In response to this Documenta's 1997 curator, Catherine David, looks beyond Germany to new forces of globalisation, where an economic domination of the real is accompanied by crisis and sometimes violent social and cultural transformations. David identifies "the Benetton effect" as symptomatic of the dilemma facing contemporary art, where "through the aestheticization of information and forms of debate . . . any act of judgment in the immediacy of raw seduction and emotion is paralysed."¹ David links this to a "mounting spectacularization and instrumentalisation of contemporary art" by the cultural industry.² Further, David argues that this reduction is why art is so easily condemned by the likes of Jean Baudrillard for its meaninglessness or its nullity.

In response to these problems, Documenta X sponsors artworks that are ambiguous and paradoxical in their meanings, models of communication which are complex and contradictory, concerning resistance and opposition, often esoteric, hermetic, opaque and formalising negative critique. In this context, the producers (artists) are held apart from the museum, and their artworks are separated again from the exigencies of the cultural industry. For David, overcoming these institutional obstacles involves isolating what is critically intact rather than that which is academically and culturally domesticated.

Parcours (the itinerary)
The exhibition focuses on a timely and programmatic re-examination of the vanguard movements and conceptual practices of the 1960s and what might be their progeny: Marcel Broodthaers, Gordon Matta-Clark, Helio Oiticica, Öyvind Fahlström, Dan Graham, Gerhard Richter, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Richard Hamilton and Aldo van Eyck. Two historical turning points in contemporary culture are crucial here: 1967, a year when post-war economic and utopian aspirations entered overt social crisis, particularly in Europe and with the Vietnam war in America; and 1978, where radical social critiques gave way to more ambiguous positions formed within textuality and linguistic frameworks. Eighteen artists (of a total ninety) re-exhibit work from 1967 and a further seventeen exhibit work from 1978.

Marcel Broodthaers' work, Section Publicite (Advertising Section) from 1968, is reconstructed immediately inside the entrance of the Museum Fridericianum, the Baroque palace situated at the centre of the six Documenta pavilions. The work exists as a jumble of crates, boxes, postcards, mock paintings and objects with dim lighting and muffled voice-overs. In the Documenta catalogue, Benjamin Buchloh illuminates the opacity of the installation in the following way:

[Broodthaers] understood from the very start that there was no radicality in the fact that the [art] work can be reduced to a linguistic structure, that there would be no wider or more egalitarian distribution, no abolition of the commodity object or of the fetishization of aesthetic procedures and perceptions . . . [Broodthaers] was neither sentimental nor reactionary, but he saw this institution [the museum] as an instrument of emancipation.³

There is very little in-situ practice in this Documenta which contrasts institutional and public space with that which is supposedly outside; a project which Broodthaers thought naive. Much of the Museum Fridericianum and other main pavilions are given over to conventional displays of recent and not-so-recent photographic work and urban projects. Architectural propositions such as Archizoom Associati's 1969-72 Non Stop City, which uses mirror box models to project an infinite horizon, are presented alongside Hans Haake's 1977 documentation of slum landlord holdings in Manhattan.

Criticism has been made of Catherine David's aversion to traditional painting practices in this Documenta; a curatorial move that is perhaps opposed to the disenchantments of spectacle and the vagaries of the "overly aestheticised"⁴. For instance, Marria Lassnig and Gerhard Richter are represented without paintings. Lassnig has several pencil and water colour drawings including L'Intimite (Intimacy) from 1967, and Richter has an entire room devoted to the notebook-style 5,000 image Atlas, 1972-96. The view offered by both is closer to the sensitivity of a diary than the spectacle of grand painterly art.

Invariably, it is the different procedures of subjectification - of subject formation, and their associated investments in imaginary and symbolic meaning - that were distinguished in this Documenta. Gary Winogrand's 1971 black and white photographs of people in ordinary urban space, and Robert Adams' 1983 series of shoppers in a Rocky Mountains mall car park, for instance, involved a mixture of cross-gazes and micro-events.

Some of the earliest work in Documenta is Helen Levitt's 1940s photographs of urban poor and street graffiti such as the one scrawled in chalk: "M.J. love some body because she cannot eat or talk, she is crazy you" (Mexico, undated). A more recent confrontation with the stress of city space is Peter Friedl's Dummy from 1997. Here, a video looping day and night in an abandoned underground passageway, records a man putting money into a cigarette machine without successfully obtaining his packet. Frustrated, he kicks the machine, and as he walks away a junkie approaches him for money. The man brushes him off without a word. The junkie, vexed, punches him. In a similar vein, Erik Steinbrecher's photographic propositions, which he describes as "urban grotesque", are displayed in Kassel's local "bus shelter for the drunk and hopeless". And screening in the Museum Fridericianum is Charles Burnett's new film The Final Insult (Am Ende) 1997, which recounts the very funny and attractive history of Box Brown, from his family's slavery to his death in the shopping cart heaven of downtown Los Angeles.

Catherine David uses the earliest work of Jeff Wall to index the turning point of 1978 (Milk from 1982 is installed behind glass in a railway underpass). David argues that Wall's work is emblematic of a change following the generation of conceptual art practices which emphasised activity over the artwork; the shift leaving an unenviable structural problem of managing traces and leftovers. Wall strategically introduced new ambiguities that drew conceptualism back to the basic problems of representation. As he argues, after "1978 there can no longer be an art of activity which does not also integrate the work."⁵ As well as Milk, four monumental Jeff Wall photographs are shown at the Museum Fridericianum. They are still staged and computer-assisted but for the first time the images are black and white and without light boxes, representing a return to realism and inherent internalised tensions. The prosaic titles indicate simple subject matter: Cyclist (propped up against a grey wall and maybe asleep), Citizen (resting on a lawn), Housekeeper and Passerby. These images are contrived between compositional artifice and naturalist description, evoking an ambivalence which cuts into the spectator's belief in the credulousness of the image.

Also ambiguous but more light-handed, Franz West's sculptures and paintings were organised so that they would be near unnoticeable; a strategy which works as a metaphor for the artist's position at one time in the Viennese art world. Looking carefully one might find three Franz West occasional lounges being used by a couple of kids in front of a queue of waiting people in the Documenta-hall. Especially attractive was West's large wire and plastic-wrap bed, positioned among the video replay facilities for the "100 days - 100 guests" lecture program, and used as a seat while viewing the projected

Documenta
Perhaps the best place to end this review of the cultural history sketched out by Documenta X, is with the American artists Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler. These two occupied rooms at the very back of the Documenta-hall, which they crammed with their mutations of post-industrial America. Planned as a retrospective history of their 1977 punk band the Poetics, Oursler and Kelly utilised prop-paintings, loud-speakers, video images, interviews with celebrated rock critics, and other sampling of raw noise to define a particular LA subcultural aesthetic. But as if offering his own critique of Catherine David, Kelly explains that:

Minor histories are ones that have yet found no need to be written. They must find their way into history via forms that already exist (parasitically)... In the end, this work is not so much a portrait of the Poetics as it is an examination of how history is constructed. And in this examination, hopefully the present historicization of the punk period (and any period) will be perceived as a war for the control of meaning.⁶

Jonathan Nichols
October 1997

Endnotes
1. Documenta Short Guide
2. Documenta Short Guide
3. Benjamin Buchloh quoted from Poetics-Politics, Documenta X Catalogue
4. Catherine David quoted from Poetics-Politics, Documenta X Catalogue
5. Jeff Wall quoted from Poetics-Politics, Documenta X Catalogue
6. Mike Kelley quoted from Poetics-Politics, Documenta X Catalogue

© The artists and
Courtesy of Jonathon
Nichols & Documenta

Archizoom Associati, No Stop City,
Paesaggi Interni, 1970

Gerhard Richter, Atlas, 5,000
photographs, 1972-96

Helen Levitt, New York, b/w
photograph, vintage print,
17.8 x 26.3 cm, 1939

Mike Kelley & Tony Oursler,
props painting with speaker, 1997

Franz West, installation view,
undated

Hervé Graumann, Documenta X,
Website, Lost, screen grab, 1997