Art and politics continued: avant-garde, resistance and the multitude in Documenta 11

Description/Abstract

The article examines the wider ideological framework operative in one of the most important events of the contemporary international art scene: Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002. The author considers various aspects of Documenta 11, which is not however approached as a group art show but as a curatorial initiative responding to the challenge of 'globalisation' as orchestrated by capital and the networks of resistance to the latter. The author considers in particular the deployment of key terms such as 'avant-garde', 'postcoloniality', 'postmodernism' in the Documenta 11 discourse as well as the curatorial engagement with recent political theory and specifically Hardt and Negri's concepts of 'empire' and 'multitude' to propose a reading of Documenta 11 that does not exclude its function as spectacle.