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    Foster Hal Et Al 2004 1972 Documenta 5 PDF

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    Johanna Caplliure

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    6261-0261 1972. The international exhibition “Documenta 5, * held in Kassel, West Germany, marks the institutional acceptance of Conceptual art in Europe. x0 foundational exhibitions, both organized by the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, demarcate the origins and the zenith of the production and the institutional reception of Conceptual art in Europe. The first was the (by now famous) exhi- bition “When Attitudes Become Form” that took place at the ‘Berne Kunsthalle and elsewhere in 1969, and the second was “Doc ‘umenta 5°, the fifth installment of what had become the most {important international group show of contemporary art, orga- nized in Kassel, Germany, every four or five years since 1955. "These two exhibitions demarcate—in their initial omissions as much as in their eventual inclusions—the changing orientations that occurred in the late sixties and early seventies in diferent centers of artistic production (New York, Paris, London, Diisse- dorf). Artists like the group Art & Language, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Blinky Palermo ‘were still excluded from “When Attitudes Become Form.” (Buren was prosecuted by the Swiss police for illicitly pasting his color- whit an exhibition in w striped paper signs throughout Berne—his contribution to ch he thought he should have been repre sented.) However, three years later all these artists were given a central role in “Documenta 5,” where they installed works that ‘ould subsequently be seen as the foundational models of Euro- pean Conceptual art and its strategies of institutional critique. “Documenta 5” used its institutional resources on the level of the exhibition as much as that ofthe catalogue to enact the legalis- tic-administrative dimensions of Conceptual art and to transform these into operative realities. The catalogue (designed by Ed ' Ruscha tolook like an administrative loose-leaf binder ora techni- ‘al training manual with a thumb index) carried one of the first systematically philosophical and critical essays on the commodity status of the work of art (written by the philosopher Hans Heinz Holz). More importantly perhaps, it reproduced "The Artists Reserved Rights Agreement,” a contract developed by New York art dealer Seth Siegelaub and New York lawyer Robert Projansky. Originally published in Studio International in 1971, this contract would allow artists to participate in decisions concerning their workafter ithad been sold (exhibition participation and reproduc tions in catalogues and books) and would also oblige collectors to offer the artist a reasonable, if minimal, share in the increasing 19720 | “Documenta 5° resale value of their work. This was obviously an arrangement that would be loathed by most collectors; so much so that they refrained from buying works by any artists who had signed the contract, thereby deterring other artists from engaging in the project altogether. Conceptualism’s encounters Several factors came together to transform 1972 into the amas mirabilis of European Conceptual art, culminating in the emer gence and institutional reception of the work of the Bechers, Broodthaers, Buren, Hanne Darboven (born 1941), Hans Hauck, ‘Palermo, and Gerhard Richter (1). The fist factor was thatthe politically radical student movement of 1968 and the cultural radicality of Conceptual art entered into a dialogue in 1972, rather than—as had been the case with “Documenta 4" in 1968— remaining entangled in a polemical confrontation, ‘Thus, the work of Broodthaers and of Buren at “Documenta 5” tured some of the critical tools of 1968 (that is, the Frankfurt School tradition of Marxist critique of ideology and the poststructurlst practices of semiological and institutional critiques) back onto the actual institutional frameworks of the museum the exibition, and the market TThe changing relations of that generation of postwar artis fo the legacies of European avant-garde culture undoubtely con: stituted the second factor. A particular tension emerged ftom the simultaneous reception not only of the recently recovered practices of the most advanced forms of European abstraction (Constructivism, Suprematism, and De Stil) but also Ament ‘* Minimalism: both practices were evident fused and operas¥e!? the work of Buren, Darhoven, Haacke 2},and Palermo. Thirdly, all ofthese artists contested the dominant postions « Joseph Beuys in Germany and Yves Klein and the Nowvests istes in Paris (and in Dusseldorf). Throughout the earty Sst Beuys, Klein, and the Nouveaux Réalistes had developed a aesthetic in which memory and mourning had ‘unknowingly a fronted the effects of thei me NE tant spectacularizatio _ generation of artists recognized the fallacies ofthese cues F acuity that foe sed on te tions, displacing them with self-criti a ‘Gere Rene, 48 Portraits, 1971 ‘ncal and political power structures governing the production ‘arexeption of culture in their own time. Furthermore, since the munger artists had al “Anerican at of the. aged in an explicit dialogue with rly to mid- sixties, in particular with Pop ar thecases of Broodthaers and Richter, for example) and Mini maim (Buren, Darboven, Haacke, and Palermo were especially seemed with the work of Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Robert Man), they were fully prepared to confront the recent formula: "sof ¢ Conceptualist aesthetic that was first articulated by the pound Seth Siegelaub in New York in 1968 (Robert Barry, /'shsHucbler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner). ¥ tthe Euro Furopean responses to Conceptualism, even in their most qistand hermetic variations (such as the work of Darboven) «tthe principal differences from Anglo-American Conceptual cagmenson of historical reflexivity that now appeared as deg bY ittertwined with Conceptualism’s neoposiivist set rage he epistemological and semiotic conditions of is ‘2Hans Haacke, Documenta Besucher Prof (Dacumenta Visitors’ Profi), 1972 ‘oocumenta 8° | 19721 261-0261 sss gue that Darboven's work [3] originated to some ‘extent in her earlier encounter with kineticism (as represented in the work of Almit fir Bildende Kun: ts] in Hamburg, attempt to innovate postwar abstraction by mechanizing talizing its permutations and chance operations). ‘The second formative encounter for Darbo. LeWitt during the three y \cademy of Fine nd his n was her friendship with Sol rs she spent in New York from 1966 to 1968, Darboven's trajectory synthesized the oppositions between an, infinity of spatio-temporal proliferation and processes of digitalized ‘quantification, the dialectics of mathematically fone A tions with a new type of drawing bordering on thei << e scriptural writing. Furthermore, she fused the order of the stip sting the concept sive repetition, invest public performance of com re of automatism with significations that were radically oe a definition in Surrealism or its postwar T= ‘4 Abstract Expressionism, ‘+ Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly had of course in! a : drawing that a ai ‘or that appro ch r-less fixed and contained grapheme jconttion of ring (initiated inthe postwar period asa dale cof somatic and libidinal loss and emancipation from estate Once the features of iconic represent. 1, chiaroscuro) had been comp! ion (eg, figurative volume tely stripped from the ie vm of drawing’s mimetic relationship to nature, the order of snd iterative enumeration (in Johns) appeared as a perfo shops eof ody of drawing ise as the srfcng oft Sci ctition of an infinity of This infinity of possibilities (an infinity of permutations, of proses of quantities) is very much at the center of Conceptual sia. The extent to which this model would inform European jonceptual art became poignant in Hans Haacke's prstices of ‘anibution to" Documenta 5” when he installed the third version shhisseries of *Visitors’ Polls” [2,4]. This work made the historical {iets of Conceptual art painfully obvious. On the one hand it teed (or subjected) the spectator to the most complex form of ever participation that neo-avant-garde parameters had ever ilpved for (by asking them for the full statistical accounts of their sain and geopolitical identities). At the same time, however, the atk articulated the extreme poverty of spatio-temporal, psycho- igcal and perceptual/phenomenological experiences available thio the conceptions of the artist and to a realistic estimation of pcatorialeapacities and dispositions. Hacke's synthesis of a seemingly infinite number of random ipatons (the size and scale of the work are totally open and eéent on the number of visitors who choose to participate in Satstcal accounts) and a very limited number of factors of ‘lorerdetermination (since only a very limited series of ques nico be asked in the ready-made statistical questionnaire) Sup the constitutive opposition of the work. In that reduc ie bSantation of each participant as explicitly unique and Meat the same time a merely quantifiable statistical unit wit work acquires the same intensity of having mimeticaly Hed the order of the administrative world that we had nthe work of Darboven, tthe cam be discerned in the development of the ncn Palermo (Peter Schwarze/eisterkamp) who—like Sand fellow artists, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter— » et in West Germany from Communist East Germany be had spe had spent his childhood. The definition of Palermo’s «Sales inthe triangulation between the ruins ofthe heroic a Oeten 61-016} abstractionists of the prewar avant-garde (Mondrian and Malevich 1sin particular), the radical revisions of these legacies of abstraction in the postwar period in Europe (in particular in the work of ‘shis teacher Joseph Beuys and in the presence of Yves Klein in Daisseldorf at the moment of Palermo’s emergence), and thirdly on in its most reduc Barnett Newman the dialogue with American postwar abstracti tivist models, ranging from Ellsworth Kelly an sto Sol LeWitt ized that the spiritual and utopian While Palermo clearly reca + aspirations of the Bauhaus and De Stijl, of Suprematism and Con structivism lay in historical ruins, he also realized that all attempts to resuscitate them would inevitably turn out to be travesties. As with the radical departures in the work of Darboven, Palermo h myth equally emancipated abstraction from its entang ‘of Beuys) and at the and utopia (as ithad still appeared in the han ‘ame time he severed abstraction from its entanglement in spectacle inadvertently or cynically proffered by culture (as it had b —. 2 ee Binky Palermo, Wall Painting, 1972 Fed ladon card, 2.7 16.5 8 x6 Klein). Thus the ncopositivst and empiricist formalism of the American Minimalists provided Palermo with a counterforce that allowed him to articulate the contradictory predicaments of abstraction in postwar Germany all the more Pa and wall objects, the fabric paintings, and the wall paintings. srmo’s work consists of three principal types: the rel cfs All three rehearse, and some of them repeat, the fundamental problems facing postwar abstraction, The first group (which is also chronologically the earliest) departs from the most advanced forms of postwar reflections on the transition from easel painting to the relief as they had been embodied in Barnett Newman's works such as Here I (1950). Pa reflection on their simultaneous status as both reliefs and archi smo’s wall objects, however, rapidly move to a more explicit tectural elements, comparable in many ways to the Postminimalist work of Richard Tuttle. As in Tuttle's reliefs, Palermo’s Wand. Objekte (1965) oscillate between organic and geometric form as though they literally wanted to reembody abstractio against its rationalist and technological tendencie be r The Wand-Objekteseem to lecting on the contradictions between autonomous pictorial presence and public architectural space. Yet the intensity of their intimacy and phenomenological presence appears first of all to ‘compensate for the absence of that horizon of collectivity toward 19720 | “Documenta 5 nk 4 Mi bein te | the tenon — which te heroic abstraction ofthe twenties ad enable g itself All these oppositions areas mich anti formal definition as they are generated by natural and indstial qualities in the chromatic dentin objects andit sar fom accidental hatin thesevaleher fetuses Yoes Kein’ supposed pal nore Klein Blue,” modifying it verso lightly, yet remaining ann spectrum, publicly exposing the absurdity of Klein's smenan branda color and toown the copyrightina pattcular gg In Palermo’ bic paintings, soe bough length of omy sil decorator’ fabric are sewn together in biparit or wipe ‘alermo horizontal divisions to compose a painting Reiteratnga mod ‘shad been developed in the first and only Ellsworth Kelly that was made with the colors of industrially produce Painting ol fabrics, entitled Twenty-Five Panels: Red Yellow Blue and White in 19 Palermo’ fabric paintings withdraw two crucial elements from an ventional abstraction: ist of ll they liminate even the lst trace og drawing and facture, where the process of paint application —aven + in its most reduced form of staining, as in Mark Rothko’s work for example—had itself become an integral element inthe production of painterly meaning. Secondly, the fabric paintings performa turing of color in exact analogy to the denaturing of drawing inthe pice of color and color itself now appear as suspended between their innate relation to the realm ofthe natural and their new conception as.a commercially produced readymade But the cheapness of the materials and their ready-made character are constantly counteracted by Palermo's determ work of Darboven. tation to conceive the most differentiated chromatic constellations and chords from the extreme poverty of his own means. ‘The third group in Palermo’s oeuvre is that of the wall drawings and wall painting Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich. Undoubtedly resulting in part from Palermo's attention to the development of painterly and that he first executed in 1968 in a work fr the sculptural practices in the context of Minimalism (in this case the ‘= wall drawings of Sol LeWitt in particular), Palermo’s wall daw ¢ dialectics hetween painting's internal ings/paintings address ¢ ‘order its figure-ground hierarchies, its morphologies its relations ‘of color) and its external “situatedness” within public socal space. Palermo was among the first to recognize that punting tion into architectural space would no longer carry any of the cof El Lisitaky 0 Palermo od with + promises that this shift had entailed in the wor example. Typically, in his installation at “Documenta 5, positioned his brightorange wall panting [81 (excel wi industria rus-proofing pant na mere fone spss in the public display functions of exhibition architecture) 4 nal pace (a placed it in what was structurally the most function case that—while not intended for exhibition usage—

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