The 53Rd Venice Biennale

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker Making Worlds: The 53rd Venice Biennale Guangzhou @ Ireland @ Venice One of the most memorable events at the 53rd Venice Biennale was a seminar that took place in a sweltering, over-crowded hall in the Irish Pavilion. As Homi K. Bhabha sardonically noted at the beginning of his presentation, the narrow, interlocked chairs into which both panel and audience were uncomfortably squeezed created . an association of ideas and bodies at the same time, very much like many art practices where affect and sweat and all kinds of bodily fluids mix and blend, sexualities are questioned, nationalities become blurred, boundaries immediately become tangible. An orgiastic experience is being provided in this wonderful city [of great sexuality]. This is not going to be a sober seminar! In fact, despite the wanton grandiloquence and dazzling intellectual displays of its participants, this seminar was a deadly earnest exercise in power. Some of the Western art world’s most respected luminaries had been invited by Sarat Maharaj, co-curator of the Third Guangzhou Triennial (GZT 2008), to participate in a conversation that would “query” the Guangzhou Triennial and its call for, as the triennial’s title suggested, a farewell to postcolonialism.2 The occasion was not only the opening of the Venice Biennale, but also the launch of a special issue of the Irish journal Printed Project,3 which was intended, according to its guest curator/editor Maharaj, to add to the reflections, debates, and analysis surrounding the GZT 2008 and, above all, to address the “ongoing methodological instigations, to use Ezra Pound’s word, . that are urging and nudging us, even perhaps twisting our arms, asking us to think about these questions.”4 Bhabha, a leading theorist in the field of postcolonialism, accepted the challenge to participate, as did Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale; Chris Dercon, director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich; and Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Also present was Gao Shiming, deputy director of the Advanced School of Art and Humanities, China Academy of Art. It was Gao who had argued passionately, as a co-curator of the GZT 2008, that contemporary discourse and artistic production should be liberated from Western models such as postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and alternative modernities.5 They had become, Gao had proposed, propaganda strategies to manage difference in “a new policy of domination” and as “tools of a new ideology of global capital” that have 6 evolved into little more than high-sounding but increasingly hollow slogans of political propaganda.6 Bhahba launched a dismissive counter-attack on any suggestion that postcolonialism could be described as a model: If, like me, you had some modest responsibility for floating the concept, we were trying to get away desperately from the fiat of models. The post-colonial model does not exist. That is not my problem. It has never existed in my own work.”7 Bhabha’s version of globalization, he argued forcefully, is “that the incomplete project of decolonization—which has not had its chance—is recognized today in the profound inequalities of globalization.” In an eloquent and persuasive monologue on these inequalities, Bhabha noted that “what is important about identification, or identity, or the politics of recognition, is how much authority you have, or you don’t have, through the mediation of that concept.” Authority, he continued, is about access, or “where you can put the object, or where you are not allowed to put the object, or who writes the label, or who in fact proceeds to write the essay on the label, and what resources institutionally are there—and who has the right to narrate.8 The next person with the right to narrate was Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale. Having arrived late due to prior obligations, Birnbaum deftly moved the topic from postcolonialism to his own conversation with Maharaj, which had been published in the catalogue to the 53rd Venice Biennale under the title Philosophical Geographies.9 In the course of this conversation Maharaj had referred to a “spiritual geography” of Europe0 reputedly proposed by the Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl (859–938) in a lecture in Vienna in 935 titled Die Philosophy in der Krisis der europäischen Menschheit (Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind). Maharaj further suggested that Husserl had made claims for “Europe’s singular achievement” of having “broken through to a more theoretical, transcendental plane” while “the cultures of India or China remained bogged down at the mythic level.” At the Irish Pavilion, seventy-four years and countless interpretations of Husserl’s 935 lecture later, Birnbaum continued his ongoing conversation with Maharaj by describing Husserl’s spiritual gestalt of Europe as a “brutal map” based on the principle of exclusion.2 The next speaker, Chris Dercon from Munich, quickly shifted the conversation from Husserl to the principle of (postcolonial) inclusion and the plethora of pavilions that, in 2009, constituted the Venice Biennale. “It seems,” he contended, “as if we have another form of mapping! . I am quite struck to find suddenly a pavilion of Catalunya. I am very struck to find all these regions popping up trying to establish not quite an identity— no, but a kind of management of culture, a kind of mismanagement of different cultures, maybe a kind of mismanagement of performing the difference.”3 Biennials, he conceded, had “created a kind of guarantee for participation,” but, he wondered, in two years’ time, would cities such as Lyon or Berlin have their own pavilions? Dercon’s key concern was, 7 however, neither exclusion nor inclusion but rather what he termed the “dictatorship of the present.” One of the major crises of the visual arts, he argued, was not the dictatorship “of the management of multiculturalism, or the management of performing the so-called difference, but the management of amnesia. ‘farewell to postcolonialism’ should mean ‘farewell to amnesia’!” Dercon concluded his presentation by suggesting that we should perhaps not say farewell to postcolonialism. “There are other, more urgent farewells.” This challenge was taken up by Charles Esche of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. “Postcolonialism was a convenient excuse for what we might call the West, or what we might call Western Europe, not to deal with its history and not to have to face its memories, but actually to displace the issue. There is a crisis. It is not a crisis of identity but a crisis of memory. It is also a crisis of reflection.”4 Esche referred to writings by Maharaj that described the move in Europe in 989 “from a world of juxtaposition [as exemplified by the Berlin Wall] towards a world of entanglement.” Saying farewell to postcolonialism, Esche argued, would perhaps allow for a new understanding of the fact “that we are all immediately entangled even before we encounter any notion of the Other. We are entangled through the economy, we are entangled through politics, we are entangled through our digital exchange.” Nevertheless our notions of the nation state and the bureaucratic structures on which we are dependent do not “reflect on entanglement, or fully on themselves.”5 It was time for Gao Shiming to speak. The conversation could finally move away from a familial, internal discourse among curators and theoreticians based in the West. Now a curator and theoretician from China—indeed the very person who had called for a “farewell to postcolonialism”—had the right to narrate. Perhaps he would challenge the progenitor of postcolonialism himself, endorse or reject notions of entanglement, or defend his Liberationist calls to abandon Western theoretical models and English as the international language of intellectual exchange. Perhaps once again, as he had done at the Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, Gao would rebel against the dictatorship of the past (and not the present).6 The room was still as Gao began to speak. First he apologized for his difficulty with English before complimenting Bhabha on his narrative of “the re-emergent past and the coming future.” Then, in the grand tradition of Western academic jousting, he dealt an elegant blow to the (metaphysical) body. Referring to Bhabha’s opening query (“farewell to post-colonialism but say hello to what?”), Gao asked him, “Is this question itself on the basis of a linear history?” Bhabha’s reaction was swift and unequivocal: “No! None of the work I have done could have been done if I had thought in linear terms.” Bhabha then embarked on a lengthy reply, which concluded with the statement that modernity was “the most messianic project ever with its notion of the now, and the now, and the new, and the now, and the now.” The gauntlet had been thrown down and the debate could begin. To my astonishment, before Gao could reply or make the kind of substantial contribution to the discussion that other panel participants had been allowed, the conversation was declared over. Audience and participants alike rushed to the next event. As Gao Shiming passed me we greeted one another. “How eloquent Homi Bhabha is as a speaker,” he remarked, smiling. 8 National Participations and Collateral Events in a World of Entanglement The pre-eminence of the Venice Biennale as an international platform for contemporary visual art remains undisputed despite the rapid growth of biennials and triennials around the world. This is due, in part, to the Venice

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