Posted:Jul 1, 2007

documenta 12 press conference

Documenta is an important and deliberately infrequent contemporary art exhibition, which takes place every five years in a small city of Kassel in Germany.

Its next meticulously planned installment will take place from June 16 to September 23, 2007. Last week, a group of documenta curators, staff and magazine editors toured some of Tokyo’s art spaces and institutions as AIT and co-lab, and gave a teaser introduction to the upcoming exhibit at a small press conference. Here are some highlights.

Issues regarding the history and direction of the documenta exhibit surfaced in the introduction by Ruth Noack, a curator of documenta 12. She underscored the tradition of customary changes in design of each documenta and outlined the new set of guidelines for the next year. Among the goals that present curators led by the artistic director Roger M. Buergel have set themselves and stress is education of the public. Ruth Noack, an art historian and a curator of documenta12, laid out the ‘innovations.’ The education of the public will largely happen through the presentation of a historical perspective reaching all the way to the middle ages and the new ways that the visitors will be able to interact with ‘educators’ in special stations instead of customary tours. Also, individual artists’ works will be broken up to fit different ‘family’ groupings. It seems overly conservative and harbingers that documenta 12 might turn into a 19th century Salon de Paris with works, I imagine, cluttered in order to highlight some kind of genealogy. But we shall just wait and see.

Another innovation of the exhibition will be the documenta 12 Magazine. Documenta has a tradition of producing a magazine for each exhibit. Its function is similar to the exhibit catalogue that usually accompanies exhibits and fairs, but the magazine is more than a simple introduction of the artist. As Georg Schollhammer, the editor of the documenta 12 Magazine was buried in questions, it is easy to assume that it’s a more intriguing aspect of the exhibition. It seems that Schollhammer has been working on involving scores of publications, paper and web-based to start a world wide discussion with many local centers. And the public should expect a large part of this dialogue to take place on the Internet. One of the more baffling part of the magazine is the issue of its translations. There are plans to produce translations to different language of selected parts of the magazine. Is that effort worth exerting, knowing that a dialogue is expected? Will major part of this dialogue be lost then in a tower of Babel, ironically due to too many translations? The first of the three issues of the documenta 12 Magazine will appear in Winter 2006 and should be available in its entirety on the web.

Another interesting aspect of documenta is the temporary pavilion that gets built for the duration of the exhibit and dismantled soon after. The name of the architect was not mentioned and if at all the design is significant, the architect seems to be kept secret along with the names of the participating artist, who are supposed to be doing their own promotion.

Aneta Glinkowska

Aneta Glinkowska

Born in Poland. She has lived in New York since 1996, where she attended college and graduate school. To escape the routine of science labs in college, she went to the movies daily. Following an MA in Cinema Studies, she roams Tokyo as a writer, visiting art galleries daily and blogging about art events. She's looking for opportunities to write about art and cinema for all types of publications. Contact via email: aneta [at] tokyoartbeat [dot ]com.