The curator of the next Documenta exhibition has found herself in a familiar controversy after removing an artwork from her current exhibition in Paris, echoing the censorship issues that plagued the previous Documenta. Naomi Beckwith, who will oversee the major art exhibition in Kassel in two years, is based at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and is known for her diplomatic approach. However, her current exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo has already sparked debate when one of the displayed works was removed shortly after opening.
The controversial artwork was created by Cameron Rowland, a 36-year-old New York-based artist, and consisted of a flag installation. Rowland's piece, titled "Replacement," involved hanging the newly introduced flag of Martinique, a Caribbean overseas department that belongs to France and the European Union, in place of the French flag outside the Palais de Tokyo. The flag features pan-African colors of black, green, and red, which Martinique adopted in 2023.
Despite the building's large size making the flag relatively inconspicuous, the exhibition venue and Rowland's gallery announced on Instagram that the flag would no longer be displayed at that location because it might violate French laws. Notably, the announcement used the conditional tense "might," suggesting that no actual violation of France's strict neutrality requirements for public buildings had been formally challenged. Unlike the significant uproar that surrounded Documenta 2022, there had been no comparable public outrage or protests regarding anti-Semitic imagery, as this case involved only the flag of an overseas department that potentially violated flag regulations.
The situation recalls a famous marketing ploy from the 1960s when a Berlin gallery owner called the police himself to report potentially indecent material in his own space, then tipped off the press just in time for the confiscation. Ironically, the flag was displayed as part of an exhibition examining the influence of "French Theory" – thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida – on American art, and the removal actually fits better into this theoretical context than the original display.
The self-defeating irony becomes apparent when the institution that initially encouraged critical statements ultimately intervenes against them, as if posthumously confirming Foucault's theories about how even the most liberal state eventually monitors, regulates, and intervenes. While the exhibition inside focuses heavily on Derrida's famous concept of "différance" – an intentionally confusing term sometimes rendered as "Differänz" in German – the outside relationship to city and state demonstrates simple "déférence," or respectfully preemptive obedience.
Rowland's flag work, though not particularly elaborate in execution, addresses Martinique's adoption of its new flag in pan-African colors. According to the explanatory text, "Black Martinicans have been fighting for an end to French rule for 390 years." However, this statement oversimplifies the complex reality, as people of the same skin color should be allowed to hold different opinions, and votes in Martinique have consistently confirmed the island's complex colonial status. Rowland advocates decisively for independence, which is unsurprising given that his work fundamentally deals with the history, economics, and lingering effects of the transatlantic slave trade.
Within the context of an exhibition examining the influence of francophone texts on American art, Rowland's reference points lie more with the anti-colonialist writings of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, both from Martinique, rather than with the Parisian thinkers typically associated with "French Theory" and postmodernism. Both terms were essentially coined in the United States, where since the late 1960s, thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari were enthusiastically received but not always fully understood.
The grouping of such diverse thinkers under the umbrella terms "French Theory" and "postmodernism" was likely uncomfortable for the philosophers themselves, especially since both labels weren't always meant kindly. The transformation of Michel Foucault's legacy after his death from AIDS in 1984 is particularly telling. Conservatives criticized him for undermining solid values and moral principles, the Marxist left denounced him as an unscrupulous forefather of neoliberalism, and more recently, left-liberals like philosopher Susan Neiman and mediaevalist Helen Pluckrose, along with mathematician James Lindsay, have accused him of being the intellectual godfather of authoritarian campus activism and oppression-fetishizing "wokeness."
The exhibition catalog takes a surprisingly doctrinaire approach, with sociologist Eric Fassin dismissing all criticism of "wokeism" as anti-intellectualism, while philosopher Judith Butler pathologizes any doubt about gender theories as mere "fear" – irrational feelings and resentments of the backward. This smiling enforcement of agreement resembles 1970s psycho-sects more than the original French theory. Perhaps Foucault would have found this tooth-baring amusing.
The exhibition's most impressive image isn't actually an artwork but a photograph of the theory pop star in 1975 during an LSD trip with two California hippies – one laughing heartily, one photographing, and Foucault laughing with both or at them. The most striking video is an excerpt from Foucault's legendary TV debate with leftist linguist Noam Chomsky, where Foucault smiles maliciously, picks at his bared teeth as if performing, digs in his ear, and ultimately punctures Chomsky's entire beloved theoretical balloon by declaring that "the" human being on which his colleague bases his faith in progress doesn't exist.
The Parisian exhibition presents not only "the" Black people who all want or should want independence in Martinique, but much more that pushes with activating impetus from root (the evil) straight to crown (the abolition of evil), making it the opposite of what Deleuze and Guattari once idealized as the hierarchy-free proliferation of the rhizome. What's truly impressive is how much art has moved away from French Theory and postmodernism on its path toward activism.
The vocabulary has shifted dramatically over the past decade. Where 1990s and 2000s contemporary art catalog texts were practically unthinkable without Foucault's portmanteau word "governmentality," without "episteme," "dispositives," or at least a few "techniques of the self," today's essential terms are "race," "gender," and "identity." "Marginalized" people stand at the center, "read" more often refers to genders and origins than to books, and "identified" no longer means empathetically "with" but distancelessly "as." Where art commentary once almost always "examined," "researched," "questioned," or even "interrogated," now there's often clear knowledge from the start about how the world should and shouldn't be.
This represents a remarkable reduction in complexity from the pleasure in the open, ambiguous, and contradictory down to clear didactic directives. Art historian Wolfgang Ullrich addressed this problem in his book "Identification and Empowerment" last year, bravely claiming it wasn't a problem at all but rather good, beautiful, and sometimes even interesting. However, this perspective is debatable.
When confronting older works by artists like Kiki Smith, Mike Kelley, or Cindy Sherman in Paris, they remain immediately confusing, unsettling, ambiguous, and magnificent – but clearly from another era. In 2025, Cameron Rowland calls for the decolonization of a French overseas department without any doubts or ambiguities, showing his colors as literally as possible.
Naomi Beckwith will likely be unable to avoid this part of the art world at her Documenta in two years if it aims to be contemporary. The considerable portion of the art world whose identification and empowerment is essentially dedicated to Hamas's fight against Israel can already look forward to seeing Beckwith caught between activist art and German laws, including the so-called "Staatsräson." That the conflict zone will likely center not on Russia, China, Iran, or Sudan, but on this particular issue, is already as clear as anything has been since the beginning of postmodernism.
