The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
During the requisite three days recommended to view Documenta- the mega international contemporary art event that occurs every five years in Kassel, Germany-I was chastened into thinking that here in Australia we are inured to pleasure. Seemingly far removed from catastrophic world happenings and in denial of fully appreciating the fall-out from major genocide, we may not register the moral and ideological pressures on artists living elsewhere.
The political under-pinning of much of the multi-media work presented at this year ' s event, where aesthetics played a secondary role to the documentary approach, is among the overwhelming impressions with which I was left . Very little humour registered in this series of installations and groups of artists ' works. The urgency in expressing global uncertainty- the violent disruption of individual lives through war, the surveillance and tracking of peoples , the marked economic dichotomy between affluent communities with those branded by poverty, were obvious themes. Time and time again, the artists ' imagery featured physical barriers, confinement and other indications of an erosion of human rights. One could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the activism of much 1970's art endeavour was being replayed, and not necessarily through the aid of advanced computer technology and new tools of expression.
Even the open-ended projects, which opted to reveal the corpus of an artist through studio presentations rather than by a series of ' finished' statements, were symptomatic of the messy business of creative experimentation and of 'work in progress'. This lack of aesthetic closure is obviously a legacy of postmodernism, familiar to us now, and indeed one could interpret most of the 'studios ' as reflections of a 'bankrupt modernity '... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline