Biennials: The Exhibitions We Love to Hate

Rafal Niemojewski

• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781848223936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Examine one of the most significant recent transitions in the contemporary art world: the proliferation of large-scale international recurrent survey shows of contemporary art, commonly referred to as contemporary biennials. Since the mid-1980s biennials have been instrumental in shaping curating as an autonomous practice. These exhibitions are also said to have provided increased visibility for certain types of new art practices, notably those that are socially and politically committed, research-based, and site-specific, and to have undermined some of the more traditional art media, such as painting, drawing, or sculpture. They have been responsible for substantially reshaping the contemporary art world and disrupting the existing value chain of the art market, which now relies on biennials as much as it does on major museums' acquisitions and exhibitions. Rafal Niemojewski, Director of the Biennial Foundation, deftly unpicks the critical discussion and controversy surrounding contemporary biennials. Branded by some critics as showcases of neo-liberalism run amok, in which culture has become synonymous with the dollar-generating leisure industry, biennials have also been associated with the production of monumental artworks which are both highly consumable and photogenic (Instagrammable). The exhibitions we love to hate? This engaging publication makes an essential contribution to a fascinating cultural debate.

Chapter 1

Biennialization and its counternarratives

There are few transitions in the contemporary art world over the past three decades that have made a mark comparable to the proliferation of the international iterative exhibitions commonly referred to as ‘biennials’.¹ They have been instrumental in the most spirited debates in contemporary art and theory, in particular those surrounding decolonialization, migration, the formation of subjectivity, intersectionality, technology and temporality. Their growth has encouraged the progressive absorption into the discourse of contemporary art of vocabulary and concepts borrowed from a variety of disciplines – from the humanities, but also the social and political sciences, economics and urban studies. At the same time, they have advocated for the authority of artistic practices to make epistemic claims. These exhibitions have facilitated the production and dissemination of certain types of art practice: socially and politically committed, process- or research-driven, documentary, site-specific, community-based and public – all practices which might have had difficulty finding a place in the context of a museum or commercial gallery. Parallel to this, biennials are also said to have undermined more traditional art media, such as painting, drawing or sculpture. Intersecting new and existing networks, biennials have been responsible for a substantial reshaping of the contemporary art world, whose calendar revolves around them at least as much as it does around art fairs and exhibitions at major museums. They have laid the ground for unprecedented movement of artists and the increased visibility given to emergent art hubs and scenes. In putting a new spotlight on the figure of the curator, they have also added new dimensions to their practice, including cultural translation, diplomacy and a growing requirement to be public facing. Last, but not least, large-scale international exhibitions have disrupted the existing art market’s value chain, which now relies on biennials as much as it does on major museum acquisitions and exhibitions.

The beginning of this period of growth can be roughly traced to the mid-1980s, concomitant with the appearance of new biennials in territories largely peripheral to, or disconnected from, the core of the contemporary art world, which at that time was still centralized and revolved around the few Western art capitals empowered throughout modernity. The biennials emerging during this period were characterized by a strong desire to challenge the status quo of unequal power relations within the art world and the world at large. The earliest contemporary biennial organizations (Havana, Cairo) emerged in territories then designated as the Third World, which could be translated as both geographically remote and politically and economically incompatible with the Western core. Others (notably Istanbul) materialized in the peripheries and semi-peripheries with an analogous agenda of correcting and decentralizing the cartography the art world inherited from modernity. One thing that these various positions had in common was that they were located on the margins of dominant culture, within the regions of the so-called social, cultural and/or geographical periphery or ‘other’.

By the early 1990s, with major shifts occurring in geopolitics following the end of the Cold War, the ever-accelerating pace of the revolution in information processing, transportation (the boom in low-cost aviation) and telecommunication technologies (the Internet, use of satellites), globalization processes took a major leap. The visible division of the world into two blocs had been replaced by a complex network of exchanges, in which American hegemony was relativized by the European Union, the rising power of East Asia and the former USSR – among others – while the future remained uncertain for most of the Arab and African countries. On the economic front, mass national markets had been largely replaced by other, smaller units and scales, notably by subnational entities such as cities and regions as well as supranational ones such as global electronic markets and free trade blocs.² The signing of treaties activating two new major trade agreements in the Americas – Mercosul (Southern Common Market including Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela and Uruguay) in 1991 and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico) in 1994 – along with the transformation of the earlier European Economic Community into an economic and political European Union in 1993, introduced economic deregulation and open markets on an unparalleled scale.

Accordingly, in the decades following the 1989 transitions, we have witnessed an increased number of new biennials in Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East. With the new world order in place, the previous political alliances and the notion of periphery – whether defined geographically or symbolically – could no longer be used to comprehend the proliferation of biennials. Instead, it was necessary to privilege a different approach, using the same nomenclature and division into strategic alliances that characterized the system of the global economy. We have seen the rise of contemporary biennial organizations within the single market of the European Union (Lyon, Berlin, Liverpool, Gothenburg etc.), later including its new and prospective members from Eastern and Central Europe (Tirana, Iasi, Prague, Cetinje, Łódź, Bucharest etc.), as well as from the highly developed economies of the Asian Tigers (Gwangju, Taipei, Busan, Fukuoka, Singapore etc.), the emerging markets of BRIC and Mercosul countries (Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, Moscow, Kochi, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Buenos Aires etc.), NAFTA countries (Tijuana, Santa Fe, Montreal, New Orleans etc.) and the Persian Gulf region (Sharjah).

The agendas of post-1989 biennials greatly differed as compared to their predecessors. Most were established with the desire to join and expand the Western art world, rather than to challenge it, eager to play an important role within the post-Cold-War global economy. They can thus be seen as a legitimization of rising economic powers eager to promote themselves on the international arena and to join the competition over cultural influence between global cities. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to conclude that the development of any biennial is directly and solely subsumed within the circulation of capital and global competitiveness. As I will argue in the following chapters, along with global visibility, city branding and attracting foreign money into the local art scene and local economy, the ambitions behind the creation of a new biennial may also be rather less prosaic, and include sustainable development of a local art scene, social cohesion, political projects, utopian ideals or simply a genuine passion for the arts.

BIENNIALS COME UNDER CRITICISM

In the absence of academic research and publication, the first reactions to the growing number of biennials of contemporary art came from the art press. The arrival of new biennials in various parts of the world has been seen from the start as a prolific phenomenon by some critics and a veritable outbreak by others. The guesstimates of the actual number of biennials continued to grow exponentially: 50, 100, over 250 … Eventually, they became a feature of almost every review of a biennial exhibition. It is curious that art critics rarely indulge in the exercise of counting the art museums in the world. Yet biennials brought about a strange case of arithmomania in the art world.

Following the most intense period of proliferation in the 1990s, the contemporary biennial came under increasing scrutiny. The format had already been dividing critics and art professionals in the previous decade; however, the amount and severity of criticism directed at the contemporary biennial from 2000 onwards was unprecedented. ‘Does the world really need another every-other-year contemporary art exhibition?’ asked Jana Reena on the pages of Artforum in 2001, opening her review of the newly founded Valencia Biennial.³ Similar questions regarding the overwhelming number of new biennials have multiplied in parallel with the growing awareness of this proliferation.

Statements about the excess number of new arrivals on the scene were not the only type of criticism that biennials began to attract. Next came critiques exposing the troublesome relationship between biennials and the economic agendas of their host cities. Representative of these were comments made by curator and critic Robert Nickas in his contribution to the 2007 book Curating Subjects: ‘If you are a city that hosts one of them, the mayor of that city, its travel and tourism director, the owner of a hotel, a sauna, or a sex shop, the answer is yes. Biennials make a lot of sense. Dollars and cents.’⁴ Despite the flippant tone of Nickas’s remark, it was symptomatic of the view of many critics (though generally not of curators) that the biennial was merely a showcase of neoliberalism run amok, in which culture became synonymous with the leisure industry. It is not a secret that the governments in capitalist countries came to consider the cultural sector in terms of its economic contribution, especially given the interest in what are known as the creative industries. The visual arts sector, in particular, has been singled out for its ability to attract business and investment, and to generate spillover effects and innovation across the economy as a whole. Nonetheless, to assume that destination marketing was the dominant logic behind the growing number of biennials would be to undermine the work of thousands of artists, curators and cultural producers who have contributed to biennial culture over the past 30 years. Biennials make a lot of sense, and not just because of dollars and cents.

Biennials have also been repeatedly criticized for commissioning artists to create overly exuberant works, giving rise to ‘biennial art’ that is often monumentally scaled, elaborately produced, rapidly consumable and photogenic (now read as Instagrammable), veering towards the spectacular. In turn, members of the press and visitors alike have come to expect as much, frequently compare the pictures as to which installation was the most impressive. The examples of such criticism go back to 1999, when the critic for The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, condemned biennials as ‘festivalism’ – a style of exhibition that ‘commands a particular space in a way that is instantly diverting but not too absorbing … the drill is ambulatory consumption: a little of this, a little of that.’⁵ For others, however, biennials mean a great deal more. Okwui Enwezor, former curator of documenta and the Venice Biennale and a committed champion of the biennial format, has argued that today’s large-scale exhibitions can ‘create possible uses for spectacle’, allowing new possibilities in artistic practice and ‘a rich ground for curatorial experimentation’.⁶ I would also add that, while acknowledging the existence of biennial art and festivalism, one could argue that if some biennials seemed to be crossing the line between contemporary art and entertainment, that may have been because engaging local audiences was a more urgent need than winning the approbation of far-off Western art circles. Regardless of one’s persuasion, the importance of these initial debates also lay in the fact that, round the turn of the century, they began progressively to involve curators as well as art critics.

Even the most staunch advocates of biennials had reason to worry when, unexpectedly, the next stab came from an experienced curator and one of the protagonists of biennial culture. In 2007 Daniel Birnbaum declared in the pages of Domus: ‘The Biennial is dead. Its formula as a container of artistic expression is worn out in the same way as the genre of the novel tired out in the Sixties …’⁷ This rather sweeping declaration could be dismissed as yet another hasty generalization disregarding the diversity and complexity of biennials. In retrospect, it also turned out to be a little premature, as only a year later Birnbaum was co-curator of the third Yokohama Triennial and curator of the Turin Triennial, shortly before being appointed Artistic Director of the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennale (2009). Yet it was emblematic of a certain ‘biennial fatigue’, a fatigue that became habitual, if not fashionable, among art world professionals. The timing of Birnbaum’s statement is of utmost importance – it coincided with the first palpable signs of a slowdown in the proliferation of the contemporary biennial as well as an economic downturn in the wake of the global financial crisis. It also directly followed the highly publicized failure of the ambitious project of Manifesta 6 (2006), which further called into question the validity of the contemporary biennial.

Following Birnbaum’s infamous epitaph, the bashing of contemporary biennials continued, often more targeted but not necessarily more nuanced: a ‘sinking ship’, a ‘train wreck with survivors’, a ‘sporting event’ or a ‘high-brow theme park’, to quote but a few of the gentler descriptions. In her catalog essay for the Sydney Biennale in 2008, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev noted: ‘It is increasingly fashionable now in western circles to criticize the “new biennales” – saving only the oldest European and American periodic exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International and documenta in Kassel. This is a typically conservative attitude dictated by the fear of losing power.’⁸ While innocently browsing through a review of a recent edition of the Berlin or Singapore Biennale, we would learn about ‘worldwide biennial fatigue’, or ‘biennial burnout’. One wonders why the reviewers would feel compelled to make such broad, general statements about the state of biennials at large while often admitting that their knowledge of the shows – in particular those taking place in locations remote from their home – came from mediated sources rather than first-hand experience, as noted by Joshua Decter: ‘even if we miss a biennial here or a Manifesta there, we can always rely upon a continuous influx of emailed, tweeted and Facebooked press releases, up-to-the-minute “reports” and instantaneous “reviews”, all so kindly reminding us about what we’re missing.’⁹

As the rather tedious question of ‘Do we need another biennial?’ came up again and again, several arguments began to crystallize, some more compelling than others. ‘Our world is drowning in biennials, triennials and other periodic large-scale exhibition platforms,’ lamented Decter, claiming that the market for contemporary biennials had been saturated, and there were simply not enough days in a year to visit them all.¹⁰ With all respect to the authors mentioned above, let us remind ourselves that globetrotting art critics are not the only or even the primary target audience for these exhibitions. The new ecosystem of biennials that now spans the entire planet creates greater time demands than ever and requires us to accept that we will never see every exhibition or understand their intent completely. The growing number of biennials requires more looking, more reading, more travel, but also greater intellectual rigor and cross-cultural sensitivity in assessing their production.

Other biennial critics, such as J.J. Charlesworth, seem to have come to terms with the impossibility of complete perspective, yet it does not prevent them from making sweeping statements about the state of biennials at large, or the biennial’s presumed intrinsic properties:

the large international exhibition is inevitably a top-down structure which, by definition, cannot be reformed. That’s not to say that the biennial can never be a format by which the best art from everywhere can be seen by the most people. But it does mean that what that art is, and who chooses, can’t be left to the judgement of one individual.¹¹

Charlesworth makes some excellent points about the recent editions of the three biennials he uses as examples to back up his argument (Manifesta, documenta and the Venice Biennale), yet he makes no attempt to audit his entrenched Eurocentric perspective. Instead, he takes these three large-scale perennial shows – which also happen to be those with the most problematic lineage in terms of European dominance – as universally representative of all biennials worldwide.

Roughly around the same time that Birnbaum and Christov-Bakargiev expressed their positions, a new and captivating term entered the debate, reframing and expanding the previously articulated set of arguments and criticisms. The word ‘biennialization’ was forged to describe the spread of large-scale international shows entwined with the process of globalization. The newly coined term – presumably a portmanteau of biennial and globalization – was not in itself pejorative. However, the earliest instances of its usage already conveyed a strong sense of criticism of the proliferation of biennials organized with only minimal regard for the host city’s specific characteristics, comparing the biennialization of the art world to economic globalization under Western domination.¹² Additionally, biennials, in all their geographic diversity, were accused of presenting a particular type of artwork (often by the same group of artists), too often curated by an exclusive group of curators with strong ties to major art institutions.^1...