¡õ By Pan Huimin
Kassel, a tranquil small town in Germany, witnessed its once-in-five-years extravaganza in June, 2007. My opportune presence at the opening of Documenta 12 enabled me to feel the pulse of such a high-profile event. Swarming through a variety of venues, those blue-eyes demonstrate an inexhaustible enthusiasm about this international mega-exhibition, which is accompanied by a surprisingly large population of their black-haired, black-eyed contemporaries. If not for the local architectures, I would have felt as if I were wandering in Beijing's 798. Every single minute I run into my countrymen, familiar faces such as celebrated curators, artists, critics and culture enthusiasts. Thanks to Ai Weiwei's Fairytale, many Chinese, whether within or without the art circle, have gotten a ticket to come to Documenta. Once riding in a tram, some locals asked if I was one of Ai Weiwei's group -- Mr Ai had been hitting headlines since the preview. The answer is, of course, No. I am here not only to see the difference between the exhibitions in the West and those in China, but also to learn the Western professional experience.
For a show as gigantic as Documenta, great stamina is a must in order to guarantee a thorough view of the exhibits. This year's Documenta consists of venues including Museum Fridericianu, Neue Galerie, Documenta-Halle and Schloss Wilhelmsh?he. Lacaton & Vassel's openplexiglass showroom Aue-Pavillion, also known as the Crystal Palace, was specifically constructed for Documenta and had caught much attention to date. Since my time is limited here, I have to run through all those five vast sites in a day and half.
From my hostel to the exhibition sites, the tram that reaches downtown in less than 10 minutes is my better choice. The hustle and bustle can be felt in the square in front of Museum Fridericianu where a bunch of performance artists have gathered. The whole town had borne an artistic aura.
I first enter Documenta-Halle. The tall and spacious gallery offers a spectacular view of installations hanging from the ceiling. Raising their head to see with difficulty, the audience might break their necks if more pieces were added on display. In the same gallery hangs a large carpet which I initially mistake for Michael Lin's production, but is in fact an artifact from the 1800s. It captures a bird's-eye view of an ancient Iranian garden, mapping out the construction layout and irrigation system. The carpet links the works by ancient and contemporary Iranian artists with a conceptual twist of visual representation.
My following encounter is with I?igo Manglano-Ovalle's intriguing red psychedelic space, with a stereo broadcasting a noise that dazes and confuses you, if not necessary knocks you out. Further inside the dark lurks another piece based on the descriptions presented to the UN in 2003 by US Secretary of the State Colin Powell, of a mobile biochemical laboratory. As I stand inside the space, every pore of my skin absorbed the feel of a repressive intimidation. Today, many an artist have turned the clipboard of news and rumors into their palette, and political happenings as such have caused our eyes to fail to decipher the real information behind.
Museum Fridericianum displays numerous relatively new works. On a wall hangs a minute yet delicate, inviting portrait made in 1997 by Gerhard Richter who made his name by painting photos. Based on the picture of his daughter, this portrait is an example of his signature approach. The little girl's intimate look was represented by his loving father with fully detailed color so that you can sense the emotional communication on the canvas. Photography as the most objective medium in Richter's view abolishes the subjectivity generated by the human eye. In this case, he re-documented the childhood of his daughter through painting the photo.
Richter's Russian neighbor Iole de Freitas presents a human-size installation occupying the entire space around. It passes through the wall and extends outside of the gallery, excising tremendous strength. Through the large overwhelming steel structures and irregular plexiglass, the artist attempts to articulate his experimental notion of space.
His monumental moments of structural experiments see the seemingly floating steel and plexiglass perforating the whole room which intensifies in turn. Upon entering the multidimensional space, the subtle relationship between gravity and the physical senses of the body turns the audience a mere mark on the curve. Hence, the viewer, the work and the milieu ends up in an indefinable relationship.
Commissioned for Documenta 12, the Crystal Palace boasts a huge labyrinth - imagine the budget of the construction. Such an act could be regarded as luxurious in China, especially used only for a hundred-day exhibition. The works in there showcase a diverse discipline of work, as if it is the hybridity of culture that Documenta aims to explore. Most of the Chinese artists' works can be found in this section, including Xie Nanxing, Lu Hao, Zhen Guogu and Ai Weiwei. Being familiar with their styles, I can tell from a distance who is the author of each piece. Ai's work speaks loud. As with his Fairytale, the installation of a gigantic door composed of 1001 Ming-Qing wooden doors, takes up as much space as it possibly can. Now the Chinese can take pride in this giant work that stands on the meadow near the Palace overlooking everything around it. Groups of ancient wooden armchairs appear unexpectedly in various venues, brings viewers back to ancient days.
Also impressive is the array of black-and-white photographs by British female artist Jo Spence, which was created for the project Reshaping the Historical Pictures. Their obese figures intrude upon the landscapes in an easy and casual manner. What the artist wants to address in this case is the dialogue between femininity and culture-social development. Females play a critical role as observers in everyday life, due to their industrialized and victimized status.
My fourth stop is Neue Galerie, where all the works are arranged in conventional order. The layout of the space is clear and flawless. An installation, allocated in a separate, spotlighted cabinet, stands independently among other exhibits, with an interesting feature that is likely to be missed even on closer examination, if audiences take for granted the ordinary-looking frame hanging in the shade of the wall. But an experienced exhibition-goer would not let this go amiss. In fact, this white-as-the-wall blank frame interacts with viewers. When the viewers approach, their shadow will drop onto the center of the frame to reveal a paragraph of white texts. The idea is simple: even in the center of Germany, an individual has to interpret art based on his own cultural context. On top of that, this piece embodies the effect of an eclipse.
There is another simple work concerned with lines. The author is Agnes Martin, an American artist who pioneered minimalism in its early years. Martin is fascinated by grids and has kept her faith in minimalism. Since the 1960s, her continuous and comprehensive practice of grid paintings has won her fame in the art circle. Her paintings explore the potential of grids, with emphasis on the subtle relation between grids, squares and rectangles. However, her grids never look square, but instead create a certain unharmonious character in between the rectangle and the square. Seated next to Martin's work is Nasreen Mohamedi's piece that looks confusingly similar to her neighbor's. Nasreen's abstract minimalism transcends culture shock and echoes with social issues, the tradition of abstract art and her hometown India. Her inspiration originates from a variety of symmetric paintings on Islamic architectures and crosswalks. With a profound tranquility her art reflects the great impact of Zen on her and evokes a strong response to formalism.
Schloss Wilhelmsh?he as my final stop is a quite independent location, away from those more condensed venues. Located on a hill to the west of Kassel, it actually looks just like a castle. I get off the tram at the terminal and rush up the hill. Right there I see a clearing in front of the castle, which can be mistaken as part of the gardens of the castle. As a matter of fact, it is a terrace project by Thai artist Sakarin Krue-on. The artist has planned to transplant Thai agriculture to the local terrain to interact with Kassel's old architectures. A terrace was made and seeds planted in front of the museum. I witness some local gardeners doing the maintenance for the work. By moving the rice to Kassel, Sakarin tries to deal with the geographic difference between the East and the West, and by studying the growth of rice in different places, to explore the culture shock. However the piece is later said to have failed with many of the seeds dying; also the irrigation system installed might possibly cause landslides. Sakarin has decided to give up the project.
Most of the works displayed in the Schloss Wilhelmsh?he are oil paintings from the 18th century. When entering the gallery, I feel like being in a fine art class with a focus on the early techniques of oil painting. The entire gallery is oddly arranged. Some contemporary pieces are sandwiched between classical works, with few clues regarding the context. What is the curators' intention? I find Yan Lei's oil painting among the baffling combination of the contemporary and the classical.
This trip to Kassel has been a great lesson. Walking through the seas of fabulous works by artists around the world and immersed in their thoughts, I cannot stop my mind from thinking. The show in general is perfect in its curatorial thinking, space layout and presentation of the works. The curation shows a typical German scrupulousness. But the problem is there was still some unfinished pieces when the show opened, which of course is a big taboo in the industry. Even after we left Kassel, bad news still followed, such as works falling apart, other that failed to be realized due to problems with the weather. It can never be an easy job to do a perfect one-hundred-day large-scale exhibition.