Documenta: Ruangrupa
A Radical Collective Takes Over One of the World’s Biggest Art Shows
Ruangrupa, an Indonesian group of collaborators, turns social experiences into art. How will they leave their mark on Documenta, which unfolds over 100 days?
For four out of every five years, Kassel is a relatively humdrum town. Its population of 217,796 inhabits a central German valley, hundreds of miles from Berlin or Munich. Its parks and palaces are Teutonic-prim. People eat their lunchtime kebabs on a plaza opposite the squat, sober Fridericianum, one of Europe’s oldest public art museums. The local football team, KSV Hessen Kassel, languishes in the fourth tier of the German league. But on the half-decade, when Kassel hosts Documenta, arguably the world’s largest exhibition of contemporary art, nearly a million visitors pour in over 100 summer days. The Fridericianum is the nucleus, but Documenta annexes the entire town — shops, gardens, warehouses, streets — leaving relics behind. A wanderer may be art-struck without warning. Once, walking by the Fulda River, I encountered a Claes Oldenburg sculpture, from a Documenta in 1982: a tremendous blue pickax planted bit-first into the soil.
If you’re tempted to be pleased by the pickax — to regard it as a fine interplay of public art and public life — ruangrupa, an artists’ collective from Indonesia, will gladly disillusion you. Ruangrupa is directing the 15th edition of Documenta, which opens this month. Throughout its 22-year history, the group has spurned the ideal of art as object. The pickax may be outdoors, but a formal gap still separates artifact from audience. In Indonesian, the words ruang and rupa mean “room” and “form,” so the group’s mashed-up name prizes not product but process: the physical space in which people collaborate, things take shape and art is made.
To describe ruangrupa as an “artists’ collective” is a well-established shorthand but perhaps a misleading one. Not every ruangrupan is a conventional artist; one worked as a journalist, another trained as an ecologist, a third is an academic. The collective has no defined membership beyond a core of 10 people, and these 10 — architects, printmakers, a performance artist — don’t work with one another to create what we typically recognize as art. It’s not just that they don’t create tangible objects, they don’t even create intangible experiences of the kind, say, the artist Tino Sehgal does when he trains people to converse as pretend-docents with museumgoers. In fact, Ruangrupa has staged a solo show in a gallery only once, two decades ago.
‘It’s like they were taking revenge on this mythical space, trying to hurt it.’
Instead of collaborating to make art, ruangrupa propagates the art of collaboration. It’s a collective that teaches collectivity. For its projects, ruangrupa solicits accomplices: artists, of course, but also those otherwise stranded on the art world’s margins, like slum residents or factory workers. Out of these social relations and communal feeling, Ruangrupa coaxes an aesthetic. The artistic value of silk-screening T-shirts, cladding a neighborhood in murals or turning out zines lies in how decisions are collectively made — the process of determining which designs work best on which fabric, how high the murals should be, what texts to publish. Authorship ceases to matter. “Even opening up a coffee shop can be an artistic practice,” Ade Darmawan, one of ruangrupa’s founders, says. He was, perhaps, channeling Joseph Beuys, the German conceptual artist who once said, “The act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.” Read the full article in The New York Times
