wished to delay a thematic
narrowing down for as long as possible.
With its changing venues, Manifesta already necessarily includes
the European periphery. This time, however, Frankfurt was a more
central venue than Kassel could ever be. Frankfurt is big business
and Manifesta turned this into an issue - or was dragged into it.
Portraits of (peripheral European) artists were shown on bus shelters
with a statement of how ridiculously low their annual wages were.
Christoph Büchel took the opportunity to make money more directly.
He was invited to participate and sold this invitation to Manifesta
via an internet auction site. Many of the other artists collaborated
with Dirk Fleischmann in The Bistro, where various drinks
and snacks were named after the artists who had chosen them. For
each item sold, the artist would earn a fixed amount. No wonder
that big business welcomed Manifesta. Art Frankfurt willingly
adjusted its dates to coincide with the exhibition, which luckily
for most foreign visitors coincided with Documenta also.
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FINGER: Evolutionary
Cells, 2002, installation view;
photo Bernd Bodtländer; courtesy Manifesta
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More coincidences: Ute Meta-Bauer, co-curator
of Documenta, figured with an entry in a competition run by FINGER
(www.evolutionaere-zellen.org)
on the individual and social shaping of every-day life. Viewers,
other artists and interest groups of all kinds were thus part of
an installation in the staircase of a former office building and
thus could advertise for their concerns. In both exhibitions, viewers
are invited to research, inform themselves and engage with artists'
projects on the internet (www.documenta.de,
www.e-manifesta.org).
Transparency of research and the curatorial
process, which Enwezor stressed through Documenta platforms, was
institutionalised or even became art in Frankfurt. Revolver - Archives
for Current Art had a large display of independent art-publishers'
products. More importantly, the curators themselves displayed the
fruits of their travels and research in an archive-cum-installation.
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Stefan Wieland: KIOSK
- Modes of Multiplication, 2002
installation view, mixed media; photo Axel Stefan, courtesy
Manifesta
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A sizeable file was labelled 'Rep. of Ireland',
but only three items could be found in it: A brochure of IMMA's
From the Poetical to the Political exhibition and two copies
of the D - n Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology's
CIRCA supplement. Despite the best efforts, how Gerard Byrne
was found and chosen for this exhibition remains a mystery (he was
not in the New York file and there was none for Dublin). Nor was
it possible to establish why so many others weren't. It is now evident
how much research work curators of important, large-scale contemporary
art exhibitions are willing to undertake. To put it bluntly, they
need to be spoon-fed and somebody has to hold the spoon. One more
'Irish' contribution was a lecture by Katy Deepwell, whose feminist
concerns fitted well into the perspectives of the three curators.
She is, after all, member of our section of AICA.
Well, one of the 167 European artists is
Irish - not exactly a statistically adequate representation. Gerard
Byrne (Dublin- and New York-based) was included with his excellent
piece Why It's Time For Imperial...Again. The enacted Chrysler
ad matched the monetary theme and gave it a suitably critical and
theoretical twist. It was well placed, too, in a small classicist
building, the Portikus, which in itself speaks of imperialist aspirations.
Mark Bijl wrote 'RESIST' on the facade, one letter on each column.
Indeed, Byrne's piece would have suited Documenta11 extremely well.
(Was it excluded because Catherine David's catalogue had included
a Hans Haacke work using a luxury car ad?) Some other projects,
like Maria Eichhorn's Public Limited Company, which is contractually
bound not to make any profit, could have been swapped, this time
from Kassel to Frankfurt.
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Gerard Byrne: Why
It's Time for Imperial, Again..., 1998-2000,
installation shot; photo Bernd Bodtländer; courtesy Manifesta
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If postcolonialism was an issue at Manifesta,
too, sociological approaches also featured. Whereas Fareed Armaly
and Rashid Masharawi showed video footage and adorned walls with
graphs, etc., on the borders of the Palestinian territories at Documenta,
in Frankfurt, Måns Wrange displayed statistics and real-life political
exhibit documentation on lobbying for Joe Soap alias Norma. The
project is described in the exhibited documentation as "a socio-political
experiment that aims to change society in accordance with the opinions
of a statistically average citizen."
Both Documenta and Manifesta seem to have
preserved a charming utopianism against all the odds. In Frankfurt,
this often manifests itself more playfully: figures on a roof (Anton
Litvin's Population Next), oranges in the river Main (Jasper
van den Brink), the Jungle Book Project in different languages
(Pierre Bismuth), a performance, Superficial Blackhole (Takehito
Koganezawa), with masked men in a bathroom filmed in situ... Even
serious topics somehow looked a bit more light-hearted, because
they were mostly tackled in public spaces. A sand-filled, burnt-out
car in front of the Schirn (complete with 'no surrender' graffito)
or a reproduction of a version of Picasso's Guernica on the
banks of the river Main looking almost like a bus stop (Ibon Aranberri):
the clash with pedestrian zone or greenery works wonders.
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Marc Bijl: RESIST,
2002, installation; photo Bernd Bodtländer;
courtesy Manifesta
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The way in which the exhibitions serve
as an appendix to each other may be due to the fact that the brief
was similarly open and certain preoccupations (not to say trends)
are in evidence in recent art - or shall we say curatorial practice.
The ubiquitous rhizomes also sprouted in Frankfurt: "Instead of
dealing with binary oppositions (interior/exterior, exclusion/inclusion)
or stressing national identities, our project tries to establish
a more rhizomic [i.e. rhizomatic] structure[,] which can relate
one project to another, one group to another and both to the physical
place" (press release). Artists and curators did, I think, work
well with the place (Frankfurt) and a larger entity of interests
and concerns (e.g., monetary) did emerge. This was, however, 'only'
a European affair. After Kassel, the limits of this approach became
visible, a regrettable restriction. Moreover, once again, the chance
to address at least the European peripheries (and not only Ireland)
more adequately was left relatively unexplored.
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Måns Wrange:
The Average Citizen Lobbying Project, 1999-2009,
installation detail; photo Axel Stephan; courtesy Manifesta
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Finally, and just in case I need to spell
this out: since the first Documenta11 platforms have taken place
without Irish involvement, since Irish art was almost absent from
Kassel and was only just there in Frankfurt, it may be a good idea
to work towards holding a Manifesta here. This would continue in
the best Rosc tradition, show international contemporary
art in a way in which IMMA or small galleries could never do, introduce
ambitious curatorial work on an international scale to Ireland and,
last but not least, it could get Irish contemporary art noticed
abroad. If Irish artists can now stay in their postcolonial home
country and create valid work, then the curators need to travel.
We need to get them to come here and take work back with them when
they leave.
PS: Would somebody please persuade Harald
Szeemann to say a final "I do" to curating EV+A.
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is a Government
Postdoctoral Fellow at UCD (IRCHSS); she is a Dublin-based art historian,
critic, writer and curator of an exhibition on Joyce in Art for
2004.
Documenta 11, Kassel, June-September,
2002
Manifesta 4, Frankfurt,
May-August 2002
