[iDC] Documenta and Data Mining

[brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr]

I like the idea that Documenta 12 was a vast data-mining operation, a kind
of Google-image search of the world of contemporary art. However I had a
somewhat different read on it, perhaps due to familiarity with some of the
artists and their histories. You mentioned the McCracken
mini-retrospective, which to me appeared like a careful territorial
marking, letting us know where the art was, and what art is. I observed
this function of the McCracken works in the vicinity of the one artist whom
I wrote about in that sort of abbreviated catalogue which made up the
entirety of this last Documenta's official discursive contribution.
Actually the hanging of the show looked more systematic than Julian
Stallabrass makes out, maybe up to a .45 in places. I wrote this about it:

...One of the most telling gestures of this exhibition is the placement of
a small sculpture by John McCracken on a pedestal right next to the
photograph of Graciela Carnevale’s “enclosure piece”: the one that shows a
female spectator exiting from the broken window of a gallery. The entire
history of the avant-garde – its experimentation, its class contradictions,
its feeling of entrapment and urge to “break out,” its dangerous
revolutionary inquiry into the effects of art on human material – is
accompanied, shepherded, softened and quieted down by the calm,
self-contained pink monolith, similar to all the others which, throughout
the show, stand in for the nostalgic consensus of a missing modernism....

...If you don’t think that's clever, go up to the castle on the hill and
see the exact same gesture once again. Behind Dias & Riedweg’s Dionysian
video there is a little glass wall to cut some of the infernal din, and
then a vitrine with McCracken drawings from 1966, preserved in a sacred
atmosphere. Here, penciled in the artist’s own hand, we find a classic
restatement of the good old Greenbergian doctrine. I quote: “My tendency is
to reduce everything to single things; things which refer to nothing
outside themselves, but which at the same time refer, or relate, to
everything. I find I can’t examine my sculptures from a dualistic point of
view, which sees everything in terms of opposites (life-death, right-wrong,
natural-unnatural) because this produces what seem to be paradoxes. I have
instead to begin by regarding them as objects that simply are what they
are, and they are to me quite simple and clear, but also very complex and
mysterious, and in some respects almost impossible to really talk about.”...

Documenta 12, to my mind, was an extremely conservative show, whose ruling
idea was that artists don't talk, that art is mute, a form or a gesture
laden with effusive pathos. That idea was staged very deliberately in the
Fridericianum at the center of the exhibition, by means of a specific
selection of works. It was repeated in the gesture of the "picture book,"
which instead of having any kind of discursive exploration of what might be
at stake - or any attempt to point beyond the conditions of a quick visit -
was just casually taken pictures. Compared to previous years' vast and
often self-contradictory attempts to examine the conditions under which
people live and breathe and make art and social life around the world, this
was a big disappointment for me and a sign of more regressive times to
come, since a big show like documenta opens up space, or closes it down.
And by the way, I believe the only trace of the Internet at the show was
your idea of data mining!

best, Brian Holmes

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