Last night, the NCCA hosted an evening devoted to documenta 12. Surprisingly, the house was packed. I say surprisingly for two reasons.
First, because the NCCA is somewhat autistic and you never know who the “public” will be. You might find a fan club of the nonconformist classics, honorable defenders of late modernism with no interest in contemporary art. Or you could get into an involved discussion with internationally successful activist artists who find that they have almost no one to talk to in Moscow.
But last night, there were lots of new faces, and almost everyone stayed until the end…
Buergel and Noack, curators of documenta 12. Courtesy: documentablog flickr.
The occasion was documenta 12, and this itself was a welcome change. All summer, the public eye was trained on Venice and the neo-baroque barbarism of the Russian pavilion, Abramovich’s yacht on the Giardini blotting out San Marco.
As for Buergel and Noack, Joseph Backstein, commissar of the Moscow Biennial, seemed to speak for the entire community when he said, “I don’t know what documenta 12 is all about, and I don’t care.”
So what was it all about?
A team from the NCCA in Nizhny Novgorod tried to answer this question in a 40-minute documentary. Last evening started with its screening. It would be unlikely for Russian TV to air something like this. So the Nizhny Novgorod NCCA went on a nation wide tour of smaller Russian cities, co-sponsored by the Goethe Institute. Moscow was the last stop.
The film was still pretty much a typical TV documentary, quite solid in some ways, in that it gave a good chronological overview of documenta’s beginnings and evolution over the years. What it could not do for the lack of time, was to supply a broader overview of the exhibition’s different venues and pavilions, its curatorial modes and its pedagogic-discursive outsourcings. It also had difficulty unscrambling the actual figural code of the exhibition, and took the easy way out, working through artist portraits.
Translator and Dima Gutov at documenta 12. Courtesy: documentablog flickr.
Even though these were of two of my favorite artists, Dmitry Gutov and Johanna Billing, they did not satisfy me at all, because they led to the false impression that documenta 12 was, like some of its predecessors, all about rehabilitating the artist hagiography of singular creative genius.
But the choice, in some ways, is quite apt: Johanna Billing’s Sunday afternoon videos and Gutov’s affected fence manuscript bricollage somehow express something very important about documenta 12, beyond its far more obvious critical rehabilitation of the ornament, its pseudo-criticality, and its fair dose of culinary kitsch for the discerning Bildungsbuerger, who senses both the emancipatory potentiality of singular forms along with the potentiality of his or her own proletarianization, his or her constant exclusion-Angst in the potential mashup of the all-seeing flickr eye.
The goal of the panel was to deepen the discussion of documenta 12, and to provide insight into some of its themes. Since I took part in this panel, I can’t really reproduce the exact sequence of arguments. Suffice it to say that each of us played her or his customary instrument: Osmolovsky and Gutov gave unadulterated, somewhat anecdotal praise, Preobrazhensky talked about his project. Degot held two impressive speeches.
One of them was about the false contradiction between “commercial” art and “critical” art, and how she liked documenta’s featuring of romantic conceptualism, ornamentality, and obviously saleable “beauty” in a formally non-commercial, critical setting. People applauded when she was through.
I said that documenta 12 was an inquiry into what a massive art exhibition could be in a new Biedermeier, a bio-political knowledge machine that provides productive consumer culture for the Western European Bildungsbuerger, who sees responsible aesthetic enjoyment as a pleasurable civic duty.
As I said these words, I couldn’t help but wonder: are these young people (most of them clearly university students) tomorrow’s Russian Bildungsbuerger? Is this the audience we had been playing for?
Somebody (I think it was Katya Degot) said that the entire “critical” side of the art world is a bit like pop music. If that is true, our panel discussion was a performance, an unpaid all-star jam session benefit reunion, played to nice kids, completely free of charge. In Moscow, it is, in some ways, still a viable alternative to Marylin Manson, whose drawings and watercolors are currently on show at the Marat Guelman gallery in Winzavod, but that does not make it ontologically immune.
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