It was a little disquieting that in May of this year, a month before the
opening of Documenta X, curator Catherine David had yet to publicize a
list of the participating artists. In an interview with Robert Storr
published in the May issue of Artforum, she names five artists-out of
120 in the show-whose work "is strongly echoed in the contemporary
situation." Of the five artists, Marcel Broodthaers, Gordon Matta-Clark,
Helio Oiticica, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gerhard Richter-three are
no longer living and all began their careers in the sixties or earlier.
Later on in the interview Storr asks: "Are there any painters of either
the '70's or the 80's that contribute to this conversation?" David's
response: "Not really." That David should consider a particular period
(the late sixties) as being more influential or more pertinent to
contemporary artmaking than any other is open to debate. That this
period alone, excluding twenty interim years of activity in painting or
any medium, can account for the present conditions of art production is
downright presumptive. So it was with trepidation that I logged onto the
Documenta X website. (http://www.documenta.de)

The site ("dX" to those in the know) is organized into five parts:
Surfaces and Territories, Cities and Networks, Groups and
Interpretation, In and Out, and Contacts and Forums. Grouped under each
of the double-headings are artists projects, critical pieces, and a
category called "Debate." The Debate area of the Documenta site contains
an introductory text by David, in which she offers an explanation of how
the Documenta website operates as the "outermost ring" in the concentric
logic of this meta-exhibition, which also includes a catalogue and a
program of speakers.

In David's opening statement she tells us that "the term art is no
longer suitable for describing or summarizing the heterogeneous artistic
methods of our time." Too bad for those going to Kassel expecting to see
an art show. She goes on to say "In art the object is undergoing a
crisis." Duh. Of course the object is undergoing a crisis-it has been
since the turn of the century, or at least Duchamp's submission of
Fountain to the Armory show.

David's tone is strangely reminiscent of the kind of criticism which
surrounded conceptual art in the late sixties and early seventies. There
is an interview in Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of
the Art Object, in which she responds to a similar "crisis" of the art
object in 1969. Interviewer: "I think it is very obvious that concern
with the object is the fundamental issue of what has been going on the
last few years." Lippard: "Probably it's typical of the first half of
the twentieth century."

If the major art exhibitions in Europe and America this year (other than
Documenta) can be read as a barometer of its livelihood, then in fact
the art object has entered a period of relative stability. This year
alone there have been at least three major exhibitions with a strong
emphasis on the object- the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, and
the Munster Sculpture Show.

So where's the crisis? The perception that the art object is undergoing
a crisis is more likely a reflection of the instability of the web, in
terms of its own identity as a producer of objects, and its uneasy
co-existence with conventional art mediums. Certainly this is the case
with the Documenta site, where many of the artists' projects are
derivative of earlier, object-driven modes of production, specifically,
conceptual art of the sixties and seventies.

The project most indebted to conceptual and system theory art is
"Location Sculpture System," by Eva Wohlgemuth and Andreas Baumann. The
piece involves a network of geographical points (outside the net) marked
with plaques. The work is strongly evocative of Robert Smithson's
"Mirror Displacement" works (1969) in which mirrors were placed in
different locations outside the gallery, and objects from the "real"
world were brought in for exhibition.

"Without Addresses" by Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron seems to take
its cue directly from the Situationists (again, the late sixties.)
Visitors to the site "leave traces that expand into paths and produce
routes. They inscribe their presence on the map. The structure is
generated by the visitors' passage." The model of an unfolding structure
which evolves around the visitor is akin to the Situationist theory of
the derive, drifting walks through the city (Paris) in which the
urbanscape is mapped out according to its "psychogeography."

Perhaps we could look to Matt Mullican's web project "Up to 625" for a
glimpse of how the web might interact with objects in the future.
Mullican's project is a multi-tiered visual environment laid out
according to an elaborate cosmology of symbol and color theory. Again
there is the suggestion of "psychogeography," but here the virtual space
exists independently of the visitor and the objects contained within
refer to objects in the real world. Mullican's project opens up a range
of interpretational possibilities free of the systemic frameworks that
contain and delimit many of the other projects on the site.