Where art worlds meet
Text of Talk at the International Symposium Where art worlds meet: multiple modernities and the global salon, December 9-12, 2005, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, Campo Santo Stefano, Venezia
with Giandomenico Romanelli, Robert Storr, Bruno S. Frey, Ackbar Abbas, Anna Cestelli Guidi, Beatriz Colomina, Lynne Cooke, Jean-Hubert Martin, Angela Vettese, Daniel Birnbaum, James Meyer, Peter Schjeldahl, Paulo Herkenhoff, Wu Hung, Vasif Kortun, Gerardo Mosquera, Monica Bonvicini, Tania Bruguera, Daniel Buren, Emily Jacir, Steve McQueen, Luc Tuymans, Homi K. Bhabha, Boris Groys, Marc Augé, Geeta Kapur, Jean Fisher, Gao Minglu, Salah M. Hassan, Francesco Bonami, Achille Bonito Oliva, Giovanni Carandente, Germano Celant, Jean Clair, Rosa Martínez.
One, Two, Many Biennials: How Do Local Conditions Prompt and Shape the Spread of the Global Salon?
Festivalism is a term Peter brought up yesterday, which probably was appropriated by Roberta Smith in The New York Times article that she wrote after the 2003 Venice Biennale, and which I thought was a rather lazy piece. It really displayed a crisis of journalistic criticism in the face of large biennials. I mean, certainly criticism is not obsolete and not helpless, but it really lacks the kind of tools that you need to deal with a large exhibition today.
And so, for example, Charles Esche and I are actually now thinking about a post-review publication of the ninth Istanbul Biennial that we curated together, because we feel that we also have to challenge the criticism and advance the discourse, and we think this kind of talkback is essential. For example, I have always enjoyed Peter Schjeldahl’s writing, but I have enjoyed it in terms of the pleasure of his writing. I have never read it as an interpretation or a description of an exhibition but more as a distinct text in itself; and, in the future, I think we should not shy away from, for example, enjoying Bellini, as people coming from far away. I think it is much more important to bring things together than break them apart, so I don’t, for example, have to be a Lutheran from North Dakota.
Second, about globalization, I think we are speaking of several things at once, and I want to add one silly term, which I am thinking about these days: expanded provincialism. I think expanded provincialism is on the rise today and is a particular sphere of the globalized art world; it is a kind of replica sphere, with cushions of reassurance that the art world is basically integrated to the machinations of the market. It is a seemingly functional situation, and there are regularized exhibitions in white-cube spaces around the world. These institutions participate in art fairs such as Basel, or Frieze, or ARCO’S annual programs, and so on. It also comes with another package or another proliferation of new collectors from different parts of the world. I was looking at the last Frieze, an art newspaper. The cover read “Middle Eastern Collectors Make Their Mark,” which was kind of scary to me at that moment. With these new collectors, the ultimate context is event-driven acquisition structures like art fairs and copycat museums, or advertisement-layered bilingual magazines; for me that is not an international situation but a kind of replicated subject, which I guess should also demand some merit because of the conscientious assimilation of something that has happened elsewhere. You can imagine the art world as a kind of large party: in the old days there were only special invitees or those with a secret code that were allowed to enter, and the rest were outside. If there was another party, you invariably knew that it was not the real party: the main dish was somewhere else. Today’s situation is somewhat different because there is a big party and everybody gets an invitation: but the difference is that the hosts have already left the table, so you get fed, you go around with the leftover food, and the leftover drinks, and the canapés, and so on. This is actually a fantastic situation because then the right party begins, which is actually quite healthy. I think we should look at it also from another position: we cannot operate forever in this environment of disorientation and undefined value, a world that engages in spinning around imagined centers, but where nothing happens.
Now, about the biennials, which throughout the 1990s have been the privileged agencies for the global distribution of art: they are created in large part by international freelancers in the knowledge industry, so-called itinerant or independent curators, who are thrown into this kind of free-market competition seeking similar sources, similar critical spaces, and so on. We are essentially privileged subjects of a new economy. Nevertheless, the biennials also substitute the conscience of an urgent present for a painful past; they divulge and obscure, but hardly reveal, their own machinations, and this is an issue to be considered. Of course, a positive side also exists out of the desires of cities to be part of contemporary culture and share its values, not only with indigenous populations but also with tourists. And this is actually not bad because the events actually have educational and informative possibilities. And they also introduce critical art spaces, critical art practices in a certain context, pretty much at that scale for a first time, and that is that is very important.
The burning phenomenon of the biennial since 1989 has driven much of the art world’s global expansion. After the collapse of socialism and the advent of global economic growth, artists could actually reach out to the free market in order to sustain themselves. So the biennials have been the central vehicles that have validated the circuit that is now actually moving over to art fairs. And with that there is a homogenizing effect; I would like to think that biennials as art institutions are still one of the last fronts of art in a fragmented public sphere today. So we have to hold onto them.
Now, I just want to speak a little bit about the last Istanbul Biennial. We had eight prior biennials, so most of the hard work was already done. Nevertheless, we changed the model, I think, in a big way; we did not quite make a new biennial, but we tried to produce a new model that could be played upon in the future. One aspect of this was our taking the biennial not as an event that happens every two years but thinking of it as a perennial, that is, something that happens for the duration of two years. An eclectic program, a conversation, or engagement with the city started about twelve months before the exhibition, which prepared the local public for the fact. In terms of the classical meaning of the world biennial, it has its global meaning, and we usually opt for the event aspect of it, but there is a second aspect that I think is much more important. That is the idea of moving the entire exhibition from the tourist city to the actual city, so as to use the city as the actually environment in which the biennial was constructed and to which the viewers would return during and after their visit.
Instead of having venues, we decided to integrate the exhibition into the city, which was actually in large part due to our failure to find such spaces because the speed of the city was faster than the speed of the exhibition. The city was then privatizing at a phenomenal rate, so anything we found could be taken away from us. We tried to turn a built-in failure into a positive situation: we chose relatively anonymous buildings, workaday buildings, and that created a ground for the artists to produce their work. So the buildings were an apartment building, an office, a warehouse, a theater, a gallery, a shop, and a depot. And with that came the notion of relieving exhibition fatigue in a large exhibition, where attention spans are very low and the real time of the exhibition actually exceeds anything that is humanly possible; by breaking up the venues and turning the exhibition into a walking path, we were able to forget, remember, divulge, get lost in the city, and go back to the exhibition again. And then en route projects were laid out along the way, so that it would be possible to mark the exhibition along its path.
We also decided to rethink the exhibition publications. Traditionally, we have a pre-catalogue and a post-catalogue, and the pre-catalogue would include previous work by the artists and the obligatory, not particularly intelligent, single-page essay about each artist’s work; a post-catalogue would come too late, about six months or a year later. The post-catalogue, which is the documentation and the memory of the exhibition, would come too late to be connected to the exhibition in a particular way and lose its intensity. So what we did is completely disregard the notion of a catalogue: we printed a simple black-and-white guide book, using today’s printing technology where you can actually write, edit, design, and print basically one day before the exhibition. So, two days before the exhibition, during the book launch, we were able to get the exhibition documentation before the exhibition itself opened. And this was given to every single ticket holder. So that was a kind of hospitable agency of information on our part. The second publication was a newspaper, which we piggybacked onto a national newspaper. Every Friday an eight-page biennial supplement was inserted into the newspaper. So we were able to reach the country, and people who did not see the exhibition could at least have had access to the discourse about the exhibition, about the works, discussions about other exhibitions in the city, opinion columns, talkback columns, art columns by curators, and so on. Finally, we produced a publication containing our approach as curators. We had a small introduction, a selection of essays and reviews that started with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau and ended with Giorgio Agamben, which framed how we were trying to approach the exhibition and the notion of Istanbul as a conflicted situation, as a place of radical democracy, and so on. And to make the exhibition into a perennial we needed this kind of long-term residency so that the exhibition itself would turn into a consistent practice.
Istanbul is a very old historical city with a lot of charm, located between the East and West, North and South. It has a lot of historical kitsch, rather, our cognition of it would be kitsch, not the history itself; we felt many artists would have a difficult time dealing with Istanbul and that their awareness would be “kitschified,” since we felt that on a short visit the artists would produce the most obvious response, which we really did not want. So the artists were invited to actually live in Istanbul or stay for a long period, anywhere between three weeks to six months. Some came with existing proposals and others developed their work in Istanbul. We also connected them with philosophers, thinkers, journalists, and all kinds of people from different fields to articulate their reactions to the city. Some simply painted in the city, some did other work. But this put Istanbul itself in a central position, so that even work from other places would actually reflect back to Istanbul. Because it is also historically the center of a conquering empire, we tried to extend our reach from the region but not cover the whole globe. I don’t think the globe is graspable; no exhibition can actually address the whole world and should not have that pretension, so we really shied away from looking at a lot of geographies. We tried to fold the exhibition out from the region, recognizing the fact that Istanbul was once a kind of mercantile center of an empire that had to provide hospitality for the southeastern Mediterranean and European areas. We tried to privilege where it came from so that the city became a real and lived-in place.
And the final point: there was an exhibition ecology by which we did not produce huge white cubes and ultimate conditions for the works. We did not paint a wall when the wall did not need to be painted. We sometimes left sheetrock completely bare; sometimes we did not do any wall building at all, so we tried to bring it back to a minimum instead of replicating the post-white-cube, post-factory situation. We let the character of the buildings come through, and the artists were also working with those particular salient characteristics of the buildings themselves.
And as a cultural event, this was an exhibition that was generally supported by galleries, which, I assume, created a kind of freedom. There were no private parties, nor private things of any sort, so it was a democratically open and free situation from which much of the joy of the exhibition actually came. Of course, we had no organized conferences, no lectures, and no symposia during the opening days. That was also important because that could have been done before or after but not during the opening. The opening days were for fun: a great get-together, a sharing of what people had worked on for a long time. I think it should be reserved for that.
Tags: 2005, biennials, discussions