Wired News Wire service news & photos Wired Magazine HotBot (the Web) Contemporary art bie... Around the World in 80 Biennials | Asian sex
Home

Wired News Wire service news & photos Wired Magazine HotBot (the Web) Contemporary art bie... Around the World in 80 Biennials

Unlike art trade fairs like Art Basel or the Armory Show , where dealers and galleries pay to exhibit, biennials tend to be government-funded, centrally curated and designed to put the host city on the map. On any given day of any given year, an art biennial is being staged somewhere in the world, attracting its own nomadic tribe of curators, connoisseurs, collectors and curious locals. But what would it be like to spend an entire year going from one to the next?

Well, congratulations! You've won a place on the Art Biennials Mystery Tour! Cancel all your appointments and grab a toothbrush, it starts right now!

Your first destination is sunny Tirana, Albania. The Tirana Biennial 3 is themed around "Sweet Taboos," but don't expect passé taboos like sex, drugs or money; here in Tirana what's taboo is standard organization. They're running the show backward, with the opening party and catalog at the end. If you think that has more to do with running late than subversion, well, keep your cynicism sweetly taboo, please!

After Tirana you're off to Venice, the elegant grandmother of all modern biennials, founded in 1895 at the height of what critic Ulf Wuggenig calls "the age of the gold standard regime ... the belle époque of globalization."

This year Venice has two female curators, María de Corral and Rosa Martínez. The theme is "Perpetual Genius," but don't worry, you're not in for room after room of Great White Males.

The first thing you'll see at the Arsenale is 1970s-style agitprop from the Guerrilla Girls, then lots of video art made by emerging artists from emerging places. It's a pity Gregor Schneider's daring plan to turn the Piazza San Marco into Mecca was rejected by the Venetian authorities. But the granny of all biennales still has teeth.

There won't be much time to hang around Venice; you're off to the second Beijing International Art Biennale in China. Its theme is "Contemporary Art with Humanistic Concerns." That sounds good -- one in the eye for critics of China's human rights record!

The Beijing curators seem to know where you've come from: "A lot of narrative and symbolic works of excellence have emerged, which have broken the convention of the Venice Biennale paying attention to the video art. That method of image viewing is comparatively time-consuming and doesn't leave a deep impression on viewers."

So Beijing has hung a lot of paintings in its biennale. Whatever style they're in, there's a certain socialist realism about the curators' final statement: "When art is attracting attentions of various circles, it is a good chance for enterprises to gain business opportunities, to expand industries and to enhance reputation."

While we're in Asia, let's swing by the third Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, then the Yokohama Triennale , where the art this year is presented inside packing cases in two huge working warehouses down on the dockside, just in case you need to be reminded how closely the global trade in ideas relates to global trade itself.

Then there's just time to catch the end of the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, where "60 non-artists, from fashion designer Muiccia Prada to British farmer Ross Cherrington" have picked the artists. After that break from art -- well, from art picked by art curators, anyway -- it's back to Europe, or rather a city that may one day be in Europe, if Turkey meets the EU's membership criteria: Istanbul.

At the Istanbul Biennial , the curators have invited artists to live and work in the city for several months. "The sites are an apartment block, an old customs storehouse, a former tobacco depository, a gallery, a shop, a theater and an office building.... The walk between these venues should also be seen as a part of the biennial experience."

Note: You are reading this message either because you can not see our css files (served from Lygo, a Lycos image server, for performance reasons), or because you do not have a standards-compliant browser. Read our design notes for details.

Note: You are reading this message instead of message board comments either because you have javascript turned off, are running software that prevents you from viewing 3rd party javascript files (ours are served from Akamai for performance reasons), or because you do not have a supported browser. Supported browsers currently include Firefox and Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher on a PC, and Safari on a Mac.

We are translated daily into Korean and Japanese Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Lycos® is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University.

This is cache, read story here

admin – Tue, 2005 – 10 – 18 17:01