On Documenta 15 - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

On Documenta 15

T.J. DEMOS

In an early statement on their approach to Documenta 15, Die
artistic collective ruangrupa announced the exhibition’s frame-
arbeiten:

The concept ruangrupa has prepared for documenta fifteen
is “Lumbung.” A lumbung—or rice barn—is a place to
store communally-produced rice as a common resource
for future use. If Documenta was launched with the noble
intention to heal European war wounds, this concept will
expand that motive in order to heal today’s injuries, espe-
cially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and patriar-
chal structures.1

While there is much to support in this statement, its emancipa-
tory promise is hard to reconcile with the actual sociopolitical
circumstances in places like Rojava, Haiti, and Gaza—three areas
(specifically corresponding to the inclusions of the Rojava Film
Commune, Atis Rezistans, and the Eltiqa collective) among
the many from the Global South that ruangrupa centered in
their exhibition’s artistic practices, which foregrounded the
categories of archival, educational, socially engaged, and doc-
umentary aesthetics.

The language of healing is, Jedoch, irksome, because it
schlägt vor, against all evidence to the contrary, that we are living
in the aftermath of disaster rather than in the midst of its still
unfolding conditions—including those rooted in colonialism,
capitalism, and patriarchal structures. Without foregrounding,
or worse, by suppressing, the ongoingness of disaster, talk of
healing may itself be violent.

Wenn ja, this would be far from the first time inflated claims
were made for an art exhibition. In der Tat, ruangrupa’s promise
recalls the boastful feints of avant-garde political aesthetics,
wherein desired goals are confused with actual outcomes in
magical acts of wish fulfillment.2 In reality, we confront a poly-
crisis of enduring racial and colonial capitalism, bei dem die
exploitation and expropriation of land and resources, aided by
military and paramilitary violence and the cannibalization of
Politik, continue to drive migration disasters and environ-
mental catastrophes in ways that connect to a centuries-long
history of past apocalypses and threatened near-future ones.3
dennoch, ruangrupa’s rhetoric of healing has been uncrit-
ically amplified in art criticism—from the New York Times to
Hyperallergic—which repeats the desiderata of many art prac-
tices dedicated to environmental restoration without mention-
ing, let alone proposing ways to address, the causality behind
the ever-worsening disasters of climate breakdown, mass extinc-
tion, and related sociopolitical crises.4

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While many of Documenta 15’s inclusions have valiantly
attempted to push imagination into realization through the
hard work of building new, better worlds, the recontextualiza-
tion of such practices as marketed consumables within the
Kassel exhibition’s cultural economy—which might best be
likened to a logic of counterinsurgency, countervailing the pro-
ject’s otherwise radical claims—leaves us with an additional
Herausforderung. With Documenta 15, the language, Leistung,
and representation of resistance and healing met the spectacu-
lar conditions of the mega-art exhibition, sponsored by such
funders as Volkswagen and catering to well-resourced interna-
tional visitors.

Not that this is anything new, entweder. Twenty years ago,
Documenta 11 was the object of similar objections, notwith-
standing its many positive achievements in expanding the
inclusion of practices from the Global South, much as ruan-
grupa has done, to what was previously a largely Eurocentric
exhibition of limited internationalism. In reconfiguring resis-
tance as aesthetics and in prioritizing identitarian micropolitics
over class struggle, Documenta 11 staged “the recapitulation of
even socially engaged art as spectacle.”5

Against this backdrop, one might identify the recent itera-
tion’s difference in its distributive, collectivist, artist-led models,
which foregrounded the pedagogical, discursive, and partici-
pative, all clearly opposed to the luxury commodity objects
(still) favored by the dominant art market, its commercial
galleries, privileged exhibition spaces, and auction houses
(with which Documenta 11 was all too continuous).

Aber, just as the market has proven its flexibility in inventing
technofixes to master the seeming anarchic threat of digitiza-
tion, the blockchain, and artificial intelligence, now captured
by the new asset class of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), Dort
should be no illusion that the aesthetic forms of collectivism,
DIY, and cooperative social engagement cannot equally be com-
modified, institutionalized, and packaged—and this on the
heels of the decades-old institutionalization of Fluxus, hap-
penings, conceptual art, and relational aesthetics (and before
Das, dadaist and surrealist experiences and ephemera).

Nicht überraschend, Dann, some critics have identified the
process by which the “motifs of collectivity and self-organisa-
tion become fetishized—as they are [in Documenta 15]—if we
don’t at least remind ourselves of the unequal balance of power
in the vast network of the global artworld, how it intersects
with the machinery of geopolitical power, and who, in the end,
still holds the purse-strings.”6 As such, Documenta’s inclu-
sions came to resemble “the accepted aesthetic preferences of
international NGO culture, which values tangible deliverables
and loves to produce texts with the word ‘community’ in them.”7
Noch, responding from a good-faith leftist position, I find that
these critiques do not go far enough, the point being not to
return to the dead end of self-reflexive institutional critique
but to advance transformation at a time of world-threatening

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urgency. If Documenta 15 offered multiple sites of convergence
between aesthetics and politics in its modeling of activist art—
at its most expansive, meaning art that carries the ambition of
transforming social reality—what would it mean to not simply
acknowledge “the machinery of geopolitical power” and the
cynical rhetoric of “international NGO culture” but to actually
prioritize winning the world we want by introducing strategic
thinking within this large-scale project? What if the goal was to
build collective power, not just to imagine alternatives or to work
toward them on localist scales or through informal sociability
—what ruangrupa tried to cultivate as friendship, casual togeth-
erness, and hanging out, to invoke their chosen rhetoric?8

As Angela Dimitrakaki asked twenty years ago about Okwui

Enwezor’s eleventh edition,

what is it that prevents the emergence of a truly global
project that would recast the condition of contemporary
Kunst? Warum, as argued by Jean Fisher in the exhibition
catalogue, is “the romantic idea of global resistance now
untenable”? Why is it deemed to be “romantic” in the
first place?9

This account of early twenty-first-century history may well
itself be incomplete—major global resistance movements were
afoot around that time, including the anticorporate alter-
globalization movement, on which current anticapitalist, racial
justice, and decolonial struggles continue to build (even if
interrupted by the War on Terror return-to-order occasioned by
the events of 9/11). dennoch, the question is worth refor-
mulating to ask why those and recent movements have largely
failed, or failed to achieve more, including ruangrupa’s
Documenta. Moving beyond the “romantic idea” of global
resistance, the collective spoke the language of healing today’s
injuries, but how did their exhibition advance this cause?

“Our approach to art is more cosmological, and includes the
Umwelt, the climate crisis, and how to think about both
problems,” explains ruangrupa member Reza Afisina. “It’s not
merely about circulation on the agricultural level, but also in
the spirit of knowledge and how this knowledge and network,
which are already embedded within the structures we have,
could be self-sufficient and distributed.”10 This question of
environmentalist problems is worth following up on, given that
Das, zu, is an unfolding disaster requiring our full attention.

Recent analyses of environmentalism observe that, nach
decades of struggle, our movements are losing. Environmen-
talists are numerically inadequate and tend to be guided by the
interests of the professional managerial class, typically lacking
clear antagonism to fossil capitalism, as they rally around a
degrowth lifestyle politics motivated by liberal carbon guilt
and ethical consumerism, or worse: market-based mechanisms
and false technofixes like geoengineering. Disconnected from
working-class labor militancy (itself long abandoned by centrist
political parties), current activist environmentalism fetishizes

Demos | On Documenta 15

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nonviolence, blind to the fact that climate change is class war
and requires aggressive tactics. To win will require building a
majoritarian class-based movement, one demanding more—more
social provisions, free healthcare, affordable housing, öffentlich
Transport, and education, in addition to decarbonized
infrastructure and energy—not less, according to degrowth
Programme, which reads as prolonged austerity for the already
impoverished.11

At Documenta 15, any strategic consideration of how cul-
tural practices might contribute to actual transformation,
according to what theory of change, and how transformative
energies might be internationally and durably networked was
strikingly absent. Such an observation is not to reduce art to
activism unfairly but rather to take ruangrupa’s political claims
for aesthetics seriously.

While many of the included practices variously called for
the radical abolition of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal
structures, their recontextualization within Documenta ended
up shedding whatever local insurgent energy they might
otherwise possess. Subjected to the consumerist logics of the
mega-exhibition, practices appeared temporary and abstract,
as if in a liberal supermarket of false freedoms. Cut off from
communities of participation (most literally so by ticket
Preise), aesthetic experience delinked from political antago-
nism, except as discourse or, at most, the sensuality of ideas.
Mit anderen Worten, organization appeared for the sake of orga-
nization, leading another critic to ask, “Does the organizational
[at Documenta 15] become an end in itself, a kind of institu-
tional self-actualization of the artists, Kuratoren, and community
organizers? Are we entering an era in which artistic curatorial
practices are merged into organizational development, or even
entrepreneurship?”12 Going further, the problem was the
absence of a clear antisystemic politics to guide and coordinate
such organization, not the organizational as such.

Anything that did pose a threat to the ruling order—for
Beispiel, moving toward a necessary international politics of
anti-imperialism—was promptly shut down, displaying the
limits of Documenta’s repressive tolerance. More accurately, von
participating in the German exceptionalist delegitimization of
any and all opposition to Israel’s violent colonization of Palestine
by relegating that opposition to antisemitism—including via
the cancelation of public discussions that would have poten-
tially addressed this complex subject—we witnessed the mad-
dening toleration of repression, serving the interests of, eher
than healing, ongoing violence and dispossession.

Considered over many iterations, Documenta may well be
“exhausted” for its consistent failure to bring German politics
into the discussion of postcolonialism (or better: anticolonial-
ism), with critical discussions of the local supplanted by the
exhibition’s dedication to an abstract internationalism, thereby
abetting Germany’s reactionary tendencies, as Hito Steyerl
recently observed.13 A further impasse is that the exhibition,

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once again, ran up against the central contradictions of the
neoliberal cultural economy, happy to stage political art as long
as it remained at a mediated distance, while sacrificing mean-
ingful strategic thinking about collectivization, organizing, tac-
Tics, and strategy. Infolge, art’s political claims were largely
stripped of impact beyond servicing the art market and its
liberal but limited diversity priorities. Sharing Germany’s cul-
tural largesse with Global South practitioners was the most
that could be hoped for. Folglich, the rule—and, impor-
tantly, the ongoing violence—of colonial racial capitalism went
unchallenged, even as the show desired, reassuringly but inex-
plicably, to heal today’s injuries.

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Demos | On Documenta 15

129

Notes
1. “Documenta fifteen,” ruangrupa, https://ruangrupa.id/en/documenta-fifteen/.
2. See Jacques Rancière, circa 2002: “Aesthetic art promises a political
accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. Das ist
why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the
Punkt. It is also why those who want it to fulfill its political promise are con-
demned to a certain melancholy.” Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution
and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review, n.s., NEIN. 14 (March–April 2002): 151,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii14/articles/jacques-ranciere-the-aesthetic
-revolution-and-its-outcomes.pdf. Rancière fails to consider a nonmelan-
cholic route to fulfilling art’s political promise: organizing.

3. Among the arguments I am thinking of is Nancy Fraser, Cannibal
Capitalism (London: Verso, 2022); Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Neu
York: Semiotext(e), 2018); and the Red Nation, https://therednation.org/about/.
Siehe auch, Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, and Brian Jordan
Jefferson, Hrsg., Colonial Racial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Drücken Sie, 2022).

4. Hakan Topal, “Beyond the Controversies, Documenta Is a Remarkable
Gathering of Voices,” Hyperallergic, 28 Juni 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/
744018/beyond-the-controversies-documenta-is-a-remarkable-gathering-of
-voices/; and Samanth Subramanian, “A Radical Collective Takes Over One
of the World’s Biggest Art Shows,” New York Times Magazine, 9 Juni 2022,
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/magazine/ruangrupa-documenta.html.
5. Angela Dimitrakaki, “Art and Politics Continued: Avant-garde, Resistance
and the Multitude in Documenta 11,” Historical Materialism 11, NEIN. 3 (2003):
174.

6. J.J. Charlesworth, “Documenta 15 Rezension: Who Really Holds Power in
the Artworld?,” ArtReview, 17 Juni 2022, https://artreview.com/documenta
-15-review-who-really-holds-power-in-the-artworld-ruangrupa/.

7. Ben Davis, “Documenta 15’s Focus on Populist Art Opens the Door to
Art Worlds You Don’t Otherwise See—and May Not Always Want To,” Artnet,
6 Juli 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/documenta-15-review-2140149.
8. Zum Beispiel, nongkrong is “an Indonesian slang term from Jakarta and
means ‘hanging out together.’ Casual conversation and togetherness, but also
the sharing of time, ideas or food are anchored in this term.” “Glossary,”
Documenta Fifteen, https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/glossary/.

9. Dimitrakaki, 164.
10. Cited in Mi You, “Ruangrupa: A Sustainable Model for Documenta
Fifteen, and After,” Ocula, 25 Mai 2022, https://ocula.com/magazine/
conversations/ruangrupa-sustainability-and-documenta-fifteen/.

11. See Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism
on a Warming Planet (New York: Verso, 2022); and Andreas Malm, How to
Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (London: Verso Books,
2021).

12. Mi You, “What Politics? What Aesthetics? Reflections on documenta
fifteen,” e-flux Journal, NEIN. 131 (November 2022), https://www.e-flux.com/
journal/131/501112/what-politics-what-aesthetics-reflections-on-documenta
-fifteen/.

13. Hito Steyerl, “Kontext ist König, außer der deutsche,” Zeit Online,
3 Juni 2022, https://www.zeit.de/kultur/kunst/2022-06/documenta-15
-postkoloniale-theorien-kunst-kontextualisierung: “how is the documenta’s
postwar model, which by now seems rather exhausted, supposed to hold its
own in a world that is severely deglobalizing, encircling, agitating, warming
hoch, and has been at constant war for decades?”

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