Documenta IX, Body Language

Before the opening, expectations ran high. This, everybody supposed, would be a revisionary Documenta, a call to order after the decadence of the past. Replacing the extravaganzas of the 80s would be an event with fewer artists and more rigorous section. Grand theories - like 'internationalism' for Rudi Fuchs at Documenta VIII, or the confluence of art, design and architecture for Manfred Schneckenburger at Documenta VIII - would no longer be touted. Instead, thee would be evidence of degree of collaboration with artists that distinguished Jan Hoet's exhibitions at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent. News that Hoet was collaborating with Denys Zacharopoulos and Pier Luigi Tazzi only confirmed these first impressions. Each could have made a Documenta of his own. Together, perhaps, they would be even stronger, Zacharopoulos's polymath, polyglot rigour offsetting Tazzi's high poetry. Better still, they had things in common. In particular, both championed artists, speaking for and through them, and were more involved with a new generation of Europeans than with their American counterparts. This suggested the possibility of a Documenta more influenced by personal partisanship than by market forces or national lobbying, an event which would make history as much by exclusion as inclusion. Judging by the swift reaction of the German and American press, it might be thought that Hoet had failed. (In the Village Voice Kim Levin described the event as "the grand fiasco that is this ninth Documenta"). But how much did German bile have to do with the fact that Documenta lacked a single German curator? (Indeed, Hoet must have seemed even more determined not to choose one when he announced that the fourth of his team was to be Bart de Baere, a colleague at his museum in Ghent). And did American reactions stem from Hoet's determination to make Documenta independent of market forces and gallery interference, publicly attacking Manfred Schneckenburger for having capitulated to both with Documenta VIII? Until 1992, Hoet's international reputation depended on two factors: first, his promotion of Belgian artists - 12 were chosen for Documenta, 11 of whom accepted - and secondly, an independent streak verging on sheer cussedness. (While expressing confidence in the idea of the museum at the end of the 20th Century, for exempla, he struggled to bypass museums, as in Cambres d'amis, which took place in homes all over Ghent.)

But one main aspect of Hoet's cussedness is his view of art itself. In a tower at the centre of Documenta he installed works he regarded as exemplary: David's The Death of Mara L Gauguin's E Haere oe i hia, Ensors Self-Portrait with a Flowered Hat, Giacometti's Le Nez, Newman's The Moment, Beuys' Wirtschaftswerke, an untitled Rene Daniels painting from 1987 and White Figure by James Lee Byars. From grotesque (Ensor) to spirituality (Byars), escapism (Gauguin) to confrontation (David), from beginnings (Newman) to endings (Representative of Death, Jean Genet called The Nose)... Hoet's intention was to examine the avant-garde. Yet it is characteristic of him to make even a tiny exhibition into a reflection on exhibitions in general. The melancholy Daniels painting deals with the gallery itself, for example. Three walls of paintings, looking as if they are cut out of blue paper, seem wafer-thin against the black background, the 'works' mere slices of light, one in the form of a candle. Hoet described his tower manifesto as 'a continuous argument between art and life'. This picture would be better described as a running battle between art and death: a candle running its course. Sadly, it was the last painting by Daniels, who has been suffering from the effects of a stroke since 1987. Like Beuys's installation, it allegorises the artist's life, and although Hoet expressed doubts about its inclusion looking like sympathy, his decision to use it comes as no surprise. After all, Hoet's great gift is for a reading of art which blends literalism and storytelling. His critical approach is not historical, nor even analytical. Instead, he weaves and unweaves fictions about art itself. Before rejecting his approach as self-centred or just plain wrong, it is worth mentioning the degree of blind faith it demands: a faith resembling traditional aestheticism only in its insistence that art is at its most powerful when it is not dragooned into patterns. To illustrate his point, he does just that, making patterns time and again, partly for pleasure, partly for reasons of manipulation, but always with a smile, con-scious that the significance of his play derives from its potential for resistance. This point of view emerges in interviews about a Documenta which he obviously regards as one more thing to do with art. This is what he meant when he told one interviewer that every Documenta was a lie, a statement opponents have used against him. He really said 'The problem is: a Documenta is partly also always a lie, because it must always function dialectically'. This broaches a second problem that Hoet's detractors approach wrongly: when he says 'politics' he implies an element of change. Hence his use of the mathematical formula for displacement on one of the Documenta posters. And hence his determination to show his working, not simply his solution, by presenting the preparation of his Documenta as a performance marathon, and prolonging it for the hundred days of the exhibition by staging public debates between him, the artists and his team. This was learned from Beuys, no doubt, as was Hoet's scrupulous honesty. (He admitted that he had invited one artist, Belu-Simon Fainaru, on the strength of a single, tiny sculpture.) Beuys made Fluxus princi-ples work in the world, without sacrificing their element of play. How also sees 'politics' as the deployment of 'play power' in its 60s sense, rather than as a series of 'power plays'. If others find that childish, they should read it as yet another commentary on art, its freedoms and the particular space it demands. And because art demands such latitude, as an honorary artist Hoet expects the same.

More worrying, perhaps, is what Hoet feels art cannot do. In a lecture delivered early in 1990, he explained at length. Despite the attraction of cultural pessimism such as George Steiners, he believed that it was possible to be pessimistic about every area of life except art. Yet faith could be sustained only when artists distance themselves from life, for 'If an artist looks too steadily at life, the result is a sudden loss of creative power.' Many would take issue with this doctrine of necessary distancing. In an era of famine, war, epidemic and financial recession, art and criticism are regaining the moral responsibility that they shirked for so long, their objection runs. So Hoet's convenient theory that life will not bear examination has a whiff of unhealthy aestheticism, at least for the growing number of commentators intent on visiting exhibitions without wanting to leave their conscience outside. For Hoet art has lost its political potential. 'Beuys still thought art could change the world,' he has said. But that was in the past, when it was possible to fluctuate between a view of art as being autonomous or representing a political position. In the course of a monologue, published in 1991, he pondered this problem. 'Poverty, AIDS, censorship, war, personal alienation and so on...The stories swarm to the foreground again. This makes me suspicious. In the case of AIDS for example, aren't we better advised by science than art? In the case of poverty, by a less egocentric world order? In the case of war, by a polemic for peace? Of course l don't want to say that artists should not be concerned with these problems. They can express it by personal engagement, for example. But they must express it by bringing the symptoms into their work. So they use the possibilities to show the people's potential for working toward solution. In that way they demonstrate the positive energy of art. Art is not an illustration, it is the mirror." Unexpectedly, at this point he turns from this to jazz. 'Great artists don't tell the story of sickness (war, AIDS, hunger and so on) but manoeuvre around the problem. Deconstruction in art becomes a method of releasing oneself from worry. Exactly as in jazz. Jazz manoeuvres too... in order to go further. The art I'm looking for is manoeuvre, is the productive development of forces which break loose." One work at Documenta involves jazz: Stan Douglas's film, in which the aural cues provided by the soundtrack fail to correspond with the visual images. But its significance is greater than that. Together with baseball and boxing, jazz is one of the metaphors for art that underlie Documenta. One thing all three have in common is aggression. (Think of 'cutting contests' in early jazz.) Others are improvisation and a sense of tragedy. (Didn't Barnett Newman choose the baseballer's long walk back to the stands as a parallel to the apparent defeat of the heroin Greek tragedy?) For all three are ritualised activities which demand that the participant is put on public trial. Before Hoet became a curator, he was a boxer. He also worked as a school teacher. Hence, perhaps, his need to make himself clear at every stage, with books, public meetings and an endless round of interviews. Is it surprising that it ended with Hoet T-shirts, Hoet mania at the press confer-ence, Hoet voted one of the ten sexiest men in Belgium...?

Enemies would call Hoet a formalist. They might also think him Euro-centric. After a month in Africa, he found nothing he thought worth including. In his own words, he met artists who operate in complete isolation. 'For these people there is no gallery or museum-world, there is no correct context for their art. From an anthropological view that is very interesting for us... Art today always has to do with criticism and conflict - yet neither exists in Africa. In Europe the artist is always a critic... In Africa and also in India... art is totally isolated." This was bound to cause trouble. (It certainly alters the meaning of the Gauguin painting.) It also broaches the subject of whether Hoet is correct. There is good and bad art everywhere, though assessment criteria may seem obscure to outsiders. Have societies existed where criteria for judgement were shared and understood without recourse to verbal or written discussion? Probably there have. These days, communications now make so much more likely that Hoet's thirty day encounter with Africa (for instance) misled him. There is every reason to suppose that peoples whose cultures are threatened would prefer not to play into the hands of those who want to co-opt it, or explain it away. In other words, what Hoet regards as an unnatural vacuum may be a healthy rather than an unhealthy state of affairs. It is also worth remembering that there is such a mood as persuaded bafflement, when the viewer is attracted to a work of art on every level without fully understanding what it is doing or why, and that in Western terms this is regarded as a necessary reaction to the originality of an avant-garde artwork. Whichever is the case, the inclusion of Tim Johnson, an Australian who adapts the dotted technique of aboriginal artists - presumably because some critical framework exists for his art and none for theirs - seems grossly insulting to great living aboriginal painters. To argue that their painting is not involved in critical procedures would be foolish. To suppose that it is of no interest to outsiders is disproved by Johnson's work. So some of the best painters alive have been ignored in order to support a position which favours inferior art (and it is no disgrace to Mr Johnson to say he is not, for example, Clifford Possum.) In his exhibition Open Minds: Closed Circuits in 1989 Hoet included the work of Adolf Wolffli, a mentally disturbed person and a genius. Well, wasn't Wolffli isolated? Can he ever be fully drawn into a 'normal' critical discourse? And Wolffli is one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Given the utter dismissal of the Third World, it is good to see that at least two artists in danger of being included for reasons of exoticism react violently to expectations of their art. The Native American Jimmie Durham's sculptures include a self-portrait as a parodied Christ figure. Half white, half red, his beggar sitting on a wheelbarrow makes, to quote the title of Durham's outdoor work, 'An Approach in Love and Fear. Meanwhile, a Black American, David Hammons, shows a room-size homage to his own hair.

Hoet's philosophical position could be described as a watered-down Existentialism, more Sinatra than Sartre. Perhaps it leads him astray. 'At a time when AIDS and technology are alienating the viewer,' he told an interviewer, 'the artist seeks to rediscover the individual in the existential sense of the word.' Certainly at Documenta references to the body recur with alarming regularity. Charles Ray's Oh Charley, Charley, Charley consists of eight wax models of the artist enjoying sex with himself, an extension of masturbation that turns viewers into voyeurs while reversing the point of masturbation by making it more public, more physically based, than usual. Here eroticism verges on nightmare. At the Neue Galede, a museum, Zoe Leonard modified the meaning of the existing collection by adding black-and-white photographs of vaginas, a theme taken up, perhaps accidentally, by Denys Zacharopoulos in his superb catalogue essay. A simple gesture, a complex result. The contents of any city museum the world over exist to celebrate the traditional bourgeois lifestyle: family, property, stability, luxury. Central to all this is the place of women as wives and mothers. Alternately sarcastic and truthful, Leonard reminds us that sex is the key to this, as well as the potential undoing of the system. Gary Hill's Tall Ships involves wordless, face-to-face encounters. Entering a long, darkened space, the visitor is confronted by screens on which looped films of people are shown. Seen from head to toe, they approach the viewer and hesitate before veering away. At first, they turn quickly, but towards the dead end of the corridor, they take longer to size us up. Finally, they pause for minutes at a time. But they are still 'ships that pass in the night'. Being rebuffed is no fun. And by so many different people... Men, women, old, young, black, white, all end with a gesture of rejection. Finally, we realise that the tables are turned; we are exhibits and the filmed figures are gallery-goers. Hill's work reads like a Rorschach blot and touches more raw nerves than an evening in a singles bar. Bill Viola once called a piece of work I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like. Loss of bearings has long been a feature of his art. In Chott el-Djerid, a video made in a desert, hot air rising made shapes like flames, phenomena without solidity or definition, to be watched without expectations. In another installation viewers walked through a white tunnel to a much larger screen, on which vague, monstrous shapes were fighting. Nowa-days, Viola fixes the moment of not knowing, using even simpler means. A giant vertical surface resembling a painting from the outside, a cinema screen from the dark viewing space inside, shows an inverted shape, its edges in a state of constant, blurry motion, its vertical position varying slightly from time to time. How difficult it is to solve the mystery, given that the clues are so obvious. This is not technology alienating us from the body but enriching appreciation of it by focusing on the conditions and psychology of perception. But psychology will not account for the spiritual aspirations of Viola's work - for his interest in St John of the Cross or the influence of Asian and Indian religions on his thinking. Released from the first-person singular, viewers arrive at a state approaching prayer.

On New Year's Eve 1990-91 in a freezing, derelict synagogue in Tiflis, a half-naked man was suspended upside down from a rope between two large, perpendicular steel plates. His wrists were bound together by another rope which dangled to the ground, when it was seized by an assistant who swung it violently, rhythmically, from side to side, beating the victim for five minutes like a bell between two sheets of metal. Then, as his half-naked body hung bruised and bleeding, music began and an elegantly dressed couple began dancing to a Strauss waltz. The idea of risk and physical engagement has long been a staple of the art of Wolfgang Flatz, whose performances have included being knocked to the ground from behind by a swinging sandbag or standing naked in front of an audience instructed to try to hit him with darts. By the time of Demontage IX, elementary bodywork had given way to more complex statements. (Traditionally political prisoners were swung to and fro until they 'sang', for example. Tradi-tionally, also, bells are rung to celebrate the new year, and the annual Vienna Philharmonic concert of Strauss waltzes is broadcast over the world on the same date.) And part of that complexity involves a gradual accretion of mean-ing, as gestures and movements are repeated in different contexts. Consider the sandbags as a man, hanging as if dead, like a slaughtered animal, while the curved movement - his own word is Kr-eisbewegung' - of the dancers is emulated in Bodycheck by the path of the swinging bags. Political significances gather in a similar way, layer upon layer. On the drawing for his installation at Documenta Flatz describes it as 'a metaphor for the interplay of power and mass, form and content, power and provocation, perpetrator and victim, artist and society, and a piece of life.' Subtitled Physical Sculpture No. 5, it consists of 76 punch bag-shaped forms, each the same weight as the artist himself, hanging in eight offset rows from side to side of a room which has to be crossed to reach other exhibits. Negotiating this forest is more easily said than done, since the forms translate touch into movement. Knocked, the bags continue to swing, so a moment's hesitation can mean being struck by a sinister form with the weight and bulk of a grown man. One's reaction is immediate; to move fast, as reflexes translate stimuli into physical reactions. Safety cannot be guaranteed in this miniature jungle, where other people constitute an ever-present threat.

In a room in an underground car park below the Fredericianum, two video monitors show a Matthew Barney video made for and in that space, where a spiral staircase winds around a glass elevator-shaft topped by a pyramidal structure, also of glass. Below ground, it looks like any car park anywhere: a glimpse of hell. On the left is a screen with a shorter tape showing a repeating set of images. On the right a longer tape shows a sequence of events. As the two proceed independently, viewers are left to discover conjunctions and crossovers. On the left-hand screen a large, spongy shape falls again and again, in slow motion, flattening to reveal a naked man with a tube in his mouth. In the next shot chains distend his nostrils and an elaborately shaped rectal attachment is inserted. On the other monitor a man with glasses and newspaper walks in slow motion through a tunnel toward a bulky figure dressed as an athlete, his rear seeming particularly vulnerable because he is trapped in a strange punishment/exercise machine which forces his legs apart. The sinister passer-by looks to and fro. Then, yelling as he runs, he kicks the harnessed man. By now a pattern has emerged. While the left-hand screen shows short, punctuated activities, its counterpart presents a looped narrative, in which certain props, costumes, movements and actions are repeated. Both screens are silent, giving the yelling, kicking and fighting a dreamlike quality, like a nightmare under an aesthetic. Gradually, as the essential, gestures on the left are repeated - prising, poking, falling and more - the same props occur, part athletic equipment, part torture device. Presented with a combination of surprise and inexorability, strength and weakness seem curious-ly interchangeable and identities are mislaid. Is a man in a rubber hat an athlete or a surgeon? Is a man with bandaged hands preparing to fight or unable to do so? But these are the wrong ques-tions. Here mysteries are solved gently. As stylised Scotsmen appear on the right, complete with bagpipes, the details of the anal tubing on the left suddenly begin to look familiar. Childish, erotic, playful, athletic, sinister, Barney's work succeeds like good dance: by revealing its workings gradual-ly, with a combination of surprise and inexorability. But to say so sounds as if plots unravel and secrets are explained. Here the logic is more psychological-ly grounded and mysteries remain mysteries. Yet some scanty development can be discerned. At the end of the longer tape, as Barney himself moves manfully upwards in a feat of daredevil moun-taineering, we begin to recognize those winding steps, that empty shaft. Only the kilted Scotsman comes as a surprise, legs wide apart, buttocks planted over the point of the glass dome.

Francis Bacon's last paintings include an untitled triptych. Each of three sand-coloured canvases has a black square in the top centre. While inset squares on the outer canvases contain painted photographs of figures, one in each, the equivalent square in the central painting shows the back of a nude, head in darkness, legs resting inside the square as if on a ledge with a protruding elbow and its stylised shadow. Between the legs lies a raw, cavernous space, while a customary, curved arrow indicates something we are not allowed to see: a face, perhaps an identity. The stillness of the body is unusual even for Bacon, and despite the stylised, darkened trace of alight, nothing more will happen; that raw, cavernous anal cleft must be viewed coldly, almost surgically. Is the figure asleep or dead? To be plausible as the centrepiece of a work about resurrection, it must be both. For on the rectangles inset within the black squares on either side are painted black-and-white photographs of faces - left, an unknown, faintly sinister man with a heavy growth of beard, and right, Bacon himself. And, as if connected, a body nude from the waist down steps out of the flanking canvas directly below each head, one leg in darkness, the other in light. Are they stepping in to become photographs, or out, to confront each other? As the lover awaits the act of love, so the dead may expect resurrection. Suddenly, the equation of sex and death takes a sudden swerve. The memory of the pose, like a raised Christ stepping from a sarcophagus, could support such a reading. The alternative is that a corpse is a corpse and as it awaits autopsy, photographs become sad, faulted records of what once existed. Bacon's flirtation with photography was hardly new. Yet at this final stage, at a point where his nude studies were gaining humour, realism, even an unfamiliar warmth and erotic charge, the idea of photography indicated a more personal approach to old configu-rations. Another approach to this unusually final variation on familiar Bacon themes might be to regard it in terms of separation: the body/mind division related to erotic desire, fuelled by memory but also by those free agents, the loins. 'To be seduced is to be separated from oneself,' wrote Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'led outside oneself. Every seduction is disjunction, tearing of the friable image of itself that the ego tries to construct." At last, Bacon attempted to capture a personal relationship, translating into visible terms the inevitable fragmentation and sacrifice (here literal fragmentation, literal sacrifice) that each partner demands.

High up in the Fredericianum, a curved corridor seems to offer nothing. Then, half-way along, a high, roofless barrel looms up, made of lengths of wood lashed together with two metal bands, on one of which is a motto: 'ART IS A GUARANTY FOR SANITY'. From high above, a single light shines into the enclosure. Stepping up onto its wooden floor you find only one other lightsource: at floor level a lamp with a strange design, one breast/penis form lying across another of equal size, like a pair of nippled bolsters. Opposite, taking the light, stands a metal bed with tubular extensions at each corner. And from the skinny 'posts' of this undraped four-poster loops of metal protrude, supporting gas-mantles which catch the light. Near us in the shadows, a coat at least twice the normal length hangs from the ceiling and two pairs of heavy spheres are placed, one pair made of wood, the other of solid black rubber. Yet finally the eye is drawn back to the bed itself, with no mattress but instead a flat metal surface with a broadening stain from top to bottom. Precious Liquids, the installation is called. Gradually personal life is mythologised and psychological pressures released. In this way the work gains its own momentum, obeying rhythms of emotional engagement and diffusion. Part bedroom, part stockade, this circular space also looks like a laboratory or a lumber-room. In it, objects come to light only gradually, like the two pairs of solid spheres - one hard, one soft one perfectly shaped, the other irregular, one real, one ideal - a meditation on relationships and what they could be. Once, perhaps, they meant breasts and maleness, eyes or objects. Now they play them-selves, like celebrities with walk-on parts in a movie. They are art but also lumber, left in corners, almost unnoticed products of habit waiting to be used. The illuminated sculpture - also a double form, also equally male and female - has always had the same name: Trani Episode. Since Trani is a place, it can be assumed that the work was once a kind of souvenir. What matters more is the persistence of this form, not only its recurrence but the order and meaning of each recurrence. The first manifestation was made of fired clay, so that the result was hollow and the top 'bolster' could be removed to reveal a hollow chamber, a box for storing memories. The second version was of bronze, with an increase in weight and solidity, still hollow except that now it was sealed totally - as protection, perhaps, because of its value. Carved from granite, the third version was indivisible, weighty, singular, rebarbative. The fourth appearance, however, as part of Precious Liquids, is as a ghost, a talisman, a comforting reminder, the kind of lamp a child has at its bedside, a 'full' form as distinct from the bubbles above the bed. In a catalogue statement, Bourgeois recalls two dis-turbed children who rang her doorbell. When she answered the door, one of them lost control. 'Suddenly there was a puddle on the floor. She fragmented... Loss of control means fragmentation. Are you together? Find yourself. Be in synch.' Read this ironically. (No artist could do otherwise.) Liquids, like paint, are precious only when spilt. Even then the spilling is more precious than the liquid, which has been ex-pressed, squeezed out of the body. It is not an easy process; guilt can replace catharsis. (Unseen inside the long overcoat hangs another with two words inscribed vertically next to the buttons: MERCI on one side, MERCY on the other.) The absentee is an exhibitionist, a 'fragmen-tation' expert. Is exhibitionism fetishistic or are they two ways of being 'un-together'? In this space which is public and private, museum-cum-cell, no liquids are visible, only dried remains of one. Is art nothing more than coagulated impulse? Does it guarantee sanity? This room is a repository for ideas, memories, creative thoughts, where art may be no more than a stain on a bathtub. Blending shock and affection as it does, the impulse that underlies it may indeed be destructive for the artist. Yet the promise lures them on, as if they were medieval alchemists.

Despite Hoet's account, art selected for Documenta indicates espousal, rather than alien-ation, of the body. While conceptualism is treated either as a jokey or a critical concern (Prina, Kosuth) and photography as antiquated and tasteful (Grauerholz, Ruff, Geoffrey James) painting is brought centre-stage at last as an ongoing activity. In terms of the veiled theoretical pro-gramme of Documenta, the finesses of colour and structure in Christa Näher or the jewelled refine-ment of Raoul de Keyser finally say more than (for example) Attila Richard Lukacs, who relies on images of the nude male to trigger some knee-jerk political response. Instead of isolating 'issues', abstract painting clothes and enacts them. In other words, it embodies thought while mocking cogita-tion, speaking to us of the flesh. More than a decade of theory has offered support for this position: Leo Steinberg's work on the sexuality of Christ, for example, the Zone issues on the body or Elaine Scarry's magnificent The Body in Pain. By now, the impossibility of adjusting accepted ideas of life-span and illness to encompass AIDS and the ecologists' struggle for greater awareness of man not as an independent agent but rather as part of an infinitely complex structure of checks and balances should have placed us in a position of potential realignment. Isn't this implied by Jan Hoet's T-shirt proclaiming that he does not know what art is or his emphasis on displacement or 'manoeuvre' or his refusal to shrink from conven-tional accounts of the physical such as the sculp-ture of Katsura Funakoshi's? Much of the finest art at Documenta - Cady Noland, Pitz,Totsikas, Therrien, Balka, Kapoor, Cemin, Visch, Munoz, Baikas - pondered questions of physicality. But the perfect work for the occasion was Robert Gober's collaboration with Christopher Wool: a large, high room papered to the ceiling with an hallucinogenic woodland pattern, in which the repeats conjured up associations of water and infinite reflection, pubic hair and Steineresque diagrams of infinite rebirth, while Wool's printed 'paintings', also with natural references, were included without being over-whelmed. In other words, the fin de siècle ideal of a total artwork, updated by a century to a time when one curator of the most prestigious survey exhibi-tion in the world would include a catalogue essay which commented on the bulge in a teenage boy's jeans while another would begin his with Courbet's long-lost L'origine du monde, the most famous beaver shot in the history of art; a time when questions of sexual politics, violence and mortality were bound to surface in any group exhibition deliberately assembled without pre-ordained concepts; a time when artists were continuing to struggle towards a language which would try to confront the body.