The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials

Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art

Panos Kompatsiaris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317290827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity.

This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.

1 Introduction

Biennials, Politics, Critique

The 3rd Athens Biennale opened on 22 October 2011, the same day as hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in the city against recently imposed austerity measures. This demonstration in which one person lost his life and many others were injured occurred in the context of a disintegrating urban fabric, where the reality of the economic crisis, unemployment and escalating racist violence against people of colour was becoming a daily routine. As a reaction to this bleak condition, the Biennale announced itself as a site of protest. Deploying the thought of the Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin, it aimed to generate for its 1.5-month duration a space where progressive political organisations and collectives would reflect upon and coordinate resistant actions. In the evening of the opening of this loaded art event, an unforeseen encounter occurred. Wearing a safari hat, an artist who calls himself the Biennalist¹, took the initiative to invite into the Biennale premises an undocumented migrant residing in the area in order to guide him through the show. As they both roamed around the floors of the venue, the awkwardness of the encounter gradually became apparent. The lack of a common language was obvious in more than one sense; there was neither a grammatical nor a conceptual structure through which the communication of radical statements or some kind of resistant action could be made possible. In this case, and also for the duration of the event, the Biennale and its vocabularies seemed to enact a site of exclusion for the most repressed and crisis-hit part of the population living in Greek territory, the migrants around the area. Benjamin’s idea of the history of the oppressed (Benjamin, 1999), that is to say the purposeful resurfacing of oppressed historical moments so as to combat the homogeneity and linearity of dominant historical narratives, provided a guide for the Biennale’s curatorial strategies. However, the actual subjects that constituted the oppressed par excellence in the Greek public space were not only totally absent from the Biennale’s premises, but became largely alienated by the presence of the art crowds in the district during the event.

This short encounter and the subsequent development of the exhibition performed the tensions inhabiting the socio-spatial configurations that both the 3rd Athens Biennale as well as biennial cultures in general invoke in their claims to be politically relevant and socially interventionist: What does it mean for a biennial to mobilise political energies and for whom are these energies mobilised? How are these two spheres of action – art and politics – entangled, layered and performed by biennials and their participants? What do the in-built tensions of this conjunction say about the trajectories of the historically conditioned category of art and the contemporary biennial as its key contemporary articulation? What are the forms and affects that this category releases to the world through the institutions that represent it?

The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials approaches these questions by focusing on the sites that are (or declare to be) at the forefront of a process of claiming a new socially relevant role for art within contemporary societies. Contemporary art biennials, or ‘new biennials’, are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions; to the world of politics and critical theory; to the world of business and creative branding; to the world of flexible labour and urban renewal; to the world of left-wing activism and social intervention. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, or between the ‘elitist’ and the ‘popular’, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Franz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy-makers and creative entrepreneurs and where such contra dictions are channelled for wishfully staging challenging and thought-provoking art events. They are sites of coded dissent, where members of the art world employ idiosyncratic languages to enable resistances against dominant hierarchies or raise awareness on the issues of the day. And, as they foster an abundance of cross-cutting agencies, these sites are equally striving to display their capacity to be artistic, to confirm their ‘artfulness’, so to say, through aligning themselves with qualities and intellectual discourses scattered around the tradition of fine arts.

Far from being accidental, the ambiguous politics that these events employ become indispensable for their long-term durability and functioning. Ambiguity is constitutive, to an extent, of all art institutional efforts to coordinate conflicting rationales. Through its attempts to reconcile the destructive and elitist ethos of avant-gardism with the pacifying and popular taste of the general public, the biennials represent a dynamic contemporary articulation of this process. Their exercise in ambiguity, the cohabitation of contradictory agencies and coded dissent, the balancing acts between radicalism and commerce, or between avant-gardism and mass-culture, is indispensable for maintaining old and approaching new legitimating bodies in the light of a rising European (and global) neoliberal cultural policy. Yet, and as it will be argued throughout this book, these ambiguous politics do not consist of free-floating, arbitrary efforts of simply ‘bringing in’ new social actors. They rather designate a practice grounded on the material settings and signifying codes within which these events are placed and around which they are carefully choreographed. These settings and codes may include common-sense assumptions shared by members of the art world about what art is and what is not, emerging discourses that challenge these assumptions, the social and cultural particularities of the host cities, cultural policy and government directives, the mundane requirements of maintaining and expanding institutional legitimacy in the name of art or the personal ambitions of the various contributors.

By exploring the aforementioned themes in two contemporary biennial settings, this study questions a usual claim in recent continental aesthetics that we may have entered some sort of post-aesthetic or post-artistic condition as a result of the image saturation and the collapse of the empirical and epistemological boundaries between artistic and everyday images (i.e., Joselit, 2013; Avanessian, 2014: 54). It does so by focusing on institutional sites that enable an assemblage of agencies, which propagates and reinvents the category of the artistic without doing away with it. The preservation of ‘art’, as a specific arrangement of seeing, doing and experiencing the world, it will be argued, lies less on the boundaries of the conceptual distinguishability between art and other fields of practice than on the institutional structures and symbolic sites that enact and replicate its form across social landscapes. Despite their opening and expansion to forms of social practice and everyday forms, contemporary biennials are sites that, albeit precariously and varyingly, safeguard and disseminate a quint-essentially artistic gaze. They are places that, for better or worse, act as containers of an aesthetic regime of experience, realising an environment that despite its persistent denunciations of the aesthetic as a bourgeois category, it can never be thought as somehow independent of it. There is then a particular ‘way of seeing’ enacted by these institutions, the construction and upholding of a visual regime through which objects, events and performances are estranged from their actual form inviting non-literal interpretations. Their resilience and durability as global artistic sites of display show that any discussion of a post-aesthetic condition needs to confront the structural, emotional and social frameworks that art institutional settings inscribe in the world.

In particular, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials digs into a peculiarly tantalising period for biennial politics in the Western world, a period in which the biennial’s visual regime was brought into question. It is a moment when their usual impulse to be polemical through popularising art’s critical function (a tendency that increasingly dominated the biennial since the end of the 1990s and marked the emergence of the ‘new biennial’) goes through a phase of intense questioning. The eruption of the subprime mortgage crisis in the USA in 2007 and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe in 2009 gave birth to an audacious left-wing discourse clustering around new articulations of Marxist theory, class politics and immediate calls for insurrection. As this discourse leaked into the art world, it took the form of art boycotts, protests against free labour and interrogations of art institutions on ethical grounds. This sprouting cultural interchange seemed to brush biennials as hypocritical, suspicious establishments, which may advocate resistant politics (as and through art) but firmly adhere to the capitalist reason. The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials then focuses on a moment when biennials in Europe and most of what is known as the ‘West’ saw their politics coming into harsh questioning, enabling a crisis of legitimacy through an implicit or often explicit request to operate in more literal and unambiguous ways. Indeed, for their various reasons, in both the institutions I set up in exploring, the 3rd Athens Biennale (2011) and the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), the desire to perform ‘non-ambiguous politics’ was prevailing around and often within their manifestations, translated to an impulse to be consistent, to cling to responsible, correct and ethical actions that could ‘really’ change the status quo, reinvigorate their political commitment, and, as an extension, that of ‘art’ as a socially relevant category. The impulse to be real and consistent incarnated, one can dare say, a superego, a surveillance mechanism monitoring the politics of these events.

This book tells the story of efforts to radicalise the art biennial, to close the gap between the artistic and the political, in the context of this emerging ‘structure of feeling’, to use Raymond Williams known term, across contemporary art scenes. It eclectically draws from art theory, anthropology, political theory and visual culture and employs ethnographic material about these two events as well as global biennial politics from the years 2010 to 2015. However, it can hardly be seen as a thoroughly anthropological or art theoretical research. If I were to choose an area for this study, I would tentatively place it within what has recently come to be known as the ‘new sociology of art’ (de la Fuente, 2007). This perspective employs the sociological ethos of social constructionism, associated with writers such as such as Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker, that avoids evaluative judgements in favour of examining the context, social interactions and power relations within ‘artistic fields’ or ‘art worlds’. Questions, therefore, of whether a work is good, pleasing, beautiful, resistant, challenging and likewise evaluative classifications are here avoided as much as possible. At the same time, the ‘new’ in the new sociology of art sets out to re-inject questions of aesthetics in a discipline that is fundamentally anti-aesthetic (Born, 2010; Fox, 2015). Rather than a peculiar property of privilege found solely in ‘works of art’, however, aesthetics here signifies the affective and agential states triggered by encounters with various objects or situations that may go under several labels, including that of ‘art’ (Gell, 1998). Aesthetics then denotes the modes of interaction that artworks unleash within and through certain environments; the ways they carry sense and meaning not only through their shape, colour, content or form and in relation to a larger art historical canon, but also through their embedded materiality and the ways that are socially mediated as art.

Biennials as Politics

The idea that biennials² are primarily platforms of political rather than aesthetic interventions is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its modalities are bound to the modalities of a post-1990s curatorial discourse, mainly developed in the Western Europe and the USA, whose aims, vocabulary and forms tend to prioritise the ‘political’ over the ‘aesthetic’. Here, the terms ‘political’ and ‘aesthetic’ may stir some confusion, as they signify fields that essentially interweave and feed off each other; every political articulation assumes aesthetic components, and every aesthetic experience hinges on political implications, congealed or emerging. For Jacques Rancière, the dimension of the political in art, as the indiscernibility of art and life, is already an essential component of its ‘aesthetic regime’ born out of the French Revolution (Rancière, 2009a). By referring to the prioritisation of the political over the aesthetic, I mean both the incorporation of critical theory (as a field of knowledge) within the biennial field as well as the tendency to make artistic critique more accessible and influential to the public. This is a double process of art moving closer to critical theory and opening itself to new audiences (usually already equipped with some cultural capital) at the expense of its function as an institution that displays works of art. The new, post-1990s biennial consists of an effort to reach out and approach new social subjects, extending from activists and new social movements to disenfranchised communities and contemporary social theorists, rather than merely the field of art connoisseurs. In the new biennial, then, aspects concerning the form of a work, or its capacity to exert certain emotions through its form, are significantly downplayed or tend to be read in respect to social rather than art historical references. This is, in many respects, the ideological apparatus of the new biennial.

The new biennial draws on certain historical precedents and its rise relies on certain socio-economic conditions. Regarding the precedents, past cross-fertilisations between art, critical theory and counterculture include the now famous exhibition Les Immatériaux (1985) curated by Francois Lyotard in Pompidou in Paris, or events such as the Schizo-Culture (1975) and the Nova Convention (1978) organised by Sylvère Lotringer and his peers at Columbia University. These events brought to the surface an organisational mode of address, redrawing the boundaries between an academic conference and an artistic event, crafting an experimental assemblage of a post-1968 counter-cultural ethos and bridging the fields of post-structuralism, critical theory, activism, new technologies, visual arts, music and literature with figures such as William Burroughs, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Bryon Gysin, among its notable heroes. During the period of the ‘long-sixties’, one can find similar endeavours springing from within the traditional field of visual arts, including Allan Kaprow’s happenings in the 1960s or the 1972 documenta 5 (Chapter 3). Twenty-five years and five editions later, in the context of the new geopolitical condition of the 1990s, documenta X was the first mega-exhibition, a big-budget, blockbuster and recognised show, which explicitly forged and subsequently popularised dialogues between art, critical theory, activism and desires for artistic social intervention. It was a constellation of parallel events consisting of lectures, publications and performances, exploring and questioning processes related to economic globalisation and social inequality.

The success of this format and its canonisation as the proper biennial mode of address relates to the emergence of a global and widespread left-wing radicalisation after the fall of the Soviet Union, culminating in the anti-globalisation movement and the anti-G8 protests in Seattle and Genoa, which again made anti-capitalism part of the political and intellectual agenda, as well as the enormous and globalising diffusion of artistic theories of social engagement, such as relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002), dialogical aesthetics (Kester, 2004) and, more recently, ideas of art as militant knowledge production (Holert, 2009). The new biennial seems to be both the fruit of and the vehicle for institutionalising this mode of address. During the 2000s then, the biennial came to be perceived as a discursive exhibition, an exhibition that not only displays art, but also carries the format of the conference and the laboratory intervening on current social and political issues (Ferguson & Hoegsberg, 2010: 361; Adajania, 2012; Papastergiadis & Martin, 2011).

In the field of curating, the so-called criticality approach and its satellite concepts, such as participation, knowledge production and social engagement, provide some of the adjacent modalities of the new biennial. As identified by the cultural theorist Irit Rogoff, criticality refers to the ways in which art institutions can mobilise the ‘smuggling’ of radical discourses inspired by Marxism and critical theory, rather than solely being adversaries to a project of social emancipation (Rogoff, 2006: 1). The approach of criticality involves the effort to actualise such discourses; an actualisation ought not to occur only through artistic but also through educational and discursive means, such as lectures, publications and workshops. The engagement with criticality over the past decade (mainly across contemporary art milieus of Europe and the USA, but also diffused to all parts of the world through travelling curators), has resulted in the inauguration of a multitude of exhibitions, art projects and events that aspire to enable alternative models of educational engagement and knowledge production by simultaneously downplaying their role as sites of art display.³

Strongly linked with the model of the discursive exhibition and the scope of documenta X, many of these socially engaged projects are also related to the curatorial movement of New Institutionalism. The term ‘New Institutionalism’ is introduced in 2003 by the critic and curator Jonas Ekeberg,⁴ to describe new modes of institutional engagement proposed and implemented by certain European curators since the late 1990s (among them, Charles Esche, Vasif Kortun, Catherine David and Maria Lind). These curators (all of them active in the biennial scene) imagined the art institution, in Esche’s words, as ‘part community center, part laboratory, part school’, putting less emphasis on ‘the showroom function that traditionally belonged to the art space’ (2013a: 27). The art exhibition here takes the form of ‘a social project’ (Kold & Flückiger, 2013: 6), a project that invites citizens and communities to participate in its activities instead of simply targeting a small group of art connoisseurs. Informed by a Gramscian framework of hegemonic politics, these curators (claiming to speak from the perspective of the political left) ask how to cooperate with art institutions, rather than whether one should cooperate with them in the first place (i.e., affirmation rather than denial). While the movement of New Institutionalism (or Experimental Institutionalism [Esche, 2013a]) as well as the discursive exhibition and David’s documenta X have not transformed museums or biennials into left-wing agitprops, they did establish a certain mode of curatorial engagement and exhibition format that is dominant today in projects all over the world.

To be fair, the idea that exhibitions are spaces purposed to enact alternative modalities to ones reigning daily life through the promotion of unconventional educational models and thinking is well-rooted in the histories of world fairs, universal exhibitions, cabinets of curiosities and museums (e.g., Rydell, 2006; Pollock, 2007).⁵ It is i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Biennials, Politics, Critique
• 2 Histories, Values and Subjectivities
• 3 The Biennial-Form, Social Visions and Curatorial Authorship
• 4 Gaps Between Words and Deeds, Social Movements and Legitimacy Crisis
• 5 7th Berlin Biennale: Enacting Dissent, Forget Fear and Occupy
• 6 3rd Athens Biennale: Reflective Indeterminacy, MONODROME and the Failure of the Nation
• 7 Conclusion: On Being Contemporary
• Bibliography
• Index