In the months leading up to the opening of Documenta 11 -- the prestigious exhibition of contemporary art that is staged every five years in Kassel, Germany -- the outlook was grim. Okwui Enwezor, the dashing and brainy Nigerian-born curator of this year's show, was deemed to have no eye for art. Politics was his thing. Documenta 11 would be preachy, arid, woodenly documentary, dreary with good intentions. Ever the pedant, Enwezor had organized four discursive "platforms" (most people would just call them symposia) leading up to the final exhibition in Kassel. Bearing such worthy titles as Democracy Unrealized; Experiments in Truth: Transitional Justice and the Process of Truth and Reconciliation; Creolite and Creolization; and Under Seige: Four African Cities, they were construed as the grisly foreplay to dry and theory-driven disappointment.
The glitterati believed its own scuttlebutt, and stayed away in droves. A friend of mine recounts the press previews -- the opening bell at Documenta usually resembles the chariot race scene of Ben-Hur -- and finding himself alone, with just 20 or 30 journalists, roving the massive halls of the Fridericianum, the exhibition's principal venue. Even by the public opening on June 8, the crowds were tame. The dealers had stayed home, and the wardrobe requirements were more Land's End than Gucci.
To the watchful eye, these were the signs that something very different was afoot. Indeed, walking the halls of the exhibition -- which this year spreads over five sites throughout the city -- one came to understand three things:
One: This is the least market-driven exhibition of this scale in memory.
Two: The show has more intellectual integrity and sincerity than any such exhibition I can think of. The installation of the work is intelligent, and one feels that one is in the presence of a consistent argument about art's role as witness and conscience. You may like it or not, but there's an idea here.
Three: Enwezor and his team have cracked the Mighty Whitey mould that has prevailed in this sort of show. There is a distinct absence of established masters from the Western world: no Bruce Nauman, no Gerhard Richter, no Richard Serra. Instead, he is presenting a truly global event.
These are huge successes. Usually, at such an exhibition, one wanders from room to room trying to calculate the personal paybacks that resulted in the presence of this or that feeble, superfluous talent, or groaning at the autopilot canonization of the Big Boys. Here, there was no autopilot. For that, it is profoundly refreshing.
Discussion in the opening days centred around the question of politics and art. Had Enwezor hitched art to a social mandate, making it the weary packhorse of political science, or had he reinvigorated art's role in society by foregrounding its engagement with the problems besieging mankind?
For the record, I think the latter. But as time passes and the dust settles, something else emerges, something which, judging from the exhibition catalogue, appears to have been the farthest things from Enwezor's mind. This was an exhibition about storytelling.
From the conventional but deeply moving documentary on Rwandan genocide by Eyal Sivan, to the poetic video-triptych by Isaac Julian about emigrating from the Caribbean to Britain, to the 31-panel video installation by Lorna Simpson depicting a month in the life of a New York career woman, to the spectacular 13-part video work Nunavut (Our Land) by Igloolik Isuma Productions, which reclaims the Inuit oral-history tradition through electronic means -- these artists were telling us stories, often in ingenious new ways.
Touring the exhibition, one came upon darkened room after room of people huddling together and watching the flickering screens like listeners around a campfire. Our need for stories is a profound part of our humanity, and this show connects with that on a deep level.
In the Canadian art world, we can pride ourselves in having one of the greatest storytellers around: Jeff Wall. For three decades now, he has been creating finely crafted dramatic tableaux, featuring a variety of dramatis personae. While he develops these images the way one would a film -- with sets and actors and props and months of obsessive and elaborate planning -- he exhibits the resulting images in lightboxes, like bus-shelter advertising. A (literally) dazzling bit of dramatic imagining, his work for Documenta borrows a scene from literature -- from the prologue to Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, to be precise. Though he showed just one work, Wall seemed to set the stage for much of the narrative work in the exhibition.
Wall presents the black protagonist in his basement hideout, brilliantly lit with 1,369 lightbulbs. In Ellison's story, these are charged with pirated electricity, siphoned off from Monopolated Light & Power. One of the army of the dispossessed to which this Documenta pays homage again and again, the invisible man has found a way to survive despite the authority of the state, or of big business. "Before . . . I lived in the darkness into which I was chased," Ellison wrote in 1947, "but now I see. I've illuminated the blackness of my invisibility -- and vice versa." The lightbulb is also the symbol of the idea, of ingenuity, the sign of the imagination. The protagonist, one senses, is also the artist in his studio, refashioning the world from the currents of information and capital around him. An underground hero.
In Western Deep (2002), the British artist Steve McQueen delivers us into another subterranean world. Through the lens of his camera, we are herded into the dark, tight little elevator cages like animals to the slaughterhouse, descending into one of South Africa's deepest gold mines, and seeing only what the occasional flashes of ambient light allow in this cramped and dangerous hell hole. Whether this was art or documentary seemed rather an effete question. The content of the experience was more interesting than the need to categorize it.
If McQueen's work has the feeling of a descent into Hades, Allan Sekula's epic work Fish Story (1987-1995), installed in a suite of rooms in a converted brewery building, has the breadth of a Homeric Odyssey. "Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea . . .," Homer wrote at the start of his great epic. "Launch out on his story, Muse, daugher of Zeus, start from where you will -- sing for our time too."
Sekula sings for our time, charting the living reality of the global economy as it plays itself out in the lives of the "maritime proletariat" from the Philippines to Gdansk to the ancient Roman port city of Minturno. We meet dockworkers and fishermen, longshoremen and pilots, battered by fate and the many headed hydra of global capitalism, which exploits human life as just another commodity to be extracted for profit. Alongside his 105 documentary images of man at sea, his 26 text panels provide a thread of narrative linking the sequence of images.
The American artist Raymond Pettibon, who numbers such literary figures as William Blake and James Joyce among his influences, uses the device of the kaleidoscopic cartoon, blown up to room-size, to deliver his stinging attack on contemporary American foreign policy and the nation's myopic approach to 9/11. Text and image are layered over top of each other in a rich compost of subversive humour. "Throw off your burkas!" exhorts one slogan beneath a curvaceous nude. "Our little George isn't allowed to play with war toys until he makes commander-in-chief" is inscribed below an evocative drawing of a lonely, petulant boy. Al-Qaeda's grand poobah appears above the inscription, "Is that really him? This is the now Laden. The new Osama Bin. Looking refreshed? Rested? Younger? A little work under the eyes? Or just more CIA doctoring?" Together, the words and pictures are so much more than the sum of their parts.
South African artist William Kentridge also uses animation -- moving images created through both drawing and erasure -- to create stories about industrialization, racial tension and the divided self. In his video installation Zeno Writing (2002), shadow puppets, drawings, text and music are blended together to create a moody, impressionistic atmosphere. In Kentridge's world, strange golems that look like walking oil rigs, and headless ladies and gentlemen with twigs erupting from their shoulders, stalk the blighted landscape. Edwardian chairs and settees dance around in tight little parlours. A ship evaporates into a puff of smoke, soldiers dash amid the hail of bullets in archival First World War film footage, and a mad typewriter, its keys all flailing in different directions, struggles to record the crazy mess of human experience. Kentridge creates a rich poetics, where lush visual pleasure and a sense of tragedy are intertwined.
The exhibition includes a great deal of classic documentary work, such as the Black Audio Film Collective's documentary on the 1985 Handsworth riots in the British Midlands, or David Goldblatt's photographs of apartheid in Boksburg, South Africa, taken in 1979 and 1980 (hung adjacent to Wall's work), or William Eggleston's images of nomadic poverty in the American Southwest, California and Mexico. But there are also a number of artists making films or photographs too subjective to be called straight documentary, while still partaking of the liberal spirit of the genre.
Zarina Bhimji's Out of Blue (2002) is the most striking example of this. A film about her native Uganda (she now lives in London), it moves us -- by virtue of her slow, hypnotic gaze -- over the mist-filled valleys of the countryside, scattered with little villages, into the city, where we see the prisons and the abandoned storefronts decimated in the aftermath of Idi Amin. We float like ghosts through the bombed out husk of Entebbe airport, hovering to watch a spider making its web, before finding ourselves in the cargo hold of a plane as it takes off down the cracked and rutted runway. As the broken line on the runway scrolls away from us, faster and faster, we flash back to the lush fields and fertile valleys. This closing sequence seems to carry in it all the sorrow of the contemporary African diaspora.
Stories are comforting, no matter how chilling. By having the world told to us, we experience a sense of security. Some order has been brought to bear. Perhaps this is why, at this historic moment in which we find ourselves, this show was so surprisingly satisfying.
Many people said that they found the show depressing, and in a way you can understand why. Walking through Documenta 11, you wade through the sorrows of the world, continent by beleaguered continent. But what I took from the experience was something different than despair. For all the bullying despots and hate-mongering warlords and brain-dead right-wing hawks out there on the loose, there are also the men and women of conscience, intelligence and high purpose who made these works, and told these tales. This exhibition showed us that, while the world may be a wicked place, our arsenal, too, is full.