Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Presenter: Terry Smith
204 Frick Fine Arts
For Documenta 15 in 2022, Jakarta-based, art activist, curatorial collective ruangrupa collectivized the artistic directorship among multiple similar collectives active in many parts of the world, mostly in the Global South, all of whom exhibited their locally based cultural activism. This generated a Documenta unlike any predecessors. New York Times critic Jason Farago worried that “The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition is Over. Maybe Forever,” and doubted that Documenta will “ever recover its aim of imagining the whole world in one show.” In contrast, Charles Esche, curator and long-term director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, welcomed the “lack of utopian or messianic symbols…of art that wants to fix the world or propose a new system of living,” and was fascinated, challenged, and inspired by art that, instead, “looks for how life can survive and thrive in the face of the hostility of a catastrophic economic and social world system,” making d15 feel like “one of the first art exhibitions of the 21st century.”
Catastrophe increases, not diminishes, the necessity for projective world picturing. What do these (mis)readings tell us about the different kinds, and scales, of world thinking that are in play today—in mega-exhibitions, in exhibitions of other kinds, in artmaking, and in the wider world?
Jason Farago, “The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition Is Over. Maybe Forever,” The New York Times (23 September 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/arts/design/documenta-15.html.
Charles Esche About Documenta 15, Facebook, August 7, 2022, https://museum.care/charles-esche-about-documenta-15/
Terry Smith, “Documenta 15, 2022: Collectivism and Controversy,” Artlink, July 11, 2022, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4983/documenta-15-2022-collectivism-and-controversy/