Documenta 5

Overview

Held in Kassel between June and October 1972, documenta 5 was organized by “master curator” Harald Szeeman, and remains one of the most important international exhibitions of the last few decades. Entitled Interrogation of Reality—Picture Worlds Today, it brought together works by Marcel Broodthaers, Christian Boltanski, Arnulf Rainer, Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha, and could be considered the first instance of an “exhibition as spectacle.” Introducing the different sections (“Artists’ Museums,” “Individual Mythologies”) and protagonists, the film is both a report on the trends and pacesetters of the time, and an approach to the phenomenon of documenta, sidestepping and questioning the definitions of exhibition makers, as well as of artists, of an exhibition, and of contemporary art.