A 600-hour Documenta: under the direction of Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor, the sprawling, video-heavy Documenta 11 seeks to define the role of art in a postcolonial, globally interconnected world. The exhibition remains on view until Sept. 15

Eleanor Heartney

The New World Order, declared so triumphantly by the first President Bush after the demise of the Soviet Union, has proved to be even more disorderly than the Old World Order that it replaced. In particular, the unraveling of the Cold War and the emergence of a global economy have been followed by often horrific consequences. It is these conditions, rather than any strictly artistic developments, that have been the focus of Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian-born curator who is the first nonwhite, non-European artistic director of Documenta. In previous curatorial undertakings, such as the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale and, more recently, "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994," Enwezor has taken on such issues as the social and political upheavals wrought by globalization, the unequal development and distribution of the economic benefits of technological innovation and the emergence of non-Western versions of modernity.

Since it opened on June 8, Documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany, has been accused of being overly didactic, humorless, one-sided and indifferent to esthetics. An experience that is demanding on visitors to the point of physical and intellectual exhaustion, the exhibition features 162 artists or artist groups spread over four major venues. The show, organized with the assistance of a curatorial team consisting of Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghee, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zaya, is extremely heavy on film and video; some viewers have estimated that it would take 600 hours to watch all the time-based pieces in the show. Further, many of the works incorporate daunting amounts of text.

Documenta 11 carries the subtitle "Platform 5," indicating that it is the fifth in a series of events that Enwezor has organized around the world. Involving symposia and workshops, the previous "Platforms," which tackled such themes as "Creolite and Creolization," "Democracy Unrealized" and "Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation," took place in Berlin, New Delhi, the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and Lagos, Nigeria. Each of the five "Platforms" has generated its own massive tome--the catalogue for Documenta 11 alone contains over 600 pages and weighs seven pounds.

All of this serves to underscore the serious intentions of the project. During Documenta's inauguration, even the festive atmosphere that inevitably attends the opening of such art-world spectacles could not erase the sense that this was an exhibition remarkably well suited to the stark new realities of the post-Sept. 11 environment.

Critics wishing to prove that Documenta 11 is excessively journalistic in tone can point to the proliferation of videos and photographs that seem chiefly concerned with documenting contemporary social problems. And yet, the show also includes works of art that blend powerful content with visually complex and, at times, even lyrical presentations. For instance, Belgian artist Chantal Akerman's From the Other Side (2002) addresses the issue of immigration and how, in the West, it has become a political scapegoat for everything from flagging domestic economies to moral and spiritual malaise to terrorism. The subject is undeniably topical, but Akerman's work is also beautifully structured to suggest the variable nature of vision. A multimonitor, multiscreen installation of film and video shot along the border between the United States and Mexico, it was inspired by news of vigilante posses formed by American ranchers to hunt down illegal border crossers.

Akerman presents the work as a group of flagmentary glimpses of a territory uncomfortably occupied by two sets of irreconcilable desires. Playing across the monitors and screens are different modes of video representation. Some sequences are crosscut with a variety of short scenes, while others bring the camera in for close-up views. On the screens flash images of children playing ball in bleak vacant lots, fences dividing expanses of empty desert, makeshift border towns, anti-immigrant signs posted along the highway and people scattering across nighttime fields under the blaze of airborne spotlights. Several monitors are periodically given over to the mesmerizing nocturnal view from behind the windshield of a car cruising endlessly down a highway illuminated only by its headlights and those of occasional oncoming cars. Arranged so that one could take in multiple screens at the same time, the work made the viewer a participant in the difficult process of making sense of a set of partial and often contrary truths.

Equally involved in issues of esthetic presentation, though somewhat less successful than her previous explorations of this format, is Shirin Neshat's untitled two-screen, 35mm film (shown at Documenta via a DVD transfer). Drawing, like Akerman, on the surreal quality of the Mexican landscape, Neshat creates an interplay between two narratives, one of a group of Mexican laborers crossing an empty field, the other focusing on a towering tree inhabited by a mysterious female spirit. The two threads converge at the end when the men surround the tree and stand in silence, as if absorbing its magical powers.

Issues of borders, migration and displacement permeate other works as well. A Season Outside (1997), Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar's beautiful and heartbreaking film, focuses on a point along the India-Pakistan boundary where the opening and closing of the border is enacted by an official drawing a white line. Footage of border guards, children playing along the fence, military skirmishes and a visit by a group of Tibetan monks is accompanied by a spoken commentary that meditates on the contradictions inherent in ideas of masculinity, nonviolence and truth. Similarly elegiac is Zarina Bhimji's Out of Blue (2002). Born to a family of Indian immigrants who were expelled by Idi Amin from Uganda along with other Asians, Bhimji returned to her native country to make a film that meanders mournfully through abandoned military barracks, prisons and hospitals haunted by memories of a brutal past.

A more personal take on the costs of displacement appears in British artist Isaac Julien's semi-autobiographical film Paradise Omeros (2002). Here, formal devices serve both to distance the viewer from a fragmented narrative and to introduce elements of dream, fantasy and desire. As images playing over three screens converge, double up, diverge and occasionally recur, a voice-over recounts a young boy's expulsion from his native Caribbean paradise. Adapting to the less hospitable world of postwar Britain, the unseen narrator observes, "We were in England to pay for our sins." The film, which takes some of its text from Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros, climaxes with an infectious party scene intercut with shots of the pensive adolescent protagonist and scenes of a man being beaten on a bed, effectively evoking the immigrant's sense of multiple consciousness.

Much more problematic is a sprawling collaborative installation titled From/To (1999) by Fareed Armaly, a Stuttgart-based artist who was born in the U.S. to Lebanese and Palestinian parents, and Rashid Masharawi, a Palestinian filmmaker. The largest work in the exhibition in terms of sheer square footage, it mixes maps, diagrams, didactic materials and films, including an hour-long, single-camera take of an Israeli army checkpoint. The installation makes an impassioned plea for Palestinian independence. However, it is so strikingly polemical and one-sided in its presentation of Middle Eastern history and politics, one feels the show should include a work presenting the Israeli perspective.

Instead, the only Israeli artist in the exhibition, Paris-based Eyal Sivan, is represented by images dealing with a different, though equally intractable conflict. Through film footage and photographs, he chronicles the aftermath of the Rwandan massacres of 1994. We see hospital scenes, corpses, mug shots and views of rubble, accompanied by recordings of radio broadcasts in which Rwandans were incited to violence against each other.

Closely related in theme to the works of Julien, Armaly amd Sivan are a number of presentations dealing with the chaos resulting from the breakdown of old orders. Leon Golub contributed several recent large paintings and a set of small drawings that employ graffiti texts and depictions of eagles, dogs and incidents of torture to convey a vision of the world in which "justice" is the plaything of the powerful. In the same room with Golub's paintings is a set of wooden tables and chairs that Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo has altered to suggest torture instruments and prison bars.

Dealing with a similar theme, Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer invites viewers into a small room that evokes a prison cell. He lined the exterior walls with photographic images and written commentaries ("measuring helped him appreciate the space," "the sense of order was creeping away") which convey the claustrophobia that a prisoner might feel. An even more frightening alternative to incarceration is conjured by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Visitors to her installation are confronted by blinding spotlights that flash on and off, and by the sounds of a rifle being cocked loudly and repeatedly, and someone marching endlessly back and forth above their heads.

Two artists deal directly with last fall's terrorist attacks. Moroccan-born, Paris-based Touhami Ennadre presents a set of photographs that he took in New York in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The subjects of the flash-lit photos--distraught faces, missing persons fliers, improvised shrines and U.S. flags--are pulled by dramatic light out of a pitch-black ground and often call to mind religious relics. California artist Raymond Pettibon abandons any such visual restraint, plastering a room with semi-hysterical graffiti texts, drawings of comic-book superheroes, war scenes, bombs and Arabs, the totality suggesting an uncensored jumble of visceral reactions to the attacks. While not specifically tied to the terrorist attacks, Fabian Marcaccio's large-scale mixed-medium mural that combines abstract motifs with scenes of war and social chaos also seems to convey the explosion of a distressed unconscious. It is also, along with Golub's work, one of the very few paintings in Documenta 11.

Implicit in many works in the show is the notion that global capitalism is the cause of much of the anguish on display. Artists approach this topic in a variety of ways. A suite of rooms is devoted to Allan Sekula's Fish Story (1987-95), an ambitious text-and-photo work that well deserves the expanded space it is accorded [see A.i.A., June '96]. Conceived as both a book and an installation, it consists of 105 color photographs interspersed between 26 text panels, as well as two sequences of slide projections. Ranging from Newcastle, England, to Veracruz, Mexico, to Seoul, Korea, Fish Story is a rambling consideration of the metaphorical, political and social implications of the contemporary maritime industry. Sekula shifts between discussions of maritime trade as an antidote to the fantasy of a dematerialized, information-based economy; literary analysis of the sea story as an allegory of authority; and considerations of the ironies inherent in the 21st-century reliance on a centuries-old practice.

German photographer Lisl Ponger focuses on last year's G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, where antiglobalization protesters and police clashed, resulting in the death of one demonstrator and the injury of many others. Rather than capture the protests themselves, Ponger chooses to tell the story obliquely, through unpeopled photographs of Genoa that show graffiti, concrete street barriers and the blood-streaked rooms of a schoolhouse where demonstrators were attacked by police after they had settled down for the night.

American artist Michael Ashkin also employs uninhabited panoramas in a series of photographs and videos that suggest what happens when heavy industry moves on. He depicts desolate, rubble-strewn lots and crumbling building sites on New Jersey's industrial fringe, presenting them as modern ruins little different from the remains of dead civilizations. Several artists make their critiques by setting up mock models of capitalist enterprise. German artist Maria Eichhorn created the Maria Eichhorn Public Limited Company. According to documents on view, this company has complied with all legal and bureaucratic requirements for setting up a new business, with one unusual stipulation: its capital is guaranteed not to increase by even one Euro for the duration of the piece. Andreas Siekmann, also German, presents a related undertaking which he dubs the Limited Liability Company. This is represented in a room filled with crisscrossing worktables, drawings of busy workers and posters parodying industrial production, security and distribution.

In a slyly clandestine work, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles arranged for vendors to sell unflavored popsicles in front of the exhibition venues. Especially on hot summer days, there were customers for what were essentially sticks of ice. The only clue that this is a conceptual art work rather than a real business venture is the label on the sticks that declares them "Disappearing Element/Disappeared Element"--a comment on the coming global scarcity of usable water and perhaps an allusion to South America's "disappeared."

Not surprisingly, given the exhibition's focus on the consequences of modernization, economic development and migration, among the strong points of Documenta 11 are a number of thought-provoking works dealing with architecture and urbanism. Historical perspective on such ventures is provided by the inclusion of Constant, the Dutch artist and architect who was a cofounder of the CoBrA group and a member of the Situationist International. He is represented here by funky architecture models and drawings dating from 1957 to 1971. They explore his concept of the New Babylon, a futuristic city to be based on mechanization and the liberation of people from labor. As with most such visions of the future, Constant's models, which employ colored Plexiglas and interlacings of metal rods to depict raised horizontal buildings, look a bit dusty and tarnished. A contemporary exponent of utopian architecture is the New York-based firm Asymptote, which contributed a hypnotic room installation that features mirrored walls and a revolving plastic cylinder overlaid with projected images of modernist cityscapes.

Equally hallucinogenic is the fantasy architecture of self-taught Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez, who offers a vision of the modern city filtered through an African lens. In his multicolored tabletop models, Manhattan becomes a carnivalesque forest of brightly painted skyscrapers dominated by clear-glass versions of the Twin Towers capped with gaudy domes.

Meanwhile, the failure of utopian social schemes is alluded to in the architectural models and drawings of Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. Inspired by Cuba's many unfinished and decaying buildings, Garaicoa proposes the completion of long-abandoned architectural projects and the restoration of ruined structures. The models seem to mock the spirit of socialist idealism. One project, for instance, is about transforming a dilapidated cinder-block apartment house into a modern version of a Greek agora.

Similarly visionary is Hungarian-born, Paris-based architect Yona Friedman's rejection of the grand schemes of midcentury city planners. He is represented by makeshift architectural constructions composed of torn cardboard, plastic rings, glass and other throwaway materials and designed to advance his notion that the layperson is the best designer of his or her own surrounding social space.

The exhibition also contains various photographic reports of the incomplete nature of global modernization. South African photographer David Goldblatt surveys the contradictions of apartheid and post-apartheid life in his native country. In his photographs, the sleek Johannesburg skyline emerges beyond a foreground field of rubble, while a Tuscan-inspired casino rises in the midst of a devastated landscape, and ramshackle markets sprout like kudzu along urban streets. The contradictions are equally evident in photographs by his countryman Kendell Geers that document the elaborate security warnings and electrical fences that turn affluent homes in the Johannesburg suburbs into combinations of fortresses and prisons.

The strange bedfellows created by unequal economic development are, as well, the theme of Ravi Agarwal's color photographs of street scenes in New Delhi, Jaipur and Gujurat. He shows slum dwellers coexisting with skyscrapers, and children in traditional costumes lingering along bleak urban streets. Similar conditions are reported in photographs of Lagos by Nigerian photographer Olumuyiwa Olamide Osifuye, who zeroes in on teeming market scenes and improvised dwellings set against distant skyscrapers. However, the most apocalyptic visions of the modern city come from Kobe, where Japanese photographer Ryqji Miyamoto chronicled the aftermath of the 1995 earthquake in surreal black-and-white shots of toppled modernist apartment buildings and streetlights snapped in two like matchsticks.

If some of the photography on view is open to the charge of being photojournalism rather than art, the work of Jeff Wall clearly stands apart from reportage. He is represented by a single striking image that was inspired by a scene in Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man. It shows a young black man sitting in a basement room filled with hundreds of lightbulbs.

While the message of many works is that social chaos is inevitable in a world subject to insurmountable natural and economic problems, there is more hopeful news from a number of collective projects that celebrate and facilitate self-determination. Huit Facettes is a group of eight Senegalese artists who have organized workshops in a remote village to help local artisans acquire the tools for economic development. Igloolik Isuma Productions is represented in the exhibition by videos of Inuit people involved in such activities as hunting, fishing, bob-sledding and dressing meat. These videos are the creation of a group of Native Canadian filmmakers devoted to presenting their own version of Inuit life as a way of preserving a threatened culture. Also devoted to self-representation is the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of black British filmmakers who came together in the aftermath of a series of race riots in England in the early 1980s. Their contribution, Handsworth Songs (1986), is a 58-minute-long documentary film on the riots.

Such works seem to have been included in Documenta less for their intrinsic artistic merit than for the evidence they provide of the efficacy of collective organization. Given the exhibition's relentless interest in social critique, it is surprising that so little attention is given to public art, a field that can address questions of community, social space and participatory action. The only project that comes close to filling this bill is Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's Bataille Monument. Set far from the other exhibition venues in a Turkish neighborhood (free shuttle service is provided by an artist-decorated taxi), Hirschhorn's installation consists of a Turkish coffee stand and several rickety plywood structures that appear to be cobbled together with tape. One shack houses a collection of books by and about the transgressive French writer Georges Bataille. Furnishings include frayed but comfortable armchairs and television monitors for video viewing. The work offers a pleasant respite from the rigors of the other Documenta venues, but one wonders to what degree the community residents--its ostensible audience--are likely to peruse its collection of volumes on art and social theory.

By contrast, the sparse selection of works officially designated as public art--as Hirschhorn's was not--seem unrelated to the show's larger themes. They include audio pavilions by Renee Green, a small park area designed by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, a mirrored maze by Ken Lum and a stage set with videotaped performances by John Bock. The impact of these pieces is further diminished by their scattered placement throughout the formal gardens of the Orangerie, just to the south of the Documenta Halle.

Much more in evidence are works that revolve around the idea of the archive and hence can be seen as meditations on the kind of encyclopedic exhibition represented by Documenta itself. A number of artists provide what appear to be almost museological displays. Ivan Kozaric, an 81-year-old Croatian artist, moved his entire studio from Zagreb to Documenta, allowing viewers to wander among tables covered with sculpted busts, paintings, piles of cardboard portfolios and other elements of the artist's trade, arranged as if for work rather than exhibition. In a related spirit, the late Dieter Roth is represented by an installation that was a work in progress from 1970 until the artist's death in 1998. Large Table Ruin is a densely cluttered room full of ramshackle tables covered with old equipment, dirty beer bottles, kitchen furniture and video monitors. The installation conveys an oddly mournful feeling suggesting that this riotous assortment of odds and ends, begun in a spirit of play, had become the artist's memorial.

There is an oblique connection between this installation and one by Chohreh Feyzdjou, an Iranian ,Jew who immigrated to Paris, where she died in 1996 at the age of 41. Although considerably more organized than Roth's tables, Feyzdjou's work seems equally archival. It consists of a display of empty wood frames, piles of crates, rolls of canvas covered with brown pigment and charred-looking objects in wooden and cardboard boxes. Adorned by the artist with labels that read "Products of Chohreh Feyzdjou," these objects were offered for sale in a Paris storefront by Feyzdjou herself. Now they exude a feeling of death and decay. More upbeat is the cluttered room installation of Benin artist Georges Adeagbo. Floor and walls are covered with artifacts, books, magazines, news clippings, photographs and texts that deal with various biblical, historical and mythical aspects of the African experience.

Other compendia presented in the show include Belgian artist Jef Geys's compilation, in a 36-hour video, of photographs of himself taken over the last 40 years; Indonesian artist Fiona Tan's 200 filmed portraits of a cross section of contemporary Germans (a conscious recapitulation of August Sander's archive of German types); and Isa Genzken's display of 121 segments of journalistic photos cut from the political weekly Der Spiegel. One might also include in this category On Kawara's One Million Years, parts of which are presented here as an installation, a radio broadcast and a live reading by performers in a glass booth; several rooms devoted to Bernd and Hilla Becher's serial photos of half-timber houses; Ecke Bonk's random projection of entries from Jacob and Wilhelm's 350,000-word German dictionary; and a mini-retrospective of Hanne Darboven's obsessively repetitive numeric drawings.

If such works suggest a continuing confidence in the Enlightenment promise of knowledge through the encyclopedic compilation of bodies of data, other contributions offer a counterview. Alfredo Jaar's Lament of the Images (2002) reminds us that we inhabit a world where information can be purchased, withheld and manipulated. A dark antechamber contains three illuminated texts concerning real situations in which access to history is being obliterated--for instance, the purchase and burial of photographic archives by Bill Gates for "safekeeping" or the ownership and consequent control of all satellite images of the recent Afghanistan air strikes. In the second room, the viewer is greeted with a blank, brightly illuminated screen that in this context becomes a metaphor for the process of erasure.

Equally provocative is a display by the Atlas Group, which is the creation of the Lebanese artist Walid Ra'ad. It purports to be a foundation devoted to chronicling the Lebanese Wars of 1975-91. Consisting of displays of fictive archival information (which some viewers took to be factual), it includes such "finds" as a cache of photo negatives, supposedly unearthed during a construction project in Beirut, which mysteriously revealed faint images of unknown individuals when developed, and a video that tells the story of a fictional Lebanese man held hostage for 10 years along with real figures like Terry Anderson and Terry Waite. At once whimsical and convincing, the Atlas Group archives subtly casts doubt on the accuracy of the documentary tendency otherwise so ubiquitous in Documenta 11.

Though not a major concern of this exhibition, Documenta 11 includes the obligatory nod to new media and the idea of the Internet as a connective force. Chinese artist Feng Mengbo contributes a personalized version of a commercial video game in which all characters bear the face of the artist. The New Delhi-based Sari Collective introduces its interactive Opus software, which addresses questions of authorship in the context of digital networks. And American artist David Small enters the battle between new and old technology with an electronic "illuminated manuscript" whose pages are equipped with interactive sensors that allow words to materialize and change at the viewer's touch.

Existing on the margins of this exhibition so intensely concerned with social issues are several works of a more subjective orientation. Significantly, these are all by women artists and exude a sense of the way in which physical and psychological violence is inscribed on the psyche. Louise Bourgeois's Cells (2000) are large cages occupied by anguished-looking stuffed-fabric heads, while her "Insomnia Drawings" (1994-95) chronicle the neurotic thoughts that invade the mind during sleepless nights. Lebanese-born British artist Mona Hatoum brings paranoia to the domestic arena with Homebound (2000), a sparsely furnished bedroom and living-room tableau set off by rows of steel cable and wired so that isolated objects--utensils, colanders, lamps and even the bed--periodically light up with a threatening flash. The home appears as an equally frightening environment in Finnish filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila's The House (2002), in which a woman is driven mad by voices that invade her living space. Annette Messager filled a room with her darkly humorous fabric sculptures of human body parts, insects, mutant figures and other fearsome creatures. Some of these are connected to motors and pulleys, giving the effect of spiders descending or dolls humping with delirious abandon.

Sex and wit, otherwise in short supply in this most sober of Documentas, also form the basis of the work that can be read as a sly critique of the whole international art-show phenomenon. For his large installation, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (2002), British artist Yinka Shonibare populates the gallery with headless mannequins clad in 18th-century costumes made from his signature African-patterned, European-made fabric, and arranges them in highly athletic sexual couplings. Hovering above is a full-scale horse carriage, while vintage traveling trunks are scattered across the floor, occasionally serving as props for the mannequins' erotic activities. The work was inspired by the tradition of the Grand Tour in which young aristocrats learned the ways of the world through extended voyages around the continent. The nearest equivalent today, Shonibare's work hints, is the summer art pilgrimage, in which art aficionados decamp to exotic foreign locales for the purposes of both edification and entertainment.

Given its enormous scale, Documenta 11 is a remarkably cohesive statement about the meaning and function of art in a postcolonial, globally interconnected world. While many critics from Germany and elsewhere met the exhibition with cries of "Where is the art?" Enwezor made it clear that he considers this to be an irrelevant question. Instead, in his view, the boundaries between art, journalism and sociology are essentially nonexistent. His essay in the catalogue takes numerous swipes at universalist definitions of art and at the notion of art's autonomy from the larger social world. One must say that his vehemence seems a bit misplaced in an art world where art for art's sake is all but moribund, and politics, history, gender, ethnic identity and sexual orientation are ubiquitous subjects.

Perhaps the criticisms leveled at the show were also inspired by the relentlessness of Enwezor's vision and by the hostility he sometimes expresses toward Western notions of liberal democracy and freedom. In one disquieting passage in his essay, Enwezor maintains that there is "a clear recognition by forces within Islam (enlightened and fundamentalist alike) that the only force capable of challenging the global political and cultural Dower of the West is that of Islam as a viable world culture. As such, radical Islam must therefore be properly understood as a serious counter hegemonic opposition, at least on the global political stage." One can't help but be struck by the irony that the triumph of such a "counter hegemonic" force would make exhibitions such as this one impossible.

Fortunately, the voices of the artists in this show are varied and contradictory enough to largely offset any such curatorial proclamations. In the opening-day press conference, Enwezor described his undertaking as "diagnostic" rather than "prognostic." From this perspective, Documenta 11 succeeds as a thoughtful and thought-provoking presentation of the complexities of a post-Cold War reality. In the process, it suggests that political art performs best when it asks questions instead of presuming to answer them.

Documenta 11 is on view in Kassel, Germany [June 8-Sept. 15]. It is accompanied by a catalogue and a short guide, both available in the U.S. through Distributed Art Publishers.

Eleanor Heartney is a freelance critic based in New York.

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