Documenta 7

Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas Author(s): Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Source: October, Vol. 22 (Autumn, 1982), pp.
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Documenta 7: A Dictionary of
ReceivedIdeas
BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH
Absences In both its inclusionsand omissions, the selectionpolicy forDocumenta 7 form constituteda symptomaticdisplay of repressivetolerance, an intensified of amnesia withregardto real historicalconditions. It is not so much a question of the absence of individual artists(although one can certainlyspeculate about the omission of political artistssuch as Victor Burgin, Darcy Lange, and Steve Willats fromthe otherwisevirtuallycomplete repetitionofexhibitorsthat Rudi Fuchs, Documenta's Artistic Director, had shown at his home base at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven). It is, rather, the absence of perspective, methodological or historical-not to mention critical or politicalthat gave the show its fundamental sense of pompous and pretentious obsolescence. It is what one might have found at a turn-of-the-century salon, when the greedyanxietyofa rulingclass to maintainitspositiondimmed critical perception. This absence of perspectivewas, of course, rationalized as liberalism,preabsolute freedomto the workof art understoodas an tending,as it did, to offer autonomous, ahistoricalentity,a product of the artistseen as the "last practitioner of distinctindividuality."1 Thus, a perspectivewhich would attemptto the most encompass productive investigationsof the functionof visual reprewithin culturewas replaced by a desperate attemptto sentation contemporary reestablishthe hegemony of esoteric, elitistmodernisthigh culture. And this occurs just at that moment when the inadequacy of this framework has been made most apparent, having become the central object of contestationin art history,criticaltheory,semiology, and feminist theoryalike. The fifth and most importantin the series of Documenta exhibitionsorganized by Harald Szeemann in 1972- had at least begun to question a general focus on high art. Therefore,ten years later, one mighthave expected froma team of highlyqualified curators2a slightly more complex organizing
R. H. Fuchs, catalogue preface in Documenta 1. 7, Kassel, 1982, vol. 1, p. XV. 2. The team consisted of an Artistic Director, Rudi Fuchs, Director of the Stedelijk van Committee composed of Coosje van Bruggen, formerly Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and an Artistic
MichaelAsher.Proposal for official poster for 7. 1982. Documenta
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principle than that of the simple agglomerationof the most recent samples of market-oriented avant-garde products. Adorno In 1959, some ten years afterhis returnfromexile in America, the phitime,at the second Documenta, losopherT. W. Adorno encounteredforthe first the work ofJackson Pollock. For him, as forso many other visitorsto the exforconhibition,that work became and remained a central point of reference visual More than later at Documenta 7, temporary thinking. twentyyears - even American criticshave convertedthe veins of Adorno's aestheticthought while his major work,Aesthetische remains untranslatedinto EnglishTheorie, into a mine fromwhich to extracta vocabulary of emptyradicalism that is informed by neither the historical specificity nor the political acumen of its model. Rather, Adorno simplyprovides them with a jargon ofjustificationfor the reemergenceof irrationalismin contemporaryGerman painting. Asher to Documenta looked as ifitscensorshiphad Michael Asher'scontribution of been merelythe product of circumstance. His proposal: the reconstruction the wing walls fromthe ground floorof Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany (a private residence designed and constructedby Mies van der Rohe in 1931, as a museum withone ofthecuratorsofDocumenta restored to function recently 7 as its director). The walls of Asher's reconstruction were intended to be installed accordingto theiroriginalfloorplan on the second floorofthe Orangerie thereas regular display surfacesin the contextof the at Kassel and to function exhibition. This proposal was accepted by the curatorial committee several months before the opening of the show, and constructionhad begun when Asher visitedKassel in May. With the walls nearing completion,however, the have understoodthe implicationsof the work. Construccuratorsmust finally tion of the walls was abandoned before the addition of the dark stained door framesand baseboards that Mies's design had provided forthe framingof the starkwhitewalls of the home. The framedobjects to be displayed on the walls - in the would have suffered opinion of the curators- fromthe suggestion of of architectural conditions the private home. As though Cindy Sherman's the fashion plates depictingthe cynical recapitulationof the rituals of female submissiveness could be affected by baseboards.
Curator, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Germano Celant, Contributing Editor, Artforum; Johannes Gachnang, formerlyDirector, Kunsthalle, Bern; and Gerhard Storck, Director, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld.
Ideas A Dictionary ofReceived
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Broodthaers If only what John Russell wrote in the New YorkTimeshad been true: "Documenta 7 could indeed be said to be under the benign and posthumous aegis of Broodthaers."Marcel Broodthaers'sworkwas the sole exception to the exhibition'sproviso that nothing be included if it dated frommore than two years back. (Presumably thisrigorousbut pointlessimpositionwas established as a selectioncriterion by the curatorsto guaranteethecurrencyofthe exhibits.) Broodthaers's oeuvre is beginningto emergeas one ofthemostcomplexaesthetic investigationsof the conditionsof artisticproduction and receptionwithinthe of modernismand its social institution, the museum. As such it emframework bodies the truepostmodernpracticeofthe 1970s. In theirrandomjuxtaposition of mutuallyexclusive aestheticpositions,the curatorsmay well have attempted to imitatecertain aspects of Broodthaers'swork. But forBroodthaershimself, this notion of aesthetic paradox did not arise fromcompromised thinkingor or from the used artdealer's attitude lack ofhistorical thatanything commitment, in the On Broodthaers commissioned both Gerhard when, 1972, contrary, goes. Richter and Georg Baselitz to paint paintings of eagles forhis final museum a liberal reconciliafiction,the MuseumofEagles, his purpose was not to effect in orderto affirm tion of contradictions the existingpower structure, but rather the dialectical opposition of the two approaches, to sharpen the to intensify viewers' awareness of the framingconditions within which both practices are contained. Curatorial Creativity A second workby Asher, one thathad been commissionedforDocumenta, was dropped withoutexplanation. This was to have been a poster forthe exhibition, for which Asher used the figuresrepresentingmale and female unemployed workers,which had been designed in the early 1930s by the Cologne artistGerd Arntzforthe Isotype language developed by the Vienprogressivist nese sociologistOtto Neurath. The poster implicitly questioned the historical adequacy of an international art exhibition costing seven million Deutschmarks at a moment of considerable social instabilityand economic crisis. Paradoxically, Asher's proposal was replaced by a design that the exhibition's curatorsculled froman earlierworkby him forthe Art Instituteof Chicago, in which he had integrateda sculpturebyJean-AntoineHoudon into his installation. Misunderstood, Asher's idea returned, inverted, in their design for the officialposter and postcard for Documenta 7, which used a photograph of Johann August Nahl's neoclassical portrait of the Landgrave Ludwig II, a referenceto the past and its inherentauthority.3
3. That WalterNikkels's to Asher'sChicago indesignforDocumentareferred specifically
Decor. 1975. (Detail of MarcelBroodthaers. at Documenta installation reconstructed 7.)
Artistscan, in fact,be excellentdesigners,especially at a historicalmoment when ornament and decoration are among the only practices they are - insoallowed to reactivate. But the curatoras poet and the designeras artist far as the curatorsand designersof Documenta 7 triedtheirhands at it4- only constituted a leaden addition to the verbal and visual ballast thathas accumulated withinthe ideological space of culture. Dcor was the titleof Marcel Broodthaers'sinstallationat the Decor-A Conquest ICA in London in 1975. This, his last major installationwork, was reconstructed ofhis widow at Documenta 7, whereit functioned underthe supervision as an allegorical anchor. The workconsistedof two main sections. One was an arrangementof lawn furniture, includinga table on which a puzzle of the Battle of Waterloo was scattered,accompanied by a collection of contemporary machine guns. The otherwas an awe-inspiring arsenal ofhistoricalcannons inwith and furniture candelabra, a taxidermist's terspersed eighteenth-century boa constrictor, and red Broodthaers's tableaux morts- they trees, palm carpets.
stallation is evidenced in the Documenta catalogue, vol. 2, p. VIII, where the design is pictured in conjunction with two photographs of the Art Institute'ssculpture of George Washington by Houdon, one in its old location at the museum's entrance, the second showing its relocation by Asher in the eighteenth-century gallery. 4. See, forexample, the statementby Walter Nikkels, the designer of the exhibition,in which he states: "The placement of the walls withinthe classicisticorder of the spaces can be seen as a negative sculpture"(Documenta catalogue, vol. 2, p. XXXIX).
A Dictionary Ideas ofReceived
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and historical tableau function as hybrids of the contemporary naturemorte vivant-were always conceived for and placed within the particular circumDicor-A Constances and specificmomentsof an exhibitionand an institution. questoriginallyprovided the settingforthe shootingof Broodthaers'slast film, which combines shotstaken fromthe window of the ICA La Bataillede Waterloo, of the Trooping of the Colors on Pall Mall, in celebrationof the Queen's birthto piece together the puzzle of the Battle of day, withfootageof a woman trying whetherthe Waterloo taken in the installationitself.It is impossible to verify filmstemmed fromthe installation,or the installationserved as a pretextfor the film,and it was therefore had its only appropriatethatLa Bataillede Waterloo German premiere during the opening of Documenta 7. We can rest assured, different work for however, that Broodthaerswould have proposed an entirely the contextof thisexhibition,which makes it all the more astonishingthatDecor could unravel the secret fatality of the historical moment within which Documenta 7 seemed to rejoice. Discoveries of an exhibitionof contemIt mightbe expected that one of the functions on the of of its art scale Documenta curators porary compared it, in the (one would be of to the new Olympic perspectivesand catalogue, Games) discovery: unknown artists, of unrecognized contexts and relationships within various disciplines, of new methodological approaches, as well as of rediscoveriesof artistswhose works deserve reevaluation. In 1972 Documenta 5 disclosed a whole range of such new perspectives, and introduced new work by young of art practice in the years artistsof considerable consequence forthe definition to come. Moreover, it opened the exhibitionto a notion of visual culture that threwinto the sharpestpossible reliefthe obsolescent isolation of autonomous high culture. Ten years later Documenta 7 closed down that investigationin favor of a conservativerealignmentof the Beaux-Arts categories and a methodological agnosticism which undoubtedly sees itself as postmodern. Its not only emphasizes the hegemonyof paintingand sculpture,but reaffirmation also reestablishesthe supremacy of the museum as the social institution within which the discourse of high art originatesand must remain. Documenta 7 proclaimed the individualityof the artist and the autonomy of artisticpractice. -"Modern art does not have a history- it is an experi(Fuchs's statement - is one that we mightlast have read around 1955 in a commercial galment"5 lery'sbrochure promotingFrench tachism.) It obviously does not consider the and how thatmighthave determinedthe curators' currenthistoricalframework
5. R. H. Fuchs, "I Want to Make an Opera out of Works of Art," interview by Heiner Stachelhaus, Das Kunstwerk, June 1982, pp. 4-5.
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present enchantmentwith conservativecliches. The painted expression, that predictable stereotypethat stared out fromevery second wall surface of the show, promised aestheticdiscoveriesand adventuresof the kind one expectsto runway: too shallow and breathlessto be said to parade down a fashion-show be bathed in ideology, theycan only be said to be soaked in Zeitgeist. FashionModa The Fashion Moda pavilion at Documenta, transplantedfromthe South Bronx to its temporary high-artsettingin the Fridericianum'sEnglish garden, was one ofthe fewcourageous curatorialchoices. Through itspetty-commodity and souvenirswere traded over the counter, program,where artists'tchatchkis Documenta's high-art the hidden orderof exchange value underlying pretenses was revealed. One would hate to think,however, that this mightbe Fashion Moda's finaldestination(even thoughthe name does suggestthe ultimatelocation of the enterprise).Jenny Holzer, who, in collaborationwith Stefan Eins, was responsibleforbringingthe Fashion Moda pavilion to Documenta, excels in both unmaskingideologyat workin language and maskingart as business to fromT-shirts achieve a wide disseminationof her texts- printedon everything to facades. But when the workentersor leaves the galleryin the formofbronze plaques, small change indeed seems to have compromised Holzer's original radicalism.
FashionModa display others, of T-shirts by,among Christie Rupp andJohnFekner. (Shown infront of workin situat theOrangerie.) Daniel Buren's
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Daniel Buren.Les Guirlandes. 1982. (Photo-souvenir: Daniel Buren.)
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Garlands Daniel Buren's work, Les Guirlandes, introduced sound and motion into Documenta 7, which was given over to painting'ssilence and stasis (in spite of its pretense of emotional turbulence). Together with the sound, the sense of and temporalcontinuity of Buren's workcontradicted the exhibition's historicity for the claim and timelessness of general universality contemporaryaesthetic A of collection musical from production. samples- ranging Lully and Philidon l'Ain6 through Bach, Purcell, Mozart, Beethoven, and Verdi, to Offenbach and ScottJoplin- were broadcast over the large fieldleading the visitorsto the Museum Fridericianum.These musical offerings were regularlyinterrupted by a litanyofcolor names recitedin fourteen languages. In the strict chronologyof the musical samples, as well as in the abstract administrativelistingof color of historicization was proposed as a counterpoint terms,a parodic framework and the to the to overridethe viewers' efforts exhibition's-curators'--concerted discoveryof the real historicalconditionsof aestheticpracticeby inspiringawe and dignity.Pennants of Buren's recognizable colored and white stripeswere stretched above the fieldon the same poles that carried the loudspeakers, complementingthe musical sideshowwithan ambience of gaudiness appropriateto a fun fairor the grand opening of a gas station. This, in open confrontation to the discretionand rigor of the newly constructedwhite wall systemthat had museum forthe display of objects. The been installedin the eighteenth-century of all these elementsin Buren's workprobably accounts for successfulsynthesis the attemptby the majority of the show's curators to prevent its installation (although theyfinallyrelentedat the last minute) since the majorityof viewers might have perceived the work as a decoration installed by the exhibition's organizers to celebrate the inauguration of theirshow. Haacke
a MarcelBroodHans Haacke's two-partinstallation,Oelgemaelde- Hommage well within the exhibitionnor very well thaers placed (1982), was neithervery it to Benevolent critics deemed received. necessary defend Broodthaers'swork and its historical politicalpotentialas thatpotentialwas revealed against genuine in Haacke's timelyhomage. The juxtaposition of the meticulouslypainted portraitof Reagan (Haacke's own accomplishment)witha mural-sizedphotograph of an antiwar demonstrationon the occasion of Reagan's visit to the German capital, brought too many aspects of the interdependence of aesthetic and politicalmattersinto focusto please those conservativecriticswho would prefer to neutralize Broodthaers's work within an aesthetic nebulosity. Haacke's referencewas to an installationby Broodthaers at Documenta 5 in which inscriptionscontained withina black square were painted on the floor.Such inscriptionsas "rever, peindre" were replaced halfway throughthe exhibition's duration by "private property."The elements of traditional museum exhibi-
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tions that demarcate the threshold between life and high art- stanchions, velvet ropes, carpets- frequentlyused by Broodthaers in his installations, returnedin Haacke's work as the means of bracketingthe two apparentlyincompatible elementsof his work, the paintingof the leader and the photograph of the crowd. But the particular depiction in Haacke's painting and its within the ambience of an presentationgenerated discomfort mock-dignified exhibitionwhere the dignityof both art and its manner of presentationwere declared primaryconcerns of the curators(Fuchs at one point mentioned that he would installcarpets in what had once been a guttedbuilding). If Haacke's workonce again broke the unspoken rule that art can be criticalas long as it is - a rule that Broodthaershad often discreet emphasized in workthatpointed to it responded to a historicalsituationand a particular ritualsof discretion--then instance where Broodthaers'sstrategieshad themselvesbeen acculturated and falsified by the curators. The repeated devaluation of these already devaluated was, then,seen by Haacke as the only means by whichto pay homage strategies to the inherentpolitical radicalism of theirauthor. Kassel Every fouror fiveyears, a small provincial cityin West Germany (comparable in size, climate, and location withinthe countryto Akron, Ohio) requests the pleasure of the internationalart world's company. In the eighteenth century, Kassel was the glamourous residence of the aristocracyof Hesse, museum buildingsof Europe (1769-79), the Museum patronsof one of the first Fridericianum. Hesse was, at the time, a feudal state notoriousforthe rigidity of its army. It was the state where one of the most innovative German playwrights, Georg Biichner, was born, prosecuted, and imprisoned after the failure of the revolutionin the early nineteenthcentury. In the 1930s Kassel served as one of Hitler's most importantammunition depots, a central point connectingBerlin, capital of the Reich, with its westernand southernregions. Destroyed by the Allies in the final phase of World War II, Kassel was reconstructedin a rush during the economic miracle to become one of the ugliest cities west of Siberia, a citywhere Volkswagens are now assembled by is only Turkish, Spanish, and Italian hands. The blandness of the architecture exceeded by the blandness ofthe inhabitants,who seem to have eaten theirway fromtheirFascist past to theirneo-capitalistpresent.The population of Kassel could not care less about Documenta and internationalcontemporary art,just as the internationalart world could not care less about the people of the city and state that sponsors the most expensive of art exhibitions.But the 250,000 to 450,000 visitorsthat the exhibition attractsduring the 100 days of its installationcome fromall over the countryas well as fromneighboringcountries, excluding, of course, those neighborsto the east, the East Germans. Unlike its visits to the Venice or Paris biennals, where the food is good and the monu-
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ments are plenty, the international art world dreads going to Kassel, yet is always eager to participate, for Documenta- both the exhibition and its tradition- is an ideological institution where the aestheticstock of the present evaluated and is tested. day Postmodern Mysticism, In one of his many pronouncementson Documenta artists,Rudi Fuchs declared Lawrence Weiner a mystic and paired him with Jannis Kounellis, whom he wished to be seen as Weiner's Greco-Italian counterpart.Six years earlier, Fuchs had described Weiner's work in the catalogue ofhis exhibitionat the Van Abbemuseum: Is thisworkthenvisual art?That depends on use (on what one wants or expects to do with it); also it depends on how a notation can be read. The use of language conformsin no way to the use oflanguage withinpoetry. Designation of the work as visual art is a question of utilityonly. (There is no reason to name it differently.) The work is pure praxis. It is not carried by an aesthetic theory; there is just a sense of utility.Importantis that it entersthe culture - not as aesthetic satisfactionbut as a methodology to deal with material culture.6 If this descriptiondoes not correspondto our notion of mysticism, it nevertheless helps us understand the recourse to mysticism that pervades the catalogue rhetoricand installation strategiesof the present exhibition. In this context mysticismis called up to reconcile the blatant contradictionswithin current aesthetic practice, and is required to cover over the systematicbreakdown of liberal thoughtand its presentconversionto outright reaction.To be committed to a programofbourgeois enlightenment and rational progressas intellectually long as the expanding economy allows forit, but to fallback into a swamp of irrationalismwhen economic crisis requires a legitimationof hierarchicalorder - this is the historical constellation that and privilege generates the perverse embrace and willful combinationof mutuallyexclusive aestheticpracticesforming the foundation of Fuchs's installation. The postmodern coexistence of aestheticcontradictionspretendsto assure and defend the continued existence of a sublime high culture against the vulgar forcesof "the media and politics," as Fuchs puts it. (Whose media? Whose politics?) Certainly in the 1930s one could have combined a paintingby Mondrian and a flowerstill life by Vlaminck (they had once been historicallyand geo6. R. H. Fuchs, LawrenceWeiner, Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum, 1976, pp. 19-20.
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graphicallyclose enough to be thoughtof as artistsof the same region who "spoke the same dialect") in the same way that Fuchs combined, forexample, the work of Hans Haacke with the paintings of a lost local talent called J6rg to claim forsuch Immendorf.But it takes a particularurgencyformystification eminentlyrelevant artisticpractice, on the one hand, and juxtapositions--of the currentrevival of trivialpicturemaking, on the other- that theyrepresent the "battle of the century."' With this inflatedphrase, Fuchs refersto another such combination, that of Andy Warhol and a painter fromthe rural environment of southernGermany by the name of Anselm Kiefer, who uses strawand tar in his paintings to give tangible formto his desire to return to primary matters. Operaand Operator Too numerous and too frequentlyquoted fromhis notorious letter inviting artiststo participate in Documenta 7 are the confessionsof the Artistic Director's creative ambitions to make the exhibitioninto anythingother than - a poem called Le Bateauivre, an exhibition a story,a fairytale, or, ultimately, an opera: "I understand myselfto be a composer. I will make an opera out of works of art, paintings, and objects. Such explicit manipulation stands ."...in overt contradictionto Fuchs's professed concern to present the artworks ofhistorical or stylistic withoutan imposition categories,as immaculateaesthetic conceptions. This reveals the extentto which the administrationand distribution ofthe individualized productsofthe contemporary avant-gardepartakesof the conditions of the culture industry,which must constantlymythify its activitiesin order to maintain its credibility.Or-its dialectical complementthe extentto which industrymust employ the cliches of individualism and the cult of personalityas a means of sellingits productsat a time when genuine individualityis most threatened.No wonder, then, that the desire forpoetryexpressed by high culture's top manager (the three-yearsalary of Documenta's ArtisticDirector was 365,000.00 DM) and the private confessionsof the corporate entrepreneurcoincide almost word forword. Thus, Ralph Lauren: I'm inspired by America. . . . When I do the shows, it's all a dream. . . . There's a vibration I'm expressing, as if I'm a writer. When thatmodel came down the runway in the patchworkskirtand the pictorialsweaterwiththe school and the kids and the treesacross and Neil Diamond was singing"Hang onto the Dream"the front, I am.9 I believe in, everything that was everything
9.
8.
7.
August 1982, p. 305. Jesse Kornbluth, "Ralph Lauren: Living the Dream," Vogue,
Ibid.
Fuchs, "I Want to Make an Opera."
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Props Parsifal's Paradoxically Documenta 7, whose declared goal was to restoredignityto the visual arts and to defend high culture against the incursionsof the media, opened with the German premiere of Syberberg'sParsifal.The film'sFrench producers,with theirbusinessmen's sense of what is proper, had turned down the conservativeaesthete's Fuchs's plea forthe world premiere,thus frustrating attempt at a media coup for Documenta. Nevertheless, the film director's pathetic desire to be an artist and the exhibition director'sambition to participate in the Zeitgeiston a grand scale did findtheirmeetingground: in the basement of the Fridericianum. There the monumental kitsch of Parsifal's gigantic plaster props (Wagner's head, Hitler's hand) loomed in the dark (where better might the exhibition'srepressed desires be displayed?). In the moviemaker'sobsession to be taken seriouslyas an artist,while also cashing in on the media's current success at toying with fascism under the guise of in the exhibitiondirector's need to show these emblems historicalintrospection; of the fashionable taste forthe prohibited,togetherwith his wish to make the unacceptable tasteful- in these the collapse of modernistaesthetic historically criteriathatpervaded the exhibitionas a whole revealed its implicationsforthe between the formsof mass culture- which appear as seamfuture:the conflict - and the less totalities within which the individual subject is constituted - which a of critical dimension aestheticpracticesof individual artists open up - cannot be resolved the which social institutions negativity by support and contain aestheticpractice.They lack the criticalresistance,let alone the political consciousness, and under the pressureof crisiswill yield to whateversystemof representationand method of distributionis necessary for the ideologically organized dismantlingof modernism. Outdoors Sculpture, With Documenta 7's renewed faithin theinstitution ofthe museum-both its mode of display and the ideology it imposes- sculpture appears to have entereda historicalcul-de-sac. This is particularly the case forthatworkwhich, motivated a of the discrete partially by critique object, extended its investigations to an architectural dimension. Eitherby excluding certainsculptorsor by presentingtheirwork in an incoherentmanner (Richard Serra was, forexample, representedonly by a drawing),the curatorsmade it appear thatsculptural activityhad withered to utter marginality. One has only to remember the extraordinarysculpture exhibitions organized by Germano Celant-"Ambiente Arte" at the 1976 Venice Biennale-and Kaspar Koenig-"Skulptur" at Muenster in 1977- to realize the drastic change in recentcuratorial attitudes. Three works in Documenta 7 did, however, engage in an exemplaryway in a reflection of sculptureduringthepast two decades, inupon the transformation the recent with outdoor installation:Claes Oldenburg's cluding preoccupation
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Pick-Axe Peneplain (1982), and Dan Graham's TwoAd(1982), Carl Andre's Steel of plac(1978-82). Rather than having to face the contradictions jacentPavilions ing contemporarysculpture in the urban environment,these works accepted in the setting of an eighteenth-century theirconfinement English garden, but at architecture as did the sculptural thegarden'shistorical least theydid not destroy installationsof past Documenta exhibitions. Oldenburg's work, placed on the bank of the Fulda River, introduceda giant tool of physical labor into a landscape of leisure. The blue steel axe was ofTatlin's monumentand its attemptto replicate tiltedat an angle reminiscent the inclinationof the globe. Oldenburg's work escaped questions of the paradoxical nature of iconic representation using large scale steel construction by functioningin relation to Kassel's Herculessculpture. Oldenburg confronted that work, "an aristocraticfollyon top of a hill," with a banal contemporary object turnedinto a sculpturalsign of classicistmeasure. The dimensionof col- in - the essential Oldenburg's quality of any public monument lectivity work depended upon iconicityand its scale, but it remained external to the
Dan Graham. Two AdjacentPavilions.1978-82.
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sculpture'sstructure.In Andre's steel plate sculpturethat collectivedimension was achieved mechanistically through the sheer expansion of size-to 300 metersin length- and throughthe implicituse of the workas a walkway in the park. Graham's work is dependent upon both Oldenburg's ingenious transformation of public signs into monumental sculpture and Andre's materialist definitionof perception throughthe physical involvementof the viewer. But into the materialstructure of Graham incorporatesthe dimension ofcollectivity the work, insofaras the work embodies that dimension in both the perception and the use of the sculpture. Graham's pair of two-way mirroredpavilions fromeach other only in the light conditions resultingfromtheirceildiffered one of whichwas opaque, the othertranslucent.This determinedwhether ings, the viewers inside the pavilion could watch people outside withoutbeing observed,and vice versa. Using the mostcommon elementof recentinternationalstyle corporate architecture,the mirroredglass curtain wall, Graham transinto particularizedpavilion units of a size-just large formedthat architecture enough to feelmore spacious than a telephonebooth, yetnot as large as, say, a - which did not bus shelter impose upon the eighteenth-century garden architecture.The pavilions engaged the visitorsto Documenta in a reflection upon the social implications of perceptual activity, ranging from self-reflection, through interactionsgenerated by the two pavilions among groups of specinto an analyttators,to the inversionof the language of corporatearchitecture ical model that could be seen as architecturalsculpture. Warhol As a collectorof weathervanes,Andy Warhol apparentlyknows as much about how oxidation is induced as he does about painting. His Oxidation Paintthe rare at Documenta were to the pleasurable exceptions among ings generally of the exhibition. From a distance they apsomber and pompous offerings peared to be a new version of Art Informel;theirglisteningmetallic surfaces, their emphatic splashes and spots, their undercover preciousness seemed to share the worst aspects of Yves Klein. (These qualities already made viewers aware thattheywere looking at verycontemporary work.) When, however,the authorshipand production procedure of the works were revealed- Warhol or an assistant urinated onto canvases prepared with a copper emulsion, causing highlygestural green splotchesof oxidation to formon the reddish ground-it became clear thattheirmysterious quality was not only the resultof theirsheer physical beauty nor even their truthto materials. Indeed, what arrested the viewersin theirdisenchantedwanderingsthroughthe show thathad attempted to be a fairy tale was relief from the manufactured angst of the dozens of Dutch, German, and Swiss art-schoolgraduates.
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Lawrence Weiner. Many ColoredObjectsPlacedSide by Side to Forma Row of Many ColoredObjects. 1978-82. (Photos: DanielBuren.) Weiner For the past fifteen used years or more Lawrence Weiner has consistently a to to the as medium desire for aesthetic respond language contemporary The success of his linguisticstrategies-in his texts,films,and representations. and historians' atvideotapes- is evidentin the almost totaldefeatofthe critics' a to on the discourse tempts impose secondary primarylanguage (the paraphrasing paragraphs which accompany Weiner's statementsin Rudi Fuchs's 1976 catalogue formone of the rare exceptions). Weiner's tripartite contribution to Documenta 7 consisted of one inscriptionon the museum's exterior walls, and one on the paper wrapperthat frieze,threeon the museum's interior binds together the two volumes of the catalogue. Laconically, in the manner of these sum up not only the conditionsof theirown exallegorical inscriptions, the conditions, performance,and mode of but istence; also, metonymically, of art objects; and finally, representation adjacent by logical extension,those of the exhibitionat large. Weiner's statement, "Many colored objects placed side in form a row of colored to side many objects"- painted in upper-case letters by German on the friezeof the Museum Fridericianumbeneath allegorical sculpturesrepresenting Philosophy,Architecture, Painting,Sculpture, History,and itself to the Latin Astronomy counterposed inscription on the museum's The latter into frieze. is incised the architecture and gilded, while portico consistsof bronze-coloredlettersapplied with automobile Weiner's inscription of thisworkwas the lacquer sold by Chryslerto BMW. The particularfunction restoration of the real conditionsof discoursewhichunderlaythe accumulation
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of mythicalobjects on display inside the museum. Its placementin an architecturalsetting insureda public mode ofaddress,and itsparticular materialpointed to the extension of the conditions of imperialismfromeconomic to aesthetic matters. Women Artists Undoubtedly it was Coosje van Bruggen, the curatorresponsibleforthe selection of American artists,who was also responsible forthe inclusion of a number of women artistswhose work continues and develops the radical imthe therefore, plications of the major work of the 1960s and '70s, and offers, most stringent what is of as the new, predominegation currently presented nantlymale avant-garde of painting. Adequately presentedwithinthe exhibition, the work of Dara Birnbaum,JennyHolzer, SherrieLevine, and Martha Rosler would presumablyhave helped a wider audience to understandthatthe puerile performancesof neoexpressionistartistsare, despite theirspectacular of contemporarycultural pracsuccess, insufficient proposals for a definition tice. Prominent display was provided instead for the work of Gilbert and as spiritualleaders forthe male curators George, who seem to have functioned in theirinstallationof the masters. Whatever turnone took in the exhibition's one was confronted withanotherpanel depictingGilbertand George's labyrinth, London lives of petitbourgeois turpitude.And whateverwall space remained on the main floorsof the central building had to yield to the German and Italian canvases vyingforspace, fame, and supremacy. Nevertheless,in spite
122
OCTOBER
of dispersal and displacement(or, in Levine's case, because of the installation in the shadow of an Italian scenario), thewomen's workmanaged to function in its subversivecontextual strategies. Dara Birnbaum's work, the only video work admitted to Documenta 7, was one of the most successfulin the exhibition,even taking into account its juxtaposition withpaintingsby Boetti. Its success could be seen in its capacity to attract and hold the attention of large groups of predominantlyyoung to contemporaneity, viewers,who obviouslyunderstooditsexplicitcommitment which denies the false impositionof the new aestheticsanctity. a commitment They presumablyunderstood,as well, the work'scriticalcapacity to interfere whichhas become so ofthatideologicalenvironment withthe normalperception in itseffect oftelevision. environment life,thehermetic upon everyday totalizing of Birnbaum'sthree-monitor Clearly those gazing crowdsin front panel installations were not in awe of the dignityof a high-art discipline. Indeed, theywere containedwithinit the seeds of critical distracted viewers. But theirdistraction distanciation.Their pleasure in the seriallyrepeatedTV imagery,as well as the ofdisrupting television's recycledsounds of'60s rockmusic, showsthepossibility usual totalizingabsorption. With Birnbaum's work, as with the traditionof Brechtianstrategies generally,the viewersdo not abandon realitythroughtur-
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123
moil. The potentialfor criticalnegation in pleasurable distanciationprevents the them fromenteringa spectacle whose apparent liberationonly reinforces of the perceptualprocess. reification invitationof Martha Rosler to Documenta resultedin a The last-minute that confrontedthe attendperformance,Watchwords first-day of theEighties, of artworldwitha veryspecific question, thatofthe possibility ing international under the politicaland economic condiculturalresistanceand activistcriticism with its self-consciously artificial tions of Reagan's America. Her performance, of rap talk and graffiti writing,was as specificto contemporary incorporation New York cultureas the "real"graffiti painterLee Quinones, who had been invitedby thecuratorsto paint thewalls of a subterraneanpedestrianpassageway to the local dialect of art). As in Kassel (so much forthe curators'commitment a witha ghetto we see Rosler bouncingaround stage like street blaster,it fighter the art to accontradicts world's desire that notion of her is apparent authenticity authentic of denial and resistance.The authenticity culturateinstantly any sign of with which Rosler confronts the viewer is that of the apparent impossibility and cultural activism the framework commitment within provided by political of practicewithin the culturalapparatus and the necessityof a transformation that framework.
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7. 1981-82. JohnKnight.Project forDocumenta (Drawing byFumikoGoto.)
on theWall Writings Two worksin the exhibitionreceivedlittleattention due to theirsuccess in to the curators' resistingsubjugation declamatorydisplay style.The two artists situated their in works the stairwells of the Museum Fridericianum, deliberately from the battlefield of and enforcedcomparisons. Both away prime exposure works,thatby German artistLothar Baumgartenand thatby West Coast artist into the museum's arJohn Knight,were written signs thathad been integrated chitecture. nor Language was not, however,theirprimaryfieldof investigation, did they subscribe to a reifiednotion of site specificity that ignores both the linguisticand the ideological dimensions of modernistpractice in favor of the perceptual conditionsgeneratedby architecture. - his initialstransformed John Knight's six nearlyidenticalreliefelements intoa logo design and coveredwithsix different travel were installedon posters-the six landings of the museum's two lateral staircases. The symmetry of the installation and the repetition of the elements incorporated the strategies of
125
advertising and commodity display, contradictingthe curators' attempt to camouflage the ways in which such strategiesdetermine contemporaryart practiceand its exhibition.Through the drasticreductionofthework'smaterial features and functionsto the sign of individualization and authentication, worksat Knight'sinstallationmade stillanotherconditionof the contemporary Documenta transparent. The restriction of drawing, or forthat matterany otherpictorialmaneuthe artist'ssignaturehad already been ver, to the design of a logo incorporating in Broodthaers's plasticplaques ofthe early'70s, as well as by Luciano proposed Fabro's repeated execution of his signature and address in neon. Using the mode of conceptual tautologythen current,these works anticipated in their theirinherentfunction as self-promotion materialstructures and theirultimate status as commodities. In all of these works contemporaryaestheticpractice acknowledgesits share in the conditionsof the cultureindustry, especiallyas it is evidenced in an exhibitionlike Documenta. Only with the explicitintegration of theseconditionsdoes it seem thatthe workscan open up a dimensionof criticalnegation and authenticity. Baumgarten's inscriptionsin dark red classicistletterson the balustrade beneath the rotunda of the central staircase listed the names of Indian tribes fromthe Amazon region,where Baumgartenhad lived and done researchfrom Monument fortheIndian Lothar Baumgarten. Nationsof SouthAmerica.1982.
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126
OCTOBER
1979 to 1981. The names ofthesetribes,many ofwhichare threatenedwithextinction,might have appeared to the uninformedviewer like a dada sound poem. In such poems, as Walter Benjamin observed, the rediscoveryof the purely phonetic dimension of language liberates the word fromits slavery to meaning and simultaneouslyredeems the historicaland material body of lanthe historicaloverguage. Thus, in Baumgarten'scommemorativeinscriptions determinationof the current desire for primary expression- the romantic of the noble savage that has haunted art since the longing for the Ursprache nineteenth century-is dialecticallyrelatedto the actual historicaland political existenceof those culturesthat are stillperceived by Western ethnocentricism as exotic and primitive,and that continue to be destroyedin the name of enlightenment.
7. Weiner. Lawrence ofDocumenta forcatalogue Wrapper Louise 1982. (Photo: Lawler.)
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Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas Author(s): Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Source: October, Vol. 22 (Autumn, 1982), pp.

MichaelAsher.Proposal for official poster for 7. 1982. Documenta

Ideas A Dictionary ofReceived

Decor. 1975. (Detail of MarcelBroodthaers. at Documenta installation reconstructed 7.)

A Dictionary Ideas ofReceived

Ideas A Dictionary ofReceived

Daniel Buren.Les Guirlandes. 1982. (Photo-souvenir: Daniel Buren.)

'> i~iiii' 71!i

Hans Haacke. Oelgemaelde - Hommage 'a Marcel Broodthaers. 1982.

A Dictionary Ideas ofReceived

Fuchs, "I Want to Make an Opera."

Ideas A Dictionary ofReceived

Dan Graham. Two AdjacentPavilions.1978-82.

A Dictionary Ideas ofReceived

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PM Magazine/Acid Rock. 1982.

Ideas A Dictionary ofReceived

Martha Rosler. Watchwords of theEighties.1982. Richard (Photo: Baron.)

7. 1981-82. JohnKnight.Project forDocumenta (Drawing byFumikoGoto.)

A Dictionary Ideas ofReceived

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7. Weiner. Lawrence ofDocumenta forcatalogue Wrapper Louise 1982. (Photo: Lawler.)

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