Review relating to an exhibition, 2002
Published by: Frieze magazine
Year published: 2002
Number of pages: 4

Dan Fox wrote the third of three reviews of Documenta 11, published in Frieze, issue 69, September 2002, totalling 14 pages (pp. 80 - 93). The reviews, all liberally illustrated, were written by Thomas McEvilley, Kobena Mercer and Dan Fox.

Title: Documenta 11
Author: Dan Fox

Article (pp. 90-93) is a somewhat sceptical overview of the Platform_5 entity of Documenta 11, in which Fox laments what he sees as a flat, misfiring and unconvincing Documenta, despite the grandness of its vision. “As I walked away from the sight of Okwui Enwezor surrounded by European press crews (a scene that looked, as one participating artist put it, like the cover photo for a college textbook on post-colonialism) I knew the fantasy couldn’t last, but also that I would not be alone in having to own up and confess a certain disengagement from Documenta in its entirety. I wonder how many who attended Platfiorm 5 of Documenta 11 - the exhibition leg - could look you in the eye and tell you that they have fully cogitated, pondered, digested, wrestled with and thoroughly mulled over the public debates, seminars and mighty tomes that comprised Documenta 1 - 4: Democracy Unrealized; Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation; Créolité and Creolization; and Under Sierge: Four African Cities - Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. This structuring of Documenta into five equally important sections presupposes an audience’s total immersion in the entire dialogue, but the whole history of Documenta inevitably weighs emphasis towards the exhibition in Kassel.”

Fox goes on to write “The serious and often harrowing political import of much of the work in Kassel - particularly the documentary offerings - was also diluted by mundane exigencies of presentation.”