ABSTRACT
The initial working title for this collective presentation by Texte zur Kunst was given as “documenta as an anachronistic ritual”—the same as Stefan Germer’s essay. That construction has prompted me to consider the function of ritual in the reception of documenta 9 as indicative of blockbuster exhibitions in general. By ritual I mean the cycle of raised expectations and quick disillusionment which has come to typify big international survey shows, a cycle whose very predictability suggests that it is overdetermined. Of course all rituals incorporate anachronistic elements, but that does not render them inoperative or even foreshadow their disappearance. Blockbuster exhibitions, for example, by engendering surplus frustration as a ritual in its own right, tend to recuperate dissent as part of the totality of the overall event. Thus ritual, in this case, helps to maintain a given set of power relations. Yet to remain silent is no solution; this simply abandons the possibility of formulating a critical perspective for the sake of some ill-conceived notion of autonomy. Today, we can break through this impasse by carefully identifying the object of our critique-not the personal achievements or failures of a given auteur curator, but rather the ideology of the mega-exhibition as an institution.
