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Art and cultural diplomacy in the international exhibition: documenta 1 and Prospect.1
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Art and cultural diplomacy in the international exhibition: documenta 1 and Prospect.1
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Content
ART AND CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN THE INTERNATIONAL
EXHIBITION: DOCUMENTA 1 AND PROSPECT.1
by
Linda Constant
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2009
Copyright 2009 Linda Constant
ii
Dedication
To my husband Nikos, the best person I have ever met:
This thesis is, of course, dedicated to you.
iii
Acknowledgements
To my thesis advisors, Karen Moss and Christina Ulke—thank you so much for your
insight, analysis, and assistance during this process.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Chapter 1: A Brief Contextualization of Art in Recent Cultural Diplomacy 1
Chapter 2: documenta 1: Context and Development 9
Chapter 3: Prospect.1: The City of New Orleans as Material 19
Chapter 4: Critical Utilization of the Site in the Large International Exhibition 28
Chapter 5: The Investigation and Process of the Large International Exhibition 35
Bibliography 46
v
Abstract
Art in cultural diplomacy is a significant and powerful resource utilized not
only for the purpose of furthering relations between disparate societies, but also for
social regeneration in the public sphere. This thesis purports that art and the
international exhibition can be an inherent tool of cultural diplomacy, particularly to
nations and cities in times of devastation. Cultural diplomacy in art amid postwar and
post-trauma contexts will be evaluated through two specific exhibitions, documenta 1
and Prospect.1, focusing upon the historicity of their physical sites as well as selected
curatorial and artistic decisions within each environment. The development of
documenta 1 will serve as a platform for investigating the nature of Prospect.1 in its
own unique place in history. Finally, the serious role of art as a diplomatic and
cultural resource in the substance of the international exhibition will be
contextualized into the proliferating problematics of globalizing socio-economics and
transnationalism.
1
Chapter 1: A Brief Contextualization of Art in Recent Cultural Diplomacy
Regeneration of a public place after a traumatic event—be it a war, a natural
disaster, or a systemic economic turndown—is ultimately only possible when a
comprehensive span of methodologies, knowledge, and unconventional inquiries are
placed as similarly relevant priorities in the list of issues that needs to be addressed.
For instance, though a war may generally be considered as the business of a
government and its respective military, there exist many more nuanced factors that
play key roles. One example is the scope of issues that both the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States (US) had to confront during the
tumultuous Cold War. Despite the fierce competition between the two nation states in
terms of traditional sectors such as science and economy, the two nations performed
very divergently in the realm of cultural outreach. Though the USSR placed a good
deal of emphasis on their superiority over the American cultural and educational
systems as well as their athletic programs, “the closed nature of the Soviet system and
its constant efforts to exclude bourgeois cultural influences meant that the Soviet
Union ceded the battle for mass culture, never competing with American global
influence in film, television, or popular music.”
1
The Soviet lifestyle, in a cultural
sense, was not broadcasted to the Western world. Though the Soviets marketed
themselves as purveyors of science and technology, athletics, and classical music,
they lacked social ownership over any feasible kind of culture in which the broad
international public could participate. Though their homegrown cultural institutions
such as the Bolshoi Ballet and Kirov Ballet garnered internationally renowned
1
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Cambridge:
PublicAffairs, 2004), 74.
2
attention, many other potential facets to Soviet cultural life did not fare this kind of
success—or even acknowledgement. In the dichotomic and divisive political
landscape of the Cold War, these two key players battling for hegemony had to use all
of their possible resources to arrive at a victory.
In a world where the United States could offer McDonald’s and Elvis to a
very broad cross section of the population, the Soviet non-response to such cultural
media and commercialism was unfortunately both inherent to the USSR’s
socioeconomic system and an area that was dismissed as ultimately less important
than other sectors. The Soviet approach to culture was directed to a “high” culture,
where only the most elite ballet dancers or the most gifted scientists defined this
aspect of Soviet culture. Thus, to the rest of the world Soviet culture was attractive in
only certain categories—not in an all-encompassing manner like that of the United
States at the time. As such, the absence of popular culture exports indirectly, yet
definitively, limited the Soviet impact in non-cultural sectors of the Cold War.
Though the Cold War is certainly not a traditional war of military dispatch
and bloodshed, the Cold War can conceivably be viewed as a kind of conflict that
humans can expect to increasingly engage in during the future—a non-physical,
cultural, intellectual, and information-based battle. However, even traditional wars
fought with hard power require a considerable level of attention towards a rather
untraditional focus: soft power, the export of attractive cultural goods that other
nations are drawn towards and ultimately results in higher communication, exchange
and influence in those societies. In the late 1980s, American political scientist Joseph
Nye, Jr. coined the term “soft power” and politicians, writers and academics alike
3
have since frequently used this term (which is the opposite of hard power such as
economic and military power). In his recent book on soft power, Nye states that soft
power is “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or
payments. It arises from the attractiveness of our country’s culture, political ideals,
and policies.”
2
Nye’s theory of soft power exemplifies exactly what the USSR lacked
in its pursuit of Soviet cultural internationalization and, alternatively, what the US
successfully experienced with their own cultural exports during that time. Both of
these entities had distinct approaches to the process of their cultural relations with the
rest of the world.
The cultural stakes for the US and USSR in the 1980s were ultimately defined
by the developing European social context earlier in the century. By the 1940s, a
contextually contemporary European cultural dialogue had begun to flourish between
European nations as well as between Europeans and nations abroad. Modernization,
internationalization, and globalization had firmly planted roots in the communication
nodes of the developed world by this time, and battlegrounds were not only sites of
destruction and inhumanity, but also inherent structures of information absorption and
exchange. Publics of differing nationalities, cultures, and belief systems were forced
to engage with one another, either physically on the battlefield or diplomatically on
the sidelines. Data was dispersed; opinions were formed. As people and entities began
to recognize the subtle and continuous shrinking of their globe, the stakes of a
nation’s best interests undeniably amplified. No longer was the world a place where
groups of people could acquire prosperity, power, and insularity—their successful
2
Nye, Soft Power, x.
4
participation and dialogue on a broad, international level would be decisive in their
ultimate realization.
As a result of this ongoing process towards globalization, former cultural
attaché Richard T. Arndt states:
Most thoughtful cultural diplomats use ‘culture’ as the anthropologists do, to
denote the complex of factors of mind and values which define a country or
group, especially those factors transmitted by the processes of intellect, i.e., by
ideas. ‘Cultural relations’ then…means literally the relations between national
cultures, those aspects of intellect and education lodged in any society that
tend to cross borders and connect with foreign institutions. If that is correct,
cultural diplomacy can only be said to take place when formal diplomats,
serving national governments, try to shape and channel this natural flow to
advance national interests.
3
The analysis of actual cultural relations and cultural diplomacy envelops art because
of the broad reach of culture. In this framework, culture denotes a process of the
humanities in the quest for knowledge, and the betterment of civilization through
rational thought, traditions, and civilization. Subsets within this overarching thematic
inherently include facets such as music, science, education, and art.
Perhaps one of the most crucial moments in recent history that exemplifies
cultural diplomacy exists in the case of Germany after World War II. The relationship
between art, the Nazi elite and the German public was not truly encompassing,
however. Joseph Goebbels, the Reichsminister of the Reich Ministry for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda, was a highly public figure in the Nazi regime—he
was not only a flashy, high ranking official of the Party but also a theorist, critic and
major collector of Nazi art. Though he did not fully subscribe to the notions of the
“master race” like many of his cohorts, he nonetheless maintained a delirious anti-
3
Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the
Twentieth Century (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005), xviii.
5
Semitism that would only fuel the Party’s existing anti-Semitism as well as feed their
inclination towards the indigenous völkisch groups of Germany, often referred to as
“radical traditionalists.” The
völkisch cultural program included the idealization of the German peasant, the
rejection of all nontraditional aesthetic styles (often referred to by the catch-all
epithet ‘cultural bolshevism’), and a propensity toward racism based on the
supposition that artistic expression and ‘blood’ are inextricably linked. These
völkisch groups also exhibited another common quality: a dogmatic and even
militant advocacy of their views.
4
Within the artistic disposition of the German public, the growing influence of this
völkisch culture—alongside the Nazi regime’s maniacal and violent hatred of the
Jewish culture and community—developed a sensibility that was fervently hostile
towards the aesthetics of modernism. . By 1936, “the government no longer tolerated
modern art or any expression which deviated from that sanctioned by the state, and in
1937 the Degenerate Art Exhibition, which first opened in Munich and traveled
through Austria, signaled a more activist posture on the part of the government.”
5
The
exhibition was a very dense, salon-style display of modern artworks by now
prominent artists such as Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky that had
been seized from museums and art collections throughout the Reich. A public
campaign aimed to implicate the “perverseness” of Jewishness—and ultimately, the
alleged un-Germanness of these artists —these works were often placed side by side
with artworks created by the mentally ill. In the years to follow, the Nazi regime
would only continue their increasingly radical and feverish mantra in the general
4
Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 29.
5
Ibid., 9.
6
public, ultimately sanctioning artists and collectors who were even remotely
interested in the concept of modern art and, thus, modernism.
On the Nazi regime’s utility of art as a social tool, the German historian and
critic Joachim Clemens Fest states, “rarely was a government’s cultural ambition
higher; never was the result more provincial and insignificant.”
6
Fest’s reference to
the insular and parochial qualities of Nazi-sanctioned art points to the fact that
ultimately, these National Socialist leaders—despite their professed passion for
paintings and sculptures and their gigantic collections of such artworks by the late
1930s—primarily used this alleged interest in art to accelerate their positions of
power within Hitler’s program. Though they definitely viewed art as public status
symbols, because of their lack of serious interest and understanding regarding art and
aesthetics they were ultimately incapable of exerting any resonating cultural influence
over the German public that would enable the nation to progress in the increasingly
globalizing platform in which they existed (whether they liked it or not). However,
their actual appliance of art as a tool for their immediate benefit and growth
undeniably played a significant role in Germany before World War II, intriguing a
desperate and unenlightened German public to cowardly and insidiously ignore
atrocities on a scale never before experienced by the modern world.
7
Following the humanitarian atrocities that the National Socialist Party directly
imposed upon Germany and the surrounding regions during the war, Germany found
6
Joachim E. Fest, Face of the Third Reich (Cambridge: De Capo Press, 1999), 255.
7
Since the atrocities of the Holocaust are external to the scope of this thesis, I
respectfully decline to analyze the nuances of this historical humanitarian crisis here.
The focus of this thesis regards art and cultural diplomacy, and I wish to leave the
rightful analyses of the Holocaust to those with the appropriate experience and
expertise.
7
itself in a precarious social, economic and political situation typical of most nation
states that do not emerge from a war victorious. The Germans had to assess all of
their infrastructural assets and utilize all of their potential channels of growth in order
to even attempt to experience an existence similar to that in which they existed before
World War II. In 1955 Germany soon committed to a large international
contemporary art exhibition titled documenta
8
, hoping to initiate a new form of
communication and exchange with the international community. documenta 1 gave
the German public an opportunity to view modernist art previously banned in the
country, but it also provided the chance for Germany to participate in the European
avant-garde that was sweeping the rest of the continent even before the war. This
exhibition, which takes place every five years in Kassel, aided in the cultural
regeneration of postwar Germany—in effect, Germany offered a new cultural
dialogue with the international community via documenta 1 and was thus able to
attempt to move forward from its tumultuous, repressive, and shameful past.
documenta 1’s trajectory towards cultural growth is clearly distinctive from—
but still conceptually parallel to—the foundation of Prospect.1 New Orleans in 2008,
three years after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Both cities of Kassel and New
Orleans explored their options in terms of recovery via broad channels of cultural
communication. Conceived by New York-based curator Dan Cameron, Prospect.1
New Orleans is the largest biennial in the United States thus far, serving as a response
to the ultimate non-response of aid and total breakdown of disaster relief during
Hurricane Katrina. Despite the media’s obsession with the tragic scenario of New
8
Because documenta has occurred approximately every five years since 1955, I will
refer to the first documenta as documenta 1 from this point onward in this thesis.
8
Orleans, the federal government “relief” was delayed and dysfunctional, state and
municipal support were severely compromised, and public aid was nearly
nonexistent. This devastating natural disaster of 2005 ravaged the city and the
surrounding areas to the point where the environment was left unrecognizable in
many areas, similar to a war zone. Though the backgrounds of New Orleans and
Kassel (and their respective contexts of trauma) are obviously separate and distinct,
they are certainly not incomparable or irrelative. The congruity of the large
international art exhibition’s actual utilization by these two cities—even in such
varying moments in time—is a testament to the ultimate value of cultural dialogue
and exploration in localities and circumstances challenging reconstruction and
viability.
9
Chapter 2: documenta 1: Context and Development
Though the inception of documenta 1 was certainly used as a channel for new
communications between postwar Germany and the rest of the Western and United
States-dominated world, the concept of art as a powerful tool within government was
not foreign in the German system. In his book Art as Politics in the Third Reich,
historian Jonathan Petropoulos asserts that within the Nazi elite before World War II,
“art provided a means to a larger and more important set of goals. For this reason, the
Nazi leaders used art instrumentally, that is, to serve as a means or intermediary to a
particular result…in general, the leaders manipulated art policy and the collecting of
works in order to articulate fundamental (or even definitional) tenets of their
ideology.”
9
Prominent members of the National Socialist party would utilize the
collecting of primarily traditional, völkisch art in order to rise up within the ranks of
the party—not only because of their aesthetic appreciation, but also because of Adolf
Hitler’s interpretation of art as a very direct symbol of taste, status and power. Art as
a status tool was a central foundational aspect to the Nazi elite, and they continued
this trajectory as they expanded their roles within the German public.
Following Germany’s surrender in 1945, the country was divided by the
Allied Nations (United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union). The
former top leaders in the Nazi elite were already captured or had committed suicide.
The country’s infrastructure itself was shattered because of the relentless ground
fighting. The cities were mostly rubble, which made transportation and
communication, already an intensely difficult task at this point, nearly impossible.
9
Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich, 7.
10
Food supply and access were minimal at best, and hyperinflation hit the German
economy, making pure survival a treacherously bleak endeavor. Germany was in
shambles. Not only was the entire regional economic infrastructure dilapidated, so
was the international public’s view and opinion of Germany. Nazism was now a
stigma in the general public dialogue; it offered no attractive, or even neutral,
qualities to the international community—only hatred, despair, and ultimate shame.
Germany at this time needed to not only recover physically, but also socially and
culturally. Contrary to Germany’s previous exclusionary position under the National
Socialist party, now with a newly divided country and an uncertain future the nation
finally found itself in the role of ‘the other’ in the global stage, and desperately
needed to discover new channels of outreach and discourse to balance the reproach it
was now, naturally, on the receiving end of.
Despite the cultural persecution that the Nazis imposed upon to the artistic
domain of Germany, the citizens of Germany were still extremely supportive of the
arts in general and following the World War II, public art exhibitions often
experienced large turnouts, even for artists who were previously defiled by Hitler’s
regime. This dichotomy was the substructure of artistic exploration by the German
public after the war. Curator Sabine Eckmann states
On one hand, the newly established bond between German expressionism and
contemporary practices demonstrated a reconnection to artworks of the past
that during the Third Reich had been devalued on the basis of alleged
internationalism, distorted renderings, and excessively subjective mark
making. On the other, months after Nazi Germany’s surrender, expressionism
11
was also employed to connote contemporary artworks as carrying on a better
German tradition, and hence solidifying a new national art
10
Perhaps it was this nuanced division in the artistic development with Germany’s
public sphere that inspired Arnold Bode to produce documenta 1, a contemporary art
exhibition to initiate artistic participation and cultural growth. Bode, a German
painter and university professor, worked in Berlin from 1928 until 1933 before being
banned from his vocation by the Nazi party.
11
Aware of the artistic repression that
had settled upon the German public, Bode understood that postwar Germany was now
ready for a trajectory that left its cultural fascism in the past. He was one of a few
German art historians from this time who stood out for his role in “promoting
abstraction, and for rehabilitating German modernism as a link between international
modern art and contemporary German art.”
12
Located in the recuperating city of
Kassel, a city in close proximity to the Iron Curtain, documenta 1 featured many
artworks that the Nazis would never have permitted in a formal, public exhibition and
“was established to present contemporary German art to an international audience.
While the aim of documenta 1 was to celebrate those artists whose work had been
vilified in the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, it established the
view that would be maintained for years to come: that postwar German art was the
10
Sabine Eckmann, “Ruptures and Continuities: Modern German Art in between the
Third Reich and the Cold War,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures (New
York: Abrams, 2009), 51.
11
documenta Archiv for the Art of the 20
th
and 21
st
Centuries, “Bequest Arnold
Bode,” documenta Archiv, http://documentaarchiv.stadtkassel.de/miniwebs/
documentaarchiv_e/ 08191/ index.html.
12
Stephanie Barron, “Blurred Boundaries: The Art of Two Germanys between Myth
and History,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures (New York: Abrams,
2009), 16.
12
direct descendant of prewar European modernism.”
13
One example of this reversal in
portrayal is Wilhelm Lehmbruck's sculpture Kneelers (1911), which the Nazis had
placed in a central location in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Bode revisited this piece
and placed it in the main entrance of documenta 1—this time the sculpture was
treated in a serious and respectful framework. Bode’s curatorial decision of
promoting modern art in a formerly hostile creative environment is a symbol of his
cognizance regarding the need for assistance in Germany’s very limited social
position. documenta 1 was not appropriated as a means for shame and reparation on
behalf of the German people—certainly a mere art exhibition would be a ludicrous
vehicle for even attempting such a concept. Bode knew documenta 1 could not
celebrate the threatening artistic trajectory with which Germany was already so
familiar. With a nationalist genocidal history on its resume, the arts of Germany had
to progress into a program that would ultimately begin the first steps in the long road
to recovery.
The choice of the city of Kassel itself was fortunate and perhaps a bit
incidental since the city also happened to be the chosen location for the National
Garden Show in 1955 (the National Garden Show was a moving exhibition and not
bound to the city of Kassel in any way). Kassel’s central location within the state of
Germany is undoubtedly a provocative and indicative location considering its
symbolism of not only the dividing wall within Germany but also the Iron Curtain
symbolically dividing the European continent as a whole. Germany’s role in the
divisive reality of Europe during this time through its former Nazi regime was a
13
Ibid., 17.
13
glaring fact of life that Bode, a Berliner who was artistically stifled by the Nazis, was
willing to concede. However, the location of Kassel was also a choice that supports
the notion of modernism in this very sense. Despite the fact that the small city of
Kassel played a huge role in the process of World War II (from hosting slave labor to
being virtually annihilated by bombing in 1943) Arnold Bode believed that this
location was a logical choice for an art exhibition that would give Germany an
opportunity to participate with its surroundings in an international and cultural
setting. His sophisticated trajectory of not only focusing on the artwork itself, but also
upon the site of the exhibition, was a challenging problematic in 1955 that he perhaps
did not need to mount (since the cultural atmosphere was already quite challenged in
many respects in Kassel during this time), but did nonetheless.
Bode’s choice of venue displays his desire for a documenta 1 that would
showcase the artworks in the exhibition within a context of tradition, history and,
most importantly, progression. The Museum Fridericianum, the first public museum
on the European continent and once known as the Museum of the Enlightenment, was
thus chosen as the official exhibition venue. This museum existed in shambles much
like the rest of Kassel after the 1943 bombing and its once emblematic stature as a
bastion of European civilization and culture for years existed in the aftermath of
barbarism and vulgarity, waiting to be inserted back into the framework of which it
was conceived. documenta 1 visitors would be able to revisit this museum—a site
already intrinsic to their cultural roots, yet recently only disjointedly familiar—and
actually involve their
fragmented, genuinely traumatized existences in a compositional activity.
Presenting its audience with modern art, documenta constituted a public realm
14
in post-Nazi Germany…Within the context of documenta, the public
constituted itself on the groundless basis of aesthetic experience—the
experience of objects whose identity cannot be identified.
14
In this postwar context that spans jarred and grossly incongruent extents of
trauma under an unquantifiable scope of limited physicality, two very different
visitors to documenta 1 at the Museum Fridericianum in 1955 could—perhaps for the
first time in years—converge on a visual and cultural platform decontaminated of
burdens such as ideological and racial drifting or economic brackets. And, in this less
fragmented context, the manifest afflictions and accountability of their recent
collective histories rise above any contemporary preoccupations, drafting them into a
truly inward examination of their common identity. To the foreign visitor, this meta-
framework of the Museum Fridericianum would also suggest an analysis that
overlooks, momentarily, the exclusive humanitarian crisis that occurred in this
region—and rather simultaneously takes into account the history of the site as a
totality. As such, the foreign viewer would be courted with Germany’s cultural
diplomacy, engaging with and exploring this austere country’s cultural history by
literally standing on the grounds of past contentions and present self-examinations.
The Museum Fridericianum is one of the overarching features of documenta 1
that gave the exhibition viewers an opportunity to savor their incomprehensible recent
histories through the confrontation of categorical art that was socially forbidden in
previous years. Architect Simon Louis du Ry, inspired by the British Museum in
London, began his design of this neoclassical structure in 1769. In 1779, the museum
officially opened its doors on the northeast side of the Friedrichsplatz, one of the
14
Roger M. Buergel, “The Origins,” in Documenta Magazine No.1-3, 2007 Reader
(Cologne: Taschen, 2007), 31.
15
largest public urban spaces in Germany. With the label of being the first public
museum built on the European continent, this museum’s history as an integral cultural
node in Germany—as well as within Europe as a whole—includes housing the first
official German parliamentary building as well as hosting exhibitions of Kasseler
Kunstverein (one of Germany’s oldest civic art associations, dating back to 1835).
The rich historical backdrop of this cultural center made it an ideal choice for
Bode to utilize for documenta 1. Because the Museum Fridericianum was devastated
by the 1943 bombing raids in Kassel, it was still in an imperfect state for documenta
1’s opening:
The burned-out Fridericianum had been scantily renovated, with Bode trying
neither to capitalize on nor conceal its character as a ruin. The brickwork
remained unplastered and was merely whitewashed. A minimal load-bearing
system was installed in the spaces using elements from trade fair architecture,
plus lightweight construction panels in gray that gave the walls a modular
structure and a lively texture.
15
Just the façade and tower were left intact from the war and with just modest
restoration the museum surely appeared merely as a shell of its once grandiose,
looming architectural presence. The trauma that this historical architecture had barely
survived, inflicted upon by the issues within its own public constituents, rendered the
Museum Fridericianum similar to a graveyard
16
“above the ground—congealed
memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.”
17
Since traditionally documenta
1’s inception “must be understood as part of the overarching postwar project of
German democratization…and if Adolf Hitler once put together an exhibition of
15
Buergel, “The Origins,” 35.
16
An interesting note here is that the roots of the term “museum” can be traced to the
roots of “mausoleum” in Latin.
17
Jack Flam, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 156.
16
decadent-therefore forbidden-art, documenta 1’s mission would be to extol that
formerly repressed material as a guarantee of liberal democracy.”
18
With the insertion
of documenta 1 into this ideological burial ground of the museum, Bode reinforces
the public viewer’s capacity to legitimate—and increasingly confirm—the death of a
past oppressive culture (as well as marginalize their past provinciality) by capitalizing
upon the traditional yet weakened bastions of their own civilization. His agreeability
to move forward within this less than satisfactory pretext of the museum reveals
ostensible perception of the precise value of directing a public through their
recuperating landmark, now filled with modern and conceptual art once considered
taboo. Utilizing the specificity of cultural landmark as material of Kassel ultimately
fortifies the modern, democratic pursuit of documenta 1, legitimately producing a
self-critique of Germany’s past for public cultural consumption and thus broadening
the nation’s potential political, economic and cultural relations on an international
level.
Two particular installations in documenta 1 that attempt to embody the
concept of this free platform of visuality and culture were located in the entryway of
the exhibition.
19
The first was a collection of photographs showing historical and
ethnographic artworks, referencing “the production of art as an anthropological
constant,”
20
and the second was an installation of actual photographs of some of the
18
Jens Hoffman, The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist (New York: E-
Flux/Revolver, 2005), 59.
19
In writing this thesis I relied upon several photographs of the works analyzed,
which I could not reproduce due to copyright restrictions. The hardcopy version of
this paper, complete with photographs, is available at the Roski School of Fine Arts at
the University of Southern California.
20
Buergel, “The Origins,” 32.
17
artists in the exhibition, displaying “the human individual in its dependence on fate
and its struggle with external forces.”
21
The historical and ethnographic artworks
reflected an aesthetic of primitive art, while the installation of artist portraits further
along the entryway included modernist figures such as Piet Mondrian and Max Ernst.
Ultimately, this “attempt to reverse the way specific artists had been considered and
thus re-contextualize their work was supplemented by a centrally positioned walls of
photos with portraits of the artists, thus celebrating the individual creative minds
behind the works.”
22
Additionally, the modernist compositions of Piet Mondrian (as
well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse) were displayed in extremely untraditional
curatorial methods—against dark backgrounds instead of the typical, austere white
backdrops that dominated exhibitions during this time. Furthermore, a more
provocative artistic and curatorial approach was considered in the displaying of works
by Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, which were all conspicuously
instructed by Bode to be hung against untraditional backgrounds. In particular, the
arrangement of Mondrian’s Composition en blanc, noir et rouge (1936) against black
painted construction panels, “could be said to rub Mondrian the wrong way, since the
background had a painterly life of its own, setting free the subdued or suppressed
moments of painterly texture in the picture.”
23
Another perspective could rightfully be
argued that the inky and indistinct construction panels actually highlighted
Mondrian’s techniques of painterly non-representation. This rigorous discourse, in
21
Ibid., 32.
22
documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, “d11955,”
documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, http://www.document
a.de/d12.html?& L=1.
23
Buergel, “The Origins,” 36.
18
relation to such ultramodern visuals (at the time), was necessarily instigated by Bode
in his peculiar curatorial choice for Mondrian’s painting—“without favoring either
one of these interpretations, it is clear that this tension, this play of surfaces, benefited
the [painting].”
24
Bode’s goal of showing “European Art of the Twentieth Century” (the
original title of documenta 1) was not simply to
bring together a large number of artworks as a way of expressing—in
historical terms—what was created in the various countries in the first half of
the twentieth century. Instead, its task [was] to provide information about
which works and which artistic positions formed the point of departure for
what we now call contemporary art.
25
These fresh and unfixed methodologies of exhibition that Bode believed in exploring
actually contextualize his conviction that an unfamiliar (yet urgent) aesthetic and
cultural dialogue could indeed emerge out of the rubbles of manmade carnage and
devastation, hopefully carving out a vital passage for civilizing and humanizing the
morally bankrupt public. In the next chapter, one may see how this notion of
novel curatorial decision-making within a depraved and undermined location and
climate that developed out of the context of Kassel, Germany is similar to that which
ultimately reemerged in the contemporary example of Prospect.1 New Orleans.
24
Ibid., 36.
25
Ibid., 28.
19
Chapter 3: Prospect.1: The City of New Orleans as Material
The physical backdrop of the city of New Orleans is perhaps one of the most
unique in the United States. With distinct geography such as
miles of waterfront in three directions, New Orleans is partly peninsular. The
heart of the city spreads around a curve of the Mississippi River—source of
the nickname ‘Crescent City’—while edging Lake Pontchartrain on the north.
Lake Pontchartrain connects to Lake Borgne, a broad opening to the Gulf of
Mexico. Lakes, marshlands, and bayous extend from the city in all
directions.
26
Perhaps this existence amid such varying inserts of bodies of water is what influences
Barbara Bloemink, in her essay for the Prospect.1 New Orleans catalogue, to refer to
this city as “Our Venice.”
27
Bloemink compares New Orleans to Italy’s Venice,
displaying the near counterintuitive settling of these two cities on such difficult-to-
control, water-laden land—hence the literal sinking of Venice and, likewise, New
Orleans’ utter dependence upon levees to prevent from being flooded from the
prevailing waters around the city. Despite the risk of such infrastructures being built
within such naturally volatile environs, the waterways of both Venice and New
Orleans did in fact provide a highly unique and advantageous asset: the inherent
position of witnessing, participating in, and influencing a diverse range of cultures
over time, via the trades of goods and services. Regarding these two cities, Bloemink
states:
Each city has a distinct culture influenced by the myriad nationalities that
have passed through its busy ports bringing goods from all over the world.
Both Venice and New Orleans have many museums and long histories as
26
City-Data, “New Orleans: Geography and Climate,” City-Data, http://www.city-
data.com/us-cities/The-South/New-Orleans-Geography-and-Climate.html.
27
Barbara Bloemink, “Eden, Babylon, Our Venice: The History & Development of
the Visual Arts in New Orleans,” in Prospect.1 New Orleans Catalogue (New York:
PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 39.
20
cultural centers…Like Venice, New Orleans is a cultural destination—there
were over ten million visitors in 2004—and is likewise animated by an annual
citywide carnival.
28
With New Orleans’ distinct geography and deep-rooted cultural history, events such
as Mardi Gras and Jazzfest—both world-renowned spectacles and conventions for
fans of New Orleans culture—attract both local and foreign spotlights on the city
every year. Undoubtedly, the city’s lure as a cultural and tourist destination has long
been a significant source of its existence.
This is why the absence of appropriate humanitarian assistance to Hurricane
Katrina’s victims creates an alarming degree of confusion and appall towards
governmental and non-governmental entities—and continues to raise questions all the
way down the system towards the individual, who may experience feelings of
ultimate uselessness and helplessness. Collective response and precise, large scale
organization in the cases of natural disasters are clearly not easy undertakings—and
this is exactly why the efforts of Dan Cameron, the organizer and curator of
Prospect.1 New Orleans in 2008, are not only exemplary and awe-inspiring to say the
very least, but also excessively motivated and efficient as well. He explains his initial
interest in revitalizing New Orleans in his essay introducing the Prospect.1 catalogue:
“My compulsion to undertake the organization of Prospect.1 originated in a wave of
strong, almost overwhelming sensations of the city’s diminishment that have never
been far from my thoughts since the day of my first post-Katrina visit in January
2006.”
29
The emotional gravitation that New Orleans possesses certainly affects how
28
Bloemink, “Eden, Babylon, Our Venice,” 39.
29
Dan Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” in Prospect.1 New Orleans
Catalogue (New York: PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 20.
21
people perceive the city post-Katrina, but ultimately the city’s economy and cultural
infrastructure is an aspect that must also be dealt with. Cameron continues:
It has been some hundred years since New Orleans last occupied a position of
any real authority in the American art scene…the absence of a collecting
community capable of sustaining national price levels has resulted in the
gradual disappearance of mainstream contemporary art from the walls of New
Orleans museums, private galleries, and collectors’ homes.
30
The irony of New Orleans being a destination for culture, ‘otherness’ and ultimately
spectacle, and yet having been left economically left behind in the art world is a
problematic that Prospect.1 would inevitably grapple with. Cameron concedes that
perhaps
all international biennials face challenges in getting established, and in the
case of New Orleans, the struggle is to rally the right type of support from the
outside world to return to a level of urban vitality that might be sustained for
future generations.
31
Because of the inherently unique culture that the city embodies, Cameron intends to
utilize this shared resource in order to uplift the city’s current diminished position. He
believes that if
the international art community visits New Orleans in the numbers
anticipated, this will signal both that antipathy toward new art is waning, and
that the objective of bringing the world’s art together in a single place may be
less about the art than about the place itself.
32
His efforts bring together the largest international art biennial in the United States
within the context of a still recuperating New Orleans, and he has purposefully
curated an exhibition that includes artworks highly sensitive to this backdrop of
culture and trauma in order to contextualize this trajectory in a manner that is relevant
30
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 21.
31
Ibid., 22.
32
Ibid., 23.
22
to the place itself. Cameron compares this regenerative aspect of Prospect.1 to
documenta 1, stating that the “largest exhibition of new art in the world, documenta,
has taken place every five years since the early 1950s in Kassel, Germany, a city that
developed something beautiful from the rubble of war.”
33
His curatorial ambitions are
clearly articulated here as he draws a parallel between Kassel's rubbles of war to New
Orleans’ debris of natural disaster.
One of Prospect.1’s artists, Navin Rawanchaikul, illustrates the overarching
value of sensitivity and astuteness that should be intrinsic in all international art
exhibitions. On the opening day of Prospect.1, Rawanchaikul, who lives in works in
Fukuoka, Japan as well as Chiang Mai, Thailand (along with Canadian artist Tyler
Russell), organized a funeral for deceased New Orleans musician Narvin Kimball,
who passed away while dislocated outside of his home city in the Hurricane Katrina
aftermath. Kimball—the last founding member of The New Orleans Preservation Hall
Jazz Band—was a musical fixture around the city for more than forty years, and was
also a familiar face to different neighborhoods in New Orleans because of his thirty-
seven year stint with the United States Postal Office. His presence and influence in
the cultural community, as well as the everyday neighborhood business of the local
community, inspired Rawanchaikul to produce a traditional jazz funeral for such a
beloved figure in the locale.
The artist’s vision commenced on Prospect.1’s opening day, “equipped with
banners painted after the style of Thai film posters and led by the Preservation Hall
Band, a group of visitors paraded through the French quarter, walking and dancing,
33
Ibid., 22.
23
picking up more people on every block.”
34
Even Kimball’s daughter was present,
graciously giving a speech of thanks to the rowdy, joyful crowd. The Navin Party, the
art collective that Rawanchaikul and Tyler formed which is comprised of people
around the world named “Navin” had “created an artistic tribute that incorporates film
footage of the musician, historic photographs, and painted works that resemble
concert posters with an oriental flavor.”
35
This tribute to Kimball was then installed in
the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Foundation and Center, becoming a temporary
installation intended for visitors who may not have been able to participate in the
traditional jazz funeral. This fusion of music and visual art within the localized
context of New Orleans traditions is a valuable experience, providing relief and
recognition to the local viewer and simultaneously offering a glimpse of the
attractiveness of the region’s customs and its collectivity to the visitor.
Rawanchaikul is also an artist who is quite familiar with the experience of
cultural displacement, as his Thai background—against the backdrop of a
homogenous Japan—affords him the reality of always existing somewhere in-
between a culture or nationality. Though he is of Asian descent, a country with a
social environment as un-diverse as Japan does little to reassure him of truly being
accepted, or even being remotely non-conspicuous. His existence as the “other” is an
experience that most foreigners undergo in similarly cultural homogeneity, and this
existence is what perhaps ultimately informs Rawanchaikul’s methodology of
34
Steven Stern, “Prospect.1 New Orleans,” Frieze Magazine, issue 120 (2009),
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/prospect1_new_orleans/
35
Jan Rothschild, “The Big Easy’s Canvas,” Preservation Magazine (November
2008), http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/story-of-the-week/2008/new-
orleans-prospect-1.html.
24
organizing a jazz funeral for Kimball with the help of his ongoing Navin Party. The
rich intangibility of these components of globalism and collective organization echoes
the conceptual and emotional structure of Prospect.1 itself, offering the viewer an
opportunity to grapple with the site’s past and the respective values connected to it.
Rawanchaikul’s abstruse materials of his traditional jazz funeral embody a deep-
rooted cultural and civilian entity.
Rawanchaikul is certainly not the only artist in Prospect.1 to utilize the site of
New Orleans as a foundation in his art. The works of Canada based Rafael Lozano-
Hemmer, a media artist with a B.Sc in Physical Chemistry, utilize public space to
install large-scale projects that engage and interact with the viewer. His piece entitled
Pulse Tank, which was displayed in the New Orleans Museum of Art, consists of
ping-pong table-sized, illuminated shallow water tanks lined with pulse sensors.
Visitors can place their fingertips on these sensors, allowing their heartbeats to be
recorded and then watch as their “pulses reverberate through the water as ripples,
radiating outwards from the source and illuminated on the surrounding walls. The
vital signs of up to five people can be simultaneously detected, creating turbulent
patterns in the water.”
36
As the illuminated water beings to ripple, the darkened room
in which the installation resides allows for the ceiling to come “alive with silvery
circles and streaks created by spotlights shining through shallow, gently rippling trays
of water.”
37
Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Tank implements the utilization of water,
36
Shearyadi’s World, “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer installation view at New Orleans
Biennial,” Shearyadi’s World, http://www.shearyadi.com/myworld/rafael-lozano-
hemmer-installation-view-at-new-orleans-biennial/
37
Doug MacCash, “Prospect.1 New Orleans exhibits by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and
Willie Birch at The New Orleans Museum of Art,” The Times Picayune Blog,
25
connecting to New Orleans’ strikingly peninsular existence that Bloemink alludes to
earlier. This reference to not only the cultural heritage that blossomed from the
historical trade routes of the surrounding waters, but also to the devastation that these
same currents inflict upon the region, is an inherently poignant attribution of the
installation. Lozano-Hemmer gives the viewer, in essence, an opportunity to confront
the materiality of the water with the viewer’s own pulse as well as the heartbeats of
other individuals. The artist temporally expresses these pulses into the framework of
the once-still water tanks, and amalgamates the viewer’s existence into a context that
is ultimately hybrid and collective. The individual observer is forced to participate in
this room of water, light, and pulse—sometimes with other viewers—their heartbeats
meshing into an intimate collection of patterns and movements. Although the trauma
and distraught brought on by Hurricane Katrina is indeed experienced in
individualistic and unquantifiable ways, Pulse Tank rises above the subjectivity of
everyday life and inserts a visible objectivity to this context. Likewise, though every
person categorically enters the room as an individual, this artwork may randomly
force viewers to be aware of themselves in a manner that overrides their exclusive
identities and situates them in an aggregate involvement and experience with other
humans as well as the surroundings. Should viewers truly engage in this installation,
they can no longer be convinced that the New Orleans devastation is the most fervent
in their capacity alone. The viewers succumb to others like them in the room within
this experiential moment, all of them interpreted by the pulse sensors and perhaps
December 5, 2008, http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2008/12/prospect1_new_orlea
ns_exhibits. html.
26
seeing an actual physical collectivity—a spatial document of the ultimate
namelessness of the disaster’s victims.
Another piece in this biennial that reaches out to the concept of water—
though in a divergent and non-literal perspective—is Mithra by Los Angeles based
artist Mark Bradford. In his blog in The Times-Picayune, art critic Doug MacCash
describes this looming wooden ark as “the perfect monument for the 2005 flood that
so changed our world. Even its steady deterioration seems appropriate.”
38
This sixty-
four by twenty-five foot structure, undoubtedly a familiar image to most viewers
because of the transparent biblical reference to Noah’s ark, sits nearly alone on the
2200 block of Caffin Avenue, a street once full of homes and buildings, in New
Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward—the hardest hit area of the city. Mithra not only alludes
to the massive flooding of New Orleans and the unfathomable amount of lives that
were affected, but also serves as a simple reminder of those lives by utilizing tangible
ingredients of those very entities that were left behind in the aftermath. Bradford’s
piece encompasses a shell of an old home from the neighborhood, and various scraps
of wood that were left strewn around this area. His decision to construct an artwork
that utilizes material available to him only because of the site’s ultimate destruction is
a destination in the viewer’s experience while touring the Lower Ninth Ward. Mithra
connects the viewer to his unique setting in front of the ark in the 21
st
century all the
way to natural elements of New Orleans that overwhelmingly predate him (like the
seeds and roots of the trees that provided the wood for generations of family homes),
38
Doug MacCash, “Art critic Doug MacCash rates the Prospect.1 New Orleans
sculpture by Mark Bradford,” The Times Picayune Blog, December 16, 2008,
http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2008/12/art_critic_doug__maccash_rates_10.htm
l.
27
and finally to the broadest context of human history and religious culture in the
reference to Noah and his ark. Mithra, situated not in the calm shelter of a museum or
gallery space, stands vulnerable and deteriorating, constructed by an artist who valued
the importance of using physical elements of New Orleans to signify the city’s
physical existence, cultural sustenance and cyclical moments of birth and rebirth.
Someday Mithra will be recalled only in fragments of the wood in which it was made,
or by photographs and video documentation, but in this very sense the temporal
nature of this ark is parallel to the ultimate tragedy of Hurricane Katrina—time will
have passed, people will have recovered, the city will have revitalized, and the
memories of this disaster will be intense yet still distant.
All of these Prospect.1 artists utilize historicization of their sites to inform
their works in the exhibition. Although the artworks from Prospect.1 and documenta
1 are surely bred from highly dissimilar environments of trauma, the fundamental
gravity of both respective pasts illuminates throughout these points in both
exhibitions. Utilizing the expression of trauma in the large international exhibition,
the artists involved were able to harness innate characteristics of their respective
public domains and display these works to an audience delimited to their own
localities.
28
Chapter 4: Critical Utilization of the Site in the Large International Exhibition
Perhaps two of the most prevailing characteristics of the aforementioned
artworks in documenta 1 and Prospect.1 are the notions of a singular versus collective
existence and the utilization of materials inherent to the sites’ contexts. Both of these
notions, informed by the historical roots of the respective sites, contribute to the
ultimate aesthetic and regenerative objectives of these exhibitions. Additionally,
although the concept of art itself is often remarked upon as frivolous, it is precisely
the seriousness with which these trajectories were pursued in both exhibitions that
ultimately aided in the recuperation of these two places. Post-disaster situations that
utilize irresponsibly uninformed art would conceivably benefit very little from a large
exhibition in this context. The artistic decisions made in both cases of documenta 1
and Prospect.1 display the attractiveness of their cultures in their specific scenarios,
paving the way for cultural interaction and regeneration long stymied and
demoralized.
This commonality that arises from the initial awareness of the distinct entity is
reminiscent of the aesthetic orbit in the photographic artist wall installation in
documenta 1. This grouping prompted the viewers to situate themselves within the
context of humanity and history, as an entirety as well as an individual, and was an
ambitious trajectory for Bode to commit to at the time. Considering the demoralized
state of the German public in the postwar years, the viewer entering an injured
museum and after visually digesting the site, himself, and the group of artist
photographs, perhaps contributed to the consensus of why this exhibition was
considered necessary or beneficial in the first place. The hostile anti-modernist
29
message which was pounded into, and encapsulated, the German art dialogue for
decades earlier was definitively and confrontationally inserted into the historically-
legible architecture of documenta 1—this time, the faces of previously scorned artists
gaze down upon the museum visitor, (re)establishing themselves right along with
those who were in the process of reformulating their conceived notions of
modernism.
The effect that arose from Bode’s desire to fuel Germany’s ride out of the
country’s fascist past and towards a refined, modernist culture, “was a kind of
mirrored wall in which the visitors could recognize themselves as singular existences,
but also as a group.”
39
Perhaps after years of ignorantly following an obscenely
grotesque governmental party, the German people’s participation in art and visual
culture would best be reconstructed from the basis of viewing their individuality as an
all-encompassing identity within the humanitarian structure—rather than another
divisive and elitist scope that ultimately rendered their value system uncultivated.
This perception “of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of
continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity…engenders the need
for a narrative of ‘identity.’”
40
Despite the Nazi regime’s crude and ultimately unsuccessful attempt of broad,
long-term, systemic domination, the German people were essentially left with a self-
made cultural void. This void spans to intrinsic societal facets of economy, political
beliefs, humanitarian faith, nationalistic confidence, as well as a self-sufficient
cultural stance. The sectarian cultural practice that monopolized the vast majority of
39
Buergel, “The Origins,” 32.
40
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2006), 205.
30
public thought towards art in particular deteriorated into an unfocused, disjointed
appreciation of visuality. Although modernism was technically “allowed” to be
pursued with the demise of the Nazi system, Germany the nation—not as an elite
group of select individuals to dictate yet another insular artistic axiom, but as a
serious entirety—had to be organically regrouped, somehow, into a restorative
schedule that would finally allow for them to pursue social equality on the
international stage. Though surely at the time there was no concrete way of knowing
if a second documenta would be produced, this first exhibition in the context of
postwar Germany provided an early social mirror in an artistic context, granting the
viewers a relatively non-threatening—yet morally challenging—grid in which to
diagram themselves. This decision of avoiding the safety of a kind of art that would
simply coddle the German public is at least respectable in terms of social
responsibility. In the aftermath of World War II, Europeans wanted to learn from the
inhumanity of earlier years and move forward with the rest of the world. Thus a
purely self-assuring German art exhibition would not have been an event conducive
for propagating international cultural relations that focused upon the collective
growth of these existences.
The flux of collective existence within the large international exhibition can,
however, be (temporally) harnessed when the artwork and the utilization of the site is
informed by the location’s history. The Prospect.1 projects where materials were
utilized directly from their specific sites are significant because they afford the
locality its own identity after years of social neglect and irresponsibility. The artists
were aware of the fact that they could create artworks out of the self-sufficiency of
31
New Orleans itself, in ways that were both intangible and corporeal. Navin
Rawanchaikul’s aforementioned traditional jazz funeral for New Orleans’ local
musician Narvin Kimball utilizes local figures, families, traditions and musical
culture from the city’s cultural fabric to resurrect the parameters of physicality that no
longer exist in human form, but instigate urgent explorations of experientiality
nonetheless. Though the argument that perhaps such a spectacle or public art
performance can be construed as distasteful or insensitive (since it utilizes a man’s
death in order to garner attention towards the streets of the city), this approach would
require a void of historical localism and the actual context of traditional jazz funerals
in the New Orleans tradition. Furthermore, the actual value of the cultural diplomatic
effects in such a pursuit would be discounted. Such funerals with music and
enthusiasm are quite commonplace, particularly in reference to those passed
individuals who were musicians themselves (or were somehow connected to the
music industry). Photographic documentation such as Leo Touchet’s Photo No. 004
(2007) illustrates the reflective yet resilient outlook on this particular kind of
funeral—a disposition antithetical (and even perhaps counterintuitive) to the typically
somber, quiet, and melancholy temperaments customary to funerals of other cultures.
This dichotomic tension between the perceived values of these facets is the material
that Rawanchaikul chooses to utilize and expand upon, offering extrinsic material to
communicate with the public.
Similarly, yet distinctly, Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Tank allows the viewer to
engage in a carefully curated space with the element of water—a natural resource of
New Orleans that was conceptually reversed in the public sphere from a destructive
32
force of nature to a positive affirmation of life and survival. He reveals this inversion
in a safeguarded environment—the New Orleans Museum of Art, a cultural
institution that escaped the wrath of the flooding for the most part unscathed. Yet
despite the museum remaining firmly on its home territory after Katrina, inevitable
financial obstacles loomed over the establishment: the city of New Orleans hardly had
any money to recuperate physically, much less donate emergency funding to this
institution. Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Tank revives the viewer towards notions of
continuance, survival and cyclicality. This high tech artwork adopts the main
destructive force of the flooding—water—in an ambience that had successfully stood
its ground despite natural and manmade turmoil. There exists a sensibility of triumph
and, more importantly, a turn towards the future that Lozano-Hemmer emphasizes.
He stresses that the viewers are—whether they believe him or not—standing in an
environment that is quickly moving forward from its tumultuous past few years, but
also that they are not alone in neither the problem nor the solution to it. The viewers’
roles in this public space of New Orleans—which happens to be surrounded by the
white walls of the city’s museum—are panned out to all of them as they engage with
the natural element in the artwork that also embodies the simple existence for the city
itself.
Physical elements of New Orleans left over from Hurricane Katrina are also
recontextualized into elements of an artwork in Bradford’s Mithra. His purpose in
reclaiming the conceptual viability of the city’s former building blocks in a new
context of contemporary art directly confronts the viewer who stands in the most
devastated areas of New Orleans. The visitors are asked to reframe themselves in this
33
humbling moment in American history, and also to perhaps articulate their roles in
the larger scope of human history by the ancient religious symbolism that this piece
pervades. Despite the artwork title which distances it from being a purely biblical
concept, it is highly unlikely that Bradford was unaware of the black community’s
strong ties to the church in New Orleans, and his undertaking a project that constructs
a depiction of a biblical reference would certainly be viewed not only as a symbol of
strength and resolve, but also as a cultural gift. This approach, highly sensitive to the
community in which this biennial was intended to assist, is perhaps the most ethical
way to give an artistic contribution in a context of disaster and trauma. Instead of
simply swooping into a “foreign” land and claiming to offer an artwork of
understanding, Bradford attempts to channel his efforts into a piece that is generally
devoted to the local belief system, yet is a tribute in only an organic and entropic
sense (instead of a traditionally permanent and self-fulfilling endeavor). Like the
wood from which it was constructed, this three-story piece will naturally and
eventually become a part of the New Orleans terrain and perhaps become even more
significant because of its temporal condition.
Both of the works by Lozano-Hemmer and Bradford signify the utter
relevance of the place of the art, harkening back to Cameron’s conviction that
bringing an international group of art together will become more about the location of
this structure and less about the actual art itself. With the shrinkage of the globe
through continuing modernization and higher levels of technology, perhaps the
context of these large international exhibitions can be pursued by the organizers,
curators and artists every time, not only as cultural and economic stimulators but also
34
as processes for public growth and gain—tools for ultimately linking the disengaged
throughout the art world.
35
Chapter 5: The Investigation and Process of the Large International Exhibition
Artists and their artistic production are a resource and also a valuable
mechanism for cultural diplomacy, in the soft power context, by both nation states as
well as other non-governmental entities. Prospect.1 came out of a traumatized New
Orleans to become the largest international art biennial in the United States. New
Orleans was foundationalized by a regional history already rich in artistic and cultural
exchange as well as a developmental synthesis of a broad range of traditions and
values. Despite the destruction and despair that 2005 left in its wake, a discreet
opportunity existed for collective efforts towards a resurgence based upon the city’s
unique historical infrastructure. The site of the city itself is the anchor in this
groundwork—without the Venice-like physical qualities of New Orleans, the city’s
historical water trade routes would not have existed. These advantageous waterways
offered the region a unique fusion of foreign goods, new languages, and intriguing
customs that most cities in the world simply do not have as a collective experience
merely because of their physical location.
New Orleans’ unique essence as a destination city for cultural tourism only
compounds the inherent and organic inclination to utilize art as an additional tool for
regeneration. The ultimate dilapidation of the city, and the severely inefficient
response by governmental agencies, were enormously incomprehensible obstacles to
those who needed to mobilize a spark of growth in this economy. Since the local,
state, and national governments were struggling within their own inappropriate
politicking after the hurricane, restoration efforts derived from untraditional forms of
thinking were certainly not out of the question—in fact, the gross extent of the
36
disastrous situation (compounded with the city’s cultural heritage and respect for the
arts) may have in fact instigated a path towards the utilization of creative resources
that are too often overlooked by governmental entities in the United States.
The overall literal efficiency and organization of Prospect.1 in the New
Orleans post-disaster context may very well be one of the most poignant
characteristics of the exhibition that will continuously garner more and more attention
and admiration with time.
41
Though Hurricane Katrina may be the worst natural
disaster in modern American history, humankind has been dealt tumultuous blows—
both natural and manmade—too many times to count. The locations of these
disasters, if they occur in modernized regions, surely require time to fully
recuperate—but they usually eventually do, as long as all of the resources used are
not limited to unnecessarily rigid and traditional methodologies.
In hindsight, though this assertion surely cannot be proven today, Prospect.1
may be one of the critical underlying momentums of post-Katrina New Orleans’
engine. Capitalizing on the inertia of the city’s existing affair with the role of culture
in its overall allure, a new growth of artistic interest and participation in New Orleans
may have definitively begun with Prospect.1. New Orleans is obviously not a nation
state in the literal sense, but the city’s application of cultural diplomacy—in its
outreach efforts via Prospect.1—is similarly informed to the diplomatic and cultural
role that documenta 1 played in Kassel. Although the context of Kassel harbors a
situation with an even more horrific social and physical environment, this momentum
41
At the time of this writing it is simply too early to tell what results will arise—
either culturally, socially, or economically—from Prospect.1. However, my objective
here is to display the foundational similarities of the utilization of art and culture in an
established, as well as new, testing ground.
37
of cultural diplomacy is conceptually parallel since both instances use art as a
resource for social regrowth.
Acknowledgement and utter comprehension of the host city’s past is an
integral component for a socially responsible exhibition to be utilized as a resource or
tool for regenerative stimulation. Under the Nazi party’s rule, both the city of Kassel
and the nation state of Germany were participants in an art culture of dangerous
censorship. Hitler and his comrades knew that they wanted to wield art as one of their
major intangible weapons against any person who ventured into disagreement:
the prejudices, persecutions, and policies imposed by the…Nazi [regime]
were held to be variants of a single ‘totalitarian art’, a blend of ‘realism’ and
‘neo-classicism’ demanding a uniform and strictly disciplined dedication of
the artist to the Völk…but always to the State and its Leader.
42
Artists whom Hitler labeled as “dilettantes—misinformed cripples and cretins,
women who could only inspire aversion, men who are more like beasts than men,”
43
were actually many of the artists who were included in the oppositional documenta 1.
Arnold Bode’s objective of showing the world European pre-war modernist art (as
well as an historical overview of artistic development likewise ignored by the
National Socialist party such as Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Blauer Reiter,
Futurism, and Pittura Metafisica) as being alive and well despite the impossibly brute
systemic obstacles in Germany only reinforces the categorical potential of art being
used as a cultural tool in the most relevant and compelling sense. Bode was, perhaps,
familiar to the demands of cosmopolitanism of which today’s curators are expected,
42
David Caute, The Dancer Effects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the
Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press: 2005), 511.
43
Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art: In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist
Italy, and the People's Republic of China (London: Icon Harpe, 1990), 104.
38
attempting to “articulate the ability of art to touch and mobilize people and encourage
debates about spirituality, creativity, identity, and the nation.”
44
The unenlightened
mobilization of art-as-weapon enforced by the Nazi regime, though successful for its
duration, was ineffectual and reductive in its true scope. documenta 1 was able to
create a surge towards an attractive yet collectively unexplored artistic realm. The
decision of site within the site—the Museum Fridericianum within Kassel—fed the
culturally one-sided German public into a cycle of self-realization and collective
progression. Non-traditional curatorial strategies introduced in the displays of Piet
Mondrian and the grouped artist photograph installation, ramped the exhibition visitor
to an exotic and challenging moment of tradition and memory. Such pure and unfixed
orbits would not have existed in an influential capacity in documenta 1 had the
historical and contextual matters of prewar and postwar Germany were not taken into
serious account by both Bode and the viewers.
Similarly, the artistic decisions of Rawanchaikul, Lozano-Hemmer, and
Bradford of Prospect.1 reflect to their ability of perceiving and utilizing materials
from the site, history, and local people of New Orleans in order to rise up to the
original aspirations of Dan Cameron: to ultimately rebuild the city and spirit of its
citizens by mobilizing one of their most familiar natural resources—their seemingly
innate ability to create and share art. Such an endeavor was unquestionably not a
mere insertion of yet another cultural event into the public domain—rather, the
history that was understood and respected in the New Orleans context is ultimately
what will give way to their overall infrastructural rebirth and betterment. In this
44
Simon Leung, Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
56.
39
sense, the ultimate criticality of art as a cultural diplomacy tool is realized in a most
recent and contemporary situation. The actual process of cultural progression itself
simply cannot be undermined nor utilized in an insular fashion—looking in hindsight,
the confirmed failure of such motivations is displayed in not only the divisive,
völkisch outlook of the Nazi regime, but also the negligent approach to cultural
relations influence taken by the Soviets during their hegemonic battle with the United
States during the Cold War. Such exhibitions like documenta 1 and Prospect.1
deserve continuous attention and analysis, but their results should mirror the
undeniable implication of art as a natural asset for a city, country, or region. Today,
Germany enjoys an association to progressive and avant-garde art, visible by the
explosion of influential works coming out of Berlin and other areas.
Though the actual effects of Prospect.1will be documented further in the
future, it is comforting to know that New Orleans is still currently growing out of its
devastation, partly spurred by the tourism and media attention that Prospect.1
generated for the region. However, this definitively brings forth further inherent
problematics of the large international exhibition and is a common issue among
biennials already: do these exhibitions actually function as agents for engaging local
art with the broader art world context, instead of simply existing as additional public
event spectacles that generate tourism and branding income for the location while
catering to the creative whims of the usual jet-setting group of curators, artists and
collectors? In her New York Times review of Prospect.1, Roberta Smith states that
despite this common socio-economic formula in international biennials, Prospect.1 is
a
40
testing ground with little in the way of way of superstars, big curatorial egos
and elaborately produced works, and none of the vast, chilling art halls
endemic in biennials. It proves that biennials can be just as effective when
pulled off without bells, whistles, big bucks and the usual suspects. Maybe
even more effective, especially if the local cultural soil is spectacularly fertile,
and if there’s a citywide need for uplift.
45
Smith’s assertion that Prospect.1 perhaps inherently ideologically contrasts other
biennials because of its untraditional curatorial approach (Cameron’s delegation of
artwork to unusual locations throughout the public space of the city such as public
buildings, alternative spaces, vacant lots, empty homes as well as the traditional
museum) and its concept of merging “art and city into a shifting, healing
kaleidoscope.”
46
This merge, in the case of New Orleans, can be likened to an
American version of Dak’Art, the Senegalese biennial for contemporary African art.
Of course this comparison is certainly not all encompassing, but these two biennials
have one particular goal (perhaps among many goals) in common: to uplift their city
and local culture through a large scale art exhibition. This obviously entails the ability
of the art world jet setters to land in their airports, stay in their hotels, tour their
localities—and everyone seems to benefit. But is this what the large international
exhibitions will ultimately revolve around in these modern times? Though Prospect.1
surely seems to de-emphasize the usual glamorous presence of high society and the
art world elite, the substructure of this large scale exhibition is ultimately the
revitalization of a dilapidated city—and because this kind of regeneration is
ultimately based upon money and funding, this goal may be quite difficult to achieve
without the active involvement of influential and exclusive members of the
45
Roberta Smith, “Kaleidoscopic Biennial for a Scarred City,” New York Times.
November 4, 2008, C1.
46
Ibid., C1.
41
contemporary art world. In Tim Griffin’s roundtable discussion in a 2003 Artforum
article, documenta XI curator Okwui Enwezor states
The value of the global paradigm for me-if it means serious interaction with
artists and practices that are not similarly circumscribed-is in its allowance for
greater methodological and discursive flexibility. I see the changing contexts
of the temporary exhibition as one way to engage the limits and blind spots of
the professional site of contemporary art. I believe that large-scale exhibitions
are seriously addressing these issues, even if we may never be in complete
agreement about what they add to the critical discourse of globalization.
47
Enwezor’s bold statement brings light to the possibility that perhaps because of the
ingrained problematics and questions that transnationalism and contemporary art
exhibitions brings forth, viewers from any node on the globe (be it peripheral or
central) will be able to participate in a social process of investigating the role of
contemporary art—and because of our increasing technology, perhaps on a public
scale never before encountered in these modern times.
Additionally, the concept of art as a cultural weapon should be questioned as
the planet evolves deeper into globalization. documenta 1 is perhaps one of the most
profound instigators of cultural regeneration because of its occurrence following one
of the most annihilative and calamitous wars in human history, surely to inspire and
influence similar collective mobilizations in the future. Because of this backdrop,
exhibitions like documenta, which in a way resemble transnational
companies, function as central structures working like a centrifugal force, and
this generates a huge web of connections and collaborations, a base for
immaterial production. The promotion of social situations, the invention of
concepts that can improve the social-humanitarian aspect emerge from the
idea of the artist who is no longer a visionary, but rather a person who knows
47
Tim Griffin, “Global tendencies: globalism and large-scale exhibition - Panel
Discussion,” Artforum (November 2003), 152.
42
how to use the platform of contemporary art as a tool…to achieve a better
sense of reality.
48
Perhaps because of how these exhibitions are becoming increasingly functional as
transnational corporations, the matter of economy within the contemporary art
context will organically grow as an intrinsic factor for all regions and their respective
publics. For instance, the local public of a given city that hosts a biennial or similarly
large scale exhibition will undoubtedly feel the effects—namely, the monetary
benefits—of doing so. However, does this simple fact in any way conflate the
trajectories of curatorial intent, and the inclusion or exclusion of certain artists and
projects simply based upon their backgrounds? This inherent connection between the
curatorial demands within the vacuum of the exhibition, and the more rigid and
pragmatic socio-economic expectations of the host environment, is a difficult
reconciliation to come by. However, documenta has certainly become not a solution
to these still developing questions, but a forum that gives a home to the actual process
of grappling with this problematic. Since its inception in 1955 in a burnt museum in
postwar Germany, documenta has become a powerful force in the contemporary art
world today, uniting different cultures, ideas, belief systems, and even socio-
economic agendas, every five years. The fact that Germany has been able to sustain
such a huge cultural endeavor (be it with the appropriate sources of governmental and
corporate funding, of course) as well as maintain the interest of the critical art world
is testament to the progressive artistic bedrock and disposition of the German public
back in the context of documenta 1’s inception, where
48
Hoffman, The Next Documenta, 49.
43
after twelve years of Nazi rule, other passionate voices within the slowly
forming public sphere of postwar Germany contested and often deeply
distrusted an explicit correlation between art, politics, and national
identity…it is striking to see how German critics, artists, art historians, and
cultural politicians identified the value system of ‘art’ as an indispensable tool
for reshaping and humanizing a unified German nation.
49
The art world definitively continues to welcome documenta as a highly relevant and
discursive exhibition, and Germany surely reaps the cultural and social benefits to
having hosted this event since the 1950s. Germany succeeded in joining the rest of
the European avant-garde by publicly engaging with an exhibition that was extremely
modern for its time—and was very well received, considering that more than 130,000
visitors attended the first documenta.
50
This surprisingly large number of viewers
only confirms the notion that the public of Germany was hungry for a new direction
in its cultural trajectory—as were the country’s surrounding neighbors. This public
consumption continued in the second documenta, which accelerated the cultural
growth of this movement—one poignantly private example of this looming public
inertia is the experience of artist Gerhard Richter, who viewed the paintings of
Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana at documenta 2 as a revelation and it “was the
exposure to these abstract paintings that strengthened his resolve to leave the GDR,
which he did in 1961.”
51
This influence that art and visual culture has upon members
of the public and local sphere of a host city shows precisely how networks of
communication and migration have always been subtly affected by art. With the
49
Eckmann, “Ruptures and Continuities,” 52.
50
documenta Archiv for the Art of the 20
th
and 21
st
Centuries. “documenta 1-Facts
and Figures,” documenta Archiv, http://documentaarchiv.stadtkassel.de/miniwebs/doc
umenta archiv_e/08196/index.html.
51
Barron, “Blurred Boundaries,” 17.
44
advent of greater technology and travel mechanisms, this condition is unlikely to
diminish in our information and travel hungry society.
Further, documenta 1 has contributed to the inspiration and birth of today’s
Prospect.1—a uniquely traumatic context in its own right, springing forth new
possible channels of exploring the potentials of contemporary art in modern cultural
diplomacy. Although the future of Prospect.1 is currently incalculable, the curatorial
intentions of this biennial directly relates to documenta 1’s role as a regenerative tool
and this intuitive, foundational concept will hopefully inform its development, what
ever this may end up being. With New Orleans already a destination city, the artistic
resources that Prospect.1 embodies will ideally only contribute to the socio-economic
regeneration of this region.
As the globe moves closer towards globalization, cultural diplomacy will
become increasingly important to every socio-economic orbit. Compartmentalized
sectors of social thought such as politics, economics, science, history, political
science, and fine art will likely experience ongoing syntheses in their conceptual and
discursive frameworks. As such, the evolution of newfangled and unprecedented
trajectories of communication, as well as the categorical fading of hard and soft
borders on the planet, will likely play relevant roles in the perception of art within
cultural diplomacy. documenta 1 may have been the gateway to a new movement of
art as a tool for cultural diplomacy, while the intense proliferation of biennials today
mark the contemporary art world’s desire to investigate this very notion. Ultimately,
investigation and process may be the most valuable and appropriate objective in a
post-capital and post 9/11 global society. Perhaps continuing the exploration of
45
artistic precedents as socially regenerative mechanisms will dutifully inform the
growing transnational and transcultural problematics of the globe and reinforce the
proliferating essentiality of critical cultural diplomacy.
46
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Constant, Linda
(author)
Core Title
Art and cultural diplomacy in the international exhibition: documenta 1 and Prospect.1
School
School of Fine Arts
Degree
Master of Public Art Studies
Degree Program
Public Art Studies
Publication Date
05/11/2009
Defense Date
03/16/2009
Publisher
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Tag
art,cultural diplomacy,documenta,Germany,Globalization,New Orleans,OAI-PMH Harvest,prospect.1,public art
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