The Cook, The Curator, The Bike & The Festivals: Venice, Kassel, Münster
by Andrew Maerkle

Perhaps super-curator Harald Szeemann (1993-2005) earnestly wanted to warn would-be participants away from the Venice Biennale when he said, in a 1999 Artforum interview with Robert Storr (See P. 84), "All these nations, or ethnic groups, are looking for a platform to try and bolster their cultural identity or national conscience or whatever it is. This is very touching and frightening, and in the end it may be more interesting psychologically than artistically. There is a problem of First and Third World, between the countries that have national pavilions in the Giardini and the ones that don't."

One might interpret Szeemann's words to mean, "Don't come here looking for validation, you won't find it because we cannot deal with you"—a refrain all too familiar to asylum seekers and immigrants looking toward Europe in the past decade. Unperturbed, new Biennale entries such as the Afghanistan Pavilion and the Central Asia Pavilion debuted, in locations beyond the Giardini, to rave reviews in 2005 (see AAP 45). They proved not only interesting artistically, but also compelling because their artists communicated the psychological complexities of their realities, for example, through the restrained choreography of Lida Abdul's film in the Afghanistan Pavilion, or the spare yet baroque outdoor performances recorded by Almagul Menlibayeva in the Central Asia Pavilion.

This year's Biennale features a record 77 national pavilions with Robert Storr, now in position as the festival's first American director, extending special invitations to pavilions from Africa and Turkey (see P. 97). Furthermore, the rare convergence of Venice, the five-year periodic contemporary art survey documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the 10-year periodic festival skulptur projekte münster, also Germany, may set tone for years to come.

Venice and documenta put themselves in the position of assessing the state of world art, but that world has changed incredibly in recent years, with institutions and attitudes opening up to a wide range of perspectives. Contemporary art centers in Istanbul collaborate with counterparts in Kosovo and Manila. Curators make serious efforts to travel, research and communicate with artists and art professionals outside their comfort zones. Artists pass easily between different cities and milieus. The market has been radically reshaped by the proliferation of art fairs, innovative new galleries and a boom in spending. With all eyes fixed on Europe, one can anticipate a referendum on the multi-track tensions that define, complicate and enliven art today: the West's drive to learn about and assimilate foreign cultures into "world history;" the desire by those outside the West to have their cultures acknowledged and understood on their own terms; and the Western canon's self-justifying enforcement of it sown limits. Will these festivals reconsolidate the border of contemporary art, or seek out a new paradigm altogether?

Tellingly, the curators have eschewed diagnostic assertions in favor of rhetorical inquiries. Storr's Venice exhibition, "Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind - Art in the Present Tense" tread lightly through the wasteland of failed antagonisms, namely between intellect and intuition, that now coexist in contemporary art practice. The exhibition seems promising in its attempt to synthesize disparate strands of art. Japanese artist Izumi Kato's dream-like paintings of strange animistic creatures will share space with Australian Shaun Gladwell's edgy videos and Chinese filmmaker Yang Fudong's noir-inflected Brazilian artists and French artists with ties to Africa such as Philippe Parreno and Adel Abdessemed, both born in Algeria, alongside older stalwarts Louise Bourgeois and American Bruce Nauman.

Documenta 12, organized by artistic director Roger M. Buergel and curator Ruth Noack, also takes a reflective approach, questioning the repercussions of modernity. The exhibition bears the burden of being marketed as an "authoritative worldwide seismography of contemporary art," yet it was not until 2002 that Okwui Enwezor's documenta11 embraced a truly global perspective. Criticized initially as pandering to identity politics, Enwezor's exhibition drew the largest audience in documenta's history with 650,000 visitors.

Buergel and Noack do not feel any pressure to one-up Enwezor. In an interview with ArtAsiaPacific in New York, Noack emphasized: "We're not into representation, we're into production and the relationships between places because, if you look historically, they are more intertwined than national theories of art suggest."

Documenta 12's focus reflects the strain of recent years. European and American intellectuals, in dealing with the failure of the Iraq War and the political distortion of liberal democratic ideals, must now rethink not only the assumptions of modernism, but those of post-modernism as well. Noack further commented, "We thought we had criticized modernity and it had evolved, but we find ourselves at the same place: how to talk to each other, how to think in common terms and not just platitudes. We are returning to modernity not because we think there's one model that applies across the world but because each place has its own experience."

Noack traveled extensively to conduct research, encountering surprises along the way. In Malaysia, a group of 20 young artists "hijacked" her in the middle of the night and drove her to a secluded shed to discuss documenta. Needless to say, she left impressed with the vibrancy and initiative of the Malaysian art scene. But she also reflects, "In the beginning people are angry because they feel they're left out of this dominant structure, but when you talk with them it gets interesting because they are responding to more of a preconception."

She is pragmatic about the exhibition's hegemonic position: "I relish in it. It's great opportunity that comes with equal responsibility, but I wouldn't deconstruct it. My responsibility is to anticipate 650,000 people coming to Kassel to look at art they have probably never heard of and may not be prepared to understand. How do you deal with the gap between artists and public? You have to avoid didacticism, because that kills the spirit, but you also have to be clear. I trust people. If they are told that they are responsible for their own experience and that they should use this opportunity to look at work, then that will help."

As for the artists, only a few key names have been officially released in advance of the opening, among them celebrity chef Ferran Adrià, of El Bulli restaurant in Barcelona, who admitted to England's Guardian newspaper that, "I feel like an intruder. Artists all over battle their lives to received an invitation to display their work at documenta and now I, a cook, am asked to go along!" The learning curves in Kassel may be steeper than even experienced art goers expect.

Among the three exhibitions, skulptur projekte munster is the most clearly defined in that its mission is tied to the town of Münster itself. Most of the works at Munster are commissions with an aspect of site-specificity. Artists are given a year to develop projects that can be integrated into the public sphere. The organizers have never made any particular effort to include a broad survey of international artists.

Kasper König, who worked on the first exhibition and has overseen all subsequent editions, refers to it as "an ongoing research project" and views the alignment with Venice and documenta as more incidental than indicative of Münster's ambitions. König told AAP, "We have not looked geographically. There are artists from different cultural backgrounds, most of whom live in Europe, but we don't look at it from a national point of view."

Guy Ben-Ner, who represented Israel at Venice in 2005 and takes part in Münster this year, compares the two experiences: "I wasn't interested in representing my country and it felt very weird when they decided I would do the Israel Pavilion. I have five months to produce an idea and finish it. Münster is more supportive in that it happens every 10 years and there's time to prepare."

Ben-Ner, Known for his self-reflexive videos that ingeniously adapt classic adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe to the strictures of domestic life (see AAP 49), will use his new project to poke fun at Münster 's reputation as a town of bicycles. He is working on a film in which he and his children sneak into a museum and assemble a functioning bicycle from classic Dada ready-made sculptures such as Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, which they then use as an escape vehicle. Ben-Ner downplays the project's allegorical undertones: "I don't emphasize it. It's important that the images I use are iconic so there is a feeling that one bicycle was taken apart and shared by the artists throughout art history."

There is a refreshing simplicity to both Ben-Ner's approach to dismantling the contemporary art canon—namely, by reassembling it—and Münster 's laissez faire attitude toward keeping up with contemporary culture. With its artist list published well in advance and many of the proposals underway, Münster generates a different kind of anticipation than documenta's closely guarded preparations. Nothing is at stake, yet everything is possible.

Ben-Ner counsels, "I don't naïvely think of it as an open space without any power of worth involved, but it will exist there as it always exists. The big shows, either you fight them or you try to enjoy them. I realized it's usually hard to enjoy them. People go suffer but what you can get from them, especially this year, is a general feeling of energy."

The Venice Biennale, 52nd International Art Exhibition, opens in Venice on June 10 and continues through November 21; documenta 12 opens in Kassel on June 16 and continues through September 23; skulptur projekte münster opens in Münster on June 16 and continues through September 30.