Review of 'Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta' & 'The Global Work of Art' (original) (raw)
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Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art is a well-researched and historically sensitive investigation of the so-called biennial phenomenon. The study sheds new light on the geographies and artistic lineages of these increasingly celebrated perennial art events, comprising of historical dialogues in diverse times and spaces from shows with often radically diverse political agendas. The authors claim that their book differs 'from the general demonization of biennials' (4), a claim, however, that appears slightly inflated given the domination of what could be called the 'double-edged' approach in the field (biennials are both good and bad at the same time, both politically/economically manipulated and potential civic platforms) and the relative absence of studies that would demonize the phenomenon in a totalizing way. By grasping, however, biennialization as a process that offers 'profound, critical insights into art's nexus with globalized commerce' (4), the authors do a good job in turning the spotlight on an array of largely neglected exhibitions of the biennial scene and literature. The examination of such exhibitions, including the Biennale de la Méditerranée in Alexandria, the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane and the Emergency Biennial in Chechnya, and their insertion within global biennial histories, performs a careful decentring of the common Eurocentric orthodoxies that decisively loom over the field. And while this is undoubtedly the most useful contribution of Green and
A recurring occurrence: biennials and perennial exhibitions of contemporary art
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.
Image & Text : a Journal for Design, 2015
What is the scope of "global art" and who drives its framing within the current climate of 'corporate globalization' (Demos 2009:7, emphasis in original)? In what ways do the recent global turn and curatorial turn underwrite meaningful global inclusivity and visibility, and to what degree does this globally shared art constitute mutuality? Does "global art", including the accompanying process of biennialisation, allow for local narratives in a way that seriously accounts for a geopolitical view of contemporary art in the twenty-first century? While the inclusion of "new art worlds" 2 in what Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013) term "global art" is framed as a democratisation of 1. Thank you to Dr. Alexandra Dodd for the insightful feedback she provided. 2. This term is used in the title of Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel's 2013 book, The global contemporary and the rise of new art worlds.
Biennials, Triennials and documenta (2016)
In this engaging and insightful new treatise, Charles Green and Anthony Gardner examine in depth the history and popularization of large-scale international survey exhibitions, or “biennials,” and their impact on contemporary art since the 1950s. From the 1972 director-driven documenta 5 at Kassel to the rise of mega-exhibitions across Asia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the renewed ascendancy of gargantuan biennials in the twenty-first century, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta offers a comprehensive history of biennialization that is global in scope. In addition to interrogating specific curatorial models and methods, Green and Gardner use the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art. With a comprehensive global array of case studies seamlessly connected through shrewd narrative analysis, this innovative new book will be essential reading for curatorial and museum studies students and scholars, aspiring curators, gallerists, and all those interested in the exhibition of contemporary art. Available through Wiley-Blackwell, May 2016
World Pictures: Toward a Minor History of Biennialism
The primary exhibition venue for much new art is an international circuit of fairs and biennials, most of which are less than two decades old. Much of this art problematizes its own cosmopolitanism and novelty, depicting mobile populations or exotic locations while conforming to the most current technological or aesthetic standards. Critical discussion of such work often assumes that biennials give us the most direct access to global contemporary art, and that the concepts of “the global” and “the contemporary” are both self-evident and interrelated, or even interchangeable. But what if this isn’t the case? How might the singular form of these concepts function ideologically, blocking our understanding of conflicting geographies or uneven histories? How have international exhibitions sought to contest these relations or to alter their own function? How might such examples change our thinking about the geopolitics of art, the task of the curator, or the relations between exhibitions and their audiences? This seminar will explore such questions by developing an alternative, “minor” history of the contemporary biennial, focusing on developments that took place outside or in opposition to the hegemony of the global North. We will begin by studying theories of postcoloniality, globalization, and “the contemporary,” and by surveying recent debates about the biennial format. We will then consider historic precedents for the ongoing biennial explosion, moving from the congresses and conventions of the decolonizing Third World through the development of periodic exhibitions in sites including Cuba, Delhi, Lagos, and Sydney. The bulk of the course will consist of case studies of important exhibitions since 1989, including the following: Dak’Art, the Johannesburg Biennial, Manifesta, the Istanbul Biennial, inSite, the Emergency Biennale of Chechnya, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Tbilisi Triennial. We will meet with several curators, critics, and art historians with expertise in this field.
Just Another Exhibition: Histories and Politics of Biennials
"In the last twenty years the “Biennale” has become a prominent exhibition model, disseminated all over the globalized art system. A laboratory for curatorial experimentation, the Biennale has come to affect and make visible international exhibition practices. Conversations with Thomas Hirschhorn, Alfredo Jaar, Antoni Muntadas, and Stéphanie Moisdon focus on the questions brought about by each chapter, and open up to different ways of thinking about national representation, history-making and conceptualization of biennials’ exhibition formats in contemporary art. "
What is the scope of 'global art' and who drives its framing within the current climate of corporate globalization? In what ways do the recent global turn and curatorial turn underwrite meaningful global inclusivity and visibility, and to what degree does this globally shared art constitute mutuality? Does 'global art', including the accompanying process of biennialisation, allow for local narratives in a way that seriously accounts for a geopolitical view of contemporary art in the twenty-first century? While the inclusion of 'new art worlds' in what Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013) term 'global art' is framed as a democratisation of contemporary art and the demise of the western art canon, it is important to raise questions regarding the blind spots of this supposedly global, post-1989 expansion. In this article I analyse the current discourse of 'global art' as articulated in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Belting, Buddensieg & Weibel 2013), focusing on its origin, transcription, mapping, consumption and ultimately, I suggest, its emergence as a function of privilege. Challenging the charting of supposedly new art regions (Belting et al. 2013:100), which 'writes-out' local narratives and counter-narratives, I argue for a logic of subtraction in place of a logic of addition. While the latter triumphantly implies that 'new' art worlds have been added to the dominant core, the former is useful to a geopolitical perspective that strips away normative vision and actively seeks that which people often fail to see. In this paper I analyse the work of CAPE Africa Platform in South Africa, which, while briefly and erroneously used as "evidence” of biennialisation and global expansion in The Global Contemporary, was locally referred to as 'not-another-biennial'. Discussing what some see as the shortcomings of the Cape 07 and Cape 09 exhibitions, I propose a reconsideration of measures of 'success' and 'failure', suggesting that an embrace of 'failure' can enable new ways of seeing the privilege of the contemporary art world. It is only when blanks, failures and things presumed not to exist are carefully regarded, that the goal of achieving mutually shared art on a global scale might become possible. Only then does it become apparent that the global south can have a certain edge over what is viewed as the prevailing art world.