Page 12 - Studio International - March 1973

Exposition of In retrospect, the first thing that stood out at as a play cf harmonious, unharmonious or
Documenta 5 was the exhibition's seriousness. neutral relationships between the social
an exhibition: First, because one had to regard it as the thematic form and the artistic thematic content.
most important exhibition of recent years, and The supposed unity of this duplicity was the
a backward look no opportunity had been spared to make it just fact of D5 itself; which, as a social institution of
that. It was this very seriousness which made it, an artistic and cultural character, was the
at Documenta 5 right at the planning stage, a conceptually- objective representation and tangible proof of
determined reality, a 'work-in-itself' — the reality of the theme it proposed.
executed in the form of a 'model for an `Documenta 5 — as — art — exhibition — at —
René Denizot exhibition', presented as a critical programme, Kassel — West Germany' was thus not only a
and backed up by interviews and publicity. factual reality, but also in itself the objective
Second, it was serious also in scope and justification of this reality. It was a work
execution; though it did not remain entirely sufficient unto itself.
[This article was written last summer at the
faithful to the original conception (the 'school Of course, the whole enterprise hinged on art.
time when Documenta 5 was held at Kassel. It for visitors' was dropped) there were no Everything depended on the significance of the
is published in this issue, which deals obvious gaps; serious, too, in the way it ran word 'art'. That was D5's exemplary strength.
extensively with the present art scene in smoothly and satisfied individual needs It played the art game in a radical fashion,
France, because many of the points it raises without allowing anyone to escape from the played on its ambiguity by leaving it up to the
have engaged the particular attention of freedom it authorized. invited artists to show the effective reality of art
French artists and critics.]
Finally, it was serious in the sense that such in the objective conditions determined by the
`seriousness' radicalizes the situation in a exhibition itself. 'It remains to be seen to what
disturbing way. The order, beautiful extent these objective conditions are
arrangement, perfect and finished appearance — recognizable in the results of work in the
everything, in fact, which should have put one different fields. The aim of D5 should be to
at ease — made one uneasy. The exhibition hid clarify these problems, and above all the
nothing. On the contrary, it was so precise in problem: what meaning can one attribute to
execution that it exhibited only what it showed. art in order to resolve them ?'
This is what every exhibition aims to do.
But Documenta was disturbing in that it did The question is perverse. Unlike most
that and nothing but that. There was nothing exhibitions, this one was not a simple display of
unforeseen to see, nothing unforeseen stood artistic production or of artists of any special
out. In this sense it was totalitarian; everything school. Instead of displaying what it exhibited —
was answered, and all the questions which the which is usual in commercial or institutional
exhibition should have raised were pre-empted galleries — here the exhibition confronted
because they were answered too. So there was artists and their works with self-determined
nothing to say. categories and left it up to the works to confirm
Because of this Documenta 5 was an or invalidate Documenta's theme. By its own
exemplary model. By forestalling criticism in sufficiency, the exhibition isolated artistic
the traditional sense it managed to escape from production as an autonomous function and thus
it and forced criticism to be no better than a played on the ambiguity whereby art invokes
pale reflection of what it has so exhaustively an autonomous creative freedom which it has
conceived itself to be, a 'picker-up of crumbs' never assumed, if indeed, since it has existed as
of the reality it defines. an aesthetic, art has ever come to any
Moreover, this view of criticism was clearly conclusions regarding its own fundamental
defined in the exhibition's programme/schema. premise. The one question called up by its
This, according to its stated theme, envisaged autonomy, the question of art as art, is the one
that 'the correctness and effectiveness of the which art has never brought out, thus leaving its
work invested in the execution of D5 will be `works', their appearance, to the discretion of
able to be judged according to the degree of instances in which art and its claimed liberty
unity achieved between the theme deduced are used as a pretext for the discreet exercise
from the pre-existing artistic productions and of power. The artists thereby become the
the theme formulated independently from the safest guardians of the dominant ideology.
field of artistic production'. The 'concept of art' was the passport,
The thematic duality of form, which D5 avant garde the password, the gallery as
defined as an 'investigation into reality' based institution the ideological guarantor, the
on the apparent forms of contemporary social commercial gallery the economic and social
life, and content, defined as 'imageries of today' promoter, the exhibition the means of display
based on the forms of contemporary art, without which artistic production would have
constituted the explicit ambiguity which D5 no artistic meaning. Art rests on this ambiguity
played on so as to circumscribe any and this ambiguity D5 carried to its ultimate in
intervention, whether it stemmed from art radical application. By this very fact, it threw
criticism proper, artistic production, or from art and its traditional forms to the winds in
argument pure and simple, in the field initiated favour of the artistic and social instances which
and enclosed by the exhibition itself. Any it represents in itself. D5 stands to the detriment
manifestation, whatever it might be, was of art, which at the same time it alone makes
integrated by this duality/duplicity into the possible in its capacity as exhibition and
thematic field which the exhibition laid down, institutional gallery. In other words, it demands
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