metropolis m

Like planets aligning, this summer the big art shows follow one after another: documenta 12, skulptur projekte münster 07, the Biennials of Venice, Istanbul, Athens and Lyon. At one time these big events were the quintessential curatorial experimental playground. But is this still true?The emails arrive every now and then, sometimes from somebody I know, sometimes from somebody I don’t. They’re pretty similar, these emails – ‘I am a young independent curator working on a… I would like to invite you to participate in… Other artists, curators and critics who are involved include…’ – characteristically asking for my response to a quirky, quick-to-complete task which, if I agree, will be put together with those of other respondents to create a completed project. Over the past few years, I have been asked to compile a ‘shit list’, to invent a rumour about a non-existent art work and to nominate a ‘personal wonder’, to pitch my own re-imagined version of Tate Modern’s opening show to a panel of senior art world figures as part of a ‘Curator Idol’ type live action game show, and to contribute to an exhibition which took the form of a magazine that could only be read under an ultraviolet light. Whatever the relative merits of these projects – and at least a couple of them, I think, have considerable smarts and wit − it’s hard not to feel a flicker of admiration for their instigators. Often at the beginning of their career, and often working without an exhibition space or anything but the tiniest of budgets, these individuals use what resources they have – a neat idea, a nice turn of phrase, and a list of email addresses acquired from who knows where – to make something happen. This is curating, if not from quite nothing, then from a few thin gasps of air. If many curators now begin their careers with such self-started projects, the place where many of them hope to end up (more so, even, than in a senior post at a world class museum) is at the helm of one of the major Biennials. These, it is widely believed, are the gigs that really matter, offering as they do an audience, a level of authorial recognition and a set of freedoms – thematic, spatial, and financial – that few, if any, conventional museum shows can match. The art world, or at least those parts of it that are inclined to peer beyond the smoke and mirrors of the market, commonly looks to these exhibitions to frame the art of today, and to set an agenda for the art of tomorrow. This year, there’s a lot of looking to be done. Like planets aligning, this summer and autumn the big shows follow one after another. June sees Robert Storr’s Venice Biennale hove into view, followed a week or so later by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noak’s documenta 12 and Kasper König, Brigitte Franzen and Carina Plath’s skulptur projekte münster 07: ‘When a radical break in a situation, under the names borrowed from real truth-processes, convokes not the void but the “full” particularity or presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing with a simulacrum of truth…. Fidelity to a simulacrum, unlike fidelity to an event, regulates its break with the situation not by the universality of the void, but by the closed particularity of an abstract set (the “Germans” or the “Aryans”). Its invariable operation is the unending construction of this set, and it has no other means of doing this than that of “voiding” what surrounds it’. Beyond July and August lie the September openings of Hou Hanru’s Istanbul Biennial, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio and Augustine Zenakos’ nascent Athens Biennial, and Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Lyon Biennale. In one sense, this alignment is, of course, nothing but a numerical inevitability – assuming they last that long, the next year in which Venice, Istanbul, Athens and Lyon will coincide with the five-yearly Documenta and the ten-yearly Münster is 2017 – but there is a tangible expectation that this event does, or at least should, mean something more. The question is, what? The recent proliferation of Biennial-type shows is often remarked upon – according to a recent e-flux announcement by the 2007 Lyon team, there are now 103 such regular events, one of which opens roughly every 3 days. The various criticisms of this format (among them, its lack or surfeit of attention to regional context, its transformation of artworks into barely differentiated products in a cultural ‘supermarket’ or its encouragement of a artificial sub-genre of ‘Biennial-Art’, its propensity towards curatorial conceits that are either absurdly baggy, or constrictingly tight, its tricky relationship with local, national, and international business and politics, and its positioning of the curator as an auteur) are now familiar to anybody with more than a passing interest in contemporary art, and have even been absorbed, sometimes uncomfortably, into these events themselves in the form of self-reflexive activities such as the Biennalicity symposium which accompanied Jack Persekian, Ken Lum and Tirdad Zolghadr’s 2005 Sharjah Biennial. Given how well rehearsed all of this is, it should not detain us further here. What may be interesting, however, is to think about the claim, surely supported by the level of anticipation that surrounds the 2007 alignment, that the Biennial-type show is the curatorial playground ne plus ultra. To put it another way, is this where adventure really lives? The editor of this magazine approached me to write this piece with the question ‘Are the big shows appropriate stages for new curatorial practices?’ It’s not an easy one to answer, partly because I’m currently involved with two of these shows (as one of 50 or so individuals invited to select an artist for Lyon, and as a guest-curator of a section of Athens) myself. That aside, I can perhaps best respond with a half-doubtful, half-hopeful ‘maybe’. In an art world in which, against all odds, it’s still worth believing that nothing is true and everything is permitted, the possibility remains that these types of exhibition might still surprise, prickle and provoke. Think, for example, of The Wrong Gallery’s excellent 2006 Berlin Biennial Of Mice and Men, the structure of which more closely resembled a rambling, funny, and occasionally heartbreaking 19th century novel than that of a conventional big show. Think, too, of the 2003 and 2005 Lyon Biennales, in which Le Consortium, Dijon and Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans both took, in their different ways, time as their theme, all the while refusing to predict a future for art, or to parade it under a glib political banner as though it were not art at all but, to paraphrase the poet John Ashbury, an ambulance speeding to our rescue. Yes, too many Biennial-type exhibitions circle the same territory. Yes, too many of them serve art badly, and are blind to their own incoherence or absurdity. Still, these defects are not necessarily inherent to the big show format. Think hard enough, and kick hard enough against cliché, lip service and vested interest, and the Biennial is, like any other type of exhibition – from a monographic museum presentation of a single artist’s work to the wing and a prayer projects with which I began this piece – a stage on which innovative curatorial practice may be played out. What might be said, before the fact, about the curatorial approach of this year’s big shows? On the basis of their pre-publicity material, Storr’s Venice seems to continue the global ambitions of previous editions; Buergal and Noak’s Documenta seems characterized by a lyricism and attention to the artwork that combines with some tough thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics; König, Franzen and Plath’s Münster for now remains a matter of reading the runes of the list of participating artists (which include Michael Asher, Jeremy Deller and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster); Hanru’s Istanbul seems to emphasize globalization, urbanism and an energetic, perhaps unruly type of participation; Kalpaktsoglou, Yio and Zenakos’ Athens seems to be a heretical re-imagining of the now traditional ‘city-focused’ biennial; and Moisdon and Obrist’s attempt to kick-start the 21st Century at Lyon by inviting 50 collaborators to select an essential artist of the new Millennium seems of a piece with the neophile and playfully procedural aspects of the latter’s practice. These, though, are impressions gleaned at a shadow play, and cannot usefully point to what these exhibitions will or will not achieve. It’s not so long until the alignment begins, so it’s perhaps best to book some tickets, worry briefly about our carbon footprint, and sit tight until then. While we’re doing this, it might be a good idea to call a temporary moratorium on the question ‘whither the biennial?’ and agree to focus on their relative qualities instead. Adventure, after all, exists anywhere there are adventurers, and we should not confuse the playground with the idea of play.