Documenta 5 (1972) solved the puzzle of the lost photographs of artists.

Instead of
venerating the producers, behind whom the documenta organizers of the first and
second hour had retreated, the triumph of the new heroes, the mediators, was heralded.
Szeemann was prepared for it, as his first feat, the exhibition When Attitudes become
Form (1969), had already proved that not only artists but also art mediators can become
stars of the art world if they present the right artists at the right time in the right context.
Fascinated by the way modern artists work without commissions or reservations,
Szeemann discovered the artistic sides of his activities as mediator and emphasized
them—half-art-historian, half-visionary—in his theoretical concepts also. His
contradictory notion of Individuelle Mythologien (Individual Mythologies), the slogan
of documenta 5, is possibly the best password ever invented to lead into modern art’s
field of force. It gave documenta 5 the intellectual and artistic features necessary to
secure its fame as the most important documenta apart from the first.
Incidentally, this notion changed Haftmann’s strategy of legitimation, because it did not
historicize the artistic material but characterized it by labelling it. Haftmann’s strategy
had anyway come to an end because the fast changes in avant-gardes and new
tendencies made it obsolete. By calling the central section of the fifth documenta
‘Individual Mythologies’, Szeemann had appropriated a different way of producing art
history without historical concepts. This way characteristically removes an activity from
the artists, which is in any case only occasionally incumbent upon them nowadays. If
the names ‘Impressionists’ and ‘Fauves’ were distilled from insults, ‘Dadaists’ from an
attempt at parody, the ‘Surrealists’ and ‘Futurists’, like other groups of artists,
condensed their intentions programmatically into their group names. Since the sixties,
the mediators, among others, competed to name groups first. With ‘Individual
Mythologies,’ Szeemann launched a name comparable to those which other mediators
had come up with earlier and later, e.g., Conceptual Art, Earth and Land Art, Arte
Povera, and the New Savages, in competition with the artists who named the
movements ‘Fluxus’ or ‘Art & Language’. When an audience wants to fall back upon a
programme or a surrogate programme in order to understand a work of art, it has come
to do so by means of such concepts, and especially through the mediators, whose new
heroic role is derived from their achievements, which they prove with their
understanding of artists and works on the one hand, and their apt characterizations on
the other.
Although Szeemann succeeded in revitalizing the institution of documenta by giving it a
risky
contemporaneity, he was not thanked for his achievements for a long time. The official
organizers of
documenta even considered suing him personally for some deficits in the budget that
appear ridiculously
tiny today but at that time might have ruined a man who did not have another job to go
to. Nor was his
immediate successor, Manfred Schneckenberger, the head of the documenta 6 and
former head of the
Cologne exhibition hall, reintegrated into the mediators’ career scheme, but worked
freelance for a long
time after. Rudi Fuchs was clever and did not leave his job to make documenta 7
(1982), but returned to his hundred days could turn out to be highly respected un-
employees in the following years. Not one of them in fact Berlin National Gallery after
he left the Kassel exhibition committee. Nevertheless, the example set by Szeemann,
with When Attitudes Become Form, documenta 5 and other subsequent important
exhibitions, has influenced and changed the world of art mediating in many ways. P. 55-
56 Bruce ferguson