The art crowd arrived in Kassel coming from the Basel Artfair. This is relevant: If you ever had any illusions left about art as an agent to better the world, the Fair’s glossy, trendy exhibits and the highly agitated protagonists of the Fair, dealers, collectors, auction house and media representatives and their hectic party circus definitely would have wiped out those illusions. This is not a cynical statement, and certainly not directed against visiting the Basel Artfair – on the contrary, Basel is the finest representation of an overpowering trend in the worldwide art operating system and as such really deserves a visit. And rightly so the Chinese contingent of visitors has grown exponentially since four years ago when the first Chinese appeared. But representation of art produced in China has not kept up with this growth and with the escalating interest of the art world. This did not go unnoticed as we are assured by the ArtBasel organizers.
But going forward to Kassel, we enter a completely different territory: Almost all of Western European and American artists that compose the global mainstream art have been left out of this DOCUMENTA.A different map has been drawn of the art, coming mainly from Eastern Europe, India, Asia, Africa and Latin America .For Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, the two persons curating the show, this is not about drawing a summary of the last five years as many expect them to do. This is about a line of thought where the roots of today's contemporary art lie, and where the transgressions, ruptures and fissures can be identified that ultimately shaped and continue to shape the outcome of contemporary art. For this purpose, exhibits may date back as far as the 14th century, as some Indian miniatures do". Migration of Forms" has morphed into a main topic of this DOCUMENTA—a global research of patterns, colours, visual language, movements and concepts that have appeared across space and time, with or more often without a cause and effect relationship at the time they were conceived somewhere on the globe. The curators weave these very different manifestations into what becomes one big ornament, the DOCUMENTA.
We may disagree with this line of thought and their curatorial choices, but we have to agree that bold they are, in that the curators have not compromised to the expectations of the global mainstream. And equally so they have not compromised to the expectations of the art market. So many curators and art dealers rushing through the different exhibition venues in the opening days were dazzled not to find their heroes that they have so successfully groomed into global mainstream over the past few years. Actually one of the biggest merits of this DOCUMENTA is to abandon this vicious circle of forced innovation however small and irrelevant, then market success, then hype, then competition and then even noisier over shouting as marks so much of the event art of today. We will not find the cracks of today's art market in this exhibition who command the staggering prices and our respect during the reminder of the year. Are the many artists we come to discover in this DOCUMENTA worse than the mainstream artists? Not really. Are they better? Not really. But they provide considerable freshness in this offering, even though some have produced their art in the sixties or seventies, widely unnoticed innovators in their time. These discoveries may well be the greatest merit attributable to the curators and provide for some great attractions—even taken as single expressions and not as part of the grand curatorial rationale.
The curators also targeted another taboo of contemporary art presentation: the White Cube. "The White Cube is dead", as Roger Buergel declared in one of his often quite spectacular and skillful presentations. In most spaces the art was presented against strong colours such as burgundy, dark lilac, apricot, pink e. a. ,with strong spot lighting, provoking drama and emotion, providing an entry point and often resulting in interpretation or narrative of its own rather than plain and sober background to the piece. At times this obviously contradicts the intention of an artist who produces for the specific condition of the autonomous white cube. We can safely predict that the White Cube will survive this attack.
Two critical issues come to mind when weighing DOCUMENTA 12: The three questions defining the entry point- “Is modernity our Antiquity?", "Bare Life" and "What to do?" — are hardly traceable in the exhibition any more. I suspect that during their research the curators became so fascinated with their personal discoveries of migration of forms that they switched their priority .Also the first question may have proved during the research process to be formulated very much with a Western viewpoint: Modernity in other parts of the world may have come in very different manifestation or maybe has not arrived at all. But these questions have no lesser charm to be developed than "Migration of Forms". And clearly less charm has another innovation of DOCUMENTA 12: The greenhouse pavillion in the Aue part of Kassel. Originally designed as a grandiose crystal palace, it aborted in the end into something like a tomato breeding station. Hard to explain how a building could ever be conceived that would expose artworks directly to sunlight and extreme greenhouse temperature without precaution and protection. Somewhere in the construction process the misconceived crystal palace concept had to be abandoned and adapted, and an environment as unfriendly as ever imaginable resulted.
Chinese artists have been represented much more numerous than in the past, a result of extensive visits by the curators to China. Since 1972, when Beuys and his team planted 7000 oak trees, no artist could ever occupy the global media in a comparable way as the artist Ai Weiwei did with his "Fairytale" social sculpture.
In a recent interview, Artistic Director Roger Buergel said:" I will never curate again an art exhibition. I only want to do things I cannot do..."Let us wait and see.
第十二届卡塞尔文献展 温室大棚
卡塞尔城区俯瞰