TOM HOLERT
Bataille That Binds
THE CLIMACTIC FINALE OF
THIS CRITIC’S DOCUMENTAII EXPERIENCE TOOK PLACE UNDER the influence of an
obscenely outsize mirror ball. The rotating disco globe was installed at a
considerable height in one of the countless black cubes/white boxes crammed
into the main building of the Binding brewery on the outskirts of central
Surprisingly few visitors
seemed intrigued enough to approach the empty space beneath the globe. Probably
Cleave ‘02 (The Accursed Share), 2002, by Welsh artist and former filmmaker Cerith Wyn Evans, fails the test
of high-tech spectacularity, in spite of the presence of a laptop computer. But
the installation turns out to be not only a complex stage for experiences of a
both visceral and highly erudite order but also one of the unlikelier works to
sum up a good deal of Documenta11’s themes and ideas: Evans proffers a lexicon
of translation and translatability (the beams of light are triggered by
software that translates an English sentence into Morse code), of globalization
and images of the global (the glitter ball as a futuristic-nostalgic vision of
the planet), the construction and domestication of the exotic (a potted palm
next to the spotlight), of architectural dreams and social utopias (the discodelic club space as ultimate destination of a
community at once emergent and vanishing).
Moreover Cleave ’02 (The
Accursed Share) invites one to draw connections with other works and artists
that either are included in Documenta11 or provide subtexts and models for the
overall conception of the show. Marcel Broodthaers, a key figure in the history
of the exhibition (this time very present in his absence), is quoted with one
of his signature items of displacement, the potted palm tree, a metonymic
object that addresses the symbolic axis between the (un)homely and the exotic,
the decorative and the colonial, but also refers to the ways Broodthaers “framed”
the institutions of culture by means of mimicking their idle efforts to bridge
the gap between public concerns and private spaces of imperialism.
Less obliquely, Georges
Bataille is another figure, already invoked in the parenthesis of the
installation’s title. “The Meaning of General Economy,” a chapter from Bataille’s
The Accursed Share, is supplementarily turned into the language of the spinning
glitter ball light via Morse code-something Evans has already done, in a
previous version of Cleave, with the writings of William Blake.
In a working-class, “multicultural”
housing estate in northern Kassel, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn has
erected a multipart interactive anti-”monument’’ to Bataille, similar to those
he has already dedicated to Gilles Deleuze (in Avignon) and Baruch Spinoza (in
Amsterdam). Several buildings and sculptures, made out of cheap materials such
as plywood and tape, serve as a library, a snack bar, a TV studio, etc. Built
by people from the neighborhood, who were paid by the artist and who worked
under his direction, the “monument” loosely connects the writings of Bataille
to the sculptural activity of the artist and the practice of the specific
community generated in and around the whole project. Time and again during the
first days of the event Hirschhorn explained to journalists and TV crews, who
adored slumming/visiting him on-site, how he imposes his particular brand of
Bataille fan obsession on this very specific urban environment.
The philosopher of
expenditure and the informs seems an unlikely candidate to serve as a model for
the alleged politics of Documentary. In fact, Bataillean politics might be
least expected In the wake of German media coverage of the show. Reduced to
notions of “political correctness’’ (yes, stall the source of much anger...) or
“globalization” (as if this were a process whose totality is consensually
agreed upon...), politics and the political become nothing if not the antidote
to aesthetically convincing, “sensual” art. The best work in Kassel precisely
contradicts such limited understandings of “the political,” since It does not
eschew or repel but instead Inverts and reconceptualizes it.
Here, the heritage of a
general economy of accumulation and expenditure seems strangely suitable in
offering a way out of politics “proper.” In his admonition to consider “the general
problems’’ of the “global activity of men’’ (instead of following the “narrow
mind of the mechanic who changes a tire”) Bataille introduces a scope of
analysts that is both necessary and Impossible In its generalist.
Exiting the dilemma, one
could enter the discussion about the political as the “art of the local and
singular construction of cases of universality,” as Jacques Rancičre, a writer
who was part of Catherine David’s referential armature in 1997, puts it in La Mesentente (1995). But the alignment of categories like
locality, singularity, and universality should not be confused with easy
concepts like “the glocal.” The curatorial and conceptual challenge of
Documenta11, defined by Okwui Enwezor and his collaborators’ theoretical and
political premises, is to shun such confusion. Insistence on the difficulty of
the relationship between the singular and the universal, the local and the
global, presents a major task here, because it is in the very construction of
this relationship that the poetical emerges.
This task is seriously
complicated by the sheer scale of the final “platform” of operation Documenta11, which affects
every single work practice, and gesture on display. The (rather non-Bataillean)
economic constraint of persuading and seducing the more than 600,000 visitors
necessary over the course of a hundred days for the exhibition to break even is
inscribed In the tiniest aspect of the project. “Difficulty” itself, packaged
as discursive aroma, becomes a selling tool. Of all the problems generated by
the supershow scale, the curatorial ambition as such is less pertinent than the
almost inevitable urge to create effects of evidence through thematic
clustering: Archive, city, model, border, textuality, encyclopedism, violence,
postcolonialism, carnival, labyrinth, and so many other classificatory aids
tend to support a narrative of contiguities and selflessness rather than one of
disruptions and constructions (in Rancičre’s sense of the political). On the
other hand, the Impressive array of concepts displayed In the theoretical
framing of Documenta11 is supposed to represent an enhanced reflexivity-which
is certainly unusual for a blockbuster art event like this but also, as the
largely positive echo in the German mainstream media might prove, is well
disposed to be conceived as a discourse about (not of) subversion,
creolization, exterritoriality, etc., and therefore In danger of being consumed
instead of being put into (political) practice.
Hirschhorn’s disruptive and
open-ended Inscription of his idea of a Bataillean practice in a given social
environment and Evans’s sophisticated entrapments of allusion, translation, and
bodily sensation both point to very different modes of conceiving the political
as integral to art. Usage of the same philosopher’s name notwithstanding,
convergence is out of the question. Dialogue between the two works appears far
from evident.
Conversation might start
here. Possible topics: how to contest Documenta without serving the spectacle
of “criticality”; how to construct universality out of the singular and the
local; what it means either to provide visual news fodder for the reporting
mainstream media (Hirschhorn) or to be comparably invisible (Evans) ?
Tom Holert is a Cologne-based
cultural critic