No form, no function

KASSEL, Germany — EXITING one room tinted with searing red light and crackling with radio static, you enter another that's all but blackened. Eyes adjusting, you make out a specter, like a ghost ship emerging from the fog -- a full-scale model of one of the supposed mobile biological weapons labs used as partial justification for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

This is "Phantom Truck," by the Spanish-born, Chicago-based Inigo Manglano-Ovale, a work that is not only timely but strangely resonant here in a city that Allied bombers targeted during World War II for its locomotive, aircraft and vehicle factories. The installation is among the pieces that stand out in the 12th incarnation of Documenta, a survey of international art held twice a decade in Kassel. But the high points are few in the massive but disappointing exhibition, which will run through Sept. 23 in five venues.

According to artistic director Roger M. Buergel and curator Ruth Noack, "The big exhibition has no form," and they have used this assertion as justification for what they say is a curatorial exercise in formlessness that frees art from "preordained categories" and creates a "plateau where art communicates itself and on its own terms." But the tendency to categorize is what plagues this show.

Buergel and Noack express a vague desire to question what is contemporary and what is the present in an effort to escape "all-encompassing immediacy." Ostensibly, the goal is to prompt viewers to think for themselves about the relationships between artworks, life and the world. Rethinking on the part of the viewer, however, is soon overwhelmed by revision decreed by the organizers, not with words but with deeds.

Of the more than 500 works in Documenta 12, nearly a third were not produced in the last quarter of a century, and many more weren't made within the last decade, yet all but a handful were made during the lifetimes of the organizers, both born in the early 1960s. So apparently we need to get our heads out of the moment -- but not beyond when Buergel and Noack first drew breath. Moreover, this time period began just as the training of artists moved significantly into a university context, as art began its shift from what is generally regarded as a Modernist epoch to a Postmodern one and as, for a time, traditional art forms were being eclipsed by photo-based, conceptual, installation and performance practices.