Biennials and Hegemony Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
shift.5 While acknowledging that biennials are created to promote the context—city, region, country—in which they are organized, Basualdo argued that criticism of this instrumental nature disguises the radical, subversive potential of biennials in helping to open up the very Western art world. At stake here, is the potential of the biennial to help breach the Western ‘hegemony’ on signification that was not only controlling the art world, but also the world in general. This would become the go-to-argument legitimizing biennials for years to come.6
In recent years, the pendulum has swung back to attention to the complicity of biennials in economic dominance. Revisiting earlier debates about the instrumental nature of biennials, this time the discussion is explicitly framed in terms of neoliberal
‘hegemony.’7 The main target of this literature is a certain type of biennial, organized through entrepreneurial strategies of states and corporations, aiming to lure tourists, middle-class consumers, and the international art crowd to art spectacles that promote the economy of cities, regions, countries, or corporations.8 These events accommodate contemporary capitalism’s need to continuously mobilize people’s desires while shaping their identities.9 In view of their promotional agendas, they tend to be risk-averse, employing forms of censorship or self-censorship; after all, who wants to risk inconveniencing their paymaster? For Chantal Mouffe, their emergence reflects the “post-political” reality of late-capitalist societies, in which the public sphere has been transformed from a core battlefield of explicit agnostic political disagreement into an advertisement domain of consensual soft power, and where critical gestures are quickly appropriated and neutralized.10
This short overview suggests that in the discussion on biennials, the term hegemony is generally used to refer to forms of cultural and economic dominance operating at a global scale. Furthermore, these forms of dominance tend to be discussed in isola-tion.11 Also, this literature seems to use the term hegemony without a great deal of explanation.12 This is not surprising, as the term has become part of our everyday speech. However, this diminishes its analytical potential, especially when we discuss the role of biennials in relation to dominance in a specific place and time, like Thailand in 2018. We reach that conclusion on the basis of Antonio Gramsci’s interpretation of hegemony in relation to situated forms of dominance.13 In Nancy Fraser’s reading, Gramsci understands hegemony as “the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural by installing the presuppositions of its own worldview as the common sense of society as a whole. Its organizational counterpart is the hegem-onic bloc: a coalition of disparate social forces that the ruling class assembles and through which it asserts its leadership.”14 Hegemony thus broadens the reach of domination as it replaces direct coercion for consent through agreement on common sense.15 Fraser adds to her description that hegemony relates to assumptions about what is just and right regarding both the cultural and economic reality. It is important to stress that Gramsci was writing about a specific place and time—early twentieth-century Italy—and that hegemony in his conception relates to the dominance of a concrete situated alliance. This alliance and the worldview around which it is built need to be actively constructed and maintained.16 Meanwhile, challenges to hegemony necessitate building an alternative political alliance—or counter-hegemonic bloc—
around an alternative common sense or counter-hegemony.17
We suggest following Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as a situated, time and space bound “settlement” supported by a specific alliance, and expressing both cultural and economic dominance. This implies foregrounding the—so far under-researched—
empirical questions “In which situated hegemony with related forms of cultural and
economic dominance does this biennial take place?,” and “What is the precise role of this biennial regarding this hegemony and its related forms of dominance?”18 Does it operate as a “biennial of resistance,” or function as post-political affirmation of hegemony?19 Furthermore, we suggest that it is not enough to answer this question by looking at the financial sources behind a biennial alone. Instead, we suggest focusing on the precise strategies involved in the organization of biennials. As will become clear, it is important to differentiate between strategies of organization and curatorial strategies in that discussion.
Art and Hegemony in Thailand
As even the most cursory observer of international news will know, over the past decades Thai politics has been in virtually constant turmoil, with repeated street occupations, bloody clearances, and military coups. The by now extensive literature on these conflicts suggests that they are the expression of a fundamental rift that has characterized Thai society at least since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932.20 This rift is rooted in fundamentally opposing views of the Thai nation that are defended by different—although changing—alliances. The dominant worldview—or hegemony—centers on the three pillars of nation, religion, and monarchy. It portrays the nation as a mystical unity (samakkhitham) and stresses the uniformity of Thai identity, organized around ethnolinguistic homogeneity, Buddhism, deference to a quasi-divine king, and ‘Thai-ness’ (kwampenthai).21 Furthermore, the nation is pre-sented as having a distinctly graded hierarchy with ‘good people’ (khondi) who aspire to be ‘siwilai’22 at the top, and with Bangkok as its Sino-Thai center, overseeing
peripheries like the ‘Lao’ Northeast and ‘Malay’ South.23 A strong state needs to defend this unity against external and internal threats, thus achieving ‘progress’ and making Thailand a significant country in the world.24
Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit argue that this hegemony remained dominant over time, as it was continuously reactivated by consecutive alliances (or “historic blocs”).25 While the monarchy and bureaucracy were original core parties, from the 1950s onwards the military became more central. Beginning in the early 1970s, the alliance changed again as the military lost its central position in favor of a ‘royalist democracy’
around the ‘network monarchy.’26 The dominant economic actors also shifted over time, resulting in rapid accumulation by the monarchy first, and generals later. In the 1960s and 1970s, national banks became central economic actors, and large interna-tional corporations such as ThaiBev and CP Group thereafter.27 However, the hegem-ony that these alliances supported remained remarkably constant, and it naturalized the fabulous wealth of the core actors, as well as vast national economic inequalities.28 Of course, this hegemony has not gone unchallenged. In part, challenges came from alternative factions that also supported the strong-state worldview; see, for instance, the challenge to the network monarchy by Thaksin Shinawatra in the past two decades.29 Challenges have also been mounted by counter-alliances propagating a second—altogether different—worldview.30 This alternative view is built around an egalitarian popular nationalism, situating sovereignty in the people rather than the palace. This view embraces the nation’s diversity, and suggests that different groups should have equal access to power. The nation-state should improve the well-being of members of these groups, while privileges and economic inequality are criticized. Over time, different alliances have again supported this counter-hegemonic view. While successfully mobilizing transformation at times, these critics of the strong-state worldview have been systematically denigrated as ‘un-Thai.’ Control of counter-hegem-onic opposition has also involved the legal system, for instance, through draconian
Biennials and Hegemony Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
lèse-majesté laws that make criticism of the monarchy in Thailand virtually impos-sible.31 Whenever counter-hegemonic alliances have become too threatening, they have been systematically met with military coups, resulting in what Chai-Anan Samutwanit has termed the “vicious cycle” of Thai politics.32 It is a stark reminder of Gramsci’s warning that behind hegemony lies an armor of coercion.33
Art practices in Thailand have always operated within this context of hegemonic struggle. Since the 1932 revolution, we can at least discern three distinct roles of art in relation to hegemony.34 First, as David Teh observes, after the end of the absolute monarchy, “Popular sovereignty and newly mooted freedoms had to be sacrificed at the altars of national unity and progress, and in order to be imagined, these ideals had to be imaged. There was plenty for art to do.”35 Modern art was thus conceived in tandem with an evolving conception of the modern state. A Fine Arts Department was established “to help mould the public culture of the post-absolutist era.”36 In 1933, a national art academy that would become Silpakorn University was founded by Corrado Feroci, or Silpa Bhirasri, ‘the father of modern art in Thailand.’ Feroci’s views on art were conservative, equating art with beauty and goodness, indirectly restricting a more critical role for art.37 Silpakorn University would come to exercise an iron grip on all facets of Thai art practice for decades to come, regulating access to teaching jobs, annual National Exhibitions, state commissions, and competitions sponsored by banks and insurance companies.38 The gatekeepers were Silpakorn-educated ‘artist-civil servants’ with a monopoly on signification and expression of Thai culture. Art thus functions to image Thai culture in a way that affirms Thailand’s hegemony. It is this role to which Mit Jai Inn’s remark in our introduction alludes.
In the course of the 1980s, cracks started to appear in this all-encompassing ‘Silpakorn system.’ Alternative art schools were established and foreign-educated artists returned without “personal debts to the national institution or its senior functionaries.”39 Art spaces like the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art (BIMA) provided new podia. And while the role of ‘artist-civil servants’ within the ‘Silpakorn system’ was institutionalized in 1985 in the figure of the ‘national artist’—a honorific for yearly elected artists, whose benefits include a considerable lifelong stipend—art was increasingly wrested free from the narrow confines of Silpakorn-mandated views and the related Thai hegemony. The result was a flurry of activities in the 1990s, including recurring artist-led events such as the Chiang Mai Social Installation, Womanifesto, and Asiatopia. Meanwhile, in Bangkok alternative art spaces opened up such as Project 304 and About Studio/About Café.
Open to imagining diversity, these initiatives veered far from the official narrative, thus resulting in a second role for art of implicitly and explicitly countering hegemony.
However, the end of the twentieth century also saw the seeds of the realignment of art with the hegemony to come. One year after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a joint effort by Silpakorn University, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority, and the Tourism
Authority of Thailand delivered the Bangkok Art Project. Illustrating the utility of a new understanding of ‘contemporary art,’ this exhibition helped to forge a third relationship between art and hegemony. At its core was the establishment of the Office of Contem-porary Art and Culture (OCAC) within the Ministry of Culture in 2002, directed by established curator Apinan Poshyananda. According to David Teh, “In his six years at its helm, the OCAC drove both the successful reencompassing of art by the state and the concomitant collapse of art’s heterogeneity.”40 Apinan and the OCAC would dream up various large contemporary art exhibitions with a remarkable similarity, including punny names, reappearing artists, and a focus on the spectacle, and sometimes centered on packaging socially disturbing events—such as the 2004 tsunami and the
Biennials and Hegemony Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
violent crackdown of a popular movement—in ways befitting Thailand’s hegemony.
One example is Imagine Peace, organized in June 2010 when the casualties of the most recent bloody crackdown were barely buried. As David Teh observes, “Here we saw art’s independence from the state, tentatively staked out in the 1970s, extended in the 1980s and ‘90s, collapse in a spectacular heap.”41 Art’s affirmative role in relation to hegemony was firmly re-established.
Three Biennials
For contemporary art in Thailand, 2018 was a remarkable year. Around the world, cities, regions, and nations had been jumping on the perennial bandwagon, resulting in a ‘biennial boom’ of more than 300 events.42 However, despite earlier perennial
initiatives, Thailand did not yet feature on the list of global events.43 This all changed when, in the timespan of a few months in 2017, organizers announced various inaugural biennials. The character of the three events discussed here would prove remarkably diverse. With core funding from ThaiBev—a giant drinks company with enormous real estate interests in Bangkok—the Bangkok Art Biennale was led by artistic director Apinan and his curatorial team. Under the tagline “Beyond Bliss,” they showed work of seventy-five Thai and international artists in shopping malls, heritage buildings, art spaces, temples, and a dedicated ‘BAB box’. Funded by the OCAC and Krabi municipality, the Thailand Biennale reflected on the theme “Edge of the Wonder-land.” UK-based Chinese curator Jiehong Jiang and his curatorial team commissioned site-specific work by some fifty local and international artists, presented at outdoor public sites in the beautiful natural surroundings of touristy Krabi province. The Bangkok Biennial—the first of the three events to take place—was a decentralized, artist-run event. Initiated by Lee Anantawat, Jeff Gompertz, and Liam Morgan, it had neither central curation nor central funding, relying instead on the collective efforts of the organizers of about seventy ‘pavilions.’ What is the relation of these events to Thailand’s hegemony? And which strategies have structured that relation?
Bangkok Art Biennale
With a week of opening events in late-October 2018, Apinan’s long-held dream of creat-ing a contemporary art biennial finally became reality: at twenty venues, the Bangkok Art Biennale opened for three months. Seventy-five artists—including big international names like Marina Abramovic´, Yayoi Kusama, and Elmgreen & Dragset—showed often spectacular works to a public mainly consisting of Bangkok’s middle-class and
international tourists. From an organizational point of view, this biennial is the reflection of a new, capable Thai elite, valuing a certain idea of smooth professionalism.
While main sponsor ThaiBev was an indispensable partner, the spider in the web creating Thailand’s first “world-class art event”44 was its artistic director. In interviews in the run-up to the opening, Apinan referenced various earlier one-off events like Siam Art Fair and Bangkok Bananas, organized while he was working for the Ministry of Culture.45 However, in his opinion, in the complicated Thai setting, “Hosting a proper biennial requires a lot more money and professional commitment.”46 Thanks to an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Thai bureaucracy, the willing ear of the CEO of ThaiBev—to whom he is art and culture advisor—and a Moleskine bursting with high-profile international art world contacts, Apinan finally pulled off what he could not do as a bureaucrat. This no doubt informed a certain triumphant boldness, which he exuded in all manner of international (media) appearances.47
One has to admit, Apinan did pull it off. But what exactly did he pull off? Unfolding here, with many distracting bells and whistles, was the affirmation of Thailand’s hegemony, through a new way of imagining Thailand—the third way of relating art to
Biennials and Hegemony Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
hegemony discussed above—heavily focused on the economy, but with implicit support for the (military) regime. This link to Thailand’s hegemony and its “historic bloc” was illustrated by the location of the biennial’s many opening events, suggesting close links to Thailand’s Sino-Thai economic elites and the army. And the instrumental nature of this biennial for the urban economy was always clear, as Apinan expected that, “it will not only encourage tourism and positively impact our economy but will lead to benefit the quality of life of Thai people in terms of commerce and services.”48 Here the biennial is employed—rather traditionally—for branding Bangkok as a city of art, while envisioning its public as consumers, finally able to reach their full potential as worldly citizens by experiencing contemporary art in leisure spaces. The Bangkok
Bangkok Art Biennale, Aurèle Ricard’s Lost Dog Ma Long (2018) in front of the ‘BAB Box’ on the site of ThaiBev’s One Bangkok real estate project (March 2020). Photography by the authors.
Bangkok Art Biennale, Opening event at Sino-Thai heritage destination
Lhong 1919 (October 2018). Photography by the authors. Bangkok Art Biennale, Zero (2018) by Elmgreen & Dragset along the Chao Praya River, in front of ThaiBev’s East Asiatic Building (January 2018).
Photography by the authors.
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Art Biennale also related to economic development in a second—more innovative—
way as well: by using art to ‘enrich’ the spaces where the exhibition took place.49 Those spaces included existing shopping malls and hotels, but also—more importantly—the enormous real-estate holdings of ThaiBev, including its One Bangkok project located next to the purpose-built ‘BAB Box’—likely to be the project’s future sales office—and the beautifully dilapidated East Asiatic building, to be redeveloped into a luxury Plaza Athenee hotel. Despite a smokescreen of supposed subversiveness, to which we will return later, the biennial dovetailed with the interests of the state as well. After all, according to Apinan, “the social malaise and political upheavals of the past decade have made it difficult to organise” large-scale recurring art events.50 It is no surprise then that, at the 2014 “Innovative City Forum” in Tokyo, he spoke about the then five months old coup d’etat in positive terms, crediting the military as “quite creative and contribut[ing] much to bringing back happiness to the people.”51
Affirmation of Thailand’s hegemony was realized by a strategy of ‘total curation,’
integrating organizational and curatorial strategies behind the biennial. This strategy is reflected in a string of decisions: with Apinan as artistic director and lead curator, this biennial de facto operated without an independent curator; the curatorial team mainly selected artists working on themes that do not touch on issues sensitive to the Thai hegemony; control over Thai artists—who are ‘risky’ for this hegemony—was further enhanced by the fact that the international curators were not supposed to work with them; and on top of this, various artists and curators participated in this biennial on the basis of personal favors relating to earlier contributions of Apinan to their careers.52 These decisions supported in an ornamentalization of the presented works, which often had a spectacular, experiential nature. Works that were conceptual
Bangkok Art Biennale, Komkrit Tepthian’s Giant Twins (2018)
at Wat Arun – Temple of Dawn (January 2019). Photography by the authors.
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in nature were reduced to their superficial ornamental appearance as well, through a strategy of de-contextualization. Throughout, the exhibition was very text-light, comprehensive curatorial texts were largely absent, and a discursive embedding of the works in a larger context was missing. In short, without meaning-generating compo-nents, works were reduced to mere objects in venues, neutralizing the critical potential
in nature were reduced to their superficial ornamental appearance as well, through a strategy of de-contextualization. Throughout, the exhibition was very text-light, comprehensive curatorial texts were largely absent, and a discursive embedding of the works in a larger context was missing. In short, without meaning-generating compo-nents, works were reduced to mere objects in venues, neutralizing the critical potential