Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe: the Work of Art in the Complex City 9781350166974, 9781350167001, 9781350166998

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CONTEMPORARY ART BIENNIALS IN EUROPE

CONTEMPORARY ART BIENNIALS IN EUROPE: THE WORK OF ART IN THE COMPLEX CITY

Nicolas Whybrow

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Paperback edition first published 2023 Copyright © Nicolas Whybrow, 2020 Nicolas Whybrow has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image © Nicolas Whybrow All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Whybrow, Nicolas, author.  Title: Contemporary art biennials in Europe : the work of art in the complex city / Nicolas Whybrow.  Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe examines five urban situations in diverse parts of Europe. Roughly tracing a central horizontal strip from the western to the eastern edges of the continent, the events and cities covered are the Folkestone Triennial, UK, Münster Sculpture Projects, Germany, the Venice Biennale, Italy, Belgrade’s Mikser Festival, Serbia and the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey. Whybrow establishes how public artworks operate in these contexts as part of a complex prescribed by the format of the biennial event. This means drawing out the extent to which biennial events seek to engage with the complexity of the city in question, in a manner that takes into account local socio-cultural ecologies, while also positioning the event itself within a globalist art world perspective. The book also considers how sited installations - which are very varied in form, as a reflection of a new, eclectic urban aesthetic - tell a particular story of a city, while the regional diversity of these selected cities and events in turn tells a composite story of European difference at a moment of high tension, centring on matters of migration, political populism and uncertainty around the future form of the European Union”-- Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2020011221 (print) | LCCN 2020011222 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350166974 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350166981 (epub) | ISBN 9781350166998 (pdf)  Subjects: LCSH: Biennials (Art fairs)–Europe–History–21st century. | Art and cities–Europe–History–21st century. Classification: LCC N4396 .W49 2020  (print) | LCC N4396  (ebook) | DDC 700.74–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011221 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011222 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6697-4 PB: 978-1-3503-7520-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-6699-8 ePub: 978-1-3501-6698-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures  vi Acknowledgements  ix

Introduction: European Biennials, Complex Cities and the Work of Art  1 1 Folkestone Turned: Of Fault-Lines and Fairy-Tales  33 2 Sculpture Trials, Sculpture Tales: Münster’s ‘Rupture Projects’ and the Time of Art  71 3 Viva, Venezia, Viva: Treasures from the Wreck of the ‘Unbelievable City’  101 4 Belgrade Conversations: Mikser, Its Festival and the City’s ‘Descent to its Rivers’  Marko Jobst with Nicolas Whybrow and Marijana Cvetković 139

5 Neighbourhood Watch: Building and Dwelling in Istanbul  173 Conclusion  199 Bibliography 203 Index  213

FIGURES



All photographs have been taken by the author Nicolas Whybrow unless indicated otherwise.

I.1

FOLKESTONE (2008), Patrick Tuttofuoco, 14th September 2017  28

1.1

FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL (2017), Bob and Roberta Smith, 15th September 2017  34

1.2

Folkestone Lightbulb (2017), Michael Craig-Martin and FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL (2017), Bob and Roberta Smith, 15th September 2017  36

1.3

Weather Is a Third to Place and Time (2014), Ian Hamilton Finlay, 14th September 2017  52

1.4

Whithervanes: A Neurotic Early Worrying System (2014), rootoftwo (Marshall/Charles), 10th October 2014  54

1.5

Pent House 1 (2014), Diane Dever and Jonathan Wright, 10th October 2014  56

1.6

Holiday Home (2017), Richard Woods, 14th September 2017  59

1.7

The Wind Lift (2014), Marjetica Potrč and Ooze (Pfannes/ Hartenberg), 10th October 2014  61

1.8

The Electrified Line (Cross-track Observation-deck) (2014), Gabriel Lester, 10th October 2014  62

1.9

Vigil (2014), Alex Hartley, 10th October 2014  63

2.1

5V (2017), Aram Bartholl, 28th July 2017  84

2.2 Versetzung des Denkmals ‘Knecht mit Pferd’ und ‘Magd mit Stier’ (1987), Rémy Zaugg, 29th July 2017  85 2.3

On Water (2013), Ayşe Erkmen, 27th July 2017  91

2.4

On Water (2013), Ayşe Erkmen, 30th July 2017  91

2.5

Privileged Points (2017), Nairy Baghramian, 25th July 2017  94

2.6

Momentary Monument – The Stone (2017), Lara Favaretto, 25th July 2017  95

3.1

The Fate of Banished Man (2017), Palazzo Grassi, Damien Hirst, 1st September 2017  108

3.2

The Collector with Friend (2017), Punta della Dogana, Damien Hirst, 1st September 2017  110

3.3

Anonymous Stateless Immigrants’ Pavilion pochoir (2011), 24th July 2011  123

3.4

Venezia, Venezia (2013), Alfredo Jaar, 2013  128

3.5

Folly (2017), Phillida Barlow, 29th August 2017  128

4.1

Untitled, Interventions in Space (2012), Irena Kelečević, 31st May 2012  141

4.2

Savamala, Belgrade during Mikser Festival 2012, 31st May 2012  142

4.3

Beogradska Zadruga (The Belgrade Co-operative), 10th April 2018. Photo: Marko Jobst  145

4.4

Belgrade Waterfront development projection, 10th April 2018. Photo: Marko Jobst  151

4.5

Belgrade Waterfront residential flats, 10th April 2018. Photo: Marko Jobst  163

5.1

International Billboard Project (2017), Lukas Wassmann, 25th September 2017  175

5.2

Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM), Taksim Square, 25th September 2017  182

5.3

Follower (2017), Burçak Bingöl, 24th September 2017  192

5.4

Follower (2017), Burçak Bingöl, 24th September 2017  193

FIGURES

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Nicolas Whybrow is Professor of Urban Performance Studies in the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick, UK. A former Head of School, he was also Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project Sensing the City (2017– 2020). A book entitled Urban Sensographies, arising from this project and edited by him, is forthcoming (Routledge 2021). Other books include Art and the City (I.B. Tauris 2011) and, as editor, Performing Cities (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I

wish to express my gratitude to Dr Marko Jobst and Marijana Cvetković (of the arts organization Magacin), who co-authored the chapter on Belgrade with me. I became acquainted with Marko when he invited me, while he was teaching in the Department of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London, to be part of a delegation of academics and architects visiting and contributing to the Mikser Festival in the Savamala area of the city in 2012. The conversations begun on this occasion, which included Marijana to some extent, turned out to be the point of departure for the chapter on Belgrade in this volume. It would also be appropriate to recognize the contributions of other main interlocutors that feature in Chapter 4, not least Maja Laliç and Tatjana Gostiljac who have both been key figures in the Mikser set-up that forms the central focus of this chapter. In addition to their immediate involvement here, Marko and Marijana respectively curated and produced an exhibition in Belgrade in July 2017 entitled ‘Great War Island: Desert Fictions’ to which I was invited to make a contribution. This turned out to be an installation based on artist’s pages produced previously for Performance Research journal’s ‘On Ruins and Ruination’ issue (see below) and represented a response to the Venice Biennale. Some of this material features in Chapter 3. I would also like to thank Dr Nese Ceren Tosun for the time and energy she dedicated to acting as my guide and interlocutor during the fieldwork for the Istanbul Biennial in September 2017. It was a very intense period and her contributions were invaluable. On that occasion Nese also arranged a meeting with Dr Rana Öztürk of Istanbul Bigli Üniversitesi, who provided us with insights into previous Istanbul Biennials and pointed me in the direction of certain useful publications by her. A brief encounter with Dr Emine Fişek of Istanbul’s Boğaziçi Üniversitesi during her short stay at Warwick as visiting scholar in 2019 also yielded useful tips relating to Istanbul literature. Meanwhile, my old friends Donald Forbes and Anthony Haddon spent a weekend navigating the Folkestone Triennial with me on foot in September 2017, which also proved to be an illuminating exercise in conducting ‘ambulant dialogues about art and place’ and entirely in keeping with the fieldwork methodology that underpins this book. I am also grateful to

Jo Cowdrey of Folkestone’s Creative Foundation (renamed Creative Folkestone in 2019) for supplying important information about the Triennial and Folkestone Artworks. Aspects of the material published here have appeared in various guises in journal articles and as a chapter in a book about public art, as well as keynotes and conference papers delivered in a range of forums. Early in 2012 I was invited by Professor of Art History Altti Kuusamo to deliver a keynote at the University of Turku in Finland to mark the culmination of Turku’s stint as the 2011 European Capital of Culture (alongside Tallinn, Estonia). The topic of the keynote was the Venice Biennale and this later appeared in adapted form as a chapter in a publication as follows: ‘Venezia, Italia, Fare Mondi: Doing and Undoing (the Myth of) Venice’, ed. Johanna Ruohonen and Asta Kihlman, The Machinery of Public Art: from Durable to Transient, Site-Bound to Mobile, Turku: Utukirjat (University of Turku), 2013, pp.29–49. In similar vein, I was invited in 2012 to give a keynote in Linz, Austria, at a symposium sponsored by the Architekturforum Oberösterreich and Kulturdezernat Stadt Linz. The city had also been European Capital of Culture recently (2009) and was looking for ways to capitalize on the legacy of that honour. The title of my talk, which referenced the Folkestone Triennial, was ‘Statt Kunst, Linz: The Integrated Work of Art in an Urban Age’. My thanks to the architect and urban planner Clemens Bauder for the invitation and Professor Elke Krasny of the Technical University and Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna for chairing the subsequent discussion. Closer to home, the History of Art Department at Warwick asked me to give a keynote at the University’s Institute for Advanced Study in July 2016 addressing the conference title of Artists’ Critical Interventions into Architecture and Urbanism, 1960–2016. Again my paper drew on material relating to the Folkestone Triennial and was entitled ‘Complex-cities: The Architecture of Art in Urban Situations’. My thanks to Dr Bill Roberts and Dr David Hodge for the invitation and organization of this event. Meanwhile, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art in October 2017 I gave a keynote entitled ‘Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe’ at the symposium The Biennial Effect: Biennials and Place-making, The Box, Fargo Village, Coventry. My thanks to the Biennial’s Director Ryan Hughes for this invitation, to Craig Ashley, Director of New Midlands Arts, for the introduction and to the curator Jonathon Hughes for chairing the discussion afterwards. I have also given conference papers covering various aspects of the material in this book as follows: ‘Whither the Weather: An Urban Ecology of Ebb and Flow’, Overflow, 23rd Performance Studies International conference, University of Hamburg and Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany, 8th–11th June 2017; ‘High Tide, High Time: Alfredo Jaar’s Venezia Venezia’, Sustainable Futures: Survival of the City symposium, Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava, University of Warwick in Venice, Venice, Italy, 23rd– 24th October 2015; ‘Folkestone Perennial: The Enduring Work of Art in the

x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Reconstitution of Place’, Scenography working group, Theatre and Performance Research Association annual conference, University of Worcester, 8th–10th September 2015; ‘Folkestone Turned: Of Fault-lines and Fairy-tales’, International Cultural Policy: Production, Engagement and Memory (a joint Paris Seine and Warwick Universities Interdisciplinary Workshop), University of Warwick, 12th– 14th November 2019. Journal items containing ideas and material that appear in the book are as follows: ‘Folkestone Perennial: The Enduring Work of Art in the Reconstitution of Place’, Cultural Geographies, 23 (4), October, 2016, pp.671–92; ‘Folkestone Futures: An Elevated Excursion’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 36 (1), January 2016, pp.58–74; ‘Watermarked: “Venice Really Lives Up to Its Postcard Beauty”’, ‘On Ruins and Ruinations’ issue, Performance Research, 20 (3), June 2015, pp.50–7. At Warwick, I wish to acknowledge all my colleagues in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies for their moral support (above all in recent times of ill health and high uncertainty for me personally). In particular, I wish to thank Dr Silvija Jestroviç for permitting me mercilessly to pick her brains on the city of Belgrade, and my doctoral student Carolyn Deby for kindly alerting me to the Urban Salon event on ‘Art Festivals and the City’, taking place at the London School of Economics in May 2018. I have also benefited enormously from many modest amounts of Warwick funding support, which helped facilitate fieldwork in all the cities covered in this book and attendance at key events. My gratitude in this regard to the Humanities Research Centre, my own Department, and three of the University’s Global Research Priority programmes – Connecting Cultures, Sustainable Cities and International Development. Finally, I wish to extend my sincere thanks to Bloomsbury staff, in particular to the book’s editor Rebecca Barden and her editorial assistants Claire Collins and Libby Davies for their sense of urgency and sensitivity in seeing it through its various production stages.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Introduction European Biennials, Complex Cities and the Work of Art

In 2011 the contemporary art world’s global biennial industry, such as it is, was able to welcome at least one further addition to its ever-growing corpus. While doubtless not the only such event to be inaugurated that year in the headlong rush of cities worldwide to jump on the biennial bandwagon, the Balsall Heath Biennale (BHB) in Birmingham, UK, marked itself out in several ways. Its distinctiveness, insofar as anybody beyond England’s West Midlands noticed, would at least give pause for thought, if not propose a radical new direction for the biennial as a (plat)form for the curation and presentation of contemporary art. First, notwithstanding its insistence on calling itself a biennale so as to invoke the legacy and prestige of the continuing ‘mother of all biennials’ in Venice, BHB’s take on the concept of a ‘biennial’ subscribed to that term’s ‘other definition’: not an event occurring every two years but lasting two years and, as such, taking place with no ambition to repeat itself. Second, while supposedly aligning itself via its name with the biennale culture of the European continent (otherwise known as ‘not-Britain’), which would include being largely defined by an association with the profile of a particular city, BHB merely represented one inner-city district within the UK’s ‘second city’, Birmingham. Moreover, its instigators, the artists Chris Poolman and Elizabeth Rowe, who collaborate in the guise of General Public, not only were residents of the neighbourhood in question – and had been for a number of years – but also took responsibility for initiating all the many projects that materialized between 2011 and 2013 with the participation of various members of the public and constituencies of the local community in Balsall Heath. This included turning the bay window of their terrace house’s front room on Eastwood Road into a ‘Cat Gallery’ in which live domestic cats could be viewed languishing amid exhibited items of contemporary art (Poolman and

Rowe 2014: 128–32). Apart from the invitation to stare unashamedly into the artists’ front room, or indeed knock on the door and come in, as many did, the Biennale’s very own newspaper, delivered to all 5,000 residences in the Balsall Heath area, carried the polite suggestion that other houses might like to consider following suit. As an exercise in making themselves known as artists in the neighbourhood – or ‘coming out’ as they put it in the co-authored book they subsequently produced about the whole undertaking (5) – it proved successful, serving at the same time as a form of poignant counterpoint, first, to the overt prevalence of feral cats in the area and, second, to the one-time practice, which reached its peak in the 1980s, of prostitutes advertising their services in the flesh by parading in the bay windows of their front rooms in nearby Cheddar Road (130–1). Other projects included the staging of a street party for the multi-ethnic, post-Empire community of Eastwood Road (22–7), ostensibly to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s sixty-year jubilee in 2012; the development, with the assistance of a network of residents groups, of a ‘chilli farm’ on a patch of overgrown ‘commons’ behind a row of houses in Cheddar Road (14–21); and the devising of a Biennale ‘colouring-in book’ based around an alternative A–Z encyclopaedia of Balsall Heath (28–35), which included plans to stage a Balsall Heath World Cup involving the mobilization of a hexagonal football pitch design with three sets of goalposts once devised by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn (158–61). If it isn’t apparent by now, BHB effectively set itself up as a parody of biennial culture, functioning more like an anti-biennial or biennial-as-artwork which used its inverted, common or garden form to raise all kinds of questions relating to who and what biennials are for. While it traded in witty, tongue-in-cheek gestures via its various event-based interventions in the neighbourhood, its purpose at the same time was genuinely to engage with the specificities of the area and the particular urban challenges facing its residents. In spite, then, of being a form of metabiennial  – a spoof that implicitly meditated critically on the nature of biennials per se – it was nevertheless a thing in its own right, above all for the people who engaged with it. That is, over a two-year period it offered something to the local community that held the promise of creative participation, social integration, improvement of neighbourhood amenities and infrastructure, and the general enhancement of the quality of life in Balsall Heath in a way that simultaneously pointed up the often elitist limitations and, indeed, failings of ‘global biennial culture’. The reference to Situationist practice witnessed in the co-opting of Asger Jorn’s proposal in itself suggested there was a form of constructive détournement or ‘critical hijacking’ of the global biennial model in operation (see Knabb 2006: 51). Importantly, Balsall Heath is an area of inner-city Birmingham with ‘many different histories’ and, despite more recent attempts to transform its early 1990s image of being ‘synonymous with prostitution, urban decay and crime’, it is still ‘identified as being socially and economically disadvantaged’ while boasting, typically for British postindustrial cities, a ‘diverse population of different faiths, nationalities and cultures’ (Poolman and Rowe 2014: 4). Clearly, then, a notion of ‘global’ still applies here; 2

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but, rather than extending its purview to the ‘four corners of the earth’, the world finds itself already in Balsall Heath. Given such circumstances, contemplating the hosting of a World Cup not only becomes rather less of a far-fetched prospect than it may have appeared at first sight but also acquires a new meaning altogether. This can be extended, moreover, to apply similarly to received ideas of what ‘biennial’ signifies. The ‘unlikeliness’ of the location for the staging of a biennial, with its intense focus on a run-down multi-ethnic urban neighbourhood within modern, post-Empire Britain, forms one part of the disarming strategy. Yet at the same time BHB was not merely an instance of socially-engaged activity but clearly positioned itself, as a composite, durational artwork, within a contemporary art world discourse of avant-garde practice. Exemplifying this straddling of two worlds was one particular artwork in the Biennale, namely a ‘video commercial’ entitled ‘Public Art Shares’. Based on the existence of a ‘Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Plan’ relating to the future provision of amenities and initiatives for residents, the video effectively raised the question of whether public art should figure as part of such a plan in the form of a shared acquisition by the community of a sculpture by a high-profile international artist. The strap line for the video declares: ‘Imagine the improvement to your child’s prospects if they’ve had the opportunity to touch a Franz West every day.’ Thus, as the artists point out, the video of the ‘Public Art Shares’ scheme is instructive, taking ‘the system of the art market (a place where rich people buy shiny beautiful things) and giv[ing] the everyday person a point of access into this investment structure’ (112). Again, the proposal to neighbourhood residents is fictitious and couched in satire, but is at the same time serious in the way it addresses the question of public art’s relevance precisely to the ‘public’ that such work would seek to claim for itself, to say nothing of the tendency of ‘global art’ to become the commodified plaything – or investment – of a privileged international clientele. So, the critique is directed far less at Franz West, who indeed produced playful interactive sculptural forms intended for public use, than at the culture surrounding and mediating how the artist’s work is received and, ultimately, co-opted by a global art world. To underscore the genuine intention of the initiative to instigate debate within the community, it is worth mentioning also that the renowned British commentator and curator of public art, Claire Doherty – who has done more than anyone to shift the debate and practice around public art in recent years (see Doherty 2004, 2009, 2015; Cross and Doherty 2009; Situations 2013) – was invited to give a keynote lecture entitled ‘Public Art: How Does It Get Made?’ as part of a series of ‘specialist talks’ staged during the course of the Biennale. Again, the BHB organizers – I hesitate to use the term ‘curators’ here, since I sense that they would avoid it themselves – could be seen to be cannily negotiating a fine line between socially-engaged practices with community constituencies, for whom the ‘art world’ was a remote concept, and subtly introducing the neighbourhood to some of the productive features of precisely that art world in a way that avoided being alienating but instead offered a form of constructive assimilation and ownership of ‘ideas of art’. INTRODUCTION

3

As intimated earlier, this study of biennial culture and the complex city has commenced with the intriguing instance of BHB because of the way its deliberately unpretentious, hands-on approach to mounting a biennial highlights many of the points of criticism that have emerged in the protracted discourse around the marked proliferation of the form since the 1990s on a global scale. Its antithetical premise deliberately seeks to address and realize what is typically perceived to be lacking in biennials. One of these aspects is, of course, BHB’s defiantly localized focus. The paradox – if it is one – of the global biennial phenomenon as it has evolved in recent decades is, on the one hand, that by virtue of almost always associating itself with, in Elena Filipovic’s words (and emphasis), ‘some place’, usually a particular city, the staging of a biennial presupposes the forging of a local identity. As Filipovic continues in The Biennial Reader: ‘One of the critical particularities of biennials […] is precisely their potential to be specific – sitespecific, if you will, and time-specific as well’ (Filipovic 2010: 328). On the other hand, the biennial seeks at the same time to position itself, first, within an art world discourse and, second, more often than not, an urban marketing discourse related to city branding, business development and tourism. Both of these positions are globalist in their respective outlooks. For Thierry de Duve, ‘rather than simply signalling either successful integration of the local into the global (the optimist’s view) or hegemonic appropriation of the local by the global (the pessimist’s view), I think that art biennials are, quite typically, cultural experiments in the glocal economy’ (de Duve 2009: 46). So, one purpose of the biennial form is to worry precisely at that tension and, as Simon Sheikh points out – warily – there can, in turn, be a form of misplaced idealization, if not inverted snobbery around emphasizing localism: [O]ne of the most widespread complaints about contemporary biennials is their lack of connection to the ‘local’ audience, but this often takes the form of a positivity of the social: that social relations and identities in a specific context are given and whole, if not holy, that the local audience is a singular group with essential qualities and shared agencies. This is a residue of the myth-making of the nation state and its production of citizenry through cultural means, such as exhibitions and institutions, and hardly seems adequate on the postmodern and post-public condition, where identities are, at least, hybrid and agencies multiple, and even contradictory and schizoid. It is, rather, a question of how a biennial produces, or attempts to produce, its public(s) that must be analysed and criticized. (Sheikh 2009: 73–4) The question of local urban connectivity looms large, then, and this is certainly one of the preoccupations of this book: how – in some cases, indeed, whether – biennial events look to interact with and define themselves in relation to the complexities of the urban locales that would host them. 4

CONTEMPORARY ART BIENNIALS IN EUROPE

BHB made a deliberate virtue of the latter within the parameters of its parodic form, which also dictated that it was but a single part of a city, rather than the city as a whole, that received the focus of attention – a kind of (multi-)cultural quarter – for a duration of two years, moreover. But what BHB also signified, and in this sense it certainly made a contribution to a broader art world discourse, was that the protracted debate about biennials in general has advanced in the meantime to a point where the form’s maturity and integrity can be said to be such that it offers itself up to parody and subversion. In other words, it is robust enough to either withstand it or, indeed, critically and constructively reassess its premise. There have been other instances of playful biennial ‘spoofs’, which underscore the point. Perhaps the first instance was in fact as early as 1999 after just a decade of the ‘biennial boom’ when Jens Hoffmann and Mauricio Cattelan famously curated the one-off 6th Caribbean Biennial. For this they invited a selection of artists […] who, in their view, had been the most ubiquitous on the international biennial circuit. The project was advertised, marketed, and mediated through the standard art and media channels, but, on arrival at St. Kitts in the West Indies, the artists and curators enjoyed a holiday together with no exhibition actually taking place. Afterward, they produced a glossy, full-color catalog with holiday snaps, texts, and statements representing the experience. (O’Neill 2012: 74) Here the object of critique was perhaps more that of the nomadic, networked curator figure produced by a rampant global biennial circuit, the existence of which also raises questions around local sensitivities and hegemonic appropriation (see O’Neill 2012; Green and Gardner 2016: 218–19). As with BHB, in this case the biennial was the artwork (or vice versa). Panos Kompatsiaris, meanwhile, cites the instance of ‘the Biennialist’ who, by contrast, ‘hijacks’ extant biennials by assuming the persona of a visitor/ viewer and making surprise interventions. The purpose is ‘to reveal the contradictions and incongruities in the statements and releases of biennial exhibitions’ (Kompatsiaris 2017: 20). At the 2011 Athens Biennale, for example, the Biennialist took the initiative to invite into the Biennale premises an undocumented migrant residing in the area in order to guide him through the show. As they both roamed around the floors of the venue, the awkwardness of the encounter gradually became apparent. The lack of a common language was obvious in more than one sense; there was neither a grammatical nor conceptual structure through which the communication of radical statements or some kind of resistant action could be made possible. (1)

INTRODUCTION

5

By the by, not having witnessed the Biennialist in action myself I am hesitant to make too much here of the whiff of unethical exploitation that Kompatsiaris’s account carries. The notion of ‘a migrant’ – or should that be Migrant A? – potentially being set up in an experiment to make a fool of himself/herself by effectively failing to ‘fit the bill’ has shades of the controversies surrounding Santiago Sierra’s engagement of ‘ordinary subjects of the precariat’ to be involved in self-demeaning durational acts as a way of drawing attention to the discrepancy between ‘norms of aesthetic autonomy and the quotidian violence of global capitalism’, as Grant Kester puts it (2011: 167). For Kester the supposed self-evidence of these exploitative acts, which Sierra seems blithely to assume, is not borne out and carries the potential of being ‘merely iterative, reproducing the same forms of un-self-conscious projection and pseudo-transcendence that he deplores in his art world audience’ (171). Nevertheless, what I mean to suggest in general terms is that with the emergence of such subversive forms, biennials appear to have reached a stage of ‘naturalization’. That is, biennial culture is firmly established now and welldeveloped enough in its varying manifestations to submit itself to such critical interventions, so the rather clumsy, noun-turning existential conundrum famously posed by Maria Hlavajová at the Bergen Biennial of 2009, ‘To biennial or not to biennial: that is the question’, which was obviously intended as an interrogation of whether the advent of the age of biennials was ‘a good thing’ per se, has in a sense been answered affirmatively and definitively in the meantime (Hlavajová 2010: 293). If anything the question has implicitly been turned into one relating to quantity – in other words, ‘too much of a good thing?’. For ‘naturalization’ read ‘potential saturation’, or ‘exhausted shelf-life’, as Anthony Gardner and Charles Green suggest: ‘In fact, as the second decade of the twenty-first century began, there was a constant critical refrain that the arc of biennials may have reached its limit and that the form itself needed reimagining. Reviewers of almost every major biennial noted this situation’ (Gardner and Green 2016: 171). If stagnation and complacency represent the state of play, rather than stopping the bandwagon, what remains perhaps is to determine the intensely challenging matter of bespoke forms and approaches in recognition of the fact that the circumstances of any one urban location are always both highly complex and distinctive.

Backyards and doorsteps As it happens Balsall Heath, located on the southern side of Birmingham’s inner city, is literally a few miles down the road from where I live and work in the nearby city of Coventry. So, the question of localism as explored playfully by its one-off Biennale is one that has a particular pertinence, at least from where I’m sitting. Even more local for me, though, is the new Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art which was inaugurated on a shoestring in 2017, just in time to for it to figure as a persuasive feature of that city’s successful application to be nominated UK City of Culture in 2021 (a quadrennial occurrence). With its next, expanded staging 6

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already occurring in October–November 2019, the Coventry Biennial has evolved very rapidly, but, as if to confirm the point regarding the assimilated maturity in the meantime of biennial thinking and practice in general, demonstrates clear evidence in its business plan of a rigorous conceptual working through of the question of what kind of biennial would be appropriate for the sort of city that Coventry is – which is, in brief, similarly post-industrial, multi-ethnic and in need of infrastructural reconstruction, urban revitalization and cultural repair as Birmingham (for which the district of Balsall Heath is typical). The city’s ‘coventration’1 in the Second World War was followed by a period of industrial resurgence in the 1950s and ’60s, based largely around the British car industry, and the creation of a civic-minded modernist ‘new town’ for working people grafted on to the former medieval town (of which a few prized relics had remained). After the years of boom, Coventry suffered corresponding decline from the 1970s onwards when the car industry, upon which a majority of the city’s residents depended directly and indirectly, faltered in the wake of the global oil crisis of 1973, and the city has never entirely recovered. The Biennial’s founder and artistic director, Ryan Hughes – himself a practising artist – has been insistent from the start that the event should be self-organized and led, first and foremost, by an assembled team of artists. Between them they were responsible in 2019 for curating eight distinct ‘programme channels’, which effectively formed the structure and conceptual direction of the Biennial based on the theme of ‘duality and place’ to reflect, as a point of departure, the city’s pioneering work in forming twinned relations with a host of other cities across the globe.2 In essence the eight channels prioritized the following: 1) presenting activity by, and ensuring opportunities for, local and regional artists so as to reach wider audiences; 2) presenting activity by early career artists, ensuring recent graduates and emerging artists receive support in making new work; 3) presenting participatory activity by artists that encourages healthier ways of life, including the facilitation of contributions to the civic life of the city; 4) presenting activity by artists from or with clear connections to Coventry’s twin cities in order to sustain the city’s internationalist outlook; 5) presenting activity by artists who work with new technologies and the networked relationships they produce; 6) presenting activity by artists that is freely and widely distributed, ensuring enhanced opportunities for the public to engage with high-quality art; 7) presenting activity by artists who are engaged in the production and legacy of conceptual art in order to acknowledge and maintain the role the city played in hosting the renowned Art and Language movement (and journal) in the 1960s; 8) presenting activity by leading international artists so that audiences in the city have access to industry-leading contemporary art. (Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art 2018) INTRODUCTION

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The majority of funding in the Biennial’s relatively modest budget came from public arts subsidy, for instance, from the Arts Council of England. But an important source of support for the event in both its incarnations thus far lay in its director’s deft negotiation of free installation space in a range of city centre sites and buildings, some, but not all, of which were abandoned or derelict, and therefore disused. Whether or not it was intentional, this strategy has invoked in fact a certain ‘ghost from the past’, namely the city’s Virtual Fringe: A Festival of Possibility mounted in 2004. In this, the local site-specific theatre company Talking Birds commissioned twenty-five separate artists and groups each to provide detailed blueprints and mock-ups towards an installation work that would be sited hypothetically somewhere in the city centre. These proposals were then presented as an online ‘virtual fringe’ that effectively mapped the urban core in a variety of ways from 3-D sculptural interventions into the built environment, to soundscapes, to performance, serving as an intriguing curation of imaginative ideas towards a city that could be. Thus, the exercise implicitly drew attention at the time, first, to the rich, but missed potential of urban space in Coventry and, second, to the sore lack of cultural support and infrastructure in the city for such creative engagements. Tragically, so the latter implied, such highly inventive commissions would only ever exist as ‘ghosts’ within the realm of online fantasy projections when they could feasibly be realized as in situ projects.3 Some fifteen years later Coventry Biennial has effectively responded to the melancholic potency of ‘the event that deliberately never happened’ by successfully turning the virtual into the actual. Moreover, it appears to have implicitly taken on board art world conclusions typically being reached by the likes of Filipovic, which stress the necessity of situated integration: Merely inserting works in crumbling industrial buildings or any number of other ‘exotic’ locales is not the solution either. Instead, the future of biennials is to be found in a sensitivity to how the coincidence of works of art and other conditions (temporal, geographic, historic, discursive, and institutional) locate a project and how that ‘location’ can be used to articulate an aesthetic project that is respectful of its artworks and speaks to its viewers. (Filipovic 2010: 343) It is not my intention in commencing the present study of biennial practice within the context of Europe to dwell too long on local circumstances, such as they happen to relate to me personally. My main point in focusing initially on what is on my Coventry doorstep is really to emphasize the degree to which there have been various stagings of highly sophisticated biennial-type events in recent years within my very limited, as well as deprived, geographical ‘backyard’ of the UK’s West Midlands. Each of those mentioned here – and there are many more, in fact – has thrown up its own particular questions around art-making and curating in its relationship with the public spaces of the complex city, but in concert they are also testament to a general proliferating culture of committed engagement by 8

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artists both with urban situations and within biennial formats. What kind of work is taking place within the context of cities, as a function of being framed by the specificity of the city in question, is precisely the subject-matter of Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe.

Globalism and the global The title of Caroline A. Jones’s recent book The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials and the Aesthetics of Experience (2016) brings into play several key notions that prove pertinent, in terms of defining both differences and synergies, to the present book’s points of departure – as encapsulated, indeed, in its title. For one, Jones’s emphasis on the ‘global’ and on ‘globalism’ – which, rather than being equated with neo-liberalist globalization, should be seen as inevitably representing a critical response to it – makes a very compelling case for contemporary art to be viewed within the context of an interconnected world or, as she has it, ‘world picture’. To put it crudely (as Jones herself, incidentally, does not), whatever happens where – be it the construction of walls on the US-Mexican border or in the disputed territories of Israel and Palestine – everything is ultimately an expression of a complex global situation whose tensions and challenges implicate and affect all citizens and communities of the world to greater or lesser extents. Far from being a disavowal of the local or regional, for the artist a sensitivity to the global represents a recognition of the place of art as one that permits it ‘to focus on where we are in an entangled world, to make us aware, through experience, not of our distanced relation to a picture but of our enmeshment in situations’ (Jones 2016: 248). And these may be as much to do with what is happening down the road in multi-ethnic Balsall Heath as on the intransigent North-South Korean border. Following from this, critical globalism, which ‘thrives on the rupture of the event’ that is the biennial (247), emerges as a key tactic in the praxis of artists and curators (not to say scholars) to reveal the workings of what is at stake in situations of human co-existence. ‘Global’ thus delineates geo-political parameters of enquiry which are reflective of an existential condition that may be shared – and in that sense perhaps ‘universal’  – but are certainly experienced differently, depending on where one stands in a whole range of ways, not least in terms of one’s ‘privilege’. When it comes to the biennial and its well-documented worldwide proliferation as a conceptual form for making, curating and presenting contemporary art (since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989), a global(ist) outlook begins to become enmeshed in issues of globalization, bringing into play the perception of biennials as facilitators of an elitist art world circuit that is essentially structured around neoliberalist market values and corporate prerequisites – in other words, either of the market or an implicit facilitator of its practices, or both at once. As Peter Osborne suggests, the ‘constitutive fiction’ of biennials centres on INTRODUCTION

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the fantasy of providing comprehensive artistic coverage of the globe, through something like a world system of art. Within this system, the biennial would appear as the dominant form, articulating the relations between itself and other elements (museums, art centres, galleries of multiple kinds, festivals, fairs, markets, sponsorships and other forms of institutional funding); ‘overdetermining’ these other elements and the relations between them, whilst being determined in its own development by them in turn. (Osborne 2015: 24). Implicitly, then, biennials begin to lend themselves to being used as vehicles for conveniently importing ‘global flavour’ to other ends; the biennial finds itself ‘ineluctably tied up with corporate, municipal, national and regional development projects, and property markets in particular. The important role of biennials within the art market is, in this respect, by no means the main capital function at stake in biennials themselves’ (28). Here the intersections and tensions of ‘local’ and ‘global’ begin to emerge, as de Duve’s observation earlier hinted at, but a principal critical preoccupation in the global discourse around biennials in recent years has been more specifically related to a hemispheric North-South divide as exemplified in the focus of the two World Biennial Forums that have taken place to date in Gwangju, South Korea, in 2012 and São Paolo, Brazil, in 2014 (documented respectively in Bauer and Hanru 2013a and Eilat et al 2015). This has brought to the surface in particular the perception of a sharp dichotomy between a post-89 ‘first world’ art scene, based essentially around a traditional ‘allied axis’ of North America and Western Europe, as against a ‘peripheral’ geo-political hemisphere of emergent countries which awkwardly encompasses a motley ‘other world’ that would include the vast territories of Central and South America, Africa and Asia. The divisions and relationships in play are enormously intricate, sensitive and multi-faceted and have been the subject of intense debate, not least around neo- and post-colonialist agendas implied by this bipolar split. Peter Weibel both sums up the historical legacy of what is at stake and points the way towards a new dawn premised on the so-called peripheries seizing the moment and creating new contemporary art worlds: Modernity, and by extension, modern art, were part of European expansion, part of the expansive universal ideology, part of historical capitalism’s ideology of progress. Eurocentric culture as part of the capitalist world system that arose around 1500 in Europe is increasingly being questioned by the colonized countries. Contemporary art in the global age addresses the opportunities for a gradual transformation of the culture of this capitalist world system and the attendant difficulties and contradictions as well as the opportunities for developing an understanding of other cultures and their equality, assuming that such art takes such qualities seriously and is worthy of its name. We are at present witnessing the beginning of a transformation process that needs and utilises the plethora of biennials in Asia, South America, and the Arab world to 10

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take form, whereas modern art, naturally is defending its position hysterically in the capitalist world system’s fairs and auctions by charging high prices. (Weibel 2013: 24) For Green and Gardner too the biennial of the ‘South’ proposes a model for change, one which revisits global hegemony, calling into question a North Atlantic-Western-European predominance (Gardner and Green 2015: 38). What is interesting above all perhaps in the evolution of ‘Southern’ biennial discourse is the emphasis on staging biennial events that seek to assert a committed politics by fostering place-based social engagement. This seeks out the participation of new audiences beyond the customary ‘art crowd’ and thereby roots itself within parameters of concern that are deeply implicated in the local and regional – in the placeness of place. As Bauer and Hanru maintain: If biennials want to survive, they need to create in the local context a site of public engagement that is not only periodically erupting but also permanently anchored. Interactions with local communities are essential to the raisons d’être of biennials, although such engagement is largely deemed to be merely part of the public programs and popular pedagogy insisted on by the local (i.e. municipal, regional, or national) authorities and grass-root collectives as a way to promote the locality (ie. the city). (Bauer and Hanru 2013b: 21) The prime instance to date of such a focus is perhaps the Havana Biennial in Cuba, which seems to be as much a paradigm for the biennial of the ‘peripheries’ as Venice has been for the Western hegemonic model (premised, among other things, on notions of nationhood). Havana began to assert an eye-opening practice of ‘engaged regionalism’ – drawing ‘horizontally’ on surrounding countries of the Caribbean, Central America and beyond – as far back as the 1980s. As one of its founders, Gerardo Mosquera reports on the second edition staged in 1986: ‘It was the first global contemporary art show ever: a mammoth, uneven, chaotic bunch of more than 50 exhibitions and events presenting 2,400 works by 690 artists from 57 countries. The Biennial’s variegated structure made it a true urban festival, a pachanga that involved the whole city’ (Mosquera 2010: 203). Placeness and localism apart, Bauer’s and Hanru’s cited comment draws implicit attention to a further key aspect of biennial culture – ‘peripheral’ or otherwise – and this relates to its temporal rhythm of repetition,4 irrespective of whether this means two, three, five or, indeed, ten years, as we shall witness in Chapter 2 with the city of Münster in Germany. In fact, the biennial model’s ontology of repetition is closely bound up with ‘place’ inasmuch as the unavoidable fact of recurrence implies that, unlike the one-off exhibition, the points are set for the nurturing of a localized relationship based on a projected continuity. By virtue of happening more than once the way is paved for the building of a relationship of structured and concerted urban integration, if not gradual transformation in time. Each INTRODUCTION

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successive biennial event in any one city inevitably stands in some kind of relation to previous ones taking place there, while also taking into account the specific inroads those biennials of the past have made into forging a connection with the complexities of the city in question. As we shall see, the example of Münster, precisely on account of its slow pulse, is particularly instructive in this regard for a range of reasons. One of them, worth mentioning briefly here, offers a sobering counterpoint to what I have just maintained, namely that ‘repetition’ is similarly a phenomenon seized upon by city marketing entrepreneurs who see in it a business opportunity. Ever since the hard-won success of Sculpture Projects Münster has become evident, the pressure has been on the organizers to hold the event more often so as to maximize the profitable economic side effects – based on hotel reservations, catering, shopping and so on – afforded by its branding as a desirable city to visit during the event. By contrast, from within the terms of the art event itself (and the art it shows), Camiel van Winkel warns of the complacency that can set in with the recurring biennial syndrome insofar as the ‘bedazzling merry-go-round’, particularly of those established, large-scale periodic events, can easily end up masking mediocrity because ‘after all, there’s always a next time’ (van Winkel 2005: 219) – to which one might add in the perspective of a ‘too big to fail’ factor. In this respect the venerated Venice Biennale certainly stands in the dock, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

The Euro zone In keeping with my earlier assertion relating to the advanced maturity in the meantime of both biennial culture and its accompanying discourse, I do not intend as such to rehearse the complexity of the occurring ‘global’ debates to which I referred in the previous section – even in synthesized form – or, indeed, attempt to develop a fresh angle on them.5 What I do wish to extrapolate for my particular purposes, though, is an emergent preoccupation with locale (amid a globalist perspective) in the form of particularized urban environments, and, allied to this, art’s in situ engagement with the lives of urban inhabitants. This approach is premised on the basic understanding, referred to earlier as part of a ‘biennial paradox’, that such perennial art events are invariably named for the places (cities) in which they occur, ergo they identify in some way with that place and aim to engage with or represent it in some way. How exactly they do so is the principal concern of this book. In establishing this position, what I mean to say is that my motivation is far less to contribute to the continuing ‘global art world debate’ around biennials, which tends to be conducted by art historians, specialists in visual culture, curators and artists, and is conveniently summed up by Ferguson and Hoegsberg as follows: The gap between intention and outcome may be the issue most productively addressed by newer exhibition practices, particularly in relation to the global/ 12

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local tension. Although almost all non-Western biennials conceptually position themselves as an alternative to the international circuit through some focus on the local, each one attempts to legitimate itself, to some degree, within contemporary art’s global ‘system of validation and hierarchic differentiation’, in Matei Bejenaru’s words.6 A calculated combination of global flair – a selling point of particularity for many biennials – and international scope seems to remain a prerequisite for having useful visibility in the international art world. This double-edged sword of differing conditions between local and global production, is, not coincidentally, the most pervasive biennial discontent, taken up by artists and curators alike. The focus on a repetitive roster of artists and curators cuts even deeper when juxtaposed with each biennial’s local host city or region. Centrality and regionality as competing and antagonistic pressures seem to have been omnipresent in the post-war biennial structure. At the centre of the debate is the question of whether ‘art’, however it is defined, can be an instrument of universal exchange and values in opposition to the degree to which it is always local in some way. The desire to be both global and local is inherent to a large degree in the promise and promotion of each biennial. (Ferguson and Hoegsberg 2010: 372) Although the focus in the present study is on some of the most high-profile ‘global biennials’, the main emphasis as a whole is instead on interrogating how contemporary art works within the context of diverse European cities in their complex particularity, which here effectively form in sequence a straggling path from the continent’s western periphery (Folkestone, UK) to its eastern one (Istanbul, Turkey). The way this structural ‘route’ has come about conceptually will be explained a little later, but it is also important to acknowledge both a degree of spatio-temporal fortuity and singularity in this selection – which additionally incorporates Münster, Venice and Belgrade – and at the same time a useful representative diversity. Each urban situation and its corresponding art event are subject to differing terms and circumstances and therefore raise distinctive issues and questions around the working practices of artistic initiatives. At the same time these can also prove loosely indicative of the politics and cultural policies of various European regions – above all perhaps in terms of what is currently possible. To give just one example in this regard from the five cities under scrutiny: the situation surrounding the arts in Belgrade (Chapter 4) demonstrably brings to the fore a political-historical legacy of rupture and controversy encompassing Cold War Yugoslavia, its 1990s break-up in circumstances of civil war, the emergence of Serbia and present-day tensions around nationalism, an entrepreneurial market economy and aspirations to join the European Union (EU). Without wishing to simplify here a highly complex situation, it is not too far-fetched to maintain that variants of what is currently happening in Serbia are, or have been, occurring in other countries of the former eastern bloc (many of which are already members of the EU in the meantime), or at least the Balkans, and so Belgrade can be said to be a form of regional echo INTRODUCTION

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chamber (within the parameters of this book), while also intensely local in terms of the detail of the urban engagements that are presented. Still mining the seam of indicative differences and synergies that are to be located in Jones’s book title and mine: if her ‘global(ism)’ presupposes a certain geo-political criticality which implicitly interpellates us all as always already implicated citizens of a ‘global domain’ – a position that emerges potentially as ‘an aesthetic response to economic, technological, and cultural processes of globalization’ (Jones 2016: xiii) – then the present study would certainly acquiesce with such a position. However, in purely territorial terms, this book delimits a European arena of operation, which, as a move, is of course not without contention, particularly in any ‘hemispherical discourses’ around biennial culture, its origins and its hierarchies. As de Duve has asserted, when it comes to biennials, ‘Europe still houses the majority’ (de Duve 2009: 45) and, with all its historical associations as the canonical epi-centre of a privileged bourgeois art world, in which, as Jones makes clear, Europe effectively was the world (Jones 2016: 106–7), European dominance is precisely what needs to be called out and constructively dismantled, as the curator Okwui Enwezor (for one) has cogently argued in The Manifesta Decade (Enwezor 2005: 175–86). The historical ‘European Grand Tour’ which prescribed a touristic circuit of ‘civilizing visits’ for, mainly, ‘young privileged gentlemen of the Enlightenment’, epitomized such elitism; moreover, it has its modern-day variant as witnessed in the convergence in 2007 of a documenta/Sculpture Projects Münster/Art Basel/ Venice Biennale event circuit, in which ‘[t]hose aficionados sufficiently wealthy and inclined could journey from one opening to the next during the course of June’ that year (Gardner and Green 2016: 257). Two of these locations are ones I will be covering, but rather than being chastened by such obvious biases of European privilege, I would point instead to a form of ‘perverse inversion’ as constructive tactic – perhaps in the Situationist spirit of BHB, without having recourse to parody exactly – wherein a deliberate focus on Europe and an implicit replication of the Grand Tour (with a difference) permit certain aspects of both to be subject to critical scrutiny. Perhaps there is also something to be said in this respect for following Piotr Piotrowski’s ‘provincializing’ line of argument in The Global Contemporary and coming to regard European (or Western) culture ‘not in terms of its hegemony, but its geographic specificity: as a culture of one of the regions of the world’ (Piotrowski 2013: 206; my emphasis). Thus, Europe is acknowledged for its continuing influence (and affluence) but is seen merely as taking its place ‘horizontally’ alongside all the other regions and art worlds of the globe. In doing so, the region’s own diversity of micro-cultures and geopolitical sub-divisions emerge – a European topology of shifting relations and worlds within a world. The founding of the Manifesta Biennial in the post-Wall 1990s – renowned as the itinerant biennial that ‘comes to town’ (one near you, if you’re lucky) – was intended, of course, precisely to address existing regional fault-lines as well as 14

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potential synergies of an emergent ‘New Europe’ as they manifested themselves in selected urban centres of the continent, thus supposedly emphasizing a new ‘polycentric Europe’: Manifesta – the European Biennial of Contemporary Art – as well as the numerous biennials, triennials and quadrennials located all over the continent aim to give new centrality to local cultural scenes. Large-scale exhibitions facilitate depolarization of the art system and foster alternative artistic and curatorial solutions on a smaller scale. The new map reflects the multiplicity of artistic experiences and institutional systems in today’s Europe. (Belting et al 2013: 114) As Gardner and Green explain, ‘the purpose of Manifesta was to replace the Cold War divides between East and West, communism and capitalism, with a panEuropean sensibility driven by openness, hospitality, and integration. Indeed, from its outset, Manifesta sought to be both a metaphor and instigator of what Hedwig Fijen, the director of Manifesta’s International Foundation, called “a Europe without borders”’7 (Gardner and Green 2016: 150). Inevitably perhaps the inherent idealism of the Manifesta (ad)venture was never going to prove a smooth ride and the intense political contentiousness of the situations it has encountered – or, indeed, engineered – on its travels to its chosen cities every two years since 1996 is in themselves indicative of the troubled nature of the idea of ‘Europe’ as a whole (as a changing but continuous entity). The 2006 edition in Cyprus was cancelled altogether owing to confusions around the intentions of one of the curators – Anton Vidokle – in locating some of the biennial in an old hotel on the Turkish Cypriot side of the capital Nicosia, which created the impression locally of a disrespectful bias towards that half of the city. The biennial ‘was in fact designed to involve both parts of Nicosia, but Vidokle’s plan to hold much of its activity in the hotel was the crux of the problem. The plan would have required Greek Cypriots to cross the Green Line, and therefore have identifications checked by representatives of a state they did not recognize’ (Voorhies 2017: 200). Of course, there is an argument within the calamity of such a situation to say that ultimately Manifesta should exist precisely to put its finger on such raw pulses, that its role is deliberately to seek out such situations, not in order to inflame or even pretend to resolve them but to disclose what is at stake. On the one hand, then, Manifesta proves controversial because of its perceived insensitivities to localism and regionalism; on the other hand its repeated capacities to provoke, sometimes alone by its choice of location, can be seen as instructive, as confirmation of the existence of continuing challenges at certain flashpoints on the polycentric European map. Regarding the latter, however, Gardner and Green detect the possibility of a ‘pathologizing’ factor in Manifesta’s interventions. They highlight the case of Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, ‘with its preponderance of publicly sited art works dedicated to representing Ljubljana’s cityscape as riven with borderlines, neuroses, and “energies of defense”’ (Gardner INTRODUCTION

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and Green 2016: 152). As such, Manifesta 3 ‘did something more than simply thematise the borderline; it created the very disorder it sought to analyse […] it was also clear that Manifesta was engaged less in crossing borders than courting them, persistently (even obsessively) fixating on how to manage border politics from a soft liberal viewpoint’ (153). Arguably, then, there is a form of nomadic cultural policing that Manifesta has unintentionally brought into play. Given this proceeds from a position of privilege, merely by virtue of the event appearing to have the freedom of untrammelled mobility as it roams across the continent, there is also something that grates at a point in time when migration and the restricted mobility of refugees have become one of the biggest challenges for ‘fortress Europe’. For Enwezor, writing, admittedly, as far back as 2005, such discrepancies are indicative of Manifesta’s effective status as ‘an extension of EU cultural policy’ which continues to emphasize forms of European identity based on an indigenous populace: Rather than being open and outward looking, it barricades itself behind the idealism of European nationalism, a model long discarded by most progressive biennials across the world. In accordance with this limiting national model, all its curators have been, without exception, ethnically European, and the vast majority of artists exhibited have been of similar origin. This policy seems to stem from an inability or refusal to make the interrogation of ‘Europe’ part of the process. Given such realities, one wonders what is so pioneering about its so-called new model of exhibition practice, beyond the fact that it entrenches itself as an extension of Brussels cultural policy. What if Manifesta were to move from what has been essentially a logic of die Europäer Volk [sic] to an active commitment to der Bevölkerung, in other words to exhibiting the artwork of the European population in all its multiplicity? (Enwezor 2005: 184) Der Bevölkerung (the Populace) refers to Hans Haacke’s post-Wall intervention into the Berlin Reichstag building (at the time of its conversion to the new German Parliament) in which he effectively proposed a re-phrasing of Peter Behrens 1916 inscription on the façade of the building which bequeathed it to ‘Dem Deutschen Volk’ – the German people. Haacke thus sought to efface the premise of indigenous nationhood as a reunified Germany commenced a new phase in its history. In Der Bevölkerung, Enwezor maintains, Haacke offered one possible proposal to overcome the paradigm of the concentration camp. However, Der Bevölkerung falls well short of its own goal, for it merely proposed inclusion and tolerance rather than assimilation of other forms of difference into the norms of belonging, those which can never be wholly or ethically absorbed into the discourse of the state or its institutions. […] The goal for Manifesta, therefore, is to surpass the institutional limit (the

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concentration camp) and enter the city (the community) composed entirely out of a tremulous politics of difference. (185) My later explication of the conceptual starting point for the book, which rests in part on a repeated Grand Tour-style convergence of events occurring in 2017, will shed more light on its critical position, but suffice it to say for now that a European delimitation is driven by three main factors. First, by a curiosity about how the cities in question, which happen to be in Europe, seek technically to integrate biennial-type events into their complex urban workings – and vice versa. Second, by a perception of Europe itself being, after some considerable stability overall since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (when biennial culture commenced its proliferation), in a new situation of troubling disruption and uncertainty, not least within the customary – some would say complacent – safety of the EU,8 but also in terms of ever-growing, continent-wide nationalist populism and attendant challenges of mass migration from outside the Euro zone. Third, by a more pragmatic reason relating to my own personal mobility as a researcher: given that the research for this book has entailed extended and repeated periods of embedded fieldwork in the locations in question, my pecuniary means, as well as time-bound work commitments to my employer, simply did not stretch to embracing a ‘global perspective’. The latter is significant additionally inasmuch as I have frequently been struck, in my immersion in the critical literature of biennial culture specifically and contemporary art in general, by the way commentators’ points of reference, be they scholars, artists or curators, imply membership of a form of transnational ‘jet-set’ that permits the privilege, typically, of witnessing and comparing biennials from Sydney to Gwangju, Venice to São Paulo and so on. Participation in the debates about contemporary art arguably presupposes, then, subscribing to a certain ‘world event circuit’ and discourse in which biennials are axiomatic, as Osborne explains: ‘Biennial’ thus presents itself as the first category of an incipient global art history. Or at least, this is the theoretical ambition implicit in its current understanding: its constitutive fiction. It corresponds to a certain practical, intellectual and cultural ambition associated with the recent practices of biennials themselves. In this respect it is their collective fantasy, we might say: the fantasy of providing comprehensive artistic coverage of the globe, through something like a world system of art. (Osborne 2015: 24). In my case, deliberately failing to accede fully to this globalist realm is then another small tactic in my method of slanting my interrogation instead towards the quotidian business of what goes on in the nooks and crannies of a few ‘to hand’ European cities when art endeavours to find a place within them.9 And

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that includes using both artworks and art events as forms of navigating compass, working outwards from within their structural parameters so as to get, first, my own bearings within the terrain of unfamiliar cities and, second, the measure of the place (more of which later).

The work of art ‘What goes on’ is another way of saying how art works, including what kind of experience it affords, and here again I align myself, as well as depart from Caroline Jones, who, among other things, is concerned with the historical evolution of those italicized terms: ‘I aim to reanimate a term that has ossified in art historical practice: the work of art. Art works. It is and has been active, working on the viewer historically, working on me still. My emphasis on art’s action, on work as a verb, reflects the historical shift this book narrates, from art as an object of craft to art as an expectation for experience’ (Jones 2016: x). The work of art in the complex city is in this sense strictly still a noun, of course, but it implies, first, spatio-temporal movement or performance and, second, some form of reaching out or entanglement with the ‘not-art’ of that which immediately surrounds or frames it. As such, this book’s subtitle flirts with the conventional expectation of self-contained objecthood as conjured by the vision of sited public artworks in urban space, only to disperse itself, or enact a disruption, by referring principally to a form of doing that pertains to place (without necessarily even being sited directly in it). In this view, the artwork may indeed be a sited object in the first instance, but what matters is what can be said about its engagement with the urban ecology in which it is presented as an integrated element or to which it refers in some way. This also brings into play Jones’s ‘aesthetics of experience’, which implicates a spectator in the performance of the artwork’s work: ‘The aesthetics of experience foreground the agency of the art in transformation, and also call to the responsibility of the viewer’ (219). That responsibility can be taken to mean participation not only in the realization of the artwork’s work (via some form of response or attempt to make sense) but also in the sense of realizing one’s ethical obligation as witness to the event of encounter with the artwork. As Birken suggests, in the chain of participants involved in any art project ‘no single person can be held responsible, and everyone must at least to a certain extent accept responsibility. In other words, “authorship” no longer means empowerment, but rather the potential of being addressed – so to speak the prospect of supplying the response as implied in the term responsibility’ (Birken 2013: 299). Kester, meanwhile, articulates his understanding of ‘work’ as follows: The modern viewer is obliged to ‘work’ – cognitively, perceptually – against the semantic resistance posed by the complex art object. In the presence of such works, he or she will experience amazement, discomfort, shock, and outrage, 18

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while cultivating a more enlightened self-reflective mode of subjectivity. […] This labor is defined in implicit opposition to the banal, programmatic forms of perception that are presumed to characterize our normal existence. In fact, we might say that modern avant-garde art is defined precisely by the (naturalized) tension between […] the exemplary labor of the artist’s production and the corresponding mimetic labor of the viewer’s reception. (Kester 2011: 101) As we have seen, Kester is also interested in the notion of labour as a function of economic relations (167); referring to art working inevitably invokes, beyond   the abstracted notion of its implicit ‘aesthetic effort’, its socioeconomic framing as labour. In his seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical  Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin was arguably already engaging in a similar flirtation with the ambiguity of the ‘work of art’ as phrase (Benjamin 1999a: 211–44). Not only was he proposing a radical shift in the public perception of artworks, as advances in mechanical technologies signalled an end to the deistic aura of their singularity as objects, but also, by implication, identifying their new role as one that was subject to a far greater extent to the work of a reproductive economy of representation within mass markets, mediatization and commodification. In The Human Condition (1998 [1958]), meanwhile, Benjamin’s colleague Hannah Arendt went on to differentiate between the ‘labour’ of maintaining everyday existence, as in domestic tasks within the private sphere (79–135), the ‘work’ of industry and manufacture within the socio-economic sphere (136–74) and, finally, the space of ‘action’, corresponding to the politicalpublic sphere (175–247). Seeking to tease out the complexity of what defines work as work, for Arendt artworks and the work of artists took their place in the third category. While also subject to the making practices of ‘work’ (as in manufacture), ultimately artworks were not utilitarian as such but contributed to public discourse. In the more recent, changed times of the twenty-first century the question of labour/work as it pertains to the global art world and globalization has been subject to close interrogation, not least in terms of its relationship to surplus value and the invisibility, as well as precarity, of much of the work that implicitly shores up the activities of the art world (see, for example, Jackson 2011, Harvie 2013 and Steyerl 2017). As Kompatsiaris neatly outlines, bringing the role of biennials into play: [T]he most noticeable trend is the understanding of the art field as an economically productive area, subject to and often subservient to neoliberal logics. Issues such as labour, class and the commons, appearing emphatically in critical contemporary art milieus a decade before, were now structuring the rationale of contemporary art theory. To state a common example, the tendency to treat artistic activity as labour, in Marxian terms, an activity that generates value and is thus subject to exploitation, is a reflection of the growing influence of the Italian Autonomist framework of ‘immaterial labour’ INTRODUCTION

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in art theory. Within this framework, practising artists can be conceptualised as advanced subjects of exploitative neoliberal policies in the framework of post-Fordism and in the context of what the urban geographer Sharon Zukin has previously called the ‘artistic mode of production’ (1989), involving the employment of art as vehicle of urban regeneration in state and regional agendas. The position of the biennial within this conceptualisation is again an ambivalent one; on the one hand, biennials, as institutions of visibility and prestige, can potentially highlight the wrongs of exploitation and gentrification, and on the other, they may be often themselves implicated in these processes. (Kompatsiaris 2017: 68) Within the context of globalization and the so-called peripheries, exploitation of labour is all the more pertinent (see Bydler: 378–405; Enwezor: 426–45; and Baker: 446–53 in Filipovic et al 2010a) and Kester (2011) has been particularly adept at teasing out the potential abuse of human labour in the work of certain high-profile artists creating socially-engaged participatory works involving ‘hired hands’, paid or voluntary, as we have seen. Be that as it may, for my purposes the notion of work takes its cue from Jones’s initial delineation of the artwork’s own work (within the context of the biennial event and the city), which in itself does not preclude the potential incursion of questions of people’s labour insofar as that arises as a function of the artist, artwork or biennial event under discussion. Returning to Jones’s notion of ‘experience’, in her view the biennial of today is precisely where ‘an appetite for art-as-experience has been cultivated, its aesthetic codified and defined’ (Jones 2016: xiv). Carlos Basualdo appears to concur with this perception, pointing as a factor to the tendency of biennial events to function as public discourse (compare Arendt), far less constrained by the customary circumstances of the market: The configuration of interests at the core of the institutions like biennials clearly differs from that that gave rise to the institutional circuit traditionally linked to modernity in art (museum, art criticism, and galleries). The commercial fate of the works, for example, is neither evident nor even strictly necessary in biennials, for the simple reason that the bulk of the financing behind the event and the production of many of the projects is largely independent of art collecting (either private or state-funded). This facilitates the inclusion of practices of a nonobjectual nature, as well as works of an interdisciplinary nature and even practices pertaining to other fields of cultural production. (Basualdo 2010: 131) The space to experiment within the biennial event paves the way, then, for certain kinds of art-making which can end up on the one hand in a form of selfreferentiality (‘biennial discourse’) but on the other often implies a particular engagement with local circumstances. As Basualdo puts it: 20

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The inclusion of works of an interdisciplinary nature, as well as the persistent integration of discursive elements in these kinds of events, has become increasingly a constant. Moreover, the sheer size of these shows […] makes their insertion into highly particularized interpretative systems an absolute necessity. Without these systems, the shows would lose their ability to communicate as discrete singularities; that is, they would lack all identity. In many cases, it is even manifestly expected that the conceptual framework charged with giving these events legibility is related to local issues – at least as far as the inclusion of elements tied to local culture is concerned. (131) Jan Verwoert expresses related sentiments when it comes to biennial discourse, referring to certain modalities of artwork at biennials seeming ‘to have by now become so recognizable that (in conversation among art professionals) these works can casually be referred to in terms of a genre: “biennial art”’ (Verwoert 2010: 187). Within the context of Europe, Kester attributes this, in fact, to ‘subsidization of art education’ and a ‘relatively generous level of state support for exhibition spaces, biennial exhibitions, and other venues dedicated to contemporary art’ (Kester 2011: 134). This has led to a generation of European artists being liberated from the immediate demand to produce saleable goods imposed by the art market (at least in the early stages of their careers). Taken in conjunction with an increasingly standardized model of neo-conceptual art practice, the result has been a loosely defined genre that we might term ‘EU art’: open-ended experiments in the public realm that range from site-specific installations and performances to longer-term collaborative projects. (135) Verwoert warns of the ‘curse’ that such a ‘genre-fication’ may represent, but goes on to argue for a ‘sensualist ethics of biennial art aesthetics’ based on a paraphrasing of Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘Performatively speaking, communication is an encounter on a threshold defined by the mutual limits of understanding. The renegotiation of this boundary is what the performance underlying communicative acts is initially concerned with’ (Verwoert 2010: 193). Returning us effectively to Jones’s aesthetic of experience, for Verwoert the self-conscious encounter with the work of art produces the sensation of a threshold coming into being. The work in fact is that threshold; it constitutes it. The experience of encountering a potent work is the realization that the encounter itself is made possible through the emergence of a threshold (an opening as much as a boundary) on which the experience (of the work as a threshold) occurs. To attune oneself to the intricate dynamics that allow for a threshold to emerge and be negotiated is the ethical stance that Nancy espouses. (193) INTRODUCTION

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On complexity The term ‘complexity’ (or, in a transfigured sense, ‘complex city’), as this book makes use of it in relation to urban ecologies and their intersection with artworks and biennial events, attempts to encapsulate several notions at once, all of which can be said, in turn, implicitly to reference, overlap or interact with one another. First, its use is prompted by Hal Foster’s book The Art-Architecture Complex (2011) in which he analyses the dynamic interdependency and, indeed, increased fusion of artworks and the built environment. Thus, art and architecture form an integrated complex whose component parts are mutually contingent, either influencing or, indeed, producing one another. Implicated in this complex is the viewer, as witnessed in the possibilities of sculpture’s ‘expanded field’ famously introduced by Rosalind Krauss (1986: 276–90). ‘With this opening to field’, Foster writes, the sculptor Richard Serra, for example, was led ‘to describe “the sculptural experience” in terms of a “topology of [a] place” demarcated “through locomotion”, a “dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape”. In this way sculpture became a parallel operation, in which the work frames and reframes the subject and the site in tandem’ (Foster 2011: 139–40). One principle now, Foster continues, ‘which might be called “phenomenological” was that sculpture exists in primary relation to the body, not as its representation but as its activation – its activation in all its senses, all its apperceptions of weight and measure, size and scale’ (140). A further principle, ‘which might be called “situational”, was that sculpture engages the particularity of place, not the abstraction of space, which it redefines immanently rather than represents transcendentally’ (140). The implications of such a performative relationship are in part what Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe would wish to elaborate upon in developing a notion of an expanded or, to echo Anna Moszynska in Sculpture Now (2013), exploded field of urban aesthetics. Referencing Krauss’s seminal notion of sculpture in the expanded field as having identified in essence ‘what is “not-architecture” or “not-landscape”’, Beatriz Colomina suggests, ‘now it is not just sculpture that assumes this double negative position, but art in general’ (Colomina 2014: 211). She goes on to argue that art now finds itself unambiguously in the already expanded architectural field: the urban landscape that threatens to overwhelm it. Looking back at Krauss’s 1979 essay, which treats a space of logical oppositions as the real expanded site of the artwork, perhaps it is the city, the always already expanded field of architecture, which becomes the missing term from the essay and its wellknown diagram. The dissolution of the pedestal described in the ‘Expanded Field’ establishes not only the aspiration toward autonomy of modern sculpture but also its detachment from the surrounding architecture of the city. All of Krauss’s examples of contemporary sculpture remain polemically detached 22

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from the urban landscape. The city literally disappears from the text and illustrations. It becomes the final negative term left to explain. […] ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ broadens the general terrain but ultimately remains within the immediate family of art. The same terrain is then defined by that which is left out – the ever expanding field of the city. (213) Taking into account more recent developments of the concept of sculpture and/ or public art, the present study will also seek to reference various recent ‘turns’ in art-making – site-based, everyday, social, cultural, relational, situational, participatory, live, digital, performative and so on – to arrive, finally, as Colomina seems to be hinting, at an urban turn or an aesthetic of urban complexity. A second sense of complexity will serve, then, as a description of that which is perceived to be a highly sensitive, intricate and complicated urban ecology. In other words, the way the city itself is organized around various interlocking, contingent functions – including institutions, amenities, informal uses, rituals and behaviours  – corresponds to a structural complex, involving a range of interdependent human and civic practices that play out in the urban environment. Within that complex ecology contemporary art has the potential to hold a vital and integrated position. That is, it should not be set apart as an autonomous phenomenon but conceived of as thoroughly implicated within the day-to-day workings of urban life, without it thereby becoming instrumentalized. In other words, art is as essential, on its own terms as art, as any other civic amenity or resource available in the city. Arguably, it is precisely such an engaged, integrated as well as galvanizing role that landmark art events such as the biennial aspire to fulfil even as they enact their own introspective ‘discursive turn’, as outlined by Ferguson and Hoegsberg (2010: 361).10 As indicated earlier, whether or not they actually succeed is another matter and therefore precisely one of the main questions being pursued by this book. The argument for art’s indispensability is validated in part by its capacities to tease out the complexities of modern urban living. This would include drawing attention to the fragile, often fragmented or, in some cases, divided nature of cities and therefore the challenges facing them. Part of the implicit function of art would be to expose or, like the work of the archaeologist, painstakingly ‘dig out’ that which is latent, as well as to initiate and facilitate forms of public critique (for the general good of the urban populace). This leads to a further possible sense of ‘complex’ relating to the psychoanalytical trope of repressed traumas, emotions or impulses: metaphorically cities, or parts of cities, may have ‘complexes’ relating to decisive aspects of their histories that have been experienced collectively or passed on as myth and that hinder, as common ‘trauma’, their vitality and viability (or, indeed, health and happiness). Such cities can be said, therefore, to be in need of attention and repair, for which art may pave the way via its capacities to disclose what seems to be going on.11 Importantly an aesthetic of urban complexity takes into account the role of the spectator-participant (as implicated citizen or visitor), recognizing that new INTRODUCTION

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art in the public sphere possesses an ever-growing variety of forms these days – often linked to participation and performance, in fact – and this is partly what the curated form of the biennial aims to draw out and develop. A particular feature of Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe is its exploration of the notion of ‘curated conversations’, which relates not only to the intended conceptual linkages that a curator might seek to establish between various artworks – for example, sited ones that effectively treat the city itself as a large-scale gallery space – but, more importantly, the kind of co-incidental conversations that can arise, or be made to arise, between artworks that share – often temporarily – or reference a common urban location and common interlocutors. The unifying factor of place and place-making – which, to follow Miwon Kwon’s important argument (itself based on Nancy’s theory of the ‘inoperative community’12), may, in fact, involve a form of unmaking or unwork (Kwon 2004: 153–4) – is key in this equation. But so is the notion of the spectator adopting a form of implicit curating function as the facilitator or instigator of conversations between artworks. Following from this, in Participation in Art and Architecture HanakLettner usefully draws attention to the way that the German Besucher (visitor) implicitly incorporates the sense of ‘seeking’ (suchen): hence, the visitor is by definition he or she who would be in search of something, an ‘approach that may also be called participation’ (Hannak-Lettner 2016: 194). The spectator in the case of the present book is its writer, so this introduces an important methodological concept for the writing of the book which is expanded upon in detail below (in the final point relating to complexity). To illustrate the point, though, again using an artwork that seems in itself to be performative of the very concept: at Sculpture Projects Münster in 2007 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster prepared a form of miniature theme-park of Sculpture Projects ‘icons’ from previous decades (going back to the event’s inauguration in 1977). Entitled A Münster Novel and choreographed within a delimited, inner-city parkland setting in which the spectator was enabled to wander around at leisure, it effectively presented both a concertinaed version of the story of sculpture’s general evolution as an expanded form in recent decades and a microcosm of sited Münster artworks in which connections between sculptures, between past and present – the miniature toy-like forms evoking ‘remembered playthings’ – and, finally, between the artworks and the city itself could be established by the active, perambulating spectator. Importantly the spectator, or ‘reader’ of this ‘novel’, was positioned to bring into being (or perform) the various possible linkages on offer, thus effectively completing the work as an implicated performer within a temporal present. In expanding on her theory of critical spatial practice, first presented in Art and Architecture (2006) and subsequently referred to as ‘sitewriting’ in her eponymous book (2010), the architecture scholar Jane Rendell refers to a kindred configuration – occurring in this case as a series of so-called one-day sculptures across New Zealand13 – in the following terms:

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I imagined the configuration of the curated works as a night sky. This drew on an earlier idea which remains only lightly touched upon in Art and Architecture, of the possibility of imagining large-scale site-specific commissioning projects, which take place over time and across space, as constellations. Since the constellation is a spatio-temporal configuration, it provides both a map and a calendar of the individual works and their place in the overall pattern. Each star in the night sky occupies a discrete position in relation to the others; it also has its own unique life span or time. Like a star, each artwork has a different duration; what we see of a work today is not simply a function of what is physically present right now, but it is also a trace of what has occurred, which even as we look at it now, is no longer present. … (Rendell 2009: 21–2) A final application of ‘complexity’ relates to the methodological form of the proposed book and is premised on a writing approach developed by Rendell. Critical spatial practice (or site-writing) is a bid to find a way of accounting in writing for the space of encounter produced, in the first instance, by the triangulation of subject, site and artwork. Such a method ‘allows us to describe work that transgresses the limits of art and architecture and engages with both the social and the aesthetic, the public and the private. This term draws attention not only to the importance of the critical, but also to the spatial, indicating the interest in exploring the specifically spatial aspects of interdisciplinary processes or practices’ (Rendell 2006: 6). The desire to which Rendell refers – see the extended prologue to her later book Site-Writing (Rendell 2010: 1–20) – in explaining her method to invent a writing that is somehow like the artwork can feasibly be applied simultaneously to the experience of and interaction with the environment of the city. In other words, the writer encountering and seeking to mediate the artwork in situ is implicated in a compositional complex (or site) that incorporates cognitive and affective factors in response, as well as performative ones in the act of communicating those responses (to a readership). Where urban writing has for so long been dominated by textual readings of the city – as seen in the hackneyed trope of the ‘city as text’ – here is a move towards a form of situational, relational and performative writing that is premised on the multifarious inflections of bodies and actions in space and – as Rendell implies additionally – in time, emerging thus as ‘spatio-temporal’ or ‘complex’ text as opposed to ‘textual text’. Since some of the present book is co-authored, a further dimension supplied by the notions of ‘encounter’ and ‘curated conversations’ comes into play. In terms of fieldwork the points of departure for the chapters on Belgrade and Istanbul involved in situ dialogues between the co-writers and cofieldworkers concerned (and ‘incidental others’ as it happens) and this paradigm of exchange clearly set the tone for the way the form of those respective chapters unfolded.

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Tales of time and space I am all too aware of an extensive globalist discourse around contemporary art and biennials, with many commentators identifying such a global perspective as inherent to the form of such events, as we have seen. The present book, however, strives far less to contribute directly to what can paradoxically appear to be, for all its globalism, a rather introspective, self-perpetuating tendency: an art world meta-discourse of ‘biennials about biennials’, rather than about the places in which they occur. While valuing this discourse and drawing on its insights, I wish instead to focus specifically on how the art of biennial culture connects with a variety of particular urban situations. In fact, coming principally from the discipline of urban performance studies, as opposed to visual art and culture or art history, the emphasis in this book may be said to be on the stories that are there to be narrated regarding the performative intersection, or working, of biennial-based art in its multiple forms of engagement with the space and time of the city – what might otherwise be termed the urban turn of art. Thus, each chapter of the five urban portraits presented proceeds implicitly from the question: what’s the story here? (not without an awareness of the fact that places have a multiplicity of potential stories to tell). For, as has already been implied, there is no getting away from the fact that what characterizes biennial events above all is that they are situated; that their very existence presupposes the making of connections in a range of ways with the complex diversity of the place/city in which they occur, engaging inhabitants (as well as visitors) as audience/participants. Each situation has different stories to tell when it comes to the particular tension of art-biennial-city, so the premise is to narrate these varying stories, not so much to draw general conclusions about biennials per se as to see how the artistic engagements they facilitate as incursions into public life contribute vitally – or not as the case may be – to an understanding of how those cities operate. In fact, the Istanbul Biennial in 2017 (themed ‘a good neighbour’), which features in Chapter 5, was premised on the notion of telling tales of urban neighbourhoods, producing a 600-page volume entitled Stories to accompany its exhibition catalogue (Albayrak et al 2017b). Moreover, as the director of the 2008 Yokohama Triennial, Tsutomo Mizusawa, proclaims (in Gardner’s and Green’s citation), with the proliferation of biennials globally, ‘there is a danger of them becoming homogenized. But, if you make performance the underlying theme, then the experience is of that place and that time. It naturally becomes differentiated from other events’ (Gardner and Green 2016: 258; my emphasis). To delineate briefly the emergent themes of the five chapters: Folkestone (UK), with its relatively new triennial, tells a story of regeneration and its continuing challenges; Münster (Germany), with its decennial Sculpture Projects, tells a story of rupture and assimilation (in time); Venice (Italy), with its longstanding Biennale, tells a story of globalization and stagnation; Belgrade (Serbia), with its Mikser Festival, tells a story of creative energy and entropy; and Istanbul (Turkey), 26

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celebrating the 15th edition of its Biennial in 2017, tells a story of sustained urban engagement over the years – its 9th Biennial in 2005 actually took ‘Istanbul’ as its governing theme – amid adverse political tensions. It should be clarified at this point that the term ‘biennial/biennale’ is applied loosely in this book to refer to stagings of large-scale urban art events that do indeed function according to a premise of assumed repetition but not necessarily every two years (see O’Neill’s definition 2012: 52–3). While ‘perennial’ is a term one sees bandied about in biennial discourse, there appears to be a general understanding in the meantime that ‘biennial’ captures the essential terms by which such repeating art events operate irrespective of their frequency. ‘Perennial’ may be more correct technically as a catch-all temporal descriptor, but no single event would ever make use of the term – although the Venice Biennale, which seems to have been around forever, would be a contender – and so the term has struggled to gain purchase. As the editors of The Biennial Reader sum up in its introduction, unpronounceably entitled ‘Biennialogy’: [F]or many ‘biennial’ refers less to a specific periodicity […] than to a type or model of large-scale, perennial, international manifestation that has become so common in the landscape of exhibition-making today. Often grandiose in scale, sometimes dispersed across several locations in a city, at times locally embedded through site-specific commissions while being global in ambition, and often involving discursive components such as symposia, extensive publications, or even accompanying journals alongside a group show featuring, for the most part, a panoramic view of a new generation of artists, the ‘biennial’ has become shorthand for many wildly different recurring exhibitions of contemporary art. (Filipovic et al 2010b: 14) As it happened, 2017 represented another moment of convergence for several European art events, replicating the twenty-first-century ‘Grand Tour syndrome’ of 2007 identified by Gardner and Green (2016: 257). This included the quinquennial documenta in Kassel and Art Basel – which has made the ultimate globalizing move of translocating additionally to both Miami, Florida and Hong Kong – and those covered in this book. Thus, in 2017, Venice and Istanbul were mounting their respective (two-year) biennials, while Folkestone staged its fourth Triennial, Belgrade its ninth annual Mikser Festival, and Münster its fifth decennial Sculpture Projects. Seizing this instance of present-day temporal convergence as the focal point for each case study is intended, crucially, to mark out the book’s endeavour as being very much ‘of the moment’ rather than a historical one (and, therefore, certainly rooted more in the realm of live performance than art history). This amounts in part to what might be called realizing the ‘presentness’ of a spatiotemporal here and now – as seen in the trope of encounter performed by me as writer (sometimes in dialogue with co-authors) – but it also relates to a definition of ‘contemporary’ provided by Kompatsiaris in which he quotes from Osborne’s Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (2013): INTRODUCTION

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[A]s the philosopher Peter Osborne argues, to name something as ‘contemporary’ in the context of contemporary art is ‘to make a claim for its significance in participating in the actuality of the present’ (2013: 2). It is, in other words, to recollect the specificity of a gesture that both grasps the particularity of the moment and (re)produces this moment in an interrogating fashion. The ‘contemporary’ then expresses a style and poetics of doing clustering around qualities of critique, reflexivity and self-consciousness as well as an urge to dissect and question the current moment. The biennial is then ‘contemporary’ to the extent that it inhabits this style and poetics and reproduces it varyingly across social landscapes. (Kompatsiaris 2017: 181) One way of thinking about the work of Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe is as a site-specific enterprise. In other words, the approach to the complexity of a particular city might be equated with one typically taken by the contemporary artist seeking to devise a piece of site-based work there. It is trying to connect to things going on in the city – often ‘bubbling under’ – via the medium of artworks and the events in which they are enshrined. A conceptual cue in this regard, which effectively sets up the practical as well as ‘metaphorical’ structure of the book, is provided by an artwork that was presented at the first Folkestone Triennial in 2008 by the Italian artist Patrick Tuttofuoco. This piece, entitled Folkestone Express, picked up on the rather unexpected fact that the town was once a destination of the glamorous Trans-European Orient Express train from Istanbul. The artwork

FIGURE I.1  FOLKESTONE (2008), Patrick Tuttofuoco, 14th September 2017 28

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exists in two parts. First, a large-scale sculptural installation sited slightly beyond the town’s former station on the harbour arm mole, facing inland on Folkestone’s eastern side and made up of the ten letters that form the town’s name (Figure I.1); and, second, a ninety-minute ‘road movie’ in which the artist and his camera crew are seen trailing across Europe – like the Orient Express – seeking the letters that will eventually constitute the installation on the harbour arm in the form of moulded steel. Each letter comes about as the consequence of an adventure on the road in the various cities concerned (historically stops of the Orient Express). For example, the neon tubes discovered on a visit to Bucharest’s Nikola Tesler Museum – named after the inventor of ‘free energy’ – lead to the formation of the letter ‘L’. And so a resonant sense emerges of contemporary urban tales of European time and space being collected and carried like hard-won trophies to Folkestone, symbolically offering the town the opportunity to form its identity as a place that has the potential, figuratively and literally, to ‘look to’ Europe. As Tuttofuoco explains (in the catalogue edited by the Triennial’s curator Andrea Schlieker): The Orient Express is chosen here as a vector connecting Folkestone’s and Europe’s history. Represented in the film and the sculpture, the journey acts as a way to re-create the sense of mobility and also as a symbol for multinationality linked by the railway, whose route includes Folkestone as one of its destinations. So Folkestone not only represents the final destination of a physical journey, but also the boundary of a symbolic organism, as it was when the town was part of greater European mobility and connection. (Schlieker 2008b: 96) Tuttofuoco spells out the 2.7-m-high letters that make up ‘FOLKESTONE’, pinning a tale (of travel) to each one, and reflects this citation back to the town, so that every time its citizens look out across the outer harbour to the sea that is the English Channel – and, by implication, to the Europe that lies beyond – the name of the place in which they dwell is reiterated for them against this vast natural backdrop. Thus, a form of hieroglyph that seeks to connect name to place has been etched literally into the material fabric of the townscape, not merely to identify the location, as a road sign might, but to tie it to certain anecdotal mnemonics that integrate it in a ‘European picture’. Even if you have not seen the accompanying film of Folkestone Express, which recounts the detail of the various European tales of acquisition, the siting of the installation as event and as continuing intervention begin to generate their own form of ‘urban mythology’ as the object of discussion and conjecture. This is confirmed, in fact, by what appears to be a neat ‘sleight of hand’ inasmuch as the piece, which is one of those that has been adopted by Folkestone Artworks as a permanent work, has since dropped the ‘Express’ part of its title, leaving only the name of the town.14 This would suggest that the artwork has deliberately evolved since 2008 – along with the town – with emphasis now being placed on the capacities of the physical installation to resonate independently, as an enduring fixture, rather than in necessary conjunction with the European INTRODUCTION

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adventures presented in the film. The year 2008 was also the year that the last Orient Express passed through Folkestone, so dropping ‘Express’ from the title symbolically captures the disappearance of a perennial feature of the town since the nineteenth century. The proposed ‘route’ of Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe adopts the same ‘continental poles’ as the Orient Express of Folkestone and Istanbul, sandwiching the evenly dispersed European stops of Münster, Venice and Belgrade in between. In each case it will be a matter of identifying issues or characteristics that are currently particular to these cities and how the recurring art events staged in them seek to engage with those features of the place, as well with the urban environment in general. While the focus is principally on the specificity of the cities concerned, rather than the continental entity that is ‘Europe’, these urban portraits nevertheless serve as flashpoints that cause key issues about the state of play of Europe to rise to the surface. One need only gesture towards the way those European termini of Folkestone and Istanbul relate respectively in the meantime to the question of EU membership to make the point: at one end of the spectrum, as a UK ‘frontier town’ on the south coast, Folkestone sits on the very fault-line of an imminent British exit from Europe, not merely on account of being a ‘first receiver’ of migration – the mythical threat of which has served decisively to drive the whole Brexit initiative – but also in view of the fact that one of the practical and logistical repercussions of a UK exit will involve coming to terms with the reintroduction of extensive border security controls on vital and voluminous freight traffic seeking to make the Channel crossing. Moreover, the very fact of Brexit being finalized and scheduled to commence in January 2021, and what that may signify for the future of the EU in turn, not least in relation to the question of migration and perceptions of ‘fortress Europe’, also represents one of the main tremors on the Folkestone fault-line. Istanbul, meanwhile, similarly represents a fault-line, in its case that between continents (Europe/Asia) and cultures (modernizing/traditionalist). After many years of Turkey harbouring aspirations and agitating diplomatically to join the EU club, its government’s more recent, post-coup position under President Erdoğan has been to pull back on the ideal of EU accession and focus instead on a heightened Islamic traditionalism, including, if anything, worrying ambitions to revisit the parameters of the former medieval empire of the Ottomans, towards the Balkans on the one hand and the Levant on the other. Like Folkestone, then, Istanbul finds itself geo-politically implicated in the notion of turning its back on EU integration, in its case by virtue of Turkey simply relinquishing its stated ambition to join in the first place. How ironic that it would be precisely the propaganda of ‘a potential invasion of 70 Million Turks’ that would be deployed by the Brexit Leave campaign in 2016 to scare British citizens into voting for its cause based on the mythical perception of Turkey’s imminent accession to the EU. How doubly ironic that the momentum for the facilitation of that particular perception had been enhanced by Turkey recently agreeing a multibillion Euro deal with the EU to accept and contain streams of refugees escaping 30

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its war-torn neighbour Syria, whose impulse otherwise would have been to try and penetrate ‘fortress Europe’ across the Mediterranean Sea, thereby taking the strain, at least for the interim, of what was a huge problem for the EU as a whole. Each chapter will attempt, then, to reflect critically on both the constitution of the particular city in question, as place – how it performs itself – and on the phenomenon in each instance of ‘biennial culture’ or, more broadly, the impact of contemporary art on the urban domain: how the artworks that form biennial ‘complexes’ engage with existing urban ecologies and, indeed, serve to construct specific urban imaginaries and realities.

Notes 1 Coventrieren, the German verb to describe the blanket bombing and annihilation of cities, was Hitler’s personal coinage in a speech given shortly after the flattening of the city in November 1940. 2 Coventry prides itself in being the first city in the world to have formed a twinned relationship with another city, that being Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in 1944. Post– Second World War its most important twinning among the twenty-six cities it is officially connected to now has probably been with the city of Dresden in eastern Germany (in 1956), which was effectively ‘counter-coventrated’ during the war by British bombers. Much joint peace and reconciliation work has been undertaken in the meantime and the city centre in Coventry boasts a Dresden Place. 3 To emphasize the aptness of the ghost metaphor, fifteen years after its online inauguration, the Virtual Fringe website continues to haunt cyberspace and can be accessed at: http://www.talkingbirds.co.uk/virtualfringe/pages/03_info.html (accessed 14 February 2019). Coventry is, incidentally, well known as the home of the early 1980s 2-tone band The Specials, whose most famous hit about the city was Ghost Town (although the video was evidently shot in London). 4 The curators Maria Hlavajová and Charles Esche specifically explored the concept of repetition and difference in relation to biennial culture in their contribution, entitled Einmal ist Keinmal (Once Is Never Enough), to the 2008 Brussels Biennial (which ironically only managed to occur once as it happens). See Esche and Hlavajová (2009) and Hlavajová (2010). 5 The key texts in this discourse, such as my research has led me to discover, are as follows, proving striking for the frequency of the term “global” in their titles. See Filipovic and Vanderlinden (2005); Buddensieg and Weibel (2007); Belting and Buddensieg (2009); Seijdel (2009); Filipovic (2010); Vogel (2010); Kester (2011); Belting, Birken, Buddensieg, and Weibel (2011); O’Neill (2012); Bauer and Hanru (2013a); Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013); Eilat et al (2015); Gardner and Green (2016); Jones (2016) and Kompatsiaris (2017). 6 See M. Bejenaru, ‘The “Periferic” Project: A New Beginning’, http://www.periferic.org/ periferic5_en.html (accessed 14 April 2019). 7 Cited in R. Martinez and V. Misiano (eds), Manifesta 1, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1996, Rotterdam: Manifesta, 1996, p.25. 8 The final days of a calamitous exit process from the EU by the UK are in train as I write. 9 I suspect Panos Kompatsiaris found himself in a similar situation of limited field mobility in choosing to restrict his ethnographic focus to two European case studies (Berlin and Athens) in The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials (2017). INTRODUCTION

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10 Ferguson and Hoegsberg write: ‘Recently, there has been a development in the biennial genre toward so-called discursive exhibitions. These include exhibitions that question the format of the curatorial project from within, or foreground symposia, platforms for discussion, research, and educational programming, which is to say, they attend to pedagogy, aesthetics, and knowledge production. One might in this case also speak of the emergence of curatorial projects that could be called “durational”: long-term, process-oriented works-in-progress that unfold over the course of several months or even years. If the “discursive turn” in exhibition practice more generally has shifted the focus from the exclusive presentation of concrete and autonomous objects (display) in art institutions of various kinds (museums, art centres, Kunsthallen) towards the engagement of the audience in listening, reading, studying, or participating rather than merely looking, it has in the last decade become more and more the case that biennials and other such perennial exhibitions have become privileged platforms for exhibiting discursivity’ (Ferguson and Hoegsberg 2010: 361). 11 In discussing one particular instance of urban engagement in Denmark, Mick Wilson refers to the patient, drawn-out work of the art in question as being understood best as the ‘multimodal disclosure of a situation’ (Doherty and Wilson 2011: 306). 12 In Nancy’s inoperative community, ‘community’ is premised effectively on its ‘impossibility’, on recognizing its limits and limitations or, indeed, its ‘lack of identity’. As Nancy himself puts it: ‘Being in common has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being in common means, on the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity’ (Nancy 1991: xxviii). Being ‘inoperative’ (désœuvre) implies a self-reflexive un-working or un-doing in which the self-imposed questioning of the terms by which a given social constituency establishes its own legitimacy is the only thing that might confirm it as legitimate. 13 One Day Sculpture was a ten-month project (August 2008–May 2009) in New Zealand curated by David Cross and Claire Doherty, involving twenty commissioned public artworks each of which was installed for the duration of just one day. Among other motives its purpose was deliberately to challenge the perennial presumption of permanence and enduring impact in the siting of public artworks. 14 The installation was temporarily removed and refurbished as part of the harbour arm development on Folkestone’s seafront, so it was not in fact to be seen at the 2014 Triennial. Folkestone Artworks is an arm of the Creative Foundation (now Creative Folkestone), assuming responsibility for securing Triennial artworks as permanent installations (as appropriate).

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1  Folkestone Turned: Of Fault-Lines and Fairy-Tales

‘FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL’ proclaimed a large colourful banner draped over the side of the town’s inner harbour wall as you looked out towards the old harbour arm and station, still undergoing major renovation work in the late summer of 2017. If you then swivelled slightly to your left, allowing your gaze to travel up to the top of the nearby Eastern cliffs, one of Folkestone’s five Martello lookout towers – built at the start of the nineteenth century to pre-empt a possible Napoleon invasion that never materialized, of course1 – displayed the same slogan in even larger lettering, just to make sure any passing boats got the message (Figure 1.1). And, with a further quarter turn, your back now to the sea, the statement again, several times over: painted on to the low white wall bordering an island of flowers and plant life on Harbour Street, strung across the lower end of Old High Street, and then on vertical banners at intervals all the way up the central drag of Tontine Street. If you’d arrived in Folkestone by train, a huge billboard at the station entrance, bearing the self-same motto, will have been the very first thing to greet you as a visitor, immediately offering you one possible frame through which to contemplate the town, one that implicitly posed the question: by virtue of what exactly could the town of Folkestone be called an art school? The intervention was the work of that past-master of polychrome, DIY sandwich-board messaging, Bob and Roberta Smith (just a single person, of course) and only one of four component parts of his Folkestone Triennial 2017 project commission, though certainly the most visible one in the context of the urban environment. The other three elements incorporated, first, a series of twelve short how-to-go-about-making-art video films, featuring the artist as inspirational teacher. Second, the creation of a ‘Faculty’ running a programme of art instruction during the Triennial for a selection of committed pupils from the town’s high schools and colleges. This involved a large, multi-skilled team of resident artists, with work and exhibition space – open and accessible to the public – at the Triennial’s former visitor centre on the corner of Tontine and Old High Streets (where the artist’s dozen videos were also on show).2 And, third, a

FIGURE 1.1  FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL (2017), Bob and Roberta Smith, 15th September 2017

‘Directory’ of all the many and varied art-based initiatives and facilities existing in the meantime in the central Creative Quarter of Folkestone: from adult education at The Cube building at the north end of Tontine Street,3 to the work of local community artists Strange Cargo – whose presence in the town predates by several years the move to commence serious regeneration initiatives at the onset of the new century – to the Folkestone Fringe which was inaugurated in 2007, in anticipation of the first Folkestone Triennial the following year, as an artist-led platform for nurturing local arts events and activities on an ongoing basis. These four components combined already give a hint of the sheer volume and breadth of contemporary art practice and arts-based learning taking place in Folkestone and, therefore, begin to reveal what Bob and Roberta Smith was getting at with FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL. Struck by the concerted efforts on the part of the local Creative Foundation (renamed Creative Folkestone in 2019) – which instituted the Triennial in 2008 and has substantially funded it ever since – to establish creativity, the arts and education as the drivers of urban regeneration in Folkestone, the artist resolved to make an artwork that would constitute a response to the challenge implicitly thrown down by those particular emphases. His multi-part intervention is, then, first, a form of acknowledgement of the noticeable infiltration of a revitalized cultural life into the town in a relatively short space of time and, second, a kind of advertisement for the intrinsic creative potential lurking in the place – extant arts activity apart – in terms of its history, its geological and geographical morphology and its current socio-cultural ‘life’. All of 34

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these reveal it to be very much a town living within the tensions of several spatiotemporal and cultural-political meeting points, be that where the land converges with the sea, the UK intersects with continental Europe, the more salubrious western half of Folkestone borders its run-down eastern counterpart along a north-south spine right in the town’s centre, or where a thriving past identity as popular seaside resort, inaugurated in the nineteenth century, encounters the beginnings of what turn out to be a drawn-out decline in the latter part of the twentieth century. But if those instances all represent one form of conceptual ‘edge’ addressed by Bob and Roberta Smith’s art school take on the town – to bring into play the 2017 Triennial’s governing theme of ‘double edge’ – the other is surely to proffer Folkestone as an example of creative inspiration to the broader art world and implicitly declare ‘there’s a lot artists can learn from this place, actually – about art, but also about the state of things in the UK at this moment in time’. There have been a few instances in recent times of curators or commissioned artists using their exhibition briefs effectively to set themselves up as alternative ‘art schools’ – generally parading under the banner of ‘new institutionalism’ – as a way of asking fundamental, socially-engaged questions about what art is for and, therefore, how it should be taught. In other words, the art school as artwork. The failed 2006 Manifesta exhibition in Cyprus, later resurrected in Berlin, famously comes to mind, as do experiments by the likes of Tanya Bruguera and Thomas Hirschhorn (see Bishop 2012; Voorhies 2017). While such critical questions may similarly underpin FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL, the impulse for the endeavour is rooted far less in formal theories of pedagogy and the socio-cultural critique of institutions (often enacted for the benefit of an already educated ‘art audience’) than in a playful, down-to-earth, hands-on nurturing of creativity in a way that anyone can identify with. Watching Bob and Roberta Smith ‘at play’ in his studio or roving the streets and beaches of Folkestone in his video films is a bit like spending quality time with a favourite uncle as he potters resourcefully and intuitively in his garden shed, opening your eyes to all kinds of weird and wonderful creative possibilities using the most everyday of materials, often in the form of discarded junk or based on chance juxtapositions. Even the ‘homework’ the artist issues at the end of each film comes over as inspirational: a task one is eager to fulfil rather than a self-consciously pedagogical chore. ‘We are the stuff around us’, the artist declares in one film entitled What Is That?, implicitly pointing the viewer in the direction of the potential that is to be unearthed in the town. And, while the approach appears straightforward and effortless in his performance, there is nothing facile about it. The artist’s disarming gift is that he can subtly introduce the most complex questions of art, humanity and urban living in the most quotidian way, thereby paving the way for creativity to infiltrate and flow naturally in the collective practices and consciousness of the town – as if it belonged. The deeper political implication is that the making of art is inherently humanizing, inclusive and democratic, and therefore has the capacity to lead people away from damaging, corrosive and constrictive ways of thinking and acting. FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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Returning us to the hub of FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL, which is the ‘open space’ at 3–7 Tontine Street, Michael Craig-Martin’s 2017 ‘double edge’ commission Folkestone Lightbulb seemed to capture perfectly the spirit and moment of the town’s recent resurgence (Figure 1.2). Positioned effectively at the gateway of the emerging Creative Quarter, the simple, enlarged outline of a coiled energy bulb in shades of pink, blue and green adorned the narrow corner façade of the building in which Bob and Roberta Smith’s ‘Faculty’ had based itself on the ground floor. The façades of the building as a whole had been divided into separate, rectilinear panels of vibrant colour – lilac, sky blue, orange and so on – forming a kaleidoscopic cornerstone to the Creative Quarter. It was  – and remains  – unashamedly an image of hope, illumination and inspiration, apparently celebrating at a level of representation the ‘Eureka moment’ at which someone had the bright idea of investing in the area’s rehabilitation via the arts, creativity and education. At the same time, it is an energy bulb and, therefore, suggests not so much the triggering of an instantaneous event at the flick of a switch as a delayed reaction, as something that warms to the maximum potential of its task in the fullness of time – a slow burn evolution. That in turn points to the imperative of a future sustainability: the implementation of this step change must not be merely a fad, a momentary upswing or, indeed, a prelude to exploitative gentrification, but an improvement that is both lasting and inclusive. An energy bulb, moreover, implies sensitivity to key factors relating to the sustainability of the environment, such as clean and renewable energies and climate change. As

FIGURE 1.2  Folkestone Lightbulb (2017), Michael Craig-Martin and FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL (2017), Bob and Roberta Smith, 15th September 2017 36

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such the coiled form of Craig-Martin’s lightbulb not only signifies an appreciation of its aesthetic design but also warns of a direction or momentum that has the capacity to spiral either way: upwards or downwards. Be that as it may, both Craig-Martin’s and Smith’s engagements with Folkestone in their respective ways assert the recognition of infusions and circulations of life-giving energies into the town and it is no coincidence perhaps that one of its famous historical sons and one-time resident is William Harvey of whom there is a statue overlooking the Channel at Langhorne Gardens. In 1628 Harvey made the revolutionary discovery, as Richard Sennett explains in Flesh and Stone, that ‘the heart pumps blood through the arteries, and receives blood to be pumped from the veins. This discovery challenged the ancient idea that the blood flowed through the body because of its heat’ (Sennett 1994: 257). Importantly, Sennett pinpoints the way such new-found knowledge of the internal workings of the human body on the one hand ‘led to new ideas about public health’ (256) and, on the other, became analogous with urban design. Thus, ‘Harvey’s revolution helped change the expectations and plans people made for the urban environment. […] Planners sought to make the city a place in which people could move and breathe freely, a city of flowing arteries and veins through which people streamed like healthy blood corpuscles’ (256). As such, the ‘desire to put into practice the healthy virtues of respiration and circulation transformed the look of cities as well as the bodily practices within them. […] Planners thought that if motion through the city becomes blocked anywhere, the collective body suffers a crisis of circulation like that an individual body suffers during a stroke when an artery becomes blocked’ (263, 265). The latter sentiment certainly chimes with the perception of Folkestone at the advent of the twenty-first century, a town whose complexion had become positively anaemic so blocked were its circulatory systems. In short, Folkestone was a basket case in urgent need of tender loving care in a whole range of ways. What follows, then, is a brief contextualization of its circumstances: how the town arrived at such a point of decline and how it endeavoured to extricate itself. More importantly for our purposes: how the introduction of an international triennial of contemporary art in 2008 played its part in the ‘fairy-tale’ of regeneration.

Ruination to repair As a ‘frontier town’ on the South-East Kent coast located, like its near and probably more famous neighbour Dover, at the narrowest crossing point to France, it is no surprise really that Folkestone’s origins can be traced back a long way to the Mesolithic era and, later, include the arrival of the Romans in Britain. The existence of a convenient river, running from its source in the North Downs above the coastline’s renowned chalk cliffs through the town to the English Channel below, underscores the point: even if the river is culverted these days, strategically this was a good place to build a settlement. And, although staying FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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relatively contained in size – to this day it remains a town rather than a city, while nevertheless being decidedly urban in character – Folkestone’s significance through the ages, but particularly since the mid-nineteenth century, within the context of the UK as a whole should not be underestimated. Until the advent of an era of package holidays and cheap flights abroad in the 1960s, Folkestone had thrived for a century or so, in one incarnation at least, as a seaside holiday resort whose attendant facilities contributed significantly to sustaining the local economy. The town’s role as a place of leisure was reflected, for example, in the existence of a vast and popular amusement park in the Marine Parade area on its western seafront, with a funicular lift powered solely by gravity and water conjoining it with the popular Leas cliff-top promenade above;4 a coastal park and pebbled beach, with requisite bathing amenities stretching the length of the western undercliff; an extensive wood and wrought iron pier poking out into the sea; to say nothing of Sunny Sands beach at Coronation Parade on the other, eastern side of the harbour area. Facilitating the development of Folkestone as desirable, accessible resort had been the earlier arrival of the railways in the 1840s, which had created, in turn, the demand for the installation of these late nineteenth-century leisure features. Thus, the town was cast as an appealing place to visit and stay, with a broad spectrum of lower to upper classes looking to spend their holidays there or even take up residence. The Victorian and Edwardian splendour of monolithic grand hotels, still functional to some degree, is there for all to see along the promenade of The Leas on the western cliffs, with its fantastic views across the Channel. The introduction of the railways during the course of the nineteenth century had witnessed the construction of the line from London to Dover – today the UK’s first high-speed route (HS1) – and, by century’s end, the beginnings of crosschannel ferry traffic to the European continent. The present-day harbour arm, a solid stone pier with a leftward knee-bend halfway along, whose construction led to the formation of Folkestone’s inner and outer harbours, had been acquired by the South Eastern Railway Company in 1842. Having bequeathed the town with what remains to this day the highest brick-arched railway viaduct in the world – set well back from the sea and looming large over the roofs of the town centre – the company proceeded to situate a curved two-platform railway station directly on the harbour pier at which passengers from London could step off their trains and straight on to ferries to Europe (and vice versa). Indeed, for a time trains such as the renowned Trans-Europe Orient Express – on its way to Istanbul via Paris and Venice – were able to trundle directly on to the ferries and continue their untrammelled journeys. Surprisingly the Orient Express only gave up stopping in Folkestone in 2008 – the year of the first Triennial – but channel ferries had long since given up landing and departing. The demise of cross-channel operations, including hovercraft traffic, followed as a combined consequence of the Euro Tunnel’s inauguration – whose construction had at least provided much local employment while it lasted in the 1980s and 1990s – and the fact of the far larger 38

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port of Dover a few miles east being able to operate a 24-hour ferry service, since, unlike Folkestone, its harbour was not tidal. By the advent of the millennium Folkestone had evidently lost a clear sense of its purpose and identity as a place to live, let alone visit. Many of the buildings in the central area surrounding Payers Park, above all on the main arteries of Tontine Street, which leads down to the harbour front, and the cobbled Old High Street, were dilapidated and boarded up. Local unemployment was high, with key industries, services and businesses in the town having gone to the wall. Educational achievement was statistically of the lowest standard in the country, which pointed to bleak post-school prospects for young people regardless of whether or not they chose to remain in the town. As Schlieker reported on the occasion of the first Triennial in 2008: Folkestone Harvey Central ward, which is the focus for the Creative Quarter and much of the Triennial, is ranked worst in Kent for health deprivation and worst in the south-east (out of 5,139 wards) for employment, putting it in the bottom 0.4 per cent nationally. East Folkestone has 40 per cent unfit housing (overcrowding, damp, lack of basic facilities). In 2003 only eight per cent of pupils at Channel School (which serves central and eastern Folkestone) achieved GCSE A*-C grades, making it the fourth poorest performing secondary school in the country. A high percentage of the working-age population is in longterm unemployment (34.32 per cent) and has no formal qualification. Reported crime is high. (Schlieker 2008a: 15) A seemingly unstoppable downward spiral of Folkestone’s general fortunes was the gloomy order of the day, then, applying as much in relative terms to the more affluent western side of town – where its imposing, once-grand hotels on the cliff tops struggled to attract guests, and a chill breeze of abandonment and ruin ghosted around the area’s stuccoed buildings – as to the disaffected, predominantly working-class east. In comes the fairy-tale prince, one Sir Roger De Haan, an archetypal ‘local boy made good’ entrepreneur with a conscience, who had made his vast cash pile by capitalizing among other things on the idea of offering package holidays and global tours abroad, specifically tailored to the over-fifties, as the owner of the renowned Saga empire. Not without some irony, then, the misfortunes of Folkestone could be attributed in part precisely to the de Haan family enterprise, stretching back to the 1960s when his father had first begun to implement in modest form what was to become Saga’s commercial strategy (Ewbank 2011: 13).5 So, even a fairytale prince has his flaws and contradictions, but these are easily erased perhaps if he displays a sense of ethical and social responsibility that resolves him to ‘give something back’ to the community, as the ‘humble’ rhetoric of those who belatedly discover their consciences almost always seems to phrase it.6 To de Haan’s redeeming and, as the case may turn out to be, enduring credit, his brand FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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of pride in and duty towards the town of his upbringing is of the sort that views donating millions – which were available to him as a result of selling the Saga empire for £1.35 billion in 2004 – not merely as an advancement of the lolly by an arms-length patron. Thus, as cultural benefactor, he has been centrally involved, via the Roger de Haan Charitable Trust, in determining how his investment is applied, resolving to support the establishment of the aptly named Creative Foundation in 2003, with an experienced executive team and board of trustees whose declared strategy, as we have seen, is essentially to galvanize the town by devising and implementing an array of key sustainable initiatives based strictly around the arts, creative industries and education. This includes setting up and commissioning the building of brand new educational establishments. So, for example, a well-resourced state secondary school, The Folkestone Academy, with a special focus on arts, media and European culture, and designed by starchitect Norman Foster’s practice, has been up and running successfully since 2007, effectively replacing the doomed Channel School mentioned by Schlieker above (71–2). A further aim of the Foundation was to develop a ‘creative quarter’ in the central area around Payers Park. This also witnessed the opening of a multi-purpose arts centre in 2010, the Quarterhouse on Tontine Street, with a full programme of events running throughout the year (from films to touring theatre to literature festivals). More telling perhaps, in terms of widespread, low-key, slow-burn revitalization, has been the policy of steadily buying up derelict properties in the quarter, of which there are many, restoring them and re-letting them at reasonable, affordable rates exclusively to artists as studios and apartments or to creative enterprises or educational initiatives. An important principle of urban regeneration was thereby being asserted wherein it was not architects, designers and planners who were the first to be invited in to introduce fresh, galvanizing perspectives about the future of the town, but artists.7 So far there have been some ninety of these developments and the effect on the area since the first Triennial in 2008 is palpable, based on an impression acquired simply – albeit unscientifically – by taking a casual stroll around the streets in question. Not only has there been an explosion of activity and vitality directly associated with these properties but an attendant effect has also occurred with, for instance, cafés, bars and restaurants seizing the opportunity to tap into the increased presence and circulation of people. So, a spiral gradually yet visibly reversed from downward to upward. It is important to acknowledge in all this the ethical integrity of the endeavour, which has consciously sought to avoid creating a so-called Hoxton effect when it comes to the perceived threat of gentrification. As Ewbank explains, de Haan’s benevolent solution, which would appear to typify the latter’s general desire to be positively constructive, established the key step-by-step conditions listed below. Reading almost like a dream charter for regeneration, these ensured among other things that the control of properties would remain with the Creative Foundation and that rental profits would be ploughed back into its projects: 40

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●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Acting on Creative Foundation advice, the de Haan Charitable Trust would buy a portfolio of buildings in the Old Town, retaining the freeholds for the long term; The Creative Foundation would plan and manage the process of restoring the buildings to a high standard – or rebuilding them where necessary, drawing on de Haan Charitable Trust funds for the purpose; On completion of the refurbishment or rebuilding projects, the properties would be leased to the Creative Foundation on 125 year leases at zero rent; The Creative Foundation would then be free to let out the completed properties to creative or educational tenants, on the condition that the rents it charged remained affordable; The Creative Foundation would retain the income from rents to fund its own staffing and running costs and to manage and maintain the property portfolio; Once the break-even point was reached, the Creative Foundation would invest any surpluses in running arts events, festivals and educational programmes in the Old Town and beyond.

(33–4)

Of course amid such ‘model practice’ in developing a Creative Quarter it should not be forgotten that the factor making it all possible was de Haan’s willingness to draw on his vast accumulated wealth. This is clearly Folkestone’s good fortune but not generally the case in situations of deprivation and decline where it is usually down to local councils to strive to implement urban improvements with severely limited resources. Moreover, a note of caution is in any case appropriate, based on the fact of planned developments being as yet incomplete. Thus, the situation nevertheless bears the potential of being a familiar story of gentrification, particularly in relation to the pending harbour arm and western foreshore developments with which de Haan is also centrally involved, having, first, bought the whole harbour for £11 million in 2004 and, second, commissioned a masterplan for the entire seafront area from Terry Farrell Architects. Hobnobbing with the arts is, as is commonly known, a favourite tactic these days in nurturing a Richard-Florida-style ‘creative economy’ where art and creativity are arguably exploited primarily to generate economic rather than socio-cultural ‘capital’ (Florida 2002, 2005). Artists and other creative workers easily end up being the unacknowledged enactors of the invisible labour that produces a ‘creative urban buzz’ that proves economically lucrative. The danger clearly lurks, moreover, of bringing about displacements of locals and the desecration of a place’s intrinsic sense of itself, as well as subjecting the town to the limited-shelf-life prosperity of economic boom and bust that eventually leaves a depressed vacuum all over again. So the jury is still out on that score perhaps, but there is equally enough indication that it will not occur in Folkestone. The objectives of the Creative Foundation are based on engaging in a genuine multi-pronged experiment to integrate educational initiatives and creative practices in general, and visual art in particular, in such a way that they will have FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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a positive and enduring impact on the town on their own terms, rather than as adjuncts to or instruments of another agenda. One factor which speaks both to the integrity and vulnerability to failure of the enterprise is that de Haan’s original purchase of the harbour was motivated in fact by the optimistic desire to provide for possible expansion of the modest university facility that his endeavours had brought to the town as a further dimension of his education strategy (Ewbank 2011: 65). University Centre Folkestone had opened its doors as a satellite of Canterbury Christ Church University in 2007, focussing on offering degrees in the visual and performing arts. However, as a salutary warning perhaps of the sheer risk involved and difficulty of sustaining such well-meaning revitalizing ventures, the Centre was forced in 2013 to return its operation to the Canterbury campus and close down in Folkestone owing to complaints from students about a lack of adequate study resources and support. So, somewhat ironically perhaps (in view of Bob and Roberta Smith’s initiative), this was a formally constituted art school that didn’t make the grade.

The Triennial So to the Triennial itself, which has been another major project initiative of the Creative Foundation in the last decade. Over four successive Triennials, beginning in 2008, art has been key in attempting to foster a sense of movement and vitality in a stagnant place that appeared to have lost sight of why it existed. Arguably, by virtue of the Triennials themselves coming to pass as major undertakings against unlikely odds, a palpable willingness has been generated among an ever-growing number of citizens to begin to put creative ideas into practice themselves – to be flexible, imaginative and open to change in conceiving of the future of the town. This is precisely the groundswell of local energy that Bob and Roberta Smith recognized and sought to amplify in FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL. While for some local artists and residents the approach of the Triennial organizers in the early years was seen as too much of a top-down invasion by outsiders, it is also evident that the sense of disquiet and opposition arising on this basis has had the positive effect of fuelling its own creative initiatives with the development of a popular fringe arts movement in the town that sustains itself beyond just the limited period of the Triennial event. By the time of the third Triennial in 2014, moreover, the representation of local artists within the parameters of the official event was beginning to make its presence felt to a significant degree. In particular, Strange Cargo had been commissioned for the second time by then and Diane Dever, who had inaugurated the Folkestone Fringe in 2007, collaborated with another local artist, Jonathan Wright, in the dispersed installation work Pent Houses which features significantly later in this chapter. Dever has been the leading light in an indefatigable campaign to champion the preservation of a 42

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sense of locality in Folkestone’s creative revolution, in terms of both nurturing the work of local practitioners and arts initiatives and paying attention to the specificities of the town in terms of its complex historical, geographical, cultural and social evolution. Her commission for the 2017 Triennial, which involved creating an ‘urban room’ in the relic of the old Customs House at the former station on the harbour arm in collaboration with the architectural collective The Decorators, typifies the substance of that commitment and will be discussed in the conclusion to this chapter. An indication of the regard that Dever has commanded, since the endeavours of the Creative Foundation and Roger de Haan’s reconceived plans for the town’s seafront began to take root in the first decade of this century, is that she was given the major responsibility of curating the programme of initiatives and events in the development of the new harbour arm as a public leisure facility. The development has witnessed the extension of the parameters and atmosphere of the Creative Quarter across the inner/outer harbour viaduct – newly reconfigured as a landscaped pedestrian walkway – through the renovated harbour station and out to the lighthouse at the tip of the harbour arm, with both permanent and pop-up installations centring on eating, drinking, the arts and entertainment to be encountered along the way. With each successive Triennial a different curatorial emphasis has been introduced, which is naturally reflected in the respective titles they have been given. Thus, 2008 commenced with ‘Tales of Time and Space’ and, as its curator Andrea Schlieker puts it, looked to draw out ‘the unique story of a town sidelined and in decline for years’, to which end twenty-two high-profile British and international artists were commissioned in the first instance to be ‘inspired by the specifics of the place they encountered’ (Schlieker 2008a: 12).8 At the same time the intention of the curatorial approach was evidently also to reach beyond the specificity of Folkestone, not only by finding common thematic cause around notions of time and space – artworks ‘resonating with many universal issues’ – but also by presenting ‘an ambitious exhibition of newly created works for the public realm, which furthers the debate about place-making and makes explicit the dramatic changes in public art over the last twenty years’ (12). A key principle that appeared to be cemented from the start, then – misplaced in the opinion of some – sought to resist an exclusively local introspection and instead position both Folkestone as place and the artworks of its Triennial within a broader conceptual complex. Thus, the town’s circumstances, its ‘sense of place’, were not merely its own business and ‘of its own making’ but related also to questions and situations arising and affected by ‘elsewhere’; and, similarly, the site-responsive works by visiting artists were not merely about the town but also engaged with timely questions about the shifting aesthetics of contemporary public art-making. Schlieker’s curatorial approach was unashamedly influenced by the prototype of Sculpture Projects Münster (SPM) which had been inaugurated in the western

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German city in 1977 and is the focus of the next chapter. As she announced, hopefully, in the 2008 catalogue, SPM had been an active model and inspiration [although] Folkestone is only a third of the size of Münster, and is without even a museum and cultural centre. Because of its ground-breaking venture, Münster has experienced an extraordinary change of image over the past 30 years, from conservative backwater to cultural innovator. We hope that such a paradigm may foreshadow a similar revolution in the perception and fortunes of Folkestone. (16) But, while there are clear similarities of form in comparison to the Folkestone Triennial, not least the desire to commission the engagement of international artists of the highest profile, and also shared narratives of pioneering struggle to gain acceptance, the circumstances of place are quite distinct in each case. Not to pre-empt the following chapter, apart from SPM occurring only once every decade, which imposes a telling rhythm on the event, as we shall see, it was consciously inaugurated as an exercise in art historical pedagogy: to attempt to introduce the most significant international contemporary sculpture to the sceptical citizens of Münster and thus persuade them of its relevance and value as modern art. With its governing sense of conservatism and Catholicism, Münster was essentially a bourgeois provincial city which had been flattened during the Second World War but had in the meantime been meticulously restored – many maintain over-restored – to its former state of gothic and baroque splendour. While there may have been a general sense of stagnation in both these urban situations, Münster’s was born more of a form of complacency and a lacking sense of adventure and imagination whereas Folkestone’s represented the highest excesses of urban infrastructural decline and social deprivation, as we have seen. The latter desperately needed regeneration as a matter of survival in a way that the former did not and so the ground upon which contemporary art installations were introduced differed markedly in each location. The slow-burn decennial cycle of SPM, taking its time to persuade citizens and eventually bring about change (above all in attitudes to contemporary art) as against the more urgent rhythm of the Triennial, is indicative of the differing degrees of perceived ‘emergency’ and, therefore, the strategies applied. It is quite sobering to reflect that by the time of the next Triennial in 2020, Folkestone will have staged as many such events in a period spanning a dozen years as Münster has in forty. Also curated by Schlieker, the second Triennial in 2011, ‘A Million Miles from Home’, logically extended the concept of an outward perspective: of looking ‘elsewhere’ (in order to locate oneself) and of finding oneself in unknown, uncertain territory, as its title clearly indicates. In some cases this involved importing tales of other countries – Egypt, Israel, Algeria, Kosovo, Brazil and so on – but it also invoked mythical places of the imagination, liminal places of exile or the challenging ‘other worldly wilderness’ of Christine Iglesias’s Martello Tower paradise on the 44

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western cliffs, which I will come to presently. Representing a concerted attempt to deal with profoundly pertinent contemporary and global problematics relating to the changing geo-political state of the world – incorporating migration and exile, displacement and difference, the redrawing of national borders and boundaries, as well as to redefinitions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ – this Triennial had obvious ambitions to show how art could open up unseen, unsuspected, through-thelooking-glass worlds that might appear tangential, ‘far away’ or even fantastical, but were actually related immediately to the life of the town. Indeed, the cleverness of the themed title of the event, ‘A Million Miles from Home’, perhaps lay in the tacit implication that it could not really be read and absorbed without mentally attaching the missing negation ‘not’ that is customarily associated with the use of that phrase. As such it drew attention to the town’s own precarious position as a form of threshold town, both in terms of its spatial location on the cliff-edge of Britain’s Europe-facing coastline – not a million miles from Calais9 – and in the current uncertainty of its temporal in betweenness as a place that had once thrived but was now in many respects ‘all at sea’ and in need of redefinition and repair. ‘Lookout’ was the title of the third Folkestone Triennial, which took place over nine weeks in the late summer and early autumn of 2014. Fittingly the term resonates in a range of ways, suggesting, first, the figure of sentinel, whose gaze implicitly looks both ways: inwards to protect and ensure all is well, outwards to detect and avert any approaching danger. Second, it effectively refers to the observation post or watch tower itself, an installation that aspires to offer an omniscient vantage point. And, third, it describes something for which one is personally liable, that constitutes one’s business or responsibility. Of course, the noun can also be mined further for its verbal connotations: the imperative mood of a warning issued with urgency. Or, in slightly calmer mode: to resolve to be alert and prepared, to search for and find (something), or simply to scan a given, sometimes panoramic view. There is, moreover, an implied dialectic in the notion of ‘looking out’ between the fundamentally defensive tendency of (jealously) guarding something against potential threats on the one hand and that of projecting into the unknown and embracing the uncertainty of that which is spatio-temporally distant on the other. With this we begin, within the context of the 2014 Folkestone Triennial, to get at one of the principal tensions in play in its thematic conception: the deliberately ambivalent ground of being rooted and place-bound, yet looking elsewhere for stimulus. Factoring in the role of the artist, the newly appointed curator of ‘Lookout’, Lewis Biggs, proposed the following model in the Triennial catalogue introduction: ‘We all constantly recalibrate our position (social, physical, intellectual, emotional) through our perspective on the world. From the known we gaze out over the unknown. We gain that perspective, that understanding, through triangulation, the knowledge of two fixed points determining the position of a third’ (Biggs 2014a: 4). Such a triangulation implies that the Triennial’s commissioned artworks ‘necessarily start with a “position” given to them’, first, ‘by the historic and geographic context of their placement’ and, second, by ‘the aesthetic conditions FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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of the materiality of their surroundings’ (4). The  third component in this composition is supplied by the artist who ‘adds his or her proposition’ (4). So, the artist-as-lookout draws attention to a spatio-temporal horizon that refers to both the promise and ‘beyond’ of other places and cultures – to that which we might welcome as new into our lives – and the imminent future: to that which may be some way off but nevertheless heading our way. Moreover, the lookout is, as Biggs concludes, ‘integral to Folkestone’s history as a port’, so the place itself is uniquely ‘exposed and sensitive to the global weather of economics, politics and migration. Art placed here can easily access this global weather, a weather that affects humanity as a whole’ (4). Pursuing the idea of triangulation one might see in the third Triennial a form of synthesis that emerges logically from the spatiotemporal dynamic – tales of home-and-away, past-and-present – proposed by the themes of Schlieker’s two previous Triennials. In this sense, to invoke Biggs’s terms of reference, the ‘positions’ established by previous Triennials at certain moments in Folkestone’s evolving re-constitution of itself served not only as a curatorial opportunity for the third Triennial to move things on – quite feasibly in critical contradistinction to the narratives and imaginaries conjured by what had taken place before – but also as a barometer of the extent to which circumstances in the town itself had shifted in the meantime. The fact of the latter called, in turn, for a new kind of artistic response. If a lookout can be said to look of necessity in two opposing directions, then a similar presumption of duality attaches to the notion of a ‘double edge’, which, as we have already seen in relation to Bob and Roberta Smith’s and Craig-Martin’s artworks, provided the curatorial point of departure for the 2017 Triennial. Thematically ‘double edge’ highlighted the many ways that Folkestone is positioned liminally on potential ‘fault-lines’ that can be said, in both actual and figurative terms, to reveal temporal, cultural, socio-political as well as spatial dimensions. As Biggs proposes of the term ‘edge’ in his introduction to the 2017 Triennial guide, a ‘dominant meaning is one of anxiety. The edge of the world and the edge of the future are scary cliff tops’ (Biggs 2017a: 4). The metaphorical converse of that particular edge, however, is balance, which allows us to be on (an) edge in a stimulating but safe way, like being on a bicycle, or skates or riding a wave; through art we can go ‘over the edge’ and look back from the unknown to the known. Then we realise that what we thought was teetering was in fact a state of balance. And the known becomes strange and the unknown safe. (5) Thus, ‘[a]n edge, even a cliff-edge or a knife-edge, can be a place on which to take a stand (with others) and learn how to act with cultural confidence’ (5). At the same time, the siting of art in an urban context forms a complex edge of its own, a meeting point or intersection that is premised on multiple forms of exchange already outlined in Biggs’s trope of triangulation. What the latter 46

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appears to pay less attention to is the role of the perambulating viewer – plotting a route between sited artworks, or perhaps, as town resident, living immanently with certain ones – who implicitly performs a form of self-directed curation across time and space, particularly given that several of the artworks from previous Triennials have evolved into permanent sitings (twenty-seven remained in place after three Triennials with a further sixteen due to be added from the 2017 edition).10 The plausibility of such a role validates itself inasmuch as the onus is on this interlocutor to forge imaginative, intellectual, physical and emotional links not only between the works of four Triennials conceived under different thematic signs but also between artworks and place, the latter being, ultimately, what all the sited works have in common. Thus, an important secondary triangulation arises in the conceptual and embodied navigation between artwork, place and interlocutor, leading to the formation of a kind of urban cartography, or poetics of place, that may be merely personal – carried, as it were, in the being of the individual concerned – or that may find public expression in some way (as in writing about it, for example). So, I am interested here in the way very varied, sited artworks can be made to resonate in the context of Folkestone as a place ‘on the edge’ that is looking to recharge its batteries, as well as in part in how those works may be induced effectively to strike up conversations – which may prove agonistic, in fact – or enact cross-pollinations among themselves, serving to form a kind of cross-town choreography or implicit composition that produces a narrative of place. This is one key way in which I see the integrated and enduring work (as  in labour) of art occurring – which is also contingent, of course, on the viewer’s work – and it can be a conversation that takes place across time as well. That is, not only in the sense of Folkestone’s past being conjured and brought to bear – and of course, faded grandeur, deprivation and dilapidation are frequently stimulating circumstances for artists to work within – but also inasmuch as artworks from different Triennials can be made to engage with one another. The possibility of the latter presents itself via a further, perhaps underestimated, dimension of the Creative Foundation’s brief, which is formally titled Folkestone Artworks. Obviously it draws exclusively on the sited works of successive Triennials, but it also consciously represents a separate venture in recognition of the fact that keeping such public artworks beyond the shelf-life of the Triennial event introduces a whole new set of challenges, however desirable the impulse to retain may be. The main ones relate, first, to the purchase of the installations as permanent acquisitions; second, to their maintenance in perpetuity, often in circumstances of considerable ‘environmental susceptibility’, be that in the form, for example, of adverse weather conditions or vandalism; and, third, to questions around health and safety and the associated need for ongoing site invigilation as is provided for each artwork for the duration of the Triennial event itself. In short, installing a public artwork for a period of nine weeks is not the same as securing its permanent siting and some pieces do not easily lend themselves to that transition. As it happens, Folkestone Artworks has managed to retain a notably FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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high percentage of pieces over four Triennials – approaching as many as half, in fact – thus casting a defining ‘web’ of sited art across the town which invites the viewer and/or citizen to assert his or her own curation. In keeping with the formal holding apart of individual Triennials and Folkestone Artworks, a curator such as Lewis Biggs is adamant that the curation as exhibition of any one Triennial is a selfcontained matter that bears no necessary relation to the curation of any previous Triennial or to the collection as a whole as acquired by the Artworks initiative, as he stated at a Q+A session during the two-day symposium The Sculpture Question (1st–2nd November 2014, Quarterhouse, Folkestone). Moreover, on a slightly different tack, there is an interesting tension between ephemerality and permanence that is worth reflecting on here. The assumption of artworks – in whatever form – confirming their value on account of their capacities to endure is, of course, a contentious one in the modern era, not least because of its alliance with notions of universality. In other words, one reason an artwork supposedly endures is because it transcends cultural boundaries, speaking to ‘all of humanity’ and thereby clinching its ‘greater significance’ over time. More recent perceptions of the purpose of art in public space – previously thought of as ‘sculpture’ – reflect a move away from the durable material object and towards an expanded temporal field where the life of the artwork-as-intervention may, for instance, be deliberately finite. As such, the enduring artwork may not be the goal where the enduring work of art may indeed be. And it may even be that the ephemeral artwork, as a short, sharp intervention, better enables the latter to come about. As the Bristol-based group Situations, which sponsored Michael Sailstorfer’s cryptic and controversial 2014 piece Folkestone Digs, put it in their 2014 manifesto outlining the new rules of public art: ‘Rule no. 2. It’s not forever. From the heretoday-gone-tomorrow of a “one day sculpture” to the growth of a future library over 100 years, artists are shaking up the life expectancy of public artworks. Places don’t remain still and unchanged, so why should public art?’ (Situations 2013: 4). The key point is that the work aspect of the sited work of art has shifted position from the discrete artwork itself and, indeed, the artist’s labour to produce it, to the relationship of the artwork to its particular location and to its interlocutors: to that which happens in between. And that ongoing work is something still worth valuing in terms of longevity, above all in terms of its specificity as a gift to the local community, as Sailstorfer’s intervention exemplifies. Paradoxically, Folkestone Digs is an artwork that retains its presence and permanence via its invisibility, as the following section explains.

Unearthing Folkestone In many ways Sailstorfer’s Folkestone Digs was the standout artwork of the 2014 Triennial in the sense that it made a big splash and got everyone talking (and digging), attracting immediate media and public attention – not just locally but both nationally and globally – at the onset of the nine-week Triennial event 48

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on 30th August. In one sense the effect of this widespread news coverage, which was carefully orchestrated by the artist in terms of the timing of press releases, represented an incalculable boon to the Triennial. The blaze of publicity got it known and off to a great start, and it enticed a whole host of visitors to Folkestone who would normally not even have heard of the event, let alone contemplated attending it. In another sense, though, the controversial content and open-ended participatory nature of the piece – again, carefully conceived by the artist for its probable impact – tended to soak up all the interest and energy of visitors, with attention inclining towards remaining exclusively with Sailstorfer’s installation rather than the Triennial as a whole at this early stage of the event. Briefly to explain the artwork’s conceit: on the eve of the Triennial’s opening the artist let it be known that he had spent £10,000 worth of his commission on producing thirty pieces of gold, all of which had been buried somewhere in the sand of Folkestone’s outer harbour area. The pieces weighed either 10g or 20g and were worth £250 and £500, respectively. Anyone was free to come and dig and try their luck at locating one of the pieces; finders would be keepers. This would only be possible, of course, when the tide was out, so the artwork implicitly aligned itself with one of the principal rhythms governing life in the town. The announcement naturally triggered a range of public reactions, from initial doubt as to the veracity of the claim – surely it was all a con – to disgust at the childishness of it and the unethical waste of subsidies for the arts. Where was the art? Surely this was the kind of thing to give artists and art a bad name. And so on. Importantly, however, it drew the crowds on that first sunny weekend of the Triennial, and one of the things that can surely be said for the piece is that it generated a form of temporary community – anticipated in the title of the work – born of a common sense of intrigue and purpose. While not every lucky finder necessarily identified themselves, there were one or two early on who did. That proved it was not a cheap gimmick and provided further incentive to keep looking. When I arrived in town at the tail-end of the 2014 Triennial in late October, however, there was nothing to be seen in Folkestone’s outer harbour except the customary scene of floating boats and buoys, and a strip of deserted sandy beach. Even the arrival of low tide saw little more than the odd dog walker and dog, or fisherman tinkering with his nets. Should I attempt a lonely little dig of my own? It didn’t feel right. The word on the street was that the hubbub had long since died down. No one knew exactly how many gold pieces had been found or may be left. What remained was the collective memory of the initial flurry, and the speculation about future finds and what the ultimate value of such a gold piece might be. For one thing, was it worth more as a unique part of an artwork or as straight bullion? And, like the speculative rumours generated by the presumed treasure of a sunken ship whose precise whereabouts is unknown, what a story it would make were there to be a lucky finder say fifty years from now. What value would the piece have then? (With the town’s history of coastal smuggling, Sailstorfer’s artwork clearly tapped into an existing mythical narrative of ‘illicit activity’.) FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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The post-party feel begins to permit the fuller implications of Sailstorfer’s event to sink in. An interesting temporal interplay exists between the immediacy of the initial explosion of interest and its long-term effect. Interestingly, the frenzied digging for gold at the outset, which seems in part to be about a kind of impatient, unthinking, something-for-nothing delirium, also emerges unexpectedly as an exercise in communitas: a participatory improvization that gets folk talking to one another, even if it is merely to share in the amusing absurdity of this particular common activity. For many the appeal turned out to be less about the promise of instant personal gain than the sport of engaging in an exercise whose collaborative nature may lead to someone being lucky: like the striker who happens to be the one to put the ball in the net, it would be more like ‘one for the team’. The collective digging up of the beach aspect even generates its own sense of creating a form of land art on the one hand, which, in being bound by incoming tides that immediately smooth over the disturbed sand, emerges as a repeatable time-based performance on the other. The long-term implications of the intervention, meanwhile, suggest it has made its mark above all as a ‘good yarn’ whose narrative will etch itself into the folklore of the town and doubtless receive a few embellishments as it circulates over time. But if it is a good yarn that endures, it is one that is also instructive, even cautionary (look out!), in the way it shows how all kinds of primitive, knee-jerk responses are triggered by staging such a ‘dream of cashing in’.11 And this applies in a sense that is very specific to the future of the town as well: as mentioned earlier, in 2004 Roger de Haan dug into the £1.35 billion for which he had just sold Saga and bought the whole of Folkestone harbour, including the pier and station, for £11 million. So, whether intentional or not, the notion of buried treasure evoked by the artwork carries connotations of the entrepreneur effectively sitting on a gold mine. The question is: what will he do with it? It is perhaps no coincidence that nearby Tontine Street, which has been central to the whole Creative Quarter enterprise, refers to the phenomenon of ‘tontine funds’ wherein ‘several subscribers accumulate and invest a common fund out of which they receive an annuity that increases as subscribers die until the last survivor takes the whole’ (Collins English Dictionary 2007: 1696). Figuratively, then, who in the town stands to gain in the end? Above all, though, Folkestone Digs works as an emblematic instance of the way in which artworks – the artworks of the Triennial – have indeed got the capacities to mobilize and bring people together and to generate profound critical and transformational discourses about the town. Viewing them as spectacular money-spinning investments is not helpful. They are more likely to begin to work towards fulfilling the promise of turning a town’s fortunes by implicitly lodging themselves in its complex fabric, posing searching questions by virtue of their siting and being permitted to germinate over a period of time. Sailstorfer’s piece epitomizes a prevalent paradigm detectable in many, if not all of the sited artworks over successive Triennials. It is one relating metaphorically to a process of gradual unearthing – a form of mystery, often entailing precisely 50

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an active ‘mystery tour’ to locate it, that eventually leads to the revelation of an insight about the place that is Folkestone. In 2011 Christina Iglesias’s Towards the Sound of Wilderness provided just such a framing, which I will introduce here as a form of preamble to the analysis of artworks that constitutes the remainder of the chapter. Taking us to the far end of The Leas promenade on the Western Cliff, an engagement with Iglesias’s installation effectively involves disappearing into a cluster of small trees and shrubbery where a narrow path leads round to some steps and, as the brief description on the 2011 folding guide-map puts it, ‘to a mirrored walk-in structure clad with resin foliage’. At the other end of this short, enclosed passageway is a large open frame that looks out across a deep-cut, overgrown moat to a monumental assemblage of dense foliage. The explanation for this striking but curiously misshapen form is that the plant life, which has been left to grow without human interference over many years, masks another of the defensive Martello lookout towers, a form of twin to the one bearing Bob and Roberta Smith’s 2017 slogan on the Eastern Cliff. Actually clad originally in a prominent coat of white plaster akin in its tone to the renowned cliffs of the southern coastline, but remaining wholly obscured by its vegetation and, therefore, in a state of oblivion even to many locals, the tower could be said to have been fated ‘from birth’ to be rendered obsolete – condemned to the thousand-year sleep of a Briar Rose, while a dense thicket sprouts all around it. Alternatively, as Iglesias’s rediscovery (and framing) of the tower’s existence shows, it can be said to have become ‘involuntarily re-purposed’ as an architectural construct. Ironically echoing a defensive move customarily associated with military strategy in the antithetical camouflaging effect provided by its foliage, nature has taken over both tower and surrounding moat to create an unexpected paradise, ‘a microcosm of untamed flora and fauna, a secret fairy-tale wilderness’ (Schlieker 2011a: 30). Continuing the fairy-tale analogy, then, Iglesias’s installation even invokes the promise of ‘princely rescue’, a re-awakening kiss of life that reveals the way in which a ‘new arcadia’ of natural riches – including a multitude of animal wildlife that has found its home amidst the greenery – has magically evolved around a relic of the past and under the noses of the townsfolk. Discover the right places to look and a hidden world may unveil itself unexpectedly. These mirrors are then an invitation to an unknown through-the-looking-glass-world that also reflects you back to yourself. As the artist herself teases: ‘ … who knows what could lie in wait for you in such an enchanted place’ (in Rendell 2010: 170).12 At the same time, Schlieker reminds us of the role of ‘invented nature’ in this installation, a deliberately perverse form of re-naturing nature. The spectator encounters not only a passageway ‘encased in stainless steel [which] mirrors the vegetation around it, doubling it and thereby making itself disappear’ (Schlieker 2011a: 30), but also the ‘fictional vegetation’ of the bas relief panels that adorn its inner walls. Thus, the wilderness is framed for us artificially as an uncanny surprise, drawing attention perhaps to our unnatural relationship to the natural, to the constructed nature of nature as we frame and perceive it, and to our general indifference to its enduring work. FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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Iglesias’s Towards the Sound of Wilderness is, then, about looking out for or scenting the unexpected: the promise of enrichment, insight or adventure produced by straying marginally off the beaten track – a sideways step through a ‘weathered threshold’, which is a term derived from Walter Benjamin. He used it in his review of Franz Hessel’s 1929 book on flânerie in Weimar Berlin (On Foot in Berlin) to describe the flâneur’s dismissal of the customary tourist spots in cities as ‘so much junk’ in preference for ‘the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile – that which any old dog carries away’ (Benjamin 1999b: 263).13 The threshold is seen, then, as that which leads to unsuspected insights. And in that there is a template to be discovered for the act of experiencing the Folkestone Triennial as a whole, corresponding to a ‘serendipitous imposition that … conditions the urban landscape’, as the artist puts it with regard to her related piece Guided Tour (1999–2002), but also, as Jane Rendell adds, an instance – even if Folkestone itself is more urban municipality than city – of ‘the work fram[ing] the city and the city fram[ing] the work, both providing guides to one another’ (Rendell 2010: 169).

Whither the weather Talking of the weather: ‘Weather is a third to place and time’ is a coinage of the artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and, although the artist himself passed away in 2006, his words have been specially ‘looked out’ from his writings by the curator of

FIGURE 1.3  Weather Is a Third to Place and Time (2014), Ian Hamilton Finlay, 14th September 2017 52

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the 2014 Triennial, Lewis Biggs – a ‘detached sentence’, as he puts it (2014a: 5) – and inscribed in capitals on the shore-facing side of the small white lighthouse at the tip of Folkestone’s harbour arm (Figure 1.3). The lighthouse, which was installed in 1903, is perfect, of course, not only as a form of fulcrum or kingpin for an event entitled ‘Lookout’ but also as the location at which to reflect fleetingly upon this artist’s particular ‘proposition’, which, as well as gesturing as a thought experiment towards the possibility of weather being a ‘third’ factor in a consideration of the dimensions of time and place, also neatly forms, precisely as a clear proposition, the third part of Biggs’s aforementioned triangulation (4). Even if the lighthouse as functional device has tended to sacrifice its utility to GPS navigation these days, the memory at least of its flashing or sweeping light pattern at night re-invokes the figurative notion of sited art offering a ‘momentary illumination’. (No doubt CraigMartin was mindful of providing a form of counterpart image of illumination for the twenty-first century with his 2017 Folkestone Lightbulb at the opposite end of the harbour development.) With the French coastline providing, on a clear day, what might be called (paradoxically) a ‘real’ trompe l’oeil horizon, and the wind almost inevitably whistling about your ears as you stand out on the pier, the combined expanse of sea and sky forms a veritable ‘theatre of the weather’ in which the spectator can observe, indeed feel, this drama of affect unfold in all its nuanced, seasonal variations. As such, Finlay’s aphorism, asserting the significance of the weather as a vital and defining inflection of place and time, turns out to be far more than mere sentiment here but materially present as a changing choreography of water, air and light. The context performs these words for the spectator ‘for real’, turning it into a haptic and, indeed, emotional experience that makes its case relating to the unexpected and powerful effects of the weather – and by extension climate – all the more forcefully. And, precisely on account of the visceral, enhanced sense of embodied exposure to and dependency on weather – framed as an influential natural force unstoppably and inevitably coming towards the town from afar, from ‘over the horizon’ – the raw phenomenological experience paves the way in turn towards metaphorical conjecture or ‘flights of fancy’: what other affective ‘forces’ are headed this way? What other kinds of ‘weather’ are there, and how do they interact with place and time? Weather as metaphor sends us flying (as the crow) to the polar opposite end of town, to Whithervanes by the artist duo rootoftwo, composed of Cézanne Charles and John Marshall. If the materiality of natural elements is pivotal in the performance of Finlay’s text (as facilitated by the location of the harbour arm lighthouse), this roof-top installation of headless chickens-cum-weathervanes from the 2014 Triennial proposed a ‘new sculptural materiality’, which, paradoxically, gradually revealed the ominous potency of its form to be precisely immaterial. Referencing the visible prevalence of conventional weathervanes in Folkestone, if not a trope of withering on the vine, whose decaying vegetative state might productively be allied with the ominous ‘scent of bad weather’ (see n.13), there were five such FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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FIGURE 1.4 Whithervanes: A Neurotic Early Worrying System (2014), rootoftwo (Marshall/Charles), 10th October 2014

alternative whithervanes. Essentially these were smooth, peppermint-white sculptures of cockerels without heads (usually on trestle-plinths) dotted around in raised locations of the town centre (Figure 1.4). The first was on the roof of the Red Cow Inn on Foord Road just to the north of the town’s imposing Victorian railway viaduct, remaining beyond the culmination of the 2014 Triennial as one of two (the other being on the roof of the Rocksalt restaurant on The Stade). At night they can be seen to light up in various garish neon colours which, like the sculptures themselves, appear to rotate. What makes the whithervanes move, however, is nothing to do with the passing breeze of local weather conditions as such but relates instead to the installation’s subtitle: a Neurotic Early Worrying System. If we’re talking ‘weather’ at all, then, it is generated by the immaterial ‘climate of fear’ that seems to characterize the operation of internet newsfeeds. So, this network of whithervanes (or lookouts) – each individual one is also in communication with the others via WiFi, instantly sharing incoming data – monitors global newsfeeds and has been programmed to respond to certain pre-set words and phrases that  invoke fear: ‘natural disaster’, ‘economic collapse’, ‘war’ and so on (Biggs 2014b: 22). Varying affective intensities of internet ‘fear-mongering’ accordingly induce the ‘emotionally sensitive’ whithervane to swivel and point ‘headlessly’ away from the global origin of the newsfeed in question at differing speeds – the more alarmist the news, the faster it goes – while changing colours similarly represent a ‘fear index’ of five levels of alert: severe (red), high (orange), elevated (yellow), guarded (blue) and low (green). Members of the public too can get in on 54

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the act of contributing, via an app on their smartphones, to the various tempers of this collective and neurotic ‘worrying system’. They have the choice of influencing the anxiety levels of individual whithervanes either positively (relatively speaking), by texting ‘Keep calm and carry on’, or negatively, by sending the message ‘The sky is falling’, thus enhancing the atmosphere of emotional panic. Both effects are relayed subsequently to the rest of the network, producing a form of aggregated frenzy that serves no useful purpose other than to perpetuate a sense of nervous disorientation and bemusement: headless cockerels that cannot crow, whose sole capacity is to ‘express the sense of panic that corporations and governments use to keep consumer-citizens acquiescent’ (20). While rootoftwo’s installation is clearly light hearted – and the degree of public participation, insofar as the invitation to interact would even be registered by the casual passer-by, is tokenistic at best (perhaps that is exactly its point … ) – it draws a clever analogy between the properties and effects of natural weather on the one hand and the human-made ether or cloud that is the global realm of the digital information and communications jet-stream on the other. Both are enormously powerful affective influences based on the complex way they are constituted and in their widespread impact on civilization. Social media and the internet in general evidently have a lot to answer for in the way they can be used to stoke and manipulate fear in order to nurture a perversely dependent, complicit and, ultimately, subordinate populace. Look no further than recent campaign narratives around Britain exiting the European Union, which centred primarily on intensifying levels of panic and prejudice around ‘invading immigrants’. Like the weather, then, we are, arguably, at the mercy of cyberspace. It represents the ‘new normal’ and, like it or not, we cannot afford to lump it. Both phenomena appear to be relentless and inevitable and, therefore, supposedly beyond the immediate influence of humanity. They are simply there. They happen. But, in fact, as the performance of Finlay’s lighthouse subtly proposes, even a natural phenomenon like the weather is itself symptomatic of, or subject to, all kinds of practices in which humanity plays an irresponsible, detrimental part: ‘crowded shipping lanes, tidal erosion and energy, climate change and altering sea-levels, air and ocean pollution, all seem very close’, Biggs maintains (2014a: 5). So, in another sense it is precisely our lookout: we get the kind of weather we deserve; the choice whether to abuse natural resources or harness their properties positively is humanity’s. And, so it is with social media and the internet: in itself a magnificent human invention, but, as our whithervanes tell us, prone to be contaminated and misused, subjecting us in commodified form to affective tyrannies of fear. The two-way nature implied in meeting impending ‘weather fronts’ head on was neatly captured, in fact, by Marc Schmitz’s and Dolgor Ser-Od’s Siren for 2017’s ‘double edge’ Triennial. Positioned just below Martello 3 high on Folkestone’s Eastern Cliff, this bright yellow, enlarged ear-trumpet-cum-megaphone was based on obsolete, large-scale ‘listening ears’ from the Second World War, which the artists had encountered in all their brutalist concrete glory on the cliff tops further along the coastline. FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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Importantly the amplification of sound waves that the installation invokes – which references the function of these devices as a defensive early warning system, presaging the arrival of incoming aircraft – affords the option of listening out and ‘speaking back’. Thus, it is a siren that both receives warnings and actively issues them like the lighthouse’s foghorn on the harbour arm once did (Biggs 2017a: 8). Folkestone’s specific position amid all this ‘adverse weather’ could not be more frontline, not least regarding the imminent climate of Britain’s severed relationship with the European Union and all the immediate cross-border side effects of restricted conditions of trade and transportation, which threatens to witness, first, long queues of freight traffic on the nearby motorway to Dover; second, hampered coordination of security measures, particularly regarding terrorist activity; and, third, unresolved issues around immigration with boatloads of trafficked migrants from France regularly turning up on the Kent coast, to say nothing of those emerging through the Euro tunnel whose entrance is just up the road.

Come high winds and water A few metres from the first whithervane on the roof of the Red Cow Inn, the first Pent House is also to be found (Figure 1.5). It’s a replica Manhattan water tower with a shiny steel finish, elevated on a truss amidst the clustered signage of a small triangular traffic island at the intersection of four streets. Just as there were five whithervanes sited strategically around the town, so there were five Pent Houses

FIGURE 1.5  Pent House 1 (2014), Diane Dever and Jonathan Wright, 10th October 2014 56

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at the 2014 Triennial (now reduced to four). The latter demarcate a line of flight straight back down to Folkestone’s inner harbour, but this landscaped installation has nothing to do with routes taken by crows (or headless chickens for that matter) and everything to do with the town’s origins. For the Pent is Folkestone’s river and the principal reason why the town came into being as a Roman settlement in the first place (as mentioned earlier). In the industrial boom-time years of the nineteenth century when the advent of the railways facilitated its transition from modest or ‘miserable fishing town’ – to cite Defoe (in Newman 1983: 326) – the Pent’s currents were used to power Folkestone’s mills and the river provided quick access to the tidal harbour and the sea. As these industries dwindled, though, so the Pent gradually withdrew its labour so to speak, eventually becoming culverted and forgotten – Folkestone’s little underground secret. As such the river’s fortunes serve as a resonant synecdoche of the town itself: a vital force whose energy has been rendered obsolete. Geographically, moreover, the Pent represents another of Folkestone’s edges, neatly bisecting the town on a north-south axis that has become symbolic of a social class divide. In Diane Dever’s and Jonathan Wright’s five-part installation the water towers come in various material shapes and sizes. One, not able to be retained for logistical reasons, was set back in the vacant space left by the First World War bombing of a building at the lower end of Tontine Street, and was made of wood – as the original ones in New York City are. Via a ladder leading into its bowels, it afforded access to visitors, conveying the feeling of entering a loft. The series as a whole draws attention not only to the rather startling fact of the river’s hidden but continuing existence in the town but also to Folkestone’s history, paradoxically permitting an ‘unknown memory’ to seep into public consciousness. But why, in particular, the combined invocation of Manhattan water towers and exclusive penthouse suites? A clue can certainly be discovered via Rachel Whiteread’s 1998 Water Tower installation on the rooftop of 60 Grand Street in the SoHo area of Manhattan itself, thus clearly positioning issues arising here under local circumstances within a global context. In this case it has less to do with attributing local effects to global forces (although ultimately that may be in play as well), than gesturing towards similarities relating to the commodification of both water and housing. Water towers are ubiquitous, of course, on the New York City skyline and doubtless something of a rough-hewn oddity amidst the slick, hi-tech skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan: distinctly out of place as both an architectural anachronism and an essentially rustic construct – ‘between a yurt and an outhouse’, as Sante puts it (Sante 1999: 89). But because they’ve seemingly always been there – part of the urban furniture so to speak – providing a functioning engineering solution to the problem of water pressure in tall buildings, their presence somehow remains beyond question: they are simultaneously integral and anonymous. Nevertheless, Whiteread’s Water Tower – which was cast in translucent resin according to her signature technique of solidifying the ‘interior air’ of actual-size objects and constructions, and installed on the vacated iron truss of a former water tower – FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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seeks to perform an act of memory that plays on a perceived disappearance or dissipation. Drawing attention to something perennial yet taken for granted, and therefore invisible, via an aesthetic mechanism that gives material substance to ‘air’ – or a phantom presence to absence – has the effect of highlighting the water tower’s significance not only as an essential, functioning contributor to the life of the city but also as a landmark container of an urban history that is fast being forgotten and replaced. Situated in the renowned but dwindling artists’ quarter of SoHo, whose erstwhile inhabitants were steadily and cynically priced out of their apartments, studios and galleries by a rampant, gentrifying property market, it is not difficult to establish the symbolic link between the effects of urban real estate management and Whiteread’s Water Tower installation whose ghostly afterimage evokes precariousness and warns of the cost of ruthlessly imposed economic change.14 Moreover, the artwork materialized only a couple of years after Whiteread’s notoriously controversial House project (1993) in the workingclass Tower Hamlets neighbourhood of East London which witnessed, first, the demolition of terraced housing and, second, on the instructions of the local council, the demolition of the artist’s prize-winning memorial installation to the community affected by the first effacement. Dever’s and Wright’s Pent Houses effectively reprises the link between private property and water towers within the context of Folkestone – the reappearance of a phantom presence – but also finesses the specific role of water by explicitly highlighting its intrinsic value as a natural resource that can find itself made similarly subject to indiscriminate forms of capitalist appropriation. Thus, as Folkestone embarks on a path of regeneration, the forgotten waters of the River Pent – which eventually flows into the inner harbour basin, where the fifth (now fourth) and final Pent House is located – re-emerge as a potential source of real estate exploitation in their capacity to enhance the value of the Creative Quarter’s desirable properties, whether that be in the form of renovated existing ones or those yet to be built as part of a comprehensive seafront development around Marine Parade. On one level, then, the artists’ water towers invoke a memory of the town’s water as a free and natural resource throughout history; on another, their strategic installations point to the very real dangers of a contained ‘housing’ or ‘housifying’ of water as a utility: a cynical, gentrified co-opting of its rich, free-flowing attributes that is both symbolically reminiscent of the way the commercial property market intrinsically operates in relation to the question of housing as a resource and in the actual interests of private ownership exercised by a handful of wealthy landlords. Richard Woods’ series of six Holiday Homes in 2017 – strategically positioned in deliberately implausible ‘edge’ locations stretching from the Western to the Eastern cliffs, with various beach, harbour and central town sitings in between – offered a further dimension to the ‘property, land and gentrification debate’ in Folkestone. With its long, if recently interrupted tradition as seaside resort of attracting well-to-do metropolitan visitors, the potential for the town to become subject to the holiday home syndrome, whereby ‘wealthy city types’ purchase for 58

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themselves the privilege of a second home for occasional recreational use, is high. The practice would be immoral not only on account of the acute national shortage of affordable homes in present times but also in that such a market would lead to a general property price surge in Folkestone, thus serving only to underscore existing discrepancies of economic prosperity. Woods’ intentionally formulaic, one-third size Holiday Homes, whose bright, singular colours seem to reprise those of CraigMartin’s ‘cornerhouse’ (though probably to different ends), also draw the eye via their improbable locations: teetering on the edges of cliffs or the outer harbour wall (Figure 1.6), floating alongside dinghies and fishing vessels on the tidal waters of the harbour, squeezed on to a traffic island at the junction of four streets in the town centre, at an awkward angle on a sudden dip in the pebbled beach at Marine Crescent.15 Their look-at-me colouring and toy-town (or Monopoly) design begin to acquire a vulgar quality – reminiscent of the appeal of cheap and cheerful ice lollies or sticks of seaside rock – when one realizes that these bizarre, inappropriate locations are suggestive of sharp developers and estate agents willing to exploit any part of the surrounding terrain to their own profiteering ends. At the same time the garish colours echo both the style and sentiments of rootoftwo’s ‘early worrying system’ of coded levels of alert. Subject to the tides, the pink home floating in the outer harbour naturally finds itself ‘high and dry’ at intervals – a stranded boom and bust investment perhaps – which is all the more poignant for taking its place alongside the few remaining boats of the Folkestone fishing industry fleet. (Jonathan Wright’s 2017 Fleet on Foot series of small-scale gilded

FIGURE 1.6  Holiday Home (2017), Richard Woods, 14th September 2017 FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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replica fishing vessels, to be encountered perched on poles as one walks along Tontine Street, draws attention to the fleet’s decimation – literally inasmuch as it has been reduced to a tenth of what it was.) If Folkestone’s invisible river meanders its way unobtrusively down to the harbour, the railway viaduct with its ‘nineteen brick arches monumentally spanning the Foord Valley, nearly 100 feet high in the centre’ poses a radically antithetical presence (Newman 1983: 326). Designed by William Cubitt c. 1843 its visual dominance of the townscape is testament to the difference it once made to the place: ‘It is only justice that the viaduct should be so impressive, for the railway made Folkestone’ (326). That difference was dependent, of course, on an additional track being dropped down the cliffs to the harbour pier, thus embedding the railways in the heart of the town and establishing a direct sea link to Europe. Ironically, with that feeder track now shut down, the imposing viaduct, which witnesses trains flitting regularly between London and Dover, stands more as a signifying monument to Folkestone’s present-day obsolescence – a place to pass by and over, rapidly. And, just to pile irony on irony, Britain’s first high-speed rail track (HS1) and the vehicle-transporting Eurotunnel company, which seek to inject maximum efficiency to train connections with Europe, run to and from, as well as through a station called Folkestone just off the M20 motorway, yet have little to do with the town itself. So, if the viaduct has succeeded, in the twenty-first century, in upholding a narrative of efficient transportation begun nearly two centuries ago, it has not taken Folkestone with it on that journey. However, for Marjetica Potrč and Ooze (comprising Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hertenberg) the presence of the viaduct offered an alternative possibility which would, on the one hand, pay homage to its place in history as a striking feat of engineering whose introduction revolutionized the life of the town, and, on the other, propose a radical refunctioning of its original purpose, which might prove equally transformational. Where the arches of a viaduct are conventionally allocated a supporting role, as that which facilitates horizontal travel across the top of the structure, in this installation they themselves became the focal point – in more ways than one. Potrč’s and Ooze’s The Wind Lift for the 2014 Triennial not only enabled vertical travel instead, inviting contemplation of the sheer aesthetic and material magnificence of the viaduct as a structure, actually and symbolically ‘from below’, but also drew attention, again, to the implicit presence of an invisible, untapped natural force in the town, namely the powerful winds that are channelled through these nineteen gaping arches (Figure 1.7). Thus the voids created by the arches are as significant as the brickwork structure itself. And, to hark back in spirit to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sentiments inscribed on the harbour lighthouse, here the weather that produces those invisible gusting winds truly is the unseen third dimension of place and time. The wind lift itself was a passenger lift, an open viewing platform that rose some 25m in the air up a slender gantry structure that flanked one of the 60

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FIGURE 1.7  The Wind Lift (2014), Marjetica Potrč and Ooze (Pfannes/Hartenberg), 10th October 2014

central pillars of the viaduct. It was powered entirely by a small turbine that was suspended in mid-air within one of the main arches, harnessing the wind as it swept in from the sea. Thus, the lift was pleasingly self-contained; in order to fulfil its function of affording groups of visitors both close-up views of the brickwork and a panoramic lookout position over the town and the sea, it generated all its own power. Of course, by the artists’ own admission, that also implied that ‘the number of rides depends on the strength of the wind’ (Biggs 2014b: 28). As such it made a positive and convincing point relating not only to the need for clean energy use but also to the viable and exciting potential of harvesting available but unexploited environmentally friendly natural resources to constructive ends. Some questioned the latter, pointing out that there was an element of Sisyphean futility to the exercise: all that generating and capturing of energy to go nowhere much (except up and down) and merely for the sake of a view.16 But that would have been to overlook not only the affective pleasure of the visual aesthetic experience – to say nothing of the sheer fairground thrill involved – but also to have underestimated the value of the artwork as an incredibly neat and elegant conceptual proposal or prototype for better living, involving the kind of lateral, creative thinking that would give the whole town a lift, in fact. While scientists and engineers envisage the future as one of high-speed electronic transportation and communications, here was a vision – an artist’s proposition – that, in its own subtle way, was arguably even further ahead in the game of anticipating the future through the sheer scope of its inventiveness – one that made canny use FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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precisely of the instruments of engineering and science – and its sense of ethical responsibility to humanity and the natural environment of the planet in general, as well as Folkestone in particular.

Transient nestings In 2014 two artworks – both gone now – contemplated one another diametrically across the tidal waters of Folkestone’s inner harbour and, as such, could be made to enter into productive conversation with one another, revealing as they did that they had several points in common. Both addressed the ‘Lookout’ theme of that Triennial in a range of immediate and distinctive ways, not only embracing it as subject-matter and form but also underscoring the particular contribution artists, in their role as lookouts, can make to envisioning urban futures. In addition, both pieces also very much took the locality as their respective points of departure, yet also positioned Folkestone within a wider, changing global framework. Finally, they epitomized the changing nature of public art-making, taking into account, for instance, conventions of performance and notions of a participatory ‘spectator’s turn’ in which it becomes quite literally the spectator’s turn to precipitate the significance of the artwork. The subtitle of Gabriel Lester’s The Electrified Line installation was Cross-track Observation-deck and this enclosed, yet open and airy bamboo pavilion amounted to a raised platform structure which invited entry by

FIGURE 1.8  The Electrified Line (Cross-track Observation-deck) (2014), Gabriel Lester, 10th October 2014 62

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the public via a set of wooden stairs (Figure 1.8). Importantly, it sat squarely on the disused railway tracks at the head of the viaduct – a far more modest one than Foord Valley – that bisects the inner and outer harbours and leads across to the former station on the harbour arm. Alex Hartley’s Vigil, meanwhile, was a durational performance piece involving the artist himself at intervals, along with a rotating group of volunteer assistants. For the entire nine-week period of the Triennial at least one person remained ensconced at all times in a ‘vertical campsite’ or ‘portaledge’, to use the mountaineer’s technical term, hanging off the side of the flat roof of the all-white Grand Burstin Hotel (Figure 1.9). The latter is a veritable mountain of a building that dominates Folkestone’s sea front, with a sweeping view of the whole harbour area, the town centre and the English Channel. In fact, while Vigil certainly framed the fourteen-storey Grand Burstin as an Alpine construct via its recognizable use of mountaineering paraphernalia, the form of the hotel itself is perhaps more nautical, thus simultaneously evoking the image of a docked multi-deck cruise liner waiting to head out to sea. This chimes, in turn, with the perception of Hartley’s installation as a form of ‘crow’s nest’, on the one hand looking out over the horizon for encroaching danger and, on the other, keeping watch over the goings-on in the town. Vigil’s figurative duality is echoed in the concept of Lester’s installation, whose ‘observation deck’ implicitly references nautical navigation, while ‘cross-track’ evidently referred to the obsolete railway line upon which the entire pavilion structure perched. Thus, one form of transportation met another head on. Coincidentally it emerged during the making of the piece

FIGURE 1.9  Vigil (2014), Alex Hartley, 10th October 2014 FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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that there once was a wooden tower positioned right in that spot to hold watch over the various comings and goings of the harbour area (Biggs 2014a: 6). It would not be stretching a point to suggest that the intricate and meticulously slotted together bamboo scaffolding similarly brought to mind a bird’s nest, with its formal construction providing a secure and strategic, seasonal – that is, temporary – home. When I say strategic, I do indeed mean to evoke a sense of the way that birds carefully scout around for an appropriate location for their nest-building, but also thereby to emphasize the way that The Electrified Line and Vigil have chosen to lodge themselves – to occupy or squat – in sites that reveal specific local and political sensitivities. The reference to squatting draws attention to the interventions’ shared capacity to function as fixed-term ‘interlopers’, cheekily claiming the right to assert their temporary presences and make their propositions known. So, as much as they may have sought to engage with ongoing urban realities, as well as construct potential urban imaginaries, in manners that would have an enduring impact on the town, they simultaneously drew their potency from both the eye-catching, momentary nature of the interruption they initiated – like a light suddenly going on – and a certain renegade quality that pointed to a form of ‘tactical urbanism’. Like the plight of the illegal fugitive, which is driven by economic and political factors, tactical urbanism throws down an ethical challenge to the ritualized orthodoxies that prevail and is, as Saskia Sassen puts it, ‘partly a practice that involves occupying. To occupy is to remake, even if temporarily, a bit of territory, and therewith to remake its embedded and often deeply undemocratic logics of power. This begins to redefine the role of citizens, mostly weakened   and fatigued after decades of growing inequality and injustice’ (Sassen 2014: 44). These tactical interventions represented, then, clear attempts to put artistic fingers on the urban pulse and to engage in a conversation – with the town and, why not, with one another – about what dangers and opportunities Folkestone’s future held in the larger scheme of things. If Potrč’s and Ooze’s Wind Lift contrasted sharply with the monumental, if elegant, brickwork of the Foord Valley viaduct, thereby drawing attention to an untapped and free natural energy source, Lester’s utilization of bamboo made a similarly antithetical proposal relating to the future of global material resources. While bamboo was intended symbolically to foresee ‘the coming Chinese century’  – Lester himself spent time living in China (Biggs 2014b: 52)   – the material lightness and flexibility, as well as simple aesthetic gracefulness with which the structure rested upon the stolid brickwork of the nineteenth-century harbour viaduct also pointed to the potential for a new enlightened way of conceiving of the built environment. Importantly, bamboo is very light, yet at the same time immensely sturdy and durable and was recently acknowledged via the winning entry to a Cities For Our Future global architecture competition to represent the optimum material for resolving issues around the sustainable building of affordable housing in situations of acute need (Laville 2018: 45). 64

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Thus, with a warm breeze gently kindling some wind chimes, those of us who had gathered on this particular lookout platform – this temporary haven of contemplation, placed subtly but provocatively astride the overgrown and rusting, yet beautiful ruins of the railway tracks – were invited to reflect in tranquillity upon the promise of an improved urban environment. Like Potrč’s and Ooze’s wind power, which neatly generated its own clean electricity in implied counterpoint to the polluting, fossil fuel-driven exploits of the industrial age, Lester provided a performative space – a transient one that was both social and domestic – for us to look out and re-imagine how this once-electrified, miniChinese Wall of a viaduct, extending to the harbour arm, might be re-purposed in the common interests of the town’s citizens. At the time I observed in my field notes that this could take the form of emulating Manhattan’s renowned High Line development, which famously functions now as a public promenade, and this is in fact more or less what has materialized in the meantime as part of the harbour development. So, Lester’s installation could be called a deliberate squatting which sensed that the lurking temptations of commercial, real estate interests – such as we saw implicitly being addressed in Woods’ Holiday Homes and Dever’s and Wright’s Pent Houses, whose fifth water tower was but a pebble’s throw from Electrified Line – may end up taking precedence over that which should be regarded as public space. The installation’s very transience as a dwelling, coupled with the lightness of its material, proposed a similar adaptability of future use, one that would avoid being subject to the heavy-handed, closed-off rigidities and exclusivities of private ownership. Hartley too appeared to sense looming peril along these lines and therefore implicitly counselled eagle-eyed caution. As indicated already, his colourful encampment invoked the trappings of mountaineering, but its accompanying banners simultaneously recalled Occupy-style ‘dug-in’ demonstrations, such as those in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park or in front of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (in 2011). In an age of renewed public activism based around urban encampments, occurring across the globe for a whole range of reasons, it clearly represented a socio-political protest of sorts whose protagonist played in part on the irony of having a whole grand hotel full of comfortable rooms from which to choose, but defiantly insisted on pitching his humble solo tent in circumstances of highrisk and physical exposure to the elements. Presumably the installation had the corrosive effects on the town of mass tourism in its sights, but it also appeared implicitly to renounce the mass protest aspect of these global demonstrations, though not their anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist sentiments. Instead, seeking to resist perhaps any ‘spectacle of false togetherness’ (to borrow a phrase from Guy Debord) or, indeed, the knee-jerk platitudes of twitter-style mass protest, the lone performer asserted the right to the integrity of solitary protest based on quiet self-reflection in a necessarily isolated space of calm, thus echoing the one-time perception of the introspective medieval hermit as prophet and visionary (Biggs 2014a: 6, 2014b: 64).17 Moreover, Vigil presented an omniscient vantage point over FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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the town which paradoxically inverted the disciplinary gaze of mass surveillance. Rather than spying covertly on the citizens of the town from above, as CCTV cameras do – supposedly in their best interests, but more likely so as to ensure the maintenance of the built environment as a ‘safe space of consumption’ – the installation drew attention instead to its position on high: its protest, its sacrifice, its temporary squatting of this 1970s carbuncle of profit-making real estate, with its ‘crude and silly detailing’ (Newman 1983: 328). Vigil represented a form of appeal from the crow’s nest to the good citizens of the town that this was the Folkestone future that may be on the horizon unless they exercised vigilance and held their seemingly well-intentioned benefactors to account. Like rootoftwo’s Whithervanes, it represented a form of ‘early worrying system’, but where that work jokingly referred to itself as ‘neurotic’ in response to a phenomenon – fear-mongering newsfeeds – that had already firmly cast its spell, inducing a form of pathological acquiescence, Vigil demarcated an open terrain of non-coercive circumspection in which the possibility of a pre-emptive mindset comes into view. From a commanding position of omniscience over the town, it exemplified, then, what the art of a triennial such as Folkestone’s can do, enacting a form of subversive counter-surveillance which proposes that the onus of observation lies within that which is perceived to be the common purpose of the public – a gaze between citizens that is met, ultimately, at ground level and induces ‘conversations’.

Urban room If Hartley’s and Lester’s installations formed two points in one kind of conversation between artworks across the inner harbour in 2014, a neat triangulation implicitly occurred in 2017 with the introduction of a third point that also represented a form of ‘nesting’ or shelter, albeit one whose presence has been maintained beyond the end of that Triennial: Diane Dever’s and the Decorators’ Customs House: Urban Room Folkestone. Ensconced in the remaining part of the sizeable former Customs House where the harbour viaduct, now a promenade, meets the beginning of the curved platforms of the former harbour station, the Urban Room or UR for short, as the neon sign affixed to its façade has it, forms one of a network existing in other towns and cities of the UK.18 In effect it is an urban archive, exhibition space and resource centre, gathering together all kinds of historical documentation about Folkestone and general information about town planning and design, architecture and the built environment and other urbanist practices. Above all perhaps – and here it exquisitely fulfils the projected sentiment of vigilance and exchange on the part of citizens with which the analysis of Hartley’s encampment ended – it is a public meeting place where formal, critical discussion about the future of the town can take place via organized programmes of events for residents or where casual visitors can interact informally as they drop in to browse through the 66

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room’s resources, informing themselves as they do so about such things as the morphological evolution and history of Folkestone on the one hand, while getting up to speed on the latest ‘town gossip’ on the other. As if to enshrine the spirit of both these activities, part of the Triennial intervention involved delineating the footprint of the much larger Customs House as it was – it having been bombed during the war – using line markings laid down in front of the remaining building. Within these some specially designed, mobile ‘urban furniture’ had been arranged for folk to sit down and converse at their leisure. As such the Urban Room is perhaps the perfect place to wind up in conclusion in this excursus about Folkestone, encompassing as it does many of the key thematics raised in relation to the recent development of the town (and its Triennial), in particular those relating to its ‘double edges’: a figurative ‘fault-line,’ whose particular sensibilities as a frontline town implicitly act as form of national barometer of what is and what will be, as well as a town that has been subject to ‘fairy-tale regeneration’. The designation UR at the building’s entrance already sets the tone of this artwork-as-resource’s aim of somehow getting back to first principles of what a town is for; the word ‘urban’ has its origins, of course, in the world’s first acknowledged city, Ur, located in Mesopotamia on a channel of the Euphrates River, and known these days as Sumer, in Iraq. The custom, moreover, in English language usage of adopting the German prefix ‘ur-’ to emphasize something as authentic and archetypal in the purest possible sense underscores the point; ‘ur’ always takes one back that little bit further in time to provenances, as in the difference between ‘old’ and ‘ancient’. In that sense, then, there is an interesting conflation of time and space implied in the word: Ur is both a place and a point in history. Whizz to the opposite end of the spatio-temporal spectrum, to the present, and UR introduces another important factor in all this via its modern-day texting short-hand: ‘you are’. In other words, this place is about you as a human being and how you are (or live) among other human beings in the face of a beckoning future. Towns and cities are, ultimately, for people, who arrive and settle and develop customs and habits in a place if it suits them, as the Romans once did in Folkestone and abandoned boatloads of trafficked refugees – from Iraq, for example; perhaps even from Sumer – strive to do these days. A customs house marks that moment and point of arrival, a mechanism of border control, a processing station, as well as a further meeting point or edge at which official decisions are made about the futures of very anxious people. While the ghost of that former function lingers, and is highlighted here by the phantom terrain that those outlines of the former Customs House demarcate (to say nothing of the spectre of real-life refugees ‘at sea’), in its re-purposed capacity as public facility, a new function has been superimposed via the Urban Room. This expands the definition of ‘customs’ and underscores the need for the citizens of Folkestone constantly to re-assess in what kind of town they wish to reside, including considering whether the double edge of migrant integration means that they need as much to adapt their customs and

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habits in reciprocation of incomers being expected to alter theirs. As the 2017 Triennial catalogue states: ‘Customs are the collective behaviour of a community: changes in behaviour can shape the physical environment in which we live, for better or worse, just as developments in the built environment can also affect the way people behave’ (Biggs 2017b: 88).

Notes 1 Folkestone boasts five remaining Martello Towers of the 103 originally built along the UK coastline between 1805 and 1812, the most prominent of which, Martello 3, lies fully exposed on top of the town’s Eastern Cliff and was used as the basis for an artwork entitled Entanglement by the Turkish artist Ayşe Erkmen for the first Triennial in 2008. 2 Bob and Roberta Smith’s films for FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL can all be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFydzFn07pI (accessed 14 April 2019). 3 One of the Triennial commissions in 2017 involved the artist Sinta Tantra transforming the façades of The Cube using a colour scheme based on a 1947 poster advertising train travel to Folkestone. 4 The Leas Lift was built in 1885 and is the only feature of this seafront complex that still exists – and functions. The principle behind its mechanism – which, in stark contrast to the swish, enclosed modern-day elevator, is wholly exposed in all its clunking glory – is remarkably straightforward: its two carriages are symbiotically roped together, so while they are headed in opposite directions, the activity of one is entirely dependent on the other. Once the carriage at the top of the steep cliff face has fully filled up with water pumped from the sea, gravity pulls it downwards while the other one waiting at the bottom rises. In 2011 Martin Creed sited his aural installation No. 1196 Piece for String Quartet and Elevator in the lift. Users were subject – often unwittingly – to the ethereal sound of ascending or descending chromatic scales played on stringed instruments. 5 Nick Ewbank was appointed Director of the Metropole Arts Centre, housed in the Metropole Hotel on The Leas in Folkestone, in 2001 with a brief to expand its remit as part of the general initiative to regenerate the town. Realizing it was a lost cause he founded the Creative Foundation as a charitable organization (Ewbank 2011: 21–30). 6 The hackneyed phrase ‘giving something back to the community’, which is clearly designed to garner approval, is always haunted by the hint of a confession, as if the individual concerned were only too aware of their historical culpability in ruthlessly and shamelessly ‘taking an awful lot out’ for personal gain to begin with. 7 Following from the notions of the ‘town as art school’ and ‘art school as artwork’, the German artist Jochen Gerz created a similar set of circumstances to Folkestone’s Creative Quarter but as a commissioned artwork entitled 2–3 Streets on the occasion of the Ruhr region functioning as European Capital of Culture in 2010: ‘His proposal was to turn three ordinary residential streets with vacant apartments into a year-long “exhibition” that would be entirely accessible to the public, and to invite “creative” people to live there rent-free for twelve months. […] In this way 2–3 Streets can be understood within Gerz’s practice as a project that subverts the conventional methods by which the city is performed through spectacular events. Instead it sets up a relatively simple, but practically complex, series of occupations that effect a subtle shift in the quotidian’ (Doherty 2015: 172–3). 68

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8 The UK-based German curator Andrea Schlieker, who was responsible for the 2008 and 2011 editions, was instrumental in developing the essential concept of the triennial model for Folkestone. The 2014 and 2017 Triennials were curated by Lewis Biggs, who had been artistic director of the Liverpool Biennial and heavily involved in that city’s activities as European Capital of Culture in 2008. 9 The Danish artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen presented a three-screen film entitled Promised Land at the 2011 Triennial which focused on Afghan and Iranian migrants seeking illegal passage to Britain from the notorious refugee camps in Calais. 10 The total projected figure of forty-three retained artworks refers more to the numbers of artists involved. Given that several commissions are presented as a series, the total figure of sitings is in fact seventy. (My thanks to Jo Cowdrey of the Creative Foundation for providing these figures.) 11 Retroactively that sense of a symbolic ‘gold rush’ was emphasized all the more with the fraught and frenzied train-hopping events during the Summer of 2015 and at intervals thereafter when Folkestone was directly implicated in the effects of refugees and economic migrants seeking to make their way through the Eurotunnel to the UK from Calais, often on the vague assumption of British pavements being paved in gold. 12 Towards the Sound of Wilderness references an earlier series of pieces by Iglesias (to which the quote refers) known as Vegetation Rooms (2002). See Rendell (2010: 170–2) and Schlieker (2011a: 30). 13 In fact, there is no actual reference to a weathered threshold as such in the original German, merely the sniffing out of a threshold or doorway (‘die Witterung einer einzigen Schwelle’). According to the image conjured, this is meant in the manner of a dog compiling for itself an olfactory scent-map of the local neighbourhood (as dogs do). Where ‘weathered’ may have come into play in the translator’s mind is that Witterung, here referring to ‘scenting’ or ‘sensing’, is a cognate of both ‘weather’ (Wetter) and ‘decaying’ (verwittern), but since it is not applied adjectively to Schwelle (threshold), it is far more the act of memory-sensing involved that is significant: a faint, lingering memory being the doorway to an unexpected encounter (Benjamin 1999b: 263). 14 This part of New York City was very much the stamping ground of the architecture journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs. She famously expended considerable energy campaigning against ruthless moves to destroy neighbourhoods and communities in the Greenwich Village and Soho areas by the city’s ‘master builder’ Robert Moses whose primary goal was to construct urban freeways that would facilitate traffic flow to and from the suburbs. 15 The orange Holiday Home on the beach at Marine Crescent had originally been intended for a precarious location halfway down the zig-zag path of the undercliff that leads from The Leas (roughly at Leas Cliff Hall) to the shore below, but installation difficulties forced a relocation. 16 The organizers of the Triennial had a considerable battle on their hands convincing the residents of the adjacent Bradstone Court flats that their private lives were not about to become exposed to a succession of visitors peering into bedrooms from the open lift. 17 One can’t help see in Vigil a twenty-first-century counterpoint to (if not parody of) the romanticism of the nineteenth-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich in which solitary figures are seen to confront, or be confronted by, a vision of nature’s sublime elemental magnitude. Revealing only their backs as they look out into the vast landscape – which implicitly positions them as proxies of the spectator’s view – Friedrich’s lone individuals are situated very much at the centre of these depictions of the overwhelming forces of nature. As such the moods evoked appear to be ambiguous: both natural spectacle, the witnessing of which reduces the solitary FOLKESTONE TURNED: OF FAULT-LINES AND FAIRY-TALES

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human to insignificance, and a powerful, even masterful projection of inner emotion. In fact, Vigil appears to conflate two well-known Friedrich paintings: on the one hand the signature Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), with its protagonist’s omniscient perspective of the mountain peaks poking through a blanket of mist and, on the other, Monk by the Sea (1809) in which a lone figure on the beach appears about to be sucked dramatically into a one-point perspective vortex of sea and cloud. Each in their own way invokes a powerful sense of unknown futures. 18 In the meantime, the Urban Room has moved to a more central location in Folkestone at 1 The Plaza in the Tram Road Car Park directly opposite Craig-Martin’s Lightbulb installation. Its weblink is: https://urbanroomfolkestone.net/about-ur/. Meanwhile, the weblink for the national network of urban rooms is: https://urbanroomsnetwork. wordpress.com/ (links accessed 29 March 2019).

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2  Sculpture Trials, Sculpture Tales: Münster’s ‘Rupture Projects’ and the Time of Art

As an event Skulptur Projekte Münster (SPM), whose inaugural edition took place over nineteen weeks in 1977, represents an intensive and consistent engagement with the spatial dimensions, social practices and institutional complexities of urban life. But where the discourse around biennial-type formats – or perennials as they are sometimes referred to – tends to be dominated by questions around site-specificity, topographies and the public sphere, art in public places and place-making, the impact of the Münster event is characterized significantly as a function of overlapping orders of time. Perhaps the most telling of those relates to SPM’s decennial rhythm, which certainly does depart from the customary ‘breathlessness’ of successive biennial stagings at two-year intervals, but also from the more measured five-year cycle of its near neighbour in central Germany, documenta in Kassel, with which it finds itself in perennial alignment.1 documenta is held by the art world in general to be among, if not the most significant and influential of the major global exhibitions. That perception doubtless arises in part on account of the extended lead time the event permits itself for each iteration, lending it a sense of meticulousness and high seriousness in its presentation and inevitably, therefore, exclusivity. The word on the street during the 2017 edition of SPM was that the City of Münster’s marketing services were increasingly applying pressure on the event organizers – in particular the evergreen figure of Kasper König, who has been involved as curator from the beginning – to switch to the same five-year pattern as documenta. Obviously this is indicative of SPM’s evolving success over the decades – measured strictly by visitor numbers, of course2 – and a desire to play to the gallery of the Münster tourism industry. In those rarefied European ‘Grand Tour’ years ending in ‘7’, which witness documenta

coinciding with SPM (alongside, for example, Art Basel and the Venice Biennale), the flow of international visitors between these two events is marked, so why not cash in on a good thing every five years rather than ten, is logically the marketing director’s line of argument. Alert to the dangers of what could easily creep towards inimical compromises of SPM’s inherent identity and independence with such commercialist speculations, König was adamant that a ten-year cycle was central to that which had enabled the event to flourish in the first place. As he stated in interview, he would rather move to pastures new after forty years and five SPM editions than pander to such opportunism (Kock 2017a: 50).

The time of art The significance accorded the ten-year interval points to SPM’s own sense of itself – as event or exhibition – as a durational entity whose implicit curatorial strategy involves working precisely with the ‘materiality of time’. Whether such a motive was apparent from the very start is doubtful, though – not least since a 1987 followup edition of SPM was probably hardly in view at the first, experimental iteration of the event in 1977 – but this only confirms the event’s own awareness of itself, and therefore its virtues, as a necessarily evolving factor: an experience of time unfolding gradually while the (art) world around one moves on apace arguably renders one more sensitive – or at least sensitive in a very particular way – to shifts that are occurring, above all regarding sculpture and public art as forms; the notion that ‘time passing’ is key is one that emerges performatively in time. Such temporal movements apply as much to the city of Münster as a whole, and we shall return to this aspect later. But regarding SPM specifically, they relate to the evolution of contemporary sculpture at a point in modern, art historical time – the late, postmodern twentieth century moving into the post-human, digital-virtual twentyfirst century – that the very understanding of the medium or form has found itself subject to a form of radical undecidability and reappraisal of what it is (for). In an age characterized by a series of overlapping ‘turns’ – performative, curatorial, spectatorial, cultural, spatial, digital, virtual, participatory and so on – conventional notions of public sculpture as figurative or abstract plastic form in space (more often than not on a plinth) have, of course, long receded in the meantime. Without replaying the drawn-out debates, initially around ‘expanded’ (Krauss 1986), later around ‘unlimited’ (Grubinger and Heiser 2011) or ‘exploded’ (Moszynska 2013) fields, it is probably true to say that the question of what has stepped into the breach remains productively moot. Why laying down a submerged footpath made up of containers in the inner harbour basin (Stadthafen 1) for members of the public to paddle from one side to the other should constitute sculpture, as was the case with Ayşe Erkmen’s highly popular On Water installation at SPM 2017, is a valid and intriguing point to raise, not least because of the way it leads to a reassessment of critical terms and concepts – relating among other things to those old favourites of space, time and the body – and, therefore, to what matters now. One thing that has 72

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always been a feature of SPM is its recourse to the term ‘projects’ in the relationship it has sought with sculpture. ‘Projects’ tends to direct one towards process and experiment, a time-based endeavour that engages with a particular form of ‘trial and error’. It reaches for that which is innovative but that may, in being so, fail or remain unfinished, both of which are nevertheless valuable attributes for the potential insights they yield as conceptual interventions in public urban space. In fact, the very first SPM in 1977 was merely the third part of a larger pedagogical survey show entitled ‘Skulptur 77’ curated by Klaus Bussmann at Münster’s main art museum, the Westfälisches Landesmuseum, as it was then (its name changed to Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe or LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in 2008). Subtitled ‘Projekte’ and focusing exclusively on a modest number of sited installations curated by Kasper König – eleven were commissioned but not all materialized, as we shall see3 – it was seen as the vanguard wing of the show, its purpose being to examine the future of sculpture as form. Thus, the points were effectively set for subsequent editions of SPM as an exhibition of sited artworks in its own right. The emphasis in ‘Projekte’ was very much on principal (male) players in what might be called, paradoxically perhaps, the ‘conceptual materiality’ of minimalism, pop art and institutional critique: large-scale, object-based interventions that nevertheless presupposed, as a feature of their aesthetic, a form of projection beyond objecthood in both the conception and perception of the artworks in urban space. Arguably those artists were, as such, already sowing the seeds for a later dematerialization and performativity – of the On Water variety – that no longer pegged its aesthetic to objecthood (yet remained a sculpture project). Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Pool Balls (1977), in its idyllic setting beside Münster’s large central lake, Aasee, has become totemic of SPM over the years, remaining in place through the thick and thin of tagging interventions and physical attack, eventually becoming a trademark branding tool for the city itself. But no SPM artwork epitomizes – or can, indeed, hope to epitomize – more the conceptual virtues of the event’s decennial rhythm than the legend that is Michael Asher’s Installation Münster (Caravan). First commissioned in 1977, Asher ended up making the self-same proposal with each successive edition of SPM until 2007. This involved the siting of a standard Heymer Eribia Familia BS caravan trailer in a range of designated public locations in the city for a week at a time, with fresh directions as to its whereabouts issued to visitors via SPM headquarters at the Landesmuseum each week. In 1977 these locations numbered nineteen in line with the length of the exhibition. With fluctuations in subsequent SPM editions in both their respective durations and the accessibility and availability of sites used previously, the precise playing out of these weekby-week sitings proved never to be the same from decade to decade. Where locations were no longer viable – because public space had become reconfigured or privatized, for example – the caravan was stored in a garage for that particular week, so more and more gaps began to appear in the decade-by-decade temporal MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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schedule, as the 2007 SPM catalogue graphically records using the examples of four of the sites (Franzen et al 2007: 24–33). By 2007 the caravan was putting in appearances in only ten of that SPM edition’s fifteen weeks, so almost half as many as thirty years earlier (Alberro 2017: 3). For the alert spectator/ citizen those voided weeks in themselves drew attention to the way the built infrastructure of the city was changing incrementally, given the impossibility of a repeated siting that the caravan’s non-appearance implied. Where a siting was still possible, documentary photographs reveal subtle changes in the immediate urban surroundings of the caravan in the appearance of buildings, street furniture and signage, as well as in vehicle design. Regarding the last of these, the caravan itself began life in 1977 as a fairly recent, fashionable model, which gradually began to look more and more ‘vintage’ as the decades wore on and, therefore, seemed itself to signify a progressive obsolescence, or at least change as functional object from event to event. Conceivably its marked ordinariness in 1977, as a bog-standard model for families of modest means, which actually meant it ended up in all its blandness being largely ignored by the public, had acquired the kudos of ‘collector’s item’ by 1997 (much as the ‘people’s car’, the VW Beetle, had). It therefore stood out where previously it had blended in. The fact that it was subject to theft a further ten years later, in 2007, being towed away from a residential street one night, only to be spotted, like some exotic Siberian tiger that had escaped from the zoo, in a wood not far from the city a couple of days later, seems indicative of its changed extraordinariness and exclusivity as a rare object of desire.4 Previously it had been given parking tickets and had even been towed away one time for being illegally parked, but these were relatively humdrum occurrences by comparison that accorded with practices of the everyday. Regarding the question of valuation, König’s intriguing response to the police’s query on the occasion of its theft as to the artistic worth of the caravan was: ‘Outside of the context of the exhibition and itself as a project, the caravan ultimately has no artistic value’ (Kock 2017b: 65). The ‘repetition and difference’ of Asher’s protracted engagement with Münster offers, then, a form of documenting the evolving city in time but also suggests the continuing validity of the practice of institutional critique that stands essentially as its point of departure and as the artist’s signature approach.5 The key here is that the performance that emerges in this apparent ‘eternal return of the same’ is precisely not the same with each reiteration, but actually throws up new insights into art, its institutions and the city, ones that are immediate embodiments or reflections of time passing and things changing (Alberro 2017: 3). As a selfreflexive moment in twentieth-century art history, institutional critique has long since been superseded by all manner of ‘turns’ and rhizomatic multiplications of its tenor, not least that of ‘new institutionalism’ (Voorhies 2017: 71–138; Kompatsiaris 2017: 7). But the principle remains of drawing attention to, and thereby calling into question the terms by which contemporary art and curated exhibitions come into being, present themselves, are formally handled and, 74

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ultimately, are valued and categorized by the various interlocking socio-cultural discourses and practices in which they are embedded.6 In 1977 Asher’s Installation Mϋnster (Caravan), in escaping the confines of the ‘art building’ and its formal exhibition parameters, was already making a powerful proposal about where art should, or at least could be situated, namely on the streets of the city, embedded in the quotidian lives of citizens. Even here, though, the object in question would not take on the customary mythical aspect of the commemorative monument, fixed with avowed intentions of permanence and preferably on a plinth. Instead it would be not only decidedly mundane but also, in keeping with its properties as a caravan, temporary and mobile to the point of invisibility. So, while it existed as a multiply sited, moving object, with symbolic resonances relating to everydayness, ephemerality and itineracy, these aspects functioned more as navigation points or stimuli in a critical meta-discourse about the nature of public institutions and the role of art. Nevertheless, as Voorhies points out, the artwork’s requirement of the spectator that he or she exit the museum and indulge in some potentially challenging urban detective work represented an important embodied engagement that would trigger the possibility of a committed individual response (45). The fact that the prize for this endeavour was in itself unremarkable as object merely enhanced the chances, first, of institutional critique relating to the place of art coming into play for the spectator and, second, attention being drawn, via the excursion itself and the eventual, off-the-beaten-track circumstances of the location, to the place of the city. Importantly perhaps the association of the caravan with going on holiday proposed a dual sense on the one hand of the ‘burned-out’ museum – or, indeed, ‘white cube’ – and its artworks leaving home and taking a temporary, regenerative break and, on the other, the citizen of Münster being effectively led to ‘have a little vacation’ in their own home city with all the differencing perspectives that both of these excursions might bring about. In essence, then, the mechanism of experience remained the same from event to event, but in the intervening periods the places of both art and the city moved on ten years so that the live experience occurred each time under changed conditions – a process of ‘repetition and difference’. And, by 2007, the artwork had inevitably also gathered significant historical meaning by virtue of its repetition over three decades. In other words, the live experience of the 2007 installation traded in part on its relationship with previous incarnations. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s 2007 installation A Mϋnster Novel serves as a resonant encapsulation of the implied historical, spatial and embodied telescoping that is in operation here. Making use of the full extent of a shallow, bowl-like grass clearing (Am Kanonengraben) in the area around the old city wall on the southern side of Mϋnster’s centre, the artist placed scaled-down replica models (1:4) of familiar SPM installations from successive editions. In effect, it represented a form of compressed, living memorial of sited works, the miniature toy-like forms, evoking ‘remembered playthings’. This three-dimensional mapping in time not only set up the possibility of trans-historical conversations between installations MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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but also cast the walking viewer as the instigator of such potential narrative linkages. As Gonzalez-Foerster says in her proposal: ‘[V]isitors will be able to go from one sculpture to another without having to wait ten years or walk for kilometres, just like in a novel’ (Franzen et al 2007: 105). Thus, A Mϋnster Novel works as a form of spatio-temporal synecdoche, the installation – which naturally incorporated Asher’s caravan – simultaneously encompassing Mϋnster and the SPM’s evolving presence in time within the broader dimensions of the city. SPM 2017 produced an interesting coda, moreover, inasmuch as Asher’s longitudinal project was given a form of curatorial epitaph in the wake of his death in 2012, which signalled the impossibility of a fifth staging in 2017, thus introducing further dimensions of erasure or change in the form not only of an artwork missing in its entirety but also that of a ‘voided artist’. In an exhibition at the LWL-Museum entitled ‘Double Check: Michael Asher’s Installation Mϋnster (Caravan) ’77 ’87 ’97 ’07’, the full historical documentation of his artwork was presented (as the title suggests), including a present-day photographic ‘in-dialogue’ response from the artist Alexander Rischer. The notion of a ‘double check’ refers to Asher’s own stated self-appraisal of the continuing validity of the installation’s concept each time the question of its renewed participation in the next SPM edition had come up. Arguably – with my tongue firmly in my cheek – the exhibition could have been titled something like ‘The Last Gasp’ or ‘Installation Mϋnster (Coffin)’ to take into account the undoubted irony of Asher’s caravan project ending up back in the museum after all as a form of terminal statement. In other words, the institution as final resting place. Even then, with commentators of no less standing than Benjamin Buchloh speculating in 2017 in the pages of Artforum that SPM itself was ‘now in its fifth and probably final iteration’ (Buchloh 2017: 284), Asher could be portrayed as merely reprising his eternal capacity to remain ‘on it’ (even in death) by effectively enacting a prediction of the event’s end. More a ‘last word’, then.

Trials and tales of rupture If Asher’s and Gonzalez-Foerster’s spatial and conceptual interventions enable a significant ‘time of art’ to emerge, which addresses, in turn, orders of ‘time passing’ in both the decennial event as a whole and the evolving city, another key characteristic of SPM’s historical presence in Münster is the role of rupture. This relates specifically to multiple instances of controversy, aggravation, rejection and failure over the years in the perennial battle of SPM organizers and commissioned artists to be given formal permission not only to make use of certain locations and institutions in the public realm but also to meet with the acquiescence of a critical urban citizenship as to the validity and integrity of their intentions. There is a form of SPM ‘foundation myth’ that encapsulates the notion of rupture with all its associated and, indeed, temporal implications of generating if not an earthquake, at least some form of shape-shifting movement in the complex workings of the 76

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city. In 1974, the then head of modern art at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster, Klaus Bussmann, carved out an opportunity for the municipality to acquire a George Rickey kinetic sculpture entitled Three Rotating Squares for display in public space.7 Bussmann was also a member of the City Council’s Culture Committee – as well as a committed member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – which agreed to condone the acquisition and its siting in one of Münster’s central parkland areas (Engelschanzen) by the Promenade. Tracing the circumference of the former city walls, the latter is a broad, tree-lined pathway for cyclists and pedestrians that encircles the entire city centre.8 Unfortunately for Bussmann, who had already given a commitment to the purchase, the Parliament of the City Council voted to reject the opportunity, saying the sculpture represented an ill fit with the immediate cityscape at Engelschanzen. A decisive part of the highly politicized narrative that then unfolded related to the actions of a regional bank, the Westfälische Landesbank (WestLB), which had recently been given clearance to build a new headquarters on the public lands of the city’s zoological gardens. The zoo, so the bank had argued, could be relocated from its prime central site in Münster, where it was cramped, to a more appropriate, expansive location on the outskirts of the city. In spite of vigorous public contestations, this had been agreed by the Council and implemented in 1973. A canny Bussmann seized the opportunity of this Council concession and succeeded in persuading WestLB to buy the Rickey sculpture and donate it as a gift-in-thanks to the city, thereby forcing the issue of its siting at Engelschanzen and circumventing the original reasons for the rejection of the sculpture by the Council Parliament. Public disquiet at this turn of events was palpable and operated at several levels of complexity, including, first, the aesthetics of the so-called artwork, supposedly as an instance of the ‘avant-garde’; and, second, its imposition on the location in question, which was held not only to offend against the eye within the context of the cityscape but also to be inappropriate inasmuch as the area was too protected by surrounding trees, thus diminishing the air flow upon which the three rotating squares relied in order to function as a kinetic sculpture (so the argument went). Politically speaking there was public consternation above all at the sleight of hand involved in circumventing a democratically enacted Council majority decision, made all the worse by the bank’s central implication in this manoeuvre in the wake of the previous controversy surrounding its neat displacement of the old zoo. Bussmann, who certainly emerges from this tale as something of a wily operator, playing both the political establishment and corporate business at their own games for the sake of public art, stubbornly saw to it that the siting of Three Rotating Squares took place and held firm – it remains to this day – thus establishing an important paradigm for Münster (and, later, the SPM) best summed up as the assertion of public art in adversity. Whether or not one has a liking for Rickey’s kinetic works per se, in the context of Münster his sculpture acquired a particular appropriateness in fact in that its square ‘tectonic plates’ began, by virtue of their siting, and in their own quietly elegant manner, to generate irreversible and MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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far-reaching movement in the city. If the sculpture’s own kinetic aesthetic was more akin to provoking a mild tremor – all the more so in the windless terrain it ironically came to occupy in Münster – the discourse around it proved seismic, not only precipitating what eventually established itself as SPM but also setting the tone for a continuing sense of contentious rupture when it came to the siting of artworks in the city. In keeping with his formal position at the Landesmuseum, Bussmann’s insistence at this stage was motivated – and this is where one may morally excuse him his political manipulations, insofar as one has reservations – by a desire to educate the citizens of the city in the project of modern and contemporary art. To his credit, then, and in the best spirit of much-debated notions within the discourse of politics and art around ‘dissensus’ (Rancière 2009) and ‘agonism’ (Mouffe 2000) that were to emerge at a later point in time, of course, Bussmann held a public circumstance of difference and contestation to be the perfect moment to pursue a provocative pedagogical project, out of a clear sense of public duty: in his view the public needed, for its own benefit as a corpus of participating citizens in the life of the city, to become cognizant of the inherent humanizing value of modern art – and sculpture in particular – part of which entailed capitalizing on its capacities to provide a critical forum, to pose questions and to provoke. Thus, not unlike documenta’s post-war mission in Kassel to reconnect the (West) German public with the conceptual and intellectual challenges of an international avant-garde formally classified as degenerate by the philistine National Socialist propaganda machine before and during the Second World War, Bussmann saw the need to conduct a form of ‘object lesson’ on modern and contemporary sculpture in the context of Münster and the region of Westphalia with the three-part exhibition, entitled ‘Skulptur 77’, which, as a whole, sought to cover the evolution of modern sculpture (since Rodin). As already mentioned, the third part was dedicated to site-based work outside the confines of the museum’s galleries and subtitled simply ‘Projekte’. Kasper König was invited to organize this section in his capacity as a New York City-based curator with impeccable connections to high-profile international artists of the moment, but also as a former ‘Münsterland lad’. It is important at this point to put in context the particular status and circumstances of Münster at the time. Historically it had experienced its moment in the limelight in being, along with nearby Osnabrück, the place where the Westphalian peace treaty that brought the pan-European 30 Years War to a close in 1648 was signed by all implicated parties. The opulent, gothic Friedenssaal (peace hall) in the historic town hall where this occurred was destroyed in the Second World War but, along with the rest of the city’s central area around the Prinzipalmarkt – which was also flattened ‘in response to the German raids on the British city of Coventry’ (Grasskamp 1997: 20) – has been fully restored and polished up since then. As such, the built core and traditional ‘look’ of this typically concentric medieval town, with its later gothic and baroque additions, has been preserved. This conscious heritage conservation strategy – witnessed similarly in many German cities from Dresden to Cologne, but not perhaps in 78

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quite the same concentrated way as in the far smaller Münster – is not without its vociferous detractors, lending as it does an overwhelming sense of ‘artificial affect’ to the built environment of the city centre. Arguably the restoration work has been ‘too meticulous’ in the sense that it presents perfect and whole versions of historical buildings effectively without a history. In other words: without any signs of natural ageing, of a ‘life lived’. If the buildings evoke history, it is as a seamless continuum rather than the sum of ruptures that more accurately describes its course in Münster. The aesthetics of architecture aside, such a projection also poses the implicit danger of turbulent recent histories per se becoming conveniently effaced and forgotten. Not surprisingly, the contentiousness of this über-sanitizing approach and its effects have proved to be a repeated source of implicit as well as explicit critique for successive SPM-commissioned artists. The paradigm of restoration stands not least in immediate counterpoint to Asher’s caravan, which is an instance of decidedly ordinary, impermanent architecture with a colourful, disrupted biography and, thereby, arguably more in keeping with the course of historical events in the city. While its implication in formative historical wars such as the 30 Years War and the Second World War conveys a sense of importance on the city, Münster remains relatively modest and contained as an urban conurbation and, city or not, is frequently referred to, like Kassel, as essentially ‘provincial’. On the one hand this makes the emergence of an internationally renowned event such as SPM all the more remarkable; on the other it underscores perhaps the degree to which Bussmann’s ‘educational impulse’ was appropriate in the circumstances. In Frankfurt or Munich there would not have been the same call for it. That said, Münster has a thriving, centrally located and internationally respected university with a large student population that contributes, avidly among other things, to a marked culture of bike riding in the city. A formal cycling infrastructure has been comprehensively implemented and maintained by the urban planning authorities and is comparable to similar concerted initiatives in places such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam. While student populations generally remain stable as a numerical abstraction, delimited periods of study and eventual graduation naturally mean a high turnover, so there is a perennial sense perceived by locals of university life existing as a substantial but essentially independent presence in the city. As far as the residual majority of the population goes, it is mainly bourgeois and wellto-do, conservative and Catholic. As such, the city conveys a predominant sense of thriving functionality. As a pronounced ‘cathedral city’, the presence of the Catholic Church, both physically and in terms of its influence on everyday life and public discourse, is historically substantial. To illustrate the former, Jef Geys’ 1997 intervention Don’t Believe What You See identified seven churches in the city centre for which he provided close-up access to the facades via a mobile hoisting platform (to facilitate better scrutiny). Whatever the purpose of the artwork may have been, the tight-knit cluster of churches that Geys highlighted on a map – all within a few minutes walking distance of one another – gives a good idea of MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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the kind of ‘spatio-spiritual density’, of affective presence, involved in the church’s position as an institution in the city (Bussmann et al 1997: 171). As for the church’s influence on the public life of the city, in the same 1997 edition of SPM Ayşe Erkmen found herself basing her whole commission around an unholy spat with the Cathedral Diocese which had refused permission for her initial site-specific proposals relating to interventions on the rose window of St Paulus Cathedral’s western façade (142–9). Involving adjustments that identified the component parts of the window effectively as a twelve-point clock face, these had had the intention of ‘making the viewer think about time and religious symbols’ (Spinnen and Pieper-Rapp-Frick 2017: 91). Erkmen’s eventual artwork infamously witnessed her taking to the air: that is, hiring a helicopter to undertake mini aerial tours of the city centre with a succession of iconic sculptural figures (from the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries) selected from the Landesmuseum collection dangling from it. The excursion, which took in locations where these sculptures had once been sited prior to the city’s destruction in the Second World War, culminated in them being deposited on the roof of the museum facing St Paulus across the cathedral square, the incoming figure replacing an extant one. On one occasion, a Sunday morning, this shuttle procedure apparently disturbed a sermon in the Cathedral by a visiting bishop; in ‘retaliation’ the Diocese maintained that the force of air pressure generated by the helicopter rotor blades had caused damage to some of the cathedral’s roof tiles (Kock 2017b: 50). Unwittingly perhaps, as Spinnen and Pieper-Rapp-Frick suggest (2017: 91), Erkmen was stirring up memories and sensitivities around two past controversies relating to the Church’s identity in the city. First, the western Cathedral façade had itself been subject after the Second World War to public dispute on account of the way its restoration was being conducted and so was a touchy subject; second, and more relevant to SPM, in 1987 there had been protracted aggravation around the siting of a bright yellow Madonna figure by Katarina Fritsch – similar in size to Erkmen’s chosen icons – in one of the city centre’s main shopping squares. Interpreted by some as cheaply blasphemous and an inadmissible affront to the church, Fritsch’s intention was, in fact, to draw attention to the kitsch, touristic commercialization of religious iconography and the implicit mass commodification of immaterial notions of spirituality and belief. This was in a year when the Pope himself deigned to pay Münster a formal visit – in itself indicative of the city’s powerful Catholic associations – and 100,000 ‘Papal tourists’ had been attracted to the city. All in all Yellow Madonna was defaced and attacked on four separate occasions during the SPM that summer, each time being rapidly repaired, even recast once, and resurrected in its original location. On the final occasion it had been ruthlessly broken into three parts with the head being decapitated.9 Fritsch was neither the first nor, as the example of Erkmen shows, the last to engage critically with the marked influence of the Church in Münster life. In fact, these examples serve as typical instances of the degree to which invited artists invariably develop their commissions in relation to the complexities 80

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of specific institutional and/or architectural aspects of the city, thereby often meeting with resistance. Importantly the controversies provoked by these very public sitings highlight the way that such artworks have the capacity to put their figurative fingers productively on sensitivities in the life of a city, arguably in a way that confinement and framing within the cloistered walls of a museum or gallery would never permit. Although, art historically speaking, these kinds of intervention have happened, of course, a contemporary public would be unlikely in the main to consider itself to have the right to subject museum-based artworks to similar abuses and forms of inquisition. While hardly an ambition that artists would ascribe to their installations, the fact that these ruptures occur with sitebased works is nevertheless symptomatic, first, and perhaps perversely, of a public to whom the questions provoked matter enough that they would feel the need to interfere with the works; and, second, of a citizenship that feels it has been offered ownership of the art by virtue of it ‘escaping’ the formal clutches of an institution which may, to many, seem intimidating and exclusive, if not irrelevant. In other words, by virtue of being sited in public space the artworks are fair game now. Thus, the frequent ruptures caused by ‘art on the street’ (in the broadest sense) are indicative of a greater degree of engagement with and by the public and the city’s institutions. Each time it seems art is effectively being put on public trial, having to prove its integrity and validity, and, precisely via this process of enhanced scrutiny, raising important issues about both itself as art and the city as a place to live. Following hard on the heels of the contentious ‘founding myth’ surrounding Rickey and, in effect, continuing the theme, rupture and/or failure accompanied all the initial commissions for the 1977 ‘Projekte’ event. Bruce Nauman’s 25 m2 Square Depression – a form of shallow, inverted pyramid sunk into the ground – did not materialize at all because the Council planning department’s structural engineers would not give permission for it to be sited at the time. Thirty years later, at SPM 2007, the installation was deemed possible after all and has remained in its location outside the bland, generic Life Sciences Faculty block of the University. This seems to tell its own tale of how initial resistance in Münster – here on the part of specialist municipal officialdom – to the idea of critical interventions in urban space was gradually persuaded in time of the validity of such practices. A similar tale of rupture and time attaches to Claes Oldenburg’s iconic Giant Pool Balls installation referred to earlier, which found itself subject in 1977 to critical attack by an unusual alliance on the one hand of middle-of-the-road, conservative citizens expressing their disapproval via newspaper letters pages on the basis of aesthetic distaste and, on the other hand, radical left-wing student activists who saw only irresponsible frivolity and capitalist decadence at play and  proceeded, without success, to try and roll the concrete balls into Lake Aa (35–7). Over the decades the three light grey balls have repeatedly served as public canvasses for all manner of political statement or casual tagging, always being restored again to their pristine state. Nowadays their removal would probably be met by similarly resounding protests from students and citizens alike. They have MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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been affectionately adopted by the public and, indeed, shamelessly co-opted as the most potent symbol of Münster’s identity as a happening tourist destination by the City’s marketing department. The rapid clean-up response to continuing, largely benign graffiti interventions is more likely to be driven these days by the need to ensure as a matter of urgency that this ‘pride of Münster’ upholds an appropriately sanitized and attractive image of the city. (In fact, intriguingly there is a similar sanitizing principle in operation here in the case of a contemporary artwork as there has been in the restoration of historical buildings referred to earlier, which may be contentious for similar reasons.) By contrast, one artwork from 1977 that was unlikely ever to find itself being accepted as a benign ambassador for the city was Joseph Beuys’s Unschlitt (Tallow). Based on an urban location referred to after an initial scouting tour by the artist as a wound, the sculpture not only failed to appear for the duration of the ‘Projekte’ exhibition but was also finally rejected by the Landesmuseum director as a permanent acquisition once the piece had had the chance to be displayed in the museum’s courtyard (Lichthof). The ‘wound’ that Beuys meant was a functional, brutalist underpass linking the city centre to the broad expanse of the Palace square (Schlossplatz) and eventually the baroque Palace (Stadtschloss) itself with its adjoining botanical gardens. The dingy underpass exists because of a wide multi-lane inner ring-road that rudely cuts between the medieval core of the city and the open terrain of the Palace square. It entails descending into a dark bunker-like structure whose uninviting entrance is rammed in alongside one of the University’s main lecture auditoria (known as H1). Beuys was interested in particular in the underpass’s staircase which featured a ramp facility for disabled wheelchair users, but the entrance had been deemed unsafe and so was, ironically, permanently closed to the public. The artist created a giant mould of the entrance as a whole, into which he poured 23 tonnes of a stearin/tallow mixture. Effectively this would form a 3-D imprint of the texture and wedge-like shape of this section of underpass (conceptually not a million miles perhaps from an aesthetic that Rachel Whiteread came to make her own). However, on account of the sculpture’s overwhelming size, technical problems arose during the casting and cooling process. A fresh attempt had to be made but even then the liquid substance took far longer to harden and prising the moulded form from its shell proved problematic, so the work failed to be ready on time (101–7). If rupture seemed to be the norm in 1977, then it is important to recognize its initiatory manifestation in the case of Beuys’s Unschlitt project as the urban ‘wound’ that was the location itself. The underpass, to say nothing of the inner ring-road that provoked its construction in the first place, represented a failed post-war architectural aberration, which cut inhumanely into the cityscape. Nothing emphasized the latter more poignantly than the paradox of the foresight being there to incorporate in the design a facility for wheelchair users, only for the latter to prove unusable. Beuys’s material aesthetic, in particular the consistent use of tallow and fur in his sculptural works, was well known for its autobiographical associations with notions of rescue 82

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and healing, so Unschlitt was in fact an attempt to provide a form of conceptual antidote to the underpass’s inhuman form. Hence, if there is a link between Beuys’s and Whiteread’s inverted sculptural imprints, it is also important to recognize the former’s prime preoccupation with curativity as against the latter’s with memory. Interestingly successive SPM artists – doubtless alerted to the underpass by Beuys’s pioneering engagement with it – have been attracted to working with the controversial location. In 1997 and 2007 respectively Douglas Gordon and Valérie Jouve both made use of its innate and symbolic dinginess to create temporary cinemas, the latter’s Münsterlands showing a film she had made featuring, among others, an itinerant homeless man who, in actuality, had made the underpass his home and ended up agreeing to act as the live-in projectionist for the duration of SPM 2007. Gordon’s installation was entitled Darkness and Light (after William Blake), the artist interpreting the underpass as ‘a kind of “purgatory”’. In order to ‘initiate a dialogue, in abstract, between two representations of philosophical positions’ relating to the idea of purgatory, he showed two films simultaneously: The Exorcist (1973) and The Song of Bernadette (1943) (Bussmann et al 1997: 175). In 1987, meanwhile, Siah Amanjani had also wanted to create a form of antidote to the underpass ‘wound’ by building a temporary pedestrian bridge across the ringroad but was thwarted by prohibitive costs and had to come up with an alternative site and concept (the Study Garden at Jesuitengang/Johannisstrasse, which is a permanent installation now). In 2017 Aram Bartholl used the H1 underpass as one of three sites to explore the relationship between fire as an ‘analogue’ natural energy source and the powering of faceless digital technologies in a triple installation entitled 12V/5V/3V, with each respective voltage corresponding to one of the sites. Four chandeliers with LED lights hanging from the ceiling of the underpass relied on charges generated by conventional tea light candles burning underneath each individual lamp. A warm, humanizing atmosphere was thereby generated in the dark underpass which, like the campfire charging smart phones in one of the other locations of the artwork (Figure 2.1), invites sociability  – analogue energy sources as a gathering point for people. This serves to point up the analogue and digital dichotomy: analogue represents a form of immediate contact that applies as much to the interaction of human beings meeting in real space, whereas digital communication may be hyper-efficient and fast but is ultimately intangible and distanced. These various instances of interventions in the same ‘wounded’ part of modern-day Münster each in their own way draw critical attention to another side of the city in counterpoint to the centre’s immaculate post-war restoration. They raise divergent issues but all more or less depart from the point of view of the location’s problematic nature, which is indicative of, and produces, inhuman situations of social marginalization, alienation and limbo. The implied ‘in common’ aspect of the site as a source of inspiration also generates a form of ongoing dialogue between artworks from differing decades. Inevitably an artist such as Bartholl, working on his commission in 2017, will be aware of the interventions that have preceded his, thus not only steadily building MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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FIGURE 2.1  5V (2017), Aram Bartholl, 28th July 2017

on and enriching the discourse around the continuing ‘sore’ but also ensuring that this otherwise non-descript, buried site is kept at the forefront of the city’s consciousness as an unresolved matter. One final, historical example of rupture worth dwelling on for its incorporation of issues relating to art and aesthetics, public sculpture and the changing city – to say nothing of the artwork’s dependence on temporal factors – is the highly controversial case (again) of Rémy Zaugg’s 1987 piece Versetzung des Denkmals ‘Knecht mit Pferd’ und ‘Magd mit Stier’ (literally: Transposition of the Statues ‘Farm Labourer with Horse’ and ‘Maid with Ox’). As the title indicates, the installation – which, after all the furore surrounding it, has, like Rickey’s Three Rotating Squares, retained its place – is made up of two separate statues in bronze, depicting salt-of-the-earth country folk. These instances of ‘rustic realism’ were originally crafted and unveiled, in fact, in 1912 by the sculptor Karl H. Bernewitz and stood out prominently at the southern entry point to the city centre at the square that is Ludgeriplatz. Here they were effectively intended to celebrate and welcome Westphalian farming folk from the surrounding countryside, coming to town to flog their produce. By the 1960s, when market practices had radically changed and the city had lost its immediate significance for the agriculture industry, the two sculptures found themselves increasingly marginalized. By the time Zaugg encountered them in the 1980s they had been effectively banished – owing to a reconfigured Ludgeriplatz – to a drab corner of the square in the shadow of a high-rise Council office block (Stadthaus 2) where they were screened off, moreover, 84

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FIGURE 2.2  Versetzung des Denkmals ‘Knecht mit Pferd’ und ‘Magd mit Stier’ (1987), Rémy Zaugg, 29th July 2017

by ongoing building work (Kock 2017b: 35). Zaugg’s conceptual intervention entailed resurrecting the statues by repositioning them in their original place of prominence, which was now on the central island of Ludgeriplatz’s presentday roundabout (Figure 2.2). The move was welcomed in principle by public opinion for its retrieval of an important feature of Münster’s history and its reconnection with the surrounding Münsterland environment. The citizens of the city made it clear that they liked their statues, which had effectively evolved in the meantime into memorials. Zaugg was doubtless less interested in the realist aesthetics of the statues, or even particularly in what they stood for in their original incarnations, than in drawing attention to the paradox of the city of Münster hosting a major international, site-based sculpture projects event – there were sixty commissions in only the second SPM in 1987 – yet historically neglecting Bernewitz’s statues in this way (123). Ironically, as it turned out, the City Council planning department had initially rejected the proposed move only to agree after all, on the strength of public support, to a temporary repositioning. But the real rupture of this case lies in the public outrage that subsequently greeted the news that Zaugg was commanding substantial payment on top of his commission fee to permit the translocation to be made permanent, thereby throwing into relief, in a way that had perhaps not been apparent previously, that the act of discovering and replacing the neglected sculptures was the artwork and that this therefore effectively made it Zaugg’s (123). Not only that, but the artist also expressed delight at the fact that a scandal had erupted over the issue MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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since the ensuing, highly productive debate about public art – what it was, how it should be valued and who it belonged to – in his eyes also represented a vital part of his artwork’s contribution (123). In other words, none of it would have occurred without the artist’s instigation. The discrepancy of perception around ownership and meaning – of art, of the city’s myths and histories – at a point in time when Münster’s citizens were still attempting to decide what they thought about SPM was marked, but again suggested that a constructive process of provocation had been set in train that would not only question what sculpture was but ultimately be for the good of the city as a whole. In other words, dissensus, and the engagement that it presupposed, was the point. The examples given so far represent only a handful of the ruptures and ructions that have arisen over the decades by the siting of artworks in the city of Münster. As I have indicated, putting art out on the street, in the public domain of urban institutions, networks and spaces in general, automatically places it within a highly circumscribed, determined and, therefore, often contested context that rarely arises within the safe confines of a museum or gallery space. Although curatorial practices are constantly evolving, the museum/gallery remains the designated place for showing art – art’s theatre – and so whatever is displayed is contemplated within the discourse of art. If it proves to be controversial, it tends to be little more than a scandal about art. With each public siting, by contrast, there is a working connection that is being sought by the artists/artworks with the context in question and so each time – though to greater or lesser extents, of course – a deliberate form of experiment is being conducted, one which carries risks of a breach or of failure and, as such, tests both the parameters of art and the working practices of the city and its citizens. Over the decades, SPM and the city of Münster appear to have got this implicit tension down to a fine art (so to speak), though not by design, and it is perhaps no coincidence that there are figurative echoes of ‘medieval style practices’ that have accompanied some of these ‘trials’, given the city’s history. In fact, the perfect encapsulation of these various points is Lothar Baumgarten’s 1987 installation Drei Irrlichter (Three Will-o’-the-Wisps) on the steeple of the church of St Lamberti, which recalls an infamous moment (mid-sixteenth century) in Münster’s history, as Grasskamp explains: The Anabaptists’ revolt against the Catholic Prince-Bishop was a quirky chapter even in the context of the Reformation […] The measures taken by the Catholic Church to torment the captive leaders once the rebellion had been quashed included putting them on show in cages; and when they were executed, their bodies were put in the same cages and in them hoisted up the tower of St Lamberti, both to deny the rebels a burial and to hold before the eyes of the living the deterrent example of the punishment incurred. (Grasskamp 1997: 31)

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For one thing the account affirms that the Church was, and is, itself perfectly partial to indulging in provocative acts of ‘public performance’ to get its particular message across – here, somewhat harrowingly, both live and dead. But Baumgarten’s actual point of contention was, in fact, more contemporary. Grasskamp again: As exemplary as one may find the reconstruction of Münster’s inner city after the Second World War, it remains vexing to the present day that the Catholic Church should have found it necessary to reconstruct the destroyed Anabaptists’ cages as well, and to suspend them in their original place. How great must have been the satisfaction, four centuries after the victory, to be able still to humiliate the former foes! With his project, Drei Irrlichter (Three Will-o’-the-Wisps), Baumgarten took issue with this triumphalist form of commemorative practice, and highlighted it with means both simple and disconcerting. In each of the cages he installed a light-bulb which would light up at night and, given a breeze, would sway gently, lending the Anabaptists a curious presence in the life of the town. If, during daylight hours, they were as dead as they had once been when pulled up the outside of the church steeple, the night seemed to grant them the lamp of life again. (31–2) The literal English translation of Irrlichter, as provided here, fails to capture the suggestion of ‘wayward practices’ that is implied by the ambiguity of the original: an Irrlicht/will-o’-the-wisp serves indeed to lead the lost traveller (or soul) home or to a place of safety on a dark night, but ‘(sich) irren’ means acting in error and so the Irrlichter, hanging off the side of St Lamberti’s steeple, can be taken to be as much an emblem for the Church’s misguided actions – of lights that lead you, in fact, astray.

SPM 2017 As eye-catching and intriguing as SPM’s successive public trials have been over the decades, it would be inappropriate to view them as in some way a measure in themselves of the value or success of either the artworks concerned or the SPM event as a whole. The point is surely to stimulate public discourse, not invite scandal and outrage for the sake of it. The fact that the latter arises, when it does, is indicative of something important being raised for the city and often this is, indeed, something that lies submerged in the collective psyche of its institutions and citizens. With the fifth SPM edition in forty years having recently ended, the city’s gradual, in principle acceptance and, now, championing of the event’s challenges is palpable and loops us back to the positive effects of its time-based durational rhythm highlighted at the outset of the chapter, not merely in terms of

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its continuing recurrence but the decades-long interval each time. This reflects to a degree the pedagogical impulse of SPM’s pioneers, which was to teach an ‘object lesson’ on contemporary sculpture, but the public learning curve has a far broader sweep than just that of art, drawing in complexities of everyday urban life and witnessing significant shifts in attitude here, too. In a 2017 interview Kaspar König himself gave an illuminating example of changed perceptions, which he plausibly attributes to the relentless critique of the Church’s practices exercised by artists over the years: In 2018 the Catholic Church is due to host a conference in Münster. The North Rhine Westphalian regional government has stated: ‘We’re right behind it   – financially as well’. Münster City Council on the other hand has said: ‘We welcome you, but don’t expect any cash. The Bishops have enough as it is, so there’s no need for them to send in amateurs’. In other words, the City has emancipated itself a little from the influence of the Church. (Kock 2017b: 50–1; my translation). It would be fair to conclude, then, that SPM has undergone a process of ‘everydaying’: as an art event that consistently provokes, it has become naturalized within the context of the city. The 2017 SPM consciously pushed the boundaries of the ‘What Is Sculpture Now?’ debate further, above all embracing performance and participation – via stated engagements with time, place and the body10 – filtered through an exploration of the ever-expanding ‘universalizing’ influences of the digital-virtual realm and globalization. To sketch the first of two initial examples that appear to encapsulate several of these aspects, Alexandra Pirici’s half-hour long, movementbased piece Leaking Territories, performed by an ensemble of six, took place in the historic Friedenssaal of the Town Hall mentioned earlier. So, merely by virtue of its chosen location it invited analogies with the seventeenth century’s 30 Years War and, in turn, the contemporary European situation relating to political and economic cooperation and the allocation of lands and borders. In the wake of the UK’s controversial decision in 2016 to quit the European Union – in significant part as a consequence of a naïve, populist public perception that the influx of migrants into the country was excessive and out of control – present-day questions around border security, mobility, nationhood, sovereignty and the future shape of Europe echo those that were at the heart of the eventual Westphalian peace accord signed off in that very space. Proceeding from the repeated refrain of ‘Here we are’, which underscored each time the shared weight of both the moment and location, the performers reproduced a series of human sculptures or vignettes based on poignant events in recent history as widely relayed in the global news media and consumed as entertainment by a faceless public at large. One of these cultural memes recalled the moment captured on TV when the then British Prime Minister David Cameron, having emerged from 10 Downing Street to resign after his abject failure to prevent Brexit being narrowly voted for in a referendum, 88

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returned through his front door muttering a self-satisfied, job-done ‘Right’ to himself, before humming an aimless little tune, as if to say: ‘Right, I’ve screwed up the UK for at least the next generation, now how about a little lunch and then a nap.’ Shifting continuously between the formation and disintegration of live sculptural constellations – a processual flow of recitation, embodied image composition, momentary stillness, then dissolution – the ensemble created a fluid meshwork of complexity relating to the negotiation of a bewildering contemporary world, much of it driven by digital technologies and the social media and communications platforms it facilitates. The mediatized, fast-changing signifiers of such platforms may momentarily entertain, but fail to provide adequate coordinates or handholds with which to orientate oneself and make sense of global goings-on, let alone act ethically. Towards the end of the performance, audience members, who had randomly taken up their positions in the Friedenssaal space – some standing, some sitting on the floor – were invited to shout out words, in response to which the performers improvised definitions as a form of human hyper-textual search engine. Inevitably descending into absurdist comedy – a parlour game akin to playing charades – this coda to the performance neatly brought out the farcical but also worrying discrepancies and distanciations produced by the digital-human interface (not unlike Bartholl’s interrogation of the dehumanizing effects of relying on digital energy sources). If Leaking Territories sought to introject disorientating effects of both globalization and digitalization into an embodied now within the context of Münster’s histories, Koki Tanaka also raised questions about present and future living on the planet, as well as in the city, in times of acute uncertainty and instability. Working with an experimental ‘control group’ of eight Münster citizens from varying cultural backgrounds and walks of life, selected via an open application process and not previously known to one another, Tanaka had instituted and filmed a series of extended workshops over a nine-day period. These addressed fundamental issues around How to Live Together and Sharing the Unknown, as the artwork was called.11 In effect the group enacted, for that nineday period, the premise of the experiment as contained in the title, sleeping and cooking together, and switching spaces within the very particular and significant circumstances of the chosen site, alongside engaging in intensive, often tortuous existential discussions. The location was in fact a nuclear shelter, dating back to Cold War times, built below Münster’s ultra-functionalist Aegidiimarkt. This is a red-brick multi-purpose complex, situated directly opposite the LWL-Museum, incorporating residential, work, leisure as well as shopping facilities and so in many ways it implicitly sought, as a post-war construction, to enshrine ‘how to live together’ sentiments as an architectural realization. Perceiving the need to include in the design of such an integrated ‘machine for living’ a nuclear bunker that can accommodate 3,000 citizens may have been a pragmatic move at the time, but it also suggests, first, that there is something not quite plausible or sustainable about this particular modern-day, Western way-of-life solution if it is contingent upon MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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including such a large-scale ‘panic room’ in the face of a potential nuclear threat. Second, in a hypothetical projection of its actual implementation in the event of an emergency, it neatly sets up the question of how indeed to start living again from scratch once the catastrophe has occurred – and to do so better this time. In particular, the situation addressed the matter of negotiating with strangers in circumstances of acute emergency – how difference can be managed when there is no choice but to do so – thus drawing in highly pertinent contemporary issues relating to migration and xenophobia. In recent times, above all in Fortress Europe, immigration and refugees streaming in from a variety of ‘elsewheres’ largely as a consequence of war and economic destitution have, figuratively speaking, represented the immediate ‘nuclear challenge’ that threatens to destabilize if not obliterate comfortable and convenient yet complacent ways of living. How to live with this often exaggerated and irrational perception (in Münster) is, indeed, the question. Tanaka’s documentation of the experiment was presented as eleven edited films in the bare multi-room cellar of a building directly opposite the Aegidiimarkt complex. In a sense it worked for the viewer as the antithesis to superficial Big Brother-style reality TV entertainment, incorporating all kinds of inarticulacy, moments of genuine rather than engineered tension, as well as boredom and exhaustion as participants attempted to collaborate with integrity in the business of communal domestic living, while also grappling with challenging existential questions such as what constitutes ‘dignity’ or what ‘globalization’ means. If these questions frequently yielded interesting and surprising responses and exchanges, they also clearly framed viewers themselves to feel addressed and, indeed, be moved by the set tasks as they played out, and thus to ponder how they themselves might have set about engaging with them. As such the artwork as presented set up the possibility of empathy with the premise of the exercise, but it also called for a form of commitment or work on the part of the visitor to ‘live’ with its challenges, even if for just a little while, because they clearly mattered. As with Erkmen’s submerged pontoon bridge installation On Water, mentioned earlier in the chapter, Pirici’s and Tanaka’s projects illustrate how the terms of sculpture itself have become stretched if not ruptured entirely. For one thing they consciously draw in and are, in fact, significantly contingent upon participatory practices both in the making of the artwork (Tanaka) and in its presentation to spectators (Pirici). For another they utilize performance, whether in the form of movement-based ensemble work or a filmed documentation of a framed, collaborative workshop process that is in essence a kind of performed reality. Erkmen’s On Water was also entirely dependent on the performance of participants, who probably didn’t see themselves as performing as they waded across the harbour, clutching their footwear, trying to avoid getting wet, chatting to fellow crossers and playfully relishing the novelty of the event as if they were at the beach (Figure 2.3). Not least by virtue of their sheer volume, participants effectively constituted a transient ensemble, making the piece happen by exploiting the physical stage that had been created for them. This paved the way 90

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FIGURE 2.3  On Water (2013), Ayşe Erkmen, 27th July 2017

FIGURE 2.4  On Water (2013), Ayşe Erkmen, 30th July 2017

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for all manner of improvised variations. On one occasion, a Sunday morning in late July, crowds had gathered in the sunshine on either side of the harbour when a wedding party suddenly arrived. Whether or not the SPM invigilators monitoring health and safety at the location had been forewarned, they temporarily cleared the water crossing to allow bride and groom to paddle across in full regalia, with only a photographer accompanying them to record the occasion of their symbolic journey to the other side (Figure 2.4). As they paused in the middle, to milk the moment, a lone busker, not apparently connected to the party, began playing My Way on his trumpet, to the palpable delight of a cheering public who demanded (and received) an encore. After figuratively and literally stirring up the air around St Paulus Cathedral with a helicopter in 1997, in her controversial exploration of the ‘invisible lines’ drawn between art and religion (König et al 1997: 142–9), one might say, somewhat waggishly, that Erkmen had succeeded once again, albeit inadvertently this time, in staging the spectacular on a Sunday morning in Münster, this time exploiting the element of water (rather than air) with its capacity to cause  figurative ‘ripples’. Frivolous as the impromptu – and to all appearances secular – wedding ritual may have appeared by comparison, ultimately it represented a serious performative gesture for the couple concerned since it embodied the idea of a lasting commitment to their future lives together on earth.12 If one of Erkmen’s provocations with On Water was implicitly to replicate, at one remove so to speak, the devastating scenario of desperate Mediterranean migrants pledging their futures to the lottery of being transported across the sea by exploitative trafficking gangs using unworthy boats, then productive analogies are perhaps there to be drawn with this very local, celebratory scene occurring in Münster. Such analogies may make their point contrapuntally: how easy and pleasurable by contrast with the Mediterranean situation to paddle back and forth in the warm, shallow waters of Münster’s harbour. However, a clear distinction nevertheless exists between the harbour’s recently developed northern bank, with its trendy bars and cafes and art galleries, and the raw, neglected, post-industrial ‘B-side’ (as some graffiti on the side of a disused warehouse has it). There is then an immersive replication, in miniature, of the marked difference globally between ‘privileged land’ on the one hand and undeveloped, exploited or destroyed territories on the other. Thus, On Water permits the way-of-life complacency of Fortress Europe to be thrown into relief via a local analogy. Making use in the building of the underwater bridge precisely of the sea-going cargo containers that are associated with the mass, global transportation of goods, including in the form of trafficked human beings or stowaways, is certainly no accident. Moreover, the mutual, yet contrasting focus on unknown futures – in married life or as an illegal refugee heading for strange, unwelcoming lands – poses a question in both cases relating to the essential value of a human life. What strikes one in all three of these 2017 artworks outlined so far is the way the premise or framing of a combination of participation and performance (among other features) facilitates the emergence of a particular, embodied form 92

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that exists in time and space. Importantly, it assumes its shape momentarily – although that moment can be a drawn-out one – only to dissolve again having made its mark. Whether or not the residue of such an intervention – which can also have fortuitous aspects, as we have seen with the wedding example – remains is ultimately up to posterity; certainly Erkmen’s 1997 project has entered Münster mythology and her 2017 ‘splash’ is likely to follow suit. As it happens Kasper König himself has frequently referred to the ideal sculpture in public space as being the bog-standard snowman built by kids (Waldvogel 2008; Hein 2017: 91). This is precisely on account of its relatively rare and temporary presence, which celebrates the ‘renewed novelty’ of the moment of it snowing, but also works within the limitations of its material properties and chosen location.13 Of course, as Lisa Le Feuvre points out, some SPM commissions have been retained (2017: 15), but actually surprisingly few – thirty-two prior to the 2017 edition – given the overall number installed over the decades. In truth their retention has more to do with whether or not a patron emerges once the event is over and is, as such, far less the concern of SPM curatorial strategy. Retention holds dear principles of durability (of materials) and permanence, which, not least in the light of this discussion, appear in the meantime to belong to earlier eras of public sculpture. Those very obviously performance-based projects at SPM 2017 aside, an engagement with the temporal ‘snowman’ principle of ‘new sculpture’ was visible as well in more apparently object-based artworks such as Lara Faveretto’s Momentary Monument – The Stone at Ludgeriplatz (as its title suggests) and Nairy Baghramian’s Privileged Points in the grounds of the baroque Erbdrostenhof Palace, which had hosted works by Richard Serra (Trunk, 1987) and Andreas Siekmann (Trickle Down: Public Space in an Age of Privatisation, 2007) in previous SPM editions. Baghramian presented two installations in the forecourt and rear yard of the palace, both of which projected unfinished states. The former constituted what appeared to be three large-scale segments of blackened, ‘prepared bronze’ piping in an out-of-kilter, yet elegant horseshoe shape, with temporary metal brackets crudely joining the segments together, thus raising the sculpture off the ground at varying heights (Figure 2.5). If this proposes a ‘sculpture in waiting’, the installation out back appears to be at an even earlier material stage: two piles of similar, but whitened piping, which may or may not be eventual augmentations of the piece in the street-facing courtyard. So, the artist’s concept emphasizes provisionality, but it also incorporates a prepared artist’s statement to the effect that this apparently sitespecific installation will at the end of the SPM event be completed as a sculpture and, pending the identification of a sponsor, positioned somewhere else entirely (König et al 2017: 134). Whether or not this textual addendum is true is, in a sense, neither here nor there (as it were). The fact remains that so-called sitespecific works more often than not end up ‘unsited’ – and often with no other home to which to be displaced – once the exhibition or art event they are part of has expired. Of course, in one regard this taps neatly into the infamous site debate around Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) in New York City’s Federal Plaza, with the MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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FIGURE 2.5  Privileged Points (2017), Nairy Baghramian, 25th July 2017

artist’s renowned insistence on ‘here, and here only’ as the suggestion was made to re-site it in the face of vehement public protest. It is surely no coincidence that Serra’s Trunk, which so precisely engaged in a centuries-crossing relationship with the ‘perfect’, baroque execution of the Erbdrostenhof by Münster’s masterful eighteenth-century architect Johann Conrad Schlaun, was one of the previous occupants of the courtyard. The ‘privileged point’ of the latter as prime location is defined on the one hand by the Palace itself but, arguably, on the other by the albeit perverse fact of Serra’s controversial involvement with the site.14 Since there had been problems during installation with the sculpture’s sheer weight, which threatened permanently to damage the surface of the courtyard, the owners of the Palace wanted Trunk removed again as soon as possible, so once again a Tilted Arc conundrum presented itself, if for different reasons. Ironically, Trunk was bought by a delighted Swiss museum director at the end of SPM 1987 and, with Serra’s reluctant agreement, re-sited in the director’s home town of St Gallen although both buyer and artist were said to be deeply unhappy, ultimately, about the new location (Spinnen and Pieper-Rapp-Frick 2017: 137). The point about relating this particular Münster ‘rupture tale’ is less to record the potential that had existed for a replication of a Tilted Arc-style trial or, indeed, Serra’s apparent, if reluctant acquiescence and dissipation of the situation in this case, than to take note of the way Barghramian’s engagement with Erbdrostenhof playfully invokes Serra in order to offset itself – or define its difference – as a ‘site-specific’ piece. Effectively it ends up being, in a deliberately paradoxical way, a site-based intervention about the purist premise of Serra’s site-based piece and thereby serves as a measure of 94

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how far thinking around site-specificity has come in the meantime. By evoking Trunk’s absence or disappearance, it asserts a new-found aesthetic of ephemerality in the siting of such public art. In a sense Privileged Points represents the temporal antithesis of a ruin: raw material which, in presenting itself consciously as not yet fully formed, reveals itself in fact to be conceptually ‘ahead of the game’ in what it has to say about site-specificity and permanency. In its state of enduring incompletion it is, then, ‘complete’ after all. Lara Faveretto’s Momentary Monument – The Stone suggests related forms of engagement with location and new sculptural principles. But where Baghramian’s project is arguably pre-sculptural, hers is more de- or post-sculptural (König et al 2017: 189). Sited in a grass clearing just off Münster’s Promenade at Ludgeriplatz it has the appearance of a conventionally modern, abstract monument: a rough-edged, rectilinear, 4.20m high, vertically striated block of local grey granite (Figure 2.6). Closer inspection reveals it to be hollowed out with an open, horizontal slit on one side, as for a mailbox, which is intended in fact for monetary donations by the public. An on-site explainer states that the collected cash will be bequeathed to a charity in the nearby North-Rhine Westphalian town of Büren, which offers support to refugees and failed asylum seekers in state detention and awaiting deportation (Hilfe für Menschen in Abschiebung). The assumption of the monument functioning effectively as a piggy bank is entirely correct, stretching as far as the traditional act of being smashed open to retrieve the cash. Thus, the monument is set to be reduced, or ‘de-sculpted’ to gravel, which will then be donated to a local building firm for re-use in its construction

FIGURE 2.6  Momentary Monument – The Stone (2017), Lara Favaretto, 25th July 2017 MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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work (189). Undoing sculptural form in this way, which essentially defines the piece as a durational performance, whose work continues in the form of contributing both to the immediate social need of aiding deportees and to the construction of a new built infrastructure long beyond the life of the installation itself, represents then an aesthetically integral feature of the artwork as sculpture project. In its own way the ‘life’ of Momentary Monument is performative in its various stages of evolution of the pattern a refugee’s life has from being raised, then dashed (like hope) – a transient state of rude and continuous subjection to the highs and lows of adapting to new circumstances. In material terms the invocation of the piggy bank is significant, as the SPM catalogue notes explain, insofar as it harks back to the origins of the term, which turns out to have nothing to do with pigs: ‘Before the creation of modern-style banking institutions, people commonly stored their money at home in ordinary kitchen jars. During the Middle Ages, dishes and pots were made of an economical clay called pygg. Whenever people could save an extra coin, they dropped it into one of their clay jars – a pygg pot’ (190). The domestic saving of coins in this way was a near cousin of the practice of hoarding in times of threat and desperation: ‘[P]anic-stricken people who wished to hoard their money did not waste their time saving depreciated paper money but laid aside gold coins. Receptacles in which hoards are hidden vary wildly and are often broken during the finding, but the protection they have afforded accounts for the unusual condition in which some of the ancient coins come down to us’ (191). Favaretto’s monument replicates the notion of the hoard as symbol of the refugee’s plight of forced migration and destitution but at the same time, in literally saving coins, enacts a form of immediate material rescue or remedy of the situation. This not only has the capacity to ‘save the bacon’ of the refugee (fortuitously to invoke pigs again), but also runs against the grain of the traditional memorializing monument’s desire either to provoke reflection (in German Denkmal), to honour (Ehrenmal) or exhort (Mahnmal), yet frequently effects its opposite: invisibility and forgetting. Moreover, Favaretto’s sculpture is bound into a poignant site-specific relationship with the 1920s ‘Train Monument’ on the other side of Ludgeriplatz, which commemorates the heroic deaths of German soldiers and officers of the so-called Train Battalion waging colonial wars in Africa on behalf of the German nation, including the genocide against the Herero and Nama tribes in Namibia (Kock 2017a: 15). In another corner of the same square, meanwhile, is the City Council’s high-rise Stadthaus 2 – highlighted in the discussion of Zaugg’s controversial intervention in 1987 – which contains the immigration office where decisions regarding deportations are doubtless made on a daily basis. Thus, Momentary Monument performs a debate around ethical responsibilities in the light of Germany’s postcolonial legacy and its relationship to the presentday global immigration crisis, while simultaneously raising questions around the functionality of historical monuments in relation to the changing role of contemporary sculpture. 96

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Forty years after the foundational, scandal-shrouded installation of Rickey’s kinetic artwork, Favaretto’s ‘momentary’ project, sited but a couple of hundred metres away, encapsulates kindred notions of sculpture that moves – in itself as ‘object’ and figuratively in terms of the ‘disturbed air’ of the discourse it stimulates, be that to do with questions of art, the city, or both at the same time. In fact, Favaretto’s Münster installation had a counterpart sited outside the town hall in the nearby city of Marl. The doubling was part of a project entitled ‘The Hot Wire’, which was an initiative that involved the 2017 edition of SPM attempting for the first time to spread its Münster wings by engaging in a simultaneous exchange of artworks with the Glaskasten Sculpture Museum in Marl. A similar, provocative holding to account is implied by situating the piece right outside the town hall, of course, but the twinning, and ‘The Hot Wire’ event itself, also points to another way in which sculpture, and SPM in particular, has moved.15 Over the decades SPM commissions have consistently engaged with the places of the city – its architectures and institutions – forming a rich complex of interventions or propositions that, taken as a whole, form a kind of urban mythology or mosaic – a network of narratives, some of which live to tell the tale themselves. Those that do not physically remain – which, unlike Folkestone, constitutes the majority, as we have seen, in a curatorial strategy that resists the idea – nevertheless leave a trace, having, to greater or lesser extents, made an impression for the duration of the event. To give one outstanding example: the city will not forget Erkmen’s 2017 On Water event in a hurry, pulling in as it did vast numbers of members of the public who were eager at least to witness, if not indulge in this provocatively secular ‘walk on water’ in the Catholic Diocese of Münster. But if participating in such an event represents one form of temporal experiencing, the ‘ripples beyond’ represents another, one that is more to do with critical reflection upon what any one intervention means and what it leads one to think and feel about the city. Thus, a preoccupation with space and place emerges – as Michael Asher’s caravan has epitomized – whose work is subject to time: the complex, unfolding, overlapping time of sculpture. This is what amounts to SPM’s gift to the city. In the same way as the ‘new sculpture’ of any one artwork represents a process of finding a form that resonates within the complex context of the city, so SPM, as an art event repeated decennially, assumes a distinctive form, both for the duration of any one edition and over successive editions, one that ultimately extends to the city and enables it too to find and re-find itself over and over.

Notes 1 The alignment is no coincidence since SPM came about to some extent as a counterpoint to documenta, which had tended to ignore the city of Kassel itself and was therefore far less preoccupied with questions of site-specificity, sculpture and public art. MÜNSTER’S ‘RUPTURE PROJECTS’

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2 Visitor numbers had risen progressively from 100,000 in 1977 to 650,000 in 2017. See https://www1.wdr.de/kultur/bilanz-skulptur-projekte-100.html (accessed 10 February 2018). 3 Artists invited in 1977 were Carl Andre, Michael Asher, Donald Judd, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Ulrich Rückriem, Joseph Beuys, James Reineking, Richard Serra and Walter de Maria. 4 To underscore the point, by 1997 the curators of SPM had enormous difficulty locating an Eriba Familia caravan to hire for Asher’s installation, spending a year looking and only locating one by chance a few weeks before the event was due to open (Voorhies 2017: 49–50). The caravans used each time were the identical model but not the same one. 5 See Asher (1983), Peltomäki (2010), King (2016), Alberro (2017) and Voorhies (2017) for further material relating to Asher in general and his SPM caravan project in particular. 6 James Voorhies points out that Jonas Ekeberg has positioned the recent work of new institutionalism ‘within a history of Conceptual Art and institutional critique’ (Voorhies 2017: 211). 7 Much of what follows in this outline of SPM origins is taken from ‘local myth’ but I am also indebted specifically to overlapping accounts by Grasskamp (1997), Spinnen and Pieper-Raap-Frick (2017) and Kock (2017b). 8 The Engelschanzen location is but a couple of hundred metres from GonzalezFoerster’s 2007 A Münster Novel site. 9 To continue the point relating to SPM installations referencing one another across decades: in 2017 Nicole Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain installation in a parkland clearing just off the Promenade on the northern side of the city centre suffered similar decapitations with three of the six figures involved being subject to separate wanton attacks. 10 See three journal-type pamphlets produced at half year intervals by SPM 2017 organizers in the run up to the event: Out of Body (Beeson and Peters 2016), Out of Time (Beeson and Peters 2016), Out of Place (Beeson, Peters and Pilz 2017). 11 There was an accompanying booklet to the films, documenting key aspects of the process: Koki Tanaka, How to Live Together: Production Notes, Münster: Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017. 12 In fact, the wedding ritual corresponded perfectly to the physical realization of J. L. Austin’s ubiquitous ‘I do’ speech act example from How to Do Things with Words (1962). In other words, the performativity of the short phrase resides in the fact that its saying corresponds simultaneously to its actual enactment. 13 Eisenman’s genderless nudes (see n.9) at the fountain at Kreuztor, three of which were made of white plaster, were coincidentally suggestive in appearance of ‘snow figures’ and, more significantly, were intended to be left to disintegrate – or ‘melt’ – over time. 14 Serra has fulfilled commissions for three successive SPMs in 1977, 1987 and 1997, each of which has involved engagements with Schlaun’s architecture. 15 While only some 50 km away, Marl, as a post-war, working-class industrial ‘new town’, could not have a more distinct history compared to Münster, yet part of its ‘new identity’ was to nurture a practice of integrated modern art and, in particular, public sculpture, as the current director of Glaskasten, Georg Elben, explains: ‘The dominant theme after World War 2, however, was urban development and the attempt to integrate the various districts, with their rural character, into a whole by means of a new city centre. […] Thus, prompted by the mayor Rudolf-Ernst Heiland, art was

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purchased that met the high aesthetic, qualitative and democratic requirements of the town hall architecture and also had a close relationship to urgent social questions that had their origins in the catastrophic and traumatic experiences of World War 2. […] The exhibitions Stadt und Skulptur (City and Sculpture) are an important factor in the current cooperation between Marl and Münster. They took place in 1970 and 1972 – before the very first Skulptur Projekte – and were temporary open-air exhibitions on the large lawn in front of the town hall’ (in König et al 2017: 350–1).

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3  Viva, Venezia, Viva: Treasures from the Wreck of the ‘Unbelievable City’

In 2017 Venice staged its 57th Biennale Arte and it hardly takes an arithmetical genius to work out, first, that this amounts to well over a century’s worth of biennials and, second, that there must also have been one or two interruptions – world wars come to mind – along the way.1 In fact, since Venice inaugurated the event – and, indeed, the concept of a biennial of art per se – as long ago as 1895, its life can be seen to have straddled three different centuries in all, witnessing and being subject to momentous occurrences and shifts in geo-political history in that period. Remarkably, it has managed not merely to sustain itself but to retain to this day the reputation among art cognoscenti of being – alongside documenta in Kassel, Germany – the most significant of international art events, and that in the face of a veritable mushrooming of biennials worldwide in the last thirty or so years. Nothing throws this predominance and, indeed, singularity into sharper relief than the fact that ‘going to Venice’ for members of the art world fraternity is far less likely to signify their intention of paying the city a visit than its Biennale, and for blue blood art industry professionals, as well as lounge lizards, that generally means the first preview week of this six-month event when all the intense partying and schmoozing take place.2 For them, in short, ‘Venice’ is the Biennale. The converse, that the Biennale is Venice, would probably amount to the same thing for this particular constituency. In this metonymic view the event or phenomenon has seemingly come to be the place, but it is striking also that such an elision, which arguably effaces the city itself by appropriating its name, may, paradoxically, emphasize the Biennale as in fact wholly bound up with and dependent on the urban location in which it takes place. This would include the impulses behind its original conception in the public gardens of the Giardini (introduced by Napoleon in the eastern Castello district of the city in the early nineteenth century), which are summed up by Carlos Basualdo as: ‘to attract visitors, educate the masses,

and stimulate a floundering art market’ (Basualdo 2009: 27). As such, the spatioconceptual institution that is the Biennale aligns itself, broadly, with a series of toponymic coinages – or ‘gifts to the world’ – associated with the city of Venice: the ghetto, the arsenal, the lazaret and the casino. These are all originally locations in Venice whose names have ended up being adopted as universal signifiers for the activities either once having taken or still taking place there, as Wolfgang Scheppe et al elucidate: Ghetto: a place of ethnic segregation, which now also stands for the urban segregation caused by poverty. In 1516, the Republic of Venice passed a resolution to confine the Jewish community to the premises of a former foundry (gettare means ‘to cast’) on a solitary island. Arsenal: a place where the state, with its monopoly on the use of force, maintained its weapons stockpile. Today the term stands for the entire range of a nation’s armaments. The word is derived from the Arabic darsiná-a for ‘workplace’. Before its meaning became more general, it was the designation for the state shipyard. Lazaret: a place of mandatory quarantine for sick and potentially infectious foreigners who were suspected of carrying epidemic diseases. The term, whose meaning eventually came to signify the hospital in general, originally denoted the leper colony on the Venetian lagoon island of San Lazzaro. Casino: a place of licensed gambling, whose historic origins lie in Venice. The Venetian aristocracy maintained pavilions and apartments that were devoted to this type of entertainment, places they referred to by the diminutive form of the word casa, or ‘house’. (Scheppe et al 2009: 54–5) Importantly, for their purposes, the authors identify these Venetian ‘loanwords that have entered the global vocabulary’ as ‘toponyms for locations subject to the authorized use of force by the state – places of isolation in which individual rights were granted and revoked’ (54-5). In general terms, Scheppe et al’s extensive two-volume, 1,344-page study Migropolis: Venice/Atlas of a Global Situation, to which I will have regular recourse in this chapter, is concerned with explaining ‘the collision between leisure based and subsistence based mobility on the terrain of the city by questioning the European viewpoint that holds illegal migration to be a quasi-natural phenomenon accidentally happening to the Western world as a passive victim’ (112). The application, by extension, to the ‘space of the Biennale’ of such a deeply political definition of toponyms, which highlights the carceral and repressive nature and history of the institutions concerned, would seem exaggerated at first sight: can the conditions of a ghetto or lazaret really be equated with those of an art biennial? However, one should bear in mind that the casino, by comparison, is 102

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generally seen to pass typically (and ‘merely’) for a place of harmless entertainment when it is clearly tainted by more contentious issues relating, on the one hand, to gambling addiction as a social or pathological malaise and, on the other, to that institution as the playground of the ‘obscenely wealthy’. Further to the latter, the very first state-owned casino in Venice, the Ridotto, which opened its doors in 1638, required masks to be worn as a condition of its dress code. According to Baumstark, anonymizing the experience in this way drove up the gambling stakes, lowering inhibitions and intensifying the sense of intoxication, which typified the way Venice nurtured a hedonistic image of being the cultural plaything of the rich  and is, moreover, a sentiment that extends to the present day (Baumstark 2017: 92). Moreover, as Scheppe observes in Done.Book, his study of Ruskin in Venice, after the end of the era of Doges in 1797 ‘Napoleon’s administration banned gambling throughout the Kingdom of Italy except for “cities of the water”’. This occurred ‘[i]n the spirit of the Napoleonic redefinition of the former economic and political world power of Venice into a symbol of mere cultural significance for outside consumption, [thus] an initial object of touristic infrastructure was created’ (Scheppe 2010: 11). As for the Arsenale, which, since 1980 has formed the second of two fixed Biennale venues in the city: there is a potentially intriguing linkage – but not one I will indulge just now – between it being co-opted, as a one-time site of weapons stockpiling and the construction of warships, and repurposed as an international gallery space.3 Establishing the place of the Venice Biennale is, then, precisely what this chapter sets out to do. This will occur against a backdrop of the event, first, as the archetypal progenitor of an exhibition concept – the curated biennial – that has become widely adopted in recent history; and, second, as the continuing prime point of reference and influence within the international art world – so much so that the event has become synonymous with the city in which it takes place to a degree not witnessed in quite the same way elsewhere. It would also be true to say that a measure of the Venice event’s standing is the fact that it is arguably the original Italian (or, indeed, Venetian) term, Biennale, which tends to have generic currency within the art world (rather than ‘biennial’). However, I would wish to counter any impressions of the event’s ‘universality’ or ‘paradigmatic aura’ that this might conjure by playing down the ‘emulative’ aspect. The Venice Biennale itself has evolved through several phases over time, of course, so it does not in any case represent some kind of fixed biennial form, even if it does appear to have painted itself into something of a formulaic corner in its present incarnation, as we shall see. As such, it is more the idea of a biennial that it has spawned and sustained than any prescriptive ‘recipe’ that is relevant here. In fact, with its own nineteenthcentury origins in replicating implicitly the principles of commercially orientated ‘world fairs’ or expos, not to say a certain ‘Olympian spirit’, the organization around national pavilions and notions of the ‘sovereign representation of art’ (in competition) – which are features that have, in fact, tended to prevail – has rightly been subject to exhaustive and ongoing critique by participating artists and curators VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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in the Venice Biennale itself and, indeed, the organizers of new biennial-type events elsewhere, who have sought to define their difference. As Kompatsiaris points out, drawing on the perspective of the curator and critic Niemojewski, ‘the biennial in its contemporary version does not originate from the model of Venice, which […] more closely resembles today’s commercial art fairs. […] Venice with its system of national representation has very little to do with the biennial proliferation after the 1990s, which significantly differed in terms of format, content, scope aims and politics’ (Kompatsiaris 2017: 24). Of course, the Biennale’s continuing promotion of ‘international art’ in line with spatio-conceptual principles of nationhood – with the original, limited number of national pavilions in the Giardini long since having expanded not only to the naval shipyards of the Arsenale site but also to all manner of one-off rented locations across the length and breadth of the historic centre – draws attention to a further decisive factor relating to the event’s place in the city: that it is merely one part of a much larger ‘Venice picture’ relating to the latter’s role as exclusive global art hub. Venice, the city, is quite simply a key player in the highly lucrative, global capitalist art market and this is reflected in the sheer number of big-hitting international collectors, gallerists and patrons who have based themselves, or at least their galleries and foundations, in some significant form in the city. This includes, to list but a few, the legendary Peggy Guggenheim, who moved with her permanent collection of modernist art into the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in 1949, the Gucci and Christies-owning François Pinault and, most recently, the Russian gas billionaire Leonid Mikkelson. (One might add to this list at least the galleries of Prada, Louise Vuitton and the Cini Foundation.) These bigtime owners and inheritors of artworks can be described as the ‘new merchants of Venice’, whose palazzos occupy prime sites, typically in and around the Grand and Giudecca canals, and whose integrated business interests – that is, non-art as well as art – are premised on facilitating the acquisition of expensive artworks and, in turn, making money from them, as Pinault’s triadic model of global brand (Gucci), private art collection and display (Venice foundation and museums) and auction house (Christies) might imply. (As a ‘site of financial speculation’ the last of these returns us to Baumstark’s point relating to the role of casinos.) Pinault’s museum at Punta della Dogana, one of two that have fairly recently opened their doors, is situated at the tip of the promontory where these two canals converge before opening out into the broad watery expanse of the Bacino di San Marco between the Doge’s Palace at St. Mark’s Square and the Island of San Giorgio. As the former customs control point for the city, Punta della Dogana has always represented, as Richard Sennett points out in Flesh and Stone, the optimum location for the observation of all water-borne comings and goings and, therefore, has been a key strategic feature of the ‘defensible city’, which the compact morphology of Venice as a whole epitomizes: ‘Surveillance was the very lifeblood of the Venetian port, and the physical form of the city made surveillance possible in many ways. The narrow entry straits of the lagoon, the promontory of the customs house, the great 104

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mouth of the Grand Canal permitted government surveillance by the eye as well as in law’ (Sennett 1994: 219). Metaphorically this reflection on the city, and Punta della Dogana in particular, captures the combined senses of visibility, vigilance, control and posturing that go with the territory of being a significant player in, if not driver of the global art market. Venice has a long history of facilitating precisely such values, which are commensurate with competitive trading, financial speculation and the staging of spectacle. The Biennale, meanwhile, is perhaps less directly preoccupied, as it once was,4 with the international art market as big business for collectors, gallerists, dealers and patrons, but is symbiotically bound up in a relationship with it nevertheless. It contributes to nurturing and lending validity to both the category of ‘international artists and curators’ and to a general, and historically continuous, ‘global art city’ culture or ‘ambience’, which, incidentally, also plays conveniently to the needs of the city’s life-blood: its heaving tourist industry. In turn, the Biennale feeds by association off the presence of major private collections and venues, which provide glamour – often via their immediate alliances with the exclusive fashion industry (Gucci, Prada, Vuitton) – as well as continuity inasmuch as they never pause their activities (unlike the Biennale). So, if Venice is by implication synonymous with the Biennale for the cognoscenti of the contemporary art world (as, indeed, the annual International Film Festival is for the movie industry), the event itself is only really fathomable in its contingent relation to Venice as a whole. This includes, of course, its association with the historical city itself, with its long-standing singularity of built form, its picturesque aura and the sentiments of romance and nostalgia that it provokes, and its abundance of art historical treasures housed in churches, scuole and municipal museums. But it also, importantly, takes into account a dependency on the city’s status as a magnetic focal point for the activities of the global art market whose wealthy protagonists make use of the city effectively as a ‘ludic site’ within which to parade their artwork assets and speculate, casino-style, on their trading value. In short, whether Biennale, private art collection, film festival or hotspot for tourists, everything ‘cultural’ that takes place in Venice appears in some way endlessly to feed off, as well as perpetuate in turn, the pre-projected, commodified image of the city in a mutually enhancing celebration of it as ‘unique historical artefact’. As Scheppe et al put it: ‘With reality transpiring here as a comparison to prior-held notions, the consumption of place is transformed into an utterly idealistic practice. The site of its staging is recognizable as a city mutated into a universal machine désirante’ (Scheppe et al 2009: 1,264). The premise of an artfully disguised distortion or masking that such an image represents is perhaps no-where better illustrated than in the work of Venice’s renowned tradition of Vedute painting, whose exponents, from the eighteenth century onwards, sought to capture classic views of the city in all its splendour. As Baumstark observes, the received, idealized image of an ‘enchanting Venice’ has been framed by these artists, who were not, obviously, working in a tradition of realism, but flattering homage, not least for the sake of posterity (Baumstark 2017: 92). First among VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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them was, of course, Canaletto, who, despite the appearance of a form of detailed verisimilitude, wilfully adjusted the perspectives and content of his views (Vedute) to serve his particular purposes of balance and harmony, one image of the Doge’s Palace, for example, revealing double the number of arcades (92). Arguably, Ruskin’s endeavour to document Venice in its entirety in the nineteenth century by focussing rigorously on the close observation of the city’s architectural stone was an attempt not only to capture the city before it sank – already an issue of high concern then – but also to introduce a form of sensuous materiality to the act of encountering the city that asserted the primacy of unmediated haptic experiencing. Nevertheless, as Scheppe et al state, Venice remains ‘a city that confronts itself only in effigy’ (Scheppe et al 2009: 1,265), whereby there is, as we shall witness, a form of doubling in operation: the false fronts of its façades, in themselves already a form of theatricalized ‘image’, are replicated in the city’s projected image as captured by the Vedute painters and endlessly reproduced photographically in the modern era. Scheppe et al again: ‘Venice is a shadow that casts another shadow. Yet this shadow then falls back on Venice: the encounter with the physical urban territory becomes the enactment of characteristic rites of passage in which pictorial prejudices precede and determine first-hand inspection’ (1,264).

Exit through the gift horse: ‘Somewhere between lies and truth lies the truth’ In April 2017 a full month before the start of the 57th Biennale Arte, Damien Hirst’s mammoth double-header of an exhibition ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ opened across François Pinault’s two Venice museums at Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal. It ran for eight months and included a mid-term launch of the ninety-minute ‘documentary’ film accompanying the exhibition as part of the Venice Film Festival in the late summer, closing one week after the Biennale Arte in early December. As such it bookended, if not enveloped the Biennale, with which it had no formal connection even as a collateral event, effectively both pre-empting it in terms of attracting public interest – or, to be less polite, deliberately stealing its thunder – and, just to hammer home its projected sense of superior potency, outliving it. In one respect it is perfectly possible to dismiss the implied upstaging as petty speculation, for, to follow in fact the terms of my preceding argument, why should the Biennale have cared about any such potential competition since all art activity is grist to the mill of Venice’s general culture and, indeed, tourist industries? Thus, anything Hirst may have done would have had no adverse bearing on the Biennale and may indirectly have served to enhance it in fact. This is certainly true, but it was less here about the Biennale ‘caring’ than the dramaturgy of the ambitious and ambiguous game that Hirst was potentially playing with his monster exhibition, because, as we shall see, the 106

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performance of ‘Treasures’ had much to do with the image of both the Biennale and Venice as a global art market hub. Assuming one commenced viewing at Punta della Dogana, which is where the combined exhibition guide began, one was met at the entrance to Room 1 with an inscription in gold lettering paradoxically announcing: ‘Somewhere between lies and truth lies the truth’. Not unlike the Brechtian epic convention of prefacing scenes by sketching out for the audience in advance what is about to unfold – in order that spectators would refrain from submitting to the drama of the scene, maintaining instead a detached critical perspective on proceedings – the epigram clearly signalled to visitors that they were entering an ambiguous, playful realm in which they would be invited in essence to explore how they could tell whether or not they could reliably believe their eyes. However, as with the confounding riddle that the sentence ‘This sentence is false’ poses, viewers were unlikely to be able to arrive at a clear-cut resolution, not least since the second ‘lies’ in the aphorism was poetically equivocal: lying could be taken here to mean both ‘residing’ and ‘dissembling’; and the latter sense, which implied that the work of truth may be one that actively fabricates, effectively annulled any validity that the first sense may have had. The clue to all this was, of course, already implicit in the ‘Unbelievable’ of the exhibition’s title. This referred in the first instance to a ship whose 2,000-yearold wreckage had supposedly been discovered in 2008 submerged in the Indian Ocean ‘off the coast of East Africa’ (a suitably vague geo-continental description). To continue in the succinct summary of the exhibition guide: The finding lent credence to the legend of Cif Amotan II, a freed slave from Antioch (north-west Turkey), who lived between the mid-first and earlysecond centuries CE. Ex-slaves were afforded ample opportunities for socioeconomic advancement in the Roman Empire through involvement in the financial affairs of their patrons and past masters. The story of Amotan […] relates that the slave accumulated an immense fortune on the acquisition of his freedom. Bloated with excess wealth, he proceeded to build a lavish collection of artefacts deriving from the lengths and breadths of the ancient world. The freedman’s one hundred fabled treasures – commissions, copies, fakes, purchases and plunder – were brought together on board a colossal ship, the Apistos (translates from Greek as the ‘Unbelievable’), which was destined for a temple purpose-built by the collector. Yet the vessel foundered, consigning its hoard to the realm of myth and spawning myriad permutations of this story of ambition and avarice, splendour and hubris. (‘Treasures’ exhibition guide 2017: 3) Hirst, so the official tale goes, had funded the salvaging operation, thereby implicitly becoming the owner of all the found artefacts, which, for the purposes of exhibiting them to the public, had been prepared and classified into three material categories: as found (i.e. coated in coral), restored (‘as new’) and reproduced (as a museum copy). In case it isn’t apparent yet, the entire hoard as displayed at Punta VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi, including the dramatic Discovery Channel-style filming of its retrieval from the bottom of the ocean, which brilliantly parodies all the seductive rhetorical conventions of this documentary genre, was fake, although the predominant use of lavish materials such as gold, jade and Carrara marble was genuine enough. Within the parameters of the narrative, then, Hirst had cast himself satirically in the role of ‘benevolent art patron and private collector’, the deliberate self-serving vanity of which was hinted at inasmuch as the title of the exhibition as it appeared on publicity materials and the accompanying catalogue could be seen to effect a typographical sleight of hand that easily permitted it to be read as: ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Damien Hirst’. The other potential sleight of hand in play here was that the fictional collector Hirst, who had in a sense effaced and/or transfigured the original fictional collector Cif Amotan II – widely recognized as being an anagram for ‘I am a fiction’ – stood to mask the fact that Hirst the real-world artist was at the same time Hirst the realworld collector. In other words, although he may have invested millions in having these fake artefacts made over a period of ten years, they were also very much for sale – beyond the parameters of the exhibition display – in convenient editions of three (plus two artist’s proofs) for so many more millions, and so Hirst clearly stood to profit financially. In fact, the two exhibition venues had striking pseudomythical, sculptural ‘calling cards’ positioned outside their respective entrances on the north and south banks of the Grand Canal respectively, both entitled The Fate of Banished Man (Figure 3.1). These, like the passage cited above, could have

FIGURE 3.1 The Fate of Banished Man (2017), Palazzo Grassi, Damien Hirst, 1st September 2017 108

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been taken to refer as much to Cif Amotan II as the return of the ‘prodigal son’ Damien Hirst, who, in spite of his busy collecting activity, had been rumoured to be in financial difficulties, not to say declared passé as an artist. Importantly, the suggested sleights of hand were not, arguably, deliberate attempts to pull the wool over the eyes of the viewing public, but were effectively performed sleights of hand which would be perfectly apparent to the vigilant spectator. That is, they were all part of the carefully constructed, complex metastaging that was in operation, whose deliberate game was to toy with, but also reflect on, the workings of the global art industry, including the role of the commentariat or aptly named ‘media circus’ surrounding it, from a deeply implicated position which recognized that there was no viable, detached ‘outside’ from which to comment critically and/or poke fun. Given his success as an artist, first, then as a wealthy collector, Hirst had the financial means as well as influence and clout within the art world to orchestrate a spectacle on such a staggering scale and at the most prestigious of venues. The notion of filling up two whole museums in Venice, belonging to one of the world’s leading art doyens, with ‘fake stuff ’ is, as the exhibition title already intimated, in itself audacious beyond belief and, in truth, something only a Hirst could have carried off based on his personal wealth and reputation.5 To the attentive viewer the premise of the double-exhibition, its game, was evident in Room 1 of Punta della Dogana, which meant the remainder of it, at both sites, was merely a drawn-out reiteration of a point long-since absorbed. Nevertheless, an experience of the whole exhibition remained important in order to gauge its purpose overall as the vast staging of a performance whose significance reached beyond the walls of the museum. In truth, the magnitude of the operation was reminiscent in its scope of the machinations of the Hollywood movie industry. This applied, first, to the content of ‘Treasures’, wherein artefacts had affinities with the exquisitely crafted paraphernalia of studio film sets seeking to project maximum truth-to-materials verisimilitude. Interestingly this seemed to occur in two modalities, which highlighted the self-reflexive, fake-real tension in operation in the exhibition: on the one hand through the use of genuine ‘precious materials’ and, on the other, through openly signalling via labels the use of cheap prop-making materials such as MDF, yet applying the highest standards of workmanship to create the artifice. The analogy with Hollywood, and popular culture in general, extended further to the inclusion, for instance, of sculptural references to Disney cartoons (Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Jungle Book), as well as celebrities of the moment such as Pharrell Williams and Kate Moss – not forgetting an immediate likeness of Hirst himself, of course, in The Collector with Friend in which he could be seen to be symbolically ‘hand-in-glove’ with Mickey Mouse (Figure 3.2). The faux documentary film, meanwhile, which relied on recreating ‘plausible footage’ of the deep-sea salvage operation – plausible, that is, in the sense of replicating the implausible artifice of Discovery Channel-style presentation – revealed the highest production values. Second, the Hollywood analogy is fitting in terms of the sheer mobilization of finance and labour over a VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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FIGURE 3.2  The Collector with Friend (2017), Punta della Dogana, Damien Hirst, 1st September 2017

drawn-out period of preparation. Moreover, as product, ‘Treasures’ was simply and deliberately a jaw-dropping, money-spinning blockbuster spectacle of artifice and trickery right in the heart of the inveterate ‘cultural-historical capital of the western world’, which the writer and poet Joseph Brodsky once described as being a work of art in its own right, in fact ‘the greatest masterpiece our species has produced’ no less (1992: 116). And, as I have been suggesting all along, the contextual aspect of the exhibition, its location in Venice, was key: it would only have made proper sense in this city.6 Ultimately, this is because the wreck of the Unbelievable, whose salvaged treasures revealed a protracted, but highly selective and jumbled up mythical history of civilization, told in 189 objects,7 was an immediate reflection of this ancient and ruinous city of false fronts, fake goods, speculation, masquerade, spectacle and power-mongering: a city that trades – and has done for many centuries – primarily on the quaint image it projects of itself. As Scheppe observes of Ruskin’s renowned take on Venice’s picturesque built environment: He shows in great tectonic detail how the two-dimensional false architecture since the 14th century was solely devoted to serving the expression of power. With the early Renaissance, the building’s shell was viewed as part of a societal system of representation, which transformed its façades into medially conceived bearers of meaning. They are stage effects of a formalism oriented 110

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to a display of splendour. The illusory architectural space, orchestrated by the feudal stakeholders in the profits of long-distance trade, is defined by Ruskin as the impure semblance of theatrical decoration. (Scheppe et al 2009: 115–16) Moreover, as Mary McCarthy explains in a chapter entitled ‘The Loot’ in Venice Observed, much of the decoration on show in the ‘picturesque city’ was not ‘typically Venetian’ but acquired from elsewhere: Venice, unlike Rome or Ravenna or nearby Verona, had nothing of its own to start with. Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes. It was therefore obliged to be inventive, to steal and improvise. Cleverness and adaptivity were imposed by the original situation, and the get-up-and-go of the early Venetian business men was typical of a self-made society. St Mark’s Church is a (literally) shining example of this spirit of initiative, this gift for improvisation, for turning everything to account. It is made of bricks, like most Venetian churches, since brick was the easiest material to come by. Its external beauty comes from the thin marble veneers with which the brick surface is coated, just as though it were a piece of furniture. These marbles for the most part, like the columns and facing inside, were the spoils of war. (McCarthy 1963: 32–3) Thus it is the perennial artifice of Venice, including its implicit dependency over centuries on looted objects and materials, imported from afar by its wealthy seafaring merchants in the creation of the city’s opulent and abundant picturesqueness, that Hirst invokes most powerfully with his magnificent fake of an exhibition. Figuratively, Hirst’s fiction of ‘sunken treasure’ gestures towards Venice’s ageold fear of being on the verge of sinking. Make no mistake, this represents a real enough threat to the city, but it is also one that plays into a marketable narrative of ‘imminent demise’ that lends a further veneer of authenticity to its image. So fake, so real: ‘Somewhere between lies and truth lies the truth’. However much we may perceive ourselves to live in an unbelievable, post-truth, fake news world, the artist appears to say, we’d better believe it’s real; the fiction creates the reality. Furthermore, the full force and magnitude of what Hirst is getting at can only be realized, as far as the artist is concerned, by operating at an equivalent scale: investing millions, securing the support of a wealthy patron – and exploiting the kudos of exhibiting in his prime sites right in the ‘belly of the beast’ – and, finally, choreographing, over the period of a decade, a truly elaborate fiction that is also ‘unbelievable’ in the sense of being the ‘awesome folly’ that it is. In a way ‘Treasures’ amounts to a form of institutional critique. But where the latter has tended, as a movement in art, to restrict itself to manoeuvring within the modal parameters of art making in its subversion of such factors as museological criteria of display and classification, Hirst recognizes and embraces VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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the decisive influence and potency of the global art industry as a whole and plays it at its own game by implicating himself as a key mover and shaker. At the same time, he takes into account the formidable signifying effects of popular culture and kitsch, including all their associations with commerce and fashion, again immersing himself in them rather than attempting to stand at a judgmental distance. What is important in all this is to recognize that for all his real-life role as a multi-millionaire collector of art, Hirst is not first and foremost the businessman – the hoarder, prospector, entrepreneur or trader – whose aim is to generate wealth for the sake of personal gain. He does indeed collect and sell and, ultimately, has the capacity to make (and lose) millions with apparent ease, but he remains above all an artist whose materials, as well as subject-matter, are contemporary art’s implication in an industry of representation and power as witnessed in the operation of the exclusive global art world itself. In other words, his direct involvement in the ‘obscenity of wealth’ and the self-promotion that goes with it and his interest in the role of the popular as well as ‘trashy’ are based on an understanding that this is how a neo-liberalist, corporate culture of consumerism and market principles works within the art world and, above all, how it sustains itself as a viable business proposition via its signifying practices – its performances, its narratives and its projected images of itself. Drawing critical attention to how value and meaning are generated, how they assert and naturalize themselves in the interests of power and profit, can ultimately only occur by manoeuvering within the space of the art market so as to reveal its compromised and divisive workings. As Walter Benjamin pointed out a long time ago now in the ‘This Space for Rent’ section of One Way Street, the detached perspectives and ‘correct distancing’ of formal criticism ‘are long past’ because ‘[n]ow things press too closely on human society. The “unclouded”, “innocent” eye has become a lie’. The exclusive space ‘where contemplation moved’ has gone; instead the ‘most real […] mercantile gaze into the heart of things’, as seen, for instance, in the effects of advertising, is what affords the possibility of insight into the workings of cultural practice (Benjamin 1997: 89). Following from this, Scheppe et al observe of Venice, that the ‘city of the spectacle’ is ‘beginning to turn into a communications medium’ in which ‘its real raison d’être is to provide a presentation platform for advertisers’ (Scheppe et al 2009: 370). But for Benjamin (and by extension Hirst) it was not what the ‘moving red neon sign’ itself said, but ‘the red fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt’ (Benjamin 1997: 90), thus suggesting the temporary ‘renting’ of a liminal space of simultaneous inhabitation and subversion. One might say, then, that Hirst ‘rented’ Pinault’s prime spaces, almost in a situationist act of détournement (or critical hijacking) which looked the gifthorse in the mouth, implicitly posing institutional critique-type questions about the curatorial construction of art historical and archaeological narratives of civilization’s cultural evolution by presenting droll, semi-plausible explanations for a selection of the sumptuous pseudo-treasures on display. There are ample 112

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hints in them of the artist’s agenda of self-reflexive critique, which is effected by attributing to these ‘ancient artefacts’ deconstructivist principles and intentions, as well as employing self-referencing strategies in the ‘Treasures’ exhibition as a whole. Some resonant examples of object descriptions: Skull of a Cyclops Demonstrating the enduring need to create narratives for that which resists explanation, the ancients accounted for the discovery of fossils and unknown animal bones through complex mythological creations […] This object is one of a number of pieces acquired by the collector that would have been deemed inauthentic by contemporaries, who would presumably have believed it to be a real skull (‘Treasures’ exhibition guide 2017: 19). Dead Woman Roman art collectors were not driven primarily by the desire to acquire originals. Displaying multiple versions of the same work together would have invited admiration of the replica, its status enhanced by the association with an antique sculpture (29). Bacchus Bacchus was the subject of cult worship and dedicated ritual from as early as the Mycenaean period (c.1600–1100 BCE). It was his capacity to inhabit liminal realms that often proved attractive to artists – between sobriety and drunkenness, human and divine, masculine and feminine […] The Roman tradition of imaginatively recreating lost antiquities was revived during the renaissance, when the classical era was upheld as a pinnacle of creative achievement (32). Mercury Mercury was the god of movement – which encompassed the circulation of goods and people – as well as words and their meanings. He was also the patron of travellers and tricksters (67). A dominant thread in these extracts is that of perennial art historical and collecting practices of copying and reproduction – not to say playful deception – all of which are designed to foreground that the artifice of art transfers itself similarly, yet imperceptibly to an artifice and arbitrariness of display. At one extreme there are shades here of the anonymous Banksy’s covert interventions in high-cultural institutions such as London’s British Museum, smuggling in and surreptitiously mounting rogue archaeological artefacts, complete with witty caption labels. These are not merely exercises in what you can get away with but relay a form of contemporary cultural commentary as well as satirical critique of institutions – for example, a ‘cave drawing’ as found artefact from the ‘Post-Catatonic era’, depicting a supermarket shopping trolley with ‘early man venturing towards out-of-town hunting grounds’ (Banksy 2005: 155). It hardly seems coincidental somehow VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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that in a very limited selection of art books in the rather exclusive Punta della Dogana giftshop, one of them should happen to be about the non-establishment Banksy, not least on account of his popular faux documentary film Exit through the Giftshop (2010) in which he stages an exhibition of fake art by an invented artist who is, in effect, his alter ego. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the formal institutional critique of a Mark Dion, which also raises questions around the museological classification, cataloguing and presentation of artefacts as constituted ‘knowledge’ and as documents of ‘civilization’ via performed strategies of fictional address. In an installation entitled Raising Neptune’s Vault: A Voyage to the Bottom of the Canals and Lagoon of Venice (1997/8) presented some twenty years ago at the Venice Biennale, Dion started out by dredging Venetian waters in a site-specific endeavour randomly to trawl up whatever specimens and evidence of natural and human existence he could find. The second act, in what has become a signature process for the artist, was to sift and clean the detritus of found materials, classifying the fragments and samples according to potential generic linkages. These were then carefully displayed in custom-built ‘cabinets of curiosity’, a term often applied figuratively to the city of Venice itself.8 The whole procedure was executed by a quasi-scientific/archaeological team of fieldworkers in white coats over an extended period of time and could be witnessed effectively as a durational performance by a passing audience. Similarly, in the third and final act, which presented the artefacts as an installation that incorporated the props and costumes of the archival fieldwork (white lab coats, for example), visitors were at liberty to inspect the materials presented at close hand. As such, the whole event took on the aspect of a site-based performance that situated itself somewhere between the historical reality of the place in which it was occurring – everything found was real enough and potentially had a story to tell about Venice – and the artifice of how it presented itself. Like Hirst’s ‘Treasures’ exhibition, Raising Neptune’s Vault utilized a trope of fictionality to pose profound questions about cultural value and the historical construction of narratives of knowledge. Both artists premised their artworks on ‘raising treasure’, but where Hirst fabricated his sumptuous artefacts at great expense, Dion genuinely found his archaeological fragments in his capacity as ‘aquatic rag-picker’ within the waters of the city.9 Nevertheless, they shared the premise of ‘sunken treasure’, or ‘loot’, the retrieval and acquisition of which, as performance, would be revealing about the place in which it was presented. For Dion this took an intriguing ‘institutional’ turn, in fact, in that an attempt was made by the Venice police force to confiscate his Biennale commission in its entirety. As Dion’s Italian gallerist, Emi Fontana, explains, the police revealed that ‘there had been an anonymous report informing them that Mr Dion’s work in the Nordic Pavilion contained pieces of priceless archaeological value. […] I was able to discover that, yes, indeed, there was an Italian law passed during the Fascist era making it illegal to remove any materials taken from Italian soil [or water]’ 114

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(Fontana 1999: 48). The police chief later informed Fontana as follows (in her paraphrasing): ‘Since Mr Dion is an American citizen, and since the work is being exhibited in the Nordic Pavilion, we have a situation akin to the crime of illegal international art trafficking, imputable to both the artist and to you as his gallerist’ (49). Before any arrests could be made, however, the case was subject to a formal assessment by an ‘archaeological expert’ who, after amiable private negotiations with the gallerist behind closed doors, made the suggestion that the artist donate one of the items from Raising Neptune’s Vault to the Italian State, immediately naming which piece he had in mind. This was a mosaic collage of fragments subtitled Loot, which supposedly contained Chinese porcelain, a majolica, an Islamic piece, a Sephardic fragment and an eighteenth-century English fragment, as well as a bog-standard coffee cup from the Bar Sport Café (53). Loot would be exhibited in the prestigious Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) at St Mark’s Square. Thus the matter was settled. In effect the incident serves to enhance the meaning of Dion’s piece, emphasizing its site-specificity by overlaying an unforeseen dimension relating to how the institutions of the city function. This was an artwork that clearly ended up becoming implicated in the vagaries of ‘canny Venetian practices’ in matters of law enforcement, governance and ‘doing business’ as part of the city’s historical culture industry. At the same time the affair pointed up the extent to which the depths of Venice’s canals are indeed an ‘unbelievable’ vault of treasure fragments that have the capacity to reveal illuminating data relating to the city’s long history of trading, trafficking and looting cultural artefacts and goods for the personal enrichment of its merchants and the enhancement of its image, as McCarthy’s comments quoted earlier made clear (McCarthy 1963: 32–3). The point, ultimately, about both Dion’s and Hirst’s artworks is that they encapsulate what McCarthy refers to in conclusion to her chapter ‘The Loot’ as the way Venice appears in certain respects to have remained ‘changeless throughout the centuries’ (35) in how it goes about its main business. The contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marías echoes the sentiment in Venice, an Interior with regard to the city’s appearance as witnessed in paintings by the likes of Bellini, Mansueti and Carpaccio: ‘you discover that nothing has changed, not just in two hundred and fifty years, but in almost five hundred’ (Marías 2016: 23). Moreover, so Marías observes, the city’s fixed structural form meant that even its famous twentieth-century architectural son Carlo Scarpa was unable to contribute more than ‘mere details’ (25) to the built environment: ‘No one can touch Venice, and he was no exception’ (26). As far as Venice’s business operations go, these days the city is unlikely, of course, to send out merchants (or, indeed, its navy) to secure and bring home the loot. Instead it stays where it is and uses its ‘in-house wiles’ to seduce and fleece the endless, churning source that constitutes the mega-tourist industry – processing hordes rather than hoards. The global art industry, meanwhile, has similarly consolidated its position within the impervious, unchanging culture of ‘fortress Venice’, feeding off a potent mix of commercial tourism, faux exclusivity and the VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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city’s image as World Heritage Site and universal jewel in the crown of Western civilization. Alone the fact that Hirst was permitted to stage his ‘Treasures’ spectacle in Pinault’s flagship museums when the show is inherently subversive among other things precisely of the wealth-wielding Pinaults of this world, is indicative of a level of immunity in play amid those who would hold cultural power in the city. Ultimately, as art, Hirst’s intervention is water off the gift-horse’s back and, as business, it is only lucrative.

Of time and money To relate these reflections on Venice and its global art industry back to the Biennale: the event itself evidently plays a less obviously commercialized role as  such. But it also seems to sustain itself as an institution, and, therefore, by virtue of its reciprocal relationship with it, the art market in the city, via a similarly ‘unchanging’ manner of operation. Its longevity as the world’s urbiennial, with its origins in the nineteenth century, contributes in part to this impression; it appears to have been around ‘forever’. However, it is more a reflection of the way its current incarnation is seemingly bound into a relentless, fast-repeating Biennale cycle. This witnesses it not only rotating annually, and according to an identical format of national pavilions plus main curated show, with the architecture Biennale, but it also stretches in the meantime over a period of six months (May–November in 2017). This means that the time between one Biennale Arte ending and the next opening is only eighteen months, with the Biennale Architettura, which itself engages increasingly with the visual arts and performance, sandwiched in between. Moreover, this is not to mention all the other minor ‘biennials’ – actually shorter annual events taking place in the summer – that come under the Venice Biennale umbrella, incorporating the renowned International Film Festival and ones in dance, music and theatre.10 The endless event turn-over implied here, using the same presentational formula each time, lends the Biennale an aura of dogged, if not dog-eared ritual  – a kind of complacency and sense of fatigue, whose repetition, like celebrating a family Christmas in the same way for the umpteenth time, carries a degree of thrill in the first instance, but all too easily seems to collapse gradually into a repetitive ‘domestic’ pattern of experiencing for participants. For van Winkel this results in quality often being compromised: ‘the bedazzling merry-go-round’ persists for ‘memory is short when it comes to these exhibitions – after all, there’s always a next time’ (van Winkel 2010: 219). Thus, a paradox presents itself inasmuch as the Venice Biennale succeeds in preserving its global reputation and appeal for artists and curators as the major art event at which to be asked to show  – largely by virtue of simply continuing to ‘be Venice’ – yet, unlike documenta, for instance, doesn’t in itself appear to do very much organizationally to mark itself out as a cuttingedge instigator of contemporary art practice and debate on an international scale. Its persistence for one thing with the mechanistic sub-division into national 116

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pavilions, which accounts in large part for the publicly perceived ‘honour and prestige’ involved inasmuch as artists are seen to be representing their countries of origin, bears out the point. Artists and curators for their part have frequently seized the opportunity to critique and subvert outdated, hierarchical notions of nationhood as a form of site-specific response to the spatial layout and general ethos of the Biennale from, for example, postcolonial perspectives, which uncover ingrained first world biases, or to take into account the issue of mass migration in Europe (and elsewhere).11 But the essential form of the original Biennale site, the Giardini, with its twenty-eight privileged national pavilions, has been replicated rather than revised since the event’s expansion to the Arsenale shipyards (Mulazzani 2014: 19), and then to privately rented venues – for those ‘lesser’ nations ‘late to the table’ – across the whole city. For Hlavajová artistic scope and standards remain compromised: The Venice Biennale, since its inception a disparate assembly of national representations accompanied by an international exhibition, provides rather narrow insight into contemporary art currents. It tends, instead, to be a parade of national mythologies and nostalgia for an international avant-garde – a conflict that exemplifies the difficulties inherent in establishing a new global system of representation beyond nation states and national representation. Furthermore, the national selection of artists as well as the realization of presentations in individual pavilions take place in radically different political, cultural, and economic circumstances and often create distinctions not necessarily related to the quality of the art being exhibited. (Hlavajová 2005: 158) If anything, cutting-edge innovation stands to come into play in the form of artists’ and curators’ resistances to the structure, organization and public face of the Biennale, but even here Hlavajová is sceptical: ‘The international exhibition at the Biennale is aimed at riposting the nationalism of the pavilions and synthesizing the  current state of art, both of which invariably have led to a focus on the dominant artistic tendencies of the time. This tendency has kept the displays from breaking much new ground and maintained the Biennale’s dual position as maker and protector of the canon’ (158–9). Saturation is a further significant factor: the main exhibition, which is always curated by a leading international museum director or freelance curator – who duly gives the Biennale its theme – spans both Giardini and Arsenale sites and poses a significant challenge alone in terms of the space that is required to be filled. It invariably appears unnecessarily overloaded and overambitious and, consequently, exhausting for the spectator who, in purely practical terms, is also supposed to take in the additional exhibits of the national pavilions within a limited viewing period (it’s called suffering for someone else’s art). The sense of excess was captured particularly aptly – consciously or otherwise – by the title and, indeed, content of Massimiliano Gioni’s 55th Biennale edition in 2013, which was VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’. This was derived from the premise of a 1955 proposal filed with the US Patent Office by the Italian-American artist Marino Auriti for an ‘imaginary museum that was meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite’ and was, therefore, by implication, suggestive of a kind of totalizing excess (Gioni 2013: 18) – not dissimilar, in fact, to Hirst’s ‘Treasures’ show. Again, though, the articulation of such drawbacks in the presentational form of the Biennale does not ultimately seem to make too much difference: the show goes on regardless because it can and because the Biennale is an integral part of the general ‘art world picture’ when it comes to the city of Venice’s marketability, both paying its way – with the assistance of its own regular sponsors – and ensuring continuing profitability for the city via the cultural adornment and prestige it affords Venice’s image as a tourist destination (Altschuler 2010: 19–20). For all its performance of breathlessness, of iterative urgency, in the way it operates, the time of the Biennale is then one that subscribes to a form of stasis: an exclusive and commodified ‘eternal return of the same’. Thus, as a platform, the Biennale’s focus tends to be on reproducing itself as a desirable brand image. As I have indicated, however, that is not to say that its invited artists and/or curators are prevented from attempting to show radical work which, like Hirst’s ‘Treasures’ exhibition, can be seen implicitly to be biting the conservative hand that feeds it. Christine Macel’s curation of the 57th edition in 2017, for example, which was entitled ‘Viva Arte Viva’ (long live art), sought to assert the paramount importance, within an increasingly widespread global culture of biennials (often implicated in programmes of economic regeneration), of artists and their making practices. Among other moves she resolved the challenge of spatial plenitude by directly involving a plethora of artists in the curation of the main exhibition, thus relinquishing the customary ‘totalizing vision’ of a star curator by instilling distributed responsibility. As Macel herself stated, it was: ‘a Biennale designed with artists, by artists and for artists, about the forms they propose, the questions they ask, the practices they develop and the ways of life they choose. Rather than broaching a single theme, the exhibition offers a route that moulds the artists’ works and a context that favours access and understanding, generating connections, resonances and thoughts’ (Macel 2017: 16). This also involved dividing the exhibition into nine headlining ‘chapters’, whose purpose was to rethink the traditional(ist) principle of pavilions: The journey unfolds over the course of nine chapters, or families of artists, beginning with two introductory realms in the Central Pavilion, followed by another seven across the Arsenale through the Giardino delle Vergini. Each chapter represents in itself a Pavilion or Trans-pavilion, as it is transnational by nature but echoes the Biennale’s historical organisation into pavilions, the number of which has never ceased to grow. This semantic nod addresses the

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often debated relevance of the national pavilions, whilst going beyond it, as each chapter mingles artists from all generations and origins. There is, however, no physical separation between the various pavilions which flow together like the chapters in a book. (16) The pronounced emphasis in the ‘Viva Arte Viva’ concept on the raw properties of art in itself appeared to be proffering a form of celebratory buffer – a deliberate and vital idealism – against the compromising, deadening forces of global capital and the market in an age of acute ‘precarity’. In the end it was the ethical, humanizing capacities of art-making as living phenomenon that mattered in the formation of civilization, so the exhibition as a whole seemed to declare. The titles of the nine chapters read like an index of the key elements of artistic practice in its creative contribution to the positive evolution of humankind as a species on earth, with its pavilions of Artists and Books, Joys and Fears, the Common, the Earth, Traditions, Shamans, Dionysius, Colours, Time and Infinity. Moreover, as with Hirst’s ‘Treasures’ shows, the locating of the exhibition in Venice appeared to be essential to the broader statement being expressed. Here, then, was an example of a Biennale seizing its curatorial opportunity consciously to initiate a critical debate about what matters in art, about what sustains its vitality, within the context of Venice’s role as global art hub and atrophying ‘curiosity shop’. (Arguably, for all its appearance of selling out to the art market, Hirst’s non-Biennale show subscribed to a similar ethos of insisting on the necessity of art, but in his case from behind the shamanistic mask of the guileful trickster, asserting art’s capacity to kick back by playing the system at its own game. Or, as Derrida once put it: ‘using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house’ [Derrida 1982: 135].) Macel positions the practice of art-making as existing ‘between idleness and action, otium and negotium’ (Macel 2017: 17). Whereas the latter is associated unproblematically with the world of business (in Spanish, for example, negocios is the term for business), the former, as Macel points out, is improperly allied with pejorative connotations relating to indolence and leisure. For the artist, however, otium ‘implies a space for free time, for inactivity and availability, a space of productive idleness and mind work, of quietness and action, a space where the work of art comes to be’ (17). Thus, in order to conduct their particular kind of business, artists need to be able to assert the right to buy the time of otium, which, in a world where ‘time is money’ – in other words, where time is commodified – easily leads to situations of compromise on the part of artists, or to artists being seen as both idle and conceited: The decision to become an artist in itself requires taking a stance in society, one that is today broadly popular and widely acknowledged, but is perceived nevertheless as an act of calling into question work – and its by-product: VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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money – as the absolute value in the modern world. Being an artist means differentiating between the private individual and the public individual, not as a person of media but as someone who is confronted with the res publica. Indeed, while the artist produces artworks that are meant to be commercialised, the modes of production at his or her disposal include an alternative within which the need for inactivity or rather non-productive action, for mind wandering and research, remain paramount. (17) If there was a commission at the 2017 Biennale that epitomized what is at stake for the artist in this regard it was the partial retrospective of the Taiwanese emigré Tehching Hsieh’s work. Entitled ‘Doing Time’, it had nothing immediately to do with Macel’s main exhibition as it happens but was curated by the British writer and academic Adrian Heathfield and presented as a collateral event of the Biennale at the Palazzo delle Prigioni (Palace of Prisoners).12 The latter is located right next door to the grand Doge’s Palace (Palazzo Ducale), to which it is joined by the famous Ponte dei Sospiri (Bridge of Sighs).13 The venue proved a perfect choice in two main respects, both of which marked out the exhibition as effectively a site-sensitive phenomenon (or perhaps it was the site that was sensitive to the exhibition). First, Hsieh’s reputation as an artist is predicated on his durational One Year Performances – presented here in part – in which he subjected himself to a series of carceral situations as a means to ‘buy’, or take ownership of his own time.14 The first of these works, not formally included in ‘Doing Time’ as it happens, was entitled Cage Piece (1978) and involved Hsieh sealing himself in solitary confinement in his cell-like studio for a whole year without the everyday distractions of conversing, reading, writing, listening to the radio or watching TV. The only practical concession to this situation of extreme denial was the daily visit of an assistant who took charge of the basics of food, clothing and refuse. The context of this scenario related to Hsieh’s status as a destitute, illegal immigrant from Taiwan, living in 1970s New York City and struggling to survive, let alone practise as an artist. He found that whatever low-level situation of employment he might succeed in carving out for himself, it inevitably involved some form of merciless exploitation – expressed as an excessive abuse and control of his personal time – against which he had no formal juridical recourse owing to his position as an ‘illegal alien’ (a classic instance perhaps of what Giorgio Agamben was to theorize as a situation of ‘bare life’). Paradoxically, in order to assert his freedom as an artist and human being, his solution was wilfully to impose incarceration upon himself, a situation, framed as art, that bought him the time and right to ‘do nothing’ (Macel’s otium), indeed to waste time as a creative act of resistance to his alienation. As Heathfield writes in ‘End Time Now’: ‘In the logic of capital, time is a commodity that must be exploited to its maximum potential; wasted (non-productive) time is thus contracted or excluded from institutional operations’ (Heathfield 2000: 107). If Cage Piece in its bare simplicity did not carry any specific signifiers relating the act of imprisonment to the conventional workplace and the implicit commodification of time experienced 120

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in labour practices, a subsequent one-year performance, Time Clock Piece (1980), which was featured in ‘Doing Time’, certainly did. It presented a related situation of intense constraint but this time required Hsieh to punch a specially installed factory-style time clock in a room adjoining his studio on the hour every hour for a year, an act that was recorded using a 16-mm movie camera, which shot just one frame each time. The accumulation of frames was subsequently presented as a continuous film – a document of the performance – which compresses the full year’s worth (24  × 366) into six minutes and eight seconds, producing the effect of a manically speeded up movie, with the time clock appearing to whirr round and normally slow, imperceptible shifts in Hsieh’s appearance over time – his hair growing, for example – becoming evident. As Heathfield puts it: ‘The film acts as an extraordinary visual testimony in which Hsieh’s body rapidly mutates and trembles in the grip of a relentless machinic condensation of time’ (108). Heathfield goes on to situate the film within the context of Hsieh’s resistance to being at the mercy of commodified time. Importantly, he recognizes in his analysis the role of surveillance – or visuality – as a form of perverse guarantor of the ‘value’ of capitalism’s operations. In other words, the film of Hsieh forcing himself repeatedly to clock on, which effectively renders time visible, seeks to stand as proof of ‘Hsieh’s giving over of himself to the temporal regulation of capitalism […] Visual representation is thus itself seen as the necessary correlate upon which capitalist systems of time depend’ (109). Yet, in truth, the film fails to capture anything close to Hsieh’s reality in executing the piece since it gives no hint of what is going on beyond the singular moments of the hourly ritual: ‘the film cannot even be said to capture its object, but rather it reproduces the excess which formed it’ (109). Crucially, then, ‘it is this freedom from surveillance that emerges as the value most predominantly lost to the temporal orders of capitalism. […] The apparent weaknesses in the film’s representational capacities effectively denaturalise the relation between capital and time and make apparent the subject’s alienation from both’ (109). The second way in which the Palazzo delli Prigioni proved to be an apt location for ‘Doing Time’ was in its contrapuntal framing of the relationship between the artist’s ascetic, self-depriving aesthetic on the one hand and the general excesses and indulgences of Venetian culture, and the tourists who would both consume and feed it, on the other hand. The Palazzo entrance displayed a large-scale publicity image of a solitary Hsieh in the context of a snowstorm in Manhattan during the year he spent living effectively as a fugitive on the streets of the city as part of Outdoor Piece (1981). As a backdrop to Venice in the heat of August, and at one of the most populated tourist gathering points in the city (Bridge of Sighs), this could not have offered a more surreal contrast. Like the sudden presence of a solitary, wizened Romany woman squatting on the steps of the bridge, begging humbly while trying to avoid being trampled upon by the throng of tourists, it captured poignantly the disparity of experience between legal haves and illegal have-nots or, to invoke Scheppe again from Migropolis, the collision in Venice between VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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sanctioned and highly visible ‘leisure-based mobility’ in the form of tourists, and unsanctioned, clandestine ‘subsistence-based mobility’ in the form of migrants and refugees (Scheppe et al 2009: 112). Moreover, the dichotomy of visibility and invisibility as enunciated via Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece film is also pertinent here inasmuch as it points to a form of unseen ‘Venice excess’ or Venetian blindspot: not the excess that is the spectacle itself, or, indeed, the tourism it spawns, but the excess of that which the spectacle or image of the city conveniently masks – its ‘other side’ – in order to sustain its commercial viability.

Venetian blindspots A Venice that is ‘other’ is often invoked romantically by the ‘enlightened’ tourist seeking to separate himself or herself from the experience of the popular throng – which is implicitly deemed distasteful – and typically involves attempts to discover instances and locations of the ‘real Venice’. A more significant ‘other’ is, however, the lurking presence of a range of infrastructural challenges relating to the following: first, a fast-receding and increasingly marginalized population in the historic centre; second, the erosion of the fabric of the built environment; third, the intensified flooding and gradual sinking of the city; fourth, the pollution and silting up of the canals and lagoon; fifth, the excessive influx and attritional impact of, yet dependency on, tourists – including the detrimental effects on the urban environment of the massive cruise ships that bring many of them; and, sixth, in stark contrast to the latter, the influx of cross-Mediterranean legal and illegal migrants to the city, who are subject to exploitation and harassment in various forms as they seek to eke out an existence for themselves. As a form of longitudinal social scientific art project that integrates a wealth of big data in its examination of the representational power of visuality in Venice, Scheppe et al’s Migropolis does an admirable job of teasing out the implicit workings and symbiotic connections between migration, tourism, environmental depletion and ‘big business’ in the city, presenting its findings about Venice as a symptom of the city’s submission to the forces of globalization. One of the most resonant examples the study cites, which highlights the fundamental fakeness of much that is peddled in this ‘haven of consumption’, relates to illegally and cheaply replicated luxury brand goods and Venice souvenirs displayed on the streets by poorly paid illegal migrant-vendors (under the control of unseen gang-masters), who have one eye permanently peeled for any approaching police officers. Typically, and ironically, such an urban scene witnesses Chinese tourists haggling over counterfeit luxury goods and ‘traditional Venetian handicrafts’ manufactured in and exported from China (Scheppe et al 2009: 46–7). Among these are paintings of stereotypical Venice scenes – arguably the new Vedute of the twenty-first century – produced en masse in the ‘Painting Village’ of Da Fen, a suburb of Shenzen (1284–93). Typically, ‘the pictures portray a specific misrepresentation of Venice, making it likely that the composition is based on word-of-mouth sources about separate and dislocated abstractions’ (1,292). (In 122

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FIGURE 3.3  Anonymous Stateless Immigrants’ Pavilion pochoir (2011), 24th July 2011

fact, some of Hirst’s fictional ‘Treasures’ artefacts replicate the ‘cheap fake goods’ syndrome evoked here, a closer look revealing that they have deliberate ‘Made in China’ tags attached to them, not least where they are unashamedly made of synthetic prop-like materials such as painted MDF, silicone or printed polyester.) In the summer of 2011, stencilled grafitti (pochoir) was to be seen occasionally in strategic locations around the Biennale sites, announcing the existence of a wholly unofficial pavilion for ‘anonymous, stateless immigrants’. The détournement of a Biennale signpost to the Arsenale, for example, revealed stencilled arrows that appeared to direct one to the abject sea waters of the canals (Figure 3.3). The interventions not only drew attention to the excluded and marginalized of a Biennale that is perceived to be elitist and glamorous, with its historical and traditionalist focus on national pavilions and attraction of a privileged international ‘art crowd’, but also linked this thematically to the plight of illegal, border-crossing migrants to Italy from the African continent, who often find themselves literally and metaphorically ‘at sea’. Thus, it cleverly entangled the Biennale’s social exclusivity on the one hand with the VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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politicized exclusionist tenor of upholding a notion of secure national borders via its system of pavilions on the other. In European terms Venice is a frontline city when it comes to migrants seeking refuge and its border control practices of refused entry, enacted by Frontex, the European Border Regime, are correspondingly stringent and questionable in terms of human rights.15 Although there is clear evidence of surveillance sting operations in the historic centre to catch street vendors (844–5) – illegal immigrants selling illegal goods – the truth is that such matters as human screening processes tend to occur ‘behind the scenes’, well away from the tourist hotspots, or, one might say, in the realm of the obscene: that is, beyond the limit of what is deemed ‘tasteful’ or worthy of being seen. If there is an ‘other Venice’, then it is to be found on the mainland of ‘Grande Venezia’, in Mestre in particular but also in the de-industrialized zone of Marghera. It is here, where no tourist ventures for pleasure, that 70 per cent of the city’s population resides. Among it is the bulk of the historic centre’s low-paid, unskilled, tourism-serving, commuting workforce, many of them recent or temporary immigrants, and not surprisingly it reveals all the customary social problems associated with poverty, deprivation, dependency and restricted rights. This is the harsh actuality of the vast Venetian underbelly, the decidedly unromantic invisible city or, ironically, ‘life-support machine’ which props up and sustains (for the time being) the beautiful, protected tourist-driven cash cow that is La Serenissima (‘the most Serene Republic’). ‘Grande Venezia’ is a notion conceived under Mussolini’s fascist rule and attributable as a vision of the future city to one Giuseppe Volpi, whose post-war influence on the development of Venice has been comprehensive and decisive. According to Scheppe et al, in the 1930s the International Film Festival and Biennale Arte (in its present-day form) ‘were conceived by Volpi, who, among other things, wished to expand the tourist season to increase turnover in his chain of Grand Hotels’ (52). The establishment of both ‘the infrastructure of heavy industry and the culture industry’ in post-war Venice was down to Volpi, who was essentially a wealthy industrial magnate but had also served as finance minister in Mussolini’s government and, like Berlusconi, had fingers in many pies: ‘director of the Italian employers’ federation, owner of the most popular Venetian newspaper, president not only of the Port of Venice, but also of the nation’s largest insurance firm and the biggest energy company in Northern Italy – which was the first business to base its headquarters in Marghera, the huge industrial development initiated by Volpi’ (52–3). Thus, as the authors conclude: The same person embodies both the productive and spectacular sides of Venice, which are still the mainstays of its prosperity. […] Contemporary Venice’s celebration of self, with respect to its cultural, touristic and economic elements, is the product of Volpi’s vision of Grande Venezia. Akin to the Futurists’ fantasies of destruction, this ideal sought to re-establish the power of a great industrial metropolis that would dominate the Mediterranean. (53) 124

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As Scheppe et al point out later in their study, in effect the infamous Futurist desire to ‘raze Venice’ in the interests of a ruthless industrial revolution has been fulfilled owing to Volpi’s interventions (265). While his post-war plan did not in itself envision such a wilful destruction, the collective might of petrochemical (mainly), coal-fired power, aluminium, steel, glass and shipbuilding industries has wrought ecological havoc on the lagoon and the city’s historic centre, causing widespread pollution and degradation of both the natural and built environments. Moreover, augmenting the existing rail link from the mainland, Volpi also had the vehicular bridge built, thus precipitating further the increase in visitor accessibility on the one hand and, headed the other way, the population flight of residents from the historic centre on the other (Scheppe 2010: 12). In the 1970s a slow process of decline set in, with various industries unable to sustain themselves in the wake of the global oil crisis, recession, downsizing, strike action and redundancies. Marghera today is engaged in an ongoing struggle to cope with the effects of an inevitable de-industrialization, with large tracts of disused and derelict plant needing to be decontaminated and made safe in order to prepare the way for planned high-tech repurposing of the area (Scheppe et al 2009: 258–9). Ironically, the building of cruise ships, whose devastating effects on the ecological and cultural environment in their finished form as functioning ‘tourist vessels’ have been one of the most controversial public issues facing the city in recent years, continues unabated: ‘Fincantieri, the company which for many years has held the ship construction monopoly in Italy and has become the market leader in cruise ship building, has its main shipyard at Marghera’ (302). Since the millennium there has been an inexorable increase of oversize cruise liners ‘showboating’ in immediate proximity of the urban core (200 annually in the year 2000, 510 by 2005). The displacement of water involved as these disproportionate ships parade their way along the central channels of San Marco and Giudecca from the lagoon’s Lido inlet on the eastern seaboard all the way over to their docking berths on the western side of the city (and back) is one thing, but churned up sea-beds and the adverse effects of salt erosion on façades are further factors in a complicated picture of ecological destabilization and structural wear and tear. That apart, such cruise ships, whose operating companies view the delivery to its customers of the grandiose spectacle of arrival within this unique cityscape as the prime, money-spinning commercial consideration, are also responsible for dumping up to 5,000 sight-seeing tourists on the city in one fell swoop, which naturally also strains at its infrastructural capacities. The very sights that might be said to constitute the singular appeal of the city are under attack by virtue of being subject to such a relentless and indiscriminate ‘industry of seeing’, suggesting that the long-running ‘immersive show’ that is Venice contains the seeds of its own destruction. I wish to supply a topical aside here, one that crystalizes the general perils of such showboating and underscores its profoundly compromised nature as spectacle. It concerns the infamous Costa Concordia that hit rocks off the island of Giglio in VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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January 2012 and typifies exactly the kind of cruise ship regularly entering Venice. One of the mooted explanations for the Concordia veering off course and ending up too close to Giglio is precisely the issue of a form of ‘grandstanding’. Here was a captain either choosing unilaterally, as a matter of pride and vanity, or being actively encouraged by his cruise ship company, Costa Crociere (because it was ‘good for business’), to engage in a practice of ‘saluting’ – as it has been termed – or ‘providing a spectacle’ for tourists and islanders alike. The Concordia disaster, and the ironic metaphor of a spectacular shipwreck in particular, has of course paved the way for analogies with the current state of Italy as a nation (see Hooper 2012: 18−19 and Parks 2012: 1), but the point here, and in the example of Venice (which is more significant for my purposes), is that there is a fundamentally corrosive aspect to the ways such practices seek via an ‘excess of the spectacular’ to churn profits. In other words, in the case of Venice this particular performance of the city is effectively a self-destructive rehearsal of its death. Interestingly, Sarah Lookofsky and the art collective DIS use the analogy of the cruise liner phenomenon to analyse art fairs (which one may assume in this instance to be emblematic of the Venice art world): [T]he art fair is itself a spatial product; it is a space produced with the sole purpose of generating capital. In this way, it shares multiple characteristics with other spatial products, such as the luxury mall, the trade fair and trading floor. But perhaps its closest spatial counterpart is the cruise ship, which similarly aspires to full detachment from national confinements (regional style, tacky provinciality, tax and labor laws), giving priority to the fluidity of Capital, while recognizing the more sedentary nature of human beings. The art fair, like most cruise liners, is also a pleasure boat that speaks the language of global currency and seeks out international waters in search of duty-free provisional placement. (Lookofsky and DIS 2014: 50–1) Volpi evidently viewed the historical centre – and events such as the Biennale – as a form of contrapuntal ‘eye candy’, offsetting the ‘greasy’ engine room of Marghera, which would serve to enhance his and the city’s commercial and industrial interests. The legacy of such a vision is effectively that of the city in ruins: an atrophying, sinking hoard of treasure. Yet, with the aid of such institutions as the ubiquitous Biennale and the continuing presence of wealthy art patrons and their exclusive retail businesses, it is a condition that persists in making the most of its capacity to soldier on against the odds. In other words, in the meantime the sustainability of Venice’s threatened demise appears to have become the governing narrative of the city – an abiding, fetishized image of continuous ruination which even serves to enhance the sense of ‘ancient quaintness’ that is so attractive to the all-important thriving tourist industry. The latter may represent an ‘industry of seeing’ but the situation is actually 126

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characterized by its blindspots: a deliberate turning of a blind eye to unpalatable realities by those who are in a position to capitalize on them. Underpinning all of it is, as Scheppe makes clear, the dichotomy of the dual city, ‘split between the increasingly uninhabitable representational space of the historic centre and a surrounding agglomeration with dormitory towns, shopping malls and industrial zones’ (Scheppe et al 2009: 109). Thus, ‘the social decline of a segment of the population, usually ethnically marked and dependent on the informal economy, presents itself as an immanent and instrumental complement of a prospering economy’ (109).

Venezia, Venezia: A long conclusion The question of how much longer the city of Venice and, indeed, its Biennale can sustain themselves was central to an artwork devised in 2013 by the artist Alfredo Jaar for the Biennale’s Chilean Pavilion at the galleries of the Arsenale. Entitled Venezia, Venezia it played to (and with) the ongoing thread of the visibilityinvisibility dichotomy under discussion here. Jaar’s installation represented a critique of both Venice and the Biennale – specifically its original Giardini core – effectively portraying the latter’s fate in the twenty-first century as analogous to that of the city itself, if not Western civilization as a whole, for which the condition of the historical city serves as a form of bellwether. As an artwork, then, it provided a useful provocation that will serve well as a means to institute a concluding evaluation of the role of the Biennale in relation to the city of Venice itself. In Venezia, Venezia the viewer was confronted initially by a large-scale blackand-white photograph hanging from the vaulted ceiling of the Arsenale. Having just returned from eight years of exile in South America, the Argentine-born Italian artist Luciano Fontana was seen picking his way gingerly through the post-Second World War rubble of his studio building in Milan (in 1946). He had reached a gap in what appeared to be an interior load-bearing wall, formerly perhaps a doorway, and, seeking to steady himself with both hands either side of this threshold, was momentarily contemplating the next wobbly step on the unstable, ruinous terrain that lay before him. It was effectively an image that invoked ‘Italia, anno zero’: the end of the war and, therefore, the end of fascist rule in the country.16 If it was anno zero, then that implied the hope of a new beginning amid the traumatic aftermath. While the slashed canvases for which Fontana was subsequently to become known suggest gaping wounds and, Adorno-like, the impossibility of painting after the war, at the same time they offer an opening: both a symbolic release of built-up pressure and a new unforeseen aesthetic option for painting. With old Europe on its knees and the new world of the Americas waiting in the wings, Kapur also sees in the ambivalence of this threshold image the heralding of a new global order based on a blurring of sovereign borders: ‘Fontana’s presence in this installation is emblematic: stretched between old and VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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FIGURE 3.4  Venezia, Venezia (2013), Alfredo Jaar, 2013

FIGURE 3.5  Folly (2017), Phillida Barlow, 29th August 2017

new worlds, he loosens the tensions of nationality’ (Kapur 2013:  62). Prefaced by this historical framework of an uncertain, traumatized post-war European future, Jaar’s installation went on to present an exact model replica (1:60 scale) of the Venice Biennale’s Giardini complex, that lush garden-scape of signature 128

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national pavilions laid out neatly like a posh diplomatic neighbourhood of foreign embassies in a formation that effectively performs twentieth-century global power relations and tensions (Figure 3.4). In some ways the pavilions of the Giardini, although often designed by leading architects of the time (Mulazzani 2014), implicitly replicate in spirit the false front staginess of the Venetian palazzo, as invoked earlier (McCarthy 1963; Scheppe et al 2009). In effect, they function as temporary ambassadors of a nation’s cultural prowess, attending the masked ball of the Biennale while it lasts, only to acquire a melancholy form of hollowness and abandonment out of season.17 Phyllida Barlow’s 2017 British Pavilion appeared to pick up on this theme of theatrical fronts by naming her installation Folly in reference, in the first instance, to those fanciful architectural indulgences of colonialism and the landed gentry (Figure 3.5). As she replied to the question of whether Folly was responding to Venice itself: I think I have responded to the sense of façade. You are so close to everything the whole time that it’s almost as though you are stepping in and out of a pictorial space […] Venice has a faded palette that I love: layers of those pinks and those greys and those browns. And the surfaces themselves are also things in their own right, let alone the buildings to which they’re attached […] So we are constantly adjusting to two conditions: what is perceived and what is actually there. Venice is also very much about that. (Buck 2017: 12) Venice certainly is ‘very much about that’: on the one hand orientated towards a lively, heavily populated public life on its streets and canals (symbolized by the image of its famous bridges which facilitate public mobility), on the other hand preserving its privacy, and in many respects the ‘sinister secrecy’ of its ‘business’, behind apparitional façades (for which closed doors provide the corresponding symbol). Barlow’s large-scale, brightly coloured, abstract sculptural constructions, ‘monstrous bulging forms’ as the installation brochure puts it (Phillida Barlow: Folly 2017: np), not only deliberately crammed the interior spaces but appeared to burst out of the walls of the pavilion into neighbouring territories. In a festering climate of Brexit, with its perverse insistence on regaining sovereignty and control of the nation’s borders at the expense of European collaboration and a collective identity, Barlow seemed to be playfully evoking the sheer folly of the enterprise, subverting the pavilions neo-classical, colonialist performance of impervious, intact nationhood and global power by exploding into the ‘gardens of Europe’ that immediately surround it. Jaar studied architecture and his Giardini model was very much an architect’s maquette, but, as such, it post-dated by many decades the actual coming-intobeing of the Giardini pavilion complex in its present form, suggesting a kind of ‘architecture in reverse’: the ghostly epitaph to a form of rupture. (You could say the same of Fontana’s post-war studio.) In fact, ‘rupture’ is an apt choice of word here, corresponding as it does to the German Riss, which forms the stem VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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for the architect’s blueprint or Grundriss (ground sketch/imprint). Here it may be appropriate to talk of a ghostly Nachriss or post-sketch/imprint (in 3D) that emerges after the event. As Hou Hanru suggests: ‘Probably, only the image of a ghost can “represent” nation-states, as a kind of post-apocalyptic ruin’ (Hanru 2013: 50). With the name of the country represented clearly emblazoned on each pavilion’s façade there is, for example, a choreography of early century European colonialist might as evoked by the ‘natural order’ of the British and French pavilions sitting at the apex of the rising, one-point perspective avenue of trees that initially greets the visitor to the gardens. Significantly, as Adriana Valdés notes, the art historian Hans Belting draws a connection between the vanishing point perspective ‘invented in Renaissance times, and flourish[ing] in Venice’ (Valdés 2013b: 100) and a colonialist outlook: ‘there can be no doubt that perspective functioned as an instrument of colonialism. Europeans considered it the “natural way of seeing”’ (Belting 2011: 45). The German pavilion is up there, too, forming a kind of Gorgon’s head with the other two, but its presence is inflected more precisely by its fascist past. The pavilion was re-inaugurated in 1938 (in a new design by the German architect Ernst Haiger) with Hitler himself present (Mulazzani 2014: 48–51). It reflected in its monumental neo-classical form the master-plan developed by the Führer and his ‘personal architect’ Albert Speer for a new post-war capital city for the thousandyear Reich named Germania, which would be grafted on to the extant site of Berlin (Wise 1998: 11). There are clearly similarities of fascist vision to be detected in the Hitler-Speer plan for Germania and Volpi’s ‘Grande Venezia’. Moreover, Hans Haacke’s 1993 German pavilion commission – presented in the heady aftermath of reunification – saw fit to create a deliberate ruin within the building, the artist hacking its floor to pieces and, in turn, naming his installation Germania as a form of abstracted snapshot of the then state of the nation. In a sense, the effect of this act – which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one might alternatively have titled Germania, Anno Zero (take 2) – echoes that of Jaar’s image of Fontana amid the post-war rubble of Milan: a reduction ‘to pieces’ of the lingering spectre of fascism as a prelude to renewal. Haacke’s intervention prompted Hanru to ask: ‘Is it only with the “suicide” of national representation that the word “representation” starts making sense?’ (Hanru 2013: 51). Continuing with the choreography of geo-political power relations, the US pavilion occupies the very centre of the Giardini grounds as if to exemplify the emergence of a new centrifugal/centripetal global force in the mid to latter part of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century (America’s time) that simultaneously exerts power and attracts dependency. Bearing out the latter, with exhibition space in the Giardini at a premium in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Israel caused some consternation – above all among certain underrepresented South American countries – when, as a new nation, it appeared to be allowed to jump the queue in the allocation of permits to construct a pavilion. It duly nestled itself, so to speak, on a prime site directly 130

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under the protective shadow of the US pavilion next door (Martini and Martini 2013: 21). Bruce Nauman challenged the US pavilion’s premise of nationalist centralization and representation in 2009 when ‘Making Worlds’ was the formal title of the Biennale. Drawing on the concept of topology, his exhibition formally engaged with three separate sites, taking his work beyond the Giardini and out to locations in the city, thereby proposing a ‘poking into these seemingly discrete and separate territories’ (Basualdo 2009: 148). The logic of these multiplicative and inverted ‘subsets’, relating to the ‘representative art of a nation’ as embodied by the US pavilion, pointed, via their displacement, to the sheer impossibility of representing that nation as a fixed and cohesive entity. Moreover, the concept of topology ‘provides a framework in which the audience can relate the experiences of and encounters with Nauman’s art to traversing and negotiating the city’ (‘Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens’ exhibition brochure 2009: np). Thus it was a citywide installation that required the viewer to move in and between (urban) spaces, implying, then, a necessary undoing of American national identity as framed by the traditional pavilion format of the Giardini site but also, thereby, an undoing of the Biennale itself in its capacities as both art tourist event and proud, perennial icon of Italian and/or Venetian identity. The mobile spectator was effectively facilitated to perform this critical displacement by decamping physically from one site to another, experiencing a version of Venice that was refracted through the unsettling ‘overwriting’ action of Nauman’s kinetic works. Meanwhile, the residue of Cold War-era Eastern European national boundaries is epitomized by the continued existence of a ‘Czechoslovakian’ pavilion – as if the Velvet Revolution of the early 1990s had never happened. In fact, the Slovak artist Roman Ondák made a piece for this pavilion entitled Loop (also for ‘Making Worlds’ in 2009), which seemed in part to be addressing this anachronism. As you wandered into the pavilion through the wide-open entrance at one end, it was as if the gardens had simply continued inside: a path led through trees and shrubs – varieties of ‘perennial’, in fact – and, before you knew it, you were out the other side of the pavilion, which, with its glass roof letting in copious natural light, had the appearance of a giant greenhouse at a botanical garden. As with the name of the pavilion emblazoned over its entrance, the experience of the installation incited a form of double-take: one couldn’t quite believe that trees and shrubs were really all there was to it once one had passed through, and so one was inclined to loop back to look again in order to ascertain what the ‘art’ of the artwork was. As Cooke suggests, Loop ‘seeks – not only figuratively but literally – to restore the site to its pre-historical condition: that is, it transforms a venue designed for the display of art back into a public park’ (Cooke 2011: np). In doing this it highlighted the fact that these one-time public gardens have been subject in the meantime to co-option and commodification: they can only be accessed these days by paying to enter the Biennale; the rest of the time they are locked and therefore similarly off-limits. Furthermore, the installation was a critical comment on the Biennale as both an ingrown and overgrown phenomenon, which, like Venice itself, just keeps hanging VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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on in there in a form of self-repeating time warp that is largely oblivious to how things have moved on in the wider world. For Huck Loop amounted to ‘[a] lesson in ideology and how to disable it. With a featherweight gesture, Ondák annuls the nationalistic concept of representation, the patriotic drone that dominates the events in Venice. With consummate self-assurance, he runs roughshod over the showcases of national achievements, over arrogant attitudes and petty wrangling for attention’ (Huck 2011: np).18 As we have seen, one way in which the Biennale as a continuing presence does indeed remain tuned into the outside world is that it has a very acute sense of its own market value on the global stage, which includes its central importance in sustaining the industry that, for the time being, keeps the whole city afloat: tourism. As such, it is indeed sensitive and implicitly responsive up to a point to its role as a brand. The decision in 1995 to scatter the Biennale’s parameters beyond its traditional sites in the Giardini and Arsenale to all manner of locations in the city could be said to have been driven primarily by a canny financial sense that capitalized economically on demands made by smaller nations also to have their art represented. As Martini and Martini explain: ‘Thus began the new system, now routine, of private owners, church authorities or the municipality renting out palazzi to countries’ (Martini and Martini 2013: 22). What this reveals, however, as Luigi Fassi points out, is the degree to which the implicit choreography of a ‘now completely globalized Biennale’ is indicative of persistent geo-political hierarchies and power structures (Fassi 2013: 42). Micro-nations, supposedly admitted magnanimously into the international art world fold from the late 1990s, are effectively exploited for profit via the exorbitant rents that they are required to pay, but continue to have their visibility marginalized by being banished to peripheral non-Biennale sites in the city.19 Meanwhile, the old Euro-American centre, with its twenty-eight immovable pavilions, ‘renders the structure of the Giardini even more isolated – no longer an elite aristocratic club as it was in the heyday of colonial Europe, but rather a defensive fortress of supremacies and privileges’ (42). As Valdés adds, ‘[n]ot a lot of water has gone under the bridges of Venice, the spatial layout of the Giardini seems to say’ (Valdés 2013a: 95), and Jaar himself makes the point that ‘for an African artist visiting the Giardini, for example, the total absence of a single pavilion dedicated to any African country communicates clearly what the so-called Western world thinks of Africa or African culture: it does not exist’ (Jaar 2013: np). In Venezia, Venezia, Jaar’s resin model of the Giardini invoked a similar sense of a relentless replaying of the status quo. Once you had climbed the set of steps to reach it, there was no initial indication of any Biennale complex, only the deceptive calm of a large square pool of still, typically murky-green Venetian canal water. As you dwelled expectantly by its side you could catch a glimpse of your own reflected image, whose effect was ambivalent – at once appearing to position you within the work and implicitly chiding you for your introspective narcissism. Finally, your mystified waiting was rewarded when a clunking mechanism, reminiscent 132

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of playful nineteenth-century amusement park automata, could be heard clicking into gear and the scaled-down Biennale gardens slowly emerged from the depths, an ash grey island of exactly replicated pavilions. Eventually reaching a still point, the model remained for approximately thirty seconds, water dripping furiously from its forest of broccoli-like trees, before gradually receding again, a ‘lost Atlantis’ that left behind but a few air bubbles floating on the surface, evoking, as Rancière suggests, ‘a Biennale sunk beneath the waters of a city that is itself always under threat from the sea’ (Rancière 2013: 85). At this point you either stayed, hoping for an encore of this endlessly replayed, lo-and-behold kinetic curiosity or proceeded down the steps on the other side of the square pool and moved on. The installation as a whole was effectively arranged so as to replicate, in abstract, the form of a typical Venetian arched bridge: an apocalyptic bridge of last sighs, you may say. Some saw in the elevation of the island a miraculous form of Lazarus-like resurrection or cleansing, but the immediate dramaturgy could not have been clearer really: this was a Fall, and, theatrical illusion or not, it was not so much the waters rising here, as they do periodically in the lagoon, but the island being subject to sinking as the work of civilization. So, these were ‘drowned gardens’, which, under the long shadow cast by Fontana amid his post-war studio rubble, had the effect of ‘doubling the trope of the ruin’ (Kapur 2013: 63). As Antonio Negri confirms: ‘All the national pavilions of the Giardini complex [are] drowned here, then, re-emerging not to show signs of life but to remind us what drowned bodies look like’ (Negri 2013: 74). And Jaar himself suggests: ‘The pavilions and their archaic rigidity dissolving into the flowing depths of water reflect the manner in which [they] have lost their meaning in the fluidity of today’s world of culture’ (Jaar 2013: np). On the other hand, the initial, invariable rise for the spectator towards the brow of the bridge’s arch can be said also to have been ambivalent in its effect, producing, like the post-war image of Fontana, a combined sense of profound uncertainty about what lies ahead, and of expectation and possibility. Thus, Jaar continues, ‘[a] utopia is created the very instant the Giardini vanish, for the space of the pool becomes a historical opportunity for rebirth. […] Drowning the Giardini abolishes the authority of an old-fashioned global hierarchy in the hope that a redeemed Biennale may emerge from the abyss’ (Jaar 2013: np). Moreover, as I have intimated all along, if Venezia, Venezia represented a critical confrontation of the Biennale as a highly influential, long-standing global artworld event, it was at the same time a comment on the city of Venice as a whole: the Giardini island site as Venetian synecdoche. But it was also, in a far grander sense, an engagement in turn with the notion of a declining Western civilization – as exemplified by the all-out preservation of the city’s image as singular ‘jewel in the crown’ – and the last gasp of a colonial and post-colonial Western power complex. What is interesting about the Giardini in this regard – paradoxical, in fact – is that the site has always preserved an aloofness from the rest of the city: a kind of ‘otherness’ that is very much not part of Venice. As we saw in relation VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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to Ondák’s Loop, the gardens remain very much inaccessible out of season, despite having been inaugurated as far back as the immediate post-Doge era of Napoleon as public gardens that would provide the otherwise heavily built-up, claustrophobic city with a much-needed green area for its citizens – in Basualdo’s words, ‘a city that appears to have been created as a refusal of nature’ (Basualdo 2009: 27). So, again, the island analogy is ambiguous, if not paradoxical: on the one hand it stands for a separatist Biennale that occupies a privileged art world ‘high ground’ yet remains dependent on the city;20 on the other, it chimes very much with the image of the city in toto as atrophying ruin and, moreover, as itself maintaining – as the perennial city state with its own distinct language – a historical, self-sufficient aloofness and isolated defensiveness in relation to the rest of Italy and the world. What these ambiguities propose, in short, is that, separation or not, the fate of the Biennale symbolically encapsulates the fate of Venice – and, by extension, Western civilization – and it is the complex interaction of global art hub, the leisure- and subsistence-based mobilities in which the tourist industry is implicated, big business and, finally, water that provides the conceptual link to an understanding of this state of affairs. As we saw earlier, in Watermark Brodsky declares Venice as a whole to be a work of art that is ‘the greatest masterpiece of our species’ (Brodsky 1992: 116). For him, the picturesque nature of its art and architecture guaranteed a benign, becalming and uplifting public environment for visitors and citizens alike, an argument whose potency may implicitly be encapsulated by the city’s centuriesold mythical name of La Serenissima. Brodsky also developed a spatio-temporal theory about the city that boils down to the formula ‘Water equals time and provides beauty with its double’ (134). By implication, then, Venetian water reflects the picturesque quality of the city’s façades, thus the ebb and flow of water-as-time capture and record the aesthetic beauty of the built environment. For many a tourist such a universalizing, romantic view of Venice’s visual presence provides the stimulus to visit the city and have the perceived spectacle confirmed for oneself. But a harsher, more realistic view that takes the city’s ‘other side’ into account would suggest that Venice is in fact in grave trouble. It has been struggling for some time now to control the decline of its historic infrastructure, as the rising tides, literally of water and figuratively of tourists, threaten to make the city disappear altogether. As we have seen, the commercial excesses of tourism – Scheppe’s ‘leisure-based mobility’ (Scheppe et al 2009: 112) – implicitly exacerbates the practical ecological problem of regular flooding, and thereby the material erosion of the built environment, caused not least by the regular arrival and departure of disproportionately oversize cruise ships. So, the very sights that may be said to constitute the singular appeal of the city are under attack by virtue of being subject to such a compulsive and indiscriminate ‘industry of gawping’, to say nothing of the invisible mass of migrants and displaced citizens, bound into an economy of ‘subsistence-based mobility’ (112), who have inevitably been coerced into serving and maintaining the whole spectacle. 134

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This suggests that the long-running ‘immersive show’ that is Venice contains the seeds of its own destruction, a combined overkill of ‘climate and capitalism’. International art world island that it may be, a major event such as the Biennale is deeply implicated in this scenario inasmuch as it contributes directly, and for substantial periods of time, to the influx of visitors into Venice. Thus, it continues to promote itself as a landmark global event in order to enhance the image of the city as a desirable destination, thereby indefinitely perpetuating not only its own existence by association but also the commercially profitable yet clearly attritional tourist industry in general. This witnesses a form of unconscious complicity or symbiosis between city and tourist – effectively a co-produced fetishizing, based on discrete motivations, of Venice’s ‘sustainable demise’. Arguably, then, Venice is a city on the verge of ruin or, for those who care to take a closer look, already in ruins as we speak. As Hanru states: ‘Its historical and imaginative beauty and grace, along with its mystery and theatricality, poetically shared by people from all around the world, are now hijacked by materialistic and profit-oriented consumptions of that “beauty”, by the spectacle, an image of life in agony’ (Hanru 2013: 51). Regarding Venezia, Venezia, Fassi maintains that its ‘very ambivalence, the impossibility of telling whether Jaar’s work relates to a future prediction or an image of the past, places the ghostly apparition of the Giardini at an indefinable temporal boundary’ (Fassi 2013:  42). If Brodsky proposes an untainted, idealized doubling of the city’s unique beauty in the clear reflections that appear in the water surrounding its built environment, Jaar’s form of doubling draws sobering attention instead, first, to the self-absorbed and ultimately myopic reflection of the narcissistic twenty-first century viewer – made possible, ironically, by the murky water’s opacity and ‘incapable of seeing any beauty but its own’ (Valdés 2013b: 102) – and, second, to a transparent and melancholic premonition of the mythical city’s eventual ‘undoing’. Thus, where Brodsky was able to project the beauty of the city – its life-enriching vitality – on to a neat and eternal temporal rhythm of ebb and flow, Jaar points to the inevitable and, therefore, necessary decay that will follow from such an indefinite and relentless reiteration – a metaphorical flow that turns into flooding. The purging waters of high tide urgently signal ‘high time’, in fact, and the Biennale’s very premise of a large-scale showcasing of the ‘here and now’ of international art every two years into eternity in itself points to a perception of time that belongs perhaps to another era. Jaar’s critique of the Biennale’s myth challenges, as Martini and Martini explain, ‘the morphological inability of the Giardini to adapt to a transnational vision of art’ and results in ‘an attempt to “deactivate and discontinue” the linkage between the international art fair and national representation’ (Martini and Martini 2013: 26–7). So, like the city, the organizational premise of the Biennale is trapped in a damaging time warp and, in Valdés neat summary ‘[a] fascinating illusionistic device is used to show the illusionism of an order that continues to believe in its own existence, when in fact it went under long ago and is now a ghost of itself ’ (Valdés 2013a: 96). VIVA, VENEZIA, VIVA

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Notes 1 As Di Martino records there were no biennials in Venice during the First World War years of 1916 and 1918 while the effects of the Second World War meant none in 1944 and 1946 (Di Martino 2005: 118–19). 2 A witty as well as illuminating fictional account of the heady atmosphere of the Biennale’s preview week is to be found in the first half of Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009). 3 The Arsenale shipyard was first used by the architecture biennial in 1980 but, as Ricci reports, only came into play for the art biennial in 1997 (Ricci 2010b: 103). Ricci adds that the introduction of the Arsenale marked the point at which the Biennial became ‘Venetianized’ since the Giardini had always been autonomous and seen as independent of the city itself (105). 4 It is worth adding that up until 1968 the Venice Biennale had in fact been a selling show. 5 Don Thompson’s book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (2008) uses (as its title suggests) the example of Hirst to elucidate, in Sara Giannini’s words, ‘the branding strategies adopted by art dealers and auction houses – but also by museums and artists – in order to create and increase the value in contemporary art. The peculiarity of this system is the almost complete alignment of agency and critical judgement between the market on the one hand and the critical or scholar milieu on the other hand, leading to the establishment of a market-driven contemporary art production’ (in Belting et al 2013: 144). As Giannini also observes, in What Is Contemporary Art? (2009) Terry Smith draws similarly on the example of Hirst, speaking of ‘the unprecedented merger of advertisement, marketing, and art production as a fundamental mark of contemporary art. In his journey through spectacular architecture, local and global markets, contemporary art museums, and the postcolonial turn, Smith positions advertising executive Charles Saatchi (Damien Hirst’s patron) at the conjunction point of a series of global connections and transactions between luxury goods magnates, auction houses, artists and institutions which at large shape the structure of contemporary art. Icon of the overlapping of art and capitalism is again The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, portrayed on the book’s cover’ (145). 6 This renders the brazenly commercial, post-exhibition break-up of the fake artefacts into discrete ‘editions’ all the more bizarre and comic since they don’t really make sense out of context. As such, they begin to take on the aspect of a very expensive tourist souvenir. Further to the point, it is intriguing to speculate what future archaeologists and art historians would make of Hirst’s hoard were they to discover it in toto, say 2,000 years from now, as sunken treasure. 7 Hirst has cited the then director of the British Museum Neil McGregor’s BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, which was broadcast in 2010, as an influence. 8 Henry James’s late nineteenth-century verdict on Venice already evoked an image of hackneyed decadence, the writer declaring in Italian Hours that the city ‘scarcely exists any more as a city at all […] only as a battered peep-show and bazaar […] reduced to earning a living as a curiosity shop’ (James 1991: 12, 15). 9 The influence of Walter Benjamin on Dion’s practice is significant. For the former collecting was an obsession which manifested itself among other ways in a preoccupation with the archetypal figures of the flâneur and the itinerant urban rag-picker as cultural-historians-cum-archivists operating at very different levels of the social scale. Rag-picking is ‘the “career” of those who have been remaindered by 136

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capitalist modernisation’; the transfigured rag-picker is then a cataloguer of ‘the broken promises that have been abandoned in the everyday trash of history’ (Highmore 2002: 63–5). 10 An abundance of festivals and the sense of a ‘culture of hedonism’ have strong historical precedents in Venice. Baumstark points out that in the eighteenth century there was an average of forty large-scale festivals annually (Baumstark 2017: 92). 11 One popular tactic to undermine classifications according to nationality has been for a country to invite an artist from ‘elsewhere’ to exhibit ‘within its borders’, Mark Dion’s 1997 installation Raiding Neptune’s Vault in the Nordic Pavilion being a case in point. The Nordic Pavilion in itself falls out of line since it provides for three countries: Norway, Sweden and Finland. Opening as late in Giardini history as 1962 (Mulazzani 2014: 122), the convenient ‘lumping together’ of Nordic countries owing to lack of additional space at the ‘top table’ in the Giardini is perhaps a reflection of the lack of flexibility in accommodating the new. 12 In fact, there appeared to be some confusion as to whether ‘Doing Time’ was formally the Taiwanese Pavilion at the Biennale. The artist’s website implied it was that, but the exhibition was neither listed in this category in the Biennale catalogue – where it appears under ‘Collateral Events’ (2017: 202–3) – nor indicated as such in the exhibition brochure. Given that it was sponsored by Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan as well as several Taiwanese government ministries, the case for it to be seen as the Taiwan Pavilion was certainly strong, but, of course, Taiwan’s status as an independent nation, separate from China, has been subject to dispute for some time and has not been formalized. In fact, as Catenacci points out, nations can only participate in the Biennale as nations if they are formally recognized by the Italian Government, otherwise they have to be listed as a ‘collateral event’ (Catenacci 2010: 87). 13 Built in 1600 to join the Doge’s Palace to the New Prisons (Prigioni Nuove) next door, the Bridge of Sighs is one of the most sought-out tourist sites in Venice. Myth has it that condemned prisoners’ sighs could be heard as they made their way across the bridge to jail. Ruskin’s verdict on the well-known ‘Bridge of Sighs’, as noted in Scheppe’s Done. Book: Picturing the City of Society was: ‘a work of no merit, and of a late period, owing the interest it possesses chiefly to its pretty name, and to the ignorant sentimentalism of Byron’ (Ruskin 2010: 47). 14 Hsieh has collaborated with Heathfield in preparing a comprehensive, published documentation of this performance cycle entitled Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (2009). 15 See ‘Borderline Street’ in Scheppe et al (2009: 386–501). 16 Roberto Rossellini’s film Germania, Anno Zero (1948), set in Berlin after the end of the Second World War, is, of course, one of the neo-realist classics of post-war Italian cinema. 17 Steve McQueen’s 2009 British entry to the Biennale, the film Giardini, focused precisely on the ‘post-party’ life of the gardens out of season, discovering that a fascinating natural wilderness reigns. 18 Further to the implicit link with the city itself, there is an intriguing looped inversion in play inasmuch as Venice was originally formed by importing tree trunks and driving them, tightly packed together, deep into the bed of the lagoon as a foundation, which remains intact to this day. Here the notion of imported, living trees – Ondák had his transported from Slovakia – as the foundation of a new identity has a particular resonance perhaps within the context of Venice, as well as the Biennale’s Giardini. 19 Incidentally, the canny sense of Biennale organizers in relation to those privileged nations with their own pavilions is pointed out by Block: ‘The Venice Biennale model

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of presenting an international survey exhibition every two years and having the other nations pay to be represented is simply ingenious and therefore it has often been copied’ (Block 2013: 107). 20 For what it’s worth, the Dutch architect Wouter Vanstiphout, who had collaborated on the British Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, was heard to quip at a conference in Folkestone themed Imagined Cities that the Giardini site was ‘the only part of Venice never to flood’ (Jacob, Long and Vanstiphout 2014). The reason for this, as Scheppe explains in Done.Book, was that the Napoleonic Gardens ‘formed an artificial hill in keeping with the aesthetics of the English landscape park, constituting a further anomaly as the only such place of raised elevation on the entire island. It was erected as a mountain of rubble from expropriated and demolished churches such as the old monastery of Sant’ Antonio, which had been torn down to provide a grand open expanse for the gardens as the embodiment of a state and its cultural ideals’ (Scheppe 2010: 10).

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4  Belgrade Conversations: Mikser, Its Festival and the City’s ‘Descent to its Rivers’ Marko Jobst with Nicolas Whybrow and Marijana Cvetković

As with previous chapters in this book, this one sets out to tell the story of contemporary art’s working connection with the city in question, based on an analysis of the conscious initiatives of curators, artists and cultural organizers to enable art to ‘find its place’ via the staging of festivals, biennials and other related public events. To reflect the particularity of that endeavour in this instance, the following chapter on Belgrade – formerly the capital of Yugoslavia, of course, now that of Serbia – adopts a specific form, whose distinctiveness begins with the fact of its co-authorship. Marko Jobst is a writer and scholar of architecture and design based in the UK, who was born and grew up in Belgrade and still maintains strong personal and professional links with the city. However, in the wake of the turmoil and uncertainty of Yugoslavia’s disintegration as a nation state in the 1990s, he made a conscious decision – personal and political – to leave Belgrade with no intention of ever returning there to live. In one sense, then, his contribution to this chapter, which is as principal author, is driven by a form of personal odyssey to see how the culture of the city – the opportunities it offers in the arts but also its socio-political infrastructure – has changed now that nearly twenty years have elapsed since the end of the Yugoslav civil war in 1999. In this undertaking Marijana Cvetković is a key interlocutor for Jobst on account of her comprehensive grasp of the contemporary cultural scene in Belgrade, as one of its leading players.1 Indeed, she is someone who very much stayed and, as a key producer and activist with the prolific cultural events organization Magacin – based in the central district of Savamala, upon which there is a particular focus in this chapter – tried against all kinds of political pressures to make things work in the city from a perspective of the integration of

arts practices, all the while retaining an uncompromising sense of integrity and independence in her manner of operation. Cvetković’s contribution here, which is based far more on her insider’s view of the cultural scene as a whole than the work of Magacin per se, is in the form of an extended interview with Jobst, forming the centrepiece of the chapter, and this represents one of several conversational forms around which the chapter has organized itself. The intention in adopting such a structural approach, which is premised on notions of improvization and polyvocality, is to reflect an inherently contradictory culture in Belgrade. On the one hand it offers creative vibrancy, diversity and possibility, involving a multiplicity of ‘actors’; on the other hand, and for a whole range of complex reasons, many related to politics and governance in the city, there is a corrosive prevalence of compromise, complacency, corruption and intellectual bankruptcy. This state of affairs leads invariably to the paradoxical sense of a buoyant, energized cultural scene marked fatefully by chaos, failure and stagnation – one of the reasons Jobst was moved to depart the city – and it is something of the ensuing fragmentation and sense of volatility thus generated that the conversational form of the chapter, which undergoes several ‘mood shifts’ as it progresses, attempts to harness to its own instructive ends. To replicate the ambivalent sense of innate optimism tempered by scepticism, the chapter commences with what might be called a series of tentative beginnings – promising scene-setting starts, involving a collage of multiple voices that pave the way for a picture eventually to emerge. The first of these refers, in fact, to an event Jobst himself initiated in Belgrade in 2012 as part of that year’s Mikser Festival in Savamala, whose organizers, Mikser, had recently made the district the exclusive focus of their multiple cultural activities. It was a public conversation that included me, Nicolas Whybrow, and that sought to address the question of how the interventions of art and architecture might enable this neglected central area of the city on the banks of the Sava to fulfil the city of Belgrade’s ‘descent to its rivers’. In other words, how to bring about a revitalization of Savamala’s once thriving status as ‘bustling port’ by configuring it as the vital connective tissue between the ‘old city up on the hill’ and the Sava River as it flows towards its nearby confluence with the Danube, rather than serving as a functional part of the city, good only for vehicular traffic conveniently to pass through or over.

Festival days (and nights) On a spring evening in 2012, we sat inside the dilapidated, stately building of Beogradska Zadruga (The Belgrade Co-operative) in the Savamala district of the city on wooden chairs arranged in a loose arc around a worn office desk from the 1960s (most likely), an institutional item left over from a period when the building was used by the Geological Institute (Geozavod). The desk top was covered with office paraphernalia – files, notebooks, in-trays, a manual typewriter – left in the 140

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FIGURE 4.1  Untitled, Interventions in Space (2012), Irena Kelečević, 31st May 2012

building after most of it had been vacated in the 1990s. But the arrangement, much as it looked like someone had just left the room and might be coming back any minute now, was actually an art installation by Irena Kelečević composed of diverse ‘office relics’ found by chance inside the abandoned building (Figure 4.1). Only a bowl of fresh fruit marked the present moment. In fact, the still life on the desk, which was positioned roughly in the middle of the room, had been carefully re-ordered to accommodate a special one-off event, as the work of art made temporary way for an evening of presentations and a public discussion: a stack of papers had been shoved to one side to provide enough space for a laptop, while the fruit bowl teetered on the edge of the desk to allow space for a recording device to nestle itself in. By contrast, a stubborn old armchair, the only one of its kind in the room, proved too unwieldy, so the assembled company had to fit itself in around it instead. On the one hand, then, an art installation had insinuated itself into this former institutional space, drawing attention, as a spontaneous act of intervention, to the ‘interrupted business’ of the past when the building had ceased all of a sudden to have a purpose. On the other hand, critics, curators and other interested parties were temporarily squeezing themselves inside the conceptual parameters of this artwork. The very possibility of staging such an integrated mise en scène would have disappeared but a couple of years later, erased by the radical transformation of this area of Belgrade. Nicolas Whybrow was stationed at the desk, speaking about a Holocaust memorial and its relationship to the city of Berlin. Later on, he would say to me: ‘This building feels eerily like the former Stasi headquarters’, adding that it too BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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FIGURE 4.2  Savamala, Belgrade during Mikser Festival 2012, 31st May 2012

had the feel of sudden abandonment – flight even – with all the bureaucratic instruments of the state disarmingly reduced to the quotidian. The event at Beogradska Zadruga was entitled ‘Conversations in Situ’ and organized as part of Mikser Festival 2012. In its breadth and scale the Festival is nothing short of ambitious: as its Wikipedia entry declares, it is ‘an annual exhibition promoting design, architecture, urban planning, new technologies, art, music and communications in Serbia’ and was inaugurated in 2009 (Mikser Festival 2018). Dubbed ‘the biggest regional festival of creativity’ in its event publicity, from 2012 it assumed a special emphasis on the Savamala area of the city, a rundown central district that had once been the ‘pride of Belgrade’ and appeared to be undergoing a process of gentrification with a ‘local flavour’ (Figure 4.2). Tucked in at river level below the cliffs that rise steeply up to Belgrade’s old town (topped by the city’s famous Kalemegdan fortress), Savamala was very much the epitome of a lively urban hub in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It offered up a heady mix of industry and commerce, transport and travel (based on the city’s main harbour, the central bus and railway stations, and exclusive hotels), residential life and vibrant entertainment, all taking place in and around the harbour area of the Sava River. Second World War desecration of the district was followed by the city authorities choosing, despite the existence of plans for the Sava’s right bank, to prioritize development of New Belgrade on the opposite river bank and so, in a familiar urban turn of events, Savamala lost its raison d’être and became the forgotten corner of the city. 142

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Sarah Chaplin, architect, academic and co-editor of Curating Architecture and the City (2009) would follow Whybrow with a talk about strategies of co-curation in architectural projects. The people seated around the table included curators from Mikser Festival’s various programmes, most notably Dušica Dražić, who had curated one part of the contemporary art exhibition housed in the building in which we were all gathered; the then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Branislava Anđelković; and her husband, curator, writer and lecturer Branislav Dimitrijević. Participants in the ‘conversation’ were also brought in from another part of the Festival programme concerned with ‘urban transformations’ and curated by the Belgrade University academic Ivan Kucina, with a focus specifically on architecture in the city: Lydia Matthews from Parson’s School of Design in New York City and Glenn Weiss, who had recently managed public art and design projects as part of the reconfiguration of New York City’s Times Square. The conversation that ensued, about the conditions of art production and reception in Serbia, and the merits and pitfalls of festivals – in particular Mikser Festival – was livelier than anyone could have hoped for. Dimitrijević argued against the festivalization of culture; Dražić was at pains to point out that in a city in which both the National Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art have been closed for years for ‘reconstruction’, there had to be a way of introducing contemporary – indeed any – art to new audiences and that the space and funding the Mikser Festival organizers had managed to secure, with little to no support from State and City authorities, were certainly to be applauded. ‘Just look at all the young people milling about’, she said. Or something to that effect. For I have only my memory to vouchsafe for it, as the recording of this intriguing conversation, despite a production manager and a technical assistant’s advance assurances, turned out not to have taken place. The file was void, just a crackle of cable connections gone awry. In the coming days we drifted between the Festival’s various sites scattered across Savamala, participated in other talks, observed workshops, witnessed performances and installations, and strolled through a design fair. We ate food from stalls manned by small, independent restaurants (on one occasion for free). We sat in cafés as heavy traffic drove past, leaving toxic exhaust trails since the route for all heavy transport in Belgrade runs straight through central areas of the city, along the River Sava, and from there down the Danube. Decades of discussions about possible rerouting and the construction of a ring-road around the city have all come to nothing. We had dinner at a swanky jazz club housed inside a former port authority building on the banks of the Sava, paying London prices for it (and then some). Chaplin had her saxophone by her side, daring herself to join the band for an improv session. But they were a well-oiled outfit, so there was no easy opening for an outsider. The nights were warm, there was a buzz in the air, music thumping up the hillsides and into the old city from the rivers below. ‘Enjoy your beautiful city’, Lydia Matthews said to me, as I attempted to articulate why I’d never return to Belgrade.

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Earlier that day, Whybrow had walked into an unauthorized photoshoot taking place in one of the rooms at Beogradska Zadruga – a naked female model in front of an artwork, posing for a male photographer whose identity was never revealed and who had refused to erase the images even once the police had arrived on the scene. Exasperated, Dražić, the curator, resorted to pouring water over his digital camera, short-circuiting it. ‘That wasn’t really called for’, the policeman muttered feebly as he slunk away. A few days later, someone would kick one of the electronic artworks by Korinna Lindinger, which crawled erratically across the parquet floors in jerky flips, picking up, via sensors, on the presence of visitors’ bodies as they entered the space, thereby being enabled to avoid contact with them. When asked why he’d done it, the young man had said he hadn’t known it was forbidden. Perhaps he’d thought the electronics would be able to react quickly enough to evade the deliberate kick. Or he’d just wanted to cause damage. ‘Not a single museum is open in this city’, someone had commented in passing. ‘People haven’t a clue how to behave around art these days’. The following year, Mikser, the umbrella organization responsible for running the Festival – of which more later – would open as a permanent space in Savamala, at Mikser House, a former industrial storage space. It began to engage in the local area in ways that would typically witness CNN crews come calling to report on this new and unexpected ‘Belgrade buzz’. International media would start circulating the idea that Belgrade was the ‘new Berlin’. Tourism was picking up, mostly with a backpacking crowd who filled the hostels and short-let apartments in the city centre. The city’s bar and clubbing scene was, and remains, prodigious.

The Belgrade co-operative If you visit the city today, you’ll find that the façades of the building that had housed ‘Conversations in Situ’, Beogradska Zadruga, have been restored to a semblance of their former glory. That’s if you can focus on them adequately, adorned as they are in the meantime by an obtrusive array of vertical advertising banners (Figure 4.3). The building houses a display of a different kind now: a large-scale promotional model of the controversial Belgrade Waterfront development, which reached a milestone in June 2018 with the opening of the first two of its many planned housing blocks and towers. These jagged, hulking forms have already been popularly nicknamed cokule, an archaic term for ‘sturdy leather boots’  – in other words, ideal for trampling recklessly all over undeveloped terrain. Uniformed young women sporting winning smiles offer to explain the project and provide further information should you be interested in purchasing a flat (or three). Photography is allowed with mobile phones only. No unauthorized shoots here. The foundations of the building – this being an area regularly flooded by the Sava and riddled with subterranean waterways – are said not to have been restored to quite the same extent as the façades. Beogradska Zadruga itself was built in 1907, commissioned by a co-operative 144

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FIGURE 4.3  Beogradska Zadruga (The Belgrade Co-operative), 10th April 2018. Photo: Marko Jobst

bank founded in Belgrade in 1882 and transformed into the first insurance company in the country at the turn of the twentieth century. It was designed by Nikola Nestorović and Andra Stevanović, with an imposing roof and prominent position at a crossroads of the then bustling and prestigious area of Savamala, right around the corner from the main city port. A century later, as its façades began to peel and its foundations deteriorated, undermined by underground flooding, it was still referred to as one of the most beautiful buildings in Belgrade, the sheer grandeur of its neo-classical proportions echoing a bourgeois Europe once aspired to. Between the Mikser Festival of 2012 – which was the first time Beograda Zadruga had been used on such a scale and for an event of its kind – and the injection of oil money into the building in 2014, as Belgrade Waterfront developers would arrive from Abu Dhabi, it had served as the site of October Salon (Oktobarski Salon) – of which more later – hot on the heels of the Mikser Festival of 2013. A couple of years later, the building was reduced to an advertising hoarding, which is what it remains to this day (with the addition of an exclusive restaurant). By that point, both the relationship Mikser had forged with the area and the district itself had undergone a dramatic change, with the arrival of waves of refugees and migrants from the Middle East into the Balkans, and to the city in particular, as well as with the annexation of whole areas marked out for Belgrade Waterfront. In reaction to the upheaval of rapid and aggressive gentrification processes initiated by Belgrade Waterfront, Mikser had issued a call for local communities to take a more active role in shaping the city. Writing in 2015 in relation to the fourth successive Mikser Festival in Savamala, which assumed the title of ‘Restlessness’ (Neizdrž) in what seemed to be a rather non-committal gesture towards the intensely politicized climate of uncertainty BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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in the area,2 curator Vida Knežević condemned Mikser’s apparent participatory ambition, dismissively calling it a ‘necessary mask’ in the context of the production of cultural capital. In an article entitled ‘The District of Culture and Its Stage Sets’, Knežević riffs off an earlier piece by Noa Treister and Ivan Zlatić (2015), which had questioned Mikser’s relations with the owners of properties in Savamala, those privatized remnants of former Yugoslav companies and industries that had once been state-owned. ‘In such a problematic setting’, Knežević writes, the false commitment to the question of citizen participation and care for the public interest of the local community becomes a convenient smoke-screen with which to hide the fundamental structural conflict in the relationship of labour to capital. This is highly opportunistic and supports the claim that citizen participation is nothing other than a paradox of sorts or, more precisely, a sophisticated and effective strategy of capitalist entrepreneurial dynamics applied in the field of culture, an appropriation of a topic/theme with currency […] and a tool for the pacification of actual social antagonisms. Because, in truth, we can’t speak of citizen participation in Serbia today without taking into consideration the various dominant economic processes and problems in the socio-political organisation of society as a whole. (Knežević 2015) Knežević goes on to claim that Mikser cannot be seen as representing part of an independent cultural scene despite its claims, as it stands for a form of cultural entrepreneurship that is dependent on a large ‘unemployed yet highly educated work force’ which finds itself in the unenviable position of ‘(self)-exploitation and volunteer activism’ (Knežević 2015). Clearly, by this point Mikser’s projects and events were drawing highly articulate critical responses. This in spite of its various and varied successes, not least of which had been that very art component of the 2012 Festival, which had inspired Beogradska Zadruga’s reuse the following year by the long-established art institution that was October Salon. The criticism was nothing new; it had emerged the moment Mikser had upscaled dramatically from mere design festival, to all-encompassing cultural event, to urban intervention platform with its own ‘house’ in Savamala, and when its annual festivals assumed spectacular character, incorporating events ranging from art, performance, concerts and education to food and design – all aiming for maximum visibility. What the criticism illuminated, though, was that the stakes had clearly been raised: for the future of the city, for cultural production and its institutions, for the arts and those who make it. In other words, Mikser had become the poster child for the perceived resurrection of cultural vibrancy in Belgrade – against all the odds – but, at the same time, negatively, for unresolved structural problems within the country itself, which were sensed to be lurking behind its exuberant and spectacular events (the ‘scenographies’ or ‘stage sets’ that Knežević actively mistrusted). 146

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Mikser Mikser (meaning ‘blender’ in Serbian) was set up as a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the spring of 2002 in Belgrade by Maja Lalić (then Vidaković) upon her return from New York, where she had completed her master’s in architecture at Columbia University and worked as an architect for a few years. ‘As an NGO, Mikser was established with the aim of knowledge exchange and education in the fields of design, architecture and communications, through the organization of lectures, exhibitions and workshops’, explains Tatjana Gostiljac, one of the key figures in the Mikser team, who has been involved in the organization from the beginning (Gostiljac 2018). ‘It brings together people from a number of creative areas with the idea of promoting and developing cultural activities and creative industries in Belgrade, Serbia and the West Balkans region, expanding multicultural networks and promoting cooperation with similar cultural entities and individuals in the country, region and world’ (Gostiljac 2018). Mikser in its current form developed from this initial set of initiatives and activities, which were set up and realized by Mikser NGO in the period 2002–9. Suggestive of its ‘blended’ diversity, the first notable project had been ‘Bollywood in Belgrade’ in 2003, which enjoyed the distinction of being the first festival of Bollywood cinema in the city (to whose  curation I personally contributed). The long-term initiative ‘Ghost Project’ (2006–13), meanwhile, attempted to stress the ‘economic, social and cultural importance of industrial design, its name indicating the perceived lack of focus on industrial design that existed in the country at the time’, according to Gostiljac (Gostiljac 2018). Between 2006 and 2008 Mikser NGO convened and curated the Belgrade Design Week conference and exhibition programmes, ‘noted by International Herald Tribune in 2007 as being one of the 10 best design events in the world’, Gostiljac points out (Gostiljac 2018). Subsequently, in 2009 and 2010, ‘Ghost Project’ evolved into ‘Young Serbian Designers’, which was presented at Salone Satellite, part of the international Milan Design Week, and was supported by SIEPA, the government agency for foreign investment and promotion of export. ‘This was one of the rare Mikser initiatives that was realized in cooperation with a state institution, which supported the project organizationally and financially’, Gostiljac stresses, pointing to Mikser’s NGO status and hands-on approach to funding in times of lacking support from both the State and the City (Gostiljac 2018).3 The first Mikser Festival was held in 2009. Then, in 2010, Ivan Lalić joined Mikser, having come from the organizing team of the renowned EXIT music festival held in Novi Sad, probably the first internationally visible cultural ‘export’ of the country in the period after the fall of Milošević. ‘For Mikser Festival, Lalić’s experience served the push to expand into other creative practices, beyond design and architecture which had been the dominant aspects up to that point’, Gostiljac explains (Gostiljac 2018). Before the incursion of the Festival into Savamala, the locations for specific Mikser activities had not been seen as holding any particular significance despite being site based. In its BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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first three iterations, the Festival had occupied the industrial spaces of a disused wheat production facility located in the city’s northern Lower Dorćol district on the banks of the Danube, which included inhabiting storage silos and the open spaces around them. But the attraction was based more on repurposing abandoned spaces ‘reeking of previous use’ than connecting with the locality, which was in any case fairly isolated from the more densely populated areas around it. In 2012, as an already established event, the Mikser Festival moved to Savamala. With it, the Festival format also changed, raising the key question of how to respond appropriately to this dense, inhabited and, in many respects, broken urban context. It led to the idea of opening a space that would work all year round and would house the various dimensions of Mikser’s activities. This paved the way for the opening of Mikser House in a disused industrial space, constructed in the 1950s as a temporary structure, and privately owned by Mikser’s new business partner – a partnership that wouldn’t last as it happens. The Mikser team redesigned and refurbished the space and opened Mikser House on Karađorđeva Street in February 2013, putting its in-house expertise in architecture and design, and interior architecture in particular, to effective use. In many ways Mikser’s capacity to co-opt such disused spaces and repurpose them itself in a very immediate, hands-on way, rather than having to search for and pay external experts, was always one of the organization’s most potent tools. Mikser House was to encompass an exhibition and sales space for design from across the Balkans, a space for lectures, seminars, workshops, concerts, theatre and even club nights, conceived to ‘re-awaken the dormant spirit of Savamala’, as Gostiljac puts it (Gostiljac 2018). These activities were also accompanied by activism, she stresses, together with the fight to revitalize the quarter and its key buildings, effectively tying Mikser’s destiny to this part of Belgrade. However, amid the optimism of the move to Savamala, Gostiljac adds: In 2012, right before the start of that year’s Festival, the expected financial support from the City of Belgrade budget for culture failed to materialize, despite previous verbal assurances. This was still under the Democratic Party. In the second half of 2012, with the arrival of SNS [Srpska Napredna Stranka – Serbian Progressive Party] in power after elections, the only finance that came Mikser’s way from that budget was for projects relating to the protection of the environment, and even that occurred only a couple of times. Quite a number of projects weren’t realized owing to this lack of financial support. The only thing Mikser has managed to accomplish in the past five years in the arts specifically has been to present the work of international artists through the support received from various foreign embassies and their cultural arms [the Goethe Institute, for instance], which would cover travel and accommodation expenses, but not fees. This resulted in a few dance companies being able to participate at the Festival, some theatre productions, and a few (inexpensive) visual artists. (Gostiljac 2018) 148

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Mikser spent the following five festival seasons in Savamala, taking part in the transformation of the district through its various projects, to which Maja Lalić refers in more detail later. In 2017, however, it would return to the first location, the silos in Lower Dorćol. In 2018, no festival was held at all following the short-lived incursion that year into Bosnia and Herzegovina with Mikser House Sarajevo, thus marking the end of a period of continuous activity. At the time of writing (late 2018), Mikser suddenly bounced back, though, announcing plans to hold its tenth Festival in May 2019 in Lower Dorćol – themed ‘Circulate!’ to reflect, typically, issues around the circular economy and urban sustainable development – including a retrospective exhibition of its first ten festivals. Mikser House in Savamala, however, had finally closed, and several commercial interests (restaurant, club) moved into the warehouse that had housed it. Something – as the next section shows – had clearly happened to end Mikser’s journey through the district, but also to shift the emphasis from the kinds of activity it had championed to the next stage in the complex processes to which that area was subjected.

Belgrade, ‘descending to its rivers’ After 2012, and owing to changes in funding opportunities, Mikser’s approach to curating art projects was reduced in scale and, arguably, visibility. Focus gradually shifted to community engagement and the application of art-making processes as part of such activities. And yet, because of the overlap of Mikser as NGO with the commercial aspects of the brand name ‘Mikser’ – embodied in part in Mikser House despite its nominal and partially educational nature – the organization increasingly attracted ire from the left, as is evident in Knežević’s article cited above (2015). This was exacerbated, no doubt, by what was becoming the hulking backdrop to the area of Savamala, in the form of the notorious Belgrade Waterfront development, and the increasingly radicalized tensions between the independent art scene, which was socially active and highly critical of the urban processes at play, and the perception of Mikser’s projects in the area as being tainted by commercialism, opportunism and political evasiveness. As Kadijević and Kovačević wrote in 2016, in terms of a concerted effort to enable ‘Belgrade to descend to its rivers’, the history of the ‘Sava amphitheatre’ – the area’s broad sweep downwards from the hills of the old city – had begun in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Serbian part of the then Ottoman city expanded south-west (Kadijević and Kovačević 2016). A port was established along the right bank of the river, becoming ‘the centre of customs, trade and industry’ (Kadijević and Kovačević 2016). In 1840, this transformation was ‘symbolically brought to a head’ with the building of the Cathedral Church of St Michael the Archangel, followed by the introduction of the central railway station and the construction of the railway bridge in 1884, ‘which effectively established the barrier between the city and the river’ (Kadijević and Kovačević 2016). It was only with the beginning of the twentieth century that thorough BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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studies and regulatory plans for the ‘amphitheatre’ began to emerge, with regular flooding by the Sava preventing their development and implementation at the time (Kadijević and Kovačević 2016). Later in that century, as the architect Dragoljub Bakić explained in an interview in 2016, post-Second World War plans took care to protect that area of Belgrade for the establishment of a new cultural quarter for the city, seeking to coordinate what was envisaged for the left bank of the Sava, in Belgrade’s evolving ‘new town’, with that of Savamala and the right bank where the current Belgrade Waterfront is now slowly emerging (Bakić 2016). This included the General Urban Plan (Generalni Urbanistički Plan, GUP), which was intended to be valid until 2021, and which designated an overwhelming percentage of all planned functions to culture. In contrast, the current Belgrade Waterfront plan practically erases this provision, apart from the more recent initiatives to turn the railway station building into a museum with a nationalist theme. Furthermore, GUP insisted on an international design competition, which would ensure two things that Bakić considers to be of crucial importance: the involvement of professional expertise on the one hand and public transparency on the other (Bakić 2016). The first plan that dealt actively with both banks of the Sava was devised in 1975 and is associated with the proposals for an administrative centre for the Unallied Movement. The second part of the 1990s witnessed preparations for a large international competition overseen by the International Union of Architects (UIA). In both cases, as Kadijević and Kovačević write (2016), the shifting political landscape had a clear impact on what was, by then, the perennial question of Belgrade’s relationship to its rivers and neither was taken forward. As the architect and academic Branislav Mitrović notes, the ‘historical need’ for Belgrade to ‘descend to its rivers’ had always been a legitimate one and even Milošević’s plans in the 1990s, whatever the political point-scoring behind them, were conceived so as to be reliant on professional expertise, to be delivered through an open, international competition (Mitrović 2015). The Serbian Association of Architects, Mitrović claims, worked on the documentation for the competition, including ‘all the required checks and analyses of the space of the river’ (Mitrović 2015). The UIA had marked the promotion of this competition, he writes, as one of its priorities for 1996 – all of which ended up shelved due to a loss of interest on the part of the country’s political elites (Mitrović 2015). Cut to the second decade of the twenty-first century and the plan for Belgrade Waterfront, which makes its first appearance as part of an election campaign in 2012 (shortly before that year’s Mikser Festival). Its authors remain unknown to this day, Kadijević and Kovačević write (2016), and that initial blueprint was significantly lower in capacity and density than subsequent iterations. The first additions to the plan were a 180-m-tall tower and a shopping mall; later versions raised the height of the tower to 210m and changed its form to one more ‘iconic’ in aim, so it could be argued. Meanwhile, the shopping mall grew in size – ‘beyond enormous’ – and the overall plan now provided apartments and office spaces in buildings ranging from fifteen to twenty-five floors in height (Figure 4.4). As 150

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FIGURE 4.4 Belgrade Waterfront development projection, 10th April 2018. Photo: Marko Jobst

such they blatantly disregarded the built heritage of Belgrade in what Kadijević and Kovačević identify as the typical architectural ‘key’ of globalization (2016). The tenuous relationship to context and heritage, they maintain, is implicit in the blithe claim that this development will constitute the ‘new identity of Belgrade’ – unasked for and ill defined (2016). ‘The basic impression’, Kadijević and Kovačević continue, ‘is that the space of Belgrade Waterfront is being treated as if it has no organic contact with neighbouring ambiences, occupying capacities that aim to squeeze out maximum profit’ (2016). ‘Heritage as a whole’, they add, ‘is completely sidestepped, reduced to preserving a few free-standing structures in situ but essentially removed from the urban fabric due to its stark contrast with the aesthetic symbols of globalisation’ (2016). Any continuity with Savamala, the authors insist, which the proponents of the project had claimed it would foster, is absurd due to the relative sizes of the two, with the area of Savamala paling markedly in relation to the overall territory that the new development will eventually cover (2016). ‘The narrative of a 3.5 billion Euro investment fell through’ – or ‘into the water’, as the Serbian idiom applied by Bakić has it – ‘the moment the contract was signed’ (Bakić 2016). The contract itself was released to the public only five months after the signing and it is clear, Bakić points out, that it is financed by off-plan sales, with no guarantees required from the investor (Bakić 2016). The only guarantees, in fact, were those protecting the investor’s interests, backed up by the Serbian Government. The contract stipulates rental rights for ninety-nine years for free, thirty years are given for the development, and the City Council is to provide all of the necessary infrastructure. At the end of the process, the investor has the option to convert the right to use into the right BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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to own. Furthermore, the cost of reconfiguring the transport infrastructure for the area, which implies a complex relocation, is immense and quite likely impossible to deliver within the initial timeframe. At the time of writing the main railway station alone had been replaced with four stations dispersed in separate locations across Belgrade, corresponding functionally to the nature and type of rail traffic involved in each case. Not surprisingly chaos has ensued. The relocation of heavy transport is particularly problematic, Bakić claims, since it implies a new bridge across the Danube, as well as a new heavy transportation railway route (Bakić 2016). His estimate, at the time of the interview, was that the investments required from the City Council would be at least double the figure the foreign investor is supposedly bringing to the table, derived from advance sales. To top it all off, sewage issues remain inconclusive, according to Bakić, since ‘there are 116 waste outlets going directly into the Sava currently, and 136 into the Danube, all of which will have to be resolved in accordance with EU environmental objectives’ (Bakić 2016).

Politics and economy, art and the city: A continuing conversation One of the people present at the 2012 ‘Conversations in Situ’ event with which this chapter began was Marijana Cvetković, who had been involved with the independent art scene, and Savamala specifically, for several years before the arrival of Mikser in the area. Cvetković had initiated and realized various programmes and projects in the fields of cultural policy, international and Balkan cultural cooperation, contemporary dance, visual arts and museum culture, and co-founded Belgrade’s independent cultural centre Magacin, which has also been located in Savamala since 2007. On the night, she had mostly kept her own counsel. As I learned in subsequent years, Cvetković’s own engagements with the arts, and the models she had helped develop and support, were increasingly at odds with the entrepreneurial model Mikser appeared to be developing on the fly. What it meant to be independent in the arts, a principle championed by Mikser, was understood very differently by Cvetković, above all when it came to forms of financing, to art’s relationship to the market place and to the ideological positions implicit in such factors. As an alternative voice of Savamala, actively and articulately engaged in the political aspects of the production of art, yet less audible and visible, she struck me as the person to offer a broader perspective on the situation. What Cvetković asserts pulls no punches in its assessment of the cultural politics of both the city of Belgrade and Serbia as a whole, particularly under its current government. It is the authoritative voice of radical, independent, uncompromising activism in the arts. I conducted formal and informal interviews with her over the course of two years, culminating in an extensive written exchange undertaken in the summer of 2018 which distilled many of the ideas discussed previously. This is presented 152

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here in translated and edited form for the overview and insight it offers of both the official and unofficial workings of politics in the Belgrade cultural scene as a whole, thereby permitting the specific case of the Mikser Festival and Mikser’s work in general in Savamala to be put in perspective. Jobst: What do you see as key characteristics of the period that had started with the fall of the Milošević regime in 2000 and its repercussions on the city, the arts, arts funding and art institutions? Cvetković: There are several issues I’d like to sketch out here first, which I consider crucial in depicting the basis of a new political project in Eastern Europe that started in 1989. In Serbia, this process was slowed down and further complicated by the Milošević regime. Gradual changes in the social and political order in Yugoslavia during the 1990s had as their aim the eventual cancellation of all the practices of a socialist state and the facilitation of a transition to capitalism. This entailed a project of incremental privatization of all communal resources, including public ownership, the means of production, natural resources and so on. This is highly pertinent in the context of the subsequent development of cities and public space, which I think is central to your concern, since the deterioration and degradation of public space was precisely the consequence, and implicit goal, of privatization. That is why the so-called democratic changes of 5th October 2000 are seen by many in Serbia as introducing the final destruction of social cohesion, which had been based on collective ownership and sharing, as well as the management and use of common goods – even during the Milošević regime. That moment at the turn of the century marked the start of the privatization of large state-owned companies and factories, which lead in turn to the privatization of all sorts of public resources. What intensified these processes further in Serbia was the shift towards the dominance of a single political party, which controlled all levels of government and dismantled all instruments of control of the executive government. So, parliament lost its representative role, the judiciary was placed under the control of executive power, all the mechanisms of power were optimized to serve the needs of the political elite (including the operations of police, army, communal police), the work of the opposition was obstructed at every level, and all the media came under the control of the ruling party. And so the processes of privatization became tied up with the party in power, in the sense that all business interests ended up being contingent upon the political interests of the party, thus implicitly making them work for each other. That symbiosis is the key mechanism at work in the whole system to this day. This brings us to the second key factor here: corruption. The inextricable links between capital and political influence – in this case, the ruling elite, who feel all powerful and untouchable – have inevitably lead to the practice of corruption as the ‘natural way’ of ordering relations between the constituencies concerned (political, business, criminal and so on). No one resists this culture because everyone is implicated in it. There are numerous examples of it in operation: first, in the emasculation of the academic community; second, in directors/executives BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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being strategically parachuted in to head up various cultural institutions, as opposed to appointments being based on criteria of expertise, vision, programme, experience; third, in the dismantling of the system of medical insurance in order to shift the emphasis to private clinics populated by the same people who ‘lead’ the health sector – ministers, assistant ministers, directors/executives in stateowned clinics, key hospital consultants; finally, and sadly, in the ruination of the education system  – for example, all private schools and universities who have acquired dubious licences to operate remain nonetheless equally eligible for state subventions. The third key element in this picture is so-called European integration. The way I see it, this is yet another instrument in the process of grafting the capitalist system onto an inherited socialist base – ruthlessly for the most part – yet now under the banner of democracy. All these changes being demanded by the EU as a prelude to Serbia joining it are accompanied by forms of blackmail, whereby the victims of the blackmail aren’t the political actors in power in Belgrade but the people. In the past eighteen years, European integration has boiled down to a trade-off between local political elites and Brussels. This has witnessed the fulfilment of an agenda for Serbia forged in Brussels – key issues being Kosovo, EU expansion, the migrant crisis, Russian influence – and the local elites enriching themselves in the process. All changes that have been agreed are generally ‘cosmetic’. For example, changes in standards of law so as to be aligned with Europe, which then aren’t implemented in practice because the necessary legal infrastructure for this to be effected simply isn’t in place. Everything that relates to the issue of EU integration, including culture, is left to the political elite to implement as and how it wants – and mostly it doesn’t know how and doesn’t even want to know. Because of the bigger issues involved (Kosovo, Russia), Europe turns a blind eye to all the misdemeanours committed locally: covert demolition of buildings, media restrictions, pressures on the judiciary, raiding of public goods and resources, and so on. The Serbian Progressive Party (Srpska Napredna Stranka, SNS) is a party that emerged from a wing of the Serbian Radical Party (Srpska Radikalna Stranka, SRS) led by Vojislav Šešelj, a war criminal convicted in The Hague for war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia. SNS was established by his closest allies, Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić. The latter was the information minister in the coalition government formed by Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistička Partija Srbije, SPS) and Šešelj’s SRS in 1998. That was the government that pushed the most anti-Western propaganda ever seen in Serbia, covering the period of the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 and continuing up until the fall of Milošević in 2000. SNS was founded in 2010 as an ambitious nationalist party with a European agenda, championing European integration, co-operation with Russia and the preservation of Kosovo as part of Serbia. In other words, a party ideally positioned for the local context: on the one hand playing up to nationalist sentiments (Kosovo, Serbia) and on the other to the EU, as a collaborator prepared to do anything locally to implement its agenda in Kosovo and to enable circumstances for the unobstructed 154

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flow of capital into Serbia. In sum, a capitalist and nationalist party, populist in its methods of public engagement and clientelistic in the way it solidified its hold on power by giving tycoons free rein to operate, accepting financial benefits in return. Jobst: Let’s move to the general cultural-institutional landscape now. Tell me a bit about the long-running situation with the National Museum, which is instructive in terms of circumstances in general, I think. Ahead of its recent reopening the Minister for Culture emphasized its value as a tourist destination, failing to mention its cultural and educational importance for the country … Cvetković: The National Museum in Belgrade was the first public museum in Serbia, established in 1844 and, as such, the most important museum institution in the country. Before the Second World War it was relocated to its current home in Republic Square, a building initially designed as a bank. After the civil war in the 1990s, the new government decided to invest capital funds into the reconstruction of the Museum. That reconstruction presupposed a slight expansion (upwards), with the addition of a glass dome that would enable added surface on the roof of the existing building and thus additional public functions. So, the Museum was closed in 2003 in order to commence with the refurbishment, which was planned to take but a few years. The extended delay that ensued is paradigmatic of the internal social struggle that would determine the future development of Serbian society as a whole and its basic values. What turned out to be the fifteen-year-long period of ‘reconstruction’ of the National Museum marks, in fact, the process of reconstruction and arrival at a final conclusion regarding what this society is, and where it’s headed. Even though the Museum’s completion was announced time and again – under the watches of a number of ministers for culture, prime ministers and two different museum directors, with projects discarded along the way and at least three successive competitions for the reconstruction being held – it was not finally opened until 28th June 2018. The final outcome is that only the most rudimentary, cosmetic work has been done: the building infrastructure has been repaired, basic systems have been installed for climatic control and conditions of display and storage, the walls were given a lick of paint, the façade cleaned up. The space wasn’t enlarged, or its use reconfigured, the organizational layout hasn’t been changed, no new programming has been introduced, and staffing hasn’t been renewed. At least one can say the Museum is projecting a revealing image now, which is being sent out urbi et orbi: it is one of a society stuck in a pre-communist past, frustrated by its defeats in the 1990s and unable to confront the crimes committed in its name. Moreover, the Museum is dismissive of all Yugoslav heritage, placing it at the service of the commercialized cultural industries and the spectacularization of culture. This final point is of particular importance for the institution of the Museum as it accepts being tied to profitorientated cultural industries and leaves key political decisions to the cabinet of the prime minister and her Commission for Cultural Industries, which organizes all public programmes, from the opening of the Museum itself, to the debate about the future of museums in general. BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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As such, the main preoccupation for the Museum these days is the question of attendance figures and how to attract more visitors. In essence, nothing has changed. A talk was recently held, entitled ‘The Museums Are Open. What Now?’, in which the director of the National Museum managed effectively to confirm the implications of the assessment I’ve just outlined: that with the opening of its refurbished building, the National Museum would cease to engage in any socially relevant questions and would become known instead as a receiving house for international blockbuster exhibitions, the first one announced being from China. Thus, the final killing off of any possibility of committed discussion within the museum-as-forum has been declared and implemented. Jobst: And what is the situation with the Museum of Contemporary Art? It also went through a long period of ‘reconstruction’ that is similarly instructive. Cvetković: Muzej Savremene Umetnosti (MSU) was closed in 2007, initially for a year, in order to deliver the refurbishment of the building at Ušće (at the confluence of the rivers Sava and Danube on the New Belgrade side). This had opened in 1965 and represents one of the masterpieces of Yugoslav modernism. It is one of only two buildings in the city that were designed specifically to be museums, the other being the former Museum of 25th May, today the Museum of Yugoslav History. At the point of its closure the management of MSU was made up of people appointed in 2001, having come from the Centre for Contemporary Art, which is the Serbian node in the network of centres for contemporary art set up and supported by the George Soros Foundation for an Open Society in the 1990s throughout Eastern Europe. Supported by the Democratic government at the time, the management re-established MSU as an important place for contemporary art (after the dire policies of the 1990s), as well as ensuring its integration as a venue within the international art scene and its participation in multiple networks. However, that management was also criticized for its perceived elitism and the way it limited its circle of ‘actors’ – artists who were perceived as being given privileged opportunities to work in and through the Museum. The reconstruction project, supposedly commencing in 2007, was supported by the Government and the Ministry of Culture. But these were the years of struggle between pro-European and pro-nationalist politics in Serbia, the fight for power and for the spoils of privatization. It led eventually to the establishment of a partocratic system of rule in which public institutions represent nothing more than a potential source of profit, and whose purpose is to employ party members whatever their qualifications and expertise (or lack thereof). In such an atmosphere, the fairly straightforward project of reconstruction proved impossible to pursue, and the whole process became a long and exhausting battle between various factions whose prime victim ultimately was the Museum itself and, by extension, a public deprived of its right to a contemporary art venue. This scenario gradually solidified into a socio-political context that enabled the return of conservative, nationalist and chauvinist powers in the domain of culture. Most crucially, their interest was not to establish space for a contemporary art 156

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that would enable a critical discourse directed at society and, even minimally, at Serbian politics in the 1990s. Equally, they actively discouraged any sort of a positive attitude towards Yugoslav heritage. For this, MSU was paradigmatic, since the original collection was that of Yugoslav art and so, after the dissolution of the country, the collection acquired relevance for the histories of all the newly formed nations. As far as I am concerned, this is the prime reason for the years of closure of MSU, as well as the National Museum. Although the formal explanations for slowing down and then stopping work on the refurbishment were always supposedly financial and bound up with petty and corrupt everyday politicking and favouritism, the real reason lies in the Serbian ideological discourse that was being established at the time. This could not bear the notion that ‘contemporariness’ could be embodied in such a potent institutional signifier as a museum, one whose emphasis, moreover, was Yugoslav. In other words, the ruling elite wasn’t prepared for such a cultural institution to become a constituent signifier of value in this new vision of Serbian society. And so it remained until a new political party, SNS, emerged, which came into power in 2012. As I detailed earlier, the party appropriated the language of a proEuropean orientation and started placing the existing cultural-institutional scene under its control, so that it represented and embodied new, neoliberal politics, which were reflected in the spectacularization of the institutions of culture and were devoid of any critical forum or embracing of principles of diversity and difference – Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonistic pluralism’.4 With this, the reconstruction of both museums gained new momentum. This was not for the purposes of the true reconstruction of these institutions – in all senses, not just of the buildings – but, first, as proof of the Government’s ‘hard work’ and ‘decisiveness’ in renewing the museums and the entire system of culture. Second, these initiatives served as examples of ‘adjustments’ of the institutions of art, culture and public education to the practices of the commercialized cultural industries, which turn a profit, attract consumers in large numbers and create neutral, entertaining and easily consumable content, ‘prettily’ packaged. These are the new promotional projects in which the political message that is implicitly and repeatedly reiterated is: the current Government cares about culture, and opens up opportunities that those previously in power could not. This involves constantly spinning in public discourse the idea that the previous political elites were solely culpable for the closure of the museums. Both museums were re-opened with the personal engagement of the prime minister and without the participation of museum professionals. It was bad enough that the directors obsequiously toed the party line, but all the worse that they excluded their colleagues, museum specialists, from any professionally relevant decision-making processes. Both openings (October 2017 for MSU and June 2018 for the National Museum) were spectacles of political marketing and bore no relation to the nature of the work in which the two institutions are engaged. Both directors emerged as SNS candidates in Belgrade local elections in April 2018 and therefore watched us – as we watched them – on billboards spread across the city. BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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Now that MSU has opened again, problems are accumulating fast. The institution’s budget is smaller than it was before its closure in 2007, which speaks to how much less the State supports culture from the public budget (0.69 per cent in 2018). Also, there has been a ban on new appointments in the public sector for four years now. In the case of MSU, this amounts to coping with around twentyfive fewer employees. With the re-opening, it has become clear that it is impossible to work with such reduced human resources and this is a chronic problem in all public institutions: culture, education, health – anything that is non-profit. Besides this, the programme for the first three years hasn’t been approved yet by the Ministry for Culture – a refusal to plan ahead. This makes it impossible to develop serious exhibition projects which require long lead times for the purposes of research and acquisition. Thus, the curatorial team has no idea what exhibitions will be realized in 2019, other than that the prime minister herself has arranged for a large retrospective exhibition of the work of Marina Abramović, who will exhibit in Belgrade for the first time in almost forty years. The exhibition will be generously financed from the public budget as yet another showpiece example of what this Government can do, ‘unlike the previous one’. This is being announced as a spectacle of state importance supported by the Government. Such an uncertain financial and political situation will result, among other things, in the closure of one of two remaining alternative spaces in the city belonging to MSU, since there are neither the staff nor finances to keep it running. Jobst: How about the October Salon, an art institution with a long and respected ‘pedigree’, which was recently transformed into a biennial – what’s its role now? Cvetković: October Salon, a traditional exhibition of art established in 1960 in Belgrade, gained in importance when it was transformed into an international exhibition of contemporary art. This began to take place annually from 2005, following the replacement of its then curators and the participation of large numbers of international artists. It gained importance in particular after 2007, with the decade-long closure of the Museum of Contemporary Art. As a result, it became a large, representative exhibition, offering regular insight into international developments in contemporary art – to the public, to local artists and, importantly, to art students. However, in keeping with the gradual and systematic shift in politics towards neoliberal transformations of the entire public realm, including culture, of course, the City Council, who had established it, started signalling that October Salon would be transformed into a biennial. The economic situation, ‘necessary’ rationalizations and the shrinking of the public budget as one of the goals of austerity politics were all listed as reasons. Incidentally, this same logic had shrunk the number of public sector employees by about 45 per cent and the capital city, with its two million inhabitants, was left with just over 1,000 employees in the public culture sector – which is deeply worrying. As it had indicated it would do, Belgrade City Council implemented the decision to turn October Salon into a biennial in 2014, supposedly so as to double its funding in order to raise levels of quality. In addition to that, statements made by the officials involved were directed 158

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critically at the supposed overbearing predominance of foreign artists and curators over local ones. Of course, the very next edition of the Salon showed that this was not only meaningless in principle but also something that they would neglect to implement: all the editions of the Salon so far have been curated by foreigners and there are even more international artists involved now, since the international scene is obviously far larger, while the budget is still below what is needed. The key point about all of this, in my opinion, is the hidden agenda to narrow down the public sphere in which it might be possible to speak critically about social, political and economic questions, criticize daily politics, including its relation to public issues, and expose the lack of expertise, intentional malice and outright damage inflicted on society by the local ruling elites’ neoliberal politics. This is precisely why October Salon is an example of the way the space of contemporary art is shrinking in Serbia. Even when art is nominally apolitical, it is seen as a threat since it becomes a mirror for the conditions of life in the community and raises awareness by comparing the reality of what is here and now to what could be here and now. October Salon is the clearest example of the politics of retrogressive traditionalism in the field of culture, which prefers to support the ‘industrialization’ (via the cultural industries) and festivalization of culture in such a way that its critical edge is blunted and it is reduced to entertainment, with the added bonus of generating money. Jobst: Are there any other key institutions or regular events that you think are worth mentioning in this context? Cvetković: As I’ve pointed out already, all these and other city institutions have been emptied of any critical and creative capacity. The current Government’s cultural politics prevents any institutional autonomy and the ‘cadre politics’ in operation is run exclusively according to party political appointments when it comes to directorships and other key positions. What else is there to say if we take into consideration that for five years now Belgrade hasn’t had an open call for a position in the institutions of culture? During this period, many have retired or simply left, while those who have arrived to fill posts were mostly appointed through the party, or the vacant positions in question were closed. Is that realistic for a capital city of two million with a significant cultural infrastructure built under socialism? No. It’s the result of a predatory politics that manages to bypass and cancel out all professional standards of work in the field of culture, and reduce the whole sector to a clientelistic mess, in which it has become hard to find a way and, indeed, reason to exist. The most illuminating example is that of the so-called City of Belgrade Heritage Protection Institute which covers the preservation, reconstruction and restoration of all cultural monuments. This Institute has enabled many cultural monuments to become privatized, to spiral towards dilapidation and so on. As a consequence of its decisions, a private investor was permitted to devastate the Belgrade Co-operative building in Savamala; now they intend to ‘reconstruct‘ the neighbouring Hotel Bristol building, which is protected by law (i.e. it is listed), making use of it to their BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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own ends without any payments to the State, which is completely against Serbian law. The main railway station in Karađorđeva has already been devastated  – the moment rail services stopped operating, cafés, bars and clubs started opening there. The very same Institute, whose base is in Kalemegdan, has allowed the protection plan covering the famous fortress of Kalemegdan to be altered, so that the construction of commercial spaces is now being prepared there without informing or consulting the public – all done through secret agreements and deals. The Institute deliberately neglects to monitor the condition of listed items under the protection of the State, which have been sold to private interest groups or returned through restitution to pre–Second World War owners. It also refrains from adhering to the law that binds the State to recall ownership of listed buildings if the private owner fails either to maintain them in accordance with the law or to retain their original use. This is a good example of the way the State has been ‘hi-jacked’ by the new political elites and the way its own laws are being bypassed by the new state apparatus. In short, it is a para-state: both above and against the State. The victims of all this are, of course, the citizens themselves who, unless they belong to the ruling minority, remain powerless and voiceless actors whose only function is to pay state bills and not have any opinion, voice or desire for change. But another phenomenon I would also single out (of many) is cultural colonialism. This relates to the fact of local artistic and cultural production receiving no Government support; instead, what is funded are various high-profile spectacles and imported programmes, for which large sums of money are ringfenced even though they are actually profit-orientated commercial events. Famous examples would be concerts by Madonna, The Rolling Stones or the Belgrade Festival of Dance with its exclusively foreign line-up. This tendency is supported by business initiatives in culture in particular, that is, the ‘cultural industries’, which align their interests with the ruling political agenda so that public money trickles into their private pockets. Jobst: How about the independent art scene? Cvetković: This is a phenomenon that is of great importance in the context of Eastern European countries and therefore calls for careful explanation. After the dissolution of the socialist system – in which culture, for example, had been founded and financed by public bodies and funds – these countries began developing what is termed ‘civil society’. As part of this, citizens started forming independent associations, including in fields linked to culture. What evolved specifically in this context were associations engaged in various practices within contemporary art and culture, and their activities developed particularly successfully in those areas that weren’t already covered by existing cultural institutions. Starting in the 1990s, these associations introduced new artistic and cultural practices such as new media, digital arts, alternative theatre and contemporary dance, experimental and new music, activist practice, socially engaged art, new transdisciplinary cultural practices, new festivals and so on. The associations worked from the very beginning with partners from abroad, thereby becoming visible in the 160

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international arena, applied new forms of organization, production and promotion of their work, but were also to a large extent critical of the existing socio-political context and engaged in the anti-war movement. Because of the activities of such independent organizations, with their various regional and international networks and platforms, the post-socialist governments in these Eastern European countries often felt uneasy since they threatened to undermine the smooth enforcement of nationalist, neoliberal, pro-market reforms and solutions in cultural politics. So the associations came to be seen as a disruptive element and attempts were made to discredit them in various ways, from media slanders to the withdrawal of public funds in competitions, to a general disregard for their relevant artistic and other successes (often, by contrast, recognized internationally). These independent activities were particularly visible in the countries of the former Yugoslavia with their traditions of self-management and autonomy. This led to a stronger awareness generally of the importance of such influences in the development of society, since they were grounded in the social and cultural practices of the former socialist Yugoslavia. After the end of the civil war in Yugoslavia in 1999, these dispersed ‘scenes’ and their actors started reviving their former connections through regional cooperation, and through recognizing the need to join forces in the fight against the increasing pressures of capitalist transformation, but also nationalism. All the actors realized that connections and cooperation both at national and regional levels would be key strategies in ensuring visibility – that their voices would be heard in the debates regarding cultural politics in each country. That is how the individual associations of the independent cultural scene came about – Asocijacija in Slovenia, Clubture in Croatia, NKSS (Association of the Independent Culture Scene of Serbia) in Serbia, Jadro in Macedonia – and soon after the regional umbrella network of these various associations, Kooperativa. The associations gather together some of the most significant players in the cultural scene but also a large number of less well-known ones, who come from small places in the provinces, and who are very important for the local context since they are the sole providers of contemporary art to those places. The associations are also sites of critical thinking and action, places of international cooperation, and nodes for the creation of alternatives to the dominant models of production and management in the field of culture. In Serbia, according to surveys from 2015, this scene produces 44 per cent of the total cultural content in the country, while receiving less than 10 per cent of the public budget. Jobst: And moving on to the city, what has been happening since Milošević, even before Belgrade Waterfront? What has been happening to the arts and culture, specifically in relation to the city? Cvetković: After the political changes in 2000, cultural politics in Serbia became part of a wider process of European integration and the introduction of neoliberal capitalism. Culture is seen as a field through which to generate profit via the concept of ‘cultural industries’, while the State retreats from conceiving, subsidizing and generally supporting culture as a public good in line with the BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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cultural infrastructure inherited from the Yugoslav period. You can take here as an example of such processes the ‘hi-jacking’ of Savamala, tearing it from its sociocultural context, which is an exploitation, in Pasquinelli’s terms, of the collective dimension of value production.5 ‘Creative zombies’, to use Vida Knežević’s and Marko Miletić’s term (2012) – that is, individuals who don’t possess any class consciousness – came running to fulfil the agenda of the new capitalist elite and erase the historical heritage of this district and its ‘unpretty’ aspects, overlaying a new ‘urban’ face and opening doors for the influx of capital and gentrification. And so, a residential workers’ milieu, which had formed around the port area and then the central railway and bus stations, started radically changing through the appetite generated for attracting private capital, rather than improving the infrastructure – traffic, amenities, culture and so on – for the actual residents of this part of town, or specific communities that started meeting there (artists and migrants, for example). Even though the idea for the city to ‘descend to its rivers’ had been lingering for years, economic conditions and an absence of political will hadn’t allowed it to happen, so Savamala had ceased developing until 2006. Around that time Magacin arrived in the area, the first initiative to do so, as a cultural centre that was primarily there to satisfy the need for a space for new actors in the artistic and cultural scene, space that existed nowhere else. Then Kulturni Centar Grad (or KC Grad) arrived in 2009 and started promoting a new model. Its partially profitable programme, with its nightclub + art mixture, ‘urban spirit’ and other such features, slowly started attracting a similar kind of content to the area, which then replicated itself. Clubs, bars and restaurants gradually started opening and multiplying. Then Mikser arrived in Savamala and with its Festival beginning in 2012 and its new space – Mikser House opening in 2013 – completed this process of transformation of a district into a space of nightlife and ‘cool Belgrade’, attractive to backpackers and the young, who make up the majority of tourists in that period. The image of a ‘new Berlin’ is cultivated precisely here, and that picture is fostered through media events, tourist advertising and so on. In parallel with this, the conditions of work and production of art are becoming increasingly challenging; the new authorities are venturing ever more into the realm of cultural industries but are becoming at the same time increasingly retrograde, promoting nationalist discourses which, in fact, have the effect of masking the push of art into the realm of the marketplace. Jobst: What is the art link to Belgrade Waterfront? The general plan was to provide for more culture but now focuses on housing and shopping, etc. Meanwhile, the ‘culture provision’ box seems to have been ticked by the proposed statue of Stefan Nemanja, its artistic (non)value and ideological purpose an illustration of the relationship between Belgrade Waterfront and artistic production … Cvetković: This idea for a monument to Stefan Nemanja came about via President Vučić (in December 2015) and his project to sell off – that is, co-opt to his ends – public resources, primarily using Belgrade Waterfront. It is supposed to serve as a smoke-screen for all of the Government’s dubious decisions and illegal moves in this colossal project, which the ruling clique is using, moreover, to make 162

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itself rich. This is precisely why the choice fell on the founder of the medieval Serbian state, Nemanja, since Vučić believes that no one could possibly oppose a monument to a historical figure of such importance. He altered the proposed site of the statue several times, until he arrived at the ‘genius’ idea of placing it exactly on the border of Belgrade Waterfront territory. First, he had announced it would be on the esplanade in front of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defence building, then in Manjež Park, ending finally with the cunning idea for a 15-m-tall sculpture in Sava Square, which supposedly would be seen from Slavija Square. The statue is to be physically imposing but also metaphorically so, and, in being that, aims to shut up all those critics of the idea of transforming the railway station building into a museum, either of the history of Serbia, or the Nemanjić dynasty in particular (the jury is out on that question). In other words, a big monument to shut big mouths. Further to the cultural content of Belgrade Waterfront: the first model provided for an opera house. This idea has been abandoned in the meantime and instead we are hearing about plans to have it located at Ušće on the other side of the Sava River or at the central Republic Square. There is no other remotely similar cultural content planned for Belgrade Waterfront. Instead there is currently [as of August 2018] mention of ‘the biggest park in Belgrade’ as part of the Waterfront plan. In other words, fun and games once more. The latest regarding Belgrade Waterfront is that the first tower opened with a ceremony on 14th July 2018, with the arrival of the first batch of inhabitants (mainly Serbs from New Zealand). This announced the end of the ‘first phase of the construction of Belgrade Waterfront’ despite the fact that the first phase, according to previous announcements, was to encompass two high-rise residential blocks, a main tower (a skyscraper), a shopping mall and a marina. In the past six years, only two buildings have been completed, and only one of those is ready to be moved into (Figure 4.5).

FIGURE 4.5  Belgrade Waterfront residential flats, 10th April 2018. Photo: Marko Jobst BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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Jobst: And so, here we are in 2018, with Mikser gone from Savamala, having also failed in attempts both to move Mikser House to Lower Dorćol and to expand into Sarajevo.6 What is the situation now with Magacin in Savamala? Cvetković: In the past couple of years, Magacin has nurtured an active public presence, arguing for free, ‘agonistic’ spaces for contemporary culture in the heart of the Belgrade Waterfront project, and against SNS Government policy. Even though there were several attempts to neutralize and evict it, public campaigns prevented this and led, in fact, to a further solidification of Magacin’s position. Other than that, Magacin is the only space for actual production in the arts – a space made available to artists and other cultural workers for free, so that they can create their art ‘products’, even when they are for subsidized public institutions – and it strives to retain that position as a symbolic link to pre-gentrification Savamala. Over 1,500 different programmes of work are produced there per year, from exhibitions, performances and concerts to workshops, training, conferences, seminars, student study visits, charity work, migrant support and so on. All this is done without the support of either the City or State governments, mostly through self-organization and donations. A plan for the reconstruction of the street of Kraljević Marko was announced in June 2018. This has sounded alarm bells for us, indicating that renewed pressure will be applied on Magacin, especially its annex at No.8 housing the gallery space (Ostavinska Galerija), which is part of Magacin. It is a wonderful space and it is highly likely that the city authorities will portray it as one of the ‘abandoned spaces’ from the time when the area was a centre of Serbian commerce, as is claimed, and use that as an excuse to throw us out when the actual reason is our independent, leftist radicalism. We are bracing for impact and preparing a large number of counter initiatives that would enable a new campaign for Magacin to be heard more clearly through public programmes, social networks and the media.

Coda: Mikser and Savamala In the various formal and informal conversations with Mikser’s creative director Maja Lalić over the past few years, it has become apparent to me, first, that her point of departure is to accept at face value the complexity of relationships that prevail between the various forces and actors in contemporary Serbian society, and, second, that she seeks to persevere at all costs in moving through the minefield that this particular complexity represents, fully aware of the compromises this entails. Criticisms such as Knežević’s (2015) – mentioned earlier – apart from displaying clear mistrust in any case of Mikser’s true intentions, suggest, however, that the multivalent and agile role Lalić desires to embody in order to effect positive change (as designer, manager, entrepreneur and most recently refugee activist) is simply overridden, and therefore rendered ineffectual, by the much more powerful forces at play in the city. These are located in the murky, exploitative relationship between labour and capital, which models such as Mikser’s ultimately sustain whether that 164

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be knowingly – in other words, by stealth, as Knežević rather unkindly implies – or through a form of wide-eyed optimism that seeks out opportunities wherever it can. Maja Lalić’s approach is no doubt at least in part the result of Mikser’s origins in promoting activities such as industrial and product design – that is, the more obvious content and materials for the commercially orientated ‘creative industries’ (however much design itself should bear no intrinsic proximity to the market place). But in the various conversations with artists, curators, architects and other participants in the cultural scene of Belgrade, two key aspects of Mikser’s work were repeatedly portrayed as negative: first, the tendency to foster spectacle in culture, whatever the practice; and, second, the active promotion of culture’s entry into the domain of the market place, if nothing else via both the scale and elusive nature of Mikser as a brand. Mikser was seen to be helping to undermine the socially-engaged community orientation of various cultural infrastructures, even as it promotes them, particularly those relating to the independent sector and the socialist legacy, as outlined by Marijana Cvetković above and manifest in Magacin’s activities. Lalić noted in one of our early conversations that she found (infra)structural issues in the city to be so vast and complex, and the change accomplished through existing institutions so slow, that she regarded it as an imperative early on to take things into her own hands, proceeding from the values of the design disciplines from which she hails. To critics like Knežević, this represents, at best, a naïve failure of foresight of the repercussions of such an (in part at least) entrepreneurial approach, and, at worst, deliberate disregard of Serbian economic and political realities. One suspects also that the crucial issue with Mikser’s practice has been its seeming lack of criteria in the choice of projects: any disciplinary practice can be sucked into its energetic vortex, with varying levels of success, thematically unified only by their high visibility and the continuity of the (brand) name. It is quite possible that a more rigorous, discerning selection of ‘battles’ and project content would have made the perception of Mikser less vulnerable to scepticism and hostility in critical circles on the grounds of its apparent opportunism. An activist for housing issues in Belgrade, on her way to a Dorćol squat that was being shut down by police in April 2018, offered an interesting assessment in passing: there should be a space for the likes of Mikser in Belgrade, despite some of its more dubious aspects. The ire it has provoked, she thought, wasn’t based so much on the question of scale and the nature of its events, as its seeming desire to position itself beyond the realm of politics, and local party-politics in particular – so far, in fact, that it eventually becomes morally unsustainable. Mikser crashed out of its attempted incursion into Sarajevo in 2018 – an experimental move which seems typical of the way it is constantly on the lookout for new potential – and has no home in Belgrade at the time of writing, although a festival in Lower Dorćol in 2019 has just been announced. The organization looks as if it will resurface, then, but until recently had made itself largely invisible, arguably appearing to have lost its bearings. The only current activity left with a BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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link to the brand name is Miksalište, ironically the very refugee centre that might have contributed to Mikser’s downfall in the broader political landscape, for a variety of reasons that will become apparent shortly. The fact that Mikser House failed to secure yet another post-industrial site in Lower Dorćol in 2017, which had been one of their preferred objectives in an area that is rapidly becoming ‘the new Savamala’, also suggested that it hadn’t quite managed to plug itself into the current ‘power vibe’ in the city. (Detractors would have assumed that would have happened as a matter of course given the entrepreneurial instincts usually displayed.) Meanwhile, the building in Savamala that was Mikser House has been subdivided into several smaller units, including a restaurant and a club, one of which carries the name that echoes Maja Lalić’s own architectural design studio (Remiks). Copyright issues clearly didn’t play a role here and the fact that this restaurant now carries the same name as an architectural practice is oddly emblematic of the loose (or leaky) nature of Mikser’s overall ‘portfolio’ structure. The Mikser team did not emerge as (financial) winners in the Savamala project, as had been widely assumed. The actual owner of the building that had hosted Mikser House may well have done, however, on the back of the gentrification processes taking place in Savamala and the powerful association with the adjacent site of Belgrade Waterfront. Belgrade artist Danilo Prnjat was another who wrote a highly critical essay about the Belgrade scene in 2015. Pre-empting some of Knežević’s arguments, and discussing the ‘independent scene’ in general, Prnjat specifically mentions Ivan Lalić’s comments in the press at the time: as executive director of Mikser, Lalić had actively promoted an entrepreneurial approach to culture. In an analysis arguably more nuanced than Knežević’s, and worth quoting here at length, Prnjat traces the complex and fluid relationships that had developed between the socalled independent cultural scene in Serbia and what he terms its ‘independententrepreneurial’ wing, represented precisely by the likes of Mikser: The unification of Serbia’s independent cultural scene through the NKSS platform [in 2011] was welcomed at the outset by many, who saw in the process the possibility of developing a stronger and more unified front for all cultural protagonists. The NKSS platform also included initiatives from across Serbia who don’t cite business as the reason for their involvement in culture but base their work instead around the realisation of community projects, especially when it comes to the use of public space. Unfortunately, their voice is harder to hear, and often it is as if they have been assimilated into the ‘independententrepreneurial’ contingent mentioned above. Since the ‘independententrepreneurial’ actors are more dominant, and ideologically and practically better connected both to the political parties in power and the corporate sector, they manage to leech the public space initiative image from those who are ‘independent-community’ but, unlike the latter, approach it as a space of potential profit. It should also be said that this binary distinction is only 166

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provisional and that NKSS includes many in-between organisational forms, such as those based on the idea of ‘bohemian entrepreneurship’, which includes those organisations who realised that the notion of NGO entrepreneurship in Serbian culture is a more secure and profitable route these days than the uncertainties of market competition. An interesting transformation is taking place in this realm, especially with regard to commercial galleries, which are increasingly re-registering their status as NGOs. (Prnjat 2015) Cut to 2018, and in an interesting turn of events, Maja Lalić and Danilo Prnjat are working side by side in the context of Miksalište, a refugee centre. In a conversation with me in August 2018, Prnjat described the shift that had marked the period since his 2015 observations. What had been establishing itself as the independent-entrepreneurial – that is, post-socialist, ‘petit bourgeois’ – model in the cultural sector, was largely swept aside, first, by wider European shifts regarding the influx of Middle-Eastern refugees and migrants into the Balkans (their arrival at the central railway station had affected both Savamala itself and what was becoming the expanded territory of Belgrade Waterfront, leading directly to the formation of Miksalište); and, second, by the increasingly aggressive processes of urban transformation implemented directly from the political top, as manifest in the covert demolition of buildings in Savamala in 2016, for which responsibility has not been established to this day. Prnjat notes that this double-hit resulted in Belgrade’s small entrepreneurial actors in the cultural sector being eventually swallowed up by much bigger financial and political ones, be they local, from the EU or places like the Gulf, thereby pushing them inadvertently towards a more politically radical set of positions as a matter of survival. Some actors of the independent cultural scene entered the field of party politics, while Mikser itself went through a sequence of increased social engagement in the area of refugee support. First, it opened the doors of Mikser House to charitable donations; then it transformed the skating rink (Klizalište) it had acquired and repurposed in Savamala similarly into a donations collection point, forming Miksalište.7 With the demolition of a section of Savamala for Belgrade Waterfront, the site of the skating rink was eventually wiped out as well, at which point Mikser diverted some of Mikser House’s income, together with subsequent successfully secured international funding, into acquiring the use of the space that remains the refugee centre to this day – yet another building that had served industry in the past. The way Prnjat paints it, this picture represents a telling shift away from the scale of the previous entrepreneurial project, caused no doubt in part by the genuinely empathic and conscientious reaction to the refugee crisis but also by a collapse, of sorts, of the small entrepreneurial project in culture, at least in Savamala. Amid such a re-orienting of the local landscape, Prnjat finds himself operating within Miksalište, alongside a number of other artist-activists, through BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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a series of engagements with refugees, specifically through an approach to critical social engagement via the arts, as the Guardian newspaper reported in September 2018 (Deghan 2018). The work is illustrative to some extent of the practices of new institutionalism, whereby the institutions it has in view here are less those of the arts per se than socio-economic ones.8 In other words, it possesses an overt political orientation, attempting to address social production processes from the ground up in an attempt to devise models of alternative practice that rethink the whole value and integrity of socio-economic relations. Through ‘Minipogon’, for example, a ‘mini-plant for the production of commonness’, Prnjat and others – tellingly unnamed on the website in order, presumably, to stress the collective nature of the endeavour – have worked, among other things, on recycled plastic and its transformation into utilitarian objects. As the website declares, the project is an experimental production recycling plant that explores alternative methods of production, cooperative relationships and self-management, and develops the concept of equity with an economic foothold. It is a project that implies intervention in the field of work (in culture), its deconstruction and the creation of something new within the marginal and discarded. The production plant for making objects from recycled plastic works through inclusion of marginal groups (unemployed, middle-aged women, refugees etc) and as a resource uses the rejected by-products of modern capitalist society. […] In this sense the project is trying to create a field for the production of new values, but also to create a place where the politicisation of production relations will be practically feasible and possible. (‘Minipogon’ 2018) Importantly, then, this is not ‘merely art’ but a form of relational engagement with real-world production processes – in other words, with labour and industry – whose art resides in its capacity to raise at the same time key questions around the depletion of the earth’s natural resources, relations around economic capital and surplus, the marginalization of social groups such as migrants and refugees, and to offer alternative working models. Thus, the arts, the various forms of independence on the art scene (and its actors) and the critical cultural project steeped in politics and economics have all been reconfigured into a new, more radical, constellation – at least for the time being. But to go back to Mikser’s own approach: in response to my question as to what she saw as the organization’s most lasting accomplishments in Savamala, Maja Lalić seemed to confirm Prnjat’s perception of a significant shift. Writing on one hectic day in November 2018 via bursts of messaging app notes in between meetings, she also revealed the degree to which Mikser’s social and infrastructural impacts have often been imperceptible owing to their incremental, low-key nature: What I consider to be Mikser’s biggest achievement in Savamala are precisely the various participatory activities and practices we initiated, and the way we 168

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often connected experts (architects, urban designers, artists) directly with the community, the inhabitants of the area. This was done through a variety of informal projects, such as ‘My Piece of Savamala’ (Moje parče Savamale) which was delivered in collaboration with the School of Urban Practices (Škola urbanih praksi) and given an award at the annual Architecture Salon prize [the biggest architecture awards in the country] for advancing urban practices through citizen participation. We also supported and initiated a great number of street art projects, mostly on walls that were in a poor state. For example, we’d ask construction companies to install thermal insulation on the walls in question first. This was the case with the Ceresit mural, for example, located opposite Mikser House, on Karađorđeva Street. We were often accused of commercialisation, but no money exchanged hands in such projects, and we certainly didn’t make a profit from such endeavours. Companies would provide the material and workforce and we would name them as donors during the Festival. Young street artists would then get to develop their craft, while we sourced materials, applied for permissions from the local council, acquired flat owners’ consent, etc. Belgrade’s Street Smart movement emerged from this, to follow its own trajectory of development and growth. The achievement Ivan [Lalić, Mikser’s executive director] is proudest of (being a playwright) is the re-introduction of theatre into Savamala, since the first theatre play ever staged in Belgrade took place in this area in 1841, in a building called Đumurkana. Also, all these activities took the local community into consideration: the inhabitants of Savamala were, whenever possible, offered free tickets, placed on free entry lists, etc, to the point that ushers would learn over time to recognise the locals, and let them in as a matter of course. We often acted as mediators between the local citizens and the Council, or the city, when it came to establishing channels and modes of communication, or solving problems. This ranged from addressing the issues of unsafe railway crossings to the closure of streets for motorised traffic, sometimes with success, sometimes less so. We halted the felling of trees in the small public space in front of Mikser House and prevented the construction of a car park for the Belgrade Waterfront showroom. We often used the festivals to draw attention to such issues (eg. organising temporary installations for the crossing of the railway for mothers with prams and disabled people, or temporary demonstrations on how to turn the space under the bridge into a park and a playground, etc). And some things really changed, like better signposting of railway crossings, permanent installation of flower beds under the bridge, etc. Finally, there is Miksalište, which I take to be the prime example of direct cooperation with the local community, and an example of how much can be resolved by fostering communication and solidarity. There was a lot of good will in Savamala and I think we played a key role in having the positive spirit prevail in the context of the refugee crisis. The problems came later on with the move to the new premises, which are located right next to a building populated by at least BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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ten extreme xenophobes. A record of this remains in Ivan’s (Lalić) theatre play, ‘Love in Savamala’ [Ljubav u Savmali], which opened in the autumn of 2018 in Zvezdara Teatar, selling out. Our decision to close Mikser House was the direct result of our engagements with, and around, Miksalište: the owner of the building that housed Mikser House threatened to terminate the contract if we didn’t close Miksalište, the logic being that the proximity of a refugee centre competed with his commercial interests in the area. We decided we’d had enough suffering the pressures of investment interests such as those, and shifted emphasis to social engagement projects of the type embodied by Miksalište. This decision was also spurred on by the general transformation of the district by that point: the demolitions in the interest of Belgrade Waterfront, evictions of existing collectives from their spaces, the arrival of fancy jeeps, parked all around the area … Ivan (Lalić) would also point out that the charge against us as major ‘carriers’ of gentrification can be countered by the fact that the development and revitalisation of the district were organic in the way we approached them. Savamala is still inhabited by the same community (and property owners) that were there at the beginning, when we first arrived. In other words, the usual gentrification narrative pertaining to raised rental values simply does not apply here. And that is really where we see the direct conflict between a project such as Belgrade Waterfront, orchestrated by the State, and a more organic way of resurrecting Savamala that we pursued. My fear is that, with or without us, the result would have been the same, due to this top-down approach. In the end there are probably a number of locals who are happy to see this particular change, ie. our departure and the replacement of the ‘dodgy arty types’ with a set of polished, sanitised urban interventions. (Lalić 2018) At that ‘Conversation in Situ’ at Mikser Festival in 2012, Sarah Chaplin had suggested that curating the city means perhaps curating it even for the urban developer. That is, educating those players who are unaware – and often largely uninterested – as to the value of urban heritage. As it turned out, in the context of Belgrade, Mikser had indeed effected a ‘curation’ of the Belgrade Co-operative building, that emblem of the deeply troubling trajectory of Savamala: first, for the benefit of the institutionally established – and, at the time, ethically acceptable – October Salon and then, inadvertently, for Eagle Hills, the Belgrade Waterfront developer. As Ivan Velisavljević wrote in his article ‘Savamala: The Games of the City, Culture and Capital’ in 2016, the regular speed of gentrification simply wasn’t efficient enough, resulting in ‘masked men overseeing illegal demolitions of buildings’ (Velisavljević 2016). And that is, perhaps, precisely the image that symbolically encapsulates the nature of the current transformation of Belgrade: dictated by local, European and global investment interests, their foundations firmly in neoliberal values, implemented ad-hoc, opportunistically and at times outside any legal framework, the reshaping of the city takes place at an aggressive speed, and often in a covert, 170

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even illegal fashion. Art production and related socially-engaged initiatives find themselves actively sabotaged if attempting any critique of culture and society, and relegated to the arena of entertainment and spectacle instead. In such a context, Mikser’s journey traces a telling trajectory of enthusiasm, energy and the desire to transform the urban environment for the better, as Maja Lalić’s comments imply, but also one of failure, inconsistency and an inability, or perhaps refusal, to map out the consequences of its interventions. But perhaps bewailing Mikser’s supposed ‘failure’ is also a bit of a red herring. Seeking to sum up the situation from an outsider’s perspective, Nicolas Whybrow wrote to me in August 2018: It strikes me that Mikser’s hit-and-miss modus operandi – its high creative energy on the one hand, its lack of discernment, naivety (perhaps) and lack of ability to follow-through on the other – is maybe reflecting back to the city a kind of perennial Belgrade ‘wild west’ syndrome, one of chaos, opportunism and complacency, which can perhaps be seen, therefore, as a form of tragic flaw: Mikser’s heart is in the right place, but there’s an element of self-destructiveness about the organisation in how it operates. Or maybe it’s more that Mikser is the fall guy, wretchedly unable because of political circumstances beyond its control to deliver on its good intentions. The sheer volatility and uncertainty generated by political tensions, corruption, factionalism and so on make it fiendishly difficult to work to meaningful and productive ends. Savamala, it seems to me, is a lost opportunity, though perhaps predictable given the sheer scale of the challenge, with the Waterfront project hopelessly disconnected from its surroundings and ruthlessly exploitative – a sell-out to big oily bucks rather than the socially-engaged, measured reconfiguration promised by the vision of a ‘descent to the rivers’. (Whybrow 2018) Somewhere in this mix, there should still be space for hope. One of the things Lydia Matthews stressed at that ‘Conversations in Situ’ in 2012 was that the lack of clear structure, an ‘in-betweenness’ of sorts, is also an opportunity to develop new, different and locally useful models. As it stands, I am not sure that in the interplay of increasingly sinister global forces and their power-grabbing, capital-amassing local enablers there is space for more than a stab at resistance. But then, I am not in Belgrade anymore. It is those who are, and who persistently push against the tide, that remain the indefatigable agents of hope: that positive change can, and will, take place.

Notes 1 The extended interview with Cvetković has been translated by Marko Jobst as have all other quotations from Serbian in this chapter. 2 The annual Mikser Festival has consistently given itself multiple themes, which often serve to highlight what the main socio-political challenges of the day (or year) are BELGRADE CONVERSATIONS

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3

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perceived to be. In 2016, for example, the overall theme was ‘Sensitive Society’, which included ‘female creativity and gender equality’ and ‘the refugee crisis and European integration’, while 2017’s Festival covered ‘migration, education on the move, the city and the making of culture’. Setting up as an NGO is roughly equivalent to the practice in the UK of seeking charitable status. It signals an intention not to be profit-orientated and/or market dependent, thus affording an image of operating independently and for the common good. Mouffe’s ‘democratic paradox’ relates to a form of democracy based not on resolving difference in social relations and/or values held, and thereby effacing or overcoming it, but permitting and, indeed, sustaining difference as a recognized and necessary aspect of a pluralist society (Mouffe 2000: 33). In ‘The Number of the Collective Beast: Value in the Age of New Algorithmic Institutions of Ranking and Rating’ (2006), Pasquinelli discusses decontextualized value, which is then exploited for purposes divorced from the initial context. In Savamala’s case, it is precisely the monetization of a heritage that had been brought about through collective labour, or collective ‘sedimentation’ of commonly produced values and goods. It would appear that Mikser Sarajevo represented another enthusiastic, and in hindsight hasty, decision to attempt to expand activities, this time over the Serbian border. For a variety of reasons, shrouded in mystery and subject to gossip best not indulged here but relating, for instance, to the promise of funding that never materialized, the space had to be closed months after its opening. Klizalište is the Serbian term for skating rink, hence Miks(er) + (kliz)alište = Miksalište. Its grammatical form also makes the resulting term read as ‘a place for mixing’. Citing the curator Charles Esche’s definition of new institutionalism, Kompatsiaris writes that the movement imagines the art institution ‘as “part community centre, part laboratory, part school,” putting less emphasis on “the showroom function that traditionally belonged to the art space.” The art exhibition here takes the form of “a social project”’ (Kompatsiaris 2017: 7).

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5  Neighbourhood Watch: Building and Dwelling in Istanbul

The 15th Istanbul Biennial (IB) in 2017 took place under the banner of ‘a good neighbour’ with all its implications of exploring what constructive urban coexistence means, to include negotiations of ‘difference’ and ‘strangeness’ as well as ‘positivistic reciprocity’. The theme of ‘a good neighbour’ was itself the product of close collaboration, the Biennial being co-curated by the renowned artist team of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, who commence their introduction to the Biennial catalogue by recounting the story of the fortuity of their own first meeting on a night out in Copenhagen in 1994. The appeal of the tale is less in the chance encounter that occurred – after all, ‘nights out’ are arguably designed for precisely that to happen – than in what later emerged: ‘When the time came to head home, we realized that we not only lived in the same neighbourhood, but on the same street, and even in the very same four-storey building. That made the decision to walk home together so much easier’ (Elmgreen and Dragset 2017: 41). And the rest is history, one is tempted to add, given that the duo have since gone on to forge a highly successful joint career within a cohort of the most high profile of international contemporary artists and curators. The private-professional romance of the tale aside, a detail of broader significance one may extract from it is the fact of Elmgreen and Dragset being such near neighbours with obvious common interests as artists, yet never having bumped into one another until that moment – and that in Copenhagen, which is, in my experience, a highly sociable city, geared towards nurturing public interfaces, civic responsibility and urban habitability. In a sense, though, that was precisely the point of ‘a good neighbour’ in Istanbul: to interrogate why such paradoxes persist when it comes to human coexistence and, moreover, to extrapolate from the detail of the local and personal – the apartment block and the street – larger questions relating to how cities, regions and, ultimately, nations perform neighbourliness (or not, as the case may be). As the curators say, in an echo of Caroline A. Jones’s notion of critical globalism discussed in the introductory chapter to this book: ‘The microcosm reflects the macrocosm and vice versa’ (44).

Implicitly pursuing sub-themes of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ – as well as those forming the 15th IB’s accompanying public programme of ‘Chosen Families’ and ‘Mutual Fate’ (Örer 2017: 24) – Elmgreen and Dragset also gathered together a formal list of forty ‘good neighbour’ questions which were made public ahead of the event’s opening in September 2017. These not only served to put in play as propositions the kinds of issue that the commissioned artworks of the Biennial may be interrogating but also paved the way for so many more related questions to be posed hypothetically by a participating public. In itself, then, the cluster of forty questions – all beginning ‘Is a good neighbour … ?’ – formed its own notional ‘neighbourhood’, one that promised a form of rhizomatic expansion and accommodation of difference, first, in the many public responses its interrogative form presupposed – questions always demand answers – and, second, in the exponential multiplication of additional points of enquiry pursued by the inquisitive viewer. All implicitly proceeding from the everyday urban experience of neighbours, the questions – for example, ‘Is a good neighbour someone who collects your mail when you’re on holiday?’ or ‘ … someone who makes you feel at home while you listen to low voices through the wall?’ – also have the capacity to point to more general matters relating, for instance, to migration and multiculturalism – ‘Is a good neighbour from a neighbouring country?’ or ‘ … someone who lives the same way as you?’ – as well as to abstract ones of an ethical nature: ‘Is a good neighbour too much to ask for?’1 Arguably, these are not just questions for Istanbul but could be posed with similar relevance in any city or, indeed, place of the globe. Potentially this represents another way of implementing a micro- to macro-conceptual trajectory; at the same time, one of the fascinating features of posing the same question in diverse places is doubtless  the local differences that are liable to emerge: the questions may be the same, but the answers are not. Indeed, the artist Lukas Wassmann pursued exactly this idea in his IB commission, producing a sequence of public billboards and posters showing photographs of ‘neighbourly encounters’ (or intriguing juxtapositions) in a range of urban as well as non-urban situations, in some cases accompanied by one of the forty questions (Figure 5.1). These images were liberally displayed across Istanbul’s municipal spaces – the free use of such prime sites as publicity platforms is one of the few ‘in kind’ subsidies the City Council offers the Biennial – but also twenty other cities in the world from Ljubljana to Chicago to Gwangju. Quite apart from anything else the Istanbul-wide intervention, in which art occupied the customary spaces of large-, medium- and small-scale advertising, was a canny tactic not only to disseminate the artwork of the Biennial itself to a broader non-gallery-going public but also effectively to publicize the IB event as a whole. Each captured moment tells its own story but doubtless receives its own particular inflection depending on where it is being viewed (even within the context of Istanbul alone). One particular image, for example, which could easily have been shot on a pavement in Istanbul, shows an idling, jet-black Harley Davidson motorcycle, 174

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FIGURE 5.1  International Billboard Project (2017), Lukas Wassmann, 25th September 2017

complete with rider, who sits majestically astride it in his matching black biker’s leathers, helmet and goggles. The sleek, luxury motorbike and its owner have the appearance of being ‘on display’, if not ‘on guard’, high-handedly blocking the whole pavement having seemingly just emerged from a rear courtyard entrance. To one side, and engaging momentarily in a cryptic exchange of gazes with the rider, is the frail figure of a middle-aged man, plainly dressed in scruffy anorak, cords and trainers and, importantly, trailing a cheap Burberry-patterned shopping trolley behind him. As the snapshot of an impromptu encounter on the street it clearly presents a contrast in styles that speaks volumes, drawing attention as it does to vast discrepancies of wealth and power as expressed through performances of masculinity: the arrogant, crypto-fascist presence of the rider with his imperious machine throbbing between his legs and pristine whitewall wheels, as against the emasculated figure of the humble man, manually trailing behind him his rather feeble shopping trolley with its two little wheels as he engages in the humdrum work of ‘feminized domesticity’. Interestingly, though, there is nothing obviously antagonistic in the encounter; instead the ‘humble man’ appears almost to be faintly amused by the exaggerated bombast of his macho counterpart, whose face is largely masked, and so he seems to succeed within this status stand-off in clawing back something of his sense of dignity, not least by virtue of daring to hold his stare at close quarters. The requisite ‘good neighbour’ question accompanying such an image is different with each iteration across the city’s public spaces – at tram-stops, in subway lifts, on ferries – and so the scope of interpretative responses is infinite. The context of a populated metro train carriage, for instance, creates its own highly BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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temporary ‘neighbourhood’, which regularly rearranges itself with each opening and closing of the doors at station stops – certainly more so in central areas of high congregation than on the peripheries of the city. In the case of ‘Harley Davidson man’ versus ‘shopping trolley man’, then, a question such as ‘Is a good neighbour someone who lives the same way as you?’ opens up a space of contemplation for the viewer-cum-passer-by in which he or she is led, first, to form an impression of the nature of the relationship being portrayed (as I have here); second, to consider how the specific question posed applies to that relationship; and, finally, to ponder how the question applies to them as witness, within their own personal circumstances. This example of Wassmann’s project certainly realizes Elmgreen’s and Dragset’s intention in focusing on such situational stories of simultaneously disclosing something about the way things are in the macrocosm of national and international co-existence when one contemplates the significance of local neighbourhoods and neighbourliness. The importance to them, as curators, of story-telling was further underscored by their own compilation of stories commissioned from a wide range  of art world colleagues (not necessarily involved directly in the curated artworks of the 15th IB). Thus, issued alongside the Biennial catalogue was a second volume of similar size entitled just Stories which contained nearly seventy texts written in spontaneous response to the theme of ‘a good neighbour’ (Albayrak et al 2017b).2 One of them, by the curator Jens Hoffmann – himself a previous cocurator of the IB (in 2011) – provocatively entitled ‘Like A Good Neighbour (Stay Over There)’, succinctly sums up the shift from micro- to macro-systems: In our daily lives, we might consider our neighbours to be defined as those who live next to us, among us, or in our neighbourhoods, boroughs or cities. Neighbours could be those whom you pass in the morning on your walk to work, or see in the grocery store or local café, who attend our schools, ride our trains, and share our patterns in various ways. In the language of international politics, the definitions expand – in this context, our neighbours may be defined as those who share our borders. In all of these conceptions, proximity is broad, and moves across tribal, religious, national, class and familial lines. In an increasingly linked and connected world, these far-flung ideations of the neighbour take on a new relevance. Both in and out of the art world, through travel and virtual space, our lives are often not bound by the geographies of our births. Why, then, should our ethics be? In our globalised, interconnected world, are we not all neighbours? (Hoffmann 2017b: 448) The focus on stories in the 15th IB in 2017 plays neatly into the basic methodological premise of the present study, which is to tell a story relating to the complexity of each city in terms of the meaningful intersection with the artworks of its corresponding biennial event. This not only validates to some extent the book’s 176

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approach overall by confirming story-telling as a viable source of revelation but also produces its own question: what’s the particular story in Istanbul? Hoffmann’s reference to an ethics of neighbourliness also points to the way there is a need to address and work with difference – allowing it rather than effacing, ignoring or, indeed, antagonizing it – in recognition of the basic fact that, when it comes to co-habitation, it is in everyone’s interests ultimately to make things work for all concerned. As Iwona Blazwick, a member of the IB’s advisory board, puts it (in Örer’s citation): ‘The Biennial proposes that we can all be good neighbours and listen, look, talk, support and share. In a time of political turmoil, art is a powerful reminder of what connects rather than divides us’ (Örer 2017: 25). Following from that sentiment, a consideration of the ‘good neighbour’ emerges as potentially analogous to speculating about the ‘good place’ and, therefore, at the same time, the ‘no place’ of utopian design. To echo the sub-themes of the 15th IB’s public programme noted earlier: humanity’s or a city’s various families may not be chosen as such but the fate of its members is mutual. In other words, the idyll of the ‘good place’, like that of the ‘faultless neighbour’, does not actually exist in all its supposed perfection, and hence is ‘no place’. But that does not preclude striving for it and art should be valued for its capacities to institute and facilitate that process. In that sense, the presence of art, its quotidian necessity, may take its place too within a definition of what makes for ‘a good neighbour’ and this notion was consciously formalized by the curators in their choice of locations for the Biennial in 2017: Within the institutional and spatial confines of the sites we are using for ‘a good neighbour’, we imagine the co-existence of multiple identities. Five of the six venues that we have selected are within walking distance of each other, and together they constitute a sort of neighbourhood in themselves. It might only be for a short time, but hopefully such an imagined community on a smaller, symbolic scale, can help to inspire real-life communities on a larger scale. (Elmgreen and Dragset 2017: 45)

Contemporary art in Istanbul Elmgreen and Dragset have a long association as artists with Istanbul and in 2001 made a site-specific installation for the 7th IB in the grounds of Hagia Irene between the city’s world famous Topkapı Palace and Hagia Sophia museum complex in the historical quarter of Sultanahmet south of the Golden Horn estuary.3 In the IB’s early incarnations it had fostered a policy of deliberately making use of the city’s historical buildings and areas, partly to make a general point to the municipality and the population at large about the absence of contemporary art venues in Istanbul. The very first IB in 1987, which was not yet referred to as a biennial,4 adopted the title of ‘Contemporary Art in Traditional Spaces’ and, according to Marcus Graf, this concept effectively remained the guiding principle of the Biennial right up BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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until the 8th IB in 2003 (Graf 2013: 148). By that stage the point relating to the dearth of exhibition opportunities had been sufficiently forced home to witness the decisive inauguration of Istanbul Modern (museum of contemporary art) in 2004 in a former warehouse, Antrepo 4, on the Bosphorus Strait sea-front in the Beyoğlu area north of the Golden Horn, which is the most overtly Europeanized part of the city and incorporates several smaller districts. This breakthrough moment, which was attributable in no small part to the persistence of the IB since 1987, marked a general opening out of the contemporary art scene in Istanbul and smaller venues and private galleries followed in its wake. Nevertheless, it remains to this day a perpetually uncertain and shifting picture, with Istanbul Modern itself having to relocate temporarily in 2017 post-IB since that whole seafront area from Karaköy to Tophane (some 1.2 km) is rapidly being reconfigured as Galata Port, an ambitious harbour development directed, among other things, at welcoming cruise liners to the city. It will also include exclusive hotel and residential accommodation, a marina and posh shopping malls, to say nothing of the instant, mass infusion – Venice style – of tourists into the popular central district of Beyoğlu with each docking of a cruise ship. Apart from being seen as key to the development of Istanbul’s globalist economic ambitions, Galata Port represents one of the city’s several signature infrastructural construction projects – either recently completed or still underway – others of which include a new international airport, a vehicular tunnel under the Bosphorus, the controversial ‘third bridge’ at the entrance to the Black Sea, and a monolithic mosque, Çamlıca, on the Asian side, which, with its six minarets – where, apart from the famous Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet, there are usually only four – is popularly portrayed as President Erdoğan’s pet vanity project, cementing both his image as a committed traditionalist, and Islamic religion as a dominant visual signifier in the urban landscape. Elmgreen and Dragset’s 2001 installation intervention at Hagia Irene was based on the notion of a ‘ruin’ – one of several they were to create – throwing into relief precisely those twin problematics of, first, the absence of an adequate or permanent space for living artists to show and, second, the consequent precariousness and transiency of the contemporary art scene, even when some events succeeded in seeing the light of day. As the artists themselves explain: The first ‘ruin’ we made was embedded into the lawn in front of the old Mint, a stone’s throw from Hagia Sophia and other historic buildings. The structure alluded to a white cube museum space with a translucent, tiled skylight, sinking into the ground. Atop the double metal doors, barely visible above the ground, one could read ‘ … TEMPORARY ART’, hinting that the first part of the word – ‘CON’ – had been buried underground. This was three years before Istanbul Modern, the city’s first museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, opened its doors. (Elmgreen and Dragset 2017: 42)

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Thus, by implication, contemporary art appeared doomed to be forever temporary in the city – always already a ruin before its time. The IB’s role in eventually forcing the issue and bringing about a contemporary scene since its relatively early inauguration in 1987 – ‘early’ inasmuch as the global biennial explosion that occurred was really the product of a slightly later, post–Berlin Wall effect – is testament not only to the sheer commitment, vision and persistence of successive organizers over the years but also to its resourcefulness, first, in working with a comparatively limited budget, the majority of which has had to be secured from private sponsorship, and, second, in negotiating the use of installation and exhibition spaces all over the city. The startling modesty of its budget, given the global reputation of the IB in the meantime, which, according to a comparative survey of ten major biennials conducted in 2010 (as the initiative of the IB itself as it happens), revealed this to be approximately two million Euros (in Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts 2013: 153–70). This is less than the relatively small-scale Folkestone Triennial has available to it. Moreover, only some 6–7 per cent of that is attributed to public funding, most of which materializes ‘in kind’ (as mentioned previously). Inevitably, as Graf points out, this introduces the danger of a range of potentially exploitative labour practices at all levels to creep in, wherein a reliance on goodwill is assumed in the name of being for a positive cause (Graf 2013: 589). Allied to this, it means the Biennial cannot fully professionalize itself, being reliant on an army of interns and students, for instance. The absence of a formal, permanent Biennial venue (or home), which is not that unusual as biennials go and can often lead, in fact, to highly innovative, unforeseen improvisations in and interactions with the spaces of the city, is nevertheless perceived by some to be a continuing indication of contemporary art struggling to maintain its foothold. As such, it amounts to a major organizational challenge, requiring as it does prolonged negotiations with the municipality and private business with each new mounting of the IB (Graf 2013; Örer in Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts 2013: 95–6). Without question, though, the iterative need to engage in this way with the city in all its complexity ensures that among the IB’s distinctive characteristics are its orientation towards urbanity and nurturing a responsiveness to the living present – to the lived reality of what is going on now in Istanbul (and, by extension, Turkey). While the IB’s aim, at least from its third edition in 1992 onwards, has been to bridge the gap between an emergent Turkish art scene and the global contemporary art world – on the one hand by enabling Turkish artists to further themselves by rubbing shoulders with international ones and, on the other, by looking formally to position Turkish contemporary art production within a global context – one of its attributes within the period in question has been largely to avoid merely mimicking existing European biennial models. Graf identifies the important ‘decentralizing role’ the IB has played in this regard, above all from 1995 onwards when it abandoned the Venetian national pavilion structure with which it had been inaugurated. This divergence is characterized BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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in part by its willingness to put forward untried artists – not all, but mainly Turkish – and by focusing on an engagement with the city itself and its sociocultural and political challenges (Graf 2013: 581, 583).

Gezi Park/Taksim Square protests and the 2013 Biennial Making my way to Istanbul Modern from the tram-stop at Tophane on my first day at the 15th IB in September 2017, two things confronted me as I approached the Bosphorus sea-front. First, to get anywhere close to the museum’s formal entrance I was forced to trudge through an active building site of brown sludge, gravel-laden lorries roaring past within inches of where I walked, churning cement mixers, and diggers hacking away angrily at stubborn remnants of a former warehouse. Second, having survived this particular gauntlet, I was required to enter a low security gatehouse in which I was subjected, airport style, to an allover body scan, while my rucksack disappeared through a baggage scan on a separate conveyer belt, before being permitted to enter the grounds of Istanbul Modern. The first ordeal immediately brought to mind an installation I had read about entitled bangbangbang by the Turkish artist Ayşe Erkmen, which she had presented at the 13th IB in 2013. Parked next to the vast warehouse Antrepo 3, which neighbours Istanbul Modern (formerly Antrepo 4) and was being used as one of the main Biennial venues that year, was a truck with a retractable crane, protruding at an angle high into the sky above the building. Dangling from it was a large green wrecking ball, which turned out to be a plastic buoy. Once every hour for the duration of the Biennial it would swing on its cable, crashing against the wall of the warehouse. In some respects it was a piece about the projected fate of the building itself, which had been slated to be demolished and rebuilt as an exclusive hotel. That would simultaneously mark a decisive blow against the IB, which had frequently, and very successfully, made use of Antrepo 3 in previous editions, capitalizing not least on its convenient proximity to Istanbul Modern. Yet more significantly perhaps, and here one can witness the ripple effect of a micro-situation assuming macro-proportions, the artwork referenced the relentless prevalence of rampant demolition and construction taking place in the ever-expanding megalopolis, which, on closer examination, reveals itself to be not only highly contentious for a range of complex reasons (to which I will come) but also the most important issue facing Istanbul as a sustainable urban entity as it strives to assert itself as one of the leading global cities in the twenty-first century. Antrepo 3’s fate was bound up with the major Galata Port development mentioned earlier and, as Marcus Verhagen explains, ‘in using a buoy [Erkmen] is pointing to the allure of the site, which overlooks the Bosphorus and serves as a docking point for cruise ships; clearly this is a prime location for a hotel’ (Verhagen 2013). At the same time, he goes on, 180

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the work can also be understood, given its gentle and regular swinging motion, as a giant pendulum; it refers not only to the linear thrust of urban development but also to the recursive temporality of the pendulum swing, suggesting that whatever will be built on the site of the warehouse will in time also be replaced. And inasmuch as the buoy is upside down, suspended from a crane rather than anchored to the seabed, the work may be read as hinting that property development in Tophane and elsewhere in Istanbul follows a logic that stands in an inverse relation to the needs of the local communities. (Verhagen 2013) As for the second obstacle I had encountered, the stringent security check – facing the visitor at all IB venues that year – was a symptom of Turkey’s state of emergency declared in the aftermath of the military coup attempt in 2016 and since used, under instruction, by the state and municipal security services in their various guises to make their intimidating presences felt in all public spaces, as well as by the Government itself to engage in indiscriminate censorship, dismissal from office and arrest of numerous members of the secularist intelligentsia and professional classes. This state of affairs returns me to the IB in 2013, since it took place but a few months after the protracted Gezi Park and Taksim Square protests in the ‘European centre’ of Istanbul, and thus in circumstances that were similarly fraught and politicized and, of course, very much symptomatic of an ongoing stand-off in Turkey between Islamist traditionalists on the one hand – avid supporters of President Erdoğan and his ‘Justice and Development Party’, the AKP – and Europe-orientated modernizers on the other. Interestingly, the twin issues of rampant urban erasure on the one hand, executed so as to facilitate private enterprise building projects and indiscriminate gentrification, and a political state of emergency on the other, instituted so as to keep citizens in check, come together in the Gezi-Taksim situation. The protest was originally set in train by the desire to co-opt and privatize public space with the building of an exclusive shopping mall – in the themed replica-style of a nineteenth-century military barracks that once stood there – at the expense of the existing, much-used recreational urban parkland in the centre of the city (on the European side). One acknowledged characteristic of the sustained Gezi-Taksim protests during May and June of 2013 was their highly inventive recourse to creative tactics and interventions. This ‘activist art’ sought not only to assert its political point but was frequently implicitly designed to precipitate some form of (re)action or ‘effect’, helped naturally by the modern-day, widespread global dissemination capacities of social media and internet technologies. In other words, its staging was performative and can therefore be seen as instrumental in nudging along the course of events. The most notable example in this respect was probably the renowned figure of the ‘Standing Man’, who, after all the aggravation and frenzy of protesting masses being confronted, corralled, ejected and arrested by security forces, opted simply to stand his ground, symbolically facing the Atatürk Cultural BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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FIGURE 5.2  Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM), Taksim Square, 25th September 2017

Centre (AKM) on the eastern flank of Taksim Square (Figure 5.2). Taking place in mid-June at an advanced stage of the protests, with the camp of the occupying Taksim Commune having been unceremoniously cleared away by the authorities, fresh flowers having been planted by the municipality in Gezi Park and security forces under strict instruction to nip any sign of demonstrations in the bud, this seemingly passive act proved disarmingly inscrutable to law enforcement officers (von Borries et al 2014: 148). They realized something was indeed going on in this supposed non-performance and subjected the man – a dancer and choreographer called Erdem Gündüz – to searches of his rucksack and to interrogation – all of which he ignored – but ultimately could not pin anything on him to merit removal or arrest (148).5 By the evening of the following day (17th June), Gündüz had been joined by over a hundred stock-still kindred spirits, all gazing up at the AKM building. As von Borries et al explain, this aspect was key to the performance: the modernist AKM, inaugurated in 1969, was a highly resonant landmark of postOttoman secularization, as introduced in Turkey by the legendary Atatürk in the 1920s, and so this ‘innocent gaze’ was interpreted as an implicit critique of Erdoğan’s traditionalist tendencies (148). As with the proposed shopping mall at Gezi Park, then, it was common land and a public building that lay at the centre of this silent protest. The AKM had, in fact, been closed in 2007, supposedly to be renovated in preparation for Istanbul’s assumption of the title of European Capital of Culture in 2010, but had lain empty ever since (110). In 2013 it became apparent that the building was actually earmarked for demolition and replacement with a nostalgic 182

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neo-Baroque construction that, like the army barracks design plan at Gezi, flew in the face of enlightened modernization. As such, the building became the eventual focal point of the Gezi-Taksim stand-off when protesters occupied its empty shell, effectively using it as a makeshift cultural resource centre and gathering point to prepare and stage creative interventions, which included decorating its vast façade with a sea of banners and posters (14, 45–6). Interestingly, an empty AKM had been used as one of the principal venues of the 10th IB in 2007 shortly after the building’s closure. In this capacity it had deliberately served to focus the public debate in the city about its symbolic function and proposed future, which swayed at the time between demolition and renovation. Echoing this, the curator Hou Hanru gave the AKM segment of the Biennial the interrogative title of ‘Burn it or not?’, showing forty artists who all engaged with the notion of urban utopias in general and, for some, the historical and contemporary specifics of the building itself (Graf 2013: 421). For Hanru (in  Graf ’s citation from the 10th IB catalogue), AKM’s archetypal socio-modernist style makes it a perfect symbol of the utopian vision of the Turkish Republic: that of a secular, progressive and modern nation-state guided by Atatürk’s farsightedness and political power. However, this highly interesting edifice is now facing a fatal crisis; it is now under threat of being gentrified by the force of neo-liberal economic power, hand in hand with populist political power. […] Indeed, this crisis is part of a much larger, global tendency. With the end of the Cold War and the prevailing neo-liberal capitalism around the world, numerous buildings representing socialist or social-democratic modernisation in various countries are facing the same fate of erasure and gentrification. Interestingly, most of the projects to replace these buildings are designed to erase the memory of certain periods in history – that of social utopia – in order to validate the neo-conservative order imposed by global capitalist and populist politics. (Graf 2013: 422–3) As Graf adds, Hanru’s motivation with the 10th IB as a whole was to find ways in which artistic practices could inspire social action, not least to counteract such potential co-options of architecture and urban space. As the curator himself states (again in Graf ’s citation from the catalogue): Obviously, a mobilisation of social consciousness to resist such a global trend becomes an urgent task. And the art community, with its capacity of critique and envisioning, should be leading the battle. The city should be the battlefield to imagine, test and promote alternative urban and social projects to defend the public sphere and democratic values, namely the values of the ‘Multitude’. (424)

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Apart from serving as a good example of the extent to which the IB in general has consistently understood its role to be one of urban and socio-political integration,6 it is striking how Hanru’s words proved almost prophetic of what eventually materialized in 2013, not least around the very same AKM building. In fact, this leads me neatly back to the ‘Standing Man’ as a resonant example of creative practice being applied in 2013 as a key activist tactic. Of course, there were so many more creative interventions in all manner of forms, including that of the performance artist Şükran Moral, who, wearing a white dress, carved the letter ‘A’ into her belly with a razor blade on a bench in Gezi Park (von Borries et al 2014: 144).7 So marked were such acts in their combined impact that the activist authors of Urbane Interventionen Istanbul (2014) declare art and culture clearly to have been the most potent weapon in the 2013 protests, making subtle use of irony, humour and distanciation techniques which also ended up playing well with an expanded international audience via social media and internet platforms. They cite the Hamburg-based artist Christoph Schäfer – also a contributor to the 13th IB8 – who summed up the productive co-option of art practices as follows: There’s an expectation of art that it will ‘normally’ trade in complex social ideas and innovations. In that sense it represents a form of ‘preserve’ in which discussions can take place that don’t affect reality. During Gezi there were unbelievably large numbers of people on the streets engaged in creative and extremely clever activities. It’s great, of course, when so many heads are implicated in producing such intelligence, as opposed to a single artist coming up with some creative intervention, realising it in space and encouraging others to participate in it. In Gezi art was realised in a way that we artists dream of. That is, that art would dissolve itself into a better world in which everyone performs as an artist, a doer, a thinker, a philosopher. That’s what actually happened at Gezi! (160; my translation) Moreover, the authors attribute this creative participation of citizens to the influence in particular of the IB, which, they maintain, has naturalized over the years the notion of art having a role to play in urban space, doing the critical work of both enlightening urban citizens and gifting them participatory tools with which to protect their rights to the city (75). Paradoxically the acknowledgement of such a causal link was to present the 13th IB, commencing a few months later, with a conceptual and logistical challenge. Under the co-curatorship of long-time Istanbul resident and IB associate Fulya Erdemci and Andrea Phillips, the Biennial, entitled ‘Mom, Am I Barbarian?’ in reference to the eponymous title of a book by the Turkish poet Lale Müldür, was already all geared up to implement its programme of interventionist commissions in installation locations spread across the city. The Gezi-Taksim protests, however, forced a rethink since Erdemci and Phillips became all too aware of the fact that their aim to interrogate the ‘agonistic public domain’ of Istanbul via these artworks 184

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had acquired a different ‘alchemical’ significance in the meantime, as Erdemci put it in her introduction to the IB guide (Erdemci 2013: 25). Von Borries et al provide an illuminating example – literally as it happens – concerning a proposed minimalist light installation called Intensive Care by the Dutch artists Rietveld Landscape, which was planned for the AKM building façade. The light was intended to be emitted from deep within the cultural centre to evoke the faint breathing action of a patient in intensive care as a way of drawing attention to the untapped potential of the ‘sick’, empty building. This became superfluous, however, with the activists’ co-option of the AKM during the protests (von Borries et al 2014: 160–1). In fact, the activist art of Gezi-Taksim had not merely nullified the conceptual impetus and purpose of the IB’s strategic interventions in urban space but had also produced a pragmatic challenge related to negotiations with the municipal authorities, as Erdemci explains: Before the Gezi resistance, we had planned to realise a number of projects that would intervene in urban public spaces. However, when we questioned what it meant to realise art projects with the permissions of the same authorities that do not allow the free expression of its citizens, we understood that the context was going through a radical shift that would sideline the raison d’être of realising these projects. Accomplishing these projects that articulate the question of public domain in urban public spaces under these circumstances might have contradicted their essence and purpose; we were thus convinced that ‘not realising’ them is a more powerful political statement than having them materialize under such conditions. Therefore, we decided to withdraw from the urban public spaces and to continue our debate on publicness in the exhibition venues. (Erdemci 2013: 27) As Rana Öztürk reports, in addition to the ‘retreat to traditional exhibition spaces’ the ‘Biennial’s public program, a series of events titled “Public Alchemy”, was also cancelled. Earlier editions of the program had been challenged by local activists and artists. They claimed that the problem of urban regeneration could not be freely discussed in a forum sponsored by private funding, the interests of which were considered to be its cause’ (Öztürk 2013: 391). Istanbul’s established arts organizations, including the IB, have, as H.G Masters explains, ‘been targeted by protesters because their international reputations as progressive organizations belie their corporate sponsors – Garanti Bank and Koç Holding, respectively  – who are, or have been, engaged in politically dubious activities, whether in urban development, as military contractors or with environmental exploitation’ (Masters 2014: 128). If the cancellation of the public programme on the part of the IB organizers was welcomed for its principled stand, Öztürk draws attention, by contrast, to the severe criticism that the withdrawal of sited artworks received from some critical commentators – and, indeed, artists9 – who failed to be convinced by the curators’ rationale and sensed a ‘missed opportunity’ (Öztürk 2013: 391). While BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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the commission proposals nevertheless featured in the Biennial exhibits, framed historically in relation to urban interventions in other cities, for Öztürk the 13th IB, though ‘well thought out’, thereby took on something of a ‘museological study removed from the urgency of the issues in Istanbul’ (391). Nevertheless, as Green and Gardner point out, the likes of Elmgreen and Dragset found ways, in this case as commissioned artists, to be responsive to events in a manner that to some extent prefigured their championing of the politics of the anecdotal and the interrogation of ‘good places and neighbours’ in 2017. The duo reconfigured their contribution, Istanbul Diaries (2013), to incorporate the utopian character of early June, contracting out to seven locals the task of writing daily diaries inside the exhibition. All this was bravely invested in the vestige of the idea that art has social agency (rather than being the exclusive province of capital), an idea that now persisted via curators such as Erdemci (who admired critical theorists Chantal Mouffe and Luc Boltanski) even when curators like her were forced back into conventional exhibition methods, makeshift buildings, and weary white cubes. (Gardner and Green 2016: 262) Perhaps the most telling shift that occurred in 2013, however, was the full-circle reciprocity involved in the IB being acknowledged implicitly to have influenced the tactics of civic protestors with its perennial practices of exploring the politics of urban-art interfaces (particularly in its 9th and 10th editions in 2005 and 2007, respectively), only to find itself having, in turn, to adjust its own curatorial precepts as a consequence, which effectively meant it found itself momentarily back within the four walls of the museum. Pessimistically speaking that would be viewed as a matter of regret; optimistically it could be seen as the optimum fulfilment of an enduring policy of urban integration and the ‘everydaying’ of art in the public spaces of the city: in the heat of the moment, when it mattered, the art had rightly been co-opted by citizens and put to work in the interests of contesting urban space and insisting on the realization of civic rights to the powers that be in the city. The Biennial, meanwhile, momentarily drew back so as to reassess its conceptual relationship to the city, importantly continuing to signal its solidarity with events on the street by introducing for the first time in the IB’s history, and notwithstanding its perennial underfunding, free entry to all venues.

The many and the few Following to some degree from the previous observation, one thing that is discernible – and doubtless inevitable – from biennial to biennial in Istanbul is the way each one implicitly sets out to distinguish itself from its preceding one. Because of the way the IB in general looks to engage with the city as a matter of principle, the prime point of distinction often, if not always, orientates itself around what kind of specific urban interface has been sought on any given 186

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occasion. Figuratively, there is almost a form of in-out breathing action that reveals itself in this respect, which arguably emerges as testament to the Biennial’s perennial liveness: its prescient responsiveness to the pulse of the city. So, where the 13th IB pulled back at short notice from urban spaces out of a sense of necessity in highly charged political circumstances, the 14th in 2015, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakarkiev and intriguingly adopting ‘Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms’ as its theme, dispersed itself far and wide across Istanbul terrain like no biennial before it, thus requiring a high degree of commitment to mobility from the visiting viewer. This included ferry rides across the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city (there is no question really that the staging of the IB has tended historically towards the European side), as well as out into the Marmara Sea to the Princes’ Islands. Such a move brings its own challenges, as hinted at above: paradoxically, spreading the event across the city in this way to temporary spaces of habitation – including boats, hotels, former banks, garages, gardens, schools, shops and private homes – decreases the chances of a non-art-going audience having an experience or concept of the Biennial as a whole, skewing things, in fact, in favour of the connoisseur – local or visiting – who has the requisite motivation and time to undertake the cross-town travel and ‘detective work’ demanded. To continue the point relating to an IB breathing rhythm, it is no surprise really that Elmgreen and Dragset opted effectively to inhale again in 2017; perhaps, for the sake of contrast, this is why they were earmarked as curators in the first place by a canny Biennial organizing committee, who may have been aware, given the duo’s previous work, that their curatorial focus was likely to proceed from urban micro-narratives and ecologies involving personal subjectivities, alternative coexistential realities and issues around the ‘domestic’ and anecdotal. As we have seen, Elmgreen’s and Dragset’s concept involved establishing a form of ‘Biennial neighbourhood’ of venues based almost exclusively in the central Beyoğlu area north of the Golden Horn, a containment that would generate a sense of intimacy and connection – a ‘Biennial community’, alone by virtue of venues being within easy walking distance of one another. For some, such a move merely epitomized a general tendency of ‘high art’ to confine itself within a trendy, bohemian enclave – convenient, moreover, for tourists – that ultimately had no interest in reaching out to the broader non-art-going population of the city – the ‘barbarians’ of IB 2013 perhaps10 – and this is, of course, in its own way undeniable. As Masters, a resident of the city, complains: Most international visitors arrive at Atatürk International Airport, on the European side, and zoom along the comparatively scenic seashore road in well under an hour, through the crumbling Byzantine walls, around Topkapı Palace before beholding the wide Bosphorus, and the Europeanized hills of Beyoğlu where they will spend their time in the city. Historical and newly prosperous, this is the Istanbul the world sees, but not the reality that most citizens of the Turkish Republic experience day-to-day. (Masters 2014: 128) BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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And, as far as local circumstances go, Masters adds, ‘[w]hen asked, I always say the same thing about Istanbul’s arts scene: it’s still a community of people, not an industry’ (128), implying that for all the current IB’s internationalist outlook, to say nothing of the city’s globalist ambitions, Istanbul retains a certain parochialism in how it functions. As we have witnessed, though, dispersing the geographic parameters of the Biennial arguably only feeds the charge of elitism in its effect. If the answer is to change the curatorial angle of approach altogether by consciously devising socially-engaged interventions, then here too there are complex cultural as well as logistical challenges in a megacity of 17 million citizens, sprawling to an everexpanding degree over deathless kilometres of terrain, with highly differentiated areas – both between and within neighbourhoods – in terms of ethnic, religious and class make-up, disparities of education and wealth among inhabitants, and inconsistent municipal provision of basic services. Even Hou Hanru’s 2007 IB, with its conscious aim of infiltrating urban communities with cultural programmes of events deliberately modelled on practices employed in China’s cultural revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, struggled to make inroads. The programme ‘Nightcomers’, for instance, commissioned five curators to select 100 video films to be ‘projected in public spaces in different parts of the city, from the centre to the periphery’ (Ayvaz 2007: 153), while ten ‘Special Projects’, involving ‘humanitarian actions in collaboration with NGOs and minority groups in urban spaces’ would explore selforganization and ‘the possibility of art’s temporary occupation of urban space, of “Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ)”’ (169). As Graf concludes, the realization of both these key strands of the 10th IB ended up undercooked, marginalized and largely ignored by the public and media (Graf 2013: 479–81 and 491–4). Elmgreen’s and Dragset’s contained focus on neighbours and neighbourhoods, meanwhile, actually recognized something that is of critical relevance to Istanbul as a whole, and has been for some considerable time, not least since its staggering expansion in the twenty-first century, which has witnessed the population grow from the 10.5 million recorded in 2005 to its present estimate of 17 million (and counting) in 2019: the question of ‘building and dwelling’,11 of ethical co-existence in circumstances of intense cultural, political and urban challenge. How existing neighbourhoods are being indiscriminately erased – involving the ruthless eviction of inhabitants – and reconfigured in the gentrifying interests of private capital and enterprise, as Istanbul seeks to establish itself as a major player in the global market-place, is one live topic in the urban conversation. Another, meanwhile, is the reckless expansion of the city, which witnesses a bizarre mix of remnant geçekondu-style shanty-town-builds, whole ‘forests’ of cheap high-rise towers for low-income families, in and around which there are privileged gated communities. This is occurring on both European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus, though principally the latter since there is more space on the Asian side, coupled with the fact that it represents the first point of arrival for Turkey’s many rural migrants to the city. Elmgreen’s and Dragset’s exclusive use of everyday buildings with former 188

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identities for the 15th IB – a primary school, a warehouse, a women’s hammam and so on – seems in itself to represent a form of quiet resistance to the construction mania crashing around one’s ears in the rest of this bustling city – a temporary oasis of calm. Alongside the tensions over land and property one may feed into these circumstances, first, issues of political repression, as the effects of Turkey’s state of emergency play themselves out; second, a marked resurgence of Islamist traditionalism, which makes its affective presence felt on the street, from more and more veiled women to an enhanced sense of mosques – of which there are some 3,500 in Istanbul alone – calling relentlessly to prayer during the day and late into the night; and, third, the marginalization of ethnic minorities whether, for example, in the more low-key form of the Roma community or the more blatant one of the embattled Kurdish community, which, for the Government, represents the ultimate political thorn-in-the-side.

Death and life In the title he gives his chapter on Istanbul in Arrival City (2010), Doug Saunders makes a minor adjustment to the book title of Jane Jacobs’ seminal study of neighbourhood life in New York City, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1993 [1961]). His chapter is called ‘The Death and Life of a Great Arrival City’, which tacitly recognizes, first, that the ethical question of how to dwell, and, therefore, how to build, is similarly at the heart of the life of this city. Second, it captures the extent to which a stark existentialism is at stake that appertains to the built environment of the city as place, as well as to its capacities to provide a sustainable habitability for its dwellers. Saunders traces the remarkable trajectory of Istanbul’s population surge through its various, complex historical phases, whereby a relentless mass migration of people to the city from rural Turkey from the 1980s onwards effectively morphs into the migration of the infrastructure of the city itself with both the vast expansion of its borders and the radical replacement of existing neighbourhoods (Saunders 2010: 161–96). For many years it was the flimsy shanty town constructions of the geçekondu – literally ‘night arrivals’, but referring more to the impromptu erection of the dwellings than the incoming dwellers themselves – that prevailed. Beginning as a trickle in the late 1940s already, arriving migrants were permitted to occupy a patch of public land on the edges of the city as long as they succeeded in knocking up some form of dwelling before daybreak. Naturally, these were makeshift and, as geçekondu neighbourhoods grew, the lack of connection to basic urban utilities such as water, sewage and electricity became an ever-greater problem. At the time dwellers were barely accepted by regular Istanbul citizens, being merely tolerated for their manual labour, which was very much in demand as industrialization took hold in Turkey (165). In fact, for both the municipality and the factory owners who capitalized on the availability of this labour force, BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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the geçekondu were a convenient solution since it let them off the hook entirely in terms of having to provide adequate housing and services to incoming migrants (von Borries et al 2014: 199). In the 1970s geçekondu neighbourhoods began to self-organize in order to agitate for the supply of adequate amenities and citizens’ rights, thus becoming highly politicized. Geçekondu areas on the urban periphery gradually came to be associated with incubating militancy and terrorism in the 1970s and were seen by many self-respecting Istanbul citizens as a lawless frontier zone, surrounding and threatening the rest of the city (Saunders 2010: 175). In short, and I should admit that my brushstrokes are of necessity very broad here, the upshot of this state of affairs was the military coup of 1980 which led, among other changes, to the declaration that ‘all neighbourhoods would now have to be legal’ (175). Moreover, once the military had handed over again to a civilian government in 1983, geçekondu dwellers were granted ‘formal ownership of their makeshift houses and title deeds to the land under them’ in a concerted attempt to resolve the problem of ‘angry, rootless squatter communities on the urban outskirts’ (176–7). As Saunders outlines, this decisive breakthrough occurred within the framework of a so-called Improvement Plan, which offered the following options to geçekondu dwellers: ‘First, they could choose conservation, in which existing geçekondu houses were legalized, physically improved and provided with public services. The second choice was redevelopment; replacement of the existing stock with apartment blocks. And the third was clearance: selling off and bulldozing the geçekondu and selling the land to developers for profit’ (180). With most geçekondu inhabitants seizing the gift of profiting financially by selecting either the second or third options, former labourers – typically – earning a modest wage, were suddenly catapulted into the realm of being bourgeois property owners, free to exploit the market as landlords or developers. The result is there for all to see, above all in the interminable sprawl of soulless residential complexes on the Asian side of the city.12 The evolution of the geçekondu syndrome outlined by Saunders gives a sense of the kinds of radical shift that have occurred in time, accounting in part for not only the population explosion in Istanbul but also the gradual journey towards privatization and commercialization of land and property in the city. But it is also only one factor in a composite picture, the complex ‘new world of real estate’ in Istanbul, as Orhan Esen calls it (Esen 2008: 184). As he explains, speaking a dozen years ago in the meantime, ‘gated islands are on the rise’. Thus, ‘[n]ew housing projects for high-income groups in newly emerging gated communities on the periphery and the first business towers in the emerging Central Business District at the highway junctions north of the centre marked the start of an entrepreneurial mode of involvement with the metropolis’ (182). Moreover, even a state-run social housing agency such as TOKİ has become the instrument of neo-liberalist urban transformation, granting itself the right not merely to provide new housing – bland and impersonal – in uninhabited territories of the expanding city but also to erase long-standing neighbourhoods 190

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in central areas so as to facilitate new projects, some of which clearly take the form of luxury apartments directed at the relatively well-off. For Pelin Tan, this constituency represents the new AKP-voting middle-class whose politics are essentially pro-Islamic and reactionary (Tan 2014: 27). Increasingly such projects incorporate the building of profit-making shopping malls and plazas in nouveauchic styles, with existing residents being evicted from their neighbourhoods and barely compensated for their ruthless displacement. Their communities destroyed, they are often offered alternative social housing somewhere on the outskirts of the sprawling city in some alienating high-rise complex, thus TOKİ stands accused of implementing a form of urban clearance and segregation based on wealth and class as well as ethnicity (von Borries et al 2014: 201–2).13 The effect is to enhance the sense of an increasingly gentrified centre on the one hand, which, among other things, seeks to guard an image of privileged propriety and security via the marked prevalence of CCTV surveillance, and, on the other, an out-of-control, sprawling periphery. This, as Imre Azem’s illuminating and wellreceived 2011 documentary film Ecumenopolis: City without Limits implies, may well be paving the way, in the social alienation it produces, for the kind of political unrest witnessed in the former under-privileged geçekondu neighbourhoods of the 1970s. Alternatively it would lead to abandoned ghost towns as residents find a way to flee the un-neighbourly, inhuman conditions of the new housing schemes.14 At the same time mammoth transportation building projects such as the controversial ‘third bridge’ at the gateway to the Black Sea – officially the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, which opened in 2016 – or the continent-bridging Eurasia tunnel for vehicles – opening in the same year under the Bosphorus Strait  – provide the illusion of improved urban mobility. In truth, as Ecumenopolis again shows, they merely enhance the volume of traffic that regularly brings the city to a choking standstill, emphasizing as it does so the impossibility of adequately bridging the centre-periphery divide, to say nothing of the appalling levels of pollution thus generated. Jane Jacobs was similarly concerned in the 1950s and ’60s about the way urban planning in Manhattan threatened to destroy existing neighbourhoods in areas such as Soho and Greenwich Village. For one thing, the proposed building of multi-lane freeways, for which those neighbourhoods would have to make way, would simply create a deathly commuter city of new-build dormitory suburbs and functional down-town business districts at the expense of generating ‘life’ in the city. For Jacobs, the unplanned informality and socio-cultural variety of residential dwelling in the heart of the city produced an implicit sense of neighbourly cohesion, one that was premised, moreover, on benign witnessing: the ‘eyes upon the street [of] those we might call its natural proprietors’ (1993 [1961]: 45). Importantly, she observed in the everyday, ritualized comings and goings on her street in Greenwich Village a reassuring communication as well as informal security between neighbours: ‘We nod; we glance up and down the street, then look back to each other and smile. We have done this many a morning for BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well’ (61–2). Notably, the informal communication Jacobs advocated was between locals who may nevertheless have remained strangers to one another over many years, but who implicitly did the job of benignly ‘handling’ visitors to the locality (who come and go) and unforeseen incidents on the street. It is instructive to set this view of functioning street life against the widespread implementation of CCTV cameras in Istanbul city centre, as the Turkish artist Burçak Bingöl implicitly did with her installation Follower at the 15th IB in 2017. Fourteen dummy cameras were sited, often alongside clusters of functioning ones, across Elmgreen’s and Dragset’s Biennial neighbourhood in Beyoğlu (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). As a casual passer-by one was unlikely to notice them amid the plethora of existing private and public surveillance, but, armed with both an IB map pinpointing locations and the knowledge that the replica cameras were ceramic and decorated with a flowery ornamental pattern reminiscent of domestic wallpaper, one was able to actively seek them out. That in itself produced a resonant challenge to the ‘following’ surveillance gaze: the watched turning the tables on the watchers, stretching even as far as the inquisitive viewer effectively being given licence to film or photograph the CCTV camera (which would often entail incorporating in the frame both the ‘fake’ and actual cameras that were its near neighbours). Thus, the performative process of systematically following the map to track down the network of dummy cameras in the neighbourhood felt very much like an act of covert counter-surveillance or sousveillance, as referred to by Karen O’Rourke in Walking and Mapping, which effectively implies

FIGURE 5.3  Follower (2017), Burçak Bingöl, 24th September 2017 192

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FIGURE 5.4  Follower (2017), Burçak Bingöl, 24th September 2017

‘watchful vigilance from underneath’ (O’Rourke 2013: 210). The gaze of secrecy and control – supposedly there, of course, to provide the public with security and protection – is unmasked through this artistic intervention, which returns a gaze of critical openness that figuratively raises questions about the existence and prevalence of such CCTV surveillance in the first place. Arguably, that is not all that is raised; conceivably the literal gazes of members of the public on the street are elevated, which, by implicitly having acceded to the ‘protective gaze’ of surveillance technology, have let their own responsible ‘eyes on the street’ drop or be averted. In other words, where, in public space, human gaze once met human gaze (in Jacobs’ analysis) and thereby ensured the tacit, trusting negotiation of an ethics of safety and benign neighbourly living, that gaze has been stolen by CCTV technology. The use of criminological terminology is as apposite as it is ironic in this instance: a network of mechanical eyes on the street, installed for the public’s safety, can be said to construct the environment as hostile, arguably producing rather than alleviating a climate of suspicion and fear and reeling all users of public space into an implicit web of criminological intolerance (or mass detention) in which everyone is potentially guilty and no one is trusted. In Istanbul, with its heaving population and vibrant, sociable street life, this seems all the more absurd and counter-productive, as Jacobs’ concluding observation implicitly underscores: On Hudson Street […] or in any other animated neighbourhoods of great cities […] we are the lucky possessors of a city order that makes it relatively BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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simple to keep the peace because there are plenty of eyes on the street. But there is nothing simple about the order itself, or the bewildering number of components that go into it. Most of those components are specialized in one way or another. They unite in their joint effect upon the sidewalk, which is not specialized in the least. That is its strength. (Jacobs 1993 [1961]: 71) There is something disarming in the domesticity of Bingöl’s replica cameras, which seem to get away with the audacity of their positioning in prime surveillance locations on account of the sheer everydayness of their patterning. Wallpaper – or wallflowers – carries connotations, of course, of blending inoffensively into the background, but it is important to recognize as well that Bingöl’s ‘glazing techniques, floral designs and motifs were prevalent in the Ottoman period. Thus her works are investigations of Turkish cultural history and its legacy, as seen in relationship to historic crafts, symbols and visual motifs’ (Albayrak et al 2017a: 155). Moreover, the camera designs are based specifically on existing plant life in the Biennial neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, so on the one hand there is an important nod to the renowned historical legacy of craft techniques emanating from this area in particular – which are rapidly disappearing as the area undergoes gentrification15 – while, on the other, there is a critical understanding of the idea of ‘traditionalism’ as being subject to rude hijacking by the state powers that be. Thus, ‘[w]orks in the series Follower are experiments in dissemblance and stealth, in which tradition becomes a means of camouflage or disguise’ (155). The contemporary prevalence of ‘protective surveillance’ is being portrayed, then, very much as one of the affective weapons of state ideology. In fact, in its ‘strangely familiar’ domestic replication of the CCTV camera, Bingöl’s intervention invokes the Freudian uncanny, neatly encapsulating the linguistic journey Freud traces wherein heimlich (‘homely’, ‘familiar’, ‘native’) ‘is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ (Freud 1990: 347). This is premised on the fact of heimlich also meaning ‘secret’ – ergo, the home, or its objects, as the protector of secrets – which is, in fact, its dominant sense in common German usage. A ‘warm and secure’ phenomenon harbours something ‘ugly and threatening’. Neil Leach provides an illuminating example of the dialectic in operation, which has a particular resonance perhaps in the context of Istanbul: ‘within the heimlich of the homeland there lurks the unheimlich of nationalism’ (Leach 1999: 159). By implication, then, the performance of the uncanny captures something of the current state of Turkey with the worrying return of a repressed Ottoman-Islamic traditionalism. But it also maps convincingly on to the 15th IB’s critical interrogation of what makes for ‘a good neighbour’ and, by extension, a good place to dwell. Bingöl’s ironic ‘neighbourhood watch’, which questions the premise of urban-state security enforcement as being in the public interest – that is, for the ‘good of the people’ – by inversely leading the viewer back to a notion of domestic neighbourliness, 194

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epitomizes Elmgreen’s and Dragset’s essential curatorial concept of seeking to negotiate the fault-line between subjectivities and immediate localities of urban co-existence on the one hand and regional, national and global relations on the other. As the final question of their list of forty implies – ‘Is a good neighbour a stranger you don’t fear?’ – that means embracing alternative realities of strangeness and difference not merely as ‘tolerable’ but as necessary. Moreover, where surveillance mechanisms exist in truth jealously to guard the land and property of the built environment, rather than making people feel safe, Elmgreen’s and Dragset’s Biennial proposes that another form of ‘building’ can take place in the city by enabling an impromptu neighbourhood of diverse human stories to emerge. Volkan Aslan’s triptych of looped video films Home Sweet Home, shown in the 15th IB, seems to capture the magnitude of what is at stake here. Against the steady, rhythmic put-put of a boat engine, one witnesses, first, an indoor domestic scene of everyday living, but one clearly taking place on the boat: a young woman going about her business, making coffee, repotting a plant, rolling a cigarette for herself and so on. As she lazily bounces a tennis ball off the wall at one point, one realizes she is essentially bored and these are all time-killing activities rather than necessary chores. Meanwhile, with the boat apparently chugging its way down the Bosphorus Strait on a bright sunny day, another young woman has left her cabin and gone out on deck where she has set up a desk for herself and quietly writes away as the landscapes of the Asian and European sides of Istanbul glide past in the background. As the narrative loop of the trio of short films draws to a close, the camera has pulled back and one witnesses an image of the boat itself, a curious hybrid contraption wherein a shed-like dwelling – the home of the first woman encountered – sits lopsided atop the small boat with its cabin and deck. It is effectively a geçekondu boat, a temporary improvised structure, home sweet home for now, and these two women, who are never seen to acknowledge one another directly, are itinerant neighbours. Quietly and peacefully they get on with doing their own thing as they share this voyage into the unknown against the backdrop of their beautiful intercontinental surroundings. They live and let live, a chosen micro-family with a mutually precarious fate.

Notes 1 The full list of forty questions is available at the following link: http://15b.iksv.org/ agoodneighbour (accessed 18 March 2019). 2 One of the texts in Stories is by the artist Monica Bonvicini, who featured in two locations of the 15th IB. The contribution is entitled ‘My Name Is Good Neighbours’, which refers fittingly to the fact that bonvicini literally means ‘good neighbours’ in Italian (Bonvicini 2017: 417–20). 3 Hagia Sophia began life as a church in AD 360, being subject to three successive iterations (as a church) before being converted, with the arrival of Mehmet the Conquerer, to a mosque in the mid-fifteenth century. Since 1934 it has functioned, in fact, as a museum. BUILDING AND DWELLING IN ISTANBUL

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4 It is always a wise move by organizers inaugurating such events to refrain from binding them into a projected temporal commitment by referring to them as a ‘biennial’ first time round when there is no guarantee of their continuation. 5 There were echoes in the individualism of the Standing Man’s act, and the way its image reverberated around global media, of the famous ‘tank protest’ by a solitary figure in Tiananmen Square in 1989, although the latter was far more direct and provocative in its intentions, of course. 6 For many the absolute model in this regard was, in fact, the Biennial preceding Hanru’s, the 9th IB in 2005, co-curated by Vasıf Kortun and Charles Esche and themed simply ‘Istanbul’, with its accompanying Biennial reader being entitled Art, City and Politics in an Expanding World (Istanbul: IKSV, 2005). 7 Marina Abramoviç performed a similar act, of course, cutting a five-point star into her stomach in her 1975 piece Thomas Lips. 8 To cite the Biennial guide: ‘For the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Schäfer piles up layers of historical and current urban situations in a new series of drawings speculating about real and possible urban transformations in Istanbul. A starting point for this series is a moment photographed by filmmaker Margit Czenki in Hamburg in June 2013, showing an island of people who celebrate the renaming of a local public park as “Gezi Park Fiction St. Pauli.” Park Fiction, an independently organized initiative that began in 1994, is a prominent example of Schäfer’s long-term engagement with urban issues. It emerged as a planning project for a public park in response to the redevelopment of the harbour area in St. Pauli, Hamburg. As a member of Park Fiction, Schäfer developed playful tools to create platforms of exchange and coproduction in the community […] These tools helped residents imagine a park as if it existed, until the city recognized the space as a park and it was opened in 2005’ (Amado 2013: 77). 9 As Kompatsiaris reveals: ‘In June 2013, in light of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, a group of 100 artists signed a statement condemning the 13th Istanbul Biennial whose corporate sponsorship and hierarchical structure was “highly in contradiction with its claims to activate social engagement and public fora to generate a possibility for rethinking the concept of ‘publicness’”’ (Kompatsiaris 2017: 61). 10 Öztürk writes that ‘barbarian’ ‘points to a critique of civilization and rationality but also to the figure of the stranger, the outsider, the outcast. Of Greek origin, the word “barbarian” referred to the language of the other, those who could not speak Greek and hence were not considered citizens’ (Öztürk 2013: 390). She adds that the 13th IB set out to investigate whether ‘art could give voice to the marginalized and contribute to the construction of new subjectivities beyond identity politics and multiculturalism’ (391). 11 The subtitle of the present chapter is unashamedly thieved from Richard Sennett’s recent book Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (2018), which interrogates the relationship between the ‘good built environment’ and the ‘good life’. 12 The Istanbul artists collective Oda Projesi has engaged in a long-running interrogation of the geçekondu phenomenon, in particular the stereotypes it provokes. At the 8th IB in 2003 the group offered a ‘Geçekondu for Sale’, reproducing a geçekondu dwelling which members of the public could enter. At the 9th IB in 2005, the group formally presented its Room Project (representing the English translation of Oda Projesi), which had been running since 1997. The artists rented an apartment in the dense, multiethnic Galata area of the city, pursuing their presence there to create a neighbourhood network of everyday community activity from cooking for their neighbours to organizing a crèche, as well as running workshops on art-making (see von Borries et al

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2014: 61; Bishop 2012: 20–2). Oda Projesi’s work over many years underscores the central importance of neighbourliness and the question of how to dwell in Istanbul. 13 The artist Halil Altindere’s music video Wonderland, shown to great acclaim at the 13th IB, was made with a young hip-hop rap-crew consisting of members of the Roma and Kurdish communities from the Sulukule district of Istanbul (which hugs the western landwall). The film shows the group being chased by the police through their neighbourhood against a background of bulldozers destroying houses and TOKİ-style new builds going up. This area had witnessed just such ‘ethnic’ evictions, clearing the way for gentrification. 14 Imre Hazem’s documentary film Ecumenopolis: City without Limits (2011) also focuses in part on Sulukule. 15 Another Turkish artist, Bilal Yılmaz, also explored this effacement with his installation Dirty Box at the 15th IB, which documented ‘the passing of traditions of skilled labour due to changes to urban life in Istanbul’ (Albayrak et al 2017a: 371). Meanwhile, regarding Bingöl’s reference to plant life, Mark Dion presented a two-part installation at the 15th IB examining Istanbul’s biotic communities, The Persistent Weeds of Istanbul and The Resilient Marine Life of Istanbul. As the Biennial guide explains: ‘Urban ecosystems have long been of interest to Dion, and his contribution to the Istanbul Biennial points to the resolute tenacity of life in polluted areas and their environs. He takes Istanbul itself as a paradigmatic case of urban sprawl – a complex and rich natural environment in which flora and fauna thrive under the treacherous conditions of a densely populated city’ (179).

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Conclusion

Much more than ever before, cities are today complex laboratories that produce heterodox urban culture, neologisms, and ‘border culture’. The connection between art and the city has not evolved very far yet, but will probably indicate a main course of action for artistic practice in the near future.

(MOSQUERA 2013: 235)

Every fair, festival, or biennial produces a hypothetical urbanism; each creates a temporary city within a city.

(COLOMINA 2014: 213)

Between them the observations above by Gerardo Mosquera and Beatriz Colomina encapsulate several key aspects – which we may extrapolate here as conclusions, in fact – relating to biennial culture, urban complexity and the work of art as they have merged in diverse ways in the European locations covered in this book. For one, Mosquera’s reference to cities as complex laboratories confirms the book’s premise of identifying an ‘intricate entanglement’ in the ecology of the urban environment – in how cities operate – which is constituted of multiple synergies and symbioses as well as ruptures, paradoxes and dissonances. Moreover, complexity takes into account all areas of civic endeavour: everyday, historical, cultural, commercial, economic, political, social, topographic and so on in a list that is, in truth, never ending since the city is constantly generating new practices and intersections. And so the lab experiment in question is one of habitability: of how to live well in circumstances of high density, close proximity, continuous change and, more often than not, marked diversity. Where the last of these refers to heterodoxies within any one city, it points at the same time to a further conclusion of this study, which is that no one place is ultimately like any other, however much we may live in a world – in this case a Europe – that is subject to the interpellating practices of globalization deriving from neoliberalist homogenization. The latter may appear to assert a form of ‘generic algorithm’ in which we are all implicated, but its in situ effects play out in distinctly arrhythmical

ways. Thus, even within the privileged, and seemingly cohesive ‘Euro zone’, clear differences of circumstance have revealed themselves locally and regionally as we have travelled occident to orient across the continent, conducting our urban ‘spot checks’ along the route. Having said that, it has also been noticeable that there are recurring themes and common areas of contention from place to place, not least when it comes to such questions as land and property (public and private) or migration. Each urban situation has disclosed things, then, that are at once identifiably common European matters and specific to the place in question. The local or regional experience and handling of such issues nevertheless remain marked by divergent approaches in each instance, which is a reflection of the unique complexity in operation in the respective urban ‘laboratories’ or sites. What makes the difference in terms of the manner in which a matter such as the contested ownership and use of a building plays out – be it in Belgrade’s Savamala, Istanbul’s Taksim Square or the Catholic churches of Münster – is dependent on a series of interconnected variables relating to the specific cultural complexities of any one place. If complexity characterizes cities, then the complex city is also precisely the challenge that is issued to art-making and, ultimately, to the presentation of art within its framing as biennial culture. Mosquera identifies a connection here that, for him, has yet to evolve fully but certainly portends a critical urban role for artmaking in the near future – signalled in the Introduction as an urban turn – while Colomina implicitly recognizes the part biennials can play in instigating and sustaining such activity via their capacities to hypothesize: to make speculative proposals about the city in a methodical, concerted and consistent way. Key within such an approach would seem to be to meet the inherent complexity of the city with a matching complexity of art-making and, above all perhaps, a complexity of biennial culture. That is, to seek to maximize the potential of a biennial to develop an integrated, multi-form engagement with the variegated ecology of urban matter and practices; indeed, with what matters in a city. And so we arrive perhaps at a conclusion that points towards the imperative of cities, and the curators they would appoint, to design for themselves bespoke biennials. In other words, a biennial that recognizes in the most responsive way possible what would be appropriate for a given city given all its vicissitudes, and so to organize itself according to certain bespoke specifications which, in turn, succeed in speaking to the city and its citizens. As we have witnessed, a biennial has the capacity to put its finger on the pulse of a place. In doing so, in functioning as a form of critical barometer, it can throw into relief what is and, indeed, is not going on, thereby also projecting an idea of what could be going on (Colomina’s hypothesizing). Hence, the biennial emerges potentially as a form of custombuilt living experiment: a live entity or even performance that can gauge, test, propose and, in the last instance, perhaps transform. Playing such a complex role brings us back, of course, to the work of art and to the recognition of the artwork’s

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engagement in a form of unique, invaluable labour the quality of whose yield is, finally, dependent on the extent of its sensitivity to and connectivity with its surroundings. Speaking of ‘bespoke’, however, I resist the temptation to be too prescriptive here. We have witnessed five very diverse urban situations in this book and, although a part of what has produced those differences is attributable to the more or less successful design and implementation in each case of the events and art practices in question, at the same time each of these European locations has nevertheless had a revealing story to tell as a consequence of that particular interface between art event and the city – that is, irrespective of the event’s ‘success’. For instance, the Mikser Festival’s tortuous travails in Savamala over many years, leading eventually to its displacement elsewhere, were in themselves symptomatic of the heady and unpredictable cultural and political scene in Belgrade (if not Serbia) and thus enormously revealing of life as a whole in that city. By contrast, a long-established, world-leading event such as the Venice Biennale, which is seen as ‘too big to fail’, nevertheless emerges very much as a compromised, and ultimately stagnated pawn in a grander scheme involving the city’s implication in the global tourist industry on the one hand and a powerful global art market on the other. As such, it is perhaps more productive to conclude that cities tend to get the kind of biennial they deserve. In other words, all five biennial events covered here have in their own way had the effect of disclosing what is at stake in the places concerned by virtue of being able to draw out existing urban entanglements, so confirming the inherent value of the biennial form as the staging of a socio-cultural experiment. To end in confirmation of this thought – and because it happens to be where I’m sitting right now and, indeed, where this book began – I return to the UK and the specific example of ‘broken Folkestone’ and its Triennial, which was illuminating for its positive defiance (so far) of the familiar traps associated with regeneration and gentrification. Key in this regard was the implementation of an integrated, bespoke urban plan based around the arts, creativity and education. This took into account realities of infrastructural dilapidation and social deprivation and sought to instigate repair via concerted creative initiatives relating to arts and education practice, which, as we have seen, seemed in 2017 to coalesce symbolically around Bob and Roberta Smith’s declaration that Folkestone the town was an art school. Arguably, however, Folkestone is living through a form of fairy-tale inasmuch as its upswing over the course of a relatively short period of time in the early twentyfirst century has been premised on the decisive intervention of a single wealthy benefactor. Bully for Folkestone; the replication of such patronage certainly could not be assumed anywhere else in the many run-down and deprived towns and cities to be discovered across the UK. Moreover, despite hitting this jackpot Folkestone continues to be strangely emblematic, in its role as ‘frontier town’, not only of Britain’s conflicted relationship with Europe – like many towns on the

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Kent coast, a high majority (62 per cent) of its voting citizens avidly embraced Brexit – but also of the kind of social polarization whose attendant symptoms of poverty and neglect characterize many urban enclaves in the UK and are widely held, in fact, to be the actual driving factors in a misplaced desire among the populace to leave the EU in the first place. In that tension, then, between what is and is not on the one hand, and what could be on the other, Folkestone stands as a beacon of possibility yet also a troubled fault-line, whose intriguing complexities the aggregated urban discourse produced by successive triennials has succeeded in teasing out.

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INDEX

Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes. Abramoviç, Marina 158, 196 n.7 abstraction 22, 79, 122 Abu Dhabi 145 Africa 10, 96, 107, 123, 132 Agamben, Giorgio 120 Albayrak, Ö. 26, 176, 194, 197 n.15 Alberro A. 74, 98 n.5 Altindere, Halil 197 n.13 Amanjani, Siah 83 Amsterdam 79 Anđelković, Branislava 143 Andre, Carl 98 n.3 Arendt, Hannah 19, 20 Art Basel 27, 72 Artforum 76 art history 17, 26, 27, 74 art-making, notion of 119–20, 200 Arts Council of England 8 artworks, notion of 18–21 art world, discourse 3, 4, 5, 26 Asher, Michael 73–6, 79, 97, 98 nn.3–5 Asia 10–11, 30 Aslan, Volkan 195 assimilation 3, 7, 16, 26, 117, 166 Auriti, Marino 118 Austin, J. L. 98 n.12 Azem, Imre 191 Bacino di San Marco site 104 Baghramian, Nairy 93, 94, 95 Baker, G. 20 Bakić, Dragoljub 150–2 Balkans 13–14, 30, 145, 147, 148, 152, 167 Balsall Heath 1–3 Balsall Heath Biennale (BHB) A–Z ‘colouring-in book’ 2

‘Cat Gallery’ 1–2 community participation 1–3 concept of ‘biennial’ 1, 3 evolution 1–2 global phenomenon 2–4 newspaper 2 parodic form 2, 5 projects and activities 1–3 ‘Public Art Shares’ 3 specialist talks 3 Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Plan 3 Banksy 113–14 Barlow, Phillida 128, 129 baroque architecture 44, 78, 82, 93, 94, 183 Bartholl, Aram 83–4, 89 Basualdo, Carlos 20–1, 101–2, 131, 134 Bauer, U. M. 10, 11, 31 n.5 Baumgarten, Lothar 86, 87 Baumstark, K. 103, 104, 105, 106, 137 n.10 Beeson, J. 98 n.10 Behrens, Peter 16 Bejenaru, Matei 13, 31 n.5 Belgrade art scene/cultural policy 152–64 City Council 151–2, 169 GUP/UIA initiatives 150 media report 144 Mikser Festival (See Mikser Festival) MSU 156–8 National Museum 155–6, 157 NATO bombing of 154 political-historical legacy 13 Savamala neighbourhood 140–6, 152–71 Sava River 142, 156 tourism 144, 155

Waterfront project 144–5, 149–52, 162–3 Belgrade Design Week 147 Bellini 115 Belting, Hans 15, 31 n.5, 130, 136 n.5 Benjamin, Walter 19, 52, 69 n.13, 112, 136 n.9 Bergen Biennial 6 Berlin Wall, fall of 9, 16, 17, 130, 179 Bernewitz, Karl H. 84, 85 bespoke forms 6, 200, 201 Beuys, Joseph 82–3, 98 n.3 biennials art aesthetics 18–21 concept 17, 27, 101, 103 debates 4–5 development 32 n.10 funding 10 future 8 global/local tension 4–6, 9–18 mounting 4 site-specific 2, 4, 9, 10, 14, 21, 25, 26–31, 43, 48, 71, 80, 93–96, 97 n.1, 114, 115, 117, 177–8 biennial boom 5 biennial culture 2, 4, 6, 11, 12, 14, 17, 26, 31, 199, 200 Biggs, Lewis 45–6, 48, 53, 54, 55, 61, 64, 65–6, 68, 69 n.8 Bingöl, Burçak 192–5, 197 n.15 Birken, J. 18, 31 n.5 Birmingham 1–2, 6, 7 biennial-type events (See Balsall Heath Biennale (BHB)) Blazwick, Iwona 177 Boltanski, Luc 186 Bonvicini, Monica 195 n.2 Bosnia and Herzegovina 149, 154 branding 4, 12, 73, 136 n.5 Brazil 44 World Biennial Forum 10 Brexit 30, 55, 88–9, 129, 201–2 British Museum 113, 136 n.7 Brodsky, Joseph 110, 134, 135 Bruguera, Tanya 35 Brussels 16, 154 Brussels Biennial 31 n.4 Buchloh, Benjamin 76 Buddensieg, A. 31 n.5 Bussmann, Klaus 73, 77–80, 83 Bydler, C. 20 214

INDEX

Cameron, David 88–9 capitalism 6, 10–11, 15, 58, 65, 81, 104, 121, 135, 136 n.5, 137 n.9, 146, 153, 154, 155, 161–2, 168, 183 Caribbean 11 Caribbean Biennial 5 Carpaccio 115 Catenacci, S. 137 n.12 Cattelan, Mauricio 5 Central America 10, 11 Chaplin, Sarah 143, 170 Charles, Cézanne 53–5 China 64, 122–3, 137 n.12, 156, 188 Christies 104 Christov-Bakarkiev, Carolyn 187 Cini Foundation 104 city ‘as work of art’ 18–21 complexity of 22–5, 176–7, 189–90, 199–202 Euro zone public art policies/practices 12–18 global recognition 9–12 potential for artistic and curatorial practices 6–9 space and time of 26–31 CNN 144 Cold War 13, 15, 89, 131, 183 Cologne 78–9 Colomina, Beatriz 22–3, 199, 200 communism 15 complexity spatio-temporal 24–5 spectator-participant 23–5 urban 22–3 contemporary (art), definition 27–8 Cooke, L. 131 Copenhagen 79, 173 Costa Concordia 125–6 Coventry industrial decline 7 named UK City of Culture 2021 6–7 potential of urban space 8 Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art 6–8 ‘duality and place’ theme 7 funding 8 programme channels 7 quadrennial occurrence 6–7 Virtual Fringe: A Festival of Possibility 8, 31 n.3

Craig-Martin, Michael 36–7, 46, 53, 59, 70 n.18 Creative Foundation/Creative Folkestone 32 n.14, 34, 40–3, 47, 68 n.5 Creed, Martin 68 n.4 critical spatial practice 24–5 Croatia 154, 161 Cross, David 3, 32 n.13 Cubitt, William 60 ‘curated conversations’ 24, 25 Cvetković, Marijana 139–40, 152–65, 171 n.1 Cyprus 15, 35 Czechoslovakia, pavilion at the Venice Biennale 131 Czenki, Margit 196 n.8 Danube 140, 143, 148, 152, 156 deconstructivism 113, 168 Decorators, The 43, 66 de Duve, Thierry 4, 10, 14 de Haan, Roger 39–43, 50 de Maria, Walter 98 n.3 Der Bevölkerung (Haacke) 16 Derrida, Jacques 119 Dever, Diane 42–3, 56–60, 65, 66–7 digitalization 89 digital technologies 23, 55, 72, 83, 88, 89, 144, 160 Di Martino, E. 136 n.1 Dimitrijević, Branislav 143 Dion, Mark 114–15, 136 n.9, 137 n.11, 197 n.15 DIS (art collective) 126 Disney cartoons 109 documenta 14, 27, 71–2, 78, 97 n.1, 101, 116 Doherty, Claire 3, 32 n.11, 32 n.13, 68 n.7 Dragset, Ingar 173–4, 176, 177, 178, 186, 187, 188, 192, 195 Dražić, Dušica 143, 144 Dresden 31 n.2, 78–9 Dyer, Geoff 136 n.2 Ecumenopolis: City without Limits (dir. Azem) 191, 197 n.14 Eilat, G. 10, 31 n.5 Eisenman, Nicole 98 n.9, 98 n.13 Ekeberg, Jonas 98 n.6 Elben, Georg 98 n.15 elitism 2, 9, 14, 123, 132, 150, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 188

Elizabeth II 2 Elmgreen, Michael 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 186, 187, 188–9, 192, 195 ‘encounter,’ notion of 25 English Channel 29, 30, 37–8, 39, 40, 63 Enlightenment 14 Enwezor, Okwui 14, 16–17, 20 Erdemci, Fulya 184–5, 186 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 30, 178, 181, 182 Erkmen, Ayşe 68 n.1, 72, 80, 90–3, 97, 180 Esche, Charles 31 n.4, 172 n.8, 196 n.6 Esen, Orhan 190 Eurasia tunnel 191 Eurocentrism 10 European Union (EU) 13, 16, 17, 21, 30–1, 55, 56, 88, 152, 154, 167, 202 Euro Tunnel 38, 56 Euro zone 12–18, 200 Ewbank, Nick 39, 40, 41, 42, 68 n.5 existentialism 6, 9, 89, 90, 187, 189 EXIT music festival 147 Exit through the Giftshop (dir. Banksy) 114 Exorcist, The (film) 83 experience, notion of 18, 20 fascism 114–15, 124, 127, 130, 175 Fassi, Luigi 132, 135 Faveretto, Lara 93, 95 Ferguson, B. W. 12–13, 23, 32 n.10 fictionality 51, 114, 123 figurative art 72 Fijen, Hedwig 15 Filipovic, Elena 4, 8, 20, 27, 31 n.5 Finland, pavilion at the Venice Biennale 137 n.11 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 52–3, 55, 60 First World War 57, 136 n.1 Florida, R. 41 Folkestone adverse weather conditions 52–6 art exhibitions (See Folkestone Triennial) history and urban regeneration 37–42, 201–2 Imagined Cities conference 138 n.20 townscape 48–52 Folkestone Academy 40 Folkestone Artworks 29, 32 n.14, 47–8 Folkestone Fringe 34, 42 Folkestone Triennial 28–9, 42–8 catalogue 45, 68 INDEX

215

concept/features 42–8 Craig-Martin’s Folkestone Lightbulb 36–7, 59, 70 n.18 Creed’s No.1196 Piece for String Quartet and Elevator 68 n.4 Dever/The Decorators’ Customs House: Urban Room Folkestone 43, 65, 66–8, 70 n.18 Dever/Wright’s Pent Houses 42, 56–9, 65 ‘double edge’ theme 46–7, 55, 58 Finlay’s Weather is a Third to Place and Time 52–3, 60 Hartley’s Vigil 63–6, 69–70 n.17 Iglesias’s Towards the Sound of Wilderness 51–2, 69 n.12 Larsen’s Promised Land 69 n.9 Lester’s Electrified Line 62–5, 66 and local weather conditions 52–62 ‘Lookout’ theme 45–6, 52–3, 62 Marshall/Charles’s (rootoftwo’s) Whithervanes 53–5, 66 ‘Million Miles from Home’ theme 44–5 Potrč/Ooze’s The Wind Lift 60–2, 64–5 Sailstorfer’s Folkestone Digs 48–52 Schmitz/Ser-Od’s Siren 55–6 Sculpture Question conference 48 Smith’s FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL 33–7, 42, 51, 201 ‘Tales of Time and Space’ theme 43 Tuttofuoco’s Folkestone Express 28–30 Whiteread’s Water Tower 57–8 Woods’ Holiday Homes 58–9, 65, 69 n.15 Wright’s Fleet on Foot 59–60 Fontana, Emi 114–15 Fontana, Luciano 127–30, 133 Foster, Hal 22 Foster, Norman 40 Freud, Sigmund 194 Friedrich, Caspar David 69–70 n.17 Fritsch, Katarina 80 Gardner, Anthony 5, 6, 11, 14, 15, 26–7, 31 n.5, 186 Germania, Anno Zero (dir. Rossellini) 130, 137 n.16 Germany. See also Kassel; Münster, and other individually listed cities Germania, Hitler-Speer plan 130 heritage conservation strategy 78–9, 96 216

INDEX

indigenous populace 16–17 pavilion at the Venice Biennale 129–30 reunification 130 Gerz, Jochen 68 n.7 Geys, Jef 79 Giannini, Sara 136 n.5 Gioni, Massimiliano 117–18 globalism 4, 9–12, 17, 26, 151, 173, 176, 178, 188 globalization 9, 14, 19, 20, 26, 88, 89, 90, 122, 151, 199 Gonzalez-Foerster, Dominique 24, 75–6, 98 n.8 Goofy 109 Gordon, Douglas 83 Gostiljac, Tatjana 147–8 gothic architecture 44, 78 Graf, Marcus 177–80, 183, 188 Grand Tour 14, 17, 27, 71–2 Grasskamp, W. 78, 86–7, 98 n.7 Green, Charles 5, 6, 11, 14, 15–16, 26–7, 31 n.5, 186 Guardian newspaper 168 Gucci 104, 105 Guggenheim, Peggy 104 Guided Tour (Iglesias) 52 Gündüz, Erdem 181–2 Gwangju 10, 17, 174 Haacke, Hans 16, 130 Hague, The 154 Haiger, Ernst 130 Hanru, Hou 10, 11, 31 n.5, 130, 135, 183, 184, 188, 196 n.6 Hartley, Alex 63–6 Harvey, William 37 Harvie, J. 19 Havana Biennial 11 Heathfield, Adrian 120, 121, 137 n.14 Heiland, Rudolf-Ernst 98 n.15 Hein, B. 93 Hertenberg, Sylvain 60–2 Hessel, Franz 52 Highmore, B. 137 n.9 Hirschhorn, Thomas 35 Hirst, Damien 106–16, 118–19, 123, 136 nn.5–7 History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC radio series) 136 n.7 Hitler, Adolf 31 n.1, 130 Hlavajová, Maria 6, 31 n.4, 117

Hoegsberg, M. M. 12–13, 23, 32 n.10 Hoffmann, Jens 5, 176–7 Hollywood 109–10 Hong Kong 27 Hooper, J. 126 Hsieh, Tehching 120–2, 137 n.14 Huck, B. 132 Hughes, Ryan 7 ‘ideas of art’ 3 Iglesias, Christina 44–5, 51–2, 69 n.12 inoperative community 24, 32 n.12 International Herald Tribune newspaper 147 International Union of Architects (UIA) 150 Island of San Giorgio 104 Israel 9, 44, 130 Istanbul CCTV surveillance 191, 192–5 contemporary art venues 177–80, 186–9 EU accession 30–1 geçekondu neighbourhoods 189–90, 191, 195, 196 n.12 Gezi Park/Taksim Square protests 180–6 social housing projects 190–1 “Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ)” 188 TOKİ 190–1 Istanbul Biennial (IB) 26–7, 173–97 ‘activist art’ 181–2 AKM venue 181–3, 185 Altindere’s Wonderland 197 n.13 Aslan’s Home Sweet Home 195 Beyoğlu neighbourhood 192–4 Bingöl’s Follower 192–4 Bonvicini’s ‘My Name Is Good Neighbours’ 195 n.2 catalogue 173, 176 ‘Contemporary Art in Traditional Spaces’ event 177–8 Dion’s Persistent Weeds of Istanbul 197 n.15 Dion’s Resilient Marine Life of Istanbul 197 n.15 Elmgreen and Dragset’s installation 176, 178–80 Erkmen’s bangbangbang 180 and European models 179–80

funding 179 and Gezi-Taksim protests 180–6 global reputation 179 Gündüz’s ‘Standing Man’ act 181–2, 184, 196 n.5 Hoffmann’s ‘Like A Good Neighbour (Stay Over There)’ 176–7 Istanbul Diaries event 186 ‘Istanbul’ event 196 n.6 ‘Mom, Am I Barbarian?’ event 184–6 neighbourhood theme 173, 176, 186–9, 192, 194–5 ‘Nightcomers’ event 188 publicity 174–6 Rietveld Landscape’s Intensive Care 185 ‘Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms’ theme 187 socio-cultural and political challenges 178–80, 187 ‘Special Projects’ 188 Stories catalogue 176, 195 n.2 sub-themes 173, 177 Wassmann’s International Billboard Project 174–6 Yılmaz’s Dirty Box 197 n.15 Italy 103, 123–6, 134. See also Venice Jaar, Alfredo 127–30, 132, 133, 135 Jackson, S. 19 Jacob, S. 138 n.20 Jacobs, Jane 69 n.14, 189, 191–2, 193, 194 James, Henry 136 n.8 Jobst, Marko 139–40, 152–64 Jones, Caroline A. 9, 14, 18, 20, 21, 31 n.5, 173 Jorn, Asger 2 Jouve, Valérie 83 Judd, Donald 98 n.3 Kadijević, A. 149–51 Kapur, G. 127–8, 133 Kassel 27, 71, 78, 79, 97 n.1, 101 Kelečević, Irena 140–1 Kester, Grant 6, 18–21, 31 n.5 kinetic art 77–8, 97, 131, 133 King, J. 98 n.5 Kingdom of Italy 103 Knabb, K. 2 Knežević, Vida 146–7, 149, 162, 164–6 Kock, G. H. 72, 74, 80, 85, 86, 88, 96, 98 n.7 INDEX

217

Kompatsiaris, Panos 5, 19–20, 27–8, 31 n.5, 31 n.9, 74, 104, 172 n.8, 196 n.9 König, Kasper 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 88, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99 Kortun, Vasıf 196 n.6 Kosovo 44, 154–5 Kovačević, B. 149–51 Krauss, Rosalind 22, 72 Kucina, Ivan 143 Kwon, Miwon 24 labour, notion of 18–20 Lalić, Ivan 147, 166, 169–70 Lalić, Maja 147, 149, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171 Larsen, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum 69 n.9 Leach, Neil 194 Le Feuvre, Lisa 93 Lester, Gabriel 62–6 Lindinger, Korinna 144 localism 4, 6, 11, 15 Long, K. 138 n.20 Long, Richard 98 n.3 Lookofsky, Sarah 126 Macedonia, cultural scene 161 Macel, Christine 118–20 Magacin 139–40, 152, 162, 164, 165 Manifesta Biennial 14–17 Manifesta 3 (Slovenia) 15–16 Manifesta 6 (Cyprus) 35 Mansueti 115 Marías, Javier 115 Marshall, John 53–5 Martinez, R. 31 n.7 Martini, F. 131–2, 135 Martini, V. 131–2, 135 Masters, H.G. 185, 187–8 Matthews, Lydia 143, 171 McCarthy, Mary 111, 115, 129 McGregor, Neil 136 n.7 McQueen, Steve 137 n.17 Mehmet the Conqueror 195 n.3 Metropole Arts Centre 68 n.5 Mickey Mouse 109–10 Middle East 145, 167 Mikkelson, Leonid 104 Miksalište 166–70, 172 n.7 Mikser Festival 26, 27, 139–72 activism 152–3 Beogradska Zadruga (The Belgrade Co218

INDEX

operative) site 140–2, 144–6, 170 ‘Bollywood in Belgrade’ project 147 ‘Circulate!’ theme 149 decline of 164–71 evolution of 147–8 funding 143, 147 ‘Ghost Project’ 147 Kelečević’s Untitled, Interventions in Space 140–1 Lalić’s (Ivan) ‘Love in Savamala’ [Ljubav u Savmali] play 170 Lower Dorćol site 148–9 and Mikser NGO 143, 145, 146, 147–9 October Salon (Oktobarski Salon) project 145 ‘Restlessness’ (Neizdrž) theme 145–6 Salone Satellite event 147 Savamala area 140–2, 145–9, 164–71, 201 themes 171 n.2 Wikipedia entry about 142 ‘Young Serbian Designers’ 147 Mikser House 144, 148–8, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170 Mikser Sarajevo 172 n.6 Milan Design Week 147 Milošević, Slobodan 147, 150, 153, 154, 161 minimalism 73, 185 Minipogon 168 mise en scène 141 Misiano, V. 31 n.7 Mitrović, Branislav 150 Mizusawa, Tsutomo 26 modern art 10–11, 44, 72, 77, 78, 98 n.15 Monk by the Sea (Friedrich) 70 n.17 Moses, Robert 69 n.14 Mosquera, Gerardo 11, 199–200 Moss, Kate 109 Moszynska, Anna 22, 72 Mouffe, Chantal 78, 157, 172 n.4, 186 Münster Catholic influence 44, 79–81, 86–8, 97 and Folkestone, comparison 43–4 LWL-Museum 73, 76, 77 Sculpture Projects (See Sculpture Projects Münster (SPM)) Stadt und Skulptur exhibitions (Marl) 99 n.15 Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade 143, 156, 158

Nancy, Jean-Luc 21, 24, 32 n.12 Napolean 103 nationalism 13, 16, 17, 117, 131, 132, 150, 154–7, 161, 162, 188, 194 National Socialism 78 naturalization 6, 19, 88, 112, 121, 184 Nauman, Bruce 81, 98 n.3, 131 Negri, Antonio 133 Nemanja, Stefan 162–3 Nestorović, Nikola 145 new institutionalism 35, 74, 98 n.6, 168, 172 n.8 New Zealand 24, 163 One Day Sculpture by Cross and Doherty 32 n.13 Niemojewski, B. 104 Nikola Tesler Museum, Bucharest 29 Nikolić, Tomislav 154 Norway, pavilion at the Venice Biennale 137 n.11 Oda Projesi 196–7 n.12 oil crisis 7, 125 Oldenburg, Claes 73, 81, 98 n.3 Ondák, Roman 131–2, 134, 137 n.18 O’Neill, Paul 5, 27, 31 n.5, 32 n.11 One Year Performances (Hsieh) 120–1 Ooze 60–2, 64, 65 Örer, B. 174, 177, 179 Orient Express 28–30, 38 O’Rourke, Karen 192–3 Osborne, Peter 9–10, 17, 27–8 otium, concept of 119–20 Öztürk, Rana 185–6, 196 n.10 Palazzo delle Prigioni site 120, 121 Palazzo Ducale site 115, 120 Palazzo Grassi site 106, 108, 109 Palazzo Venier dei Leoni site 104 Palestine 9 Park, Manjež 163 Parks, T. 126 parody 2, 5, 14, 69 n.17, 108 participation concept 23–5 spectator/citizen 18, 23–4, 51, 53, 62, 69 n.17, 74–5, 90, 107, 109, 117, 131, 146, 156, 158, 169, 184 Peltomäki, K. 98 n.5 perennial art 12, 27, 30, 32 n.10, 32 n.13, 58, 71, 79, 111, 113, 131, 186, 187

performance, concept 24–5, 26 Peters, B. 98 n.10 Pfannes, Eva 60–2 Phillips, Andrea 184–5 Pieper-Rapp-Frick, E. 80, 94 Pilz, L. 98 n.10 Pinault, François 104, 106, 112, 116 Piotrowski, Piotr 14 place/place-making 24, 43, 71 Ponte dei Sospiri site 120 Poolman, Chris 1–2 populism 17, 88, 155, 183 Potrč, Marjetica 60–2, 64, 65 Prada 104, 105 Prnjat, Danilo 166–8 prostitution 2–3 ‘Public Art: How Does It Get Made?’ (Doherty) 3 Punta della Dogana site 104–9, 114 Rancière, J. 78, 133 realism 84, 85, 105, 134, 137 n.16 reality TV 90 Reineking, James 98 n.3 Remiks (design studio) 166 Renaissance art 110, 113, 130 Rendell, Jane 24–5, 51, 52, 69 n.12 repetition and difference 11–12, 13, 31 n.4, 74–5 Ricci, C. 136 n.3 Rickey, George 77–8, 81, 84, 97 Rischer, Alexander 76 Rossellini, Roberto 137 n.16 Rowe, Elizabeth 1–2 Rückriem, Ulrich 98 n.3 Ruskin, J. 103, 106, 110–11, 137 n.13 Russia 104, 154 Saatchi, Charles 136 n.5 Sailstorfer, Michael 48–52 São Paolo 10, 17 Saunders, Doug 189, 190 Scarpa, Carlo 115 Schäfer, Christoph 184, 196 n.8 Scheppe, Wolfgang 102–3, 105, 106, 110–11, 112, 121–2, 124–5, 127, 129, 134, 137 n.13, 137 n.15, 138 n.20 Schlaun, Johann Conrad 94, 98 n.14 Schlieker, Andrea 29, 39, 40, 43–4, 46, 51, 69 n.8, 69 n.12 INDEX

219

Schmitz, Marc 55–6 sculpture ‘new sculpture’ principle 53, 93, 95, 97 notion of 22–3 Sculpture Projects Münster (SPM) 12, 24, 26, 27, 43–4, 71–99 Asher’s Installation Münster (Caravan) 73–6, 97, 98 n.4 Baghramian’s Privileged Points 93, 94, 95 Bartholl’s 12V/5V/3V 83–4 Baumgarten’s Drei Irrlichter 86–7 Beuys’s Unschlitt (Tallow) 82–3 and documenta 71–2, 97 n.1 Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain 98 n.9, 98 n.13 Erkmen’s On Water 72, 90–2 Faveretto’s Momentary Monument – The Stone 93, 95–6 Fritsch’s Yellow Madonna 80 Geys’ Don’t Believe What You See 79–80 Gonzalez-Foerster’s A Münster Novel 75–6, 98 n.8 Gordon’s Darkness and Light (after William Blake) 83 Nauman’s Square Depression 81 Oldenburg’s Giant Pool Balls 73, 81 Pirici’s Leaking Territories 88–9 Rickey’s Three Rotating Squares 77–8, 97 role of rupture 76–87 Serra’s Trunk 93, 94–5, 98 n.14 Siekmann’s Trickle Down 93 ‘Skulptur 77’ theme 73, 78 success of 71–2 Tanaka’s How to Live Together and Sharing the Unknown 89–90 time-based features 72–6, 87–8, 92–3 Zaugg’s Versetzung des Denkmals ‘Knecht mit Pferd’ und ‘Magd mit Stier’ 84–6 Second World War 31 n.2, 44, 55, 78–80, 87, 127, 130, 136 n.1, 137 n.16, 142, 150, 155, 160 Seijdel, J. 31 n.5 Sennett, Richard 37, 104–5, 196 n.11 Serbia Architecture Salon prize 169 and Brussels 154 cultural scene/policies 152–64 220

INDEX

EU integration 13, 154, 161 and Kosovo 154–5 Nemanjić dynasty 163 NKSS 166–7 Serbian Association of Architects 150 Ser-Od, Dolgor 55–6 Serra, Richard 22, 93–5, 98 n.3 Šešelj, Vojislav 154 Sheikh, Simon 4 Siekmann, Andreas 93 SIEPA 147 Sierra, Santiago 6 site-specific art 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 21, 25, 26–31, 71, 80, 94–7, 114–17, 177 site-writing 24–5 Situationist International 2, 14 Slovenia 15, 161 Smith, Bob and Roberta 33–7, 42, 46, 51, 68 n.2, 201 Smith, Terry 136 n.5 Song of Bernadette, The (film) 83 soundscapes 8 South America 10–11, 127, 130 South Korea 9, 10 Speer, Albert 130 Spinnen, B. 80, 94, 98 n.7 stagnation 6, 26, 44, 201 Stevanović, Andra 145 Strange Cargo 34, 42 subversion 5, 6, 66, 68 n.7, 111, 112, 116, 117, 129 Sweden, pavilion at the Venice Biennale 137 n.11 Sydney 17 Syria 30–1 Taiwan pavilion at the Venice Biennale 120, 137 n.12 Taipei Fine Arts Museum 137 n.12 Talking Birds 8 Tan, Pelin 191 Tanaka, Koki 89–90, 98 n.11 30 Years War 78, 79, 88 Thomas Lips (Abramoviç) 196 n.7 Thompson, Don 136 n.5 3-D sculptures 8 Tilted Arc (Serra) 93–4 time passing, notion of 72, 74, 76 topology, concept of 22, 131 Treister, Noa 146

triangulation 25, 45–7, 53, 56, 66 Tuttofuoco, Patrick 28–30 UK City of Culture 6 United Kingdom contemporary art scene (See Balsall Heath Biennale (BHB); Coventry Biennial) Occupy protest at St Paul’s Cathedral, London 65 pavilion at the Venice Biennale 138 n.20 withdrawal from EU (Brexit) 30, 55, 88–9, 129, 201–2 United States biennial art scene 10–11 NYC’s Times Square reconfiguration project 143 Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park 65 pavilion at the Venice Biennale 130–1 urban planning 191–2 unmaking/unwork 24 Valdés, Adriana 130, 132, 135 Vanderlinden, B. 31 n.5 Vanstiphout, Wouter 138 n.20 Van Winkel, Camiel 12, 116 Vedute painting 105–6, 122 Velisavljević, Ivan 170 Velvet Revolution 131 Venice arcades 106 arsenal 102, 104 art exhibitions (See Venice Biennial) casinos 102–3, 104, 105 decline of 135 ghettos 102 and global art industry 115–22 lazaret 102 and the ‘other’/Volpi’s ‘Grande Venezia’ vision 122–7 pavilions 102–4, 114–19, 123–4 127–135, 137 n.19, 138 n.20 137 nn.11–12, 179 picturesqueness 105, 110–11, 115, 137 n.13 Renaissance times 110, 113, 130 surveillance 104–5, 124 toponyms associated with 102–3 Venice Biennale 1, 11, 13, 26, 72

Arsenale site 103, 104, 117, 123, 127, 132, 136 n.3 Barlow’s Folly 128, 129 Biennale Architettura 116 ‘Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens’ exhibition 131 conception 101–6, 116, 124 cycle 116 Dion’s Loot 115 Dion’s Raising Neptune’s Vault installation 114, 137 n.11 and documenta 101 ‘Encyclopaedic Palace’ exhibition 117–19 Giardini site 104, 117, 127–35, 136 n.3 Haacke’s Germania 130 as hegemonic model 11, 104 Hirst’s Collector with Friend sculpture 109–10 Hirst’s Fate of Banished Man sculpture 108–9 Hirst’s Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 136 n.5 Hirst’s ‘Treasures’ exhibition 106–14, 116, 118, 123 Hsieh’s Cage Piece 120–1 Hsieh’s ‘Doing Time’ exhibition 120–1 Hsieh’s Outdoor Piece 121 Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece 121, 122 Jaar’s Venezia, Venezia 127–35 Macel’s ‘Viva Arte Viva’ exhibition 118–19 McQueen’s Giardini 137 n.17 national pavilions 102–4, 114–19, 123–4 127–135, 137 n.19, 138 n.20 137 nn.11–12, 179 Nordic Pavilion site 114–15 Ondák’s Loop 131–2, 134 role in art market 104 social exclusivity 122–7 Venice International Film Festival 105, 106, 116, 124 Verwoert, Jan 21 Vidokle, Anton 15 visual culture 12 Vogel, S. B. 31 n.5 Volk 16 Volpi, Giuseppe 124–6, 130 Von Borries, F. 182, 184, 185, 190, 191, 196 n.12 Voorhies, James 15, 35, 74, 75, 98 nn.4–6 INDEX

221

Vučić, Aleksandar 154, 162–3 Vuitton, Louise 104, 105 Waldvogel, F. 93 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Friedrich) 70 n.17 Weibel, Peter 10–11, 31 n.5 Weiss, Glenn 143 West, Franz 3 Westphalia 78, 84, 88, 95 Westphalian peace accord 78, 88 Whiteread, Rachel 57–8, 82–3 Whybrow, Nicolas 139–42, 144, 171 Wikipedia 142 Williams, Pharrell 109 Woods, Richard 58–9, 65 work, notion of 18–21

222

INDEX

work of art 18–21, 48, 199, 200–1 World Biennial Forums 10 Wright, Jonathan 42, 56–60, 65 xenophobia 90, 170 Yılmaz, Bilal 197 n.15 Yokohama Triennial 26 Yugoslavia break-up of 13, 139, 157 civil war 13, 139 socio-political reforms, 1990s 153 Zaugg, Rémy 84–6, 96 Zlatić, Ivan 146 Zukin, Sharon 20