...but is it art?

"Documenta has turned itself into a clever but occasionally convincing, Didactamenta."

Diadactics and art are two different things and, while art can be didactic and one can be didactive in an artful way, once the secondary overwhelms the primary, you've defeated your purpose. If in being didactic (teaching) the vehicle is larger than the content, the message is diluted. If we sacrifice craft to content in art, we're left with nothing but dogma. Soviet Social Realism, art subservient to the state (read "propaganda"), art constricted and constipated, was a desaster. Few I can think of managed a balance between content and medium: Ancient Egypt with it's deep religious beliefs linking imagery and eternal life, The Renaissance / Baroque Church in Rome (which, when the art displaced the message, led to the Reformation) and the Mexican Mural Movement are three, the German social realists to a lesser extent. Documenta does not. It is an exercise in venting, lamenting and begrudging with little if any craft anywhere to be found. Any random sampling of their offering should suffice. All consideration of esthetics has been trashed. "...shear, unrelieved boredom - a boredomfrom which all the fanciful formulations of artworld rhetoric can offer no relief" says Hilton Kramer about another exhibit but, if the shoe fits... Nothing but more dull, boring, craftless, tasteless, inane, guilt-ridden, angst-laden, gender-geo-gagga agitprop. Quoth Herr Enwezor: "The exhibition counterpoises the supposed purity and autonomy of the art object against the rethinking of modernity based on ideas of transculturality and extraterritoriality. Blather, bluster with no luster. You go figure it out!!! There ARE those "who confuse discourse with vomit," says Florence King in her satire With Charity for None.

- RC.

With great hope I met Okwui Enwezor`s proclamation that this Documenta will have nothing to do with art - in short - with the game of art world society. Well, I soon realized that Enwezor meant that the art would be engaged with current social and political problems, and that the curator is "not interested in aesthetical values at all" (quotation from TV interview).

Initially I hadn’t the intention to care about this next example of "freedom in art," but how can I act, as an artist, in a world shaped through such opinions?

- Slawomir Marzec

Exerpted from Michael Kimmelman's New York Times review of 18 June 2002:

"This happens to be the most politically minded Documenta..., even more than the last one in 1997, which is saying a lot. ...a global., multigenerational exhibition...more about social and economic evangelism than anything else. ...the show is also puritanical and nearly humorless...conceived by people for whom the messiness and frivolity of art are almost moral failures. Baubles and fashion are evil, social engagement and didactics are good.

"In accord with its vision of social egalitarianism, the show llevels almost everything on view. Much of what's here therefore blends together...a strange homogenization of sympathy and topicality considering homogeneity is what anti globalists preach against. I think this is what happens when you try to shoehorn a panoply of econpomic and social issues into an ART festival.

"The show's goal, Mr. Enwezor has said, is knowledge through art. Nobody here seems to care about the difference.

"Making visually engrossing social documentaries, like writing strong advocacy journalism, is honorable and difficult work. Making art, good art anyway, is something else that's difficult and it's certainly rarer and no less necessary to the wellbeing of society.

"Politics, this show reminds us, is like a circle. Go far enough to the left or right and you end up in the same place... When Docuimenta started in the 1950's, its goal was to show the sort of modern art that Nazi Germany, then Communist East Germany, forbade. The Nazis and Communists thought art served politics or was decadent. documenta presented an alternative view.

"But now we have German politicians endorsing the art here for being political. ...the new Documenta flips the original concept for the exhibition almost upside down."

* * *

"(Diego) Rivera probably gave more to Mexico, in terms of self-knowledge and cultural pride, than any artist in its history, but he was only able to do it because he had absorbed and completely internalized the great tradition of Renaissance fresco painting which, combined with his absorption of French modernism, pre-Colombian Mexican art and living folk-art to produce the tremendous results we see on the walls of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City. If you had told Rivera that quality didn't matter, he would have laughed in your face."
- ROBERT HUGUES in CULTURE OF COMPLAINT