Page 17 - Studio International - July August 1972

with self-portraits by artists and middle-men
(critics, dealers, exhibition managers, collectors),
procedural art, real-time film, real-time
theatre, play, sport, Surrealism (Dali),
`Art as Life' (eg Vostell's appropriation method),
teaching and learning as performing arts (eg
Buren, Filliou, artists as protectors of the
environment); and finally there is Non-identity,
with the art of ideas (including the 'forerunners' :
systemic painting, minimal art, land art), the
Oldenburg method and the Magritte method.
The publication of this draft caused what
almost amounted to an anti-'documenta'
campaign, and scepticism and criticism went
far beyond what was usual in Kassel.
Progressive dealers refused to collaborate for
fear of becoming accessories to politological
agitation; artists, on the other hand, protested
that their work would be misused in an attempt
to illustrate theoretical relationships; museum
directors, who had already promised their help,
shuffled discreetly into the background; critics
thought the programme incomprehensible and
unworkable.
There was division of opinion among the
organizers, too. The programme seemed to be
endangered, particularly since it was apparent
in any case that the finances would not stretch
to cover the original plans for bringing the
progressive Frankfurt theatre festival
`Experimenta' to Kassel, incorporating the play
film in the exhibition programme, and setting
up Bazon Brock's computerized school for
visitors. But Harald Szeemann soon put about
the rumour that art was turning back upon itself,
so that one could believe `documenta 5' would
end up by being an art exhibition like its
predecessors. It seems to me that what we in
fact have is an exhibition not unlike a
combination of 'When Attitudes Become Form',
`Prospect-Projection' and a picture gallery of
realism, but which will nonetheless be more
general and all-embracing in its theoretical
penetration. When more than one hundred and
sixty artists are showing their works on,
roughly speaking, five out of six floors of
exhibition space, that leaves little room for the
so-called 'parallel image-worlds' which in
current opinion do not count as art. On the
other hand, at any rate in Germany and
Switzerland, all these 'image-worlds' have been
shown in thematic exhibitions during the last
four years, Cuban posters as much as comics,
science fiction as much as 'social iconography',
not to mention pornography, banknotes and
kitsch. One can only wonder that, in all the
criticism of the first draft (which patently
(Left) language (eg Darboven or Herbin, but also needed amendment), this fact was overlooked.
Etienne Martin including anonymous scientific models), What was, in my opinion, decisive and (in
Le Manteau 1962 caricature (Topor), and portraiture (the former the best sense of the word) provocative was the
Photo: David Pype
Nazi artist Paul Mathias Padua, as well as taking over of the question of relationship
(Top) Andy Warhol). between art and society by an avant-garde
Jean Olivier Hucleux
Cimetière, oil on wood, 2 X 3 m The section 'Identity/Non-identity' is institution which, having done it four times
Photo: David Pype sub-divided into three. There is Imposed • before, was once again expected to celebrate
Identity, with children's painting, work by the the spiritual 'definition of standpoint' as an
(Above) mentally ill, concretism (hermits, flagellants, inherently artistic event. As if one could turn
Will Insley
Model for Passage Space Spiral 1969 hippies) and naive painting; Desired Identity, the clock back beyond the discussions that have