ART : REVIEW : Look for the American Label : Global pluralism may be the theme of Documenta 9, the latest extravaganza at Kassel, Germany, but the show gets its bite from American artists

This small city of 200,000 souls, former home to the storytelling Brothers Grimm, was, once upon a time, just a short drive from the ominous border separating East and West. When that dividing line suddenly got erased, Kassel found itself on a redrawn map almost smack in the geographic center of a reunified nation.

An event that cataclysmic was no doubt disorienting. Yet, being in the middle of things is not completely alien to the locals. For once every five years or so, the city’s grassy, tree-lined Friedrichsplatz is transformed from a sleepy pedestrian square into Ground Zero for the international contemporary art world.

Documenta is the name of the extravagant, summer-long art exhibition that, periodically since 1955, has made Kassel the temporary home of the international art tribe. A so-called “Museum of 100 Days,” the show began as one small way to start climbing out of the self-inflicted isolation created by years of warring brutality, years marked by the suppression of modern art as filthy and degenerate. Today, Documenta is huge. It is a carnival. It is a key ingredient in the region’s economy. And, it is a forum whose prestige has for 20 years outstripped other venerable rivals, such as the faded Venice Bienniale.

At least since 1972, when Harald Szeeman engineered a universally acclaimed exhibition, Documenta has provided an incomparable platform from which an artist can speak to an international audience. The ninth installment of the extravaganza, which opened last month and continues through Sept. 20, doesn’t come even close to Szeeman’s success, though it does have more to recommend it than the last Documenta, which was almost universally panned. Chaotic and far too large--more than 180 artists from dozens of countries on six continents have contributed paintings, sculptures, drawings, video, Conceptual works and installations--the show tries for an air of openness and inclusiveness. In fact, its supposed pluralism is merely a bullish accretion of diverse curatorial tastes.

Still, Documenta 9 can boast a variety of individual works of exceptional merit--enough to make a visit satisfying, if not a watershed of artistic revelation. And, amid a few triumphs from unexpected sources, one big surprise was hardly anticipated: The energy and challenge in the show is almost always traced to the work of American artists.

Here are some stats. The show is spread out over six buildings--seven, if you count the underground parking garage where Cady Noland and Matthew Barney chose to lay out their installations--including the big, new, glass-and-steel Documenta-Halle, a disappointingly awkward suite of permanent galleries built expressly for the exhibition. Happily,they also include the linked chain of marvelous temporary pavilions that will be dismantled next fall--glorified sheds of corrugated metal and glass erected on 10-foot stilts, bythe Belgian architects Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem. The sheds look vaguely like a post-industrial wagon train rumbling across a leafy urban park--which, considering that Documenta is a reigning symbol for the unprecedented nomadism of today’s international art world, is apt.

A number of artists, including sculptors Jonathan Borofsky, Tadashi Kawamata and Richard Deacon, have chosen assorted locations in parks and public buildings in the general vicinity, while Germany’s Ulrich Ruckriem found the perfect spot for his threateningly monumental, typically exquisite blocks of carved stone: He chose an abandoned factory in the town of Essen, undaunted by the fact that Essen is about 90 miles away from Kassel. (Daunted, I didn’t get by to see them.) Organizers say the show occupies nearly 100,000 square feet indoors; if you count the outdoor installations, double that.

Documenta 9 cost about $10 million--a considerable sum, to be sure, although one a bit more reasonable considering the five-year span between outings, and in light of the income generated by the half-million visitors expected to pour into town during the three-month run. Slightly more than half the exhibition’s funds come from the city, the state of Hessen and the federal German government. Imagine that happening in the United States--especially these days, when puffed-up provincials feather their own comfy nests with paternalistic assaults against taxpayer-funded art--and then wake up, because obviously you’re dreaming.

Documenta 9’s guest organizer is Jan Hoet, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium. Before Documenta, he was principally known for an innovative show called “Chambres des Amis,” in which a number of artists were invited to create installations inside a variety of private homes in Ghent, which were then opened to the public for the show’s duration. After Documenta, he will probably be most widely known for having been named one of the Ten Sexiest Belgians by the Brussels-based magazine, “The Bulletin.”

So, the German extravaganza has been organized by a non-German, who enlarged on the fact by forming a committee composed of Greek art historian Denys Zacharopoulos, Italian critic Pier Luigi Tazzi and Bart De Baere, a young Belgian curator from Hoet’s home museum. This may help to explain the otherwise surprising abundance of Greek, Italian and Belgian artists in Documenta (I counted 25), despite the generally lackluster quality of their work.

More important, it gives a clue as to the show’s larger ambitions. Documenta 9 has a theme, sort of, but it’s buried so deep within a tangled, curatorial web of Euro-art-babble that drawing it out is difficult--if, indeed, it’s worth the effort. Charting Hoet’s Byzantine public statements and written claims, it appears to have something to do with the failure of revolution, the death of the hero, the loss of individualism, the globalization of culture and the urgent need to carefully guard the fragile flame of personal experience, regardless of where it might be burning.

The theme even has a historical exegesis--also sort of--in the form of a cheerfully pretentious display in several little rooms stacked high in the tower of the Museum Fridericianum, the show’s main venue. Pressing your nose against thick, steel-framed glass walls constructed to provide security, you stare into airless white chambers at Documenta’s equivalent of the Crown Jewels: Jacques-Louis David’s great, 1793 portrait of the slain revolutionary leader, Jean-Paul Marat; a languorous and exotic Tahitian scene by Paul Gauguin; a wonderfully loony self-portrait in a ridiculously floppy hat by Belgian Symbolist James Ensor; an installation of mysterious jars, books and objects on shelves--part alchemical laboratory, part artist’s studio--by the late German artist, Joseph Beuys, and more.

From this, the vague claim of a contemporary crisis of the spirit might be inferred, a crisis both registered and resisted by international art. So call the theme of Documenta 9 global pluralism, complete with its very own Tower of Babel.

You might also infer some sort of supposedly populist aura, enhanced by Hoet’s otherwise bizarre decision to add baseball games, boxing matches and jazz concerts to the art events at Documenta 9. That these three are also identified specifically with American culture seems, however, more salient. Given the strength and prominence of American art--more than one quarter of the show--it suggests the director is a confirmed American-ophile.

My own list of the standouts in Documenta 9 includes 11 Americans and only one European--Great Britain’s Richard Deacon, whose swollen, bean-shaped, indoor sculpture looks impossibly like it’s made from inflated wood, and is the single most beautiful object to be seen. And his big, industrial-organic outdoor piece manages to wrestle the cliche of Henry Moore-style pastoral sculpture to the ground, despite some technical glitches in its fabrication.

It isn’t that the European, African, Asian, Australian and Latin American work is uniformly bad. Tadashi Kawamata’s jerry-built, stream-side shanty town, for example, which transforms the neat and tidy picture of a cluster of sheds in a nearby community garden into a bleak, mirror-image of decay and loss, is very strong. It’s just that so much of it is derivative. The show’s full of second-generation versions of work by mainstream art-stars, such as the pseudo-Jannis Kounellis sculptures of Pier Paolo Calzolari and Hidetoshi Nagasawa.

One buzz at Documenta claims the arrival into prominence of little-known, 50-year-old Jimmie Durham, an American Indian whose quizzical assemblages of cast-off materials are being likened to those of David Hammons. The problem, aside from an unmistakably paternalistic whiff, is that Hammons’ contribution to the show is a knockout, cowing comparisons. A fountain-like spray of wire rods, emerging from a pile of rocks and covered with twisted strands of hair salvaged from barber shops in African-American neighborhoods, it’s studded with assorted flotsam: cigarette butts, popcorn, gum wrappers. The dazzling sculpture is a mesmerizing monument to dreadlocks, resurrected from communal sweepings.

More difficult, especially for the Europeans, is the recurrent Joseph Beuys Problem, which, in apparent homage to Documenta’s Belgian director, is joined this year by the Marcel Broodthaers Problem. The Beuys (and Broodthaers) Problem is often (but not always) a national dilemma, in which a late artist of towering achievement stands as a nearly insurmountable hurdle for younger generations.

It is because Richard Deacon has successfully vaulted the Henry Moore Problem, both venerating and undercutting the British master in one brilliant stroke, that he’s become a leading sculptor of his generation. The Moore Problem is no more. Documenta 9, alas, gives us lots of art of the merely faux-Beuys and faux-Broodthaers sort.

Another difficulty is inherent in carnivalesque extravaganzas like this. Although nearly half the artists are traditional painters and sculptors, the show’s theatricality inevitably favors artists who work in installation, video or Conceptual forms. Video, specifically projected video, is quite strong, especially Bruce Nauman’s room filled with four spinning, chanting heads (a variation on a work shown last year at the Museum of Modern Art) and Bill Viola’s scroll-like, slow-motion image of a diver hitting water, whose sudden passage from one realm to another seems shocking, and finally liberating.

And, Gary Hill’s “Tall Ships” is extraordinary. In a darkened, dead-end corridor, 16 silent, ghostly figures are projected on the walls. In random patterns they walk slowly toward you, beckon with their eyes, turn and begin to leave--then turn again and come back, as if puzzled by your inability to join them. You scrutinize remote images, which also scrutinize you.

Painting suffers most at Documenta, given the impossibility of solitary contemplation. (Sculpture at least occupies the same physical space as the viewer, so you’re obliged to pay attention, lest you stumble.) Lovely paintings by Susan Rothenberg and Denmark’s Per Kirkeby could scarcely be looked at for all the whirring and whizzing of nearby installations.

In fact, little sense of curatorial affinity for the medium is evident--a situation plainest in the pairing of major paintings by Brice Marden and minor ones by Jonathan Lasker, which have absolutely nothing in common in style, sensibility or concept, except that both feature squiggly lines. Faring slightly better are Ellsworth Kelly’s three, single color, shaped canvases, chiefly because they have their own small room. They’re also the only clear successes among what is an inexplicable abundance of bland, monochrome canvases, which apparently is meant to pass for a painting “trend.”

The cleverest solution to the carnival dilemma is achieved by Christopher Wool and Robert Gober. Wool’s stenciled, black-and-white floral paintings are given much-needed contextual resonance by Gober’s vibrantly colored scenic-wallpaper, on which they hang. Made from narrow, vertical strips depicting an autumn wood, the wallpaper is installed in a soaring, oddly shaped room in kaleidoscopic patterns that create a kind of environmental Rorschach blot. You can’t see the phony forest for the surreal trees. Wisely, and wittily, they transformed their work into a theatrical installation that says much about the contrived “nature” of the exhibition.

Painter Manuel Ocampo is also featured in an installation--although its circumstance is frankly disturbing. Accounts vary, but it appears local politicians applied pressure to have the young, Los Angeles-based artist’s swastika-studded paintings barred from the show; the curators obliged, offering him the option of displaying in a roped-off basement storeroom of the Documenta-Halle the single work that has no offending signs. Dominated, ironically, by the Spanish phrase, “La Mala Vida” (“The Bad Life”), the painting hangs in spotlit isolation on a far wall behind table saws and between storage racks.

Ocampo’s paintings conflate signs of colonialism and brutal repression, and German nervousness over a youthful emergence of neo-Nazism is very real. Still, what kind of curators are these who, in response to complaints, first feign ignorance of Ocampo’s subject matter--they chose him for the show!--and then brush the paintings aside as insignificant?

Also roped off is Charles Ray’s hysterical (in both senses of the word), crowd-pleasing sculpture of a sex orgy, in which all the writhing, life-size nudes are self-portraits of the artist. A wildly literal, visual transcription of a vulgar epithet, in which one is urged to go have intercourse with oneself, Ray’s sculpture is also a dark meditation on the circularity of desire and satisfaction.

Several installations that probe the deadening of art by institutions--Topic A of the post-1960s era--are in the Neue Galerie, one of Kassel’s two general art museums, providing the only thematic group in Documenta. The most dramatic is Joseph Kosuth’s shrouded paintings, sculptures and display cases in two long corridors, one in white and the other in black, where art is replaced with snippets of text about aesthetics by assorted writers and thinkers, living and dead (e.g., “It’s our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us”--Marcel Proust). It’s provocative but ponderous--especially after you see the not unrelated work of the young New York-based artist Zoe Leonard, which explodes in adjacent galleries.

Leonard is the succes de scandale of Documenta 9, with a devastatingly simple (and funny) installation that makes a shambles of cozy perceptions. On damask-covered walls, interspersed among two dozen aristocratic portraits and Rococo mythological paintings by the 18th-Century local hero, Johann Heinrich Tischbein, she has installed 19 blunt, black-and-white photographs of women’s pubic regions. In this company the work of Der Kasseler Tischbein, as the painter is also known, looks more lively than seems possible. You begin to read his dull, frothy pictures in a new way, paradoxically injecting them with nasty life.

Leonard’s photographs are plainly modeled on Gustave Courbet’s famous 1866 painting of the same subject, “The Origin of the World.” A wry, disbelieving eye is therefore cast on the presumption that Modernist art swept away the West’s traditional social hierarchies, so artfully enshrined in 18th Century painting. Amid Tischbein’s conventional pictures representing male perceptions of power, Leonard’s “Oh, yeah?” photographs create a ruckus.

For example, in two galleries devoted solely to his portraits of women--in the role of virgin, seductress, mother, wife, dowager--Leonard includes masturbatory photographs that fill a gap: woman as utterly self-sufficient sexual being, undefined by her relationship to men. Suddenly Tischbein’s pictures seem not just minor art, but major offenses. And, while you’re engaged in this old-fashioned exercise in connoisseurship, you oddly begin to wonder if you’re also supposed to be deciding which of Leonard’s abrupt, artless photographs is most “beautiful.”

Leonard’s installation deftly inserts a woman’s images into the museum--and into Documenta 9, too. Organizers have proudly trumpeted the greatly increased number of women invited to be in the show, notorious for its Germanic exclusion, but the number adds up to a whopping 18 %. Call it ironic justice that Leonard’s witty indictment is one standout, while Cady Noland’s installation is the show’s succes d’estime .

The Dantesque descent into the urban underworld of a parking garage, noxious fumes and circling automobiles providing suitably maniacal dizziness, is fitting prelude to Noland’s “Toward a Metalanguage of Evil.” The garishly lit installation, assisted by Robert Nickas and incorporating paintings and sculptures by Joan Wallace, Peter Nagy and Steven Parrino, is a wild, three-dimensional, illustrated version of a 1987 lecture that draws on everything from Machiavelli’s “The Prince” to Ridley Scott’s “Alien.”

Dismantled scaffolding, piled cement blocks, random electrical equipment, a junked Camaro, bundles of fluorescent light tubes, news photos of racing-car drivers, a smashed Ford mini-van and panel after panel of rambling, theoretical text analyzing the denial of death, psychopathology, pornography, the structure of evil, the Jonestown massacre and the tragic deaths of James Dean, Mark Rothko and Diane Arbus--the stunned and incomprehensible tone of the piece is absolutely right, as is its location in the margins of a functional place. If Adolf Eichmann gave us the banality of evil, Noland obsesses on its far more pervasive and equally pernicious contemporary twin: the evil of banality.

There are other notable works: Louise Bourgeois’ psychologically haunted bedroom; Mike Kelley’s scatalogical torture devices; Guillermo Kuitca’s cluster of beds, dreamily painted with road maps; Thomas Ruff’s back-alley photographs of numbing apartment blocks, suffused in a sickly green light; Bob Therrien’s wistful attic room covered in pale, white cardboard, and more. If, unlike 1982, when Documenta 7 sent a big signal about the return of long-absent European art to center stage, no equally dramatic or definitive declaration can be made this time out, one thing is certain: American artists, especially younger American women artists, have given Documenta 9 its only biting edge.