I proposed that we should dedicate the issue to the history of the documenta , combining our minor jubilee with the major event that had re-established West Germany as an international forum of modern art in The archive in Kassel turned out to be quite a respectable library, consisting of catalogues and books on modern and contemporary art, most of them debris from the previous six exhibitions sent in by gallerists and artists, or bought for, and left behind by, the various exhibition committees.
More appropriate to the name and function of an archive was an impressive collection of press clippings and reviews, stored in folders that also contained letters, drafts and other material written by the founders and curators of the first six dOCUMENTAs. When I asked for installation photographs of the exhibitions, however, I was shown a metal locker in the corner of the room, brim-full of envelopes and files containing heaps of photographs and papers. But it seemed that the locker had been opened for me for the first time in years: a quick examination showed that most of the photographs were unsorted and had no comments, or only laconic comments, on the back, some not even giving the number of the documenta in which they had been taken.
Most of the photographs were great — but so was the work of sorting and titling them that lay ahead of me. I am a little wary about describing this unforgettable day in autumn because the two art historians who then ran the archive then became friends during my time there.
They had taken over the archive only a year before and had their own priorities in reorganising it. Moreover, interest in installation shots — primary sources for the history of exhibitions and nowadays commonplace in curatorial studies — was then only just beginning to develop.
During the weeks to come, which included my Christmas holiday, I sorted the chaotic material into chronological order, identified dozens of people and, using the catalogues, many works of art, as well as various views of the Museum Fridericianum. I tell this story not to glamourise my personal history but to give a sense of this Stone Age in the historiography of exhibitions. At the time, I wondered if the magazine issue I planned could ever be produced at all. I was not aware that I had just discovered a law of historiography, namely, that nothing is more difficult to obtain than material on events that were sensations only a couple of years ago at least, in the age before Google.
