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m Documents The n Road to . / s < £ ood avea . w 1 th Intentions Galia Bar Or The road to Documenta 11 in Kassel was paved with good intentions , but the picture of the world assembled by its curators was remarkably reminiscent of the worldview disseminated by the Bush administration . In this respect , more than an affirmation of the world , the Documenta echoed the lesson of the previous century . It is a pity that the Documenta curators missed that lesson , or perhaps hurried to forget it . The faces of "left" and " right" are all too similar precisely in the great moments of the battle of good against evil , when dogmatism dissolves humor , and universal justice wipes out the private register . Thus , for example , both sides share a consistent rejection of avant-garde alongside an allembracing adoption of a narratal , sweeping language that is comprehensible to all . Those who believe that avant-garde is the product of a degenerated West , those who do not promote exploration of the boundaries of language , restrict themselves a-priori to a simplistic view of the world , even if their jargon is formulated in the spirit of academic , political correctness , so to speak . The "objective" tracing of the authentic by the camera , preferably somewhere in the so-called third world , captures the gaze . One sees a sled in the snow , tunnels in the desert , massacre , pain , profound emotion , presence of the good guys ( the "bad guys" are absent-present ) on a large screen with comfortable seating arrangements , occasionally interspersed with an exotic production and good acoustics . One can sum up by saying that it isn ' t bad in the Documenta , but strange nonetheless . If the horizon of vision is the horizon of language , how did the Documenta curators plan to deal with an intricate view of reality without giving any thought or any room to the intricacies of artistic language , its boundaries , experimentation with tools , and insights of the time ? A few artists whose language is different hover in the show like an archaeological vestige from a deserted world . What curatorial logic could possibly link Hanne Darboven's minimalist language and Chantal Akerman ' s sophisticated installation with Iranian Shirin Neshat ' s grandiose spectacle presented in the same area of the exhibition ? What is the connection between Bernd and Hilla Becher ' s meticulous inventory of building photographs and Allan Sekula's hysterical ( nonselective , to say the least ) flood of mediocre color photographs ? Those who seek answers to these questions can turn to the thick large-scale catalogue consisting of two major parts - a traditional if not anachronistic structure : texts in the first part , a sequence of photographs depicting the works in the second . Among the multiple catalogue essays , however , there is not even a single one that deals with the exhibition itself . In the absence of an entire essay - we would have settled for a page , and if not a page - at least a few lines . But the catalogue contains no discussion of the exhibition whatsoever ; it refers neither to the curatorial logic underlying it , nor to the location of the works within the overall context . The works are presented as a sequence of large-scale photographs in color , followed by an appendix consisting of random textual materials sent by the artists to the Documenta offices . The curators' essays , one after the other , substitute discussion of the show , overflowing with ( indisputable ) concepts and terms such as "transculturalism" and "extraterritoriality " . But all this " multiculti" does not help answer the pressing questions raised here : What ' s between Darboven and Neshat , the Bechers and Sekula , and where do other curiosities that have been gathered together under a single curatorial wing fit ? Five years of work on the show , a chief curator and a team of assistant curators who worked jointly with him , 11 million dollars , extensive display space in one city expecting to host half a million visitors - and they couldn't make the effort to tell us what is really going on here . How can this be explained ? The first explanation pertains to the curators' perception of art . Those who do not believe in avant-garde perhaps don ' t really believe in art , at least in the Western idea of art . It seems that the Documenta curators perceived art as reflecting reality , and did not give much thought to its alternative potential ( the attempt to present Utopian architecture only illustrates the detachment and lack of understanding ) . If the show is but a reflection of reality , it deserves to be the fifth of the " platforms" - discussion panels of sorts about the problems of the world , including the so called "Third World "
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