Around the world in 80 biennials

[imomus]

Can you imagine what it would be like to spend a year doing nothing but seeing art biennials? With over fifty now happening around the world, it would be quite possible. That's the theme of my new column at Wired News. In the article it's some random punter who's won an all-expenses-paid "Biennial Mystery Tour", but there are people who really do this; curators of other art biennials, mainly. You've got to keep an eye on the competition, after all; keep up with hot artists and cities, keep triangulating trends, making your selections from within other curators' selections, but also introducing fresh talent to hungry locals and the keen, kerosene-burning international audience.

For comic effect I make it sound in the article like an incredibly arduous year, but actually I think I wouldn't mind it at all. It'd be like an endless shopping spree, but without the guilt or the excess baggage charges, and no need to rent storage when you got home. Well, when I say "without the guilt" I really mean that any guilt you felt about your utter privilege would be expiated by all the exposure to heavy, moralistic curatorial concepts; "all the problematics of the early 21st century," as N. Bourriaud et J. Sans put it in their introduction to the themes of this year's Lyon Biennale; "feminism, multiculturalism, the struggle of sexual minorities, “new age” spirituality, identitarian and relational experience, ecology, orientalism, decolonisation, psychedelicism… But above all... a model for rejecting the consumer society."

I really doubt that biennials are "models for rejecting the consumer society". But I do think they help to transform their host cities—post-industrial places like Liverpool, filled with empty warehouse space and untapped creativity—into cities fit for the information age, that odd epoch where we shop for non-material things and work with our minds. Even if they don't make a profit on ticket sales alone, biennials end up attracting money and attention to the cities they're held in, post-industrial port cities like Liverpool and Yokohama or "emerging" cities like Sao Paolo and Istanbul. Emerging from what? Well, from the obscurity of not having a big, centrally-curated, government-subsidised contemporary art show every two years, silly!

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, at the moment there's a markup problem in the article. The first paragraph should read:

"Contemporary art biennials are booming; there are now over fifty of these mega-shows worldwide. Unlike art trade fairs like Art Basel or the Armory Show, where dealers and galleries pay to exhibit, biennials tend to be government-funded, centrally curated, and exist to put the host city on the map. On any given day of any given year, an art biennial is being staged somewhere in the world, attracting its own nomadic tribe of curators, connoisseurs, collectors, and curious locals. But what would it be like to spend an entire year going from one to the next?

"Well, congratulations! Read on... (http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69242,00.html)

[loverboy82.livejournal.com]

Beijing just had their second biennale. pretty tame, underwhelming stuff. but beijing has a large art scene. brian eno is here right now and a sound installation of his is due to go up in a public park on Friday.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Beijing website didn't fill me with hope, I must say. It was literally "reactionary", in that the curators were reacting against what they saw as the over-exposure of video art in the West and instead focusing on "the Glamour of International Easel Art"! Which could be fine, except they kept going on about how they saw their biennial as "not inferior to the Olympic Games, Oscar, the Nobel Prize, World Fairs…" and "a good chance for enterprises to gain business opportunities, to expand industries and to enhance reputation."

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

That is so utterly PRChinese.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But in a way it's a lot more honest about what biennials are about than the Lyon curators, who talk about "a model for rejecting the consumer society," right?

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

One doesn't necessarily preclude the other.

In fact, in a lot of ways that rather depress me, propagandism and earnesty seem to go hand-in-hand.

[loverboy82.livejournal.com]

ahh they're all crazy!!

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

It'd be like an endless shopping spree, but without the guilt or the excess baggage charges, and no need to rent storage when you got home.

What kind of shopping are we talking?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, walking through hall after hall of art at the Venice Arsenale, I felt like I was in some really interesting branch of Ikea, you know, Ikea 100 years into the future, in a world where money no longer exists and people don't need material things any more, just concepts.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Well, haven't we always needed a concept for living? Religions for example are, in my eyes, concepts of living. But we don't shop them, we use them when we shop instead.

[framework.livejournal.com]

And you can throw in the non-Biennale things everyone goes to, such as Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, The Armory Show, Swiss Expo.. eeeeeeowieruiieowoieruowieurowie.

[discreet-chaos.livejournal.com]

Needless to say, a good article and a good post. I was able to view the biennial in Santa Fe this year and though there were several interesting pieces and I came away happy with what I had seen, I also remember that I attended on one of the underwritten days, so admission would be free. Afterwards, when I recommended attending to a few and posted a tiny blurb in my blog, I suggested that others may want to take advantage of the free days because I wasn't sure that particular show was worth eight bucks.

[(Anonymous)]

television
Hello - it's been busy - Tripping is the European number one single in Billboard and with such success comes responsibilities - shirts have to match shoes - studios have to employ the right Thai Verte hand wash - self depreciating and morose liner notes have to be written for the ever expanding re release campaign as my entire catalogue is remixed in the by now de rigeur faux ska style. I have been crowned King of the Upper Sixth and I rest my case - but only for 2 or 3 hours a night.

Tomorrow - the 19th - BBC3 Making of Intensive Care. (A variety of cravats and hair do's pretend to make an album for the briefly present film crew. Thrill to my looks of nervous exhaustion and mental disarray. Well up when informed I am the "pseudo intellectual Noddy Holder"). Later that very night Ch4 show The Road to Berlin (Various pieces from Dior Hommes Autumn & Winter go to Berlin to sing some songs. Thrill to my looks of nervous exhaustion etc.) Friday John Ross BBC. Saturday Live In Berlin on Ch4. Monday Intensive Care the album comes out. x

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, who'dathunk Robbie Williams read this blog, and even blogged on this blog? They only cost $15, Robbie, get your own!

Promise to blog your album when it comes out, Rob — fingers crossed!

Caribbean Castaways

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

Biennials are getting to be the Wal-Marts of the art world; but to put a positive spin on that, I agree that they're helping to extend the most general subversive impulses of art into places that they would have never otherwise been. Postindustrial, "emerging" cities... what have you.

Biennials, as a form, though... have really yet to be fucked with in an interesting way.

Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffman came close a few years back, however, with their 6th Annual Carribean Biennial. Anyone here heard of it?



Ann Magnuson wrote a nice account of the experience that I'd like to share:

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/magnuson/magnuson2-24-00.asp

Re: Caribbean Castaways

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Biennials, as a form, though... have really yet to be fucked with in an interesting way.

Didn't Miltos Manetas send 23 invisible U-Haul trucks (http://archive.salon.com/people/conv/2002/03/21/manetas/) to surround the Whitney in 2002, and serve as screens onto which he projected his own alternative art picks? I mean, okay, they were invisible, but they were there, m'wkay?

Re: Caribbean Castaways

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

God, I'd completely forgotten about Manetas! I stand corrected. His cyberjacking of the Whitney's net presence, to me, is more impressive:

http://www.whitneybiennial.com/

Re: Caribbean Castaways

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ann Magnuson wrote a nice account of the experience

That is a good read! And to think Cattelan is now curating a real biennial, the Berlin one in 2006...

Re: Caribbean Castaways

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

Nick, did you happen to catch Rickrit Tiravanija's co-curatorial effort "Utopia Station" at the 50th International Venice Biennale in 2003? Your Venice Podcast, which I am just now getting around to listening to on my iPod, is delightful in painting a realistic, grittily on-foot, breathless picture of a city (and a Biennial) that I, along with most everyone I gather, have long idealized. Cattelan curatingBerlin in 2006 is a total coup!!!

Re: Caribbean Castaways

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, this year's was the first Venice Biennale I'd ever seen. And I was impressed. I should have taken the podcast through the endless rooms of the Arsenale, the endless pavilions of the Giardini... I'll be back there in two weeks, actually, to see the stuff I couldn't get to last time.

Wayne Booth Obit

[(Anonymous)]

Totally off-topic, but Wayne Booth just died--lit-crit types might recognize him as the originator of the general conceptualization of narrative as a persuasive act and (perhaps more importantly to click opera) as the inventor of the concept of the "unreliable narrator."

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/05/051011.booth.shtml

-B

Re: Wayne Booth Obit

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't hear about that! A well-thumbed copy of The Rhetoric of Fiction used to stand on our family bookshelf, and I know it influenced my brother (just appointed Professor of
Contemporary Writing at UEA) a lot. And yes, that one idea of the unreliable narrator has been hugely important in my work, and is the key idea in a performance art piece I'll be doing in New York next year too.

Wayne Booth Obit

[(Anonymous)]

In case anyone cares, the times obit is much better:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/books/11booth.html

[armoredbaby.livejournal.com]

I am imagining something of a pace that is akin to that of a pub crawl. The people not on the tour at one biennial or another feeling invaded by this sudden force only to have it fade rather shortly as the group goes on to the next gig.

information

[(Anonymous)]

i am Howaida El Sebaee plastic artist from Egypt , can you please send me a list of the 80 biennials names and places... if it is avaliable for you.

Regardes,
Howaida El Sebaee
howaidasebaee@yahoo.com