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Home , Artempo, Barbara Vanderlinden, Remodernism, Walking Artists Network, Ydessa Hendeles

2. Shifting the Exhibitionary Complex

Can we ever get beyond the essential conservatism of displaying works of art in conventional, dedicated spaces?

—Paula Marincola, What Makes a Great Exhibition?, 2006 TERRY SMITH Shifting the Exhibitionary Complex

Sites of exhibition are the most visible elements arts projects in their apartment and the courtyard of the infrastructure within which art curating of a building in the Galata section of Istanbul, is practiced today. We might set them out as a continuing their work since then in more mobile spectrum, an array, ranging from the traditional and virtual formats, as well as pursuing projects (in the minimal sense of having been around in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. Since 2003 in the longest) to the most recent, and from those Yangon, Myanmar, Networking and Initiatives thoroughly invested in landmark and location in Culture and the Arts (NICA), founded by two to those that presume mobility and transience. artists, Jay Koh and Chu Yuan, has nurtured a At one end, there is the Metropolitan Museum variety of local possibilities and international of Art, New York: a mother-ship among connections for Burmese artists and spun off megamuseums that—like its few comparators, other independent arts spaces. Meanwhile, in such as the British Museum, London, and East Liberty, Pittsburgh, the Waffle Shop is the Louvre, Paris—has recently included a community building, consciousness raising within its treasure troves, location, performance space, TV studio, and blog Façade with banners, detail of main entrance and steps, The appointed a specialist curator of twentieth Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, site, conceived and run by artists associated with Metropolitan Museum of Art, and twenty-first century art (Sheena Wagstaff, Conflict Kitchen, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, that also offers a full New York, 2006 who arrived from the Modern), oriented Pennsylvania, 2010–present menu of edible waffles. A related project, the its collection rooms toward making vivid the take-out restaurant, Conflict Kitchen, only sells contemporary circumstances surrounding food from nations with which the United States 1 the creation of at least some of the items, and 1 Oda Projesi’s website http:// is in conflict. heralded, where appropriate, the continuing odaprojesi.blogspot.com. See also Claire Bishop, “The So- vitality of cultures that had previously been cial Turn: Collaboration and What are the exhibitionary venues that fill out regarded as having reached their aesthetic Its Discontents,” in Mischa the infrastructural spectrum between these two Rakier and Margriet Schave- highpoints at some time in the past. We could maker, eds., Right About Now: ends? Having begun with the universal history place at the other end of the spectrum venues Art and Theory Since the 1990s of the art museum that holds pride of cultural (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007), that focus on the work of one artist or even, as 58–68. On NICA, see Grant place in most metropolitan centers, we soon shift is the case with The Artist Institute, New York, Kester, The One and the Many: our gaze to the huge variety of more specialized Contemporary Collaborative Art a slowly changing program of exhibitions of in a Global Context (Durham, collections—the period museum, the national just one work of art at a time. Yet the real other N.C.: Duke University collection, the geopolitical area or civilization is not concentrated versions of the same thing Press, 2011), 145–53. Kester museum, the city museum, the university gallery, discusses a number of similar but the proliferation of open-ended curated projects. On the Waffle Shop the art school gallery, the private collection Oda Projesi (Room Project) projects, short and longer term, that seek to and Conflict Kitchen, see museum, the museum of , the single collective (Gunes Savas, Secil http://waffleshop.org/; and Yersel, and Erden Kosova), work from within the creativity already present http://www.conflictkitchen. artist museum, the museum of contemporary art, October 2005 in the everyday life of small, but constrained, org/. the one-medium museum, and spaces dedicated communities. Between 2000 and 2005 Oda to large-scale commissioned installations. Projesi (Room Project), a collective formed by Continuous with these, in well served cities, are three women artists, staged thirty community various venues that do not have collections as

58 59 TERRY SMITH Shifting the Exhibitionary Complex their basis but are devoted above all to changing these shows sometimes include among the works exhibitions: Kunsthalles, alternative spaces, for sale a number of not-for-sale works borrowed, artist-operated initiatives, satellite spaces, and or loaned for a fee, from museums. In their Miami the exhibition venues of art foundations (some location, Mera and Don Rubell regularly present of which have collections). Finally, we visit theme shows drawn from their collection: their institutes of various kinds that include exhibitions focus, since 2000, on young artists from Los as one part of their research, publication, and Angeles helped propel that city to its current educational activities, and check out temporary return to prominence as an art center. Certain and online sites. With these last, and with many private collectors have always known that they can emergent quasi-institutions, the focus shifts from influence the development of art itself, not just physical location and on-site continuity as the the direction of the market, simply by the weight literal grounding to situations in which the event of their attention: Charles Saatchi is merely the and the image prevail over place and duration. most notorious recent example of the collector Each of these venues or operations has distinct become museum director. There are many features and purposes, and they often spring up precedents, going back to the first large-scale in response to perceived shortcomings of already private collections made available to select circles existing institutions. At the same time, of invited viewers that were assembled during the in ideas, objects, and people has always flowed seventeenth century by certain Italian cardinals between them. These days it is becoming very and German princes. Closer to our times, and dense indeed. still very influential, are public museums oriented around the values of the original collector, such as To this long—and, it must be said, the Menil Collection and the associated Rothko impressive list (how many other arts spin off Chapel, Houston, which are constantly curated to new infrastructure so often, and so variously?)— promote relationships between “Art, Spirituality, we should add the growing interest of many Human Rights,” so dear to the founders, John and commercial galleries, collector museums, and Dominique de Menil. art fairs in certain kinds of public-oriented, “art historical” exhibitions. This has not displaced Some collectors are beginning to see that their basic commercial orientation, nor is it they can become not only museum directors likely to, given the seemingly endless boom (at and de facto curators but artists as well. least at the top of the market), especially for foundation director curates contemporary art. With a narrower set of costs 2 Ydessa Hendeles, cited exhibitions aimed at creating “an experience and far greater financial resources than most in Robert Fulford, “On the that precludes words” by establishing “new neurological path through public museums, Gagosian Galleries has taken to Ydessa Hendeles’s museum,” metaphorical connections” between artworks presenting “museum-quality” shows of artists such Globe and Mail, November 16, that she collects for this purpose.2 Since 2001 she 1999, http://www.robertful- as , Yayoi Kasuma, , ford.com/Ydessa.html. has worked on Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), and Lucio Fontana. Staged by in-house curators, a vast accumulation of found photographs that

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include teddy bears, usually from family albums compiled between 1900 and 1940. In the versions shown at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2003), and the Gwangju Biennale (2010), the multilevel central rooms were filled with thousands of these

Ydessa Hendeles, Partners images. Installation style, they were preceded by (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002. smaller rooms that displayed a range of vernacular Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, November 7, artifacts including a 1950s Minnie Mouse doll and 2003–February 1, 2004 artworks such as a small self-portrait taken in 1945, and were followed by a room that included one item that the viewer approached from behind: ’s Him (2001), a child-sized figure, on its knees praying, with the unmistakable features of the adult Adolf Hitler. In this installation, one of Cattelan’s typical visual one-liners suddenly resonated with multiple, 3 3 Among many reviews, most darkly explicit meaning. evocative is John Bentley Ydessa Hendeles, The Wedding (The Evans Polaroid Project) with Roni Horn. Installation view, Andrea Rosen Mays, “That Century: Notes Gallery, New York, December 10, 2011–February 4, 2012 on Partners,” Canadian Art In 2011 Hendeles was invited to curate an online, May 2, 2004, http:// exhibition in the Chelsea space of the dealer www.canadianart.ca/art/ features/2004/05/02/195/. Andrea Rosen. The only stipulation was that the affective distance between this imposing she include at least one of the Polaroid images environment and the modest Polaroids through that Walker Evans shot in the last year of his selections that laid out a set of affinities. life (1973–74), which the gallery was licensed to sell. The result was The Wedding (The In the first room visitors were greeted by a Walker Evans Polaroid Project), shown between model of a cooper’s workshop crafted in France December 2011 and February 2012. Subtitled in the nineteenth century set on a child’s table A curatorial composition by Ydessa Hendeles, she manufactured by Gustav Stickley around 1904. used certain items from her own collection and The center of the main space was dominated by a borrowed others from museums and dealers: the monumental birdhouse made in England in 1875 final installation included eighty-three Evans from mahogany and wire, around which were Polaroids, including some from the Metropolitan arrayed, pew-like, wooden child’s settles based Museum of Art. The Rosen Gallery consists of on a design by Stickley. The Polaroids lined each a narrow entrance area that opens on to a large wall of the main space, their subdued grays, blues, central space topped by an impressive skylight and greens offering mute witness to the existence mounted on a wooden frame and supported elsewhere of the buildings or architectural details by steel beams. Hendeles cleverly negotiated that Evans recorded. Imitation architecture

62 63 TERRY SMITH Shifting the Exhibitionary Complex squared off against reproductions of absent disparate elements. These elements are in architecture, leaving an emotional gulf no way aligned art historically, and I regard between them. each as a fundamental component of the composition that bears no substitution, not 4 The gap was filled by imagery of movement, 4 Ydessa Hendeles, “Protha- even from the same body of work. of living things, albeit elusive ones. The cardinal lamium,” The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project), points of the main room were marked by four A curatorial composition by A clearer statement of the contemporary pairs of images from Roni Horn’s Bird series Ydessa Hendeles (New York: convergence of artistic and curatorial impulses Andrea Rosen Gallery, 2011), shot between 1998 and 2007 that show close-ups 2. See also her “Curatorial and constraints is difficult to imagine. Every key of birds seen from behind, their folded wings Compositions,” The Exhibi- artistic idea since conceptualism and tionist, no. 5 (January 2012): betraying no signs of their identity, except as 47–52. is amalgamated into a seamless, pure, J. K. singular, and singularly beautiful, creatures. We Rowling-kind of “curatorial composition.” That now understand why the first room contained this statement comes from a collector who sees two photographs: Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 no boundaries between any place on the spectrum record of the running flight of the adjutant bird is typical of our times. Nor is it a surprise that and Eugène Atget’s photograph, taken around Hendeles’s projects excite the interest of young 1900, of a shop front, an old boutique on the Quai curators more than most other models out there. Bourbon, Paris. In the doorway of the latter we glimpse the blurred shadow of a young girl. Is it The Exhibitionary Complex she who has imagined these spaces? Is it her house of memory, her dream world, into which we have How does this Houdini-like identity-swapping been invited? of roles across the spectrum relate to the idea of “the exhibitionary complex”—as described by In the explanatory booklet (designed Bennett, historicized by Lorente, and theorized somewhat like a child’s notebook), Hendeles is by Duncan and Wallach, among many others— quite explicit about her process: that undergirded the growth of modern art, linked it to the modernizing city, provoked the avant- In my practice, my approach is to develop a garde into existence, and subsequently sustained 5 site-specific work, conceiving and executing 5 See Tony Bennett, The Birth for many decades? These authors each show as an artistic embodiment of the of the Museum: History, Theory, identified the system that was initiated most Politics (London: Routledge, particular exhibition space. I start with the 1995), esp. chap. 6, and his influentially for Europe and its cultural colonies context and search for ways to develop a important chap., “The by the addition, in 1818, of an annual showing Exhibitionary Complex,” relationship with it that is expressed through in Bruce W. Ferguson, of new works to ongoing displays of works from layered metaphorical connections. I use Reesa Greenberg, and the permanent collection at the Luxembourg Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking an artistic process to create a site-specific About Exhibitions (London: Palace, Paris. Entrants to the Museum of Living curatorial composition that interweaves Routledge, 1996); J. Pedro Artists were chosen by members of the Academy, narratives from disparate discourses using Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban a professional organization led by artists that

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Modernity, The First Museums operated under the patronage of the Emperor to change, tends, like all institutional structures, of Contemporary Art, 1800– and later the state. Works deemed worthy of to prioritize self-perpetuation, slow down time, 1930 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ash- gate, 1998). See also Emma entering the national collection were passed and incline toward the securities of repetition, are Barker, ed., Contemporary Cul- on to the Louvre Museum ten years after the sets of practices, such as those that Lind labels tures of Display (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, artist’s death, while others went to provincial “the curatorial,” examples of emergent, more 1999); and Carol Duncan and museums, to storage, or were returned to the inventive, and more critical alternatives? Or are Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” artist’s estate. Artists sold works from these annual they the latest supplement to a structure quite 3, no. 4 (1980): 448–69. See exhibitions or direct from their studios. By the capable of generating its own transformations—as also Carol Duncan, Civiliz- mid-eighteenth century in England a number of ing Rituals: Inside Public Art it has done in the past, is doing now, and will do Museums (London: Routledge, independent auction houses had been established for the foreseeable future? 1995); and Alan Wallach, Ex- and commercial galleries began appearing hibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United throughout Europe in the 1890s. This apparently A third, pivotal element pushes itself into States (Amherst: Univer- competitive, but mostly cooperative system is the this mix: the repeated mega-exhibition, or sity of Massachusetts Press, 1998). A similarly skeptical core of the multimuseum and gallery spectrum biennial, now so widespread as to have become spirit informs Shaked’s useful that we have inherited. Role swapping has been an institutional form in itself. We may situate survey of ethical questions in museums, especially in endemic since the beginning, especially as the it, logically, in between concrete institutions, the U.S.: Nizan Shaked, system was adopted in city after city throughout such as museums, and supplementary ones, “Something out of Nothing: Marcia Tucker, Jeffrey Deitch, the modern world. This is still occurring, as new such as Kunsthalles and online sites. Indeed, and the De-regulation of art distribution centers are created; China during biennials have evolved into internally diverse the Contemporary-Museum the 2000s is a striking example, with the Arab displays that occasionally, but regularly, spread Model,” Art and Education, April 7, 2012, http://www. states in the Middle East the most recent. themselves out across the range of exhibitionary artandeducation.net/paper/ venues of the city that hosts them, occupying something-out-of-nothing- marcia-tucker-jeffrey-deitch- Yet the framework is changing, leading each site, making each site different from what and-the-de-regulation-of- us to ask why, and what would change for the it normally is, while also connecting them, at the-contemporary-museum- model/. better look like? If French artists in the early least for the duration. Biennials, therefore, may nineteenth century faced the problem of how be considered structural—they have become to effectively distribute their work and solved it fundamental to the display of contemporary art. by institutionalizing, proliferating, and varying For historical art, the parallel is the blockbuster. the venues for doing so, artists in the Middle Since Treasures of Tutankhamun, which toured East today are small players in local art worlds England, Europe, Japan, and the U.S. between that seem primarily dedicated to selling works 1972 and 1979, attracting millions, blockbuster drawn from all over the world to targeted buyers exhibitions have become so regular a part of from their region and to anchoring large-scale museum programming that they, too, may be real estate projects. In the longer-established art considered structural. The major museums centers, the issue for curators is rather different. seem to be incorporating the mega-exhibition If the selecting, collecting, and exhibitionary into themselves: they have become so large, so ensemble, however chameleon-like in its capacity internally various, so full of attractions, and so

66 67 TERRY SMITH Shifting the Exhibitionary Complex crowded that we might regard these institutions issues while continuing to ask: What kinds of themselves as megamuseums. contemporary curatorial thought are in play in each instance? Our galleria-like infrastructural array might, therefore, be seen as concentrating its energies The Experience Museum into three realms: the institutional, the alternative (or the supplement), and the link. These are the In recent times the status of the museum as forms taken by its urge to territorialize. At the a site of permanent collection is gradually same time, as we have shown, there is an incessant shifting to one of the museum as theater for urge on the part of each type of venue and each large-scale traveling exhibitions organized exhibition format to imitate the vital practices by international curators and large-scale of the others, to absorb some of their enabling installations organized by individual artists. energies (in the case of institutions), to counter Every exhibition or installation of this kind is them with previously unimagined activity (in the made with the intention of designing a new case of the alternatives), and to embody projective order of historical memories, of proposing versions of both (in the case of the biennial). Stasis new criteria for collecting by reconstructing is always vitiated by change; storms are vital to the history. These traveling exhibitions and regular patterning of the weather. To fully grasp installations are temporal museums that 6 the settings in which curating is done, we need 6 Boris Groys, “On the New,” openly display their temporality. to keep in mind the interplay between the art in Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 40. system’s slow moving yet constant regeneration Boris Groys’s remarks in his book Art Power of structures and its fast moving proliferation of highlight the modern transformation of the art artworks and exhibitionary ideas. museum from that of repository of a collection to site of exhibition, its transmogrification from In this section, I will reflect further on this a place that held history in stasis, presenting it as interplay by thinking first about museums, then a stilled panorama, to one in which everything— about biennials. What has been happening to including the collection rooms—has the status of both, and what do the changes mean for curating? an event in the process of happening. As he goes We have come to a pass in which the museum on to say, contemporary art may be distinguished seems no longer to be the limit setter, perhaps from that which prevailed during the modern not even the default, for contemporary art and era precisely in its core commitment to radical contemporary curating. Biennials have become temporality: it makes every element in the the major vehicles of contemporary art, yet their situation utterly and only temporary. very success has brought problems for curators, their primary custodians, not least the challenge In the modernist tradition, the art context of constant reinvention. Are these the indicators was regarded as relatively stable—it was the of infrastructural shift? I will explore these idealized context of the universal museum.

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Innovation consists in putting a new form, a new thing, into this stable context. In our time context is seen as changing and unstable. So the strategy of contemporary art consists in creating a specific context that can make a certain form or thing look other, new, and interesting—even if this form has already been collected. Traditional art worked on the level of form. Contemporary art works on the level of context, framework, background, or of 7 7 Ibid., 40. a new theoretical interpretation.

This is an acute description of key aspects of the situation—not least because in late modern and contemporary circumstances, and in line with a history I will sketch in the next essay, when it comes to the radical renovation of exhibition forms, curators have mostly followed artists.

Museums everywhere use these strategies to “contemporize” their offerings. A spectacular instance is Tate Modern’s framing, since 2000, of its collections of modern art with both spectacular (in the Turbine Hall) and less in-your-face, but still agenda-setting works of contemporary art (in the entrance and exit rooms of each of the themed floors). On a quite different scale, and far away, the idea of the temporary exhibition is recast in projects such as One Day Sculpture. Curated by David Cross and Claire Doherty, it consisted of twenty installations, performances, events, or demonstrations, each mounted for twenty-four hours, in twenty different places Ólafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machine, mirror foil, across the two islands of Aotearoa New Zealand, aluminum, and scaffolding, 26.7 x 22.3 x 155.4 m. Installation view, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London during an eight-month period from August 2008. This was an innovative way of splitting the difference between a place-bound medium

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and a cultural setting saturated by multiple and Chelsea, London, and Pinault at the Palazzo fragile temporalities. No surprise that productive Grassi and the Customs House, Venice), or by tensions between these two factors shaped each of carving out art parks in the jungle (Bernardo Paz 8 8 I explore Tate Modern’s the twenty exhibits. at Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil). contemporizing strategy in What is Contemporary Art?, chap. 4. See David Cross and In my description of the three currents that The second current, which I call the Claire Doherty, eds., One Day predominate within contemporary art, I highlight transnational transition, has found its ideal vehicle Sculpture (Bielefeld: Kerber, 9 2009). how each was hatched within, latched onto, or 9 “Transnational” is a term in the biennial. Local-international exchange coevolved with the disseminative forms most adopted by all sides of these is built into the biennial form, as is the regular equations: it is, for example, suited to its needs. Thus prevails favored by the Guggenheim repetition of the temporary survey exhibition. Thus at universal art history survey museums when for its Abu Dhabi project. the biennial has suited Western institutions that they address contemporary art and it drives the wish to sample art from everywhere else, yet not desire of museums of modern art to remain necessarily collect it: Venice, São Paulo, Sydney, contemporary, as it does those museums of the list goes on. (Pittsburgh, beginning in 1896 and contemporary art (the majority) that see their role thus the second biennial, has consistently collected as updating audiences on the continuous output from its Carnegie Internationals.) In mirror of art (rather than grappling with the challenges reversal, it suits artists from elsewhere who wish of contemporaneity). Retro-sensationalism is the to sample art from the West, but not necessarily preferred mode for the private museums of those reproduce it. Havana, beginning in 1984, remains collectors who identify with its maverick-in-the- the leading instance of this (unaligned, Third citadel attitude—famously Charles Saatchi, Eli World) perspective. As well, the biennial offers Broad, and François Pinault. Their enterprise international standard models for art producing is echoed, on a smaller scale, by many of those locales that wish to build and maintain permanent newly arrived to riches in Russia, China, the infrastructure. At the same time, it substitutes for Middle East, and elsewhere. For example, the the grand exhibition in locales that either do not Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) that wish or are unable to present them as a matter of opened in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2010, to house course. This has been a winning combination for the collection and present the lifestyle of gambler the global trafficking in art. David Walsh. Emergent during the wealth concentration enabled since the 1980s by the Museums are not the preferred disseminative widespread embrace of neoliberal economics, the modes for the under-the-radar proliferators new collectors have been drawn to spectacular whose activities constitute the third current in art and to high-profile public presentations of contemporary art. Nor are biennials. Preferences their collections, whether as part of well-known are for the Internet, direct interactivity, alternative museums (Broad at the Los Angeles County spaces, and temporary settings—all constantly Museum), grand renovations of older structures changing, all entirely experimental. Museums (Saatchi at the Duke of York’s Headquarters, of any kind are OK, if they are interesting for

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whatever immediate purpose, but are not special of cultural administrators and museum directors, in the sense that helping to shore up their perhaps more so than that of curators. But these continuity has any priority. While they remain, in roles are shifting now, especially as a generation the public mind at least, the singular gatekeepers of curators who have found their vocations within for what counts as art, they seem increasingly the shape-shifting spectrum that I have been openhanded—at times, frantic—about what they describing take on higher positions within arts will encourage into their portals. Meanwhile, institutions. third current prosumers care less about their output being labeled as “art” and more about One extremely popular response has been whether it is of interest to their peers. Some to turn museums into centers of culturtainment curators, consciously turning away from the art (ugly word, awful phenomenon). Carsten Höller world’s fawning dependence on the 1%, actively pinpoints the context: seek to add artistic energies to social changes that are occurring in new contexts, such as the We’re in the middle of the “rule of populism.” 10 These phrases invoke Occupy movements. Most curators working today All the big museums all over the word are famous essays by, respectively, are aware that the most interesting, rapid, and showing contemporary art. Contemporary Duncan F. Cameron, “The Museum, a Temple, or the perhaps the most profound kinds of change in art galleries are opening everywhere and Forum,” Curator: The Mu- their field of practice are happening inside the becoming larger. In the 1970s contemporary seum Journal in 1971 and in UNESCO’s Journal of World three currents I have identified and along the fault art was a specialist domain—not many people History in 1972, reprinted in lines between them. were interested in it. Now it’s impossible to Gail Anderson, ed., Reinvent- ing the Museum: Historical and open a lifestyle magazine that does not contain Visitor to Carsten Höller, Contemporary Perspectives on The Museum Question Experience, New Museum, something on contemporary art. Today, the Paradigm Shift (New York: New York, October 26, Altamira Press, 2008); and though, it’s necessary to go out of the museum, 2011–January 15, 2012. Stephen Weil, “From being Taking these changes together—they are, after Posted on New Museum to avoid the mainstream to produce new, about something to being for all, occurring contemporaneously—we might wiki, http://experiencewiki- more radical concepts. The museum has done someone: The ongoing trans- newmuseum.tumblr.com/ formation of the American ask: Are they threatening to make ruins out of its job, and, as an artist, the benefit you get post/16820185024 (January museum,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 all kinds of museums and exhibition spaces, no 2012) from making more and more museum shows (Summer 1999): 229–58, re- printed in Lois Silverman, ed., matter where they fall within the spectrum? If is decreasing. It’s not possible to make things The Social Work of Museums so, is the best response one of defiant resistance, in a museum that are radical enough to have (New York: Routledge, 2010). For an analysis of the mis- total acceptance, or calibrated change mixed a powerful influence, because the important sion statements of sixty U.S. with carefully chosen continuity? If the latter, things have already been done. And that’s not museums, see András Szántó, “Sixty Museums in search of precisely which elements should go into the blend only pertinent to art shows and museums. It’s a purpose,” Art Basel Miami and how should they be blended? Has the move something you see in many domains in society, Beach daily edition, December from “temple” to “forum,” from being “about 11 Carsten Höller, “Art and including science, where all the big discoveries 1, 2011, http://www.theart- Entertainment: Forum,” 11 newspaper.com/articles/Sixty+ something” to being “for somebody,” gone too have already been made. Australian and New Zealand museums+in+search+of+a+pur 10 far, or nowhere near far enough? Putting these Journal of Art 11 (2011): 74. pose/25146. questions in this way is to deploy the language

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He should know. Along with others, such as more popular than ever before, but most of them Maurizio Cattelan, he is an expert supplier of are more banal than ever before.” (There are, of contemporary art as entertainment—it was the course, many kinds of banality: for example, that of entire object of his New Museum exhibition in the lowest common denominator of taste and that late 2011, as it was of Cattelan’s contemporaneous of the conformist parrot of high fashion.) Borja- show uptown at the Guggenheim. He is wrong, Villel traced a three-stage history, or evolution, however, about there being nothing “big” left to from the exclusivist modern museum (which used discover. We are just beginning to grasp the depth white cube transparency and immediacy to display of complexity within contemporaneity and how to a linear art history to a specialist and a generalized live with it. public), through the inclusive postmodern museum (which mixed styles, mediums, and chronologies Höller paints a picture of the triumph of the and used marketing to sell multiculturalism as a conformist contemporary—a nightmare scenario. product to audiences), until now, at a moment of Of course, it is extremely pleasant for most of crisis for societies and museums, when there is a those involved, as seductive as the “death rooms” need to rethink the presumptions about property in THX 1138 (1971), George Lucas’s first, and and patrimony embodied in collections and to in many ways best, film. This mood is captured treat them instead as an “archive of the commons.” in Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s This archive should be displayed, he believes, as video Museum Futures: Distributed (2008), which a repository of other narratives, from oral ones to features an interview between an archivist and multiple modernities, as stories of belonging, the director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 13 For videos of The Now with works of art treated as relational objects, that set in 2058, the centenary year of the museum. Museum presentations, go to is, objects to which people can relate in a variety http://curatorsintl.org/events/ 13 Neil Cummings and Marysia Their exchange reviews a “history” of the Museet the_now_museum. In Spain, of ways. Lewandowska, Museum up to that time, with the years between now these issues were raised in Futures: distributed, 2008. the 1995 exhibition El limits Video still. HD video, 32 min. and then imagined as a struggle between open del museu (The End(s) of the In a setting as vast and varied as the Reina inventiveness and managerialism during which the Museum) curated by John G. Sofia, itself a minicity, one already experiences Hanhard and Thomas Keenan museum is put partially into the marketplace to at the Fundació Antoni something like this incessant interplay between become a quasi-private, quasi-public institution. Tapies, Barcelona. They are deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionalization. elaborated in Franciso Baena, One becomes gradually aware that the managers Manuel Borja-Villel, Chema More broadly, for the past thirty years, unevenly have absorbed institutional critique into their González, and Yolanda across art worlds around the globe, we have been official language while never having become at Romero, eds., 10,000 francs experiencing the contemporaneity of the three reward (The Contemporary Art all critical. It is as if a time-transported Andrea Museum, dead or alive), confer- types of museum that Borja-Villel outlines. These 12 12 The text of the interview Fraser is interviewing her double. ence proceedings (Barcelona: exhibitionary venues register the three currents in Ministry of Culture, State opens the centenary volume, art that I have distinguished. Museums across the Anna Tellgren, ed., The Corporation for Spanish History Book (Gottingen, At The Now Museum conference, held in Cultural Action Abroad and spectrum busily strive to adapt to the unfolding of Germany: Steidl; Stockholm: New York in May 2011, Reina Sofia director International University of each current, while also showcasing instances of Moderna Museet, 2008). Andalusia, 2009). Manuel Borja-Villel remarked, “Museums are the complex interactions between them.

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At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 12:00–3 p.m., except Fridays: 4:00–7:00 in recent years, a quite different approach p.m., has been attempted. Updated in 2010, its (clay, wood, wire, styrofoam, plastic, cast Mission Statement declares its primary goal as iron, fabric, aluminum, synthetic polymer remaining “the foremost museum of modern paint, ink, paper, and brass wire) Bleekmen, art in the world,” but then goes on to add Huma Bhabha “and contemporary” to every subsequent use (plywood, shoes, animal fiber, thread, and of “modern” in the more specific bullet points sheepskin) Atrabilious, Doris Salcedo 14 14 Collections Management about how it will remain at the forefront. In its Policy, The Museum of Modern public advertising, MoMA pitches itself, in every In other words: This is what you can expect Art, October 5, 2010. www. moma.org/docs/explore/Col- respect except for its brand name, as a museum to see when you come to the museum now. And: lectionsMgmtPolicyMoMA_ of contemporary art. An advertisement in the How more contemporary can you expect us to Oct10.pdf+Museum+of+Mod ern+Art+New+York+Mission+ New York Times (November 18, 2011, C27) has be? Subtext: Do you really want us to be more Statement. this header: “MoMA Contemporary Galleries contemporary than this? 1980–NOW Over two hundred new works in all mediums ALWAYS NEW ALWAYS ON VIEW.” Elsewhere, I have tracked, month by month These messages overlaid or bordered an image of from its reopening in November 2004, MoMA’s picture frames in which the titles of these works struggles with its core wish to continue to be were given: the defining museum of modern art in the world while at the same time remaining open to, even (16mm film transferred to video [black and being at the forefront, but not quite at the cutting white, silent]) Deadpan, Steve McQueen edge, of collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting 15 (pantyhose and sand) R.S.V.P.1, Senga Negudi 15 In What is Contemporary contemporary art. I identified some of the (video [color, sound]) Histoire(s) du Cinema Art?, chap. 1, I pay particular factors preventing the successful performance of attention to the succession of (Chapters 1A and 1B), Jean-Luc Godard exhibitions in the second floor this double act: the presumption that the only (candies, individually wrapped in silver “contemporary” galleries. contemporary art worthy of consideration was cellophane [endless supply]) Untitled that which evidently extended the innovations of (Placebo), Félix González-Torres twentieth century modernism, the token inclusion (glass, painted steel, distilled water, plastic, of a small number of artists outside the modernist and three basketballs) Three Ball 50/50 mainstream and from cultures outside of Europe Tank (Two Dr. J. Silver Series, One Wilson and the U.S., the territoriality of departments Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free), 1992/2007. Silvershot), Jeff Koons based on traditional artistic mediums, the Refrigerator, tables, chairs, (refrigerator, table, chairs, wood, drywall, infrequent showing of art using new and digital wood, drywall, food, dimensions variable curry, and lots of people) Untitled (Free/ media, the constant foregrounding of the Still), an interactive installation of museum’s own history, and incessant curatorial vegetarian Thai curry served free of deference to precedence and institutional charge in a gallery, Nov 17–Feb 8, sanction.

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one hopes inevitably, these galleries are shedding their modernist residues, gradually becoming contemporary spaces. (At least in the first rooms: to date, this sense is rarely sustained around the entire suite of galleries.)

The Saatchi Gallery, London, for all of its fast-schedule exhibiting of current art, its clever educational programming, and sexy website, remains a profoundly conservative operation, a kind of museum of retro-sensationalism in frenzied (yet in effect freeze-frame) motion. Its founder, Charles Saatchi, recently announced that he was fed up with the self-aggrandizing, pig- ignorant, money-grubbing spectacularization of the international art world, which has become, in his words, “the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedge- fundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with a masturbatory Contemporary: Inaugural Installation, Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 20, 2004–July 11, 2005 level of self-regard.” Any reader of The Art Newspaper can fill in the names. Most would include his among them. Saatchi’s view of curators Since then it has been fascinating to watch betrays one basic reason for the conservatism of the museum wrestle with these self-imposed and his gallery: increasingly anachronistic limitations and find ways of modifying them, with varying degrees of For professional curators, selecting specific success. There is support for research, archiving, paintings for an exhibition is a daunting and publication involving aspects of the art of prospect, far too revealing a demonstration other regions: Eastern Europe, China, Japan, of their lack of what we in the trade call an Venezuela, and Argentina, to date. This has taken “eye.” They prefer to exhibit videos, and those the form of a series of anthologies of documents, incomprehensible, postconceptual installations though rarely, as yet, exhibitions. A brace of and photo-text panels, for the approval of 16 contemporary curators have been appointed in 16 Charles Saatchi, “Charles their equally insecure and myopic peers. recent years. Their impact can be seen in some Saatchi: The hideousness of the art world,” , of the temporary exhibitions and in the changing December 2, 2011, http:// Presumably he does not see as curatorship installations of the collection shown in the www.guardian.co.uk/com- his personal approval of every purchase added mentisfree/2011/dec/02/ second-floor galleries. Slowly, spasmodically, but saatchi-hideousness-art-world. to the collection, his firm policy settings for the

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exhibition programs of his galleries, his walk- past might be understood, its future imagined. around review of the hangings, or his oversight of (That would be an ethnographic museum, one publicity. For him, the wealthy amateur—inspired that offered, from some point in the future, by a genuine love of art and possessed of a pure and inevitably shaped by its own anxieties, an “eye”—transcends the callow collectivism of archaeological profile ofthis present.) The professionals. “exhibitionary complex” of most cities with any degree of art infrastructure already does The New Museum, New York, founded something like this—implicitly, in a prefigurative in 1977 as a gallery devoted entirely to way. Better that contemporaneity is experienced contemporary art—in explicit contrast to spatially and contingently, rather than give the MoMA—has, since moving into its new building mystifying illusion that it is accessible, in its on the Bowery in 2007, tended toward showing entirety, at one site. If it were, would it not, in mainly work from the first and third currents, such a place, at such a moment, instantly freeze with isolated elements of the second thrown up, become past history? Does such a modernist in. It often does so in three layers—historical, fear still haunt contemporary conditions? contemporary, and online—usually presented on three separate floors. I celebrate its Museum as I share Borja-Villel’s hope that big public Hub initiative, which, while it might seem to the art museums are evolving in the direction that fleeting visitor like just another floor, is a clearly he indicates, toward open-hearted archives of delineated space devoted to the museum’s strong the commons, but we also have to recognize the commitment to connecting itself to art spaces powers of recuperation, spectacle, and recursion around the world. Begun in 2006, it explores that Höller identifies when it comes to museums possibilities for new art, events, and exhibitions of such scale. As well, we need to be aware of via residences and exchange programs between the powerful persistence of national cultural the museum and a small number of partners in elites and acknowledge that, in many parts of the Seoul, Mexico City, Cairo, and Eindhoven. It is world, “the commons” is itself a highly contested no accident that the museum’s second Triennial, space. In some repressive situations, it exists only The Ungovernables, was curated by Eungie Joo, as a dream; in others, such as the Middle East, director and curator of education and public it is turning into transformatory action (and programs, who also directed the Museum as Hub, provoking extreme reactions). Throughout South which was the catalyst for the Art Spaces Directory, America today people’s movements are becoming a resource that profiles four hundred art spaces in governments, rather than taking government— 17 17 See Eungie Joo and Ethan ninety-six countries. with, so far, less extremely repressive reactions Swan, Art Spaces Directory than those that followed the Cuban Revolution (New York: New Museum / ArtAsiaPacific, 2012). On the I am not advocating a three-floor museum, of 1959. Even in the United States, where Museum as Hub, see http:// each level tracking how one of the currents consumerist comfort squares off in an uneasy www.newmuseum.org/learn/ museum_as_hub. is unfolding through the present and how its alliance with fearful citizenship, spontaneous

82 83 TERRY SMITH Shifting the Exhibitionary Complex combustion is proving more and more possible— as we have seen as the Occupy movements have spread throughout the country.

A sidebar of the transnational transition is the current convergence between art and ethnography museums. For some of the latter, in Europe especially, as the West surrenders its presumptions of superiority, contemporary art has become the one best hope for their continuation. In Cologne early in 2011 one could visit Afropolis at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (of Ethnography), an engrossing exhibition in which displays of daily life in six African cities were anchored, and, in fact, dominated, by specially commissioned installations by artists from each city. In comparison, an exhibition Slum-TV in collaboration with Hawa Essuman, Sam Hopkins, Chris King, Charles Matathia, Upgradation, 2010. of Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art at Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, Afropolis, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museums, Cologne the nearby Wallraff-Richharz Museum (of Art) seemed aestheticized by being presented almost entirely without context, despite its promising title, Remembering Forward. Both kinds of museum were subjecting themselves to certain modes of aesthetic deinstitutionalization while at the same time using traditional display frameworks to try to tame the cuckoo that they had invited into their nests. Meanwhile, at the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Peter Zumthor’s superb renovation of the St. Columba church site enables a display that mixes, with considerable elegance and restraint, modernist and contemporary art with religious artifacts to create spaces that, while resonant with an unspecific, rather amorphous spirituality, are constantly interrupted by aesthetically arresting artworks. (Those more spiritually or religiously inclined will of course have different experiences Infinity Space Expands, Room 13, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, September 2007–August 2008. Left, Untitled, St Michael of Bavaria, or Suabia, c. 1620-30. Limewood. Center, Joseph Maroni, Yellow Painting, 1982. in such spaces.) Acrylic on canvas

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In such situations we can see the operations endeavors. Enwezor’s and Bonami’s shows of institutionalization, deinstitutionalization, seemed to confirm that the biennial, with and reinstitutionalization that is the “natural” its global reach and its comparative freedom life, the breathing in and out, of any institution from institutional red tape and historical or system. In orthodox managerial terms of baggage, provided a unique opportunity reference, it is up to directors, boards, and to experiment freely with curatorial managers at all levels to decide on the balance arrangements (international teams, shows between these forces, one that ensures the growth within shows, artist-curated shows) and (or at least survival) of the institution by enabling exhibition structure (geographically dispersed a comforting degree of continuity, while inviting satellite programs; conferences, symposia, and in calibrated doses of disruption, which is then publications), and to seek out practices that incorporated into a narrative of reinvigoration, museums were too provincial or cautious to adaptation, and regrowth. All of this would be embrace…. The idea that these biennials were easy to manage if the social locus of the museum constituting an alternative public sphere, one and the pattern of change in society at large were in which visual culture offered compelling relatively constant. But they are not; they are propositions for a world in disarray, imbued becoming less so, everywhere. In Cologne, for the exhibitions with an energizing sense that 18 example, the programs of the three museums just 18 Claire Bishop, “Safety in the stakes were high. mentioned are markers in an ongoing ideological Numbers,” Artforum 50, no. 1 (September 2011): 276–77. contestation that is city wide, regional, and often Not so anymore, at least not in Venice. national, in its dimensions. This is to be expected The past three Biennales have been laid out in any city of any size. in zones that echo at least two of the currents constituting contemporary art. In the Central The Biennial Idea Pavilion, we find a reach for a “universal” theme within contemporary art (some version of Art in What of the biennial, tsunami-like in its recent General) that usually implodes into a melancholy ubiquity? Claire Bishop opens her review of the remodernism, but retro-sensationalism has mostly 2011 Venice Biennale with this comment: been avoided (except when offered in quick and easy doses, as last year in Cattelan’s ubiquitous Who would have thought, eight years ago, pigeons, entitled Others, themselves an expanded that the biennial as an exhibition form had version of his 1997 installation, then entitled peaked? In hindsight, it appears that Okwui Tourists). A “global” glance outwards at the world Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002 and from the Euro-American center usually prevails ’s “Dreams and Conflicts: at the Arsenale. Transnational transition in The Dictatorship of the Viewer” in Venice various “official” forms appears in the National the following year may have marked the outer Pavilions (that divide between aspiration to enter limits of what is possible in these sprawling the Central Pavilion and indignant opposition

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to any such ambition). There is a spilling over of and the Caribbean, as well as to reach out laterally transnationality throughout the city, including to other “non-aligned” nation states around the 21 in the hired out palazzos, where smaller nations 21 See Rosa Artigas, Bienal world. As Carlos Basualdo observes, “In all show their art and better-resourced ones show 50 Anos (São Paulo: Fundação these shows, however, diplomacy, politics, and Bienal de São Paulo, 2001); their “unofficial” art, while dealer coalitions Walter Grasskamp, “‘Degen- commerce converge in a powerful movement, the show quasi-official art. Meanwhile, at the Palazzo erate Art’ and Documenta 1: purpose of which seems to be the appropriation Modernism Ostracized and Fortuny, Belgian collector Axel Vervoordt Disarmed,” in Irit Rogoff and instrumentalization of the symbolic value of demonstrates what universality really looks like and Daniel J. Sherman, eds., art.”22 Museum Culture: Histories, when it comes to art. (Or at least he attempts to Discourses, Spectacles (Min- do so, with diminishing returns—as a blinkers- neapolis: University of Min- He goes on to suggest that the proliferation nesota Press, 1994), 163–94; off comparison of ARTEMPO [1997] and TRA Roger M. Breugel, introduc- of biennials in the past thirty years—which itself [2011] will attest.) Art made within the third tion to Roger M. Breugel, seems to constitute either a second wave or a current appears sporadically, usually as an echo or Ruth Noack, and Georg new phase in their history, one now coming Schollhammer, eds., Documen- 19 19 For an example of my an absent option. ta 12 Magazine, No 1–3 Reader to an end—has occurred “completely in tune” take on the challenges facing (Cologne: Taschen, 2007); with the global integration of markets and the mega-exhibitions these days, and Rachel Weiss, To and see “The World, from Eu- Venice is, of course, the primogenitor of all From Utopia in the New Cuban worldwide dissemination of information about rope: The Mega-Exhibitions biennials. Its history as a theater on which the Art (Minneapolis: University localities everywhere, along with resistances to of mid-2007,” X-Tra 10, no. 3 of Minnesota Press, 2011). (Spring 2008): 4–19, http://x- world’s art—on analogy to international trade fairs such globalizing forces. The tension between the traonline.org/current_articles. and expositions—showed itself to itself, every two 22 Carlos Basualdo, “The homogenizing and anti-homogenizing forces of php?articleID=173. Unstable Institution,” in years, is routinely acknowledged, yet has not been Marincola, What Makes a globalization itself is captured in the biennial, explored in satisfactory historical detail or been Great Exhibition?, 56. And with its simultaneous foregrounding of both 20 from Anthony Gardner and 20 Lawrence Alloway, The thoroughly contextualized. It is arguable that the international and local art and its highlighting Charles Green, Mega-Exhibi- Venice Biennale 1895–1968: biennial format was not categorically revised until tions: Biennales, Triennales and of the complex relays between them. We might From Salon to Goldfish Bowl Documentas (Boston: Blackwell (London: Faber and Faber, the São Paulo Bienal (1951), documenta 1 (1955), add that the same is true of the museum that Wiley, forthcoming 2014). 1969). For minihistories from and the Bienal de la Habana (1984). Each, in enlivens its dutiful displays of its collection and of contemporary perspectives, see also the introductions to their different ways, inaugurated a more limited, local art with imported blockbuster shows from the catalogues of most subse- regional version of international–local exchange. famous museums elsewhere. These generalities quent editions. In each case, again distinctively, regional emphasis 23 We anticipate such a treat- seem valid enough, but more work needs to be aimed to manifest an ideological perspective: ment from Caroline Jones’s done to ground them with historical precision.23 forthcoming book, Desires for São Paulo to connect art in South America the World Picture: the global For example, in some cases, if one looks at the (Brazil especially) to Europe and the United work of art, judging by her capacity for long-term planning, budget size, and “Biennial Culture: A Longer States; documenta 1 to make Kassel a site for History,” in Elena Filipovic, levels of personnel management, many biennials the symbolic internationalization of German art Solveig Ovstebo, and Marieke have matched and often exceeded the capabilities van Hal, eds., The Biennial after the Nazi era and to contrast West German Reader: An Anthology on Large- of the local museum. This is particularly so abstraction to the Socialist that prevailed Scale Perennial Exhibitions of outside of the Euro-American context—the Contemporary Art (Ostfildern: across the nearby border; and Havana to offer a Hatje Cantz, 2010), 66–87. São Paulo and Mercosul biennials in Brazil, for base for artistic connection within Latin America example—where operations move from small

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working staffs during the off years to employing Returning to my own argument, I would hundreds in the year of the biennial. observe that curators have a relationship to this complex mix of elements distinct from that of Yet Basulado’s worry arises at a deeper level: artists, critics, or historians, on the one hand, and that of the museum’s role as an “objective” the demands and expectations of public officials, guarantor of artistic value, a house of judgment funders, and traditional museum professionals, supposedly separate from the commercial greed on the other. While respecting the specific of the art market. perspectives of all of these players and constantly negotiating between them, the curator must The symbolic value created initially by articulate a position that interrogates “local museums—as a concealed affirmation of history and contexts,” though always in terms of the exchange value of objects and artistic their potentially productive relationships with practices—is ultimately transformed by the “horizon of internationalism” on which the biennials into pure utility. Perhaps this biennial is based. This is a huge challenge to the was (and in some cases, may still be) the contemporary curator, one that (presuming that (ultimately naïve) reasoning of many my argument that biennials are now structural institutions that founded biennials. within the system has been accepted) faces him or And in some cases, such reasoning may her with a degree and kind of responsibility that 24 24 Basualdo, “The Unstable be partly justified. parallels that of the museum director. Certainly Institution,” 58. the long-term planning, the size of the budgets, But, he argues, the convergence between the and tasks of personnel management are, in many biennial and the museum on this level is more cases, comparable. As well as being exhibition apparent than real. Works shown at biennials makers par excellence, curators of mega-exhibitions tend to be less tied to market and collector tastes are required to become custodians of the biennial and dictates, more critical in character, more form itself. They tend, therefore, to assume the adventurous as to medium, and more likely to title Artistic Director, thus locating themselves on be drawn from other expressive and symbolic a par with the music director of an orchestra. mediums such as cinema, design, and architecture (in a word, more contemporary). And biennials Taking a broader view, many of us have require greater and more immediate immersion argued that, in recent decades, the biennial has in dense and diverse interpretative discourse frequently led in explorations of the implications than do the usual run of exhibitions at museums. of radically new forms of art making. Thus this (Ditto.) This has certainly been the case in the statement by Rosa Martinez about her 2005 history of biennial exhibitions to date. The Venice Biennale: question is, for how long will it remain so? A biennial… looks beyond the present and into the future… Biennials are the most

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advanced area for this expanded field precisely Among the curatoriate there seems to have arisen because they do not function like museums. a competition as to who could reconceive the Museums are temples for the preservation biennial in the most inventive and influential way. of memory… Biennials are a context for the “Of late, it has become a cliché for curators to 25 25 Rosa Martinez, in Carolee exploration and questioning of the present. announce bravely that they are dispensing with Thea, ed., Foci: Interviews with the conventional biennial structure, a tendency 10 International Curators (New York: D.A.P, 2001), 79. This is classic modernist wish projection. so pervasive that one begins to wonder where, More concretely, we are now reaping the benefits outside of Venice, a conventional biennial might 28 of twenty years of sustained assault, through the 28 Eleanor Heartney, be found today.” Eleanor Heartney made biennial form, on the “canonical mechanisms “Gwangju Report: Image this comment in connection with the 2010 Surplus,” Art in America 98, established in the historical narratives produced, no. 11 (December 2010): 78. Gwangju Biennale, noting that its early editions almost exclusively, in Europe and the United were curated by teams overseen by “big-name 26 26 Basualdo, “The Unstable States.” Despite the fact that museums often European curators, like Harald Szeemann and Institution,” 59. house biennials, I agree with Basualdo that René Block,” while more recent editions fell to “large-scale international exhibitions never “younger, more geographically, philosophically, 29 completely belong to the system of art institutions 29 Ibid., 78. and ethnically diverse curators.” These have in which they are supposedly inscribed” and that, included Charles Esche and Hou Hanru who, therefore, “the range of practical and theoretical in 2000, turned over curatorship to alternative possibilities to which they give rise often turns spaces and artist’s collectives; and Yongwoo Lee 27 27 Ibid., 60. out to be subversive.” This is highly significant, who, in 2004, teamed “ordinary” people with with enormous potential for the development professional curators. In 2008 Okwui Enwezor of art and for its disseminative structures. presented an exhibition of other exhibitions, Museums have taken note and have been quick recreating in part or whole a number of shows to at least partially absorb some of the lessons that had been presented elsewhere in the world of the biennial into their usual displays and during the previous year. While these innovations regular programming. What has this done to the aimed at opening up the event to “the serendipity subversive potentials of the biennial format? of unexpected choices,” ’s 2010 edition, entitled 10,000 Lives, struck Rethinking the Mega-exhibition Heartney as “a carefully crafted exercise in curatorial control” that “embodied the museum 30 Since 2000 the biennial has been widely seen 30 Ibid. For other perspec- ethos it was meant to overturn.” However as being in a crisis of overproduction, of having tives see “Assessments: 10,000 accurate her characterizations (they are partial Lives: The 8th Gwangju become stale in form (theme A, with subthemes Biennale,” The Exhibitionist, at best), they nonetheless illustrate my larger a, b, c, and d; theme B, ditto; x number of no. 3 (January 2011): 23–34. point about the contradictory friction between artists, y number of works each, in z amount an open-ended format (such as the biennial) and of rooms) and, as a result, in danger of being a singular event (the clear curatorial statement, absorbed back into the traditional museum. the definitive exhibition) that haunts the curating

92 93 TERRY SMITH Shifting the Exhibitionary Complex of contemporary art, whatever the site of the response to a graffiti attack on the main walls of 31 exhibitionary act. 31 See Ana Paula Cohen the empty exhibition spaces. and Ivo Mesquita, “Em vivo contato,” Guia da exposição There is, I think, a quantitative issue at play (São Paulo: 28ª Bienal de São As elsewhere, the polemical tone was soon here. The sheer number of biennials (nearly Paulo, 2008); for a detailed lowered. The 2010 Bienal at São Paulo explored contextualization, see Vinicius two hundred) has made it impossible for even Spricigo, “From Artistic a constellation of political/artistic “territories”: the brilliant curatoriate described above to pull Internationalism to Cultural “The skin of the invisible,” “Said, unsaid, Globalization: Notes Toward off its self-imposed challenge of reinventing the a Critical Reflection on the forbidden,” “I am the street,” “Remembrance and exhibition each and every time. No wonder that Recent Changes in the Strate- oblivion,” “Far away, right here,” and “The other, gies of (Re)presentation of the São Paulo in 2008 and Bergen in 2009 decided São Paulo Bienal,” Global Art the same.” In 2012 we can expect an exploration to prioritize meetings and events that reflected and the Museum (Karlsruhe: of “The Immanence of Poetics.” Poesis is on the history, relevance, and prospects of the ZKM, December 2009), replacing politics everywhere as the retreat http://globalartmuseum.de/ biennial form itself over exhibits of works by site/guest_author/254. See position in the international art world. Titles of international and local artists. That is to say, also Royce W. Smith, “28th this kind—mixed lists of lines of poetry, graffiti, São Paulo Bienal: In Living they invited attendees to reexamine an exhibition Contact,” X-Tra Contemporary book titles, text headers, and film subtitles—are format whose success as a mode of global Art Quarterly 11, no. 4 (Sum- becoming a familiar mode for naming clusters of mer 2009), http://www.x- connectivity—arguably to the point where the traonline.org/past_articles. curatorial themes. They signal the presence of “international” and “local” dialogue has become php?articleID=335. disparate elements, “torn halves,” that do not add decreasingly productive as an antinomy—was up, perhaps because that would imply totalities coming under threat due to local funding and that no longer exist. This does not, however, take political difficulties (themselves the outcome, away the challenge of making meaning on more largely, of the global financial crisis). There were, specific levels. of course, significant back stories at both places. The São Paulo organization, with its relatively Applying “biennial processes” to the problem long history (since 1951), its relative success in of rethinking the biennial is occurring throughout consolidating cultural links with Europe and the the system at the moment. For example, the U.S., and its promotion of local artistic ideas as of Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, under the title international relevance (notably “anthropophagy” “The Most Beautiful Kunsthalle in the World,” in 1998, an initiative of curator Paulo organized twenty-five meetings between 2010 and Herkenhoff), had often demonstrated a capacity 2012 for art world players to debate “the diverse for reflective changes of direction, however models of exhibition spaces and its characteristics; fraught and contested. In 2008 the decision to the relation between economy and art; the show few (initially ) artworks and to devote 32 See the website of the definition and identity of the figure of the curator; the entire exhibition to different forms of debate Fondazione Antonio Ratti, the publications of art and other questions Como, “The Most Beautiful about contemporary art’s relationships to local Kunsthalle in the World,” related to all the aspects of doing and producing society and international forces was derailed by www.fondazioneratti.org/ exhibitions.”32 Outcomes are as yet uncertain. calendarmostre/kunsthalle. the high-level security imposed on the venue in The 2009 conference in Bergen, To Biennial or

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Not to Biennial, led to an excellent resource book, was to take the form of an art school that would 33 33 Filipovic, Ovstebo, and The Biennial Reader. At the conference itself, the conduct classes in both parts of the only divided Van Hal, Biennial Reader. underlying issue was whether or not to institute city remaining in Europe, fell afoul of local a biennial in the city, given the plethora around regulations and political tensions. Since then it the world, but the few in Scandinavia, the relative has been shown at Trentino-South Tyrol (2008), wealth of Norway, and its need to prepare for and Murcia in Spain in dialogue with North a post–North Sea oil future. The City Council Africa (2010). In 2012 it will land at Limburg, recently announced that the Bergen Biennial Belgium, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, 34 Foundation would play a major role in developing 34 See Elena Filipovic and Katerina Gregos, and Dawn Ades. the proposed Scandinavian Triennial for the city, Barbara Vanderlinden, The Manifesta Decade: Debates on and that “an aspect of discourse and knowledge Contemporary Art Exhibitions On a global scale cultural connectivities are production” would be inserted into its outlook. and Biennials in Post-Wall also changing, fast and drastically, as locales in Asia Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); and http:// and the Middle East in particular institutionalize Against this model of updating and manifesta.org/biennials/ rapidly and the old cultural centers see the ghosts regionalizing the standard “international” model, about-the-biennials/. of entropy looming within their success with the history of Manifesta, the nomadic biennial, spectacle. In locales outside of the former West, is instructive. It was launched from Holland, one regional connectivity has been sought for some of the key nations of Western Europe, precisely decades, as we have seen most notably in Havana to engage the fragmentation of the borders since 1984, from a tercomondialist perspective. of the European Union, at that time a newly In recent years, as the income divide becomes a formed yet largely notional entity. The errant yawning gap and concentrates in relatively few itinerary of Manifesta, a fragile yet resilient yet highly mobile hands, many Asian biennials, quasi-organization, has accurately reflected the and those in the Middle East, such as the Saadiyat productive errancy at the heart of the enterprise of Cultural District at Abu Dhabi, seek to use high rethinking the idea of “Europe.” Since Rotterdam art as lifestyle cement within the formation of in 1996, Manifesta has been staged every two economic hubs for the top 1% in the region. years in a different European city—Luxembourg, On an intrastate scale, within large nations such Ljubljana, Frankfurt, Donista-San Sebastián, as Brazil and China, internal cultural connectivity etc.—by teams of curators from outside that city is a growing concern. It is coming to match their who have never worked together before, who are interest in connecting with “global” currents. asked to spend the intervening years combing Cultural policy, they might say, must face the continent for new art and to present it in both ways. whatever ways seem relevant to them. Iterations have deployed innovative formats ranging from If I am right that the biennial has become museum exhibitions through the use of unusual structural, then this recent history might indicate sites all over each city to Internet sites. The a certain ossification of the large-scale mega- Manifesta planned for Nicosia in 2006, which exhibition, a lowering of its subversive potential.

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Does it make sense to take the biennial form, currently operating in Austra- Fruit (2010), drawn from the collection of one rather than the concept of the specific exhibition lia; see http://aripedia.org.au/ its trustees, Dakis Joannou, and curated by Jeff index.php?title=List_of_Ac- for this place and at this time, as the crucial tive_Artist_Run_Initiatives; Koons, whose work Joannou assiduously collects? object of critical curatorship? Is this not to and Georgie Meagher and How does the programming at the Museum of Brianna Munting, eds., We mistake a medium for a subject? Perhaps it also Are Here (Sydney: National , London, differ from that at the presumes that the biennial is perfectible, singular, Association for the Visual Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh? An account that Arts, 2012). These initia- when the success of the format as a vehicle tives complement the dozen mapped out this field and tackled questions such for transitionality has for decades depended contemporary art spaces, most as these would show, more than any to date, of which have been active precisely on its node-like structure; its easily promoters of experimental the pivotal role that alternative spaces, artist- imitated parameters; and, on the local level, its arts for over forty years; see run cooperatives, and supportive site-specific unique (for the art-institutional ensemble) mix of http://www.caos.org.au/ organizations (such as Artangel, London, Exit content/Home/. A history of flexibility, regularity, and reliable unpredictability. these kinds of quasi-institu- Art, New York, or Artspace, Sydney) have played This confusion between open-endedness and tional initiatives throughout since the 1970s in the growth and diversification the world, especially since 35 35 Examples of the begin- singularity remains unresolved—it might be said the 1960s, would show that of infrastructure for the visual arts. It would also nings of such research include to have proliferated. infrastructural activism has show how much unsung groundwork undergirds Julie Ault, ed., Alternative been with us for a while, Art New York: 1965–1985 but has only recently come what is emerging as a major activity for artists (Minnesota: University of We could keep going across the exhibitionary to be valued within the art and curators today: infrastructural activism. Minnesota Press, 2002); Julia world as inherently creative, Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: spectrum, noting the low-level warring between transformative, and essential. “The infrastructural” is rapidly replacing “the Radical Practice in the Vietnam the institutionalizing, deinstitutionalizing, and At the same time, the growth curatorial” as the problem to be grasped, the issue Era (California: University reinstitutionalizing forces that shape each site and of neoliberal values within to which attention must be paid, and upon which of California Press, 2009); governments, and increasing and Peta Rake, “Inclusivity each actor. We could plot the ways in which each economic uncertainty, means energy must be expended. and Isolation: Artist-Run kind of institution and each kind of curator seeks that support from shrinking Initiatives in Brisbane,” Fillip, public funds is becoming less no. 11 (Fall 2011): 70–78. to draw either reactive or enabling energy from and less likely. Before we can clearly see how this issue Research into alternative art one or more of the other actors while at the same is being tackled today, it is important that we spaces underlies the small but sustained governmental time striving to create and maintain a distinctive, understand the delicate symbolic between support for them since the yet always transformable, profile. And we could two figures: the curator as artist and the artist as 1970s in certain European countries and in Canada and chart the ways these interactions have unfolded curator. There is a considerable history to both Australia. Documenta- through time, at different locations, and plot the models, a history that is constantly subject to tion of, and arguments for, their pivotal importance connections between them. There would be value simplification as a new relationship between these regularly appear in reports in this, as it would highlight the complexities two emerges to set the present agenda. Let us put to sponsoring agencies. For example, Sarah Thelwall, Size within which curators actually work and bring some history back into it and see what happens. Matters: Notes towards a Better out distinctive aspects of the different kinds of Understanding of the Value, curating required by each kind of exhibition Operations and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organizations site, as well as recognize the constant, variable (London: Common Practice traffic between them. Would Marcia Tucker, with support from the Arts Council England, 2011). Over founding director of the New Museum, have ever ninety artist-run initiatives are contemplated staging an exhibition such as Skin

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