documenta X

The last documenta of the 20th century was directed for the first time by a woman, the Frenchwoman Catherine David. As is so often the case, people in Kassel were skeptical. The intellectual demands that Catherine David placed on the major exhibition - the meaning and purpose of which she questioned in the introduction to the catalog - and the critical examination of the political, social, economic and cultural problems of the globalized present that she called for caused many critics to fear for the autonomy of art in the run-up to the event. Even the poster, on which the small "d" is crossed by a large "X" (Roman 10), sparked indignation - people even suspected that it called the institution of documenta into question. In retrospect, it is astonishing how little the reception of documenta 10 did justice to its concept as a "manifestation culturelle" with the claim to "enable access to recognizing the state of the world in different ways" - and this explicitly beyond a "society of spectacle".

Without falling into the trap of the "anniversary exhibition", documenta 10 confronted a variety of challenges and discourses - from the post-colonialism debate (for example with Lothar Baumgarten's series Vacuum, 1978-80, or the documenta documents) to various models of urbanity (Aldo van Eyck, Archigram, ArchizoomAssociati, Rem Koolhaas) and positions on the significance of the image in the media society (here exemplified by Marcel Broodthaers' Séction Publicité du Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968)) through to current net art (Heath Bunting, Joachim Blank/Karl Heinz Jeron).

Instead of a real examination of these issues or David's curatorial achievements, however, the general tenor of art criticism of documenta 10 repeatedly boiled down to terms such as "theory-heavy" or "intellectualism" as well as the exhibition's alleged "lack of sensuality". The accusation of "senselessness" was perhaps also directed at Kassel itself - after all, in her documenta parcours, David thematized the city of Kassel, once the most car-friendly and therefore "most modern" city in Germany, as a "modern ruin". The rampant weeds - neophytes from southern and south-eastern Europe - that Lois Weinberger planted as a metaphor for migration processes along a disused track at Kassel's main railway station, which has only been a regional station since the completion of the Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe IC station and has been converted into a "cultural station" for commercial and cultural purposes, fit in with this. The route led from there through underpasses and down the Treppenstraße to the Fridericianum and past the documenta hall and the Orangerie to the Fulda. Along this axis, the various social, economic, ecological, aesthetic and cultural systems that converged here were to be examined.

The artistic works installed were not intended to be event-oriented "street furniture" with works of art, but rather to subtly intervene in the public space with specific questions. Jeff Wall's Milk (1984), a lightbox with a photo of a man sitting on the side of the road in front of a brick wall with a brown paper bag in his hand from which a fountain of milk is spraying - a banal scene at first glance, surreal at second - was installed in a pedestrian underpass. Christine Hill set up her Volksboutique (1996-today) in another underpass, while Suzanne Lafont's posters near the train station laconically traced the route of migratory movements between the metropolises of south-eastern and central Europe. The trail ended near the Fulda with the Metro-Net sculpture: Transportable Subway Entrance (1997) by Martin Kippenberger, who had died shortly before. However, the entrance to the suggested mobility was a dummy - a symbol of dysfunctional urban networks. Not far from here was perhaps the most popular work of art at documenta 10: Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel's Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen (1997) near the Orangerie. The supposed interspecies idyll subtly and disturbingly combined evolutionary theory with the cruel reality of profit-oriented factory farming.