Articles Available Online

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is the story of the post-war avant-garde Born out of the rubble of Nazism — Kassel was a manufacturing centre specialising in the production of tanks, and was heavily bombed during the Second World War — the state-funded exhibition sought to reframe attitudes to culture skewed by the Third Reich’s denunciation of entartete kunst, its attacks on free expression, and its recapitulation of art as propaganda Unsurprisingly given the circumstances of its birth, Documenta has historically been defined by its profound suspicion of the systems of money and power that serve to instrumentalise art It enshrines a vision of culture as a means of resisting the kind of group think — characterised by the passive acceptance of images and information — that precipitated Europe’s descent into chaos, and which now threatens to do so again   Those points of resistance have shifted over the decades In the wake of Fascism, the free expression of Henry Moore and the playfulness of Alexander Calder’s mobiles thrilled audiences in 1955; in the coming editions, as Germany struggled to deal with the legacy of its actions during the war, visitors flocked to see Pop Art’s promotion of American freedom When the mood shifted against capitalism and consumerism, so Harald Szeemann’s 1972 Documenta — one of the most important exhibitions in contemporary art history — focused on performances and ideas, meaning works of art that can’t be sold (although the market, ever ingenious, soon found a way)  In 2002, Okwui Enwezor’s celebrated eleventh edition put forward a global vision of art that challenged the priority of North America and Europe and set the agenda for a decade in which institutions focused on acquiring Latin American, African and Asian art in order to balance out their collections (for one example, visit the recently rehung Tate Modern) So it goes on: Documenta is both survey and manifesto, redrawing the parameters of contemporary art at five-year intervals according to the socio-political circumstances in which it is staged   Which brings us to 2017,