'Suddenly I Have Hundreds Of Friends'

View page in TimesMachine

NO EXHIBITION OF contemporary art is more important or more eagerly anticipated than Documenta, the giant survey held every five years or so in Kassel, Germany. But recent Documentas have also been giant disappointments. When a relatively little-known French curator was chosen in March to head the next one, in 1997, it was not only surprising news; it suggested the possibility of tangible change for the show. The person chosen, Catherine David, has been a curator at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris since 1990 and for nine years before that was a curator at the Pompidou Center. In the past, commissioners of Documentas have all been men. Handicappers had made Kasper Konig, a well-known and respected curator from Frankfurt, a favorite for the job that eventually went to Ms. David, who was a long shot at best.

"Suddenly I have hundreds of friends," jokes Ms. David, who is 39, during an interview here at the Jeu de Paume. She is a friendly, energetic woman with long, dark hair and a fixed stare, who talks in bursts, between puffs on a cigarette. "It's as if Documenta were a fair, and some people just assume they can get in if they want to, so they write me to ask what they do to make sure they're included." This was the first time an independent jury, instead of officials from Kassel, chose the commissioner. Kathy Halbreich, director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, who was on the jury, says its goal was to find a young curator. "She has traveled widely, and her own talents range from the acknowledged masters to those artists who may just be coming of age in far-flung countries," Ms. Halbreich says. "She's sober, thoughtful, global in her thinking in terms of the range of media as well as esthetically."

Indeed, Ms. David is not an ideologue or easy to pigeonhole. In conversation she talks a lot about film as well as art. She is interested in video and photography. At the Jeu de Paume and elsewhere, she has organized exhibitions about Israeli cinema and Brazilian cinema as well as retrospectives of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica and the American artist Eva Hesse. She has done shows of contemporaries like the Italian Pier Paolo Calzolari, the Germans Reinhard Mucha and Lothar Baumgarten, and the American Robert Gober, and next year she will do one of the Canadian Jeff Wall and another of the Belgian Chantal Ackermann. She is known for having a special interest in Latin American culture. She studied Spanish and Portuguese at the Sorbonne and wrote her thesis on Wifredo Lam. The next Documenta will be the 10th. The first one, in 1955, grew partly out of the cold war and was an effort to introduce international developments in modern art to West Germany, only then recovering culturally from the effects of the Nazi era. At the same time the show provided a forum for new art from around the world when big international traveling exhibitions of contemporary painting and sculpture were far less common than they are today. By the 1970's, Documenta had become at least as influential as the Venice Biennale. In principle it was more coherent: its selection of artists did not depend upon committees from different nations; instead, a head curator, or commissioner, was supposed to bring order to the show. The reality was sometimes different. The last Documenta, in 1992, organized by Jan Hoet, a flamboyant, self-aggrandizing museum director from Belgium (now, aptly, an aspiring politician), was inconsistent, poorly installed and without clear purpose. It was also immense. At a cost of $11 million, it included 200 artists from nearly 40 countries. The modest Ms. David is in striking contrast to Mr. Hoet. "It's safe to say that most of us thought the last Documenta was not the exhibition it could have been," says Ms. Halbreich. "We were looking for something that put the spectacle back in the art and not in the organizing of the art."

Ms. David says, "I'm not a star, not an actor, and this is not show business." The last Documenta was "just one more big exhibition, without a function," she adds. "Nothing was done to collaborate with the artists. You can't collaborate with 150 artists, of course, but with specific artists and projects you have to be faithful to them and work closely with them for a long time. Collaboration can't be improvised." Ms. David's goal is to broaden the exhibition, to make it even more international and at the same time to re-examine the premises of a global survey. "We're no longer in a postwar North America-Europe dialogue, and we must open up, somehow. What do we mean by international? Without neocolonial attitudes? Documenta should be a way of addressing these questions -- not necessarily solving them but at least addressing them." Her openness to diverse ideas comes through in conversation. She speaks of the mandarin abstractions of a Robert Ryman in the same breath as the psychologically charged multimedia works of a Bruce Nauman: "I think Ryman is as contemporary as Nauman. I don't agree with the etiquette of political art, which is becoming internationalized and is particularly strong in the United States. I think being closed to Ryman is itself political. A certain range of political art for me is doing exactly the opposite of what art should do; it's not paradoxical, open and asking questions." She is years away from naming artists for Documenta, only saying she will look especially at those who were not represented in previous shows. "We are not obliged to a gigantic scale," she insists. "At the same time we obviously can't be so small that the show is like a little laboratory experiment. We must work with the spaces we are given at Kassel." Documenta, which in 1997 will have a budget of $13 million, is presented in several eclectic buildings clustered near the city's center. "You have to deal with these idiosyncratic, heterogeneous spaces," she says, "not in a megalomaniacal way but in terms of how things belong together and how to work with, not against, the spaces, sometimes with site-specific art. You have to find spaces for intimate works and also for confrontational works, to be very attentive to the needs of the works. It's also important to keep space open for surprises: you can't make a Documenta with a rigid program and exclude great works just because they don't fit in with the program." Ms. David, nonetheless, has certain issues in mind. One is the changing dynamic between center and periphery, the idea that contemporary art is no longer just about Western Europe and New York City, the traditional centers, but increasingly about the rest of the world too. "It's not a question of quotas or simple political correctness but of methodology, meaning when you present artists from different contexts together you must think about, and deal with, the meanings of those confrontations. We are now in an increasingly polycentered world. The question now is, Periphery in relation to what?" ANOTHER ISSUE SHE IS CONcerned about is public versus private. "They are two dimensions of contemporary life," she says. "One has to do with intimacy and private space, while the other has to do with the city and everything else that disturbs and impinges upon private space. "In thinking about whom to include in a show like Documenta, you also have to deal with debates like what is the privileged medium in a culture -- sometimes it is music, more often writing or movies -- and find a way to make that fact visible in the exhibition. Ex-colonial countries, for example, were always sent bad or second-rate European paintings. Except for Mexico, maybe, where painting thrived after Spain had sent great things. And painting is a colonial practice. But movies are originals, even if they are scratched copies. A Godard sent to an ex-colonial country is still a Godard. Maybe it's not surprising that in India a film maker like Satyajit Ray is so interesting, and the artists there are less well known." Ms. David is setting up an office in Paris to prepare for Documenta, hiring assistants for the paper work but not other curators, who, as in any collaborative enterprise, might end up blurring the show's focus. "It's very important for the show to remain coherent, so I prefer just talking to people I've known for years." She says she hasn't felt any pressure yet from French artists. (There were plenty of Belgians in Mr. Hoet's show.) And it's only a coincidence, she thinks, that she was named at the same time that Jean Clair, the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, was picked to head the visual arts component of next year's Venice Biennale, the first time that job has gone to a non-Italian. "I hope both committees chose us because they were interested in independent and fresh perspectives," she said. "At least that's what I want to bring to Documenta."