Art Biennials Backgrounder

This http://transtexts.revues.org/index149.html article reviews the rise of Istanbul as a megacity with a regional and growing global importance and the place of its cultural policy in the process.

Cities as Places of Longing and Dumping Grounds

2010-07-03T17:07:00.002-06:00

This article http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/32/32718/1.html on the urban condition in the twenty-first century brings the melancholy of the urban change and its history into the open of literary and comparative reflection.

Art Biennials as Emerging Global Institutions

2010-02-27T07:03:00.003-07:00

More than anything art biennials are fascinating as institutions. Beyond the glitz and hype, it is far from clear how the transition from few major biennials to scores to hundreds biennials around the world has been accomplished. There does seem to be a parallel between globalization and proliferation of art biennials as if there were a correspondence between the structures of period preceding World Wars, when one thinks of Venice biennale, Cold War, with Documenta in Kassel close to its fault-lines and San Paulo biennial sitting aside Latin American struggles, and post-communism, when the floodgates for the biennialization of the world had seemingly been open. Definitely there are multiple driving interests behind the events. One should only think of Istanbul biennale set up with an eye towards Turkey's efforts to make a case for its accession to the European Union. However, the background for sprouting art biennials seem to be less trivial than those for art museums that reply on a combination of urban and regional politics, real estate development and urban revitalization. Tantalizingly art biennials do not let themselves to be narrowing traced down to a configuration of interests that could be traced in their stability.

The fluid, ephemeral and anti-institutional nature of art biennials forces one to think in terms that are probably proper to the contemporary art itself as it becomes increasingly dependent on its institutional framing to claim its very status of art. While the role of geography and origin in the sphere of celebration and valuation of contemporary art may have remained undiminished, the very growth of art biennials internationally does open a greater field for institutionalization of art works and of consecration of artists from global peripheries that might not necessarily claim same valuation and recognition for themselves as those from North America and Western Europe do. However, as wealthy art collectors are as likely to hail from global margins and from global centers the center of gravity of the international art world might consequently shift or become complemented with other competing centers of cultural production. In other words, New York as a preeminent global city, as far as modern and contemporary art is concerned, may be entering into a period of competition with other cities that might be vying for a comparable position internationally.

To a some extent this approach gives back the lie of global city rankings to their constructors in that it assumes that indicators of globality, however one might conceptualize it, miss the dimension of relations between global cities. Since mid-20th century, New York has been an unquestioned center of modern and contemporary art. Should this city be losing this singular standing, not only New York's role in the international art field might be coming into question, but also other rival urban centers might be arriving at the global art scene to show off their cultural vibrancy. One might look at the two components that have historically made up the trappings of what went down into the annals of art history as art movements and preeminent artists later: culture and money. The latter is easier to trace since, one needs only to look at interviews with people from leading art auction houses to get a sense of the shift from the West, be it Europe or America, to the East, be it Hong-Kong, Shanghai or Beijing. Christie's website immediately offers two other language interface options other than its default English: French and Chinese. In its dropdown selection, German, Spanish and Italian are followed by Russian and Japanese. Sotheby's adds Arabic as its interface language, given its presence in the Middle East, while keeping its immediate language options to the same three languages: English, French and Chinese.

Thoughts on Comparing New York and Hong Kong

2010-02-03T08:36:00.005-07:00

Well, thinking comparatively about cities only seems to be easy or straightforward. Any professed form of application of theory might just as well involve a form of mash-up between literary narrative and urban imagery. Theory no more than a narrative may be in for a form of a confrontation with its own ephemeral materiality as a written text bound to its media, audiences and circulations, which brings it close to how cities are experienced, lived and told. In this regard, any changes to structures of relations that define cities could be compared to their re-writings. Re-branding, apart from being parts of urban marketing campaigns, are also re-writings of how ciites are read by their everyday life participants. Rewiring cities, through new architectural ventures, infrastructure upgrades, and event economy may be only a partial determinant in how cities are actually told and retold in the circuits of information production and exchange. One might think of literary works that before being considered universally, or not so universally, great were lounging in obscurity of their before-their-times originality for, probably precisely, the lack of accepted forms of being read in terms that would define their much later reception. This may be behind why urban popularity has an exhaustion arc that every urban enthusiasm follows from its highs to its untarrying lows as what is described as public interest in the latest urban toy - be it a spectacular museum, a posh train terminal or a heritage quarter - wanes.

It could be interesting to find out whether the more internationally recognized urban icons, such as Paris' Eiffel Tower, have a yearly marketing budget behind their seemingly inexhaustible pull power on the touristy throngs that do not tire of climbing up it. The research question, of course, is whether what makes it different from Coca-Cola, whose unfading brand is propped up by serious annual spending on keeping its brand on everybody's lips and minds, is an urban narrative it is inseparable from and indispensable to. In other words, this Eiffel Tower question has relevance to efforts elsewhere not only to create an attractive urban environment, and not necessarily by literally copying le tour Eiffel into some outlying, postmodernly ahistorical location, by seeking ways in which an urban text could be effectively narrated with the help of interventions into urban space. Everybody cites the economic reasons behind Berlin's come-back as the creative capital of the early 21st century, such as artists attracting low rents and transportation accessibility to major art markets, making it thus into an export processing zone of high and low culture of sorts. However what is missing is a sense in which its urban space may be part of a comprehensive effort to narrative Berlin's urban identity anew with how its transformation over the last twenty years was steered.

The closesty one might be getting to the scale of the urban transformation Berlin was going through since its re-unification should be what is going on in Chinese cities where old cities are rebuilt in a seemingly endless process of creative destruction of the old urban spaces and erecting in their place as endless anfilade of new ones, where new cities spring up by the dozen in places and spaces only recently on the very margins of global field of attention, and where the transformations in terms of how these cities are experienced and narrated are yet to find their sufficiently verbalized predictions or realizations. For comaparison with Berlin I presume Hong Kong would have a fitting combination of change and continuity, of the old and the new, that would let a sense of comparative learning from a pair of examples of urban transformations about how urban narratives in discourse and space get formed, reformed and represented. Is it about urban aesthetics, urban modernity, or urban culture? I am not sure if it is any of the above or all of them. One could argue against urban modernism and avant-garde on the basis of their lacking appear to the masses that ultimate make or break a city's fortunes. It's is difficult to argue that New York's MoMA's renovation, opened to the public to the tune of a billion large price tag, has made much of a difference of how New Yorks international image was narrated and experienced ever since. How many films have actually taken it into a focus? How many works of literature have made a reference to its high-brow modernist recast? How much of an impact its forms have had on the architectural or urbanist discourse? One might still be looking for an NY MoMA phenomenon as far as urban change and identity are concerned.

It may be that only thinking about Hong Kong that a sense of newness of New York and America's rise to the position in the international scene it enjoys now sinks in. Without going to Wikipedia entries on the two cities just yet, it does seem plausible that Hong Kong would show more historical depth, continuity, and weight than New York does. After all, there are few of the historical snapshot moments that decorate New York's history - the one dollar purchase, initial christening as New Amsterdam, rapid spread amid pre- and later intensely industrial wasteland - that may be as easily applicable to Hong Kong as an urban text. One can surely argue about the post-European legacy, British colonization, and common modern foundations of the two metropolises. However, The historical background and the sense that for New York what would be a common denominator is the whole story whereas for Hong Kong there are layered grounds of historical comparison that are yet to be properly decifered and read might contribute to a sense that a different historical and contemporary dynamics may be at work in the two cities. That should all the more so apply when their brand identities, so to say, may be sought to be compared to each other. The question is not just whether Hong Kong might want to become the New York of East Asia, since one might justly question what if it would have to re-think itself from probably an unsustainable model for imitation or emulation, however one wants to call the process of learning from other cities' success or stories of it.

The question is more along the likes of whether cities have their unique stories to tell and whether there are meaningful ways to compare between them.

Art Biennials between La Revolution urbaine and Les Revolutions du capitalisme

2009-04-10T12:33:00.010-06:00

While La Revolution urbaine refers to the book by Lefebvre (1970), Les Revolutions du capitalisme is the title of Lazzarato's (2004) work. Lefebvre assesses the historical process through which cities came to dominate space around them. Capital cities are just one form in which the asymmetry of the relations between city as a point of economic, political, social and cultural accumulation and the processes that while corresponding to these forms of accumulation take place over expanses of space. Before global cities were proclaimed centres of command and control, each city that has succeeded in establishing itself on geographical maps had to impose the structure of relations that would create an island of intensity across time and space. For Lefebvre, cities feed on the countryside while rejecting it through the construction of their urban identity. Whether the supply chains becoming stretched across global distances makes the rise of urban difference any less enigmatic from the perspective of repetition of the status quo ex ante or not, cities have always been part of a more rational social, political, economic and cultural order. Even though these claims can be taken for justification strategies that serve the purposes of domination, as Lefebvre holds, the urban surplus and excess across processes of accumulation may provide a foundation for cities theorization over and above the structures of exchange into which they become embedded.

Lazzarato's Revolutions takes precisely this aspect of excess and surplus to point to the essence of the revolutions of capitalism taken to mean the turning points in the logics that govern the processes of economic, political, social and cultural accumulation. Essentially these are cultural events that have a revolutionary significance not only for the narratives that subsequently describe their consequences but also for the actual processes of accumulation themselves. I am loath to describe these events virtual, as being caught between being real and abstract, since the transitions between these two qualities are instant and radical. As their consequence, one group of causes and effects experiences a transition from real to abstract and another in the opposite direction. Lazzrato suggests that the alterations in the forms of collective thought, feeling and action break out with the force of revolutions that belong much more to the changes in what spheres of intellectual, emotional and practical possibilities become actualised than to a pre-existing logic of their development as such. From this point of view, capitalism becomes a ride through the geography of unexpected possibilities that become added to individual and collective experience only once they are realised.

This connection between capitalism and revolutions, however, is properly understood in the context of rapid changes in the structures that govern the possibilities of accumulation as abstract means of their creation. Capitalism steps forward as an abstract process that is defined much more by the theorisation of excess than by the theorisation of lack. Each realised form that capitalism takes rationalises away the circumstances of its emergence in terms that point to the functions that its fulfils as a lack oriented activity. As such this historical activity is dependent on the existence of lack that it satisfies. But a new form of capitalist accumulation, or any form of capitalism whatsoever, is unpredictable for exactly the reason that it needs novel logics, possibilities and terms that go into the process of its transition from abstract to real in the first place. The term of virtual while correctly pointing to the theoretical gap between the real and the abstract appears to assimilate itself to the existing logics, possibilities and terms, which may defeat the possibility of transition from the abstract to the real as a subject of theorisation in the first place. In other words the gap between repetition and difference may be more unbridgeable that the term of virtual suggests.

This is where Perniola's notion of transit may stand in better stead than the theorisation of virtual. Rather than pulling the abstract and the real apart, transit describes their immediate contact. In other words, it is at the points of contact between the real and the abstract that urban revolutions of intensity, excess and surplus occur. This is why, art biennials connect between the two works by Lefebvre and Lazzarato through Perniola's works on art and desire that come closer to theoretical ethnography than to philosophical reportage. A philosophy of capitalism would try to bridge the repetition of philosophical discourse with the difference of economic accumulation. A more cogent approach might be the concentration on the points of transit between the two. Spaces of art appear to be just such points. Neither fully abstract, nor exhaustively real, artworks belong to the realm of excess, surplus and intensity in ways that make them both capitalist and anti-capitalist at the same time, as Perniola reminds us vis-a-vis the provocations of Warhol. Modern art has defined itself via the exploration of the possibilities of aesthetic expression that were unavailable heretofore. Modern capitalism charts a homologous path. However, it is art biennials that are the points of contact that as urban spaces of global culture bring processes of cultural, economic, social and political accumulation into immediate and highly charged contact.

City as a Masterpiece

2009-04-05T02:16:00.010-06:00

It is tempting to think that different cities beyond being centers of regional and sometimes global influence can, for a historical time period, have a cultural appeal that shines beyond the cycles of their rise and fall. Even though their place in the historical narratives of their economic, political and cultural flowering secures them a respectable position in the media that turn this memory into points on maps of trade, warfare and literature, the complexity that attends to this relationship between space and culture begs the question of the configuration that possibly a variety of perspectives in this relationship make available to thought and feeling. In other words, New York, in its components that make up its urban space - underground transit, downtown architecture, landmark landscapes and communications networks - appears to gradually lose its unique position as a city where many of the features that we recognize as typical of New York were pioneered. From a city of the future - that many poets, writers and scholars took for a model, whether desired or not, of a modern urban form -, it has almost imperceptibly become city of the past. It joined Rome, Paris, and London in a row of venerable seats of regional and global affairs that acquire patina of period pieces on the moving scale of urban development.

Cities take their place in the museum without walls of urban memory of historical globalization. As each emergent center of global accumulation - be it cultural, economic, or political -, claims for itself a timeless transparency of being contemporary without a shade of historicity, as older urban quarters become repositioned within a rapidly transformed urban space - one only needs to think of Haussmann's introduction of rectilinear avenues to Paris, of Rockefellers' skyscraper construction in New York, or of Meiji's transformation of Tokyo -, so does the terms on which the relations between space and culture are articulated undergo constant change. Emergent urban centers appear to have an aesthetic side to their rise. Paris as a capital of modern art has above all been a modern city in the making just as the artistic movements of modernism and avant-garde were in ferment in its coffee-houses, art galleries and literary salons. Artistic sensibility appears to have undergone a change that like a cultural double has followed urban change that has inscribed cities associated with it into collective memory. One needs only to think of Eiffel tower or Crysler building in Paris and New York respectively. A sign of the contemporary times may be that memory fails to serve other landmark structures and cities other than Beijing, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Shanghai as having the same staying power of visually iconic architecture.

In terms of urban spaces heading towards rapid modernization Beijing could be a far outlier in terms of the tempo, scale and scope of its modernization. Its CCTV building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, is just one landmark in a city that in a series of simultaneous processes of change - spatial, social and economic -, promises to spill over in the sphere of culture as well. The rapid rise of Chinese artists into the ranks of highest ranked artists of the world can provide only one indicator of this. With unprecedented density across more than one hundred of still growing Chinese mega-cities, one might expect that the wave of cultural innovation will not wait in sweeping wide beyond the borders of China. After all, French literature, art and ideas can be said to be consequences of its continuous process of urban innovation when first structures of thought, than social relations and then urban configurations have remade Paris into a modern city par excellance. It was New York that has supplanted Paris in all these relations in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first, as an Asian century in the making, it could be the Chinese articulation of cultural ideas, social relations and urban forms that will be supplying a signature style of places of collective memory in the terms of which this century will be described.

Historically, changes in urban hierarchies in a global scale have never been without friction, resistance and crisis. However, the dynamics of relations between different crises is not given in advance. Crises may reinforce each other, cancel out, or combine into patterns that escape definitions. The current moment may, from this perspective, become just such a moment when to speak of a global crisis may fall short of the complexity of the global structure of relations that connect what happens in different regions, states and cities into a dynamic pattern of change that allows for polyvalent and local interpretations rather than for an overarching reading of its directions. Bruce Mau speaks of massive change that ecological, energy, financial, and governance challenges may trigger singly or severally in the medium term of development around the world. Historical record, as seen from urban perspective, suggests that it was the cities that successfully capitalized on the opportunities that rapid change offered that rise to the more visible positions in the urban hierarchies of the period. In other words, cities of the future of the past were laboratories of effective coping with the disruptions that unfolding modernity has introduced into society, economy and politics.

However tempting the thesis of post-modernity may be, it could exactly be the rational foundations of modernity that lay at the root of the present day disruptions that may have in the meanwhile undermined the forms of containment of modernity that Western capitalism has put into place in the twentieth century. Much like in the manner in which Ulrich Beck accounts for the unintended consequences of modernity that undermine the social, economic and political structures that were responsible for managing the modern condition on institutional, collective and individual levels, one may propose that, as older forms of Western modernity come into question, other configurations of modernity may be finding their paradigmatic urban expressions in the present moment, since it is not precisely conceivable that unprecedented urban transformation of Beijing takes place without concomitant, and as rapid, changes in other spheres that are much less easy to visualize, document or grasp. One is challenged to think what changes the culture, economy and society of Beijing has gone through as this city catapulted itself into the ranks of the more modernized metropolices of the world. The scholarly and media discussions of whether the Chinese path of modernization will ever lead to a configuration of modernity that can reasonably resemble its Western precursor seem to lose in relevance as the foundations of Western modernity enter into what appears to be systemic crisis.

The attractiveness of French literature, philosophy and art, the appeal of American movies, technology and trends, the spread of English language, fiction and institutions provide historical examples that the world spends little time before jumping at the next big thing be it in culture, society or economy. The geography and history of each phase of globalization is far from homogeneous. However, those cities, countries and regions that manage to adapt themselves to the challenges that each stage of modernization poses become highlights in the dynamic geography of spaces and places that plays central role in its unfolding. Signature structures in the cities that successfully claims a dominant position in historically emergent configurations of urban spaces that bring developments in society, politics and economy into relations specific to key cities for each stage of modernity become shorthands for these periods and places outright. Moments of urban glory become signs of cultural distinctions. The cultural appeal of Renaissance painting tells something of these complex relations between time and space that define the relations between masterworks and their wide appreciation. The transformations that modernity has brought about may allow to speak of a fund of ideas, knowledge, and images that find their adequate representation on an urban scale only. City as a masterpiece becomes a signature imprint of modern times in a tradition as old as the world itself.

A Template for Israel-Germany Cooperation

2008-11-17T02:58:00.002-07:00

Such cooperation could work on the principle of establishing one or several Internationale Forschungs-"Filiale" that would closely work with their counterpart research institutes in Germany.

Relations between Art Biennials and Experience Society

2008-10-23T11:21:00.005-06:00

Among the applications of a research on art biennials could be conclusions drawn with respect to cultural diplomacy since cities are entities that perform their identity on scales ranging from local to global. Another conclusion that can be drawn from the operation of art biennials is their role in the urban culture, economy, society and space, especially in view of Gerhard Schulze's notion of 'arrival' which he uses to describe a necessity of a modernization of the process of modernization that has shaped modern cities that need to redefine their relation to the change that modernity is associated with in terms that recognize the unstraightforwardness of urban development once major goals of modernization of cities are achieved.

In other words, the global trend of the growth in the number, scale, and scope of art biennials corresponds to the transition to experience society that Schulze theorizes. The orientation of experience society to post-material development foregrounds culture as a factor of social, economic, cultural and political change an adequate response to which on the urban level should become a priority of urban policy-making. The post-material orientation stresses personal encounters over customer relations, historical preservation over architectural uniformity, creative work over mass production, and unique experiences over material possessions.

Within this framework, art biennials express a more general transformation of economy, culture, society, and politics that under the influence of the intensification of the processes of communication allocate increasing resources to the process of management of the inflation or deflation of their media of exchange, as Richard Munch argues. These transitions not infrequently become thematized, explored, and mapped by contemporary art that as it loses its foundations that a theory of art would supply becomes an experimental field of inquiry into the economic, social, cultural and spatial interrelations that it becomes drawn into.

Since the challenge of the arrival at the stage where the continuation of the process of modernity is largely unattended to, contemporary art offers rare opportunity of access to experience society.

Review of BB5 in Baux Arts; Larger Reflections; Geography

2008-10-17T15:57:00.004-06:00

Definitely, the short six-point pience in the Baux Arts is an unsparing one. Berlin biennial, indeed, competes with the art biennials having far greater Renommee than it does. The art events in Venice, Kassel and Lyons - the last a little surprising choice - pose an insuperable challenge, perhaps, to any up-and-coming art biennial that would want to be mentioned in the same rank of reputation, power, expertise and money, since it is an overall judgment of the reviewer - Emmanuelle Lequeux - that sees the Berlin biennial to pitifully fail to score a success vis-a-vis its more established counterparts. However it is a positive counterpoint speaking in favor of visiting Berlin in these days of the biennial exhibition - that of seeing a different selection of place-sensitive works of art, not to forget the more eastern location of Germany, and especially East Germany historically surrounding the formerly divided city of Berlin - that draws my attention.

More highly internationalized art exhibitions - and here the advantages of the Venice, Kassel, and, possibly Lyons art events come into critical light, or shadow - lose of out sight the relations between space and culture, and more specifically between cities and culture that is of interest to me, since if I am to reconstruct art biennial as an analytical ideal type - as opposed to its historical incarnations - I have to think harder about the place of art exhibitions with relations, vis-a-vis possibly, to the social, political, economic and cultural structures that stretching from scales micro to macro make the former sociologically meaningful.

The remaining question would be what then happens on the events that supposedly loose any connection to their spatial, urban, and cultural contextuality as I have implied earlier vis-a-vis the established and historical art biennials. Should a global shift of power to the east - notice that I take a blog distance to the originally hyperlinked article on the topic - also mean a special prominence of art biennials taking place, say, in Shanghai, Gwangju, Singapore or Sydney?

Media Coverage of 5th Berlin Biennale

2008-10-17T15:44:00.002-06:00

Bits and pieces. This page of the official site for the 5th Berlin Biennale contains a series of press excerpts documenting the media response to the event taking place in April-June, 2008.