Dear friends and colleagues
Some thoughts about biennales, in particular those in South-east Asia.
I am closing all my books and putting them to one side whilst I write this: I am trying to get down to basics. As I said last week, I want to ask what the biennales in South-east Asia are, and who they are for. What succeeds? How could they be better?
Who is a biennale for?
The inhabitants of a town or the visitors to it?
The art scene or a wider public?
If I look at the Biennales in the West I know best (Venice, I have been 15 times, Liverpool 5 times, Dokumenta 5 times, Münster 3 times, Folkestone 3 times) there are big differences: Liverpool, Münster and Folkestone are very fixated on their locales: they are very much about the history and future of those towns. Dokumenta and Venice less so. Those two are to a greater degree focussed on bringing outsiders (tourists in the widest sense) in. They are both, like it or not, more linked to the commercial art world. Someone told me that over half of the money to make and put up the assorted shows in Venice and Dokumenta comes from dealers. They are maybe in that sense sui generis.
The audience for contemporary art in South-east Asia is still very small. A major function of any biennale there must be to grow that audience. To do that you need some works that are accessible, spectacular and controversial. Accessible, so people feel the biennale is for them, not just for an elite. Spectacular, so it draws attention. Controversial, so it gets people talking. The most controversial biennale of all the Whitney 1993 had twice the attendance of any preceding biennale in that museum. I remember being surprised when I went how many non-white people were there – it attracted a wider audience. A biennale without a controversy is a tame one. I wonder how many people visited the last Whitney Biennale just to see Dana Schutz’s Emmet Till painting – or to not be able to see it because of a protester standing in front of it?
The artists in South-east Asia get to see very little art from outside. I once tutored an MFA student in Singapore who was doing her dissertation on Rothko. But she had never seen one for real. Images on the internet aren’t enough. What are the chances of there being a room of Rothko paintings in a SEA biennale? In fact, though most artists in South-east Asia are predominantly painters you rarely see painting in biennales here. But not only painters would like to see a room of, for example, Dana Schutz, Neo Rauch, Luc Tuymans or Michael Borremanns.
Likewise, artists in SE Asia rarely, if ever, get to see full scale video installations by artists like Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, Isaac Julien, Eije-Liisa Ahtilla. It is a big gap in an overall understanding of the possibilities in contemporary art because multi-screen installations do not translate at all to the internet – just as complex installations by, say, Ilya Kabakov, Ann Hamilton or Gregor Schneider cannot be experienced by jpegs or video clips on the internet.
To interweave art from the city, nation or region with art from overseas is crucial. It creates dialogue, it breaks down walls. For an Indonesian or Filipino artist to show alongside Dana Schutz or Ryan Gander or Marina Abramovic is both challenging and liberating. It means to be accepted as an equal in a Global community.
The decision after the third Singapore Biennale to make it regional only was mistake. Yes, the Singapore Art Museum wants to be recognised as a centre of excellence for regional art, but Singapore was the one place in the region that had the money and infrastructure to make a truly international biennale. However, in recent years Jakarta and now Bangkok have mounted truly international biennales. (Each, one notes, curated by a person with substantial experience of working outside SE Asia.)
The decision of the Jogja Biennale given their limited funds, to just invite artists from one other country (last time Brazil, before that Nigeria) seems eminently sensible.
Last year’s Manila biennale was an almost entirely Filipino show, but it is best seen as a false start. If there is to be another what it needs to make it stronger and more international above all, perhaps even more than a curator with some international experience, is a good fund raiser who can get sponsors to bring over artists and/or their work from beyond national boundaries.
Is a biennale a survey or a thematic show?
Venice is, despite the curatorial machinery attached to it, a survey, albeit a very big and very makeshift one. But if I think of the Whitney Biennials I went to in the Eighties which were surveys of art in America and that in 93 which was very themed, partial and provocative, a paradigm shift happened. No curator now wants to do a survey. But away from countries like Germany, Italy or UK in which there is a regular flow of art from overseas the most useful thing a biennale can do for artist is show a wide selection of good or interesting art from overseas. A biennale should be about what is needed: opening doors and windows, establishing dialogues.
And where should the biennale be? In what buildings? In which public sites?
Yes, you want people to come to the museum, but if you want to (a) engage with the city and (b) reach the wider population you have to go outside the museum. But where? Which sites?
Well, it is always nice to put up work in parks if they are well enough policed to deter vandalism and it is always nice to visit old museums and historic buildings. The park in Intramuros used for the Manila Biennale is, I guess, the best possible. There are lots of historic buildings there too which could be made available to an acceptable and persuasive curator.
But you don’t find that many people in Intramuros. Where you do find a lot of people is in the shopping malls. (This is true of Bangkok, Jakarta, KL and Singapore too.) This is why Ateneo always initially stage their annual art awards in one – you do get seen by a whole lot more people. But it is a very difficult place to show art in! As we saw in Bangkok the art became rather lost in the incessant visual noise of the Mall. Though, arguably, Poshyananada was too soft in placing only agreeable or decorative art in the malls.
The only time I have seen a biennale that made a whole-hearted attempt to populate a shopping mall, to interest, provoke, entertain and engage the shoppers was at Sonsbeek 9 in 2001 curated by Jan Hoet where artists showed in Sonsbeek park itself, in and around an historic church and in Kronenberg, a shopping mall in southern Arnhem. Artists like Meschec Gaba and Sergio Vega took over shop fronts and made ironic tableaux. There were video projections, animations. Alicia Framis provided a booth for lonely women to sit in with a professional comforter. That was very popular apparently. As were Justin Kurland’s lightboxes installed in the toilets of young women planting tulips. Antoinetta Peeters crochet sculptures were installed in the underground car park, but were set alight by vandals – those remaining had to be reinstalled in the mall per se. (Henk Visch’s sculpture in the neighbouring car park was made of tougher stuff, however.)
I think it is an interesting model for future curators to look at.
Have a good week
Tony