Late in August I visited Documenta 11, the most recent version of the mega-exhibition that has been held in the German city of Kassel since 1955, when Arnold Bode, a professor of art at the Kassel Academy, decided to organise an international art show. It achieved such success that it soon became a crucial element of Kassel's character as a city, once the arms industry had gone. Documenta 11 dominated Kassel, filling the 18th-century Museum Fridericianum and its adjoining buildings; the nearby Orangerie and the Karlsaue park with its lawns and paths and ornamental lake, home to a host of temporary pavilions and installations; the disused hulk of the Binding Brewery, now converted into an art palace accessible by free Documenta bus; and the city's central railway station, the Hauptbahnhof, renamed the Kulturbahnhof in 1995, its waiting rooms miraculously transformed into gallery spaces. Finally, a particularly eccentric outpost, Thomas Hirschhorn's plywood and packing tape temple in honour of Georges Bataille, was erected in the middle of a low-income housing project.

LRB 3 October 2002 | PDF Download