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The Week in Germany: Culture

September 22, 2006

Bathtubs on Tour: First Work of Art for documenta 12 Redefines the Roles of Artist and Public

The first work of art for the upcoming documenta 12 was unveiled in Kassel on Monday. Nine months ahead of the major international contemporary art exhibition Brasilian artist Ricardo Basbaum presented his project "Would you like to have an artistic experience?".

Basbaum's concept consists of 10 identical "bathtubs" - structures resembling blue-and-white tubs with a "drainpipe" in the middle. These will be shipped off to different people who will be given free reign to use, change and work them over as they like. Six tubs will stay within Kassel's city limits, but one each will be sent to Vienna, Ljubljana in Slovenia, Liverpool in England and Africa, according to dpa.

Another ten of the tub-like objects will be sent to Brazil for distribution across Latin America. The changes made to all of these works will be recorded and shown at the documenta exhibition starting in June 2007.

Basbaum (at left) and Buergel in front of one of the "tubs".

"I want to turn the relationship of artist and viewer upside down, to learn something about people. Now the viewer is the sender and the artist the receiver," Basbaum explained. "One is a different person after reading a book than one was before doing so. I want to change people a little bit in this manner," added the 45-year-old, who is based in Rio de Janeiro.

Going beyond the established western art world

Roger M. Buergel, documenta's artistic director, described Basbaum's work as "an empty cake tin or a bathtub with a hole in it. It is an affront which does not fit anywhere. But therein lies the challenge".

He added that this work underscores documenta's goal of being a global art exhibition: "We are not just relying on the established axes of America and Europe, but are showing art which appears peripheral to us."

According to the documenta anyone can apply online to own one of Basbaum's "bathtubs" for a couple of weeks at http://www.nbp.pro.br/

Avoiding a "carnival" atmosphere

Considered one of the most important modern art exhibitions in the world, the documenta has taken place in Kassel every four, and more recently every five, years since 1955. Spanning 100 days, it puts hundreds of objects of art on display in and around Kassel, a mid-sized city located due north of Frankfurt in Germany's central Hesse state.

The history of the documenta exhibitions mirrors the history of postwar modern art.

The last documenta in 2002 drew 650,000 visitors to Kassel, and its organizers announced recently they plan to keep this figure from going up any further. "The goal is the number of visitors we had last year, plus one," Bernd Leifeld, the show's business development director, said earlier this month.

And Buergel said he wanted to avoid a "carnival" atmosphere, with a view to focusing on one of the next documenta's core themes, education. "It cannot be that we do not understand contemporary art. This is what we want to change," he emphasized.

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