How to Cite: Uribe-Castro, Roberto. "The exquisite corpse of Documenta Fifteen". Dearq no. 36 (2023): 88-103. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq36.2023.09

The exquisite corpse of Documenta Fifteen

Roberto Uribe-Castro

ruc@robertouribecastro.de

Artist

One of the most important events in the world art calendar took place in the summer of 2022: the Documenta. This event is held every five years in the city of Kassel (Germany), and is for many connoisseurs a milestone, as far as contemporary art positions are concerned, only comparable to the Venice Biennale. And if each edition of the event left its visitors with the idea of having attended the event that would change the course of the history of art, in this version, Documenta 15, has definitely marked a before and an after. This time, visitors were left with a sense of a rupture rather than a change, as the event shook the very foundations of this quinquennial appointment.

To understand what happened in this last edition of Documenta and its scope both in art events and in the political-cultural discourses of the world, it forces us to look at the origins of Documenta itself. Its history is intimately linked to the post-war processes in Germany. The name Documenta itself is a neologism that refers to a documentation of modern art, an artistic movement condemned by Nazism in Germany and the occupied countries during the years in which this dictatorship remained in power. National Socialism considered many abstract art movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, such as Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism or der Blauer Reiter, as “degenerate art.”¹

The first organizers of Documenta, Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann, sought, in its early editions, to establish a chronological and linear bridge between the artistic movements condemned by the Nazis and other pre-World War II schools in Germany, such as the Bauhaus, in an attempt to reconstruct or re-establish a history of Western art.² Today even these origins are looked upon with suspicion, as Werner Haftmann himself has been linked to the paramilitary arm of National Socialism in Germany during World War II.

The first Documenta was planned as a side event to the Garden Biennial, which was being held for the third time since the end of World War II.³ These gardening biennials date back to the 19th century, along with industrial and science exhibitions such as the Great Exhibition of 1851, organized in London, and the Paris Salons. All these major events forged a tradition of macro-events intended to establish the new canons⁴ of modernity based on the principles of the Enlightenment and relying on the goodness of the European Industrial Revolution. Based on these fairs, Europe built promotional platforms for its vision of progress and welfare, not only in the old continent, but with extensions in the former European colonies, including Colombia.

Documenta Fifteen was curated by the ruangrupa collective from Indonesia. For the first time, a group from the Asian continent and, above all, a collective was in charge of leading and convening this event. ruangrupa, in turn, invited fourteen other collectives, who invited others and so on. As a result, more than 1500 artists, architects, philosophers, musicians and different professionals were involved in 100 days of concerts, lectures, exhibitions, workshops, and different events in the city of Kassel.

Comments, attacks, and signs of discontent soon followed the announcement of ruangrupa as curator of the show in 2019. Everything intensified at the beginning of 2022, when the first accusations of anti-Semitism appeared on behalf of the alliance against anti-Semitism in Kassel, against its organizers and some collectives present at the exhibition. Later, when Documenta Fifteen opened its doors to the press, these accusations grew because of the work People's Justice, produced in 2002 by the collective Taring Padi, which was accused of promoting anti-Semitic images. The work was quickly covered with a black cloth while a committee evaluated the accusations. In the end, the work was removed from Friedrichsplatz (the main square) in Kassel, where it was on display before the exhibition was opened to the public.

The event was then marked by scandal throughout its hundred days. The diversity of arguments and positions made the duration of this last version insufficient to understand the scope and magnitude of what was at stake, not only in the future versions of Documenta, but also in the relations between art and politics, art and censorship, and art and the media. In the end, it would seem that the invitation to a collective from what is now called the Global South would have been more to fulfill quotas of inclusion than a genuine intention to get to know proposals different from those that have been imposed since the 19th century from Europe to the rest of the world.

When I was asked to chronicle Documenta Fifteen, I already sensed the difficulty of doing so about an exhibition that focused more on long processes than on closed and finished results that are usually seen in this type of exhibitions. However, the cascade of events, criticisms, and scandals exceeded any prediction that could be made as to the difficulty of the task.

For this reason, this text has finally been conceived from another perspective. My proposal to the reader is that of an exquisite corpse, rather than that of a finished text. The idea of an exquisite corpse refers to the technique used by the surrealists: it consists of a board game in which each participant writes a sentence or draws a picture on a sheet of paper that is folded before passing it to the next player. The latter must follow with a new contribution, and so on, until all participants have written or drawn something. At the end of the round, the result is read or displayed. What I was looking for with this activity is the creation of a group poetic, which was playful, anonymous, intuitive, and spontaneous, which somehow manifests the collective unconscious present in the participating group.

This exquisite corpse takes different press sources, including articles, texts and the comments and images shared by friends and colleagues, which either refer directly to Documenta Fifteen, or are references that invite an exploration beyond this spatiotemporal framework defined by the exhibition in Kassel. Rather than unraveling the complex plots that were interwoven throughout these discussions, the aim is to invite the reader to contribute his or her own sources (future and past) to this surreal text. Faced with new times in which it seems that artificial intelligence offers us the option of producing and writing texts that allude to a certain type of logic, I would like to propose a text that extends beyond the pages and that questions the idea of the author to become a collective exercise in construction.

More than others, Documenta Fifteen has marked a before and a now in the art world. And the fact is that thinking an event that obeys European structures and traditions from the so-called Global South had to shake these forms to their deepest foundations, if it was to be consistent with its own criteria. This Documenta broke, from the very beginning, with the idea of a finished event, of continuous narrative and unidirectional reading, to become an invitation to discussion, and contributions coming from different places and contexts. Surely, this will not be the last Documenta, but it is a fact that the hegemony and authority in the historical and aesthetic discourse imposed in the last centuries from Europe to the rest of the world has exploded, and its pieces can be recomposed from new centralities, with different interpretations and from very different angles.

It would seem that we are facing an exquisite corpse that responds more to a social and collective unconscious that is awakening, and where rather than a single, linear narrative, there are several that are opening the field for communication. Perhaps from the standpoint of Western logic, this Documenta is a real disaster, which invites us to think that an event like this does have some sense of evolution. We must, perhaps, eradicate concepts based on preconceived ideas of success or failure, because in reality, they are continuous processes in constant development.

1 Entartete Kunst was the term used by the Nazis to refer to any kind of abstract art and art that distanced itself from the classical canons of art in the West.

2 Werner Haftmann was an art historian, and in 1954, he published Painting of the 20th Century, a programmatic history of the evolution of art since the end of the 19th century in Europe.

3 The first Bundesgartenschau in Germany was held in Hannover in 1951. It then continued without interruption after World War II, and every two years since then in a different German city.

4 [Middle English, from Late Latin, from Latin, standard] a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works.