Documenta X (review)

EXHIBITION DOCUMENTA X Kassel, Germany, 1997 Reviewed by Sabine Fabo, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Peter-Welter-Platz 2, D50676 Cologne, Germany. E-mail: . There has been much criticism about the 1997 documenta X, especially with regard to its reluctance toward an ex­ pressive, opulent art that might appeal intensively to the senses. Thus, painting and sculpture played a minor role in the exhibition, whereas art reflecting its mediality stood in the focus of curator Catherine David's concept. The skepticism toward the materiality of art became obvious in one of the cen­ tral rooms of the main exhibition build­ ing, the Fridericianum, where German painter Gerhard Richter, acknowledged for the stylistic variety of his paintings— which range from photorealistic realiza­ tions to large abstract formats—was rep­ resented only by Atlas, his private photo archive, which is closely connected to both his work and his biography. This subjective collection of private snapshots and reproduced press-clips has served the artist by inspiring raw material over a period of three decades. It constitutes a basis of already-mediated images from which the process of painting as another transformation of media images was de­ veloped. The paintings that resulted from these explorations were absent, somehow characterizing Catherine David's concept: the complex process of image-making was focused on and fa­ vored against the idea of the merely aes­ thetically pleasing—and perhaps com­ forting—results of a closed work of art. The immediacy of art and its sponta­ neous impact on the viewer was always questioned; the exhibition was devoid of any unmediated approaches towards art. The world seems to have become too complicated to follow a simple plea­ sure principle. David's concept coupled mass media (as well as new electronic media) with both entertainment and Guy Debord's notion of a "society of spectacle," against which David endeav­ ored to establish a critical discourse. The idea of artists' experiments and ex­ plorations of new means of expression in the field of the electronic was rather ignored. Consequently, David tried to avoid any commercial involvement by either the art market or the entertain­ ment industry. Oddly enough, it was this strategy that brought documenta Xan enormous public profile; the culture in­ dustry embraced and encapsulated most willingly an approach that was originally meant to criticize that very system. The "political and aesthetical inquiry" David intended to undertake was also reflected in the catalogue's title, poetics and politics, the main assumption being that, under the signs of globalization, experience can be gained only in frag­ ments. There are no central perspec­ tives offering a complacent, holistic view of the world. The rejection of a single, all-prevailing view was central to the ex­ hibition; instead, the notion of the pe­ riphery was emphasized against the cen­ ter. Urban structure was used as a metaphor both for actual modes of per­ ception and for the social framework that embeds and contextualizes art. Ar­ chitects—with their concepts of social city structure and theories on urbanism, social networks and global economy— are crucial to David's outlook on the state of modern society and culture. Rem Koolhaas in particular seems to have inspired vast parts of the exhibi­ tion. His concepts for the Pearl River Delta in China were reproduced as huge wallpaper that contextualized the exhi­ bition rooms in some areas. Koolhaas' concept of urbanism, overwhelmingly formulated in his book 5, M, L, XL, was quoted in the catalogue as structural metaphor. Earlier critical Utopian posi­ tions like those of Aldo van Eyck or the early Hans Haacke, along with Archigram's design for flexible, almost organic cities in the sixties, were reemphasized and put into an actual context. Despite the clearly defined concept of art and its mediation, documenta's ap­ proach toward media could not avoid ambivalence. The highly ambitious theoretical claims were not convinc­ ingly reflected in the exhibition itself: aside from the Internet projects—with their emphases on the urban meta­ phor—media art and electronic art as such were only very sparsely presented. Works of this type included a video in­ stallation byJordan Crandall, suspension , which explored different roles of the observer, who himself...