Fully Freighted Art

At Documenta 11, A Bumpy Ride For Art World's Avant-Garde

KASSEL, Germany --

Last weekend, two solid-looking men approached the check-in desk at the station hotel of this modest German town. Dressed in the blue-and-red uniforms of the country's railroad, complete with conductors' caps, they were overnighting before their next cross-country trek. And they were taken aback to find that something big and strange seemed to be up, in a city they had always imagined as determinedly middling and normal.

Everywhere they looked in the usually sleepy lobby, glossy signs, high-style posters and stacked brochures proclaimed the arrival of Documenta 11; groups of oddly dressed foreigners lurked and gossiped in dark corners of the bar.

The hotel clerk explained: Documenta is the world's most lavish festival of contemporary art, and it has been staged in Kassel every five years or so since the Marshall Plan came to the bombed-out town; its 11th edition had just opened to the public, after several days of galas and media previews. Try it out, the clerk suggested with a noncommittal shrug, and there might be something in it worth a look.

His guests, looking unconvinced, headed off to their rooms. I checked out, and lost track of them. But I like to imagine that, after a bit of rest, our pair put aside their skepticism and spent the rest of their furlough among the town's unlikely art exhibits.

For all their initial doubts, I imagine that they would have ended up impressed.