Freedom or principle? That’s the question on my mind right now, following the news that the next Artistic Director of Documenta, Documenta 16, that’ll take place in 2027, will be Naomi Beckwith.
This announcement comes with quite a lot of painful feelings. On one level, it’s so exciting that a Black woman, an American curator, whose exhibitions have centered really significant artists, and I’m particularly also excited by the fact that her work, and this title of this post, comes from the exhibition, The Freedom Principle Experiments in Art and Music in 1965 to Now, that she curated at the MCA Chicago, alongside documenta 14 curator Dieter Roelstraete.
And so on one level, Beckwith is a really exciting choice as is the decision to have this curator lead such a mega exhibition and huge project that is Documenta. At the same time, Documenta has lost so much legitimacy as a place for free artistic expression and freedom more generally. And this started with the attack on documenta 14 in its projection of the splitting with Greece as a xenophobic attack from within the German political landscape, but also the attack on Nigerian artist Olu Oguibe’s by right-wing groups in Germany.
So there’s the debt attack and the financial attack, but also the its attack on refugee artists and identities and Indigenous identities as well. And then you fast forward to 2022 and documenta fifteen, where the Indonesian collective ruangrupa were attacked for specious claims of anti-Semitism and various aspects of the exhibition were censored and, along with artists in the exhibition, had statements about the institutional racism of documenta. And one of the artists that was severely attacked and is still being attacked is Hamja Ahsan.
And so with that in mind, especially following October 7th last year, the kind of cultural wars in Germany focused on and around the world focused on a kind of weaponization of anti-Semitism. And this meant that the finding committee for this 16th edition resigned en masse because of what they were asked to navigate in terms of what curatorial positions and artistic reflections could not be included, specifically attacks on anyone supporting Palestine or the BDS movement to sanction Israel for its ongoing genocidal violence. And in the statement from the three members of that finding committee that resigned, Simon Njami, Gong Yan, Kathrin Rhomberg and María Inés Rodríguez November 16, 2023, they write
Fast forward to today, December 18th, 2024, with the news of Beckwith’s appointment, the question about where she would stand on this question, I mean, by accepting the position, it seems that she’s kind of happy with this, which is a real shame. At the same time, there is always the hope that an institution would be transformed by people leading it from within, so we will see.
For my part, as things stand I have no interest in attending Documenta 16* because of principled issues with the institution of Documenta, even though I know that Beckwith’s exhibition and the curators, educators, and artists who will participate will be exciting and significant because of what she will bring to this massive stage. Moving forward, minus plato (question mark) will be a site where we’ll continue to reflect on the transformative experience of documenta 14 in Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany, from artists and people that made the exhibition and so forth. I want to host this space as a place for debate and conversation around those legacies, but we’ll obviously have to take into consideration what is happening with the development of Documenta 16 as well. I think it’s really interesting that here I am in the Midwest, in Columbus, Ohio, having kind of thought about and really immersed myself in this exhibition and brought it into my classes, and a curator from the Midwest, from Chicago, will be leading the next edition, so it’s really heartbreaking, actually, that on one level I really want to be excited about what she can bring to the world through this exhibition. At the same time, I just can’t engage, and actually I’m interested in developing alternative sites of thought around it.
Anyway, I just want to end this brief post with a quote from Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director of documenta 14, and this is from an essay in the Documenta 14 Reader called ‘Iterability and Otherness, Learning and Working from Athens’, and it speaks to this question of freedom or principle. So at the beginning of the essay he’s talking about how he was selected as the artistic director, giving that background to the reader, and he writes:
“I believe that such an insight into the organizational constitution of documenta 14 is necessary in order to understand how near impossible it is to realize a project that aims at making a political statement from within the organizational structure and constrained position of a state-subsidized cultural institution (one with additional institutional, corporate, and private funding involved, of course). Moreover, the enterprise of Documenta has raised and is now facing a huge expectation of success, success measured in the anticipated number of paying visitors, whose contribution is a fundamentally important part of the budget, and in the much hoped for financial revenue documenta generates for the city of Kassel. In this field of economic and political forces, institutional self-preservation mechanism of documenta does not easily allow for “experiments” that go beyond what can be projected onto the notion of “artistic freedom” that documenta famously offers to its artistic director. The question we ask, what about freedom not limited to artistic expression, only freedom that is not at all conditional, and the “artistic” qualifier – remains to be answered in documenta 14.”
And I would argue that in very different circumstances, in a very different political landscape, and with a different artistic director, they also need to be answered by Documenta 16.
So, we’ll see.
* Note added Dec. 19. 2024 – this is my position right now, but someone whose opinion and perspective I respect, who has had a long history being part of and also protesting Documenta exhibitions in the past, has suggested that I keep an open mind about engaging with Documenta 16. I will do that and we will see what happens!