Word: documenta
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...high sausage-shaped balloon enfolding plain air, for instance, was the dominant feature of the landscape at West Germany's Kassel Documenta last summer. He has constructed dozens of storefronts with empty display windows. They leave the viewer with his nose pressed against the glass-foolishly aware that he is observing the presence of pure nothingness...
...present Documenta IV more than lives up to its reputation-a particular triumph in troubled '68. The near recession in West Germany last year forced the show's budget to be slashed. The country's militant student New Left, encouraged by the success Italian youths had enjoyed in upstaging the Venice Biennale, threatened to disrupt the Documenta. Shipments from France were delayed by strikes, and artists labored through the night before the opening, installing exhibits. Still, the show began on time for a three-month run-and it was like...
Unity in Kinship. Documenta uses three castles to signal three trends. Striking the keynote in the Fridericianum are the signal-flag squares of German-born Josef Albers, who lives and works in the U.S. They are accompanied by the shaped, geometric and op canvases of his many European and American admirers. A room is lit with the disks of California's Robert Irwin (TiME, May 10). Highceilinged, cathedral-like galleries are filled with the gigantic rainbows of U.S. color-field painters and the authoritative sculpture of the U.S. minimalists...
...artists shown, 39% were born or are living in the U.S. But Documenta makes no case for a U.S. monopoly on styles. The sprightly satires of Britons Richard Hamilton and David Hockney hang in the same gallery with their better-known U.S. pop equivalents, such as Tom Wesselmann and Robert Indiana. Indeed, it is Documenta's unity that last week prompted Sculptress Louise Nevelson to remark: "Usually an artist works in loneliness. But here, one suddenly experiences the kinship one always suspects one might have with the rest of the artistic world...
...floor above, the visitor discovers a bizarre and even gruesome realism, one that may be the most important new trend signaled by Documenta IV. Edward Kienholz's grotesque nude on a sewing machine inhabits a macabre room furnished like a brothel. New York's Paul Thek shows a roomful of chunks of dead flesh sculpted in wax. Italy's Michelangelo Pistoletto presents sarcophagi and chest-high chamber pots. Sweden's Oyvind Fahlstrom is represented by Firing Squad, a plastic snowbank filled with cryptic symbols including L.B.J. on a cross, bugs and butterflies...