Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta

The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art

Anthony Gardner, Charles Green

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119212676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

This innovative new history examines in-depth how the growing popularity of large-scale international survey exhibitions, or 'biennials', has influenced global contemporary art since the 1950s.

• Provides a comprehensive global history of biennialization from the rise of the European star-curator in the 1970s to the emergence of mega-exhibitions in Asia in the 1990s
• Introduces a global array of case studies to illustrate the trajectory of biennials and their growing influence on artistic expression, from the Biennale de la Méditerranée in Alexandria, Egypt in 1955, the second Havana Biennial of 1986, New York's Whitney Biennial in 1993, and the 2002 Documenta11 in Kassel, to the Gwangju Biennale of 2014
• Explores the evolving curatorial approaches to biennials, including analysis of the roles of sponsors, philanthropists and biennial directors and their re-shaping of the contemporary art scene
• Uses the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art

Part 1
The Second Wave

1
1972: The Rise of the Star-Curator

Exhibitions in this chapter: documenta 5: Befragung der Realität, Bildwelten heute (documenta 5: Questioning reality, image worlds today) (1972, Kassel, Germany)

Introduction

The focus of this chapter is documenta 5: Befragung der Realität, Bildwelten heute (Questioning reality: Image worlds today), the landmark 1972 edition of documenta. Founded in 1955 by veteran art historian Arnold Bode and now held every five years in the German city of Kassel, documenta was from the outset intended to be a survey exhibition of modern art. Although it initially played a secondary role to a monster-sized flower show in this small provincial city – located closer to the East German border than to Cologne or Düsseldorf, West Germany's principal art centers – documenta is now widely regarded as the most important mega-exhibition of all.¹ Inclusion in documenta is an even surer marker of an artist's importance than selection into Venice, São Paulo, or any of the other biennials described in this book.

documenta 5 was directed by the immensely influential Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. Even at the start of the 1970s, the charismatic Szeemann already had a reputation for adventurous, large-scale survey shows. This was largely the result of the notoriety and excitement surrounding his exhibition at the Bern Kunsthalle, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information (1969). When Attitudes Become Form was in part Szeemann's reaction to the conservative, abstract painting-dominated 4. documenta (1968), which was the last documenta to be directed by Bode. The civic controversy surrounding When Attitudes Become Form became a cause of his departure from the Bern Kunsthalle, the exhibition space of which he had been director and in and around which the controversial exhibition was held.² Extreme reactions from conservative municipal authorities and parochial local artists on the Kunsthalle board of management notwithstanding, When Attitudes Become Form signaled that a wide generational shift amongst artists into utterly nontraditional art forms had taken place. But as a now unemployed freelancer, Szeemann founded his own curatorial agency and immediately embarked on a furious agenda of equally unconventional exhibitions, in particular Happenings & Fluxus (1970), which he curated for the Cologne Kunstverein.³ Meanwhile, the documenta board in Kassel, deliberating about the next documenta, cleverly appointed the maverick Szeemann as its director. By 1970, then, he was already an auteur and an entrepreneur upon whose alternately idiosyncratic and prescient curatorial choices, and controversial display methods, much attention was inevitably focused. Szeemann was not yet the mega-star curator that he was to become by the 1990s, and much about his overwhelming directorial vision was controversial, for he was to now situate art within a wider field of visual culture and iconology, almost relegating artists to secondary importance. But “his” documenta was to immediately change the course of biennials, triennials, and other documentas, and of the ambition that their directors have for them.

Figure 1.1 City view, Kassel, during documenta, with at left the Museum Fridericianum, documenta's main venue. Photograph Charles Green.

His exhibition was a definitive statement, a work of art in itself. It was the precursor to what Maria Lind has called “the curatorial.”⁴ According to her useful concept, works of art can be building blocks or signs pointing to a clear curatorial statement, a higher concept or, in this documenta's case, to a phenomenological state: documenta 5 was generously offering to guide viewers in their seeing of contemporary pictorial worlds.⁵

The backdrop to documenta 5 must be sketched in: by the start of the 1970s, the liberalization (or as it is more usually called, the dematerialization) of artistic form was well underway. Equally important, contemporary art production was considerably more dispersed around the globe than is usually understood and this was not the result of the simple diffusion of influence from one or two centers of artistic production. Both liberalization and dispersal meant the rejection of American art critic Clement Greenberg's media-centric, North Atlantic-dominated modernist narrative that culminated in abstract painting, then still influential but on the wane. It had dominated the first four documentas. Even so, the dispersal of innovation across the globe rather than its concentration in Western Europe and the American East Coast remained almost unacknowledged at documenta 5. Los Angeles was as far afield geographically as Szeemann's choices went, even though he himself had already traveled much further afield.⁶

Preparation for a Walk-Through Event Structure

In an early press statement released in May 1970, Szeemann proposed that documenta 5 would be “a place for programmed events, as spaces of interaction, as a walk-through event structure with shifting centers of activity.”⁷ documenta's title was to be “The Hundred-Day Event.” Not unexpectedly and under considerable financial pressure, as planning for documenta 5 progressed, Szeemann gradually retreated from this grand recapitulation of the anti-form and the appropriately unpredictable chaos of Happenings & Fluxus towards a far more choreographed, static exhibition design that could cleanly incorporate artist actions. Even putative protests, such as Daniel Buren's outdoor, signature-stripe, poster paste-ups, fitted neatly inside the exhibition and its anything-goes publication. Szeemann had not allocated each artist a simple, neatly demarcated space, but blurred the boundaries of each artist's contribution. Though Szeemann remembered that the sixty-nine artists in Attitudes “took over the institution,” by contrast documenta 5 took over the art works. Sound spill, light spill, and the blurry-edged boundaries of installations and sight-lines were (and remain) a real challenge in large survey exhibitions of contemporary art.⁸

Szeemann had been appointed the General Secretary of documenta 5. The new job title reflected weighty expectations about the role. But each documenta director had thus far been like a United Nations Secretary General, embedded in a small bureaucracy but juggling for a pathway upon which great international expectation was focused, amidst more powerful players amongst whom were potent American art dealers and artists. This was, more or less, the Venice Biennale model. Szeemann, however, was gradually given wider latitude over the administration and the selection of the works. This turned out to be as much a rethinking of the way such exhibitions were administered as of what was selected. Szeemann quickly moved documenta to a different, much more director-focused managerial model. He ingenuously characterized this more presidential role as one that would allow for more transparency and experimentation during the organization of documenta 5: “I am convinced that, the more authority I have, the less I will have to play safe and be secretive during the preparations, and the more I will be able to be open on all sides.”⁹ documenta's previous committee structures and voting systems all but disappeared by mid-1971, replaced by a small “Working Group,” consisting at its core of Szeemann as well as the documenta founder Arnold Bode, plus two very sympathetic writer-curators, Jean-Christophe Ammann and Bazon Brock. (Brock had been responsible for 4. documenta's proposal for an eccentric Visitor's School that, like the multi-media festival planned by Wolf Vostell, was cancelled before the opening, and shelved once again during documenta 5's preparation.)¹⁰ The four were supplemented by a list of freelance advisers and guests, including young Kasper König. Szeemann, as director, retained most power and responsibility. This was quite different from the more consultative committees of earlier documentas. Whilst the idea of a biennial as a project dominated by the sensibilities of a charismatic, independent director who does not have a permanent curatorial position in any institution is now so familiar as to seem normal, we should point out just how different this was from the organization of older biennials, including Venice. More unexpectedly, we should understand that later models of diffused curatorial responsibility that seemed so radical at the time and which we will examine later in this book – not least the first Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993) and the 2003 Venice Biennale a couple of decades after documenta 5 – represented a return to the past as much as a leap into a more collaborative future. But Szeemann's autocratic auteurism did not mean that he was not interested in his exhibition's reception nor in its impact: Szeemann's network was wide, reflecting his internationalist perspective, restless travel in the lead-up to the opening, and the deep affection and profound admiration that he inspired. From the start, it was clear that this was a pioneering, landmark exhibition in which to be included was an accolade.

Szeemann was less interested in representing emerging art according to the artists' and their promoters' own terms for radically different new practices – conceptual art, arte povera, earth art, minimal art, or post-minimal art – and more concerned with evoking an immersive, “structured chaos,” identifying the works with “great intensi...