Hands Off

KASSEL, Germany—Walking through Documenta 12 this summer produced an odd exhaustion. The lackadaisical installation, a temporary building like a provincial tractor display as one of the exhibition’s five venues, and the disavowal of any particular intention by the curators (belied by their concurrent press releases claiming critical and community engagement) left some viewers perplexed and irritable. To others, it felt like a liberating intervention into festival culture. Various satellite projects extended the exhibition into the realms of distribution via live art, print and online magazines, symposia, town hall meetings, and so on, all of which circulated around three broad questions: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? What is to be done?—a weird amalgam of Nietzsche, Agamben, and Lenin. Supporters of the show claimed that this “non finito” curating had a lateral, open, networked way of thinking; detractors pointed accusingly at the disjunctions between the high-flown theoretical posturing and the competing coy resistance to the imposition of “meaning.”

No overarching thematic conceit, no tasteful arrangement: the curators themselves described Documenta as an example of “radical formlessness.” Yet formal connections that the viewer could assemble on her own betrayed a queasy, transhistorical, deracinated, “creative economy” rhetoric. Here’s an example of a network of connections: in Trisha Brown’s radiant 1970 dance, Floor of the Forest, dancers weave in and out of a thick, chest-high rope grid, their limbs gliding just above the floor. The piece occupied a central position in the Fridericianum, animating the core of the exhibition, and viewers could stand right at the lip of the performance space, or they could catch glimpses from flanking galleries; the piece could also be seen through the stairwell from a room above, where a tendentious video about Japanese bondage screened continuously; to the right of the latter space, a vast, gnomic installation by Canadian artist Luis Jacob was dedicated to an anarchist expressive dancer, and to the left a room was cohabited by Atsuko Tanaka’s brilliant Electric Dress and moody skeins of handcrafted red rope by Indian artist Sheela Gowda. Rope, dance, bodies, gender, and performativity—the visual linkages were multiple and yet obvious and completely banal. The conceptual associations were awkward, thoroughly flattening out each work: it was a real “duh” moment, and it recurred throughout the sprawling show despite the often interesting individual artworks. A syntagmatic train wreck, Documenta may be the 21st century’s first major example of deskilled curating.

The past five years or so have seen the entry into the artworld lexicon of a word that until recently had been used only in the rarefied analyses of Marxist critics. Originally deskilling was used to describe a complex dialectical process by which virtuoso artistic technique was displaced or suppressed in order to bring attention to art’s conceptual underpinnings (Warhol’s Factory churning out “signature style” paintings; three-chord punk returning rock to the people). Artists as disparate as Karen Kilimnik and Robert Morris have been characterized in terms of deskilling, while the ongoing fascination with Duchamp buffs its sheen. But where deskilling once referred to an analysis of artistic production that articulated strong critiques of authorship and of the commodity status of art, the term has morphed into academic shorthand for perfunctory or outsourced execution.

In 1981 the Conceptual artist Ian Burn used the word deskilling to describe the way in which vanguard artists of the early 1960s divested themselves of the obligations of physical production and invested more in conception and presentation. A move away from traditional craft allowed artists to take up a number of critical positions with respect to the production of unique objects, to isolated studio work, and to the gallery and distribution systems. But once these deskilling strategies became established, and especially once they began to be taught in art schools, their critical force seemed actually to be in concert with what turns out to be a very flexible gallery system, one capable of both absorbing and commercializing conceptual art and retuning traditional practices by emphasizing their  “conceptual” aspects. More poignantly, as Burn saw it, deskilled art as a genre didn’t just devalue traditional skills; it devalued disciplined training itself. What had been a democratizing impulse was inadvertently turned into a dumbing down, for, as Burn pointed out, “skills are not merely manual dexterity but forms of knowledge. The acquisition of particular skills implies an access to a body of accumulated knowledge. Thus deskilling means a rupture within a historical body of knowledge—in other words, a dehistoricization of the practice of art.”