Eric Banks on Artforum, October 1972. (10 20 30 40).

Thirty years ago this month, Artforum went to Kassel for the first time. Senior editor ERIC BANKS revisits the magazine s coverage of Documenta 5, the first themed installment of the peerless European quinquennial.

IN "'REALITY': IDEOLOGY AT D5" (Artforum, October 1972), Lawrence Alloway took note of a tetchy petition signed by Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Barry Le Va, Robert Morris, Dorothea Rockburne, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson that had been published in the magazine four months earlier. Bridling at the liberties they alleged Documenta 5 curators Harald Szeemann and Jean-Christophe Ammann were then taking, the signatories declared the artist's right to determine both whether his or her art would be exhibited and how it would be classified; they further demanded unfettered control over catalogue entries and that an itemized budget be made public at the close of every exhibition.

While such a broadside is hardly surprising given the politicization of the art world at the time, it gives one pause three decades later. Documenta 5 has entered the lore of contemporary art history as the exhibition that brilliantly introduced its large audience to Conceptual and post-Minimal art. (The show followed on the heels of two other charter exhibitions by Szeemann, "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form" [1969] and "Happenings and Fluxus" [1970].) Reviewing Artforum's coverage of Documenta 5 with thirty years' hindsight, one can't but note the ambivalent tone of the three reviews published on the occasion (Alloway's, Carter Ratcliff's, and Lizzie Borden's assessments were accompanied by Robert Smithson's "Cultural Confinement," a rancorous statement reprinted from the Documenta catalogue, and Angela Westwater's interview with Claes Oldenburg, whose Mouse Museum was on view in Kassel). Terms like "control," "autonomy," "cultural prison," "behavioral game playing," and "metaphysical junkyard" pepper the essays, and Ratcliff's article takes the us-versus-them title "Adversary Spaces."

Documenta 5 was nothing if not ambitious. The first "themed" installment of the mega-exhibition--and in that sense the real precursor to Documenta as we now know it--the show was a far-reaching attempt to counterpose "images--artistic and nonartistic." The armature for this examination of parallel image-worlds, titled "Inquiry into Reality--Today's Imagery" (catchy, no?), featured subsections surveying kitsch, religious illustration, advertising posters, and science-fiction book covers as a foil to contemporary art (which was grouped into nebulous categories like "Individual Mythologies," "Idea," and "Ideal+Light"). If the notion of presenting post-Minimal work alongside, say, a history of garden gnomes seems cockeyed, consider the juxtaposition of Fluxus works and photorealist painting, both of the sheeny American Robert Bechtle/ Ralph Goings variety and the harder-to-place European efforts of Gerhard Richter and Franz Gertsch (an installation view of the latter's Medici, 1971, shown towering over a pair of spectators, graced Art forum's cover). As Alloway wrote, the result was "something between a supermarket and a wunderkammer."

The Artforum correspondents were understandably a bit nonplussed by Documenta 5. Alloway was most at home taking the exhibition on its own terms. Suited for the task thanks to his early association with the British proto-Pop Independent Group, he diligently wades through the offerings and mounts a respectful effort that shorts neither the curators' argument nor their selections. "It is precisely by their willingness to tackle 'already objectified' sign systems and set them into a context of relationship with other signs, including those of art, that the organizers have made their most interesting contribution." Pre-High/Low, Alloway's probe of the links among a disparate group of artists, a number of them Conceptual, and popular culture in its broadest sense was salutary. "Conceptual art, like performance art, is archival, as dependent on the techniques of transmitting information in a bureaucratic society as Pop art was on the existent products for a source of reference."

Meanwhile Ratcliff and Borden largely sidestepped the popular effluvia in favor of the artists' contributions. In "Cosmologies," Borden took the inclusive route, reshuffling the Documenta deck into several suits so as to find common streaks running through the work on view, while Ratcliff singled out for discussion works he saw as escapingthe logic of the organizers' scheme. Given that this was Artforum's first significant coverage of the European exhibition, it is curious that Ratcliff zeroed in on a trio of American artists already well familiar to New York readers: Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Asher.

Still, it's hard to fault Ratcliff's focus, since all three artists have become such monumental figures. But perhaps the best call was putting the Gertsch on the cover. Who would have guessed that, three decades later, this John Singer Sargent of the Euro-youth set would be opening his own self-styled museum in Switzerland? Where Gertsch once seemed so quaintly of-his-moment as to merit an aesthetic freshness stamp ("Best Before 12/73"), his work of the period has somehow escaped the photorealist time capsule to garner a cultish following. To what degree his mid-'70s work will be highlighted in the new space remains to be seen, but whatever goes on view, the October '72 cover boy will at least be spared complaints about officious curators and beguiling categories.

In this ongoing series, Artforum looks back on an essay of note from our pages ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago to the month. Visit artforum.com to view the contents of all four issues and read selected articles from each.