Viewing the Documenta 12 through my first Nurope oasis was a complex multi-level experience – the Documenta in itself being quite overwhelming. One of the pieces, which has already become almost emblematic for the exhibition, is the Fairy Tales of Ai Weiwei. Now, there’s good reason for that, I think; for what meets the visitor is certainly an abundance of stories – vast not only in quantity, but in diversity as well. Themes, bridging inherent polarities, deal with human conditions of the global/local male/female/queer… of age/youth east/west wealth/poverty south/north black/white illness/health/you name it…
…now that everything can be told, even at the Documenta. And that is a good thing, too.
But trying to spot what isn’t there is also interesting.
To me, all this narrative action takes place in a kind of horizontal dimension, in-between human beings. Consequently, I kept looking for a vertical quality – more specifically, for the vertical dimension from a painter’s point of view; that is, works that essentially connect light and matter. What I found was a few pieces of Tanaka Atsuko and John McCracken, the orange light room in the documenta-halle, the to-be poppy field outside the Fridericianum…
…and for traditional painting? I don’t know – I guess there were things escaping my weary eyes. Maybe more easily so because they were ‘out of theme’, from the curator’s point of view. Or were they? The work of John McCracken, of early and mid-20th century modernists and utopians, appeared every now and then throughout the exhibition; tying things together? or counterpointing the cacophony of today’s tales? (By the way, curating seemed to me intelligent as well as consistent… though somewhat brutal in the handling of certain parts.)
Well, maybe this verticality just isn’t a big issue among contemporary artists… but then again – think of Per Kirkeby, of James Turrell or Olafur Gudmundson. There are options if one is interested in handling this, and some artists are.
I do not say that dealing essentially with the shades of light itself – its Taten und Leiden, to speak with Goethe – necessarily brings out Finer Art than, say, the tales told by The transported of KwaNdebele photographies of David Goldblatt or Romuald Hazoumé’s mournful canister boat – that is not my point. I just make the notion that the horizontal quality is very obvious at the Documenta 12, while the vertical one isn’t always so present.
(This raises another question to me: could there be a vertical dimension in form? What comes to me from the Documenta is, among other things, the textiles of Hu Xiaoyuan, photographic works from Dmitri Gutov and Gonzalo Diaz… I’ll have to ponder upon that.)
I sensed beauty in all the above mentioned; but what is beauty? I’d say: the vertical channel opening.
So, ‘what is beauty’? The reception of beauty has to change, obviously, with the changes of our means of perception. As did ‘classical beauty’ widen into ’sublime beauty’ when Europe somehow passed another threshold in the 18th century… I know this is thin ice, but something did happen then and I believe something is happening now.
To close up, I return to Ai Weiwei; his contribution was the fairy tales of H C Andersen, embodied in 1001 Chinese women (and men, I guess, but I met and spoke only to one: a woman artist from Beijing) taking turns walking the streets of Kassel… and a collection of 1001 handcrafted antique chairs. These chairs were placed in groups and pairs in the different exhibition spaces, and they were used. People sat down; to rest, to reflect or to speak to each other. They may have asked themselves, asked each other this very question: what did we see? When did it open up to me? to you?
An image of this something happening.
