documenta 4

The last documenta, for which Arnold Bode was mainly responsible, had the somewhat strained, youthful slogan “The youngest documenta ever”. A significantly rejuvenated documenta Council (including Jean Leering from the Van Abbemuseum) was to bring the “International Exhibition” in Kassel closer to the pulse of the times in 1968. Werner Haftmann, one of its “fathers”, was no longer there; Will Grohmann left with him, later Werner Schmalenbach and Fritz Winter also left.

After the retrospective orientation of the 1955 documenta and the connection to the international art scene four years later, a fundamental reassessment of the position seemed overdue at the latest after the third edition. After some internal quarrels, a team of 26 people was now to decide on the selection of artists in a grassroots democratic manner - for the first time not from a secure historical distance, which would have been accompanied by a latent authoritarian art-historical evaluation, but consistently committed to the present, i.e. the four years since the last documenta.
Many works of art were created shortly before the opening of the exhibition or were even produced especially for it - a trend that was to continue. Now, in 1968, Pop Art arrived somewhat belatedly in Kassel on a grand scale, as did Color Field Painting, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Op Art and Minimal Art.

Impressively staged over two floors in the stairwell of the Rotunda, James Rosenquist’s Fire Slide (1967) went down in the visual memory of documenta 4. Roy Lichtenstein’s Big Modern Painting (1967), Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude No. 98 (1968) and Robert Indiana’s The Great Love (1966) in the main hall of the Fridericianum as well as Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Poolballs (1967) in the Galerie an der Schönen Aussicht also confirmed the slogan “Seize matters” in their titles. But Robert Morris’ L-Shapes (1967), Sol LeWitt’s room-filling 47 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1968), as well as the paintings by Barnett Newman (Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II (1967)) or Morris Louis also impressed with their imposing formats.

With 51 artists, art from the USA made up around a third of the entire exhibition, earning documenta 4 the nickname “Americana”. In 1968, the year of student protests and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, this triggered a strong backlash - even though the demonstrations in Kassel were relatively harmless compared to those at the Venice Biennale of the same year: students with red flags disrupted the opening speeches on Friedrichsplatz, and the press conference in the morning of the same day was successfully transformed into a happening by a group of artists led by Wolf Vostell and Jörg Immendorff.

Among other things, the activists protested against the complete absence of the current trends of Fluxus, Happening and Performance in the official exhibition. In fact, the omissions of documenta 4 as far as the German art scene was concerned were glaring in comparison to those in the USA - although concept art and performance were missing here, the important representatives and trends were present in the field of painting and sculpture as well as with environments by Ed Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg and George Segal.

Joseph Beuys was represented with a room installation, but otherwise the selection of German artists, including Horst Antes, Joseph Albers, Erwin Heerich and Richard Paul Lohse, proved to be less innovative - artists important for the 1960s such as Thomas Beyerle, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Imi Knoebel and Reiner Ruthenbeck were missing, not to mention Fluxus and Happening. The fourth documenta also underperformed in terms of the presence of positions by female artists: with Jo Baer, Chryssa, Marisol, Louise Nevelson and Bridget Riley, there were just five women among the 150 artists.

In the outdoor space, the documenta ventured out onto the Karlswiese for the first time with sculptures, which were displayed extensively - primarily with more traditional, semi-abstract sculptures. Christo’s (Jeanne-Claude was not yet named as a co-author at the time) spectacular air cushion 5600 Cubicmeter Package (1968), which at least introduced a new approach to the concept of sculpture, was particularly memorable. After several failed attempts, the helium-filled tube finally proved its stamina and rose a proud 58 meters phallically into the air (which earned it various obvious nicknames among the people of Kassel).

A novelty with socio-political aspirations was Bazon Brock’s school for visitors, in which he used his technique of “action teaching” to make the changing references to reality in contemporary art comprehensible to a wide audience. With his performative-didactic act of art mediation, Brock had a lasting impact on the mediation claim of the subsequent documenta exhibitions.