⁰¹ Installation view with sculptures by Kostis Velonis (left to right: Bauhaus Cathedral Do It Yourself, 2007–08, private collection, Italy; Revolution Essentielle, 2008) and drawing by Stelios Votsis, at the 1st Brussels Biennial, 2008
⁰² Ai Weiwei, Web of Light, 2008, Liverpool Biennial, 2008. Commisioned by Liverpool Biennial International 08. Photo: Adatabase.
⁰³ Pierre Huyghe, A Forest of Lines, 2008, 24-hour installation at the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Biennale 2008. Courtesy of the artist & Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris.

Let’s say you are driving along a Greek motorway. The speed limit is 120 km/h, but you are doing a bit more, closer to 130 or so. Suddenly, a car coming in the opposite direction is intensely flashing its headlights at you. What could this mean? If you are not from these parts, you might very well keep guessing, until, a couple of minutes later, a traffic policeman gets out of his police car, conveniently parked behind a bend in the road, speed radar in hand, and flags you down. ‘You were 10 km over the speed limit’, he says. ‘Could I see your license?’

What the other driver was trying to tell you, having come from the opposite direction and having seen the police car was, of course, to watch out and slow down: Police up ahead!

This is by no means what one would term civil disobedience in the traditional sense. Nor does it belong to any systematised set of ideas or beliefs that posit themselves against authority or the state. Quite the opposite, it is, in traditional terms, conformist, not challenging authority but evading it when possible — seeking, as it were, merely to survive. On the other hand, it is illegal, or at least on the fringes of legitimacy. And in the face of a haphazard traffic police that leaves a lot to be desired in the area of fair treatment before the law, it is arguably a way of resistance. Not bound by any programme to actually change anything and never organised into anything more than a recurrence of friendly nods, this has always struck me as a terrific, albeit idiosyncratic, expression of community: in the face of dead-ends, systematic resistance is often outrun by the proficiency of people to wiggle themselves through, using loopholes, discrepancies, uncontrollable and unforeseeable combinations of circumstances. People go on.

The same is true of art. And there is evidence that what has been variously called ‘The Biennial Phenomenon’, ‘The Biennial Inflation’, ‘Biennialisation’, or even ‘Biennialitis’, is a staggering manifestation of this capacity to go on. In fact, it is the very proliferation of this mode of exhibiting art — more so than the mode itself — that offers, at the crossover of the 20th into the 21st century, unexpected capabilities of wiggling through in the face of dead ends, and seems to represent a developing cultural paradigm shift of awesome proportions.

During the recent opening of the inaugural Brussels Biennial, I had the good fortune to listen to a few lectures, during a conference entitled ‘The Biennial as a Global Phenomenon’ [i] In his opening remarks, the moderator of the conference, Pascal Gielen, Professor of Art Sociology and Art Policy at Groningen University, said: ‘Biennials can be seen both as a tool of neo-liberal capitalism and as a laboratory for prudent utopias’. This is a remarkably attractive statement, and provides a good incentive to jot down a few thoughts on issues that are very important to the Contemporary Art Biennial — both in terms of the criticism often levelled against it, and the directions it seems to imply for art practitioners to explore.

A few weeks before the 1st Brussels Biennial, I was at another opening, that of the Liverpool Biennial, this one in its fifth edition, Made Up. During the opening days, the European Biennial Network organised an open panel discussion and also a closed workshop [ii], with the participation of representatives from biennials, but also from museums and art centres, and independent critics and writers.

During the workshop, the question was raised why biennials stick to the prescriptions of so-called ‘event culture’, rather than spread their activities over time — particularly as some, like Liverpool, do see themselves as ‘art commissioning structures’ and do indeed operate beyond the boundaries of the biennial event itself. Many biennials are, actually, constant operators, only peaking at the time of the event, and also holding activities throughout the intervening two years. The answer was, however, rather pragmatic: it is a lot easier to get the money for an event than for a series of activities without an easily identifiable peak.

This started off a brief conversation about the confines that the market economy puts on artistic freedom. One might as well admit that indeed art practice operates within an existing economy – to say, in fact, that one’s political liberties are interdependent with their position within the economy sounds like the first day in Marxist school. But what is actually astounding is that very often, the one to raise the ‘freedom’ issue just gets a heavy round of applause — Yes! Give us back our freedom! — and the conversation ends there.

Let us run off to another biennial for a second, the last Sydney Biennale, Revolutions. Forms that Turn, part of which was the work by Pierre Huyghe, ‘A Forest of Lines’. I wonder how the restrictions of neo-liberalism over artistic freedom look, under the light of a situation where American and Portuguese funds enable a Frenchman to take over a whole opera concert hall, for twenty-four hours, on the other side of the globe, in Sydney. This seems to me a kind of freedom never before experienced. Can anyone seriously think of a time when things were freer?

And since I am quite aware that the example above will immediately be misunderstood as a defence of neo-liberal economic policies, let me clarify: of course there is an issue of intent here and of course the funders have a private — though not at all secret — agenda: they are creating value for this artist by funding this project and they will, despite the current or future crises in the market, get their money back and then some. Moreover, in some cases, they are indeed establishing symbolic equivalents for their power, and are even just catering to their own vanity. This is not a defence of the market economy or neo-liberalism. It is a defence of the biennial. It is not the market players who are responsible — considering their endgame, at least — for providing such an opportunity; it is the biennial that manages to be a malleable enough platform. It is the biennial that flashes its lights to the artist coming the other way: watch out!

Sometime we should get really fed up with this avant-garde hangover that somehow wants to describe art in general as a defeated former revolutionary that needs to find its anti-system soul again and attack the ‘market’ or capitalism. In recent months, one of our most respected publishers for contemporary art in Athens, Michalis Paparounis of Futura Publications, launched a tirade of texts on his blog [iii] about how contemporary art cannot hope to be meaningful in any way, if it is not working programmatically and as a whole towards the overthrow of capitalism. There was even a point, in countless, exhausting lines of heavy theorising, heavily laden with quotes, where there was a call for all art to get back to what the author thinks should be at its core, what it can only ever be: ‘situationist’. Now, laughable as this proposition may be, its authoritarian overtones are most unpleasant. At their best, propositions such as this borrow from political theory in a way that sounds almost reasonable in a contemporary art context, but wouldn’t even get one past the first year in a half-serious university. At their worst, they are totally unrelated to art, betraying a fundamental lack of understanding for its complexity and the convoluted, and often contradictory, intentions, actions and desires of the people and structures that make up the art ecosystem.

Actually, the issue of desire is perhaps central to this discussion. In the Brussels conference, again, Maria Hlavajova, Artistic Director of BAK, was speaking about one of the Biennial’s exhibitions, Once Is Nothing, which she co-curated with Van Abbe Museum Director Charles Esche. This exhibition is one of the 1st Brussels Biennial’s bravest moments: a reflection on Igor Zabel’s Individual Systems show in the 50th Venice Biennale. Once Is Nothing reproduces that exhibition — the space is rebuilt wall-to-wall in the same way — but without the artworks. There are obviously many things that could be said for such a show, particularly in relation to the premise of institutional critique that the 1st Brussels Biennial introduced by inviting museums and art centres to take over its exhibitions. So, it is rather surprising that one of the things that Maria Hlavajova chose to say about Once Is Nothing was that one of the messages of the exhibition was to ‘break the flow of production’. One has to ask: why? Where is the space for the desire of the producer in this formulation? Doesn’t this formulation presuppose that art production is only an issue to be examined from the point of view of the investment of the capitalist, and not at all an issue of the desire of the producer? Yet, the plain fact is that art remains — if in this respect only — quite different from other production and distribution systems: producers want to produce — and not just because someone wants their product.

And, maybe, this ‘message’ about ‘breaking the flow’, which testifies to an intention by the curator, is a good point from which to address precisely that: the figure that stands at the centre of the large-scale periodic contemporary art exhibition. Let me quote from Maria Hlavajova once more: ‘What was remarkable’, she said, referring to Igor Zabel’s Individual Systems, ‘was the focus on works, time, and space to look at the exhibition, despite the Biennial context’. Where the exclusive point of view of the curator becomes evident here is the word ‘despite’. It signifies that the speaker perceives biennials as something that intrinsically does not permit — or, at least, absolutely does not facilitate — a focus on works, time and space to look at the exhibition. In reality, though, this is only true of the so-called ‘opening crowd’ — the strange breed of the contemporary art professional that rushes through openings with a blackberry loaded with meeting alerts, and barely finds the time to look at the shows. Everybody else’s perspective is totally different. Most people see the biennial in their city or their country and no other. Some have been to Venice, but a very small percentage of a biennial’s visitors in one city will have seen other biennials in locations as diverse as Brussels, Liverpool and Sydney. And, just to give a statistical twist to this, the 1st Athens Biennale 2007 Destroy Athens received approximately 4,000 visitors over its two-day opening, while its total attendance was over 50,000 — Maria Hlavajova’s point therefore seems to be significant for less than a mere tenth of the viewers concerned, if even that. Some older biennials measure their attendance in figures twice as high, and sometimes even in the hundreds of thousands. So why is it that curators seem often to forget this?

Biennials can be many things, but arguably the worst choice among all the things that they can be is an internal discussion. Contemporary art curators, however, largely build careers through internal discussions. Not even what the mainstream Press says matters so much anymore, apart from perhaps the New York Times and very few other notable exceptions. What the big, international art magazines say matters more, but not nearly as much as what the network of colleagues says. It is hardly a wonder that there is such a gap separating the rationales of contemporary art organisers and contemporary art curators: they care about very different things.

It seems obvious that the contemporary art curator has still to come to terms with their changing role — much like the discourse about politics and the economy has to face up to the Biennial Phenomenon. The curator of contemporary art in the era of Biennials operates in a way that is actually at odds with the main characteristics of the role of the museum curator, even more so with those of the role of an academic art historian. The comparative study and preservation of artworks is not their priority — nor are they addressing specialised audiences in privileged fora. Primarily, what they do, faced with an art that is increasingly legible through context, time and place, is to provide exactly that: context, time and place. And they do this not by serving in a public space, but by manipulating a space which becomes private, just as individuals are invited into it. A biennial is akin to a visit to someone’s home — despite the massive scale. It is someone’s world that we step into.

To further echo a part of the lecture by Boris Groys from the very same Brussels conference, curators of biennials have to realise their position: they do not justify their choices in the same way that a museum curator or art historian must. They cannot and that is just how it is. That is the only way it can be when one is operating within a living, incredibly dense and constantly shifting contemporary art production. They make choices and provide readings with an arbitrariness that can only be accurately thought of as that of an auteur. They make artistic choices. And their position is as free, as exposed and as precarious as that of any contemporary artist.


Augustine Zenakos is an art critic, one third of XYZ curatorial trio, and co-director of the Athens Biennale.


[i] The conference took place in the Vlaams-Nederlands Huis deBuren, on 19 October 2008, with the participation of Pascal Gielen, Maria Hlavajova, Charles Esche, Boris Groys, Chantal Mouffe, Molly Nesbit, and Michael Hardt. According to the organisers, the lectures will be edited for publication. All quotes are based on my personal notes. I sincerely hope I am not doing anyone an injustice by misinterpreting what they said or by failing to overcome the difficulties of the spoken word. More information: www.brusselsbiennial.be.
[ii] The European Biennial Network is a collaborative structure between contemporary art Biennials in Europe. The Liverpool Workshop, on 20 –21 September 2008, was one of a series of activities within the scope of the Biennial Exchange and Residency Programme, initiated by the European Biennial Network with the support of the Culture 2007 Programme of the European Commission. More information: www.europeanbiennialnetwork.org and www.biennial.com.
[iii] To read the texts, browse through www.futura-blog.blogspot.com. Texts in Greek only.