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

207 Pages·2017·13.574 MB·English

by  Panos Kompatsiaris

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