Just another Exhibition. Histories and Politics of Biennials (original) (raw)
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The Evolution of an Exhibition Model. Venice Biennale as an Entity in Time
This is the second chapter of the book "Just Another Exhibition. Histories and Politics of Biennials" (Postemdiabooks, Milano 2011 co-authored with F. Martini). The book intends to set the biennials within the framework of the history of exhibitions, in order to observe the transformations of recent curatorial practice in relation to the issue of internationality and national representation. The second chapter examines the 1976 Biennale, as a point of rupture in the history of the Venice Biennale, since it marks the beginning of theme-based exhibitions as a solution to the fragmented exhibition space brought about by national pavilions.
The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art
Routledge, 2017
Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. 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 activist sites. Drawing on 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.
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Modos. Revista de História da Arte, 2021
The text presents the main historiographical and theoretical guidelines of the thematic issue, briefly introducing the addressed themes and its different approaches. It equally suggests a possible reading approach of the collected essays. Keywords Biennials. documenta. Exhibitions history. Global turn.
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The idea of enabling resistant narratives to neoliberalism through dialogical and participatory works, steadily informs the agenda of perennial large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art (biennials) around Europe and the world. Somewhat paradoxically, the proliferation of such shows since the early 1990s depends on this very neoliberal model that values culture for its measurable outcomes. By discussing such predicaments of the “biennial phenomenon,” this article lays out its ambivalences and potentials within the current political–economic context. Moreover, through looking at the case of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), a controversial exhibition that prioritized activism and the “real effects” of art in society, the article suggests that such biennial complexities could be better addressed through ethnographic methodologies.
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Biennial Art and its Rituals: Value, Political Economy and Artfulness
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2019
The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the insistence to perceive the objects as artistic objects constitutes a paradox that has been rarely discussed in sociological terms. This article draws on ethnographic research in order to explore “biennial art” that is to say the art that displayed in contemporary art and international platforms of showcasing. These platforms struggle to maintain a concept of art as social practice while at the same time nurture an exclusive and highbrow environment in which “artfulness” is key. I call this quality artfulness so as to both underline its artificiality as well as the inventiveness and skills required for its production. Artfulness in these sites is enabled through various formal or informal rituals of valorization, including guided tours, curatorial statements, media promoting activities and artist talks. These rituals, positioning certain objects within the sphere of art and producing them as objects meriting aesthetic interpretation, resemble the politics of publicity found in aesthetic capitalism at large. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2019.1627847 KEYWORDS: Contemporary art, aesthetics, biennials, politics of art, Rancière, conceptual art, ethnography, art and value