DOES THE WORLD NEED YET ANOTHER BIENNIAL? 1ST MOSCOW BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, 2005 DIALECTICS OF HOPE
What is positive about a biennial is that there are actual possibilities to do something new and different and to allow artists to experiment. The principle of selection for the Moscow Biennial have not been according to 1A of regulations which says to include as many cool and internationally acclaimed names as possible, and instead the exhibition in Venice, Aperto -93 has been used as a kind of prototype. For Aperto –93 a lot of names that today are included in the so called “usual suspects” were presented for a larger audience for the first time, for example Tobias Rehberger or Carsten Höller, and the team of curators claims that they are presenting today’s emerging young artists in a similar way.
Economy politics
However, the Moscow biennial is not only curators and artists, every biennial is also heavy politics in another, higher level. In December 2004, the minister of culture in Russia, Alexander Sokolov, announced that the closing of many of the state museums and institutions were to be expected soon if nothing radical were to change soon. The average salary within the Russian state museum is according to a source only 50.000 rubels a year (some 1700$ a year). High expectations on keeping up to Western standards adequately complicates the situation, one has a need to show that Russia is a country to be trusted in the competition with the West not only in the “common” commercial market, but within the cultural market too. As of today, no other place in the world could perhaps measure up to the large amounts of Hummer and Mercedes that crowd the streets of Moscow, and nowhere else ladies dress up everyday as much in Gucci, Prada, Dior and Versace, but the state sector of culture still has some work cut out for them. The state budget for the first version of the Moscow Biennial is at low 1,5 million Euro, which can be compared to the budget of 1 million Euro Olafur Eliasson had two years ago for a solo show at the Danish Pavilion in Venice. With that extremely low sum it is a wonder in itself that there was a Biennial at all, and if this wasn’t enough, the building where one had planned to hold the main exhibition burned down and one had to place the main exhibition in the Lenin Museum that had been closed for twelve years.
In order to resist the trend with lesser and lesser time (and lesser and lesser budget) for biennial preparations (latest development legio only allow six months of preparations) and also to create some kind of concentration for the team of curators, it has been settled that the very same team will be working with the next Moscow Biennial in the year 2007. This is something the curators gladly emphasize. The upper “age limit” of ca 42 year old artists, in combination with a “timelink” between the first and the second biennial creates what Hans Ulrich Obrist calls the “new model” to try to resist the negative homogenisation the globalisation of the many international biennials add to. This is only the beginning, Rosa Martinez fills in, who also promises to use a similar strategy for the Venice Biennial for which she is one of the curators. It is important for the curators to not regard the biennial as one big firework, but that one is able to follow a timeline between the first and the second biennial. If it will happen, no one can tell for sure whether or not there will be a second biennial. Nothing is taken for granted in Moscow, not least the state cultural budget. And we must not forget that Russia is in fact a country at war.
Dialectics of Hope
Like many other biennials, the Moscow one has a wide and empty theme, and there is nothing strange about that – how on earth would six strong and opinionated curators gather over 40 artists within one and the same contextual framework? The frame this time is “Dialectics of Hope” and of course the theme, as well as the whole concept of a biennial, have been debated hefty within the Russian intelligentsia for quite some time before the opening. One of Russia’s most well known curator, Victor Misiano, disappeared from the group of curators during 2004 and this is nothing that is unnoticed of course. A lot of rumour circulate about that the artists were not allowed to criticize Putin for instance, something the curatorial team strongly denies. The role of Art is however, to quote on Daniel Birnbaum, to create intellectual tension, or to the least intellectual friction, even if this is not always the case. Art can be so much more than objects with changing owners, and the ambition has been according to Birnbaum to try to resist that the biennial should become only a window towards the market. With a more and more globalised arena, art collectors and dealers are following the art works on a more close watch, and are no longer only shopping at the international fairs, such as Basel, Frieze or the Armory. It is all about to find artists before they make it for real on the market an prices shoot to the stars. But as Martha Rosler once contended in a seminar (Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist, Istanbul) art is about remodelling the world, and that biennials (and larger manifestations such as Documenta) also is a market for ideas. This would mean that a biennial, or any other larger art exhibition, comes with a purpose – to be a larger market for ideas and thoughts.
Friction...
The exhibition in Moscow does not feel like a window towards the commercial market, but “intellectual friction” might not be the first that comes to mind contemplating the exhibition. In the main exhibition in the Lenin Museum, close by the Red Square and the Kremlin, there are both highlights and the opposite. Blue Noses, a group of russian artists, win the prize for worst bad taste in the biennial with a series of short films projected in the bottom of large cardboard boxes. In an outbreak of distance to them selves (?) the middle-aged male artists have recorded films where they are for instance playing pool with regular cues and billiard-balls, but the “holes” is made out of the nude lower female abdomens. And while on the subject, why not mention a work of Santiago Sierra Spraying of Polyurethane over 18 People 2002. Sierra had 18 female prostitutes from east Europe have their lower abdomens sprayed frontally and from the behind by Polyurethane (shielded with black plastic sacks) in a church no longer used as a church in Lucca, Italy. Sierras’ critique on a wide variety of things, on male dominance, political systems and minimalistic sculptures is raw and not very subtle. It is questionable whether this sort of critique, where a morally doubtful action is executed within the name of art really functions like 1) critique 2) great art.
In a lot of different places in the Lenin Museum, on floors, in corners, under radiators etc. several bomb-like things in different sizes are placed, which are the art works It is not a Bomb, 2005, by Russian David Ter-Oganyan. These are booby-traps in various dimensions, and one is hardly mistaken about what they should resemble – what they’re not. The exhibition guards were very sceptical towards the objects from the start on, with Beslan and the drama with hostages in a theatre in Moscow 2002 freshly remembered. Of course, none of the art-crowd at the opening raised an eyebrow. Ter-Oganyans work could not have been exhibited in another country like Germany or so because of its lack of subtleness. It is a pity that the hosting country were represented by Ter-Oganyan and Blue Noses (among others) in an exhibition trying to underline the likenesses with the western art world, which is considered as the “global” art world, and where the outsider position of Russian art’s was supposed to be erased. Unfortunately the opposite effect is achieved.
Intelligible resistance
One of the most secretive, but also one of the most interesting works of the biennial, could also be found in the Lenin Museum. One of the guards of the Museum posted in one of the rooms suddenly start to “dance” in a remarkable manner, his arms waving around at the same time “jogging” in the same spot. My company believed for a second that he was about to be attacked by a guard gone crazy, but the guard just kept on waving and uttering the sentence “This is Good [the title of the work] 2005 by Tino Seghal [the artist].” Sehgal is an artist that does not compromise. It is totally forbidden to document his works, and the works are a mixture of conceptual art and performance that he lets others perpetrate. An earlier piece performed at the Frieze art fair some years ago where a bunch of 10-11 year old kids walked the fair area and asked the visitors about “What do you think about art and economy?” and when one couldn’t really answer one got to listen to how it really functions in the art world with. Politically hard-core on a commercial fair ground. To have the guard in Moscow pronounce the title, which in itself is a judgement of taste, creates an interesting meta-situation. In this piece one can find a deconstruction of the art work as an object as well as some Marx’ian analysis’ on economical value of trade and materialism reactualised via a rather simple act.
In the Lenin Museum the only Nordic participating artist is to be found too, Johanna Billing that presented two films of hers, Waiting for a Revolution 2000 and You Don’t Love me Yet, 2003. The piece Waiting for a Revolution has already been shown a number of times already, however it has really come to its right place in the Lenin Museum. A group of young people sits and awaits a revolution, but noone seems to have either any ideas about what to revolution against, nor does anyone like to agitate. In one of the larger spaces a documentary film from the opening day of the Museum in 1924 is projected, where Lenin himself speaks to the masses. The films of Billing’s can be seen as counterparts, and the curatorial twist to add the documentary film turns out to stabilize all art in the exhibition and becomes an interesting move.
One artist known not to avoid political approaches is Jeremy Deller who quite recently won the prestigious Turner Prize in London. Deller is represented in the exhibition with a documentary film on the massacre in Waco 1993, and on what happened in the Texan city after. It is not easy to see what Deller added artistically to the film, except for a several minutes long cut where thousands of bats fly over the lens of the camera. It is a shame, Deller knows how to do it better.
John Bock v/s ”ordinary people”
The inhabitants of Moscow might perhaps direct their thoughts to large sculptures of Lenin or portraits of different political leaders and philosophers when one mentions “art in the public space.” To present art video in the subway station Vorobyovy Gory is a relatively “new” thing in Moscow, that might not be very helpful for the art. John Bock with a surreal video in the typical burlesque style of Bock, and Allora & Calzadilla from Puerto Rico with a video where a man on his moped with a trumpet mounted on the exhaust-pipe rides through a town, have been placed on the platform between the trains. Both films are really interesting and would have been better off placed in a different concentrated space and context, but art is considered to be for the people in a democracy, and unfortunately art is the looser in most cases like this.
At the third space of the biennial, the Museum of Architecture, mainly films are shown as it was forbidden to attach anything to, or drill into, the walls. The most intricate work of the biennial is shown here, a work by German Clemens von Wedemeyer. A 16 mm film, made in one shot from a constantly moving camera dolly placed in a field in Berlin with Russian participants. Wedemeyer have spent some time at the Russian embassy and here registered authentic conversations and events, which he reconstructs on the field with the help of people he found at the embassy. The result is very close visually to a tableau by Jeff Wall. In the film, the main character meets several Catch 22’s, she has to wait in line, she has to leave her bag but must leave her place in the line to do this etc. and it all resembles the worst nightmare of Russian formalities you could imagine. The film is also seamlessly looped, and this underlines the hopelessness in the situation. It is a masterpiece, and together with Yang Fudongs black and white film that is also shown in the same museum, a special kind of atmosphere is created and this is also something that affects the exhibition as a whole.
Although the curators emphasizes that this is merely the beginning, and that one thereby hardly can make some kind of judgement on it before visiting the second biennial in two years (if it will happen, that is) the remaining impression by the first Moscow Biennial is low-key and sympathetic. The “new model” might not obstruct hegemony and a global homogenisation, but it is without a doubt a more fruitful and interesting that just filling a list of artists consisting of the very same names all over again. The Moscow Biennial can in fact place the limelight on something else, something new and exciting, and at the very same time, continue to create some kind of an active resistance towards the totally commercialised market, which is very vital and important and vital for today’s artists of course, but also is allowed more and more space. Every attempt to “intellectual friction” and a resistance to the market in the shape of a biennial must be seen as highly motivated, and the first Moscow Biennial is no exception.
Earlier published in Norwegian at www.kunstkritikk.no, Norway