Some colleagues of mine were recently denounced as 'Antwerp formalists' by a theorist we - that is, myself and these so-called Antwerp formalists - all adore and respect. She could not accept our nuanced approach to documenta 12. She wanted the show to be torn apart, dismissed, brutally discarded. The vehemence of her stance expressed an ongoing commitment to the previous documenta, a project that opened up a new space for analysing art within a substantial - one could even say constitutional - relation to the political.

Is this confrontation the only way in which we are to imagine the relationship between documenta 11 and documenta 12? Do we really have to surrender the conceptual gains made by documenta 11 in order to truly engage with documenta 12? Documenta 11's curator Okwui Enwezor built his argument through the 'thematising' of politics by means of a multitude of political inroads in the preparative debates, in his curatorial approach and in the exhibition proper. Indeed, the most recent documenta brushed all of this aside and played itself out on a much lighter ground, creating a buzz around three contemporary intellectual topics (the discursive results of which were almost invisible in the actual exhibition), and assembling an exhibition that could be called 'extended neoclassical' - extended since it included socially and politically engaged works, which art fairs also do these days.¹ If there were any curatorial politics involved here, they were not-so-expertly hidden under the veil of presenting art-as-such, blotting out the contours of the various artists' biographies.² Does this mean, however, that the core of Enwezor's documenta 11 project should be considered in absentia while critically approaching its successor? Isn't there a possibility here to further the potential that was gained five years ago in the considerations of its successor, no matter how light-handed and light-headed its proposals may have been - indeed, no matter how sfumato, sometimes even fuzzy?

'Formalism' seems to be the original sin of documenta 12: it even contaminates those who dare consider it. But a term never comes alone; terms come (and go) in monogamous pairs. When using the f*** word, its old complement and antithesis re-emerges - the question of content. It is what attracts us in art beyond form. It may take on many different shapes and guises, ranging from the taste of Zeuxis's grapes in the famous Greek pictorial contest to the terms of social and/or political engagement during the decade of documenta 11.

Two sides, then. Which of these two sides of the moon is the enlightened one? Neither of the two, obviously; they are both dark. This is also how we could best define the attitude of documenta 12, an exhibition that did not seek or 'mean' to polemicise or polarise, but in some sense begged to be widened, enriched, to be made more inclusive. Coming at the moment it did, it should not be thought of as a merely formalist exercise (that, in any case, would mean a great loss indeed); instead, it may result in the posing of questions concerning the potential relationships between the formal possibilities of art on the one hand, and the problems in society at large on the other. Rather than a specific quality of the exhibition proper, this 'posing of questions' is a generic possibility implied in the kind of project documenta 12 really was (and, I believe, wanted to be), the more so at the moment it announced itself. And it is a challenging possibility nonetheless, in the epoch defined by Enwezor's documenta.

As the sfumato approach of documenta 12 seemed to suggest, then, there are no compelling reasons to follow up on its particular choice of artists. As a project, it could just as well be 'recharged' with artists who were not part of this initial selection. It seems possible, for example, to inject it with a shot of Bjarne Melgaard.

Melgaard is an artist whose work can be validated along very classical lines of judgement. He originally is a painter. Even though he became known primarily for the grey-and-black works that he produced after the largest part of his oeuvre went up in flames during a fire in his studio on New Year's Eve in 2000, he is one of those rare contemporary painters who, in a rather old-fashioned sense, could be characterised as a colourist. The whole of Melgaard's oeuvre can be approached and assessed in terms of atmospheric fields and retinal intensities, considering all the other articulations as a mere support for this focus. His works from the 1990s - such as the magnificent paintings that were presented in his solo exhibition 'Everything American Is Evil, The Return to Constantinople' at Kiasma in Helsinki in 1998 - often breathe and bathe in light colours which establish fields of attention through consciously balanced tonalities.³ Because of their outgoing vividness, one is tempted to speak about these tonalities in terms of primary colours - blue, yellow or red. Yet they are cultivated and ultra-specific floating hues. Only their degrees of deviation from primary colours lead to a focus - into yellow, blue or white.

Similarly, Melgaard's work can be approached in terms of its linear qualities. His early installations articulated those qualities by using woollen threads that linked together different materials from divergent origins into a web of relationships. A draughtsman, then. A great deal of Melgaard's output has consisted of drawings indeed, works in which whole hoards of informal gestures team up around figurative proposals. Part of the virtuosity in his more recent paintings is based on drawing too: the sketchy emergence, through curt brushstrokes, of recognisable shapes, heads and limbs. Sometimes Melgaard will decide to simply enjoy drawing lines, like he did for his exhibition at Stella Lohaus Gallery in Antwerp in 2005.⁴ Beside a series of etchings one came across five cashmere wall carpets filled with images whose content can only be described as raw, even if they appear to display light and elegant designs held together by a minimum number of crafty lines. The technique used in these works at first seemed to be that of delicate pastel lines on dark surfaces; after attentive analysis they prove to be woven into a special fabric of an uncanny quality.

Textiles, yes, and from this tactile realm of textiles we seamlessly arrive in a domain which - in the occidental tradition, at least - is that of the formal radicalised into formalism: in one word, that of design. It is no mere detail that the space which housed Melgaard's new paintings in last year's Athens biennial was outfitted with stylish sofas, covered with fabrics designed by Melgaard himself. Lifestyle and fashion are anything but alien to him.

Yet this is also the artist who has consistently experienced problems with the explicit articulations of his content matter. His works, virtually all of them, are indeed shocking, the content ranging from cocaine orgies to rape fantasies and doomsday visions of dogs being thrown out of windows. Light touches are combined with harsh content, as in the blazers he made in light grey wool in 1999 - 'a Queen of Peking • Brad.B. • Melgaard production' - that joyfully exclaim to be '100 % mega dope', or, on the back, state 'All Gym Queens Deserve To Die', prime examples, no doubt, of perfect post-fitness leisure.

We do know that a contemporary 'content' approach brings out pertinent relations to the problems in society at large. As such, this stance may help to increase our attention, both for the vastness of the issues at stake and for the specificity of the artistic proposal. It may even stir up that rarest of phenomena - true debate, discussion. On exceptional occasions, the ripples caused by this approach move beyond the free flow of meaning, and manage to touch a public nerve, even cause a public scandal. Melgaard was one of the rare artists to recently achieve this effect in Germany. At MARTa, in the small German town of Herford, his sombre exhibition 'Black Low: The Punk Movement Was Just Hippies With Short Hair' (2002) was deemed obscene, and closed down by the local authorities. An artist's book by Melgaard from the same year consists of an appropriation of Lords of Chaos. The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (1998), a book co-authored by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind. A copy of this journalistic quest to understand the vitality and violence of the Norwegian Black Metal scene of the 1990s was simply signed by Melgaard, who scrawled his signature in black marker on the cover - in the sky, above the image of a burning medieval church. Nothing that Melgaard hints at, expresses or describes in his art can be thought of as more violent than the real-life story that is captured by this cover image (an actually burning church), which he just barely touched. Why is it, then, that Moynihan's and Søderlind's book was not banned, while Melgaard's exhibition was transformed into a scene of symbolic political closure? Is it simply that the museum space is more 'loaded', or that artists are more respected than writers, and that their 'coverage' of certain stories inflicts more pain? That hardly seems conceivable, no matter how strong we may think the bourgeois afterglow of German art life is. Nothing is weightier than the sphere of the media - printed matter's influence is tantamount to that of museums. There must be some strange twist here which lured authority into overplaying its hand, into losing its mind in being horrified by these simple, slightly old-fashioned products of a person's hands and mind, artworks that were slightly over-expressive in their appearance.

What happens when Melgaard signs up for Lords of Chaos? Let us look at another artist's book of his, one that is five years older - from 1997. This one is a hardback. Its fine cloth surface is of an uncanny tactility, light purple with gold relief print, depicting a sun setting - or rising - over a sea, nine rays emanating from it, and with the sentence 'Paul Gauguin is eternity by Bjarne Melgaard' completing the image. Inside, it consists of just fresh and light white quality paper. However, this radiant report of Melgaard's voyage to Gauguin's grave on the Îles Marquises in French Polynesia is all but empty. It is filled to the brim with the same substance as Melgaard's version of Lords of Chaos; it is filled with attention.

Here, one can make slightly more factual remarks. One may say, for instance, that Melgaard uses his signifiers in a poetic way - that he isolates them and highlights them, that he lets them shine like stars on their own. The original meanings of these signifiers obviously continue to resonate within such a set-up: if a chihuahua enters the scene, the chihuahua is there indeed, as you can see in some of the works. You can see your chihuahua, any given friend of yours can see his or her chihuahua (his or her view might be more vague and tentative than yours). But each of us actually has a floating chihuahua before us when looking at Melgaard's work. The many presences in his art, be they invented or historically traceable, may well be filled with your knowledge, your suspicions and your phantasmagorias alike. But at the same time they squarely deny any identification with these suspicions and phantasmagorias. Their overt clarity is that of Lewis Carroll's white hare running around in Alice's Wonderland: it is a type of clarity that no longer is secure of its own setting, one that defies its narrative even as it is writing it. This 'chihuahua space' is populated with presences that may take on very different forms and emerge, for some time, out of very different thematic strands before fading out again. Yet every one of them to a certain degree is interchangeable - they serve as mere representations of a deeper notion of presence; they are its ambassadors.

Melgaard chooses strong and robust characters for this business of 'representing' - valiant knights who can defend presenthood against all odds, natures so unlikely that one cannot pass them by, moments in which one can truly 'believe', which surpass the conventional, comforting formalities, and which reach out beyond the cosy spaces of art. Melgaard allows this fireworks of surface effects to reach a dazzling, disturbing climax (and then some - his art really only begins beyond this climax), but at the same time also allows these effects to find a very delicately balanced mode of behaviour. In the Athens biennial installation, the textiles that decorated Melgaard's salon performed this feat of balancing; they were the installation's main actors instead of the paintings on the wall, huge surfaces full of brio and monuments of momentary performativity. The images spread out on the sofa surfaces, on the contrary, were delicate, precise and repeated. They offered network of relationships with the colour fields that surrounded them, attempting to bring in a homoeopathically engendered possibility of meaning in that specific realm of art that is called 'design', the temple of the true priesthood that rules this formalism-obsessed epoch of ours.

Be it in a design space, be it in an aesthetic heaven such as those he pictorially recalls, or be it in the sombre sonority of black metal music, Melgaard consistently invokes the possibility of the meaningful. None of the anecdotes, characteristics or noble deeds really makes a difference - being an intensity is their birth right. Their ultimate quality is that of being a possible topic of (and for) belief. As such, they do not fight on account of some characterising detail or other. They are always ready to morph, to lose ears and gain eyes, to transform themselves into an other, if need be.

Petty politics, if any, but certainly an oeuvre that can be related to the political: always taking a stance, over and over again, relating itself to the uncertainty of the setting in which the work would surely dissolve if it wasn't for its signifying conviction, and ready, even poised, nay, busy to turn itself into something else - the next presence needed in the next moment of concentration and co-existence.

It is the openness of these presences that is their most pertinent attitude: their emphatic declaration, not of being what they are, but of sheer potentiality, of potentially accepting another proposal, a re-mediation, a reversal, a complete shift from darkness into light, from blue into gold. The figurations of Melgaard are therefore never caricatures; they are living creatures, never aspiring for mere maintenance, but for a future instead. Such spacey evocations of sex-here-drugs-there-and-black-metal-at-yetanother-place can be horrifying indeed. The German authorities were undoubtedly right to intervene in 'Black Low'. If Melgaard's posse truly is a frightening bunch, it isn't because of the monsters as they appear in it, but instead because they are truly and literally monstrous, i.e. they do not fit inside any categories, even when they seem to be offering up all the elements needed to be described and analysed for the sake of categorising. If they do not convincingly fit, it is because they are ready to and in need of change. As beingsand becomings that are embedded in a context of uncertain relations, they may soon prove to be something else, some-body gruesomely unpredictable: even from within the chihuahua fear may shine forth.

— Bart De Baere