Roger Buergel, chief curator of the 12th "edition" of the international exhibition documenta visited Moscow at the invitation of Stella Art Foundation. This quadrennale which has been held in Kassel, Germany, since 1955, is considered to be one of the most important events in the world of modern art. So, every gesture of documenta's curator comes under intense scrutiny. The 45-year-old director, philosopher of Vienna University and former follower of the radical Vienna actionist movement, tells us in his interview how he perceives the new documenta.
- You are a well-known figure in Moscow art circles. Many people remember exhibition The Subject and The Authority that you organized in the Central Artists House. Having now become chief curator of the documenta quadrennale, are you going to continue this political course? Shall we expect slogans like The Artist and the Authority or The World and the Authority?
- Yes and no. In creating the program of the current documenta we have come up with a whole system of subsections that would allow us to reflect both the particular features and the global nature of our modern life. By the way, the subject of authority is one of the constituents of a broader issue of modernity as our antiquity, which is the main theme of the exhibition.
- How should one understand these words - modernity as our antiquity – in the first place?<br>- We can infer it from the philosophic concept suggested by Baudrillard. Modernity is seen here as a ruined, post-catastrophic space. Because the 20th century is indeed an era of catastrophes, collapses of totalitarian regimes and so forth. Still, all those utopias and expectations are important as a part of our experience. Look to what extent many artists are preoccupied with a kind of an archeology of modernity. One can find such artists in Russia, in Europe, in the Arab world (Lebanon) and in Latin American countries, such as Brazil. All the twists and turns of the modern life, including the heritage of colonialism, are now put into question. It has become absolutely clear that the humankind needs new horizons.
- You are familiar with the Moscow artistic milieu. I’ve heard that you have invited Anatoly Osmolovsky, one of your old pals, to participate in documenta. Did you want him to take part in the discussion? There are rumours that the new documenta will look more like a seminar or a series of workshops, than an exhibition. Maybe, the modern art is indeed abandoning exhibition halls to take seats in university lecture rooms?
- No, our exhibition will be classic in the full meaning of this word, which is to say it is meant for viewing. We want the public to share our aesthetic experience, we want it to have an opportunity to contemplate the art.
- Contemplate? Is this word at all suitable for the modern art?
- Why not? At moments like this every viewer has a need for, and a right to, privacy. A right to be left alone in order to concentrate and ponder over his or her own existence. He or she can tell the people around: that’s it, leave me alone now. Because it is the problems of human existence that the real modern art actually deals with.<br>- They say that on occasion of the quadrennale you issued a special journal or a collection of articles entitled Modernity and distributed it among art critics, curators and publishers of art magazines. Why did you do it? Was it done for advertising or maybe for monitoring purposes?
- We were guided by a whole lot of reasons. When you are appointed a director of an ambitious project like documenta, you find out all of a sudden that there are many things you don’t know. You don't really know either China, or India, or Latin America. That’s why we had to spread our "intformation net", so that we could then discuss things and, finally, taking our decisions concerning the themes and the selection of the artists. We created a network of more than 90 printed and online art magazines and started discussing about the themes of the future documenta on that basis.
- Was it an online discussion?
- No, it was rather a series of regional field conferences which were - and are - conducted every two weeks. These conferences can be moderated by eithder the editor in chief of the documenta magazine, or myself. For example, in Beirut we discussed the problem of installation as a form of conceptual utterance together with editors from the Arab countries and other representatives of the region. And we found, to our surprise, many common elements in our cultural memory. So, what I mean to say is that the meetings like these are very fruitful. For me personally it was a kind of a university. And now we have collected under one cover all this variety of reports, theses and discussion transcripts. This collection entitled Modernity was published two weeks ago. The whole edition was sold out in a moment. Altogether, we plan 3 editions of this kind: the first one entitled The Modernity, the second one entitled The Future and the third one called What is too be done? Problems of Education.
- A Typically Russian question. Are you a follower of Chernyshevsky?
- No, but I know his book. Moreover, we put this question in a universal meaning. It is not a problem of our modernity as a whole? And I would like to add that the form of our collections reflects this problem as well. We want our viewer to come to documenta prepared and well-informed, after having read these texts.
- So, one could say it is for the first time that doocumenta literally lives up to its name, acting exactly like its name suggests - as a body of documents?
- Yes, and, crucially, these documents are made available well in advance. Which means that we really become involved in an educational process. And this is very important.
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