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The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art PDF

207 Pages·2017·13.574 MB·English
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The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experi­ mentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contra­ dictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the ‘elitist’ and the ‘popular’, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity. This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate acti ­ vist sites. Drawing on extended ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes. Panos Kompatsiaris is an Assistant Professor of Art and Media at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. He holds a PhD in art theory from the University of Edinburgh (2015) and has contributed to journals and edited volumes with texts on art and media theory, ethnog­ raphy and cultural studies. Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies A full list of titles in this series is available at: www.routledge.com/Routledge­ Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS. Recently published titles: On Not Looking The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture Edited by Frances Guerin Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices Edited by Tim Stott Urbanisation and Contemporary Chinese Art Edited by Meiqin Wang Photography and Place Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 Edited by Donna West Brett How Folklore Shaped Modern Art Edited by Wes Hill Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism Edited by David Houston Jones Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth and Siv B. Fjærstad Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes Looking Beyond Borderlines North America’s Frontier Imagination Edited by Lee Rodney Intersecting Art and Technology in Practice Edited by Camille C. Baker and Kate Sicchio Wonder in Contemporary Artistic Practice Edited by Christian Mieves and Irene Brown W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory Living Pictures Edited by Krešimir Purgar The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art Panos Kompatsiaris First published 2017 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Panos Kompatsiaris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Kompatsiaris, Panos, author. Title: The politics of contemporary art biennials : spectacles of critique, theory and art / by Panos Kompatsiaris. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies ; 23 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016044955 | ISBN 9781138184589 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Biennials (Art fairs) | Art and society. | Art—Economic aspects. Classification: LCC N4396 .K66 2017 | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044955 ISBN: 978-1-138-18458-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64504-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction: Biennials, Politics, Critique 1 2 Histories, Values and Subjectivities 22 3 The Biennial-Form, Social Visions and Curatorial Authorship 40 4 Gaps Between Words and Deeds, Social Movements and Legitimacy Crisis 59 5 7th Berlin Biennale: Enacting Dissent, Forget Fear and Occupy 76 6 3rd Athens Biennale: Reflective Indeterminacy, MONODROME and the Failure of the Nation 131 7 Conclusion: On Being Contemporary 181 Bibliography 188 Index 196 Figures 5.1 Police Blockade: Augustusstrasse in BB7’s Opening 77 5.2 KW’s Façade During BB7 89 5.3 KW’s Yard During BB7 90 5.4 Replacing Mobinil with RISE UP! 94 5.5 The Occupy on the Night of the Opening 97 5.6 With Dumping Wages Towards ‘Social Justice’? 99 5.7 ‘Switch off the TV turn on your brain’ on the floor of KW 113 6.1 The Surrounding Area of the 3rd Athens Biennale 133 6.2 Diplareios: the Main Venue 141 6.3 Walter Benjamin and Little Prince 144 6.4 A ‘Squalid Environment’ inside Diplareios 150 6.5 Ruins 151 6.6 ‘Wake-Up Banana Republic’ 153 6.7 ‘Inside Now, We Walked into a Room with Coca-Cola Coloured Walls’ by Gillick 155 6.8 ‘The Café of Monodrome’ 158 All figures are the author’s photographs Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the staff at Routledge for making this book possible and to the editor Felisa Salvago-Keyes for her encouragement in the project. This book is based on my Ph. D. thesis for the University of Edinburgh (2015). I am grateful to my thesis supervisors, Neil Mulholland and Angela McClanahan, for their priceless guidance, attentiveness and inspiration. I am also grateful to Jean-Paul Martinon and Richard Baxstorm for reading the thesis manuscript and suggesting valuable revisions. I am thankful to the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y.) for the three and a half year award which made this study possible. I owe a lot to the intellectual environment around the (now dismantled) Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies (CVCS) of the Edinburgh College of Art that laid the ground for the methodological and theoretical concerns of this project. It would be hard to compose this book in its current form without the generous provision of time and resources by the Department of Media of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. I would like to thank the following individuals for all the inspiring con­ versations throughout these years: Yiannis Mylonas, Angela Dimitrakaki, Penny Travlou, Christos Papanikolaou, Kostas Venetis, Vangelis Poulios, Markos Katsianis, Georgia Axiotou, Vangelis Makriyiannakis, Vassileia Stylianidou, Stergios Valioulis, Evangelos Chrysagis, Toni Lamlari, Christos Mais, Natassa Philimonos, Barucha Peller, Georgios Papadopoulos, Mary Zygouri, Hypatia Vourloumis and Marios Chatziprokopiou; Dasha Plyugina for her generosity and my family for their continued support. A special note should be made for all the cultural workers, artists and curators that offered their time and shared their valuable information during my fieldwork in Athens and Berlin. This book is dedicated to them. 1 Introduction Biennials, Politics, Critique The 3rd Athens Biennale opened on 22 October 2011, the same day as hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in the city against recently imposed austerity measures. This demonstration in which one person lost his life and many others were injured occurred in the context of a disintegrating urban fabric, where the reality of the economic crisis, unemployment and escalating racist violence against people of colour was becoming a daily routine. As a reaction to this bleak condition, the Bien­ nale announced itself as a site of protest. Deploying the thought of the Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin, it aimed to generate for its 1.5-month duration a space where progressive political organisations and collectives would reflect upon and coordinate resistant actions. In the evening of the opening of this loaded art event, an unforeseen encounter occurred. Wearing a safari hat, an artist who calls himself the Biennalist1, took the initiative to invite into the Biennale premises an undocumented migrant residing in the area in order to guide him through the show. As they both roamed around the floors of the venue, the awkwardness of the encounter gradually became apparent. The lack of a common language was obvious in more than one sense; there was neither a grammatical nor a conceptual structure through which the communication of radical statem ents or some kind of resistant action could be made possible. In this case, and also for the duration of the event, the Biennale and its vocab ularies seemed to enact a site of exclusion for the most repressed and crisis-hit part of the population living in Greek territory, the migrants around the area. Benjamin’s idea of the history of the oppressed (Benjamin, 1999), that is to say the purposeful resurfacing of oppressed historical moments so as to combat the homogeneity and linearity of dominant historical narrat ives, provided a guide for the Biennale’s curatorial strategies. However, the actual subjects that constituted the oppressed par excellence in the Greek public space were not only totally absent from the Biennale’s premises, but became largely alienated by the presence of the art crowds in the district during the event. This short encounter and the subsequent development of the exhibition performed the tensions inhabiting the socio-spatial configurations that

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