Nothing to See Here: On the Bracketing of the Spectator in a Hyperrelational Exhibition

With Documenta 15 in our rearview mirror, what seems important at this stage is to understand the connections among the politics of exhibition, organization, and spectatorship. Only then does the significance of its propositions come into focus. These connections are also imbricated in, if not overdetermined by, the charged mediation of Documenta 15, particularly in German-language media. Focusing on spectatorship requires, first of all, that we begin to unpick its plural modes of operation; for example, differentiating, on the one hand, the experience of visiting the exhibition and engaging with the various art projects (on site and online, in short and extended time frames), and, on the other hand, browsing the exhibition on social media. To explore the latter mode of spectatorship is, above all, to consume the discourse about the exhibition, although this difference between spectatorial modalities would be decisive only if access through social media were the sole mode of experiencing the exhibition. I maintain that the moment of spectatorship is key to our understanding of Documenta 15. I find this to be crucial not due to some abstract, postconceptual notion that the visitor “completes” the work (a condition that may characterize much of the work on display at Documenta 15 but is not specific to it). Rather, I am struck by the altered role of the spectator that results from the hyperrelational principle of this exhibition, which is microcosmic in its participating projects and collectives. The spectator’s role is either undefined or defined away; that is, there are no spectators, only participants. The spectator as a “vanishing mediator,” then, is the premise I pursue here, with the aim of avoiding a reified conception of what happened in Documenta 15. That is, I am concerned to hold on to Documenta 15’s relational concept as a diffractive rather than reproductive approach to the global institution of art.1 The curatorial principle of Documenta 15, which was decisively anticonsumerist and anticontemplative, cannot separate the mode of engagement it posits for the spectator from its general mode of address (i.e., the voice of the exhibition). If a pursuit of this other, diffractive form of relationality is one of the accomplishments of Documenta 15, the exhibition was nevertheless incapable of doing more than staging the contradictions of undefining the spectator. That is, Documenta 15 was characterized by a junction of material