Outside / Inside - Documenta and Innenseite

by Sonja van Kerkhoff, 1997
Printed in Arts Dialogue, March 1998

lt seemed as if the evening lectures that occured for the 100 days of the 10th Documenta were what the French curator, Catherine David, decided was the focus, and that everything else was either subdued
or of little consequence.

A locked cabinet by Lois Weinberger
(b.1947, works in Vienna, Austria)

There was a map of Kassel on the door but you had to read the Documenta short guide to realise that these cabinets contained seeds collected from the streets of Kassel and despite being informed in the short guide, that you could collect a key from the documenta office to open them, the office didn't know what I was talking about when I asked for the key.
Documenta is a five yearly art event-exhibition that began in Kassel in 1955 in an otherwise uninteresting industrialised city in central-west Germany (The Ruhr area).

David said in various television and newspaper interviews that she was presenting a different position between politics and aesthetics than one of entertainment or show. Reading this excited me, but the positioning of the words, "poetics" and "politics" above one another as David did for the cover of the catalogue, while a nice concept, in itself, was not enough.
Over the days, it was rare to find some resonance in the exhibition itself. On the whole, the art by the 250 or so artists didn't match the calibre of the lectures and I felt annoyed because there are artists of calibre who do address many of the issues raised in the lectures and in the 830 page catalogue. What was her critera for her choice or artists or their work? My problem was that I couldn't find any, not that she needed an obvious one. But because I was so disappointed by the works I encountered, I started looking for some point in, say, the room after room of small black and white journalistic images from the '60s and '70s.

Was there some sort of message? And if not, then what made this exhibition any different from one that used sensationalism as a ploy?
Even presenting 'the book' as the catalogue felt dishonest, especially when another book, the short guide was necessary for finding some of the work. It could have been a statement; to give us text, lots to read, perhaps to mull over in place of seductive visuals.


David's Parcous, showing that the exhibtion started at the station leading the viewer a direct route (about 3 or 4 blocks) through the Friedrichsplatz to the Orangerie.

It did feel as if David intended to use the Documenta to present an opposite to iconophilia, an embracing of the pleasures of popular culture. But she didn't engage in a debate on these issues in the Documenta show itself, while many of the lectures such as those by the Indian cultural studies critic, Gayatri Spivak, the philosopher Edward Said, the Palestinian filmmaker, Elia Suleiman, the urbanist Saskia Sasson, or the South African curator, Okwui Enwezor, did.

These lectures presented alternatives, alternatives I found missing in the exhibition. Such as the room of numerous pseudo-science research-like web sites, which, when you pushed the right keys, didn't present anything new or challenge how we might perceive a website, or art for that matter.

The catalogue, presented in strict chronology beginning with 1945, was a paradox in my view. There were useful and interesting essays in it, but as a whole, history was presented in linear fashion, much like David's parcous.

She presented her parcours, a 'right' route to follow, so that the visitor could experience the Documenta in a particular order. When I followed this route, I kept wondering what it was that I was supposed to notice. That it began at the railway station? That a handful of works were in underground shop spaces - a few video monitors in shop windows? A shop filled with second-hand clothes? I kept thinking this is 1997 and surely the sighting of works outside of a museum setting couldn't be the only point here.
The '92 Documenta had works in a sewer (Jimmy Durham) and a shop window presentation (Guilliame Bijl); Joesph Beuys' oak trees and rocks at the '87 Documenta went to sites the public chose. So the claim by David that this Documenta integrated the sites within the city rang hollow. Each time I passed the monitor in the underground subway which showed a loop of a man kicking a jammed cigarette machine (Peter Friedl, Austria), there were a couple of people milling around this looking just as confused as I did until I realised, yes, this was the Documenta piece in this length of corridor.

Further on, along the walls was a trail of pages pasted up by the artist group (who were not part of the Documenta exhibition), Geo-Kunst Expedition from the Republic of Armenia, which invited the passerby for comments or responses to the Documenta.


Here, 1995 by Siobhan Hapaska
(born 1965, works in London)

This bed was walled off by a rope so you couldn't get near it, let alone touch it. A video in the same room showed you how it 'functioned' for the artist. She lay in it with the straps fastened across her body.
It came across as yet another precious art object that suggested a poetic approach in it's concept but came across as a precious museum piece.
In the same room "Stray", an upside down branch attached to a motor that run back and forth along a small railway track, didn't evoke that sense of object adoration.
It was another form of protest at David's Documenta, others being street performances and non-Documenta declared exhibitions throughout the city and along the Documenta parcours.

That the Documenta 'things' were hard to distinguish from the graffiti or commercialism of the shops wasn't so irritating, but once you found it, with the help of the short guide, then you had to decide if a locked metal box, said to contain the seeds of plants (Lois Weinberger) was subtle or inaccessible. As an idea, it was poetic, but what was the point of the painted metal box?
He had also planted seeds from other places between railway tracks (as a metaphor of migration), and this sounded like an interesting piece of intervention. But when I saw the partitioned off and unused area, it came across as an idea that had become distanced from its poetry because it was part of Documenta. Any subtlety evoked by the metaphor of migrating weeds was destroyed by all the barriers around -they made sure you wouldn't get too close to this precious work. The poetry could only be in your head. More convincing was the natural migration of plants beyond his museum-ised section; the same plants flourished just as successfully and I could get close enough to smell them.


A-Z Escape Vehicle by Andrea Zittel. 		Art doesn't have to please or be obvious, but over the days, I started to get sick of the feeling that someone was pulling my leg. Sometimes a question or an assumption was challenged or evoked, but then left in mid-air. More often than not, I had no idea why a work was include in the show. Tangible pieces such as Andrea Zittel's caravans felt conceptually empty. Each capsule-like caravan was fit out as if by interior decorators with yuppie tastes. Then the handbook informed you that they had been. The agitiation of the other visitors and the nervousness ofthe museum guards confirmed my feeling that it was a big joke on the viewer. I didn't have a problem with that in itself, but I couldn't see the point, nor did I enjoy the use of materials.

It seemed as if David chose artists who worked well with materials, but then what she chose or how it was presented undermined that materiality.

Gerhard Richter, renowned for the subtle and evocative use of colour in his semi-abstract paintings, was represented by wall after wall of tiny black and white polaroids of uninspiring landscapes. The visual was overkill, as were the three other rooms of black and white photos. The works by the journalist photographers were evocative and insightful, but it was too much of the same. This did an injustice to their work because you just stopped looking after so many rows of sameness. An overkill of the political doesn't evoke the poetic.


Detail of Durban, South Africa, 1959-60
by Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990, The Netherlands)

The text on the back of the seat is: Europeans Blankes
(=Europeans Whites)

It seemed that, on entering the Friedrichs museum, an overkill of black and white images (there were more on the upper floors too) might have been intended to create a distaste for the visual. Funnily, a highly colourful installation by the Finnish artist Oyvind Fahlstrosm, which was located in a side room always had people milling around in it, as if it were a place of refuge. That in itself might have been a powerful statement by the curator, but this installation didn't contribute to this.

Various sculptures, 1969, by Oyvind Fahlstrosm
The colours, initially a welcome sight, after a few minutes were no more than that. Splashes of colour and form and feeling of datedness (The works were made in the 1969).

Still from the film, Berlin or a Dream with Cream,
by Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976, Belgium)

Interestingly, there was a broad representation of the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers' work, with photos, slide projections and a video interview with the artist, so the visitor felt welcome to explore his world. Unfortunately it was situated by an entrance, so it was not physically possible to pause for a work that had a lot to offer. For me, his work was one of a handful that really fitted David's theme of the poetic and political. Broodthaers' 'museum of eagles' was poeticising and politicising, through his tongue-in-cheek use of popular images.

A few floors up, the African American Kerry James Marshall's colourful paintings also evoked poetry and politics, but more form the view of engagement with a poignant use of materiality: huge hanging canvases, skins so black that you could only see details if very close. If you stepped back for a view of the whole image, the details in the black surfaces vanished. The huge paintings were sumptuous and enriched the political edge in the work: the patchwork-like composition and the storytelling about appearances being not what they seem. Despite being cramped into a similiar space that Zittel's had been, here the peripheral placement suited the themes and the paintings were so impressive that it seemed that it didn't matter where they were hung.

Untitled (Altgeld Gardens) 1995,
by Kerry James Marshall,
(1955, lives in Chicago, U.S.A.)

These paintings depict the housing suburbs built in Chicago in the 1960's for the migration
of African Americans from the south.
Marshall grew up in one of these.
There were other evocative works, such as the animation film, "History of the main complaint" by the South African, William Kentridge; the film 'Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" by the Belgian, Johan Grimonprez; the filmloop, "Rijst" by Marijke van Warmerdam (The Netherlands); and the film, "Der Zandman" by the Canadian Stan Douglas. They were


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Written by Sonja sonja's art