Corrections are being made to documenta – Newspaper Kommersant No. 7 (7452) dated 01/17/2023

The management of one of the most influential international exhibitions of contemporary art, Documenta in Kassel, has changed. The new managing director is the efficient “cultural manager”, classical historian Andreas Hoffmann, currently head of the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg. About what the new manager of the exhibition, which was greatly discredited last summer, which received the alternative name antisemita fifteen in the media, will have to deal with, tells Kira Dolinina.

The periodical exhibition documenta was conceived in 1955 by the German artist and architect Arnold Bode as a revenge on art that had been considered “degenerate” just twenty years earlier. Actually, it was not an exhibition of modern art at that time either – Bode chose works that were made in the 1930s and 1940s, but were not shown to the German audience at that time. The absolute classics Picasso and Kandinsky became the main stars then, and the main idea was to restore the continuity of the development of modernist discourse in the visual arts.

Gradually, the exhibition, which opens every five years in the Fridericianium in Kassel, conquered truly contemporary art, new premises, cities and even countries. The curators were really the first persons of the art scene (Harald Szeeman in 1972, Rudy Fuchs in 1982), and by the 11th exhibition of platforms, documenta already had five at the same time, including such exotic places as New Delhi or Lagos. The 13th exhibition even reached Kabul. The expansion was first qualitative, and then geographical, so that the title of one of the most influential shows of contemporary art documenta deservedly earned.

With age, sharpness has also been added: today it is already an absolute axiom that contemporary art should walk on the razor’s edge and stick its knife into society where it hurts the most. The last documenta, the 15th, opened this summer, when military events were in full swing, but the Indonesian Ruangrupa, chosen by the curators long before 2022, turned out to be carried away by completely different world conflicts. In the two months of the exhibition, documenta was accused of anti-Semitism three times, some works were removed from the exhibition, the director of the exhibition, Sabina Shorman, was fired, although not the first time, and the damage that was done to the reputation of the event as a whole was increasingly described as total. “Documenta lies in ruins. This is especially tragic, because the beautiful works of almost 1.5 thousand artists were completely eclipsed by just a few works,” said Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt am Main. Federal Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz refused to attend the exhibition, although he had never missed it before. The head of the German Cultural Council, Olaf Zimmermann, opined that the exhibition’s curators failed: they are “stubbornly ignorant” and “waging a defensive struggle” that harms the entire documenta.

What caused such a hurricane? On the very first day of documenta, June 18, some viewers demanded to remove the huge banner of the Indonesian group of artists Taring Padi called “People’s Justice”: on it, among the representatives of absolute evil, soldiers in helmets with the inscriptions “KGB”, “007” and “Mossad” pace ”, and as a personified evil, a soldier in the form of the Israel Defense Forces with a pig snout, as well as a man with a grotesque characteristic large nose in a cap with the inscription “CC” is depicted. It made no sense to prove the innocence of this anti-Semitic attack – and no one really tried: the curators of the exhibition from Ruangrupa support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which calls for economic and political pressure on Israel. What the documenta management knew very well – they could have put straws. The banner has been removed. Ten days later, accusations of the same sin of anti-Semitism were triggered by exposed archival drawings from the Presence des Femmes brochure, published in 1988 in Algiers, showing soldiers with Stars of David on their helmets and with distorted faces. Several illustrations show the military threatening children. The administration still refused to check its entire display for lice. The third salvo was fired on August 24, when the Judische Allgemeine journalist reported that documenta “did it again” – this time, the Tokyo Reels’ hours-long video installation, assembled from pro-Palestinian propaganda materials of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Jews appear as a global evil and the source of all evil. A few more works with similar racist jokes discovered along the way (bags of money from uncles with big noses, and even in a kippah) did not make the weather any longer: documenta 15 went down in history as antisemita fifteen.

It must be said that, apart from the banner, none of these works was withdrawn from the exhibition. The documenta management simply refused to do so. Even despite the statement of an expert commission specially assembled to accompany the exhibition, which, for example, stated that the Tokyo Reels video “legitimizes hatred of Israel and the glorification of terrorism presented in the source material.” The administration’s attempts to hide behind words about censorship looked rather weak, but they convinced someone.

What is the problem here? If contemporary art is supposed to be sharp, then why not be sharp (leftist) on the subject of the Israeli-Arab conflict? Sure. The main problem (apart from the fact that this is happening in Germany, and here there is a special relationship with anti-Semitism) is that the new ethics categorically prohibits total generalizations on national or racial grounds, as well as on the grounds of various minorities. Not all Americans are fat, not all dark-skinned people are great runners, not all women are stupid blondes, and yes, not all Jews are moneybags and not all people have crooked noses. The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the longest and most hopeless looking in the world today. To talk about him (as well as about any other) in terms of “all Jews against all Palestinians” is stupid and dangerous. If only because it harms even the illusory possibility of peace in the concept of “two peoples, two states”, which even without documenta curators in the current right-wing government of Israel has zero chances. Moreover, the right turn, which took place simultaneously in many countries, as well as the Ukrainian events, force the society to take a closer look at the daily practice of defending a state that knows too well what it is like to live next to a rabid neighbor. Whether the future documenta will be able to take into account the new realities, as it should by its status, will depend on the new director. Let’s hope that knowledge of ancient history, rich in wars and conflicts of all stripes and types, will help him.