Germano Celant, “Documenta 5: Hyperrealism as Imperialism,” translated from Italian by Madeline Robinson, originally published as “Documenta 5: Iperrealismo come imperialismo,” in Qui arte contemporanea 9 (1972): 44–49 (excerpt)

Germano Celant is a renowned Italian art critic, who in the 1970s spent extended periods of time in New York. The Chapter reviews Documenta 5 , curated by Harald Szeemann in Kassel. Documenta 5 was a pivotal exhibition because it constructed a comparison between Conceptual art and a new form of American realism, called Photorealism or Hyperrealism. Hyperrealism is clearly a manifestation of the national, the macroscopic product of a reactionary push for a return to the figurative tradition of painting and sculpture that reproduces the real and the natural. Hyperrealism concretizes the way in which men conceive of painting and sculpture, as determined by their middle-class status, and is the macroscopic illustration of the repression of each individual’s creative impulse. This repression is carried out through further mythicization of the artistic technique, a linguistic and operative privilege that Hyperrealism develops to the maximum, exalting extremely refined techniques of reproduction that would be difficult to imitate in a wax museum.