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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition. Catalogue, Kassel, June 8 – September 15, 2002 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002, English edition)
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2003-03-01
2022-12-03
2003-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Cosetta Saba
2003/03/01
2036-461X
2
en
Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition. Catalogue, Kassel, June 8 – September 15, 2002 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002, English edition)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19222/17064
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and power. They both serve not only to erase            where the critical activity is deliberately
the African American woman and justify her              atheoretical or programmatically post-theo-
continued abuse but to serve up a disturbing            retical. This volume deals with the other-
narrative of national identity.                         ness, expressed and documented not only by
   The extent to which Williams has hit upon            the works exhibited in the Platform 5 –
a basic nerve of the American character and             works which are oriented towards the cross-
its history can best be illustrated here for an         ing of thresholds and of frontiers between
Italian audience by the 1997 curtain call of            territories, bodies, minds, texts, societies,
The Birth of a Nation at Le Giornate del                signs, etc. – but also by the expositive context
Cinema Muto in Pordenone. When the con-                 itself.
ductor turned to an onscreen picture of direc-             Documenta 11, as maintained by its curator,
tor D.W. Griffith, the mostly Italian audience          Okwui Enwezor,
rose as one and gave a thundering ovation of
applause and cheers. The Americans scattered              was conceived not as an exhibition but as a
throughout the audience sat dumbfounded,                constellation of public spheres. The public
unable to applaud or react. The difference in           sphere of the exhibition gesture, implicit in
cultural understanding was telling: in Italy,           the historical formation of Documenta, in
the film is a stunning achievement of film art;         which art comes to stand for models of repre-
for Americans, as Williams so effectively               sentation and narratives of autonomous sub-
shows, the film represents a landmark in a              jectivity, is rearticulated here as a new under-
complicated racial history of shame and                 standing in the domain of the discursive
denial that is reenacted regularly in today’s           rather than the museological.1
racial politics and injustices.
                                                           Enwezor presents a new curatorial model,
                                                        consisting of an experimentation of the “plat-
1    P. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination            form” concept as referring to world cultures
    (New Haven: Yale University Press, reprint          and to their geography – traced out by histori-
    1976); Ch. Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field:       cal and contemporary conflicts –, according to
    An Investigation,” in Ch. Gledhill (ed.), Home Is   the following thematic paths: Democracy
    Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and        Unrealized (Platform 1, Vienna); Experiments
    the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987).               with Truth: Transitional Justice and the
                                                        Processes of Truth and Reconciliation
                                                        (Platform 2, New Delhi); Créolité and
                                                        Creolization (Platform 3, St. Lucia, West
SELECTED BY: COSETTA SABA                               Indies); Under Siege: Four African Cities
                                                        Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos
  Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition.                  (Platform 4, Lagos).
Catalogue, Kassel, June 8 – September 15, 2002             The discourse of Documenta 11, planned by
(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002,         Enwezor together with his co-curators, high-
English edition)                                        lights through works of art, the theme of the
                                                        difference between Postmodernism and
  The catalogue of Documenta 11 Platform 5:             Postcoloniality, in a context of modernity.
Exhibition outlines a circuit of attention on           Enwezor asserts that
the otherness of art, producing at the same
time a short circuit of our attention on the              postcoloniality must at all times be distin-
same subject: a “behind the times” operation,           guished from postmodernism. While post-
which muddles modern Western societies,                 modernism was preoccupied with relativiz-

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ing historical transformations and contesting      ceptual isotopy in different ways: this can be
the lapses and prejudices of epistemological       schematically outlined as “the postcolonial
grand narratives, postcoloniality does the         aftermath of globalization and the terrible
obverse, seeking instead to sublate and            nearness of distant places.”5 The works, or
replace all grand narratives through new ethi-     better said, the texts of Platform 5 elaborate
cal demands on modes of historical interpre-       programmatically their own visibility in the
tation.2                                           double acceptation of testis and of textum, in
                                                   relation to a research path on discourses, on
   Documenta 11 is the point of synthesis of a     silences, on signs of the world realities. Their
multidisciplinary research into artistic prac-     geography is continually re-shaped by mobile
tices and processes, inquiring about “circuits     frontiers, by trespassing and by crossing, pro-
of knowledge produced outside the predeter-        duced by the reversibility between the local
mined institutional domain of Westernism,          and the global dimension. Documenta 11, at
or those situated solely in the sphere of artis-   least in the intention of its curator Enwezor,
tic canons.”3 This is inferred from works like,    transfers in social life itself – and most of all
for instance, Future Amnesia (2002) by Pierre      in the discourse that art brings to contempo-
Huyghe, The House (2002) by Eija-Liisa             rary world realities – an analytic look
Athila, Suspiria (2002) by Stan Douglas, From      through which it is possible to see procedures
the Other Side (2002) by Chantal Akerman,          of creolization, hybridization, displacement,
Shoes for Europe by Pavel Brâila, etc. Such a      subversion, translation, interpretation and
research reveals some precise forms of inter-      reassemblage taking place.
connection between artistic practices and dif-        Constitutively seeking its own definition,
ferent social realities, in various parts of the   art is a “reserve of sense;” it connects in an
world: this constitutes “a rethinking of           indissoluble way text and out-of-text, text and
modernity, based on ideas of transculturality      context (certainly not the merely expositive
and extraterritoriality.”4 Let us think, for       one, which marks the artistic function).
example, of As I Was Moving Ahead                  Documenta 11 Platform 5 reveals vehemently
Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty        how aesthetical intervention does not just
(2000, 16mm, 288’), by Jonas Mekas, an artist      dwell in the work, but also in the cultural and
who knows well the condition of displace-          social intertext which receives it. Apart from
ment; or else, of Shirin Neshat (present in        the “museal” expositive space, let me recom-
Kassel with Untitled, 2002, 35mm), with her        mend Bataille Monument (2002), by Thomas
special way of overcoming the binary opposi-       Hirschhorn: he creates a “text” from an inter-
tion between the East (Islam) and the West,        vention on the receptive context (a suburban
outlining some identities of transition, some      area in Kassel, where a Turkish community
migrant figures crossing frontiers and contin-     lives) and from the utilization of the same
ually shifting the limits between “local” and      work in the aforesaid context (an installation
“global,” and sometimes investigating into         articulated into a social center, a library, a TV
this mutual overturn (the local into the glob-     set and a bar). Bataille Monument is indeed a
al and vice versa).                                confusing text: the spectator, compelled to
   The introductory essays – let us remember       put into effect a condition of “other,” of
among others, “The Encyclopedia of Babel”          stranger, must renegotiate it in the context of
by Carlos Basualdo, “Xeno-epistemics:              art, of daily life and of the artist’s expressive
Makeshift Kit for Sounding Visual Art as           intention. Art is the place where countless
Knowledge Production and Retinal Regimes”          relations between texts and contexts material-
by Sarat Maharaj, “Can Places Travel?” by          ize; a reserve of expressive forms, originating
Sverker Sörlin, etc. – modulate the same con-      from an aesthetical intention (prefiguring the

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interpretative action to which it is dedicated),     reality. All this makes us even more aware of
producing and awaiting their sense at the            the “built-up” character of culture and inven-
same time.                                           tion, or better said, of social negotiation
   As far as the visual content of an exhibition     processes, of what we define “tradition,” of
is concerned, spectatorship is central; as           what shows how culture is a “transnational
pointed out by Jean Fischer, “this means that        survival strategy, in continuous traductive
the affectivity of any aesthetic strategy            movement.” These are therefore the themes of
depends on the way it understands and struc-         the unceasing translations among different
tures its relation to the viewer.”6 If, as Mark      cultural systems and of the interferences
Nash emphasizes, “artist’s film and video has        between different modalities of sense produc-
emerged as a major if not dominant image dis-        tion. It all regards the West and its colonial
course in the museum and gallery circuit,”7          history, but also the existence, in it, of cultur-
what is changing the gallery or museum-              al differences: let us think of the knowledge
going experience actually regards the specta-        belonging to the minority, that is, knowledge
torial activity, and concerns the presence of        which is not shared or which is unsuitable for
the work and the time of vision. The artistic        the contingencies of cultural industry. This
utilization of audiovisual languages does not        knowledge requires our utmost attention,
place the viewer in an “aphysical and intellec-      especially because it reveals the discursive
tual dimension,” but rather in a different           processes which just made it become “minori-
physical one, determining a near-corporeal           ty knowledge.”
implication of the spectator, whose aspects            Documenta 11 presents some conceptual
still have to be investigated. Let us think of       passages which are incredibly “behind the
the film and video by Shirin Neshat: not only        times” and can only be read by inducing an
does she make a complex image out of the             assumption of responsibility, a crisis, a
body, but also aims at the spectatorial body,        change.
since she foresees it, she “incorporates” it, by
outlining the look trajectory and concentra-
tion between the screens and the motion-pic-         1   O. Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11
ture camera, between light and sound.                    Platform 5: Exhibition. Catalogue (Ostfildern-
   As Fischer points out, “art itself is a form of       Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), p. 54.
excess expenditure:” when it is not organic to       2   Ibid., p. 45.
power elites, that is, where it escapes the aes-     3   Ibid., p. 54.
thetical procedures of the globalized art mar-       4   Ibid., p. 55.
ket, it emphasizes the discourses on legitima-       5   Ibid., p. 44.
tion of what is “acceptable” and “unaccept-          6   J. Fischer, “Toward a Metaphysics of Shit,” in
able” in the artistic languages, and not only in         Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition.
those. In relation to such legitimating dis-             Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz
courses, the otherness of art is what “enables a         Publishers, 2002), p. 66.
coherent discursive position to take place.”8        7   M. Nash, “Art and cinema: some critical reflec-
This is the “behind the times” challenge of              tion,” in Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition.
Documenta 11, finding its own expositive                 Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz
actualization in Platform 5. It is the challenge         Publishers, 2002), p. 129.
of a rigorous curatorial program, that of            8   Fischer, op. cit., p. 67.
Mister Enwezor: thematizing and making vis-
ible theory’s aspirations of critical resistance,
plus underlining the paradoxes and the dis-
placements of artistic languages, as well as of

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