X Marks the Flop

As disasters go, Documenta X is a pretty big one. Not so big that you should drop everything and race to this small city in central Germany, so that someday you can boast to the grandnieces and -nephews that You were there! when the great ship went down. But certainly big enough to cause slack-jawed amazement at the crash-and-burn scenario.

Documenta, after all, is the prestige ticket in the arena of large international survey exhibitions of contemporary art. The once-every-five-years extravaganza, which has a new curator for each installment, has held that lofty rank for a quarter-century. The watershed was the legendary fifth Documenta, which definitively bumped the ailing dowager, Venice’s Bienniale, from the top perch of international surveys not to miss.

Talk to most anyone who saw Documenta V in 1972 (I didn’t have the pleasure) and watch their eyes go all dreamy. The scattered ferment that had been building in the Pop, Minimal, Conceptual, video and performance art of the preceding decade was bracingly galvanized. An artistic event like that is difficult to match, and no subsequent Documenta has come close.

Still, each following outing has managed its sizable share of memorable new art. Until now, that is. Of about 60 presentations of recent work selected for Documenta X, I’d rank as memorable a grand total of nine.

And I’m trying to be generous.

Documenta X is a flat-out flop, and it’s a flop because the curatorial agenda it represents is profoundly conservative. The new art it supports is mostly a pinched, retrograde bore.

Meanwhile, its abundance of older art has been curatorially hog-tied, subjected to a demeaning role of illustration for established academic cliches, dead-end doctrine and political nostalgia. Hardly a fresh artistic idea is anywhere in sight--which is no mean feat for a show that took nearly five years to organize at a cost of more than $11.5 million.

One reason for this pitiful accounting is that Documenta X--or dX, as it’s been nicknamed--actually includes a surprisingly modest amount of recent art. More than 100 displays occupy the six main exhibition venues, but only about 60 date from the past five years. The remainder are historical works, some made as early as the 1930s.

Photographs, drawings, objects, collages and architectural projects that predate the 1990s have been assembled from an array of international artists and designers: Archigram, Lothar Baumgarten, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, James Coleman, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Hans Haacke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Helio Oiticica, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Garry Winogrand and others. Interestingly, most of the familiar names are found among this older group, many of whom are deceased.

Now, don’t get me wrong: A lot of the older material is distinctive and captivating.

Who could argue with the brilliance of Walker Evans’ and Helen Levitt’s black-and-white photographs from the 1930s and 1940s? And if Robert Adams and Ed van der Elsken are not their artistic equals, their overly abundant photographs from the late 1950s to the early 1980s do include some fine examples.

Still, the show’s out-sized emphasis on historical material is unusual. Documenta has often incorporated past art, but it has always been at the service of an overwhelmingly contemporary survey.

Born in 1955, the series was created to partially atone for the artistic sins of Germany’s Nazi past, while also doing cultural combat in the Cold War. Prior to World War II, the German government had declared Modern art degenerate; after, when the nation was split in two, Communism’s iron fist restricted art to state propaganda.

Pointedly, given the East German border just a few miles from Kassel, Documenta was conceived with complex cultural politics in mind. The tradition continues in dX, albeit in a frankly repulsive way.

This Documenta is the first post-Cold War installment of the series. (Documenta IX, in 1992, opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its organization was underway before.) French curator Catherine David, formerly of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, smartly seized a rare opportunity; then, she promptly blew it.

The unfortunate result is a schoolmarmish show with a vaguely scolding air. It says, in effect: Once upon a time art held out hope for activist social criticism, but then something went terribly wrong; now, we must correct the error of our ways.

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According to this show, the hopeful time was the early 1970s, after the counter-culture activism of the late 1960s had raised the stakes beyond anything that gallery-bound art was then thought capable of delivering. By featuring long-dead artists like the Belgian Broodthaers (d. 1976) and the American Matta-Clark (d. 1978), dX means to demonstrate the point: Their Conceptual work took a critical look at, respectively, the modern institution of the art museum and the established social systems embodied in urban architecture.

So, indirectly, does the work of Brazilian artists Oiticica (d. 1980) and Lygia Clark (d. 1988). Many of their exhibited works are props and costumes, the evocative residue of ephemeral, iconoclastic street performances.

Similarly, the documentary photographers Evans, Levitt, van der Elskin, Winogrand and Adams represent another socially minded alternative. Their images disclose a long-standing photographic tradition of exposing modern alienation and social disenfranchisement.

The show’s point about the supposed irrelevance of gallery-bound art today is also dramatically made through absence: Almost no painting or sculpture will be found.

Films, photographs, video projections and computer stations are ubiquitous. But on view are only a few sculptures--among them Dorothee Golz’s life-size transparent plastic bubble, which houses what looks like a work station for a mutant, and a half-dozen “customized living modules” by Andrea Zittel--as well as examples by just three painters.

The painters were likely chosen for their subject matter alone: Kerry James Marshall’s four poignant, ethereal pictures of black American youths languishing in the decayed garden of failed federal housing projects; Lari Pittman’s single, exuberantly decorative mural chronicling daring young men on the flying trapeze of a polymorphous new world; and David Reeb’s nine sloppy pictures with block text, based on newspaper accounts of Arab-Israeli conflict.

One way you can tell that “image strategy,” rather than painting, is what matters to the curator is that Reeb’s paintings are amateurish. In the company of Marshall’s and Pittman’s sophisticated pictures, Reeb’s look silly.

Another blatant clue is that Gerhard Richter--one of our greatest living painters--is represented here not by paintings, but by his much-exhibited “Atlas.” The hundreds of identically framed sheets in the sprawling “Atlas” form a kind of diaristic scrap-book of snapshots, sketches and clippings from mass media, which the artist uses as source material for his (banished) paintings.

It’s the research-and-development end of Richter’s art, which the curator contextually elevates above the apparently corrupting experience of actual paintings.

For dX, the 1970s represent the lost promise of a Golden Age--and if that sounds depressingly like political nostalgia, you’ve been paying attention. The diminished place of painting and sculpture here casts the 1980s, by default, as the era of the big crack-up--the rosy dream turned awful nightmare.

The ostensible collapse of street-level activism and the rise of a global marketplace in the 1980s supposedly ushered in the return to prominence of (wicked) gallery-bound art, whose frank relation to commerce makes it untrustworthy. We’re asked to place our faith instead in David’s thoroughly academic catechism of virtuous post-structural theory, which flourished in France during the now-lost Golden Age.

In short, for dX it’s back to the future--minus, perhaps, the utopianism that fueled those idealizing counter-culture days.

So far, the common art-world response to this nonsense seems to be to quietly deplore the dull tedium of most of its new art, while still applauding the tough-minded curatorial theme of confronting socioeconomic trauma in our disorienting age of globalization. In other words, to hell with art and artists; support instead the ministrations of your local art bureaucrat.

Thanks, but no thanks. Like dX itself, such a response is a stark example of our end-of-century problem, not its solution.

Adrift in the show, you find yourself clinging desperately to the few compelling new works, rather like those shipwrecked souls piled perilously aboard Gericault’s tattered “Raft of the Medusa.”

In addition to Marshall’s and Pittman’s magnificent paintings, there are fine video installations by Britain’s Steve McQueen (on playfully mediated communication), Denmark’s Joachim Koester (a music video of a different order) and Trinidad-born Johan Grimonprez (on the repulsive glamour of terrorist airplane hijacking); an extraordinary (and already widely exhibited) film projection by Canada’s Stan Douglas; a kick-out-the-jams, rock ‘n roll mixed-media collaboration by Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler; and, a coldly haunting installation recalling a train station’s waiting room by Germany’s Reinhard Mucha.

Finally, a small, elegant, slyly funny pig sty has been erected in the lush garden of a former palace by the team of Carsten Holler and Rosemarie Trockel. In a scathing send-up of the dynamic between exhibitionism and voyeurism, it lets you watch assorted hogs, sows and piglets at play from behind the placid safety of a two-way mirror.

And that about wraps it up in the Compelling New Art Dept.

The most damning feature of the show is that, whatever insightful arguments it might make about our cultural trajectory after World War II, it offers almost no art of the present that is remotely persuasive. To see just how bad things can get, log on to the dX Web site--https://www.documenta.de--where a representative variety of mostly pretentious, brain-numbing “projects” and “texts” can be endured.

If art today is in fact so meager, so joyless, so academic, why should we embrace the curator’s story as legitimate or compelling? If this nostalgic, even reactionary mess is art’s best hope for the future, who wants it?

dX is indeed symptomatic of one prominent crisis in our post-Cold War art life--although not remotely in the manner the curator perceives it to be. For David represents the implosive irrelevance of the modern academy, whose Marxist foundations have sealed it off from both the hurly-burly of commercial life and the slow, imperfect engagement of the citizenry essential to a democratic cultural conversation.

But don’t worry; all is not lost. With a bit of luck, Documenta X will turn out to be one high-visibility nail in that airless academy’s inevitable coffin.