All Politics, Little Art

Next to a defunct brewery in a scruffy neighborhood of this mid-size city, two young, architecturally minded American artists who go by the name Simparch have constructed a bit of hip-hop nirvana inside a ramshackle warehouse.

From above, the duo’s sensuous, scooped-out skateboarding arena, built from plywood and lumber, resembles a kidney-shaped swimming pool in a suburban backyard. It attracts daring local kids on wheels, pumped up by music blasting from big speakers at the end of the room. The skaters glide and swoop and sometimes crash, maneuvering their boards with varying degrees of finesse.

From below, where skaters (and gawkers) enter to climb the spiral stairs leading up to the suave arena, things look different. The swollen, bolted-and-ribbed form of the bowl resembles the hull of a handmade boat--a contemporary Noah’s ark, perhaps, promising refuge from an imminent deluge. Suburban escape performs an artful collision with urban grit. The work is thrilling.

Simparch is short for Simple Architecture--a witty turn on SCI-Arc, an acronym for the Southern California Institute of Architecture--and its New Mexican duo of Steve Badgett and Matthew Lynch titled the irresistible work “Free Basin.” Even without the puns, it provides one of the few instances of blissful enchantment in the huge but mostly joyless exhibition Documenta 11, whose several hundred works fill four big buildings and several outdoor sites.

The show has a savvy if familiar political agenda: Relocate art from dominant Euro-American views of the world and toward an authentically global perspective. Its 116 participants hail from 45 countries. The only continent not represented is penguin-filled Antarctica.

The show’s migratory effect is perhaps most succinctly captured in the fantastic, visionary architectural model of a Pop-psychedelic Manhattan made by Bodys Isek Kingelez, an artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using brightly painted wood, colored paper and gleaming plastic, Kingelez invents a post-Sept. 11 urban landscape and sets it 1,000 years into the future. (The World Trade Center is replaced with not two but three soaring towers.) Kingelez turns long-established tables. This is the United States conceived as an exotic projection of African imagination--Brightest America.

It isn’t the presence of a political agenda, though, that is the problem with this installment of Documenta, which has been mounted every four or five years since 1955 and, since a landmark presentation in 1972, has earned a reputation as the most significant international survey of contemporary art in the world. It’s the near absence of diversity that grates. Through sheer numbers, Documenta insists that one kind of art--political art--is most significant today.

Documenta was born of politics. Conceived by local professors Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann for Kassel’s Museum Fridericianum--still the central site of the sprawling exhibition--Documenta is the now-grown child of war.

Nearly 50 years ago, hosting a big international survey of the avant-garde was a means to definitively repudiate Germany’s Nazi denunciation of Modern art as “degenerate.” Documenta 1 showed the history of European painting and sculpture since 1900. The gesture carried unusual weight because only two other such international surveys then existed in the world.

Italy’s Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, had been modeled on the format of a world’s fair, with national pavilions displaying their countries’ art (rather than their industrial products) in a frankly competitive way. The show’s strong nationalist emphasis was useful to Italy, which had struggled for centuries with unification of its fragmented regions.

The following year, American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie established an international art exhibition in Pittsburgh. Carnegie was a social Darwinist. A principal motive of the show was the education of the common citizen, lifting him “higher and higher in the scale of being,” as the benefactor put it. For an expansive nation then on the brink of what would come to be called “the American Century,” the politics fueling that presentation were blunt.

When Bode and Haftmann launched Documenta, the epochal Second World War had been over for just a decade, and an aggressive Cold War had replaced it. While the U.S. Congress was busy adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, in order to distinguish the republic from the godless Soviets, so the German professors were organizing an art exhibition that would do the same with free expression. Kassel’s geographic position smack in the center of the country meant that in 1955, Documenta’s audacious celebration of artistic freedom was taking place just a few miles down the road from the closed border with East Germany. They could practically hear the lively party going on over the fence.

So politics are embedded in Documenta. Loosely defined, politics are simply the means by which people organize their social relationships with one another. That’s why you’d be hard-pressed to find a work of art that doesn’t have political content, whether it’s Simparch’s urban-suburban playing field or Kingelez’s visionary architecture.

Documenta 11, however, doesn’t merely express political content. It also strongly favors art with political subject matter. The relatively few exceptions to the implicit rule seem like ants at a picnic. Bode and Haftmann are likely spinning in their graves, as the mandate for appropriate political subject matter in art is just what the Nazis and the Soviets had in common.

Torture, labor exploitation, distribution of health care, immigration issues, repression of women, transnational economics, terrorism, government conspiracy, private ownership of public resources, strip-mining--the focus of the first Documenta of the 21st century is political subjects associated with globalization. Its artistic director is writer and poet Okwui Enwezor, 38, a Nigerian from a privileged background who attended boarding school in Britain, studied political science at Jersey City State College and has lived in New York for 20 years. Enwezor worked with an international committee of six advisors.

The curator’s reasonable position is that after centuries of colonial expansion by the West, an agonizing central story of the 20th century was the decolonization of the world. Today, after the end of the Cold War, post-colonial aspirations collide with the inexorable forces of globalization.

In the Age of Enron--and WorldCom, Global Crossing, Tyco International and on and on--Americans are beginning to taste the destructive chaos caused by a willful abandonment of regulatory oversight. A chief function of democratic government is the mitigation of inequities inevitably caused by capitalism. But what happens in a global economy, where corporations supersede nations? What becomes of the social mechanisms for relief?

And what happens when the transnational corporation is not an economic entity, but a political one? The terrorist organization Al Qaeda, for example. President Bush reiterates that the nation is at war with Al Qaeda, even though the constitutional requirement for a congressional declaration of war has not been met. There is no sovereign nation against which to move. Civil liberties have begun to crack.

Documenta 11 chronicles the acute anxieties of the unfolding globalization phenomenon. Sometimes it’s riveting.

Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman spent hours videotaping an eccentric woman who owns Britain’s national collection of Hippeastrum bulbs--a.k.a. amaryllis, African lilies with showy blossoms. She tends to them in her flower-packed west London flat. On four screens arranged in a cubic configuration, “The Four Seasons of Veronica Read” unfolds simultaneously, a dizzying ode to the inexplicable wonders of obsession with exotic beauty.

Asymptote, a New York-based architectural office, has built a remarkable room that is shaped by mirrored projections of computer data streams. The environment abruptly shifts back and forth between physical and virtual realities.

The Ivory Coast’s Frederic Bruly Bouabre has spent a half century making an archive of pictographic drawings in ballpoint ink and colored pencil on small sheets of cardboard. Hundreds of them from a 1982-1994 series called “Knowledge of the World” line one gallery’s walls, charting everything from green beans to Barbara Bush.

Occasionally, the presentation is unnerving. Los Angeles artist Raymond Pettibon is known for installations built from scads of drawings that, not unlike Bouabre’s, record an array of swirling thoughts on everything from baseball to crime. In a small, tall room with the aura of a castle keep, Pettibon has splattered the walls (and windows) with a mad, post-9/11 rant. The targets of his drawing-tantrum range from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose remarkable performance in the days after the terrorist attacks obscured the reality of a dismal eight-year reign in office, to the Olympic nattering of sportscaster Bob Costas.

Some stalwarts of the international exhibition scene also make appearances.

Nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois shows sagging, soft sculptures of tormented human body parts displayed in steel cages. (They inadvertently mirror how you feel in the show.) Canadian photographer Jeff Wall has given paradoxical visual form to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 literary masterpiece, “The Invisible Man,” by showing a figure sequestered in a cave-like room whose ceiling is covered with hundreds of light bulbs. (Hanging like stalactites, they allow the invisible African American to see himself in the surrounding darkness.) Some 4,000 drawings by Germany’s Hanne Darboven--drawings that oscillate between abstract repetition and musical notation--create “Minimalist wallpaper” in three rooms.

Most often, though, the art ranges somewhere between tedious and sophomoric. The latter includes pretty color photographs by South Africa’s Kendall Geers showing security company signs in upscale residential neighborhoods. (Privilege is a prison--get it?) They have all the visual punch and insight of an undergraduate art school project.

In a melodramatic installation by Cuba’s Tania Bruguerra, banks of light suddenly blind viewers who enter a darkened room, where the sound of a rifle repeatedly being cocked mingles with the militaristic thud of marching boots. Something about being an art tourist on the international circuit makes this theatrical experience a bit less scary than a ride through Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean.

Tedium is perhaps most common. Aesthetically arid research projects into assorted social and political dilemmas around the world are omnipresent, often in the form of films, videos and photographs with text. I spent two days going through the exhibition, but it would take at least twice that long to see all the documentaries and read all the numbing dissertations.

One unintended effect of the emphasis on political subject matter is to flatten out the show. The threat of homogenized experience is already a hazard of global capitalism. Who knew a global Documenta would so readily succumb? Under a rubric of diversity it’s monotonous--one kind of art, over and over.

A delicate work like Japanese Conceptual artist On Kawara’s “One Million Years,” which features a handsome young couple in a glass booth doing a somber reading of sequential dates that make up the million-year title, gets squashed. No wonder coming upon Simparch’s lively, cheeky skateboarding rink feels so elating.

The exhibition’s most telling statistic is that of 116 artists, 10 are painters or sculptors. All the rest work with cameras, computers, installations or performance. Some, like Benin’s Georges Adeagbo, who makes installations with found objects and printed matter, refuse to consider themselves artists. (I concur.) Since the early 1990s, a compelling resurgence of painting and sculpture has been afoot, but Documenta ignores it.

Partly it’s a matter of form. For international spectacles, the art world has split. On one side are the “ennials”--the biennial, triennial, quadrennial and “quintennial” extravaganzas that now clog the exhibition calendar. More than four dozen have joined Venice, the Carnegie International and Documenta, in cities as far-flung as Sydney, Istanbul, Sao Paolo, Kwangju and Johannesburg.

On the other side are the raucous commercial art fairs--Basel, Cologne, Paris, Madrid, Chicago, Miami--which have likewise proliferated, principally in Europe and the U.S. That’s where the paintings and sculptures are.

The “ennials” didn’t invent installation art, video or photography, but they have entrenched them as overbearing elements. Why? Expediency. It can take a dozen paintings to fill a gallery, but a single installation or video projection will cover the same acreage. And it’s harder to ship monumental sculpture to Pittsburgh or South Korea than to mail a DVD.

Further evidence of the split is evident a short train ride from Documenta. In Frankfurt, the concurrent biennial exhibition called Manifesta 4 includes only installation and camera art. Manifesta, a recently invented equivalent to the Whitney Biennial of American Art, surveys new work by younger Europeans--here, 37 artists with an average age of 32--and is organized for a different city each time. (Frankfurt was chosen for 2002 specifically to piggyback on the proximity of Documenta.) After more than 700 studio visits, a team of three curators from Russia, Spain and France chose no painters or sculptors.

Artists understandably make art to take advantage of available opportunities. Manifesta, born as a means to fuse the European Union culturally, is doing for art what the Euro has done for currency--made it uniform, interchangeable and bland.

The Frankfurt show is scattered in several venues, including an old, unused government office building--the former Bureau of Drainage, an inadvertent but fairly accurate commentary on the quality of the art inside. Files on artists not chosen are displayed as part of the show. This Manifesta Archive is a kind of bureaucrats’ version of the 19th century Salon des Refuses, which progressive Parisian artists demanded as a contrarian badge of honor for having been turned away by the academy’s official salon.

Work is also scattered in public sites around the city, such as Ibon Aranberri’s small pavilion by the river. Its severe Bauhaus form is decorated with a clumsy reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica.” (Aranberri lives in Bilbao, Spain, just up the road from the Basque town immortalized by Picasso.) A German Modernist pavilion ornamented with a reproduction of a canvas memorializing the destruction of a town by Nazi aircraft is wry and knowing. But the showy calculation doesn’t add much to the ambience of the Frankfurt riverbank.

The most engaging piece in this thin exhibition is Hans Schabus’ “Forlorn,” a homemade plywood boat with wheels, reminiscent of something by Chris Burden, which Schabus proudly sailed through an ancient sewer beneath Vienna. A video of the wretched journey plays inside a dark chamber, entered through a gigantic version of a guitar’s sound hole. It’s a romantic voyage down an urban River Styx.

Most everything else is derivative and forgettable, such as Mans Wrange’s “The Average Citizen Lobbying Project.” Using statistical profiles of the typical European resident, Wrange found a woman (named Marianne) who filled the bill, made her blank-eyed portrait bust in plaster and bronze, and worked to insert her comments on life into TV shows and political speeches. An ostensible critique of focus-group society, this standard Conceptual fare seems unaware that it describes the uniform condition of much art today. It offers little to look at and less to think about.

You get the sense that at least one Manifesta artist recognizes the tired dubiousness of it all. Marc Bijl’s sly, painted mural of a revolutionary flag, “Never Surrender,” forms the backdrop for a stripped and rusted automobile that’s shoved up against it on a museum plaza. Scrawled on the wall--in carefully artful script--is the legend “Class War Now!” Filled with sand, the ruined vehicle doubles as an outsized ashtray, becoming an amusing urban amenity courtesy of your friendly EU artist.

The global proliferation of “ennials” provides an odd context for Documenta’s dull courting of global issues. Its near-total elimination of painting and sculpture betrays an obvious ideological purpose, because painting and sculpture are mediums associated with modern European and American art. To relocate contemporary, post-colonial art on a global field, they must be suppressed.

But this agenda founders on the Scylla of mediocrity and the Charybdis of anachronism. Given the meager painting and sculpture selected--like the rest of the exhibition, it’s largely restricted to political subject matter--there’s no sense that anyone on the curatorial team has any capacity to deal productively with either medium, especially painting.

Even an important artist like the 80-year-old American Leon Golub, whose scraped pictures of leering thugs and barking dogs are painted on un-stretched canvas suggestive of flayed skin, seems beaten down by the relentless context.

The show also feels old-fashioned. Art, signifier of Western authority, is replaced by “cultural production,” which is anything made by anybody, individually or collectively. Dismantling the established authority of a traditional medium such as painting was a project undertaken--with considerable success--more than 30 years ago. Doing it again, even for different ends, is a bureaucratic gaffe--the creation of a Department of Aesthetic Redundancy Department.

For how could Documenta be regarded as anything less than a plausible definition of establishment authority itself? The “most significant show of its kind in the world” has a huge, $11-million budget supplied by government and corporate sponsors (Deutsche Telekom, Volkswagen, etc.), an expected half-million visitors during its 100 days and a reliable role as a powerful economic engine for tourism to the rather dowdy city of Kassel.

More evidence of anachronism comes in the show’s bleakest statistic: Well over two-thirds of the invited participants are men.

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker, coined the term “festivalism” for art found in “ennials” like Documenta and Manifesta. Mixing entertainment and soft-core politics, festivalism “favors works that don’t demand contemplation but invite, in passing, consumption of interesting--just not too interesting--spectacles.” True enough. But I always thought a festival was supposed to overflow with artful celebration, charged exuberance and erotic joy. How did the art establishment get so dull?

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Documenta 11, daily in Kassel through Sept. 15; information: www.documenta.de. Manifesta 4, daily in Frankfurt through Aug. 25; information: www.manifesta.de.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.