Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas

Abstract

In both its inclusions and omissions, the selection policy for Documenta 7 constituted a symptomatic display of repressive tolerance, an intensified form of amnesia with regard to real historical conditions. It is not so much a question of the absence of individual artists (although one can certainly speculate about the omission of political artists such as Victor Burgin, Darcy Lange, and Steve Willats from the otherwise virtually complete repetition of exhibitors that Rudi Fuchs, Documenta's Artistic Director, had shown at his home base at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven). It is, rather, the absence of perspective, methodological or historical-not to mention critical or politicalthat gave the show its fundamental sense of pompous and pretentious obsolescence. It is what one might have found at a turn-of-the-century salon, when the greedy anxiety of a ruling class to maintain its position dimmed critical perception. This absence of perspective was, of course, rationalized as liberalism, pretending, as it did, to offer absolute freedom to the work of art understood as an autonomous, ahistorical entity, a product of the artist seen as the last practitioner of distinct individuality.1 Thus, a perspective which would attempt to encompass the most productive investigations of the function of visual representation within contemporary culture was replaced by a desperate attempt to reestablish the hegemony of esoteric, elitist modernist high culture. And this occurs just at that moment when the inadequacy of this framework has been made most apparent, having become the central object of contestation in art history, critical theory, semiology, and feminist theory alike. The fifth and most important in the series of Documenta exhibitionsorganized by Harald Szeemann in 1972had at least begun to question a general focus on high art. Therefore, ten years later, one might have expected from a team of highly qualified curators2 a slightly more complex organizing