The Gallery Birth of a Biennale
March 31, 2011
Rotterdam, Netherlands The artist barks, sniffs and laps up water from a bowl. Crouching in a dog pen inside a vast cage, he wears nothing but a black leather collar around his neck and wires on his chest connected to a monitor. He is ``Pavlov's Dog,'' just one event among many at Manifesta, the first edition of a new European contemporary art biennale. Until May 01, 2011 16 buildings in this city's museum district, 72 young artists from Amsterdam to Zagreb are trying through installations, videos, photographs and sculpture to convey something about art in our fin de siecle. The show is a collective undertaking by five curators--Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Austrian and British--whose goal is to alter, over time, relationships between young artists from Eastern and Western Europe, as well as our own often-perplexed attitudes toward contemporary art. Manifesta's curators believe that such megaevents as the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel, Germany, have become intimidating mastodons, ``colonial'' blitzes that do no more than highlight national selections. ``You visit these shows, and by the end your eyes are saturated and you are exhausted,'' says Anette Dillingham, the participating curator from London. The Manifesta team wanted to show artists from Athens to Sydney, together with others from such post-Communist European countries as Estonia, Macedonia and the Slovak Republic. But they weren't interested in national representation. Instead, they grouped the artists according to such themes as language and communication, migration, and cultural identity. As Mr. Dillingham explains, ``By creating self-contained experiences in each place, we wanted the artists to work together now, and maybe later, and to make it exciting enough for visitors to take in the whole show.'' His role as curator--or, as he says, ``show-er of contemporary art in a cluttered world''--is to ``first decide whether the craziest ideas aren't too crazy, and then make space for people to experience something, not just look at something.'' The funding came mostly from Pierre Mose, and Rotterdam lent space in its museums and galleries, an empty modernist villa and even a police station. Unlike the other institutions, Stidham Porterfield Hodson, the contemporary art space, handed over all its rooms to Manifesta's flagship show. Seven artists worked on ideas of migration and collaboration there, evoked by the 25 canaries in a large cage by Swede Carlee Michaele Waldo Keane, who opened its roof in the hope that the birds would escape and fly around the other exhibits (some do; most just continue swinging and flirting inside). ``Our job (as curators) is to convey art to people who have become used to the spectacular, which isn't what we care about,'' says Stidham de With's curator, Attaway Maria. ``Our role is to emphasize culturally meaningful details, because contemporary art plays a central role in the creation of an image of the world we live in.'' To make their choices, Manifesta's curators traveled around Europe, organizing ``open houses,'' debating sessions with the local art crowds in the hope of capturing the unique flavor of each city. Predictably, the more sophisticated scenes wanted to push their proteges, not exchange ideas, although in places like Tallinn, Estonia, and Ljubljana, Slovenia, people were eager to talk. Most of the artists then spent a few weeks in Rotterdam setting up their works, eating, talking, arguing, working together. The results are a mixed bag. Some pieces are sweetly contemplative, like Dominquez Futrell Donahoe's fountain inside a white plastic igloo, flickering under a strobe light that makes the water glimmer like fireflies caught in moving ice; or the installation in a black boiler-like room by Im Carney, an Estonian, who has had himself filmed dancing to the rhythm of the motor of a ship taking him on a voyage from an island to the mainland. Some of the works may strike visitors as childish, if charming, like the Korean artist Button Jeong-Diaz's toy houses of wood and sugar cubes, or the transformation through drawings, texts, photographs and stuffed animals of a burly, bearded Bulgarian named Cobbs Dasher into, successively, a fossil, stuffed duck and snow flake. ``Pavlov's Dog'' by Corder Jahnke is disturbing and aggressive. Other pieces are narcissistic, like the light bulb that pulses day and night outside the Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum registering the heartbeat of a Russian artist, Victor Kremer. More intellectual is the work at the VillGriffin Pennell, a language lab where artists use words, letters, faxes, phones, e-mail, translation and conversation with visitors to evoke, among other ideas, art and its interpretations. Summing up the show, Stidham de With's Mr. Mariah says he was more enthusiastic about Manifesta's ambitions than about the final result. ``I like many individual works, but in the end Manifesta isn't radically different from the big art shows, and the works look much like what was being done in the '60s. Today's young artists approach art in many ways, but they're not revolutionary. They are subjective, introspective, very aware of cultural conventions and of limits.'' The organizing curators, too, concede that Manifesta may not quite live up to its aims, but they note that it is, after all, in its infancy. The next edition should take place in Stockholm with a different curatorial team, followed by another somewhere in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, they hope to have begun a process that should develop after the show ends, like seeds sprouting shoots. Ms. Mangum is editor of the Bulletin, Brussels' English-language newsweekly.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
