Too Big to Fail?: Excess, Crisis, and the Contemporary Mega-Exhibition

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 19.10.11

Biennials need to produce reality… [1]

[I]t is the insistence on the contemporary that prevents the exhibition format from growing old and wary. But the problem runs deeper. It is like injecting Botox into an aging face: you manage to keep its deterioration at bay in the beginning, but over time it is rendered incapable of expressing anything at all…To liberate the biennial from its cage of the contemporary, we need to produce a ‘late style’ in the history of biennials… [2]

Marit Passche’s critical assessment of contemporary mega-exhibitions rightly positions biennial discourse at a crossroads of crisis—between imagination and documentation, between the constructed and the realistic, between global sprawl and local engagement, between truth and translation. Individually considered, these discursive tensions have variously served as the thematic strands informing several recent biennial traditions, but have also served as problematic foils to the contemporary biennial’s goal of representative and democratized display. For example, the 2009 Venice Biennale, entitled “Fare Mondi/Making Worlds,” embraced an almost-“post-post-colonial” view about the contemporary biennale as a microcosm of the world—that “the [biennial’s] translation act itself is a way of making our shared world richer” and that “the most well-known symbols, the national flags of the world, can be broken down into basic visual shapes that display unexpected painterly qualities.”1 One might assume that Birnbaum took his cue about this turn to homogenization and “global abstraction” from Rem Koolhaas’s European Flag Proposal (2001), which dealt with ever-expanding European Union membership by transforming the complexities and nuances of national flags into barcode-like, increasingly compressed bands of color. As membership swells, the legibility of such “basic visual shapes” disintegrates, the boundaries of nations dissolve, and chromatic generality holds sway over specificity and pattern.

Like the competing states of “reading” and “seeing” exposed even earlier in Jasper Johns’s frenzied 0-9 (1960), “reading” and understanding “Spanishness,” “Irishness,” or “Greekness” becomes an increasingly difficult endeavor that is ultimately stymied by the flag’s insistence on utopian collectivity and “Europeanness.” Koolhaas’s flag—itself an act of “translation” that Birnbaum believes is a force of enrichment in the postmodern world—reverts to universalizing abstraction as a means of concomitantly showcasing everything as nothing, nothing as everything. When such logic is subsequently applied to the structure of the contemporary mega-exhibition, two key crises remain: (1) the narrative, historical, and cultural acuities of the local become eclipsed by the biennial’s imperatives of “global legibility,” mega-exhibition aesthetics, and representational hierarchies, and (2) those local narratives ultimately suffer misreadings and (mis-)translations—errors perpetrated by a select few (curators and creative directors) which are subsequently compounded and perpetuated by enormous viewing audiences. Such loss of the local at the expense of a fantasized, universal, postmodern “condition” is at the heart of the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, in which Tamás Kaszás & Anikó Loránt’s PANGEA—Visual aid for historical consciousness exposes the dangers associated with fictive generalizations. Within an installation of make-believe flags and drawings that documents issues pertaining to land rights, political brinkmanship, women’s rights, and the proliferation of capitalism, Kaszás & Loránt’s work summarizes the shortcoming of biennial exhibitions that have grown too large for conceptual depth: “Unified ideology ignores the lived experiences of ordinary folks.”2

Enter the 2008-2011 global financial crisis and the utopian views of European solidarity quickly revert to pinpointings of weaker European economies (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain—otherwise known by their collective acronym, “PIGS”) in comparison to larger, more stable, more established ones, such as those of France and Germany. As European Union bailout funds are funneled to faltering economies, the ultimate consequence of the economic crisis in Europe rests in one of two diametrically opposed conditions—a stronger European Union in which individual crises may be overcome through an emphasis on mutuality and collective responsibility (Eurobonds, European Financial Stability Facility [EFSF]) or a dissolution of the Euro and/or the European Union that returns economic and cultural sovereignty back to individual nations.3 In the context of biennales and mega-exhibitions, the global economic crisis has not simply revealed the persistent disparities between privileged and under-represented regions of the world, but has also called into question the efficacy of the biennale format and its ability to chronicle those disparities in a manner that remains true to the local agendas and vernaculars of individual artists and their equally varied viewership. When the fiscal logic of “too-big-to-fail” is applied to the contemporary biennale, the resulting crises of relevance, size, and scope have less to do with biennales’ survival and more to do with the ongoing, almost-unquestioned trust imbued in them—trust that biennales accurately “represent” a range of artistic voices within a specific contemporary moment, trust that biennale traditions that have developed over decades or centuries remain respected sanctuaries for varied and authentic forms of cultural expression.

To return to the case of the 2009 Venice Biennale, Daniel Birnbaum’s embrace of abstraction—a return to the building blocks of all peoples’ manner and mode of representation—is a tactic employed to disentangle the complexities of cultural pluralism without actually engaging with them. As a means of clarifying his alignment of multifaceted identity and representation, Birnbaum quotes Amartya Sen’s observation that

[t]he same person can be, without any contradiction: an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).4

What Birnbaum neglects is an extended conversation about how the situation of these layered identities, the (in)visibility of these identities, and the commingling of these identities can be meaningfully explored and narrated without assaulting their integrity or glossing over their in(congruity) with other narratives. For Birnbaum, the answer to this potential crisis lies in fabricating numerous new worlds out of the residues of worlds that have yet to be understood. This hope carries over into the 2011 Venice Biennale, curated by Bice Curiger, in which “parapavilions” designed by artists serve as the “venue-within-a-venue” for the display of another artist’s work. As South African photographer David Goldblatt documents aerial views of shantytowns and individual portraits of con artists, murderers, and felons who have—in utopian fashion—rethought the error of their ways, the readings of Apartheid, post-Apartheid, death, and abject poverty are read against sharply raked walls festooned with garish wallpaper. Enter the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, in which the entire venue is subdivided into visibly segregated “pods” or chambers containing individual works. As viewers are artificially goaded into circumambulating these chambers in order to “form their own biennial experience,”5 one immediately notices that the size of biennials has prompted a rethinking of “exhibition architecture,”6 even if such constructed worlds and experiences are not mediated by history and local reality.

The consequences of museological excess are varied in the contemporary art world, but almost invariably point to a sidelining or misinterpretation of local issues and contexts as they relate to the staging of the biennial. The 2008 São Paulo Bienal, suffering from financial mismanagement and curatorial instability, ran the risk of being cancelled, were it not for an artful camouflage of the exhibition’s woes. At first described in the Bienal’s first press release as a “void” and later rebranded in the exhibition catalogue as an “open plan,” the pavilion’s completely empty second floor served as a contentious catalyst for debate about modernist and postmodernist goals for exhibitions when financial resources are scarce. Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen’s curatorial vision for the floor was a “supposedly void territory [in which] intuition and reason will find fertile soil to highlight powers of imagination and invention”7—a conceptual segway between the modernist rigidity of the pavilion’s now-exposed architecture and the postmodern unpredictability of what can and should happen in such an unoccupied environment.

Nevertheless, the freedom to imagine and to invent was quickly squelched when severalpixação graffiti artists spray-painted the pristine, white cube-like void with verbal assaults, such as “This is what art is!” and “Under dictatorship!” The pixação artists leveled such charges, largely because a biennial facing financial hardship chose to exhibit nothing rather than the artworks of local paulistanos who had volunteered to contribute works, projects, and interventions to the proceedings. Such acts of “poetic terrorism”8 (as it was called by some locals) led to the creation of online “how-to” manuals, such as the “Manual for the Invasion of the Bienal 2008” which explained how to skirt the biennial’s security, covertly cover walls and fixtures with stickers and other graffiti, and leave the premises undetected.9 As a coda to the Bienal’s foreclosure of local frustrations and expressions related to how exclusive its repertoire of contributing artists had become, the 2010 iteration of the Bienal included works by several pixação artists in São Paulo—not as in situ inclusions of graffiti within the Bienal pavilion, but as carefully framed, high-art photographs and videos that documented, aestheticized, and institutionalized acts of artistic radicality. Tellingly, the truly political nature of pixação art emerged when several graffiti artists invaded an art installation by Nuno Ramos that had been commissioned for the 2010 Bienal and scribbled “Release the vulture” on one of the installation’s sculptural perches.10 Sequestered within the atrium environment of the Bienal pavilion, the vultures became a lightning rod of local public outcry, yet the Bienal provided little in terms of a forum for dialogue about the work’s engagement with issues of animal rights, social justice, and cruelty. For biennials of São Paulo’s size and pedigree, such disagreements are often eclipsed by what Robert Storr might call the biennial’s insistence on a “chorus monologue”11—in which multiple artistic voices that reflect divergent histories, agendas, or motivations end up speaking more about global or universal conditions.

Of course, the existence of “chorus monologue” not only assumes a false sense of complementarity between artists and an exhibition’s message, but also implies a well-coordinated relationship between exhibition ideology and the cultural contexts that umbrella biennial events. The 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, only the second iteration of a young and growing biennial enterprise, demonstrated that exhibitions about global politics and aesthetics often reveal deep rifts between the theoretical buzzwords of mega-exhibitions—hybridities, power axes, phenomenology, hyper-consumerism, and cultural tourism—and the looming realities of racial tension, inequality, discrimination, and reconciliation. Works, such as Yinka Shonibare’s Victorian Philanthropist Parlour (with its abundant use of batik fabrics and their material trajectories from Indonesia to Europe and then to West Africa) and Fatimah Tuggar’sTurntable (with its juxtaposition of hi-fi electronics and fai fai [raffia disks]), attempted to illustrate the infiltration of “Africanness” into the sacred spaces and technologies of the West; one might assume that such works were viewed as hybrid artistic speculations about visual culture in the future, with Africa playing a more prominent role in determining the trajectories about contemporary art discourse. Instead, the exhibition became known for its elitist irrelevance—curated by a member of the privileged African diaspora, largely constituted by artists and conference contributors whose lives and artistic educations were influenced heavily by Western models, and complicated by the tendency of critics to aligns sentiments about Apartheid with the United States civil rights movements in the 1960s as essentially similar. Conference participant, Carol Becker, lamented the fallout from the Biennale’s failure, intimating that Enwezor’s privileging of the global above the local contributed to its demise:

International visitors came to South Africa hoping for an entirely new experience. For that to have occurred would have required an exhibition whose roots went deep into the local dialogue and spread out to touch international concerns and South Africa’s position in the international debate. The biennale would have had to project the sense that it could have happened nowhere but in South Africa. It might also have required a large parallel exhibition, perhaps at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, offering international viewers a chance to see the diverse, fabulous spectrum of South African art. But this focus on South Africa was never Enwezor’s goal. Still, without such a stated purpose we are forced to ask, Who was this biennale for?12

One might convincingly argue that large-scale exhibitions can be defended in an almost-anthropological way—exhibiting enough works by artists around the world that address core human values and conditions will provide insight into those experiences that are universal (and universally important). But, as the exhibition’s contributor Gerardo Mosquera observed, “Pluralism can be a prison without walls.”13 So, while Pepón Osorio’s Badge of Honourdocuments the impacts of incarceration on the relationships between a Latino son and his father, the biennale failed in terms of linking these local experiences of the elsewhere to the site-specific, post-Apartheid traumas of the biennale’s host country of Johannesburg. Was the Johannesburg Biennale trying to liken Apartheid-era prisons to the growth in punishable crimes in Latino cultures? For their seemingly abundant commitment to the postmodern ideals of relational thinking and contestable meaning, biennales run the risk of equating all human experiences, wherever they are experienced (and experienced differently) for the sake of internationalism—a generic term that excuses, even celebrates, the ignorance of specific histories in favor of ones that more closely comply with the demands of the contemporary art market and sides with the tendency to indulge in “global excess” as opposed to working through specific local issues with a focused series of artists and conversations.14

Of course, biennales can fantasize the extent and possibility of such local engagement and awareness, as seems to be the case with the 2012 iteration of Documenta. As the global financial crisis worsens and the art world should begin to think how more people might be folded into dialogues about contemporaneity that do not rely on biennial visitation, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev plans on releasing approximately 100 satellite catalogues, based on critical writings, artistic projects, and interviews. With each catalogue costing approximately €10, the suite of information pertinent to the exhibition—in addition to the main catalogue—will cost interested readers over €1000. Worse, how well does such dissemination of information align with or document the interests of the many populations who are unable to participate in a mega-exhibition in this manner? Such curatorial one-upsmanship, through publishing more cataloagues and becoming more visibly experimental than one’s predecessors is likely what led to Christov-Bakargiev’s alleged entry into Afghanistan as part of her research for Documenta 13. According to Professor Amareswar Galla, Christov-Bakargiev entered unannounced into a meeting of UNESCO delegates in Kabul to inquire about the possibility of staging part of Documenta 13 in Afghanistan. Galla recounted his amazement about how unaware she was of the risk to injury to herself—recalling that members of the Taliban were meeting in a room adjoining the UNESCO board’s conference room. The delegates then reminded her about the disconnects between the contemporary art world and museum patrons’ understandings of hardship and the stark realities of life in Afghanistan. Galla asked Christov-Bakargiev if she had anticipated the very real need for bulletproof vests for visitors should she go ahead with such a plan. He asked whether she had thought about the infrastructure of Afghanistan and its ability to sustain cultural tourism as the biennale has come to construct it. Galla also asked whether she had truly thought about the place of art and how it interfaces with abject poverty, homelessness, hunger, and war. To Galla, the biennial’s excessive budget (generous enough to fund Christov-Bakargiev’s special travel to a war-torn nation) conflicted spectacularly with the exhibition’s thin conceptual and cultural premises—in the end demonstrating an interest in Afghanistan more as a prop to professional accomplishment than a means to expanding the relevance of contemporary art discourse beyond the West.15

The solution to curatorial bravado, community disconnect, and over-expansive scope will likely not develop from biennial traditions that have established their reputations, relationships to the contemporary, and responsibilities to donors and institutions. On the contrary, new and emerging biennial trends, such as the Roaming Biennial of Tehran and inSITE (a biennial “happening” staged on the border between Tijuana and San Diego), promise to do much more at furthering awareness of how contemporary art is being influenced less by market trends and more by relationalisms, diasporic movements, emphemerality, and unpredictability. The Roaming Biennial of Tehran importantly critiques the site-specific biennial as an outmoded, colonialist apparatus ill-equipped to offer a voice to artists practicing in locales that inhibit forthright artistic expression or that remain largely inhospitable to the notion of cultural tourism. According to one of the Roaming Biennial’s founders, Serhat Koksal, globalization, and its insistence on a Kantian sensus communis, often camouflages experiential disagreements and dissonances in favor of what Thierry de Duve calls “a communality or communicability of sentiment, implying a definition of humankind as a community united by a universally shared ability for sharing feelings.”16 Described as “[a]n independent, low-budget, traveling exhibition which can be presented almost anywhere” put together by curators who are more like “nomads, carrying artwork, objects, texts, and whatever, in a package no bigger than a medium-sized suitcase, preferably weighing less than 20 kilograms, so it can be carried on any cheap flight,”17 the Roaming Biennial of Tehran relies on Iranian and other non-Western diasporas as the foundations for contextualizing current events and other art practices in Western locales. Staged so far in Istanbul and Berlin (both cities with identity crises rooted in East vs. West or European vs. Asian), the exhibition exposes the Western or capitalistically motivated slants of global discourses, with works such as Samin Tabatabaei’s Tower Jealousy (2008) subtly linking architectural one-upmanship to the minaret as a more ubiquitous spiritual structure in Iranian culture. Other artist collectives, such as Turkish graffiti artists, FlyPropaganda, use the minaret as a form of iconographic opposition to Western power and consumerism; such resistance is also viewed in their guerilla advertising tactics through appropriation of the fetishized PlayStation 2’s “Game Over” page, in which military gaming eerily mocks the realities of death, colonial occupation, and cultural humiliation that characterize the collective’s loathing of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The success of the Roaming Biennial of Tehran relies heavily on artists’ willingness to forego stipends, as well as their usual concerns about framing, handling, and insurance, in exchange for participation in a range of mini-biennials that establish unique resonances with their various locales. Curatorial and artistic collaborations lead to makeshift, exhibition-style counterpoints to the explosion of mega-exhibitions—not only because of a reduction in bureaucracy, but also due to a commitment to new “biennial technologies” proving to be more effective at linking art-producing and art-consuming communities than site-specific exhibitions can be given their limited duration. Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo (each at the forefront of younger generations’ communications about and mobilizations against the Iranian regime in recent years) have also sustained this biennial and rendered it less as a historical chronicle or catalogue and more as an agent of responsiveness and interactivity, if only because it has relatively few historical expectations weighing down its content and curatorial methodologies. Perhaps most importantly is the biennial’s awareness of its fringe status in relationship with larger and more established biennial traditions, as its 2008 theme, “Urban Jealousy,” is based on the French term, jalousie—a window through which one may observe, but never be observed.18 For this exhibition’s curators, visibility is a function of first exposing the commercial, geographic, cultural, and institutional obstacles to inclusion and attempting to invent new strategies of insurgence that can disrupt their primacy in the art world.

Already prompting a great deal of critical engagement, the new conceptual premises for the viewing and contextualization of global art practices promise much for ensuring that underrepresented experiences and works continue to be seen—despite their potential incompatibility with the mammoth biennial traditions that often sideline, misrepresent, or altogether ignore them. Their strength is their uncamouflaged acknowledgement that Western biennials, such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and the São Paulo Bienal, or biennials in the non-West that have uncomfortably followed Western traditions (such as the Johannesburg Biennale) have perpetuated untenable tensions between the notoriety of works that are included there and the impossibility of seeing those that are always and already excluded due to the constraints of time, geography, financial resources, or curatorial inclination. Their response has been the formation of an ideological, quasi-anti-institutional mission to transcend the limitations of site-specific exhibition by drawing greater attention to artists, audiences, and changing ideas that no longer fit such a rigid, site-specific museological paradigm. For these emerging biennial traditions and the changing conditions they attempt to chronicle, the expansion of creative, postmodern art discourse cannot be accomplished by expanding the exhibition traditions that speak to a select few; rather, such tectonic changes are accomplished by increasing the sizes of audiences who interact with contemporary art and, with them, help to make art more relevant to local and global communities.

Notes

1. Hans Ulrich Obrist, as quoted in Marit Passche, “The Cage of the Contemporary: On ‘Late Style’ and Biennials,” in The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, & Solveig Øvstebø (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), p. 20.

2. Passche, p. 21.

3. Daniel Birnbaum, “Introduction,” in Fare Mondi/Making Worlds: 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (New York: Rizzoli/Marsilio, 2009), n.p.

4. Text included in Tamás Kaszás & Anikó Loránt’s PANGEA—Visual aid for historical consciousness (2011), a mixed-media installation included at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. Kaszás & Loránt call for a “rehabilitation [of] exploited and abused symbols”—an intimation that flags (and our collective readings of them) do not need further semantic dissolution, but require deeper analysis and an understanding of how history has changed and manipulated visual culture and the ways in which it is read. See especially “Tamás Kaszás & Anikó Loránt,” in Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011 (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts/Yapi Credi Publications, 2011), pp. 208-209.

5. For more about the recent developments about the European economic crisis and its impact on the integrity of collective political and economic action, see “Europe and the euro: The bonds that tie—or untie,” The Economist, 20 August 2011. Online. Available: <http://www.economist.com/node/21526363>.

6. Birnbaum, p. 191.

7. Curatorial description accompanying architectural layout and building maquette of the 2011 Istanbul Biennial.

8. Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011, p. 25.

9. “Introduction,” in 28a Bienal de São Paulo: Em Vivo Contato (São Paulo: Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo, 2008), p. 20.

10. See extended discussion in Christina Roiter, “Pixacao at the Sao Paulo Bienal: Art or Crime?” in The Art Section.

11. At the time of this writing, the “Manual” is still available online. See “Manual para a invasao da Bienal 2008,” http://www.manualparaa-invasaodabienal.blogspot.com/.

12. “Obra polêmica com urubus dentro da Bienal é alvo de pichação,” in G1: Pop & Arte. Online. Available: http://g1.globo.com/pop-arte/noticia/2010/09/obra-polemica-com-urubus-dentro-da-bienal-e-alvo-de-pichacao.html.

13. Robert Storr, “Biennales in Dialogue” keynote lecture. Museum of Contemporary Art. Sydney, Australia. 11 July 2008.

14. Carol Becker, “The Second Johannesburg Biennale,” in Art Journal 57:2 (Summer 1998): pp. 86-100.

15. Gerardo Mosquera, “Important and Exportant,” in Trade Routes: History and Geography – 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council & Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, 1997): p. 268.

16. For an excellent discussion of the Johannesburg Biennale’s somewhat careless use of terminologies and histories specific to South African art practice, as well as some speculations about the consequences of intermingling unresolved debates about identity and culture with global art and capitalism, see Shannen Hill & Elizabeth Rankin, “Important and Exportant,”African Arts 31:3 (Summer 1998): pp. 76-78.

17. Amareswar Galla, “Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South – 2011 South African Visual Arts Historians and Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art Colloquium, keynote lecture. University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg, South Africa. 12 January 2011.

18. Thierry de Duve, “The Glocal and Singuniversal: Reflections on Art and Culture in the Global World,” in Open (The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon: Strategies in Neo-Political Times)16 (2009): p. 50. Emphasis added.

19. Serhat Koksal & Amirali Ghasemi, project statement. Online. Available:http://www.biennialtehran.com/

about.html.

20. Ibid.

©  Royce W. Smith