A County Fair for Intellectuals.

When a contemporary-art extravaganza announces that it's not limited to art but includes everything from the social sciences to architecture and commissions the vast majority of its works to be created on site, you know it's going to be a pretty conventional show. At least according to the new convention operating in the art world these days, where exhibitions are a kind of county fair for intellectuals and catalogs resemble UNESCO reports on pressing global problems. Documenta 11, the latest edition of the every-five-years international survey of contemporary art, opening this week in Kassel, Germany, is no exception. In fact, it might prove to be an unsurpassable example of its kind.

Documenta's artistic director this time out is 39-year-old Okwui Enwezor, a passionate, globe-trotting Nigerian-born curator who lives mostly in the United States. He's got a fairly convincing theory that the current cultural climate is one of postcolonialism, in which, he says, "globalization means the terrible nearness of distant places." Enwezor is charming enough to smile widely when, during a press conference, he says things like "The countries of the North have confiscated the discussion of globalization." But he is also determinedly reformist enough to make sure that just under half the 116 artists in this Documenta come--by dint of ethnicity or residence--from outside the usual Euro-American roster of eligibles. During the past 15 months he's also taken Documenta 11 on the road, in the form of "platforms," or public conferences, to Vienna, New Delhi, the West Indies and Lagos. There luminaries like filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and architect Rem Koolhaas held forth on such issues as political torture and urban implosion in Africa. Nominally, the current art exhibition in Kassel is merely the last platform in Enwezor's postcolonial road show.

The work of art that most embodies what Documenta 11 is all about is Swiss artist-provocateur Thomas Hirschhorn's "Bataille Monument." On lawns amid apartment blocks in a housing project inhabited largely by Turkish immigrants, Hirschhorn has thrown up a snack bar, a bookshop and a little graffiti-covered exhibition room of books, maps and press clippings dedicated to the late French writer Georges Bataille. We're talking an extreme version of what someone once called "soul carpentry": measurements only roughly eyeballed, nails often bent, naked and ill-fitting plywood, all of it liberally swathed in packing tape. The precise point? Who knows? But the subject matter (cultural outlaws), the treatment (proletarian ad-lib) and the location of the work (far away from Documenta's usual galleries, in the bosom of people who've managed to survive only by crossing borders) constitute everything that Documenta 11 stands for.

Although the art in the Museum Fridericianum--the neoclassical palace hard by Kassel's main shopping street that houses Documenta's "main" venue--couldn't be more different in design from "Bataille Monument," its heart is with Hirschhorn. Cool white galleries display innumerable photographs of, say, apartheid-South African suburban developments; darkened chambers glow with slickly produced projected videos that look like Ansel Adams's photographs with portentous music and political messages added. One artist was overheard telling an inquiring journalist at the press preview, "You have to read the text, then you will understand the piece." Next door at the documenta-Halle, political didacticism reaches a fever pitch. Artistic collectives (with names like Park Fiction, Le Groupe Amos and Rags Media Collective) abound; flat-screen monitors and video walls flicker evangelically; stacks of leaflets beg to be picked up and read.

If you're naively looking for a ...