documenta 5

After a structural upheaval had already begun with the 4th documenta, Harald Szeemann was introduced as the sole artistic director for the first time in 1972 - marking the end of the Bode era. With the title "Questioning Reality - Visual Worlds Today", Szeemann gave documenta 5 a programmatic direction for the first time. The original concept of a "hundred-day event" developed in 1970, which was designed to be purely actionist and performative instead of a "museum of 100 days", was discarded, probably also due to experiences with earlier exhibitions such as the 1970 show Happening and Fluxus, which was ended amid massive public protests. Nevertheless, it initially came as a surprise that Szeemann withdrew completely back into the lofty halls of art with his exhibition "Von der Scheinfreiheit des Museums auf der Straße" (Of the Museum's Apparent Freedom on the Street) and, instead of the planned actionism, presented an intellectually influenced concept - originally in tabular form - which differentiated as follows: "1. the reality of the depiction, 2. the reality of the depicted and 3. the identity or non-identity of the depiction and the depicted." Bazon Brock provided the theoretical basis for this in an eloquent "Audiovisual Foreword" on twelve projection screens, accompanied by a one-and-a-half-hour text. In the Museum Fridericianum and in the Neue (formerly Alte) Galerie, Szeemann and his team (Jean-Christophe Ammann and Arnold Bode in the working group and, in addition to Brock, Ingolf Bauer, Johannes Cladders, Klaus Honnef, Kasper König and Eberhard Roters as freelancers) created an archipelago of different visual worlds which, in the juxtaposition of "high" and "low", demanded an individual interpretation from the viewer as to what is art and what is not.

Quasi antithetical to the first documenta exhibitions, which were largely committed to abstraction, "reality" - of whatever kind - now made its entrance: in painting with photorealistic positions (Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Franz Gertsch), in sculpture with lifelike depictions of people and environments (John De Andrea, Duane Hanson, Edward Kienholz, Paul Thek). Kienholz's Five Car Stud (1969-72), a nightmarish depiction of racist lynchings in the USA, naturally represented a completely different concept of reality than Paul Thek's room-filling installation Arc, Pyramid (1971), a spiritual cycle of life and death that played a key role in shaping Szeemann's concept of "individual mythologies". These "individual mythologies" were juxtaposed with so-called "parallel pictorial worlds": Pictorial worlds of piety, political propaganda, trivial realism (kitsch), advertising and commodity aesthetics and the "pictorial art of the mentally ill" - everyday triviality and personal obsessions existed side by side on an equal footing. Following the example of Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise (1935-41), there was also a section with artists' museums such as Claes Oldenburg's Maus Museum (1972) or Marcel Broodthaers' Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section d'Art Moderne (1972).

Concept Art and Happening also shaped the image of documenta 5, and even if the event concept was not realized in its radical form, there were a number of artworks that were performatively activated over the entire 100 days: Joseph Beuys with his Büro für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung, Gilbert & George or Ben Vautier, who inhabited documenta 5 as living sculptures, Vito Acconci's performance space in the Fridericianum or Anatol's Werkstatt Arbeitszeit (1970) in the courtyard. James Lee Byars staged his performance Calling German Names on the roof of the Fridericianum, Jannis Kounellis created a scenery with a violinist and a ballet dancer, and the Viennese Actionists around Hermann Nitsch were also represented. Hans Haacke was much more sober: together with a computer center, he conducted a sociological survey on the profile of documenta 5 visitors. And in front of the Fridericianum flew KP Brehmer's flag Correction of the National Colors, Measured by Wealth Distribution (1972).