Inclusion and Exclusion in the Art World Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
izing challenging panel discussions, the biennial serves as a platform for democratic debate. These events often take on a more activist form, especially in countries with more restrictive political systems, where the biennial invites alternative modes of thinking or expression.2
Biennial Culture and Diversity
In light of the close relationship between ideas of democracy and the emergence of biennials, it is perhaps unsurprising that the biennial itself has come under the
scrutiny in terms of how artists are selected. Of particular concern over the years is the view that biennials have given rise to the so-called “biennale artist.”3 If biennials were seen to favor artists of a certain kind, promoted by a small elite of nomadic curators worldwide, the fear was that a homogenized “biennial culture”4 would take over. By eradicating diversity, the biennial would become a “hegemonic machine,”5 replicating the same assumptions and so endangering democracy.
In this regard, there are two common concerns. The first is that biennials repeatedly show the same artists.
“There have been frequent repeats of the same artists.”6
“Biennials tend to mirror each other in terms of intent and in recycling same artists.”7
“Go to any biennial and you find exactly the same artists.”8
Table 1. Repeated inclusion of the same artists
The statistical data do not support the supposed emergence of a “biennale artist” or the proposition that the same artists dominate biennials across the world; in fact, all of the key biennials discussed here are characterized by very low frequency of artist repetition. Instead, biennials seem generally to promote rich diversity and a culture of newness. As part of that radical diversity, biennials are not generally subject to the hierarchical structure typically associated with the visual art market, where a small number of artists garner huge rewards while an overwhelming majority are unable to make a living from their artistic practice.10 In short, biennials embody a flatter ordering of the art world.
A second major concern is that a majority of the artists who appear at biennials are of Western or North American origin.
“Sometimes when I wander around the big contemporary art fairs or biennales I have the feeling that I could be anywhere: I see work by the same limited group of mostly western artists, and I would find it very hard to guess where they came from if I didn’t already know the answer.”11
“…international artists, mostly from the Europe/USA nexus, thus giving it an apparent “international” validation.”12
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Art World Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
figure 1: Frequency of repetition at four key biennials (Source: exhibition catalogues)9
figure 2: Countries represented at four key biennials (Source: exhibition catalogues)
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Art World Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
“The Venice Biennale released the rather epic list […] of artists who will partici-pated in curator Massimiliano Gioni’s exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace, which is slated to run from June 1 through November 24 and, despite its title, is domi-nated by the same American and European artists you’ll encounter at most major international shows of contemporary art.”13
Table 2: Predominantly Western or North American artists
The supposed dominance of the European-North American complex would be seen as threat, representing a powerful and even imperialist set of values and norms that dictate the rules of the art world as a whole. This kind of hegemonic order would present a threat to the relationship between democracy and biennials outlined above.
However, the empirical evidence paints a different picture. Rather than the dominance of any privileged region across biennials, each region dominates its own locale.
However, this absence of any exclusive or universally favored status is not necessarily without consequences. In the context of theories of democracy, one can imagine the biennials sector facing challenges in formulating a distinct position. In healthy democracies, for instance, political elites represent certain points of view and must play a role in integrating diverse political opinion. Additionally, democracies are characterized by the possibility of change in terms of ruling party and opposition.
In a field of almost unlimited choices, it becomes difficult to make any such choice.
This has implications not only for present choices and social elites but also for recollection. What does the biennial leave behind? What is to be memorialized, and what is the narrative in relation to that past? Perhaps it is because of this radical variety that many art professionals, critics and curators still claim that biennials are somewhat alike. However, as the evidence shows, this is not because biennials show the same artists but because radical heterogeneity means that exclusive or distinct positions are more difficult to formulate.
Biennials as Public Assemblies
Does this mean, then, that biennials undermine art world standards, making demo-cratic processes more challenging? The data offer conflicting answers. On the one hand, the evidence suggests that biennials strengthen regional cultural identity at their core while also increasing diversity in surrounding regions and often internationally.
This paradox clearly invites further research to assess the implications for the bien-nial’s democratic ethos. A growing body of literature regarding similar types of events, including fairs, world cups, fashion weeks and music festivals can be clearly divided into two streams.14 The first addresses the outward effects of such events—for example, tourism, city branding, global reception, media coverage, and urban development. The second stream focuses more on internal aspects such as rituals, negotiations, business transactions, cognitive involvement, orientation patterns, and information-seeking strategies. The present paper offers some tentative answers from a social science perspective, discussing the data in relation to both inward and outward aspects. In practice, the inward/outward distinction cannot be sustained because both work in unison to provide mutual stability. In general, diversity and fluidity represent an inward/outward view while local/global orientations are largely products of an outward/inward perspective.
In this context, Judith Butler15 has questioned what it means to gather in public, emphasizing the centrality of bodies (both human and non-human, as in works of art)
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Art World Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
that in their plurality lay claim to the public realm. This plurality is at the heart of the version of political democracy in which something new can appear that did not exist beforehand. This is not simply an aggregation of people or objects in a certain space but emerges from the in-between. For Butler, a key element in this emergence is that the gathered persons or objects are not just communicative acts but entail bodily enactment, or rather, bodily performance. Public assemblies can therefore be described as being performative by enacting and simultaneously highlighting the
‘being-with’ of other bodies. It follows that public assembly has a highly self-referential structure, in which the assembly defines what is but at the same time comes into being only in its (self-)performance.
As such, that performance is not the act of a single individual or object but depends on other individuals or objects. It can be argued that biennials are one case of ‘performa-tive public assemblies’ that gather works of art, realizing the biennial in the act or performance of that gathering. The biennial emerges and thrives in this in-between.
However, this is not without risk, as the gathering involves public exposure in the light of other works of art, and one cannot always know how such proximity may violate the meanings of some of those artworks. These risks are palpable in exhibitions such as Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern and Magiciens de la Terre. This notion of performance assembly relates the biennial to democracy in two respects: 1) as democratic amplifier (associated with increasing cultural variety) and 2) as democratic polarizing device (associated with global/local orientation).
Biennials as Democratic Amplifiers
The present findings suggest that biennials can be viewed as catalysts for a diverse range of artistic variations across different cultures. Many works of art depend on catalytic devices that attract attention through the reactions and connections they generate. Just as businesses form joint ventures or cooperatives, works of art rely on biennials. The biennial’s catalytic function lies in its ability to assemble and concen-trate a great number of works of art from many regions and different times or cultural backgrounds in one place for a short time, so creating a diverse cosmos in that place.
Building on this idea, the biennial can be characterized as a world public sphere. Unlike museum studies and theories of cultural consumption or mass communication, investigations of public spheres cannot be reduced to audiences or receivers but are more active in character. According to Jürgen Habermas,16 public spheres incorporate three aspects of immediate relevance here as a medium for public bodies, discussions, and opinions. Habermas contends that public spheres develop from gatherings in which a public articulates its perspective on the broader society. Biennials that summon works of art can be said to entail this act of assembly. However, Habermas’s concept of ‘the public’ is more than just a large number of people assembled in one place; to forge mutual connections, these actors must share their opinions or perspec-tives through the medium of public dialogue or discussion, so forming public opinion.
As well as lectures, workshops, seminars, and publications, biennials create connec-tions through the engagement and encounters of culturally diverse works of art brought together under one roof.17 This framing is linked to the practices of nomadic curators and migrating forms and narratives that amplify these practices, forming a
‘public body’ in which the broader art world is affirmed or challenged. To that extent, biennials can be understood as multicultural platforms from which artistic observa-tions are themselves observed.18 Observational direction has profound implications for democracy; by linking observations within an encompassing structure to create a local/global perspective, biennials present something unique to the art world and, in
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Art World Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
so doing, diversify that world. If this polarization can more clearly demarcate different artistic approaches to important issues, biennials can contribute to democratic polarization through their simultaneous roles of amplifying and diversifying.19 Biennials and Democratic Polarization
The biennial’s global/local orientation is typically discussed as a promotional strategy that brings local artists into contact with the global art scene. However, the literature provides little information about the biennial’s international ‘outside.’ Nor is there any explanation of why the biennials discussed here vary so widely in their intent, or why the international ‘outside’ should be receptive to local ideas, or how this informs a multicultural art world. The underlying assumption of this classical ‘transmitter’ model is that the biennial broadcasts information to an audience or public sphere according to a program that reflects its viewers’ preferences. In contrast, this paper contends that rather than involving a physical ‘outside’ or mechanical receiver of messages, a public sphere or configuration of the public is embedded in each biennial’s observational structure.20 This pattern of ‘being-with’—the presentation of the self in the light of other presentations—is what Butler (like Habermas, following Goffman) has called the
“theatrical self-constitution” of the public space of appearance. As Goffman21 argued, The perspective employed in this report is that of the theatrical performance;
the principles derived are dramaturgical ones [. . .] [O]n stage one player presents himself in the guise of a character to characters projected by other players; the audience constitutes a third party to the interaction.
Goffman goes on to suggest that this type of action unfolds as an encounter in which participants form a visible public for each other and their actions are influenced by the presence of other individuals; in short, they perform for each other. This performance enables the actors to present themselves to their designated public in specific ways, revealing a specific position to be observed by the public. For Butler, this idea is further transformed when people or objects assemble in public. The assembly is about the assembly itself rather than just “a performative enactment of bodies”22; it speaks, and about itself. Here, the public assembly extends beyond its theatrical performativity and becomes self-reflective, speaking to itself by relating itself to its other.
In each edition, the biennials studied here introduce an abundance of new artists from diverse cultural contexts and must install new frames accordingly. The creation of these frames depends on a certain density or compactness, in which deliberations occur as attributions and self-attributions of social classifications—that is, identifica-tions emerge from a process of social comparison.23 In this way, each biennial observes itself within the horizon of the ‘outside’, embedding this in its own observations and creating a particular point of view. Global/local observations are part of the overall framing process, forming the initial and closing brackets; a particular frame is formed through the inclusion of something external—something from outside its kin (i.e., habitual relationships). In short, each biennial sets the stage for a gathering of diversity—a showplace for its own construction of itself.
By affiliating and linking their kin with observations from other places, biennials create an inward outlook to which observations are directed. According to Bydler,24
“Through the biennial context itself, artistic practices are disembedded and re-embed-ded.” For Butler, not every biennial automatically facilitates democratic deliberation;
only those biennials can be theatrical in enacting the bodily conditions of being.
Beyond assembly, or even a series of assemblies, the biennial must relate itself to the
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Art World Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
struggles of other assemblies—what Bruno Latour has called an “assembly of assem-blies.”25 This entails a series of challenges, as biennials are not just art assemblies but must also serve the purposes of tourism, city branding, employment, school education, and so on. The biennial can perhaps make these other purposes part of its gathering—
part of its own theatrical performance. To do so, the biennial cannot simply serve as an agent of standardization but must deploy its paradoxical structure of increasing diversity and anchoring as a polarity that can serve wider democratic goals.
Biennials and the ‘Missing’ Audience
The first part of this paper considered the inclusion and exclusion of artists within the global world of biennials in the particular context of participation and democracy, where the latter is understood as an important feature of biennials’ foundation narrative. However, there is another twist in how biennials approach participation and the issues of inclusion and exclusion. In this context, participation refers to the
participation of artists or countries, as for instance, in the list of participating artists and professionals or countries with pavilions. Similarly, for open-call biennials, participation is restricted to this art world group; surprisingly, the democratic
discourse rarely mentions the other key ‘participants’—the biennial audience—except when counting the number of visitors. These numbers are reported with pride in exhibition catalogues, on websites, or in press features.
“Its [Gwangju Biennale’s] closing ceremony on October 23rd with a record attendance of around 800,000 visitors.”26
“A record number of visitors attend Venice Biennale art show.”27
“The 2018 Adelaide Biennial Draws Record Crowds.”28
“Rabat’s First Biennale Welcomes 51,000 Visitors in Three Weeks.”29
Table 3: Big numbers
Some biennials collect a few additional statistical details about their visitors, such as country of origin or nature of visit (professional, etc.). Some also conduct customer satisfaction surveys or small-scale self-evaluations, as in the case of the Liverpool Biennial (2016, 2018) and the Coventry Biennial (2017).30 Given the importance of reporting attendance figures, the biennials’ neglect of audience-related knowledge production is surprising. Beyond this lack of empirical research, there is little theoriz-ing of biennial audiences despite the wide-rangtheoriz-ing intellectual debates in this field and the supposed role of democracy as a common motive for audience engagement. Much of the visitor studies research literature emphasizes the role of democracy, typically with reference to external education services such as lectures, films, brochures, and audio guides.31 As well as the acquisition of knowledge, education and learning encompass broader values like empowerment, alternative thinking, social resistance, and aesthetic pleasure, but visitor studies of this kind tend to be confined to museums and public galleries, with no links to biennials. In the interests of building such links, this paper advances a more theoretical analysis to guide future empirical research.
To illuminate the relationship between biennials and their audience, the role of the art audience must first be addressed in more general terms. Practical reasons aside, there are two conceptual arguments that explain the neglect of the art biennial audience. (1)
Inclusion and Exclusion in the Art World Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
The biennial serves a different function than the museum. (2) The audience is not relevant to the art presented at these events because it does not contribute to their status as art but is merely an epiphenomenal effect of biennials.
(1) Art museums present an art historical narrative of the development of art by focusing on established artists, often through a series of inter-connected spaces.32 This selective practice is justified by the museum’s narrative of presenting the most
accomplished works of high artistic merit. The visitor’s role is to enact, experience, and learn, broadening their feelings and knowledge through this narrative, which includes the selected works and environmental elements such as the architecture of the museum, the guidance provided, and additional reading.33 Can this understanding also be applied to biennials? The following are some answers from a small survey of leading curators, who were asked about the function of the biennial.
“[…] should be fundamentally a place for new debates to emerge, new kinds of intellectual propositions to be grappled with.”34
“I believe that the biennale should propose something […].”35
“I think biennials are […] more like dealing with the questions of the contemporary issues.”36
“[…] a testing ground for new ideas […] sites for dialogue about issues.”37
“[…] it’s like a ‘heat exchanger’ or fishing with dynamite.”38
“[…] to start to have dialogue in the contemporary art sector.”39
“[…] possibility of seeing things from everywhere […] or creating discourses about everywhere.”40
Table 4: Function of the biennial (Source: interviews conducted by the author)
These replies evidence an understanding of the biennial that places great emphasis on the present and the contemporary, with a special focus on dialogue. Unlike the museum’s focus on a selective narrative of well-established cases, the biennial sets itself apart by seeking to present something in the making. As it does not present a proven concept or idea and cannot rely on a historical narrative, the biennial cannot adopt the educative approach to audience inclusion that is typical of art museums.41 For that reason, the audience may not appear on the biennial’s radar because it cannot operate with the visitor concept that works for art museums.
These replies evidence an understanding of the biennial that places great emphasis on the present and the contemporary, with a special focus on dialogue. Unlike the museum’s focus on a selective narrative of well-established cases, the biennial sets itself apart by seeking to present something in the making. As it does not present a proven concept or idea and cannot rely on a historical narrative, the biennial cannot adopt the educative approach to audience inclusion that is typical of art museums.41 For that reason, the audience may not appear on the biennial’s radar because it cannot operate with the visitor concept that works for art museums.