I recently attended a lecture by Catherine David and Lynne Cooke at
the Great Hall in New York City. It was interesting to hear some of
David's comments about artistic practice, urban space, and her own
interest in de-emphasizing the commodity-object within the art exhibition
context. (Needless to say, her ideas are not very popular in certain
main stream NYC art circles!) Unfortunately, the acoustics in the Hall
are so bad that it was difficult to hear and so much of
what Catherine David said got lost in the atmosphere.

New media was not discussed directly, but someone in the
audience did ask about the Documenta X web site. Catherine David's
response addressed her decision to disconnect the site once
the exhibition ended: she said that there was no reason for it to
continue… There were no substantive comments on the e-mail lists
connected with DX which, which looking back, may have had the most
profound impact on Documenta and its participants.

Lynne Cooke asked about the "Radical Gesture" in Catherine David's
recent comments that if she were to re-organize DX, she would have
presented only the 100 days/100 guests program, and would not have
included the exhibition. David's reasoning is that the level of
discussion around artistic practice is too disengaged, and that it is
precisely this degree of engagement which merits focus at this
time. And so, she is more interested in creating a forum for the
articulation of the artistic process than in presenting the
affects of the object-orientation of the art market.

Lynne Cooke also asked if Documenta was going to continue at all and
if so, would it still be located in Kassel? Catherine David did not offer
a specific answer to this question, but she did say that it is important to
ask whether Documenta is any longer necessary considering it's roots in
bringing Modernism back into post-war Germany. It was noted that
the budget for the event was 20 Million Marks– but there was
no mention of how (or if) the artists were paid to exhibit their work, or
how these individual artists were able to fund the installment and
presentation of their work in the exhibition spaces.

Although it is widely held that Catherine David and Lynne Cooke are the
two top female curators today, it is important to ask whether their
apparent distance from the work of female/feminist art has in fact
opened up opportunities for the advancement of their own careers within
the art establishment.

It would be interesting to hear Catherine David speak again but in a
much more interactive setting, focused on issues larger than Documenta
and with a smaller group of truly engaged individuals. Maybe on the
Net… who knows?