DOCUMENTA X: Brenda Atkinson and Ian Traynor
SPURRED by the conviction that “art alone is not enough” and jeered at and reviled by critics, the uncompromising French curator Catherine David last week unveiled the world’s biggest contemporary art exhibition.
A meandering network of venues in the central German city of Kassel is the setting for David’s documenta X exhibition, which opened last Thursday and runs for 100 days.
To the torment of critics, David (42) refused to reveal in advance the names of the 250 international artists she had chosen to exhibit in the amalgam of installation and Internet art, theatre, film, painting and sculpture.
A critic who questioned whether she and her exhibition “had anything to say” found himself barred from Thursday’s press conference. David accused him of “fascism and pornography”.
Hundreds of writers and experts attending the conference jeered David, and initial critical verdicts on documenta X – the 10th documenta exhibition to be staged since it was founded in 1955 – were withering.
The Kassel show has been attended by controversy to the last. It was unclear at the press conference whether the work of the late Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers – planned as the political and conceptual fulcrum of the show – would be seen. In a fit of pique on Thursday, his daughter removed the Broodthaers collage of photographs and postcards, and curtained off the entrance to the gallery, to protest at the placement of the work alongside a work by the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson.
The same day, which was bright and sunny, David ordered a Kassel cafe to remove its terrace parasols on the grounds that they interfered with her concept and carried advertising slogans, tainting her purist, anti-commercial views on art.
David, once curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, enjoys a fearsome reputation as austere and brusque, unbeholden to the commercial or critics’ mafias so central to the modern art world.
Appointed to direct the Kassel documenta in 1994, she immediately enraged the experts by promising “no names, no programmes, no rules” for her exhibition – a line she has kept to for the past three years.
Corporate sponsors contributing to the 7- million event were pledged to secrecy, in line with David’s contempt for the influence of markets, dealers and money in the art business.
Unapologetically intellectual and wilfully obscure, she denounces notions of “the quality” of art, declares that “feelings are something nice for amateurs”.
Urbanism is a key theme of her exhibition, set in an arid German city which was flattened by Allied bombers in October 1943 and later partially prettified by the “Seven Thousand Oaks”, the tree-planting work by Germany’s best-known post-war artist, Josef Beuys.
The venues include pedestrian subways, a river bank, the post office and railway station, as well as more conventional gallery settings. The 100-day exhibition is accompanied by “100 guests” – who include film directors, sociologists, psychiatrists, pop critics and architects – speaking on modern and contemporary culture.
The full programme of documenta X is carried live on the Internet at http://www.documenta.de/