By admin | Published: April 5, 2009
In the words of Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, the artistic director and curator of Documenta XII, “The big exhibition has no form.” It is a curious and at first glance contradictory statement, primarily because Documenta XII is nothing if not precisely a meditation on curatorial form and formalism. Coming from this curatorial team of very few words, we should not take this statement that prefaces the exhibition for granted: it marks something absolutely crucial in the curatorial approach to Documenta XII, something that must be weighed alongside this exhibitions obvious refusal to reduce the visual to the verbal. This said, if we lay to rest the merely negative and reduced sense of the critical that is so very common today, the tension between form and formlessness is potentially productive for thinking this complex curatorial project. [...]
Form, Formlessness and Curatorial Formalism at Documenta XII