Platform muse: documenta11

Every five years the contemporary-art community descends on the small hessian city of kassel to experience documenta, the exhibition whose art-world weight is often matched by its propensity for the big statement. this summer's installment, directed by Okwui Enwezor, has proved global in ambition--and globalist in contention. Artforum asked four contributors where documenta11 succeeds and where it comes up short.

LINDA NOCHLIN

Documented Success

THE MOST STRIKING ASPECT OF DOCUMENTA11 IS THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE DOCU-mentary mode, for want of a better word. The work of Bernd and Hulla Becher occupies a central place in the genealogy of this sensibility--and in the space of the Kulturbahnhof itself. Their photographs constitute some of the earliest "documentation" (pace August Sander, the father of them all) that aspires to something beyond or different from conventional documentary, something which inevitably calls forth the idiom of art, conceptual or otherwise. In a recent Art in America interview with the Bechers, the crucial question of the relation of art to documentary is explicitly raised. The interviewer, Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, cites a text by Rudi Fuchs in which the author declares that "the question of whether Bernd and Hilla Becher's work is a work of art is not so very interesting"; nevertheless, Ziegler points out that "'only in art could they find the motivation' for their gigantic task." He concludes that the Bechers "work precisely as ar tists do, since they rigidly limit their interest to a few chosen subjects and refuse to let themselves be distracted."

Endless art. What is art? What is documentary? Shows like Documenta11 ultimately redefine the parameters of the "artistic." But while everyone is surely bored by the "Is it art or something else?" question, one does crave, amid all the exempla of the documentary mode at this exhibition, works that are less problematic in their genre typology, works full of sensuousness and color. Or one wants the definitely nondocumentary, imaginative, sexually focused yet politically charged sculptural installations of, say, Yinka Shonibare, in which headless bodies--gorgeously garbed in costumes dix-buitieme siecle in cut but African in decoratively patterned fabric--fuck, suck, and bugger with an elegance at once postcolonial and bitterly ironic. Or Annette Messager's endlessly, fantastically mobile installation combining animal form and human desire, stuffed figures with deep roots in childish nightmares and grown-up perversity. Or the wacky, tacky slapstick (better filmed than live) of John Bock. Or the lacerating, retro humanity of William Kentridge's opera Confessions of Zeno, 2002, which resituates Italo Svevo's 1923 novel from pre-World War I Trieste to '8os Johannesburg.

But there is a return to humanity beyond the strictly documentary in much of the work in the exhibition, and this is certainly among the curatorial successes. Construed in its largest possible sense, the notion of the documentary mode includes installations and archives (another cornerstone typology) as well as photography, film, and video. Film and video are most apposite in exploring the nature of documentary sensibility and its relation to more conventional notions of art. Certainly the most interesting films here are not "documentary" in the traditional sense. Instead these works deliberately foreground the apparatus, defamiliarizing and dwelling on details and fragments, focusing with stop action on meaningful or meaningless images. Some, such as Steve McQueen's coruscating Western Deep, 2002, leave us literally in the dark as to the precise nature of what is going on yet fully certain that the experience presented is sinister and literally toxic.

Many of these works function in the documentary mode but transform and expand it, making it into a kind of hybrid that appeals not merely to curiosity, a quest for specific information about some topic, but to imagination, political consciousness, and unconscious fears and desires. In A Season Outside, 1997, Amar Kanwar, an independent documentary filmmaker from New Delhi, goes back and forth between pursuing a conventional documentary mode--recording the enactment of national identities on the India-Pakistan border crossing at Wagah in terms of crowd movement, the transfer of goods, and the military ritual of opening and closing the border--and constantly interrupting that mode by foregrounding the telling detail. There are hypnotically repetitious closeups of the bare feet of the Indians and Pakistanis exchanging their burdens of merchandise over that thin white line, emphasizing the arbitrariness of all such activities taking place across contested national boundaries. Or his odd, sometimes focused, someti mes oblique attention to the strange military border routine, a kind of stiff, macho dance of repetitive hostility, punctuated by sharp turns and arrogant kicks, which his camera constructs as occurring within an increasingly claustrophobic space.