Historically, Documenta’s inception must be understood as part of the overarching postwar project of German democratization. If Adolph Hitler once put together an exhibition of decadent - therefore forbidden - art, Documenta’s mission would be to extol that formerly repressed material as a guarantee of liberal democracy. Although Documenta, along with the art world per se, has grown dramatically since those early years, its mandate has never been more urgent.

Key to Documenta’s ideological significance is the myth of art as the synthesis of work and leisure. According to this myth, the artist becomes the worker par excellence, the worker whose work abolishes the forms that the industrial revolution imposes on labor. This, at least, is the hope art inspires in the popular imagination. The artist presents her- or himself as homo ludens, the one who plays. Art-as-play symbolizes utopian freedom as an alternative to capitalism's cyclical crises, the worst of which erupted in fascism. Yet fascism too envisioned a certain utopia: the total mobilization of society. All activity would be geared toward production; in other words, all activity would become work. Conversely, when automation once promised to abolish work, pundits everywhere were quick to proclaim that, in the future, everyone would become an artist. (Curiously, this prognostication neglects to consider what concrete material practices might, at any given time, constitute an artwork.) Thus, the question as to whether an artist should curate the next Documenta is a highly loaded one. My answer, however, cannot be a categorical yes or no.

The specter of the artist-curator has haunted Documenta for some time. In Documenta 9, chief curator Jan Hoet put himself forward as a meta-artist, namely as a curatorial artist who used artworks as raw materials. Hoet’s technique of confrontation hanging, that is, the willfully arbitrary juxtaposition of works, equates artistry with the free exercise of subjectivity. Hoet’s meta-artist, it seems, was an Abstract Expressionist. But before this, the momentum of the artist-curator had been building up elsewhere. In the United States a number of artists linked to institutional critique had taken curatorial prerogatives into their own practices. They included Louise Lawler, Group Material (Julie Ault in particular), Fred Wilson, and Judith Barry, among others. Their curatorial efforts were interventions designed to expose otherwise unreflexive assumptions about what makes up an exhibition and what that might mean. Lawler’s method was the most radically reductive: simply to arrange or to rearrange a group of works, without having produced any discrete work herself. Ironically, in this she came close to Hoet's approach in Documenta 9, but her intentions were almost the exact opposite: to show that the authorship of any artwork is always a collective, composite enterprise. By invoking the figure of the art consultant, Lawler insists that even those who "only" present the work of someone else actually produce its meaning within specific frameworks: the gallery, the museum, the library, the archive, the home, or even the matchbook. If the Duchampian readymade, as a form of institutional critique in its own right, implied a de-skilling or re-skilling of the artist, Lawler’s, Group Material’s, Wilson’s, and Barry's methods in turn imply the same for curators and art historians.

Institutions themselves have not remained aloof from these developments. After the Guggenheim’s censorship of Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al., a Real-Time System so sensationally backfired, museums have tended to incorporate, rather than resist, institutional critique, in order to become better, more enlightened, entities. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, started an exhibition series based on individual artists’ selections from its permanent collection. Most recently, the Brooklyn Museum rehung its American Wing using presentation strategies directly drawn from Group Material. In an open, self-reflexive gesture, it has even invited Wilson to create a project of his own within the American Wing. The Brooklyn Museum wanted its rehanging to show the diversity of American culture in terms of both its ethnic makeup and its cultural products. The curators and exhibition designers pointedly rejected the austerity of the white cube for colorful, stylized decor in which they juxtaposed paintings, sculpture, video clips, artifacts, memorabilia, and graphics. In the center of each room are groupings of chairs and rugs purchased from a middlebrow interior design store: ABC Carpet and Home. The result is rather slick and seductive, falling somewhere between didactic montage and an amusement park. Curiously, Group Material’s decidedly more homespun Americana project for the 1987 Whitney Biennial offers the clearest precedent for all this. There, the collective interspersed artworks between boxes of cereal, posters, and even a washer/drier set. If Group Material’s project was both a gesture and an intervention, the Brooklyn Museum’s strives to modify, thus establish, a new canon of American art. What began as a critique evolved into curatorial practice; the negative dialectic turns positive. The new canonization assigns a performative role to the artwork itself. No longer can it be opaque. It must be educational, entertaining, exemplary, and user-friendly. Interactivity has come to stand for realizing these attributes. This instrumentalization sharply contradicts modernist claims of autonomy, which Herbert Marcuse understood as an "esthetic dimension," a non-utility that resists the ongoing capitalization of culture. Yet, even if the artwork was never as autonomous as the modernists believed, can material culture ever be made completely legible? And would not complete legibility correspond to the ideal homogeneity of the totalitarian state? Reduced to pure logic, of course, this tendency appears to be far more extreme than it does when played out in day-to-day practice. More at stake is how shared expectations configure the place of artistic practice within the broader culture. The artist has gone from homo ludens to social worker.
While artworks now are generally expected to become ever more user-friendly, recent Documentas and other international biennales have embraced the criterion of "more is more," demanding so much of the viewing public’s time that only the most committed specialists can achieve a full overview. The upsurge of time-based media (video and film) has only exacerbated this problem. Overall, big exhibitions have become broad salvos of information more than focused, concise statements. Ironically, all this too arises from the mandate to educate and to entertain. The last Documenta was distinguished by its profusion of uniformed tour guides. Integrated into the exhibition, the tours became a central interface between the public and the works per se. They were designed to "graze" the exhibition, settling on various highlights. Guides would often march into video or film installations with their wards, briefly synopsize the work at hand (often speaking over its soundtrack), then move on. Frequently several tour groups had to negotiate the same room at the same time, turning viewing into a performance in its own right. The underlying model for the more recent Documentas is the archive. The need to guide viewers comes from its profusion of information. Since Documenta 9, both Catherine David and Okui Enwezor have tried to use Documenta as a platform for rigorous sociopolitical discussions. David self-reflexively concentrated on the development of Documenta within the broader framework of postwar European politics; Enwezor, for his part, examined the legacy of neocolonialism vis-à-vis globalization. They assumed that the more inclusive the exhibition, the more potent the critique. Less idealistically, critique as spectacle also helps ensure the exhibition’s touristic success. Although Documentas 10 and 11 both drew record numbers of crowds, they nonetheless had to compete for viewers’ attention within a far-flung media economy. There, attention - even apperception - is the highest form of capital. No doubt most viewers came away from Documentas 10 and 11 with only a superficial introduction to the works and issues in question. While such an introduction may seem worthy in itself, the sheer volume of unexamined material it is supposed to stand for reduces it to a kind of cliché. Ironically, this condition, at its worst, inadvertently approaches what Marcuse called repressive tolerance, where submerging critique in a flood of competing information works better than censorship. The model for the archive approach derives from Joseph Kosuth’s reading rooms. The archive does not demand immediate attention; the bulk of its information is not immanent. Rather, like a time capsule, it preserves an extinct history, ossified as information. Thus, it fits only awkwardly into a spectacular exhibition. Like Group Material’s Americana, Kosuth’s reading rooms were essentially polemical gestures. With these, Kosuth presented a personalized library, insisting, like Art & Language, that reading constitutes a particular kind of viewing. Although Kosuth made it possible to actually sit down and read there (in effect, converting the gallery into a classroom), the reading rooms worked best as bibliographies. In a time of formalist hegemony, Kosuth’s point was that art discourse is porous and that other discourses should be let in, not shut out. Kosuth never expected anyone to sit down in the gallery and finish all the books he placed there, but that has exactly been the hypothetical premise of the last Documentas. So, the role of the viewer has gone from connoisseur to student. But the last Documentas presume only the most docile kind of student: someone willing to be led around by a docent.
Apropos of reading and the construction of the audience, Michel de Certau argues:

The image of the "public" is not usually made explicit. It is nonetheless implicit in the "producers" claim to inform the population, that is, to "give form" to social practices. . . . The text was formerly found at school. Today, the text is society itself. It takes urbanistic, industrial, commercial, or televised forms. But the mutation that caused the transition from educational archaeology to the technocracy of the media did not touch the assumption that consumption is essentially passive. . . . The efficiency of production implies the inertia of consumption. It produces the ideology of consumption-as-receptacle. The result of class ideology and technical blindness, this legend is necessary for the system that distinguishes and privileges authors, educators, revolutionaries, in a word, "producers," in contrast to those who do not produce.(1)

De Certau’s analysis casts cultural "good will" in a new light, showing up its repressive, authoritative (if not authoritarian) side. In the conversion from Conceptualist critique to institutional policy, the productive capacity of Lawler’s art consultant or Kosuth’s reader always gets lost. That is the problem facing the curator of the next Documenta. Should it be an artist? Sure. Why not? Recent work by artists and curators has tended to blur this distinction anyway. But what about the viewer as producer? Duchamp’s notion that the viewer completes the work still demands to be taken seriously. And the naive, even laughable, expectation that automation will make everyone an artist still makes its claim our frustrations with Documentas past and present.

1. Michel de Certau, "Reading as Poaching: The ideology of ‘informing' through books," in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 166-.