Zsuzsa László
The conflict of Modernity and Modernism in a Gingerbread House The installation is shown in a white container, like the functional buildings of documenta 12, that is covered by small pictures and objects, plus real confectionary. Little parodistic changes turn the well-know shapes of constructivist and suprematist paintings into ornamentation. Old newspaper cut-outs, banknotes and coins join back the purely visual harmonies and dynamics of composition into historical time and social space. Here is the “archaeology of modernism” – I thought cheerfully, but the cakes disturbed me, and such disgraceful questions lingered on my mind as “are they real?”, “can the guards eat them after closing time?” and beside being an amusing idea “why are they parts of this work?”. Though it is not something to be proud of, the art critic sometimes likes to play a detective who is looking for a hidden patterns, the figure in the carpet. Of course we know that this is only a modernist myth, however the curators of documenta 12 permanently tempt us to compose meaningful constellations of the extraordinarily heterogeneous objects on display. Detective investigation is necessary because the main text, the curatorial conception is missing. Instead we only have three riddles, on which Buergel and Noack stringed the easily run away beads of the works. The first one: “Is modernity our antiquity?” is undoubtedly fruitful. It generated two others probably with the aim to balance to too much Europe-centred, historical point of you of the first one. The two others: “What is bare life?” and “What is to be done?” however do not really widen the above narrow-view as they slide away the first person plural subject offered for collective identification in the first one. The subject who can circumscribe what modern exactly is, and holds a non-problematic possessive relation with tradition, which today is much more understood to be acquired or appropriated. Bare life is not ours (like modernity and antiquity) but someone else’s, and the deeds to be done are lingering without active agents. Moreover the highly uncertain intersubjective relations of a big group show – it is never defined who says (quotes) such sentences and to whom – do not let us take seriously the call for personal responsibility. The catalogue does not help either to make a better and deeper understanding of the questions. It serves as the missing wall text describing individual works and do not explain how – for instance – a huge Iranian carpet can appear next to Cosima von Bonin’s installation. Such questions are only addressed in the audio-guide spoken by Buergel himself and actors with hypercorrect English flavoured with idiosyncratic musical excerpts. Here, after differentiating modernism and modernity the voice says they can become exchangeable after a certain point. Still we can get to know some useful things about Kassel, a small German city that with its wide roads, modern buildings, and elegant parks is the best example of how discontinuity can make past perfect and present overlap. And finally, we can look for answers and elaboration of the questions in the magazine project of documenta 12. In the print version of the thousands on online articles the questions are simplified however and only the punctuation marks can indicate the syntactic tension of the original ones. We got intriguing narratives of local modernities but no essays elaborating the problematics of interchanging modernity, the era or episteme and modernism, the art movement. The concept of local modernisms is still an interesting problem. The notion of modern as antique is based on the discontinuities of European tradition, modernist ideas and their present time reception, which is certainly brought about by the political catastrophes of 20th century. Regarding contemporary art the modern – lost its actuality right because of its false universalism – is dusted off introducing local modernities and not by the investigation of discontinuities. They do not state that because we lost faith in modernist ideas (in continuous development or universal narratives) new structural patterns will govern our thinking. But they identify local versions of modernity so that in the formalism of modernist art the idea of the universal language occurring in more dialects is reanimated. Thus – I think – the exhibition is using modernism mostly as a secondary visual language, and connects it to abstraction present in ornamentation. While this connection is quite artificial in the case of European and North-American Modernism, documenta 12 tries to uncover an organic correspondence in the case of former colonial cultures. In this context antiquity is used in a sense of a period before the concept of autonomous art and is projected on the modernist artworks emphasising their decorative nature and temporality. It is a commonplace that the functional art of tribal cultures had a great influence on the European and North-American Modernism, the apotheosis of autonomous art. At documenta 12 instead of the one-way genealogy of influences the objects placed next to each other are sliding in and out of the artwork status. Buergel and Noack repeat the gestures that are used within the works when, for instance, they place a textile from Mali next to Nasreen Mohamedi’s minimalist photos and drawings from the 60ies and 70ies. There are works that are about this plurality in themselves like Gerwald Rockenschaub’s constructivist composition made of carpet pieces. Here the curators fortunately did not feel necessary to strengthen the carpets double status by placing an oriental textile or a constructivist painting next to them. Instead a 1969 framed picture made of razorblades by Béla Kolarova presents a similar but less ironic position regarding the autonomy of art. If you wanted to see it as stages of a historical process from non-representational painting through assemblage and object trouve to installation, Tanaka Atsuko’s works will contradict this narrative. Her three yellowish draperies were first exhibited simply nailed to the wall in 1955, while at documenta 12 they appear on Florian Pumhösl 2007 installation titled Modernology. This is the most problematic point of the exhibition arrangement: I am afraid that most visitors do not realise that the black display panels on which they see Tanaka’s draperies and little minimalist pictures are also parts of Pumhösl’s work. As many other contemporary works Pumhösl’s is also very difficult to insert into a group exhibition since it is not one object, not even a series of objects but a certain arrangement in space. Thus Atsuko’s draperies – which should also be presented as an installation, are incorporated into the panels and become such sheer particles as the little pictures hung on it. Or the other way around, the small framed paintings and photos become autonomous works such as the draperies. The other problem demonstrated in this room is the extreme information vacuum. The visual associations are no doubt rather didactic, however many works are not at all accessible without contextualisation. We only get to know from the catalogue that Pumhösl is referring to Murayama Tomoyoshi, Japanese artist, who were influenced by German expressionism and Russian constructivism, then started to use three dimensional objects for his “concrete constructivist” pieces. The title of the work is also a quotation from Kon Wajiro (1888-1973), who called so the taxonomy of modern everyday objects and costumes. If you do not know this you will be sure that the title as well as the whole display panel arrangement is deeply ironic. The two previous documentas solved this problem securing separate spaces to almost every different work, while now the curators intended to demonstrate the “migration of forms” and the modulations of cultural codes through immediate spatial-visual links. This shift together with other archaisms, like the coloured walls, addresses the whole problematics of the presentation of contemporary art in museums. In the second half of the 20th century museums had to realise that they cannot be both modern and contemporary at the same time. Not only because these two relative words started to mean different things in different segments of the art world, but because of the paradox of contemporary art museum. And when it seemed that this paradox will be solved by temporary exhibitions, then their model transforms itself to a museum to synchronise the asynchron but co-existent artworks in the general past time of the museum. The curators play the same game in a larger scale as the artists within their own works: they create interiors out of various found objects arranged in tense constellations. Those works survive the best this subordinating logic that are themselves based on similar collective, accumulating principle (e.g. Zoe Leonard, Luis Jacob, Ibon Aranberri), or those that reflect on the artwork’s status within a collection (Louise Lawler). At the same time, I do not think that these loose associations really permit us to make out the local narratives of modernity’s “utopian hopes and catastrophic failures” from the modulations of modernist forms through cultures and times, then to leave knowing “what is to be done”. Let us take for instance John McCracken’s cuboids with shiny coloured enamel, which appear in almost all locations of the exhibition, and according to the curatorial intention are meditative objects that reflecting their surroundings and shaping the exhibition space create bridges between objects, establish a contact with the beholder’s body and steer their movements in space. The smaller ones (in Fridericianum and in Aue Pavillon) stand on plinths, whereas bigger ones stand alone on the floor. I have to say that I feel sorry for them. In Aue Pavillion next to Ines Doujak’s Siegesgärten constructed of flowerbeds and overtly critiquing the bio-politics of EU and the USA, standing in front of the landscape-like background of Karlsue a green monolith can hardly been saved by Buergel enthusiastic and loving words from the accusation of being sterile, artificial and socially indifferent. There are however a few forms that facilitate more successful historical and intercultural transitions between visual appearance and social-cultural critique. Such is the flag that can represent – not like the other numberless textile works of documenta 12 – the modernist formalism and the social-political dilemmas of modernity at the same time, like the 1972-3 EU-flag proposals of Paul Gernes and Abdoulaya Konaté’s Palestin-Israeli flag-patchwork. In a similar way in Bill Kouélany’s monumental installation the wall proves to be a prolific multi-cultural symbol. The huge structure is covered on its outer side by newspaper cut-outs like a wallpaper of fake bricks and on its inner side textile bricks with geometrical ornaments. The same self-revealing illusion is repeated by Jorge Oteiza’s huge photo-wallpaper that cover a space-dividing module. From a distance you see something that looks like shelves filled with Oteiza’s geometric sculptures, just like the real ones that are shown in the same location a bit further back. What Oteiza wittily committed against himself, in the case of Stilinovic’s work is declared exploitation with which the not yet stiffen modern art is incorporated in the contemporary. However, not even contemporary art is safe. Buergel and Noack wove such a web of associations in which the 1001 chairs that are parts of Ai Wei Wei Fairy tale project and can be seen everywhere in all locations constantly remind us that we are in the hometown of the Grimm brothers so a few iced cakes are enough to transform a container covered with constructivist pictures to a gingerbread house.
documenta 12
The work of Mladen Stilinovic titled the Exploitation of the Dead was one of my favourites in documenta 12. Though the artistic director of this year’s documenta, the influential international contemporary art exhibition organised every five years, Roger M. Buergel and his colleague Ruth Noack did not place this work to an outstanding location but the jungle of the temporary glasshouse, I still think that we should start to get a grip on this super-event here.
