[Reader-list] Interesting response to Lev's Documenta review

[pratap pandey]

Dear All,

Posted below is an interesting response to Lev's review of Documenta 11. It is, in itself, also a review of that "exhibition".

At the bottom of this interesting response (a posting, unlike mine, unlike mine because I have merely come on to it, I have copied and am now going to paste it, and claim it as MY POSTING) were a series of URLs that indicated where the interesting posting can be originally sourced from, where you could get more info (if you wanted) on related postings, and info on postings of a similar fashion.

But I have deleted these URLs. I want to claim this posting as mine. To do that, I must delete these URLs. Forgive me. I am following a pattern here.

I am merely following the dominant pattern of postings/pastings on this List. I realise this is what I MUST do.

Most of the postings that are copied-pasted on to this List NEVER mention the SOURCE they were LIFTED from. As such, the postings become a part of the productivity of the List poster. The one who posts such information becomes the provider of intelligent information. A provider who is both 1-up on other List members, because S/he provides "differant" information. And a provider who is DEMOCRATIC enough to share "critical" and "radical" and "intelligent" and  "usable" and "functional" and "contingent" and "non-transparent" information to all who subscribe to this List.

Such providers have gained respect on this List. I, too, want to gain respect on this List.    

Interesting response follows:

Hi Lev

Some thoughts to share on Documenta

Documenta 11, Art and the figuration of History, the Social as Event
Marc Lafia

A few thoughts on Documenta below. Not a review but an attempt to read 
what is perhaps its aim, its intent.

Entering the Museum Fridericianum, one of four exhibition halls of 
Documenta and encountering the work of Leon Golub and Hanne Darboven, the staging 
and terms of Documenta are set in place. Darboven¹s work is the 
permutations of the possible. It is an algorithm of possible events, indexing what 
might be a personal story about her father, a mathematician, and her grandfather 
who practiced or trafficked in the coffee trade or so this was relayed to 
me by the young guard in the room. As she said, after pondering it for hours 
and days and hearing various docents discourse on the work, Darboven¹s 
system is not easily readable, but in some sense it does not matter ­ it is a 
massive record, a voluminous indexing of an activity I myself could not 
decipher, was not certain of, yet there are three floors of hundreds upon 
hundreds of letter-sized framed documents, all words and numbers, permutations of a
system. Are they records of something that has happened or a system to 
set forth possibilities or permutations of what might have happened or 
could happen? 

Not dissimilar to what has put forward by any number of conceptual 
artists, these documents are the record of some thing, these letters stand for
something, they stand for the fact of something, they are material 
evidence of some claim, some presence elsewhere or transcription or 
transposition of an elsewhere ­ they are not in and of themselves events ­ the event 
itself is elsewhere ­ under the cipher of a new calculus. And perhaps this is 
the difficulty of history. It is an elsewhere that is too easily contested, 
too easily charged becoming a calculation for some end and we are never 
sure who is speaking and for whom and what is and isn¹t being said. As Godard 
said of cinema, we might say of history, that it is alone ­ away from us, too 
close to us, and we are its ghost, never certain of the facts, only the 
affect of a time past.

The works of Leon Golub move away from specific fact to the affect of 
police torture, a generalized maelstrom of vileness, violence, brutishness. 
His quick painterly sketched depictions of what he is well known for, 
depictions of beatings, brutality, violence to persons, women, men, imprisonment ­ 
with writing on the works, Œthis is you¹, Œwe can disappear you¹ bring us 
inside the event of what history generally presents as a remove. His work is 
the event of affect, not a specific event but a seething, poison that is.

In an adjacent gallery to these two artists is the work of Zarina 
Bhimji. The video ŒOut of the Blue¹ extends and folds these strategies,
problemitizing fact, affect and memory. A camera slowly moves through 
empty houses, barracks and commercial properties abandoned in 1974 when Idi 
Amin banished Asians from Uganda and Bhimji¹s family fled to the U.K. As 
such the very notion of remembering and knowing, of what can be said to have 
been lived and what is lived, or what is said to have had happened is raised 
into question. What exactly happened there? Again there is elsewhere.

It is in this space between the illustration of event and event itself,
between - History which points to something ­ and Art which in itself 
is something ­ that Documenta traverses and stakes claim or rather makes
problematic, that is the claims of each, history and art, turn their
respective strategies, their methods and discourse onto each other.

Documenta uses the procedures of art, the materiality of the art work, 
art as a display of works, of physical things, a display of objects, 
materials ­it mobilizes presentation and display, the well worn strategies of 
artists, museum and material culture for the purposes of opening up history, 
memory, being, time and conflict.

Documenta is a theatre of history, of politic. of art; it is a 
collection of props, procedures and tactics, a splayed database of the lived real, an
orchestration of many disparate voices, but primary voices, authors who 
are the agents and actors, the very beings in the cross fire of living 
culture.

Documenta is a spatial visualization of what often has been figured in 
the form of historical critique in writing ­ taking the evidence or even 
the very meta idea of evidence, of voluminous, forensic, physical material
evidence that creates an alternative reading of what may have happened 
­
This is the predominate and outstanding strategic procedure of 
Documenta: ­situating the social and political ­ or recasting or refiguring these 
terms and opening them up in the space of art to be seen anew and to be
re-considered. It is art taking on history as the performative, as an 
open index, history as always lived, always interpretative, history as a
particular reclaiming of events, of memory, history as living.

A number of the works in the exhibit retrace and traverse sites of
political crime, war, atrocity, genocide, aggression. In the post 
9-11 world ­ we may feel closer to what we may have felt were far away 
things, ­so it may be that these things touch us more then they once may have. 
The works implicate us in the social political ­ in a reality of a world of
violence, territorialization and use a legalistic, a juridical strategy 
of amassing material fact to make a case. It is interesting how these same
strategies of display of objects, repetitive objects, multiples of 
objects could easily be transposed into minimalist sculptures, the work all 
tends to be sculptural, objects in space, most pronouncedly the video work­ but 
here rather than objects that just are, these objects, these artifacts, this
material evidence refers back to the world, not the materials 
themselves but to the world in which we live and the things that happened and have 
happened in this world. 

This reclaiming of history, of the social is at the forefront of 
Documenta¹s project and again another example of the space of art extending 
critique, mobilizing its formal strategies to examine and take as subject matter 
other domains as it has with the sciences, the network, biology, 
entertainment and so forth. Art has become a stratagem to examine and display material 
culture, and Documenta uses this well honed post minimalist, post conceptualist
arsenal of the last 30 yrs to examine the problematic of the world as
actuality. 

Fact in the realm or domain of history, is never such, as fact is the
contestation or politicization of fact which causes all to disappear 
inside history ­ in Documenta they are brought out to be seen again, to be
considered again in a new configuration, in the language of art, or in 
the medium of display that we¹ve come accustom in seeing in art. Here 
history, politic is inscribed through material artifact ­ art is used to 
problemitize and brings back and reclaims the everyday, the difficulty of the 
everyday.

It is too easy to dismiss Documenta as political. ­It is too easy to 
dismissthis work on the level of content, of representation. It is more
interesting to note the arsenal, the repertoire, the rhetorical 
strategies so well developed by contemporary art and museum practitioners, each of 
them understanding well the shape and shaping of knowledge that both museum 
and artist engage, in terms of indexing a work, displaying a work, 
isolating the work in a space, in the vitrine, the frame and so forth. Whereas 
artists have been concerned with the museum as a medium and moving away from 
the object to the very event in which art is made to be art by virtue of 
the institution, the context of the institution, and the object in the 
space of the institution ­ Documenta takes these strategies, these advances to 
move beyond the play of the archeology of objects, objects that irritate and
tease the artwork with its obsession, its fetish of the object (and why 
not) that is the art context, the art apparatus, teasing the art world to 
know itself as that procedure which produces art by virtue of its 
sanctioning, ­taking in something under its confines into its apparatus. ­What ever 
its failings, Documenta uses the art apparatus to reflect back on the world 
and the very archaeology of material culture to reclaim the world.

Documenta's aim is the reclamation of subjectivity, history, memory in 
the space of art. It uses art as a discourse to write a new figuration of 
the social. In the space of culture there is no safety, there is no bounded
ness, there is no closing off the world in the place of what we may 
have thought of as culture.  Documenta extends us and brings us back to our
selves and the world we live in and our bearing on how it is we make 
the world, ourselves and art.

Follow up: posting on Documenta¹s video work, the spatialization of the
moving image, forth coming.

POSTING/PASTING ENDS HERE

Thanking you,

yours in full and complete information expropriation/appropriation,

pp


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