Our New Antiquity
"Our New Antiquity" by Richard Rhodes, Summer 2007, pp. 18-20
Roger M. Buergel, the artistic director of documenta 12, plays a nervy game with the press. During the lead-up to the massive contemporary-art exhibition to be held this summer in Kassel, Germany, he kept the names of the artists in the show to himself (and, presumably, the show’s curator, Ruth Noack). There was no list, no announcements, no expanding totals, only a teasing, confrontational silence. Asked at the first press conference about who was taking part, he offered two names: Ferran Adrià and Artur Zmijewski–a tongue-in-cheek, A-to-Z list. For the other names (including those of the included Canadians, Annie Pootoogook and Luis Jacob), we would have to wait.
What was Buergel up to? No one seemed to know. Certainly he wasn’t shy. Between press reports and official postings on the documenta 12 Web site, he left a noisy wake that pitted documenta against the rest of the art world. In a single sentence he dismissed “arch-conservative blockbuster exhibitions, the vacuousness of the art market, and hastily produced biennales.” His documenta would be different. The opening dates for the show appeared for a while to be in conflict with the annual art fair Art Basel, which would have been truly radical. It was as if Buergel was presenting a defining choice: either go to “vacuous” Basel, or go to documenta—the better, smarter place.
Buergel’s selection to head documenta 12, succeeding Okwui Enwezor, Catherine David and Jan Hoet, the directors of the previous three exhibitions, had been a surprise. One newspaper called him “the curator whom even people in the know hardly know.” Yet the 44-year-old Berlin-born, Vienna-based curator—once also the personal assistant to the Actionist Hermann Nitsch—seemed to come with an aptitude for raising hackles. His appointment was still fresh when Jerry Saltz, then the senior art critic of the Village Voice, encountered him at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Saltz was quick to put his reservations into print: “If a comment made over dinner in Venice by its curator, Roger Buergel, is any indication, Documenta could be truly bad.” Saltz had been reacting to a lacklustre Arsenale show and the mire of biennale art culture when he offered the opinion that “After all, big exhibitions are about the art.” In response, “Buergel narrowed his eyes and sternly countered, ‘No. Exhibitions are about ideas.’” For Saltz, dinner was over: “Ennui filled my heart as I stood up and excused myself.”
Buergel has shown a talent for such minor clash-ofcivilization moments. In his remarks to a German newspaper at the end of April, he could be seen once again drawing a line in the sand that set documenta 12 against its competition. “The curatorial model that exists today is a covert neoliberal model,” he said, painting other shows and other curators as pawns of global capitalism and making documenta sound like it might be an extension of Venezuelan foreign policy. With Buergel’s language of doctrinaire leftism and his attitude of vivid carelessness about any art other than that serving his own immediate use (Noack winningly calls him “Rogue-r”), it is little wonder that low expectations hover over the exhibition, or that there might be a flurry of changed travel plans for the week of June 16. Who wants documenta revamped as Manifesta?
With characteristic immodesty, Buergel has claimed that unless documenta can shape contemporary art for the next 20 or 30 years, it’s dead. Other directors have settled for the allotted five years, but Buergel is more ambitious. He sees himself as a maker of history, and he has a tendency to put his thoughts into epochal language: “The Documenta 12 is confronted with western middle classes, who are becoming more reactionary and reactive or indeed more pro-active and curious. The way to deal with this situation is closely linked, in my eyes, with a basic attitude towards crisis in general.” It is a scene steeped in high abstraction. Yet behind the politicized concepts is what might turn out to be the saving grace for the exhibition: Buergel’s passion for aesthetic experience as the basis for social progress. He would have aesthetics save the world. “Aesthetic experiences do not offer us a poor foothold,” he states, “they teach us how to endure tension and complexity. And they can teach us how to utilise the desire which stems from the realisation that this bottomless expanse of aesthetic experience is again holding all our expectations.”
The word “all” has a totalitarian edge, but Buergel’s language is consistent with the intersecting “leitmotifs” that he has set out for documenta 12. Each comes posed as a question: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? What is to be done? The latter concerns education. The second engages what Buergel calls “the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being.” Both are directed, by way of art, to the current state of human and global conditions as well as the necessity of a creative understanding of them. The first question is more specific, and also telling. It frames Buergel’s imaginative space, his starting point, his pool of terms and concepts. They are embedded in the word “modernity,” which, in typical fashion, he throws into crisis by putting it into a contrary coupling with “antiquity.”
Where are we in this ambiguous construction of opposites? Buergel writes, “…no one really knows if modernity is dead or alive. It seems to be in ruins…Still, people’s imaginations are full of modernity’s visions and forms (and I mean not only Bauhaus but also arch-modernist mind-sets transformed into contemporary catchwords like ‘identity’ or ‘culture’). In short, it seems that we are both outside and inside modernity, both repelled by its deadly violence and seduced by its most immodest aspiration or potential: that there might, after all, be a common planetary horizon for all the living and the dead.” This vision of a shared, ageless horizon recasts modernity as a fallen golden age, a legendary realm where Marx, Engels and the avant-garde coexist with the shining age of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” that in the 18th century, on the cusp of the modern era, Johann Joachim Winckelmann credited to classical Greece. Buergel is mixing two Arcadias here, and he presents a question that pulls in both their respective directions. One reading asks us to see modernity as a past worthy of reclaiming. The other asks us to consider modernity beyond recall and locates us in its ruins, left with bare life and the future.
This is lovely structuring that embodies his “common planetary horizon for all the living and the dead.” We should give Buergel his due; he knows his epochal space. Carping press aside, he has set out complex, interesting terms for apprehending contemporary art. The question that remains, however, is whether his documenta—which will have just opened when you read this—can match them. It is a question of whether we will be seeing stranded radicalism and nostalgia for modernism in Kassel, or whether we will see the beginnings of the unwritten space of the new antiquity. Let’s hope Buergel has taken himself seriously. The success of his documenta will not hinge on our seeing an assembly of deliberations on the honours and horrors of modernism or absurdist manoeuvres linked to its passing into history. It will be about discovering the terms of the new antiquity and the ever-more-present immersion into bare life that lies on the other side of modernity. The antique has traditionally served as the platform for utopian futures. A new antiquity should mean a staging ground for new versions of those bright futures. Let documenta show that.
For the record, this is where a list of artists would help.
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