You see the work. You see
the faces of a lot of people, whom you may have met, or wished to have met -
had you known they existed (at the time the image was taken). You meet the
artists, the collectors, the art dealers, conservators, and curators of the
inner circles of the contemporary art world. You may recognize people early in
their carriers. You get a sense of who were the makers and who were the movers.
In the fabric of this work, which covers a period of fifty years - they all
seem like contemporaries: Bijl, Beuys, Broodthaers, Baselitz etc. among the
artists, or Castelli, Hoet, König, Szeemann among the movers - to name just a
few.
Documentation extends the privilege of making sense of things after the fact - also of the art, which many an artist himself in the turmoil of the times may not have had the leisure to contemplate in all its implications. You get a sense of how things move along with cruel alacrity, as you witness the events unfolding before you. Is this then how it all fits together? The actually experience was certainly not about tying all the knots together, as we do in hindsight. The experience was in the flux of the moment - not necessarily even in the material remnant called the work of art. Often the photograph conveys more of its essence.
The photographs Benjamin Katz took in the two and half years leading up to the “Belgian” documenta IX of 1992 are an example in case.
Jan Hoet’s documenta was a pivotal event for an entire generation of artists, but then, already Documenta Wax Museum, an installation by Guillaume Bijl at the same occasion, seemed like an apt comment on issues of hagiography and the inevitable historization of whatever seems most current. The question of whether our "modernity is antiquity" seemed like a provocative question to ask, but has the current documenta XII shifted any paradigms?
Benjamin Katz was born in Antwerp. His father, deported by Belgian authorities to France perished there in 1941, while mother and son survived the war in hiding in Brussels. Katz became involved in the arts as an artist, an art dealer (one of the first exhibitions shown in his gallery were those of Georg Baselitz and Marcel Broodthaers), finally settling for artistic photography. Over a time of fifty years, Benjamin Katz has created a panoptic view of the art world and its protagonists, who, as stressed in the writing about him, were often his friends. Thus, their most poignant portraits are from his camera.
Benjamin Katz lives in Cologne and teaches at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts.
Shawn McBride, Antwerp
September 2007