The Documenta scandal has now had concrete consequences very late: In a marathon meeting on Saturday night, the Documenta supervisory board unanimously agreed to terminate the service contract of General Director Sabine Schormann.
An interim successor is being sought in the short term.
The shareholders of the city of Kassel and the state of Hesse - the federal government is no longer represented on the ten-member supervisory board - thus drew the consequences of the months-long anti-Semitism dispute.
The diametrically opposed views of the two shareholders had already become apparent before the meeting.
On the one hand there was the chairman of the supervisory board and mayor of the city of Kassel, Christian Geselle (SPD), who until the end supported the general director Schormann, who was the main person he had chosen after the last Documenta.
On the other hand, Hesse's art minister, Angela Dorn (Greens), as deputy chairwoman of the supervisory board, has kept a clear distance from Schormann in recent weeks: after the anti-Semitism scandal, she sent Schormann a comprehensive catalog of questions and publicly criticized her refusal to assume responsibility.
What the supervisory board is now demanding
Another four points contained in the Supervisory Board's notification are primarily about timely clarification of how this unprecedented incident in the history of the previous fourteen Documenta editions could have happened.
The aim is to “regain lost trust”.
The presentation of the banner "People's Justice" by the artist collective Taring Padi with its anti-Semitic imagery is described in the statement as a clear "crossing of borders" that caused considerable damage to the documenta.
In the opinion of the Supervisory Board, it is therefore essential to draw “conclusions based on scientific findings for dealing with anti-Semitic processes in the culture and art context”.
But who provides these pertinent clues, and who follows them up?
The supervisory board recommends using “scientific support made up of scientists on contemporary anti-Semitism, the German and global context and post-colonialism as well as art”.
Later in the announcement, the suggestion follows that an "organizational study of the Documenta" should be carried out, "which subjects both the structures, including competencies and responsibilities, and the processes to an examination.
This with the involvement of external experts. "A key point of many critics,
The fact that the Ruangrupa curatorial group and many of the collectives from the so-called global South involved in the fifteenth Documenta showed little awareness of postcolonial anti-Semitism or even demanded understanding for it in a culturally relativistic manner seems to have been taken seriously in the supervisory board statement.
However, the proposed committee should not only give specific recommendations for the workup, but also name which aspects may require a more in-depth "scientific" analysis.
However, this control body appears to be restricted by the simultaneous determination of the supervisory board that the selection committee, with its advisory function for the documenta, should be involved in this scientific work-up.
In it, however, there are several BDS advocates who bring rather little neutrality to an open discussion of anti-Israelism.
This decision turned the buck into a gardener, just like Schormann did before with her Documenta integration of anti-Semitism consultant Emily Dische-Becker, who wrote from 2006 to 2012 as an author for the Lebanese newspaper "Al-Akhbar", the mouthpiece of the radical anti-Israeli Hizbullah, which for example proclaims the downfall of the Jewish state every year on "Jerusalem Day".
Now it's about