Spurred by their proliferation in the last two decades, international contemporary art biennials have become the locus for heated controversies. On one hand, skeptics underline the inalienable and tight relationship between the art market and the biennials, focusing on spicing up the familiar market-oriented artists along with the new tastes. On the other hand, biennials offer an exciting change of the locales and promote international cultural exchange and multiculturalism that has been underscored since 1989 when Jean-Hubert Martin curated the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris.
Art biennials consist of a complex web of relations among national cultural policies, art markets and usual/unusual/exotic/non-exotic/innovative art practices. Despite their inevitable link to the art market and the marketing goals of the funders, I believe the biennials suggest a multi-faceted position beyond the promotion of 'local exocitism' and market-dependency.
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"International biennials are to the art market what fusion food is to the culinary world: mainstream ingredients with a local flavor snuck into the mix, but not enough to aggravate the conventional palate. What recipe possesses the right balance to allow for necessary mass consumption? Or course, nothing too excessive: Let's start with something a little unusual, say papaya? And then mix it with chicken pâté. Everybody eats chicken, right? And systematically, those with purchasing power dictate the margins of taste.
In the process of 'glocalism' or fusion, power politics play the determining role. Getting back to contemporary art, give me something familiar enough, say Olafur Eliasson, and mix in a little Solmaz Shahbazi? That's just about mild and new enough. I like chicken, and papaya sure sounds sexy.
All of this is a problematic because art is not food, and within the aggressive parameters of the market-driven culture industry, international biennials are the market's white lie: International Food Day. They are about consumption, they are about tourism, they are about branding, and they are about new product lines. But thankfully, they also have a comforting slogan: promoting international cultural exchange, art and ideas.
When the meal is over, although we believe we have widened out horizons (even though it was just chicken!), we are often still too uncomfortable to pick up a papaya the next time we are at a fruit stand. Perhaps it is indeed time to regain our Jamesonian 'distance of critique' because fusion good has yet to fulfill its promise, and we are always still hungry after leaving the table."
(Mai Abu ElDahab)
"Events like contemporary art biennials, initiated by local authorities to promote the position of locales on the global map, are then global events by nature, while they claim to be locally meaningful and productive in terms of new localities. The introduction of 'foreign,' international knowledge, cultures, artworks, and discourses are not only proof of the capacity to master international cultural exchanges and thereby better defend local characteristics. More significant yet, this process reveals that international or global cultures influence and even condition the new reality of the locales. The home is being voluntarily turned into a kind of non-home, a constantly changing and evolving in-between space, a kind of 'glocal' land. The new localities being generated are definitively impure, hybrid, and therefore innovative."
(Hou Hanru)
(Quotes from The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe.)
