The days were hot. West Berlin was walled in, but the loopholes to the West had become significantly larger with the transit agreement. That was just six months old when we set off for Kassel early in the morning at the beginning of July 1972. Autobahn to Braunschweig, then left and onto the other Autobahn. The fastest way. At that time in Kassel you could still find parking spaces in the middle of the city; A little later we saw that some people parked their car directly behind the Fridericianum.
So Documenta. The fifth edition, abbreviated to “d5” everywhere. That’s what it says on the catalogue, which is actually not a book, but a file. It started at the Fridericianum; where it always starts. The second exhibition location, the Neue Galerie, was scheduled for later hours. Never again has the Documenta been so manageable in terms of the number of locations.
On the other hand, the number of artists, works of art and other objects, and above all the themes, was not manageable. “Questioning reality – visual worlds today” was the double title that Harald Szeemann had given the d5.
The Swiss curator, who had practically invented the “exhibition maker” as an independent profession and, as a one-man operation with the clever name “Agency for Intellectual Guest Work”, achieved a head start that none of his imitators could catch up with, was resigned to his post as a result of a crisis came. The men’s group, which had been dominating up to that point and was growing in numbers, simply couldn’t cope with such a large exhibition.
For the first time, a “Secretary General” was appointed who looked for a team, but kept the decision and responsibility in his person. Szeemann, born in 1933, had become widely known in 1968 with the packaging of the Bern Kunsthalle, which he managed, by Christo and thanks to his exhibition “When Attitude Becomes Form” the following year, he had an excellent reputation in the art scene.
So Szeemann was the man to lead the Documenta, which was always plagued by financing problems, into the period “after 1968”. The number of his employees appointed for individual subject areas brings together first-rate experts on the scene, from Johannes Cladders to Klaus Honnef; Kasper König was there as a “guest” (his brother Walther took care of the bookshop for the first time).
Bazon Brock was holding his “Visitors’ School” for the second time, and the advertising slogan “See better through documenta 5”, which one encountered everywhere, seemed to be aimed directly at preliminary didactic measures. Yes, please, it was 1972, the student movement was ebbing away, but it was only just beginning to have an impact on society as a whole. “Dare more democracy”, this historic phrase echoed everywhere.
Nevertheless, there was little talk of politics in Kassel, if memory is not deceptive. Rather, the political had nested in the aesthetic and burst open from within. The old concept of art was gone, simply gone. What Szeemann and his team showed was all sorts of things, including art; but also advertising, little pictures of the Madonna, magazine covers, kitsch, banknote design.
And for what absolutely could not be squeezed into categories such as painting, sculpture and so on, Szeemann found the catchy title of “Individual Mythologies”, including coffins and black magic. The boundaries between the areas were fluid.
The Documenta once saw itself as the “Museum of 100 Days”. Szeemann wanted to turn it into a “100-day event”, in an early concept paper even as a “walk-in event structure” for the whole city. That didn’t work. In general, the claim went further than the realization; but we knew that, the normal visitor didn’t know that at the time.
After all, there was enough to see and experience, including happening-like things like Ben Vautier’s banner “Art is superfluous” on the roof of the Fridericianum or the air bubble “Oasis No. 7” by the architect group Haus-Rucker Co. that was pulled out of the venerable museum also Panamarenko’s “airship”, which was just pushed into the largest hall.
The Fridericianum, which has not yet been restored, has retained the rugged charm of the war-damaged provisional. Mario Merz’s “Fibonacci Series” crawled up the whitewashed round staircase, Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman forced the visitor into claustrophobic confinement with their installations. The Bechers’ industrial photographs were surprising for the first time and were hardly recognized in their conceptual character.
Klaus Rinke circulated water through hoses as thick as an arm, Jannis Kounellis danced a ballerina, and the “Individual Mythologies” spread out under the sloping roof of the attic floor, as wondrous as they were whimsical. Joseph Beuys held consultation hours in his “Office for Direct Democracy” on the ground floor, the long-stemmed rose in the teacup. You can buy printed plastic bags. If only you had bought one.
In the Neue Galerie there was then the wealth of “image worlds” that the Documenta title meant. Large installations such as the “Musée d’Art Moderne. Département des Aigles” by Marcel Broodthaers, the “Mouse Museum” by Claes Oldenburg, outside in a tent the terrible rape scene “Five Car Stud” by Ed Kienholz. Inside, the aesthetic shock of the American hyperrealists, Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Richard Estes; Peter Ludwig, we read later, bought wholesale. The Documenta was also famous for this.
In the suite of rooms with political posters, advertising photos by Charles Wilp, banknotes, “Spiegel” covers and the “Image World and Piety” department, one learned that everything can be “image” or has long been “image”. Then, what was then innocently called “sculpture of the mentally ill”: If Adolf Wölfli’s cell in the Bern sanatorium were to be rebuilt today, in order to show the pictures he created over decades of isolation – true pictorial worlds! – to give the historical framework?
Szeemann’s method was one of radical lack of distance, and the visitor had no choice but to look just as distantly and absorb everything. Everything was taken equally seriously and together resulted in a cosmos of images.
The art of the socialist countries remained a blank space. Please, in 1972 the Cold War was still raging. Szeemann’s inquiries remained unsuccessful, including a very naive one in a letter to Erich Honecker: “It was a matter of course for the documenta management from day one that Socialist Realism would have to find its place at this documenta.”
He worked intensively on the legendary installation from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the “Court for the Lease Collection”, which, it was whispered at the time, should have been installed on the narrow plot of land behind the Fridericianum. As can be seen from the documents published many years later, the loan was rejected as a “national monument”. GDR painting then came to the documenta five years later, represented by the “Big Four” of the Leipzig School; the “state art trade of the GDR” had a hand in this. And Ludwig bought again.
One saw more at this Documenta, much more than could be taken in and remembered in one go. 180 artists and, if you take all the picture objects into account, several thousand exhibits. One would have liked to consult the catalogue.
However, in the form of a folder with two dozen interleaving pages for the individual chapters and departments, with a bright orange-red cover and designed by Ed Ruscha, it cost a whopping 65 Deutschmarks, which aroused some displeasure among visitors.
220,000 came, which was a lot for the time. However, anyone who had seen the Documenta and felt the repercussions soon realized how indispensable it was and would continue to be. I acquired my copy, today a treasure, later from a bookstall on Steinplatz.
Contrary to what one might assume today, the reviews of the documenta were subdued, often even clearly negative. “What is the actual topic of documenta 5?” the FAZ asked helplessly, and that was meant in a friendly way. Harald Szeemann, if he read the newspaper, must have let out his Homeric laughter.
Because the uncertainty, the avoidance of conceptual definition or, as the title says, the “questioning of reality” – that was precisely the topic of the d5. Everything found its place in the “image worlds”, art and non-art no longer differed, seen in this way. Your eyes opened. There has never been such a wonderful, eventful and insightful Documenta.
