Samzie Space International Lecture Series
Shift and Change: Locating Korean art now
2007
Even though “the biennial” is hardly an isolated topic to write on, I will take a stab at it here in a succession of scattered notes and articulations.
I spoke recently of the demise of the biennials. I neither meant a literal expiration nor suggested there was a ‘good before’ date. Far from it, the biennials are increasing, at least in numbers. The critical transformation, however, is the rate of proliferation of the market end of things for which the biennials have partly provided the fuel. The art fairs have increased in scale and significance in our mental spaces. The fairs produce their offspring fairs similar to the side biennial events. More public programs, panels, screenings, and readers are now accompanying the fairs. They commission new work and integrate the not-for-profits for additional spice. At the same time, programs like Arco in Madrid have performed a critical public role when Spain did not have the array of institutions it has today; not all fairs are in this predicament. The art fair is no longer a bare-bones function but a smorgasbord of events where the sales are part of a total acquisition of lifestyle with contemporary art in the center. It is bolstered by the star architect, the designer, the exclusive lounges, and even the star chef. Likewise, most of the similar accouterment can be seen in some biennials. The fair provides a dense, short experience akin to the preview days of the biennial. For the globe-trotter, that is enough anyhow.
Throughout the 1990s, biennials were the privileged agencies for global access to art. International freelancers mainly organized them in the knowledge industry, so-called itinerants, or independent curators. They were thrown into this kind of free-market competition, seeking similar sources and critical spaces. Nowadays, as essentially privileged subjects of a new economy, we bring our services. Secondly, there is a relatively new situation with the burgeoning international money class. A newly expanded provincialism is on the rise today, occupying a new space in the globalized art world; it is a replicated space with cushions of reassurance that the art world is integrated into the machinations of the market. It is seemingly functional, with fairs and regular exhibitions in white-cube spaces worldwide with new collectors and geographies. For the new collector, no matter the geography, the ultimate context is the event-driven acquisition structures like an art fair in conscientious assimilation of something that has once happened elsewhere while having no memory of it.o the art fairs in the endgame of reciprocal legitimization.
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. So, the biennials have been the central vehicles that have validated the circuit that is now moving to art fairs. With that, there is a homogenizing effect; I would like to think that 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.
It is always interesting to see where and how the new economies have had a say, even if indirectly, in redefining how contemporary art meets its public. It used to be an institution of art that operated in different spheres during national and Fordist economies. New Biennial operations are post-traumatic and post-dictatorial. Istanbul, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Tirana, Berlin, those in China, and even Manifesta are consequences of the global shift. What is more problematic to me is how most biennials occupy the space of an amnesiac present. The ethical imperative and moral conscience of that displacement were laid in many significant projects such as Sao Paolo 1998, Documenta XI. They were evident in the very crisis of the aborted Manifesta in Cyprus. As Okwui Enwezor writes with great persuasion,[1] “Have the spaces of the contemporary become inured to the unrelenting demand to transform every site of historical encounter…, have they become in their ambivalence towards crass collectivization of guilt and redemptive forgiveness, ahistorical? And as such have lately transformed themselves into scenes of shocking repression of collective responsibility, and consequently incapable of historical reflexivity, have they become without realizing it, unwittingly the sites for the dispossession of historical memory?”
Paradoxically, a problem with the biennials I had spoken about above was partly related to its promise of expanding the art world’s boundaries and deliberating a global context beyond and above the historical places of attention. The visibility biennials created, however, was re-channeled to service the market before a revisionist practice could take hold. There are a few fundamental things wrong with the market. Moreover, it is even a positive development to offset some of the sway that public institutions sustain over artists that are often asymmetrical to their means of support. I had written in the past in harsh words that “the saga of the biennial artist is to travel from one international exhibition to another without gallery support, survive on residencies, and participate in ghettoized multicultural-agenda shows. In fact, a cross-referencing of the biennial artists and curators would disclose a rather tight circuit. This could be regarded as a global ghetto for the marginal figure, who is simultaneously empowered by his marginalization through a certain kind inclusivity, but still on the edges of the grand histories of contemporary art.”[2] The question is how the commercialization took hold without a total reassessment of the past from different perspectives. This was, to a degree, expected. I wrote in the exact text that the progenitors of the field, “the intellectual appendage of the new social body is conversant in contemporary thought, using thought not for critique but for empowerment or revisionism. This intellectual acts as a cultural translator and is systematically ushered in to the centers (places of exchange and concentrated capital) to speak on behalf of his cultural space, effectively representing it. Some of the meeting grounds are the biennials: Havana, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Sao Paolo and Istanbul. In fact, the proliferation and entrenchment of periodic exhibitions, lodged into our cultural phenomena in recent years, have to do with the three-tiered structure that forms a segment of the new contemporary art order, where the biennial exists as the main venue, the neo-conceptual installation as the main mode, and the curator as a kind of privileged cultural translator.”[3]
The biennials are part and parcel of the public sector. ‘The Biennial decade,’ if we may call it so, from the early 1990s onwards, has failed to invent a strong legacy except for a handful of remarkable projects. They failed because the lack of memory produces cultural equivalency and becomes merely the hegemony of the ever-present. The lack of memory I am speaking about is not simply the making of a non-orbitational program but choosing to forget the many angels of history.
The very aspect of repeating events every two, three, four, five, or ten years produces an expectation unlike ‘normal’ exhibitions. What happened to the ‘normal’ exhibitions of scale and depth anyway? Since the exhibition is contextualized as an ‘event,’ it sanctions all the misgivings of an event structure with augmented side projects. When we worked on the 9th Istanbul Biennial in 2005 with Charles Esche and the two assistant curators, November Paynter and Esra Sarigedik, we knocked off public programs such as lectures and panels during the preview and opening days. The same policy was applied to the exhibition, which was structured to frustrate an event—based reception. We spread the exhibition out to a series of minor venues. The gratuitous catalog was replaced with a guide, a reader,r and a weekly newspaper. These were all attempts at downplaying the event and accessing different aspects of the biennial’s constituency. So, the biennial was replaced by the perennial, not once in two years, but with conversations and connectivities for two years. It was an undoing of the expected.
The core script of the biennial model, as predicated by the World Fairs, demands a revisit of the model every time. New biennials can not be justified by their distance from the late-nineteenth—century national compartmentalized models alone. Even though the arbitrary partitioning of the exhibition across state borders, a primary art-world offense nowadays, is evidently no longer exercised, the economic, ideological, colonial, and national interests still have a disproportionate hold as they remain significant financial underwriters of biennials. The opaque economy of any exhibition is a complicated matter indeed. Real relations of economic and political power often strain the ability of the host institution to raise the necessary funds. In addition, they will come increasingly under the pressure of the privatized interests of a city that they brand and carry the names of. The thing is that the biennials are recognized like never before. The reasons for this are multifarious and include, to a noticeable degree, the field’s integration with the entertainment industry and city positioning. The retooling of the biennial calls for increasing curatorial apprehension regarding the inside of the exhibition and the precise structure of the operation and model.
Biennials had been categorically provincial in the past: they came to exist in places where institutionalization of the field was not developed. That was great because they became powerful fissures in a situation dominated by the site-specific middle class of the Nation. They were also in places where historical or synchronic substantial research was not always deep. Some helped the development of authentic possibilities and became the best educational ground for younger scholars, artists, and curators. They questioned the prowess of the site-specific late-modern[ist] intelligentsia, laid bare the problems with archaic educational programs, and head-butted with the xenophobic local media. These terrible ghosts were back in action with a vengeance during the 10th Istanbul Biennial with a savage attack against the curator.
Biennials today should not operate as peddlers of globalized knowledge or promote a radial model. Biennials should establish the political relations that sustain them, specifically, those interests motivated by the agendas of cities they carry the names of. Biennials should retain an arms-length distance from the hyperactive art market. Suppose the Biennials were from Venice onwards interested in moving a place into a proposal with means that are much more economical than operating a full-time institution of scale. In that case, they have become institutionalized, referential, sluggish, and globally competitive with each other over time. These are the ones to be dissolved.
[1] Okwui Enwezor. “Contemporary Art’s Civilizational Gap,” Not only Possible, but also Necessary: Optimism in the age of Global War, 10th Istanbul Biennial, Exhibition Catalog, pp. 387-388, 2007, Istanbul
[2) Vasif Kortun. Johannesburg Biennale (2nd : 1997). Trade routes: history and geography: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Exhibition Catalogue, 1997, Johannesburg
[3] Kortun. Ibid.
vasıf kortun 