The Future of an Illusion

by Beth E. Wilson, August 27, 2007

The day I arrived in Kassel, the poppies were in full bloom. Apparently, at the opening of Documenta 12 (the latest edition of this huge, once-every-five-years contemporary art extravaganza hosted by the central German city), not a single flower had yet emerged, leaving the broad square in front of the Fridericianum Museum looking like an undistinguished, muddy field.

But now, the flowers had changed the aspect of the Friedrichsplatz into a bright, bobbing field of color, mostly vivid red, with a few purple-white flowers mixed in. Poppies—the flower of sleep, of dreams, of death, and forgetting. Planted by artist Sanja Ivekovic, the field of flowers embraces an enormous range of references, from The Wizard of Oz to contemporary Afghanistan—a point made resoundingly clear twice a day, when loudspeakers on the square play revolutionary songs by RAWA, the Radical Afghan Women’s Association, as a bittersweet reminder of all that has gone wrong, and all there is left to do in the world.

Documenta 12 has been subject to some of the most scathing criticism I’ve ever seen for a major art exhibition (aside from a few editions of the Whitney Biennial). A reviewer for UK paper the Guardian even called it the worst art exhibition ever. Arriving five weeks after the press opening, I had steeled myself for a trainwreck of a show only to find—inspiration.

The list of artists in the exhibition quite pointedly omits the usual suspects of the international art circuit. In fact, the curators purposely refused to release the list until the month before the opening—probably because the received wisdom of the art world would not know what to do with it. (I recently ran into this myself when I invited an established New York critic to our own local Kingston Sculpture Biennial. In reply, he sent me an e-mail ticking off the names of five or six internationally prominent sculptors who live in the area, musing that “it would be great if some of them were in it,” and asking for a list of the artists. After I responded that there is certainly no shortage of talent up here, and that he should come to see the really excellent work in the show—regardless of the name-brand status of the artists—I received no response at all.)

Instead, the curators at Documenta 12 have opened a space for negotiation—of aesthetics, of politics, and of the many ways in which these are continuously intertwined in our global era. The feeling that history follows a neat path, that the universalizing vision of the European Enlightenment should be the lodestar, the ultimate measure of everything that takes place in the world, was only ever an illusion. This exhibition does not so much abandon the noble aims of liberté, egalité, and fraternité, as much as open the field to engage the inevitable blind spots of that Eurocentric philosophy as well.