ROGER M. BUERGEL, away from Miami.
By Joachim Bessing

In front of Kassel’s Fridericianum a young woman sits on the ledge of a sandstone pillar. She smokes a cigarette, watching four mechanical shovel excavators as they prepare the white modular pavilion in which Roger M. Buergel, the artistic director of documenta XII, will display part of his exhibition. Further exhibitions will take place on the outskirts of the city, in a “Crystal Palace” in Karlsaue and in the baroque park of Wilhemshöhe, where, at the foot of a hill, from which a pyramidal Hercules statue rises above the city, Buergel actually shares a home with his wife, documenta co-curator Ruth Noack, and their children. This is a first in Kassel: an art director of the quadrennial fair has finally embraced their city.

JOACHIM BESSING: What do you think it was that qualified you to become the director of the world’s largest art show?
ROGER M. BUERGEL: I think it was the way I was relaxed in the jury situation – which was also based a little on biographical reasons: I didn’t absolutely want this position, so I was not dependent on the decision and could calmly sit at that table.

Were you appointed?
Yes, just like all the others. The search committee always nominates eight candidates and invites them to Kassel – after they have submitted a more or less vague concept.

What did your concept consist of?
It was totally vague.

The buzzword?
Oh, I really couldn’t say exactly what that was anymore. It had something to do with that I wanted to return to engaging the questions of modernity and enlightenment – to argue, that is, that these two things have been Europe’s only contribution, from a global perspective. And that then there is no point in making nice, that instead the attempt must always be made to find a contemporary form for this contribution. Then it was also a consideration of how one can draw connections between things that are not in themselves related, connections that need to be drawn so that the audience, which is for the most part an audience of laypeople, gets the larger context – without having to read texts in advance. So that something succeeds that we call “communication of forms.”

Doesn’t that mean that your approach is a sort of art pedagogy?
I don’t think so. But if you want to drive, you have to get a license. And we can’t simply let people loose on the art just like that. We try to make the necessary resources available. Because Europeans are at bottom pretty uneducated.

In comparison to which nations?
You know, people in India know enormously much more about Europe or the West than Europeans know about India – beyond the shiny showcase of the contemporary and beyond the golden age. But I think it is a precondition that you bring a basic knowledge to art. At the same time, I think it is nonsense to think that an aesthetic experience can be redeemed by texts or academism or discourse.

You are curating with your wife, Ruth Noack – hasn’t the position at documenta’s helm always been held by one individual? What prompted you to break with this tradition?
Very pragmatic reasons: we have always collaborated, since 1995. And I am the kind of person who needs that.

A partner?
No, simply: being undermined.

Being undermined? So you two argue opposite positions?
Pretty much.

What does your wife stand for?
There’s no clear-cut definition, or in any case, it’s not like one of us votes for red, the other for green. I would think that most people know this phenomenon: that alone, you very quickly produce a closed image of the world. But when you work in a group, that’s not so easy do to – unless such a group develops into a criminal gang, a party of insiders that strive for power and stick together for this purpose, that is, strategically. But when you also live together, a special challenge arises, because living together creates an additional level of obligations.

But isn’t it exactly in couples that arguments run their course as though on tracks?
If there were no confrontation at all with the outside world, we would soon come to resemble the people in Le Chat – do you know that movie, with Simone Signoret? Intimate relationships develop this perverted and autistic logic. But there are hundreds of people working for the documenta. So it is in fact rather comforting to know that beyond all aesthetic and ideological debates, there is still a shared concept of life and the children.

Do you discuss the entire program between you – or have you divided it into territories?
No. You can’t do that. Because the entire show is also one indivisible thing. And because you don’t just have to select sculptures and paintings, you also create a living connection with the city of Kassel. But of course there are pragmatic divisions because one of is better at this and the other is better at that.

What is it your wife is better at?
Oh, she has a very pronounced love for Asia. And then it’s also often a matter of the artists’ personalities. Elective affinities emerge. There are people with whom I have no productive exchange – even though they are fantastic artists. And then there are those with whom I just have a blind understanding.

[As though on cue, a citizen of Kassel crosses the courtyard at this moment, spots Roger M. Buergel seated on the stairs, and shakes his hand: “Make a good documenta in Kassel!” Buergel smiles: “Yes, thank you!” When the passerby is gone, he sighs: “And now the same thing 650,000 times over.”]

That is how many visitors you need?
Nah, that’s how many there were last time. We don’t need any visitors at all.

You have announced that you want to show art that is made far away from the art market. That at least sounds good, but good art that doesn’t press into the art market – does that even exist?
The art market is absolutely marginal. The art market only notices things for which there is either a space of resonance, or which are somehow marketable. By far not everything is on the market – there are small oeuvres of ten or twenty things that are incredibly interesting but firmly in the hands of collectors or museums. But most importantly, the art market can represent only certain formats: it just can’t deal with more complicated work processes, such as those of Alessandra Vieira. Eighty-five percent of the art market is oil paintings. If you travel a little and look around, you discover scenes that have points of reference other than those of New York, London, Berlin, or Johannesburg and Basel – where there are things worth being shown.

Do you mean specifically Latin America, or Africa?
Also Africa, yes. Especially African Africa. That is to say, not the African diaspora in Paris and London, but Potenot, Benin for instance – they are already very, very, very strong. Sooner or later they will of course arrive on the market, but they aren’t there yet.

The last documenta clearly wanted to satisfy this ethnological curiosity. So how then is your concept different? Can it be specified in the form of a program?
I hope not. I have really been working for three years on being unidentifiable.

But why? With this position, you are inevitably inscribing yourself into the history of art.
I hate that. Because I believe that it saps me of vivacity when I turn into a functionary, and in the end into a mere token.

So you hope that more will be written in the future about this documenta than about you?
That would be wonderful.

But, if I may be frank, this desire to be permitted to disappear behind one’s work, that is a strategy from the eighties.
Not only the eighties! There is also Rimbaud, who went on board a ship in Marseille to become an arms dealer. The more identifiable you become, the less latitude you retain. That is not something anyone should find pleasant. It is pleasant only when you’re incredibly stupid and vain at the same time.

Or if you stand with one leg still in the past century. But aren’t you really already representative of a new type?
Perhaps.

And your program?
There’s this logic of representation at the exhibition, a logic that has to do also with the universalism that sticks to modernity and that already defined the first documenta. Back then, universalism meant exclusively Italy, France, Germany – and we thought that was universal. That was the Old World. Today, you easily slip into a UNESCO logic and think: “Now I still have to go this country to find a representative for that …”

And don’t forget about the women …
Yes. So we drew on another paradigm, one we call communication, or the “migration of forms.” We focus on certain trade routes that run far from the beaten tracks.

Far away from Art Basel Miami, etc.?
Yes. And we really trace those routes. In part that involves the fates of migrants – if you think of figures like Arshile Gorky, an Armenian in New York, or Mira Schendel, born in Switzerland, then Italy, Brazil – there is plenty of back and forth, but in the show we will focus on a network of very precise, but also speculatively elaborated trade routes. That lets us reconstruct the fates of certain forms: the transformation of modernism as a European export to various regions in Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world. Then, how these forms were enriched locally, how they were interpreted then rejected in independence movements, and how the result has been an interrelation that is today rather dialectical. That is interesting, because this way you see that artists who have nothing to do with each other arrive at similar formal solutions. In part also for very similar problems, for instance concerning the failure of public space.

Given your scant releases of advance information, the press gratefully noted that you have invited the Spanish star chef Ferran Adrià. That is a very populist measure; although his creations are admired as spectacular and bizarre, at bottom what he does is he cooks. Does that mean that with respect to content you are pursuing a very inclusive approach – one we might call “content baroque”?
Perhaps. In any case, my approach is not iconophobic. Adrià is in a category of his own.

Because of his scientific approach, because he puts the laboratory and the archive at the center of his work?
No. Because he is simply better. That is, when you eat at his restaurant. You can’t transport that adequately into glossy magazines, but I know his skills and I know him: he is in a different league, and he plays all by himself there. Interestingly, that is being acknowledged. By everyone. No one contradicts that. Catherine David had a cook. In the context of what Nicolas Bourriaud has called “relational aesthetics”, there was this art thing that was about the formation of groups and production of partial publics – it’s worth noting that it is never easy to determine whether something like that is privatism or not and whether these political promises can be kept. I really wanted to take that up but then bring it to a different level. Because the western art world is perfectly capable of dealing with a cooking Thai like Rirkrit Tiravanija. Or, with Catherine, a cooking Singaporean, but the real difficulties arise when you nominate a cook for documenta who is from the West, from the heartland.

Because the exotic is gone?
Because then the division between applied art and autonomous art, between craft and art also collapses. But I think that is very fruitful. The point was never to say that cooking is art. Only that there is an artistic intelligence that operates independently of métiers and, in Adrià’s case, becomes manifest in art.

To what degree has he himself been inspired or influenced by modern art?
Superficially, at best. He knows Picasso. Richard Hamilton is a regular at El Bulli. Adrià has a very simple and uncomplicated perspective on modern art.

And has he sought inspiration in literature, for instance in Huysmans or Marinetti?
Not at all. Adrià is a real guy, a simple and upright person.

I would like to return to “content baroque.” It is my impression that, because modern art told a story of reduction, a time is dawning where the baroque is permissible again – flourishes, expansive forms – or, as the definition of “baroque” has it: unevenly rounded?
When it comes to this question, I’m pretty schizo. There’s a Dionysian element in me, but then also an Apollonian element. A good show is in my view one that can’t be identified. Of course I have to take risks. It is also true that many curators are simply afraid of art. Afraid of the loss of control, too.

Because the artist is felt to be a dictatorial power? Or because there is this belief in genius?
Because processes become autonomous. Because the decisive medium of art, the production of meanings, cannot in fact be regulated. That is why there is a discourse in the art world that is a discourse purely of control. In this discourse, the point is no longer to understand something, but to categorize and check off. Yet many subtleties of the artistic are inconspicuous. They can’t be rendered visible simply by turning the screw too far. The theatrical is of little help there. I am more moved by a form of deferred action: you see something and it doesn’t really tell you anything, but a few hours later you realize that it was important to you – perhaps even only days later.

It doesn’t leave you alone.
I find that interesting. I would like to make that kind of show, where the audience really doesn’t see anything – of course, in a figurative sense, not in the sense of a labored minimalism.

So – nothing special.
Yes! But then it begins to work inside you. Because you were entirely permeable for what you “didn’t see” there. Because it reached you from a completely different angle than you expected.

That is to say, transferring Adalbert Stifter’s literature to the conception of an exhibition of art?
Yes, perhaps …

Do you think, in this context, that plants will soon also be exhibited again? Taking Ernst Haeckel seriously, so to speak – “nature as artist” – and showing nature’s artifacts in an exhibition of art?
I spent all of yesterday in the greenhouses in the park along the river, photographing motifs for the documenta posters.

You’re making the photographs yourself ?
I also designed the logo.

If you think back, what was your first experience with art?
When I was a child in Berlin, I was always dragged into the Gemäldegalerie. My taste was primarily formed by pre-modern paintings: Rembrandt, Dürer, Bruegel. I had a series of awakenings later, when I was a teenager. But those were terribly embarrassing!

Garish stuff ?
Fantastic realists, adolescent eroticism …

Czech graphic artists?
Yes, the very bad stuff.

Dali’s woman with the drawers in her belly?
Yes!

But that isn’t really that embarrassing. It’s art for dentist’s waiting rooms.
Today I find it embarrassing. But no longer so much that I would keep it a secret. If you begin to look for orientation during the bad years between 14 and 17 and you’re saved by art – instead of drugs and girlfriends – that’s also a privilege you enjoy!

Did art save you?
Yes, I think so.