via Artforum:
INTERNATIONAL NEWS DIGEST
ARTISTS ANNOUNCED FOR DOCUMENTA 12
Roger M. Buergel has made the first round of announcements of artists to participate in Documenta 12, which begins June 16, 2007 in Kassel. As the Frankfurter Rundschau's Elke Buhr reports, the D12 artistic director and his co-curator and partner Ruth Noack unveiled a partial artist list during a press conference held in Kassel last week. The Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum, the British artist Imogen Stidworthy, the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, and, somewhat oddly, the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià are the first to be named from a list that will include up to one hundred artists, just shy of the 118 that participated in Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11. Ayse Bülek of Kassel's Kulturzentrum Schlachthof will be responsible for making connections with the local scene. Buergel clarified this tactical engagement in an earlier press conference, along with the three questions that will frame the D12 exhibition: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? What is to be done?
"No one has ever been this early [to announce the artist list]: 478 days before the opening," writes Die Welt's Uta Baier, who recalls that the lists for Documenta 10 and Documenta 11 were kept secret until much closer to the opening press conferences and previews. By bringing in journalists, Buergel wanted not only "to show that we are working" but also to allow the exhibition to function without texts. "Texts take authority away from the art works," said Noack, a self-identified "art lover" who does not want texts to speak for the art. "[It's] information as empathic-advertising and media-effective concept," writes Baier. "All the same, you can imagine just as little under Buergel's Documenta as you could under the sparse, high-theoretical, and widely incomprehensible explanatory attempts of his predecessors Catherine David and Okwui Enwezor." Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung offers a selection of images from the press conference.
