If any aspect of the contemporary art world is tied directly to the geopolitical transformations that occurred around 1989, it is the rise of the biennial exhibition. These large-scale presentations of the latest trends in contemporary art were previously limited to such venerable institutions as the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Bienal, and Documenta (an exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel). But in the last twenty years numerous biennials have been created around the world, and have become an entrenched part of the international art scene. Many of these exhibitions have taken place in nontraditional art centers like Gwanju, Havana, and Johannesburg; indeed, they often are the result of a particular city or region’s desire to find a place on the world stage. Critics have faulted biennials for creating a kind of cultural tourism that is available to only the wealthiest of art enthusiasts and professionals with sizable travel budgets. There have also been objections that biennials show the same roster of artists, and that the format of these exhibitions prize site-specific installation and more ephemeral, context-derived pieces in favor of practices like painting and sculpture. To these arguments Massimiliano Gioni proposes in his “In Defense of Biennials” that stultifying exhibitions are not the fault of the model, since biennials, hardly if ever tied to a traditional institution, allow the freedom for constant reinvention and are a tool for serious reflection.
Biennials exert a tremendous influence on the contemporary art world in large part because they distill into a more manageable form the heterogeneity of the global art scene. Biennials are almost always expansive in design and generally occur in repurposed non-art venues. It is in biennials that some of the most compelling arguments about affinities, patterns, and new developments in contemporary art emerge, especially a reconsideration of the local and the creation of transnational public spheres, as Geeta Kapur argues in “Curating in Heterogeneous Worlds.”
Despite biennials’ undeniable importance—they help establish the careers of artists and provide the foundation for discourse—it is debatable whether or not these exhibitions, generally too big to offer a coherent argument, are merely forms of cultural entertainment, or, as some critics claim, a glorified art fair. For Caroline Jones, the biennial is central to the current experience-oriented culture, a phenomenon she traces back to the Enlightenment and Grand Tours in her essay “Biennial Culture and the Aesthetics of Experience.” To question the workings, complexities, and problems of biennial exhibitions is to begin to understand a major structural underpinning of the contemporary art world.
Perhaps I should start out by saying there are few things I loathe more than panels, talks, and articles about the theory or practice of biennials. The biennial phenomenon exploded in a decade—the 1990s—that also witnessed the emergence of the curator as a professional figure, which was soon followed by the creation of academic courses for curators, and subsequently a new didactic approach associated with contemporary art. The result: The exhibition model of periodic, recurring shows is often accompanied by generic, impressionistic criticism, by interminable round tables paradoxically held during the biennials themselves, and a plethora of meta-reflections that have become a genre unto themselves.
Moreover, I fear that as a result of these at times aggressive critiques of the biennial pattern, we have witnessed at the outset of the twenty-first century a shift from the exhibition to the art fair. Whereas the mayors, politicians—and occasionally curators and artists—of the 1990s dreamed of creating new biennials, in the first decade of the 2000s the same people discovered that an art fair is a much more tempting opportunity to spruce up their city’s image. And I don’t think I even have to spell this out, but if forced to choose between an art fair and even the worst biennial, I’ll always opt for the latter, if only because at biennials the artworks aren’t chosen because of their market value.
If you think about it, the biennial boom in the 1990s had a series of very positive effects. First of all, the proliferation of biennials coincided with a movement to redefine the boundaries and redraw the map of contemporary art. It’s certainly no coincidence that in 1993 the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale offered the first signs of a new, global art world—a phenomenon that had perhaps been foreshadowed, but in a much more problematic way, by Jean-Hubert Martin and his Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1989. Nor is it a coincidence that in 2011 dozens of countries still tried to affirm their identities in the international arena of the Venice Biennale in which nearly ninety nations from around the world now take part. Biennials—even the best-established ones like Venice—are much more permeable terrains than traditional museums; they are spheres where changes can be more easily made, categories more freely mingled. And if we think about some of the most important and innovative events, like the Havana Biennial (established in 1984), the Gwangju Biennale (established in 1995), the Johannesburg Biennial (established in 1995), the Sharjah Biennial (established in 1993), or, much earlier, the São Paulo Bienal (established in 1951)—leaving aside many other examples like Manifesta, the Berlin Biennale, and the Tirana Biennial—it immediately becomes clear that each of these institutions has opened up new channels or new intellectual “trade routes”—to borrow the title of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor—which very often have turned around or at least shaken up the Western canon of art history by playing an essential role in increasing the biodiversity, so to speak, of the contemporary art world.
Of course, the most obvious criticism of biennials stems precisely from the opposite observation. According to the most predictable script for biennial-bashing, the problem with these periodic shows lies in the fact that—especially in the 1990s—a certain group of artists or certain kind of artist could be found exhibiting at almost all the biennials around the world, in a sort of traveling circus of contemporary art. Biennials would thus be responsible for stifling local diversity by simply importing works and artists who—according to refrains we all know by now—swoop down on a city during the exhibition “like UFOs” without “putting down roots,” like “McDonald’s or cultural franchises.” Obviously, these are criticisms that have a certain legitimacy and importance. It’s hard to deny that for many founders and organizers of biennials, these periodic shows are just an opportunity to tap into an entirely Western fashion phenomenon. The success of a biennial is thus measured precisely on the basis of how well it manages to imitate the original model, with the foreseeable assortment of art stars, entertainment, and bloated, often interactive, meaningless work—that poisonous mash that critic Peter Schjeldahl has perspicaciously called “festivalism.” At the risk of seeming overly reductive and simplistic, I have always been tempted to respond to these criticisms by saying that there is no such thing as a “biennial model.” Actually, if there is a truly liberating aspect to the way biennials mushroomed in the 1990s, it is that today there is no single pattern. Their proliferation has done away with any illusion of unity.
Upon closer inspection, I think the biennial is neither a model nor a format: rather, it is a tool that can be used to build very different shows and obtain very different results. It is precisely when the biennial is reduced to a format, to a formula, that it reveals all its weaknesses. In essence, the problem with biennials is perhaps a problem with the way they are used, curated, and organized. It is not at all a problem inherent to their nature, especially since by this point there are few features that one can point to as being general characteristics of these events (the one exception being the Venice Biennale, the only biennial still partly defined by the presence of international pavilions). All that the other biennials around the world have in common is the fact that they are art exhibitions held every two years. I’m sorry if this definition is vague and simplistic, but it’s the only one that really applies to the hundreds of very different shows that we call biennials. Unlike all other artistic institutions, biennials—precisely due to their temporary nature—are, at least theoretically, wide open to change and innovation. They are flexible tools that are just waiting to be reinvented and transformed with each new edition. No museum or kunsthalle in the world is geared to such complete and radical turnarounds as any biennial, and some, like the Berlin Biennale, Manifesta, or Performa, for example, are not even linked to specific venues, or even specific cities—in the case of Manifesta—and the organizers of each edition can choose not only the artists but the exhibition strategies, the locations, and methods used to present the artworks. No other institution offers curators or artistic directors the opportunity to control the entire choreography of an event, from the graphics to the choice of venues, from the selection of artists and works to the educational and cultural programming that accompany the show.
It may be because I look at biennials from the pragmatic, practical standpoint of someone who organizes them, but I tend to think it is the responsibility of curators and artistic directors to reinvent and transform the exhibition each time around, especially since biennials offer a condition of freedom (one might say even impunity and irresponsibility) that is completely different from a museum setting. Ideally, the curators can work without necessarily worrying about later biennials and the effect that the exhibition will have on the image of the entire institution. The curator of each edition knows that he or she will be leaving at the end of the show, and this awareness often puts them in the privileged position of being able to avoid the kind of compromises that are necessary if one is to continue working in the same organization for years.
In my opinion, if a biennial is a dud—and many are—it isn’t because the model is worn out, but because (though perhaps I am attributing too much responsibility to individuals) the curators were incapable of rethinking or transforming the tool, turning it to new purposes or discovering new resources within it. The problem of biennials is therefore not that some format exists at the source and imposes predetermined choices. The problem is when biennials congeal into a genre that is always the same.
So how can one avoid this process of ossification and repetition? I have no recipes or magic charms, of course. At the most I can provide a few empirical examples stemming from my own experience. Far be it from me to present this as a list of rules or commandments. The notes that follow are just a series of observations in the field that have helped me structure my thoughts. They are very simple, but, for this very reason, they have provided me some comfort during the preparation of biennial exhibitions. I should also point out that they are reflections in hindsight. While caught up in the preparation of these shows, I have found myself working in a much more organic way, without following any formula, but I can definitely say that in every biennial I have curated I have attempted, more or less instinctively, to tackle the following questions. In writing down these notes, I have tried to be as candid and transparent as possible. Some assertions may sound generic and superficial, but I’m not aspiring to be exhaustive, nor am I trying to present a doctrine on biennial exhibitions. These are just some of the thoughts that have guided me in the preparation of some biennials, and I hope they’ll be useful to those gearing up to curate or study other biennials to come.
Let me begin with Jean-Hubert Martin’s controversial exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1989), which situates Europe’s perennial interest in the exotic within the new transculturist permissiveness of the postmodern. Magiciens claimed the democratic value of attributing both spiritual and conceptual parity to a myriad of cultural-creative acts. With Magiciens, Martin gave a ritual status to contemporary avant-garde art of the West, relating this to the allegedly magic-driven artworks from “other” cultures while, correspondingly, he contemporanized the “sacred” works from the margins in conjunction with secular works from the West. This relativizing exercise, meant to revise the debate about the “primitive” and the modern, was also intended to produce conviviality between races and genres. The exhibition carried above all a desire to recall, and even restore, the lost aura in Western art.
The curatorial premise of Magiciens was both anticipated and followed by intense debate.1 The Magiciens’ agenda admitted the modernizing process in the rest of the world, but within an anthropological paradigm of tradition-and-change that ultimately disavowed the plurality of modernism. It obfuscated the actual anticolonial/postcolonial discourse of democracy, civil and political rights, that gives cultural transformations an edge. Nor was the terrain anywhere mapped by people’s living struggles, as Jean Fisher and Guy Brett pointed out, even a conceptual recognition of which would have led to other choices than what the trope of Magiciens provided.2
Magiciens was based on an (ethnographic) anachronism, where the diachronic tension between primitive and modern, folk and urban, traditional and avant-garde, center and periphery—an important tension—would be fudged by the generous aesthetic and supposed equation in synchronous viewing, only to resurface as other (questionable) criteria. My own criticism is focused on the way this curatorial paradigm for contemporary art set up a binary of the indigenous and the avant-garde; mapped it over swathes of the globe in geographical terms; then weighed the balance of potentialities between individual agency (of northern artists) and timeless consanguinity (of artists from the south). The crossovers were designated as hybrids, in which the preferred hybrid was barely seen as a site of dense cultural collision, more like an end product of some natural mutation, replete in its full-hearted exhalation. Predictably, examples of demonstrably metropolitan art practices in non-Western societies were barely included. Few protagonists were located within these highly differentiated societies outside the West that could be shown to have agency that is properly historical—where a self-conscious breakthrough in language and politics is seen to make a conceptual contribution to the Western claim on the avant-garde.
And yet, Magiciens was a productive provocation. With time we can see that it tested the models of Western art history, including theories of the avant-garde; and it offered an anarchic spill in taste and ideology that knocked the notion of the curatorially well-made exhibition. Certainly, credit must go to the Magiciens’ bold topography for the way these ideas have been thrashed out in discourse ever since. But is the binary of the primitive and modern, so hotly debated until the 1980s, now properly deconstructed?3 Is a modernist, universal aesthetic based on either a humanist premise or the formal self-sufficiency of art forms finally terminated?4 Has the hybrid trope valorized in early postmodernism collapsed? These questions come from sites where the conjunctural urgency defining the political is fully visible. I speak of sites where the pressure of alien temporalities from the colonial past are so heavily historicized that curators are forced to convey the exhibitory aesthetic of synchronicity into a diachronic dimension, and thence into the future.
In 1996, the Asia Society in New York invited the young Thai art historian, Apinan Poshyananda, to mount a major exhibition, titled Contemporary Art of Asia: Tradition/Tensions, the first rigorous manifestation of the manifold languages (“tongues”) at work in Asian art through the 1990s.5 Poshyananda presented the exhibition as both contrastive and complementary to Western models. While the linguistic component was brought to the fore, the standard categories of art history were problematized. The virtues of “tradition” were put to work in favor of the new, whereby the monopoly of the West was subtly undermined. Indeed, he presented a wide range of artworks, prominent among which were installations with an explicit materiality, interventions both site-specific and performative, and documentary inputs with political annotations. The exhibition was premised on works that were explicitly located, where signs and meanings were embedded in the material conditions of their production. It presented artists with a rich understanding of a situational phenomenology, which in turn demanded spectatorial comprehension of how these artworks navigated between ritual protocol and political transgression. Tradition/Tensions had a built-in pedagogy with regard to types of viewing protocol. It proposed that the sacred, even when placed in parenthesis, sets up a customary etiquette whereby the phenomenology of the exhibition is restructured: Notions of invocation/circumambulation, of intimacy/distance, replace the “detached” encounter of Western aesthetics.
This culturally replete aesthetic, this experiential rendering of the esoteric and the political privileged by the first phase of Asian art exhibitions, was upturned by a widely toured exhibition, Cities on the Move (1997–9).6 Curated by Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, it took as a starting point the capitalist globalization furiously under way in Asian countries. Imitating in style the accelerated market economies of East and Southeast Asia, the exhibition was excessive, noisy, unruly; it abandoned the viewer to an array of volatile signs that put entire cultures on display and encouraged a surfeit of visual consumption. These two exhibitions, Magiciens de la Terre and Cities on the Move, staged a rupture where the spectator entered a swirling sea of signifiers that the curator had configured and spectacularized. Such extravagance can be said to have a “deconstructionist” methodology that takes its cue not from high art but from the survival tactics of popular art. The tactic is that of continual hybridization, and this aesthetic, with delirious exhibition effects, has become a favored curatorial approach.
Extending the discussion on new forums for exhibition outside the Western academy and museums, I refer to the exponential growth of the biennials/triennials located in the South and East. If the São Paulo Bienal, begun in 1951, posed the first alternative to the Venice Biennale, subsequent biennials have revealed even more heterodox curatorial ideas, as for example, the Havana Biennial, begun in 1984; the Asia-Pacific Triennial, begun in 1993; and the Johannesburg Biennial, inaugurated in 1995 and discontinued after the second edition in 1997.7 These initiatives frequently meet with high-handed critique from Western curators, who flaunt institutional fastidiousness, quality control, cultural snobbery, and even open mockery, while nevertheless conducting curatorial activities at these new sites, claiming with impunity that an international high-profile curator—read Western hegemony—is essential to put the city and region on the international art map.
The Havana Biennial, for example, forthrightly dedicated itself to radical third-world art (including, especially, South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and, to a lesser extent, Asia); it has always appointed Cuban curators; and worked from within a modest cultural infrastructure and very meager resources. The international context was unsympathetic: In the mid-1980s, third-world unity and socialism were already headed toward final dissolution. Cuba was no longer secure in its revolutionary optimism; it was systematically impoverished by US sanctions; its aesthetics lay outside the citadels of academic art history and beyond the hub of the Euro-American art market. Yet, the intransigent faith of Cuban curators was honored by countries and artists who participated in the Havana Biennial, and the lost agenda of radicalism gained new provocations in the decade ahead. More specifically, the Havana Biennial took on a vanguard role on behalf of contemporary (third-world) art. To this day, all Southern biennials owe a debt to Havana for advancing the potential of a decentralized art world; for proposing that alternative avant-gardes do not need to affix a “neo” to gain acceptance in the canon; and for demonstrating that contemporary art activity placed off-center in respect to the West becomes acutely tendentious. Curatorially, the configuration of artworks in, for example, the third edition of the Havana Biennial in 1989, bristled with works annotating actual politics in the complex terrain of South American societies, with pointed reference to national dictatorships and subaltern movements of dissent and insurgency. Cuba was (and is) a country under siege, and its stake in cultural manifestations can be nothing less than contestatory. Artworks installed in Havana refract art’s mainstream dialogue from the prism of the Cuban crisis.
In Australia the Queensland Art Gallery inaugurated the Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1993. The calibrated range of works coming out of this region was revelatory, and required strategies of signification and display where not only ethnic but even religious vulnerabilities had to be accounted for. The exhibition followed a principle already in place with Australian museums and curators, who consider it mandatory to conscientiously annotate objects of a mixed white and aboriginal society. Consequently, in the intellectual and curatorial exercise of the Triennial, categories of the secular and the sacred had to be rethought in terms of the way the societies in question face these issues within a democratically organized polity; or how the secularization of tradition impinges on the question of citizenship in the politics of a nation. While the general public is enabled to read the social problematic underlying distinct cultural iconographies, the artwork also asks to be placed in coeval terms with other, more familiar, international art forms in the contemporary.
In the light of these brief examples, my first strategic point is that the new biennials can be seen to radicalize the discourse on contemporary art towards a more investigative, more critical position by constantly revising our understanding of the very “institution of art.” Thus, while these multiplying biennials sometimes seem like reckless initiatives, they should be seriously scrutinized for their ironies, their follies, and their worth. Glossing over the more facile skepticism that the new biennials invoke, I would like to ask that we examine not just this or that biennial for its immediate certificate of excellence, but the entire relay of site, production, and discourse in contemporary art from various vantage points on the globe. I suggest, further, that the edifice of Euro-American art is now faced with what amounts to other forms of knowledge, other forms of agency, other ideological configurations, as well as other imperatives for art-making. It is in relation to the fraught nature of art and culture in the contemporary that the unprecedented multiplication of (Southern/Eastern) biennials and of theme-and-issue-based exhibitions ought to be seen. These are no arbitrary outcrop; they are a sign and consequence of historical circumstances.8
My second point is more pragmatic: The benefit from a biennial is especially evident in countries that have no museum practice worth the name when it comes to modern and contemporary art, where the opportunities to engage with international art are scarce, and where the only “institutions” developing at breakneck pace are the art market and the auction house. Such biennials have sometimes been called the poor man’s museum, and there is some truth here. The biennial phenomenon, never beyond serving vested interests (biennials being a mixture of state spectacle, cultural hegemony, market interests, and tourist commerce), is at the same time a means of creating professional conduits of communication in the cities and countries where biennials occur. These structures erect bridges between the state and private finance, between public spaces and elite enclaves, between artists and other practitioners.
The rise of the curator as a key category in the exposition of art happens, coincidentally, in tandem with the third-world assertions of alterity, including a revolutionary passage in the 1960s and a more conciliatory multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Standard discourse on contemporary art was destabilized by the redoubled exposition of postcolonial postmodernism, and relativized for good by the very scale of twenty-first-century globalization. Consequently, the curatorial project entails today an almost mandatory inclusiveness based on difference and indeed on decentralization of cultural power in discourse as in practice. The first, second, and third worlds that defined the historical battles of the mid-twentieth century are now, since 1989, condensed into what has been called the new Empire. Alternatively, the interdependence of regions, nations, cities; the imbrication of “local” cultures within global capitalism; the deterritorialization of peoples/cultures through mass migrations; the miracles of electronic communication, bring into full play the (ironically transcendent) nomenclature: transnational transculturalism.
Transculturalism is not, however, a matter of free choice; it is a condition of global exchange that is materially and politically coercive, if also potentially liberating. It is necessary, therefore, to embed the debate in transnational public spheres—the product of contrary developments such as the emergence of postcolonial civil societies on the one hand, and of capitalist globalization on the other. In this contested space, critical dialogue centers around issues of violence, power, governance, and citizenship. Where a large part of the world populace now exists outside communities and nations, citizenship includes the experience of exile, raising the question: How is the ethical and the aesthetic implicated in the exilic condition? At the simplest level, there is a statistical response: There is an exponential increase in numbers of third-world (and now also second-/socialist-world) artists in international exhibitions. Appointing translation as a key term for transcultural aesthetic, cultural criticism appoints the diasporic artist as a trope and a norm—the one who constructs both the grammar and the discourse of global contemporaneity, and conducts the process of negotiation/confrontation to this purpose.
Closely mapped and variously configured, international art relies no more on now-meaningless binaries such as center–periphery, global–local. These changes in ideological orientation have been addressed in some thoughtful exhibitions like Unpacking Europe.9 On a more dramatic scale, it was Documenta 11, curated by Okwui Enzewor, that established, through the prism of the postcolonial global, a new pedagogy for mapping the world. Indeed Enwezor’s postcolonial politics introduced a documentary turn and a political/discursive (rather than aesthetic/avant-garde) criticality.10 Building on a premise he had already established in his previous exhibitions (the Second Johannesburg Biennial, 1997, Trade Routes: History and Geography; and a widely toured exhibition in 2001–2, titled The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994), he proposed that no discussion of radical art can take place without reference to the political parameters of antagonism and redemption that come out of the decolonization process.
Thus Enwezor draws on postcolonial cultural theory (in turn drawing on elements from anthropology, psychoanalysis, and a much-transformed Marxism) to set up new paradigms for examining representational ethics, in particular its documentary component. If the aesthetic engages the aspect of the representational that abuts the imaginary, the writer–curator expands the representational further into the symbolic: This double movement allows the emergence of new subjectivities with audacious claims to a new “sovereignty.” It is, then, Enwezor’s project to determine a vantage point from which to project the subject-position of the formerly colonized who is now the postcolonial citizen empowered through struggle. It is also his wager that the discourse now exists outside the national—the “original” ground where the struggle is in actual fact waged. Indeed his engagement rests on the formation of a global citizenry with a voice in the matter of governance precisely through transnational public spheres that nurture a human and civil-rights discourse against state power. This, in Enwezor’s belief, forms the utopian potential that emerges from and confronts the new Empire. It is with Documenta 11 that he set up a new curatorial proposition: A worldwide itinerary and a cross-disciplinary argument through a series of four ideologically conceived “platforms” that were translocated to the fifth platform, the exhibition at Kassel.
My inclination is to continue to loop this argument back to the geography and politics of region and nation.11 For even as diasporic dilemmas widen the political base of global issues tackled in art, they tend to produce within the transnational space a straitened convergence. If the form of address of an artwork is coextensive with the site of production, even confrontational work addressed to the first world marginalizes region and nation, societies and living communities, into the category of geopolitical context no more. These imponderables of identity and address require the interlocutors to assume a multiplicity of agential roles so as to move back and forth between a speculative transculturalism and a declared partisanship. It is still necessary to ask how art situates itself in the highly differentiated national economies/political societies that bear the name of countries; and how, from those sites, it reckons with divergent forces at work within globalization. More pointedly, what are the countercultural tendencies generated in the contested sites of the nation-state itself? With what strategies are a neoliberal, anti-poor developmental agenda and/or a (covertly) authoritarian state opposed? What political positions are upheld by the recognizable protagonists of radical change? Further, how, in the broad attempt to build and sustain democratic structures of governance, institutions for a functioning civil society and a post-bourgeois public sphere, does the cultural vanguard in its more anarchist gestures come to be positioned?12 And, indeed, what strategies are available to these societies to oppose the treacherous rule of capital and its US-driven agenda executed through monstrous wars and consumerist dystopias?
In India, the definition of a polyvocal contemporaneity has been debated for several decades with reference to the dense ethnic stratifications replete with still-living traditions, multiple religious communities each with their own “modernizing” cultures, and a rapidly growing metropolitan society competing its way into global capitalism.13 Thus contemporaneity is discussed in terms of the reach and consequence of modernity going back to the colonial period; it is now debated in terms of a globalized postmodernity that is becoming transnational in its very infrastructure. Correspondingly, numerous exhibitions with “India” in the title have attempted to address these questions.
Billed under a country banner, the aura of national affiliation still survives.14 A critic–curator from India will have to justify the claim that a selection of artists from a particular country/context can, in the consequent exposition, address “universal” issues of global contemporaneity. A substantial partisanship from the Southern hemisphere should add both to art-historical knowledge and to political agendas that go beyond a mere counterbalancing polemic against the transnational/global.15
But, meanwhile, contemporary art, including much of the new work of Indian artists, offers perhaps a more playful “indirection.”16 Skimming history and geography, younger artists everywhere draw circles around questions of location and use shifting signifiers that are programmed to be mutational. Are they the worldwide nomads or magicians, after all, indulgent towards the fetish and inclined towards masquerade? Diversifying art production, they ask that we use differentiated frames but work, nonetheless, towards imaginary universes where a shared possibility of unsolicited pleasures can still be encountered. So the work in today’s accelerated international exhibition circuits is hectic, but it is also leisurely with its rules of conduct. In a continual process of recoding itself as object, sign and conceptual equation, it privileges only the contemporary and requires that theory annotate it, as it will into the historical paradigm. We are then asked to devise a relay of translation modes for the (sub)liminal politics of youthful artworks adrift in the world like never before.
India-based exhibitions mounted in the last few years (and by overseas curators of considerable fame and skill) grow ever more competent and, succumbing to the dubious glamour of the India banner, they gain ground in lieu of the globalizing euphoria of fast-developing/threateningly competitive countries like China and India.17 This euphoria has also produced its own travesties such as the Saatchi Collection’s The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today from 2010. The easy route to spectacle puts in place a new imagist aesthetic complemented by a range of fetishist “toys” that further commodify already reified objects, replacing whatever conceptual and critical terms of reference Indian artists are struggling to develop. These seductions are encouraged by the fact that on home ground there is no institutional infrastructure, too few independent forums of dissenting practice, and curatorially astute exhibitions whereby contemporary artists may confront, confound, dodge, and rebut the art market/art fair bonanza sweeping the global art world.
How, then, from within the full sphere of manifold art practices, do we elicit a critical calling interpellated into art in the form of curatorship? How shall we work our way from within a specific historical trajectory towards a cultural/aesthetic vantage point—and all the way across to the raw edges of the political? One understands that location cannot be isolated and valorized within what is an irreversibly globalized world; one must understand how other postcolonial (now putatively transnational) public spheres are structured. Any answers we seek will rest on evolving assumptions: First, that contemporaneity is continually co-produced across cultures; second, that place, region, nation, state, and the politics of all these substantive categories of history (proper), are in a condition of flux everywhere in the world; and, third, that past universals have been superseded, exposing major, often lethal, tensions between peoples and regions.
My argument weaves through a series of instances to suggest how the contemporary curator’s approach varies from being a collaborator, co-producing the artwork via the medium of the exhibition; to being a cultural critic providing textual/visual annotation; to laying a semiotic base for transcultural translation in the practice of art that must be nothing less than critical at the site of its production as well as within the global contemporary. These alternatives will develop agonistic sets of relationships, where the curator stages the contradictions of the present historical moment and, acting in the manner of a friendly “enemy,” makes the symbolic space that artworks inhabit more adversarial.
It used to be said that knowledge is produced in the West, and that cultural artifacts abound in the non-West. I am inclined to invert this with a degree of caprice necessary for bold prognostications. The site for fresh discourse on the problematic of contemporaneity may be elsewhere/now, here, from where I claim to speak. But lest this sound like a familiar polemic of “us and them”—the artist and the curator, the Western and Eastern critic/curator—I want to restore the picture of art’s sovereignty within and without the institution of art. Along with the strong argument for critical curating there abides a subtle caveat spoken in the artist’s voice. While critics and curators present contemporary art so as to redeem both internal and contextual meanings of the artwork, they also learn to recognize a paradox: The artist is always situated, but also always liminal to the established order of things and, thus, peculiarly placed to question the hegemonic tendencies of national and global, ethnic and imperialist ideologies. That is to say, artist and artwork can be intuitively positioned as much as they accept conscious curatorial positioning to gain navigational abilities between and beyond simple binaries—and thereby also the degree of entropy that makes the creative process and the sites of its occurrence unpredictable.
Notes
* This essay is an abbreviated version; the full text to be found at “Curating across agonistic worlds,” InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia, eds. Parul Dave Mukherji, Kavita Singh, and Naman Ahuja. Delhi: Sage, forthcoming 2013.
1 All the articles referred to here were originally published in Le Cahiers du Musée d’Art Moderne, No. 28, 1989, on the occasion of the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre. They were published in English in Third Text, No. 6 (Spring, 1989). See Benjamin Buchloh and Jean-Hubert Martin, “Interview”; Rasheed Araeen, “Our Bauhaus Others’ Mudhouse”; Jean Fisher, “Other Cartographies”; Guy Brett, “Earth & Museum: Local or Global?”
2 Ibid.
3 I refer specifically to the controversial exhibition, “ Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art, organized by William Rubin at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984.
4 Parallels between the Magiciens’ agenda and the humanist mission of Andre Malraux’s aesthetic were perceptively brought up by Yves Michaud, along with a canny suggestion that the Magiciens’ premise included something of the formalist extension of this aesthetic as propagated by Clement Greenberg. See “Doctor Explorer Chief Curator,” Third Text, No. 6 (Spring 1989).
5 The exhibition, curated by Apinan Poshyananda for the Asia Society in New York, was shown in several cities. See exhibition catalogue, Contemporary Art of Asia: Tradition/Tensions (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1996).
6 The exhibition traveled extensively through the world. See exhibition catalogue, Cities on the Move (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997).
7 Since the 1990s, there has been an unprecedented multiplication, especially in East Asia and, at a slower pace, in West Asia, Africa, and South America. See for example, AAA: All You Want To Know About International Art Biennials: http://www.aaa.org.hk/onlineprojects/bitri/en/timeline.aspx; Universe in Universe: http://universes-in-universe.de/car/english.htm; The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art: http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/Details/41902.
8 The biennial can be an occasion to engage in a cognitive mapping of complex cultures and distinct regions: Curators like Gerardo Mosquera (Cuba) and Paulo Herkenhoff (Brazil) have shaped vision and discourse for the highly heterogeneous Southern region; much later, Jack Persekian (Palestine) does this for the Arab art world from Sharjah, UAE. And while Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery keeps the curatorial course of the Asia-Pacific Triennial a museum affair, it draws on wide-ranging expertise from the region. The focus on the host city has been among the most important features of the biennial phenomenon; a key example is the 2005 Istanbul Biennial with co-curators Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche exploring with artists the interstices of the city to “hide” as much as to reveal artworks to an inadvertent public. Contrariwise, the straitened city/state of Singapore becomes a veritable garden of delights under the curatorship of Fumio Nanjo (2006–8). These exhibitions also turn to more project-oriented, more discursive, more activist forms. The Yokohama Triennale of Contemporary Art, 2005, was almost entirely collectivist and project-based. The curators (Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, and Johnson Tsong-zung) of the Third Guangzhou Triennale in China, 2007, provoked a discourse on an entire era with the title Farewell to Post-colonialism. In 2007, the Second Riwaq Biennale (stemming from the Centre for Architectural Conservation, Ramallah, and curated by Khalil Rabah) brought together local and international architects, artists, conservationists, planners, curators, and theorists, with the aim of protecting and promoting cultural heritage in Palestine; while for the Third Riwaq Biennale, curators Charles Esche and Reem Fadda chose venues for intervention whereby possible scenarios can be imagined for the future of a fatally fractured region, polity, and culture.
9 See Salah Hasan and Iftikhar Dadi, eds., Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Nai Publishers, 2001).
10 See introduction by Enwezor and texts by the Documenta team and other authors, in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002). Preceding the exhibition, the Documenta 11 team conducted a set of symposia (Platforms 1–4) in Vienna, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos, each published as a book (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002): Democracy Unrealized; Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation; Creolité and Creolization; and Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, and Lagos.
11 See Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000). I deal here with the uneven/anomalous nature of third-world modernisms, and how this leads on to differently periodized, differently theorized, variously located avant-garde moments, and thence to styles and strategies of expository presentation.
12 The multiple presentations of Chinese avant-garde art (at home and abroad) made it necessary to read the avant-garde intent as an extrapolation worked out in alternative artistic domains, and inscribed not simply in art history but in highly differentiated political–cultural contexts. After the first phase of bemused euphoria, there have been trenchant interpretations of the 1990s Chinese avant-garde, referencing radical aspects of Chinese philosophy, history, and, not least, the political “aesthetic” of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
13 Two important international exhibitions, already listed above, have brought the issues curatorially up to date: See Gulammohammed Sheikh, “New Indian Art: Home–Street–Shrine–Bazaar–Museum,” in ArtSouthAsia, exh. cat., Shisha, Manchester, 2002; Chaitanya Sambrani, “On the Double Edge of Desire,” in Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, exh. cat., Asia Society, New York, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Perth, 2004. These have not only proposed the phenomenological experience in simultaneous viewing of different linguistic regimes, but also argued for a structural relationship between image-cultures. The textual apparatus of the exhibition raises larger questions of community and nation, of the disenfranchisement of populations in the modernizing process, and, very simply, the uneasy exchange between art, living cultures, and market economics.
14 In an interview with Jan Winkelmann, Szeeman admitted: “And of course you had the eternal discussion again about whether to abolish the national pavilions or not. I find these national presentations of utmost importance. The outstanding chance for Biennales like those of Venice and São Paulo is that they have these two foundations, the national and the international. Precisely through this combination you can then build bridges, and that’s where the challenge of the Biennale model lies.” “Failure as a Poetic Dimension. A Conversation with Harald Szeemann,” Metropolis M. Tijdschrift over hedendaagse kunst, no. 3 (June 2001). As it happens, the national sections have been abolished from the São Paulo Bienal since 2006.
15 I take the liberty of self-referencing to highlight my argument. At the turn of the twenty-first century, I was asked by the Tate Modern, London, to conceptualize and curate an exposition referring to the visual culture of an Indian city, for what was to become its inaugural, multipart exhibition, Century City: Art and Culture in Modern Metropolis (2001). The dynamic of art and visual culture at specific points in the twentieth century was sought to be brought into focus by nine city-sections—Paris, Vienna, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Tokyo, New York, Bombay, and London. This involved not simply a choice of a decade or of a political moment, but of a historical conjuncture in the twentieth century.
Working with the film theorist Ashish Rajadhyaksha as co-curator, I selected Bombay in the 1990s as a signature twentieth-century metropolis. We focused on its peculiar dynamic, pitching it not simply as a local cultural variation on the theme of the modern, but a demonstration of the co-production of modernities at different sites. We looked for the consequences of these processes as they force their way into contemporary history: from policy-driven economic choices to forms (and distortions) in the democratic functioning of urban space; to the peculiar characteristics of its multiregional, multireligious citizenry and the public sphere it evolves (and too often fails to sustain before neofascist vandals). Indeed, far from being merely a case study of difference, we proposed that historicization of this kind constitutes the very definition of the twentieth century, from which neither the cultural nor the political imaginary of the white-Western, first-world citizen can escape. What guided the curatorial approach and the exhibition itinerary was elicited from the spatialization of the project in the famous Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern where London and Bombay of the 1990s were mounted face to face, becoming, as it were, the most recent, thus precipitate “claimants” to the status of Century City.
16 Artists from India are everywhere. In addition to numerous “India” shows, there is an ever-wider circuit of paths traversed by individual artists, in museums and galleries, artist residencies and networks, as well as international biennials and major exhibitions. Punning on their nomadism, a recent, imaginatively curated exhibition in New Delhi, titled Where in the World, used this exuberant “indirection” as both theme and display strategy of the show. See the catalogue, Where in the World, Devi Art Foundation, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, 2009.
17 Up until the 1980s there were very few high-profile exhibitions of Indian art in the West; of them George M. Butcher’s Art Now from India, shown at the Commonwealth Centre, London, 1965, was a cutting-edge statement for the time. During the 1980s, the Festivals of India enterprise of the Government of India undertook an elaborate manifestation of Indian culture in many countries in the world; modern and contemporary art (in conjunction with the classical arts and living crafts) was programmed into these elaborate expositions. These exhibitions were held at venues like the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. During the 1990s, the number of Indian exhibitions abroad began to accelerate with international curators taking the initiative to mount what were often museum-level shows: India Songs: Multiple Streams in Contemporary Indian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993; Private Mythology: Contemporary Art from India, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, 1998; Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora, Queens Museum, New York, 1998.
Starting with “Bombay/Mumbai” in Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London, 2001, the twenty-first century has seen an unprecedented increase in exhibitions of contemporary Indian art. These include Kapital and Karma, Kunsthalle, Vienna, 2002; New Indian Art: Home–Street–Shrine–Bazaar–Museum, Manchester Art Gallery, 2002; the magnificently mounted Bhupen Khakhar retrospective at Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2002; The Tree from the Seed, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 2003; subTerrain: artworks in the cityfold, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2003; Zoom! Art in Contemporary India, O Museo Temporario/Culturgest, Edifcio Sede do Caixa de Depositos, Lisbon, 2004; Indian Summer, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, 2005; Edge of Desire, an Asia Society initiative, shown across continents, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Asia Society and Queens Museum, New York, Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2005–6; subContingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2006; Lille 3000, “Bombaysers de Lille,” 2006; Hungry God: Indian Contemporary Art, Arario Art Gallery, Beijing, 2006; New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India, Chicago Cultural Center, 2007 (traveled in the United States); Nalini Malani Retrospectives at Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin, and Musee cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 2010; Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, 2007–8; Chalo India! A New Era of Indian Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (traveled to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, and Essl Museum, Vienna) 2008–9; India: Public Places, Private Spaces Contemporary Photography and Video Art, Newark Museum, (traveled in the United States), 2008–9; Urban Manners: 15 Contemporary Artists from India, Hangar Bicocca: spazio d’arte contemporanea, Milan (traveled to São Paulo, 2010); Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2008–9 (traveling widely thereafter); India Moderna, IVAM, Valencia, 2008–9; Panorama: India at the 28th International Contemporary Art Fair, ARCO Madrid, 2009; The Self and the Other: Portraiture in Indian Contemporary Photography, Instituto de Cultura del Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasca de Arte Contemporaneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz Agrodecimientos, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, 2009–10; Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, 2010; Paris, Delhi, Bombay, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2011.
This value-free listing, masks many important questions; not only are more and more of these exhibitions curated by important international curators, they project global curators’ new compulsions including curiosity, fetishism, and the staging of new spectacles. This requires separate investigation.
What is this thing called contemporary art? I want to argue that the trope of experience (and its affines in relational, situational, or other socially inflected modes of art) has been constitutive of contemporaneity, further predicated on the burgeoning of what I call “biennial culture.” And although contemporaneity moves, it is the aesthetics of experience that links art in exhibition from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, regardless of the very different kinds of historical subjects that are produced and the different economies that subtend these relations. Art, in this argument, is never a mere reflection or superstructural phenomenon. What contemporary art reveals in particular is that art works to produce new kinds of subjects; and exhibitions aggregate this activity to become subject-making assemblages. So if the contemporary art-world subject is increasingly produced by experience, particularly the experience of contemporaneity on offer in the contemporary biennial exhibition, then this contemporary effect is part of a vast historical arc, traced from the search for aesthetic and worldly experience in the Grand Tour, through the great expositions that attempted to industrialize those experiences for all, to the art-specific biennial form in each of its present incarnations.
Tropes of embodied experience abound in biennial culture, either announced explicitly or offered by astonishingly participatory installations (such as Cai Guo-Qiang’s Cultural Melting Bath, in which viewers entered a bubbling hot tub of herbal water at the 2000 Lyon Biennial). The aesthetics of experience evokes what Raymond Williams termed “residual” ideology. Theorized as such because in order to enter the global circuitry of contemporary art, the residues of the machinic—material objects, living bodies, elemental stuff—must be summoned only to be hybridized with cutting-edge technologies (or at minimum twentieth-century ones, revealed in the plug to the wall in an Olafur Eliasson set-up, driving the chugging refrigerator unit of the ice floor or the ice car). Such strategies can become “resistant” or critical if their dialectics are revealed, openly staging encounters between the sensing body and its prosthetic extensions, or between the human and the infrastructural.
Within the aesthetics of experience, I argue, there is space for critical maneuvering, for constituting a productive public sphere, for reflecting on the circumstances of global capital itself. Although I suggest historical continuities from Enlightenment to modernity to the present, a strong distinction must be made between subject-positions and epistemes at various moments of these “experiences.” Most proximate to our notions of the contemporary were those artists of the 1960s who engaged in a newly international critique of the epistemic isolation of modernity, dismantling the white cube that was its accomplice. They inserted bodies back into the space of art history and its accompanying documentation, a conceptual onslaught that bore fruit in the emergence of Fluxus, Happenings, performance and body art. By the 1990s this legacy had mutated via identity politics and postcolonial critique to incorporate new imaging technologies that made it possible to straddle the boundaries between an emerging bodiless virtuality that disguised the source of its labor, and the stubborn reality of marked “foreign bodies” that refused to disappear from political and economic spheres.
This is explicit in Mona Hatoum’s extraordinary video/sculpture/ installation, Corps Etranger (1994). Hatoum offers a bland white cylindrical booth to visitors; as we enter, we perpetually fall into a visceral tunnel that opens out from video projected beneath our feet. Contemporaneity, for artists such as Hatoum, lies in the way video and virtuality must be destabilized—here recording a particular local (and necessarily sedated) body, through which laparoscopic cameras have been threaded, allowing us to scopically tour the artist’s own orifices, intestines, arteries, ear canals, esophagus, and other unspeakable invaginations. Two decades later, such video bodies are more likely to pour across the walls and ceilings, exploding into full architectural spectacle as in Pipilotti Rist’s Homo Sapiens Sapiens installation at the Chiesa San Stae (2007 Venice Biennale), or her Pour Your Body Out at the New York MOMA in 2009. The viewer experiences such virtual bodies empathetically, as vertiginous, unstable, or desirably oceanic—yet also as potentially reasserting their linguistic, cultural, and social specificity in a global frame.
This is the present-day dialectic I want to explore in the aesthetics of experience: the tension between a digital spectacle that conveniently forgets the body, and the bodily “remainder” that insistently re-emerges to assert itself in the participant/observer’s visceral, local response. This dialectic emerges over the long history of fairs and biennials, in which the there-and-here were brought into forceful contact, and European traditions were staged in confrontation with the foreign cultures and new technologies that then blasted their way into the art world itself. We can sometimes take for granted the ways in which contemporary art learned to expand the site of knowledge production beyond objects, and beyond what modernism fetishized as “eyesight alone,” reaching out to non-Western cultures in a bid to globalism, and cultivating a brave new world of amplified or extended prosthetic supplements or dramatically collectivized forms of information and experience.1
Most of this in biennial culture sails under the flag of Western democracies, or emerging capitalist powers in close dialogue with the West. Given that fact, the body’s relationship to technology, a central feature of the aesthetic of experience in contemporary art, is at risk of being amalgamated to some new version of the modernist “universal man.” We need to think of the body in specific, not generic terms; we need to locate “experience” as it is differently encountered by cultural, political, already-determined bodies. My gendered, classed particulars were unavoidable components of my vertiginous trajectory through Hatoum’s similarly female, but “foreign” body. Yet another aspect of Corps Etranger is precisely how generic (and yet gendered) anatomy can be—my eardrum is probably pretty similar to Hatoum’s, as is my urethra, and even more generic (and less gendered) the epiglottis or rectal cavity.
If the West invented philosophies of “aesthetic experience,” I argue, global fairs and biennials have contributed to a much more loosely defined “aesthetics of experience,” which also aspires to transcultural and transnational communication. Indeed, it was artists, not curators of biennials or commissioners of fairs’ fine arts pavilions, who led the way in shifting from objects to experience in the art world. But the kinds of conjunctions staged in the fairs became so provocative that the fairs themselves would eventually change. By 1900, for example, the fair format would continue, but never again in the “universal” form imagined by previous commissioners. Most remarkably, the biennial form emerged at that time, offering itself as a trade-specific alternative to the grand exposition, another wave of genre purification, if you will, carved out from the intense and worldly experiences fostered by the fairs (which abandoned separate arts palaces at around the same time the biennial appeared).2 Thus “separated out” from the cacophony of the fairground, the early Venice Biennale (and its eventual copy in São Paulo) were still attempting to locate the viewer within an autonomous, object-driven sphere of ideal knowledge—a place in which socius and spirit would reach (Hegelian) sublation in the work of art.
But at the same time, biennial gears were also entrained in apparatuses of entertainment borrowed from the world’s fairs (meshing with tourism, railway packages, national platforms, state visits, guide books, and other official productions). The events that animated the first biennial in Venice, for instance (in 1895!), are captured in early advertisements, which list serenades, concerts, refreshments, sporting events, fireworks, theatrical spectacles, and discount railway packages—promoted right alongside the serious contemplation of art. After the 1970s, with the Venice, Kassel, and São Paulo curators’ belated turn to process art, these ancillary event-structures—which we might locate within capitalism’s larger sacrificial economy—were now to be drawn into the circle inscribed around works of art.
The 1970s biennials (which now included Documenta as well as biennials in Paris, Tokyo, and even Baghdad) inevitably drew on the prior history and rituals of their earlier world-picturing forbears, a trend that has only become more marked with the turn of the millennium. To take a random present-day example, the desire of the 2010 Sydney biennial to stage Cai Guo-Qiang’s installation of arrested fireworks is not unrelated to this artist’s celebrated fireworks program for the 2008 Olympics, in turn recalling that the Olympics were born at the exact moment that the biennial carved itself out of the grand exposition as another kind of international competition, spectacle, and world-picturing event. Yet I make no claim that the content of these experiential event-structures is similar. Biennials, world fairs, and Olympic Games will contain different things. We need to contemplate the shared structures, and the confluence of experiences across these various platforms, in order to understand the recent tendency of biennials to open themselves to their own covert history of festivalism. My claim is that a significant sector of the contemporary art world draws on such energies, and that the experiences biennial culture promotes have histories.
Those histories took a strong turn after the upheavals of the late 1960s, when artists and curators strategically attempted to absorb the lessons of certain festal rituals that could distinguish their events from the static “museum-mausoleum,” nowhere more so than in the extraordinarily successful Gastarbeiter curating of Harald Szeemann. No longer mere adjuncts, the kinds of performative rituals encouraged by Szeemann and staged as performances and artifact-relics in a succession of biennials in the 1970s would, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, be incorporated in contemporary art (literally embodied in the viewer, and made the corpus of art).
This set the terms for the aesthetics of experience and its millennial theorization under relational, situational, participatory, pedagogical, or other subject-making rubrics. What is interesting is the massive discourse necessary to convert the disparate and diverse subjects formed by this kind of contemporary art into a public—a project that connects postmodernism back to the Enlightenment, routing the aesthetics of experience back through Kant and the problem of the sensus communis, but now retooled for something rather more like Jacques Rancière’s “emancipated spectator” than universal man.3
These social and political histories of what I have called the “aesthetics of experience” involve questioning whose experience we are talking about, where, and in what bodies politic. Questions would begin with the word itself—what do we mean when we say the word “experience?” If I describe entering and participating in Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO (2003) at a Venice Biennale identified as “the Experience of Art,” do you believe we have shared one? How much of a description is needed? In this essay, bereft of illustrations, can I convince you of the potential commonality of Mori’s superbly finished enameled pod, an iridescent, lushly furnished capsule into which three visitors at a time are invited, reclining with electrodes taped to their foreheads in order to experience a neo-Buddhist mind-meld? The experience of my prose will not be the experience of the piece. Yet my prose will inevitably become part of the experience of the piece, should you subsequently encounter it. This is the conundrum of contemporary art—it seeks the immediacy of experience, while depending on our experienced navigation of mediation.
As a term in English, experience can assert the possession of “lived” or “studied” knowledge, an offering of freshness or seasoned professionalism. In Western philosophy, the term is all the more complicated by a split in German between an earlier word Erfahrung (with a root of “going”) and a later Erlebnis (from the root of “living”); in French it is collapsed and doubled, since expérience is both free experience and carefully planned experiment.4 But whatever its etymology, in most Western discourses “experience” is polemically asserted to interrupt the flow of thought and theory, to stage itself against “bookish” philosophy, and to question received tradition. “Experience” is presumed to have nothing to do with official discourses or external programs. At the same time, it is understood to impinge on the body from without, constructing a self and, by extension, a community, through accumulated and shared social knowledge.
In the exhibitionary complexes we have been examining, claims to experience often act as space holders, holding judgment at bay to allow something—“an experience”—to form in the bodies of visitors during their visits to the hypothetically neutral zone of art.5 The aesthetics of experience wants to claim that the activities occurring in this space of fluid negotiation can be called the work of art, where work is a verb rather than a noun. As Heidegger put it, “The working of the work does not consist in the taking effect of a cause. It lies in a change, happening from out of the work …”6—a happening I have insisted is embodied. This ongoing-ness, this working in the body of the engaged biennial-goer, is what Olafur Eliasson means to evoke in the repetitions of his titles: Your Foresight Endured, Your Sun Machine, Your Inverted Veto, Your Black Horizon.7
Without the viewer, as Saint Duchamp pointed out, the creative act is unconsummated. But if Duchamp would emphasize the cerebral and intellectual work of reception, Eliasson wants to foreground the work that begins in the experiencing body of a visitor. Not that the working ends here; this is merely one node in the multiplied processes involving the staging of the work, the slow dawning of situated knowledge from experiencing, and the dissemination of said experiences through mediated discourse into the community that continues the work of art. It is not enough to have installed the strip of LED lights at standard viewing height in a black box at the 2005 Venice Biennale for Your Black Horizon. Biennial culture ensures that wall labels, webchat, exhibition catalogue, press coverage, and word of mouth are part of the production, in addition to the expectations about Eliasson that the viewer brings along. The knowledge that needs to be produced if the working of the art is to happen, must include the fact that the LEDs embedded in the wall waxed and waned as a function of photon levels emitted by the city of Venice from dawn to dusk, the data compressed and transmitted in a repeating twelve-minute cycle. Suddenly pure phenomenology opens onto a larger discourse about energy consumption and urbanism. The embodied experience of wandering in the near dark is amplified by thinking and feeling. We wonder about the algorithm. (Is all the data compressed temporally, so that an hour’s light becomes a minute’s? Or is it a stochastic sampling of particular minutes within the hour?) Your Black Horizon may even begin worming its way into a darker space of anxiety about a global future without oil, an “event horizon” of black nights and scary strangers. Experience thus blossoms out from the individual body, through mediation, potentially to inform a body politic.
Experience in the contemporary art context is contractual. When invoked, it calls to a certain good faith and openness on the part of the observer, as well as protocols of generosity from artist and curator; it invites curiosity, but also implies more elaborated systems of intention and reception. This oscillation between micro and macro scales—the subject and the social—is a way to think the claims of experience in the contemporary art world. Tied to the individuation of subjects, invocations of “experience” are also linked to narratives of group identity. We oscillate between being separate creatures bounded by our bodies, and humans collecting ourselves around shared tales of embodied experience. The everyday machinery (of self, and of socius) that asks us to attend to affect, sensation, unprocessed data, collective identity, and the nondiscursive become embodied foundations of the aesthetic. Art works to create a forum for such processes.
But let me complicate this contractual ethic by admitting that “Experience” is both a utopian aspiration and a marketing tool in the “experience economy.”8 As summarized in a popular book by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in 1999, the place to be in the experience economy is the sweet spot at the intersection of educational, entertainment, and aesthetic endeavors (all of them heavily capitalized). They think this is something to strive for. But if we are embarrassed by such crass instrumentalization, we must also acknowledge that we can find revelation and politics in Cai Guo-Qiang even though the installation may advance both Chinese nationalism and metropolitan Sydney’s tourist economy. There is always a both/and (rather than an either/or) whenever “experience” is at hand. It is an authentic yearning and a discursive feint; it is a claim to innocence and an assertion of professional authority; it can be both sacral and a scam.
Thus, if experience is always at risk of commodification, it is also in some sense all we have to build our communities of action and contemplation. So it was with the collaborative curation of “Utopia Station” at the 2003 Venice Biennale—art historian Molly Nesbit, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija were simultaneously deconstructing utopia as an impossible conceit, and forwarding its potential for new imagined communities. A utopian toilet (Scatopia, 2002 by Atelier van Lieshout) could somehow function in this art context, even when broken—since what was on offer here were new ways of coming-into-being. Experiences can function even when products do not.
“Experience,” it is now appropriate to admit, is the body archive of contemporary art. It constitutes the not yet adequately examined dataset for close readings in the future: criticism, blogs, and the first layerings of what will constitute the history of contemporaneity. Certainly it fuels my own slow ruminations on various artworks from the past decade as constituting its own experiential aesthetics. Here we are advised to recall the critical historiography of Joan Scott from the 1990s: “Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the site of history’s enactment. Historical explanation cannot, therefore, separate the two.”9
Thus the long discursive durée of “experience,” its well-established pathways in Western philosophy, should not be ignored in a misguided belief in epiphany. Marx and Kant formed their political philosophies on the subject of sensations’ histories. And we know that it was all those Enlightenment empiricists they were reading who were the first to invoke “experience” as a way of holding dry scholasticism at bay. Experience was their primary weapon in the battle of the ancients vs. the moderns, the a priori of consciousness, making available “the only possible theoretical knowledge of what is,” as Heidegger would gloss Kant.10 For Kant, the towering theorist of the aesthetic in the Third Critique (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), experience (as Erfahrung) was fundamental to the transcendental subject, building on “disinterested” reflections upon sensory experience to form the criterion for aesthetic judgment. When encountered by Hegel and Schopenhauer in the nineteenth century, this kind of rational Kantian experience was re-infused with spirit and will, in order to suture back together what Martin Jay has recently theorized as the relentlessly fragmented and modalized experience of modernity.11
Most pertinent for the entry of contemporaneity into this discourse was the American pragmatist Dewey. For Dewey, experience was not simply an empirical precondition to subjective awareness, it was in and of itself the only way the subject could come into being in modernity. Dewey’s seminal 1937 book Art as Experience claimed that aesthetic and creative encounters were particularly powerful forms of democratic subject-formation, rebuilding the subject undone by modern industrial existence. An important contributor to the intellectual climate emerging in New York at the end of the 1930s, Dewey favored rhythmic gesture and the experience of intuitive action over the ratiocination of cubism and geometric form. We know, for example, that Dewey’s Art as Experience was crucial to the formalist critic Clement Greenberg, who gave copies of the book to European contacts and frankly emulated Dewey’s unvarnished American prose.12
But Greenberg turned Dewey into a positivist, denying the embodied give-and-take and the organic rhythms of Deweyan experience, putting in their place Mondrian’s geometries, which the critic saw as instantiating urban industrial order for what he called “our modernist sensibility.” Thus it was not Greenberg’s Dewey who influenced the emerging aesthetics of experience, but the Dewey fueling the younger generation represented by Allan Kaprow. It was Kaprow who would combine a close reading of Dewey with the teachings of John Cage to interpret the famous images of Jackson Pollock in the act of painting as auguring a new kind of embodied production and reception, requiring a new kind of art world. Kaprow’s “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” was published in 1958, a doctrine of extemporaneous creation and experience that fueled Happenings and the seeds of process and installation art from the late 1950s and into the 1970s, exploding into Szeemann’s documentas and biennials to come.13
Thus we come to the same juncture, this time via philosophy, arriving at the experiential turn that would propel the experiential aesthetic so dominant today. But as noted above in the historical trajectory that stemmed from the fairs and biennials to congeal in an experience economy, it is not enough to say that we have an aesthetics of experience. I have here urged us to grasp its politics and its ethics, understanding it as a tool in art’s workings, dependent on mediation and critical close reading of the body histories it entails.
Notes
1 Witness the provocation of Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11, which inverted the usual trajectory by which the world is brought to a representation in a Western “center,” instead offering various “Platforms” that physically took place in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos.
2 This argument is more fully developed in my contribution to The Biennial Reader, ed. Elena Filipovic et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2010).
3 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, first given as a lecture in Frankfurt, 2004, now published in English by Verso, 2009.
4 For a magisterial summary, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
5 In this respect, recent obsessions with experience can be seen as a corrective to the exhausted archival impulses of postmodernism—enough with knowing quotations, parody, pastiche; now for direct impact on everybody!
6 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in his Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstader (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 70.
7 See also Olafur Eliasson, Your Engagement has Consequences, on the Relativity of Your Reality (Baden: Lars Müller, 2006).
8 See B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 1999), theorizing that the “service economy” is being replaced by businesses that can stage their offerings as “an experience:” e.g. Disney, AOL, et al.
9 Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17: 4 (Summer 1991), pp. 779, 793.
10 See Martin Jay’s summary, in Songs of Experience, op. cit., p. 351.
11 Ibid.
12 As Greenberg wrote in August 1940, “criticism is the only really living genre left .... I know my style is too much like Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey, but I’ll be damned if I can deliver the birth otherwise.” Greenberg to Harold Lazarus, August 28, 1940, Greenberg Papers, Getty Research Institute, Archive #950085.
13 Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Artnews 57: 6 (October 1958), pp. 24–26. See also Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1966).