What I'd like to talk about when I talk about biennales

I don't even remember writing this essay, which gives a pretty good indication of where my head was at by the end of 2009. I do remember it being published though (in Broadsheet, volume 39, number 1, March 2010), because on reading it I realised that in my eagerness to come up with a critical framework for evaluating biennales, I managed to completely depoliticise WHW's 2009 Istanbul Biennale, which was, of course, completely political.

Let’s get this out of the way early — there is only one aspect of biennales that matters, and that is their capacity to ask what art is, what it can be and what it can do. If criticism, which has for so long struggled to exercise its authority on biennales, can have any recourse to its founding responsibility of passing judgment — as distinct from, say, issuing the standard complaints about scale, elitism and locality-branding — surely judgment can only be passed on how well, in the first instance, biennales perform this triadic, propositional function, as a methodological prelude to grappling with the propositions themselves.

This is my attempt to have done with the biennale debate, my concession to that conceit of modernist criticism that exceeds even the idea that through expertise, connoisseurship and social standing one possesses the authority to pass judgment, and that is to have the last word. And yet a combination of personal insecurity, persistent suspicions about the currency of art criticism — and, indeed, of art, more of which shortly — and professional experience of the biennale form’s ability to reinvent itself lead me to the understanding that there will be no last word on anything, at least until the ice caps melt or some future dystopian state bans art criticism for its sheer uselessness. Failing that, I have resolved to limit the frequency of my reflections on biennales to once every two years.

I should also say at this point that the idea that biennales might have some speculative and propositional function with regard to the nature of art is not new. I, for one, first encountered it in Terry Smith’s address to the opening symposium of the 2004 Biennale of Sydney, which argued that biennales had succeeded criticism — now ‘largely promotional’ — in attempting to articulate the state of contemporary art. Smith’s observation was muddied somewhat when, shortly after he made it, biennales demonstrated that they could be as largely promotional as art criticism, a development exemplified by the impact of a peaking art market on the production and reception of the 2007 Grand Tour. Now that things have settled down a little, though, the point stands.

It has, moreover, been beautifully illustrated by What, How & for Whom/WHW’s recent Istanbul Biennale What keeps mankind alive?, whose deft execution and careful contextualisation clearly proposed an empowering and anti-spectacular role for art. WHW eschewed the intellectual and presentational sprawl that has come to typify so much biennale-making to construct instead an organised and accessible platform for a tight, focused selection of work to deliver a vision of art that drew explicitly on Brecht’s notion of education as a process of providing agency.

What keeps mankind alive? was educative in a three closely integrated ways. Firstly, a direct sense, in a manner that Charles Esche later described as ‘art as informative intervention’, offering ‘possibilities for learning [that] ranged across geographies and cultures’ — Sanja Iveković’s report into the status of women in Turkey, for instance, scattered across all the major venues as screwed up balls of paper, unnoticeable apart from their searing red colour; or Marko Peljhan’s eerily clinical installation of documentation relating to the planning and execution of the Srebrenica massacre. But also reflexively, problematising the language of representation, the very medium that offers art its informative possibilities, through the affecting mechanism of personal reflection — Rabih Mroué’s lectures on the role of photography in political propaganda are exemplary here, as is Deimantas Narkevičius’s almost autobiographical interview with Peter Watkins on the ethics of documentary. In contrast to the more standard role of the audience as passive consumers whose reflection on the cultural production is at best evaluative, such insertions offered an appropriately critical standpoint from which to consider the various discursive encounters presented by the biennale, imbuing a final sense of the education as the production of agency.

What was most striking about this, especially for what was widely regarded as such a political biennale — not to mention, rather patronisingly given the geopolitical make-up of the show, as communist nostalgia — was that the exhibition functioned by and large as an exhibition. The project was well crafted, tidily organised, thoughtfully selected and carefully installed according to the broadly accepted standards of exhibition making, even in venues not typically used for the presentation of art. It was as if after forty years of critique, the white cube, with a few slight variations, has proved to be the medium most amenable to publicly speculating on the nature of contemporary art.

Of course, this is not so much of a problem if the Istanbul Biennale is considered in the context of its propositionality. It is one argument among the great many being offered by biennales around the world at what is no longer a startling rate. What distinguishes it is the clarity and effectiveness with which the point was made. From a critical perspective, we can say that because What keeps mankind alive? made its point about contemporary art clearly, it was a good biennale, and here the traditional evaluative function of art criticism — the temerity to ask ‘is this good or bad?’ — can be live a little longer.

It was a good biennale because it respected the intelligence and patience of the viewer — the biennale was broken into three smaller exhibitions at the main venues, each of which, though substantial, was not so vast as to not be experienced in a single visit. It was a good biennale in its approach to constructing its propositions through the judicious selection of individual works without sacrificing the need for the works themselves to be shown in the best possible light, which is to say, the need for the works to maintain a margin of their autonomy within the overall conception of the biennale. Here again, the biennale is no major departure from regular exhibitions. And it was a good biennale because it was even handed, its curators resisting the urge to apportion disproportionate space, resources and attention to ‘show-stopping’ works at the expense of others; this was a boon not only to the consistency of the exhibitions in an experiential sense, but also, one imagines, to the artists in an ethical sense.

The need for ethics of exhibition-making of compelling relevance to biennale-making is an important point to raise here as it functions as another perspective from which to determine the success or otherwise of such projects. One framework for thinking through such an ethics has been offered by Raqs Media Collective, hinging on the notion of curatorial responsibility, who ask: ‘What does it mean to undertake to bear the burden of work of representation of our ideas and concepts in and through the bodies and bodies of work of people other than ourselves?’ What responsibility does a curator hold, in other words, to those whose productive capacities they mobilise in their service, or in and possibly against the service of forces to which they themselves are subject, which is to say, in the exercise of their critical agency?

We should, by now, be familiar with the notion of the curator as a critical agent, or at least that of the figure of the curator who, at the historical nexus of a complex of power relations, has lately found itself possessed of an agency that like all agency has the potential be exercised critically. Without this agency there would in fact be no such thing as a curator; rather, there would be an amalgam of social forces going by the name of curator. Each iteration of that word, curator, would be entirely contextually determinant, relying for precise interpretation on the particular manifestation of those forces at any given moment in the performative exchange between speaker and listener. This is not to say, however, that the meaning produced in this exchange would be discontinuous, any more than the social forces at work in its construction would be discontinuous; nor would the curator radically indeterminate. The curator would emblematically reliant on the context that produced it, and subject to shifts in that context. Critical agency, the capacity to think and feel, to form opinions and to act on them, is what provides the figure of the curator with its continuity, and is thus a vital element in considering what curators produce — exhibitions, biennales and so on — in relation to the forces and imperatives that would seek to determine them and in whose service they often act. It is here that those generic aspects of biennales criticised to the point of cliché — locality branding, gentrification and cultural diplomacy — have their relevance, but only in negative relation to the precise and particular manner in which the curator’s agency is exercised against them.

What Raqs, for their part, in effect propose is the responsible exercise the agency at the disposal of the curator — curatorial responsibility — in the simplest of terms, and that is the production an exhibition ‘that can look good and think acutely’, which can in this thinking offer ‘a sustained productive contemplation, not just the curation of experiments and experience, but also the curation of reflection, a practice that dares to be theory and which must be held to account if it fails to be theory’. Taking aim at ‘shoddily mounted exhibitions prefaced by badly written, lengthy theoretical discourses’, they add that this thinking must be sophisticated enough to ‘withstand ruthless interrogation, at least at the hands of the artworks that constitute the exhibition itself’. An exhibition or a biennale must say what it does, do what it says, and do both to the best of its ability if it has any respect to those who produce its content and to those who constitute its public. In relation to the criteria for the judgment of biennales established at the outset of this essay, then, we might say that in order to be properly propositional, that is, to ask what art is, what it can be and what it can do, and to do so incisively, a biennale must in the first instance be responsible, but that at the same time, if responsibility entails a daring to become theory, then propositionality will always be what is produced.

What, then, have we learnt of art from the thousands of biennales that have taken place over the past two decades, and where might this knowledge lead us? I want to close this essay not by attempting answer that question, but by constructing a possible framework in which it might be considered, a framework that is, appropriately enough, an admixture of the work of others.

We have to note that the expansion of the notion of contemporary art that has taken place alongside and through the emergence of the biennale-form as the critical register of contemporary art — at least at a mediatic level — has, for all its challenges to Euro-American cultural hegemony, nevertheless occurred under the sign of a contemporary art that remains disturbingly closely calibrated to that of Western art. Contemporaneity has yet to divest itself of the expansionist and exoticising logics of modernity, engendering an orthodoxy according to which, to quote a recent text by Omnia El Shakry, ‘only non-Western art is expected to have questions of identity as a touchstone’. More provocatively, El Shakry adds that ‘art reduced to the status of geo-political identity politics is evacuated of all meaning’. Speaking on a panel during the opening week of the Istanbul Biennale, Bassam El Baroni observed that the practice of representing identity, initially deployed as a defence against the homogenising effects of globalisation, is inadequate to the task on account identity’s fragility, its tendency to fragment under the monolithic weight of capital (leaving behind, we would have to assume, the hollowed out image of its own otherness). Against this ‘aesthetics of identity’, El Baroni proposed a ‘logic of assemblage’. The oddly avant-gardist tone of this proposition echoes a surprising point made by Paolo Virno in a recent interview published in the journal Open. In response to a question about the importance of art to political movements, Virno offered the following: ‘… the most important effect of art is set in the formal sphere. In that sense, even art that is remote from political engagement touches upon the social and political reality … It demonstrates the inadequacy of the old standards and suggests, in the formal sphere and through the formal work of poetry, new standards for the appraisal of our cognitive and affective experience.’

In cobbling together these important observations, I don’t want to suggest that the best thing we can learn from the biennales of the past two decades, responsible and irresponsible, propositional and otherwise, is that the best course for art is an escape from representation or from political engagement, that the most ethical position is one of hermeticism and disengagement, of effectively disavowing agency. Nor — should there be any misunderstanding — do any of the artists or theorists to whom I have just referred. But I do feel that if a biennale, or any other exhibition for that matter, is to exploit effectively the integral relationship between responsibility and propositionality, it will ask fundamental questions of art and aesthetics. These questions, if they are to be taken up by curators, need only be modest — probably should only be modest — but they should be properly artistic questions — what art is, what art can be, what art can do. Then criticism, once it is finished with its evaluations, will have something it can really engage with.