Date: 16-06-1992
Owning Institution: Kassel Art Exhibition
Publication:                   The Independent 1987 - 1999  
Subject:                 Now    

TRADITIONAL German insult: ''Ab nach Kassel''. This translates as ''go to Kassel'' and it means, roughly, ''I never want to see you again, leave my presence and spend the rest of your life (I hope it's short) in total obscurity''. If you wanted to find a place in England with a similar reputation, you might settle for Coventry; and on a rainy day in Kassel, you might be forgiven for imagining you were in Coventry. With its expanses of bleak, grey, 1950s architecture, it is a place that seems never to have recovered from the devastation wrought upon it by incessant bombing raids during World War II.
 
But for a brief period, once every five years, the phrase ''Ab nach Kassel'' loses its pejorative connotations. Last week about 5,000 people from all over the world, with no intention of dying in obscurity, turned up in this provincial German backwater. The waiters in the city's restaurants, unaccustomed to such demand for their services, appeared to suffer some kind of communal nervous breakdown. Obtaining lunch could be counted on taking at least three hours, and one of the minor entertainments of the week was the sight of wealthy Americans actually begging for food. The citizens of Kassel always seem unprepared for the temporary popularity of their town.

The occasion for this bizarre gathering was an event members of the art world had been referring to for several months as The Opening. By a freak of history, Kassel is the regular venue of the largest and most ambitious contemporary art exhibition in the world. It is called Documenta, and has been described as visual culture's answer to the Olympics. At the art Olympics, the audience gets to run the marathon. It takes about two days of hard slog just to see all the art in Documenta 9, which is distributed among some dozen different museums spread around the town. On top of that, just about every available inch of public civic space has been commandeered too.

So go for a walk in the public gardens by the eighteenth-century Orangerie and you'll encounter all kinds of curious objects that are probably art: what looks like a length of grey drainpipe abandoned in a stream turns out to be a statement by a Cherokee Indian artist called Jimmie Durham (what's being stated is not immediately apparent). Leave your car in the underground car park beneath the Friedrichsplatz and you come across what appears to be the aftermath of an unusually high-speed subterranean car-crash: the twisted wreckage of a camper van, belly up. In fact, this is merely part of New York artist Cady Noland's installation piece Towards a Metalanguage of Evil. Skirting the camper van, you encounter several extremely unpleasant photographs of severed limbs pinned to the walls of the car park, the relics of assorted airline disasters. The sign saying ''Willkommen in Kassel'' may or may not be part of the installation.

After a while, most visitors to Documenta 9 are assailed by a curious form of paranoia, the chief symptom of which is the terrible suspicion that everything in Kassel might amount to art of one kind or another. Perhaps the waiter who has steadfastly refused to catch your eye for the last two hours is really a Brazilian performance artist whose work investigates the power of alienation and indifference. Perhaps the manager of the run-down motel who tries to charge you pounds 100 a night for the privilege of sleeping in a room marginally larger than a matchbox is a Dutch conceptualist foregrounding the relationship between capitalism and exploitation. Piles of rubbish in the street begin to seem charged with aesthetic intent. Shop window displays begin to look like neo-Pop commentaries on consumer society.

This creeping sense of confusion is exacerbated by the fact that so much of the art in the show itself hardly deserves to be described as such, while virtually none of it seems to serve anything remotely resembling a curatorial sense of purpose. There are, inevitably, a few extremely fine exhibits in the exhibition (more of them later), but they seem to have materialised by accident rather than by curatorial design.

There was almost universal agreement in the art community last week (in itself a pretty rare event) that standards have never been lower than at this particular Documenta. Enter the Fridericianum, the largest venue of the exhibition, and whole vistas of crud, avenues of tat, open up: a corridor whose walls have been decorated with about 30 copies of Die Zeit, each sheet partially decorated with white abstract motifs apparently done in Tippex (Niele Toroni), leads on to a chamber whose floor contains nothing bar a few brutalised bathroom tiles and a window half-obscured by a blue shower curtain (Joe Scanlon). There is no shortage of contenders for the palm of Worst Work in Show. The German artist Attila Richard Lukacs stakes his claim with a pastiche of a public urinal (urinals are a mini-theme of this year's Documenta), the trough of which has been decorated with some bog-standard Socialist Realist paintings of naked youths on goldleaf grounds. The surface quality of these works is made more interesting by the fact that several visitors have treated the installation as an audience participation work and urinated on it. The fact that it is not actually plumbed in lends the piece a novel olfactory dimension.

Attempts have been made to compensate for the paucity of good art with a surplus of words. This is the hot-air Documenta, the Documenta where ponderous self-explanation does duty for substance. It has been organised by a Belgian called Jan Hoet, a man of apparently limited intelligence but great volubility. By the time most journalists arrived in Kassel last week, they had already received something like 100 press releases, issued virtually daily by the press office during the past three months, each one peppered with yet more outre and opaque quotations from its chief curator.

Sifting through this overstuffed dossier of self-incriminating, flatulent guff, you learn that Documenta 9 does not have a guiding concept but, rather, ''a motto''. It goes: ''From the one to the one to the other; or: from the body to the body to the bodies; or: from the artist to the viewer to the art.'' Try working out how that relates to a work like Dutch artist Henk Visch's Idle Thoughts for Idle Men, a white plaster dummy wrapped in an old blanket, with a child's spinning top glued to its head.

The exhibition is almost summed up by the fact that while it doesn't have a theme, it does have a logo. This consists of a pair of swans, one white, one black, which occasion the following chunk of Hoetian poetry: ''And the swan? Who does not know the poetry of the white swan? We have given him his black reflection, for . . . are swans not black in Australia, at the other end of the world? Thus movement and stillness, male and female, aggression and darkness, blend in the logo''. If the international art community has any sense, this should be Jan Hoet's swansong.

It is hard to decide which art work would have made a more appropriate logo. Possibly Jonathan Borofsky's 50-foot high stainless steel pole, stuck into the Friedrichsplatz at a Pisan angle, along which tightrope-walks the figure of a man sculpted with carnival-float crudeness: an image of the exhibition curator going nowhere, if nothing else. A better candidate might be an irritating little work by Jan Fabre called Listening Hand: a resin cast of a human hand holding a glass which, produced as a multiple, was allowed to pimple the galleries of the exhibition. The ubiquitousness of this witless object seems like the natural emblem of a curator apparently bent on diminishing the impact of just about everything of real quality in his exhibition. This is a Documenta that prefers the sabotage of art to art itself.

Six rooms housing the permanent collection of Kassel's Neue Galerie have been given over to one Zoe Leonard, who demonstrates an antiquated conception of what it is to be radical by interspersing the assembled rococo German paintings with a series of close-up black-and- white photographs of vaginas. There is a rather poignant note from the museum director by the entrance, apologising for the upset that may be caused. In the Fridericianum, a trio of Francis Bacons are hung adjacent to a thoroughly mediocre photographic collage by a French artist called Suzanne Lafont, which is an insult disguised as a juxtaposition. Elsewhere in the same building Rachel Whiteread's meditative sculptures have been placed along one of the main through routes of the museum, a pretty effective way of destroying the mood they seek to evoke.

This curatorial approach, which is really a form of calculated philistinism, culminates in the prison-like space that has been devised to house the single most outstanding work in the show, Jacques-Louis David's painting of Marat Assassine (there only because it was painted exactly 200 years ago). Hung at a distance of some 20 feet from the locked glass door that separates it from the audience, it might as well not be there. But who needs great art, after all? It only exists to be subverted, challenged, taken issue with. It may not be a coincidence that Jan Hoet is a member of the soixante-huitiste generation: the whole exhibition feels burdened by the weight of an outmoded notion of aesthetic rebellion, of a desire to epater les bourgeois.

Nor is it a coincidence that the artists who make the best showing should be those who have somehow managed to slip the net of curatorial interference and secure an entire room to themselves. One of the best ways of doing this is to work with a medium such as video art, which requires a darkened space. Gary Hill's Tall Ships runs along the length of a blacked- out corridor, illuminated by screen projections spaced regularly along either side which read rather like the side chapels to a church's nave. The images projected are ordinary enough - film of one person after another, each of whom faces you briefly and then walks away into darkness - but the effect is profoundly melancholic, an image of not knowing, of imperfect communication as the human lot.

Bill Viola's The Arc of Ascent is an even more remarkable piece also conjured from an extremely simple idea. The image of a clothed male figure, seen in slow-motion free-fall on a thin, tall projection screen, plunges into the black water of a darkened pool; but because he is inverted, he appears to crash up and out of the room that you occupy, leaving an extraordinary aftermath of bubbles and turbulence. Description does it little justice. It is a work which performs one of the traditional functions of good art: it becomes more than itself, a metaphor for immersion and transcendence, a sort of latterday Assumption. It seems odd that one of the most resolutely high-tech works in the show should also seem the most Old Masterly.

Another artist to have put a distance between himself and Mr Hoet's maelstrom of mediocrity is the major figure of the Russian avant-garde, Ilya Kabakov. His contribution is a painstaking reconstruction of a Russian public lavatory as appropriated and converted for domestic use by a family desperate for accommodation. This is apparently not uncommon in Moscow. Kabakov's tactic is exact replication: he has spent time with such people, has noted how they find room for their deadbeat settee and rickety dining table between wall and latrine, has seen how they decorate the peeling whitewashed walls of their makeshift homes with eighth-rate paintings. It is both brutal and poignant, this monument to houseproudness in straitened circumstances. It is also a tacit reproof to most of the other artists in Documenta 9: a reminder that the privilege of being able to spend a lifetime making art is a freedom not available to many and one that should be used, in general, with a rather greater sense of responsibility.

On Friday, a large proportion of the art world army which had invaded Kassel simply rebelled and took a day trip to the neighbouring town of Arolson. They went to see what was billed as the alternative Documenta, the main attraction of which was a work by Jeff Koons: an enormous model of a dog, constructed from a steel armature completely covered with real flowers, placed in the courtyard of the town's eighteenth-century Schloss. This was unanimously declared to be the most spectacular and bizarre work seen during the course of the week: a mad neo-rococo fantasy, a grandly eccentric folly. It was poetic justice, of a kind. Documenta 9 deserves to live in the memory thus - to be remembered as the Documenta that was upstaged by a 40-foot high model of a West Highland terrier made out of pansies. It was that sort of event. Thank you, Mr Hoet. Ab nach Kassel.