Jordan, et al,
I've probably read too many posts before sending one back to the list.
Hence a mix of incomplete if related thoughts.
I'll try to clarify, for myself as well as the rest.
My post was generally an offshoot of the image/urban thread. I was
hoping to bring together some of the issues of politically critical and
resistant/activist praxes within the context of (respectively) the
urban, the image, and finally the documenta. This because this documenta
serves several roles between/as the image and the urban. The event
seeks by turns to observe or else to actualise urban/imagistic
situations. In the latter case, it becomes most apparent where other
such
systems respond. Souvenir culture, which is always
present at festival-like events, becomes such a case here.
My concern is where the vast variety of strategies at play, whether on
the part
of the artists, curators, sponsors, or visitors, ultimately fall into an
oppositional logic that separates an us from a them; creates a dichotomy
(between private and public..) that abstracts and reduces the
possibilities of action with or within. Strategies that are not just
critical but
confontational of their milieu require greater independance. Be they of
an avant- or arriere-garde variety, they suggest militant or guerrilla
action but only rarely effect it. The pieces by Hans Haacke on the
parcours, for example, are inflammatory to Philip de Montebello and
funny to a leftwards-leaning art public and ultimately still submissive
to funding from someone. I have always enjoyed his work so much, but
wondered what happens when he has no more feeding hands to bite,
theoretically or practically.
The documenta logo and poster become involved here inasmuch as they are
iconic of aspirations, inasmuch as they desire opposition. The souvenir
poster then delivers that opposition but maybe in a problematic way.
Here is my simplistic reading: the dx logo as a self-negation; a
negation of the authority that has grown into documenta's name and
history; a problematization of logos as reduced formal carriers of
meaning, ideology, consumable product. The red x serves to de-identify
the event as singular voice, a singular image of contemporary art, of
the city itself, or of documenta as an institution. Hence the logo is
straightforwardly logo-like (flat,
two-tone, instantly recognizable from the Autobahn to the U-Bahn) and
yet
impossibly or negatively so. Likewise function David's open goals of
engaging the event, (an event within the stasis of exhibition space),
into discourse with its own history as well as with urbanity in local
geographic and other new mediated spheres. These aspects dissolve the
spatial, material and authoritative boundaries of documenta just as they
multiply the membership of
participants (as I could be said to now be of the documenta). Still the
documenta is
a thing of authority, of the new Germany, of curatorship, and last but
not least of Capital. It is also primarily located within the art-ghetto
of the parcours, which Kasselers recognize as such and can so digest,
turn on or off with their feet. Spatially, it expands the realm within
which the art-goer expects art (from the white box out into the parcours
as well as some immaterial presences), but remains vulnerable to
becoming an object again, engulfed again within its host systems.
In "In Plato's Cave," Susan Sontag recounts a parable of
photographic appropriation in Jean-Luc Godard's "Les Carabiniers." The
main characters of the story, Michel-Ange and Ulysse, open suticases of
loot only to find them full of postcards ("Monuments, Departments
Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art,
and other clasified treasures from around the globe"). This is a classic
junction of pictures (as a visual component of image-making) with the
urban. Paris is the Eiffel Tower. San Francisco is the Golden Gate
Bridge (or TransAmerica). Berlin is... NOT the TV-Tower, because it was
built by the Socialists. Kassel is the documenta, or at least its logo.
Where the logo seeks to divert
its role and capacity to serve as an index of possession, it is easily
subject to reappropriation within its host system (consumption, art
tourism,
urban-festival-economy). Where one seeks to produce against and
yet within a system of capital production, using that system's tools
with ambiguity, then it is open to being corrected by that system. Put
bluntly, the logo seems to have sought to problematize one aspect of
image making in documenta's urbanistic program. But just as there are
many limits to the urban networks of the event itself , so is it also
true of the image-component. Where the "real" documenta poster poses a
problem, the souvenir complex has a quick solution.
The comment about awaiting our position refers to the fact that the
souvenir poster is even more loaded with ambiguity than the original. It
is neither clearly laughing with nor at anti-authoritative aspirations
that may be latent in the dx. It is, I think, also not clearly an
UNofficial product. In this sense, it is an example of how the image can
be projected upon anew. Hence it is also awaiting a new projection of
meaning. I hope this has articulated the problem a little more.
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documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997
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