The curator and the\r\nteam always have 4 years to create the actual documenta<\/i>’s\r\nprofile. It is a carefully planned and organised event with a generous\r\nand ambitious background. No wonder that it works as a trend-setter<\/i>,\r\nas the mounting of relevant forms of expressions and positions in the\r\nglobal system of art, an orientation point, not only for the artworld,\r\nbut also for the greater public. It has its capacity for this: for example\r\nin the case of Documenta11 more than 130 people work only on the Department\r\nof Visitor Services and Public Relations.<\/p>\r\n
So artlovers really\r\nlook forward to the event organised every five years. Hundreds of thousands\r\nof people go on a pilgrimage to Kassel exactly in this rhythm. Art slows\r\ndown the pace of the biennals and the Olympic Games. Easy ease, no hurry,\r\nHarry.<\/p>\r\n
At large, in the\r\ncourse of an ordinary, several day long pilgrimage or so to speak slowing\r\ndown process one can see t<\/i>echnically p<\/i>erfectly c<\/i>onstructed\r\nworks of a couple of masters with world-wide reputation, surrounded by\r\nalso tpc<\/i> works of young aspirants. A few of the former ones are\r\ngreat works of art both intellectually and physically, they may even crown\r\nthe artist’s oeuvre, whereas for the latter ones simply being present\r\nat the exhibition, the documenta<\/i> means the best possible reference\r\nan artists can get: world-wide capital of confidence.<\/p>\r\n
Mr. D11, Okwui Enwezor\r\nhas an intensive vision. He defines the task of the curator (and art)\r\nas a producer of knowledge rather than a taste-shaper. Under the aegis\r\nof this he extends the ordinary exclusive exhibition to create platforms\r\nsituated on five places (meaning continents) of a different nature, and\r\nthe\r\n100 day long megashow<\/a> introduced by four theoretical events (Democracy\r\nUnrealised<\/a>, Experiments\r\nwith Truth<\/a>, Cr\u00e9olit\u00e9\r\nand Cr\u00e9olization<\/a>, Under\r\nSiege: Four African Cities<\/a>) is only one of the five. Nevertheless\r\nthe exhibition’s approach is at least this distinct.<\/p>\r\n In respect of the\r\nselection of artists we find that the spectre of potential participants\r\nhas become wider, artists are bordered by activists with different scientific\r\nbackgrounds on the left, and by authentic Inuit community video on the\r\nright. If one studies documenta<\/i>-history* more deeply, it turns\r\nout that the extension is geographical rather than disciplinary, as it\r\nhappened before that there were authors of different genres among the\r\nparticipating artists, for example filmmakers, poets or architects. So\r\nthis time again documenta<\/i> is trans-disciplinary and anti-disciplinary,\r\nthe new element is the reserved a:<\/i> a<\/i>conceptual, a<\/i>capitalistic.\r\nKnowledge producing art is problem sensitive, it can articulate discourses<\/i>,\r\nit is prepossessed with desire for neutral position.<\/p>\r\n Art, as a knowledge\r\nproducing factor becomes a neutral gear as a small, quick delay, slowing\r\ndown, the diversion or d\u00e9tournement<\/i> of already known systems\r\nof knowledge (regarded as obsolete). A small, exact movement at the meeting\r\npoint of greater units. The accumulation of mediums and documents serves\r\nthis purpose. This is why video projections occupy several screens. This\r\nis why there is a strange tension between the image and the sound sometimes.\r\nA non-retinal contact. Eyes bathing in a non-uniform scenery. A<\/i>vydia\r\n(<_>Vydia; another a<\/i>).<\/p>\r\n The word d\u00e9tournement<\/i>,\r\nwith its international, lettrist** and situationalist<\/a>\r\nroots take us to the world of generous planning, operations with systems***.\r\nNevertheless from the artists who used to belong to this circle only Constant<\/a>\r\nis present, although respectively, as a real exhibition within the exhibition.<\/p>\r\n This time great names\r\nare more reserved, they choose a modest solution. Or more precisely: despite\r\nthe appearances, the enormous amount of material, very small movements\r\nare in fashion. Like the large installation by Hanne<\/a>\r\nDarboven<\/a>\r\nplaced in the centre, documenting a minimal displacement of numbers in\r\nseveral thousands of framed pictures. Or Fiona Tan’s Sanderian East\r\nversus West German catalogue. In the case of D11 there are no real grandiose\r\nworks in the old sense of the word (old school<\/i>) like the 7000\r\noaks by Beuys or the Earth Kilometre by Walter de Maria. The climate around\r\nart has changed just like art itself. The main feature is not sensualist\r\nvision, but the sensitivity of presentation. Database operations, grouping\r\nfacts, planning installations all make it possible to realise and show\r\nthe small diversions, and at the same time a designer-level control above\r\nthem is an organic part of the artistic creation.<\/p>\r\n Clido Meireles (a\r\ndocumenta<\/i> veteran) does not want to show you the brass tacks,\r\niron ones will do – he comes up with something modest looking, but\r\npoetic and precise, distributing an object that looks like ice-cream:\r\nfrozen sea and tap water like an element that is disappearing or that\r\nhas disappeared. The sellers make money on the transaction, and the buyers\r\npay a symbolic amount, one unit (euro) for meditating a minute on the\r\nwaters of the world (if you pay money for something, you take it seriously).<\/p>\r\n Thomas Hirschhorn’s\r\nBataille\r\nMonument<\/a> acts like a comic virus in Kassel’s Turkish quarter.\r\nThis temporary public work of art is less reserved. It consists of 8 elements\r\n(an imbiss operated by local Turkish youngsters (1), a library (2), a\r\nBataille exhibition (3), a\r\npublic TV studio<\/a> (4), all in typical brutal barracks, a monumental\r\nstatute covered with adhesive<\/a> tape (5), an old Mercedes Benz with\r\nHirschornian decorations, ensuring connection with the ordinary documenta\r\nscene, taking visitors from here to there (6), web cameras (7) and workshops\r\n(8)) and it is less reserved. It is rather funny to convey this sort of\r\nphilosophy so energetically to the local Turkish youth, but the great\r\nimpetus seems necessary. Because then it will also have a result. The\r\npeople living here use the work: the TV studio operates, they watch Muhammad\r\nAli’s matches in the library, they sell cheap and good kebab and\r\ndrinks in the imbiss. The meeting of cultures, knowledge producing services\r\nleft here for 100 days.<\/p>\r\n The operations of\r\ndiversion occur in rather various forms: as the poetic conjuring away\r\nof vision (Alfredo\r\nJaar<\/a>); as a company freezing the logic of capital movement (Maria\r\nEichhorn); as a playground consisting of elements brought from all over\r\nthe world (Dominique\r\nGonzalez Foerster<\/a>); as a radicalised painting (Fabian\r\nMarcaccio<\/a>); as a lyrical anthropology (Gilles\r\nSaussier<\/a>); as a one-person film (Jonas Mekas); only to mention a few\r\nexamples, because a long list could be made here.<\/p>\r\n The exhibition is\r\nnot characterised by works that can be easily commodified. At the same\r\ntime it is visible that a lot of money was spent on the installation:\r\nthe primary function of which is to make it possible and pleasant for\r\nthe visitors to spend time with the works. Despite the large number of\r\nworks observed for days it is not tiring to go through the whole exhibition,\r\nthank to all the different time-taming, comforting apparatus designed\r\nby artists. It would be much more exhausting to go through an exhibition\r\nonly consisting of paintings and statutes at the same pace. It is not\r\na string of beads threaded on the necklace of one discipline, many-pictures-hung-next-to-each-other,\r\nthe "one minute for one picture" effect****. It is a complex,\r\nthickly woven rhizome, a net which can be observed due to the retardation\r\napparatus, to make the fine, little operations that are aimed at productive\r\nresistance<\/i> visible.<\/p>\r\n The modest presence\r\nof net.art is due to eastern players. The artists of the tsunamii.net<\/a>\r\nslow down surfing to the pace of walking with the help of the latest (commercially\r\navailable) technology. They simply compare the speed of online and offline\r\nlocomotion: on the lcd monitors placed in the exhibiting area one can\r\nfollow a “web-walker” equipped with a GPS and a mobile phone,\r\nwho is walking to the another server situated in an other town. Watching\r\nit from the exhibition it is not very spectacular, but looking at the\r\nstructure of the work its simplicity makes it a lasting object of meditation\r\n(net slowing down as a diversive operation).<\/p>\r\n David Smalls interactive\r\nwork, the Illuminated Manuscript is much more spectacular. It animates\r\na text projected into a huge book synchronously with the viewers movements\r\nas they are turning the pages, rewriting the text in front of their eyes,\r\ngenerating awe as a result of moving together (book d\u00e9tournement).\r\nIt also deserves appreciation that the work exposed to intensive use in\r\nthe course of the hyper-attended exhibition (they are expecting 600,000\r\nvisitors) was still working perfectly when I was there, on the 46th\r\nday of the 100-day museum.<\/p>\r\n Those who say that\r\nthe background to all this is a highly theorised, protestant <\/i>approach\r\nto art <\/i>could be right; or those who say that the oriental sensuality\r\nof On Kawara, who melts the words describing one million years into one\r\nmillion breaths is just enough gleam; or those who say that this time\r\n(again) curators are attracted by the context operations of authors who\r\nare equally sensitive about form and content; or even those who see the\r\ngrandiose theorisation of practice in the overall picture.<\/p>\r\n They say that D11\r\ncan thank a lot to its predecessor, DX<\/a>*****,\r\nwhich introduced social-political discourse on the areas of documenta<\/i>,\r\nalthough based on an emphatically Euro-centric philosophy. D11 extends\r\nthis dialogue, at the price of some speculation, but at least it does\r\nnot operate with a speculum or a spectacle. Whether it is spec or not,\r\nthe notion of post-colonialism should be expanded to include the analysis\r\nof a similar practice expopular under socialism******.<\/p>\r\n An especially interesting\r\nfeature of the situation is that the artistic director, Okwui Enwezor,\r\nwho speaks formal, nearly aristocratic English, did not study art history\r\nbut political sciences and parallel were involved in experimental poetry.\r\nLater he founded Nka<\/a>,\r\nthe journal of contemporary African arts published in New York, in a slow\r\nrythm, biannually, but became popular quickly. This publication started\r\nhim on the way of an intimate relationship with art, made him a curator\r\nand critic. The next stations of his career were exhibitions in big museums\r\nand then the second Johannesburg Biannual. Always in collaboration with\r\nothers. An exhibition of this size requires good teamwork. Six co-curators\r\nand him in the theory and in the praxis. The Magnificent Seven of D11*******.<\/p>\r\n Many different relationships\r\nthat are seeping through the biographical sections of the catalogue: many\r\nof those artists who have co-operated with certain members of the curator\r\nteam before take part in this exhibition. Capital of connections, from\r\nwhich we in Budapest always have less than we need. Altough from a certain\r\naspect we are sitting in a very safe situation: as it can be read at the\r\nend of a video film by the Moldavian Pavel\r\nBraila<\/a>, thematizing the different size of the ex-soviet railway gauge\r\n(85 mm!): at the border between Eastern and Western Europe they stop the\r\ntrains for three hours to change their underframe. Looking from Moldavia,\r\nwe are on the west coast. Tutti frutti, my dear roasted dove.<\/p>\r\n The expansion\r\nmentioned above (i.e., the expansion of the spectre of participants) can\r\neven be measured: the fewer the number of stars, the greater the number\r\nof authors who are regarded as outsiders. Inside and outside changing\r\nplaces, passing unnoticed over our faces.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n * The list of the artists of all documenta exhibitions online at last, and the modest Hungarian\r\nparticipation can be seen: L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Lakner who lives in Berlin\r\n(D6 exhibition), G\u00e1bor B\u00f3dy, deceased (D8 video), Monty\r\nCantsin (K\u00e1ntor Istv\u00e1n), who lives in Quebec (D8 performance),\r\nthe Dawn group (Andr\u00e1s B\u00f6r\u00f6cz, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 L\u00e1szl\u00f3\r\nR\u00e9v\u00e9sz, J\u00e1nos Szirtes) (D8 performance), Guszt\u00e1v\r\nH\u00e1mos, who lives in Berlin (D8 video), J\u00e1nos Sug\u00e1r\r\n(D9 exhibition). *******\r\nOkwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj,\r\nMark Nash, Octavio Zaya<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n <\/p>\r\n<\/body>\r\n<\/html>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The curator and the team always have 4 years to create the actual documenta’s profile. It is a carefully planned and organised event with a generous and ambitious background. No wonder that it works as a trend-setter, as the mounting of relevant forms of expressions and positions in the global system of art, an orientation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630174,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400174"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2031904,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400174\/revisions\/2031904"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\r\n
** http:\/\/www.notbored.org\/LI.html<\/a>
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\r\n*** At the beginning of the summer J\u00e1nos Sug\u00e1r emphasised the significance of the presence of Attila Kot\u00e1nyi in Budapest.
\r\n
\r\n**** This phrase comes from Katalin Tim\u00e1r (
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\r\n***** the website of DX has been preserved for us due to Vuk Cosic, who\r\ndownloaded and sends on (mirrors) the content removed by the competent\r\npeople after the exhibition has been closed. Thanks, Vuk!
\r\n****** keywords from the dictionary of D11: democracy unrealised, civil\r\nsociety, the nation state, transitional justice, processes of truth and\r\nreconciliation, crolit, creolization, the state of siege in African cities,\r\ncolonisation and post-colonialism, diaspora and migration, living conditions\r\nin EE and in megalopolises of Latin America, racism, xenophobia, assimilation,\r\neurocentrism, andocentrism.<\/p>\r\n