Kassel: The town that thinks modern art is rubbish

For an event that claims the title "World's biggest contemporary art exhibition", it was hardly an auspicious start: just hours before the opening of Germany's prestigious Documenta modern art extravaganza, street cleaners tore up one of the show's key exhibits and chucked the remnants into a municipal dust cart.

It was a painful experience for Lotty Rosenfeld, a Chilean artist with a reputation for hard-hitting, agitprop art usually aimed at the likes of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet. She had travelled from South America to Documenta's home in Kassel to mount an exhibit meant as a protest against violence. It involved taping white crosses to the streets of the provincial town. "They scraped off the crosses with shovels and then just threw them into the trash - that hurt," said Rosenfeld who has been involved in similar projects around the world for 30 years.

"Sometimes the crosses are removed the same day, sometimes after a year and sometimes not at all, but in Kassel the process was particularly brutal," she added.

The destruction of Rosenfeld's work did nothing to dispel an undercurrent of simmering resentment in some quarters of Kassel about the art marathon.

This year the €19m (£13m) extravaganza, which is held every five years, includes more than 500 works by 113 artists. The exhibits could hardly be more diverse. They include works by a 16th-century Persian calligrapher and a bizarre project organised by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who he has dispatched 1,001 of his countrymen to Kassel and instructed them to stroll about the city in groups as part of a work called Fairytale.

The event was started in the 1950s to revive cultural life in the industrial town which was devastated by an RAF bombing raid in October 1943. More than 10,000 people were killed in the attack and Kassel's elegant 18th and 19th century town centre was reduced to a heap of rubble. Nowadays it consists mostly of drab Fifties and Sixties concrete architecture.

This year's Documenta, the 12th since 1952 will run until the end of September. During its 100-day run the normally provincial, out-of-the-way city of Kassel set in the rolling hills of central Germany is invaded by a vast army of art lovers from across the globe. Last week, the army consisted mostly of affluent-looking German pensioners, gaggles of pubescent schoolchildren and groups of young Japanese women tourists.

But to some in Kassel the visitors are unwelcome intruders.

In front of the Documenta press centre, which had been adorned with purple banners for the occasion, a radio reporter was holding a live interview and phone-in programme with the city's mayor and local residents.

Bertram Hilgen, the mayor, was busy extolling the virtues of Documenta when he was interrupted by a caller, Rainer Balthazar. "I am sick to death of these Documentas," Mr Balthazar said. "We are surrounded by this junk and the town is stuffed with tourists for weeks on end. What's more we taxpayers end up paying for this rubbish."

Mr Hilgen pointed out that the event generated more than half a billion euros in income from visitors and most of it was pumped into the regional economy. "In financial terms, Documenta is a roaring success," he insisted.

Kassel's dustmen and residents are not the only ones upset by Documenta. A parallel "alternative" arts festival is attempting to highlight the difference between the city's glossy Documenta image and its working-class reality. Members of an action group called Poor hold protests on the city's streets most nights claiming to protect local culture from the invaders. "People should know that four-and-a-half out of every five years in Kassel are crap," said Michael Schmeisser, the organiser.

Sniping at Documenta has included a wealth of jokes about the artist Sanja Ivekovic and her so-far abortive attempt to create a "red square" by planting poppies in four vast flowerbeds on the city's Friedrichplatz. Last week the flowerbeds were thick with weeds and dark blue poppy seeds.

An attempt by the South Korean artist Sakarin Krue-On to plant rice on a slope in front of Kassel's Wilhlemshöhe Castle, which functions as a Documenta gallery, was also ridiculed. Officials argued that the work threatened to trigger a landslide and ruled that watering of the rice paddy should be stopped.

Charges that Documenta is an elitist spectacle that does nothing to involve the local community have dogged the event almost since its outset. In 2002, Documenta 11 , organised by Odwui Emwezor, suffered particularly heavy criticism for being too theoretical and remote from the local population.

The German artist Joseph Beuys made a memorable attempt to dispel the show's elitist image back in 1987 when he organised the planting of 7,000 oaks in Kassel. The project took him five years to complete but the oaks have since become an integral part of the city and its surrounding suburbs.

This year's director, Roger Bürgel, 45, a Berlin art historian, and his partner Ruth Noack, seem to have bent over backwards to stage an exhibition that tries to be politically "right on" and satisfy the demands of both local and international visitors. He has even set up an "Unemployment Salon" which provides a forum for artists to discuss their work with the city's jobless.

Bürgel and Noack's Documenta also contains works that dwell on a number of contemporary political and social issues of global importance such as economic migration, captured powerfully in David Goldblatt's 1980s photographs of black South Africans being bused from their homelands to work in white apartheid Pretoria. The theme is reprised in the west African artist Romuald Hazoume's work Dream featuring a refugees' boat made up entirely of plastic canisters.

Engagement with the unfamiliar and even the taboo is another theme. Visitors can walk through an exhibit that comprises 13 Les Paul electric guitars that are each computer programmed to emit a certain tone at a certain time.

A video work by the artists Dias and Riedweg explores the life of immigrant male prostitutes from Barcelona's gay scene. Visitors are invited to "select" a rent boy by pressing a button as soon as a red dot appears over his body as he lies sprawled on a Barcelona street. The subject, wearing a plastic face mask, then tells his life story while lying on a bed in a gay brothel.

It may not be the kind of work that the average Mr and Mrs Kassel would pay to go and see. But as Mr Bürgel put it, when asked last week about what he was trying to impart to people visiting this year's Documenta: "I'm not a dachshund trainer... I just want people to have a powerful experience."