So this was less exhibition than what my colleague Siddhartha Mitter reviewed the show in June and cleverly called the ‘overall atmosphere’. Vibe was both its purpose and its downfall. Documenta 15, by design, worked against its own viewing. “Viewers are obsolete,” you can read in the catalog. Because the show’s real job was to hang around it, not something that hung on the wall. In other words, the actual content and form of these Palestinian seditious films of the 1970s and his 1980s are more likely than the new collective groups that brought them here and the other artists who came together to work with them. was also not important. Collectiveness was treated as an end in itself. We stayed here, as Ruang Rupa recommended us, “Let’s make friends, not art!”
Hmm, sounds like fun. But what if your friend’s art sucks? saw In Kassel — as evidenced by the almost nonexistent discussion of the safest and most boring art on display in this century. Beyond archival propaganda, uninvited workshop show-and-tell exhibits, a video of Jaejoong barely worth passing at an art school degree presentation, countless posters worthy of a teenager’s bedroom wall. and bloated with banners (“This Is My Voice, Listen. It’s about the artist, not the art Sharing is caring Pass the beer.
It was all a terrifying embarrassment, but why should anyone outside Germany worry? Away from aesthetic ambition and intellectual seriousness, it pointed to a greater shift towards unity, advocacy, and easier comfort. fun. It doesn’t matter if your friend’s art is bad. And if the German press says your friend’s art sucks, that’s fine. In fact, it’s encouraging proof that we have no place in this corrupt colonist world.
If the ‘100-day museum’ known as documenta returns in 2027, it could be a more ‘conservative’ or ‘market-friendly’ version of the return order. However, it is questionable whether documenta will command the respect and excellence it did before this year, and it will never regain its goal of imagining the entire world in one show. has died. I’m afraid a lot of people like it that way, whether reactionary or radical. The incomprehensibility and anger that this show elicited is proof that they always hoped that we wouldn’t have a common future.
But to quote someone more serious than most of Documenta 15’s participants, the postcolonial world is not “a vulgar state of endless disputes and anomies, chaos and unsustainability.” The postcolonial world is a “world of proximity” and the exhibition’s job is to make those encounters productive, meaningful, enlightening and beautiful. In art, at least in the best of circumstances, “the tensions that govern all ethical relations between citizens and subjects converge”.