Heal the World? Naturalizing the Historical in Pastoral Exhibition Making, or: Curatorial Governmentalities and their Discontents – the Case of documenta
Problematizing the “heilsgeschichtlichen” dimensions of documenta as a quasi-religious site of salvation, the presentation thus also aims to undo all too comfortable understandings of curating/care as purely good things shedding light on the dark side of the cura and its governmentalities as a pastoral power in a Foucauldian sense.
In their first statement after being nominated as artistic directors of documenta 15 in 2019, ruangrupa announced that “if documenta was launched in 1955 to heal war wounds, why shouldn’t we focus on today’s injuries, especially the ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, or patriarchal structures,” thereby invoking the idea of the exhibition as a nurse tending to the wounds inflicted by the respective dominant system. In fact, documenta’s fifteenth edition was characterized by a Manichaean juxtapositions of capitalist-colonialist sites of extraction and pastoral agrarian settings. By looking at the role holistic phantasies of nature have played in critiques of alienation in German art/history pre and post 1945, my project will complicate the notion of healing by calling attention to the ambivalent genealogies of back-to-nature trends and life-reform movements within and beyond documenta.
Drawing on my research of the ways in which völkisch-nationalistic discourses and aesthetics continued to inform documenta on a personal, epistemological, and economic level after the war and even after the country’s reunification, while these very continuities were curatorially concealed and remained mostly unaddressed in neo-romantic, pastoral and often naturalizing imaginaries of healing produced by prominent documenta figures such as Werner Haftmann (“abstraction as a bouquet of flowers”, d1, 1955), Joseph Beuys (“Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung”, d7, 1982), Harald Szeemann (Le mamelle de la verità, 1978), or more recently, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (reenactment of Szeemann’s Monte Verità exhibition in Kassel’s Karlsaue during d13, 2012) and runagrupa (2022), my project thus deals with documenta as a pastoral exhibition that evokes the imaginary of a garden of Eden-like a state of innocence, untouched by the German crimes during National Socialism.
With its aim to rehabilitate the artists that had been declared degenerate during National-Socialism, the first documenta was a good occasion to bury the dark past. It was founded as a satellite to the Federal Garden Exhibition, organized by Herman Mattern, a former NSDAP member and member of the documenta committee, who had earlier been responsible for the 1939 Reich Garden Show in Stuttgart. Covering over the rubble of Kassel’s bombing with beautiful flowers, the show’s decoration of debris ran parallel to documenta’s display of a depoliticized abstraction: just as the flower beds on the city’s rose hill (a pile of war rubble) helped to elegantly camouflage the less honorable military memories of the city’s arms production that were the reason for its bombing, the art show’s blooming fields of color in the ruins of Museum Fridericianum allowed its makers to conceal art history’s entanglement with the racist epistemologies and economies that enabled them, letting flowers grow over Germany’s dark brown “history of the present” (Foucault).
[Caption: Karaoke-Session während der documenta fifteen auf der Rückseite der Rotunde des Museum Fridericianum Kassel, Foto Credit: Nanne Buurman 2022]
Projektlaufzeit
Seit Januar 2025