Where Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and the Global Salon
La Biennale di Venezia International Symposium
Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy
9 – 12 Dec 2005
Festivalism is a term Peter Schjeldahl brought up yesterday. It was probably appropriated by Roberta Smith in The New York Times article she wrote after the 2003 Venice Biennale, and I thought it was a rather lazy piece. It displayed a crisis of journalistic criticism in the face of large biennials. I mean, criticism is not obsolete and not helpless, but it lacks the tools you need to deal with a large exhibition today.
For example, Charles Esche and I are now considering a post-review publication of the ninth Istanbul Biennial that we curated together because we must challenge the criticism and advance the discourse. We believe 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. Still, more as a distinct text in itself, and, in the future, we should not shy away from, for example, enjoying Giovanni Bellini, as people coming from far away. It is much more important to bring things together than to 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 essentially integrated into the machinations of the market. It is seemingly functional, with regularized exhibitions in white-cube spaces worldwide. These institutions participate in art fairs such as Basel, Frieze, ARCO’S annual programs, etc. 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 scary to me then. 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 large party: in the old days, only special invitees or those with a secret code were allowed to enter, and the rest were outside. If there was another party, you invariably knew it was not the real party: the main dish was elsewhere. 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. It is a fantastic situation because the right party begins, which is relatively healthy. We should look at it from another perspective: we cannot operate forever in this environment of disorientation and undefined value. This world 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 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 actual machinations, which is an issue to be considered. Of course, a positive side also exists out of the desire of cities to be part of contemporary culture and share its values, not only with indigenous populations but also with tourists. And this is not bad because the events have educational and informative possibilities. They also introduce critical art spaces and practices in a particular context at that scale for the first time, which 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 reach out to the free market to sustain themselves. The biennials have been the central vehicles that have validated the circuit that is now actually moving over to art fairs. With that, there is a homogenizing effect; 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 want to speak briefly about the last Istanbul Biennial. We had eight prior biennials, so most of the hard work was already done. Nevertheless, we changed the model in a big way; we did not quite make a new biennial, but we tried to produce a new model that somebody could
play 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 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 is much more important. That is the idea of moving the entire exhibition from the tourist city to the actual city to use the city as the 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, largely due to our failure to find such spaces because the city’s speed was faster than the speed of the exhibition. The city was then privatizing phenomenally, so anything we found could be taken away. We tried to turn a built-in failure into a positive situation: we chose relatively anonymous buildings, workaday buildings, creating 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 exceeds anything 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 it would be possible to mark the exhibition along its path.
We also decided to rethink the exhibition publications. Traditionally, we have a pre-catalog and a post-catalog, and the pre-catalog would include previous work by the artists and the obligatory, not particularly intelligent, single-page essay about each artist’s work; a post-catalog 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. We completely disregarded the notion of a catalog: we printed a simple black-and-white guidebook, 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 got the exhibition documentation before the exhibition opened. The books were given to every single ticket holder. So that was a 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. To make the exhibition a perennial, we needed this kind of long-term residency so that it would become a consistent practice.
Istanbul is an ancient 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 with a short visit, the artists would produce the most obvious response, which we did not want. So, the artists were invited to live in Istanbul or stay for a long period, anywhere between three weeks and 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 painted in the town, and some did other work. But this put Istanbul itself in a central position, so even work from other places would 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 world and should not have that pretension, so we shied away from looking at many geographies. We tried to fold out the exhibition from the region, recognizing 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 substantial 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.
As a cultural event, galleries did not generally support this exhibition, 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 came. Of course, we had no organized conferences, lectures, or 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.
vasıf kortun 