KASSEL, Germany— Is that all there is? This refrain echoed ironically through my mind as I viewed documenta 12’s accumulation of more than 500 works by some 112 artists from around the world. Despite the ambitious size and scope of the exhibition, spread across five main venues in Kassel, the show was decidedly underwhelming.

Although artistic director Roger M. Buergel and curator Ruth Noack professed to privilege "aesthetic experience in its true sense," such moments are too few and far between. The husband-and-wife team's catalogue introduction, which acknowledges the "high expectations" for this once-every-five-years exhibition, reads like a preemptive defense of their curatorial decisions.

They intend to delve "deeply into the past" to educate the audience about the lineage of forms employed by today's artists, yet they provide minimal wall text with no direct identification of the artists' origins or references. They claim they do not "want to favour geopolitical identity," part of an effort "to dispense with preordained categories and arrive at a plateau where art communicates itself and on its own terms"; but the artists' names and subject matter indicate an inclusion of disparate cultures from Inuit to Arabic, African to Indian. You can call these choices "paradoxical," or, less flatteringly, "contradictory"––either way, the result is a kind of conceptual confusion.

Still, in a show this large, there are some strong works to be seen. One of the genuine showstoppers is the Dream installation by Romuald Hazoume, a large, hardly seaworthy vessel constructed mostly from recycled oil canisters, which appears in the temporarily constructed, greenhouse-inspired Aue Pavilion. Hanging from the boat’s side are rolled messages and photographs sealed in bottles, signaling its unseen African passengers’ desperate attempt to connect amid migration attempts.

At the Neue Galerie, Annie Pootoogook’s simple drawings offer an occasionally incisive commentary on life in the Canadian North. Scenes depict family activities from the traditional (cutting a dead seal) to the assimilated (watching talk shows). In Nang Fa (Angels), a work influenced by traditional Thai murals, Sakarin Krue-On has decorated the blue walls surrounding a staircase with ethereal henna patterns and angels made of loose white clay powder.

The photographic displays here tend toward photojournalism, and some are more artfully composed than others. In the Pavilion, Guy Tillim’s Congo Democratic, a series of large color prints of the 2006 General Assembly elections in Kinshasa, question platitudes about voters, demonstrators, and candidates in that politically scarred country. Nearby Ahlam Shibli’s 41 large images collectively entitled Arab a Sbaih (which means “Arabs of the small hours”) offer rare, if rarely striking, glimpses of a community of displaced Palestinians.

The Aue Pavilion also encompasses extensive mixed-media installations by David Aradeon and Jorge Mario Jauregui that are informative but somewhat tiresome after too many works in a similar vein, albeit on different subjects. It’s enough to make one think that perhaps Buergel and Noack have taken the lexicon of documenta too literally.

Indeed, many of the works are documentary and political in nature, reflecting the curators’ leitmotifs of modernity, “bare life,” and education. These loosely structured, timely themes often take the form of works that tackle the precarious nature of everyday life amid globalization, and the destructive impact of domestic and international conflicts. Although too many of these are overly didactic, amounting to little more than illustrated lectures, documenta’s best political works are probably the most powerful in the entire show.

For me, the highlight of the entire exhibition was a majestic, darkly lit installation at the beginning of the Neue circuit. Forming a wavy horizon line around three long gallery walls, The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi by Mary Kelly is an elegiac poem about a family severed by the Serb-Croat strife. The 2001 work’s haunting text (“Unnatural spring; metal seedpods germinating bloody flora, anticipating the ‘expulsions’ … they hide … cautious as the ash around them, below them, soldiers stomping to the blunt beat of perfect solutions …”) is stamped into paper handmade from compressed lint, mounted on museum board and framed in long banners. Kelly’s choice of media materializes the “downy refuge of a nation razor-wired to loss,” while blank stretches between stanzas draw out the trauma for which there are no words.

At the center of that same room, Sheela Gowda’s Collateral blankets a curved chamber with incense material that has been molded into organic shapes, spread upon low metal screens, and scorched to ash. The fragile remains, scarred with smoke marks, evoke the wreckage of a vanished civilization unearthed by archaeologists and arranged for study.

In the next room, a recent video interview with Nedko Solakov narrates his controversial 1989-90 work Top Secret, a card catalog with mixed-media entries that track his alleged collaboration with the Bulgarian secret police. Nearly 20 years later, Solakov’s self-disclosure is still mesmerizing, a standout among a significant number of works here created in the former Soviet Bloc (which may be an attempt to make up for neglect of Eastern European artists in earlier editions of documenta).

A companion piece by Solakov commissioned for this show, Fears is a series of small ink drawings that reveal the lingering traces of intimidation and suppression. Yet one caption confides, “During socialism (when I was young), I had less fears than now (when I am older) living in a democracy.” If some of the sketches are confessional, others universalize fears, personifying them and their victims as natural phenomena: black holes, rainbows, snakes, snails, and jellyfish.

Solokov is not the only artist to be represented by works from both the past and present. Abstract sculptures by Lili Dujourie, John McCracken, Charlotte Posenenske, and Jorge Oteiza are scattered among multiple venues.

Another recurrent presence is the drawings and paintings of Kerry James Marshall. While the artist’s sharp take on the inner-city African-American experience has a good deal of bite on first viewing, the fact that it appears in just about every exhibition space dulls its effect. On the other hand, the repetition of crude paintings by Juan Davila, several of them garish caricatures of pornographic violence, does less of a disservice to the artist than it does to the viewer.

As I proceeded from gallery to gallery and saw so much work by the same artists, I couldn’t help but think of the underexposed artists whose more original and thoughtful works could have taken their place. I was not alone in this sentiment. “You see fewer artists than before, and some artists in different places, and also very often old pieces of artists,” observed documenta veteran Odette Rikkers, a 65-year-old collector from Liege, Belgium. “Usually at documenta you see new art.”