ART AND MEDIA MOTHS ZERO IN ON DOCUMENTA 8

The days of the art locust come here more often than the cicadas and with almost as disruptive an effect. The phenomenon that has unfolded here every four years or so since Germany dug herself out of the rubble of World War II is called Documenta, and it magnetizes hordes of art-and-media moths to this normally normal town on the Fulda river.

Nobody knows how many flittering critters make up the teeming host, but everybody knows nobody else can get a hotel room for miles around. Documenta 7 in 1982 is said to have attracted 380,000 visitors.

Documenta is to the arty what the Cannes festival is to the filmy, what the Super Bowl is to the sporty and--not just incidentally--what any convention is to the politico. Along with the creaky and oft-scorned Venice Biennial, Documenta is where artists earn the stripe of International Recognition.

Documenta 8 launched itself over the weekend with an excitement that has become a recipe and a ritual. The first edition of the exhibition in 1955 reintroduced the German public to the modern art that had been declared degenerate by Hitler. Old-timers say it was like a declaration of renewed cultural freedom. These days, opening morning plays like a minuet. Pretty, spike-haired girls in army boots and black tights jostle corpulent European scholars whose note-pencils are derailed by pushy TV crews as likely to be from Tokyo as from Athens or Madrid. Everybody scans the crowd for old cronies and brands everybody else as effete, foreign, no-talent upstarts. Some artists hang out in their galleries and a few are not above handing out a self-promoting post card.

Documenta is funded by a combination of local and federal government money, this year more than 7 million marks (roughly $4 million), according to one report. This is certainly partly offset if not recouped by gate receipts and profit to local merchants, but Kasselers have nonetheless always found Documenta a motive for rather gleeful protest.

In 1977 they shrieked at the cost of a project by Walter de Maria, even though it was privately funded, and used a large outdoor sculpture for an outhouse even though it did not flush. The 1982 edition took heat for including East German artists. This year’s opening saw only a ragtag woman’s marching band masked in mylar, tootling fife and drum and carrying George Segal-style casts of members’ naked torsos which were deposited in the galleries.

L.A. art dealer Jean Milant was among the onlookers and decided it must be a gesture deriding the relative paucity of female artists in the show. Of the 150 visual artists included, only about 15 are women.

The official symbolic opening ritual was performed by Eva Beuys, the widow of artist Joseph Beuys. He had been a kind of ruling spirit of Documenta for years. At the last edition he vowed to plant 8,000 oak trees around Kassel as a conceptual peace gesture and city-beautification project. (Kassel has some nice prospects, parks and river views, but it was flattened in the war and the rebuilt architecture is in the worst tradition of crackerbox modernism.) Eva Beuys planted the 7,000th oak tree before a crowd of the faithful who watched the hole being dug for two solemn hours.

Initial Documentas earned a reputation for a combination of scholarly coherence and aesthetic daring. Early editions introduced Europe to Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Photo-Realism. Recent repetitions have been repetitious, mainly keeping abreast of established trends. This one, organized by Cologne scholar Manfred Schneckenberger and on view to Sept. 20, is, as usual, installed in two renovated Neo-Classical exhibition halls and surrounding parks.

Despite claims of originality, familiar names like Richard Serra, Hans Haacke, Gerhard Richter, Les Levine, Alice Aycock and others read like an engraved roster of international-circuit artists; forms such as video, audio, film, performance, architecture and public sculpture are scarcely strangers to Kassel despite Post-Mod wrinkles.

Los Angeles pilgrims were comforted to see old homefolks in the crowd, including County Museum of Art senior curator Maurice Tuchman and dealers Herbert Palmer, Betty Asher, Margo Leavin and Helene Winer, who now runs New York’s Metro Pictures. Tour groups of museum patrons from the County Museum of Art and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art lurked about.

Even better for local color was the presence of resident California artists on the Documenta roster. Allan Kaprow and Rachel Rosenthal were on the performance slate. In the galleries stand works by Terry Allen, expatriate Stephan von Huene, Maria Nordman and Jonathan Borofsky.

Conceptual artists Helen and Newton Harrison responded to the invitation to Kassel by developing a polite but elaborate critique of the city, with suggestions about how their hosts should shape up their house.

Years back, the Harrisons threw all of London into a snit over a plan to barbecue some catfish by electrocution as part of an ecological concept piece at the Hayward Gallery. The tabloid press lynched Newton Harrison with words and the government was called in to mediate the affair.

At Documenta, a bearded Harrison was seen looking a little abashed under some testy questioning by the locals, but so far the tar lies cold and the chickens unplucked.

Too bad, really. Cynics say International Scandal is even better for artists than International Reputation.