Nanne Buurman

DOCUMENTA. CURATING THE HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
ed. by Nanne Buurman/Dorothee Richter

On the occasion of documenta’s 14th edition, this special issue scrutinizes the ways in which the Kassel-based periodic exhibition has been contributing to curating the history of the present since its inception in 1955. From diverse perspectives, the authors engage with questions of how documenta’s iterations played a significant role not only in the making of a history of contemporary art but also in the canon of the relatively young field of curatorial and exhibition studies. Focusing on documenta’s engagement with artistic and broader cultural developments, as well as its implication in shifting socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts, the texts assembled in this issue touch upon documenta’s continuous dedication to instituting and reconfiguring the contemporary throughout its history. Its characteristic dedication to contemporaneity and institutional temporariness have continuously challenged researchers to reflect and revise their methodologies and epistemological foundations. Due to documenta’s specific character as a recurring large-scale exhibition with a relatively stable framework that has to be reinterpreted anew every five years, documenta’s potentials for mediating ideologies and power structures, notions of authorship and agency, as well as relations between the local and the global have furthermore fueled negotiations of the relationship of art and politics from the outset. The texts in this issue call attention to how it not only scripted paradigmatic models of subjectivity but also gradually widened its scope from a Eurocentric vision to a more worldly frame of reference, provoking reflections on its role in the globalization of the arts and its entanglement in (neo)colonial and (neo)liberal power relations in capitalism at large.

Vortrag im Workshop Infrastructures of Trading and Transferring Art Since 1900, organisiert von Gregor Langfeld, Krisóf Nagy, Lynn Rother im Kontext des Projekts “(Un)mapping Infra- structures: Transnational Perspectives on Modern Art”, KEMKI – Central European Research Institute for Art History, Budapest, 26-28. Juni 2024 (krankheitsbedingt abgesagt).

Starting from the dialectics of (dis)possession that connect Haitian and German intellectual, cultural, and material heritages, this event by Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale engages in joint historiographical experimentation of artists and academics. To actualize the hidden heritages, silenced (hi)stories, and unrealized potentials haunting exhibitions like the Ghetto Biennale and documenta, it asks how we can converse with the (un)dead ghosts from the past to haunt the future.

In recent years, the term global art has become a catchphrase in contemporary art discourses. Going beyond additive notions of canon expansion, this volume encourages a differentiated inquiry into the complex aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, epistemological and socio-economic implications of both the term global art itself an the practices it subsumes. Focusing on diverse examples of art, curating, historiography an criticism, the contributions not only take into account (new) hegemonies and exclusions but also the shifting conditions of transcultural art production, circulation and reception.

Die documenta stellt durch ihre globale und konzeptuelle Sonderstellung einen einzigartigen Fall von kultureller Wissensproduktion und -vermittlung dar. Was und wie dort ausgestellt, kuratiert und kunstpädagogisch vermittelt wird, formt das Wissen über Kunst und Gesellschaft. Zugleich ist das Weltkunstereignis documenta immer wieder selbst prominenter Gegenstand zahlreicher Debatten sowie Projektionsfläche widersprüchlicher Interessen aus Politik, Wirtschaft oder Wissenschaft. Hier kreuzen sich in besonderer Weise unterschiedliche Be- und Verwertungskulturen sowie konkurrierende Erwartungen an die Kunst. Der vorliegende Essayband versammelt sozial- und geisteswissenschaftliche Perspektiven, die dieses Wissen durch und über die documenta seit ihren Anfängen 1955 bis 2022 diskutieren. Mit Beiträgen von Aleksandra Barjaktarević, Cornelia Bohn, Nanne Buurman, Katja Hoffmann, Michael Hutter, Sebastian Lemme, Christine Magerski, Séverine Marguin, Kathrin Peters, Sophia Prinz, David Robert...

Taking curatorial disclaimers of authorship as a starting point, the article calls attention to the convergence of historical scripts of femininity epitomized by the Victorian Angel in the House and contemporary curatorial codes of modesty. Despite Brian O'Doherty's famous deconstruction of the White Cube's purity, self-effacing curatorial statements and normative demands to always put the artists first are still very widespread. Focussing on dOCUMENTA (13) as a case study, the article scrutinizes how Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's denial of authorship by means of modest rhetorics and a camouflage of display were contradicted by the ways in which authority was nevertheless centered on the curator in more or less subtle ways. It argues that the powers of display and the politicization of the exhibition space were thereby neglected in favour of suggesting unmediated access to artists, objects and realities that speak for themselves, thus presenting the curator as a humbl...

Since the so-called 'curatorial turn' in the 1990s, curators are discussed as new paradigmatic authors in the art field. Discussions about curatorial authorship first gained momentum in the late 1960s, when curating was no longer merely regarded as a museological backstage profession but increasingly also meant organizing exhibitions and conceiving of other art events on a freelance basis. The topos of the curator as a meta-artist was popularized by Daniel Buren in his critique of Harald Szeemann's auctorial stance at documenta 5, in which he complained that individual artworks were reduced to the status of mere dots of color in a curatorial Gesamtkunstwerk. It has since been used time and again by critics who felt that curators were willfully misusing exhibitions as their own works of art, thereby illegitimately interfering with artists' intentions. As a practice that implies selecting and commissioning artworks to put them in relation with one another and with the ...

sitekeeper’s note: This transcript was copied from Pacifica’s website and reformatted for greater readability. Unlike previous transcripts, which have been done by court reporters, this was transcribed later from a tape, and so many of the Board members are listed as unidentified. I have color coded key members who are identified, as well as taking the liberty of adding paragraph breaks, also for readability.( I do not know who did the transcription the transcript bears no certifications of authenticity as have those done by a certified court reporter in the past.)

As part of a larger study on documenta as a Haunted Exhibition, my article proposes a revision of the historiography produced by and about the recurring large-scale exhibition, founded 1955 in Kassel. By rehabilitating a selection of the modern abstract art that was ostracized in the ‘Third Reich’ as ‘Jewish-Bolshevist’ degeneration, the early documenta editions contributed to the construction of a binary historiographic fairy tale of ‘good’ (i.e. democratic) abstraction vs. ‘bad’ (i.e. totalitarian) realism, which has often been discussed with regard to US-American cultural politics of reeducation in Germany. Taking a closer look at the biographies of documenta’s founding fathers and the ‘Germanic’ genealogies of their historiographic practices, however, I seek to complicate this success story of documenta as an arbiter of democracy, whose makers were claiming a radical break with the Nazi past. Highlighting the show’s continuities with German nationalism before, during and after t...