-some excerpts are here -this page is under construction-

number 43
March 1998

News & Letters

Reviews

Outside / Inside - Documenta ,
A 100 day exhibition of contemporary art
in Kassel, Germany.
by Sonja van Kerkhoff, The Netherlands.

...David said in various television and newspaper interviews that she was presenting a different position between politics and aesthetics than one of entertainment or show. Reading this excited me, but the positioning of the words, "poetics" and "politics" above one another as David did for the cover of the catalogue, while a nice concept, in itself, was not enough...

...Over the days, it was rare to find some resonance in the exhibition itself. On the whole, the art by the 250 or so artists didn't match the calibre of the lectures and I felt annoyed because there are artists of calibre who do address many of the issues raised in the lectures and in the 830 page catalogue. What was her critera for her choice or artists or their work? My problem was that I couldn't find any, not that she needed an obvious one. But because I was so disappointed by the works I encountered, I started looking for some point in, say, the room after room of small black and white journalistic images from the '60s and '70s.

Was there some sort of message? And if not, then what made this exhibition any different from one that used sensationalism as a ploy?

...It did feel as if David intended to use the Documenta to present an opposite to iconophilia, an embracing of the pleasures of popular culture. But she didn't engage in a debate on these issues in the Documenta show itself, while many of the lectures such as those by the Indian cultural studies critic, Gayatri Spivak, the philosopher Edward Said, the Palestinian filmmaker, Elia Suleiman, the urbanist Saskia Sasson, or the South African curator, Okwui Enwezor, did...
These lectures presented alternatives, alternatives I found missing in the exhibition.
The catalogue, presented in strict chronology beginning with 1945, was a paradox in my view. There were useful and interesting essays in it, but as a whole, history was presented in linear fashion, much like David's parcous.

She presented her parcours, a 'right' route to follow, so that the visitor could experience the Documenta in a particular order. When I followed this route, I kept wondering what it was that I was supposed to notice. That it began at the railway station? That a handful of works were in underground shop spaces - a few video monitors in shop windows? A shop filled with second-hand clothes? I kept thinking this is 1997 and surely the sighting of works outside of a museum setting couldn't be the only point here...

Artist Profiles

-------excerpts to come.......

...excerpts to come.....

pages 7 - 10


Miep Diekmann, author, The Netherlands.

In this interview Miep Diekman focuses on her coaching writers from Curaçao and Aruba, and her novel set in the Dutch slave trade.

...A prominent Curacao businessman from the Lions Club, came to the Netherlands to ask me if one of the books I was working on for the Antilles primary schools could be connected to the "Keep Caruacao clean and beautiful' (Tene Korsow limpi bunita) action that they had initiated. They didn't have much money, and they wanted to reach the young with this action, so I thought 'why not?'

This detective story is based around a national clean up action on Curacao, where a group of 7 or 8 year olds are the main characters. The story begins with a photographer attempting to get the crowd to disperse so he can take a clear shot of the old woman, Cirila's heap of old furniture, plastic containers, and so on. Slogan-like phrases throughout the dialogue give the effect that everyone is involved in this action in one way or another...

...Ever since I was 20 I had wanted to write a history of the slavery in the Antilles, and so I spent fifteen years researching everything I could get access to in all languages and, in museums in various countries. The journals of ship doctors were a major source as was the journal written by the voyager Adriaen van Berkel in 1672. This only exists in two museums in the world, and the only way I could read it was with gloved museum attendants to turn the pages for me.

A lot of my material about the sugar plantations in Berbice (now east British Guyana) came from this source, where in it all the plantations, their exact locations, their owners, the type of sicknesses, the conditions of the slaves, etc, were described in great detail. It was a gift from heaven. There were even drawings in it that my illustrator adapted from for my book. All these details were vital for me, as my novel is full of these sorts of details to give as full a picture as possible. ...

...This relates to the theme in my book about the slave trade too. If something goes wrong it is due to something being wrong with the way the economics of a society is set up. During the slave trade multinationals governed the ethics and functioning of a society...



pages 10 - 12

Ian Kluge, poet / writer, Canada.

.....excerpts to come.........

page 12 - 14

Mary Jane Volkmann, visual artist, Namibia.

...excerpts to come........

Poems

Consumers of the Sun

.....text to come......

Article