DOCUMENTA IX

Poster with a black swan on a white background, whose mirror image appears in the lower area as a white swan on a black background. At the top center is "DOCUMENTA IX" in a fine serif font, above which is the text in green and black: "13.6. - 20.9. KASSEL 1992".
Exhibition poster documenta 9 (1992)

Artistic Direction

Jan Hoet

Venues
Museum Fridericianum, documenta Halle, Neue Galerie, Ottoneum, Orangerie, Kassel city center, temporary pavilions in the Karlsaue
Artists

195

Visitors

615.640

Budget

18,645,501 DM

documenta 9 is considered one of the most popular documenta exhibitions, not least due to its artistic director Jan Hoet. The charismatic Belgian succeeded in staging his enthusiasm for art and for his documenta in a media-effective manner. And he conveyed programmatic approaches that could also be quickly understood by visitors who were not art connoisseurs: Hoet wanted his exhibition to focus on people and their sensual, perceptive, suffering physicality, which was being displaced by an increasingly digital-virtualized world. "From the body to the body to the bodies" was the poetically expressive motto of documenta 9.

Jan Hoet formulated his curatorial concern as follows: "At a time when people are confronted more than ever with dangers such as AIDS and multinational wars, with nuclear disasters and global climate catastrophes, at a time when threats are becoming more and more abstract and fears more and more diffuse, the only adequate response seems to me to be a reflection on our physical conditions." Hoet wanted to find this answer, not only in collaboration with his team, consisting of Bart De Baere, Pier Luigi Tazzi and Denys Zacharopoulos, but not least, and this was new, in intensive collaboration with the artists. Above all, the location of the respective artworks and the resulting dialog between location and work were discussed in this non-hierarchical collaboration.

The artists were involved in the creation of the exhibition from the very beginning. What was also new about this documenta was that its "Eurocentrism" was criticized for the first time in its history. Towards the end of the 20th century, a broad awareness had slowly emerged that interesting art was also being created in Asia and the so-called "Third World".

View into a long, vaulted corridor with dark walls and marble floor. Black fabric panels with white text quotes in various languages hang on the walls.
Joseph Kosuth, Passagen-Werk (documenta-Flânerie) (1992). Photo: Dieter Schwerdtle
Two television monitors show the face of the same person with an open mouth, one upside down and one upright. A diagonal bar runs across both images.
Bruce Naumann, Anthro / Socio (1991). Photo: Dirk Bleicker

Hoet wrote in the introduction to the catalog that the ninth documenta was a "documenta of places, its topography is the framework that supports everything. Each location stood for a specific theme due to its atmosphere - the Fridericianum, for example, was defined as a "place of history, enlightenment and cultural potency, a place of drama". In the Fridericianum's Zwehrenturm, Hoet set up a "collective memory" of documenta 9, with museum loans from Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, Jacques-Louis David, James Ensor, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti and Barnett Newman, thus staging a genealogy similar to the first documenta - but not in the sense of systematic art-historical categories; rather, for Hoet, these artists stood for "representatives of revolutionary works".

Bruce Nauman's video installation Anthro/Socio (1992) in the foyer of the Museum Fridericianum served almost as a leitmotif for documenta 9. A human figure, or more precisely: the figure of a bald man's head, rotated around itself, multiplied six times on stacked monitors, calling for help in isolation from its surroundings. "Help me, hurt me, sociology, feed me, eat me, anthropology" sounded in an endless acoustic loop. The opposites "help" and "hurt", "feed" and "eat" formulated by the male figure emphasized man's imprisonment in irresolvable existential contradictions.

In the same room, Austrian artist Peter Kogler had installed his wall mural Ants (1992). The technically generated images of giant ants in almost infinite reproduction additionally charged the room with a threatening atmosphere. Ilya Kabakov had an accessible toilet house built in the courtyard behind the Fridericianum: The Toilet (1992) represented a hybrid of a typical Russian two-room apartment and a public toilet. The proverbial "living toilet" had become reality here and, as a sculptural installation, addressed (a)social living conditions in the field of tension between privacy and publicity in the "actually existing socialist states".

The outdoor space as a "place for strolling and mental excursions" was heralded from afar, as Jonathan Borofsky's Man Walking to the Sky (1992) towered some 15 meters high into the sky on Friedrichsplatz. The people of Kassel christened this male figure "Himmelsstürmer" ("Sky Striker"), who seems to be walking unperturbed upwards on a 25-meter-long steel tube set up at an angle of 63 degrees. The sculpture was so popular at the time that it was purchased by the city with the help of a collection and donation campaign - today it stands on the square in front of the main railway station. Also remaining in Kassel are Thomas Schütte's ceramic sculpture group The Strangers (1992) - on the canopy of the Rotes Palais -, Per Kirkeby's room sculpture (1992) and two - though never officially
(Untitled (1992)) by Jimmie Durham, which the artist exhibited again for documenta 13 (2012) and then took back with him.

For the first time, separate buildings were also erected for documenta, such as the temporary Aue Pavilions in the park ("Place of Dionysian Lightness"). The recently completed documenta-Halle, situated on the slope of the Karlsaue, housed installations by Absalon, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Cildo Meireles, Matt Mullican and Panamarenko, among others, as a "place of democracy". Rebecca Horn created a highly intense atmosphere with her installation Der Mond, das Kind, der anarchistische Fluß (1992) in the former Gerhart Hauptmann School. The accompanying program also caused a sensation, as Jan Hoet had integrated boxing events into this art event alongside jazz and baseball. Hoet justified this by saying that boxing is a physical act that is close to life "because it emerged from life itself".

Despite or perhaps because of its popularity, documenta 9 also had to face fierce criticism: Hoet was reproached for the lack of concept he postulated at the beginning, the exhibition was conventional and arbitrary due to its "juxtaposition at the end of styles", an "entertainment business". However, most of the 615,640 visitors remembered it as a sensual experience.

In the foreground, numerous people are relaxing on a lawn. In the background is a slanting metal pole with a figure standing on top.
Jonathan Borofsky, Man Walking to the Sky (1991-92). Photo: Dirk Bleicker

Artists

a

  • Abramović, Marina
  • Absalon
  • Artschwager, Richard

b

  • Bacon, Francis
  • Bagnoli, Marco
  • Baikas, Nicos
  • Balka, Miroslaw
  • Barney, Matthew
  • Barr, Jerry
  • Baumgarten, Lothar
  • Bertrand, Jean-Pierre
  • Beuys, Joseph
  • Biberstein, Michael
  • Bijl, Guillaume
  • Birnbaum, Dara
  • Borofsky, Jonathan
  • Bourgeois, Louise
  • Brandl, Herbert
  • Brey, Ricardo
  • Brown, Tony
  • Burki, Marie José
  • Bustamante, Jean-Marc
  • Buthe, Michael
  • Byars, James Lee

c

  • Caldas, Waltercio
  • Calzolari, Pier Paolo
  • Caramelle, Ernst
  • Carroll, Lawrence
  • Cemin, Saint Clair
  • Ciecierski, Tomasz
  • Clark, Tony
  • Coleman, James
  • Conrad, Tony
  • Corillon, Patrick

d

  • Damian
  • Daniëls, René
  • David, Jacques Louis
  • Deacon, Richard
  • De Cordier, Thierry
  • Defraoui, Silvie & Chérif
  • De Keyser, Raoul
  • Delvoye, Wim
  • Dimitrijevic, Braco
  • Dittborn, Eugenio
  • Dorner, Helmut
  • Douglas, Stan
  • Dumas, Marlene
  • Durham, Jimmie

e

  • Edoga, Mo
  • Ensor, James

f

  • Fabre, Jan
  • Fabro, Luciano
  • Fainarú, Belu-Simion
  • Fend, Peter
  • Finn-Kelcey, Rose
  • Flatz
  • Fortuyn/O'Brien
  • Francois, Michel
  • Frandsen, Erik A.
  • Frenkel, Vera
  • Funakoshi, Katsura
  • Förg, Günther

g

  • Gauguin, Paul
  • Genzken, Isa
  • Gerber, Gaylen
  • Giacometti, Alberto
  • Gober, Robert
  • Graham, Dan
  • Graham, Rodney
  • Grauerholz, Angela
  • Gross, Michael

h

  • Hadjimichalis, George
  • Hammons, David
  • Herold, Georg
  • Hill, Gary
  • Hopkins, Peter
  • Horn, Rebecca
  • Horn, Roni

j

  • James, Geoffrey
  • Jenssen, Olav Christopher
  • Johnson, Tim

k

  • Kabakov, Il'ja
  • Kapoor, Anish
  • Katase, Kazuo
  • Kawamata, Tadashi
  • Kelley, Mike
  • Kelly, Ellsworth
  • Khakhar, Bhupen
  • Kirkeby, Per
  • Klingelhöller, Harald
  • Kocherscheidt, Kurt
  • Kogler, Peter
  • Kokolia, Vladimir
  • Kosuth, Joseph
  • Kruk, Mariusz
  • Kuitca, Guillermo

l

  • Lafont, Suzanne
  • Lange, Gustav
  • Lasker, Jonathan
  • Leirner, Jac
  • Leonard, Zoe
  • Leroy, Eugène
  • Lewandowsky, Via
  • Lohaus, Bernd
  • Lukacs, Attila Richard
  • Lutes, Jim
  • Lüscher, Ingeborg

m

  • Maeyer, Marcel
  • Marden, Brice
  • Meireles, Cildo
  • Meister, Ulrich
  • Merrick, Thom
  • Merz, Gerhard
  • Merz, Mario
  • Merz, Marisa
  • Meuser
  • Meyer, Jürgen
  • Moro, Liliana
  • Mucha, Reinhard
  • Mullican, Matt
  • Muñoz, Juan

n

  • Nagasawa, Hidetoshi
  • Nauman, Bruce
  • Neuhaus, Max
  • Nevalainen, Pekka
  • Nicosia, Nic
  • Ninio, Moshe
  • Niva, Jussi
  • Noland, Cady
  • Näher, Christa

o

  • Ocampo, Manuel
  • Othoniel, Jean-Michel
  • Oursler, Tony

p

  • Panamarenko
  • Paolini, Giulio
  • Penck, A. R.
  • Pistoletto, Michelangelo
  • Pitz, Hermann
  • Prina, Stephen
  • Prince, Richard
  • Puryear, Martin

r

  • Rabinowitch, Royden
  • Racine, Rober
  • Rantzer, Philip
  • Ray, Charles
  • Raysse, Martial
  • readymades belong to everyone
  • Reis, Pedro Cabrita
  • Resende, José
  • Richter, Gerhard
  • Rollof, Ulf
  • Rothenberg, Erika
  • Rothenberg, Susan
  • Ruff, Thomas
  • Runge, Stephan
  • Ruscha, Edward
  • Ruthenbeck, Reiner
  • Rückriem, Ulrich

s

  • Salvadori, Remo
  • Scanlan, Joe
  • Schaerf, Eran
  • Schiess, Adrian
  • Schweizer, Helmut
  • Schütte, Thomas
  • Serebrjakova, Marija
  • Simoni, Mariella
  • Solano, Susana
  • Sow, Ousmane
  • Spalletti, Ettore
  • Steinbach, Haim
  • Steir, Pat
  • Strack, Wolfgang
  • Struth, Thomas
  • Sugár, János

t

  • Takeoka, Yuji
  • Therrien, Robert
  • Thorne, David & Katya Sander & Ashley Hunt & Sharon Hayes & Andrea Geyer
  • Thursz, Frederic Matys
  • Toroni, Niele
  • Totsikas, Thanassis
  • Trinci, Addo Lodovico
  • Tusek, Mitja
  • Tuymans, Luc

u

  • Ulman, Mîkhah
  • Uslé, Juan

v

  • Viola, Bill
  • Visch, Henk

w

  • Welling, James
  • West, Franz
  • Whiteread, Rachel
  • Wool, Christopher

y

  • Yook, Keun Byung

z

  • Zobernig, Heimo
  • Zorio, Gilberto
  • Zvezdochetov, Konstantin

Artistic Director

Jan Hoet
born 1936 in Leuven, died 2014 in Ghent

  • Studied art history and archaeology at Sint-Lievenscollege, Ghent

  • 1961-1975
    Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent

  • 1975-1999
    Director of the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent

  • 1988-1992
    Artistic director of documenta 9, Kassel

  • 1999-2003
    Curator at the S.M.A.K., Ghent

  • 2003-2008
    Founding director of the MARTa Herford, Herford

  • 1976
    Panamarenko. Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent

  • 1977
    Marcel Broodthaers, Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent

  • 1977
    Joseph Beuys, Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent

  • 1986
    Chambres d'amis, Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent

  • 1989
    Open Mind/Closed Circuits, S.M.A.K., Ghent

  • 1991
    Fabre, Watari-Um Museum, Tokyo

  • 1992
    documenta 9, Kassel

  • 2002
    Bjarne Melgaard: Black Low, MARTa Herford, Herford

  • 2005
    James Ensor, MARTa Herford, Herford

  • 2006
    Anton Henning, MARTa Herford, Herford

  • 2007
    Erik Schmidt: Hunting Grounds, MARTa Herford, Herford

  • 2008
    Max Bill: without beginning without end, MARTa Herford, Herford

Awards (selection):

  • 2009
    Honorary doctorate from the University of Ghent

  • 2009
    Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany

  • 2011
    Prize of the Flemish Community for general cultural merit

  • 2015
    Hessian Culture Prize for his work as Artistic Director of documenta 9 (posthumous)

A person in a suit and scarf stands in an office with a cigarette in their hand in front of a board with notes and posters. There are several desks in the room with folders, papers and office supplies.
Jan Hoet (1992). Photo: Dirk Bleicker