Biennales and the Prudence of Contradiction

A couple of years ago, at an inaugural conference for yet another biennale in Europe, I listened to this statement: “Biennials can be seen both as a tool of neoliberal capitalism and as a laboratory for prudent utopias”[i]. Although one could take issue with almost every term – “neoliberal”, “capitalism”, “utopias” – I have been thinking that this is in fact a poignant statement…

It is poignant because it points to the fact that biennales, a form of presenting art that has proliferated to an enormous extent in the last three decades, are inherently unstable, self-contradictory and unresolved. In this sense, they mirror closely various problematics in our thinking about our new “global” world and particularly its mystifications and underlying conflicts. What makes the aforementioned statement even more attractive is, of course, the word “prudent”. “Prudent” here implies, quite correctly, that the biennale is not a revolutionary scheme. Although I hardly believe that what biennales make is especially “utopian”, I would suggest that biennales are a space of imagination, a space where unresolved conflicts may dwell and be contemplated upon.

So what are these conflicts, or rather, inherent contradictions, that mirror larger problematics?

First of all, there is the famous dipole of Global and Local. In order to be a biennale, a periodic arts event must partake in a kind of artistic discourse that is, if anything, supra-national. Biennales are, by and large, fiercely international in their selections of artists and curators, and their critical success largely depends on the so-called “opening crowd”, art-world insiders that include itinerant curators, critics, journalists, as well as the ubiquitous network of people that bear the somewhat fuzzy title of “art professional”.

On the other hand, contrary to most art-world insiders’ perceptions, who often criticize biennales as too large or too complex to be viewed, most visitors to a biennale are locals, people with a totally different attitude to art shows than the one displayed by the opening crowd. In fact, most people see the biennale in their city, or, at best, their country, and no other. Some have been to Venice, but a very small percentage of a biennale’s visitors in one city will have seen other biennales in locations as diverse as Brussels, Liverpool, Berlin, Istanbul, Athens, Marrakesh, Singapore and Sydney. Just to give a statistical twist to this, the 1st Athens Biennale 2007 Destroy Athens received approximately 4,000 visitors over its two-day opening, while its total attendance was over 50,000. The 2^nd Athens Biennale 2009 Heaven had fewer visitors at the opening, about 2,500, but close to 75,000 visitors in total. And in some of the older biennales, where attendance reaches figures twice as high, and sometimes even in the hundreds of thousands, the gap between the international dignitaries and the local public is far greater.

The fact is that biennales depend both on critical success within an international discourse, which amounts to a definite, if sometimes understated for fear of political incorrectness, claim to universality, and on their attendance, which amounts to a claim to a kind of cultural “groundedness” that makes up most of their rhetoric at home, but is understandably absent from their international pronouncements.

Then, there is perhaps a less perceptible contradiction that springs forth from the previous one. Biennales do show what a relatively uninformed observer might call highly specialized art, or, in any case, non popular art. This is backed up by looking at attendance figures from museums around the world[ii], which I think make the art-world’s claim that contemporary art is squarely in the mainstream, seem like a gross exaggeration. At the same time, however, biennales are massive, mainstream festivals that often depend on the cooperation of city and state authorities, and even contribute to the marketing of a city’s cultural identity in the arena of global tourism and competition for outside investment.

I am not ready to admit that the art shown at biennales is avant-garde, and therefore that the key to its relative lack of popularity is precisely its democratic character[iii], but here is a third contradiction: Biennales claim a democratic character in at least two respects. Firstly, they are addressed to a wide audience, taking care not to pose as elitist, through highly refined communication strategies, articulation of public discourse, education programmes, tours, etc. Secondly, they are by definition a kind of survey – at least to the extent that their character has evolved from the Great Exhibition of the 19^th century. They are at their core surveys of what happens to be current in a particular field, arbitrary snapshots of a zeitgeist.

They are also, however, bearers of strong narratives, conscious of the inherent futility of surveys. In a way, they are self-negating in that they approach this character of theirs through highly authored exhibitions, where the particular exhibits may be arbitrary samples that could well be exchanged for others, but the overall narrative is extremely specific. This is not just an unavoidable symptom of any process of selection, but a conscious behaviour. And it is precisely its self-consciousness that makes it exclusive, in contradiction to the democratic character of the survey.

Mentioning the descent of biennales from the Great Exhibitions, it is worth noting that this happened through the resounding influence of the Venice Biennale – the only biennale in the world that still retains the legacy of the Great Exhibition, the pavilion. Yet, although all other biennales have rejected the national pavilion as a relic of the age of nationalism, the contradiction between what we could call “nationalism” and “antinationalism” is ever present. Again, most biennales in the world flaunt their internationalism as their most defining trait, and generally adopt a critical language against the hegemony of powerful states and their privileged art production. (One walk around the Giardini della Biennale in Venice is enough to provide a pretty lasting image of this hegemony, particularly as one enters the courtyard formed by the bulks of the pavilions of Great Britain, Germany and France.)

Nevertheless, selections in biennales are still very much determined by national interests. The main reason is, of course, funding. Biennales raise considerable funds from authorities and institutions in various countries, which are precisely in the business of promoting their national artists, by providing funds so that their artists may show their work abroad. This, quite expectably, creates a landscape where the most affluent countries are better represented, and, what is more, where organisers already know that if they want an adequately funded event, they might as well make up their minds that working with Western Europeans, Scandinavians and Americans pays better.

Lastly, perhaps the most fundamental contradiction may be this: Biennales are obviously children of the market economy, and a globalised one at that. But they are also one of the few spaces where public discourse is articulated, which challenges the precepts of liberal democracy, market economy, and globalisation of capital. Some of the things that are articulated within the precarious structure of a biennale would be unutterable in most other contexts.

A lot of people’s answer to these contradictions is that we need to resolve them. That we should make up our minds whether biennales serve God or the devil. I am not so sure.

What seems extraordinary to me is that biennales really do embrace every side of these contradictions. They really, intensely are all these things at the same time: global and local, specialised and massive, democratic and exclusive, nationalist and antinationalist, conformist and dissenting. I think that the moment a biennale sways too much towards one of these sides, its most valuable possibilities are lost.

When XYZ (that is, my two partners, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio, and I) were still preparing the 1^st Athens Biennale, we held a conference in the Old Parliament of Athens, titled “Prayer for (Passive) Resistance”, and in our text, we wrote: “…if our subject is entrapment, exclusion and the inability to participate or communicate, how can we elaborate on it by claiming our right to participate in the very discussion that denies us that right and denies us the competence to elaborate on such a subject? If it seems to us that the position from which something is stated precedes the statement itself, how can we talk of the position in a way which might have an impact, but which would not negate our statement or twist it beyond recognition? If participation is a prerequisite, how can one discuss exclusion without actually denying its reality in practice? And, finally, if one does not deny the reality of exclusion, does that not undermine the very foundations of one’s aim, which is to acknowledge the existence of a discussion? Where does that leave us: in an ecclesia or on a battleground? Is the field in which we are striving to participate consensual, automatically allowing participation, or conflictive, meaning participation can only ne conceived as a kind of violence?”[iv]

Despite the fact that the Athens Biennale grew fast, it is still totally independent, administered by the same three people. It is true that the sway between formal obligations to sponsors, government authorities and media, and the self-organised, small but enormously rude team that we are, is sometimes nauseating. But after having directed two large-scale shows and moving on to a third, I can’t help thinking that the strongest asset in the arsenal of a cultural event such as a biennale is the refusal to let go of the contradictions.

This is the era of conventional wisdom. A terrible time to try to resolve matters. We should be desperately trying to preserve any space where they can remain unresolved. At the very least, we are buying time.

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[i] The conference took place on the occasion of the 1st Brussels Biennial, in the Vlaams-Nederlands Huis deBuren, on October 19th 2008.

[ii] “Exhibition and Museum Attendance Figures 2009″, The Art Newspaper, No 212, April 2010

[iii] Boris Groys, “The Weak Universalism”, E-flux Journal # 15, April 2010

[iv] Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio, Augustine Zenakos, Theophilos Tramboulis, eds, Prayer for (Passive?) Resistance, Athens Biennale & Futura Publications, Athens 2007, p. 11

This text is included in Atlantis. Hidden Histories – New Identities: European Art 20 Years After the Iron Curtain, edited by Inka Thunecke for Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Brandenburg, Argo Books, Berlin 2010, just published.

Under the Skin (Fruit)

After much delay, I want to return to Skin Fruit, the exhibition of Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection. I purposefully put off writing about it, I wanted the time to think, because this was yet another of those occasions where most people seem to me to be missing the point…

I know I said I would not review any shows. But Skin Fruit, ongoing until June 6^th at the New Museum, is a worthy exception. Saying that, a review is not really what I have in mind. I am more interested in how this exhibition relates to a lot of things I have been thinking about regarding exhibition making. (The background of the show, as well as the controversy that broke out, are well known, and frankly quite boring, particularly now that their urgency has expired; still,  if you feel like revisiting the whole thing, you can pretty much follow everything  through Tyler Green, Jerry Saltz, and the New York Times.)

In the numerous reviews that followed the opening of Skin Fruit, much was made out of the fact that Jeff Koons refrained from crowding the exhibition with his own works. But, the question of how many works is not really interesting. What is interesting is: which works? Jeff Koons included just one, the iconic One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, a work that stands for the beginning of the official narrative of the Dakis Joannou Collection. What is happening is clear: in the show, One Ball functions as a spare reminder that this is Koonsland, a world of art developed under the varying influence of the most important artist of the 1990s.

Unavoidably, the first image that came to my head was that I had just magically landed in Jeff Koons’s playroom. There was something happily hap-hazard  about the arrangement – I could picture him moving things around just to try everything out in many different ways, well-mannered but insistent, the tall one with the short one, no, with the other tall one, no, bring the blue one back, ahh, can’t we hang this over here, it fits, it fits, I’m telling you it will fit…

The playroom image was not a bad thing, quite the opposite. In a way, it was the instance when I felt the most connected to the aspiration of the show, namely that Jeff Koons, being a close friend of the collector and a long-time collocutor, would provide an unprecedented reading of the collection. And although the playroom image might allude to arbitrariness, it is, I think, very true to how an artist like Koons could look at his contemporaries and his descendents – like materials or toys.

This is a wholesome show, and, despite the fact that I know the collection rather well, this was still an opportunity to view it in a fresh way. There were also some works I had not seen, most of them extraordinary, like a new Andro Wekua, which really stuck with me. It is true there were instances when it seemed that something bold was being articulated (like the placement of Robert Gober’s bed behind a corner, or a wonderfully hidden-away Cady Nolland), while there were others when it felt like there was just no specific idea as to why these particular works were set up the way they were (one felt this particularly on the ground floor, where a pretty strong John Bock is reduced to object status). But, overall, Skin Fruit is full of fantastic works – selected in the only way that would have been honest for someone like Jeff Koons (as if there is someone else “like” Jeff Koons): by playing around.

Very soon, however, my thoughts drifted. I felt I was being trapped into how the questions were formulated since the show hit the news. There was a specific way to read all this, a way that since very early on became dominant: from questioning the morality of the players, we progressed to conceding that having shows is better than not having them, and from there to granting the New Museum license to “inform” New Yorkers on a great collection, and finally to the rare opportunity of snubbing Jeff Koons for not shocking us enough. I found I was inadvertently following this way of reacting to the show and I resolved to think things over.

Skin Fruit is the latest in a series of presentations of the collection, including Translation in Palais de Tokyo and Dream and Trauma in Vienna. What was common in all these shows was that they were the result of curators’ efforts to “read” and “interpret” the collection along a thematic, more or less explicit. Having seen all of them, I believe I know what is lacking – and it is something that is really exemplified in Skin Fruit:

No one is dealing with the collector. I mean really deal with him. Though I have no inside knowledge whatsoever about this, I think that there are two ways the collector winds up being treated: The first is as the provider of the works. The bond between him and the works is severed quite early in the exhibition process; the works become autonomous, free-standing. And this despite the fact that formally what is being stressed is precisely that the works belong to this collection. The exceptionality of the collection is in effect being employed to obscure its idiosyncrasies – this is the real operation behind it often being billed as “comprehensive” or “representative” of a trend, such as figurative art or art of the 90s. The second way the collector is being treated is as a “player”: yes, there are personal and perhaps intimate relationships in the background, but they are not examined as constitutive of the exhibitions; on the contrary, what determines the form of the show is the collector’s position in the field, his capacity to shape and sustain valuable relationships.

I realize I am flying against a persistent story, that the relationships surrounding the Dakis Joannou Collection are deeply personal, exceptionally so in a rather cynical art-world. I don’t doubt that. But I don’t believe that these relationships have successfully fed into an exceptionally personal way of making exhibitions. I feel that things regress to conventionality, as soon as the “personal relationship status” is established between collector and curators.

It is really puzzling to me how it is not obvious that the central character here is the collector, the true dramatis persona.

Maybe it is fear of some sort, a submission to the politically correct attitude of keeping collectors at a distance, even if on a personal level one becomes quite close with them. But, whatever it is, in the case of the Dakis Joannou Collection, it makes for timid, un-daring shows, where they should have been tremendously unsettling, rushing straight under the skin.

I am sure about this: the Dakis Joannou Collection is a seriously unsettling thing, if one looks at it like the unique personal narrative that it is. This is a dark, tormented collection. These works are no trophies. Unlike the playroom image I mentioned above, they are not even toys. One feels it might even be dangerous to touch them, as if they would be scalding hot, or infected in some way. This collector collects to save himself from himself, there is a very specific drama being enacted here. With every work that affirms status or power, this collector says: this is not who I am. Every work is a little cry. The very futility of the Sisyphean exercise is what makes it really disturbing.

But no one seems to want to deal with this. In the bleached, balanced, polished rooms of Skin Fruit, what is missing is the dark soul of the collection, the boldness to look at what this man is doing and to treat it like the subject that it is: after so many shows of the Dakis Joannou Collection, its underlying tormented humanity, its constitutive guilt, its inherent self-negation is still not pondered upon. I am still waiting for the show that will do that.