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Gernes’s psychedelic decorational art of the late 60s or John
McCracken’s “Mandala“-paintings of the early 70s (as well as his
metaphysical sculptures). Here, art returns to its roots not in beauty,
but in religion. Let us, for the last time, listen to Roger Buergel raving
about “wonderment“, Tibetan meditation and the “re-enchantment“
(“Wiederverzauberung“) of the world:
“Mandalas, with their two axes of symmetry, are representatives if
holistic notions, but they are not solely to gaze at in wonderment,
when getting high but also forms stemming from an ancient religious
practice found, for example, in Tibetan Buddhism: painting as
meditation. Enough ink has been spilt on the subject of the esoteric
currents in the anti-Vietnam movement. However these esoteric currents,
from the French Symbolists to anthroposophy, have always
also been an integral part of modern abstraction. They admonish the
re-enchantment of that world so thoroughly stripped of magic by the
capitalist rationality of the Industrial Revolution.“
Make no mistake, the mystical “re-enchantment of the world“
– exemplified by some of the artists he chose – is Roger Buergel’s
own programme, not only the programme of some strands of
modernity, and documenta became Buergel’s war-machine that
allowed him to go on phantasizing about holism (hence the associationism
– as in a holist universe everything somehow relates to everything),
“ancient forms“ (hence the many pre-modern exhibits),
meditation (hence the discourse of pure experience between visitor
and art-work), magic and the quasi-religious re-enchantment of art
(hence the return of Mandalas) – all of this frequently couched in the
regressive language of beautification. In the last instance, it is this
spiritualist and esoteric nonsense which just lurks behind Buergel’s
formalism and aestheticizism, and which allows him to finally get rid
of all text, criticality and politics in the art field. We will see whether
the mystique of curatorial counter-enlightenment will prevail,
or whether next documenta can, once again, be taken seriously.
John McCracken
Dog Star II, 1972, © John McCracken, photo: Egbert Trogemann, documenta GmbH, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2007,
courtesy: Elkon Gallery, Inc., New York
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