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This small city of 200,000 souls, former home to the storytelling Brothers Grimm, was, once upon a time, just a short drive from the ominous border separating East and West. When that dividing line suddenly got erased, Kassel found itself on a redrawn map almost smack in the geographic center of a reunified nation.
An event that cataclysmic was no doubt disorienting. Yet, being in the middle of things is not completely alien to the locals. For once every five years or so, the city's grassy, tree-lined Friedrichsplatz is transformed from a sleepy pedestrian square into Ground Zero for the international contemporary art world.
Documenta is the name of the extravagant, summer-long art exhibition that, periodically since 1955, has made Kassel the temporary home of the international art tribe. A so-called "Museum of 100 Days," the show began as one small way to start climbing out of the self-inflicted isolation created by years of warring brutality, years marked by the suppression of modern art as filthy and degenerate. Today, Documenta is huge. It is a carnival. It is a key ingredient in the region's economy. And, it is a forum whose prestige has for 20 years outstripped other venerable rivals, such as the faded Venice Bienniale.
At least since 1972, when Harald Szeeman engineered a universally acclaimed exhibition, Documenta has provided an incomparable platform from which an artist can speak to an international audience. The ninth installment of the extravaganza, which opened last month and continues through Sept. 20, doesn't come even close to Szeeman's success, though it does have more to recommend it than the last Documenta, which was almost universally panned. Chaotic and far too large-more than 180 artists from dozens of countries on six continents have contributed paintings, sculptures, drawings, video, Conceptual works and installations-the show tries for an air of openness and inclusiveness. In fact, its supposed pluralism is merely a bullish accretion of diverse curatorial tastes.
Still, Documenta 9 can boast a variety of individual works of exceptional merit-enough to make a visit satisfying, if not a watershed of artistic revelation. And, amid a few triumphs from unexpected sources, one big surprise was hardly anticipated: The energy and challenge in the show is almost always traced to the work...