Most recently, those responsible for the world art show Documenta spoke more about each other than with each other, at least publicly. Director General Sabine Schorman, for example, published a statement at the beginning of the week in which she assigned responsibility for the anti-Semitic incidents to herself and others, and Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth reacted “very surprised and alienated” to these words, which in her view “not so be true”.
On Friday evening, some of those involved wanted to talk to each other again – the Supervisory Board of the Documenta was to meet for a special meeting. It is still completely unclear which direction the meeting, chaired by Kassel Mayor Christian Geselle (SPD) and Hesse’s Minister of Culture Angela Dorn (Greens), will take: Some observers assume that Documenta Director General Schormann will announce her resignation – the An ever-increasing number of cultural politicians at state and federal level, but also many actors from the art world, since anti-Semitic caricatures were discovered on the work “People’s Justice” on the central Friedrichsplatz in Kassel shortly after the opening of the art show in mid-June.
However, the fact that Schormann is not resigning but being fired “is not up for debate,” as was well-wired in Kassel Hessian General of Lower Saxony writes. On the one hand, because Mayor Geselle is still behind Schormann, smashing criticism of their crisis management with the argument that artistic freedom is imminently important for the documenta and must not be curtailed. At the same time, people in Kassel City Hall fear a kind of “chain reaction, which could even end in the end of documenta fifteen”.
“Some processes in crisis management are not going well”
Instead of personnel consequences, there could be another attempt to clarify the events in Kassel: Hesse’s Minister of Art Dorn called for “a structure that can give us recommendations for the ongoing Documenta, but also for the future” on Thursday in the state parliament in Wiesbaden. The organization, with artistic management by a collective, was courageous and new, “but apparently it also meant that the care and responsibility of curating suffered.”
In recent weeks, however, attempts have already been made to support the artistic direction in Kassel with a committee of experts, most recently the director of the Frankfurt educational institution Anne Frank. Meron Mendel agreed to organize a discussion format together with other experts and to give recommendations on how to deal with works of art suspected of being anti-Semitic, after which he says he heard nothing more from the organization team in Kassel. Mendel, who actually had the goal of bringing this Documenta to a positive conclusion, finally gave up in frustration – also because statements by the Documenta management about events were repeatedly not true, as he assured the SZ.
“We have come to a point where we all have to see that some processes in crisis management are not going well,” says Hesse’s Minister of Culture Dorn. “It is now time for the Supervisory Board to take a joint position on this.” A weighty voice – and perhaps the sharpest in the conflict with the Documenta management – will be missing: Minister of State for Culture Roth is not part of the ten-strong body on which Hessian state and Kassel local politicians sit. Under Roth’s predecessor Monika Grütters, the federal government had withdrawn from the organizational structures of the world art show – in a five-point plan for the Documenta presented at the end of June, Roth indicated that she wanted to reverse this. And even then she demanded what should be on the program again on Friday: complete clarification.