Documenta and the Jewish Question

Dismissals and inversions of anti-Semitic content triggering to nobody but Jews.

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What possible relevance could an art show that closed last September in an obscure German city have now for Canadians? And why are arts journalists still writing about it?

In the final weeks of 2022, Momus, an online art journal based in Montreal, was among several international publications to revisit last summer’s controversial Documenta 15, the world’s most-noticed international exhibition of contemporary art. Held every five years in Kassel for almost 60 years, the exhibition was also a focus of year-end attention in the London-based ArtReview magazine, and a leading British newspaper, The Guardian. This perturbing aftermath – and how it downplays the exhibition’s problems with antisemitism – merits a response.

First, to Momus. Reviewing the Reviews: Documenta 15, by associate editors Rahel Aima and Catherine G. Wagley, was illustrated with headlines culled from various publications: “DOCUMENTA 9/11,” “Germany has cancelled us,” “Establishment Has Largely Dismissed It” and “The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition Is Over. Maybe Forever.” This crisis-evoking collage set the tone for the authors’ ensuing dismissals and inversions of antisemitic content sanctioned by the exhibition’s curators. The article begins by evoking a conspiratorial picture of bogus forces (“the Alliance Against Antisemitism Kassel”) besmirching the art world’s most cherished event. It was, the authors assert, the “international press” (I wonder who’s behind that?) that started “throwing around the term ‘anti-Semitism’,” months before Documenta 15 opened.

Around the same time, ArtReview announced its annual year-end Power 100 list of the “most influential people in art.” The fact the list was topped by ruangrupa, the Indonesian artist collective that curated scandal-ridden Documenta 15, was triggering to nobody but Jews. ArtReview used much of its text to justify the choice, playing down “accusations of antisemitism in some of the works,” which it said overshadowed “more positive consideration of ruangrupa’s vast, polyphonic, chaotic and convivial assembly of artistic voices from the Global South.”

The Guardian’s report about the Power 100 list – where I first learned of it – aped ArtReview’s language of elision and obfuscation. In fact, all three publications couched their references to clear and blatant instances of antisemitism with non-committal words like “accusations of” and “alleged.” The overriding thrust of this defence amounts to a tricky inversion of ruangrupa’s decentred approach to curating as a “disruptive” “challenge” to “old,” “exclusive and hierarchical” models of power. The account in The Guardian  erases the toxic content with this quote from J.J. Charlesworth, an ArtReview editor: “But ruangrupa’s No. 1 position is a recognition of the questions they ask about the institutions of the art world, not the debates provoked by a small number of [antisemitic] works included in the exhibition.” (My inclusion.) In other words, ruangrupa’s institutional critique of Documenta and the colonialist regime it upholds makes up for any pattern of racist infractions committed along the way.

Documenta landed in trouble soon after it opened June 18 when hateful anti-Jewish tropes were noticed on a large mural installed in downtown Kassel. Titled People’s Justice, it was created in 2002 by another Indonesian artist collective, Taring Padi. The mural was intended as agitprop against Suharto, the oppressive, murderous, corrupt and raging antisemitic president of Indonesia between 1967 and 1998. It includes an Israeli soldier with a pig’s head and a Star of David, and a parody of a Jew with sidelocks, sharp teeth, a cigar and SS symbols on his hat.

It was days before the City of Kassel stepped in and dismantled the piece. In response, Taring Padi said it “is not meant to be related in any way to antisemitism. We are saddened that details in this banner are understood differently from its original purpose.” But what would be the purpose of representing an oppressor by combining demeaning caricatures of Jews and Nazi symbols?

Documenta 15 was dogged by the stench of antisemitism throughout its run, with resignations by organizers and consultants, ongoing accusations that other works denied Israel’s right to exist, and the utter failure to properly address the exhibitions’ Jewish problem. In a highly unusual and telling gesture, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz boycotted the event. And when Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, delivered his opening address, he confessed grave reluctance in the face of such evident anti-Jewish animosity. While praising the organizers for inviting innovative art directors from the Global South, he noted: “It is striking that apparently no Jewish artists or artists from Israel are represented at this major exhibition of contemporary art. And I find it disturbing to see how, around the world, representatives from the Global South have, in recent times, refused to take part in conferences or festivals attended by Jewish Israelis.”

When German artist Hito Steyerl (No. 4 on the Power 100 list) removed her work from the show, she castigated organizers for not taking enough “control over antisemitic content.” In an essay she was to deliver at a forum on antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism that was cancelled due to the controversies (a move symptomatic of the overall failure to face them) she wrote that Documenta needed to address its own antisemitic history, given fresh historical evidence that former Nazis colluded in the first few iterations of the fair. These terrible revelations may seem like illegitimate prompts to cancel Documenta, as the Momus article suggests. But how could Germany, 10 years after the Nazi defeat, carry on without its citizens, most of whom had participated in one way or another in the Fascist regime, playing a part in a post-war liberal-democratic West Germany?

Accepting the inevitability of complexity and contradiction in people and organizations allows multiple discordant histories to emerge. While it’s true that Documenta’s first director, Arnold Bode, who had been banned as a painting teacher by the Nazis, later worked with former Nazi Werner Haftmann, an art historian who co-founded Documenta, it is also true that Bode curated Documenta’s first edition in 1955 by featuring artists and movements the Nazis had vilified in their 1937 exhibition Degenerate Art. This was a crucial and deliberate signal to the world that Germany, once again, would be an incubator of progressive modern art.

The permission, obfuscation and denial of blatantly anti-Jewish content at Documenta 15 is part of a global trend that has seen renewed and growing acceptance in recent years, not only on the far right but in progressive, leftist circles as well. In an era of proliferating conspiracy theories, it makes sense that antisemitism – the original conspiracy theory – is making a comeback. With the understandable emphasis today on reversing BIPOC and gender-diverse discrimination, the ancient, persistent and genocidal hatred of Jews passes almost completely under the radar. And so, in artistic and intellectual circles, it is once again OK to hate Jews.

In the current climate of stultifying ideological silos, conspiracy theories, social media shaming and the domination of identity-inflected discourse, it’s important to avoid essentializing and global accusations. While the statement “you are racist” leaves no room for reflection or change, remarking on a specific transgression, “that is racist,” leaves doors open. 

It seems almost plausible (but ultimately is not) that artists and intellectuals from Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation – a land that is virtually Jew-free – may have had little or no life experience with flesh-and-blood Jews and might not recognize an antisemitic trope when they see one. Can ruangrupa, Taring Padi, Documenta or even Germany itself be redeemed from this controversy? Yes – they are not originally or naturally antisemitic. Germany worked hard after the Second World War to recreate nation-building infrastructures, including its legal apparatus, public monuments and educational system, to recognize and guard against any return to a hating and hateful past.

As a self-appointed and widely recognized “barometer for the direction of art and a mirror of society,” Documenta 15 may have provided a picture of a de-centred future, but it also dredged up an enduring (and increasingly acceptable) demon from the past. The failure of the exhibition and its journalistic enablers to face the anti-Jewish scourge is worrisome to anyone who hopes an institution explicitly founded in opposition to Nazism would continue to provide a bulwark against hatred. ■

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