From Venice to Berlin, Kassel, and… Davos
There’s little that the art world has missed during the pandemic more than airport lounges. I was no exception and, despite having made a series of gloomy predictions about art’s return in a diminished yet more self-satisfied form, I was eager to chase my hits of aviation fuel fumes the moment anyone as much as whispered ‘biennale’ again. This summer provides the perfect line-up for those who wish to have their biases confirmed, whether these are pro or anti art establishment. Venice is back, Art Basel returned only nine months since the last edition, and Documenta’s promise of changing everything finally manifested itself in Kassel. Speaking of manifestations, Manifesta opens soon, too.
In Venice, I found an art world eager to put the malaise behind. And it put it so far behind that it succeeded in its own ‘great reset’, returning to some of the tried and tested material forms of Modernity, in that pre-Postmodern sense of the word. Strolling through the Giardini, one could be forgiven for forgetting that ‘the pandemic is not yet over’ or that ‘there’s a war on, you know’. Except for the sandbag-pyramid at Piazza Ucraina, no statues needed to be toppled here. This is the kind of forgetting that only art can facilitate.
The art in Venice felt less urgent than art has in a long time. This may be no bad thing, given the art world’s overconfident conviction of its vital importance to the conduct of the world’s symbolic and material politics. This change of pace will, however, necessitate the development of new aesthetics and the translation of old languages to fit new circumstances that are as much in need of voice as ever. It remains to be seen in what Cecilia Alemani’s exhibition proposes will be sustainable.
If there is no politics in Venice, Berlin Biennale is nothing but. For an exhibition that spanned the globe in its origins, nearly every component of it spoke to the same concern: the decolonial process and art’s role in it. And the role that Kader Attia proposed for art in decoloniality is central, so much so that he curated an exhibition that speaks more about art’s central role in the decolonial process than that processes’ processes or (gasp!) outcomes. Try saying colonisation-decolonisation-colonisation-decolonisation alongside biennale’s debutant artist Maithu Bùi a few times and see if the word doesn’t go funny on you too.
The exhibition utters a multitude of demands rendered aesthetic to the point that they become unintelligible. Attia’s Berlin Biennale is suspended in a peculiar half-state between an exhibition and an archive of human cruelty. I am not equipped to judge it as the latter and I leave that to the courts or to Forensic Architecture (who exhibit in the show). As the former, it feels disempowering and itself empowered only to the extent that a publicly subsidised art production budget stretches to. Thankfully, not all artists in Berlin followed the curator’s brief; perhaps there is some hope for art’s claim to autonomy yet. Or artists’ autonomy from curators, at least.
For all its freedom, Documenta was ‘overshadowed’ by accusations of anti-Semitism, or, as a NY Times review put it: “Documenta was a whole vibe, then a scandal killed the buzz.” The decision to grant control of one of the world’s largest publicly funded art events to a dispersed network of collectives whose membership will forever remain unclear may seem naïve in retrospect. It’s not unlikely that further event cancellations and the now-canceled inspection of the exhibition’s content by the Anne Frank Educational Center would have stolen the show’s limelight for good. But this is not a bug, it’s a feature. In Kassel, that scandal looks more like a symptom or a series of institutional decisions, not a problem in and of itself.
But Documenta 15 could and should have been a rigorous and conclusive test of the mantra of social utility, diversity, and equity parroted incessantly by arts institutions. Because we are likely to spend the summer arguing about censorship and the power of images to offend (recall, for example, Charlie Hebdo), the real promise of ruangrupa’s project is unlikely to be tested. The change.org petition in support of the project has been slow to gather signatures, but among the 2700 names, I spotted many colleagues who would much rather ‘vibe’ with Documenta’s ‘buzz’ than ask questions of their ideological beliefs that have allowed this experiment to become what it is. For now, we are experiencing a series of near-death spasms because neither the blue pill nor the red pill, both of which we have swallowed, has started working yet. Hito Steyerl’s withdrawal, no doubt might be followed by others, is one of these convulsions and, ironically, deprives the show of one of its more coherent artworks.
What unites the events is a progressive, iconoclastic degradation of the image through which a series of familiar histories and political symbols is replaced by others. This could go either way: the optimist would welcome a ‘great reset’, while a pessimist like me will consider their exit from the ‘managed decline’. Venice replaced the familiar depictions of discontent with soothing aesthetic forms. Berlin insisted that all images point to colonial hells. Kassel dispensed with the image altogether, save for those couple of images that everyone will now remember. From here, it’s only a short flight to Davos where the image is no more necessary to the success of capital than democracy. If you aren’t ready for this step just yet, may I suggest a sojourn in Basel, a destination popular with museum curators and directors, many of whom opted to stay Swiss-side during the opening days of Documenta?
(No) Politics in Venice
A curator waking up from a three-year coma and heading to the opening of the Venice Biennale straight from the hospital could be forgiven for thinking that little had happened in the world while they were unconscious. In the pavilions, palazzos, gardens, and warehouses of Venice, they would find little reference to the turmoil and unrest that have dominated news agendas since the last edition. Climate disaster must have been averted. The aftershocks of the last wave of social unrest must have died down. The discontents of imperialism must have found symbolic compensation. Ok, something’s up with Ukraine, but not for the first time. Why, did someone mention a pandemic? Perhaps the interesting times promised by Ralph Rugoff’s 2019 exhibition have failed to arrive.
On the surface, this year’s Biennale is in deep denial of the circumstances that have forced the event to shift from odd to even years. Save for the exhibition attendants’ shouts of mascherina, signore!, one will look for references to the virus in vain. Absent are the symbols of struggles for liberty and popular movements in the vein of Pedro Borràs’ Catalan 2019 entry that called for the toppling of statues. If it weren’t for Barbara Kruger’s sloganeering installation, there’s hardly a banner, a call, or a declaration in sight. Grand ideas may be name-checked in the catalogue (the curators of the Mexican pavilion, for example, spoke about decolonising the future) but one won’t find them elucidated on the walls. Even Leonora Carrington’s Milk of Dreams women somehow don’t reach the cult status of cyphers of art’s political potential. And there’s no trace of George Floyd.
The art world cognoscenti may frown at the notion that the biennial is a place where artists showcase their latest ideas and achievements. We scoff at naïve journalistic references to the ‘cutting edge’, preferring instead to employ euphemisms like ‘the current moment’, or to lose track of our place in history by faddishly embracing notions of the Anthropocene. But the biennial is obsessed with the contemporary and with its politics. For much of the past two decades that saw the rise of political, critical, and engaged art, artists used the platform of the biennial to take stands. It is perhaps no surprise then that one hack unversed in artspeak prognosticated that this year’s Biennale would be dominated by politics and protest. Another journalist took a more ‘informed’ view claiming that artists would surely continue to blow up the system in the face of capitalist opposition, almost as to excuse art’s feeble and selfish response to some of the past years’ greatest challenges.
But neither the protests nor the tabloid politics materialised: there is little explicit politics in this year’s Venice Biennale. Very few works, if any, engage with the pandemic and one attributes the Brownian motion on Aki Sasamoto’s air hockey table to the virus without guidance. Few artists have taken on the civil unrest of the pandemic as the topic or matter of their work, with Stan Douglas’ observation that the Springtime of Nations of 1848 was distinct from the civil unrests of 2011 a rather bizarre exception. The climate crisis hardly made it onto the agenda either, save for Nicolas Bourriaud’s Planet B whose penchant for the 3D-printed organic form is the antithesis of Greta Thunberg’s climate strike.
Has art abandoned its penchant for politics then? Have its goals changed? Or has it merely turned to other means? If there appears to be a uniting thread in this year’s Biennale, it is that art has lost its impulse to deal with the present in the present. Instead, it has opted to return to a preoccupation with form. Many of the shows – not least Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams – are filled with subdued painting and sculpture, eschewing the spectacular and the incendiary usually expected of Venice.
But it would be a mistake to assume that this wholesale return to form is a turn away from art’s political aspirations. The very gesture of bringing together a majority female show is an act of politics (an idea that Alemani has denied), all be it one that plays into the most mechanistic ideas of what art can be. Elsewhere, the Nordic countries ceding ground to the Sámi Pavilion rung equally diplomatic.
To find artistic politics in Venice, one has to consider form and matter on their own terms: in the long term. A week can be a long time in politics but the biennial comes after only three years. Suddenly, ‘the current moment’ manifests itself with the muted urgency of static objects. In many places, this contemplation is rewarding, as in the case of Ma?gorzata Mirga-Tas’ picture-palace installation in the Polish pavilion devoted to Roma histories and identities or in Zineb Sedira’s slow and deliberately homely film set in the French pavilion.
There are also misses in which we see artists attempting to harness the political nature of space, such as in the gimmicky industro-apocalyptic installation by Gian Maria Tosatti in the Italian pavilion that the artist suggested would be political because it was intimate. But spectacle is no obstacle: New Zealand’s Paradise Camp by Yuki Kihara is as bombastic as a season finale of Ru Paul’s Drag Race but subtly addresses revisionist histories and identity politics with far more nuance than a Guardian op-ed.
What motivated this change? It may be that events have finally outpaced art’s wit: unable to find the time to deal in abstractions, artists cannot keep up even with the production of artistic hot takes. What of value and on deadline could art contribute to the complex realities of the pandemic? Perhaps the suspension of the biennale schedule allowed some to break out of the creativity rat race.
This reprieve, however, is likely to be only temporary as events continue to unfold. The Biennale may have had little to say about the war in Ukraine but some artists were obliged to make their mark. For the Russian delegation, the decision to pull out would have been a matter of choosing between credible futures in their ‘glocal’ art scenes. One can imagine that the calculation was radically different for Alexei Kuzmich whose blasphemous intervention outside the Russian Pavilion landed him in jail but received only a nodding response from the preview crowds. The actor Aleksey Yudnikov who staged a less incendiary but similarly provocative performance a day earlier had the foresight to secure the attention of the press and the support of the NGO Artists at Risk.
Beyond a modest presentation in its pavilion, Ukraine outsourced its national response to a private contractor. Under what one imagines was considerable pressure but with no shortage of cash, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation presented a heavy-handed exhibition branded with a handwritten message from Volodymyr Zelenskyy whose gala opening included a streamed address by the president. It’s hard not to contrast this presentation in a grand historical venue fit more for Jeff Koons sculptures than for contemplations of war with Ukraine’s 2015 pavilion, also commissioned by Pinchuk Art Centre, which cramped a group of artists into a temporary glass structure and asked them to pose for publicity photographs with an Instagram-friendly banner declaring that they have hope.
Seven years on, the works in This is Ukraine made by Yevgenia Belorusets, Nikita Kadan, and Lesia Khomenko under Russian occupation are suitably moving and harrowing. But just like in 2015, Pinchuk did not pass up an opportunity to remind us that war is good for business by inviting the likes of Takashi Murakami, Olafur Eliasson, and Damien Hirst to celebrate their “deep connection to [Ukraine] whilst forming a common front against the war.” Would it be in bad taste to question what connection Hirst has to Ukraine, other than being keenly collected and exhibited by Pinchuk? Would it be in even worse taste for Hirst to have produced one of his butterfly paintings depicting the Ukrainian flag to order and to have already placed it in an undisclosed ‘private collection’?
If further evidence were needed that biennale art may find itself irredeemable when it tries to tackle explicit political issues, one should look to Venice itself. Among the anti-fascist graffiti familiar from any Italian street were posters advocating for the closure of an oligarch-supported art centre in Venice and a genocidal “sinking [of] the [Russian] horde into oblivion.” Whatever political turn art’s return to form signals, the realities of a chaotic, antagonistic world will return to the spotlight only too soon.
De-hy-dra-te! De-co-lo-ni-se!
The Decolonial Ouroboros of Kader Attia’s Berlin Biennale
The behaviour of a solar system with three stars is notoriously difficult to predict. Unlike the binary we know from the Earth’s revolutions around the Sun, the movement of three bodies bound by gravity is chaotic. Planets beholden to the attractive force of their suns are subject to their irrational destructive ire too, and life governed by the lack of a stable solution to the three-body problem is subject to the harshest of evolutionary demands. This Newtonian hyperbola makes for the central conceit of Cixin Liu’s sprawling sci-fi trilogy The Tree-Body Problem in which the Earth’s closest star system, host to the civilisation of Trisolarians, becomes a threat to our planet. Unbeknown to humanity, the universe is filled with a plethora of intelligent life ruled by the familiar laws of relentless capitalist expansion and competition. In Cixin’s epopee, earthly human political affairs, social orders, and personal desires are scale copies of the cycles of exploration, exploitation, and elimination that rule the whole universe.
Next to Samy Baloji’s mini-greenhouse for tropical plants and Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s botanical drawings, one of the first works one may encounter in this summer’s edition of the Berlin Biennale is Yuyan Wang’s The Moon Also Rises, a light-drenched account of a Chinese initiative to launch three artificial moons in orbits over major cities which would provide their inhabitants with constant illumination by powerful LED installations. The video mixes pulses of disco lights, shots of electronics assembly lines, and controlled architectural abstractions with a tantalising soundtrack. Its images are hypnotic and, had one not been primed to expect something rather different on Kader Attia’s curatorial agenda, one could take them to open an exhibition that thrives in the ambiguous spaces between natural and constructed phenomena. A glance at the wall text, however, dispels such hopes: Wang’s video deals with “capitalist authoritarianism and neocolonial control” and is offered as “a form of postcolonial resistance” condemning the hubris of the would-be trilunar Icarus.
Even without curatorial explanations, a visitor would soon be asked to learn about a veritable smorgasbord of abuses and traumas inflicted by war, capitalism, expropriation, or simply by history on subjects ranging from migrant communities to natural habitats. Dana Levy’s photo installation Erasing the Green documents the destruction of Palestinian Land. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s research display The Natural History of Rape presents the evidence of mass sexual assaults in post-War Berlin. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Air Conditioning itemises Israel’s illegal military surveillance flights over Lebanon. Nil Yalter’s video interviews with migrants in Exile is a Hard Job show that there is no respite from the violence of Western societies. The list goes on.
Such fare is now customary in institutional contemporary art and coded forms of decolonial discourse have become the norm in recent editions of the Berlin Biennale. Attia’s project is an exception only because it makes this focus itself the focus of the exhibition. The curatorial essay stresses the need for dwelling on “the collective trauma that haunts our societies” and the exhibition sheds light on events that took place many decades or even centuries ago. Why return to any historical atrocity when another has already entered the news agenda? Because, Attia proposes, this has the potential to initiate a ”process of reparation” and to refuse to bear witness to history is to be complicit with “imperialism’s regime.”
Such work is, no doubt, necessary but for the viewer who has not signed up to atone for all his kind’s sins, this project quickly becomes exhaustingly didactic and overbearingly demanding. Nearly every work could be accompanied by an explanatory encyclopaedia and some, like Moses März’s mind-map drawings whose nodes include ‘imagined national communities’ and ‘plantationcene’ are encyclopaedias in need of encyclopaedias. A video detail of Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige’s otherwise compelling body of works on cultural restitution is accompanied by over a dozen densely-filled pages of ‘translations’ nonchalantly left for visitors to evaluate as they stare at a static image on the screen. The political scientist David Chavalaris’ 10-metre infographic timeline Shifting Collectives which narrates recent French politics through Twitter trends not only presents thousands of data points but includes a QR code through which visitors can… buy a book with even more detailed analyses.
The artist taking on the role of witness or storyteller is nothing new, but if this is the dwelling that Attia wanted to encourage, it’s compromised at once by a lack of depth and by an excessive cognitive demand. Faced with Forensic Architecture’s high-production installation Cloud Studies, a visitor may remember that they already knew about the egregious breaches of environmental regulations by corporations, perhaps from an interactive presentation on a newspaper’s website (part of Cloud Studies is explicitly co-branded by the Guardian). In Jean-Jacques Lebel’s claustrophobic maze composed of the infamous photographs of torture in the Abu Ghraib US detention facility, they may remember that they already knew how to suppress their reactions to such material.
Between these scholastic presentations lies a range of more bizarre proposals, such as Susan Schuppli’s baffling video-and-voiceover demanding that Arctic ice be granted legal autonomy or Uriel Orlow’s intricate photographic, sculptural, and performative installation which suggests that the wood grown on the Portuguese island of Madeira is synonymous with the transatlantic slave trade. One at a time, these works and their intellectual and emotional questions have merit, but in mass, they communicate a concern for the performance of political critique more than the subjects of critique itself. Parts of Attia’s biennale are thus not a decolonising project, but an exhibition about decolonialism. This isn’t a limitation of this exhibition form per se but a present problem of the institutional political exhibition in 2022. With it comes a set of intellectual tropes and aesthetic conventions that are not easy to shake off: even the German Federal Foundation’s official introduction to the Biennale catalogue opens with a quotation from a Native American poet rather than the customary invocation of Goethe.
Over many years and many more generations, the civilisation of Trisolarians developed ways to thrive in the unpredictable conditions of their stellar system. Their history is divided into Stable Eras and Chaotic eras, each lasting anything between days and centuries. During ancient Stable Eras, the civilisation’s resources were spent mostly on rebuilding the damage caused by the burning of the sun in their preceding Chaotic Eras, until the Trisolarians developed a technology for surviving the reign of chaos in suspended, dehydrated form. The end of the Trisolarian Civilization Number 137, one of those that Cixin accounts for, is marked by the appearance of a galloping horse-rider against the scorching solar disk. He screams at the top of his lungs: “Dehydrate! Dehydrate!”
The civilisations’ revival in the subsequent Stable Eras was subject to the whims of the climate as much as to the political conditions under which they could rehydrate. Some Eras were host to thriving civilisations, others saw life return to a shadow of its former self, with only the coming of another Chaotic Era cycle guaranteed. De-hy-dra-te! Re-hy-dra-te!
Back in the exhibition, some of the works break out of the decolonial scheme and embrace the ambivalence and fleeting stability of aesthetics. Maithu Bùi’s video animation Mathu?t – MMRBX based on a virtual reality game embraces a series of visual tropes that play on the artist’s Vietnamese heritage with a mixture of reverence and levity. Bùi, for whom this was the “first work as an artist and also the first exhibition”, juxtaposes images of toylike planes with their father’s story of a campaign to collect domestic cookware for the war effort. “Pots and pans for planes! Pots and pans for planes!” After flooding the screen with cartoon bombs and floating iceberg lettuces (which stand for historical military tactics, of course), the narrator’s synthesised voice breaks into song: “Kolonizierungsprozess, Dekolonizierungsprozess, Kolonizierungsprozess, Dekolonizierungsprozess. De-ko-lo-ni-zie-rung! ?” Is Bùi celebrating the Vi?t Ki?u diasporas or digging into their parents’ generation for leaving the burden of decolonisation to their offspring?
That art’s role in probing societal norms is highly contextual is put to the test in Amal Kenawy’s 2010 performance The Silence of Sheep in which the artist paid a group of people to parade across the streets of Cairo on their knees and hands, like sheep, until the project was inevitably halted by a group of observers who found the work degrading, indecent, and insulting to Egyptian culture. Kenawy’s defence in the public altercation that ensued jars as wholly inadequate: her “I want to do art for the street and people” solicited a to-the-point “making these people into animals is art?!” Is 1960s-inspired live art appropriate for decolonising the patriarchal society of 2010s Egypt?
The problem of narrative unity of time and place is also undone in Noel W. Anderson’s tapestries in which photographic images of police abuse of black Americans are presented distorted, stretched, or distressed like documents that have survived a washing machine cycle. Despite this, the images in the tableaux appear familiar and it is unclear at first glance whether that is because they refer to singularly iconic photographs from history books or because the history of black plight at the hands of police is itself a product of endless similar images that conform to a nullifying white aesthetics. Such images are perhaps best presented without context and, as Attia aspires to in his essay, they find the viewer “standing before a work of art, […] plunged into another temporality, radically different from that of their environment”. If only the exhibition allowed for more such moments, like in the encounter with Florian Söng Nguyên’s pencil drawings of feral stray dogs which the artist encountered while living in the Atlas Mountains. The dogs, rendered by Söng Nguyên in fragments and sparse detail, were the subject of periodical violent culls by the Moroccan police. Some dogs, the artist remarks, look for masters. Some look for affection.
In The Three-Body Problem, Earth’s fate is sealed when a scientist reveals our civilisation’s existence to the Trisolarians who respond by mounting a 500-year expedition to destroy humanity. Half a millennium is a long time to develop new defences or to flee the Earth, and in Cixin’s novels, the battling factions of the UN mount no end of experimental projects to outwit the Trisolarians. The approaching invaders, however, have a fundamental epistemic advantage: they dispatch Sophons, sentinel devices which carry information at speeds far exceeding that of light. The Trisolarians are thus able to communicate with the Earth and closely monitor the progress of human preparations for their arrival. By introducing disinformation, they subvert the course of fundamental scientific research and halt human progress. While the Earth makes significant technological advances worthy of a sci-fi novel, they could never outpace those of the Trisolarian fleet. Knowledge travels only one way.
All fragments of the word will come back here to mend each other, an installation by the Senegalese collective The School of Mutants forcibly escapes the logic of decolonial knowledge production and circulation. The presentation combines an assembly of classroom furniture and books with a collection of robes and banners imbued with post-internet aesthetics. Between the bright colours of the chairs that one may loosely associate with West or North Africa and the aesthetics of pixelated screengrabs, who is teaching whom, what, and how in the decolonised virtualised classroom of 2022? What is the role of the institution intent on decolonising itself in maintaining the technologies of power-knowledge? Is the colonial decolonising institution anything but a contradiction in terms?
In a handful of otherwise compelling works, institutional allegiances clash with their aesthetic politics. Clément Cogitore’s restaging of a scene from Rameau’s opera Les Indes galantes with a group of krump dances is arresting for its visceral dynamism and the claustrophobic self-sufficiency of the black-box theatre in which it was filmed. But the illusion of cross-cultural knowledge exchange is fleeting and it vanishes with the work’s credit sequence that lists the usual institutions of the French state as creditors of the work’s cultural capital culture. Elsewhere, Asim Abdulaziz deploys craft to study the disorientation experienced by societies in Yemen and succeeds, just until the logo of the British Council floods the screen.
Attia’s introductory essay betrays a morbid fascination with Western societies’ egoistic self-destruction. Still Present! is an attempt to unpick the centuries-long threads of imperialism one by one in the hope that they can reconstitute a universe capable of averting its demise. But this is a vain hope: studying the past may change it but only so as to serve the present’s scholar. Art’s hook, line, and sinker engagement with the decolonial apparatus is never-ending and it says little about our possible futures; only sidestepping the discourse has the potential to restore art’s function in the project of world-making.
Decentralised Non-Autonomous Organisation
Documenta 15 is the perfect institution-building machine powered by the broken dreams of collectivity.
Spend a few minutes in the crypto world and you’ll hear about decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs, member-owned quasi-corporate bodies organised algorithmically without centralised leadership. A plethora of DAOs have sprung up of late; some claim to serve the needs of distributed governance, some are useful in gaming, and one attempted to buy a copy of the US Constitution. Most engage in fundraising and capital allocation. Nearly all boast ‘communities’ that form around their smart contracts. These communities are the DAOs’ ambassadors and shareholders. Many participants of these congregations remain hidden behind pseudonymous usernames and unintelligible Blockchain wallet addresses. Even though the rules of DAOs are theoretically transparent, to outsiders, the purpose and workings of these organisations may as well be magic.
Following the announcements of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa charged with curating this edition of Documenta has been like trying to decipher the jargon of a DAO. The very idea of curating became a concern named lumbung, a term originating from the Indonesian practice of communal resource management. Decision-making was driven by majelis assemblies. In uncanny resemblance to the lexical habits of the very online, the lumbung community evolved multiple ekosistems [sic], one of which is named Gudskul [sic]. Artists (estimated to number in the ‘thousands’[1] although fewer than a hundred credits appear in the catalogue[2]) became lumbung members. The exhibition itself was billed as a process rather than a product. The aim? To turn the community into an institution, the stated objective of just about every other DAO. Beyond that, little is clear.
What does this lumbung DAO look like in real life? Walking through Documenta’s multiple locations feels like touring a museum dedicated to Zuccotti Park of 2011. Many spaces, like *foundationClass*collective’s takeover of the Fredericianum rotunda, are decorated with the paraphernalia of an assembly: seating made up of colourful plastic crates, carpets, and plywood, often accompanied by presentations tracking the history of the collective in question, records of previous meetings or projects, and banners gesturing at the collective’s aims (for *foundationClass*, this appears to be the reorganisation of higher education after the model of the art foundation class). Some of the collectives, like ook_(whose full name expands to include all the collaborators involved) moved into existing community centres. Others, like Jumana Emil Abboud (a singular artist who nonetheless is credited with inviting over twenty other participants), pitch up meeting spaces in parks and on rivers. What happens in these assemblies during the 100 days of Documenta is shrouded in mystery. Someone could be talking or making art but an opening-day event at the indoor skateboard park of Baan Noorg Collaborative Art and Culture attracted neither the billed ‘fooding’ nor ‘conversing’. Another event was announced only on an artist’s private mailing list. A meme-style poster asking where the art was was spotted in town.
Even imagining the process spaces activated by communities eager for art or political progress is depressing because the method they propose has already proven itself ineffective. Collective after collective, the wall texts and mind maps gesture at members of artistic communities coming together to form grassroots organisations in a manner reminiscent of the European avant-gardes of the early 20th century. But if these processes of collective knowledge-sharing and governance were to produce the better world (or merely a better art world) that the artists long for in the 21st century, why is a success story missing? What happens to the hundreds of life-size cardboard cut-out protesters of Taring Padi’s outdoor installation when it rains? Why did Occupy fail in Zuccotti Park?
Documenta 15 tries to remain focused on method even beyond the assemblies but when, as if by mistake, the exhibition turns into an exhibition, this preoccupation with institution-building gives way to singular concerns. Amol K Patil’s constellation of objects and sounds, Britto Arts Trust village food store selling steel pomegranates along porcelain hand-grenades, and even Hito Steyerl’s (!) installation that riffs on crypto warfare and animal spirits are welcome surprises despite asking more questions of the lumbung than they answer. Atis Resistans’ voodoo takeover of a Catholic church is more ‘subversive’ than Graziela Kunsch’s crèche in Fredericianum. Pinar Öegrenci’s film Avalanche captures the struggle of nature and politics at the nexus of Turkish Armenian, Kurdish, Farsi, and Arabic influences in the artist’s birth town and is simply sumptuous. Richard Bell’s Tent Embassy and his paintings of protests from the 1970s are knowingly disillusioned with the lumbung’s promise of rewriting material relations but remain powerful for it. Perhaps the strongest counterpoint to ruangrupa’s proposal is Erick Beltrán’s Manifold, a graphic study of the history of individualism and its role in affirming structures of power. Beltrán navigates between taboo folkloristic imagery and the tools of political science such as the political compass, throwing in anonymous, tortured clay sculptures of human heads for good measure.
Is this Documenta a series of relationships, as the ever-present spider diagrams suggest, or one of transactions implied already by the lumbung concept and Documenta’s funding mechanisms? What does it mean when the art world behemoth, which for decades followed a centralised, single-curator governance model complete with corporate oversight and state-approved political intent, invests in a decentralised structure like that proposed by ruangrupa? One of the outcomes of Documenta’s institutionalising drive is the forfeiture of the autonomy promised to the lumbung artists. It is a common misunderstanding that the autonomy of the DAO rests with the members of the token-holding community. Instead, it is the logic of the organisation that is autonomous: the smart contract does not account for the wishes of members beyond a set of predetermined parameters. For all the promise of dialogue, negotiation, slippage, and mutuality, the lumbung’s only logic is that of central oversight and rule-keeping.
The omissions in the geographic reach of the exhibition go some way in exposing the logic of the operation. Artists and collectives from Eastern Europe are by and large missing from the exhibition, perhaps because those locales’ institutions have already been firmly integrated with the liberal politics and funding structures of the Western NGO scene. But when the city of Kassel routes its tourism revenues through Indonesia, it gets to shape the culture that ruangrupa propagates because, as in the case of the DAO, the rules are centrally rigged. And the NGO-industrial complex is not kind to the community: a drawing by Tropical Tap Water presented in the catalogue points to the stress of having to ‘spend it before September’.[3] In the project, The Question of Funding, the Palestinian artist Mohammed Al Hajawri complains of always having his work interpreted through a ‘political’ prism but the exhibition itself barely allows any other reading. Add to this the conspiracy theory that Documenta was at one point funded by the CIA and this is the stuff of secretive DAO Discord servers and anonymous crypto exchanges.
The lumbung’s organisational structure showed some of its weaknesses even before the opening. In May, the exhibition space allocated to The Question of Funding was vandalised with anti-Muslim graffiti.[4] Accusations of Documenta’s antisemitism followed.[5] That this edition would be troubled is no surprise: Adam Szymczyk’s documeta 14, for example, went €7.6m over budget.[6] Then, as now, the artistic community issued statements of support and protest,[7] but this time, their action was aimed at parties external to Documenta Gmbh itself. The fact that the lumbung is distributed and its members are only tied to one another by an unwritten compact means that when the collective of collectives faces stress, their solidarity comes in for the test. Would the Documenta mothership handle the attack differently if it had the duty of corporate care towards a named artist rather than a mere ‘programme participant’?
Artistically and organisationally, Documenta 15 reads like a series of creative workshops staged by corporate HR departments to boost loyalty at the lowest possible cost. Even though the human resources industry has recently rebranded itself as the business of ‘people and culture’, their allegiances remain aligned squarely to the corporate HQ. Anecdotes suggest that ruangrupa handed over much of the development of the exhibition to administrators and coordinators after the initial Zoom meetings with their invited lumbung members. Artists, many of whom have never worked with art institutions before, found themselves reporting to middle managers. Even if the resulting lumbung ‘harvesting’ workshops offer opportunities for expression, they are programmatically designed to prevent any change in the power structures that sanction them.
Perhaps the next Documenta should be curated by an artist.