Daniel Birnbaum, rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt, curator of Portikus Contemproary Art Centre and sought-after curator for biennial exhibitions around the world, is artistic director for the central exhibition of the 53rd Venice Biennial, entitled Making Worlds. Henk Slager travelled to Frankfurt to speak with Birnbaum on the background to this summer’s most important exhibition.
The title of this year’s Venice Biennial, Making Worlds, immediately made me think of the Thinking Worlds conference that you organized three years ago, together with Sven-Olov Wallenstein, for the second Moscow Biennial. To what extent did that conference help shape your ideas for the Venice Biennial?
‘At that conference, we were primarily focused on the way in which the phenomenon of biennial exhibitions was manifesting itself at various places around the world, and how a biennial can apparently serve significantly diverse objectives. It is certainly not the case that the results of that conference can be directly translated into a concept for the Venice Biennial. The idea of Thinking Worlds, however, undoubtedly played a background role when we were thinking about finding a generous title, one that could be a more or less intuitive accolade and could encompass all our ideas. There is, therefore, an indirect connection, which will also appear in the publication. In the catalogue, the concrete, descriptive segments will mostly be surrounded by associative and more atmospheric material. One of the contributions is by Sven-Olov Wallenstein, and it does make a connection between Thinking Worlds and Making Worlds.’
Another reference seems to be what is now a classic discourse, Ways of Worldmaking, by the philosopher, Nelson Goodman. In it, Goodman describes art as an exceptional means of presenting a world view. As an extension of Goodman's perspective, how do you see the specific character of art in comparison to other forms of knowledge production?
‘Creating exhibitions is a heterogeneous, eclectic affair, in which a range of sources can be brought into play. Even my against-the-grain reading of Nelson Goodman’s book is brought to light. In the beginning, we even considered using Ways of Worldmaking as a working title. We sought translations of the book and discovered that the title of the book sounds completely different in German, Spanish, French and Italian.
Each translation apparently emphasizes a certain aspect of the "making" process: the constructive, the technological, the architectural, or the intellectual. In my opinion, it is precisely in this ambiguous gap between different languages where the practice of the artistic process of making stops. For this reason, you could agree with Thierry de Duve that art is concerned with a "nominalist" form of knowledge production. With that observation, I also express my objection to those who off-handedly claim that art is simply and exclusively emotion, or purely visual. To my mind, art is an investigative activity, which can enrich our different ways of seeing. Compared to science, it offers a different kind and form of research. In that perspective, I also attach great value to the exchange between the fields of applied theory, applied science and applied art. This appears to be the place where future developments are going to be determined.’
In making such developments possible, it seems today that an increasingly clearer place has been opened up for the art schools. How do you – specifically as rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt – evaluate this development of the art academy as a research environment?
‘If we look around us, and certainly in a city such as Frankfurt, which is at the heart of the European economy, it seems as though culture has been largely instrumentalized. Of course, there are the museums, but if there were not something like the art schools, then the entire cultural field would probably be determined by the logic of public relations. There would no longer be a place that you could point to for something like free creativity. Experimentation no doubt sounds like a rather vague, meaningless term, but the art academy is nonetheless a unique location, one where experimental research is conducted in visual possibilities, where students investigate what it is to be an artist and think about the conditions of the actual art object. In short, the academy is a location from which one thinks about art from the perspective of art itself. In this sense, the art academy does not train directly for the art market, but prepares students in developing an artistic approach, as well as their own approaches in terms of art and the world.’
In your writing about Making Worlds, you stated that the emphasis will lie on the process of artistic production. How does this perspective relate to today's debate on the art academies, in which attention is primarily focused on contextualizing artistic production processes? Moreover, how will you present these processes in a dynamic and convincing way in a biennial exhibition context?
‘What we do at the Städelschule is a fairly radical example of artistic production taking place in an educational environment. This principle of dialogue is of course difficult to directly translate into the expansive arena of the Venice Biennial. Nonetheless, I am striving to bring across something of that spirit or taste. It is clearly completely impossible to interpret an entire biennial in workshops, one-day exhibitions, relational aesthetics activities and ‘utopia stations’. This is, of course, first and foremost an exhibition that must receive large audiences for a period of half a year, but this does not mean that we have to completely surrender to that. In contrast to the more museum-oriented approach of Robert Storr, in 2007, we are not going to develop a homogenized, more universalized exhibition architecture. The artists are being asked to develop proposals that take advantage of the complexity of the existing situation. That does not just mean the spaces in the Arsenal buildings, but also the uncultivated jungle of a landscape that surrounds the Arsenal buildings – with proposals from Anju Dodiya, William Forsythe, Nikhil Chopra, Lara Favaretto and others. This is experimental, in the scientific, philosophical meaning of the word, in the sense that – call it a productive failure if you will – it can also go wrong.’
Making Worlds especially hopes to draw attention to the present-day situation in painting and drawing. Why is that necessary? And today, do you perceive a special, medium-specific or culturally critical task for painting?
‘Precisely because we know that the final result of our enterprise is going to be an exhibition, we want to emphasize the fact that "retinal" richness does not need to be left out. A good example of this can be seen in the recent work of Wolfgang Tillmans, an engaged artist who is interested in non-standardized forms of societies, but also an artist who appreciates the production of artistic images as such. Tillmans intentionally seeks out the most appropriate visual medium to communicate a given point of view. His use of (abstract) painting strategies comes primarily out of that, and here the discourse on contemporary painting presents similarities to that of the Russian avant-garde: a clear focus on utopian world views, along with an intellectual attention to pure visibility and abstraction. Today, a comparable painterly debate also manifests itself in other media. Consider, for example, the work of Falke Pisano. You can see her work as painting beyond painting. In both her visual work and her texts, she conducts a continuous dialogue with concrete art and abstraction.’
As was the case in your recent Turin Biennial (50 Moons of Saturn, 2008) you are once again working with several key figures. What role will these key figures play at the Venice Biennial? Won’t they unavoidably generate a certain hierarchy?
‘There is a clear difference. The two key figures in Turin, Paul Chan and Olafur Eliasson, are still relatively young. My main concern there was providing more space for new work. In Venice, it is primarily about an art historical argument: the theory that art is not a static phenomenon, a given for now and for all time, but that it needs to be re-read, activated and retroactively reinterpreted. Consider the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, and that of Öyvind Fahlström, or Blinky Palermo. This work is totally alive today, because it is perpetually being reread and reinterpreted by a younger generation of artists. The relationships today are actually turned around: it is no longer about a generation of older artists inspiring a younger generation, but young artists who give us a new perspective of an older generation. As an example, the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija is of great importance today, in order to reach a better understanding the work of Gordon Matta-Clark.’
You described the exhibition concept as a non-segmented whole. How does that relate to the key figures?
‘Although Making Worlds is a single exhibition, there is indeed a question of different zones and articulations. Here, those key figures play an important role. They are not being placed in a separate space, but at different locations, and like a kind of battery power, they provide a clear contribution to the energy that will characterize the connections and the interactions between the various works. Moreover, in the tapestry of the exhibition, different lines will reveal themselves, such as the attention to painterly articulations that we already mentioned, or the focus on artists who are investigating architectural, utopian world visions, including Yona Friedman, Madelon Vriesendorp, Archigram and Tomas Saraceno. Ultimately, there will also always be lines of flight, such as Arto Lindsay’s parade, which, as it now appears, will be completely able to escape the institutional logic of this biennial exhibition.’
Henk Slager is Dean at the MaHKU Graduate School of Visual Art and Design in Utrecht.
7 June-22 November 2009
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