The Biennial, too big to succeed?

The Biennial today has come to be known as a non-commercial space for challenging and thought-provoking artworks and as a site of free discourse and exchange of skills and ideas. The works shown at such art festivals are often said to suggest where art will be in the future. The Venice Biennale for example, began in 1895. The original purpose of the exhibition, according to the Syndic of Venice Riccardo Selvatico “was to represent the most noble activities of the modern spirit without distinction of country.” [1] While at its inception, the work shown was largely “salon art” by its 1948 iteration, the biennale had developed into “show place for established international avante-garde” [2]. This article concerns the biennial’s rapid growth as an institution and controversies surrounding the biennial in recent years. There are three macro issues as I see it that the biennial as concept faces, the political, the economic, and the preservation of aesthetic autonomy.

Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books, 2017. Friedrichsplatz, Kassel, Documenta 14. Photo Courtesy: Roman März

The first is a political dimension. Since the turn of the millennium, politics across the globe, both domestically and internationally has become deeply polarised. As a symptom of this, culture wars have become pervasive, and the international art world has become yet another battle ground. Recent biennial news highlighted how national governments are seeking to exploit the biennial platform and promote ideological agendas. In the autumn of 2023, The Art Newspaper brought attention to significant developments in the world of biennales. The first news hailed from the Kassel-based festival Documenta, where the entire search committee for the triennial's director stepped down. This collective resignation ensued following the initial resignation of Poet Ranjit Hoskote from the committee. The reason for Hoskote’s departure developed form his signing a petition which condemned Israeli Zionism and Hindu Nationalism in India, and the subsequent charge of antisemitism brought against him in the German press.[3] If there were hopes that the next edition of Documenta would be able to shake the controversy caused by the last edition, Documenta 15, they surely have been dampened. The last edition of the festival gained significant criticism after some works shown were seen to contain antisemitic imagery.[4]  

The second development of news occurred in relation to the Venice Biennale. To break what the Italian government sees as a left-wing stronghold on arts and culture, Meloni’s government appointed right-wing journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as President of Biennale. Buttafuoco ascends to the presidency in March 2024.[5] Further evidence of political jockeying came later in late December of 2023, when Poland decided to reject the nation’s previous selection for their pavilion representative Ignacy Czwartos. Since prime minister Donald Tusk’s centrist party took over governance of the nation following a general election in October, they have decided to change tack, choosing to scrap the more conservative artist’s project, which he describes as ‘censorship’.[6] His proposed work that originally was supposed to explore Poland’s position between Germany and Russia. The piece entitled, Polish Practice in Tragedy: Between Germany and Russia has been, in Czwartos’ words, censored as it discusses Germany and Russia as two totalitarian states. There is a suggestion in the reporting that Czwartos’ work “was too closely aligned with the agenda of the [right-wing] Law and Justice (PiS) Party.” Under Donald Tusk’s new centrist government, a reassessment of how best to represent Polish art culture has apparently been taken.[7] 

Installation View of Natasha Tontey, Garden Amidst the Flame; Lacuna for Compassion, 2022. Singapore Biennale. Photo Courtesy: Singapore Art Museum.

 The news of controversy and significant political turmoil shows just how sensitive the international art world is. Of course, Venice Biennale, and Documenta are two of the world’s most important festivals of art but one wanders how effectively they can facilitate truly free discourse, and radically experimental presentation if the institution must also fall in line with turbulent international realpolitik.

The second is the Economic issue. In the last two decades, the art market has grown considerably. In 2000 the contemporary art market alone was worth $90 million, by 2022 this figure reached $2.7 billion.[8] Despite the biennial space being, in theory, non-commercial, the market is not always so easily locked out. Where there is big money, there is big influence and the Singapore example shows how the economic draw of the biennial has been exploited. There has been a proliferation in biennials since the 1990s[9], the concept is instrumentalized to attach regional or peripheral art scenes to the larger centres. Centring of regional art centres can also be used within a package for the promotion of a city as brand. The Singapore Arts council organised the first Singapore Biennial in 2006, timed in conjunction with “meetings of the international Monetary Fund and World Bank taking place in the city.”[10] Significant private investment for the festival was courted and “almost half of the Biennial’s budget of 5.9 million US dollars came from private sponsorship.”[11] Clearly the goal of the first Singapore Biennial was to accrue symbolic cultural as well as material economic capital. The potential downside of this turn towards international investment was that emphasis was placed on “showcasing a local art scene to an international audience, rather than facilitating skill or knowledge transfers within regional circles.”[12] In other words, the cultural offering was selected based on decisions concerning the branding of city-identity instead of fostering experimentation, and intra-regional dialogue. This example shows how the biennial can be instrumentalised in a globalised economic environment. The concern however is that regional art scene trades economic stability for sublimation into a much larger art world system. Whether part of that localised artistic identity or aesthetic must also be traded in the process will be seen.

Catalogue cover for second Havana Biennial 1986. Photo Courtesy: South South Art.

Thirdly, there is the question of aesthetics and regional artistic autonomy. The previous two issues of the political and the economic are part and parcel of the issues surrounding protest and critique potential of institutions within a neoliberal political economy. How exactly does art resist commodification and the aesthetics of capitalist spectacle, if the success indicator of a biennial becomes boost to tourism and attractiveness to foreign private investment? One example of how this resistance to institutional integration has been attempted was displayed at the second Havana biennial of 1986. Unlike, for example, the Venice Biennale where pavilions in the park of the Giardini are arranged by nationality, at the Cuban festival, exhibits were instead arranged by formal criteria.[13] The goal of this biennial was to decentre discourse away from the western and northern-hemisphere . This in theory would also have the effect of disrupting the connection between exhibition space, to art critic, to art collector, as has become quotidian in the western art world. The festival platformed “690 artists form 57 countries”, and aimed to “provide opportunities for mutual understanding, support and development of cultural strategies of the Third World countries and to strengthen their position in relation to the hegemonic First world.”[14] Although Northern hemisphere participants were not excluded, the second Havana Biennial promoted discourses between Southern Hemisphere actors rather than reinforcing the typical North-South dialogue. This radical rejection of the traditional centres, as well as intentional resistance to the hegemonic western art market, arguably made it the first truly oppositional, radical biennial.

Ultimately, “contemporary art is an area of economic productivity and is therefore both a subject of and servant to market logics” [15] by the very nature of neoliberal political economy any attempt to position outside of the market is futile. Any connection to the international art scene inevitably leads to subsummation into the grip of the international art market. Paradoxically the dialectic of oppositionality opens the floodgates to international critics, which in turn invites dealers and collectors, as eventually happened with the Havana biennial. So long as there is leverage value in instrumentalising the biennial for political, economic, or independent aesthetic interest, it can and will be undermined. The aims of the modern biennial concept to foster free discourse, share competencies, promote mutual aid amongst practitioners, and resist the morays of political and voracious market interest, can only be accomplished outside of the biennale as institution. 

Footnotes:

[1] Simon Wilson. “The Venice Biennale.” The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 883 (1976): 723 http://www.jstor.org/stable/878580.

[2] Ibid, p723

[3] Alex Greenberger. “Poet Ranjit Hoskote Resigns from Documenta 16 Selection Committee.” Artnews, published November 13, 2023. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ranjit-hoskote-resigns-documenta-16-selection-committee-bds-letter-israel-india-1234686467/

[4] Chiara Zampetti Egidi. “Report into Documenta 15 backs claims of antisemitism.” The Art Newspaper, published March 3rd, 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/03/03/report-into-documenta-15-backs-claims-of-antisemitism

[5] Philip Oltermann and Lorenzo Tondo. “Venice Biennale’s new rightwing director has artworld guessing.” The Guardian, published November 18, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/nov/18/venice-biennale-rightwing-director-pietrangelo-buttafuoco

[6] Gareth Harris. “Polish pavilion selection at Venice Biennale gets political as rejected artist cries censorship.” The Art Newspaper, published January 1st 2024. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/01/01/polish-pavilion-selection-at-venice-biennale-gets-political-as-rejected-artist-cries-censorship

[7]  Ibid.

[8] Artprice. “Key figures for the Contemporary Art Market.” https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-contemporary-art-market-report-2022/key-figures-for-the-contemporary-art-market 

[10] Rafal Niemojewski, Biennials: The Exhibitions We Love to Hate, Lund Humphries: London, 2021, p73

[11] Ibid, p74

[12] Ibid, p75

[13] Niemojewski, 2021, p60

[14] Ibid, p60

[15] Kompatsiaris, Panos & Endrissat, Nada, The Art Biennial’s Dilemma: Politcial Activism as Spectacle in Aesthetic Capitalism, 2020

Hamish Strudwick

Features Co-Editor, MADE IN BED