Publications

Rather than asking what a biennial represents, it may be worthwhile to shift the emphasis of the question and examine how it represents. That is: How is it experienced?

On what level does the experience of an international art exhibition like a biennial register and in which parameters does that experience then come to figure as relevant and meaningful? Is it within parameters set by the national, the international or the local context of its reception? Which of these contexts does, can or should such an exhibition therefore address?

If we take the Venice Biennale as the historic prototype on which the concept of a major exhibition presenting art from around the world is modelled, the answer turns out to be complex: The Venice Biennale professes to address the world and it speaks from the position of being set in an illustrious location, Venice, a city that has been a tourist destination ever since the inception of modern tourism, a city that people around the world can therefore be expected to (wish to) visit. Yet, the key in which Venice addresses the world has traditionally been the key of national representation. For sure, efforts have been made in recent years to shift the focus away from the national pavilions towards the multinational group shows in the framework of the biennial. Still, the way the audience interacts with the exhibition – the way we come to Venice to play the game of seeing the show – remains largely determined by the quaint attraction of seeking out the national pavilions while promenading through the park grounds and palaces with the air of the global traveller and conqueror of the colonial age. “Have we done Venezuela yet?” – “We should make sure to do Argentina on the way.” This experience is inevitably tainted by the traces of the imperialist if not fascist aspirations to national supremacy which the grandiose neoclassicist architecture of many of the pavilions epitomises. Still, the general attitude with which you perform the ceremony of seeing the biennial as an informed viewer is likely to be that of a postmodern ironicist who wittingly indulges in an untimely charade.

No doubt, to be nominated as an artist to represent the nation continues to be a mark of distinction which counts in terms of raising the profile and market value of the work in countries where an art market exists – or which can secure status in local power struggles, especially in countries where a market is virtually non-existent. Nevertheless, for the informed viewer the strong feeling of the absurdity of the calculus of national representation tends to overshadow the experience of seeing the work and even overrule the expectation to see anything truly relevant. The international audience which assembles to see an international art exhibition will by nature of its interests and provenance be attuned to the emancipated view that ever since countries established trade relations between each other, art and ideas of true relevance have been a subject to and a product of such supra-national trade and exchange. What city would make this more tangible than Venice? (If Nuremburg and Venice had not been trade partners, who knows what would have happened to DÜrer, or if he would have ‘happened’ at all. In a similar way there would have been no Kant, had the writings of Hume not found their way from Edinburgh to Königsberg – and so on.) So why would anyone take nationalities seriously when it comes to art and ideas? Is Picasso’s art French or Spanish? Was Miró truly Catalan? Who would care about this, apart from some petty power players in the respective ministries of tourism?

Then again, it might be too easy to just offhandedly dismiss the national as a relevant key of address. After all, there is a resurgence of a desire to claim art for the country in peripheral regions whose culture had been suppressed by the centre (eg Catalonia or the Basque Country) or in smaller nations that have been freed from the domination of bigger states, as in many countries of the former Eastern Block. Entire art histories are currently rewritten in countries that have emerged from the collapse of larger nations as, for instance, artists become retroactively divided into Czechs and Slovaks or Slovenians, Croatians and Serbs. Here, representing the nation is a big issue precisely because what that new nation is supposed to represent still is a contested subject. Yet, what makes the ideological if not openly chauvinist bias of such debates so bizarrely obvious when it comes to nationally (re)classified art, is, that while the nation can be the subject of (ideological) representation in art it can never be the subject that makes the experience of art. A nation never goes to see art. Only individual people do. In sports the chimera of an imaginary collective subject may still be frequently invoked as ‘the nation’ is said to have assembled before the television screens to, for instance, follow a World Cup football match. But who wouldn’t feel silly if they used this figure of speech in relation to an art event? The nation, it seems, will not be bothered to show up as one on such occasions. As, thankfully, the imaginary collective subject of the nation has therefore become unimaginable as the subject of the experience of contemporary art, the national is an impossible key of address. It lacks an addressee. Anyone who, in art, chooses to talk in the national key talks to no-one. There is no nation there to subject itself to the experience this speaker believes she/he can provide.

But if it cannot be the nation, what collective subject could be said to experience and be addressed by an international art exhibition such as a biennial? Does it make sense at all to consider collective subjects as possible addressees and subjects of an art experience? Or is the mere thought of such abstract entities already nonsensical at best or ideologically constructed at worst? Is it not much safer to assume that the experience of even a major exhibition will at the end of the day always only be a personal experience made by different people in different ways, so that the audience of any show can by definition be never more than an audience of one. And one. And one. And one. And so on. As a corrective to overblown fantasies and demands of collective acceptance – for shows are deemed to be failures if the audience attendance figures do not support the belief that ‘the nation was watching’ – the modest empirical insight that no audience can and will ever be more than one of one (and one and one and one and so on) may serve as a welcome remedy. Still, it seems hard to deny that international exhibitions would, could or should not create the possibility for some sort of a collective experience or experience addressed to more than only ever just one recipient after another.

If there is one collective subject of experience whose presence is clearly felt in the place of the exhibition, it is the local. The local is out on the streets, in the pubs and family homes and speaking its mind with the tongue of cab drivers and local journalists. No doubt, the public opinion is a questionable abstraction. Still, who could deny that it exists and produces very real effects? The collective subject of the local effectively determines the mood in which an exhibition is received and this mood is bound to linger in every corner of its venues. If this mood of the city turns against the show, it is a bad omen that will affect also the experience of those who travel from far to see it. If the mood is good, however, the general feeling of overall celebration is likely to lighten up the spirit of the whole show. At the same time, it seems equally difficult if not impossible to say how the collective subject of the local actually constitutes and composes itself. How and when do you become eligible to be part of it? How much time does it take to become a local? Is it a matter of months, years, decades or, strictly speaking, of generations? More fundamentalist positions on this thorny issue have traditionally been offset by the customs and ethics of hospitality, that is, by the ways in which temporarily and without further questions someone may be accepted as a member of the community. Hosting is difficult to grasp as a form of agency since it is a pro-active form of allowance, the act of leaving it to the guest to act, as if they were at home.

There is still a lot that could and would have to be said in favour of the true appreciation of hospitality as a form of cultural agency. Much of this would in fact force us to reconsider the very nature and role of representation in the context of international exhibitions hosted by local institutions in specific cities. (In the following I am riffing on ideas formulated in different panel discussions by Irit Rogoff, Charles Esche and Maria Lind to whose thoughts I feel very much indebted.) Symptomatically, most local conflicts over biennials do erupt around issues of representation, that is around the question how and by whom the cultural scene of the local host city is represented in the exhibition, and if this representation is adequate. There is no denying that the promise of international recognition which a biennial automatically generates puts the question of inclusion and exclusion onto the agenda. No matter then how respectful curators may proceed; the universal promise of representation which any biennial generates by itself can never be universally fulfilled and is therefore bound to provoke mixed feelings or animosities somewhere along the way. Foregrounding the significance of hospitality as a genuine form of creative agency will not solve this problem but it might help to cast things in a different light since it forces us to reconsider, as Irit Rogoff has suggested, whether it is actually justified to exclusively think of participation in terms of representation.¹

Hospitality is a compelling counter-example because by virtue of manifesting itself primarily on the level of modest performative gestures and vernacular ceremonial exchanges it has comparatively little to do with representation² – still it is arguably one of the most potent forms of cultural participation precisely because it creates the very possibility of (and forum for) participation. Obviously, hosting is an activity primarily performed by individual people who have a space to welcome guests in. Still, there is also a more general sense in which a place is felt to be hospitable or a city found to be welcoming. In this sense the collective subject (or genius loci) of the local can incarnate itself and become an agent of hospitality. This agency simply manifests itself in any random encounter between guests and locals in the city and the particular atmosphere, spirit and humour of these exchanges. So even before the issue of the inclusion and exclusion of the local in an exhibition comes to figure on the level of representation, the collective subject of the local may in fact always already be included and implicated, present and represented in the show through its performance in the role of the collective host. The crucial point would then be to find ways to appreciate and activate the collective practical intelligence of this performance – by enacting it publicly in and around the exhibition. Performing the local would then be a joint performance in which hosts and guests improvise intuitively to make their sense of humour chime and find ways of provoking and taking pleasure in each other.

That mutuality is essential for this performance to get off the ground, at the same time throws into relief how the international can only be performed in the key of the local – and vice versa. In art the collective subjectivity of the international exists in a complex state of diaspora. The international is embodied by people who either circulate physically and emotionally by travelling or who put their ideas and experiences into circulation by making their works and writings travel. At the same the only way these ideas, experiences and emotions can ever truly manifest themselves is in the local context in which they are received, presented – and of course produced (in the end we all settle down somewhere, even if is just temporarily, to work something out or pull things together). Conversely, the local tends to only perform itself as a collective subject when it is provoked by a visiting stranger to do so. The arrival of the guests make the hosts convene in committees of different sorts, official and unofficial. The local performance of the international brings the local into its own precisely by confronting and punctuating it with the reality of a diaspora which equally only comes into its own by struggling with the idiosyncrasies of the localities it tries to inhabit.

Curiously, the international is often perceived as the centre and source of power within the arts, when in effect the international is always needy and in want of the support by the local without which it can literally not incarnate itself. Apart from the art and ideas that it may bring to the table, the international usually arrives with empty hands, incapable of instantly producing the surprises it is expected to deliver. First of all it awaits to be welcomed, taken care of and fed, because the international usually arrives, not from the centre, but from the margins it inhabits, that is, from urban spaces (maybe quite close to the centres of capital but always rather in the niches and cracks that occur in and around them) which allow for improvised living, offer rents cheap enough to make flats, studios and studies affordable and are within reach of an airport that low fare airlines fly to. The return which the local can expect from the international for hosting these needy guests is therefore not the temporary promotion to the rank of a centre but rather the invitation to join the margins. In a sense this offer to take a ride on the margins is precisely the experience an international biennial can provide by assembling artists, works and ideas under the auspices of the local.

In terms of its psychic geography, the trajectory of the exhibition could then be a sliding motion around globally interconnected margins. The mutual performance of the local and international would then lie in the making and enacting of that very connection between margins in the process of the experience of the show. This does not have to be a success story. The international and local approximate each other precisely in the moment when they mutually realise their respective marginality. And margins can touch, overlap, rub up against each other, but due to the different shapes of their limits they are bound to never fit into each other completely. So some element of slapstick will inevitably inhere in the way in which the international performs the local and the local performs the international. But that’s alright. A moment of mutual empowerment may in effect result from the very circumstance that by playing roles you are not quite used to, you end up giving what you thought you did not have to others who didn’t think they actually wanted it like this but now that it has turned out the way it has, it kind of makes sense.

Jan Verwoert is a contributing editor of Frieze and writes for various publications including Frieze, Afterall and Metropolis M. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. His book Bas Jan Ader - In Search of the Miraculous was published in 2006 by Afterall Books/MIT Press.

Jan Verwoert

First published: Research papers December 2007