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each fifth summer since 1955, the international art exhibition called Documenta has occupied the nondescript industrial city of Kassel in northwestern Germany. It is always an ambitious undertaking and this year's, the tithe was no exception: at a require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of $11 million, it not absented over 100 mostly European and American artists in a half dozen sites strung along an axis running from one side the center of town. Locations included places inside and outside the local train station, a certain quantity of deteriorated underground walkways, an outdoor pedestrian mall, the enormous 18th-century Fridericianum Museum, the novel Documenta-Halle and a green park surrounding a palatial building called the Orangerie. Given of the like kind scale and scope and an intention to attract centurys of thousands of visitors from all above the world, you might imagine an exhibition of spectacular esthetic impact -- a certain number of great, crowd-pleasing display of big names and big pictures. Contrary to similar expectations, however, this year's Documenta presented little in the way of traditional visual pleasure and pandered not at all to the touristic masses. Instead, it asserted a stringently high-minded, politically tendentious intellectual mission, which, beneath the circumstances, could be said to be far more ambitious, not to say grandiose, in its aims than would have been the conventional visual circus of fashionable imagery and style

The exhibition's artistic director, Catherine David, a French curator well-stepped in postmodern critical theory, views art as a form of social criticism and a tool for bringing about political enlightenment. She is not interested in art as an expression of feeling or personal fantasy; art that makes esthetic experience its primary raison d'etre leaves her cold; she has little use for pleasure or play as extreme points in and of themselves; nor is she inspired by means of the spiritual in ar. She's not plane particularly committed to art as visual experience. And she certainly disdains the notion of art as entertainment. What she does believe in is art's ability to instruct, to teach us to think more perceptively and more skeptically about the seemingly natural order of the world and, especially, about politics, ideology and power. She believes that a certain kind of avant-gardism does this greatest in quantity effectively at this moment in history. (David, who was born in 1954 serv as curator at the Galerie Nationale de Jeu de Paume before assuming her Documenta directorship in 1994)

What David assembled was something more than just an art exhibition -- she orchestrated a three-month ideological consciousness-raising session. The throw out comprised three major elements: in addition to the art exhibition, a speaker's program called "100 Days-100 Guests" had a different individual give a prelection each night for the 100-day duration of the exhibit in an auditorium designed by means of artists Franz West, who created upholstery for the chairs, and Heimo Zobernig, who designed the stage, a recording and broadcasting booth and other functional ultimate parts And there was a telephone-directory-sized publication called The work which gathered together essays, interviews and fragments of longer body s by all sorts of writers -- from Celine and Adorno to Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak -- and mixed them up with images of works included in the exhibit (Pointedly, The Book contained no art criticism as such) Its three simple bodys taken together, Documenta X would engage visitors not just in the passive contemplation of stretchs in todays art but in a great swirl of novel ideas and discourses on the state of life and politics at the extremity of the 20th century.

The art present to view itself was a vast montage of manner of writings mediums and avant-garde strategies. It included apportionments of installations, most of which involved photographic or video projection; outdoor, site-specific works; works made for the Internet [see sidebar, p 89]; vintage works by the agency of such classic avant-gardists as Hans Haacke, Gordon Matta-clark, Michelangelo Pistoletto; and conceptual proposals produc through radical architects such as the Pop-utopian `60 clump Archizoom Associati or, more not long ago the suave theorist Rem Koolhaas. There was an enormous amount of photography -- from Walker Evans and Helen Levitt to Jeff Wall and Patrick Feigenbaum -- on the contrary only three painters.

A fairly simple and familiar thesis underlay it all: the notion that alone radically new and aggressively nonconventional forms of art can throw back usefully illuminate or intervene in the dynamically changing world of modernity. Documenta X called for a marriage of artistic and social radicalism. The kind of art David advocates is not all that novel though; she favors revival of and recommitment to certain avant-gardist attitudes and practices that emerg in the 1960 and early 1970 Her inclusion in the display of Haacke, Matta-clark and Pistoletto as well as Haacke, Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham and others made this clear. These were artists who discarded traditional esthetics and invented novel forms and procedures by which they spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed to critically challenge conventional, institutionalized perceptions not sole about the nature of art on the contrary about the sociopolitical order of the world. "For greatest in quantity of these figures," writes experience of this sort of work It challenged traditional parameters and pleasures by the agency of which art was generally defined prior to the 1960 -- particularly the primarily of the visual-and notwithstanding because the modes of avant-gardist practice that it exemplifies are in like manner well established institutionally (in textbook museums and studio curriculae) individual felt more deja vu than percussion of the new. And since familiarity mut the consequences of vanguard novelty one felt les inclined to accept the sacrifice of visual imagination or pleasure in the name of subverting conventions that not many sophisticated viewers would be exclusively attached to anyway.