PICTURE THIS: The Senegalese group Huit Facettes' J'ai Maintenant
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
ON TARGET: Indonesian Fiona Tan's Saint Sebastian
UNITED KINGDOM SUMMER PEARLS: London's architectural gems along the banks of the Thames
MUSIC: Europe's best pop and rock gatherings
BAGPIPES: The plaintive sounds of Scotland
SUBMARIUM: Journey to the bottom of the sea FESTIVALS: Fun in the sun in West Belfast
MORE ..
FRANCE and SWITZERLAND VULCANIA: Blow your top at France's volcano park
ART: Berthe Morisot, the unknown Impressionist
FESTIVALS: Aix-en-Provence has it all
ART: The Barbizon School painters come to life
ART: Take a stroll through medieval gardens of delight
MORE ..
SPAIN, PORTUGAL, ITALY and GREECE SALAMANCA: The city splashes out on culture
MUSIC: God's rock stars: the singing Greek monks
FOOD: Italy's unusual culinary delights
FILM: Great outdoor viewing in Rome
MORE ..
GERMANY and BENELUX HORTICULTURE: The world blossoms at Floriade
BRUGGE: Belgium's second city shines
ART: Berlin's homage to multiculturalism ART: The best of the world's artists on show at Documenta 11
DANCE: Czech twin ballerinos steal the show in Hamburg MORE ..
CENTRAL and EASTERN EUROPE ART: Yugoslavia's modern art museum is back
ART: A retrospective of Samizdat art and writing from the Communist bloc
GRAZ: Austria's little-known city of culture
MORE ..
THE NORDIC REGION DESIGN: Denmark celebrates Arne Jacobsen
MUSEUM: Get a blast from the past at Stalin World
STOCKHOLM: Welcome to the Venice of the North
MUSIC: Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes on tour MORE ..
PLUS LISTINGS: Other things to see and do in each region
This year's Documenta showcases art from around the world
In 1955 Arnold Bode, an artist and professor in Kassel, decided to try to "reconnect" what was then West Germany to the modern art world by staging a "Presentation of 20th Century Art." He founded a local art society and with its backing managed to pull together, in the city's still war-damaged Fridericianum Museum, an impressive sampler of the art that Hitler had branded degenerate: Picasso, Matisse, Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, Moore, Schlemmer and Beckmann.
At the time, Kassel was best known as the home of the brothers Grimm, court librarians who gathered their famous fairy tales from local legends. But Bode's exhibit was such a success that he staged a second one in 1959 and another in 1964, and his shows soon rivaled Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood as Kassel's claim to fame. That was the start of Documenta, now one of the most important contemporary art exhibits in Europe. In an art world surfeited with biennales and short on significant artists, Documenta is the only quinquennial, making its appearance in the now-renovated Fridericianum, and several other venues around town, every five years.
Since 1972 an international jury has chosen a single curator
for each exhibit, so that, for better or worse, Documenta shows
have been strongly and sometimes controversially marked by a
single personal viewpoint. The director of this year's Documenta
11, Nigerian-born poet, critic and freelance curator Okwui Enwezor,
has broken with that tradition by working with a team of six
co-curators. Together they have come up with an eclectic roster
of 116 international artists and groups who work in every conceivable
medium, from edibles to personal endoscopy.
Along with the doyenne of contemporary art, 91-year-old Franco-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, and a handful of such well-established names as photographer William Eggleston and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, the Documenta 11 list also includes Shirin Neshat, the Iranian photographer and video artist whose powerful and poetic images have won her well-deserved acclaim; Eyal Sivan, 38, an Israeli filmmaker whose works include documentaries on Adolph Eichmann (The Specialist) and Itsembatsemba: Rwanda One Genocide Later; Adrian Piper, 54, an American conceptual artist and professor of philosophy whose multimedia works focus on racism and xenophobia; Ryuji Miyamoto, a Japanese photographer known for his desolate black-and-white images of modern buildings in ruins; and "Eight Facets: Artistic and Cultural Dynamic," members of a Senegalese art project founded in 1996.
As usual with contemporary shows, visitors can also expect large installations, small concepts, assemblages of found objects, endless-loop videos, photo images reliant on captions for meaning and very little in the way of painting, drawing or sculpture. For those who'd like to add something a little more historic, the city's Wilhelmshöhe Castle, set in a vast park with a magnificent 200-m water-cascade staircase, offers Cranach, Dürer, Rubens, Van Dyck, Titian and Rembrandt.
Documenta 11, Kunsthalle Fridericianum and other venues,
Kassel, Germany •Open: June
8-Sept. 15 •Tickets: €10-€80,
season tickets €50-€80, group tickets €15-€12
•Phone:+49 (0)561 70 72
70 •Website:www.documenta.de
