Haiku Review 2 – Documenta 11

Platform 5: Exhibition

Kassel, Germany, June 8 - September 15, 2002

July 15, 2002

Documenta, the exhibition, is the fifth in a series of discourses, or platforms, exploring the spaces inhabited by culture in our global society. From March 2001 to September 2002, in Vienna, New Delhi and elsewhere, the following important subjects were debated: Platform 1: Democracy Unrealized; Platform 2: Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice & the Processes of Truth & Reconciliation; Platform 3: Creolite & Creolization - An exploration of global cultural miscegenation; and Platform 4: Under Siege - Four African Cities (Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa and Lagos). Artistic Director, Okwui Enwezor, the first non-European Artistic Director of Documenta, says that Kassel, the last of the platforms, “gives concrete form to all of Documenta 11”.

The scale and ambition of Documenta 11's mandate is both laudable and frustrating. Enwezor has honed in on a trend in the art world towards self-consciously socially engaged art, an understandable response to the many inter-linked crises that face our planet. The environment, the emptiness of corporatized culture and the astounding poverty and injustice that continue to flourish in the world are some of the broader themes explored in this sprawling exhibition. However, if there is a central thread to be found among the hundreds of works it would have to be activism as art. Art as a place where inequalities are acknowledged and perhaps in some way redressed. Art as a place where the oppressed can tell their stories, and presumably, be heard. To put it another way: Equal Opportunity Art. Palestinian despair that knows no end. Uruguayan torture victims. Congolese resistance to oppression. Moldovan railway workers in inhumane conditions. Black/white tensions in the UK that just won’t go away. Contemporary Lebanese historians facing censorship. Inuits under cultural siege. In a way there's something almost utopian about all these groups and issues intersecting and colliding in the generous embrace of the art world. But on the ground it often translated into a stunning array of artistic banality. It felt like the art world's answer to the Earth Summit. Every oppressed minority represented, irrespective of artistic merit. Endless rooms of installations that looked suspiciously like libraries, offices and information booths jammed with reams of A4 paper explanations. Stills and videos that looked like they'd been lifted straight from National Geographic and worse still, CNN.

Perhaps it is a measure of the degree of desperation felt by these artists which has lead them to communicate in such plain and direct language. Perhaps it is this that fuels their desire to deal in facts and figures rather than metaphors and images. Perhaps the last place for them to turn to is the art world. All these possibilities may be true, but what sings truest of all is that no matter how eloquently the curators shout about this kind of work, prose will never transmute into poetry. While the concept of art as social protest has been around for centuries, the line between art and protest was never in question. No one can doubt that Goya’s “Disasters of War” (1810-20) or Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937) are art. But what is one to make of Georges Adéagbo’s installation “African Socialism”? It is comprised of so many pieces of printed paper it would take you a year to read and digest them all. Is this the point? Or Andreja Kuluncic’s “Distributive Justice”, an aesthetically numbing online interactive piece created with the involvement of biologists, philosophers, theologists, geneticists, doctors and physicists. The catalogue states that this project “…deals with the distribution of goods in society.” If they hadn’t told me, I certainly would not have known just by looking at it. And isn’t that why we go to museums and galleries, to look at art? Which brings me to my central bone of contention, one that all writers will be familiar with, show don’t tell. If you need an A4 sheet of paper to explain what the work “deals” with, as opposed to the work’s meaning revealing itself through looking, contemplating, thinking and feeling, the artist has failed to communicate with the audience. Why does so much contemporary art tell not show? Is a lack of technical training to blame? Is conceptualism the culprit? Or is it post-Modernism? Mercifully, there were some notable exceptions to this general rule. These were almost all by established artists, which was a shame and a disappointment. Nevertheless, here are some of the highlights.

In Shirin Neshat's “Tooba” on two screens facing off, men and women are again polarised and unreconciled. In the green sepia of a lonely mountain landscape, a lone woman stands by a single tree that has been bricked in. Her skin is worn as the tree's bark. Opposite a band of men are slowly and menacingly advancing on the woman/tree. Just as they scale the wall, she dissolves into the tree. “Tooba” is an imaginary and allegorical place, but one that is also biblical and primal. Neshat, as ever, has surrounded herself with an expert film crew. The camera is sharp and devoid of sentimentality, the music is taut but lyrical and the editing so beautifully coordinated that in spite of only ever seeing the screens side-on, you never for a second feel lost. On the contrary, this feels like an entirely different way of seeing.

William Kentridge's “Zeno Writing” is a frantically paced animation made using not more than twenty charcoal drawings that are constantly reworked and reframed. There are amorphous, numb landscapes, maddening ledgers containing blind columns of texts and numbers, iron lace that decorates and suffocates, bourgeois interiors with grotesque dancing chairs and most memorable of all, a possessed typewriter with keys that jump up and flail about like a drowning man waving his arms. Words and images appear only to be melancholically smudged out seconds later. Kentridge simultaneously evokes the landscape of the mind, the landscape of war and hatred, and the political landscape of his native South Africa. Each of the five acts, for the atmosphere is decidedly theatrical, are bracketed by black smoke rising and black smoke falling. Appearing, disappearing, recurring and reinventing.

In “Homebound” Mona Hatoum takes you inside to a place that looks like your home gone very wrong. The room is wired off with sharp, smooth wires. Beyond that all of the familiar domestic apparatus, much of it skeletal and metallic, are connected by electric wires and heavy clamps. Periodically an object lights up and emits a pitiful wail, like a man gasping for his last breath. The title of the piece may be taken quite literally, whether the person inside is homebound because dying, or homebound because a prisoner, or homebound because a civilian caught in the crossfire of a monstrous war.

Chohreh Feyzdjou was born in Tehran in 1955 and died in Paris in 1996. Her piece, “Products of Chohreh Feyzdjou” is an enormous installation with hundreds of blackened, obscure objects. Each one of these, on sooty, mauve labels, bears the title of the piece. Rows of dirty bottles, jars and sachets containing incomprehensible, dead objects. Crates of black gunk and bolts of filthy fabrics and most disturbing of all canvases hanging from stretchers like raw hides at a tannery. The gross morbidity of the installation in the cavernous main of hall of the museum, coupled with the strangely intimate and obsessive labelling of each one of these futile objects, gives the effect of being inside the artist's very own sarcophagus. ◊

Haiku Review was started by renowned Sydney-based visual artist and writer Ruark Lewis back in the dawn of electronic journals.