MJ - Manifesta Journal

journal of contemporary curatorship

N2, Winter 2003 / Spring 2004

Biennials
Biennials
 MJ - Manifesta Journal
journal of contemporary curatorship

No. 2, Winter 2003 / Spring 2004

Biennials

Contents
Viktor Misiano, Igor Zabel Pablo Helguera
no. 2 92 From the Editors: Biennials no. 2 168 On Selfish Giants: Big Exhibitions with Small Ideas

Okwui Enwezor Michele Robecchi

no. 2 94 Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies no. 2 170 Lost in Translation: The 34th Venice Biennale
of a Transnational Global Form
Igor Zabel
Luchezar Boyadjiev no. 2 176 The Power of Proposing Things, of Taking Risks:
no. 2 120 Off the Record A conversation with Francesco Bonami

Slavoj iek Isabel Carlos

no. 2 128 Blows Against the Empire? no. 2 188 The Importance of the Place

Carlos Basualdo Rosa Martinez

no. 2 138 The Unstable Institution no. 2 189 On Individual and/or Collective Curatorial Work

Vasif Kortun and Serkan Ozkaya Thomas Wulffen

no. 2 150 Is it like giving someone a book you loved? no. 2 194 Trapped in a Paradox: Art in a Globalized World
Or more like reading an unknown writer
and publishing him? An online conversation Discussion
no. 2 198 Hosting and Hospitality in Art: The International Dimension
Edi Muka
no. 2 158 Tirana for Beginners: A Brief Guide to a Baby Biennial
no. 2 214 Manifesta 5
Lev Evzovich / AES
no. 2 166 Conflicts and Continuities
 FROM THE EDITORS

Viktor Misiano, Igor Zabel

Viktor Misiano
is a critic and curator
based in Moscow.
Biennials
There has been much discussion recently about the growing number of biennials
and other large-scale art exhibitions almost as many debates and analyses,
at once is that biennials belong both to the world of international (globalized) art and
to the local situations that give rise to them, which can be very particular and quite
He was the Director perhaps, as there are different biennials. Nevertheless, we believe it makes sense different from one another. While biennials may be understood as indications of a
(from 1992 to 1997) to extend and expand this discussion. To claim that the proliferation of big art events hypertrophy in the art system, they are also the result of various initiatives and
of the Contemporary
Art Center in Moscow, has little importance for genuine art, or that there is no need to pay any attention to needs and so may be seen as signs of intense artistic and cultural production in the
and is currently Deputy them, may sound like a bold statement, but such assertions are not really age of globalization. Globalization, however, is not only a cultural phenomenon; it
Director of ROSIZO,
the State Center productive. We believe that a critical discussion of biennials (this term is now often is, above all, an economic and, therefore, also a political process. Nor is it simple
for Museums and used generally, to refer to all recurrent large-scale exhibitions) is, in fact, a and homogeneous, but rather extremely complex and determined by conflict and
Exhibitions. He is
discussion about the basic conditions of todays art. Whether accepted or struggle. Biennials, therefore, as important manifestations of cultural globalization
the founder and chief
editor of the Moscow marginalized by the biennial system, artists (as well as critics, curators, and even processes, have their political functions, too, which constitute an important part of
Art Magazine. the public) are defined by a situation that finds one of its most obvious features this complex network of tendencies and conflicts.
Igor Zabel precisely in the growth and expansion of big art events.
is a curator and critic. There is no single right answer to the question about the significance of biennials.
He is a curator
at the Moderna Galerija It seems obvious that such proliferation is linked to the processes of globalization. Instead, there are a number of heterogeneous, partial, and sometimes contradictory
(Museum of Modern But what, exactly, is this connection, and just what role do these processes play? responses, which are, nevertheless, relevant. Some of these you will find in these
Art) in Ljubljana. The answers to such questions are much less obvious. What we can probably say pages.

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 CONTEMPORARY ART AND GLOBALIZATION

Okwui Enwezor

Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies

of a Transnational Global Form
Okwui Enwezor
is the founder and
World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a
framework in which its use value recedes into the background. They open a
European conquest of the New World, the circumnavigation of the globe, the
expansion of trade to previously closed societies, and the founding of colonies based
1
This essay was first
published as
editor of Nka: Journal of Grobaustellungen
Contemporary African phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. The entertainment on the then-hyperpower of coercion and pacification namely, the idea of a truly und die Antinomien
Art. He has served as einer transnationalen
industry makes this easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity.2 unified modern world system in which all systems of modern rationalization can at
artistic director for both globalen Form,
the 2nd Johannesburg last be properly fused together. For theorists of the benefits of globalization, such in Berliner Thyssen-
Biennial (1997) and Introduction phenomena as dispersed regimes of global governance and the multilateralism that Vorlesung zur Ikonologie
Documenta 11 (2002), der Gegenwart, no. 1,
as well as adjunct In recent years, a new figure of discourse, intended to analyze the impact of global emerged after World War II with the creation of the United Nations, the Bretton edited by Gottfried
curator of contem- capitalism and media technologies on contemporary culture, has put forward the Woods institutions, treaties on the protection of minorities, the International Court of Boehm and Horst
porary art at the Art Bredekamp (Munich:
Institute of Chicago. notion that the conditions of globalization produce new maps, orientations, cultural Justice, etc., tended to represent checks on the power of the state and forces of William Fink Verlag,
He is currently a visiting economies, institutional networks, identities, and social formations, the scale of domination and control (whether by empires or multinationals), as well as the 2002). The version
professor in the published here has been
which not only demarcates the distance between here and there, West and non- possibility for the developing world to become a partner in the broader critical
department of art slightly revised and
history and architecture West, but also, at a deeper level of penetration, embodies a new vision of global conversation about the equitable distribution of the global common good. Open extended. My thanks
at the University of totality and a concept of modernity that dissolves the old paradigms of the nation- borders of exchange were not only thought to protect cultures, but were also seen as to Horst Bredekamp,
Pittsburgh and, in the Gottfried Boehm, Sarat
fall, will take up state and the ideology of the center, which now give way to a dispersed regime of enabling backward cultures to innovate, to become modern. This was to be achieved Maharaj, and Andreas
appointment as visiting rules based on networks, circuits, flows, and interconnections. These rhizomatic through transparency and multilateral negotiations, whether in scientific, Huyssen.
professor in the depart-
ment of art history and movements are said to follow the logic of horizontality, whose disciplinary, spatial, biotechnological, economic, political, juridical, or cultural matters. As one might 2
Walter Benjamin,
archeology at Columbia and temporal orders enable the mobility of knowledge, information, culture, capital, expect, skeptics of globalization tended to see this picture through a completely The Arcades Project
University in New York. (Cambridge, Mass.:
and exchange, and are no longer based on domination and control. In the short different set of lenses. To them, globalization was exploitative and disadvantageous
He is currently in the Belknap Press, 1999).
final stages of writing term, globalization was part of the maturation of a certain kind of liberal ideal, to developing economies; it disproportionately concentrated influence in the hands of
two books: Structural which, because it joined democratic regimes of governance with free market a very small number of states, which exerted power and control over vast economic,
Adjustment:
Contemporary Art capitalism, was prematurely proclaimed the end of history. Underwriting this natural, and human resources. Moreover, the skeptics believed that it did damage to
in a State of Permanent paradoxical culmination of a modern totalization embodied by the world system fragile ecosystems and was riddled with bad examples of governance, inequality, etc.
Transition and
Archaeology of the and forestalling any serious doubt about the equity of globalization was one of
Present: the the longest sustained periods of economic growth in our history, along with How wistfully we now look back on those halcyon days, especially in light of the
Postcolonial Archive
phenomenal technological accomplishments in cybernetics, communication, and now emerging doctrine of American hyperpower. At least it was possible in the past
and the Photographic
Discourse of African genetic encoding, that is to say, in virtually every facet of the scientific system. All to engage in a productive debate (now perceived as mere illusion) on the merits and
Modernity. this resulted in a cosmopolitanization of global society and identity, which in turn demerits of globalization and such debate may well continue in isolated pockets.
has ensured outstanding growth in consumer culture and entertainment. But today we face a new kind of menace, namely the return of institutional power
as the authorizing force of contemporary narratives of history, art, culture, and
Not so long ago it seemed that everything global was celebrated, though there have ideas. To say there has been a rupture in the belief that globalization can invest
always been opposing voices, as well. Nonetheless, globalization was supposed to positive content into new paradigm formations in art, culture, and ideas is to be an
represent the final and full realization of an idea that has been with us ever since the optimist of a certain mien.

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 Today the world exhibition model
for better or for worse has been
readapted in the form of the mega-
exhibition, of which biennials are
a prime example.

3
For a more theoretically Biennial Fever: Contemporary Art and Globalization museological training programs, based as they often are on expediency rather than
inflected discussion
on the concept of the Perhaps, it is premature to write the obituary of the global ideal, which throughout on a conviction of real intellectual and historical purpose. It is here that globalization
culture industry, see
Theodor Adorno, The the 1990s promised us greater connectivity and enabled a certain proximity raises further issues. For even in historically based studies, Western modernism still
Culture Industry: Selected between spaces of culture, sites of artistic production, and contexts around shared remains uncomfortable with the modernisms of the South. In the past, this
Essays on Mass Culture
(London: Routledge, 1991), interests in the new artistic formations taking place in different regions around the discomfort has been addressed by an insistence that modernism is specific
98106; see also Theodor
Adorno and Max world. The vehicle for this critical pursuit was based, first, on a reconceptualization specific, that is, to the European experience which leads one to ask whether the
Horkheimers landmark of a nineteenth-century model for displaying cultural heterogeneity and spectacle exuberant celebration of the globalization of art, museums, exhibitions, academies,
study of mass culture, The
Dialectic of Enlightenment that was epitomized, during the great period of the industrial revolution, by the universities, and their attendant industries does not, in fact, mask something more
(New York: Continuum,
1976), where the notion world exhibition. Second, there was an expansion and extension of the world troubling. What I mean is a return to the cynical absorption and integration of a
of the culture industry exhibition model through its proliferation. Today the world exhibition model for range of counter-hegemonic contemporary practices and cultures such as would
was first introduced.
Here I use the term better or for worse has been readapted in the form of the mega-exhibition, of highlight crucial factors of difference, experimental cultures, and recalcitrant notions
culture industry to denote
the mass phenomenon which biennials are a prime example. What follows is an assessment of the rise of of art into an already well-honed system of differentiation, domestication and
that currently seems the mega-exhibition model over the last two decades, and a generalized review of homogenization. This, after all, is something most modernist ventures in other areas
to be overtaking the
museological presentation how the exhibition systems it gave rise to have financed a way of thinking about have tried to do in regard to non-Western societies. If we are to have any meaningful
of art as traveling
blockbuster cultural contemporary art and globalization at large. debate about the nature of the venture surrounding globalization and art, we would
exhibitions, which can do well to remind ourselves that the historical transformation currently underway is
have both a legitimate
mass appeal and a The predominant discourse surrounding globalization particularly in relation to not simply a fanciful notion that impedes serious thinking about the very nature of
specialized appeal to
connoisseurs and scholars. modern and contemporary art as it is embedded in museums, in large-scale art. Rather, this transformation has potential to dehistoricize, delegitimize, and
The increase in museum international exhibitions, in the culture industry,3 etc. has increasingly articulated dismantle the norms of control and domination that underpin many Western
attendance across all
categories of museological the notion that the conditions of cultural and artistic practice today, as well as the modernist claims to uniqueness, and it is already encountering serious resistance.
practice appears to bear this
out. Following on the heels complexity of the institutional discourses that mediate their circulation and insertion Today anti-globalization has been derisively often through ideological intentions
of the institutional success into broader global networks, face the risk of becoming homogenized and subject to constructed as anti-modern, nationalist, or anti-Western, or as the rage of an
of art as part of the industry
of mass culture and media ideological control. On the other hand, there is the view that sees the globalization archaic subalternity unable to confront its failures. Conversely, any embrace of the
is the increase in the
number of curatorial of contemporary art as the necessary development of late modernity toward a sphere potential of globalization as a way to broaden the space of international participation
programs in universities and of greater inclusion of artistic practices that converge with and extend the historical across a range of cultural, social, and political spheres has been decried as a
specialized art academies.
Also noteworthy are the discourse of modernism. At the nexus of this convergence and extension is the neoliberal capitalist attempt to assimilate non-Western spaces and subjectivities into
almost two decades of
expansion that have led negotiation of the relationship between the classical aesthetic language of European the West. Even where the spaces of inclusion are mutually and dialectically
to the proliferation of high modernism and those other modernisms that offer differential interpretations of embraced across the borders of ethnic, racial, cultural, gender, and sexual
international and local
biennials as models of the what is modern in modern art. difference, the pull and pressure to hold on to the coordinates and demands of
commodity culture of global
capitalism and its great certain identifications (be they local, exclusionary, nationalist, fundamentalist, or
appeal to the diffusion of Yet what this discourse has so far not made clear is: to what end? It is not enough orthodox) remain strong. To be sure, there is no easy resolution to these
artistic practice, with little
to offer in terms of heuristic simply to integrate the view of other modernisms into highly selective Western oppositions. Still, it is possible to look at the issues, as I shall try to do, from the
function or content but
merely as pure visuality in
relation to mass culture.

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 4
perspective of a number of structural and philosophical differentiations that will help fails to take account of the historical conditions under which the labor of art and Surely, Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt, with
us understand the current discourse of modernity, contemporary art and culture is manifested outside the developed economies of advanced capitalism. But their recent book Empire
globalization. At least within the sphere of culture, the given doxa of artistic practice the presumption that globalization, in alliance with market liberalism and politics, (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press,
and the heterodoxy of forms of globalization (for example, in such areas as film, takes us further down the road in our long arduous march toward modernity is, 2001), have become the
world music, the strong emergence of national literary traditions, etc.) have today, kept in check by a number of oppositional activities and critical negotiations most fashionable theorists
of this conjunction.
continuously called our attention to the broader means through which we can that have recently arisen to force new debates about the disciplinary and
5
Here I am referring
apprehend and appreciate the formidable forms of contemporary art currently being institutional efficacy of globalization. I shall mention briefly two areas around which to the kind of resistance
produced across many regions. One example is in the area of film, where the Iranian these debates are being waged: one is the domain of cultural and social production that is opposed not to
globalization per se but
and Chinese cinemas are currently in full flower. of identity; the other, the political and economic arena of democratic rights, national only to the current form of
sovereignty, and economic self-determination. globalization, whereby the
highly technological
There are two ways to study the present situation. On the one hand, as I have said, economies dictate the
there is a vigorous expansion taking place in regard to museum and exhibition For metropolitan audiences, the most visible struggles around globalization often terms of global trade
through the forums
programs, as well as academic curricula, aimed at extending the standard art- take place in the mediated activities of a loose network of social movements, labor they control, such
historical view of modernism and contemporary art and to integrate artistic contexts and environmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations (what I shall as the International
Monetary Fund,
previously considered to be marginal to the intellectual economy of Western call the Porto Allegre contingent), and through anti-globalization scuffles such as the World Bank,
modernism. On the other hand, there remains staunch resistance to such a critical those recently witnessed in Genoa, Seattle, Prague and Montreal.4 But there are and the World Trade
Organization, while
rapprochement between Western modernity and the modernities that exist in the so- other views of globalization, ones that are Third-Worldist in their perspective and the developing economies
called developing world of the non-West. Such resistance has made its claims by only nominally anti-global.5 These are more complex and differentiated, in that they wield little policy leverage
in determining their own
resorting to what amounts to a theology of modernism propagated from the are much more deeply embedded in a historically determined analysis of global course. One should
note that much of
particular view of the Western avant-garde, but without situating that avant-garde regimes and concern themselves primarily with questions of justice and social, the developing economies
within the larger complex political, cultural and economic determinations of political, and economic agency none of which, at face value, contradict the resistance
to globalization is not
colonialism and imperialism, which made possible the great expansion of the positive theories of globalization. This second phalanx of the struggle attacks anti-market in principle
European economies in the first place. Increasingly, a number of influential globalization in its present form over its attempt to establish hegemonic but is rather opposed
to the supranational global
historians and journals, through recourse to such notions as medium-specificity, control over vast areas and systems of production and knowledge (whereby those institutions imposition of
post-mediumness, artistic autonomy, institutional critique, artistic particularity, and whom Michel de Certeau calls everyday users are systemically disadvantaged and stringent structural
adjustment programs
so on, have encouraged this Occidentalist reiteration of modernity and art with very deprived of the means to assert their agency).6 through such agencies as
little said about the historical conditions around which art was produced and the Bretton Woods
institutions.
practiced throughout the entire modern period. In these debates, therefore, only a cursory examination is needed to see that there
6
is a range of antinomies inscribed within the defining features of globalization, with See Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday
Nevertheless (and without making any easy concession as to the value of the all its apotropaic promises. Some of these antinomies are historical, based on a Life (Minneapolis, Minn.:
global), the discussion is pointless unless we acknowledge that much of what is disequilibrium of power and material resources, while others are built around University of Minnesota
Press, 1984).
presented as the fact of globalization as the historical rupture par excellence careful cultural reflexes that manifest themselves in the form of resistance to the

98 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 99

7 9
See Benedict hegemonic power of supranational global forums controlled by the forces of
Andersons superb
Imagined Communities: industrial and technological capitalism. One should also note the degree to which
Reflections on the resistance from within the institutions of the West to other forms of knowledge
Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London:
inscribes another level of antinomy. Similarly, the imagined community7 of global
Verso, 1996). culture as seen from the point of view of new transnational artistic communities,
various kinds of global exhibition enterprises, and museums, and telegraphed
8
Manuel Castells,
The Rise of the Network through networks of global exchange and such reception systems as the media
Society, vol. 1 is no less fraught with these antinomies, saturated as they are with forms of
of The Information Age:
Economy, Society institutional control over vast resources, which constantly obviate the possibility of
and Culture serious exchange.
(Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996), 3.
But must contemporary culture and art including both the discursive and the
market-oriented sites in which they are produced, reproduced, marketed or exhibited,
and received be subjected to, and compelled to enunciate, the radical shift in
paradigm that is increasingly apparent in todays complex systemic delocalizations of
capital, labor flows, markets, technologies of communication and mediation
(between the net and the self),8 which globalization is said to have engendered? How
do institutions of art integrate the putatively slower critical cultural shifts that arrive
in the wake of these transnational, denationalized, and global transformations?
Where does the final arbitration about the status of the work of art occur today? What
are the criteria for recognizing, within the global mainstream, artists who produce
outside the rich circuit of advanced institutions, media, and economic visibility? As
for the preceding modernist period, which artists are to be included in the broader
discussions of modernism that have yet to be properly developed among museums?
The record of museums in both the United States and Europe is not particularly
encouraging, especially in view of the burgeoning and ever diversifying range of
options that exist in quite prolix forms curatorial procedures; museums and
exhibition spaces; media, catalogue historiography, academic journals, and art
magazines; commercial galleries, auction houses, private collections, and other
economies of art.
These questions mark a tension in the formation of the global public sphere that
mega-exhibitions seem to exemplify. Furthermore, they reveal a space of instability
100 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
as the contemporary art arena expands, tracing, as it mutates, the complex Stuart Hall,
Museums of Modern
mechanisms of control and subordination that exist in the domains of various Art and the End of
institutional forums of modern art. In the end, if the fact of globalization as often History in Stuart Hall
and Sarat Maharaj,
pronounced is the unhinging of the proscriptions of institutional modernism by Annotations 6:
mobilizing new artistic thoughts, histories, practices, and conditions of production Modernity and
from beyond the borders of the West, then we see levered into relief a number of Difference (London:
Institute of International
issues that shadow and foreshadow the anxieties of the present artistic context Visual Arts, 2001), 21.
within which there performs a range of actors curators, exhibitions, museums,
collectors, the media, and the market. An awareness of the three-dimensionality of
the space of artistic modernity as multifaceted, however imperfectly understood or
acknowledged by the dominant teleologies of museums or exhibitions, lies at the
heart of Stuart Halls observation that, because
contemporary art practices locate themselves within an awareness of the slow decentering
of the West, we see the constitution of lateral relations in which the West is an absolutely
pivotal, powerful, hegemonic force, but is no longer the only force within which creative
energies, cultural flows and new ideas can be concerted. The world is moving outwards
and can no longer be structured in terms of the center/periphery relation. It has to be
defined in terms of a set of interesting centers, which are both different from and related
to one another. . . Any museum which thinks it can incorporate or grasp the best texts
and productions of modern artistic practice, believing the world is still organized in center/
periphery model, simply does not understand the contradictory tensions that are in play.9
The problem, though, is that, rather than abolishing the center/periphery opposition,
globalization has sharpened and made visible its faultlines. It is my intention to
explore some of the underlying problems that arise at the juncture where global
capitalism and culture intersect. Here I am primarily concerned with analyzing the
nature of the museum and mega-exhibitions today. To do this, I will first focus on
three broad areas the market, institutions, and the media in order to show
their impact on a range of subsystems within the contemporary artistic framework,
for instance, exhibition models, curatorship, artistic practice, and epistemes of
contemporary art. This analysis will then fold back to articulate how each of these
systems and subsystems exist in the present social, cultural, and political climate
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 101
 within which contemporary art functions. Finally, the remaining part of this essay Skulptur. Projekte
Mnster, 1997
will be situated within a theoretical reflection on modernity. Dan Graham
Fun House for Mnster,
Mega-Exhibitions and Museums as Transnational Global Forms 1997

Let me begin with a general overview of large-scale international exhibitions of

contemporary art and the recent discourses that analyze their present proliferation.
In the summer of 1997, I participated in a three-day conference organized by the
Rockefeller Foundation and Arts International (both institutions are headquartered
in New York). The conference, which was devoted to the rise and proliferation of
large-scale international exhibitions such as are embodied in the phenomenon of
biennials and other art festivals, was convened with the tacit hope of
understanding the critical shifts being initiated internationally by such large-scale
exhibition structures and of gauging their global dimension and impact. The
gathering took place in a beautiful villa situated on top of a cliff that overlooks the
small northern Italian town of Bellagio on Lake Como, with the Italian Alps
hovering on the horizon an edifying place of seclusion for thinking and working
through the travails of contemporary art and the alarmingly mutating map (as some
might protest) of the international art economy. The very notion of mutation strikes
me as highly suggestive of the kind of disorder that overwhelms systems of
knowledge that have been the bedrock of Western imperialism when they are
confronted by the critical values of other forms of knowledge previously
subordinated to imperial authority. I would prefer, however, not to speak of either
mutation or disorder, but rather of the transnationalization, translocalization, and
denationalization of the international contemporary art world, insofar as biennials
and other such exhibitions are concerned. By 1997, their novelty had reached a
peak, to the extent that every conceivable cultural context was host to some form
or variety of these exhibitions. This was most clearly seen in the diversity of the
speakers at the conference: they came from So Paulo, Venice, Istanbul, Dakar,
Perth, Pittsburgh, Costa Rica, Havana, Austin, Sydney, Bangkok, Johannesburg,
and many other places.

Throughout the conference questions were raised about the pressures of this
astronomical growth in exhibitions and the new demands they bring to bear on

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artists and local cultural and artistic scenes as they became more and more
unhinged from the stable ground of local sites (the nation-state) and transformed
into increasingly transnational endeavors. In short, what are the contexts of power
through which artists who are eager to enter the global scene are being processed?
Here, I should like to note that such contexts are not only artistic, but political,
social, and economic as well; for it is in the context of the global production of
artistic identity that we witness a number of strategies employed by artists hoping
to leap out of underfunded contexts and into the resource-rich pastures of the global
space. In other words, biennials are important proving grounds that attract both
institutional and curatorial attention. One consequence of adjustment in artistic
strategy by artists in biennials concerns the scale of their work what I would call
the biennial scale often resulting in large, spatially distorted installations,
Cinemascope projections, and mural-size paintings and photographs. A curator
colleague has characterized such huge works as the artistic version of genetically
modified organisms. But for many artists, the anxiety of anonymity and failure in the
face of the stiff competition to be included in such exhibitions has meant that, in
order for their work to be visible and noticed, the spatial dimensions of their objects
and images must be dramatically expanded so as to be commensurate with the
global ambitions of the exhibitions themselves. In other words, mega-exhibitions
require mega-objects.
Blind to the complex historical and psychological issues at stake, most critics of
biennials have vociferously declared such expansions to be the bane of serious art.
I would insist, however, that the ever-increasing itinerant phalanx of artistic
strategies and curatorial concepts that respond directly to mega-exhibitions is far
from naive. On the contrary, they are really quite shrewd, for they represent the
realization that the space of the global is a Darwinian universe. The depiction of
biennials as an agon of epic struggle may be slightly overstating it. But there is
something of this in the destiny toward which all artists strive who join in the
agonistic struggle for visibility in the artistic field. Pierre Bourdieu explains it well:
104 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
10
The lierary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to Pierre Bourdieu,
The Field of Cultural
transform or conserve this field of forces. The network of objective relations between
Production: Essays
positions subtends and orients the strategies which the occupants of different positions on Art and Literature
(New York: Columbia
implement in their struggles to defend or improve their positions (i.e., their position-ta-
University Press,
kings), strategies which depend for their force and form on the position each agent 1993), 30
occupies in the power relations (rapports de force).10 (Bourdieus italics).
To reflect seriously on the problematic of the mega-exhibition, then, forms of critical
analysis are required that can properly understand the significance of biennials and
the attempts they have made to recode the complex dialectics between globalization
and the long process of modernization vis--vis the market-based economies toward
which much of the developing world has set its course ever since the early days of
decolonization. Furthermore, such an analysis would seek to comprehend the
resulting impact on institutional practices, both Western and non-Western, as
contemporary art has expanded into the global scene. In my own close observation
of biennials, the circumstances within which they are made provides a remarkable
filter for witnessing globalization at work, especially in comparing the funding bases
of the haves and have-nots and the access of artists who are well-funded by their
home countries vs. those without funding.
This last point became an important issue that dominated the deliberations of the
conference. It extended to the relationships between biennials and globalization and
multiculturalism, multiethnic metropolitan identities, local cultures with few
cosmopolitan attachments (except in terms of the relations of power and production
in the circulatory logic of capital), and finally the spatial and temporal disjunctures
that lie at the heart of modernity, especially as expressed through various filters of
colonial and postcolonial discourse. There were diverse opinions and approaches to
curating contemporary art, including those focused on heritage and the ethics of
representing the art of very fragile cultures, such as the First Nation peoples of the
United States; those specifically concerned with bridging territorial, regional and
cultural worlds, such as the Asia Pacific Triennial in Queensland, Australia;
institutions whose mandates concern the representation of the art of minorities in
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 105
Documenta 11, the United States (the Asia Society and Studio Museum); and those representing
Kassel, 2002
Chohreh Feyzdjou seemingly independent organizations that organize biennials (using the term in its
Boutique Product of most generic sense), such as Istanbul, Venice, Johannesburg (for which I was the
Chohreh Feyzdjou,
1973-1993
artistic director), Sydney, Carnegie International, Dakar, Havana, and So Paulo.
Installation view
Two points emerged in this array of institutions defending, promoting, or
historicizing contemporary art. The first is that almost without exception all the
organizations were founded more from ideological considerations than artistic ones:
local political, social, and economic issues to a large extent determined what form
an organization would take. Even with museums, ideology came first, before any
mention of art, even if, ultimately, it was art that became the main object in
question. But museums, too, convey not only culture, but also civic pride and a
sense of belonging to the great tradition of civilized cultures. The second point was
that almost all the organizations (with the exception, however, of the Venice
Biennale and the Carnegie International) imagined themselves to be furthering an
alternative view of what internationalism looks like, and each believed it possessed
the historical outlook to bring this about. Of this camp, Istanbul had the most
marketable image, billing itself as the bridge between East and West and between
Europe and Asia. In the main, the imperative that drove the idealism to build
museums and to invent and host biennials was a connection to cosmopolitanism
and, to the degree that it made sense, globalism. As such, cosmopolitanism and
globalism both furnish positive content in the image-making strategies of cities that
believe in the capacity of art to bring economic benefit, cultural capital, civic pride,
social cohesion, and global visibility. Consider, for example, the phenomenal
success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which opened in 1997, the same
year as the conference. In Bilbao, art, architecture, and tourism have been carefully
fused and displayed in resplendent, shimmering titanium reflectors as a beacon on
a hill for all cities looking to globalize. The success of the Bilbao Guggenheim has
led to attempts to replicate its iconicity as a monument to cultural capitalization.
What I have been enumerating so far are the realities, beliefs, and hopes of those
who see mega-exhibition spectacles and museums as both transnational mediating
systems and forms of civic politics and subjectivity. The conference provided a rare
106 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
opportunity to discuss the many areas around which contemporary art, exhibitions,
museums, and art academies are today being defined. It also afforded a perspective
for seeing contemporary art fully captured within a transitional and transnational
nexus. Suffice it to say there were no conclusions drawn or decisions reached at the
conference, but there was general agreement about the enormous and growing cost
of staging such large-scale exhibitions and building more museums. We also agreed
about the need for better cooperation between the dominant organizing institutions,
a kind of G-7 for biennials, so as not to further dilute the cachet of this incredibly
ambiguous global brand. We also recognized how important it was to meet again,
and vowed to do so. And indeed, we have met again and again on the global circuit,
as the wild spiral of biennials and other mega-exhibitions has continued to expand.
I will not bother to count how many such exhibitions currently exist, but I am sure
they run into the hundreds.
Spectacle Culture: Biennials, History, and Modernity
In their expansionist mode, as well as in their insatiable propensity to absorb even
the most arcane of artistic grammars and scales of production, biennials not only
exemplify important scenes of cultural translation and transnational encounters
between artists, art markets, institutions, and various professionals, but have also
left a negative impression as agoras of spectacle, and this has come to define the
mega-exhibitions relationship to art. While this tendency towards spectaculariza-
tion and dispersion into the logic of what Adorno and Horkheimer defined as the
culture industry may be true, it nonetheless requires further explication to make
obvious the fact that not all biennials function according to the logic of spectacle.
Even should they desire this, limitations in economic and institutional
circumstances militate against them becoming purveyors of spectacle. In truth, most
biennials, particularly those working in and addressing specific artistic contexts,
often function as low-budget projects. Within this sort of framework, the works are
usually of modest scale, portable, and intimate, while the site-specific works and
exhibitions appear rather improvisatory and often compensatory. But to make such
distinctions still does not give us a full picture of the reasons behind the exponential
growth in large-scale international exhibitions, whose chief characteristic is the
heterogeneity of the strategies and objects they assemble.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 107
11
For a particularly I would like to examine, briefly, some of the reasons why a new global culture of
insightful book on
the Wunderkammer biennials has emerged at this historic juncture. I will largely bypass discussions that view
and spectacle see the biennial as descending from a genus known as the world exhibition. Nor will I evoke
Horst Bredekamp,
The Lure of Antiquity
what is believed to be its earlier ancestor, namely, the so-called Wunderkammer
and the Cult collection.11 My interest is its present historical context: Why biennials?
of the Machine:
The Kunstkammer
and the Evolution A) History and Trauma
of Nature, Art, If we exclude the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh,
and Technology
(Princeton: Markus most, if not all large-scale cyclical exhibitions that currently exist within the
Wiener Publishers, international framework are largely post-World War II creations. Of these, I am
1995).
interested in the degree to which the desire to establish such exhibition forums is
informed by a response to traumatic historical events and ruptures occasioned by
the dissolution of an old order. Documenta and, more recently, South Koreas
Kwangju Biennial and the Johannesburg Biennial exemplify such institutions. Their
founding closely mirrors political and social transitions in the countries where these
exhibitions are situated. In fact, such transitions are central to the identity of each
of these exhibitions and were the chief impetus behind their formation. So in a
sense, one can say these exhibitions are commemorative, much in the same way
that the building of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London
was meant to commemorate both the rule of Queen Victoria and the international
power of Britain during the period of the industrial revolution. The Carnegie
International in Pittsburgh, even given its international gloss, is nothing but a
monument to the progressive and modern outlook of Andrew Carnegie. But both the
Crystal Palace and the Carnegie International are constituted around a different sort
of ideology, namely the ideology of progress and power.
Trauma, however, peers into something darker and more ambivalent, perhaps even
melancholic. In this context, then, the commemorative event assumes symbols of
celebration from an entirely different perspective: as a lesson in history and the
limits of power. In the case of Documenta, the critical signpost is Germanys post-
World War II attempt to rebuild the foundations of its destroyed civil society, as well
as the artistic and intellectual frameworks depopulated by the Nazi pogroms that led
to the exile and death of many important thinkers and leaders of the avant-garde.
108 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Gwangju and Johannesburg were both founded during critical moments in the
political and social transitions of South Korea and South Africa, respectively. For
South Korea, it was the return to democracy after years of repressive military
dictatorship, while for South Africa, the end of apartheid served as the impetus for
signifying to the rest of the world that the work of the imagination is a fundamental
part of a society in transition, as it moves toward democracy and develops new
concepts of global citizenship.
B) Modernity and Modernization
Recently, while waiting my turn at a barbershop in Brooklyn, New York, I happened
to cast a glance at a publicity bill pinned on the salon wall with the heading: Black
Inventors. On the chart were listed every conceivable invention, from the toothpick
and ironing board to airplane engines, computer hardware and software, and
stabilizing instruments for the space shuttle. But the entries that caught my
attention were the first four on the list, which read as follows: culture = African;
alphabet = African (Egypt); writing = African (Egypt); paper = African. Having lived
in the United States for twenty years, I was fairly familiar with the ways in which
many African-Americans assert their sense of cultural worth in response to Western
cultural marginalization. From the days of slavery and through the height of the Civil
Rights Movement and the Black Power era, part of the construction of African-
American cultural worth has involved a battle waged on the ground of the fanciful
ideology of origin. Given the basic historical schism between the United States and
its black citizens, I was not surprised by the poster, though I was still struck by the
deft deployment of its entries, which sought to underline the precondition of social
visibility for any knowledge-based society, namely, that one must be not only a
consumer of culture, but also a producer and inventor of the norms of modern
society. According to the posters well-told tale, civilization has its roots in a black
cultural past, which continues today. And if Africa having invented culture, the
alphabet, writing and paper is the primal scene of civilization, then it must also
be the basis for the ontological construction of modernity as such, through a range
of inventions made possible by culture, the alphabet, writing, and paper. As
bombastic as this list may seem, its presumptions are almost identical to the way
in which Western subjectivity conceives its own cultural self-understanding.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 109
12
Jrgen Habermas, Equally, Western epistemological thought constitutes the dimension of a knowledge-
The Theory of
Communicative Action, based society as essentially springing from the European imagination. Here, we can
vol. 2, Lifeworld and say, is an obvious example of one antinomy of global culture, the struggle over
System: A Critique
of Functionalist Reason
cultural legitimation.
(Boston: Beacon Press,
1987), 192. It is striking, then, to see, in this ideological struggle to establish the prehistory and
history of the modern world, how the text of historical legitimation has been written
out of the bitter imposition of indenture, marginalization, and the opposition to it
through counter-hegemonic strategies. I would, therefore, like to offer the view that
one consequence of Western imperialism and colonialism is the degree to which
cultures and societies that are seen as marginal to Western culture have written, out
of the antagonism of European imperial conquest and hegemony, a complex narrative
of other human lifeworlds. Having started with the Brooklyn barbershop, let us stay
in the contemporary and cosmopolitan Western realm and look at how this
antagonism appears today from the perspective of someone like Jrgen Habermas.
In the second volume of his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas offers a
most perspicacious view on the question of the institutionally determined sense of
culture:
In advanced Western societies conflicts have developed in the last ten to twenty years
that deviate in various respects from the social-welfare-state pattern of institutionalized
conflict over distribution. They do not flare up in areas of material reproduction; they are not
allayed by compensations that conform to the system. Rather, these new conflicts arise
in the areas of cultural production, of social integration, and of socialization; they are
carried out in subinstitutional, or at least extraparliamentary, forms of protest; and
the deficits that underlie them reflect a reification of communicatively structured domains of
action, which cannot be gotten at via the media of money and power. It is not primarily
a question of compensations that the social-welfare state can provide, but of protecting
and restoring endangered ways of life or of establishing reformed ways of life. In short,
the new conflicts do not flare up around problems of distribution but around questions
concerning the grammar of forms of life.12
110 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Through Habermas, then, we may approach the second antinomy as being predicated Documenta 11, Kassel,
2002
on cultural plurality, difference, and questions concerning the grammar of forms of Cildo Meireles
life. We can say that within the broader discourse of regimes of representation, Disappearing
Element/Disappeared
decolonization complicates the classical texts of international and global curatorial Element (Imminent
work, the art-historical work bound to the institutional domains of the museum and Past), 2002
the academy and the conception of the ideal public. Decolonization reorients and
transforms the priority placed on productive and representational values, as well as the
multifarious objects, texts, and images of Western artistic modernity. With
decolonization and the emergence of postcolonial states, as well as the dispersion of
many postcolonial subjects to far-flung places, a new figure of the modern subject in
the global metropolitan circuit became much more visible, challenging, by its mere
presence, such enlightenment concepts as libert, egalit, and fraternit.
For the postcolonial state, modernization and development not only of the
superstructure of the state but also of the substructure of culture came to be seen as
the best means of escaping peripheralization. Modernity as such, and the desire to
modernize, that is, to leave backwardness behind, became a tacit agreement to re-
Westernize, to be reintegrated into a neo-colonial scheme in the name of progress,
institutional development, and access to technology. In light of these two movements,
toward modernity and modernization, the significance of certain forms of mega-
exhibitions and museums becomes clear. The So Paulo Biennial, founded in 1952,
certainly offers one key example, while the Havana Biennial presents a kind of counter-
reformation logic to the mega-exhibition model. While So Paulo insistently looks
towards the example of European modernism, Havana looks towards the revolutionary
ideals of state Marxism to address the exclusion of the Third World and, as such, was
conceived as a critical third space amid the prejudices and decadence of Western
neoliberalism and modernity. The So Paulo Biennial, which was founded by a
member of an Italian immigrant family and modeled after the Venice Biennale, was
designed to mediate, for a modernizing Brazil, an idea of progress through the
iconography and innovations of the Western artistic avant-gardes, to bring to Brazil
historical works of European art so as to reveal Brazils continuity and contiguity with
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 111
 European culture. This conceit of cultural continuity and contiguity is interesting, insofar
as the founder of the Biennial wished to present Brazil in the company of advanced
visual cultures and thus separate it from other Latin American countries. Havana, on
the other hand, was founded in 1984, six years before the collapse of the Soviet Union
brought to an end its intricate economic, ideological, and political alliance with the
worlds other superpower, and against the backdrop of extensive emigration by many
Cubans impoverished by the United States embargo. Although the Havana Biennial
defined itself as an alternative to Western and American power, what was more
important was its emotional identification with artists working throughout the so-called
Third World. Standing in stark contrast to one another, these two Latin American
biennials clearly demonstrate that not all mega-exhibitions follow the same model.
They do, however, offer us a lesson in understanding the function of the mega-
exhibition and museum complex, especially, the way they operationalize the discourse
of modernity and modernization in relation to use and exchange value and to cultural
and political ideology. Even mega-exhibitions in the West are not excluded from
instrumentalizing the discourse of modernity and modernization. Two recent examples
offer a view into an intricate form of cultural micro-management. The emergence of
global culture in peripheral locations in Europe as supra-state policy is powerfully
illustrated by the formation of Manifesta and the development of the European Cultural
Capital program in which cities bid, as with the Olympic Games, to host the avatars of
advanced artistic and curatorial initiatives. The clear impetus for many large-scale
international exhibitions, as such, is not necessarily to instill a more complex
understanding of artistic movements in local publics through the symbolic use and
exchange of forms and ideas of international advanced art, but to propagate a certain
will to globality. By so doing, such exhibitions seek to embed the peripheral spaces of
cultural production and institutional articulation in the trajectory of international artistic
discourse. Modernity and modernization mean, then, the development of greater
proximity not only to the institutional patronage of international artistic spheres, but also
to acquire and master its language, harvest its surplus resources, and, ultimately, to
position and promote the periphery as a genuine destination of artistic modernity. I shall
not speak here of the links to economics, tourism, regional revitalization, nationalism,
etc., inasmuch as it is obvious that all these concerns are part of the complex
112 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
mechanisms at play in the formation of large international exhibitions and the building
of new museums.
C) Enacting the Diasporic Public Sphere: Mobility, Meditation, and Proximity to the
West
Even if the desire for modernity and modernization propel some institutions of
international contemporary art, it would be misleading to think of them and,
especially, of those that exist outside the context of the large industrial centers of the
West as merely pale imitations (pardon the pun) of the authentic thing as it is
constituted within the West. The very notion of proximity to the West, as a strategy
enunciated in the dialectical framework of the global relations of power inherent in
the development of the discourse of artistic modernity, is a double-edged sword.
This sword cuts a swath between the revolutionary and emancipatory portents of
the postcolonial critique of master narratives and the nationalist rhetoric of tradition
and authenticity. We can, then, quite clearly state that the periphery does not
simplistically absorb and internalize what it does not need. Nor does it vitiate its
own critical power by becoming subservient to the rules of the center. In the wake
of the globalization of culture and art, what the postcolonial response to it has
produced is a new kind of space, a discourse of open contestations that spring not
merely from resistance but are rather built on an ethics of dissent. Therefore, in its
discursive proximity to Western modes of thought, postcolonial theory transforms
this dissent into an enabling agent of historical transformation and thus is able to
expose certain Western epistemological limits and contradictions.
In his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Arjun
Appadurai put the issue of what I have called open contestations in a much more
elegant way by telling the story of the circuitous map of global cultural networks
through the twin instances of mass mobility and mass mediation as paradigms of
globality and locality. He writes:
As with mediation, so with motion. The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced)
is hardly a new feature of human history. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow
of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 113
13 15
Arjun Appadurai, the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch nationality, and citizenship. It postulates an open-ended relationship with a variety This refers to a recent
Modernity at Large: controversy in Germany,
Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics of institutional productions and private experiences, as well as between models of
The Cultural Dimension in which a German
of Globalization in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea (sic), and as Pakistani cab drivers in Chicago professional and personal identity. The diasporic, through its twists and turns, from parliamentarian
(Minneapolis, Minn.: listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving advocated that,
University of Minnesota
indeterminacy and contingency to indigeneity, shows us, in a paradoxical sense, in order for immigrants
Press, 1996), 4. images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena both the limits of identity discourse and the fate of all Leitkulturen15 in the wake of to become full citizens
Appadurais deployment that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the the mass mobility, not only of people traveling beyond home, nation, race, ethnicity, and so assimilate
of migratory audiences and integrate themselves
through the figure of key arbiter of important social changes. . . In this sense, both persons and images often and continent, but also of all forms of migratory knowledge, cultural iconography, into the German cultural
the mobile spectator meet unpredictably, outside the certainties of home and the cordon sanitaire of local and artistic objects, contemporary subjectivities and the networks of their distribution, context, they should,
whose encounter with as it were, adopt
national media effects. This mobile and unforeseeable relationship between mass mediation, and interpretation.
the objective world German culture
is mediated through mediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between as the leading culture
forums of global globalization and the modern.13 (Leitkultur). This
technologies closely
If I have dwelled on the notion of the diasporic public sphere, it is to show how implies, then, that
resembles an intertwined it is with the conditions of the global, even when it objectifies the an immigrants original
observation made What exactly does Appadurai mean, then, when he writes about diasporic public ceaseless contradictions and antagonisms between the two, especially in regard to cultural context, which
by Manuel Castells has hitherto represented
in regard to subjectivity spheres? Who and what is the public referred to here? Does not the very concept of the issues of centers and peripheries, local and global, national and regional, values that structure the
and modernity. Within diaspora as a historical condition through which global cultural processes are mediated enlightened and backward, mobility and stasis, citizen and subject, and deepest commitments
conventional narratives of his or her identity,
of globalization Castells
confront us with another antinomy in the dialectic between the tribal and modern, cosmopolitan and provincial. One visible space where these contradictions and should now be
locates a fundamental particularly in circumstances where diasporic cultures indigenize themselves on the antagonisms are often encountered is the global city, with its social, political, and suppressed or made
split between abstract, soil of other entrenched values? Here, I return once more to the Brooklyn barbershop secondary so as
universal instrumentalism,
cultural spheres. As the diasporic public sphere emerges from the spatial and to be subjugated
and historically rooted, poster, but now seen from the purview of its proliferation not on the occasion of the temporal disorientation of the global city, it becomes the space where the problems to the proliferate
particularistic journey-out into slavery and indenture, but on the basis of its inscription into and of translation for culture arise. Avid for a critical incarnation of new forms of presence of the German
identities. From such a Leitkultur.
split, the coordinates of passage through the global scene of cultural translation. Today, the Brooklyn experimental productions, cultural translation in the global present confronts us with
identity and subjectivity barbershop represents the site of another diasporic public sphere, a new transnational a way to begin again, where the past is neither a foreign country nor simply the
become enmeshed in
the polarities between
locality embedded in networks of knowledge, labor (intellectual and manual), trade, authentic name for origin. We can say, then, that the recent phenomenon of
mobility and mediation, tourism, immigration, technology, and finance. Writ large, the diasporic public sphere biennials in the periphery should not be bemoaned as a ready-made case of
a position Castells sees articulates the distinctive travelogue of twentieth-century modernity while writing new
as a bipolar opposition
biennial syndrome. Instead, one needs to see in the biennial phenomenon the
between the Net and concepts of translocalization and transnationalization of culture within twenty-first- possibility of a paradigm shift in which we as spectators are able to encounter many
the Self (Castells, 3). century globalizing processes. The diasporic public sphere offers the clearest example experimental cultures, without wholly possessing them.
14
See Nestor Garcia of what Nestor Garcia Canclini, in his book Hybrid Cultures, calls strategies for
Canclini, Hybrid entering and leaving modernity.14 This to-and-fro movement, predisposes Michel de D) Spectacle, Spectatorship and Mega-Exhibitions
Cultures: Strategies
for Entering and
Certeaus everyday user toward the instrumentalization of his or her own agency. But what of the critique that biennials and other large-scale exhibitions foster an
Leaving Modernity environment of speculative artistic enterprise and spectacle, and in so doing
(Minneapolis: The diasporic, then, delineates late modernitys transnational, transcultural,
University of Minnesota
undercut artistic practice and its critical autonomy from the forces of market,
Press, 1995). postcolonial, and global attitudes toward such concepts as identity, culture, ideology, and media? I will address this critique in two ways: first, through the

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114
16
Guy Debord, notion of what I call strategic globality and, second, through the notion of
The Society of the
Spectacle (Cambridge, spectatorship. I base my argument on a partial reading of Guy Debords Society of
Mass.: Zone Books, the Spectacle16 and Michel de Certeaus idea of the everyday user, not as a passive
1995).
consumer and receiver of culture, but as an active participant in it, an agent whose
17
Such a critique, critical engagement with culture makes the complexity of its meaning more focused.
based on what Pierre Bourdieu, in The Field of Cultural Production, imagines culture as a habitus
New Yorker art critic
Peter Schjeldahl calls where position-takings among users and producers create a strong dialectical
festivalism, has been framework through which culture makes visible its institutional, ideological, and
gleefully taken up
in the United States. conceptual practices, among others. Beginning with these assumptions, I would like
Suffice it to say, to address the question of multiculturalism as a moment where the contradictory
I find nothing either
aspirations of users, agents, producers, institutions and communities converge.
intellectually useful
or historically correct
in such an analysis. Before we look at the multicultural bogeyman, let us first examine the question of art
exhibitions as spectacle. It has been often argued that the chief value of all institutional
forms of mega-exhibitions (biennials, triennials, Documenta, Cultural Capitals, cultural
festivals, blockbuster exhibitions of modern and classical European art, ethnographic
exhibitions, world fairs, etc.) is grounded in the domain of spectacle and the
spectacularization of art and culture through a process of diffusion and the reproduction
of excess.17 While a certain case can be made for this view, I would argue that such
exhibitions address themselves not to the ideal viewer, whose senses have already been
co-opted and homogenized into the institutional logic of display and transformation, but
to a general viewer who represents an unknown demographic in the fragmented
network of global cultural exchange. This general spectator I see lined before us in a
field of spectatorship that articulates itself, not inside Debords critique of spectacle qua
the delirium of capitalist excess, but in a new instance of spectatorial experience
through diffusion and differentiation.
Thus the general field of spectatorship as an active field of everyday users, agents,
producers, and position-takings, in the context of recent postcolonial, post-imperial
discourse, inserts a new spectator whose gaze upon the mottled screen of
modernity is counter-hegemonic and not simply an instance of counter-cultural
positioning. Postcolonial subjective claims (multiculturalism, liberation theology,
116 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
resistance art, feminist and queer theory, questions of third cinema, anti-apartheid, Documenta 11,
Kassel, 2002
environmental and ecological movements, rights of indigenous peoples, minority Constant
demands, etc.) deviate from the hegemonic concept of spectatorial totality and Installation view
renders it fragmentary, because experiences of looking do not always apprehend
this same meaning from what is being looked at or the same meaning from the
effects of an image. For example, in the United States, the reading of the videotape
of police officers beating Rodney King or the media depictions of the O. J. Simpson
murder trial elicited different responses among African-Americans and white
Americans. This divergence was based, at least in part, on a subtle set of codes
embedded in the representations of race and African-American masculinity, not
whether the depictions were factual or not. So the question of spectacle is never a
universal question, but is mediated, as Debord rightly argues, by extra-spectatorial
issues. This brings up all sorts of counter-hegemonic conceptions of looking and
how ideas of art and culture may be rearticulated and reimagined in the wake of
globalization.
Though there have been many celebrations of the death of multiculturalism in the
service of a higher, more exemplary Leitkultur, we must continue to remind
ourselves that what the multicultural paradigm opened up was a space (to return to
this term) of open deliberations around what James Clifford has called the radically
asymmetrical relations of power that have been the rule in most institutional
practices. And despite some of the shortcomings of multicultural discourse, its
ethical project of citizenship, the recognition of difference, tolerance, and respect for
other cultures and forms of living remains quite salient today, and no more so than
in the post-September 11 return to the old asymmetrical discourse of the clash of
civilizations. Multiculturalism at its best is inclusive and makes clear the complex
cultural and social maps of all globalizing societies. It releases the discourse of art
and culture from the false natal bonds of ethnocentrism, while showing powerfully
and critically that relations of exchange between cultures are also necessarily
adumbrated by strong relations of power. And it is here that multicultural discourse
has shown that, when placed at the service of nationalistic identification, power can
easily turn into a tool of exclusion and marginalization.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 117
18
Hardt and Negri, xii. As we rethink the values of the emergent forms of spectatorship that offer new relations of production, circulation, dissemination, reception, and acculturation Documenta 11,
Kassel, 2002
critical insight into the historical condition of globalization, I would like to conclude proper to the European domain of culture find their expression. It did not, however, Thomas Hirschorn
by invoking with reference to the political critique of imperialism in Michael Hardt probe deeply enough into the discrepant categories of spectacle whose energies and Bataille Monument,
modes of articulating their strategic globality within the domains of cosmopolitan 2002
and Antonio Negris book Empire what a new horizon of spectatorship might
Work in public space
mean for non-nationalist art and culture. In Empire, Hardt and Negri claim that networks and relations of social production are strictly anti-imperialist and counter-
former domains of relations of social production became untied from the nation- hegemonic. Such strategies of globality introduce to contemporary artistic and
state apparatus and its imperial program. And with this unbundling, a new type of cultural circuits new relations of spectatorship whose program of social
sovereignty, which they have given the name empire, has emerged. It is a differentiation, political expression, and cultural specificity reworks the notion of
movement that mobilizes the force of critical counter-hegemonic movements whose spectacle and constructs it as the site of new relations of power and cultural
sovereignty supercedes the nation-states imperial claims to such things as territorial translation. It is here that I believe that certain cases of mega-exhibitions function,
autonomy, self-determination, a view of economic totality, and the ability to regulate especially when viewed in the light of Mikhail Bahktins notion of the carnivalesque.
economic and cultural life. Empire has no boundaries, no limits, they claim. It The gap between the spectacle and the carnivalesque is the space, I believe, where
encompasses what they call a spatial totality; in other words, it is everywhere. certain exhibition practices, as resistance models against the deep depersonalization
and acculturation of global capitalism, recapture a new logic for the dissemination
If it is true, as this stellar work argues, that the sovereignty of the nation-state was and reception of contemporary visual culture today.
the cornerstone of the imperialisms of European powers constructed throughout the
modern era,18 where can we today situate the mega-exhibition format, which still
functions under the imprimatur of the nation-states hegemonic view of culture?
While there can be no single answer to this question, one can, with all due respect
to Hardt and Negri, begin such a discussion by asserting that mega-exhibitions have
adopted the notion of the global from the perspective of imperial and colonial modes
of differentiation and homogenization, absorption and diffusion. They have not been
attentive enough to that differentiated position of general spectatorship that
heralded, simultaneously, the twilight of the nation-state and the dawn of empire.
As such, I would claim that Debords notion of the society of spectacle was only
partially attentive to the new sovereign power that emerged with the dawn of
empire. In Debords scheme, such a sovereign power, was flattened out by the
spectacle-producing effects of capitalism. Everything, all social life, was seen to be
caught in the optical haze of mediation, perpetually ringed by the fearful machines
of media absorption. The logic of the spectacle was, on the one hand, a colonial
logic, as Debord rightly demonstrates, but on the other hand, this reading of the
symptomatic logic of imperial discourse did not completely displace it. The society
of spectacle, then, was concerned chiefly with a negative dialectic, where the

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 SPORTS AND ART

Luchezar Boyadjiev

Off the Record

Luchezar Boyadjiev
is an artist based in
Sofia, Bulgaria. He has
Do you know why, in the last World Cup football competition in 2002, Turkey came
in third place but Korea was only in fourth? Do you know what I suspect is the
in ones memory over subsequent editions of the same or similar events. Or still
better, there are only a handful of really good and important artists. Nevertheless,
recently presented his motivation behind the organization of three large-scale exhibitions of contemporary such art events seem to persist, which makes me think that the origin of all regularly
work at the ICA in Sofia
(2003), Knoll Gallery in
art from the Balkans, all taking place in Europe within only a year of each other (In scheduled events, whether sports, art, or trade events, goes back to the Olympic
Vienna (2001) and TV Search of Balkania, Graz, curated by Peter Weibel, Eda ufer, and Roger Conover, Games. Lets not forget the national pavilions, selections, participations, and so on,
Gallery in Moscow in 2002; Blood and Honey: Futures in the Balkans, Klosterneuburg/Vienna, where it is not quite clear who is representing whom and for what reason. On the
(2000). He has also
taken part in a number curated by Harald Szeemann, and In the Gorges of the Balkans, Kassel, curated by other hand, one might consider the competition between biennials. Somewhere
of group exhibitions, Ren Block, both in 2003)? Do you know why they decided to have the Documenta here my old idea about a Grand Slam of artists participation comes in - a Grand
including In the Gorges
of the Balkans, exhibition every five years instead of every four? Well, its all rather obvious to me. . . Slam would be, for instance, if in 2007, the same artist participates in all the major
Kunsthalle exhibitions: Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, the Mnster
Fridericianum, Kassel,
Germany (2003); Blood
The answer to Question 1 is: because the Istanbul Biennial is older then the Sculpture Project, etc.
& Honey, The Essl Gwangju Biennial and that means greater self-confidence. The answer to Question
Collection, 2 is: because in the last three World Cup football competitions, a Balkan country Unlike sports, however, the selection process for large biennial events seems to be
Klosterneuburg/Vienna
(2003); In Search of always placed among the top four teams - in 1994, in the USA, it was Bulgaria more conceptually subjective. It, too, is based on achievement, but the algorithm
Balkania, Neue Galerie, (fourth place); in 1998, in France, it was Croatia (third place, I think); and in 2002, for selection is different. In art events, many of us are researched, but few are
Graz, Austria (2002);
Manifesta 4, Frankfurt in South Korea/Japan, it was Turkey - all of which shows an escalation of energy curated, while the selector/curator is concerned with have a unique event where
(2002); Reconstruction, that needs to be accounted for. The answer to Question 3 is: in this way, the D- there will be as many records broken as possible, including the overall track
4th Biennial of Cetinje,
show will not coincide with the Olympic Games, and thus organizers hope to avoid record, or whatever term we may wish to use to indicate the stuff once referred to
Montenegro (2002);
The Collective the danger of having peoples attention diverted; it did not help one bit in June as Art History. Nonetheless, the sheer number of events, as well as the number of
Unconsciousness, 2002, when there were not many visitors after the opening days of D-11, perhaps participating artists and presented works, makes this impossible. Still, hope springs
MIGROS Museum,
Zurich (2002); 1st because World Cup football was going on at full speed. D-12 in 2007, or should eternal on the part of both curators and artists, and maybe audiences, too. . . As a
Tirana Biennial (2001). we say, the Double-O-Seven Documenta, should be fine on this account. consequence, the attitude of the artists, including myself, is that when you are
invited to take part in a biennial (regardless of how many times you already have),
Other parallels could be made between sports and art. For instance, at any world its better to do so than not. And thats another parallel with the Olympic Games,
(or for that matter, European) championship in track and field, some records are where the overriding motivation is that it is more important to participate than
usually broken - maybe the 800-meter hurdles for women or the 3,000-meter merely to break a record or win a gold medal. . . I am tempted to quote here Sean
steeplechase for men, but it never happens that every single record is broken at Snyder, who said, off the record, in a recent private conversation, that it was
every single event. World records are often broken in national or local championship somehow better to be in second place most of the time because the one in first
games, provided there is supervision by world sports authorities to make sure all the place seems to change with every new race. (A dialogue one might have: Whos
rules are being followed. Similarly, at every biennial, every Documenta, Manifesta on first? No, Hous on second. . .)
or ARCO, there are only a handful of really good and important works that remain In sports, the sheer number of events and athletes does not automatically lead to

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Luchezar Boyadjiev avalanches of new records. But in sports, there is, by default, a high entertainment
Schadenfreude Guided
Tours, In the Gorges value to an event. So nobody is complaining. In art, entertainment is suspect,
of the Balkans, although I think there is, certainly such a trend - thank God! But the level of
Kunsthalle
Fridericianum,
complaint about the number and quality of biennials has been growing in linear
Kassel, Germany progression to the number of biennials that take place. But the complaints do not
Sept. - Nov. 2003 seem to come from the audiences of such events, which are scattered all over the
Photo: Nils Klinger
world. The audience is disunited and can rarely revolt (unless it is located in a city
or country with a high saturation of events and a dense art infrastructure). For
instance, the audience in Gwangju does not complain about the Venice Biennale,
nor does the Sydney Biennial audience complain about Documenta. The complaint
comes mainly from the professional field, and thats quite surprising when we
consider the status of the habitat we occupy as compared (how exactly?) to the big,
real world and the masses of overexploited, overworked, underprivileged, isolated,
marginalized art viewers who do not have the privilege of living in London, Berlin,
Paris or Venice (New York now approaching marginality due to the lack of a major
international art event, and with Moscow just about to emerge from this sorry
status). In a word, can we afford to complain about the growing number of
biennials? Isnt it better to concentrate on the what, where, when, why, and who
of these events and, basically, on the how and for whom do they fit into the local
context? The expectations of such large-scale events are often unrealistically high,
plus, there is a hint of confusion: Do we want an entertaining event that can engage
audiences as well as professionals? Or do we want events that, on top of all this,
also break records? Or do we want both, and how is this to be achieved? By
record, I mean here history.
As it stands now, one of the main functions served by large international biennial
events seems, in my opinion, to be in crisis, hence the complaints from the
professionals, or if you prefer, the debate. Biennials take place at least partly
because they act as proof - to the art world itself, as well as to the world at large -
that there is, in fact, such a thing as an international art world, that it does exist and
is capable of providing a product that can engage the attention of the world at large.
The preview and opening days of a Documenta, Venice, or Manifesta are the time
122 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
and place where the art world can be seen in action. The art world, there and then,
is represented by those of us in the art profession, in its many guises, who happen
to be present for whatever reason. Thats a very important function, because there
is no profession that can survive without a sense - and demonstration - of its public
identity. Thus, it is strange that art professionals are complaining about biennials,
for that would imply a challenge to the identity of the profession, cutting off the very
branch we sit on, etc. - which I do not think is on the agenda. Another possibility
is that this particular function of biennials is in crisis. The question is why?
The answer, perhaps, is that the art world is not quite sure of its own status and
function within the globalized world. Not only that, but it is also not clear if there
yet exists a discourse of biennials that would override each individual event. I
suspect there is. Maybe the feeling of unease comes from the realization that all
these biennials could turn out to be just a marginal side effect of globalization, a
symptom or, worse, one of the main tools of globalization in the realm of culture. If
there is an answer to be found, it has to do with thinking about space. I do not mean
not any particular space; nor do I mean space as a philosophical construct. Rather,
I am referring to the space between the art world and the rest of the world, or the
space populated/occupied by the art world in the real world: the fittings, the
linkages, the tensions and frictions, the mediators, the metaphors, and so on. That,
however, is an area of thought where I am not so comfortable, so instead, I will
concentrate on a kind of space that is more palpable for me. This kind of space can
best be described through approximations, and it is precisely this space that needs
to be reconsidered.
On first thought, I would say there is a distinct parallel between, on the one hand,
the space between the various biennials and, on the other hand, the space between
the art world and the world at large. But that is too generalized a concept to defend.
On second thought, a better approximation would be the space between the
artworks in a given biennial or any large international group exhibition of that sort.
This is precisely the space where the art world (artists, curators, etc.) and the real
world (visitors, audience) meet face to face. This is the concrete space shared by all
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 123
 of us. So far, this space has been made visible through curatorial concepts,
catalogues and publications, artists statements, and so on. It is a space similar to
the kind of space located between various art events, whether biennials or not. And
it is the art worlds (art professions) articulation of this space that seems to be in
crisis, maybe because the art worlds sense of identity is in crisis. I do not mean the
physical aspects of this space, but rather aspects I would call cross-referencing -
the dialogues between works, between works and visitors, between a particular
combination of works in a particular place in the world and all other possible
combinations and places, and so on. Art events, big or small, are usually
characterized by the fact that, after the opening, the audience rarely has the chance
to meet either the curators or the artists. Apart from formal press conferences, a
lecture or two, and occasional interviews in the local press, there are few chances
for visitors to encounter the curator. As for meeting the artists, well, I have noticed
that, for instance, if I hang around the office the day after the opening in order to
check my e-mail before leaving, I tend to get a lot of startled double-takes telling
me, Oh, youre still here! The organizers of an event usually feel uncomfortable
with artists who have not left by the morning after. The audience is a different
matter. In place of the missing curator and artists, the audience has at their
disposal, for example, a press release, which is too short and cursory in nature, and
a catalogue, which is either too demanding to actually read or has too many pictures
without a proper context. Thus, after the opening, the space between the works in
a show becomes void, and local audiences might not always be able to fill it up on
their own.
At this point, there is a break in the pattern of space continuity, and the art worlds
alienation from the real world becomes manifest. The professionals go home or go
to the next site of action, whereas the local audience is, most likely, left with a
frustrating feeling that the globalized (art) world was here, to be sure, but has just
left in order to manifest itself elsewhere. A desire for concrete globalization (to have
the world at home) is triggered but never actually consumed (home as part of the
world), and the educated local art consumer keeps on guessing (while musing on
the mobility of curators and artists as opposed to his or her own static situation)
124 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
where the next global appearance will take place (the penis envy of globalization).
Globalization is performed as symbolic exchange and, in this perspective, a biennial
functions as a tool for insemination, culture vs. nature, male vs. female, etc. At the
same time, it is also possible, although I cannot provide evidence at this point, that
an identical feeling of frustration overcomes the art professionals, who rarely have
the chance to enjoy the benefits of a locally successful art manifestation - I
sometimes get press clippings, but most of the time, I have no idea who actually
goes to see my work, what they think of it, how it relates to them, how it fits in with
the whole show for them, and ultimately, how it fits in (or does not) with their own
perception of the world. This is particularly true when the artist, as in my case,
comes from a smaller art scene, which is itself a playground of globalization effects.
This feeling of frustration is reinforced because what I do away from home is not
known here and I am not sure if it is understood there, while what I do at home is
always suspect because the local audience suspects that the work is part of a much
larger discourse on the global scene and there is no way for them to know anything
about it. This problem is, I think, one of global art production vs. local art
consumption.
I am not sure there is an effective way to fill in these gaps and voids. However,
recent experience tells me that a catalogue, or any sort of publication, is not enough
to fill, for the sake of visitors, the voids that exist between the works in a show. Even
less can any sort of publication fill the void between the many biennials, whatever
and wherever they might be, let alone the void between the art world and the real
world. What I tried to do recently was to stay within a show, for as long as possible,
as a living, talking and walking sculpture providing guided tours. The show was
In the Gorges of the Balkans in the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, and of the
twelve weeks of its run, I was there for five or more. I was there every day between
11 a.m. and 6 p.m., the working hours of the museum, and anybody who wanted
to could get a free tour, of a kind (my kind), around the more than one hundred and
twenty works by eighty-eight artists in the show. I have to admit that my tours were
not easy on the visitors. A full (more or less, for I could never presume to know it
all) Schadenfreude Guided Tour (as the project was called) lasted about four and
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 125
 a half hours or more. Part of the reason for this was that, since the other artists were space between art events. It is of critical importance for the future to reconsider this
not there to speak on their own behalf, I was free to say anything I wanted. For void, and here, sports, or maybe even fashion, could serve as a useful example.
obvious reasons, the curator of the show could not be there most of the time, either. Imagine having something like the Fashion TV cable channel. With so many art
I worked with the entire physical space of the show, the building and its exterior, events all over the world and nothing to connect them in the eyes of the viewer,
jumping from work to work, artist to artist, and country to country, connecting them maybe it would not be so outrageous to think of an ART TV cable channel that
all within layers of reference to the Balkan context that only an informed insider would show footage of openings and shows from all over the world around the
could provide. I think of this project as one huge performance, lasting day after day, clock. Or better still, a cross between Fashion TV and CNN dedicated to
which depended as much on an insiders knowledge and penetration as on the flow contemporary art with such top-of-the-hour stories as The New Line of Venice,
of adrenalin and the eyes of the visitors shining with enthusiasm and interest - and Spring Art in Beijing, The Post-Documenta Diary of a Curator, Youngsters on
sometimes, with exhaustion. I worked with the inner space and logic of the show, the Move in Pristina, A Fundraising Party in Moscow, Curators Fight for Viewers
trying to make it visible and almost physically palpable for visitors, to give flesh and in Paris, Artists the Day before the Opening of. . ., and on and on.
blood to the lived reality, culture, history, concepts, visual language, and so on,
ingrained in the works. Of course, the curator staged it all, but I think that, without
me, it would have been a less interactive staging. The visitors seemed to like it, and
a good number of them were people from Kassel who may not have a Documenta
in their front yard every day but who do have a distinct sense of audience pride.
Imagine talking about a complete unknown youngster from Kosovo to somebody
who is quick to remind you, Yes, we debated such issues with Beuys at the Sixth
Documenta, or was it the Seventh?

In theory, the artwork speaks for itself, right? In practice, it does not really work this
way, even when it is a sound piece made up of talking - at least not for visitors. And
even if it does work, it is never fully satisfactory, for visitors want to see who is
behind the work and experience all the things that might come out of such an
encounter. In theory, a biennial should speak for itself. This does happen, but only
to a point. In sports, things are much clearer - athletes run faster or jump higher
because they are testing the limits of human capabilities. There are many other
reasons, of course, including economics and entertainment. In sports, spectators
also get to see just who is running or jumping. But in art? In a biennial? How is it
possible to reconcile mobility with an enduring presence? To put the record straight,
in my view, the white cube is no longer a seemingly neutral container of artworks.
Now it is, instead, the voided space between the works in a show, or the voided

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 GLOBALIZATION AND RESISTANCE

Slavoj iek

Blows Against
the Empire?
Slavoj iek In his admirable The Pedagogy of Philosophy, Jean-Jacques Lecercle described
is senior researcher
in the department the scene of a yuppie on the Paris underground reading Deleuze and Guattaris
of philosophy at the What is Philosophy?:
University of Ljubljana.
His most recent
publications include The incongruity of the scene induces a smile - after all, this is a book explicitly written
The Puppet and the against yuppies... Your smile turns into a grin as you imagine that this enlightenment-
Dwarf: The Perverse
Core of Christianity seeking yuppie bought the book because of its title. . . . Already you see the puzzled look
(Cambridge, Mass.: on the yuppies face, as he reads page after page of vintage Deleuze...1
MIT Press, 2003)
and Organs without
Bodies: Deleuze What, however, if there is no puzzled look, but enthusiasm - when the yuppie reads
and Consequences
(London: Routledge,
about the impersonal imitation of affects, about the communication of affective
2003). intensities beneath the level of meaning (Yes, this is how I design my publicity!);
or when he reads about exploding the limits of self-contained subjectivity and
1
Jean-Jacques
Lecercle, The Pedagogy directly coupling man to a machine (This reminds me of my sons favorite toy, the So when Naomi Klein writes: Neo-liberal economics is biased at every level
of Philosophy, action man who can turn into a car!); or about the need to reinvent oneself
Radical Philosophy 75
(January-February permanently, opening oneself up to a multitude of desires that push us to the limit
1996), 44. (Is this not the aim of the virtual sex video game I am working on now? It is no
longer a question of reproducing sexual bodily contact, but of exploding the confines
of established reality and imagining new, unheard-of intensive modes of sexual
pleasure!)? There are, effectively, aspects that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist
of late capitalism: Is the much celebrated Spinozan imitatio afecti, the impersonal
circulation of affects bypassing persons, not the very logic of publicity, video clips,
etc., where what matters is not the message about the product, but the intensity of
the transmitted affects and perceptions? Furthermore, recall again hard-core
pornography scenes in which the very unity of the bodily self-experience is
magically dissolved, so that the spectator perceives the bodies as a kind of vaguely
coordinated agglomerate of partial objects: Is this logic, where we are no longer
dealing with persons interacting but just with a multiplicity of intensities, of places
of enjoyment, plus bodies as a collective/impersonal desiring machine, not
eminently Deleuzian? Brian Massumi has very clearly formulated this deadlock,
which is based on the fact that todays capitalism has already overcome the logic of
totalizing normality and adopted the logic of the erratic excess:
The more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The 2
Brian Massumi,
Navigating
regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalisms dynamic. Its
Movements,
not a simple liberation. Its capitalisms own form of power. Its no longer disciplinary in Hope, ed. Mary
institutional power that defines everything, its capitalisms power to produce variety - Zournazi (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 224.
because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The
3
oddest of affective tendencies are okay - as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying Naomi Klein,
Fences and Windows:
or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to Dispatches from
intensify profit potential. It literally valorizes affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value the Frontlines
of the Globalization
production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology,
Debate (London:
the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. Its very troubling and Flamingo, 2002), 245.
confusing, because it seems to me that theres been a certain kind of convergence 4
Michael Hardt
between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance.2 and Toni Negri,
Empire (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000).
towards centralization, consolidation, homogenization. It is a war waged on
diversity3 - is she not focusing on a figure of capitalism whose days are numbered?
Would she not be applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers? Is not the
latest trend in corporate management itself diversify, devolve power, try to mobilize
local creativity and self-organization? Is not anti-centralization the topic of the
new digitalized capitalism? The problem here is even more troubling and
confusing than it may appear. As Lacan pointed out apropos of his deployment of
the structural homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment, what if the
surplus-value does not simply hijack a pre-existing relational field of affects? What
if what appears an obstacle is effectively a positive condition of possibility, the
element that triggers and propels the explosion of affective productivity? What if,
consequently, one should precisely throw out the baby with the dirty bath water
and renounce the very notion of erratic affective productivity, etc., as the libidinal
support of revolutionary activity?
Hardt and Negris Empire4 aims at providing a solution to this predicament. Their
wager is to repeat Marx. For Marx, highly organized corporate capitalism was
already a form of socialism within capitalism (a kind of socialization of capitalism,

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 So, to ask a naive question,
what would multitude in power
(not only as resistance) be?
How would it function?
with the absent owners becoming superfluous), so that one need only cut the
nominal head off and we get socialism. In an identical fashion, Hardt and Negri see
the same potential in the emerging hegemonic role of immaterial labor. Today,
immaterial labor is hegemonic in the precise sense in which Marx proclaimed
that, in nineteenth-century capitalism, large industrial production is hegemonic as
the specific color giving its tone to the totality - not quantitatively, but playing the
key, emblematic structural role. This, then, far from posing a mortal threat to
democracy (as conservative cultural critics want us to believe), opens up a unique
chance of absolute democracy - why?
In immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects, but new
social (interpersonal) relations themselves. It was already Marx who emphasized
how material production is always also the (re)production of the social relations
within which it occurs; with todays capitalism, however, the production of social
relations is the immediate end/goal of production. The wager of Hardt and Negri is
that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners
progressively superfluous (who needs them when production is directly social,
formally and as to its content?); the producers also master the regulation of social
space, since social relations (politics) are the stuff of their work. The way is thus
open for absolute democracy, for producers directly regulating their social relations
without even the detour of democratic representation.
So, to ask a naive question, what would multitude in power (not only as
resistance) be? How would it function? Hardt and Negri distinguish two ways to
oppose the global capitalist Empire: either the protectionist advocacy of the return
to the strong Nation-State, or the deployment of even more flexible forms of
multitude. Along these lines, in his analysis of the Porto Allegro anti-globalist
meeting, Hardt emphasizes the new logic of political space at work there: it was no
longer the old us vs. them binary logic, with the Leninist call for a firm, singular
party line, but the coexistence of a multitude of political agencies and positions that
are incompatible with each other as far as their ideological and programmatic
accents are concerned (from conservative farmers and ecologists worried about
the fate of the local tradition and patrimony, to human rights groups and agents
130 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
standing for the interests of immigrants, advocating global mobility). It is, effectively,
todays opposition to global capital that seems to provide a kind of negative mirror-
image in relation to Deleuzes claim about the inherently antagonistic nature of
capitalist dynamics (a strong machine of deterritorialization which generates new
modes of reterritorialization): todays resistance to capitalism reproduces the same
antagonism. Calls for the defense of particular (cultural, ethnic) identities being
threatened by global dynamics coexist with demands for more global mobility
(against the new barriers imposed by capitalism, which concern, above all, the free
movement of individuals). Is it, then, true that these tendencies (these lignes de
fuite, as Deleuze would have put it) can coexist in a non-antagonistic way, as parts
of the same global network of resistance? One is tempted to answer this claim by
applying to it Laclaus notion of the chain of equivalences: of course, this logic of
multitude functions, because we are still dealing with resistance. However, what
about when - if this really is the desire and will of these movements - we take it
over? Again: what would the multitude in power look like?
There was a similar constellation in the last years of the decaying Really-Existing
Socialism: the non-antagonistic coexistence, within the oppositional field, of a
multitude of ideologico-political tendencies, from liberal human-rights groups to
liberal business-oriented groups, conservative religious groups and leftist workers
demands. This multitude functioned well, as long as it was united in the opposition
to them, the Party hegemony. Once they found themselves in power, the game
was over.
Another case of acting multitude is the crowd that brought back into power Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela. However, can we forget the obvious fact that Chavez functions
as a Latin American caudillo, the unique Leader whose function is to magically
resolve the conflicting interests of those who support him? Multitude in power thus
necessarily actualizes itself in the guise of an authoritarian leader whose charisma
can serve as the empty signifier able to contain the multitude of interests (it was
already Peron who was a militaristic patriot to the army, a devout Christian to the
church, a supporter of the poor against the oligarchy on behalf of the workers, etc.).
The response of the partisans of Negri and Hardt to this critique is, of course, that
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 131
5
Perhaps the greatest it continues to perceive the new situation from within the old framework. In the
literary monument
to such a utopia comes contemporary information society, the question of taking power is more and more
from an unexpected irrelevant, since there is no longer any central Power agency which plays a de facto
source: Mario Vargas
Llosas The War
decisive role - power itself is shifting, decentered, Protean. Perhaps, then, today,
of the End of the World in the epoch of homo sacer, one of the options is to pursue the trend of self-
(1981), a novel about organized collectives in areas outside the law.5 Recall life in todays favelas in Latin
Canudos, an outlaw
community deep in American megalopolises: are they, in some sense, not the first liberated territories,
the Brazilian backlands the cells of futural self-organized societies? Are institutions like community kitchens
that was a home
to prostitutes, freaks, not a model of socialized communal local life? (And, perhaps, from this
beggars, bandits, standpoint, one can also approach, in a new way, the politics of drugs. Was it
and the most wretched
of the poor. Canudos,
really an accident that, every time a strong self-organized collective of those outside
led by an apocalyptic the law has emerged, it has soon been corrupted by hard drugs - from African-
prophet, was a utopian American ghettos after the rebellions in the 1960s and Italian cities after the
space without money,
property, taxes, and workers unrests of the 1970s right up to todays favelas? And the same holds true
marriage. In 1987, even for Poland after Jaruzelskis coup in 1980: all of a sudden, drugs were easily
it was destroyed by
the military forces of available, together with pornography, alcohol, and Eastern Wisdom manuals, in
the Brazilian government. order to ruin the self-organized civil society. Those in power have known full well
6
Klein, 223.
when to use drugs as a weapon against self-organized resistance.)
However, what about the complex network of material, legal, institutional, etc.,
conditions that must be maintained in order for the informational multitude to be
able to function? So, when Naomi Klein writes: Decentralizing power doesnt mean
abandoning strong national and international standards - and stable, equitable
funding - for health care, education, affordable housing and environmental
protection. But it does mean that the mantra of the left needs to change from
increase funding to empower the grassroots6 - one should ask the naive question: traumatic experience that forever marked the subjects further development, giving
how? How are these strong standards and funding - in short, the main ingredients
of the Welfare State - to be maintained? No wonder that, in a kind of ironic twist
proper to the cunning of reason, Hardt and Negri end their Empire with a minimal
positive political program of three points: the demand for global citizenship (so the
mobility of the working force under the present capitalist conditions is recognized);
the right to a social wage (a minimal income guaranteed to everybody); the right to
reappropriation (so that the key means of production, especially those of new
132 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
informational media, are socially owned). The irony here is not only the content of
these demands (with which, in abstractu, every radical liberal or social democrat
would agree), but their very form - rights, demands - which unexpectedly bring back
into the picture what the entire book was fighting against: political agents all of a
sudden appear as subjects of universal rights, demanding their realization (from
whom, if not some universal form of legal state power?). In short (psychoanalytic
terms), from the nomadic schizo outside the Law, we pass to the hysterical subject
trying to provoke the Master by way of bombarding him with impossible demands. . .
What, then, would be the paradigmatic ideological form of this predicament? Today,
in our era of over-sensitivity for harassment by the Other, it is getting more and
more common to complain about ethical violence, i.e., to submit to criticism
ethical injunctions which terrorize us with the brutal imposition of their
universality. The normative ideal of this critique is an ethics without violence,
freely (re)negotiated - the highest Cultural Critique meets here unexpectedly the
lowest of pop psychology. John Gray, the author of Men are from Mars, Women are
from Venus, deployed in a series of Oprah Winfrey shows a vulgarized version of
narrativist-deconstructionist psychoanalysis: since we ultimately are the stories we
tell ourselves about ourselves, the solution to a psychic deadlock resides in a
creative positive rewriting of the narrative of our past. What he had in mind is not
only the standard cognitive therapy of changing negative false beliefs about
oneself into a more positive attitude of the assurance that one is loved by others and
capable of creative achievements, but a more radical, pseudo-Freudian notion of
regressing back to the scene of the primordial traumatic wound. That is to say, Gray
accepts the psychoanalytic notion of a hard kernel of some early childhood
it a pathological spin - what he proposes is that, after regressing to his primal
traumatic scene and thus directly confronting it, the subject should, under the
therapists guidance, rewrite this scene, this ultimate fantasmatic framework of his
subjectivity, in a more positive, benign and productive narrative - say, if your
primordial traumatic scene that persisted in your Unconscious, deforming and
inhibiting your creative attitude, was that of your father shouting at you, You are
worthless! I despise you! Nothing will come of you! - you should rewrite this into
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 133

a new scene with a benevolent father kindly smiling at you and telling you, Youre
OK! I trust you fully! (In one of the Oprah Winfrey shows, Gray directly enacted this
rewriting-the-past experience with a woman who, at the end, gratefully embraced
him, crying from happiness that she was no longer haunted by her fathers
despising attitude towards her.)
To play this game to the end, when, in Freuds famous case, Wolfman regressed
to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development - witnessing
the parental coitus a tergo - would the solution be to rewrite this scene, so that what
Wolfman effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a
newspaper and mother a sentimental novel? Ridiculous as this procedure may
appear, let us not forget that it also has its PC-version, that of ethnic, sexual, etc.,
minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-
Americans claiming that long before European modernity, ancient African empires
already had highly developed forms of science and technology, etc.). Along the
same lines, one can even imagine a rewriting of the Decalogue itself: is some
command too severe? Let us regress to the scene on Mount Sinai and rewrite it!
Thou shalt not commit adultery - except if it is emotionally sincere and serves the
goal of your profound self-realization. . . Exemplary is here Donald Spotos The
Hidden Jesus, a New Age-tainted liberal reading of Christianity, where we can
read, apropos of divorce:
Jesus clearly denounced divorce and remarriage... But Jesus did not go further and say
that marriages cannot be broken; . . . nowhere else in his teaching is there any situation
when he renders a person forever chained to the consequences of sin. His entire treatment
of people was to liberate, not to legislate. . . . It is self-evident that in fact some marriages
simply do break down, that commitments are abandoned, that promises are violated and
love betrayed.
Sympathetic and liberal as these lines are, they involve a fatal confusion between
emotional ups and downs and an unconditional symbolic commitment which is
supposed to hold fast precisely when it is no longer supported by direct emotions:
134 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Along the same lines, one can even
imagine a rewriting of the Decalogue
itself: is some command too severe?
Let us regress to the scene on
Mount Sinai and rewrite it!
Thou shalt not divorce - except when your marriage in fact breaks down, when it
is experienced as an unbearable emotional burden that frustrates your full life - in
short, except when the prohibition to divorce would have regained its full meaning
(since who would divorce when his or her marriage still blossoms?)! What
disappears in this total disponibility of the past to its subsequent retroactive
rewriting are not primarily the hard facts, but the Real of a traumatic encounter
whose structuring role in the subjects psychic economy forever resists its symbolic
rewriting. One can now understand why the Dalai Lama is much more appropriate
for our postmodern permissive times: he presents us with a vague feel-good
spiritualism without any specific obligations - anyone, even the most decadent
Hollywood star, can follow him while continuing to pursue a money-grabbing
promiscuous life style. . .
What gets lost in the liberal-permissive critique of ethical violence is precisely the
most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy. Let us not forget that,
in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something
externally violently imposed, contingent and traumatic - in short, as an
impossible/real Thing that makes the law. What is arguably the ultimate scene of
religious-ideological interpellation - the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount
Sinai - is the very opposite of something that emerges organically as the outcome
of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the
Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest. The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to
be strictly opposed to the New Age gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-
fulfillment: when the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor,
this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua
traumatic Thing. In contrast to the New Age attitude, which ultimately reduces my
Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization
(like Jungian psychology, in which the other persons around me are ultimately
reduced to externalizations/projections of the different disavowed aspects of my
personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever
persists in my Neighbor - the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic
presence that hystericizes me.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 135
 ...within our post-political
liberal-permissive society,
human rights are ultimately,
at their innermost, simply
the right to violate the
Ten Commandments.
The Jewish commandment that prohibits images of God is the obverse of the
statement that relating to ones neighbor is the only terrain of religious practice,
where the divine dimension is present in our lives - no images of God does not
point toward a gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which
is beyond any image; on the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus,
hic salta: you want to be religious? OK, prove it here, in works of love, in the way
you relate to your neighbors. . . We have here a nice case of the Hegelian reversal
of reflexive determination into determinate reflection: instead of saying God is love,
we should say love is divine. (And, of course, the point is not to conceive of this
reversal as the standard humanist platitude. It is for this precise reason that
Christianity, far from standing for a regression towards an image of God, only draws
the consequence of the Jewish iconoclasm through asserting the identity of God and
man.)
If, then, the modern topic of human rights is ultimately grounded in this Jewish
notion of the Neighbor as the abyss of Otherness, how did we reach the weird
contemporary negative link between Decalogue (the traumatically imposed divine
Commandments) and human rights? That is to say, within our post-political liberal-
permissive society, human rights are ultimately, at their innermost, simply the right
to violate the Ten Commandments. The right to privacy - the right to adultery,
done in secret, when no one sees me or has the right to probe into my life. The
right to pursue happiness and to possess private property - the right to steal (to
exploit others). Freedom of the press and of the expression of opinion - the right
to lie. The right of free citizens to possess weapons - the right to kill. And,
ultimately, freedom of religious belief - the right to celebrate false gods. Of course,
human rights do not directly condone the violation of the Commandments; the point
is just that they keep open a marginal gray zone, which is supposed to remain out
of the reach of (religious or secular) power: in this shady zone, I can violate the
commandments, and if the power probes into it, catching me with my pants down,
and tries to prevent my violations, I can cry This is an assault on my basic human
rights!
136 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Where, then, does this leave us? The ultimate postmodern irony is the strange exchange
between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when, at the level of the economic
infrastructure, European technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide, at the
level of the ideological superstructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened in the
European space by the onslaught of New Age Asiatic thought, which, in its different
guises, from Western Buddhism (todays counterpoint to Western Marxism, as
opposed to Asiatic Marxism-Leninism) to different Taos, is establishing itself as the
hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. Therein resides the highest speculative identity
of the opposites in todays global civilization: although Western Buddhism presents
itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamic, allowing us
to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect
ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known topic of future
shock, i.e., of how, today, people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the
dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany
it - things simply move too fast; before one can get accustomed to an invention, this
invention is already supplanted by a new one, so that more and more one lacks the
most elementary cognitive mapping. The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a
way out of this predicament, one that definitely works better than a desperate escape
into old traditions: instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological
progress and social change, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain
control over what is going on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of
domination - instead, one should let oneself go, drift along, while retaining an inner
distance and indifference towards the mad dance of the accelerated process, a distance
based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a
non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost
kernel of our being. . . One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old, infamous
Marxist cliche that religion is the opium of the people, the imaginary supplement of
terrestrial misery: the Western Buddhist meditative stance is arguably the most
efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic, while retaining the
appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would certainly write
a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, one that would be titled The
Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 137

Carlos Basualdo
The Unstable
Institution
This essay was commissioned
by the Philadelphia Exhibitions
Initiative as part of the
forthcoming publication
Questions of Practice: What
Makes A Great Exhibition?
Carlos Basualdo
is a poet, art critic and curator.
An Adjunct Professor at the
IUAV in Venice he was a
member of the Documenta11,
Kassel (2002) curatorial team,
and also curator of The
Structure of Survival at the
50th Venice Biennale (2003).
He contributes regularly to
Artforum. Among other exhibi-
tions he has curated are
Worthless/Invaluable at the
Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana,
Slovenia (2000), and Da
Adversidade Vivemos at the
Arc/Muse dArt Moderne de la
Ville de Paris (2001). He is
currently working on Tropiclia:
A Parallel Modernity in Brazil
(ca.1967), an exhibtion co-
produced by MCA Chicago,
the Bronx Museum for the
Arts and BrasilConnects that
will open in New York in
the Spring of 2005.
1
I should note that one of the
motives for this text stems
from my participation, in
various capacities, in three of
the exhibitions mentioned
here: as a panelist in the
program 100 Days/100
Guests at Documenta10,
and as a member of the
curatorial teams of
Documenta11and
the 50th Venice Biennale.
It was my work in the latter
two events in particular that
allowed me to interact
intimately with both the
organiza-tional and conceptual
aspects of these shows.
138
BIENNIALS AS INSTITUTIONS
In 1531, Titian bought a house with a garden on Venices north side near the
lagoon, and from here, on a clear day, he could make out the mountains that
a voluntary stance. But the fact that the shows are analyzed from perspectives that
ultimately make these intentions invisible is, indeed, something to be taken
2
For a paradigmatic
historical example
of this kind of coverage
surrounded his hometown of Pieve di Cadore. Biri Grande, in the parish of San seriously. One gets the impression, for example, that many critics respond see Brice Kurtz,
Documenta 5:
Canciano, no longer exists. The Fondamente Nuove, half a mile of docks along the indignantly to any suggestion of subordinating the individual works to an overly A Critical Preview,
islands northern edge, was built in its place just a few years after the artists death. complex thematic frame as if the primary function of these shows were to free Arts Magazine 46,
For unprepared pedestrians walking along the docks, the chance of seeing the Alps art from its intellectual overdeterminations. In other cases, it is the absence of theme no. 8 (summer 1972):
30, which contains,
is but an amusing stroke of luck. And to be sure, the smog and haze seem to that is perceived as inexcusable. Only rarely is the exhibitive structure of the event in a nutshell, most
conspire so as to limit the landscape to the classic silhouettes of Italian cypresses itself, or its frequent extra-artistic ramifications, given serious consideration in of the usual
misunderstanding
in the San Michele Cemetery and some campanile or other on Murano Island. But spite of the fact that, quite often, these side-programs are structurally constitutive about such events.
nevertheless, they are there. I can attest that the day we left Venice, we were elements in the explicit goals of the organizers. Such a survey of the bibliography
3
Although a profuse
deliciously surprised to see, from the vantage point of the boat that took us to the might be amusing, were it not a truly uncomfortable and even, at times, rather bibliography on
airport with all our baggage, the contours of the Alps. melancholy exercise.2 Not only can one often reproach journalistic reviews for their museums certainly
numerous errors and omissions, but in many cases, a careful reading allows us to exists, there seems
to be no single
deduce that the author was not even able to visit the entire show. It should be publication devoted
Even things most categorically evident can occasionally seem invisible not acknowledged, however, that many of these events are simply not designed to be solely to the subject
of large-scale
because they do not exist, but rather because, at particular moments, some act of seen in their totality, on account of both their sheer size and the fact that they are international exhibitions.
intellectual conjuring, some configuration of action and thought, manages to made up of a large number of components, so that a comprehensive visit would Some of the more recent
publications on the
conceal them from the horizon of perception. Paradoxically, I have the impression take much more time than for other shows. Critics tend to ignore this explicit
subject of exhibitions
that something similar happens with large-scale international art exhibitions. It is intentionality and merely react with disdain, without stopping to analyze the and curatorial practice
not that they literally become invisible, since they are, precisely, a staging of possible consequences of such neglect. The lack of a frame of reference to help us are Bruce Altshuler,
The Avant-Garde in
enormous mechanisms of visibility, but rather that the singularity of their meaning interpret these events becomes ever more evident, even as its development Exhibition: New Art
seems to hide itself from the myriad journalists, critics, historians, and pundits, becomes more urgent. Without a frame of reference to validate it, the kind of specific in the XXth Century
(New York: Harry N.
who, as one might imagine, come to be their privileged spectators.1 Of course, I am operation carried out by these shows in the field of art and culture is barely, if at all, Abrams, 1994);
not saying that these events do not stir up opinion. On the contrary, opinions perceptible through the opinions of a host of commentators. Titians mountains Emma Barker, ed.,
Contemporary Cultures
abound, but not because there exists any set of common criteria that can be used blend into the mist that conceals and disguises them. From the printed page, we of Display (New Haven,
to evaluate this genre of events. For example, a review of critical articles about the discern only the repeated, interchangeable silhouettes of cypresses. Conn.: Yale University
most recent editions of the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel reveals Press, 1999); Reesa
Greenberg, Bruce W.
enormous discrepancies, not so much in regard to the shows themselves, but rather In comparison to the rivers of ink these shows unleash in both the specialized press Ferguson, and Sandy
in regard to the expectations that the realms of criticism and journalism bring to and the mass media, the academic critical literature specifically tackling these Nairne, eds., Thinking
About Exhibitions
these events. Critics insistence on setting aside the explicit intentions that, in events is relatively scarce: barely a dozen books, in two or three languages, (London: Routledge,
accordance with the organizers criteria, are used to justify the realization and published largely in the last decade.3 Perhaps the two phenomena are related. 1996); Bernard
Guelton, LExposition:
subject matter of the shows would not, in itself, be so serious, especially if this was Shows like Documenta or the Venice Biennale have acquired an unprecedented Interprtation et
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 139
 Most view these shows as epiphenomena of mass
culture, an indisputable symptom of the culture
industrys assimilation of the project of the avant-
garde as spectacles, pure and simple, whose
logic is nothing more than that of late-stage
capitalism, in other words, the progressive
suppression of the multiple system of values
and its translation into a universal equivalent,
namely, exchange value.

4
Reinterprtation, visibility in contemporary art a field of culture that, until recently, was of interest, paired off slowly in order to produce, finally, an impression of totality. For their A complementary
(Paris: Harmattan, account of a tension
1998); Anna Harding, almost exclusively, to a more or less limited group of specialists. Such visibility survival, institutions require the illusion of everlastingness, since this is what (over such issues
ed., Curating the suddenly turns these shows into desirable and even, on occasion, income- safeguards them, in the final analysis, against their contingent character. In Western as taste and value)
Contemporary Art between the audience
Museum and Beyond
generating instruments for the political and corporate sectors. At the same time, it countries, modern art was thought to be structured around the relative balance and an institution
(London: Academy makes them anathema precisely for the intellectual spheres whose analytical between a number of institutions founded on a common history or histories, that is devoted to public
Editions, 1997); capacity should (supposedly) elucidate their current meaning and possible to say, on shared values. In this order of things, the tension between production and education and the
Susan Hiller promotion of art can
and Sarah Martin, potential. Of the few voices from academic circles that mention these events, the the market finds a sort of referee in criticism and museums.4 We could say, very be found in Seth Koven,
eds., The Producers: majority tends to be discrediting. Most view these shows as epiphenomena of mass schematically, that the duty of criticism has been to inscribe production into a The Whitechapel
Contemporary Curators Picture Exhibitions
in Conversation, culture, an indisputable symptom of the culture industrys assimilation of the project symbolic field in a way that simultaneously makes it accessible to the effects of the and the Politics of
vols. 1-4 (Gateshead, of the avant-garde as spectacles, pure and simple, whose logic is nothing more mechanisms of the production of exchange value, while the duty of art history has Seeing, in Daniel
U.K.: Baltic, 2000- Sherman and Irit Rogoff,
2003); Bern Klser
than that of late-stage capitalism, in other words, the progressive suppression of the been to recover the specific differential in the work that hinders its complete eds., Museum Culture:
and Katharina multiple system of values and its translation into a universal equivalent, namely, subordination to exchange value. Of the two, it was the institution of the Museum Histories, Discourses,
Hegewisch, eds., exchange value. In a way, this analytic trend implies that the oppositional nature, which from its origins has had a fundamentally ideological character that Spectacles
LArt de lExposition (Minneapolis: University
(Paris: Editions which characterizes the critical project in modernity, is largely foreign to the kind of sanctioned the value of the work as an exchange value, but not without first of Minnesota Press,
du Regard, 1988); exhibition that is unequivocally associated with the realms of marketing and disguising it, hiding it in the folds of a particular historical narrative that the Museum 1994).
Carin Kuoni, ed.,
Words of Wisdom: consumption. Following this line of reasoning to the end, we may conclude that the was supposedly responsible for preserving and intensifying.5 Clearly, it is not difficult 5
See Theodor Adorno,
A Curators Vade apparent lack of criteria that journalistic criticism underscores when discussing such to imagine how any exhibition or production of works that lacks a direct association Valry Proust
Mecum on Museum, in his Prisms
Contemporary Art
events is nothing more than a symptom of the expiration of its traditional function with galleries or museums and which, even if it maintains dialogue with both the (Cambridge, Mass.:
(New York: Independent in this specific stage of the development of the culture industry. market and history, does not really meet the expectations of either may suddenly MIT Press, 1982).
Curators International, become at least partially illegible for the system in which it is supposed to operate.
2001); Paula
Marincola, ed., The emergence of art criticism paralleled the formation of an international circuit in
Curating Now: which artists, galleries, and museums each found their own places. Clearly, But at this point I should clarify the types of events to which I am referring. Are we
Imaginative
Practice/Public academic criticism, linked to universities (and, overwhelmingly, to the discipline of dealing with large-scale shows in general? With the international biennial circuit?
Responsibility art history), finds its place in the same system as yet another institutional mooring. Perhaps more importantly, are we dealing with a characterization that exclusively
(Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Exhibitions
Artistic modernity is thus presented as a constellation of specific practices and concerns the size of the exhibition that is, the size of its budget and the number
Initiative, 2001); institutional settings charged with discerning and assigning the relative values of works included or could this also have to do with other factors, such as the
Dorothee Richter that incorporate them. The ensemble is determined by a certain way of representing nature of the institutional framework that generates such events? Although an
and Eva Schmidt, eds.,
Curating Degree Zero: the singularity of its own history and articulating the value system it produces. These archeology of the large-scale international exhibition model would include many
An International institutional instances regulate the relationships between individual constituent shows organized by more conventional art institutions, it seems fair to argue that
Curating Symposium
(Bonn: VG Bild-Kunst, parts, while at the same time restricting their freedom. Naturally, this assembly is biennials are the most exemplary. At first glance, biennials seem to have only their
1999). not synchronic; it was not produced all at once. Instead, it is a more or less unstable name in common. The Venice Biennale was first held at the end of the nineteenth
product of a series of historical processes that, like sedimentary strata, eventually century; it was modeled on the world expositions that had been so popular

140 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 141

6 8
See Paula Latos-Valier, throughout that century. It would take five more decades and two world wars to The specific motives change Venice was originally concerned with updating a Richard Tomkins,
Biennales Big Happy Birthday,
and Small, Info, found the So Paulo Bienal, which, like Venice, continues to take place. In the brief universalist ideology clearly related to European colonialism; Havana, by contrast, Globalisation, Financial
the newsletter interlude of fifteen years, from 1984 (the year of the first Havana Bienal) to the staged an ideological project that was diametrically opposed to this but the type Times, May 6, 2003.
of the 25th Biennial
of Graphic Art
present, more than fifteen international biennials have been established, including of operation is, curiously, the same. Another point of agreement consists in the fact
(Ljubljana, 2003). Istanbul (1987), Lyon (1992), Santa Fe (1995), Gwangju (1995), Johannesburg that the majority of these shows emphasize the internationalist nature of cultural
7
(1995), Shanghai (1996), Berlin (1996), and Montreal (1998).6 Moreover, the and artistic production. This is not a question of sharing a unified vision, but rather
For a discussion of
the connection between specific circumstances under which these shows were established are extremely of considering internationalism as a term literally in dispute, able to be interpreted
the first Documenta diverse; the same can be said of their resources and of the attraction they hold for specifically in highly diverse ways. The nature of the interests that generate the
and the Nazis
Degenerate Art show, both the specialist press and the general media. The Venice Biennale was the model events and their common commitment to the possible horizon of internationalism
see Walter Grasskamp. for the So Paulo Bienal, whose initial function was to establish itself, alongside seem to associate them in an intimate way with the ups and downs of modernity
Degenerate Art
and Documenta I:
Venice and the Carnegie International (founded in 1896), as a world-scale event and with the range of its possible interpretations. Their unstable nature
Modernism Ostracized that could put its city and country on the map of modern culture. In 1984, somewhat tentative, incomplete, and always subject to negotiation and readaptation
and Disarmed, the first Havana Bienal had a very explicit ideological goal: to stimulate merely reinforces this tie.
in Daniel J. Sherman
and Irit Rogoff, eds., communication between artists and intellectuals of the Southern hemisphere, so as
Museum Cultures. to keep the centers of economic power from monopolizing the distribution of In 1983, barely a year before the first edition of the Havana Bienal the success
In Grasskamps view,
the tensions between contemporary art. Havanas success was capitalized on by a number of subsequent of which contributed to the subsequent proliferation of such exhibitions Professor
Documenta as an biennials, which had the obvious function of giving visibility to local production and Theodore Levitt of Harvard University wrote in the Harvard Business Review: The
exemplary art institution
of postwar Germany
promoting the cities and countries that hosted them. globalization of markets is at hand. This was one of the first texts to use a term that
and the questions the would become increasingly commonplace in the years that followed. The
Nazis posed to Modern Nearly all shows of this type rely on the official financial support of their respective globalization to which Levitt referred consisted in extending the logic of economies
art were acknowledged,
ultimately, in all their countries or cities. A marketing component is, then, common to all of them; it is a of scale to the planetary level; it was grounded in the presumed worldwide
implications only question of publicizing the artistic and cultural potential of a city, country, or region. convergence of consumer tastes. In an article written for the twentieth anniversary
by the curatorial team
of Documenta 5 Few, perhaps, have been as ideologically marked in their origins as the Havana of the publication of Levitts text, Richard Tomkins observes: Prof. Levitts message
in 1972. Bienal and, of course, Documenta, which has been held since 1955 initially, was simple. As new technology extended the reach of global media and brought
every four years, and now, every five in the German city of Kassel. On the one down the cost of communications, the world was shrinking. As a result, consumer
hand, Documenta is a fortunate byproduct of the Cold War, while on the other, it tastes everywhere were converging, creating global markets for standardized
was created from the need for postwar Germany to bring itself up to date with the products on a previously unimagined scale.8 The publication of Levitts essay
evolution of modern and contemporary art and leave behind the painful excesses coincided with a period of market openness that still continues today, although in a
and omissions of Nazism which, among other things, affected the practice and less pronounced way. In predicting a convergence of consumer tastes, Levitt did not
appreciation of modern art in that country.7 In all these shows, however, diplomacy, seem to take into account the fact that, through the spread of new technologies and
politics, and commerce converge in a powerful movement, the purpose of which the ever more decentralized use of information, the nature of demand itself becomes
seems to be the appropriation and instrumentalization of the symbolic value of art. more specialized. From our current perspective, we could state that the value of

142 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 143

 What is instrumentalized in the large-
scale international exhibition is precisely
the symbolic capital of modern art,
tied to its own presumed autonomy
and independence from market logic.
Levitts thesis consists mainly in its symptomatic character. Coinciding with the
information revolution that took place with Internet (and the progressive
development of communications possibilities in general), Levitts essay foresaw a
period of progressive integration on a world level, although not decentralization. In
the area of contemporary art, that phenomenon is reflected precisely in the growing
proliferation of this unstable institution of the large-scale international exhibition.
One could venture the hypothesis that the biennials that have emerged in the last
two decades have done so completely in tune with these transformations, as a result
of the contrast between the tendency toward centralization, typical of the integration
of markets on a global scale, and the increasing dissemination of information, which
provides growing visibility for local situations and problems. Such tension,
obviously, is an essential component for institutions whose aim, to a large extent,
consists precisely in its representation and analysis.
It is evident that these institutions have been created with a distinct instrumental
purpose: to respond to the interests that brought them about in other words, to
promote the contexts in which they take place, giving them greater international
visibility, supplying them with a patina of prestige, and ratifying the supposed
commitment of these different contexts to modernity and, more specifically, to the
processes of economic integration associated with late capitalism. The aura of
prestige that surrounds art in general and modern and contemporary art in
particular is perfectly suited to this task. What is instrumentalized in the large-
scale international exhibition is precisely the symbolic capital of modern art, tied to
its own presumed autonomy and independence from market logic. Following this
line of reasoning, we could reach the paradoxical conclusion that the relationship
between the supposed aim of art biennials and the traditional function of museums
will eventually be one of simple continuity. The symbolic value created initially by
museums as a concealed affirmation of the exchange value of objects and artistic
practices is ultimately transformed by biennials into pure utility. Perhaps this was
(and, in some cases, may still be) the (ultimately naive) reasoning of many of the
institutions that founded biennials. And in some cases, such reasoning may even
be partially justified. Nevertheless, this equation assumes a total equivalence
144 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
between what is exhibited in museums and what is exhibited at biennials. Manifesta 3,
Ljubljana 2000
Furthermore, it assumes an agreement between the conceptual and ideological Marcus Geiger,
frameworks of both types of institutions. Both these assumptions are erroneous. Untitled, 2000,
intervention in the city
space
The configuration of interests at the core of institutions like biennials clearly differs
9
from that which gave rise to the institutional circuit traditionally linked to modernity One need only
mention such examples
in art (museums, art criticism, and galleries). The commercial fate of the works, for as 100 Days/100
example, is neither evident nor even strictly necessary in biennials, for the simple Guests at
Documenta10,
reason that the bulk of the financing behind the event and the production of many the four Platforms
of the projects is largely independent of art-collecting (either private or state-funded). at Documenta11,
and the events
This facilitates the inclusion of practices of a non-objectual nature, as well as works surrounding
of an interdisciplinary nature and even practices pertaining to other fields of cultural the Archive of
production, such as cinema, design, architecture, etc.; indirectly, this ultimately Contemporaneity
at the 50th Venice
stimulates the problematization of the notion of art as an autonomous activity. The Biennale.
inclusion of works of an interdisciplinary nature, as well as the persistent integration
of discursive elements in these kinds of events, has become increasingly a
constant.9 Moreover, the sheer size of these shows which is necessary to achieve
the marketing impact expected of them makes their insertion into highly
particularized interpretative systems an absolute necessity. Without these systems,
the shows would lose their ability to communicate as discrete singularities; that is,
they would lack all identity. In many cases, it is even manifestly expected that the
conceptual framework charged with giving these events legibility is related to local
issues at least as far as the inclusion of elements tied to the local culture is
concerned. Consequently, the figure of the curator emerges as the events
conceptual organizer. In comparison with the traditional role of the museum curator,
this more recent incarnation seems to be endowed with greater autonomy. It is no
longer a question of the discerning critic or interpretive historian examining a
specific tradition, but rather of a relatively unfamiliar figure who must negotiate the
distance between, on the one hand, the value system traditionally established by
critic and art historian and, on the other, the ideological pressures and practices
corresponding to the institutional setting in which such events emerge. But this
specific incarnation of the curator is no accident; inasmuch as these are art
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 145
 Large-scale international exhibitions
never completely belong to the system
of art institutions in which they are
supposedly inscribed, and the range
of practical and theoretical possibilities
to which they give rise often turns out
to be subversive

10
See Karsten Schubert, professionals who must respond to a variety of extra-artistic conditions and narrative will inexorably lead us to consider historical discourse as highly becomes a matter
The Curators Egg: of understanding artistic
The Evolution of the questions, their work is necessarily different from that of those who preceded ideologized and, therefore, the inevitable result of the intersection of heterogeneous practices in relationship
Museum Concept from them.10 The type of knowledge they put into practice becomes less and less and diverse practices and interests. The relationship with the local context, which to the economic,
the French Revolution political, and social
to the Present Day
retrievable from the perspective of the critic or art historian, even if this is still a is usually mandatory in these events, becomes an opportunity to exercise the context. To a certain
(London: One-Off Press, highly particular and specific kind of knowledge. The chain of meaning that makes historical revisionism that, in the final analysis, inescapably ends with a questioning extent, we could say
2000). In the last sense of the group of practices assembled for such a show will necessarily be of the ideological base that articulates the institutions of artistic modernity. With that Documenta10
section of his thematized precisely
informative overview constructed around an interrogation of local histories and contexts, though always respect to the traditional institutional structure, large-scale international exhibitions this process of canon
of the history of in terms of their possible relationship to the presumed internationalist horizon. The can act as a kind of surreptitious short circuit. Their supposed instrumentality, revision.
museums in the West,
Schubert devotes curators work is riddled with, and overdetermined by, such problems. Perhaps we signaled by a sector of academic criticism as a function of their dependence on the
several chapters to the could say that the curators ability to produce a highly differentiated form of culture industry, could, conversely, be revealed as a juncture that facilitates the
changes experienced
by the role of curators
knowledge is related to his or her degree of fidelity to the entire matrix of unique expansion of the canon and the exploration of an expanded notion of what
in the last three situations surrounding the curatorial practice. This type of work thus implies the presumes to be the artistic practice of a specific context. Needless to say, although
decades. Although articulation of a reflection capable of linking forms of local culture and history with this range of possibilities appears inscribed in the very institutional structure of such
his observations are
primarily concerned the horizon of internationalism that appears as a founding element in these events. events, there is no guarantee of their realization. The figure responsible for
with museum curators, Finally, partially freed or better yet, forcibly liberated from the constrictions actualizing this range of possibilities is, inevitably, the event curator. And this is
they could well be
inspired by and, associated with the supposed autonomous nature of artistic production, the curator because the determinations that could guarantee the effectiveness of the curatorial
indeed, seem to pertain finds him- or herself in the position, and with the need, to expand not only the practice for this type of show are in no way predetermined by the institutional
even more to the
transformation of the
canonical apparatus that articulates the historical narratives linked to the production framework in which this practice is carried out unlike what happens when a
curatorial role with of modern and contemporary art, but also the very definition of that which curator joins the traditional structure of the museum. The curators inevitable lead
respect to large-scale constitutes the artistic practice in a specific context..11 role in such shows has recently given the position an exaggerated, and clearly
international exhibitions.
equivocal, level of visibility in the cultural field. But this is a question of
11
The consideration Paradoxically, the presumed instrumental nature of biennials may thus serve as a misunderstood celebrity status. Whether the curator is a mere instrument of the
of art as an autonomous
activity certainly leads way to try out a series of operations whose scope is, for the most part, radical when culture industry or a recent incarnation of the model of the independent intellectual,
to the inclusion of considered within the institutional context traditionally linked to (Western) modern the possible range into which his or her decisions are introduced is at once
highly specialized
practices in historical
and contemporary art. We could classify these operations synthetically into two remarkably vast and dangerously undefined.
narratives. When this types: revisionist efforts, which lead to a reconsideration of the canonical
framework disappears mechanisms established in the historical narratives produced, almost exclusively, in The invisibility I spoke of the beginning of this text clearly applies to the position
as a prime intellectual
motive, it becomes Europe and the United States; and the exploration of the position of the artwork in these shows occupy with respect to the traditional circuit of criticism, the museum,
possible and, the wider cultural context in connection with a variety of symbolic practices to which and galleries. Large-scale international exhibitions never completely belong to the
to a large degree,
is compulsory it is not usually thought to be related. An exhaustive revision of the canon and a system of art institutions in which they are supposedly inscribed, and the range of
to explore the expanded reexamination of the autonomous nature of the work of art are actually two sides of practical and theoretical possibilities to which they give rise often turns out to be
field of cultural
production, since it now
the same coin, since an inquiry into the mechanisms that structure art historys subversive lets not forget that museums are, first and foremost, Western

146 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 147

12
William J. Bouwsma, institutions, and that the global expansion of large-scale exhibitions performs an project of the formulation of alternative versions of (Western) modernity seems to Manifesta 3,
The Waning of the Ljubljana 2000
Renaissance: 1550- insistent de-centering of both the canon and artistic modernity. Increasingly, one have been a driving force for many of these institutions from the start, the Denisa Lehocka,
Untitled, 2000
1640 (New Haven, has the impression that the vitality of such shows seems to be a direct function of implications of such a radical move have not yet been theorized. The development
Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2000), 131.
the number of visitors they attract and the dissemination they achieve in the media, of large-scale exhibitions can be associated with the economic and informational 13
A number of
and in inverse relationship to the appreciation of specialized criticism; in terms of transformation of late capitalism such as the expansion of tourism on a global institutions founded
An interesting parallel
in the postwar period
could be drawn the politics of exclusion historically enacted by the institutions of modernity, large- scale and the concurrent rise in the number of museum visitors worldwide in and dedicated to
between the emergence
of theater as a cultural scale exhibitions could perhaps be seen as occupying a role similar to that of theater other words, an increasing democratization of culture, characterized by an exhibiting modern
and contemporary art
practice in the High in the High Renaissance, namely, as a force for the breakdown of class increasing intermingling of education and entertainment. Large-scale exhibitions were once not so
Renaissance and the
position occupied distinctions, even for democratization.12 This vitality is, undoubtedly, the best could well represent a possible response to these phenomena from the cultural field. different from the large-
scale events I have been
by large-scale guarantee of their survival. To a large extent, the conceptual horizon opened by such Nevertheless, there is little understanding of the role they play in the culture industry discussing, at least
international exhibitions
in todays cultural
shows as the two most recent editions of Documenta or the first Havana Bienal and among institutions of artistic modernity. Their contribution to the cultural field if we consider their
remains largely unexplored. There is no doubt, however, that many aspects has barely been taken into account. Perhaps, it is precisely this sort of inquiry that original aims.
landscape. Originally
A particularly
distrusted because associated with such events have been partially absorbed and recycled by museums would give these events the visibility they need if, among other things, we are to remarkable example
of their connections
to spectacle and and galleries a process that, while not at all recent, has visibly accelerated over articulate an effective reform of the institutions of modernity.13 is the Georges
Pompidou Center,
commerce, both the last decade. In this short span of time, for instance, a significant number of which was established
phenomena experienced
artistic evolution artists have, effectively, been incorporated into the canonical narrative of the Translated from the Spanish by Vincent Martin as an interdisciplinary
laboratory for research
partially as a function postwar period. Many conventional museums have resorted to the implementation
on modern and
of their growing
popularity, exemplifying
of biennial or triennial showcases as a way to increase the number of their visitors contemporary cultural
and attract the attention of the press. In some cases, the international exhibitions production. Although
the complex relationship
while under the
between culture and clear and direct influence on the traditional institutional circuit can be confirmed; in direction of Pontus
spectacle that the
institutions of modernity others, it is more a question of partial coincidences in the development of Hulten the Pompidous
activities seemed to be
have traditionally independent (though undoubtedly simultaneous) processes, inasmuch as that form headed toward satisfying
rejected.
of internationalism we call globalization increasingly determines the financing and these goals, the center
later began gradually
programming of a large segment of the museums in Europe and the United States.
to change into a more
Beyond these transformations and a sense of the growing interdependence between or less conventional
traditional modern-art institutions and the megashow, there is still, it seems, no modern art museum.
On rare occasion,
appropriate framework for analyzing all the implications of the large-scale exhibition. some of its exhibitions
These events are constantly evaluated only in terms of the logic of institutions of still display certain
interinterdisciplinary
modernity and not in relation to the challenges they embody. A proper historical and revisionist elements,
account of the emergence of these institutions is still to be written. A clearer but even so, these
do not dominate
understanding of the implications arising from their interrogation of both the canon
the program as a whole.
and the modern notion of the autonomy of art is no less essential. Although the

148 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 149

 POSTCURATORIAL

An Online Conversation between Vasif Kortun and Serkan Ozkaya

Is it like giving someone

a book you loved? Or more the part of Radikal, to invest in it.
Though the economy of a piece and the
people, many of whom happened to be
curators. When I was trying to buy a
3
Rebecca Gordon
Nesbitt, Harnessing
the Means of

like reading an unknown economy of a large show might not

coincide. Although, personally I must
say I feel much more comfortable with
plane ticket to go somewhere, on my
budget at the Rooseum, Charles [Esche]
said something like, If you do not
Production,
in Jonas Ekeberg, ed.,
New Institutionalism,
Verksted, no. 1

writer and publishing him? situations I initiate without having been

invited to do so. That does not
necessarily mean a piece will be better in
define this carefully, it might turn into
interviews with famous curators. What
he implied, of course, was, famous
(Oslo: Office for
Contemporary Art
Norway, 2003).

This text has been adapted restlessincorporated: You know it is based on Greimass theory and his
from an online conversation a voluntary situation, but it gives one a curators whom you normally try to nail
between Serkan Ozkaya Sunday. Postcuratorial is the topic of the grammatological square if thats not a certain drive, stronger than, say, an down and get acquainted with so you
(ozkaya@yahoo.com) and
Vasif Kortun day. horrible translation and Calvino is invitation to any large show. You can make your way into their big and
(restlessincorporated
@hotmail.com) free to manipulate this system, play with remember our last chat: I do not want to famous shows, as it were although
on November 30, 2003.
artist: A plagiarist can utter a truth that it, and appropriate it one hundred be a member of a club that would accept there is a certain difference between the
Vasf Kortun does not belong to him. An author can percent, simply for two reasons: first,
is the director of Platform me as a member (whether this was said more usual model of the art institution
Garanti Contemporary Art write his own fake books. The author because he is writing his own work, and by Groucho or Karl, or Woody Allen, for and places like the Rooseum or yours,
Center located in Istanbul,
Turkey. He is also a writer, cannot escape the noise. The plagiarist second, because he is a writer of fiction. that matter). just as there is a certain difference, I
teacher and advisor in the
field of contemporary visual cannot catch the noise. Good topic, believe, between the more usual model
culture, exhibitions, and
institutional practices.
yes. Ive been having a problem lately. I restlessincorporated: I was thinking last restlessincorporated: Postcuratorial is of the artist or curator and my practice.
Serkan Ozkaya
keep hearing a certain noise all the time. night how you have become impossible basically a located practice, I was wondering: Can you try to define
(Istanbul, Turkey) is currently to include in a group exhibition, and how interfacing aspects of 1990s secular the role of the curator in such
a Ph.D candidate in German
Language and Literature restlessincorporated: Like an interference? your hand-drawn Radikal newspaper, curatorial practice and late-1980s institutions (the Rooseum, BAK,
department at Istanbul
University. Recent solo with something like 150,000 copies self-organized artist-initiated programs Platform, etc.)?
exhibitions include Loverboy
(with Matts Leiderstam) artist: Alarm bells its called in The all originals permeated Istanbul and in a way that is quite unlike what
at MiniGallery, Stockholm; Corrections 1 as if I had come home the Istanbul Biennial as an uninvited
Minerva Street at Galerist, Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt describes in restlessincorporated: Our practice at
Istanbul; Lives and Works from a loud party and, when everything guest. The piece, however, sobered her essay in New Institutionalism.3 Platform is more provisional, relativist,
in Utrecht at BeganeGrond.
Ozkaya is the founder of else was silent, there was this beeping. up, since one could get copies of the For the kind of (new) institutional concerned with our situatedness. It is
SlideShow Galleries, a chain
storefront-space in Sirens of alarm. paper at the Radikal display stand during practice that has been exercised by not about being for or on behalf of, but
Copenhagen, Istanbul,
and Hudson, NY, in the years the entire seven weeks of the exhibition. the Rooseum, BAK, Kunstverein being with. It is not production-
1999-2000. In 2003 Ozkaya
initiated The Real McCoy
The novel to be written is lost in the It became part of the show as an object Mnchen, and others, I prefer to use obsessed. We do not have an in-house
video festival with bdv (bureau noise. The noise is the foundation all of dubious status. Who would want to the term postcuratorial. curator. I prefer both the artists and the
des videos, Paris) in Istanbul.
With Radikal newspaper in stories appear from. The truth of the look at, or read, a paper written a month audiences to coexist within the space,
Turkey, Ozkaya initiated his
work Today Could Be a Day author is hidden in the noise. (Thats earlier? Let us, however, salute the artist: When I started my project of but it is only a model for our street in
of Historical Importance.
Calvino on Calvino; you must know his editor-in-chief for taking part in such a discussions, as a matter of fact, I did not Istanbul. Regarding the provisionality of
1
Jonathan Franzen,
The Corrections (New York:
brilliant novel, If on a Winters Night a project. know it was a project, in terms of being the postcuratorial, these medium-size
Farrar, Straus Traveler,2 where the entire structure is planned in advance; it just turned out to institutions will help transform the larger
and Giroux, 2001).

2
composed of beginnings, and maybe artist: You know we got an award last be a long-term project on its own, ones. It is a mode of organizing possible
Italo Calvino,
If on a Winters Night the complete book consists only of week for this project the newspaper without being stimulated. I had been subject representations in the new
a Traveler
(New York: Harcourt Brace, beginnings. Calvinos approach is and I. So maybe it wasnt that absurd, on initiating discussions with different European societies.
1979).

150 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 151

 artist: I think most of the time these
places are more slick than any artist-run
space could be. When I think of the
Superflex show at the Rooseum for
instance, it looks like a well-designed
coffee-table magazine. Do you think
curators (usually or not) are into style
and design more than the artists, at
least in the show I was talking about?
restlessincorporated: In that particular
instance, it was a museum-like display
satirizing the Nordic design dimension
and the hollowed-out forms of the
democratic ideal, more object than
document, and certainly more
mausoleum. The whole thing was
intentional, but I cannot say I bought
into it.
artist: I believe a satire consists of two
elements, at least. One is adoration and
the second mockery. The design at
Rooseum was so correct that the
mockery part was obscured by all of this
if there was any mockery to begin
with, of course. And the adoration of
such design, if you will, left no room for
this crucial satirical element. It wasnt
funny at all. In this respect, to what
extent, do you think, the budget plays a
role?
restlessincorporated: No role at all its
not about the money, honey! But not
having any at all can be quite
problematic. We were abused last
December by NIFCA [the Nordic
152 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Institute for Contemporary Art] and
Kiasma [Museum of Contemporary Art
Kiasma, in Helsinki] during Institution 2,
which was organized by Jens
Hoffmann. They distribute justice with
their public funds.
artist: How poetic... Lets think of my
piece with many, many slides in
Istanbul and at BeganeGrond [in
Utrecht]. The first: no budget, and was
more or less self initiated. And the
second: new context, more work, and
now I can not even use a single picture
of my piece. Well, I think, if there is
money, an object will occur and will find
a way to come to life. Like in Jurassic
Park when they were going to see the
animals and the founder of the place
says that all the dinos are female, and
so, no offspring; our man in black says:
Life will find a way. Because money
itself is an object, an object of exchange.
You cannot get rid of it. You cannot turn
it totally into labor. (And you know that
guy in black was starring in The Fly. I
mean, in that movie the fly itself also
found a way into life. See, it was
accidentally in the chamber, the
transformation chamber or whatever
I don t even remember what the guy
was trying to turn himself into, but in the
end, the fly succeeded in taking over.
Vasif, there is a fly in all of us you from painting than literature, economy,
know what I mean a black one, a
housefly, Musca domestica.)
restlessincorporated: Lets separate this
notion of production from the notion of
the bogus copyright. A photographer
takes a picture of your work gets paid for
it and still claims the right to the image
when you sell the document of the
work. Lets not go there.
artist: Well I still cannot see why art is
closer to painting than to literature or the
economy, or anything for that matter. It
seems its natural in the first place that
anything can be the substance. But
even afterward, when you show it change the Louvre? It is about framing, no?
when it becomes a painting or, lets say,
an art object. Painting. Nowadays,
when someone asks me what my
profession is, I say painter or,
sometimes, sculptor, but it is a bit more
problematic. Painter wins out with no
excuses whatsoever. (I guess I also have
personal issues with that kind of
profession or duty.)
restlessincorporated: Art is further away
point. The point of responsibility. I
or anything for that matter. We still
maintain some productivist lineage,
which is related not only to the notion of
painting. But what really gets me is that
Serkan Ozkaya (left), Vasif Kortun (right)
we are still obliged to make some
apologetic comment about the lasting
power of painting in order to confirm its
Lebensraum, so to speak. Why does
sculpture die and painting survive as a
zombie medium?
artist: So this provisional moment of
yours is, in fact, a middle stage between
the artists pure Ignant and Shit
initiation and the money invested to find
a way for itself to become a work of art
a painting, as said. Who needs to
restlessincorporated: The narratives of
the Louvres have to be changed, or at
least diversified, as well their conditions
of presentation and contextual frame.
artist: Correcting the history. Can I ask
you where your responsibility comes
from? Unconditional hospitality brings
responsibility, says Charles Esche,
quoting Derrida. I think thats a crucial
personally dont even like the noun. Its
funny how curators seem to like these
concepts: e.g., Justice! Responsibility!
Enemies of individuals, in fact. The
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 153

4
E.L. Doctorow, sword of Damocles. I say: No
The Waterworks
(New York: Random responsibility! Justice is always bad!
House, 1994).
restlessincorporated: History cannot be
corrected. There is no such thing as
history at all. Responsibility for me is a
personal prerogative. Do you mean
accountability? I lose any sense of
perversity when it comes to these grand
museums. I am interested in open
narratives that permit critical inclusion
in the narrative, if not in the object.
artist: How can it be personal if you are
responsible for something which is not
you?
restlessincorporated: Where does you
end for those of us working as agents in
civic spaces? I know it is a bit too old-
fashioned to be mission-driven. I felt
responsible and saved our conversation
to disk.
artist: OK, cool, no history, no framing,
no recording. So how can you make big
assumptions or statements? Thats what
I was talking about. You saved it, and
its a shame there even before we
started it.
154 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
restlessincorporated: I feel often like
that, too, in the way that, although I
cannot make the world a better place, I
will not stop from attempting to do so (I
just found out that someone said this
before). I am, however, in full
consciousness of this position. I doubt I
know any other option. I stand up and
state my position, put forth my
narrative.
artist: Lets go back to practical examples
and provisions. Like many philosophers
who have bad taste in art, I feel like a crap
philosopher (I mean an artist that is a crap
philosopher). Oh, there is a lovely passage
in E.L. Doctorows Waterworks4 where the
main guy or our guy in black says:
Harry was an idiot. Although the hand of
an unseen god made him paint beautiful
paintings. I reckon that it was like that with
all the painters. (You can imagine I read
the book in Turkish and now recall and
translate at the same time but you got the
drift, no? Artists: idiots; philosophers: bad
taste.) And I see you getting excited about
artworks. So, the role you are undertaking
is more of a middlemans. The institutions
you are starting are there to stay. I guess
all these people you mentioned the
provisional postcurators are kind of
restless and changing their status
constantly.
restlessincorporated: What gets me excited
is not the thing but what it does to me.
artist: Is it like giving someone a book
you loved? Or more like reading an
unknown writer and publishing him?
restlessincorporated: The first edition is,
I hope, not the curatorial benchmark.
But dont take this pleasure away.
artist: Sureyyya [Evren] has an idea that
todays art is akin to the punk
movement. The actors believe that
without being capable to read music or
even play properly, they can form a
punk band and make music.
restlessincorporated: That is Sureyyya,
who may not comprehend todays art
believing he can make an intelligent and
sweeping point about it. That is such a
retrograde position. There is too much
professional knowledge in the art world
today; I tell art students in the
academies to stop history-crunching
and display how much they know. It is
not the kind of practice that feeds upon
its tradition because there is no thing as
such, and any kind of continuity implies
other agendas, be they political or not.
of the artwork as being in one place at
artist: I dont think it is about the
students in the academies. That is what
I was also trying to get at. Confession: I
really get bored in front of paintings in
museums. I mean all my friends
artists, postcurators told me to go
and see the El Greco show. I went and
saw the show. It is good, great and all,
but... is it art? Creativity is like a horse
race, our friend Orhan [Pamuk] said
once; everyone is talking about the
winner, but only after the race. (I guess
he got that from somewhere else...
Whatever.) I always thought of you as
someone who does not care much
about career. For some reason I dont
know. But you know that I have a
project for you when you take over the
Louvre.
restlessincorporated: Today, you have to
put a gun to my head for me to see an
El Greco show. But let me tell you
something else, all along the way is
frustration. Our international community
does not make our audience. The
friction between those who construct
your local narratives and your
international community takes place
right where you stand.
artist: But again, your international
community writes your history, The
History. They are the ones who record
and frame. And, somehow this
international community creates its
audience. Oh, we still have the problem
one time.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 155
 restlessincorporated: Yes. You know
how much I want to direct a major
European museum, and why I turned
down the option of doing a big show.
artist: Thus your carelessness for career.
restlessincorporated: The international
community is part of a parallel history,
fickle and equally displaced, equally
vulnerable. That is why I prefer it. I
remember your e-mail that I keep using
in lectures. It ran, Lets start by not
publishing this report. The report...
artist: ...becomes the only one. The rest
are not interested in writing any. In a few
decades, its a bestseller, I think it was in
Rousseaus Confessions: He told me that
if people were given the chance to change
their roles, the number of people that rule
will decrease. So, is Platform an off-the-
record organization? Also, you keep
organizing these lectures, talks,
workshops, etc., which only a handful of
people can participate in, and it is always
the same people. Thats the core activity
restlessincorporated: Our lectures have a
critical density, but our exhibitions are
visited by thousands of people. You
cant fold one over the other.
artist: But you know it is a bit irrelevant
how many people visited your show
during the biennial. I mean, I am sure
more people visited the shoe-stand next
door. Scary.
156 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
restlessincorporated: We probably have
more people interested in us than the
shoe-stand or the shops around because
we are free. Although I dont see a
fundamental distinction in the visitor
experience the exhibition space
differentiates itself by way of an
accessibility without utility, a challenge
and generosity, and this is a critical
situation in Istanbul, where art is
associated with highbrow culture, in
effect, a kitsch condition.
artist: And I guess that is where the
newspaper project differs from that
experience. So where does the money
come from?
restlessincorporated: Core funding is
Garanti Bankasi, and the rest is public
funds.
artist: Maybe your real audience is the
members of the bank along with the
embassies and public funds people I
mean, the people who put their money
there. I know that Platform, as well as
other galleries, of that bank or any other
bank in Turkey, are considered PR, and
this PR affects the customer profile.
Platform, I believe, is a substantial part
of it.
restlessincorporated: The terms have
changed. PR is older lingo; the new
terminology is less obtuse. Also,
Platform does not operate like any other
bank-funded art institution. If Platform
would impact the customer profile, I someone and you know it is not going to
could only be happy about it; if the work out. From the very beginning you
independence of the institution is know that you dont have to worry about
jeopardized, it would be time to move it not working out because you simply
on. What if Platform would be a model know that it wont. The person then
for the bank? What if banks were cannot abandon you, because he has
administered like Platform? already abandoned you from day one
that is how I made this work. This work
artist: If we could go back to the cannot disappear. This work cannot be
mutuality between capital and product destroyed the same way other things in
and the status of the middleman, I my life disappeared and left me. I
guess it is significant that the effects are destroyed it myself instead. I had control
not clear in the first place. What I mean over it and this is what has empowered
is that Platform and its capital are not me. But it is a very masochistic kind of
linked with an umbilical cord. If the power. I destroy the work before I make
bank were administered like Platform, it. Felix Gonzales-Torres.
we would all be rich. How would you
insert this position into an old European
museum, though?
restlessincorporated: I couldnt; it would
need a new plan.
artist: One last quote: This work
originated from my fear of losing
everything. This work is about controlling
my own fear. My work cannot be
destroyed. I have destroyed it already,
from day one. The feeling is almost like
when you are in a relationship with
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 157
 THE TIRANA BIENNIAL
Edi Muka
Tirana for
Beginners:
A Brief Guide to a Baby Biennial
Edi Muka Albanias cultural landscape, its young contemporary art, and, indeed, the Tirana
is curator at the
National Gallery Biennial itself can all be considered part of the post-colonial legacy. But not only
in Tirana; he is also was Albania colonized from the outside; the country also suffered through cruel
an art critic. He was and lengthy self-isolation for nearly half a century. As both witnesses and players
director of the 2nd
Tirana Biennial (2003). in post-communisms self-devastating effects, Albanians produced an infamous
iconography with the boat people, who like flies swarmed the boats harbored in
Durrs and sailed towards Italy, risking everything, including, most of all, their
lives. Long years of suppression and isolation resulted in a sudden, uncontrollable
outburst that materialized mainly in the expansion toward and conquest of a
projected dream and desire: the Western world. So strong was this desire that
nothing could stop these people in their efforts to attain it, not even the deep,
frightening waters of the sea that stood between. And once they arrived on the
other shore, it wasnt enough for them just to see and touch their dream; they
wanted it to come true right away - to get rich overnight. Led by such impulses
and instincts, they didnt let anything stand in their way, neither state, nor police,
nor even a moral code. They soon earned a reputation for being cruel criminals,
with little human feeling, jumping in and taking over dirty mafia activities, which
had previously been performed by natives or some other ethnic group that had
arrived earlier. And it didnt stop there; once established in Italy (which served as
a springboard or passageway), they began staking out other territory and expanded
to other parts of Europe. Nevertheless, a thorough analysis of this phenomenon
has yet to be written, either inside or outside Albania (except for the condescending
remarks from various media about a mafia nation or a wild, uncivilized people).
Clearly, however, the oppression suffered over long decades has created an
extremely energetic potential that, when left unguided, knows no barriers and
overcomes all obstacles in its way.
One might well ask, What on earth does all this have to do with the Tirana Biennial?
At first glance, to be sure, there doesnt seem to be much of a connection, but the new
contemporary art coming from Albania is part of this same burst of energy. Albanian art
started getting attention at the end of the nineties, signaling a significant diversion of the
energy flux that had so far produced only negative examples, which were not very nice
to identify with. The connection, indeed, is very strong, since the situation described
158 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
above not only provided the context for the development of Albanian art but also, in a 2nd Tirana Biennial, 2003
Gregor Passens
way, helped to shape the creation and continuation of the Tirana Biennial. King Kong
The end of the nineties witnessed the emergence of a new generation of young
artists in Albania, whose desire and ability to appropriate linguistic and stylistic
systems and add to the content of the contemporary problematic of todays art were
unmistakable. This generation matured with remarkable speed in an effort to make
up for lost time and bridge the gap created during the long years of isolation. As
mentioned above, this was the beginning of a new flux of energy that, in a way,
produced as many dramatic positive results as negative ones. The idea of organizing
a biennial came about in response to these developments, and to the need to create
a structure, even though we were far from having integrated art (market) system.
Although the Tirana Biennial has but a very short history (merely two editions,
which means it has been in existence only three years), it had a strangely intense
development of its own, which makes it an interesting case study in todays power
relations in the world of contemporary art. This is mostly due to the fact that the first
Tirana Biennial originated and was organized in collaboration with Flash Art
magazine, which was then experiencing a revival of interest in organizing art shows.
Once again, we go back to the post-colonial nature of the context in which Tirana
and its art scene found themselves at the end of the nineties, and also to the new
situation and circumstances under which the biennial was about to take place,
which seem to be more of a neo-colonial nature. Obviously, the Tirana Biennial,
from its first conception, was and still is very distant from the intentions that brought
to life older biennials, although in principle they all represent structures that aim to
provide certain facilities in response to the needs and characteristics of whatever it
is they are meant to support. Of course, these needs and characteristics change as
time goes by, and so does the profile of the structure (the biennial) that seeks to
meet these needs. The oldest such event, the Venice Biennale, was born and still
functions, not only as the most important art event in the world, but also as the
biggest opportunity presented to the art market every two years. This relationship is
now so interdependent that we cannot begin to imagine Venice without the backing
and interest of collectors and gallerists. But other, younger and more peripheral
biennials have also, over time, developed in the same direction.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 159
 This developmental crisis made it
necessary to set up a structure that would
give recognition to the new Albanian
voices that were being added to the
international scene, as well as prepare the
ground for what we all wanted, follow-up
support for this young and energetic
generation of artists.
Developing a Brand, or Producing a Show?
With two sides (partners) involved, the Tirana Biennial had to accommodate the
different interests and approaches of both organizers. On the one hand, in our view,
the Tirana Biennial would provide the perfect structural response to the ever-
growing and fast-developing Albanian art scene. We were, at that very moment,
facing a kind of paradox, that of being very successful abroad and launching the
careers of a number of very good young artists, while being unable to give them the
support they needed or provide the desired follow-up for the generation of artists
who had already left the country and established themselves abroad. This
developmental crisis made it necessary to set up a structure that would give
recognition to the new Albanian voices that were being added to the international
scene, as well as prepare the ground for what we all wanted, follow-up support for
this young and energetic generation of artists.
On the other hand, there were the interests of our partners, without whom we would
not have been able to get the event off the ground. At first, it was a bit difficult for us
to understand the reasons that motivated our partners to engage in this adventure of
a biennial in Tirana. My opinion is that Tirana was a perfect setting for Flash Arts
revived interest in organizing art events. But then, if you think about it carefully, you
can understand that their main contribution, and what was of greatest interest to
them, was the publishing of the exhibition catalogue, which was very nice, indeed,
and came with a guarantee of international distribution. After all, Flash Art is itself a
publication of the Giancarlo Politi Editore publishing house, and in todays market
conditions, a business needs to reinvent itself continually in order to keep sales up.
Thus the slogan appeared that this was the biggest art event with the smallest
amount of money, with everything perfectly attuned to the post-industrial logic of
marketing: the biennial as a show did not count for much; it was the catalogue that
assumed all importance, almost replacing the biennial itself. Well, maybe they were
right. Who the hell would go to Albania to see a biennial anyway? This was also the
only point where the Tirana Biennial entered into a certain relationship with the
marketplace - paradoxically, not with the art market (which doesnt exist in Albania
and is far from even getting started there) but with the pure rules of post-industrial
capitalist marketing, which, if one may draw parallels, was developed according to
160 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
the famous corporate motto, brands, not products. By replacing the show with the 2nd Tirana Biennial,
2003
catalogue they, in a way, wanted to brand it. Obviously, its much easier to brand Exhibition view
a small object like a book that is very well produced and already inserted into all
market systems, and then to identify the biennial with that, rather than try to insert 1 Boris Groys, The
Museum in the Age of
something big, like a show with unpredictable results, many more responsibilities, Mass Media, Manifesta
and, moreover, with ties to a certain topos that could condition it forever, whatever Journal, no. 1
(spring/summer 2003),
importance the event might hold for this topos. This constituted a conflict between
38.
us as organizers, and between our different approaches and interests in doing the
event. To us, unfamiliar with the ways of post-industrial marketing, the show itself
meant everything: it was proof that we could really do a big event with little money.
The biennial offered a chance for young, aspiring local artists to get in touch with and
work with international artists; to bring people to Tirana and have them work together
and interact with the city; to change the image of the country, the city, and its people
from something nightmarish to one closer to reality; to connect art and life; and to
create a product - one that we thought could be then sold through the catalogue.
The ideas on the other side were, indeed, very different. To our partners, the show
itself didnt count for much; they made a big point of not providing anything to the
artists, because this was a different kind of biennial and everybody had to bring
pocket art; even if some artists couldnt come or send their work, no problem! They
could still be put in the nice catalogue with an international distribution, and that
was what mattered. With every step it became clearer, then, that the Tirana Biennial
was not a big concern for them; it could have been just as well replaced by the idea
of a show, possibly with a website and, most of all, with a catalogue.
In one of the essays in the previous issue of Manifesta Journal, The Museum in
the Age of Mass Media, Boris Groys, speaking of the tendency of replacement
between the two phenomena, writes:
The old product range in the media market is constantly being replaced by new
merchandise, barring any possibility of comparing what is on offer today with what used
to be available. As a result, media commentary has no choice but to turn to fashion. . . .
As long as the observer has nothing but the media as a point of reference he simply lacks
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 161
2nd Tirana Biennial, 2003 any comparative context which would afford him the means of effectively distinguishing
Apartment block
between old and new, between what is the same and what is different.1
in Tirana painted
by Rirkrit Tiravanija
The design is based Although this excerpt is taken from an analysis of the relationship between the
on a collage by Kurt
Schwitters, the text says, museum and the media, we may properly apply a similar interpretation to the way
"These are the things we the Tirana Biennial was conceived and to the intermingling of the different interests
are fighting for".
of the organizers - but here, the biennial stands in for the museum, and the
exhibition catalogue represents the media. Of course, there are a few discrepancies
in our example, since a biennial, given its temporary nature, has a different
relationship both to the media, as Groys discusses it, and to its own catalogue, as
I am trying to argue here. Also, in saying this, I dont mean to devalue the
importance of the catalogue for an exhibition, whatever its dimensions or
pretensions might be. The catalogue still serves as testimony to the event; it is what
remains from the entire show, which itself has limited durability in time and space.
I believe, however, that the two have a dialectical relationship to each other, and
one can never replace the other. Furthermore, when such replacement is deliberate,
then we are faced with a totally different situation, in which the publication (the
media) becomes a thing in and of itself: the advertisement replaces the product, and
the topos - which should supposedly be the cause for the event to take place (in
this case, Tirana) - turns into a kind of free labor zone and the biennial becomes
a kind of ghetto, a maquilladora where artists are brought in with their pocket art
in order to produce the simulacrum of a show, without any connection to the context
of the city, its people, or the local situation that gave rise to the event. This viewpoint
may seem a bit crazy, but if we are patient enough to see just how the story
developed, then we will understand that it is really not so crazy after all and, in fact,
each of these parallels falls perfectly into place.
Several months after the first Tirana Biennial had closed and we had had no
subsequent contact at all with our former partners, we suddenly heard some
incredible news: Flash Art was organizing a Tirana Biennial in Prague. Without
even deigning to send a line to their co-founders at the Tirana Biennial (that is, to
us), a newsletter was distributed, announcing that the second edition of the Tirana
Biennial was being organized in Prague, because Flash Arts editor had exhausted
162 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
his experience with Tirana. The Tirana Biennial had, then, become like a virus, 2nd Tirana Biennial, 2003
Apartment block
spreading itself around without much caring where it went and what was to be
in Tirana painted
found there. The same slogan, the biggest art event with smallest amount of by Olafur Eliasson.
money was announced, with a strong emphasis on the fact that the exhibition
shall be followed by an amazing catalogue. The parallels drawn above now become
clear. Just as subcontractors for Nike, Adidas, Reebok, or other big corporations
move to other places when they exhaust the resources in their previous locations,
our former partners were taking the biennial to a new sweatshop they had just
discovered, namely, Prague. Again, all that mattered was a nice, beautiful
catalogue, with international distribution; the artists in the show were once again
asked to bring pocket art, which could be installed and transported without many
headaches; and so on and so forth.
Of course, we did not intend to indulge in futile lamentation over the unfortunate
fate that had taken our biennial away. The situation suddenly became very
interesting and even more of a challenge for us: there was going to be a Tirana
Biennial 2. . .
At this point we had to go back to the original aims and aspirations we had when we
started this adventure. For us, the Tirana Biennial had started off at a completely different
point. As I have explained, it was born as the result of an internal need to respond to the
fast-developing art scene. On a second level, although we were not aware of it at first, I
think it did offer a kind of free zone, but in a different sense: this free zone should be
understood as the opposite of what the term implies in todays free market semiotics - it
was supposed to be a free zone that was not conditioned by the interests or rules of
the art market. It was meant to be a free zone where artists did not have to feel the
pressure of galleries, collectors, or important big people scrutinizing their presentations,
but should rather feel free to enjoy an adventure in a new and undiscovered place, to
interact with it and talk about it. This was what we wanted to be the raison dtre of
Tirana Biennial, and we knew that this would be the only way we could finally establish
a structure that would help us echo the new voices that wanted to be heard, the voices
of the emerging art scene, its city, and its people. Indeed, the other biennial, Tirana in
Prague, had to give up after a while and change its name to the Prague Biennial,
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 163

2nd Tirana Biennial, although without any new approach structurally. Nevertheless, the catalogue remained
2003
Adrian Paci the most important thing there, while the show resembled very much the one in Tirana
Behind the Wall two years earlier.
there are Some Walls The Tirana Biennial 2 may not have attracted as many people from the international
Video installation
art crowd as, say, Venice or Manifesta does, but although we would have liked to
have had more visitors from that group, that was not really our priority. Still, this
second biennial managed to fulfill perfectly two of its main goals, namely, to lure
artists to a completely new and exciting experience, context, and people and make
them respond to it all, and to create important communication with the local public,
who were the main visitors to the biennial and its outside interventions. And we
even managed to publish a catalogue for the opening. Of course it did not have the
international distribution of the one from the first Tirana Biennial, but the echo from
the show itself has been making up for the catalogues lack of distribution.
Instead of an Epilogue
Three months after the Tirana Biennial 2 had closed, I was sitting in front of the TV
at home, when my attention was drawn to horrifying news about the fate of a rubber
boat filled with Albanians secretly trying to get to Italy. This had been a plague for
our country, one that had shaped our reputation and iconography for ten long years,
but that had finally been contained and controlled over the previous year and a half.
We had started to forget about it, just as we had started to forget about many of the
things mentioned in the first paragraphs of this text, things that reflected badly on
the reputation of Albanians in early nineties. Well, like a ghost boat from pirate
legend, this damned boat was appearing once more, with thirty people in it, amid
the high seas. But there was a difference now: this time, we could follow everything,
almost live, on television. The boats engines had broken down four miles from
shore, in total darkness on a very rough sea and in very bad weather. The boat was
stuck there, taking on water, but not sinking. Twenty-one people died slowly, in
front of each others eyes, inside the boat. They slowly froze to death. It was not
until the next day that rescue teams were able to locate the boat and approach it.
Of course, tragic occurrences like this one had often happened before, but in most
cases, people just drowned in the cold, dark waters; these were not isolated events
like this last one and, moreover, we didnt follow these things on television. In those
164 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Is it worth doing a biennial
in a place where people die like this?
Does it make any sense to deal with
Art at all? Does it have anything
to do with this reality, or is it
something completely alien to it?
days, I was going through my own personal crisis thinking about what I was doing
- this biennial - while people were still trying desperately to leave the country and
were freezing to death in the sea. Now I had some big questions to face: Is it worth
doing a biennial in a place where people die like this? Does it make any sense to
deal with Art at all? Does it have anything to do with this reality, or is it something
completely alien to it?
It took me some time to work out my answers to these questions. After seeing what
had happened and how I was related to it, I started to become more and more
convinced that, yes, it is worth the effort to do a biennial in Tirana; it is worth it to
bring artists here and put them in touch with this extreme reality, have them react,
and then take bits of it to wherever they go and get invited afterward; it is worth it
to do the show and have the same people come and see it who are planning the
very next day to get on a boat for Italy, or have their children or neighbors come and
see it - because much of the biennial was about their reality and, perhaps, they will
think twice now before stepping into that boat; and yes, it still does make sense to
deal with Art, in order to construct something, in order to reflect on something and
hope that it can lead to a change, however big or small that change might be. I
understood that the decision to keep doing the biennial in Tirana was not about
meeting a personal challenge or responding to certain objectionable behavior; it was
about struggling to change the reality where we live, and the many parallel or non-
parallel realities associated with it. The biennial is our weapon, and therefore we
must use it.
Clearly, Tirana started out as, and still is, an underdog biennial, without funds and
without the big ambitions of the older and larger established biennials; and perhaps,
too, it is somewhat outside the market(ing) structures and systems that could brand it
and sell it more effectively. But rather than viewing these things as weaknesses, I think
all this gives it the potential to be something different, fresh, and somehow unique in
comparison with other events of this kind. I can not predict how long it will manage
to remain free - if this term can be applied here; I do not even know if well manage
to do it again. But I truly do hope that the Tirana Biennial will be able to reinvent itself
every two years with the same strength and energy that first made it possible.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 165
 ARTISTS OPINIONS

Without forcing anything upon

anyone, the curator might make
headway by exposing both
the conflicts and continuities

Big Exhibitions among a variety of stances.

and Small Ideas? Today, it makes sense to take the

opposite approach, shaping a projects
and scale. At the same time, this might
also help avoid yet another harmful
exhibition that attempts to present a
certain phenomenon (such as, for
AES
Action Half Life.
Episode 3, ink-jet print
underlying problematic through the practice often encountered in instance, Russian art) may actually say on canvas, 2003
analysis of individual positions. Without contemporary art, where artworks are far less about the subject and its
forcing anything upon anyone, the torn from their authorial contexts and contexts than if one were to present,
curator might make headway by put into series with fragmentary with care and at the proper scale, the
exposing both the conflicts and statements by other authors, with the work of a single characteristic artist.
continuities among a variety of stances. result that work becomes indistingui-
Lev Evzovich / AES This, in turn, would be very appropriate shable from one another.
Lev Evzovich Conflicts and Continuities for our time: global conflict has taken
(1958) lives and works hold of our world, culminating in such There is yet another variation on the
in Moscow. Since
1987, he has worked In my view, one of the main oppositions as Christianity vs. Islam, underlying paradox. A large-group
in the AES art group contradictions in contemporary curato- globalization vs. anti-globalism, poverty
(along with Tatiana
rial practice is the following: while vs. wealth, etc. In other words, the big
Arzamasova and
Evgeny Svyatsky). curators and artists continue to generate project might become a place where
AES has taken part one could assemble or bring together a
in the Sydney Biennial,
new big projects in various locations
2004; VEIL, Institute all over the world, the big themes and world in conflict, whose array of
of International Visual big curatorial discourses have actually dualistic contradictions is growing daily.
Arts (inIVA), a traveling
exhibition, 2003-2004; exhausted themselves. It goes without
the 4th Gwangju saying that one can still create a high- This model presupposes a conscious
Biennial, Gwangjiu,
quality big project, one that is more or decision to avoid having large numbers
Project 1, South Korea,
2002; the 5th Lyon less reflective, depending on ones of participants (most of whom would,
Biennial, Halle Toni anyway, be invited by some other
Garnier, Lyon, 2000;
ability to attract curatorial and artistic
and After the Wall, participation. But if you visit all the organizer to participate in one of todays
Museum of Modern Art, biennials, you will see that all of these big projects). To me, it seems that the
Stockholm, 1999.
different big discourses are dominated ideal size for a project is between twenty
by the same artists, even, in many and thirty artists, a number that is both
cases, the same work. This, indeed, is small enough and large enough to show
further testimony to the devaluation of the contemporary worlds main nodes of
the big idea, evidence of the contradiction. In this context, each
conceptual hollowness of the themes it individual artist could be presented on
seeks to proclaim. his or her own terms, in far greater detail

166 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 167


Pablo Helguera
(Mexico City, 1971) Pablo Helguera
is a visual artist living
On Selfish Giants:
in New York. He has
most recently presented Big Exhibitions with Small Ideas
his work at the Museum
of Modern Art,
New York, PS1
Contemporary Art The disappearance of the World Trade
Center, and at the Center has posed an interesting
8th Havana Biennial. dilemma: will we now build an even
He is the head
of public programs taller structure on the site in order to
at the Solomon R. prove that we are greater than before, or
Guggenheim Museum.
are more important considerations at
stake, such as safety? Herbert
Muschamp, the architecture critic of the
New York Times, rightly pointed out that
the architectural spirit of the 1970s was
very different from the one today: thirty
years ago it was quite a feat to make
such a tall building that broke all sorts of
records. The twenty-first century, by
contrast, is no longer about the
obsession with accomplishing the
impossible, since today we see our own
technological overachievement as
something ordinary. For us, the priority
is not so much to construct an
immensely large building but rather to
do something intelligent and sensible
that serves our needs as a society.
This debate might usefully be transferred
to the art world. The rapid globalization
process of recent decades has turned us
into a small economy and a
metageography, inspiring the creation of
168 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
international exhibitions that reflect the
abstract totality of this scattered
community. Consequently, biennials,
Documentas, and art fairs claim to discuss
issues that purportedly concern us all.
Hence the rhetoric of gigantism, utilized
best precisely by those whose discursive
language is fitted to large concepts,
monumental metaphors, and
philosophical premises that seek to
define a moment of international art
history. Exhibitions such as Democracy
Unrealized, The Dictatorship of the
Viewer, or Utopia Station become
hopeful micromovements that provide
all of us with momentary clarity.
However, the process of developing
large, comprehensive ideas that define a
certain artistic moment also exposes a
certain bias, as well as a certain
premeditated naivet.
First, ideas in art have become so
entangled with politics and economics
that it is often no longer possible to
distinguish whether a discourse arises
from legitimate intellectual passion or
external interests. Second, there is
constant confusion between the
definition of a group of artists under a
particular philosophical problem or idea,
When we experience an artwork,
the proof of its universality lies in
its inherent qualities, which cause
the specific experience, and not in the
curatorial description printed on the wall.
and the use of this definition as a
commercial label for the group of artists.
And third, the kind of universalist
theorizing that circulates within
curatorial practice tends to ignore
tendencies that do not fall into whatever
particular conceptual practice is in
vogue. In this regard, the marketing of
an exhibition of great scope is closer to
the world of fashion than to an
academic environment of intellectual
dialogue and investigation.
It obviously is in the interests of
international curators to create large
exhibitions with large ideas, for that
generally means large budgets, extensive
promotion, and international prominence
for the organizers making this, certainly,
more of a narcissistic than an altruistic
endeavor. Since ideas in contemporary
art are territory where we claim
ownership, we now speak of an
exhibition as Bonamis or
Enwenzors. This effort may arise
partially from a sincere intellectual belief
that great ideas constitute all art; theory,
however, does not replace experience.
When we experience an artwork, the
proof of its universality lies in its inherent
qualities, which cause the specific
experience, and not in the curatorial
description printed on the wall.
My personal hope is not necessarily to
see a biennial where the topic is the
artists mother, the color blue, or French
poodles, yet there should be a more
thorough debate as to the use of
abstract premises in international
exhibitions and, indeed, the whole
attempt to create artificial umbrella
topics. As with the World Trade Center
towers, we know that the blockbuster
idea is not a particularly great feat; it is
much harder to create an exhibition that
presents the complexity of an artists
work in the richest light possible. The
issue is how curatorial readings or
theories diminish the room of experience
by the viewer and the complexity of the
artists work.
In its best manifestations, the
intellectual striving toward the universal
in art has undoubtedly provided us with
great works, but in its worst, it falls into
cheap demagogy, with ideas so large
they are, in fact, very small. Those who
are invested in finding the great ideas
should consider that the power of art lies
in a certain specificity that is somehow
able to mean many things to others. But
when art is merely proclaimed as a
grandiose thesis, its openness and
anythingness can very soon turn it into
nothing.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 169
 VENICE 1968

"The Biennale is an old place, a bad place,

but the problem has to be discussed and resolved
within the art world, in order to avoid any form
of political manipulation and exploitation.
The artistic expression has to be guaranteed
and the different styles have to be respected
Michele Robecchi
if we want it to be free from any interference."

Lost in Translation: Pino Pascali, 1968

The 34th Venice Biennale

Michele Robecchi Spring, 1968. The movement of student
is a critic and curator
based in Milan. Former protest born in Paris, and by this time
Managing Editor of spread across the world, now made its
Flash Art International
(2000-2004), he has
first Italian appearance in Milan, a
collaborated with many northern industrial city with Central
publishing houses and European aspirations. In the first days of
institutions in Italy and
abroad. June, during the bloody week of Rio de
Janeiro, the Palazzo della Triennale, the
citys most important museum of
contemporary art and architecture, was
occupied by students. The police
intervention was firm and immediate,
and the resulting confusion generated
bitter clashes, as was often the case in
those days. There was also another kind
of confusion in the air, one that mostly
concerned contemporary artists.
Although the art world was, and still is,
an impermeable structure capable of
governing itself autonomously, in
complete independence from the
surrounding reality, there have been
moments in our history, such as during
the two world wars, when social and
political tensions reached the danger
level, forcing artists to take a position.
And the period of 1968 which now,
more than thirty years later, we can
probably define more as a time of social
than of political change was certainly
such a moment. The occupation of the
Palazzo della Triennale in Milan was a
warning bell for what would happen
some two months later. The wind blew
the climate of tension southeast, in the
direction of one of the most popular and
historically important events in both the
Italian and international art worlds: the
34th Venice Biennale, which was
scheduled to open on June 22, 1968.
The Venice Biennale, declared the
student flyers, is an instrument of the
bourgeois to codify a politics of racism
and cultural underdevelopment through
the reification of ideas. Biennale dei
padroni, bruceremo i tuoi padiglioni!
(Biennale of the rich, we will burn down
your pavilions!)
In those years, the Venice Biennale was
already in bad shape. Founded in 1895,
it still operated according to an almost
century-old statute that was inevitably
outdated. The previous few editions of
the Biennale had already seen many
artists refuse to participate. Structures
like the Ufficio Vendite (The Sales
Office), which had been created more
than twenty years earlier to sell the
works on view and which was headed
by the Italian dealer Ettore Gian Ferrari,
were the object of furious debate and
controversy. Dealers and gallerists
directly associated with the artists
objected to the fifteen-percent tax rate
imposed by the Sales Office on every
work sold. Other voices of dissent came
from those who pushed for a clear
distinction between public and private
duties and burdens, and more generally,
from those who advocated a free artistic
expression divorced from market logic.
From an organizational point of view,
the Biennale continued to rely on such
figures as Umbro Apollonio, who at the
time held the position of conservator at
the ASAC (The Historical Archive of
Contemporary Art). Apollonio was the
man who, together with Roberto Longhi,
had undertaken the difficult task of
reconstructing the Biennale from scratch
after the Fascist period and the Second
World War. More progressive views
came from other critics, such as Guido
Ballo, a leading professor at the
prestigious Accademia di Brera in Milan
and a partisan of cultural resistance in
the 1940s, a very oppressive time in
Italian and world history. In 1968,
Apollonio and Ballo were called on to
organize Linee della ricerca
contemporanea: dallinformale alle
nuove strutture (Lines of contemporary
research: from the informal to new
structures), an exhibition that, along
with a retrospective on Futurism, was

170 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 171


34th Venice Biennale intended to be the highlight of the
Works of Nicolas
Schffer Biennale. A month before the opening,
Venice became a theater of harsh
encounters between police and students
in Piazza San Marco. The gravity of
these events persuaded the mayor of
Venice, Giovanni Favaretto Fisca, to
attempt a by-invitation-only opening.
When the 34th Venice Biennale opened
on June 22, chaos ensued, fulfilling the
darkest expectations of the days before.
Police and students were the most
numerous groups, along with some lost-
looking local politicians. Most critics and
artists did not turn up. Several artists,
especially those from the younger
generation, showed their works back to
front as a sign of solidarity with the
demonstrators, while others refused
even to exhibit. A few venues remained
closed, and Bridget Riley, Horst
Janssen, Gianni Colombo, and Nicolas
Schffer won their awards in an
atmosphere of confusion and
indifference. Pino Pascali, a rising star
of the Italian art scene who, tragically,
perished in a road accident only a few
months later, wrote a text called Io la
contestazione la vedo cos? (How I see
the protest) in order to explain his
political position. Pascali was
considered to be a young and exuberant
172 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
artist, a declared antagonist, especially
because of his relationship with the Arte
Povera movement, which had been
defined just a year earlier by Germano
Celant in his manifesto Appunti per una
guerriglia (Notes for a guerrilla). Pascali
undoubtedly felt, if not a truly
ideological, then at least a generational
bond with the young protesters, but he
struggled to understand what this meant
within the art context. Today, Pascalis
position, which has recently been the
subject of lectures and debates,
deserves to be taken into consideration
since it implicitly reveals a crucial fact:
namely, that when all these social and
ideological tensions entered the art
world, they got lost in translation,
essentially becoming formal and
linguistic matters. This was an almost
cyclical generational turnover, amplified
by political positions corresponding to a
collective behavioral code that was hard
to escape. No doubt, there were those
who did not see things opportunistically
or from a certain distance, but who
naively believed in the possibility of
social change in the art system.
Politically, however, this was a false
issue, since the supposed reactionaries
against whom they were fighting were
on exactly the same side of the fence as
Today, Pascalis position, which has recently
been the subject of lectures and debates,
deserves to be taken into consideration since
it implicitly reveals a crucial fact: namely,
that when all these social and ideological
tensions entered the art world, they got lost
in translation, essentially becoming formal
and linguistic matters.
the protesters. The position of the
important Italian critics at the time, such
as Raffaele de Grada, was not very far
from what one could read in Mao-Tse
Tungs Writings on Art, which in the
early seventies was a textbook at the
University of Milan and according to
which arts role was to educate the
people and the possibility of giving an
immediate experience was an
intractable condition. The living horses
of Jannis Kounellis or the broken mirrors
of Michelangelo Pistoletto hardly fit this
approach. It was no coincidence that
Germano Celant and Alberto Boatto
considered organizing an anti-
Biennale at the Fenice Theater that
would exhibit the new generation of
artists left out of critical and, until then,
commercial approval. Still, it was too
early to talk about a real movement. In
those days, the Italian art scene was
rather fragmented, and the social
address of works like Piero Gilardis in
working-class Turin found little
correspondence in Rome, where Mario
Schifano, Pascali, and Kounellis were
following a discourse more related to
Pop Art; another factor in Rome was the
presence there of such artists as Robert
Rauschenberg and Richard Serra. The
only artist who had a romantic and
reasonable idea of a contemporary art
by and for the people was Joseph
Beuys. But Beuys was at the time still
an underappreciated and somewhat
unknown figure in Italy whose success
would come only a few years later.
So it was an internal conflict in all
senses. In the art world, the arrival of
more militant and contaminated
positions occurred in the seventies,
although the idealistic and earnest
enthusiasm of the sixties had by then
already been transformed into
something different with the arrival of
terrorism and a series of shadowy
political episodes.
The controversy around the Venice
Biennale was, however, not exclusively
political in nature. Flash Art, which at
the time was an irrefutably important
and militant voice in the Italian art
world, published an editorial called
Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice). The
magazine declared, with the usual
inflammatory prose, that the Biennale
was dead not just because of the
fights, the police, and the demonstrators,
but because it was culturally useless
and anchored to the logic of tourism and
diplomatic worldliness.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 173
 Thirty-five years after the 1968 Biennale,
the idea that the diffusion and perception
of contemporary art could be effectively
changed through revolution is still
something utopian.

There is no question that, at least from Thirty-five years after the 1968 Poster of the 34th
Venice Biennale
the cultural point of view, the 1968 Biennale, the idea that the diffusion and
Venice Biennale represented the birth of perception of contemporary art could be
a change. For the next edition, in 1970, effectively changed through revolution is
the commission decided to reduce still something utopian. If there was any
Italian participation to only seven artists, positive result from the protest, the
following the selective criteria used for Biennale itself was certainly the main
the other participating countries. On beneficiary. It emerged injured and
July 26, 1973 the Italian parliament bruised, but forced to update itself. It
approved Law 438, which reformed the was now determined to approach the
statute of the Ente Autonomo della new decade with a will to improve and
Biennale (the Biennales governing the desire to reclaim its status as a great
body), and the assignation of awards exhibition, despite its floundering image.
was temporarily suspended. This would And this goal seems to have been
start again in 1980. Ettore Gian Ferrari achieved, if we consider that today,
resigned from his job, marking the among the great jumble of art events,
definitive end of the Sales Office, and the Venice Biennale still enjoys the
after a brief but significant break from pompous yet truthful appellation
1972 through 1976, the Biennale mother of all biennials.
began its cycle of so-called theme
exhibitions: an edition co-organized by
Eduardo Arroyo that focused on the
Franco regime in Spain; Cultural
Dissent (1976), a dramatically intense
edition that saw Soviet authorities
exercising pressure on the Italian
government to have the president of the
Biennale, Carlo Ripa di Meana, resign;
and From Nature to Art, From Art to
Nature (1978). Those Biennales were
considered strange, but in fact, they
were stylistically and typologically closer
to the curatorial biennials of today.

174 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 175

 INTERVIEW

Igor Zabel: A conversation with Francesco Bonami

The Power of
Proposing Things,
of Taking Risks
Francesco Bonami If now, at a distance of three years, you to try something, and not just a big event with this kind of event. It is a legitimate successful. They think that with a Francesco Bonami
is currently Manilow
Senior Curator look back at Manifesta 3, at both the where you are mostly concerned with way to do it. The risk is always that we blockbuster they will attract more
at the Chicago Museum concept behind it and the exhibition pleasing the crowd of the professionals want, basically, clones of the big investment, but this is not true. They
of Contemporary Art.
He has contributed itself, how do you regard it? How who come. It is also very important that exhibitions, so there is a circuit of attract investments for six months, and
numerous essays important was the show for your Manifesta is a place where you can make biennials that uses one group of curators, then afterwards, they lose double,
and interviews to
periodicals and
subsequent work, and how important mistakes. This is another thing we miss a and there is another circuit that uses because people, of course, dont want to
catalogues was it in the context of the international lot - the opportunity to make mistakes. another group of curators, or the same finance a shitty show; they want to
of contemporary art
art scene at the time? We have fewer and fewer opportunities for group of artists, etc. There is never the finance another Andy Warhol show, but
and published several
of books, including I think Manifesta, this particular edition of this. When you do a Venice Biennale or a idea that a biennial should create its own there is not another Andy Warhol or
Echoes: Contemporary Manifesta, was very important. It was very Documenta, there is a psychological specificity, be a specific biennial. That is, Lucian Freud show. With biennials it is
Art at the Age of
Endless Conclusion important for me as a curator - it was a pressure on you not to make any I think, the only problem. But the fact that the same. They start with a big thing; the
(New York: Monacelli different way of working and, I think, it mistakes. And this gets into your mind; it there are so many of them provides an city invests a lot of money; they have a lot
Press, 1997); the
monographs Maurizio was an important exhibition in general. It affects your way of thinking, your way of opportunity for people to really of people... But maybe they should start
Cattelan (2003) also makes me think a lot about the organizing things, the way you look at communicate developed things. The on a smaller scale; they should develop
and Gabriele Basilico
(2001), both from nature of biennials. I think Manifesta has things. . . Manifesta was - and I think, still problem I see is that they always start out an identity. . . It is interesting what
Phaidon Press; and, a specific identity that works very well in is - a ground where you can try things out being very grandiose and then are always happened in Linz with Ars Electronica:
in collaboration with
Hans Ulrich Obrist, places like Ljubljana, in cities with a and make mistakes. Of course, mistakes forced to recede. . . They spend, maybe, they started very small and have now
Sogni/Dreams (Turin: certain dimension. Manifesta has its own are good if you are trying something out. ten million dollars for the first one, and for developed into something specific that
Fondazione Sandretto
Re Rebaudengo, 1999).
identity, its own dimension, which is very You cannot think, OK, now I am going to the second, they spend five million, and attracts a lot of attention. And that is, I
He was curator of the good as it is. And only if it maintains this make a mistake; you just have to try to then for the third, only two million, until think, interesting to do.
second Biennial of
Santa Fe, a co-curator
identity and develops it, can it aspire to be do something. But in Manifesta you have, you have just four hundred thousand
of Manifesta 3 (2000), something unique and so add to the let us say, a safety net. You do not have dollars for the fourth edition, and then Since you have considerable experience
and the director dialogue. If it becomes just another such a safety net in other exhibitions. they shut it down. It is the same thing as a curator with several biennial
of the 50th Venice
Biennale (2003). professional opportunity, like Documenta with museums that want to do exhibitions, I would like to ask you, how,
or the Venice Biennale, I think it will lose There has been a lot of talk recently blockbuster exhibitions. Once you do a in your experience, do such events relate
The interview has
been adapted from the chance to be challenging, to make about the growing number of different blockbuster, the museum is finished; its to their context?
a conversation between proposals. What we miss in the biennials. The other side of this process capacity to renew itself is finished Nobody, I think, has reflected on
Francesco Bonami and
Igor Zabel, which took contemporary art world, and in the world seems to be a tendency to equalize because they destroy the ecology of the something quite specific to the two main
place at the Moderna in general, is the concept of the them, so that every art event becomes thing. If you have one show that brings in exhibitions, Documenta and the Venice
Galerija Ljubljana on
November 30, 2003. underground, and Manifesta has a kind of similar or comparable to all the others. half a million people, any show after that Biennale: the fact that both arose from a
Some questions were underground spirit. So it was very What is your opinion about such will appear unsuccessful. So people will time of crisis. The Venice Biennale was
posed, as well,
by Zdenka Badovinac,
important for me that Manifesta had these developments? not give money because they feel there is established by someone who thought that
Dunja Kukovec, characteristics. It was a challenge, a way I always say I do not have any problem a smaller public and the museum is not Venice, as a city, was decaying. He did
and Roman Uranjek.

176 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 177

Manifesta 3, not think, Oh, Venice is a fantastic city;
Ljubljana, 2000
Ian Kiaer, everybody knows Venice; lets do a big
Breughel Project / Casa show of contemporary art there! He
Malaparte, 1999
thought, This city is going to decay; it is
in a process of decline; its only
attachment is to the past, and the only
thing that can stop this process is to
invent something that looks toward the
future. The same was true in Kassel.
Documenta emerged from the crisis after
the war. Germany was completely
destroyed, and they had to try something
- to rebuild slowly, through art, through
culture, the identity of the culture. Now,
when people go to the Biennale, they
always think in terms of celebration. They
always want to be at the Venice Biennale
- also at Documenta, but mostly at the
Venice Biennale - because of Venice itself,
because of the particular marketing
appeal of the city. So they always think in
a celebratory way; nobody thinks about
what we are lacking, about the crisis we
are facing. And the best things come out
of weakness, and sometimes isolation. I
live in Chicago, which is a city in a big
crisis - in terms of the economy, it is the
most powerful city in America, but its
cultural identity is in a big crisis. And they
do not understand; they refuse to see the
crisis; they always look at the greatness of
Chicago and operate only on that level.
Therefore, they are unable to do anything,
178 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
because they always try to delude
themselves about the state of things. . .
And so they try to compete with London,
New York - and they do not succeed,
because they are very provincial. So they
should face the fact that they are a
provincial city and try to do something
with that. People often do not analyze
exactly what the context needs; it is
always more about wishes, and not about
needs.
I think that, in the recent context of
contemporary art, it has become
increasingly difficult to really take risks
and to behave in such a way that, as you
say, one can make mistakes. It seems
that the whole context demands that
curators and artists behave in a
predictable way. How, in your opinion,
does one find ways to open up
possibilities? How does one find the open
space where mistakes are permissible?
I think the eighties destroyed all possibility
of the underground. I always think that,
when the guy shot John Lennon in the
street (even if John Lennon was
mainstream), it was the moment when
the underground ended. The eighties
started, and there was an apartheid of
consensus: you had to do certain things,
always; you could not be an outsider. The
outsider is no longer accepted, and that, I
think, is a big problem. And this affected
the way we think, as curators, critics,
artists, etc. - I will speak mostly about
curators, or maybe, critics, too. We,
perhaps even unconsciously, try to do
what the people want and sell them what
they want. And this is unnatural; this is
not a challenge. When I presented my
project for the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, the
organizers, before I was appointed, took
me to meet the head of the board. She
was a lady who was, I think, eighty-five
years old, and her husband was ninety-
two; they were extremely rich and still
fairly lucid. In America, it is all private
money, so in theory they could demand
more from a curator than a public
institution could. But paradoxically, when
she saw the project, she looked at the list
of artists and said to her husband, Look
at this fantastic project: forty-two artists
and I dont know anybody - this is great!
But in Europe, and particularly in Italy, if
they dont think of it as something they
know, they will not accept the challenge.
So this affects the way you think, and this
affects the whole way people put together
biennials. They put together the biennials,
and they always go for a dozen of names
- and I am the same, you know. You go
ask the famous people to exhibit, who are
sometimes totally unrelated to the context;
you just want the names. So, I think the
way is to take on challenges, to try to see
what happens, to propose things one feels
strongly about and are challenging. In
fact, it goes both ways. It is not only that
you propose something that is totally
alternative. You could propose, for
example, only mainstream artists for the
next biennial, but you should try to do
something challenging. It is not only the
risky thing that is challenging. Sometimes
you can present something that is super-
safe, and people respect the fact that you
are doing something else, something
new. So, I think you just have to try. Of
course it is risky. We are facing an
uneducated structure at this point; an
uneducated structure goes for the
marketing thing; it goes for the image, for
what one can sell.
There has been a lot of talk about the
position of the curator. There have also
been critical remarks that the curator is
an agent of power, that new models have
to be chosen that can somehow eschew
curatorial authority, and that new forms
of organizing and structuring exhibitions
have to be invented. How much do you
actually think about this issue of
curatorial power, and how do you relate
to these issues?
I think that at the beginning of the
nineties, the curator started to be a figure
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 179
 of the system, more than before. He
became a figure that was no longer
necessarily also an art critic or scholar; he
acquired a specific position. What I say
will sound like I am giving credit to the
Biennale we did, but, as you know, there
was an enormous amount of criticism,
and almost everybody transformed the
title, in a very banal way, into the
dictatorship of the curator. First of all,
the curator also has a moment of glory,
but you know, maybe better than I, that
we also have to take an enormous
amount of shit from the part of the artists.
We were dealing with five hundred
people, and each had his own demands,
so it is not that we always have a glorious
life. Sure, we do our job, and because we
do our job we do not want to be
overshadowed completely, to be just
butlers for the artists. We do a job and we
want to get credit for that job. I think this
is legitimate. Before, it was the artist, the
critic, and the viewer. This was the
relationship. The critic was in between, as
the filter. So the amount of criticism about
this Venice Biennale, particularly from the
art critics, indicates a resentment against
the role of the curator who is becoming
another form of filter and who can put on
the table some ideas that can go directly
to the viewer, without passing through the
critic. When the Venice Biennale opened,
180 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
despite this thing with the heat, etc., there
was an enormous amount of people.
People are like traffic. There is much more
circulation. Even if I am very glad that we
had more visitors than Harald Szeemann,
I also know, honestly, it is not only
because the show was better or more
popular, but also because people are
traveling more. More people are going
places, and so the next show will have
even more people. You know, when the
Chinese start to travel, we will have
millions of people. . . So, it is not only
because the show was good. But, in the
mind of the art critic or the journalist - they
arrived at this show, saw eleven curators,
saw thousands people attending the
opening, and I think their reaction was,
perhaps not even consciously: We have
to stop this, for if we as the press also
support this event, we will be finished, our
power will be totally finished. We really
have to create a wall that will stop this
kind of phenomenon. This was my
feeling. In fact, if you go through the
articles, you do not see a single article that
analyzes the show correctly. Nobody did a
specific analysis of the eight exhibitions in
the Arsenale, they only said, this section
was terrible, another was OK, etc. So they
were specifically trying to stop the thing.
Well, I do not think the show was perfect.
We took our chances, and this was the
result. But in a way, the curator still
seems to be an outsider in a system that
is very balanced. The curator disrupted a
certain ecology, where there was the
artist, the market, the journalists, and so
on. And the curator is a figure that now
imposes another possibility of
interpretation. But I do not think it is
possible to stop this.
Still, a curator cannot avoid a certain
This in fact sounds somehow optimistic -
that the negative reaction of the critics
indicates that the curator has the power
to go into an open field, even to do
unusual or risky moves.
Unfortunately, I have to say this kind of
resentment has also been produced by
older - and younger - colleagues who have
misunderstood the idea of power. They
think they can use their position to
produce a kind of power that is not what
you are talking about, the power to create
something new. They have this idea that
they embody a figure of power. This is
what I am against. You really have to have
self-control, because you can really cause
damage, which can be irreversible if you
really become a dictator in the sense that
you control the two years that you are
putting together the Biennale, or the five
years when you do Documenta, etc. - if
you consider yourself invincible during
this time. We are very weak and very
vulnerable. You can have the power that Entrance to the Giardini,
50th Venice Biennale,
is the power of proposing things, of taking 2003
risks. But you take risks knowing you can
be wrong. If you know you will be right, it
is no longer risk-taking. Maybe it is not
necessarily a big risk, but if you start
something believing you are totally right,
that is really damaging.
power position. Curators are the people
who make the choices, who establish the
criteria of selection, select some artists
and exclude others.
Yes, you have the moment of decision. I
dont think it is dictatorial. You always
make decisions in life. If you work, you
make decisions constantly - the friends
you are seeing for dinner, the friends you
are not seeing for dinner. The life of a
curator is really a parable of the personal
life. You make decisions; it happens all
the time. And in doing a show, you make
decisions. And if you indulge too much in
the scale and spectacle - I would say, in
the advertising (there are artists who are
advertisers and I dont say that as a
negative thing; they capture our attention
because they use a certain language that
is the language of advertising) - when you
go too much in that direction, you really
do a disservice both to the viewer and the
show. You know, they accused me of not
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 181
 having an image, like the big boy by
Mueck, at the beginning. The accusation
by the international structure was that I
didnt have an image that could represent
the exhibition. And this is all they ask for
now - something that can go on a poster
and that can be that show. And I dont
think this is fair, because the show is not
about having one image, but about an
experience, and the experience you build
in the space.
When you decided to give autonomy to
the curators, was this the idea from the
start, or were there other ideas, for
example, to create a team?
No, I hate teams, because I think that a
team is hypocritical. With a team, you
only create very angry people on opening
day. They work for you, they give you
information, but in the end, the only one
the journalists want to interview is the
head of the team, the Director. So, in the
end, this is a way of having people work
for you. It is better that you get assistants
who do the work and know they are
assistants. The idea was really, from the
very beginning, to take a chance, to invite
people to have their own shows and I
wouldnt have anything to do with them.
And they didnt even want to have
discussions among themselves. I didnt
even suggest that they should have a
182 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
communal discussion about how the
Biennale should look. They had their own
shows; they could do whatever they
wanted. You know, we always talk about
globalization, multiplicity, fragmentation,
but in the end, there is always this red line
that connects everything. If we talk about
fragmentation, I want you to have the
experience of a fragmented situation. It is
like when you travel. You cross a border
and you are in another reality; you have to
change language, you have to change
money, you have to change the time on
the watch. . . and that is what I wanted it
to be like. I wanted to be surprised, too,
by what was happening to the exhibition.
The one thing we did discuss together
was the rhythm of the series of shows. For
example, one curator didnt want to have
anothers show next to his because there
were some similarities in the way of
thinking, etc. Paradoxically, we didnt
want to create confusion. We didnt want
you to slide into a show without actually
knowing if it is still the same show or not.
We wanted to create a rhythm; we
wanted there to really be a break from one
section to another.
People have also questioned whether the
Biennale was more about the curators or
the artists.
I would accept the criticism that it was
about the curators if I had on my table -
not five hundred letters but, say, even
twenty - letters saying, This was a
scandal; it was only about curators. Not
one artist complained about the Biennale!
Well, they complained about other things
- because they didnt have their screws or
because the hotel was bad - but they
didnt complain about me or others taking
over the show; they accepted it. It was
only from the outside that it was about the
dictatorship of the curator. It was also
about curatorship, but curatorship is
about artists. I could have invited all the
people that I was in synch with and have
a very even exhibition. But I also wanted
people who I would normally not co-
curate a show with because of their
completely different way of thinking.
What were your criteria for choosing the
curators? Also, I have been wondering
what your opinion is about technology-
related art, and since there were so many
curators, then why was there no one who
specialized in this sort of art?
I didnt choose the curators for geographic
reasons, but mostly because of the
subjects they were dealing with and were
interested in. Of course, one was more
oriented toward Eastern Europe and
another toward Asia, but I didnt want to
have specific curators for specific areas. I
knew some of them; I didnt know others.
I also invited Catherine David, who is not
a curator that I particularly think in tune
with; I do not have syntony with what she
was doing, but I thought she was doing
research in a field that is particularly
interesting at this moment. And regarding
technology, there was a lot of technology;
there was a connection with that thing. I
dont believe in isolating this into a
separate art field. I was participating at a
panel on web art, and they hated me.
They showed me, as an example of web
art, one of the most disgusting videos I
have ever seen in my life, and that relates
to a lot of this web - I dont call this web
art, because they are not artists. These
people who work with the web, they are
like people who specialize in building a
perfect brush. I am sure there are other
people, but you dont see them. You know
why you dont see them? Because they do
not go out of their rooms or studios where
they produce this material. In America,
this category of web artists doesnt exist.
You have tons of people working on the
Net, on the web, but with completely
different ideas about what art is. And you
dont see them; they are closed inside
their own context. You see what they do
on the Internet, but there is not this
translation into the space, which is a
contradiction to me. But they think in the
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 183
50th Venice Biennale, same way as those people who were
2003
Michal Rovner telling me that Marlene Dumass painting
Against Order? is not good because the background is not
Against Disorder?
2003
painted properly, the canvas is not primed
Installation view properly, the brushstroke is not OK - it is
at the Israeli Pavilion exactly the same thing. They showed me
a video that was absolutely perfect in
terms of digital technique, but it was like
a perfectly painted portrait made by
someone who studied academic painting
in a school. And this is the big
misunderstanding. There is this group of
people who demand that web art should
be given more space - and this is already
a contradiction. Web art doesnt need
more space; it happens in virtual space,
and that is where it really succeeds. And
it succeeds with people who look only at
their computers. But there is this
temptation, this hypocritical attitude - they
want to be in the big show; they want to
produce works of art in the space. It is like
painters who use video because they try
to fool you into thinking they also do video
art.
How do you actually work with artists?
When you start work on a group show,
for example, what is the position the
artists have? What is your approach to
them? Do you usually select particular
works or do you enter a particular
conversation, etc.?
184 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
I try not to establish any kind of
relationship with the artists, if possible. I
try not to go to dinners, not even for a
coffee. I try to maintain the relationship on
the technical level, as much as possible.
Then there are artists who become
friends, because they are nice people and
they think I am a nice person, but this is
on a different level. I try to avoid the
tendency to become a friend. That is the
most difficult thing to overcome. When
you enter the studio of an artist, there is
this old-fashioned idea that you
immediately establish a relationship that
can never be erased. But it is a technical
thing. It is like if you went to buy a car and
then had to invite the car salesman to
dinner - no, you go to buy a car, and if
you like it, you buy it; if you dont like it,
you dont buy it. It is the same with an
artist. So I try to avoid this particular
relationship. Sometimes, with artists I
trust, I want them to develop a project;
with those that I do not trust, I prefer to
have the work that I have in mind. And
there are artists whom I never met. . . I
invited them to Venice, and I do not know
what they look like. It is, of course, always
interesting to have an exchange, but for
me, it is not mandatory.
If we now return to the issue of the
Venice Biennale, I imagine that, once
you were appointed Director of the
Biennale, one of the first questions you
asked yourself was about what was still
possible to do, what was still
challenging, and also about the role and
function of big art events and their
meaning at the present moment. What
were your thoughts and reflections at the
time?
First of all, I started to reflect about how
you deal with this thing. Do you take it as
an exhibition or do you take it as an
event? I took it mostly as an event. I do
not think it is accurate to think about the
Venice Biennale as an exhibition. Even if
it is curated by one curator, it is a big
survey, not an exhibition. You cannot
create a real sequentiality of works. As an
event, it can be a big skin that contains
many different exhibitions, ideas, and
projects, so I took it as an event. Then I
started to reflect on how you can deal with
this event, and I decided to invite people
and give them autonomy for their projects
- which, I have to give myself credit, was
a risky choice, because you all could have
really messed up, in an amazing, terrible
way, and I gave - maybe you do not agree
- but I gave you total autonomy about
what you can do in your space, and I
never intervened in any of your decisions.
But if I could go back to the moment I was
appointed, I would do exactly the same
thing again. However, I am not doing the
next Biennale, but if I were, I would do
something completely different. The big
problem is, when you do it, how you can
do it again with the same energy? To do
the same structure would be banal. And
maybe I would not be so lucky. Because
I consider myself extremely lucky with the
exhibitions I had in the Biennale. So, I
reflected on: What are these big events?
Big events are anthologies; they are not
big novels. There used to be grand
curators for grand shows. I think, there are
no longer any grand shows, and we are
not grand curators anymore. We just do
anthologies; we are editors. We put
together different ideas, different things,
and we create a cover for them. We
design it, let us say.
I remember that at the time of Manifesta
3, there were a lot of discussions about
the relation between the exhibition and
the city. Did such discussions take place
also in Venice? Was the issue of the
relation between the city and the
Biennale an urgent one, or was the
Biennale understood primarily as an
event for people who come to Venice and
not as something particularly intended
for the context of the city?
In any city, there is always a discussion
about the city, the artists who live in the
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 185
 city, the connection with the city. . .
Venice is particularly complicated,
because, you know, Venice doesnt need
the Biennale - well, this year they actually
did need it, because with SARS and the
Iraqi war, tourism was down by forty
percent, so the opening of the Biennale
saved the season for a lot of businesses
there. . . But usually, they do not need it;
they have thirty million people coming
through, spending money. . . But how do
you connect an event like that to the city?
We tried to do it with these Interludes,
types of projects that were functional, not
to the city, but to the spaces where they
were. They were not just sculptures. For
example, the fountain in front of the train
station - people were using it without
knowing it was the Biennale. There were
big billboards covering the houses; I saw
people waiting for the vaporetto just
looking at them, wandering what they
were. So I tried to create this point of
perspective, to make people, even if they
were not going to the Biennale, encounter
something that could be advertising, art,
or something - but I was trying to make an
impression. So, I think, you can melt the
Biennale a little bit into the city, but it is
very difficult to connect it in a way that is
apparent. And it was even more melted
into the city, because we had thirty-six
pavilions all over the city. But, of course,
186 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
the Giardini and Arsenale remain the
cornerstone of the whole show.
think the great danger that contemporary
I would like to turn now to the theme of
the Biennale. You connected the title
Dreams and Conflicts with the dual
nature of art today. On the one side,
there is a constant urge for art to
intervene in the social space and be
directly active; on the other side, there is
the particular nature of art that is
distanced and not a direct part of the
social reality.
The title Dreams and Conflicts comes
from the history of the Biennale itself. As I
said before, for the guy who started the
Biennale in the middle of a crisis, it was a
dream, and it became immediately a
conflict, and for the past 103 years, the
Biennale has been a conflict - with the
city, with the reality. Then, inside the
Biennale you have another dream and
conflict. You have the dream of this
universal exhibition with no borders, and
then you have the reality, the conflict of
the national pavilions, etc. And art,
particularly now, is in constant conflict:
Should art blend into life and become
anthropology, sociology, all these fields
that are not artistic, or should it maintain
its specificity, a dream-like situation,
where you cross the threshold and enter
another world, which is the world of art?
This is a transformed world from which
you can re-address the world beyond. I
art is facing is the constant erasure of this
threshold. In spite of what we think, we
still cross the threshold when we go into a
movie theater. There you can see a very
challenging experimental film, but you
cross the threshold, you go inside the
deputy space, space that has symbolic
characteristics. You go to the theater and
you enter this space. Brecht always
wanted to stress the fact that you have to
remember you are a viewer in a specific
context. Now it often happens that you go
to see art and you never become a viewer,
you just continue your normal life. You
see news at home and then you go to an
art show where an artist is showing you
news. For me, for you, for most of us
here, this is something we can theorize,
but for the probably 255,000 people who
went to the Venice Biennale, if they found
themselves standing in front of the news,
they were disappointed. They would
rather be challenged, they would rather be
in a state of confusion, than to be put in a
state of clarity, of constant clarity. They
never embody the position they are
looking for - to be a viewer. They are
people, and they keep being people, and
if this threshold is not there, then we are
creating a situation that is extremely
unsatisfying in the society. And if you are
unsatisfied, you cannot make any
changes.
So this also explains the second part of
the Biennales title. In a sense, the
Dictatorship of the Viewer, which is the
viewer being challenged and engaged, is
actually a response to the tension
between dreams and conflicts.
Yes, the viewer becomes the dictator of
his own experience, his own imagination,
and his own relationship with the work of
art. We talk about numbers; we always
talk about audience, the public, but in the
end, the experience of art is an experience
that is absolutely private. You can be
surrounded by three thousand people, but
it is not a collective experience. You dont
clap in front of a painting or a sculpture;
you dont cheer, as you do for a goal at a
stadium; you dont laugh as you do in a
movie theatre. You stand in front of
something and you think; this is the only
thing you can do. So you have to become
the dictator of these experiences.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 187

Curating Biennials
Jimmie Durham
and Cheryl Buchanan, during
the first conference for On
Reason and Emotion, the
Biennale of Sydney 2004.
Artist Jimmie Durham, who
will hold a residency in
Sydney and create new work
for the Biennale, and Cheryl
Buchanan, an Aboriginal
activist, have been friends
from more than thirty years.
Photo: Derek Kreckler.
Isabel Carlos is a curator and
an art critic. She is the
founder, and was Deputy
Director 1996 to 2001,
of the Instituto de Arte
Contempornea (IAC)
of the Portuguese Ministry of
Culture. Her recent exhibitions
include Trading Images - one
year international exhibition
cycle (Museu da Cidade,
Lisboa, 1998), Initiare (Centro
Cultural de Belm, Lisboa,
2000) and Helena Almeida:
Inhabited Drawings (The
Drawing Center, New York,
2004). She is the curator of
the Sydney Biennial 2004.
188
CURATORIAL REFLECTIONS
Isabel Carlos
The Importance of the Place
My way of working with the biennial
model is very focused on the place
where Im doing the exhibition: each
country and locality demands a specific
approach. There are certain issues that it
makes more sense to work on in one
place than in another. My approach is
specific, too, because I believe that
biennials provide good platforms for
artists to develop new work, especially,
site-specific work.
When I say site-specific work, I mean
not only the site as a physical space, but
also as an economic, social, and
political space.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
While I believe that a curators primary close watch on his wife. iek says that Manifesta 1,
Rotterdam, 1996
concern should be the artists and their a pathology does not depend on the
works, I also believe that potential truth on whether or not the woman Didier Trenet
Equilibre thermostatique
viewers should never be forgotten. has a lover or Sadam is good or bad des motivations, 1996
Thats why in the case of the Sydney the pathology exists solely to maintain Manifesta 1, Rotterdam,
Biennial, for example, I decided to keep the identity of the ill person, the 1996
Photo: Jannes Linders,
the biennial within a walking-distance persecutor and the one who feels Rotterdam,
environment; my concern was to create persecuted. And the trauma is, at one the Netherlands.
an event that would be a gratifying and the same time, both individual and Garden-installation
experience for viewers, not only in social. at Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen
artistic terms but also in a way that
The artist has
would allow them to experience the city These reflections may help us analyze transformed the garden
and the urban space. The reverse is also
true; I wanted the artwork to be located
Rosa Martinez another antagonism, one that is perhaps
less important but nevertheless
of Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen into
On Individual and/or Collective pleasure grounds based
on a familiar, daily route taken by many
viewers so as to make them stop and
Curatorial Work
troublesome due to the ideological
baggage and moral connotations it
on Classicist French
garden architecture.
look at the place in a different way. carries: namely, that of the curator Rosa Martinez
According to Slavoj iek, the collision is an art critic and
working individually or collectively. The
between the ship and the iceberg in the an independent curator.
This issue is important for me because issue of the authority (and authorship) She has curated
film Titanic takes place in order to avert
its a kind of roadmap for the curator, for of the curator who puts together an numerous solo and
a catastrophe of even greater group shows, including
the viewer, and even for the artists; exhibition, especially one that will have Manifesta 1, Rotterdam,
significance and with more far-reaching
otherwise, the show can become just a great media impact, as biennials and 1996 (member of the
consequences than the sinking of a curatorial team), 5th
summarizing of various artworks. other major international exhibitions Istanbul Biennial, 1997,
ship: the real tragedy would have been
tend to do, is subject to incessant 3rd SITE Santa Fe
the shock the girl would suffer upon Biennial, 1999, EV+A,
There are several limitations faced by a debate and is sometimes explicitly
leaving her world of riches to live with Limerick, 2000, 2nd
curator doing a biennial, from the physical questioned. At a time when the Pusan Biennial, 2000
the poor immigrant in New York. (co-curator), and the
spaces available to financial restrictions formation of teams seems to be the
Psychoanalysis has taught us that Spanish Pavilion at the
but that is all part of the job. politically correct and well-established Venice Biennale, 2003.
dramas and monsters exist in order to
practice, the new director of Documenta
distract us from the real trauma: the
There have been a lot of statements, has surprised many by asserting that he
antagonism that makes the Nazi need
recently, about biennials. I dont want to will work alone, directly with the artists.
the Jew, the United States demonize
add to that number, so Im just keeping There is no lack of significant and
Sadam, and the jealous husband keep
to what is essential. noteworthy precedents for this the
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 189
Manifesta 1, paradigm being, of course, the
Rotterdam, 1996
Douglas Gordon/ legendary Harald Szeemann but at
Rirkrit Tiravanija the beginning of the twenty-first century,
Cinema libert
& Bar lounge,
such individual boldness recalls a model
Collection : FRAC that is on the way out, burdened with
Languedoc - Roussillon, egocentricity, arrogance, and romanti-
France
Photo: Jannes Linders, cism or too closely linked to the
Rotterdam, obsequiousness of some hypothetical
the Netherlands.
star system. While the individualism
Cinma Libert is a associated with bourgeois ideology is
collaborative project
between Douglas
usually frowned upon from the clearly
Gordon and Rirkit melancholic left wing, teamwork seems
Tiravanija. Gordon to assuage bad moral conscience and
shows films that were
censured when they guarantee a variety of diverse positions
were released in the and respect or tolerance for the way
Netherlands. Visitors
can take a seat others think. Yet a policy of pact-making
on great beanbags and consensus can lead to other forms
and view these films.
Besides there is a bar
of perversion and, in the case of
designed by Tiravanija, exhibitions, transform them into
which serves beverages. disconnected collages whose fragments
not only convey their own dislocations
but inhibit even the temporary illusion of
a certain sense of discourse.
The triumph of individual sovereignty
over tradition and the confrontation
between the individual and the
collective are an essential part of
modern humanist discourse. Today,
however, the concepts of authority and
authorship are burdened by a guilt that
post-modern permissiveness has helped
190 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
liberate, largely thanks to appropriation
strategies and the proliferation of
quotation. Confusion, not to mention
cynicism, is the flip-side of this
supposed liberation. In the present state
of chaos (the paradise of exacerbated
liberalism), new technologies and new
formats of global economy are decisive
factors that make it necessary to rethink
models of coexistence on a worldwide important curatorial teams at a number
level. The meaning of individual and
collective action needs to be reinvented
thinking globally and acting locally,
forming new connection networks,
redefining the concept of locality within
a transnational context, shaping an
individual identity at a time when the
exacerbated standardization of
consumption and desire are
fundamental elements of critical
thought. Our inevitable task is to
formulate new kinds of resistance to the
dominant models that foster the
desocialization and demotivation of the
res publica.
In this context, biennials have become a
privileged exhibition typology for
showcasing local artists as the authors
of international vocabularies, promoting
transgenerational, transdisciplinary and
multicultural encounters, as well as
supporting a desire for post-colonial
legitimization. Detractors accuse
biennials of being part of the host cities
tourism marketing, of creating
superficial connections between visual
languages, of promoting an international
stylistic mannerism, and so on.
Throughout my professional career, I
have had the opportunity to be part of
individual and collective curatorial work
of biennial events. Manifesta 1
(Rotterdam, 1996), the International
Project Rooms at ARCO (Madrid, 1998-
2001) and PICAF (Pusan, Korea,
2000) were exercises in collective
curatorship, while the 5th Istanbul
Biennial (1997), the 3rd Santa Fe
Biennial (New Mexico, 1999), EVA
2000 (Limerick, Ireland), and the
Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
(2003) were individual curatorships.
Although working alone is often
associated with autonomy and the
freedom to make decisions, on the
whole, it involves a greater intellectual
and logistical strain than working with a
team in which responsibilities are
shared. Post-modernity has led to the
existence of other formulas and the
dissemination and multiplication of
curatorial models, but there is always an
underlying confrontation between the
individual and the collective. The Manifesta 1, Rotterdam,
1996
ambivalence that exists between these Ayse Erkmen,
two options never stops working and Installation at Villa
Museumpark 9,
fluctuates in giving priority to either The text Oh, what a
freedom or equality, both of which are, nice house! I wonder
in any case, entirely modern notions. who lives there? I must
go in and see!, written
onto the outer wall of
I recall that Manifesta 1 was one of the Villa Museumpark 9,
is a quotation taken
those occasions when discussions about from the fairytale
Goldilocks. It creates
an ironic undertone
took on great significance. The sum total referring to the buildings
of the different visions and positions exquisite architecture
gave rise to enriching conflicts and and its function as
an exhibition space.
highly varied forms of acceptance and The girlish handwriting
coexistence between the aesthetic brings back memories
of trying your hardest
positions of the curators and, to write neatly in your
consequently, in forms of cohabitation exercise book.
Photo: Jannes Linders,
between the artists. The methodologies Rotterdam,
used to select the artists were based on the Netherlands.
an exhaustive search involving travel,
open houses, and informative
exchanges between the geopolitical
zones we came from. At times, artists
were chosen democratically, by either
absolute or simple majority, but we also
made room for personal obsessions.
That is to say, we had a rule whereby
each curator had the right to choose one
artist even if his or her other four
colleagues were diametrically opposed. I
also recall, as an anecdotal yet
important event, that, we five curators
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 191
Curators of Manifesta 1 Viktor Misiano, Katalin Nray, Hans
at the press conference,
Rotterdam, 1996 Ulrich Obrist, Andrew Renton, and
myself had never met previously, and
the combination of our timidity and
mutual respect, together with our own
uncertainties due to the newness and
experimental nature of the event, meant
that, initially, our modus operandi was
not making adequate progress in the
eyes of the organizers; consequently
they brought in a psychologist to
dynamize our group relations. In our
therapeutic encounter, we described our
personal and professional backgrounds,
but the thing helped unite us the most
and where the therapy was most
effective was the strangeness of the
situation itself and a certain sense of
how ridiculous and comical it was.
This small anecdote aside, Manifesta
was an extraordinarily enriching
collective curatorial experience thanks to
the convergence of visions of different
origins and the conjunctions and
disjunctions created among us. My next
curatorial commission was the artistic
directorship of the 5th Istanbul Biennial,
which has always maintained the
system of a single curator. To date, the
Istanbul Biennial has been the greatest
project of my career and was a unique
192 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
opportunity to shape the aesthetic and
political visions that sustained me at
that time. I placed the emphasis on
female artists (who constituted sixty
percent of the final selection) and on
expanding the Biennial throughout the
city as a way to test the idea of the
exhibition as an urban promenade,
which was a hot topic at the time. My
individual decision-making processes
were influenced by recommendations
from an extensive group of international
advisers. As the budget for traveling was
fairly limited, I relied on invaluable help
from a number of skilled experts
worldwide, specialists in their local
realities, who preselected potential
artists for my consideration and sent us
catalogues, dossiers, and assessments
of the creative situation in their area of
reference. Without this help, I would
have been unable to put together a
biennial whose energy has been
permanently etched in the pages of the
history of this type of event.
I might summarize my thesis by saying
that, even if you believe you are working
individually, you are only interpreting
and expressing a series of collective
pulsions, and when working collectively,
you have great opportunities to affirm
your own individuality by being Manifesta 1,
Rotterdam, 1996
compelled to identify with, or distance
yourself from, the visions of others.
Today, the diversity of the models of
curatorial collaboration goes beyond the
simple opposition of individual and
collective, and there are myriad forms of
experiencing the limitations and
possibilities of transforming reality
through an exhibition. Alone, or with
others, inside or outside the museum,
the aim continues to be to reformulate
the aesthetic and emotional tensions
that are condensed in the works and to
articulate discursive strategies that
transform the exhibition into a revealing
text for others. It is necessary to navigate
the different logics of knowledge,
exchange, and pleasure. For in love, as
in politics or exhibitions, the encounter
with the face of the other makes my
existence problematic (as iek goes on
to say), and my individual pathology is
compelled to find a road to recovery that
is both personal and collective.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 193
 ART IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

Thomas Wulffen

Trapped in a Paradox
Thomas Wulffen Already, the Roman Empire represen- Identifying it proves more difficult than not as a globalized event, but rather as
is a curator and critic.
He was a co-curator ted, within its historical circumstances, tracing those localities that are not a transnational one. This distinction still
at Kunst-Werke Berlin a globalized economy, and the same marked by this globe of free-flowing preserves locality, the relationship to a
Institute for
Contemporary Art can be said of Napoleons empire. It capital and transnational corporations. nation and to a place. It is this relation
and Theory through was only in the nineteenth and Since there is no actual opponent, the to locality that defines the decisive
1995. He has
published texts twentieth centuries, with the rise of the regular meetings of the G7 represent a distinction with globality. And this is the
in Kunstforum
International, Artscribe,
nation-state, that this early kind of target for resistance and opposition to decisive point where resistance to
Flash Art, and other globalization came to an end, even as globalization. When reports of extensive globality can prove itself.
journals. He has edited
several publications,
the foundations for a new and different starvation on the African continent again
including Realkunst- globalization were laid with the spread begin to appear on the front pages of our Certainly, one of the most annoying
Realittsknste: Eine
Begriffsbestimmung of colonialism. This new globalization is newspapers, will the total deficit of aspects of contemporary art and culture
und begleitendes characterized by enormous capital flows globalization once more be made is that blockbuster exhibitions, as well
Material (1987),
Betriebssystem Kunst and transnational companies that can evident? This total would appear even as the numerous biennials, renounce
(1994), and Der operate outside the control of any larger if globalization were not precisely such locality and seek to work
gerissene Faden
The contemporary art exhibition today is
Nichtlineare Techniken characterized not by its use of small particular state. It is now possible to associated with a propaganda machine in global dimensions. It is not
in der Kunst (2001), speak about a non-national economy, that prevents even the awareness of the immediately clear how much of this is
all published forms, but rather by its striving for global
by Kunstforum dimensions. For it is only with such an as is reflected in Michael Hardt and Toni processes of exclusion. Rather, what is the fault of globalization and how much
International (Cologne).
He is currently working aim that an exhibition can assert itself. Negris concept of empire. presented is what has been included, and the fault of the pressing expectations of
on the exhibition But the truth of this statement really Globalization, however, is primarily an if this is culture or art, so much the better. the experts and the public. But one
The Torn Thread
for Martin-Gropius-Bau depends on the exhibitions point of economic term. In spite of all efforts, it cannot separate the cultural sphere from
Berlin in 2005. view, and this point of view is, from the has so far been impossible to determine On the other hand, culture always economics. A big exhibition is an
very start, global. This may seem like its cultural counterpart. When such carries with it a strong local aspect. It is, integral part of the complex
self-fulfilling prophecy: Do we have attempts have been made, they have in any case, difficult to describe these configuration of other exhibitions that
blockbuster exhibitions as a response to usually been directly opposed to facts without falling into the rhetoric of a compete with it. This competition, too,
the globalized conditions we live in, or globalization. One real opposition would Sunday sermon. Culture becomes, then, is essentially economic; cities and
does globalization entail such be a relationship to an actual place, a a sedative that hides the contradictions communities compete for companies,
exhibitions? And how should we location, in contrast to a globality that and threats of contemporary society. investments, and prestige.
understand globalization itself? What is knows no site except the globe. And Local regard turns into national if not,
merely a catchword, and what are the the globe of globalization is neither a indeed, nationalist regard. Therefore, What presents itself here is cultural
facts? homogeneous unity nor an actual place. a deliberate distinction is necessary: art, capital in both senses of the word.

194 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 195

 On the one hand, this means the actual
finances that support and appropriate
culture. Support and appropriation are
two sides of the same coin. Those who
suppose that they can make decisions
in freedom and independence from the
economic sphere will very soon discover
that the cultural sphere is like a balloon;
it is easily punctured. On the other
hand, cultural capital as such is being
saved as profit that results from the
distinction between the local and the
global. Just as it is impossible to
determine the features of a locality
without considering its relationship with
other localities (and this eventually
means its relationship with the global),
we can experience the distinction
between two biennials only by
comparing them. This, however, leads
to the homogeneity of a certain kind of
exhibition model that makes such global
comparisons possible and that cannot
be understood as a Temporary
Autonomous Zone, in Hakim Beys
sense of the term. Hou Hanru points to
this model in his text Time for
Alternatives. The time is here, and the
alternatives, too, and Hou Hanru
attempted, in Project 1 at the Gwangju
196 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Biennial 2002, to present an alternative
approach. A platform for presentation
was offered to various artistic groups,
artist-run spaces, and art movements. A
contradiction or paradox, however,
threatens such presentations. One
element eventually creates a frame-
effect, and this leads to yet another
consequence: in order to find a common
denominator, the various initiatives are
re-presented; they stand now on a
stage, in a frame. On the one hand, they
are released from their original context,
while on the other, they address an
unknown public. In the frame, however,
the image itself gets changed. The
agenda or processes of the participating
institution are now put in quotation
marks. If this model of participation by
institutions of the same type artistic
or political is expanded, the specific
stereotype of biennials emerges. Thus,
the very motivation of the biennial is
itself seemingly questioned, since it
delegates its own legitimization to
others, who are clearly not opposed to
this. But on the biennial stage, such
initiatives lose their foundation, which is
reduced merely to indicating something
that is not the biennial. (This happened,
for example, this year at the Paris
Biennial.) But in this way, the most
current model of biennials is
strengthened, since its goal is to be no
longer a biennial, at least in its most
topical and contemporary aspects it
becomes an international style. And this
is good, since the visitor must be given
the possibility of recognizing something.
Only through the process of recognition
can one experience the difference that
can, superficially, serve as the basis for
a biennial. Thus we again find ourselves
in the process of globalization: as much
globality as is necessary, as much
locality as is required.
Biennials, then, face a paradox that is
almost insoluble: to provide globality in
respect to locality. Two ways are
possible, although it is not clear whether
they may actually lead to a dead end.
First, those who want to promote or
strengthen opposition to globality should
support locality. That also means they
understand biennials as a kind of planet
around which other satellites circulate,
including those local initiatives that
remain local and keep their local
references. The planet itself merely
indicates the trajectory of the satellites
while presenting only works that can
exist without a locality. The second way
is to tie the biennial strictly to a certain
location, to link its production and
contents to the location and hope that
someone will come around. This might
work for cities like Berlin or Moscow,
but what happens in places like
Stuttgart or Yekaterinburg? Manifesta 5
in San Sebastin, Spain, follows this
model in the way it began. A third
possible model should be noted merely
as a question: How about completely
abolishing the model of the biennial, so
as to reopen the possibility of perceiving
and bringing into focus the small, the
overlooked, the locally produced, and
the unclassifiable? Just a dream...
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 197
 DISCUSSION

Hosting and
Hospitality in Art:
The International Dimension
Transcription by On September 6, 2003, the International Foundation Manifesta, in collaboration
Marieke van Hal
with the Dutch section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA),
Marieke van Hal organized a public discussion at the Felix Meritis European Center for Arts and
is an art historian
and the general
Science in Amsterdam on the issue of hosting and hospitality in art. This discussion,
coordinator of the the first in a series of such events, treated various notions of hosting in both national
International Foundation and international context. The panelists and the audience were invited to explore
Manifesta, Amsterdam.
and reflect on the implications of hosting international contemporary art events,
such as Manifesta and other biennials. The following represents the greater part of
the discussion.

Panelists: Rein Wolfs, head of exhibitions

Viktor Misiano, art critic and curator
and initiator of the Moscow Art Biennial
2004;
Daniel Birnbaum, co-curator of the
Venice Biennale 2003 and the director
of the Portikus and Staedelschule Art
Academy, Frankfurt am Main;
Saskia Bos, director of the Berlin
Biennial 2001 and director
of De Appel, Amsterdam;
Paul Domela, deputy chief executive
of the Liverpool Biennial 2002;
Moderators:
Ole Bouman, chief editor, Archis, and a
co-curator of Manifesta 3;
Jeroen Boomgaard, art critic and
professor at the University of
Amsterdam and the Gerrit Rietveld
Academy.
at the Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen and curator of the Dutch
Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2003;
Antje von Graevenitz, professor of art
history at the University of Cologne;
Francesco Bonami, director of the
Janneke Wesseling: Good afternoon. On quite a few of us here are curators as well as
Venice Biennale 2003 and Manilow
behalf of the Dutch section of AICA, Id like to art critics, but we may assume that we do not
Senior Curator at the Museum
welcome you all to this discussion. This perform these two activities simultaneously, at
of Contemporary Art, Chicago;
discussion will center around the least not on the same subject. The subject this
Erik Hagoort, art critic, the Netherlands;
consequences of large-scale temporary afternoon is quite complicated when we think
Lourdes Fernandez, director of
international exhibitions, like Manifesta and about what a host is and what a guest is. If
Manifesta 5, Donostia-San Sebastin.
other biennials, for the local situation, in their we think about Manifesta, for example, you
political, cultural and artistic respects. We are can argue that Manifesta is both a host and a
very happy as AICA to be able to collaborate guest. Hedwig Fijen, who will now introduce
Introductions were made by:
on this with Manifesta. Its the first time we the afternoon discussion to you, will be able
Hedwig Fijen, director of International
are doing this. Id like to think of it as a to clarify this. I want to thank Hedwig Fijen
Foundation Manifesta, Amsterdam; and
meeting between critics and curators. Perhaps and Jeroen Boomgaard for organizing this
Janneke Wesseling, president, AICA,
this is simplifying the situation a little, but I meeting. They are the ones who have invited
the Netherlands.
am doing this on purpose, so as to liven up you here and have prepared the discussion. I
the discussion. Im quite aware of the fact that wish you a very good afternoon.

198 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 199

 Hedwig Fijen: Id like to welcome everyone
participating in this public discussion, which
the International Foundation Manifesta and
AICA-Netherlands have organized on the
occasion of the opening, later this afternoon,
of our new premises in Amsterdam, which
we call Manifesta at Home. Manifesta is the
European Biennial of Contemporary Art.
Manifesta started in Rotterdam at the
beginning of the nineties, where it also
opened its first edition in the summer of
1996. Four editions later, Manifesta has
moved to the Basque city Donostia-San
Sebastin, where Manifesta 5 will open its
doors on June 11, 2004. Manifesta at Home
is mediating a growing international network
by initiating various activities, such as
publications, archives, conferences, a trainee
program and the transfer of information and
knowledge from one city to another.
Manifesta at Home functions as the
backbone structure of a nomadic biennial of
contemporary art, which moves every two
years from one place to another.
If we look up the word hosting in Websters Hospitality has been declared as a human
Dictionary, you will be surprised to learn that
the meaning of hosting, deriving from the
Latin hostis, means stranger and, also,
enemy. Today, we might explore the
multilayered meanings and implications of
being and acting as a host. This gathering is
meant as the first in a series of discussions
about hosting and hospitality that will be held
in Liverpool and Amsterdam, and we would
like you as audience, artists, and specialists
to participate in exploring current notions of
hosting, as well as to reflect on new
strategies toward hosting.
Manifesta, as a nomadic biennial, is based
on the notion of hosting. Without the host,
Manifesta cannot exist. At the same time,
Manifesta maintains a degree of
independence in relation to the hospitality
provided by the host and in its own behavior
toward guests. Whilst remaining a guest in
other European host cities, Manifesta at
Home itself now hosts a permanent base for
200 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
the Manifesta network in Amsterdam - a city
that is historically characterized as an open
haven and a catalyst for the international flow
of information.
Cities nowadays show an eagerness to
connect to an international network to create
an exchange of information and a flow of
energy. The willingness to emphasize a more
international cultural policy is defined both by
local and national advisory bodies.
Internationalization implies a form of
interaction and reciprocity. But what does
this actually mean for the players and
stakeholders? What does it mean to play the
role of host for a city, for an institution, or for
artists, and what does it mean to be take on
the role of guest? Host and guest are
indissolubly connected and depend on each
other at many levels in order to generate a
flow of information.
Hospitality is defined as the right of the
stranger, the guest, not to be treated as
hostile if he enters the others territory.
guest. What happens if the guest becomes a
right, the natural right of the stranger to
temporarily occupy a public space. This
emphasizes the fact that host and guest are
related to and depend on each other. Without
the host, there are no guests.
The identity of the guest can be changed into
the identity of the host, and vice versa. One
of the most significant forms of hospitality
was experienced as an unspoken rule of
hospitality between related families and
friends, they would give each other fragments
of shared family pottery; years might pass,
but everyone knew that one day a stranger
could arrive who would try to fit his piece of
the pottery with that of the host.
The concept of Manifesta is based on this
idealistic concept of creating universal
hospitality, in terms of creating a free space
for strangers. This means that by occupying
space and offering space we create a form of
reciprocity between guest and host, which is
necessary for the functioning of every group
or network. This discussion deals with the
questions: Why do we want to host, and
what should we offer? And in what terms can
one characterize great hospitality?
Biennials are, so to speak, hot. The last
decade has seen a growth of new biennials.
Politicians are eager to host a structural
biennial and enjoy high esteem from the
results. But what are the effects if politics and
commerce get involved? What must a host
actually do to guarantee the necessary
conditions to provide a complete mental and
physical space for the guests?
We are here to explore these issues further.
Besides analyzing the role of the host in all its
aspects, it is important also to focus on the
identity and changing attitudes of the guest.
For example, is the guest able to fulfill the
expectations of the host and is the host still
able to create the necessary circumstances to
allow the guest to function? Maybe the host
already has different sets of interests than the
parasite of the host and even transforms into
the enemy? The metaphorical notion of the
guest and the host should be investigated in
light of the current position of artists invited to
large-scale international art events and the
changing conditions on these platforms, from
small-scale to large-scale, from personal to
impersonal, from articulated to general.
Finally, to close this introduction, Id like to
refer to a statement by Derrida: Perhaps only
those who know by experience what it is to
have no home, can offer hospitality. True
hospitality is related to an organically grown
framework of conditions. Maybe, this
framework is slowly being eroded, or maybe
we have lost our belief in the true form of it.
Maybe, we have idealized the relationship
between the host and the guest and their
bond as part of a universal network. To
investigate this issue more closely, we are
hosting this discussion here in Amsterdam,
with the intention of encouraging you to
freely join in and actively share in our search
for answers to some of these questions.
Ole Bouman: In principle, one could say
theres a division of roles between the artist,
the curator, and the host. Today, however,
we see a kind of blurring of these roles, a
crossover of hosting and being hosted. On the
one hand, both artists and curators show an
ambition to take over the role of host. Vice
versa, curators or host cities or host
institutions show an ambition to engage with
art projects themselves.
The issue of hosting is quite new as a subject
of critical discussion in the art world. Theres
a lot of debate about artists, a lot of debate
about curatorial concepts, but hardly any
debate about what the intention of the host
is. Its interesting to have that discussion
through the angle of Manifesta, as Manifesta
is dealing with an interesting double role.
Although its a host itself (it hosts an art event
some place every two years), it also tries to
find a new host city every two years. It is
exactly this search for a host city, the right
city to provide a place for an art show, that is
maybe the most difficult thing this
organization has to do. Maybe it is difficult
enough to find the right professional and
financial services for an art show, but it is
even more difficult to find the right
intellectual and creative challenge. So
Manifesta seems to be a perfect venue for
discussing the topic of hosting.
There do exist other, related issues in the
cultural debate. If we think about hosting, we
can also think of other topics, such as the
discussion of the white cube vs. site-specific
art shows. We can think about the dialectics
between engagement, on the one hand, and
autonomy, on the other, as well-known
ambitions in the arts. Both deal with the
notion of hosting in some way. We can also
think of the discussion about the global and
the local, which has a dimension dealing
with hosting. So, there are a lot of related
debates already going on.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 201
 We also have to face a lot of semantic
ambiguities, as the term host and guest are
not one-dimensional categories. On the one
hand, we have this debate about host and
guest, but then, of course, theres this
ambiguity as to whether a guest is a friend or
an enemy. And there is the ambiguity of the
guest who can feed you and the guest who
acts as a parasite.
In conclusion, what we can say is that the
whole issue is heavily psychological. If we
think about hosting in culture, there are
many expectations. Most expectations are not
explicitly put forward, but we always expect
something. We expect something from a host
and we expect something from a guest. Since
theres a lot of psychological energy devoted
to expectations, theres also a lot of
psychological energy spent on
disappointment afterwards. If we think about
events afterwards, much of the energy in later
discussions is spent on disappointment. Its
more or less like life itself. Maybe, in this
economy of expectation and disappointment,
we can start a discussion about the cultural
meaning of hosting today. With the many
experienced people on the panel and in the
audience, we will try to explore and map it.
Lets start with Francesco Bonami, who was
a co-curator of Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana and
who more recently presented the Venice
Biennale. Francesco, as the curator in
Venice, and while being hosted by the
organization and city of Venice, you also
chose the role of host yourself by inviting
other curators to work with you. How did you
position yourself vis--vis these ambiguities?
Francesco Bonami: I dont think theres so
much ambiguity. I think the hosts are offering
and the guests are demanding. Thats the
first difference between host and guest. The
host provides certain things and the guest
requests certain things. Sometimes these
things overlap and theres harmony,
sometimes what the host is offering is not
what the guest is asking for. So the guests
have a lot of expectations, and often the
202 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
guests do not reflect on the context but just
consider themselves as the same guest
everywhere in the world. As a guest, you are
very selfish in your expectations. You dont
really analyze where you go; you just expect
to get something relating to your experience.
The host can also be very greedy. Venice, not
as a biennial but as a city, is an extremely
greedy host, in terms of economics. Theres a
sense of the exploitation of the guest on
behalf of the host. Venice is a big machine
with a lot of complications in its historical
context; its a very difficult city to deal with.
People like Venice a lot when they have to
exploit it but not when they have to demand
something from it. Thats a big problem we
faced when I did the Venice Biennale. A lot of
people like to be guests in Venice, enjoy the
context, but at the point they demand
something, they face the reality - that what
creates the pleasure also creates the
dissatisfaction. This year, we had quite a
different kind of structure. I invited ten
curators to curate their own exhibitions, and
they were totally autonomous in the sense
that we discussed the subject but then they
proceeded autonomously in their decisions,
structures, and the architecture of the
exhibition, in their own shaping of the show.
So I hosted them, and then I kind of left the
house, like, this is your home in the sense
that nobody is cooking for you; in other
words, make yourself at home. Its an
ambiguous term if you are used to be served
breakfast in the morning. You are responsible
for your own exhibition, so you have to face,
too, the challenge of your exhibition being
produced there. So I was hosting them, but at
the same time letting them be in charge, in
the good sense and in the bad sense, of their
own space and their own group. The
invitation of co-curators also implied a
multiplication of the number of artists. We
had four hundred artists invited to Venice,
which is at least more than double the
amount normally in Venice, and this created
a real practical problem with regard to
hospitality. Four hundred artists cannot be
hosted the same way as a hundred artists. So
this created a problem in terms of budget and
logistics. And this seems like a practical
issue, but it is something, if we work on large
exhibitions, that we have to face more and
more. Artists demand to be hosted at a
certain level, but sometimes this is not
possible because of economic constraints. If
you expand the exhibition beyond a certain
limit, you can not really host the artists. You
can invite them to come, so they become
tourists, in a way. Venice invites people to
come but doesnt give them food for free.
When the number of people expands beyond
a certain amount, they are no longer simply
your friends or your guests; they become
tourists, in the sense that they can have an
experience of the context, but at the same
time they have to consider the issue of
money. In certain cases, we facilitated the
hospitality, because the artists had to
produce their work there. But theres this
assumption that an invitation to a show
implies as well covering the economics
involved. Now there are different levels of
participation in an exhibition. For example,
someone is bringing this book to show. We
are happy when the artist can come to the
opening, but we cannot offer him or her
hospitality in the same way we have to offer
it to someone who has to build something at
the location. I think its a very classic issue,
because the shows are getting bigger, the
demands on behalf of the artists are
expanding, while the economics are staying
the same. This year, we had three million
euros in the Biennale budget, and the
number of artists was much bigger, so we
had to face a shortage of funds, and we had
to raise the funds that were lacking.
Hospitality and, lets say, shipping are
becoming two increasing threats to the life of
large exhibitions, as they are not giving
anything visual to the exhibition or the city.
You dont see them in terms of
communication or feedback, but you spend
the money, and the money that goes is
sometimes millions of euros, which can be
fifty or sixty percent of the budget. So its a
real challenge for a big organization as to
how to combine decent hospitality and, at the
same time, make your moneys worth from
this hospitality. I think being a host has
different levels. I think, in terms of art world
exhibitions, we provide a place where people
like to go, but more and more, we are not
able to provide them the means to sustain
themselves when they arrive, because the
economics are becoming more complicated.
So if you want to have feedback and
communication, the organization has to put a
lot of money into this area and has to kind of
diminish the capacity to be a good host.
Jeroen Boomgaard: Do you think we should
still use the terms host and guest for a big
event like Venice, since that seems a bit
idealistic?
Francesco Bonami: Both terms are idealistic.
The terms host and guest apply only to
small communities. Beyond a certain number
of people, you still have aspects of host and
a location, but you ask people to bring
something, food or wine. A lot of exhibitions
provide visibility, which is a sort of souvenir.
It would be interesting to look more into what
visibility for an artist means; it is really like a
touristy experience. What you bring back
home is something other people didnt
experience. I think with the situation now, we
have to be more realistic, but the idea of host
and guest is still valid, as there is always the
invitation.
Ole Bouman: The text of the invitation might be
very general, like, come to Venice, and make
an exhibition with me, but with nothing
specifically related to the content of the
exhibition. Theres something specific, which is
the personality of the curator providing a
theme. Thats what you offer as a host.
Francesco Bonami: Yes, its like Venice.
Venice as a city is providing a theme.
Concerning myself, I can be very specific. To
the curator I say, come and make your show.
Then they have to provide another subcontext
for the artists they invite.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 203
 Ole Bouman: But already you provide a title:
Dreams and Conflicts.
Francesco Bonami: Its like Venice: come to
Venice - its the same thing; Dreams and
Conflicts is like Venice. There were different
invitation texts. Some were, like: Come to
Venice with your ideas, your show; I wont
open my mouth; bring your artists; I will give
you this amount of money and your artists
are your problem (which was not true). Or to
an artist, the text could be: Come to Venice
and bring this specific work. Or another
invitation was: Come to Venice and see what
you like to do; we can provide you with some
help. Or again, another was: I would like to
invite you to Venice, but dont bring this work
or yourself. So there were different kinds of
invitations. I never sent out a text that was
just, like, Come to Venice, and then tell
them when they arrive that there was no
money. I was very clear.
Jeroen Boomgaard: Id like to go now to Rein
Wolfs, who was a more specific host in
Venice in the Dutch Pavilion. What are your
ideas on being a host as a curator?
Rein Wolfs: First of all, maybe I should say
Im a lazy curator, specializing in artists who
host the whole thing themselves. When we
were talking about the role of the guest, I was
thinking before, Isnt the guest, in the end,
the public? I havent heard anything about
the public as such until now. The concept of
the Dutch pavilion in Venice - We are the
World - was meant to be a very hospitable,
inviting, friendly, and sympathetic concept.
You get to a city, and there a lot of things
going on, and you look for a concept that is
inviting, for the artists and also for the public.
To bring them to this old-fashioned kind of
national pavilion, you need something more,
and I thought of having a kind of marketing
strategy, which is very much intertwined with
the concept of the late nineties and first
decade of the twenty-first century. Its an
artistic concept that is itself about hosting.
When I worked in Zurich, and later in the
204 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, I kind of
specialized in working with art that has to do
with the notion of hosting. If you are working
with artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija or Carlos
Amorales or Meschac Gaba, you know you
are yourself doing something with hosting.
You are working with artists who also think in
terms of hosting and guests. First of all,
theres the institution and the curator.
Second, and most important, the artist, and
third of all, the guest as the public. What
should be an important statement in this
discussion is that we are not only talking
about the professional side of things. We are
not only talking about city marketing, like, for
example, trying to market San Sebastin or
another city interested in hosting Manifesta.
We are not only talking about hosting in
terms of hosting concepts or hosting curators.
We are also talking about hosting the public.
When I was working in Zurich, the last two
years we were in a very happy situation with
a high level of art, which had to do with
money - a good commercial situation. It
would have been important to host an art
event like Manifesta there, to give something
to the city, too, but with the absolute
exclusion of gallery money. Thats a situation
you especially, maybe, have to fight against,
in terms of coming to a freer way of thinking
about what art can be nowadays. When
talking about hosting, the first thing you have
to think of is the public. I was looking for
artists who can deal with the public.
Secondly, when we are discussing hosting in
relation to a city, you should think about
what the city needs. Is there a lack of cultural
activities, or contemporary art? Or is it, for
instance, a city so happy with itself that it
maybe needs a push or some criticism from
outside?
Antje von Graevenitz: Id like to react to what
Francesco Bonami said earlier, as, in fact,
there was a paradoxical situation in Venice. I
understand very well your concept of hosting,
but the subtitle of the Biennale was The
Dictatorship of the Viewer. You said some
kind words about hosting the viewer, but
nothing about the dictator you in fact wanted
to host. There was no dictatorship of the
viewer; the viewer was thrown out. In the
Arsenale, in your international show, there
was no possibility for the viewer to get any
power as a viewer at all. I think it was a very
chaotic situation. For example, it was too
much for the viewer to read everything on all
the different papers, to have the possibility,
time, and even physical power to see all the
videos. The viewer didnt have any chance to
maintain his dictatorship at all. I think the
subtitle was very paradoxical. I didnt
understand, since as viewers we were not
really hosted.
Francesco Bonami: People didnt always
understand the aspect of dictatorship. I didnt
want to say that the viewer has to be the
dictator of the exhibition, but I wanted to tell the
viewer to be the dictator of their own
experience. So, become your own dictator of
your own experience. See it as travel, as a trip.
The paradox is, I realized, that the generation
younger than mine seemed to enjoy it and
didnt complain. They seemed to be in charge
of their own experience. But my generation
reacted very badly to the word dictatorship. But
you can also look at the nice sides of it. Sweet
is a nice word, but if you are diabetic, its very
bad. Maybe if we look at dictatorship you might
find nice sides, too. When you are the dictator
of yourself, its a kind of Westernized Zen idea.
Ole Bouman: After such big events, its a kind
of natural implication to move to
disappointments. Lets go to Lourdes
Fernandez, whos in charge of an upcoming
event and doesnt have to deal with
disappointments yet. What are your
objectives as host of Manifesta in the city of
Donostia-San Sebastin?
Lourdes Fernandez: First, I think its
important to underline that the curators of
Manifesta 5 are Marta Kuzma and
Massimiliano Gioni. The most different thing
about Manifesta, in comparison with other
biennials, is that the city hosts everything.
We host the biennial; its not a permanent
project like in Venice. We host the curators,
who are not Spanish. We host the artists the
curators choose, and we host the public who
comes from outside. In case of San
Sebastin, its very difficult. Rein Wolfs raised
the question of what a city needs or expects.
San Sebastin is a small city that, perhaps,
needs an international event with two foreign
curators looking at the reality of the area and
territory, which is very specific in Europe and
Spain, since its Basque country. The
curators have to see the city and adapt to it.
I think in this sense, its very different from
Venice. In one way, its sometimes difficult to
find the proper facilities. In other ways, its
easier and an advantage to have a nomadic
biennial instead of one that occurs in the
same place every two years, like Valencia,
which has a budget of millions. For San
Sebastin to have this amount of money
every two years would be impossible. The
city is expecting many things, because its an
international event coming to a small city.
But in a city with a small population, its also
very difficult to really get inside. Everybody
who works in the field of contemporary art
thinks they are doing perfectly fine. So what
are these curators from the outside doing? At
the same time, theres this notion that
hosting an international event is a good way
to put yourself on the international cultural
map. So this contradiction makes it
interesting, and very different from other
biennials that take place in the same city.
Jeroen Boomgaard: Saskia Bos, what are
your ideas about the different roles of host
and guest?
Saskia Bos: I was invited as a guest by the
city of Berlin two years ago to host the
biennial there and to invite artists. At the
beginning, not even buildings were available.
So the first question, especially for a city,
should be, what can the city offer? And is it a
good offering? I only found this out much
later, when I had already said yes. So money
and buildings are very crucial issues. I
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 205
 decided not to make too big an offering to the
audience, but rather, something one could
deal with. In that sense, it seemed wise not
to invite too many artists, so there would at
least be some production money available. I
think the question Rein Wolfs has raised is
very important: What does the city need? In
this case, what is the artistic history of the
biennial? I sort of understood that the history
at that point was mainly based on painting,
plus there had been some very good media
festivals. For me, it was very important to
integrate other activities into the biennial and
try to connect them to the city. It was not so
easy to make a quick connection with DAAD
and Bethanienhaus because of the programs
they were already doing and which they
didnt want to do outside of their institutions.
Its a continuous fight to realize such a project
and make it possible with money from the
city. The money issue remains an important
issue for the third Berlin Biennial in 2004,
which will be done by Ute Meta Bauer in
February. Buildings are very important in
Berlin. People think there are a lot of
buildings available in Berlin, but this is not
true, since everything is immediately
claimed. In a way, it is nice that the biennial
is changing its rooms and buildings now.
Because of the availability of the Gropius-Bau
now, which is supposed to give more status
to the biennial than just the Kunst Werke and
Postfuhramt and some of the smaller off-off
spaces that we had, they have now decided
to do the biennial in February instead of
October, which, in my opinion, is not ideal,
but we will see. Thats it about Berlin. Theres
one question I would like to ask Francesco,
which relates to the number of artists. Did
you consciously want to invite more than five
hundred artists to Venice, or did it just
happen that way because you invited co-
curators? Thats an enormous amount, a big
offering for your audience. And I understand
what Antje von Graevenitz was wondering, as
to whether the public can swallow such an
offering.
Francesco Bonami: In theory, I could have
invited only ten artists, if Igor Zabel had
206 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
wanted to invite one artist, Hans Ulrich Obrist
one, Hou Hanru one. It was really open. The
curators knew they had a certain budget, so
within this budget they could fit whatever
they want. So Rirkrit Tiravanija and Hans
Ulrich Obrist invited a hundred and sixty
names, and Hou Hanru, I think, fifty or sixty
altogether. So it could have been less or
much more. I didnt tell the curators, theres
maximum number of artists you can invite.
Jeroen Boomgaard: Saskia, can you tell us a
little bit about your role as a host in
Amsterdam?
Saskia Bos: De Appel has been a host since
the early nineties, especially with the
Curatorial Training Program, which started in
1994. The present Curatorial Program is the
ninth course that has been held. The curators
get a certain budget, which they also have to
expand by working on fund-raising.
I think for us it was very important to do the
program because, if I look at my own
curatorial training in the eighties, we always
used to formulate the museum as a person.
Or like Chevrier once put it: Programmer:
cest crire. You make your own program in
your own building. Its a little bit different
from what you suggested before, Ole, where
the host is the building and then you have
the curator and the artists. I think in the
eighties, it was very much put together with
the institution as a person, and this is also
how I thought about it at the beginning.
Now, especially in the globalizing art world,
you have to see that you cant and shouldnt
be doing everything on your own. The last
Venice Biennale is a brilliant example in this
sense. At De Appel, not only do we invite
students in the Curatorial Program to give an
assessment of their own view on
contemporary art from their own generation,
but since 1999 we have also invited guest
curators in the series Unlimited.nl, with Hou
Hanru, Zdenka Badovinac, and Vasif Kortun.
If I may, Id like to reflect on a small text that
Zdenka Badovinac wrote when she was
invited by me to host the artists of her choice
in our building. Its no coincidence that in
this age of globalization, art focuses on
context. Also we are no longer locked within
our own contexts. Instead we wander from
one context to another like internal guests or
nomads without a territory of our own.
Unlimited.nl-3 exposes the position of
guests at various levels. Artists are guests in
various disciplines, although their works,
instead of being primarily multidisciplinary,
resulted from the experience of other
environments. And then later, she says
more critical things about her own position:
Unlimited.nl-3 is hosted by a curator from
the so-called Eastern Europe, from an
environment which only recently was
earmarked as isolated. Everyone active
outside the dominant art system is frequently
faced with the problem of geopolitical
isolation. But at the same time, we are
aware that the issue of inclusion and
exclusion is losing its geographical
significance and is increasingly controlled by
the institution of art, which in analogy to
supranational corporation systems is
becoming an increasingly amorphous
organism which can tomorrow just as easily
relinquish what it is adjusting to today. I
think that the critical response of a guest
towards the host is what keeps us awake.
And I think the same for our students, who
are constantly critical but who you want to
have inside your house in order not to
become sleepy.
Erik Hagoort: Up to now the issue of residing
or staying somewhere hasnt been in the
debate. Manifesta always says about itself event.
that its a nomadic exhibition. Personally, I
have never really been charmed by the whole
issue of nomadism except when it is linked to
a commitment with a certain place;
otherwise, you fly over and its not interesting
at all. But if you stay and actually reside
somewhere, then this tension of hosting and
parasitism comes up. I think Manifesta cant
be idealistic enough, and I think there could
be more done with this idea of residence. Up
to now, theres been an organization and
there have been curators who reside in the
city, and they have the luxury to be there for
some time and get connected and think
about the people they want to invite. But the
artists are mainly invited only for the
exhibition at the end, and then they leave
again. This doesnt seem to me to be a
problem for a normal biennial, but for
Manifesta, I think there is the possibility if
doing more for the artists at the place where
the exhibition is held. You could think about
inviting artists during the development of the
project. Of course, you cant do this with
eighty artists all at once, but you could, for
example, stretch the period of the exhibition.
You could give more attention to the period in
which the exhibition is being developed, use
guest studios, or residency programs, and not
only focus only on the exhibition at the end.
The whole idea of hosting would be taken
more seriously.
Hedwig Fijen: Maybe I could comment on
this. One of the most famous projects in
Manifesta 1 was specifically about this, the
hosting project by Nestwork with Jeanne van
Heeswijk, whos also in the audience today.
Another hosting project was, though maybe
not on a long-term basis, the Gasthof project
in Manifesta 4 at the Staedelschule, directed
by Daniel Birnbaum in Frankfurt.
Erik Hagoort: Well, I would like to hear more
about this. But in the way Manifesta
manifests itself, on the website and in its
texts, theres not this stress on a long-term
stay and the opportunities it gives. It
presents itself as a biennial, as an exhibition
Antje von Graevenitz: I think it could work
well if you just show single artists with their
work, which is a summing up, lets say. But
if you want, as a curator, to show the secret
codes, and let the dictatorship work in a way
that you discover the secret codes from one
work to the next, then this idea of showing an
exhibition of individual artists in residence as
a summing up doesnt work. If you want the
viewer to discover secret codes, you should
offer a sort of guidance in the presentation of
the show.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 207
 Daniel Birnbaum: We all play various roles;
many of us are viewers (guests), and many of
us here have also been curators (hosts). In
the case of Manifesta 4, I wasnt so much
involved in the show itself, but I was a host
in a different sense, since Im the director of
the art academy there, and we tried to help
out, so to speak. We tried to create an
interesting atmosphere for viewers - not just
any viewers, but young artists, young art
students. We were thinking, what could we
add to this event, as an art academy? The
Staedelschule in Frankfurt is very small - the
smallest and, I think one might say, one of
the most experimental in Germany. What we
did at the school was a kind of lesson or
experiment in hospitality. All the studios were
open for visitors and we had two hundred
people from academies all over Europe and
other places staying at the school for one
week. It was an interesting experiment. Not
one I should recommend, I think, but we
managed to survive. It had certain problems,
but somehow it worked quite well. It came
out of a number of previous events. For many
years, there was a professor of film and
cooking at the academy - Peter Kubelka. He
installed the kitchen in our school, next to the
directors office; I think thats a kind of
original feature at our school. Hes gone, but
he used to do something called Gasthaus, a
kind of restaurant in the summer, where the
school opened up for the citizens of the city.
We made an international version of the
Gasthaus and called it Gasthof, and invited
people from different international schools.
They came and saw Manifesta, met the
curators of Manifesta and many of the artists.
Also, they went to see Documenta, as there
was this special moment in this part of
Germany, where we had Manifesta in
Frankfurt and, at the same time, Documenta
in Kassel, so they also met with Sarat
Maharaj and Ute Meta Bauer of Documenta.
So these young people coming from all over
Europe who stayed at the school and were
very active guests, not just guests who
expected something. Most were willing to
participate very actively. There was a big
208 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
meal being produced every evening. Rirkrit
Tiravanija organized discussions, since he
was a guest professor at the time. I dont
think it would have happened if he hadnt
been there. Gasthof was rather close to
Utopia Station in a way. It was very different,
but it was clearly related to it. We also had a
show at Portikus. So, it was an experiment
and it worked, and it was a good thing. I
think it was also good for Frankfurt. It helped
people from Lithuania and Poland and many
other parts of the world, who otherwise
would not have been able to afford to go to
Documenta and Manifesta without
something like this happening. They were
invited by us. They could get a few hundred
euros or just the trip. Some people came by
bus, some by plane, and they had a free meal
every day and a kind of infrastructure in
Frankfurt. There were discussions with many
artists participating in the show and guests
like Tiravanija, for instance. So it was a kind
of intellectual summer camp.
Jeroen Boomgaard: Did you need Manifesta
to do this?
Daniel Birnbaum: The whole idea came
about in discussions with the curators of
Manifesta and with Martin Fritz, who was the
general coordinator of Manifesta 4. We
financed it and found a major sponsor, which
was Allianz Kulturstiftung, and International
Foundation Manifesta also helped us
financially. The attraction for people to come
to Frankfurt was these two big events. I mean
our school is nice, but maybe not that
interesting. The reason why they came all the
way from Moscow or Oslo and other parts
was to see these two shows and also to have
the possibility of actually getting to know
people personally.
Ole Bouman: Is it correct to say that its an
event intended to provide people time to
spend together? And that your event is more
or less an invitation to spend time together,
which is a very social thing? And if so, what
can be seen as the artistic level?
Daniel Birnbaum: We didnt see it as an art
show, because it wasnt. In a way, from a
very special perspective, one could maybe
say it was a soziale Plastik by Rirkrit
Tiravanija. But he wasnt alone. There were
at least ten or twenty people involved in the
organization. People from Documenta and
from Manifesta and me, as being financially
and legally responsible for the whole thing,
unfortunately. No, it worked out fine.
Insurance things are just not so easy when it
comes to people staying at a school like this
for a whole week. But it was definitely about
spending time together. It was known in
Frankfurt as the Woodstock of Frankfurt. We
had two hundred and fifty students who
came, and there were also many people
locally who participated, so it was a growing
thing. It was about being together and
discussing things and meeting not only
famous artists but just colleagues from all
over the world.
Jeroen Boomgaard: From the small scale Id
like to move on to a bigger scale. Every city
nowadays wants to have its own biennial. Do
we think this has still got something to do
with hospitality, with the host and the artist
being a guest? Or is it simply, more or less,
an economic principle? I would like to ask
Antje von Graevenitz, as an art critic, to
comment on this. How can a critic still deal
with the concept of biennials popping up
everywhere?
Antje von Graevenitz: I can answer this as an
art critic and as a human being. As a human
being I came back from Venice feeling angry
because I couldnt really remember
everything since it was so much. I only had
the memory of some sparkling moments.
When I was back home, I thought about it
from the point of view of an art historian: I
think there are, in general, two positions to
take in developing such gigantic exhibitions.
One is based on a holistic concept. For
instance, Harald Szeemanns show at the
Biennale had an anthropological approach;
there was a sort of domino effect in it. One
work would contain an ingredient that you
could find also in another work; there was a
real follow-up, and the whole could be seen
as a Gesamtkunstwerk. I think this is a
holistic concept. Enwezors idea behind his
Documenta in Kassel was to present us with
a thesis, antithesis and synthesis: the thesis
was to show the tradition of concept art with
its abstractions of time, space and borders
and language; the antithesis was how these
abstractions could be experienced in socio-
political everyday life today; and the
synthesis of the two was how contemporary
artists handle these questions in their
artwork. The Biennale and the Manifesta in
Frankfurt were examples of nonholistical
approaches. We are no longer in the
nineteenth-century position of thesis,
antithesis and synthesis. We have the
possibility of reacting to things that come into
our mind and our memory, from a sort of
arbitrary position. As a viewer, you should
have the opportunity to see this how the
situation is nowadays. To see an exhibition
as a city, which is not organized in any
classical way - that is really something of our
time. We should also have this in us;
otherwise, we get into a provincial situation.
Jeroen Boomgaard: What about the hosting
concept: do we think it is out of date? Is the
host just someone with a house who invites
people and tells them what he likes? Or
should the host still create a certain
background, a certain situation or
conversation?
Paul Domela: Maybe I can respond to this.
We think it is important to articulate specific
links between the international field of art
practice and the local cultural context of the
city. The Liverpool Biennial was started by
Lewis Biggs, then director of Tate Liverpool,
and James Moores, an artist and heir to the
Littlewood fortune. They wanted to do
something for and with the city, Liverpool
being one of the poorest cities in Europe. The
city council did not understand the idea, and
the first edition had just five percent of public
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 209
 money in it. Only after the second edition, in
2002, has the council started to support the
biennial - indeed, mainly for economic
reasons - but we welcome the recognition to
increase our budget. One finds oneself
hosting more than one agenda. We also think
it is important that the biennial is embedded
within the local art infrastructure and we
present possibilities for Liverpool-based
artists. Apart from the international exhibition
that we curate ourselves, we host the
Independent, an exhibition organized by local
artist initiatives, which also has an
international orientation but works with a
different network. We host an exhibition
called New Contemporaries, an exhibition
selected from recent graduates, and a
competition called the John Moores
Exhibition of Contemporary Painting. In other
words, four different exhibition models,
organized by different partners, are all taking
place within a specific time and space. It has
to do with multiplying hosts; we are
interested in multiple hosts. A lot of biennials
nowadays seem, in a sense, interchangeable.
You shift the whole thing to a different
location and still attract an international art
audience. But rarely do you get any
relationship to the context in which the
exhibition takes place. I think this
relationship to place is important, not only for
the visiting audience but also for the
residents of a city. How does one create this
awareness, which is responsive to the
situation?
Ole Bouman: A good moment to go to Viktor
Misiano, whos organizing a new biennial in
Moscow. What are you doing to keep the
exhibition from being interchangeable with
others, from being generic? And specifically,
what would be your ideal scenario for the
cultural and artistic impact of your event?
What would Moscow be like a year after the
most successful version of your event?
Viktor Misiano: Frankly, I would say its a
little bit premature to reveal to you my ideal
scenario, as we are still in the initial stages.
210 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Lets postpone this a little. . . But of course, I
can confide something about hosting and
being a guest. I started my career in the early
nineties, and during this period I was
sometimes a host, but mostly I was a guest.
At that time, Russian intellectuals, artists and
curators were mostly hosted on the
international scene. It was a time of
enormous international curiosity and interest
in Soviet art. Thats why most of my
exhibitions at the time were done not in
Moscow, but on the international art scene. I
was mostly hosted by international
institutions and biennials. I was hosted by
Manifesta in Rotterdam, hosted in Istanbul in
1992, and I was hosted in So Paulo, in
Valencia. . . When I would host somebody
myself in Moscow, I practiced a different
philosophy of hosting, a completely different
concept, than when I was internationally
hosted. In 1990, I started a project in
Moscow called Apt-Art Int, which was
entirely based on the idea of hosting and
being a guest. That project, in fact, was
exactly the opposite of what happened in
international art institutions. We were offering
something different. Instead of offering an
institutional concept of hosting and art
production, we offered an absolutely intimate
and very human understanding of being a
guest and a host. Apt-Art Int - of course, it
refers to the tradition of the Moscow
underground in Soviet times, when artists
who were forbidden to exhibit their works in
official institutions would lend their own
apartments and organize exhibitions and
programs in their own houses. The idea of
Apt-Art International was come and be our
guest, but in the most natural and most
idealistic and human sense of the term,
which is, by the way, very close to the
understanding of hosting that Derrida
defends in his book. So the idea was: come,
and well cook for you, in a very direct and
practical sense, and you would create a work
for us, also in a direct sense, for our small
community. So in some way this was a kind
of rcyclage of Russian spirituality and of a
very human approach to cultural symbolic
initiatives. The project was very successful; it
went very well. We had many important
international artists like Franz West, and we
had a fantastic project done by the Ljubljana-
based group Irwin. They became famous for
their chain of the NSK embassies in different
countries, and the first time they organized
an embassy was in one of the Moscow
apartments. This intimate approach to
hosting determined my approach to curatorial
practice, which I have defended in a few
texts: for me curatorship is based on a feeling
of friendship. Friendship is the foundation the
basic structure of relations in the art
community at a time when institutional
initiatives have collapsed. So I repeat, in my
early projects like Apt-Art Int and in my
curatorial practice, hosting and being a guest
were understood at a very basic level. Well,
now, being involved in the organization of the
Moscow Biennial, the situation has definitely
changed, since Im a part of the institutional
machine, which must use very different
criteria for hosting. First of all, I was obliged
to realize that, behind the idea of hosting,
theres not only a human impulse but also
power games. Im actually surprised that
nobody today has really touched on this
point, since its extremely important. We
know perfectly well that people sometimes
show generosity because this is their way of
showing their power. For example, people
from the South, usually they have a strong
ego and, not by chance, are very hospitable.
Based on my experience in Russia and Soviet
Union, when you visit people from the
Caucasus, they demonstrate fantastic
hospitality and are very proud of it. When
they visit you, in the North in Moscow, its a
paradox, since they again show fantastic
generosity. Again you are their guest. They
are hosting even when you are the one at
home. At the university, I had a close friend
from Georgia, and every month he used to
invite me to a restaurant and we would have
a fantastic meal and so on. But afterwards,
every time, he used to come back to my
home because at the restaurant he had spent
all his pocket money for the entire month. So
sometimes, generosity is, in fact, a perfor-
mance of power and can be even a bit
irrational. When I made my first steps in the
direction of doing a big international event in
Moscow, I was mostly skeptical. I thought
that because of the lack of the powerful
institutions in Moscow we would not be able
to realize such a project. Who would give us
money? Here I was mostly thinking of my
experience of producing a theoretical
magazine on contemporary art. To fundraise
for it was very complicated. But now I
realized that its much more efficient to
approach official institutions with ambitious
projects rather than with small ones. If you
ask for big money, for a big event, you
immediately get a response. Why? Not
because you meet with generosity and an
understanding of cultural sensibilities, but its
something power can use. In our dialogue
with local authorities, with the Ministry of
Culture and the city of Moscow, we realized
immediately that they were going to support
it, but one of their conditions was obviously
related to the political circumstances. They
wanted this event to happen quite soon
because they wanted to use it in the political
elections. So they were able to offer financial
resources and show generosity, but only
because they had their own interests. So we
immediately found a lot of sponsorship from
cultural institutions and museums, which I
had earlier expected to be much more
indifferent to the project, even hostile. I
realized that they wanted to be hosts for the
Moscow Biennial out of a feeling of revenge.
They wanted to show that theres an
international art scene existing in Moscow
and that they could be efficient and generous
hosts. Even more, when I started
conceptualizing the project I immediately
came to the idea of proposing that other
people come, to invite other people as our
guests. For instance, Francesco Bonami,
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ren Block, and Harald
Szeemann were among the different
international curators we invited to a
colloquium organized in Moscow, in which
we asked them to share their experience with
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 211
 biennials. I was aware that we invited these
people as our guests and were showing them
generosity because we wanted to use them. I
want to emphasize this because it is an
obvious intention but sometimes we forget
about it.
Ole Bouman: Maybe its even more important
now, after this display of honesty about the
possible secret agenda of many programs in
hosting, to ask what the ideal result of the
Moscow Biennial would be.
Viktor Misiano: I dont really have an answer
yet. This is my first experience as an
institutional host, not as a private host. But
its just becoming clear that the human being
is complex. Behind the most idealistic
declarations and behaviors and facts, are a
lot of other deep unconscious or even more
than conscious motivations, and we should
simply be aware of them. For me now, the
basic problem is how to combine being a
level-headed manager, a reasonable person,
and to use all these people, institutions and
political motivations in the interest of that
idealistic idea of hosting and the idealistic
idea of receiving guests to which I was
devoted at the beginning of my career. How
does one combine these things? How does
one realize a project and maintain the
principle of pleasure without rejecting the
principle of reality? I mean everyone does it in
their lives, but also in our discussion of
hosting and guests we should bear it in mind.
Jeroen Boomgaard: I dont think we have
really reached a conclusion, although
obviously theres a conflict of interests in big
events like Venice. There seems to be a scale
problem, and its almost a little bit
hypocritical to talk about hosts and guests
because thats not really the issue. So if you
really want to take the concept of hosts and
guests seriously, you might have to scale
down. On the other hand, I think we are
facing the fact that these biennials go their
own way and maybe we should forget about
this idealistic terminology of hosts and
guests.
212 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Francesco Bonami: What came out clearly in
Viktors story is that being a host or being
hospitable is, eighty percent of the time,
motivated by interests, which are not such a
private thing, especially in our work. When
you give something to someone that means
to get something more. Or, when you invite
someone for lunch, you do it because you
expect that the next time the other one will
pay.
A question from Maria Hlavajova, a co-curator
of Manifesta 3 and the director of BAK, Utrecht:
Cities that decide to host an event like
Manifesta do it for marketing reasons, to place
the city on the cultural or tourist map. We
should be honest about this. I think the notion
of hospitality is a more ethical issue and has to
do with the arts. It has to do with the ethical
role of being a curator, and the role of being
hospitable. We have to take the torch from the
politicians, who negotiate on the political level
with their own agenda, and keep on being
hospitable. You cant only see it as a political
issue and say, Im inviting five hundred people
but you have to pay for your own lunch. I find
that problematic. I think its the responsibility of
the curator to create that kind of barrier zone
between politics and the artists themselves. I
wonder what the guests here and the panel
think.
Saskia Bos: I agree with you. Its an
economic issue. Hedwig Fijen began by
looking up the word hospitality in Websters
Dictionary and seeking out the source of its
meaning. Then hospitality is like liberality,
friendliness, and sociability. But if you look it
up on Google, it only refers to hotels,
restaurants, cafs, etc. Many years ago, I was
an assistant for Documenta. The entire
Documenta as an organization was
accounted by the city in terms of the nights
we would spend there. And they were more
interested in sponsoring Documenta than in
sponsoring the Buga, which is the
Bundesgartenschauen, because people
visiting Documenta would spend at least two
nights in a hotel. And for the Buga, the old
ladies would come on a bus, see the flowers
and go back, and never make any use of the Paul Domela: I agree with your point when
cafs, restaurants, or hotels. We all know artists practices are specifically engaged with
how it works. I agree that the ethical part of audiences. I was thinking of the different
hosting in art has a lot to do with what you possibilities of the show-off and off-show
offer the artist - what you can offer in the way periods. During the show-off the
of production money and as a living in certain possibilities are limited. But during the off-
circumstances. And also what you can offer show it is possible to engage in long-term
an audience, what they can swallow. Is it processes and have sustained dialogues with
realistic to offer two hundred artists each of audiences. Because we are in one place and
whom has two hours of film? That was a have continuity in our organization, we can
problem at Documenta. Maybe theres also a do participatory projects in between
problem with audiences who are trained biennials. Manifesta has to build these
differently. Some come for half a day to relationships with the audience every time
Venice or Kassel and dont take the trouble to anew.
really go into it. Maybe we dont discuss
these issues enough. What are the
expectations of the artists and what are the
expectations of the audience?
Jeroen Boomgaard: The notion of the
audience, apart from what Rein Wolfs was
talking about it, seems to be quite absent in
the discussion of hosts and guests. Its
always curators and artists. Is the audience
really a guest, or are they just, like, physically
visiting someone elses party and looking
through the window?
Paul Domela: I think its very difficult to
engage in a dialogue with an audience,
especially over an amount of time.
Saskia Bos: I dont agree with that. There are a
lot of interesting artists like Jeanne van
Heeswijk or Rirkrit Tiravanija, or the artists Rein
Wolfs was talking about, who are really trying
to give a different position to the audience. We
have to think about how we can resolve those
issues for the audience when an artist is really
making a gesture. But the management cannot
combine, for example, the offer of a massage
with having five hundred thousand visitors. The
artist sometimes uses very interesting
communicating strategies, strategies of making
an offer to the audience, and we have to deal
with that. How can we do this?
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 213
Manifesta 5
June 11 2004 / September 30 2004
Donostia - San Sebastian and Pasaia
Basque Country, Spain
...POLITICAL RUMOUR / CULTURAL LANDSCAPE / PRESENT IMPERFECT /
RUINS IN REVERSE / ZONES OF CONTINGENCY / UNDER CONSTRUCTION /
SPIRITUAL NOISES / PROJECT AND ACCUSATION / LANDSCAPE MANUAL /
ENCOUNTER WITH AMBIGUITY / CITY FOLDED OVER ONTO ITSELF / TWO WAY
MIRROR / DOUBLE EXPOSURE / BIPOLAR CITY / POWER OF IDENTITY /
POTEMKIN VILLAGE / STAGED MATRIX / TRICKLAND / SILENT FACTORY /... TO
BE CONTINUED
Manifesta 5 as curated by the team of Marta Kuzma and Massimiliano Gioni opens
on June 11th, 2004 to include over fifty artists from throughout Europe. The project
in Donostia - San Sebastian is organised by the Amsterdam based International
Manifesta Foundation together with the Basque Government, the Territorial Council
of Gipuzkoa and the Donostia-San Sebastian City Council.
Departing from the notion of the city as a territory, the curators refer to Manifesta 5 as
an instrument of investigation into Donostia-San Sebastian as a privileged social site
and catalytic trigger to launch the formulation of their project. Deferring from the
spectacle of the political and bypassing contemporary art's recent obsession with global
geographies, the works within Manifesta 5 illustrate how the cryptic, opaque and
enigmatic may reveal the subtlety of the polemical and the potential of its transgression.
Manifesta 5 attempts to explore cultural landscapes as they get refracted through
hieroglyphic languages. The projects developed in Manifesta 5 concentrate on the
formulation of intricate and idiosyncratic structures that translate reality into
enigmatic forms, corresponding to a more stratified understanding of the complexity
of one's relationship to the world. Such complexity reveals contradictions and
simultaneity - between the demand for order and the will for formlessness, between
the rational and irrational, construction and expression, the performative and static,
and between symmetry and chaos, violence and rupture.
214 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
In approaching Donostia-San Sebastian and its broader Basque territory as a zone
of contingency, Manifesta 5 and the artists involved in the project turn to time and
space as malleable, locating their works within a temporal gap that houses at once
the past, the present and the future.
The articulation of the exhibition endeavours to reflect those tensions endemic to the
region and the spectral doubling of place by occupying both the historic centre of
Donostia-San Sebastian and its industrial, peripheral counterpart - the port town of
Pasaia. Extending beyond the symmetry, order, homogeneity, and leisure of San
Sebastian into the polemics of its neighbouring Pasaia, Manifesta 5 aims at
revealing the essence of something that is simultaneously economic, political,
historical and aesthetic.
In looking for clues within the physical space of its inception, the curators initiated
the Office of Alternative Urban Planning in September 2003 with the Berlage
Institute, a Rotterdam based post-graduate laboratory of architecture and urban
research, directed by the architect Alejandro Zaera Polo. Together with a designated
team of architects led by Sebastian Khourian, the curatorial team explored how
Manifesta, as a cultural project, might enable the reinvigoration of Pasaia as one of
the most impoverished areas in the Gipuzkoa territory located outside San
Sebastian's city center.
The Collaboration with the Berlage Institute (Office of Alternative Urban Planning)
The collaboration with The Office of Alternative Urban Planning (OAUP) was not
merely focused on the essence of its findings, rather on its possible effects of
research. This method of investigation proved one way to abstract from the built
environment and from the irregularities relating to the traditional flow of city, region,
province and state, implicit of the Basque territory to find new articulations of
political, cultural, and social formations.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 215
 The involvement of the OAUP was also crucial in overcoming the bottlenecks
associated with the complicated layers of public administration to facilitate the role
of curators, artists and cultural producers as negotiators. As a laboratory of ideas,
OAUP provided scenarios that extended Manifesta's role into a feasibility study as to
how cultural agents and artists may provide alternative solutions to reviving areas
such as the port city of Pasaia. Since the programme's inception, Pasaia has been
designated as a priority within the region whereby Manifesta 5 serves as the catalyst
in diversifying an area formerly cut off from its community.
The Formation of a Forum of Cultural Production as an Open Source
The Office of Alternative Urban Planning and the integration of artists who have also
been in direct negotiation with the city and regional administration pressed for a
type of activation of a former dead zone within the industrial port of Pasaia - within
a disgarded warehouse referred to as Casa Ceriza and a former ship building plant,
Ondartxo: both venues will not only function as sites for the duration of Manifesta
5, but they will remain as pilot projects for cultural production beyond the closing
date of the exhibition. In this way, the curatorial team has attempted to broaden the
category of Manifesta 5 as an art event and to focus on its performativity. This
approach extends the decision not to entitle Manifesta 5 with one title or unique
theme, but with numerous concepts that relate both to the complexities of the region
housing the project, and the open diversity of today's art and reality.
Working List of Artists and Participants
Bas Jan Ader, Victor Alimpiev and Sergey Vishnevsky, Huseyin Alptekin, Micol
Assael, Sven Augustijnen, , Zbynek Baladran, John Bock, Michael Borremans, Sergey
Bratkov, Carlos Bunga, Duncan Campbell, Cengis Cekil, Iliya Chichkan and Kyrill
Protsenko, D.A.E. (Peio Aguirre and Leire Vergara), Jan de Cock Angela de la Cruz,
Jeremy Deller, Andrea Faciu, Inaki Garmendia, Geert Goiris, Kim Hiorthoy, Laura
Horelli, Kulli Kaats, Johannes Kahrs, Leopold Kessler, Mark Leckey, Maria Lusitano,
Mark Manders Asier Mendizabal, Boris Mikhailov, Oksana Pasaiko, Anu Pennanen,
216 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2
Garrett Phelan, Kirsten Pieroth, Paola Pivi, Office of Alternative Urban Planning
(Veronica Arcos, Jose Arnaud, Sannah Belzer, Sebastian Khourian, Claudia Strahl,
Monica Villate, Constanze Zehi), Marc Quer, Daniel Roth, Michael Sailstorfer, Silke
Schatz, Markus Schinwald, Conrad Shawcross, Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi, Hito
Steyerl, Misha Stroj, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Vangelis Vlahos, Gillian Wearing, Amelie von
Wulffen, Cathy Wilkes, Yevgeniy Yufit, Olivier Zabat, David Zink Yi, Darius Ziura
The Venues
Arteleku houses the OAUP. Partipating artist projects located throughout Donostia-
San Sebastian - in the cultural center of Koldo Mitxelena, Kubo Kursaal within Rafael
Moneo's Kursaal, Museo San Telmo, the Aquarium and Soto of the Aquarium, a
former storage house for boats in the historic port of San Sebastian. In complement
to the projects in San Sebastian, artists projects will also be located in Pasaia- in
the former fish warehouse of Casa Ciriza and the former boat building space of
Ondartxo.
The Catalogue
A full catalogue will include artists' representation and contributions, the Manual
produced by the OAUP, and introductory essays by each of the curators, Andrew
Benjamin, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Dan Graham, and Peter Osborne.
Additional essays in relation to OAUP by Alejandro Zaera Polo and Sebastian
Khourian.
Programming
An additional academic program related to the issues explored by Berlage and
within the exhibition will be held at the time of Manifesta 5.
MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2 217
 OPENING DATES:
Thursday 10th of June
9.00-16.00 h: Exclusive press preview. Press accreditation necessary.
16.00-20.00 h: Professional preview. Professional accreditation necessary.

Friday 11th of June

10.00-14:00 h: Professional preview.
11.00 h: Press conference. Professional and press accreditation necessary.
18.00 h (time to be confirmed): OFFICIAL OPENING.
21.00 h: Opening event.

Organizers: Basque Government, Territorial Council of Gipuzkoa, Donostia-San Sebastian City

Council. Additional Sponsors: Culture 2000, Kutxa Obra Social Allianz Kultrustiftung, El Diario
Vasco. Collaborator: Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte of Spain. Other sponsors and
partners: Association Francaise d'Action Artistique (France), Association Tranzit (Czech Republic)
Berlage Institute (The Netherlands), British Council (Union Kingdom), Center for Contemporary Art
(Estonia), Critical Voices (Ireland), Department for Land Development and Promotion of the
Territorial Council of Gipuzkoa (Spain), European Cultural Foundation (The Netherlands), Federal
Office of Culture (Switzerland), Fundacao Caloustre Gulbenkian Servigio de Belas-Artes (Portugal),
FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange (Finland), International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine),
Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Turkey), Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap (Belgium),
Office for Contemporary Art (Norway), Port of Pasajes, Port Authority of Pasajes, (Spain), Scottish
Arts Council (Union Kingdom), The Mondriaan Foundation (The Netherlands), Untitled Art
Consulting (Spain).

For more information:

manifesta5@manifesta.es
Telephone: + 34 943 44 13 00 Fax :+34 943 42 09 22
press: comunicacion@manifesta.es
http://www.manifesta.es

218 MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 2

MJ - Manifesta Journal
journal of contemporary curatorship

No. 2, Winter 2003 / Spring 2004

Biennials

Published by:
Moderna galerija (Museum of Modern Art) Ljubljana
Ljubljana, Slovenia
and
International Foundation Manifesta
Amsterdam, The Netherlands The International Foundation Manifesta (IFM), with
offices in Amsterdam, The Netherlands organizes and
Editors: co-ordinates the New Network Program, which is a
Viktor Misiano multi-faceted resource and research program,
Igor Zabel encompassing the Manifesta Biennial, the Manifesta
Archives and a program of publications, discussions
Managing editor: and related activities, focusing on contemporary art
Marieke van Hal and its role in society. The public accessible archives
of Manifesta are located at the Manifesta at Home
English language editor: space in Amsterdam.
Rawley Grau
MJ - Manifesta Journal is part of the Manifesta
Design: Network Programme and is co-funded by the Culture
Arnold+Vuga design studio; Nataa Vuga 2000 Framework of the European Commission.

Printed by: ISBN 90-75380-95-X

Bonar & Partner ISSN 1572-5154

MJ - Manifesta Journal Reproductions, printing and binding:

journal of contemporary curatorship Arti Grafiche Amilcare Pizzi Spa
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REPRINT
Printed July 2008 in an edition of 1500
Publishers:
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tel. +31 20 6721435 Mateja Kos, Nataa Vuga, Viktor Misiano and all
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A Note on the Reprint:
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Editors:
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