Introduction

This chapter focuses on the conjunction of biennial directors' delegations of authority through collaborations with other curators, and the power of star-curators. The collaborative and encyclopaedic approach to exhibition-making that curator Okwui Enwezor had so definitively mapped out during his long and very public preparations for Documenta11 at Kassel in 2002 was echoed immediately in other, contemporaneous exhibitions, most notably in The 50th Venice Biennale. Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer (2003).¹ But Dictatorship of the Viewer was more directly presaged by the loosely structured, multi-curator-directed Tirana Biennale 1, thematically titled Escape (2001). Veteran curator Francesco Bonami, who had been one of the many curators at Tirana, was to direct Dictatorship of the Viewer. His fiftieth edition of the Venice Biennale was notable for the scale of Bonami's delegation of curatorial authority to many, many other curators, as well as for the sheer, gargantuan quantity of art on display.² This was to be prophetic. It pre-figured the almost inhuman size of other exhibitions to come (culminating with the enormous dOCUMENTA (13), in 2012) and also their fragmentation into many exhibitions that sought to locate or inhabit peripheries, both geographic and psychic. Delegating the artistic director or curator's authority to a team of curators was a biennial model that we already saw much earlier, at Havana's Bienals during the 1980s. There, the impact of Cuban revolutionary, collectivist ideology had meant that the Bienal de La Habana and its thousands of works by hundreds of artists was curated by a tight working-group of cadres, which minimized the likelihood of a star-curator dominating the creation of the biennial. We also saw biennial direction by committee and by teams of advisers at the Fukuoka Asian Art Show and at Brisbane's Asia-Pacific Triennial in the early 1990s. So, this was not a new biennial method, but one that naturally emerged where the valorization of locality and the quick acquisition of local knowledge were at issue.

Tirana: “Opening Up the Conversation”

By the start of the twenty-first century, it was hard to imagine any major European city – East or West – without a biennial of some sort. The union of Eastern and Western Europe had been ostensibly assisted by the success of these shows; this had certainly been the expectation surrounding Manifesta, as we saw in chapter 5. The European art world was as a result densely populated by biennials, triennials, quadrennials (Düsseldorf), and quinquennials (documenta).

In the year or so leading up to 2001, Edi Rama, the charismatic mayor of Tirana, Albania's capital city, worked with local curator-coordinator Edi Muka, and Milan-based art magazine Flash Art publisher Giancarlo Politi to create a new biennial in one of Europe's poorest postcommunist states. Albania had also been, up to the fall of its China-aligned, reclusive brand of authoritarian communism under President Enver Hoxha, Europe's most isolated nation. Mayor Edi Rama had been a basketball player and art-school professor, and was a former artist himself. In the 1990s, he had been living in Paris at the same time as his friend, video artist Anri Sala, prior to Sala's international career taking off. Rama moved back to Albania and began an unlikely but meteoric career as a reforming politician, appointed Tirana's mayor in 2000 and later becoming, in 2013, Albania's prime minister. The creation of a biennial, negotiated with Politi early in Rama's tenure as mayor, was a clear response to the predicaments that beset Eastern Europe in the wake of the demise of communism, and marked Rama's persistent belief that art and culture could have real social and political benefit.³

These predicaments included the need to replace once elaborate but now-derelict social infrastructures, and finding how to respond to the impact of neoliberal economics and global financial markets, along with the free-market restructuring that this entailed (often resulting in the looting of state-dominated economies by entrepreneurs).⁴ The emigration of young Albanians in large numbers, often as “boat people” fleeing in leaky vessels across the Adriatic, meant that the country was perceived as a threat to the security of its richer but increasingly xenophobic near-neighbors, in particular Italy. During the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the network of Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), which hedge-fund billionaire and philanthropist George Soros had established across Central and Eastern Europe, had been instrumental in the development of contemporary art in the region and had stood almost alone in the landscape of Eastern European contemporary art.⁵ However, the pragmatic, idealist Soros always intended his sponsorship to be temporary; ahead of European Union accession by the new states of Eastern Europe, many of the SCCAs were closed or converted into autonomous institutes of contemporary art.⁶ As we might expect, the withdrawal of the SCCAs' funding left a significant gap in support for contemporary art, one that non-governmental organizations and even individual artists and curators sought to fill with small-scale biennials and galleries. That shift was particularly noticeable as postcommunist states began negotiations to join the European Union by the early 2000s, when a flood of new biennials emerged in the region. Romania alone staged six biennials in the twenty months before its EU accession as a sign of its national “progress” toward EU norms, deflecting Western European concerns about government corruption with the signs of cultural renovation. Western European companies did not race to sponsor Eastern European biennials, but art publisher Flash Art supported first Tirana's and then, in 2003, Prague's Biennale, ensuring that both were widely noticed and reviewed (not least in the pages of Flash Art itself, which dedicated special sections to the artists, their works, and the exhibition openings).⁷ The development of low- or no-budget biennials was now a very important element of contemporary art in Eastern Europe.

Ostensibly, biennials such as these were not as slow-moving, bureaucratic, or hemmed-in by the international art market as long-established, major-league biennials such as Venice or extremely well-financed biennials like Gwangju. The theory was that they would be independent and fearless in their artist choices, not bound by considerations of money and commerce, but as potentially important to their host cities (and nations) as the much more lavishly funded exhibitions. Yet, at the same time, the creation of new biennials was met with a great deal of skepticism. Many observers argued (oblivious to the various privileges on which their critique was based) that new biennials in distant locations meant little more than the adaptation of a late-nineteenth-century exhibition mode, namely Venice, in the service of nationalism, corporate neoliberalism, and dollar- or prestige-driven municipal aspirations.⁸ The reality was more complex than such a simplistic, Manichean “good-and-bad” approach to biennials allowed.

In an interview published in the preface of the Tirana Biennale's surprisingly lavish catalogue (given the Biennale's spartan financial constraints), co-curator Francesco Bonami was asked, “why a Biennale in Tirana?” He replied: “Do you think that in 1895 someone asked “why a Biennale in Venice? I don't think so. Any city, country or individual can do whatever they want to open up the conversation.”⁹ We will remember his answer later in this chapter as we look to the 2003 Venice Biennale, which Bonami was to direct only a couple of years later, working with some of the same co-curators and many of the same artists. But what did he mean? Was “the conversation” anything other than the art world's covert system of highly stratified canon and sales formation, and would it admit new entrants?

Part of the answer would be found in the words of the Tirana Biennale's director, Flash Art's mercurial publisher and editor-in chief Giancarlo Politi. His aspiration – that the Tirana Biennale could “give art back to the realm of ideals and creative power, away from the domain of sponsors” – ingenuously implied that bargain-priced ideals and political resistance were the province of peripheries.¹⁰ Tirana was ostensibly placed to redress the lack of ideals at the Venice Biennale, which represented the center. This enervated, decaying Venice, by implication, would unfortunately always remain the center, while Tirana would discover – at the hands of Politi – the difficulties faced by a so-called peripheral location that attempted to assert itself whilst at the same time engaging in a so-called global conversation. For in one direction lay the rejection of ethnic curiosity; in the other, a trading on exoticism. Tirana's location brought with it a certain dark, mysterious status but also predictable difficulties, not the least of which was a tiny production budget and a weakened local infrastructure. So, Tirana Biennale 1 presented itself as a biennial that would create a dialogue between East and West, but with very modest resources that it marketed as a positive, as a sign of the can-do attitude of biennial entrepreneurialism.

In the face of frugality, Tirana Biennale 1 was large, with works by over 200 emerging or well-established artists, from Vanessa Beecroft and Rineke Dijkstra to new stars such as Pavel Althamer and local hero, Anri Sala. Its press releases announced that it had been selected by a group of thirty-eight international curators and artists, led by director Giancarlo Politi with Tirana-based coordinators Edi Muka and Gësim Qëndro. The guidelines within which they selected artists were very flexible. Many of these curators were already highly influential, not least Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Francesco Bonami, and their names immediately lent Tirana Biennale 1 considerable prestige. Others were about to achieve art-world prominence, like Polish curator Adam Szymczyk and Jens Hoffmann. Another of the curators was Flash Art co-publisher Helena Kontova. The Biennale's organizers claimed that they were avoiding a single curatorial voice, “in order to have a global, pluralistic, realistic, and different vision,” all with the miniscule $US 30,000 provided by the City of Tirana and another $US 40,000 scraped together during the course of the Biennale, Edi Muka reported, through constant fundraising efforts.¹¹ The Biennale artists paid for the freighting of their works to Tirana and underwrote their own costs. The prominence of video art at the Biennale indicated not only its ubiquity amongst artists at that point in time, but – as it would at the Emergency Biennale in Chechnya, as we saw in chapter 5 – also its editioned portability, easy shipping, and potentially small installation costs that principally consisted of cheap labor and simple carpentry (though often-scarce data projectors). Gëzim Qëndro's entire exhibition catalogue foreword was devoted to the story of the Biennale's struggle to find financial support, quoting an unnamed potential donor to the effect that “we regret to tell you that our art foundation cannot finance the Biennale of Tirana because we simply don't believe that an event of such proportions can take place in Tirana.”¹² As Mayor Rama wrote, Tirana was situated in the “bleeding heart of Europe and the Balkans,” and Albania's own history and its proximity to the wars and insurgencies that were raging in the Balkans right to that moment made it an unattractive destination for artistic philanthropy. The organizers themselves decided that, and perhaps in consequence, “art needs ideas, not only economic resources,” with Politi arguing elsewhere that “Art doesn't defeat the war … but it contributes by having faith in life.”¹³

So it was clear from the start that the Tirana Biennale would rely almost entirely on goodwill and voluntary labor. This goodwill, in turn, was certainly the product of the star curators' leverage with artists, which persuaded them that this biennial would not just represent international art, but also occupy a space that would build Tirana's institutions and artistic life. The Biennale would, in other words, be relevant to local audiences and local artists, and also appeal to the public-minded spirit of idealistic international artists. After all, as Elena Filipovic was to write soon after, “One of the crucial particularities of biennials and large scale exhibitions, however, is that they are meant to represent some place.”¹⁴ They would capture the zeitgeist of their host city and, as well, include famous invitees from across the globe. They would aim to be “glocal,” which was the clunky word much in use at the time in Europe and elsewhere. Or as Hou Hanru put it while preparing the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000 amid parallel tensions between local constraints and the international art world, the aim for many curators was to “realize a biennial that is cultural and artistically significant in terms of embodying and intensifying the negotiation between the global and the local, politically transcending the established power relationship between different locales and going beyond conformist regionalism.”¹⁵

Escape

Why create a biennial? Why not instead build local art-spaces, art museums, networks of studios, or schools, hospitals, and parks? In an interview with Amsterdam-based theorist Geert Lovink, Edi Muka replied that the organizers – himself, Rama, Politi – felt that a biennial would be the best platform for well-known, established art professionals, both curators and artists (especially those navigating the international exhibition circuit) to meet and collaborate with young, new, and above all local artists.¹⁶ He believed that the Tirana Biennale would build the cultural infrastructure that would enable Albanian artists to develop, writing: “Without infrastructure, without information, without training, it's damn hard to develop as a good artist, especially if you walk around with this totally different background because of your socialist heritage.”¹⁷ This was a creative industries, nation-building approach, kept in the background for the exhibition catalogue for there, in the curators' essays, the focus was almost entirely on the miracle of producing such a biennial from minimal funds. In his preface, Rama recounted, “With no means whatsoever we relied only on our talent for improvisation, on creativity and intelligence.”¹⁸ For the Biennale team, it was ingenuity, not economics, which had produced a successful biennial. By contrast, our previous chapters have generally shown the opposite, especially about the sustainability of biennials from edition to edition, no matter how frequent the claims to infrastructural development and civic activism.

But the directors of this biennial were equally insistent that a division was now opening up in the wake of neoliberal economics and its globalization of the art market. On the one hand, there would be biennials like Venice, where Politi saw the “sacred gates” of the “temples of contemporary art” opened wide to the most commercial and wealthy of artists, “celebrating the apotheosis of their vulgarity with the help of sponsors that have too many interests in the world of culture.”¹⁹ On the other hand, there would be smaller, more mobile exhibitions. As we will see presently, both rhetorical aspirations would be contained inside Bonami's own upcoming 2003 Venice Biennale, within which Damian Hirst's overblown, high-production trophies coexisted with low-budget activist politics, in the form of a multitude of small works constituting a virtually autonomous exhibition, Utopia Station, contained within the main exhibition. Oblivious to the long history of biennials of the South, Politi emphatically proclaimed that, with its contained budget, Tirana was “revealing the weaknesses” of a biennial circuit dominated by Venice and documenta. Among his bugbears – paradoxically, given his editorship of a commercial, for-profit magazine – was the increasing dependence upon corporate sponsorship, which was now a “consuming and devouring” monster, creating the conditions for the festivalism that Documenta11 would be accused of a year later, and which we saw described in the previous chapter as an aesthetic of crowd control, favoring art that invited play and passing attention more than political reflection.²⁰

So, there were two connotations to the Tirana Biennale's title, Escape. The Biennale was an escape from Albania's isolation, and a flight from the standard biennial format, which by now required a superstar curator flown in, usually from New York or Western Europe. Muka was, in effect, appropriating, updating, and upstaging curator Francesco Bonami's notion of the “borderline syndrome” presented so controversially at his co-curated Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana the year before. Muka and Politi even incorporated Bonami into the curatorium and Bonami would, in turn, borrow from the anti-market rhetoric and the dispersed, casual structure of Escape for his Dictatorship of the Viewer in Venice two years later. But unlike Bonami's previous dismissal of postcommunist conditions as akin to mental illness, Muka's intentions instead sought to bring attention to Europe's peripheries so as to build local institutions, promote local artists, and project the emergence of a new generation of young artists in Albania.²¹

It was from this perspective that Bonami and many of the other curators could be considered necessary collaborators though not quite homeopathic presences. Whereas they persisted with the idea of the “margins of the art world,” the selections made by Muka and the younger members of the Tirana curatorium reflected the economic, political, and geographic conditions of their regional location in the Balkans and, more, insisted on the importance of what local artists made, regardless of the apparent handicaps of infrastructure.²² The Western European insistence on the needy margins had been predicated on the assumptions that Slavoj Žižek had earlier described, that the West assumed that the East was staring at the West, fascinated by its enjoyment of democracy and wealth.²³ In his Kunstforum interview, Muka had outlined his clear rejection of Bonami's Borderline Syndrome and its doctor–patient relationships just as, in his Biennale catalogue essay, Rama conjured a convivial image of the Biennale as a “petit dejeneur [sic] sur l'herbe – a meeting of friends, or a day in the country side,” that had little to do with Manifesta 3's therapeutic shock treatments of the year before or dicey trade with the exotic charm of Dark Tourism.²⁴ The Biennale did not emphasize Albania's impoverishment, crime, prostitution, cramped communist apartment blocks, and decaying streets, but the hope that Tirana would contribute to the global conversation. Muka wanted to show Albanian art in the context of international art, but not as an exotic exception or miraculous intervention. The Biennale was not dispersed out across the city, but was concentrated in two conventional (if somewhat decrepit) venues for exhibitions: one was an art museum – the National Gallery – and the other an exhibition hall – the so-called Chinese Pavilion (a legacy of communist Albania's eccentric alignment with Mao's China against the putatively revisionist Soviet Union).

The social, political, and economic benefits of a low-budget biennial seemed obvious. A biennial would rebrand the city in a sophisticated, energetic, and hopefully non-stereotypical way. Muka and Rama anticipated an obvious boost from cultural tourism. The flip side of this was the possibility that the Biennale might be little more than an enclave in a Potemkin village, a stage-set that occluded Albania's real problems, though there is no doubting Rama's fervent ambition to completely revitalize the city. He was simultaneously spearheading radical clean-ups, creating new urban parks and, literally, repainting Tirana's streets and apartment buildings in bright colors (part of what he called the “Painting Tirana” project) in order to trigger broad cultural change. A newly painted, brighter Tirana was to be part of an “avant-garde democratization,” as Rama explained to Anri Sala, who had filmed Rama and the Painting Tirana project for his 2003 video Dammi I Colori (or “Give Me the Colors,” shown at Tirana and then in Bonami's Venice Biennale that year).²⁵ Such impact sounds unusual indeed, but Rama claimed that the project began a communal dialogue about shared social space in one of Europe's poorest cities where, he recalled (though we do not know how accurately), people began to passionately discuss color and its affect.²⁶

If Rama's motivations were fairly clear, what was Flash Art's? That journal was Tirana Biennale 1's principal, highly visible sponsor, though most of its (invaluable and indispensible) sponsorship was in-kind. The publisher was deeply involved in the Biennale's creation, from introductions to artists and curators to the production of the exhibition catalogue. A long-term commentator on the European art scene, Milan-based Flash Art had been prominent during the boom in the 1980s art market but never attained the prestige or the authority of flagship New York journal Artforum, and its European status was being eclipsed by the rise of London-based Frieze. For all that, Politi's list of friends, advertisers, and contributors was long and his magazine had itself always contributed, as many European observers commented, to the biennialization of art, all of which made his prominently placed Tirana catalogue essay's tirade against commercialism all the more puzzling and contradictory. Moreover, against his argument that curators would only be able to work without constraints and artists express themselves freely if sponsors were more or less banished from biennials, it is far from clear that biennial curators shared his fear of large biennial budgets. The contemporary art market boom then gathering, and contemporary art's burgeoning affiliations with the leisure-consumption industry – contemporary artists now had blockbuster art museum exhibitions devoted to them, such as Bill Viola at the Stedelijk Museum in 1998 or William Kentridge at Turin's Castello di Rivoli in 2004 – had led to a growth in corporate collecting and sponsorship of the visual arts.²⁷ Such activities were a function of the prestige value of art and also of the possibility that such prestige might be conferred on sponsors. In cultures with a long tradition of state philanthropy (in Europe) and private philanthropy (in the United States) alike, the affiliation of art and corporate sponsorship during a late phase of neoliberal capitalism was now raising significant questions regarding the idea of democratic, public culture, the role of money in national cultural life, and the ability of art to embody any surviving avant-garde notion of independence. The rise of private sponsorship coincided with the increasing reliance of biennials on such patronage, given funding instability in the so-called developed world. Certainly, the Tirana Biennale 1 occurred at the very start of an enormous flood of wealth into the international art world, a cascade that would merely pause during the Great Recession of 2008 but which would then resume, fueled by new wealth in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. The complex impact of money would be discussed endlessly, not least in the international art press and quite publicly in a special issue of Artforum on the subject of art and money in April 2008.²⁸

Edi Muka was later to argue, more or less, that Flash Art's motivation had been to create a no-budget biennial template that Giancarlo Politi would then extend elsewhere. A year after the first Tirana Biennale, Politi informed Muka that he would be moving his support to Prague, and that city's new Biennale would supersede Tirana.²⁹ There then ensued a battle for the name, “Tirana Biennale,” that spilled over into the courts, with Politi demanding that the city of Tirana pay him for the right to keep the now-copyrighted name. Politi argued, “As the Tirana Biennale brand belongs to me, now I would like to ask anyone who wishes to use it, to buy it from me at a reasonable cost, so as to compensate for some of the cost of the first edition.”³⁰ So much for the realm of ideals. Creating new biennials was not without its problems, as Politi and Milan Knížák, director of the National Gallery in Prague and Flash Art's Czech collaborator, next found out. That museum parted company with Flash Art before the second Prague Biennale, so that separate biennials were held in Prague simultaneously in September 2005. But Muka remembered the collaboration between the publisher and Tirana as being mutually advantageous. His perspective was realistic and pragmatic. For backers such as Politi and for curators ambitious for their biennial like himself, aware that international visitors would be few outside the opening days, the biennial as a concrete exhibition did not count for everything, and “it was the catalogue that assumed all importance, almost replacing the biennial itself.”³¹ Flash Art was diversifying, along the lines of its competitor Frieze's creation of an inordinately successful art fair in London.

Regardless of what type of Escape the Biennale's title represented, the partnership would garner sufficient attention to Tirana that the Biennale would continue after the relationship with Flash Art foundered. The urgent but historically freighted, master–servant relationship with Italy – which Flash Art's Milan base also clearly invoked – as well as the attraction of an escape to a biennial in such a previously isolated venue so close to Europe's main centers, was compelling theater. Escape, expediency, and strategic quasi-Orientalism had already been combined in the 1999 6th Caribbean Biennial, the hoax biennial staged by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (an artist-curator at Tirana Biennale 1), with curators Jens Hoffman (who was at that time about to be a guest curator at Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt) and Massimiliano Gioni (also involved with Tirana and who, a decade later, curated the 2013 Venice Biennale), complete with press notices, fake reviews, and an exhibition catalogue with essays, in the curators' own words, about the “predictable roster of star artists.”³² It was an invitation-only party on the island paradise of St Kitts for a select twelve of Cattelan's artist-friends, parading the tropes familiar from other biennials' themes and curators (from global jetsetters self-consciously reflecting on art's capacity to shed new light on local conditions, to questioning whether the world needs another biennial). It was an art action and a dandyish work of pseudo-relational art, but one ruled by the irony of stylish enervation and highly accurate in its portrayal of biennial networks, which one would expect given its star roster of very experienced biennial curators:

The notion that things start to get interesting at the point that the global and the local meet, only mirrors the empty rhetoric of MTV-style sloganeering. The increasing globalization and the developments brought about by the new “peripheral” biennials such as La Habana, Johannesburg, or Istanbul, in fact run the risk of duplicating these universal stereotypes.³³

Accurate this was, but also worlds apart from the disinterest in irony and the sheer urgency in the biennials of contemporary Asia, the global South, or Eastern Europe, and far from both Edi Rama's and Edi Muka's intense and genuine idealism. It foregrounded, however, the status of the exhibition catalogue, the book accompanying almost all biennials. On the one hand this book would be the document that recorded the exhibition, as increasingly elaborate catalogues had done since Harald Szeemann's extraordinary publication for documenta 5, which resembled an atlas more than the art-fair-like lists that had previously predominated. Some large, supplementary publications would even begin to be issued after a biennial had been installed, in the form of a second volume comprised of installation shots; Documenta11 was to publish such an exhibition record in 2002 during the course of the exhibition but well after it had opened. This was in response to the increasingly site-specific installations that artists contributed to biennials in place of simple paintings and sculptures, which were easily photographed well before a biennial vernissage, whereas installations were not.

But even more than the power of publication, the Tirana Biennale was witness to the increasing power of the internet that intersected with the take-up of softly menacing antagonisms towards the rhetoric of emancipation and social and political amelioration.³⁴ A Polish artist shadowed Giancarlo Politi like a bodyguard during the vernissage, with the word “Politi” (Police) emblazoned on his shirt. Christoph Büchel built a military bunker directly in front of the National Gallery, within which visitors could sit inside a car listening to pop music. Meanwhile, the internet was a section of the Biennale, the means to advertise the Biennale and the art it contained, and the medium through which curators, as in all creative industries, were transacting their business. The Biennale included a Net Art section that showcased works unique to the internet, but which omitted Albanian and Eastern European artists completely, even though Net Art was emerging almost simultaneously across Europe East and West (through the Syndicate network for media arts, for instance), despite variable internet speeds and bandwidths. But the internet was also now the prime means of communication, and bore its own particular problems for the Tirana Biennale's organizers.

Tatiana Bazzichelli has reconstructed the involvement of one of the Biennale's curators, famous photographer Oliviero Toscani, controversial for his 1990s photographs advertising Benetton with, it had been charged, exploitative images of extreme suffering, death, and misery so as to advertise the fashion label (among these was the notorious image of, possibly Albanian, refugees clambering over a rusty passenger ship coming into harbor).³⁵ He had been invited (odd though this seems) to curate a section of Tirana Biennale 1 after a heated email correspondence with Politi. He chose works over the course of email correspondence from four highly controversial artists for the Biennale. They were named in the long list of exhibiting artists: Dimitri Bioy, Bola Ecua, Carmelo Gavotta, and Hamid Piccardo. The first-named artist was intimately involved in paedophile videos and the last-named artist was, ostensibly, a jihadi spokesperson who had been deputed to speak on art by Osama Bin Laden. Their selection caused wide offense, of course – their images and artist statements certainly stand out as extremely odd in the catalogue – and this offense ramped up when, three days before the Biennale's vernissage, the 9/11 catastrophe occurred and Bin Laden proclaimed his responsibility for the attack on the Twin Towers. The Albanian government declared its solidarity with the United States, such that Albania – once a Cold War adversary of the United States – now emerged as a partner in the global “War on Terror.” But Piccardo and his friends were a repulsive hoax perpetrated by anonymous artists working under two further pseudonyms, Marcello Gavotta and Oliver Kamping. Their confidence trick – far more extreme than the 6th Caribbean Biennial, but similarly mimicking contemporary biennial curators' unflappable tolerance for extreme politics and free expression – was enabled by the intensely globalized, email-saturated environment that contemporary art now inhabited. The shocked, real-life Toscani had no idea that imposters had appropriated his name. Politi's dealings with his ostensible interlocutor, “Toscani,” had been exclusively by email, without any verification by telephone or face-to-face meetings. The Tirana Biennale 1 had not background-checked the artists (trusting this to the curators) and, unlike Artforum, Flash Art had no dedicated, old-fashioned, fact-checking department. The downside to a no-budget biennial was a lack of research and the possibility of a credibility crash. International biennial curators, critics, artists, and writers had by now evolved informal networks that would soon solidify in organizations and websites devoted to biennials, but those at Tirana were weak and vulnerable to attack.

Curating by Delegation: The 50th Venice Biennale: The Dictatorship of the Viewer

In 2002, a year before the 50th Venice Biennale, Okwui Enwezor had destabilized the curatorial model – the star-curator's authorial power, so exemplified by the complex figure of Harald Szeemann, who had directed the Venice Biennale in 1999 and again in 2001 – that was so inextricably linked with European and American steering of the contemporary artistic canon. Enwezor did this to shift attention off that North Atlantic canon and onto other geographies. The power of Enwezor's gesture was so eloquent and convincing, amplified by the immense authority of documenta, that it not only had an enormous influence on which artists the next wave of biennials would select (and where they would come from), but also on the sheer curatorial form of large biennials. For Documenta11, as we saw in chapter 6, Enwezor had selected six curators to work with him such that “there was no single author but a group of collaborators very much in tune with each other's strengths and weaknesses.”³⁶ Biennial curators would henceforth often include elaborate curatorial structures and substructures, often equivalent to Enwezor's “Platforms.” These went well beyond both the relatively simple curatorial co-direction and the use of curatorial advisory panels that we noted in earlier chapters (for instance the curatorial groups that advised the Asia-Pacific Triennials), into prequel, sequel, and mobile, pop-up exhibitions that would augment the main biennial, into elaborate colloquia and conferences that ranged way beyond visual art, and, third, into the directorial curating of curators, in exhibitions within exhibitions.

This was far from unprecedented. For the 1993 Venice Biennale, director and veteran critic Achille Bonito Oliva had delegated sections of the Aperto 93 exhibition to thirteen curators, one of whom was Bonami; another was an art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch. The increasingly transnational relocation of artistic production (though neither marketing nor institutional legitimization) was so clear that Bonito Oliva named his exhibition “Cardinal Points of Art,” referring to artistic nomadism as the underpinnings of his artist choices. This expanded perspective was both geographic and chronological: Paulo Herkenhoff, in the often-cited 1998 24th Bienal de São Paulo, had nested significant sections of art from earlier periods, in particular in his section titled “Núcleo Histórico,” which included major museum pieces by Tarsila do Amaral, Albert Eckhout, and sixteenth-century printmakers, amongst the contemporary art on display at that famous Bienal.³⁷ At Tirana Biennale 1, as we saw, thirty-eight curators selected their own groups of artists, linked by vague and, according to the Biennale director, “very general and never intrusive” guidelines.³⁸ There was a further dimension to this delegation of authority: an increasing, jaded distrust of themed exhibitions linked by the taste of a single curator (such as Szeemann) “whose narcissism can easily turn into pure insolence,” according to the clearly aggrieved Giancarlo Politi in his catalogue essay for Tirana Biennale 1.³⁹

The Dictatorship of the Viewer was remarkable for the scale of such curatorial delegation but most of all for the fact that it happened at, of all places, the world's oldest and most famous art biennial, the so-called “mother” of art biennials. All Venice Biennales incorporate discrete national exhibitions, or so-called national pavilions. These are managed or subcontracted out by the participating nations' arts agencies. They constitute a large part of each Biennale. The word, “pavilion,” aptly describes the quaintly national, World Exposition-like, small buildings managed by a select group of nations, scattered amongst the green, treed gardens of the Giardini, one of the Biennale's two main sites. The number of on-site pavilions is not great. It is a short, circumscribed list, reading like a League of Nations roll-call from the 1920s, though one assembled according to an Italian perspective on the world.⁴⁰ The list of pavilions includes most Central and Eastern European nations but excludes major players in contemporary art such as India, China, and Turkey; gradually, in the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century, such nations were allocated exhibition spaces at the edges of the Biennale's vast second site, the Arsenale, a cavernous complex of buildings that had once been shipyards and rope-making factories. Other, smaller nations rent exhibition spaces in deconsecrated churches or minor palazzos across the city. The heterogeneity of the national pavilions, whose contents largely escape the control of the Biennale director, exists in a tension with the two curated exhibitions, one at the so-called Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the other in the Arsenale, a kilometer or so to the west. But the core of the Venice Biennale consists of these two very large exhibitions curated by the Biennale's artistic director or, as at the 2003 Biennale, by curators directly chosen and supervised by the director. Those, more than the national interventions in the form of pavilions, are intensely scrutinized.

Francesco Bonami was very much an art-world insider. He was typical of the small corps of senior biennial directors whose oft-noted nomadism was less peripatetic and wide-ranging than the word, “nomad,” implied. He, like a limited number of his well-known peers, held several overlapping curatorial and advisory appointments across public art museums and private art foundations, all at once. Much in demand, he was not so much juggling the demands of each job as reflecting a changing international curatorial ecology, but one that still preferred a fairly circumscribed orbit, mostly delimited by North America and Europe and very exclusive networks of curators and artists. Bonami had been, at the time, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago but also served, at different overlapping points, as artistic director of Turin's Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l'Arte and artistic director of Pitti Immagine Discovery in Florence. In addition to his selection of part of Aperto in 1993 and his co-curation of Manifesta 3 (2000), he had curated the 1997 SITE Santa Fe International Biennial. He would later co-direct the first Turin Triennale (2005) and the Whitney Biennial in 2010. Like most prominent curators of contemporary art, he also wrote frequently for professional art magazines. From 1990 to 1997, the Italian-born Bonami had been the American editor of Giancarlo Politi's Flash Art International. By this time, curators had supplanted specialist art critics in influence, impact, and sheer output of words in print. Curators had come to play a dominant role in the world of contemporary art not just through the power they exercised through biennial directing but also, as we have been observing, in creating new forms of public program such as Enwezor's Documenta11 Platforms, and also through writing art criticism.⁴¹

Bonami split the 2003 Biennale into eleven separate exhibitions, each of which was curated by one or more curators. He offered “complete autonomy to ten curators to realize their visions,” just as he had been offered the same at Tirana Biennale 1, two years before.⁴² Some of his curatorial team were as prominent and ubiquitous as he was, and had also co-curated Tirana (such as the extraordinarily ubiquitous and influential European curator Hans Ulrich Obrist). Others were artists, writers, or younger curators. All had previously worked with Bonami or had organized other well-known international shows in the recent past. There were few surprises. The co-curators were Obrist, Carlos Basualdo (also co-curator of Documenta11), Daniel Birnbaum (later to direct the 2009 Venice Biennale), Catherine David (who had curated documenta X, in 1997), Massimiliano Gioni (later to direct the 2013 Venice Biennale), Hou Hanru (co-curator with Obrist of the seminal touring exhibition, Cities on the Move), art historian Molly Nesbit, New York-based Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, Gilane Tawadros (founding director of Iniva, which we described in the previous chapter), artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (well-known as one of the exemplars of curator Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics), and Igor Zabel, the director of Ljubljana's Moderna Galerija and an expert on Eastern European art.⁴³ This was a network rather than a simple list for, as we have noted, almost all had worked with each other many times before and all were notorious for their constant travel, mobility, and movement. In short, they were exemplars of the very contemporary trope of purposeful, professional “itinerancy” that we should more accurately label commuting rather than nomadism.

Bonami curated two of the eleven exhibitions himself: Clandestine and Pittura/Painting: From Rauschenberg to Murakami, 1964–2003. He and Birnbaum co-curated Delays and Revolutions. Hou curated ZOU: Zones of Urgency. Gioni was responsible for The Zone. Tawadros curated Fault Lines, which focused on African artists. Zabel curated Individual Systems, Basualdo was responsible for The Structure of Survival, David for Contemporary Arab Representations, and Orzoco for The Everyday Altered. Nesbit, Obrist, and Tiravanija curated the celebrated Utopia Station, which was “filled with objects, part-objects, paintings, images, screens. Around them a variety of benches, tables and small structures take their place. It will be possible to bathe in the Station and powder one's nose. The Station, in other words, becomes a place to stop, to contemplate, to listen and see, to rest and refresh, to talk and exchange.”⁴⁴ Utopia Station brought together work by over sixty artists, architects, and collectives, as well as posters by another hundred artists. The works were arranged on a raised plywood platform, designed by Liam Gillick and Tiravanija, with a stage, small rooms for video projections, and seating for visitors to lounge and hang out. Nearby, eco-toilets, a communal shower, and a hut on stilts (Alicia Framis's Billboardthailandhouse (2000), where visitors could take refuge from the heat and even sleep) all contributed to the overall impression that Utopia Station was a semi-functioning drop-in center for relaxed social activity, resembling but not precisely emulating the social connections embedded in Hirschhorn's Bataille Monument, at Documenta11, the year before. It was clearly temporary, reflecting Tiravanija's own installations, and potentially transportable (as was the case when it traveled to other venues in subsequent years, such as the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005). Moreover, there were clear links with Tirana Biennale 1 two years before, for one of the Biennale's most celebrated works was Anri Sala's video, Dammi I Colori (Give Me the Colors), 2003. Here, Sala's camera navigated the dark streets of Tirana at night, tracking past the brightly patterned buildings that had been repainted during Edi Rama's now-famous project to revive the Albanian capital.

“Counterbalance the Decadence of the Ancient City”

The Dictatorship of the Viewer's sheer bigness, Bonami wrote in retrospect, was intended to “define a context where different practices can share the same skin but not the same focus.”⁴⁵ This stylistic de-emphasis on curatorial unity was staged in rhetorical opposition to Harald Szeemann's Venice Biennale (titled Plateau of Mankind) a mere two years before. In other words, an extravagantly diverse assembly of contemporary art and a concatenation of curatorial viewpoints would, he judged, be the antidote to the hegemony of a Grand Show linked by a tight, overarching theme. This would free viewers from a single curator's subjective vision of One World (even one multicultural world), enabling them to navigate their way in a more meaningful and intimate manner through installations and sub-exhibitions than the previous Biennale.⁴⁶ The problem, instead, was that critics insisted on traveling through the Biennale as if it were a single show.⁴⁷ Jerry Saltz explained that Bonami had “transformed himself into a kind of beast with a hundred eyes, creating a sort of monstrosity, or gigantic Balzacian city of an exhibition with warring philosophies, methodologies and esthetics.”⁴⁸ Complaints regarding the size of the Biennale were second only to complaints about the heat, and unfortunately for Bonami, the Biennale took place during the most severe heat wave in decades.⁴⁹ This, with the large crowds that descended on Venice for the Biennale's vernissage (opening) week, resulted in a difficult viewing experience, dominated by the “overwhelming amount of information,”⁵⁰ which left the curators “with an inability to make clear distinctions between work that [was] qualitatively better than other work, or to argue in favor of work that one feels to be more significant.”⁵¹

Why try to contrive this complexity, and why then justify it by a rhetoric of inclusion? Why would the director of the Venice Biennale agree to place himself “back at the service of the artists and the public”?⁵² Because Venice's structure – for a curator, its short turnaround, the complicated and very political relation to Italian government, the up-and-down quality of the national pavilions – had become a straitjacket. Because arriving “at terms that transform the very concept of the exhibition” was the beginning, at Western Europe's big biennials, of an uncomfortable and messy accommodation to another shift in the global art world.⁵³ The imposition of totalizing, often utterly bathetic curatorial themes delivered by a single charismatic curator at increasingly vast biennials was, in the face of globalized cohorts of artists and audiences who were not even necessarily differentiated from their European peers by easily distinguished cultural difference, no longer believable nor credible.⁵⁴ (And to the degree that old habits are hard to break, Bonami's own curatorial statements oscillated between a new-found skepticism and the older, sentimental romanticism, as had his contributions at Tirana Biennale 1 and Manifesta 3.)⁵⁵ But it was now true, partly in the wake of Enwezor's documenta, that more and more key biennials, not least Enwezor's own, were actually more like complex museum exhibitions that sought to revise art history and its canons, and these exhibitions in particular were less and less dependent upon woolly themes and more on precise historiographies.

So, from the start, Bonami was looking over his shoulder, more or less, it seems, enviously, at Enwezor and his curatorial cohort, at their aggressively interventionist, revisionist edition of documenta the year before. He was reacting, but less decisively, against Harald Szeemann's two preceding Venice Biennales (far from ignorant of coming shifts in the art world, Szeemann had also included nineteen Chinese artists amongst the ninety-nine participating artists at the 1999 Biennale). Bonami was, it seems, painfully aware of Documenta11's definitive and purposeful status (and that of documenta in general, which is assisted in its ambition by being much more generously financed by distinct tiers of government than Venice; the latter relies on the generosity of a multitude of contradictory interest groups and backers). When Bonami professed the old-fashioned idea of the curator as a singular and profound thinker dead, he was pointing in the direction of the past, in the direction of Szeemann, and gesturing in the direction of the future, at Enwezor's Documenta11 collective. This, and not simply the fact of dispersed curatorship, is the main significance of Dictatorship of the Viewer.

Venice's primate position had been dissipated over preceding decades by the global proliferation of other biennials such as Sydney and Gwangju that were just as clearly committed to defining new turns in contemporary art as documenta. In response, the Venice Biennale's experimentation had commenced with Aperto, a selection of younger artists first curated by Bonito Oliva and Szeemann, from 1980 onwards. It was only from 1984 that substantial exhibition catalogues were consistently produced. Now, in order to retain its contemporary relevance, Bonami wrote, not only must a Venice Biennale “counterbalance the decadence of the ancient city,” but also address the artistic eclipse of the Biennale itself, with its “outmoded structure of national pavilions and theme exhibitions, inherited from its origins in the era of world's fairs.”⁵⁶ However, both Venice and documenta remained, as Bonami was well aware, immensely influential. The origins of each shaped, he wrote, “the two ‘mother’ exhibitions because they were conceived with very specific goals in mind: Venice to counterbalance the decadence of the ancient city, and Kassel to give postwar Germany a new cultural voice,” continuing, in the worst tradition of art-travel writing, “we go to experience thinking in Kassel, and in Venice we go to think about experience.”⁵⁷

Artists and critics, such as Emilio Vedova and Luigi Nono, had railed against the commercialization of the Venice Biennale since the mid-1960s, organizing a boycott in 1968, the year that manifestos thundered that the Biennale was “contaminated by the historical context of declining capitalism from which it emerged.”⁵⁸ By 2003, if biennials in general had long displaced art museums in defining the directions of contemporary art, then appropriating this museological role was no impediment to, nor incompatible with, the vast, accelerating influence of an ever-expanding and now global art market. For the Venice Biennale's national pavilions and the exhibitions at the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion were shop-windows for art dealers who would subvent the exhibitions in national pavilions, participating in the huge costs of shipping complicated art works and underwriting the very substantial costs of large installations. Bonami was intensely aware of the intertwining of art market and biennial network, adding, “Before, most of the artists made it to Venice … after a solid gallery career. Today many artists land in good galleries only after a solid career in the biennial system.”⁵⁹ The Venice Biennale was part of a now transnational network of recurring temporary exhibitions of contemporary art that also included prestigious art fairs, most notably Art Basel, which was usually scheduled a short period of weeks after the Venice vernissage, when thousands of invited art-world insiders queue to enter overcrowded exhibits. This network – along with the increasing eclipse of biennials by art fairs and their own symposia, private funding, and queues of collectors – was part of the source of the self-consciousness and defensiveness that underlay Bonami's extraordinary delegation of curatorship and expansion of the scale of the Venice Biennale, and all without the geopolitical motivation of Enwezor's documenta.

“Outmoded Structure of National Pavilions and Theme Exhibitions”

Another surprisingly central feature of Bonami's Biennale was its reflection of the curatorial impact of Institutional Critique: that is, the displacement of theory from the realm of the artist and writer onto the realm of the curator and curatorial rhetoric, which preempted the types of criticisms that artists from Andrea Fraser and Renée Green to the Guerilla Girls had leveled at art museums. The initial wave of Institutional Critique had appeared in the late 1960s in the works of Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, and Daniel Buren. Significantly, almost all had appeared in Szeemann's documenta 5. There had been a second wave in the early 1990s, in the work of artists such as Fraser and Fred Wilson. Under the withering gaze of Institutional Critique and the more convivial embrace of Relational Aesthetics, Bonami claimed that the Biennale would “not be a show about political art but a reflection on the politics of art.”⁶⁰ This was a fuzzily defined politics of spectatorship, but one more or less evident in the Biennale's projects. In No Names (2003), Carsten Höller proposed that the names of the artists and curators involved with Utopia Station be concealed, in order to focus discussion on actual experience. The viewer, Bonami wrote, was “one of the subjects that contribute to define the structure of the show: the artist, the curator, the viewer. Along with the artist, the beholder is one of the poles that connecting [sic] produce the spark that activate the art work successfully in the social and cultural context.”⁶¹ Many of the individual projects in Utopia Station were concerned with activating convivial relationships between visitors, reflecting, as many reviewers noticed, the relational trend identified a few years before by Nicolas Bourriaud. It was not unremarked, however, that Utopia Station's curators did not refer to Bourriaud in their essay for the Biennale's catalogue, instead choosing to base their discussion on Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch before they proceeded to cite Jacques Rancière, who, they claimed, had been a key influence upon them.⁶² Rancière was involved from the outset in discussions with the curators, particularly on the notions of exchange that he had outlined in a book that had been widely purchased in the art world, Le partage du sensible (translated as The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible in 2004).

An additional important element of Dictatorship of the Viewer was its expansion of the contemporary artist canon in order, it was clear to reviewers, to “answer the problem of the ‘Grand Show’, but more important … as a response to the shadowy threat of globalization.”⁶³ The focus on artists who were not from the United States or Western Europe had been already presaged with Szeemann's Plateau of Humankind in 2001, and his inclusion of nineteen Chinese artists, with works borrowed from the Swiss collection of Ulli Sigg; at the same time Szeemann had abandoned the concept of Aperto in favor of a discrete exhibition, dAPERTutto = APERTO over ALL. Before that, Achille Bonito Oliva had included a selection of Chinese artists in the Venice Biennale that he directed in 1993. The Venice Biennale had, perhaps, treated art made outside Europe with more respect than other biennials elsewhere, in Europe or North America. Now, inside Zones of Urgency was nested yet a further exhibition, Canton Express, consisting of works made by artists from Guangdong in southern China, Hou Hanru's home province. Utopia Station contained three Chinese artists: Yang Fudong, Ma Qingyun, and Wang Jian-we. Yet, Szeemann's and Bonami's respective decisions to globalize (however partially or inadequately) the Biennale's artist selections without the underpinning politics of Enwezor's crusading exhibitions inevitably resulted in vague, pluralistic curator statements such as Szeemann's 2001 advocacy of Venice as “a place in which the public onlooker is the protagonist and the measure of things, a place of encounter between artist, work, and spectator.”⁶⁴ The globalist acceptance of difference was a cover for the lack of its actual acceptance (and in fact the number of artists living beyond the North Atlantic did not greatly grow overall in biennials during this period). The inverse of this was the relative Chinese disinterest in participating at Venice with the same, outward-facing aims as other national pavilions. Rather than have its Chinese pavilions selected and installed by progressive curators with Western professional networks, the Chinese government had maintained fairly strict control, aided by a list of generally provincial pavilion curators. More challenging Chinese art or even Italian art – during the second decade of Silvio Berlusconi's Italian prime ministership, which lasted from 2001 to 2011, spanning the 2003 Biennale – was by and large to be found in Aperto or, later, the Arsenale, rather than in the national pavilions.

That is why Bonami layered the belated, already anachronistic rhetoric of Institutional Critique on top of his predecessor Harald Szeemann's neoromanticism, attempting to present his Biennale as a “new Romantic dimension of inner awareness,” the specific role of which was to challenge “a condition of borderless information and … a deceptive closeness with the ‘other.’”⁶⁵ In other words, Bonami masked an essential continuity with a rhetorical appeal to the idea of resistance through delegated curatorship, by selecting artists from around the globe as a counterweight to the Biennale's ever-intensifying relationship with the international art market.⁶⁶ And when young artists from outside the North Atlantic appeared, it was with a background in independent, not government-funded art spaces, or in self-consciously globalist dealer galleries. The example had been Hou Hanru, who was the best-known Asian biennial curator of this period, but whose career had been spent outside large institutions advocating off-site biennial events and unusual public, laboratory-like reconfigurations of curatorial activity. But Bonami's “new Romantic dimension” lacked sufficient meaning to accommodate such nuances, nor to create anything more than a purely rhetorical challenge to the mess and conflict of globalization signaled in the title and obvious to every visitor; this was, after all, the first Venice Biennale after the tragic events of 9/11. Not that this was always so apparent to the Biennale's sponsors: free gift bags with the title Utopia Station carried the French fashion-house Agnès B.'s logo (in Paris, Agnès B. had for years incorporated, with considerable generosity, a very respectable project gallery for contemporary art inside its premises). As Tim Griffin slightly ungratefully observed, the Biennale thus revealed “a sponsored spin on utopia that undermined the show's tenor of straightforward idealism.”⁶⁷ But what it also and more complexly revealed was that utopian tendencies in the global era would now be tempered by terror, war, and the commercial branding of nation and corporation, all at the same time.

Conclusion

Let us finally consider what this new, ideological globalism – we use this word deliberately not as a substitute for economic globalization, but to reflect the self-conscious desire to be seen as global – would mean about the art itself. There was, as there always is, a long history that shaped the present. Across the globe, as early as the 1950s, it was clear that sending locally established artists working in traditional modes to international biennials such as Venice or documenta was not going to make much impact. We know that Australian, Brazilian, and Japanese critics understood that substantial gestures towards both contemporaneity and the transcultural would be necessary to capture so-called international attention at established exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and documenta. And at Venice after 1978, the remaining residual prestige of national pavilions was further diminished by the advent of the prestigious, curated Aperto section. This shift was certainly understood across the globe. For, as we have explained earlier, the other response from the 1950s onwards was to establish complete alternative networks of biennials of the South, for innovative parallel modernities had rarely registered, if at all, in Western art histories.⁶⁸ By the time of Szeemann's and Bonami's Venice Biennales from 1999 to 2003, the increasing interest of biennial curators in locating contemporary non-Western artists (though still not, in reality, that many) intersected with those artists' own calibrations of their identity, which implied a fairly clear-eyed grasp of international art world dynamics and imbalances. Just as national pavilion organizers at Bonami's 2003 Biennale understood that their role was to nurture artists who would be international – which was also now to say internationally contemporary in their address to the viewer – so biennial directors such as Francesco Bonami in the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale had solidified their role as inventive reinterpreters of European cultural power even while collaborating with others from around the world.