Figure 0.1 Queue of art-world guests waiting patiently on the first morning of vernissage week to visit artist Mike Nelson's installation in the British Pavilion at the 54th Biennale of Venice, 2011. Photograph Charles Green.

Introduction

Why Biennials?

This book examines the history, display, and transformation of art by one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary global culture: landmark survey shows of international contemporary art or, as they are also known, "biennials." The term is used inexactly and sometimes inappropriately, encompassing not just biennials but also triennials and even the quinquennial survey exhibition, documenta.1 These regularly recurring exhibitions have come, since the early 1990s, to define contemporary art. For decades now, biennials have been one of the most ubiquitous and celebrated exhibition formats across the globe, appearing in countries as different as Senegal, Albania, and China. Many visitors encounter contemporary art solely within their frames, while their mix of artists and art from diverse cultures and places has ensured that vital intercultural dialogues have emerged. This has brought clear benefits to art history and art-making. Biennials have drawn local practitioners into ostensibly globalized networks of art-world attention and financial support, publicizing regions or cities previously deemed "peripheral" to the metropolitan centers of London and New York. However, on another level, all this equally suggests that these exhibitions may have served as mirrors, even handmaidens, to the spread of transnational capital and imperialist politics associated with globalized neoliberalism. Biennials may be little more than a spectacle of "festivalism," as critic Peter Schjeldahl has argued, with art replicating and reinforcing the neocolonial flows of international commerce, politics and power.2

The primary aim of this book is to uncover, map, and analyze the global history of biennials since the early 1950s. In particular, we intend to examine the remarkable development of these exhibitions - a cultural phenomenon that, following critics Julian Stallabrass, Paul O'Neill, and others, we call "biennialization" - and their relation to both transcultural potentials and international politics.3 For some critics, the connections between politics and biennials are deeply problematic. Biennialization may, truly, be irrevocably tied to the spectacle culture of neoliberalism, with exhibitions sponsored through a potent mix of state and corporate support designed to lure international tourism to sites struggling on the edges of global trade.4 This has certainly been true of the "biennial boom" in postcommunist Europe since the mid-1990s. The diversion of state funds from many small-scale cultural projects into the single, short-term event of the biennial can cripple local cultural production, as occurred when Slovenia's capital Ljubljana hosted the Manifesta biennial in 2000, while the corporate sponsorship of some biennials has suggested that biennialization may be a potent way for funders to penetrate new commercial or cultural markets. As George Yúdice has argued of biennialization in the Americas, biennials and contemporary culture may thereby become expedient means to support the political and corporate interests of their sponsors.5

Such accusations are common in contemporary art discourse and need to be considered in any study of the function and influence of biennials. Where this book differs from the general demonization of biennials is in our contention that biennialization can offer profound, critical insights into art's nexus with globalized commerce and political interests, both after 1989 and, surprisingly, long before it. We are, of course, not alone in this. Back in 2003, with his short essay, "The Unstable Institution," Carlos Basualdo argued that biennials have the potential for cultural and social subversion.6 The drive to understand the genealogies of biennials is slowly gaining force in art history, following such esteemed commentators as Lawrence Alloway and Caroline Jones, who recognized biennialization's roots in nineteenth-century World Fairs and Parisian Salons.7 But a full account is required of the histories of innovation and influence that led to biennials becoming one of the most popular - perhaps even dominant - formats for presenting and promoting culture today.

Indeed, given the public popularity of biennials, their sustained scholarly analysis has been surprisingly piecemeal. We must emphasize this, for it is at odds with many people's intuitions that surely they have already digested a considerable quantity of scholarship on the subject of biennials. This lack is not due to the subject's relative newness; in-depth research on other aspects of global politics and culture has long circulated in the humanities.8 Rather, it is the rapid turnover of biennials and their curators, as well as the diversity of their themes and forms of infrastructure, that has resulted in analyses that are either necessarily introductory in scope, such as Charlotte Bydler's published doctoral dissertation in 2004, and Bruce Altshuler's two sourcebooks of 2008 and 2013 on famous modern and contemporary exhibitions in general, or limited to anthologies of anecdotes about specific exhibitions, such as Robert Storr's 2006 edited collection about the Venice Biennale, or else focused on the effects of biennialization on particular exhibitions, as with Rachel Weiss's comprehensive 2011 collection of essays on the Third Bienal de La Habana (1989).9 It is as if the features, purpose, and effects of biennials are self-evident. More prevalent still are the journalistic and populist accounts of biennials and contemporary art markets such as Sarah Thornton's 2008 and 2014 profiles of the contemporary art world, within which the biennial plays one part.10 Nonetheless, there are exceptions to this trend - John Clark's fine research on biennials and contemporary Asian art, for example, concentrates on the history of Asian biennials and ranks among the first scholarly examinations of the subject - and what these exceptions reveal is that charting and analyzing the histories of these shows is both possible and necessary. This is reinforced by the number of very well-attended conferences on biennials that have been held abroad in recent years: this includes, most notably, "Landmark Exhibitions: Contemporary Art Shows since 1968" at London's Tate Modern, and "The Bergen Biennial Conference" in Norway's Bergen Kunsthall, held in 2008 and 2009 respectively (the latter of which resulted in a landmark anthology about biennials, The Biennial Reader).11

The mounting international importance of biennials and their historical study has opened up a research gap that scholars are just beginning to address. But as we noted before, the surprise is the sheer scarcity of scholarly research so far published, and on occasion the inaccessibility of the relevant exhibition catalogues. There were calls to redress this all through the first decade of the twenty-first century: renowned German scholar Hans Belting convened a substantial research project in which biennials were meshed with the global transformation of contemporary art. In Belting's words, "the art market, with its global strategies, invites a serious study that has hardly begun."12 James Meyer, at a major 2005 conference on biennials, similarly claimed that "what we lack are studies of the contemporary international show as a form [Meyer's emphasis]."13 It is past time for a critical overview of the phenomenon. It is precisely this that we have set out to offer in this volume, as we seek to redress these substantial oversights in the study of contemporary art. And contemporary art is a research field that is particularly significant, given it is one of the main growth areas in art history enrolments, dissertation topics, and curatorial studies courses.

This book is a historical survey of contemporary art and globalization, through an analysis of the biennials of international art that evolved in tandem with both (and so we will not cover biennials that have a national focus, such as the Whitney Biennial). Such a study is especially necessary given that, as Wu Chin-tao writes, "globalization has been the buzzword of the last two decades but the precise ways in which the process of globalization has impacted on the production and reception of art works and their institutional support systems are far from clear."14 Contemporary art has boomed since the late 1980s. The period's key art productions have clustered around spectacular, expensive new art such as video installation and large color photography, implying venues able to provide the resources, scale, and public prominence required by these works. Biennials met these demands, offering newcomers to the global scene a stage on which to participate in the contemporary art industry, while enabling a dramatically expanded audience the chance to see recent art. Now, contemporary art is almost indistinguishable from its exhibitions, especially at these spectacles. These, the topic of this book, are taken to be indicative of the situation of art production and also revelatory of new developments...