Platform muse: documenta11.

Every five years the contemporary-art community descends on the small hessian city of kassel to experience documenta, the exhibition whose art-world weight is often matched by its propensity for the big statement. this summer's installment, directed by Okwui Enwezor, has proved global in ambition--and globalist in contention. Artforum asked four contributors where documenta11 succeeds and where it comes up short.

LINDA NOCHLIN

Documented Success

THE MOST STRIKING ASPECT OF DOCUMENTA11 IS THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE DOCU-mentary mode, for want of a better word. The work of Bernd and Hulla Becher occupies a central place in the genealogy of this sensibility--and in the space of the Kulturbahnhof itself. Their photographs constitute some of the earliest "documentation" (pace August Sander, the father of them all) that aspires to something beyond or different from conventional documentary, something which inevitably calls forth the idiom of art, conceptual or otherwise. In a recent Art in America interview with the Bechers, the crucial question of the relation of art to documentary is explicitly raised. The interviewer, Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, cites a text by Rudi Fuchs in which the author declares that "the question of whether Bernd and Hilla Becher's work is a work of art is not so very interesting"; nevertheless, Ziegler points out that "'only in art could they find the motivation' for their gigantic task." He concludes that the Bechers "work precisely as ar tists do, since they rigidly limit their interest to a few chosen subjects and refuse to let themselves be distracted."

Endless art. What is art? What is documentary? Shows like Documenta11 ultimately redefine the parameters of the "artistic." But while everyone is surely bored by the "Is it art or something else?" question, one does crave, amid all the exempla of the documentary mode at this exhibition, works that are less problematic in their genre typology, works full of sensuousness and color. Or one wants the definitely nondocumentary, imaginative, sexually focused yet politically charged sculptural installations of, say, Yinka Shonibare, in which headless bodies--gorgeously garbed in costumes dix-buitieme siecle in cut but African in decoratively patterned fabric--fuck, suck, and bugger with an elegance at once postcolonial and bitterly ironic. Or Annette Messager's endlessly, fantastically mobile installation combining animal form and human desire, stuffed figures with deep roots in childish nightmares and grown-up perversity. Or the wacky, tacky slapstick (better filmed than live) of John Bock. Or the lacerating, retro humanity of William Kentridge's opera Confessions of Zeno, 2002, which resituates Italo Svevo's 1923 novel from pre-World War I Trieste to '8os Johannesburg.

But there is a return to humanity beyond the strictly documentary in much of the work in the exhibition, and this is certainly among the curatorial successes. Construed in its largest possible sense, the notion of the documentary mode includes installations and archives (another cornerstone typology) as well as photography, film, and video. Film and video are most apposite in exploring the nature of documentary sensibility and its relation to more conventional notions of art. Certainly the most interesting films here are not "documentary" in the traditional sense. Instead these works deliberately foreground the apparatus, defamiliarizing and dwelling on details and fragments, focusing with stop action on meaningful or meaningless images. Some, such as Steve McQueen's coruscating Western Deep, 2002, leave us literally in the dark as to the precise nature of what is going on yet fully certain that the experience presented is sinister and literally toxic.

Many of these works function in the documentary mode but transform and expand it, making it into a kind of hybrid that appeals not merely to curiosity, a quest for specific information about some topic, but to imagination, political consciousness, and unconscious fears and desires. In A Season Outside, 1997, Amar Kanwar, an independent documentary filmmaker from New Delhi, goes back and forth between pursuing a conventional documentary mode--recording the enactment of national identities on the India-Pakistan border crossing at Wagah in terms of crowd movement, the transfer of goods, and the military ritual of opening and closing the border--and constantly interrupting that mode by foregrounding the telling detail. There are hypnotically repetitious closeups of the bare feet of the Indians and Pakistanis exchanging their burdens of merchandise over that thin white line, emphasizing the arbitrariness of all such activities taking place across contested national boundaries. Or his odd, sometimes focused, someti mes oblique attention to the strange military border routine, a kind of stiff, macho dance of repetitive hostility, punctuated by sharp turns and arrogant kicks, which his camera constructs as occurring within an increasingly claustrophobic space.

Very different yet just as visually seductive is Ulrike Ottinger's Southeast Passage: A Journey to New Blank Spots on the Map of Europe (the title obviously ironizes the earlier colonializing implications of "North West Passage"). Like Kanwar's film, Ottinger's 2002 record of a journey from Berlin through Eastern Europe and two urban expeditions, in Odessa and Istanbul, achieves its effects through film techniques that call attention to the medium itself. Although I didn't get to see all of the three-part, six-hour work--a common drawback in reviewing film presentations at art exhibitions--what I saw was memorable: a huge market in Odessa with row after row of food products and stout, feisty, mostly middle-aged women running the stalls. I was struck by the humanity of these women--no waifs here, no Botox, just big arms, ample busts, and lots of caustic interaction. Heaps of white cheeses, making their visual appeal amid pools of translucent whey, lashings of rich, opaque cream. Then the fishwives, to use the old term, offering up their glistening, fleshy catch, vying with one another to display the superiority of their wet, scaly wares and impatient for the sale. Here, among the market women, Ottinger constructs that seductive amalgam of nostalgia and utopia that so often filters our view of marginal, outmoded lives and practices. But Ottinger's market scenes make one think in more specifically economic terms as well. After all, this is buying and selling on display here, competition and comparison shopping, foregrounded by Ottinger's astute camerawork and the robust appearance of the products and their sellers. Are these succulent cheeses just a sheet of Pliofilm away from being the prepackaged products of our impersonal shopping malls? Can we talk of a contrast between use value and exchange value in the Marxist sense here? Or is a market always a market?

One film that is not in any traditional sense "documentary" but certainly can take its place within the more flexible parameters of the mode is Eija-Liisa Ahtila's The House, 2002, which can be simply described as the story of a woman who begins to hear voices. But there is nothing simple about the film or its construction. Here, using a triptych format, a multiple-screen strategy effectively deployed by several filmmakers in the show (Isaac Julien used three screens and Fiona Tan four), Ahtila visually demonstrates the subject's increasing loss of a sense of inside and outside, self and other, a disturbing permeability to the myriad sights and sounds around her. Indeed, the installation--with its simultaneous and ever-changing left, right, and center views of the subject's movement through space--envelops the viewer in this experience of dissolution. One striking sequence demonstrates the subject's loss of the most basic sense of bodily rootedness--that of the gravitational pull of the earth--as the young wo man floats uneasily into the air above her house. The house stands for, and is, the subject herself and her increasing inability to maintain a sense of psychic wholeness as the outside world--cars, cows, people--begins to impinge on her being, infest her four walls. In a film that is both highly poetic and nitty-gritty realist, madness is visually demonstrated as both terrifying and somehow just the way things really are.

I believe that all art-looking is a dialogic activity, enormously enhanced by interchange with a companion or two at one's side (or, that lacking, an invisible one inside one's head). That said, the Documenta experience was salutary. Never have I encountered so many people from so many parts of my life all assembled to look at and comment on a diverse range of often stimulating and original works. More particularly, I must admit that on first viewing I disliked The House, finding it at once pretentious and simple-minded. But my companion found it powerful in both formal and narrative terms, so I went to see it again. I realized I had been disturbed by the vividness of Ahtila's visual inscription of total loss of self/other discrimination and that I had tried to belittle her achievement in defending my own selfhood, as it were. The moral of this story is that one should see works with another person, who can sometimes shine a different light shared on things that you yourself are incapable of seeing. (Incident ally, my penchant for shared viewing and thinking fits perfectly with an exhibition in which the number of works by collaborative teams is notable.)

Finally, the previously mentioned Western Deep takes us on an infernal vertical journey into one of the deepest gold mines in South Africa. Because we are located experientially inside the mine, not watching it from the outside, the trip is almost unbearable--but irresistible in its force. It is not just that we are submerged in almost total, otherworldly darkness for what seems an interminable length of time but that there is a stomach-churning gravitational velocity to our plunge. Nor is this visceral descent tied to a continuous comprehensible narrative that might help us "make sense" of our experience. On the contrary, narrative continuity is continually disrupted--by infernal drilling noises, by momentary visions of individual heads, by the sudden and unexplained appearance of a thermometer between the lips of a desperately tired and ill-looking miner, and, most pointedly, by the unprecedented dancelike steps of rows of half-nude miners undergoing some sort of robotic physical test as inhuman and repress ive as this descent into hell itself. McQueen explains nothing; it is simply there, the filmic equivalent of relentless suffering, colonial co-optation, and the prospect of nothing better-nothing but death.

It is perhaps beside the point to speak of McQueen's brilliance as a filmmaker, and a highly political one. But his politics are totally imbricated with an original formal project. His work draws us in, suffocates us, makes us psychically permeable and guilty on the level of the political unconscious, as well as that of conscious realization of injustice. If DocumentaII engages seriously with the documentary mode, Western Deep is one of its most moving, thought-provoking, and convincing achievements.

I am grateful to Joe Hill for his assistance with this article.

Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

TOM HOLERT

Bataille That Binds

THE CLIMACTIC FINALE OF THIS CRITIC'S DOCUMENTA11 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 Kassel. A spotlight mounted on a stand beamed measured loads of photons in the direction of the glitter ball. The resulting moving tapestry of reflections on the walls, floor, and ceiling gave rise to the giddy sensation of weightlessness, of the ground loosening, of doing overtime in zero gravity.

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 film-maker 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 informe seems an unlikely candidate to serve as a model for the alleged politics of Documenta11. 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, still 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 s cope of analysis that is both necessary and impossible in its generalism.

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 Ranciere, 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 political 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 the matic 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 seamlessness rather than one of disruptions and constructions (in Ranciere's sense of the political). On the other hand, the impressive array of concepts dis played 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.

MATTHEW HIGGS

Same Old Same Old

THE FRIEDRICH-WOHLER HOUSING ESTATE IS A FAIRLY TYPICAL working-class enclave located on the fringes of Kassel's town center. Patronizingly described as a "marginalized local community" in the exhibition's accompanying guide, it is, for the duration of DocumentaII, temporarily home to Thomas Hirschhorn's extraordinary Bataille Monument, 2002, the highlight of an otherwise sober and at times tetchy exhibition.

The third in Hirschhorn's ongoing series of ad hoc "antimonuments" dedicated to some of our most troubling and original thinkers--the previous incumbents being Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze--the Bataille Monument is a series of five interconnected structures that occupy the public spaces between the extant residential buildings. Built and maintained by the artist with the assistance and support of the local residents, the piece is inextricably implicated in the daily life of its neighbors and surroundings.

The Bataille Monument comprises a cafe, a library of books and videos that relate to the recurring themes in Bataille's oeuvre, an exhibition dedicated to his life and works, a public sculpture in the form of an oversize tree trunk fabricated from scrap materials and mummified in brown packing tape, and a television studio-cum-lecture hall. Constructed in Hirschhorn's now signature and somewhat precarious manner, the Bataille Monument is a complex provocation that seeks to test the potential of art as a discursive, socially liberating force. (On my second visit, during the final stages of the World Cup, the television studio had been temporarily commandeered to screen the third-place match between South Korea and Turkey. The crowd was a good-natured mix of "marginalized" Turkish and German locals drinking beer and cracking jokes. I'm sure Bataille would have approved.)

Hirschhorn's project is successful primarily because it makes no assumptions about its outcome. Resolutely local and occurring in real time, it provides an opportunity for an engaged dialogue with its audience that acknowledges their participation and contribution as being key to its cumulative meaning. Ephemeral in nature, Hirschhorn's monuments might best be understood as temporary vehicles through which intricate webs of contested territories like economics, politics, philosophy, art, literature, even sports can be held up for scrutiny and interrogation.

Essentially colloquial--a quality echoed in Dieter Roth's scatological and entropic Large Table Ruin, 1970-98; Georges Adeagbo's accumulation of pancontinental detritus "Explorer and Explorers Confronting the History of Exploration...!" The Theater of the World, 2002; William Eggleston's photographs of the American South; and Ben Kinmont's modest and affecting conversations with Kassel residents, printed on A4 sheets of paper attached to the walls of the Documenta Halle--Hirschhorn's simple but radical proposal is often at odds with the convoluted nature of many of the works found elsewhere at DocumentaII.

While rightly skeptical of the self-referential and self-satisfied autonomy of much recent art, DocumentaII is paradoxically an often simplistic and curiously prescriptive affair. The informal, open-ended possibilities offered by works such as Hirschhorn's and Adeagbo's are nearly drowned out by the hectoring tone of the many others that seek to represent--often with the subtlety of an amateur dramatics production--the plight of the world's downtrodden and oppressed.

Works such as Chantal Akerman's From the Other Side, 2002, an overwrought rumination on the nocturnal economic migration across the border that separates Mexico from the United States; Mona Hatoum's lumpen riff on domesticity, Homebound, 2000; and Tania Bruguera and Luis Camnitzer's ham-fisted theatrical installations appear at once naive and condescending, if not exploitative, of the estranged circumstances of others.

Writing elsewhere on documentary photography, British artist Liam Gillick has described the kind of work that seeks meaning in the apparent profundity of its subject matter in lieu of offering a "constructed critique" as a "stunned mirror." Emblematic of this condition are Kendell Geers's smug photographs of the attempts by paranoid postapartheid white South Africans to defend their homes; Lisl Ponger's banal photojournalistic account of the traces of the 2001 protests against the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy; and Touhami Ennadre's frankly opportunistic images of New Yorkers, taken in the aftermath of September II.

Elsewhere Documenta11 is peppered with cliched and often sentimental pictures of the effects of social and economic deprivation, environmental neglect, natural disasters, military repression, and suspect ideologies. Unable or unwilling to go beyond meekly acknowledging the persistent presence of global traumas, these "stunned mirrors"--like images in Time or Newsweek--appear mute. Operating as political ballast, their ineffectualness is contrasted with the more pertinent inclusion of documentary films created by grassroots collectives such as Canada's Inuit Igloolik Isuma Productions, the Democratic Republic of Congo's Le Groupe Amos, and Britain's now defunct Black Audio Film Collective. Created out of direct need or to counter stereotypical misrepresentations in the mainstream media, these essentially activist works elect not to sit on the fence, preferring instead a more precise engagement with the immediate concerns of their respective constituents, communities, and audiences.

In many ways, like Catherine David's pervasively influential 1997 Documenta X, Documenta11 sought sanctuary in the ivory towers of the academy and its nostalgia for the unrealized union of the postwar political and artistic avant-gardes. Historical curiosities such as the unrealizable urban projects of Yona Friedman and the former Situationist Constant were wheeled out as being somehow exemplary. Similarly, academically inclined late-'60s and early-'70s Conceptual art--including the oblique notations of Hanne Darboven and the emotionally stunted photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher--is privileged center-stage over and above the more troublesome and contemporaneous propositions of, say, Sturtevant or Gustav Metzger.

With some notable exceptions, including Kutlug Ataman's gently subversive (and strangely suggestive) video installation The Four Seasons of Veronica Read, 2002, this is a curiously prim, somewhat repressed exhibition. Documenta11's almost total disavowal of any practices, old or new, that might have invoked the continuing presence of more complex socially (and sexually) transgressive narratives--Jack Smith, General Idea, Valie Export, Pierre Molinier, San Francisco's Cockettes, the Viennese Actionists, Nayland Blake, Sarah Lucas, Elke Krystufek, Tom Burr, Bruce LaBruce, Ugo Rondinone, Lukas Duwenhogger--appears at times censorious.

While the expectations for any Documenta are undoubtedly high, this is a curiously conservative exhibition that mirrors its predecessor in more ways than its organizers might care to admit. A decidedly mature exhibition--a cursory glance at the statistics reveals that the average age of its participants approaches fifty-Documenta11 seems wary, if not downright suspicious, of the potential and optimism that remain a privilege of youth. However, given the permanent turmoil that describes our global condition, maybe Documenta11's pessimism is an honest reflection of our times after all. If so its subtext seems to suggest that, basically, we're all fucked, and there's not a lot we--or art, for that matter--can do about it.

Matthew Higgs is associate director of the CCAC Wattis Institute at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco.

JAMES MEYER

Tunnel Visions

DOCUMENTA PRESENTS ITS ORGANIZER WITH A DILEMMA. SHOULD THE OUTSTANDING exhibition of contemporary art--a show that surpasses all others in ambition, financing, and planning--simply present the best work, regardless of form and theme? Or should the curator impose strict parameters and choose art that fits his or her concept?

Recent directors have differed in their response. Jan Hoet's Documenta IX was notable for its openness, its refusal to favor one medium or theme. Catherine David's Documenta X explored the legacy of '68 and failed utopias, as well as the history of photo-documentation. This year's show, organized by Okwui Enwezor and a team of six curators, is even more focused. Its theme is globalization and its discontents--racial strife, class inequity, and the excesses of capitalism. The dominant medium is film and video projection, our current salon form. Much of the work has a documentary format. New Media Social Realism, you could call it.

Many critics have attacked the show's blinkered grimness, and it's true that DocumentaII is a fairly joyless experience. You see a lot of work that could be described as "good for you" but little that stimulates the imagination. And yet Enwezor's wager--to present a truly international, politically acute Documenta--results in a watershed show. Like its most famous predecessor, the Minimal/Conceptual art-driven Documenta V (1972), DocumentaII is a bit tendentious. Seeing so many documentaries of the world's horrors ultimately has a diminished impact, like watching too much CNN. Still, I could not help but admire Enwezor's strong curatorial hand. This was without doubt the most memorable version of the show I have seen.

DocumentaII's social commitment is notable because the political in art has been in retreat in recent years, a trend one can trace to the cool reception of the 1993 Whitney Biennial (although there may be signs that this judgment is being reassessed). Though the effort is admirable, DocumentaII's concept of political art as documentary does not encompass a reflexive approach to the exhibition itself. Certainly the reconfiguration of Documenta into several "platforms"--events were held in Vienna, New Delhi, Berlin, St. Lucia, and Lagos, culminating in the Kassel show--challenges the traditional structure of the exhibition. DocumentaII is global not only in theme but in location, exemplifying what I have elsewhere described as a mobile sense of place commensurate with the art world's new internationalism. But as I marveled at the lavish installations, I wondered about the show's imbrication with the structures it claims to critique. Is there not an asymmetry between the images of oppression and the impressive a pparatus that supports their display? What do the German and Hessian governments--not to mention Deutsche Telekom, Volkswagen, etc.--have to gain from financing a show of such exacting multiculturalism and global reach? These questions are not easily answered (or perhaps too easily answered). But surely this Documenta might have benefited from work that addressed its innovative (and expensive) postexhibition concept.

More troubling is the show's tendency to stress the oppression of certain groups or identities. Fareed Armaly's installation on Palestinian refugees, detailed as it is, should have been balanced by a work exploring the other side of the Israeli/Arab conflict. Even worse is the show's disinterest in entire categories of political identity. In emphasizing ethnicity, nation, and race, the exhibition gives only passing attention to gender and even less to sexuality, whether straight or queer. Images of identifiably gay men are scarce; lesbian and transgendered subjects, nonexistent. Touhami Ennadre's photograph of two guys hugging on September II--one among many images of that tragic day in the show--says nothing specific about gay subjectivity. Even the film installation by Isaac Julien, a leading gay director, veils its queer content. I guess it's a matter of taste--or interest. Yet how disappointing that this ostensibly progressive show is, in the end, a bizarrely heteronormative experience.

The dominance of projection is a more telling manifestation of taste: It almost feels as if the social injustices of our time can only be accessed through the projected image. We have been told for some time that traditional media are in retreat; the presence of a mere handful of painters in the show confirms this assertion. And yet one of the conclusions to be drawn from Documenta11 is that the "post-medium condition" lately lamented by Rosalind Krauss is not so pressing a concern. The recent commodification of the projection, the epic-scale picture, and the whole-room installation means that new forms have become established. The old media seem less credible not because we no longer have a concept of medium but because the new media are more so.

Within these media, the projection rules; indeed, a visitor to Kassel cannot help but feel the relatively diminished impact of the still image. A few photographers-William Eggleston and David Goldblatt--hold their own, but in a world of projections, Jeff Wall's light box and Allan Sekula's photo-documentary Fish Story seem lost. (Even the video monitor has trouble competing with projection: Chantal Akerman's installation on illegal Mexican-US migration and Lorna Simpson's wall of thirty-one TVs look like holdovers from the Image World '8os.)

Of course, a new format does not guarantee a successful work. Stan Douglas's hard-to-follow sequence of holograms portraying fairy tales and Shirin Neshat's pretentious two-screen projection of a veiled woman in a garden confirm that even the fanciest production values can't redeem an indifferent idea. By contrast, Eyal Sivan's Itsembatsemba, Rwanda, One Genocide Later skillfully integrates recordings of incendiary speeches by Hutu leaders with haunting images of Tutsi survivors digging up corpses. The formal reticence of the piece is echoed in Zarina Bhimji's film about the destruction of Uganda under Idi Amin. Images of abandoned buildings and an eerie sound track tell you all you need to know about these places without telling you what went on there.

An occasional break from the projections was welcome: For example, Renee Green's cloth pavilions, Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems, located in Karlsaue Park, are a nice respite. The main pavilion contains a video monitor documenting Green's concept within the histories of fantastic architecture (gazebos, octagonal houses) and '7os Land art. Images of earth projects at Documenta VI (1977) provide a dimension of reflexivity that the show otherwise lacks. An intriguing mix of media and discursive forms, the project transcends the documentary aesthetic so prevalent at Kassel.

Indeed, some of the better works in Documenta are documentaries that challenge documentary convention. Steve McQueen's Western Deep ostensibly deals with a mundane subject: the daily descent of South African miners into a very deep mine. The dark initial drop punctured by slight flickers of light, the subtle sound track, the bizarre images of men foraging for gold or undergoing bizarre physical examinations-of bodies confined to unimaginable spaces, instrumentalized, rendered machinelike--makes a strong impression. The film's microscopic attention to form does justice to its subject while transforming the way we see. McQueen's work strikes a balance between documentary's reality effect and an aesthetic encounter--an unlikely combination. In a show of memorable works it is perhaps the most outstanding.

James Meyer is an associate professor of art history at Emory University in Atlanta.