”Documenta IX,” this year`s installment in the world`s most important series of exhibitions devoted to contemporary art, is a huge, sprawling show that attempts nothing less than a survey of artmaking in our time.
Gone are the curatorial overviews that once distinguished this venture from its older rival, the Venice Biennale. In fact, the current Documenta follows much the same course as the 1988 Biennale, shying away from focus-giving restrictions and embracing pluralism with tremendous fervor.
The show includes 190 artists from nearly 40 countries, giving visitors less a display of curatorial concepts than a teeming mass of approaches, styles and media that shows how contemporary art actually unfolds, in unruly variety.
”I don`t know what art is,” wrote Jan Hoet, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium, and head of the four-man team that spent three years and $11 million putting together this unusually ”open”
Documenta.
Hoet, 57, is nothing if not a showman, staging 12- and 24-hour press conferences, then collaborating on a book that outlines his organizational approach with equally theatrical vagueness.
But Hoet is also his own man, scheduling jazz, baseball and boxing events to coincide with a Documenta that he and his assistants assembled largely independently of big-name galleries and their ”hottest” artists.
Anyone expecting an exhibition filled with the stars of the `80s-Schnabel to Fischl, Kiefer to Koons-will be disappointed, as will those who look for the kind of hierarchy that in the past has turned the rosters of these shows into tip sheets for collectors.
Instead, Hoet has provided a deliberately unsettled exhibition in which fully half of the participants are unknown to American viewers, giving an unusually high degree of adventure and challenge.
All the orthodox disciplines-painting, sculpture, drawing, photography-are represented along with installations, performance art, video,
conceptual art and what often looks like industrial machinery.
The last Documenta, in 1987, had the same representation serving a theme that focussed on the ”historical and social dimensions of art.” But Hoet has written, ”Documenta is not to be reduced to a central idea. I do not have a concept. I am simply building a structure than suggests a concept.”
The concept he suggests most clearly is unpredictability, for in choosing artists from Scandinavia to Australia and Hungary to Korea, Hoet found no unifying ideas. His artists literally go off in all directions, producing an enormous range of works in countless different styles.
To show them required nine indoor locations, as well as 37 others scattered around the city, mostly outside. None of the maps is entirely accurate, and when you think you have found every last piece, another might confront you from the windows of a bank or from a treetop or, even more a surprise, in an underground facility for parking.
These works are almost exclusively temporary installations that show, as one art historian put it, the artists` ”dialogue with the spot on the spot.” Repeated visitors to Documenta will be no stranger to them, as they were very much present in the last installment and, indeed, have become commonplace in the contemporary art of many countries.
In his writing, Hoet does not reveal a bias toward them, though he certainly has one, as his most memorable show in Ghent was an exhibition in which artists created installation pieces for a number of homes. This was perhaps the best example of the ”displacement” he prizes, and if his artists have achieved little as dramatic at Documenta, their installations in public spaces are still the most imposing works on show.
The entire exhibition requires four full days of viewing, and even then, is difficult to sort out. For alongside the art of such masters as Francis Bacon, Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Merz are pieces by many, many unproven artists and artists who may not work within Western traditions.
This clouds one`s ability to determine the show`s overall quality-apparently by Hoet`s intent. As he has written, ”People want certainties. Quality in art invariably comes with this urge for absolute certainty. I`m afraid I cannot give you that certainty.”
In the main, he does give an exhibition that tends toward political correctness, with black, Asian, Hispanic and female artists represented well if not always plentifully. The biggest surprise, however, is the relative lack of socially motivated art and total absence of art that responds to the AIDS crisis.
Here Hoet is remarkably direct: ”Those of us who are slightly familiar with the world, know that a new sociological approach of art has become increasingly popular. That a trend has been started, even, to only accept what can immediately be placed sociologically.
”Poverty, AIDS, censorship, war, human alienation, etcetera, anecdotes are beginning to surface. That makes me suspicious.
”Take AIDS, for example. Aren`t we better off with science than with art for that? With a less selfish policy towards a more humane world order in the case of poverty? And with a polemic in favor of peace in (the case) of war?” From this, one might assume Hoet`s responses will be in favor of strongly formal abstract painting and conceptualism. But his team has not weighted the show in either direction, and aside from two large, beautifully conceived pieces by Joseph Kosuth, conceptual art is in its purer forms under-represented.
The absence of a theme with firm subdivisions permits a healthy mix of styles in the 18th-Century buildings that are Documenta`s primary exhibition spaces. The Museum Fridericianum and Orangerie, for example, house works as different as a sublimely haunting video installation by Gary Hill; first-rate monochrome paintings (some deliberately installed so they might be missed) by Lawrence Carroll; and figure sculptures by the Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow. Attached to the Fridericianum is a tower that was part of the city`s fortifications before becoming an astronomical observatory in the 18th Century. Here is one of the smallest sections of the show, presenting masterpieces by such forebears as Jacques Louis David, Paul Gauguin and James Ensor.
For the first time this year the exhibition has two additional structures: a glass-and steel building beautifully designed by Frankfurt architects Jochem Jourdan and Bernhard Mueller, and a sequence of five linked temporary buildings, designed by the Belgian team of Paul Rabbrecht and Hilde Daem, in the vast lush park known as the Karlsaue.
Paintings by Chicagoans Jim Lutes and Gaylen Gerber are shown to poor advantage in these structures, having to share space with artists who each claim more immediate attention. Chicago object maker Joe Scanlan has a small room to himself in the Fridericianum, just filling it with two understated wall and floor pieces. And a single forcefully reworked cage piece by Martin Puryear is cramped beyond hope in the park`s temporary quarters.
Among the strongest works on view are video pieces by Marie Jose Burki, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler and Bill Viola. One Burki piece, in particular, achieves the kind of play Hoet and his team were after, by working with animal images in relation to its setting in the Kassel Ottoneum or Natural History Museum.
Other notable interventions take place at the Neue Galerie, where photographers Angela Grauerholz and Zoe Leonard show their works among the permanent collection of 18th-Century German paintings, and in the Brothers Grimm Museum, where Rodney Graham`s computer-directed drawings propose alternative furniture arrangements for the Grimms` office-studies in Berlin.
The most ravishing installation, a spatially deceptive hole lined with velvety black pigment, is by Anish Kapoor in a one-room structure across from a sound piece by Max Neuhaus. The oddest are Jan Fabre`s hand holding a cylinder that recurs throughout the exhibition and Matthew Barney`s video-and- plastic amalgam that, among other things, has the artist climbing naked in the underground parking lot where the piece is located.
Several engaging installations are outside, from Mo Edoga`s ”Tower of Hope,” an ongoing project on the central Friedrichsplatz, to Tadashi Kawamata`s village of cast-off wood on the banks of the Kleine Fulda, Rober Racine`s word catalogue in the avenue of trees before the Orangerie and Patrick Corillon`s storytelling that leads into the foliage of the Karlsaue.
But perhaps none symbolizes the ambitious reach of the show better than Jonathan Borofsky`s sculpture in front of the Fridericianum, for there, on a long gleaming pipe, one of Borofsky`s cornball comic-book figures is engaged in a perfectly routine, matter-of-fact climb to the heavens.
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”Documenta IX” continues through Sept. 20.
