Documenta Fifteen: The Limits (and Possibilities) of Culture - Radical Art and Twenty-First Century Crises

It will be abundantly clear to anyone who has had even half an eye on current affairs, that we are living in a period of profound, critically intertwined crises, polycrises in fact. Global inequality is arguably more extreme today than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution [1] due to the domination of the system of financialised capitalism. After decades of its academic peripheralisation, issues of class struggle have returned with a vengeance. Disillusionment with neoliberal corporate ‘democracy’ has both challenged and fomented Left solidarities globally. Meanwhile, the same phenomenon has facilitated the ascendancy of increasingly violent right-wing racism and indigenous struggles against it. Meanwhile, mass protests confront mounting unignorable evidence of climate catastrophe. Many such protests have been met by governmental and police attempts to deem them illegal. All these crises intersect in real time and are fundamentally interconnected. Documenta’s last iteration Documenta Fifteen, touted as the ‘first exhibition of the twenty-first century’, [2] touched on all the above crises. Interestingly, the exhibition excluded most big names of the Eurocentric and North American art worlds. Curated by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, the exhibition focused, somewhat controversially, on non-mainstream artists, artist collectives and ‘non-artists’ from the Global South.

If Documenta Fifteen was the first exhibition of the twenty-first century as claimed, it was on the dual basis of the exhibition’s implicit (and on occasions, explicit) recognition of the bankruptcy of Western liberal democracy and its attempts to propose alternatives to them through art. Such recognition extended as well to an acknowledgement of the aligned bankruptcy of the dominant contemporary art system as a privileged site of the propagation of core neoliberal values; unerring competition and endemic individualist self-entrepreneurialism. [3] In fact, the ascendancy of financialised politics has been strongly echoed in the global art world particularly at its elite, monied end. [4] As far as contemporary art is concerned, the ‘upper end of town’ through its interaction with big name dealers and certain top-tier museums, [5] has increasingly purveyed and encouraged some of the worst aspects of neoliberal excess, celebrating art as private asset accumulation and enculturated self-aggrandisement. Contemporary art is reduced to highly covetable proxy capital. [6]

 In principle, Documenta Fifteen stood in stark contrast to this prevailing outlook. Nevertheless, the question remains regarding the exhibition’s epochal ambitions, its structuring model of collective sharing and ultimate impact: how do we transfer the lessons and realisations of radical art to the ‘real world’? This question is especially acute given that global capitalism has repeatedly proven supremely adept at reappropriating protest for profit. How can radical art executed in response to and hoping to positively allay current global crises, evade its neutering entrapment by the political forces that dominate contemporary culture, including Documenta’s historical encoding as an institutional showcase for ‘serious’ global art? This essay seeks to address these questions using illustrative examples that speak to the breadth of contemporary crises and their impact on, and beyond, art.

(i) Capitalist Crisis and Inequality: Ruangrupa and Taring Padi, the Value of Sharing and Revolt

 Documenta Fifteen was hosted by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa. Rejecting the role of ‘curators’ Ruangrupa chose instead to act as hosts to other invited collectives and individual artists in the exhibition. Its most significant contribution to Documenta was via acts of hosting - talks, meetings, discussions, screenings, dinners etc. Their model for hosting was based on the notion of lumbung, as has since been widely discussed in writing around Documenta Fifteen. Before Documenta Fifteen the term lumbung would have been practically unknown in the West. Lumbung refers to the Indonesian communal rice barn, a site where common resources are gathered for collective benefit.

 Unlike a bank, the West’s favoured economic entity promoting the primacy of private accumulation, lumbung is truly collective. Its resources are made available to those most in need under different circumstances and at different times and for various communal purposes. The flexibility of lumbung only underscores its role as responsive to collective need (whereas banks as corporate entities in the neoliberal era have increasingly focused on implementing terms to extract evermore profit in the form of debt). As an ideal, lumbung represents principles of generosity and usefulness and does not merely describe an existing institution or physical structure. Lumbung in principle and practice, welcomes possibilities of associative incorporation and collective expansion, not for profit, but for dialogue, exchange and mutual support across territories and borders.

 What is perhaps most interesting about Ruangrupa’s refusal of the role of ‘curators’ and their proposal of lumbung as a guiding methodology, is the fact that both run entirely contrary to entrenched Western cultural and economic models. In fact, the art world while it is clearly fragmentary and multipartite, is largely structured, and certainly at its most visible sites, according to long-persisting hierarchical fantasies of individual(ist) meritocracy. [7] Meanwhile the economic system defining this cultural world, financialisation, has largely supplanted actual productive (use) value with virtual (speculative) value. [8] This is the absolute antithesis to the spirit of lumbung.

Aligned yet contrasting, another Indonesian collective Taring Padi persistently and openly identify with anti-capitalist positions. Given the global rise and widespread negative impact of neoliberal privatisation as a virulently inequitable and protectionist economic system, this stance is hardly surprising. It has been evident from the collective’s founding in 1998 since when it has concertedly championed progressive communal ideals.

 Taring Padi initially undertook its activities in response to the highly fraught situation of Indonesian domestic politics at the demise of the military dictatorship of Indonesian president Suharto. In the nineteen sixties Suharto rose to power backed by US intervention, opportunistically capitalising on the anti-communist purges pursued internally by rebelling high-ranking officers of the Indonesian military. [9] Previously, the strength of the communist cause within Indonesia under Sukarno, Indonesia’s first independent president, was well known and widely supported by peasants who took up arms on its behalf. [10] By the nineteen eighties Suharto’s regime was notorious for the well-documented extent of its financial and political corruption which prevailed long into the nineteen nineties. [11] This combined history also explains the overt, often trenchant and denunciatory, communist imagery and symbolism of Taring Padi’s work – frequent depictions of the hammer and sickle, bankers represented as pigs, businessmen as rats, military and police as masked murderous mafia. Contrastingly peasants are shown as a long suffering but joyously defiant mass collective.

Tellingly, Taring Padi practice according to a five-part manifesto stating outright their modus operandi. [12] Appositionally in the West, since the long-ago demise of Left avant-gardes and the academic popularisation of liberal post-modernity, such self-identifications have largely been dismissed as antiquated, pointless, and generally embarrassing in their supposed lack of sophistication. Ambitiously titled, ‘Five Evils of Culture’, Taring Padi’s ‘mission statement’ aims to revive a ‘people’s culture’, by which it clearly means a culture of the populist Left. The culture the collective propounds opposes both the typical Western commodity status of art, refusing to commercialise the art it makes for ‘community and campaign needs’, [13] or concur with the control of art by institutional ‘departments that manage art and culture, that support the status quo and seek to shape Indonesian culture only to be sold for its exoticness in the interest of economy and power’. [14]

 Despite a growing private market locally and internationally for the type of ‘protest art’ Taring Padi produces, the group has maintained the integrity of its political stance consistently identifying with art’s social purpose. The overtness of this reticent anticommercial stance vis-a-vis the general functioning of the Western art world, is rare and arguably unequalled at this level of organisational intensity. In the West, contemporary culture’s most-publicised sphere, [15] the domination of econometric values ‘naturally’ [16] aligns art with the assumption of personal (or business) profit. Even ‘political art’ becomes a highly profitable genre. Taring Padi’s actions denounce such phenomena.

(ii) Class Crisis: Amol K Patil versus India’s Corporate Caste

Dramatically opposed to genuine collectivisation, the corporate global universe of neoliberalism, has obsessively focused on the individual. The extent of such focus has largely hampered attempts to cement transnational mass solidarities among resistant groups. The recent global return of working-class discourse and movements ­- having been effectively annihilated in discourse for many years by professionally self-serving neoliberal ‘critiques’ and the ‘anti-essentialist’ relativism of much postmodern theory [17] - is therefore unsurprising. As a class, employees (workers) statistically comprise a vast majority. Employees, however, even middle-class employees, have not seen many tangible rewards under financial capitalism as median wages have remained stagnant against levels of productivity for decades. [18] All the while, and despite considerable evidence to the contrary, market-driven myths of personal and class overcoming preponderate. The resulting cognitive dissonance between working class desire and actual lived experience, frequently reaches implosive proportions under current conditions. [19]

 Speaking to this crisis, artist Amol K Patil’s video/performance at Documenta reactivated a local tradition of working-class musical performance to speak of class and caste divisions within contemporary Indian society. In this video, a performer arrives at what appears to be his workplace and routinely deposits some basic items in a locker. Leaving his shoes behind, he substitutes them for roller-skates. The camera lingers on this simple act of exchanging shoes (plodding, pedestrian), for skates (fluid, gliding). Fitted with skates, the performer effortlessly glides out of his workplace and into the busy streets of Mumbai dodging oncoming pedestrians and traffic. His identity is largely concealed as we follow him weaving deftly and purposefully through urban terrain as though contained in his own interior world. Skating through congested streets, the performer shoulders a boombox from which spoken word protest songs traditionally known as Powada [20] play, accompanied by other sampled sounds (including at one point, snatches of the global communist anthem, the Internationale). From the outside, the skating performer may appear to have the city at his feet. However, Powada as a localised lower-class tradition, typically meant its performers were denied entry to many of the common spaces they traversed often unable to even get a drink of water due to their caste. [21]

 Especially effective and affecting about this work was both the grace and palpable vulnerability of the lone performer, the sense of their reclaiming the urban sphere through a simple mobile intervention not officially sanctioned by the city or the passers-by who experience it directly. The political subtext of the work challenges social divisions in the street via the immediacy of music and sound. To relate this work solely to caste hierarchies however is to limit the broader class critique that underscores it.

 Given the authoritarian right-wing, heavily pro-corporatist (as well as religious and caste) biases of the current Indian government of Narendra Mohdi, Patil’s work speaks also of the increasing domination of the Indian urban sphere by corporate as well as (ultra-)nationalist interests. [22] Streets and urban zones are effectively parcelled off into enclaves owned and policed by corporate ruling elites and upper castes. To be working class becomes increasingly a burden to be punished. Jobs no one wants are passed down to those in the most precarious situations. Meanwhile, the ongoing neoliberal hollowing-out of the middle-classes, the result of the excessive concentration of wealth at the top, means the working-class is perpetually replenished as ‘surplus labour’ ever ready for any job that may arise. In India the explosion of call centres to which many Western corporations outsource customer service operations, has often been remarked. [23]

 More dire and more telling of current geopolitical and global economic relations are the rise of so-called ‘click farms’ spread across countries like India. In these, workers are paid a pittance to sit at computers lined up in expansive demountable sheds smattered through urban areas. Here, they repeatedly click the ‘like’ button on targeted web pages to artificially inflate the online impact and market viability of their proprietors. [24] The ‘datafied’ worker, as it was for the factory worker at the zenith of the Industrial Revolution, is paid to function as a machine whose external needs and desires are assumed to be absolutely minimal, barely there.

 Meanwhile, Silicon Valley Big Tech whose self-representations are popularly cited as dematerialised and post-, if not super-, human, profits from the base labour of physical workers reduced to working parts. Neoliberalism moves from foundational myths of its ‘anything goes’ largesse to become authoritarian capitalism enabled by self-protective corporatised states of the sort established by politicians like Mohdi. [25] Against this backdrop, Amok K Patil’s lone skater becomes a subversively mobile transmitter of unsanctioned alternative messaging. While alone, the performer nonetheless communicates a collective call to solidarity. Ultimately, the work functions on parallel terms as imminent public intervention and lingering, politically acute, document.

(iii) Crisis of the Left: Subversive Film’s Tokyo Reels and Palestinian Solidarity

The insolubility of genuinely contestational art practiced against the ubiquitous elevation of global market values, was further evidenced by the Tokyo Reels presented by the transnational Subversive Film collective. The films comprising these reels, were composed of non-linear fragments foregrounding the direct relationship between the Japanese radical Left of the nineteen sixties and seventies, and the concurrent struggle for Palestinian liberation, a struggle dramatically highlighted currently as a result of Israel’s US-backed genocide of the Palestinian people.  Practically unseen until their appearance at Documenta Fifteen, [26] these collectively authored cinematic segments depict, among other things, conversations between activists of the Japanese Left, [27] and members of the various Palestinian Liberation movements including the PLO and PFLP. Rather than merely historical though these films coalesce as a speculatively wide-ranging and incisive documentary highlighting a little-known or publicised dimension of contemporary Japanese culture, the sheer extent of Left commitment among certain groups within that country. [28]

Particularly since the globally lauded blossoming of Japan’s bubble economy in the nineteen eighties introducing a swathe of technological and consumer innovations (since dramatically waned), very little comparatively has been publicised about Japan’s considerable Left anti-capitalist histories. Indeed, and rather unsurprisingly following the US nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Left and communist participation in Japan was high. So high in fact that under post-war US occupation, the CIA saw it their duty to infiltrate and by way of local proxies, violently disperse leftist groups due to the threat they posed to the imposition of US ‘democratic’ values on the local population. [29]

The prevailing myth of Japan emphasises it as a nation organically capitalist; resourceful, inventive, industrious, inscrutable, and family orientated. Japan was regarded by many in the West as a model country wholly dedicated to the global capitalist cause otherwise dominated by Western hegemonic interests. From an economic perspective, it was the antithesis of an outlier like Palestine as a deeply impoverished ‘stateless state’ beset by decades of violent, Western sponsored, occupation and killing as well as committed resistance. The revelation of this presentation of documentary evidence of militant Japanese Left solidarity with the Palestinian cause therefore might strike many as incongruous even fantastical. Nonetheless, Japanese operatives trained secretly in military camps in Lebanon in preparation for armed anti-imperialist struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. [30] Many participants in this struggle were internationally blacklisted, targeted by Japanese, US and Israeli intelligence and police agencies. Some even fled to North Korea to evade persecution.

At Documenta Fifteen the contemporary ‘hotness’ of this material exposed it to attempts to censor it for alleged ‘antisemitism’. [31] However, the film is compiled entirely of pre-existing documentary footage that represents an incontrovertible part of a repressed historical narrative. Its targeting for ‘antisemitism’ at Kassel’s Documenta Fifteen, in the heart of modern Germany – a country presently wholly supportive institutionally of the destruction and genocide of Palestine - suggests more about current geopolitics and the endemic weaponisation of that term by Zionists and their allies. [32] It also suggests the level of anxiety within ostensibly liberal Western nations faced with an increasing tide of anticolonial, decolonial and anti-imperialist sentiment both inside and outside the Western hemisphere. The perceived ‘danger’ of presenting this material publicly at Documenta, precisely implied this dramatically changing political climate. Rather than simply speaking from a distant past, Subversive Film’s Tokyo Reels highlighted the present rise of global Left sympathies and undeniable swelling solidarity with oppressed people facing subjugation the world over, the case of Palestine being most agonisingly present.  

(iv) Race Crisis: Richard Bell, Indigeneity and Racism on the Global Stage

 As an Australian visiting Documenta Fifteen, being confronted with Richard Bell’s paintings depicting threatening lines of uniformed police was an uncanny experience. The sheer familiarity of such imagery would be felt immediately by anyone who has participated in a protest in Australia particularly over the past ten years. Bell’s paintings dryly executed and poster-like, further indicate the indissolubility of indigenous struggle within contemporary Australia. Politically, this is an issue that is very difficult to render neutral or merely consumable.

 Bell of course is famous for his ‘Bell’s Theorem’ in which he postulated ‘Aboriginal art’, it’s a ‘white thing’. [33] Here the artist was responding in part to the massive and exploitative growth of the Aboriginal art market identified internationally as representative of Australian art per se. For many – collectors, galleries and museums – Aboriginal art is Australian art. Given its uniqueness and instant recognisability this is no surprise.  Bell however has also pointed out that in the Aboriginal art market, urban or ‘non-traditional’, indigenous art like his own, is often sidelined. He has identified as well that ironically, it is non-indigenous markets that have ‘made’ Aboriginal art a readily observable global ‘brand’ and assumed repository of ‘ancient authenticity’ from which non-indigenous consumers can draw. At a price. [34] Bell’s work upsets the ease of this relationship by graphically indicating the political struggles that have underscored the global rise to prominence of Aboriginal ‘aesthetics’. These embittered struggles have engaged Australia’s indigenous population since colonisation. They are ongoing struggles not only about what constitutes national sovereignty but about the lived actuality of ‘native title’, how indigenous lands can or should be ‘used’. [35]

 In 2023 the Australian government proposed a referendum, the so-called ‘Voice to Parliament’ through which it hoped to instigate greater proportional representation of indigenous political and social concerns. However, the structural limits of this referendum were also pointed out by several prominent indigenous activists. [36] Ultimately, a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ vote pertained to wording to be included in the Australian Constitution suggesting provisions for indigenous communities to advise the government about issues directly affecting them. The referendum would not instigate concrete laws or policy automatically benefitting indigenous populations. It would, however, make such changes dramatically more likely in principle. Even at a symbolic level a ‘Yes’ outcome potentially had momentous implications for future indigenous/non-indigenous relations. Consequently, the positive ramifications of a ‘Yes’ result could not simply be written-off as meaningless. This is especially the case considering the Australian Constitution, written of course by white, male colonists, has barely been altered since its ratification in 1901.

In the end, the ‘No’ vote prevailed after a sustained scare campaign fervently pursued by sectors of the Australian Right, including the Liberal National Party. The actual flow-on effect of a ‘Yes’ vote therefore remains untested as to whether it could have mitigated the ‘debt owed to Aboriginal people by the Australian government from 1901 to the present’, [37] as it theoretically promised to. The highly active ‘No’ campaign fully exposed, via its deliberate and substantial spread of misinformation, not only the extent of Australian liberal conservatism but more disturbingly, the sheer extent of racism persisting in the country. [38]

 Political attempts to redress the accumulated trauma of Australian indigenous experience has been met in recent years by the defensive rise of unashamedly right-wing and racist political parties like One Nation. [39] Meanwhile, the major parties in Australia today, the Labour Party (ALP) and the Liberal National Party (LNP or ‘Coalition’), have done comparatively little to benefit indigenous rights or living conditions. The former effectively condone the corporate mining of lands regarded as sacred [40] while the latter largely oppose increased indigenous visibility or political participation. At the same time, the increased policing both parties endorse not only pre-empts warranted indigenous resistance but risks further damning incidences of the incarceration of indigenous children and black deaths in custody. [41]

 As Bell is fully aware, racism is not simply a question of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people but of the structural conditions that enable, by example or neglect, the subjugation of Others usually for the sake of business-as-usual status quo, profiteering and exploitation. At Documenta Fifteen, Bell’s Metronome, a series of digital counters, algorithmically calculated exponentially mounting debts to the Australian Aboriginal people in the guise of ‘residential rents, parking fees, and other costs’. [42] His Tent Embassy, installed on the lawn outside the Friedericianum and first erected in 2013, invited Documenta visitors and artists to engage in casual discussion or open debate about contemporary race relations. These works appeared as fights for indigenous sovereignty escalate everywhere against a global backdrop marked by the emphatic rise of the right and furtive extension of US/Western imperialism. [43] 

(v) Climate Crisis: Màs Arte Màs Acción and the Erosion of Habitat

 As economic inequality, class and race crises are fully globalised, they are all further impacted and conditioned today by the concrete effects of climate inaction. ‘Extreme weather events’ – life destroying floods, fires, hurricanes, and earthquakes – are exponentially increasing becoming rapidly unignorable. [44] As is scientifically proven, proliferating events of this nature are the accumulated result of the burning of fossil fuels; coal and gas. Nonethless, fossil fuel companies remain some of the richest in the world posting billions of dollars profit annually. The understandable global anxiety this situation elicits has resulted in waves of protests and direct actions targeting the fossil fuel industry. The threat these protests pose to governments reliant on corporate mining profits, is attested by the extent of their attempts to curtail them. Recent introduction of anti-protest laws worldwide is arguably targeted predominantly at climate activists. [45]

 At Documenta Fifteen a glasshouse in Kassel’s Aue Park, housed a neatly stacked pile of de-barked tree trunks forming a pyramidal pile. This artwork initially suggested an updated version of minimalist, conceptual Land Art, which in a sense it also was. The piece was accompanied by a soundscape speaking directly to this temporary domesticated monument of felled trees. The soundscape temporally activated the static sculptural arrangement by aurally evoking the ambience of rainforests as well as their parallel decimation. Such aural enlivening subtly alerted visitors to the wider context of the installation which analogised the local and global effects of mass logging.

 The work by the Colombian based collective Màs Arte Màs Acción (MAMA) originated from group projects targeting the impact of climate change on Colombia’s tropical forests and the people, including indigenous populations, who depend on them. Metaphorically, MAMA refer to the Colombian Pacific mangrove whose extensive intertwining roots comprise a vastly complex ecosystem of biological, geographic, and cultural interdependence. [46] Mangroves are notoriously prone to alterations in water salinity whose increase has been directly exacerbated by global industrialisation, including industrial deforestation.

 In related films screened elsewhere at Documenta Fifteen, MAMA explicitly exposed the human and political culpability for climate crisis in Colombia via continued militarised incursions, ongoing drug cultivation and trafficking, and resulting widespread poverty. At the same time, the complexity and interdependence of the mangrove root system provides a model for MAMA’s continued international actions. These invite an organic, non-fixed multiplicity of participants from diverse racial, gender, cultural and educational backgrounds to confront the realities of climate violence with both pedagogical and interventionist aims. MAMA’s art therefore is not merely metaphorical but physically tied to real-life interventions and initiatives beyond the market containments of the mainstream art world.

Importantly, the logs compromising this work were sourced from local forested areas around Kassel. More recently, these and other German forests have been invaded by infestations of bark beetles. These beetles leave a complex weave of channels in the timber of effected trees that formally resemble the patterns of Colombian mangrove roots. Invisible from the outside, the beetles destroy trees from within passing from one copse to another in densely forested areas. Their destructive multiplication is directly associated with global climate impacts as rising temperatures and atypical periods of drought render regional forests more permeable to the insects.

Any persisting notions about the relative im-permeability of ‘advanced’ Western countries to climate catastrophe are rapidly being undermined. MAMA emphasised this fact by placing the stumps of these destroyed local trees around the Documenta site for people to use as stools. The shrewd restraint of this gesture suggested the literal undermining of our habitats which, despite growing awareness, too many people remain oblivious to.

Conclusion: Documenta - Resistance and…?

It would be impossible to do justice critically and philosophically to Documenta Fifteen as an event by simply amassing more and more examples of specific works. Its sprawling, deliberately inconsistent and ‘unfinished’ nature excludes this approach. The necessarily limited examples I have chosen, have been selected because they expose specific intertwining contemporary crises that are unignorable. Together these crises form the ground against which all art is produced today, acknowledged or not. They are springboards for a growing recognition of contemporary art’s compromised identity in contemporary capitalist society, and an attempt to positively avoid the replication of neoliberal values in art and in general.

The socio-political conditions informing these diverse practices are not illustrationally incidental but central to them. In fact, collectively grappling with these conditions is arguably of more concern to these artists than such work’s foremost identity as ‘contemporary art’ as far as that term indicates a global market-determined status-quo. Unlike earlier examples of ‘critical art’ attuned to a self-conscious intellectuality, many of the projects in Documenta Fifteen aimed alternatively, to practically embody socialised (if not socialist) models rather than merely identifying the (many) problems that beset artists and humanity at the start of twenty-first century. 

The radicality of this art, as with this iteration of Documenta Fifteen as lumbung, lay in its suggestion and temporary implementation of organisational and representational methodologies that challenge the deeply ingrained sedimentation of art as individualist proprietary enterprise.[47] Certainly, the notion of collectivisation as an innately progressive value has been rightfully challenged by numerous critics. [48] Similarly, a potential pitfall of large-scale cooperative models of the type vindicated by Documenta Fifteen, is the dissolution of ‘negative’ [49] interventions and aesthetic impact by the circularity of attempts at democratic horizontality [50]: the flattening of critique under the weight of neoliberal like administerial practices. Or, at worst, the collective art event akin to an interminable Zoom or manager’s meeting no more progressive than any other occurring for bureaucratically institutional purposes.

Conversely, in this context it would be better to re-emphasise the distinction between politics in art and the politics of art. The former illustrates political ‘content’ while the latter is contingent, actively practiced according to lived choices about who, where and for what intention, art is produced. [51] The real politics of art are ostensibly invisible as representation. As it stands, it is easier for the existing art system to defer the question of art’s politics as one primarily concerned with their illustration as ‘subject matter’. This also makes it easier to sell politics as series of consumable ‘messages.’ On the contrary, practicing art politically excludes art’s simplistic reduction to a recognisably professionalised ‘career path’. Instead, art acts in the world politically as decision and risk. This realisation does not automatically discount political imagery: Taring Padi’s politically charged visual vocabulary for example, arises from lived struggle and active praxis. It is not merely representationally hypothetical.

At its commencement, the exhibition’s hosts Ruangrupa asserted, ‘We are not in Documenta Fifteen we are in lumbung one’. [52] If this gesture of anti- or post-capitalist collectivism ultimately qualifies Documenta Fifteen as ‘the first exhibition of the twenty-first century’, it remains to be seen how this attitude might transpose to the Documenta to follow. [53] Crucially, Documenta Fifteen encompassed mainly practitioners outside contemporary art’s mainstream channels. This decision meant intentionally risking (if not actually), disappointing typical art-loving audiences. [54] For Documenta, the perceived success, or lack of success of this model, will mean either the continuation, development, and expansion of its collectivised approach, or, tellingly, a return ‘by popular demand’ of ‘real art’ by ‘real artists’ for real dealers, collectors, and museums. [55]

It is only in consolidating over time alternative models to mass exhibitions like Documenta (and biennales), that they will prove their commitment to genuine change by permanently altering the global art ecosystem for the better. As a microcosm of the wider world, what the art world is, who runs it, who is granted entry into it and how they are ‘allowed’ to communicate within its tributaries, says a lot about the values of that world. As a one-off, lumbung, as a communal, largely non- or anti-commercial [56] proposition, simply becomes yet another displaceable theme in the world of the international Art Event.

As an alternative, one must also consider Documenta Fifteen in lieu of the fact that most groups involved, including its hosts, came from elsewhere, from the so-called ‘Global South’. There were relatively few collectives from within the local Kassel or German, or even European, situation addressing related concerns. Nonetheless, militant critiques could have been staged natively from within the local cultural/political scene as part of a deliberate act of international solidarity. For sure, locals and local art audiences were invited to participate in collective events and discussions facilitated by Ruangrupa and other hosts, but mainly as guests. Yet it is not as though those struggles actively engaged elsewhere and brought to Kassel do not also play out differently, albeit in very similar terms as far as the operations of global capitalism are concerned. The same capitalist degradation is alive and well in Western Europe. [57]

While it is entirely laudable for a venerated long-established institution like Documenta to redress inequitable global representations, there is a distinct political risk in this approach, a risk common also to many biennales. Works from the ‘Global South’ embracing the direct-action politics of Left populism risk being consumed by Western audiences as typical of problems and struggles in a region where they ‘ought to be expected’. Such an approach gambles on potentially circumscribing globally focused political content and intentions to the limits of pure regionality. Such limits constrain an underlying political emphasis on internationalism to exotic singularities alerting Westerners to the fact that ‘over there’ things are ‘really difficult’.

Alternatively, what would it mean, if Documenta the institution, was globally mobilised in a manner suggested by Documenta Fifteen’s structuring? What if rather than limited to the physical context of Kassel, mid-Germany, Documenta appeared next in Jakarta? Or Kuala Lumpur? Or Rojava? Or Ramallah? Or Delhi? Would interested audiences from Kassel or elsewhere in the ‘Global North’ still visit and with the same enthusiasm? In the same numbers? Once there, would they merely be art tourists on guard because out of their comfort zones? What are the implications if Documenta itself were transnationally collectivised? If anything, the global response to such a ‘radical’ transformation would be extremely revealing of the extent to which we can take seriously the championing of other models within the existing structures of the art world.

Politically speaking, for the liberal art-loving sphere typical of Documenta-attending audiences, including those with enough ‘disposable income’ (author included) to visit, daily life is statistically much less likely to be fraught than for those whose countries are war-ravaged or otherwise overtly unstable. Arguably, lessons taught from afar, even while physically at Documenta, risk functioning mainly as metaphor and analogy. Such lessons tend to be relatively mute within a context they do not imbricate directly. Visiting hosts who are in the end also guests, may plant critical seeds within the local terrain but then, crucially, they move on. It remains unclear what is transformed in the local art/political culture as a result.

Surely the most direct evidence (and one should remain ever sceptical of endemic neoliberal injunctions to metrically ‘prove’ outcomes) would be comparable actions undertaken locally. In the wake of Documenta Fifteen that would mean an increase in creative tactics that likewise embrace a politically collectivist approach opposed to a business-as-usual model pinned to individualist ‘achievement’. This standardised model of endless competition habitually transforms all value (social, cultural, political) into exchange value. Value, although essentially a critical-philosophical concept, simply means here monetary value, value’s most common, though limited, and debatable, signifier. [58]

Documenta’s future, or for that matter futurity in general, particularly given the impacts of wars and climate change, depends on a radically different model (or models) of global distribution beyond the ethically and structurally spent system of capitalist profit-extraction. Capitalism’s currently predominant model as financialisation, is in fact responsible for the manifold contemporary crises it has conditioned and exacerbated; dramatic increases in global inequality; prolonged oppression of working classes; the rise of the Right and with it, widespread racist imperialist hatred; mounting, as well as already highly impactful, climate catastrophe.

Responding to truly alarming current conditions of multiple crises, Documenta Fifteen acted atypically, deliberately undercutting the propriety expectations of the private collector class and effectively deemphasising the opinions of a gate-keeping hierarchy of ‘contemporary art’ experts. And on those terms, it must be read as a resounding success. [59] Further successes propelled by Documenta Fifteen’s example, will be determined by amassing strategic frustrations of this heretofore all too limited, all too self-important sector. If imagining a better world has become imperative, then that world will also require a different art world. Openly confronting the multiple crises of our times, Documenta Fifteen can be regarded as an important parallel step in that direction.

[1] See, Daniel Dorling, Inequality and the 1%, (London; NY, Verso, [Third edition.] 2019).

[2] ‘The 1st Exhibition of the 21st Century’ was the title of the talk Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, gave at Documenta Fifteen on Wednesday, September 21, 2022.

[3] See, Silvio Lorusso, Entreprecariat: Everyone is an Entrepreneur, Nobody is Safe, (Eindhoven, Onomatopee, 2019).

[4] It is important to remember in this respect that ‘contemporary art’ as it has been globalised, is essentially a Western invention strongly aligned with competitive market-capitalist motives and values. See, Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London; NY, Verso, 2017).

[5] See, Laura Raicovich, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest. (London; NY, Verso, 2021).

[6] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 2017.

[7] Meritocracy as an ideal is not necessarily a problem when its parameters are transparent. What is increasing unclear is the nature of individual artistic meritocracy within a pluralist cultural sphere of extreme relativity. When meritocracy is simply pinned to institutional accreditation as it habitually is (the typical artist’s CV for instance), questions of underlying economic and class biases facilitating and propelling conceptions of ‘merit’ simply disappear.

[8] Most profit today is accumulated by a rentier class who derives its wealth from existing holdings via rents and abstract speculation (in ‘futures’ on the stock market for example).[8] As the global economy has incrementally but dramatically swung in this direction since the late nineteen seventies, it means the vast extent of global profits are concentrated within the grasp of an ever-smaller financial elite. Due to the extent of their wealth, this elite wields greater and greater cultural and political power.

[9] See, Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method, (NY, Hachette, 2021).

[10] See, Max Lane, Unfinished Nation: Indonesia Before and After Suharto, (London; NY, Verso, 2008).

[11] Max Lane, Unfinished Nation: Indonesia Before and After Suharto, 2008.

[12] ‘About Taring Padi’ (English). https://www.taringpadi.com/?lang=en, accessed August 10, 2023.

[13] ‘About Taring Padi’ (English), accessed August 10, 2023.

[14] ‘About Taring Padi’ (English), accessed August 10, 2023.

[15] ‘(T)oday’s most phenomenal culture [is] what one hears, reads, and sees, what is most mediatised in Western capitals’; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, (London; NY, Routledge, 1994), 15.

[16] One of neoliberalism’s most ideologically successful, if not infamous, moves was its effective naturalisation of unrestrained free-market capitalism. This allowed capitalism, a relatively young social and political construction, to appear timeless and logically inevitable, the only possible choice. See, Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Southampton, Zer0 Books, [Second edition], 2022). See also, Alex Gawronski, ‘Art as Critique under Neoliberalism: Negativity Undoing Economic Naturalism’, (Arts Journal [Basel], 10, no. 1, 2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/arts10010011.

[17] See, Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (NC, Duke University Press, [4th print], 2013).

[18] See, Marianna Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, (London, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2018).

[19] Franco ‘Biffo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, (London; NY, Verso, 2015).

[20] Skye Arundhati Thomas in A. K. Kaiza (ed.), Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 54.

[21] Skye Arundhati Thomas, Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 54.

[22] See, Alpa Shah, Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty First Century India, (London, Pluto Press, 2018).

[23] See, for example, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Sheena Malhotra, & Kimberlee Pérez, Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers, (MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

[24] See, Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, & Ellen Reese, The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, (London, Pluto Press, 2021).

[25] See, Peter Bloom, Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2023).

[26] Joachim Ben Yakoub in A. K. Kaiza (ed.), Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 190.

[27] Including the once glamorous Fusako Shigenobu, founder of the Japanese Red Army who was released from prison on May 28, 2022. See, ‘Japanese Red Army Founder Shigenobu Freed from Prison’, Agence France-Presse, May 28, 2022, https://www.voanews.com/a/japanese-red-army-founder-shigenobu-freed-from-prison-/6593275.html, accessed September 10, 2023.

[28] See, Gavin Walker, The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68. (London; NY, Verso, 2020).

[29] See, William Andrews, Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima, (Oxford, C. Hurst and Company [Publishers] Limited, 2016).

[30] See, William Andrews, Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima, (2016).

[31] See, Angelica Villa, ‘Documenta Claims Advisory Panel’s Calls to Halt Film Screening is “Censorship”’, ARTnews, September 12, 2022. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/documenta-advisory-panel-subversive-film-tokyo-reels-censorship-1234639147/, accessed September 24, 2023.

[32] Uncoincidentally, Germany is currently Israel’s third largest weapons exporter. The country has also sided against South Africa’s widely supported case at the International Court of Justice at which a preliminary ruling found that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Palestine.

[33] Richard Bell, ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art – It’s A White Thing!’, 2003, http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html, accessed September 10, 2023.

[34] See, for example, Tom Mcllroy, ‘How some dealers exploit Indigenous artists for big money’, Financial Review, December 13, 2022, https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/how-some-dealers-exploit-indigenous-artists-for-big-money-20221212-p5c5ja, accessed September 9, 2023.

[35] The Australian Native Title Act (NTA) 1993, ‘recognises the rights and interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in land and waters according to their traditional laws and customs’, PBC online, https://nativetitle.org.au/learn/native-title-and-pbcs/native-title-rights-and-interests, accessed September 11, 2023.

[36] Possibly the most well-known is ex-Greens party member, now Independent Senator, Lidia Thorpe who argued that a ‘yes’ vote would simply be a ‘“powerless advisory body”, “window dressing for constitutional recognition” and an “insult” to First Nations people’s intelligence’. See, Sarah Basford Cannales, ‘Lidia Thorpe says voice referendum should be called off and attacks ‘powerless advisory body’’, The Guardian (Australia), August 16, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/16/lidia-thorpe-calls-for-referendum-called-off-indigenous-voice-to-parliament-no-campaign, accessed September 11, 2023.

[37] Carol Que in A. K. Kaiza (ed.), Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 172.

[38] Referring to responses to the Voice to Parliament, ‘According to the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, it (racism) has been getting worse. Assembly co-chair Rueben Berg said its Facebook posts were now targeted in hundreds of comments a week that contained racist abuse and hatred’. See, Patrick Elligett, ‘Criticise the Voice if you must, but leave out the racism and vitriol’, The Age, August 26, 2023, https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/criticise-the-voice-if-you-must-but-leave-out-the-racism-and-vitriol-20230824-p5dz4l.html, accessed September 9, 2023.

[39] Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party was founded in 1997. As its name suggests, One Nation is a Right-Wing populist party who have during their existence, sought to galvanise racist and white nationalist sentiment in Australia. During a 2020 Parliamentary session, Hanson stated that, ‘The biggest problem facing Australian and Aboriginal Australians today is their own lack of commitment and responsibility to helping themselves’. The statement was roundly condemned as racist by the ALP and the Greens. See, Matt Coughlan, ‘Pauline Hanson again slammed for racism’, The Canberra Times, February 12, 2020, https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6628133/pauline-hanson-again-slammed-for-racism/ accessed September 12, 2023.

[40] In May 2020, Mining Corporation Rio Tinto, relying on lapsed Aboriginal heritage laws and with Western Australia ministerial approval, destroyed the Juukan Gorge cave of crucial sacred significance to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people of WA as well as an important archaeological site. See, Calla Wahlquist ‘Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine’, The Guardian (Australia), May 26, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-tinto-blasts-46000-year-old-aboriginal-site-to-expand-iron-ore-mine, accessed September 10, 2023. On November 24, 2022, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated on his Twitter account that that this action was ‘wrong’ followed by the disclaimer that Rio Tinto ‘broke no laws’, https://twitter.com/AlboMP/status/1595560731268636673, accessed September 10, 2023. On August 28, 2023, Albanese was photographed wearing a Rio Tinto shirt while touring Karratha in WA with the state’s minister for Resources, Madeleine King.

[41] Indigenous Australians, although numerically far less populous than their white counterparts, are imprisoned and die under police custody, at rates proportionally far higher. Since the nineteen eighties there have been numerous recorded incidences of police violence against indigenous inmates including a disproportionate number leading to death. See, for example, Matthew Hole, ‘Blak death cells: Three more black deaths in custody on eve of Royal Commission 30th year anniversary’, The Guardian (Australia), March 01, 2021, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.717648906170364, accessed September 11, 2023. More recently the rate of incarceration of indigenous children has been described as a ‘national crisis.’ See, Calla Wahlquist ‘Indigenous youth incarceration rate is a national crisis and needs action, PM told’, The Guardian (Australia), March 31, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/mar/31/indigenous-youth-incarceration-rate-is-a-national-crisis-and-needs-action-pm-told, accessed September 11, 2023.

[42] Carol Que in A. K. Kaiza (ed.), Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 172.

[43] A perfect encapsulation of this would be the US’s unconditional military and economic support for Israel’s genocidal 2023-24 West-identifying settler-colonial attack on occupied Palestine. This was backed by the EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand against the wishes of most voters, and despite clear evidence of mass Israeli war crimes and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

[44] See, for example, Mathew Lawrence, & Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Planet on Fire: a Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown, (London; NY, Verso, 2021); Astrid B. Stensrud & Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Climate, Capitalism and Communities: An Anthropology of Environmental Overheating, (London, Pluto Press, 2019); Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, (London; NY, Verso. 2018); George Monbiot, How did we get into this Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature, (London; NY, Verso, 2017).

[45] See, Stuart Braun, ‘Increase of anti-protest laws worldwide target climate change protesters’, Deutsche Welle (DW), January 14, 2020, https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/increase-of-anti-protest-laws-worldwide-target-climate-change-protesters/, accessed August 28, 2023. Of course, recent governmental resistance to widespread rallies in solidarity with Palestine has only further institutionalised infringements of the right to assembly and free speech.

[46] Camilo Jiménez Santofimio in A. K. Kaiza (ed.), Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 148.

[47] In a related attempt to confound typical art world dependency on art as ‘curated’ and ‘collected’, David Joselit proposes art as witnessing ‘…the antithesis of possessing – [whose] radical generosity opens a field of ethical contestation.’ David Joselit, Art’s Properties, (NJ, Princeton University Press, 2023), 122.

[48] Most notably by critic Claire Bishop. See, Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (London; NY, Verso, 2012).

[49] Speaking of participatory and ‘relational’ art, Bishop specifically takes issue with such work’s trading on morality (and moralism) and its subsequent repression of difficult, unpleasant, or otherwise challenging content.

[50] Such emphasis on horizontality also marred for some, while undermining the long-term effectiveness of, the Occupy movement which (in)famously developed a drawn-out practically baroque, call-and-response mode of group communication among protestors. While the grass-roots democratic principle of horizontality refuses the importance of, or need for charismatic individual leaders, it also frequently frustrates situations where swift, on-the-spot, decision making is needed. In such instances, decisive leadership is arguably vital.

[51] See Jacques Rancière & Steve Corcoran, Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics, (London; NY, Continuum. 2010).

[52] Ruangrupa quoted in Lisa Deml, ‘Lumbung will Continue (Somewhere Else): Documenta Fifteen and the Fault Lines of Context and Translation’, Third Text, January 27, 2023, http://www.thirdtext.org/deml-documenta15, accessed September 20, 2023.

[53] This seems exceedingly unlikely now given recent resignations of individual Documenta curators and staff over the organisation’s wholesale commitment to German Staatsräson which deems all criticism of Israel – including its ongoing, exhaustively documented (by its own soldiers even) genocide of Palestinians, war crimes and crimes against humanity, effectively illegal. For an exhibition priding itself on its critical and socio-political acuity, this censorious ideological stance undermines its continued credibility.

[54] Ruangrupa clearly anticipated this response in setting up a ‘Where is the Art?’ working group. See, A. K. Kaiza (ed.), Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 24.

[55] At Documenta Fifteen a word-of-mouth rumour circulated about collectors, still keen to visit the concurrent Venice Biennale, deciding to simply avoid Documenta altogether as a ‘waste of time’.

[56] Documenta Fifteen’s organisers specifically stressed the event in terms of the sustainability of a Circular Economy, that is, an alternative economic model structured on recycling and gifting as opposed to profit-seeking. A. K. Kaiza (ed.), Documenta Fifteen Handbook (English), 268.

[57] See, Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, (London; NY, Verso 2016).

[58] Marianna Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, 2018.

[59] See, Gregory Shollette, ‘A Short and Incomplete History of “Bad” Curating as Collective Resistance’, e-flux Journal, September 21, 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/491800/a-short-and-incomplete-history-of-bad-curating-as-collective-resistance, accessed September 20, 2023.