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Is it brilliant? Is it bull? Whichever, the Documenta art exhibition has totally transformed the ugly duckling town of Kassel, Germany. |
BY BRENT GREGSTON | kassel, germany-- Every five years, the provincial German town of Kassel becomes Mecca for art lovers who worship that obscure object of desire: the avant-garde. They come in the tens of thousands (last time's total was over a half million) for the hundred days of the Documenta, the Olympics of contemporary art. The current edition, the 10th, opened on June 21 and runs through Sept. 28. I decided to make the pilgrimage and give myself over for three full days to everything 115 pomo artists had to hurl at me. The event began in the mid-1950s when a local artist, Arnold Bode, organized a big exhibition to rehabilitate German art condemned by the Nazis as "degenerate" and to honor the achievements of postwar artists such as Henry Moore. Even though much of Kassel was still damaged from heavy wartime bombing, its citizens gave financial support to the first Documenta, and have ever since. The event's ambitions have kept pace with its growth. This year, the Documenta X -- abbreviated as dX -- claims to be no less than "a comprehensive survey and interpretation of the state of contemporary art." The Documenta philosophy is to select one person and put him or her in charge of the entire show. The current director, Catherine David, is the first female curator ever. A true believer in a conceptual, it's-the-idea-stupid approach to art, the Frenchwoman has called her own aesthetic shots and fiercely resisted all attempts to turn the dX into a big commercial art fair. Despite an overtly political agenda, however, her definition of art seems to embrace few non-Westerners. Of the 115 artists represented at dX, only 17 come from outside Europe and the U.S., with 10 of those being from just two countries, Brazil and Israel. That leaves seven artists from the rest of the world and none from Japan, India or a Muslim country. When asked why, she replied: "The Documenta is not the U.N." The money Kassel spends lavishly on the arts is earned in businesses such as engineering and chemicals. It lies on Germany's so-called Fairy Tale road, a route dreamed up by the German Tourist Board that links towns and villages associated with the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. The two brothers became fascinated by folklore while working as librarians in early 19th century Kassel and the city's Grimm Museum documents how they collected stories like Little Red Riding Hood from villages in the region. The center of Kassel was rebuilt after World War II in a style that is, for lack of a gentler word, grotesque. But here and there are remnants of the baroque city that played a prominent role in the cultural history of Germany: One of Europe's first museums, the 1708 Fridericianum; Germany's first permanent theater, the 17th century Ottoneum; and a bright yellow baroque Orangery and formal park, located on the banks of the Fulda River. All now serve as Documenta venues. Parsing the Parcours My first day in Kassel began in a renovated train station -- now dubbed the Kulturbahnhof (Culture Station) -- with a quiet moment leaning over a conceptual art classic: a box built by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto that consists of four perfectly aligned mirrors. The only thing visible is the outside of the box: The box top and four gray mirror backsides with the name of the manufacturer on them. You are left to imagine the perfect, infinite reflection that exists inside. Mr. Pistoletto's obsession with mirrors and mirror-gazing started in his adolescence, he has said, when he "discovered time" by watching hair grow on his face. Behind the train station, I stood in line behind other culture vultures waiting to enter a sheet metal container and view a work by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau. Each of us took turns climbing up a metal mound and sticking our head through a hole in the roof, following the source of light and the wail of Arab music -- only to find we were poking our head through a Turkish hole-in-the-floor toilet. The reference to Marcel Duchamps is a little heavy-handed -- and dated. It has been more than half a century since the flamboyant painter proclaimed the "end of painting" and put a toilet on an art gallery pedestal. Years later, he said he did it simply because he had come to loathe the art world. Landau is motivated, on the other hand, by what she calls "reverse archaeology." Works of art have invaded the city all along a dX Parcours, or itinerary, that begins at the train station and ends at the Fulda River. But don't expect the art along the way to always look like, well, art. Leaving the Kulturbahnhof, I entered an underground pedestrian passageway and walked by Volksboutique -- People's Boutique, occupied by Christine Hill, a young American artist with a pageboy hairdo, flitting to and fro among piles of donated dresses, pants, shoes and T-shirts. Her art concept allows you to participate by buying second-hand items for five German marks; while wearing them, you can reflect on her message: Clothes make the (wo)man. A few feet farther on, a man is selling socks and ties. He hasn't made it into the art catalog yet. On the wall between the two shops is a window case and inside, in place of an ad, is a photograph by Canadian Jeff Wall of a homeless person spilling a carton of milk. French photo-artist Suzanne Lafont has pasted the walls with posters of anonymous housing projects bearing different city names: Istanbul, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade. This time the message is: Because of globalization, the whole world looks the same. This message gets repeated in several dX venues and exhibits: posters of projects by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, photos by American Robert Adams and a self-contained subway station plopped on the bank of the Fulda River by Austrian Martin Kippenberger. While still underground, I rifled through my Parcours map in a baffled search for "missing" exhibits described in the catalog, until I noticed the word Internet in small red letters printed on the lower right-hand corner of a number of catalog pages. A part of dX is not in Kassel at all but at the Documenta Web site. Back to the future The heart of the dX show is the Museum Fridericianum, a magnificent 18th century structure. It was here that I spent most of my second day in Kassel, accompanied by Arpana Caur, one of India's best-known woman painters and an exhibitor in another Kassel art show. We found the place packed with photographs, installations, videos and art critics. Because this is the last Documenta of the century, dX is trying to address themes of the last several decades. Certain works of art are there to provide what the catalog calls "retro-perspectives." One such work is Marcel Broodthaers' "Eagle Museum," a collection of objects using the eagle as an emblem and an example of 1970s critical art. On a more political note, there is a powerful indictment of the Vietnam War in a series of '60s watercolors by Nancy Spero and "The Main Complaint," an animated film by South African William Kentridge. Both Arpana and I were transfixed by "Cave of Memory," an installation using eight projectors and videos by German artist Syberberg. This 30-minute performance orchestrates music by Mozart, poetry by Goethe, theater by Heinrich Kleist and Samuel Beckett, plus archival footage of historical events. You might ask, how can painting compete with such splashy multimedia works? Well, the question's pretty much moot, because very few painters have been invited to dX anyway. In the words of Catherine David, "The days of Velázquez are long gone." In fact, of the five painters invited, only three chose to hang paintings. The prominent German artist Gerhard Richter preferred to mount his photo albums -- many of his paintings are based on photos -- with some disturbing juxtapositions of pornography and concentration camps. Richard Hamilton, of Pop-Art fame, preferred pixels to pigment. He took pictures of seven rooms in his apartment using a wide-angle lens and reworked them with a computer so that they appear to be photos of photos in an exhibition. Kerry James Marshall, an American artist who grew up in a Chicago housing project, left his computer and photo album at home, bringing four large paintings instead. He was there on the first day and I asked him if it felt lonely being a painter at dX. "I personally choose to portray Afro-Americans -- their whimsy and epic dignity -- in paint," he said. "But there is no such thing as an appropriate form for art." Every animal is a female artist By the end of the second day, Arpana and I reached the Orangery and the penultimate installation on the Parcours, in the stately garden near the Fulda River. An incongruous concrete bunker received us on the edge of a baroque garden: "Welcome to a House for Pigs and People," by Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel. We entered the human half of the building and sat down on felt mats arranged on a sloping ramp. Through a one-way window we observed a boar, three sows and a little row of piglets in the building's other half; a sign requested that we observe silence, too. I was happy to be horizontal after standing on my feet all day and simply too tired to pursue pig-in-the-the-poke symbolism. My catalog came to the rescue, explaining that the this was not a pig stall at all but a symbol of the brutal exploitation of the individual for the benefit of maximum profit. Trockel was quoted as saying that "every animal is a female artist," a play on the famous Joseph Beuys dictum: "Every man is an artist." Arpana shook her head in disbelief: "Only a Westerner would put pigs in an art show. And Rosemarie Trockel is a fine painter, too, or was. This kind of cynicism terrifies me. It is the worst thing that can happen to an artist." Despite painful spikes on my bullshitometer and skepticism about some of David's choices -- so much theory, so much photography, so few non-Western artists -- I ended my first 48 hours at dX in a state of grateful exhaustion, wallowing in my allotted half of the pigsty. But I was slightly distracted by something I overheard: "It won't be in Kassel again," predicted a fellow visitor, propped on her elbow nearby. "The next big D will be in cyberspace." Inside: When the avant-garde is not enuf I devoted my last day in Kassel to another art show called Innenseite (Inside). Am I a masochist? Isn't one art overdose enough? Well, yes and no. The Documenta, the official avant-garde, had triggered my lust for the unofficial, underfunded and underhyped. Ever since the famous Paris "Salon des refuses" in the 19th century, Europe has had a rich tradition of unofficial art happenings taking place in the shadow of -- or stealing the limelight from -- officially sanctioned events. Like the dX, Innenseite will run for 100 days (103 to be precise). It has brought 109 artists to Kassel from Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. While Documenta is strong on concepts and trends, Innenseite is fueled by extremes of sensuality, lyricism and terror. The main, humble venue of Innenseite is a former police academy just a couple of blocks from Kassel City Hall on Friedrich Ebert Strasse. Dozens of mostly same-sized rooms on three floors contain installations, paintings and sculpture. All the installations were set up by the artists in person starting three weeks prior to the opening. Greek artist Nikos Tranos has hung hundreds of huts made of refined sugar from the ceilings of the first-floor hallway and two adjoining rooms. Strings dangle from each. When I pulled them, they emitted musical melodies -- "Greensleeves," "Mary Had a Little Lamb," "It Was the Night Before Christmas" and a hundred other tunes. I left a long, cacophonous trail behind. Room followed room, each a little world unto itself: antiquarian books with rectangular holes burned in them lined up neatly on 48 music stands -- a protest against censorship by Ecuadorian Manuel Cholango. "Execution" by Paul Pfarr -- a resolute parade of 250 throat-level scythe blades, supported on steel tripods. Next door, nine dresses whirled and danced by themselves, plunging their hems in and out of wash basins -- a Swedish work called "A Midsummer Cure." Down the hallway, Chinese artist Chen Yan Yin has taken a narrow table, 12 feet in length, covered it in white cloth and arranged 600 red roses on it. She feeds the roses with water from 600 IV bottles hanging from the ceiling, each one connected to the stalk of a rose by tube and needle. A machine fills the room with a hazy fog every half hour, blurring, then cleansing the atmosphere. Nigel Helyer has inscribed a Sussex folk tale about a singing bell on bell-shaped copper plates and arranged them on a wall in the basement; a real bronze bell hangs from the ceiling and transmits a mysterious hum through voltaic cells to smaller bells floating in dozens of water-filled jars. Two rooms transport the visitor to Bosnia: Alma Suljevic found small children using maps of minefields for drawing-paper in a refugee camp. She has papered a room over completely with these same maps, covering the floor with an enlarged detail and circling the houses in which friends and relatives lived before the war. "Kao Sarajevo," a film made out of black and white photographs taken by Dejan Vekic during the siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1995, muses sadly by itself in a room draped in black cloth. Most of the photos are portraits of women and children, waiting in line for food or searching for their possessions in ruined homes. Warning signs -- Pazi!! Sanjper -- remind you that snipers lie in wait for them. Innenseite also has a whole wing devoted to aboriginal paintings from Australia by people such as Billy Japaljarri Hogan, Long Tom Tjapanangka and Topsy Nangala Ross, artists who have never been to art school. One of the oldest indigenous peoples in the world, with a culture that goes back 50,000 years, Aborigines are beginning to paint on canvas rather than bark -- and dealers are selling their art abroad. Their work normally refers to specific geographical features and/or mythological ancestors, but to these Western eyes, the intricate patterns of lines and dots of Aboriginal art seem completely abstract. K19 Like the dX, Innenseite forms an archipelago of venues across Kassel. To get to a place called K19, I took a tram to the University and followed a road to a weed-infested lot in the shadow of a vast red-brick factory. Abandoned for over 50 years, the factory produced much of Germany's rolling stock during World War II; it was here that the railway cars -- originally designed for livestock -- rolled off assembly lines and across Europe to collect a human cargo. Australian artist George Gittoes chose one of these derelict buildings to re-create what he saw as an eyewitness in a Rwandan massacre in April 1995. Nine massive canvases hanging from the ceiling depict the main participants -- killers, victims and U.N. peacekeepers who looked on helplessly while 4,000 men, women and children were hacked to death with machetes. Walking between the paintings, I stepped over the debris put there by the artist as part of the scene -- clothes, cheap jewelry, broken glasses, empty canteens and hundreds of bullet casings. "Kibeho Camp, Rwanda, Africa," a sign said ... No, this is Kassel, I reminded myself, Kassel, Germany. I returned to the Kulturbahnhof one last time, not to look at art but to catch the evening train. It was time to say a reluctant farewell to Kassel, a city that invests in the avant-garde instead of the stock market -- the ugly duckling on the Fairy Tale road that has transformed itself in the name of art.
Brent Gregston is a travel writer and journalist living in Amsterdam. So you want to check out DocumentaX -- but don't know where to eat and stay? Wanderlust Marketplace has the answers. + + + + + + + + | ||
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