Art Question-Due in 10 hours

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 1 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

Landmark Exhibitions Issue

Biennials Without Borders?

Chin-Tao Wu

My interest in the subject of biennials and their participants’ national affiliations dates back to the

Taipei Biennial of 2004, the fourth such event in our city, and my reaction to a curatorial

provocation there. I had been kept waiting for more than three hours for what turned out to be a

crisp thirty-minute interview with one of the two curators of the show, the Brussels-based Barbara

Vanderlinden. I kicked off by asking her to explain the curatorial policy regarding the number –

five – of native Taiwanese artists chosen to appear. To this she replied by curtly throwing a

question of her own back at me: ‘Do you know how many Taiwanese artists were represented in

the Shanghai Biennial?’ Meaning, of course, that five local representatives seemed to her quite

adequate, thank you very much, and people would certainly be wrong to expect more. Her reply

took my breath away. I had no comeback at the time – not only because I did not know the answer,

but also because I felt I was speaking to a foreign expert who knew her own business better than I

did. In those days I enjoyed neither the funds nor the working conditions to enable me to travel

long distances to biennials, as global art-world insiders apparently can. More recently, however, I

have been able to fly to biennials as remote as Havana and São Paulo, as well as to most of the

Asian and European events, and I find that the question of artistic representation at such

international gatherings is still, after all this time, haunting me.

It may seem odd, even retrograde, to think of contemporary art practice in terms of artists’

nationality and place of birth, at a time when there is so much talk of globalisation, hybridisation,

transnationalisation, world markets and so on. Nevertheless, the question of national affiliation is

critical to what the biennial (or triennial, or quinquennial) has come to stand for since the 1980s.

An increasingly popular institutional structure for the staging of large-scale exhibitions – some

observers refer to ‘the biennialisation of the contemporary art world’ – the biennial is generally

understood as an international festival of contemporary art occurring once every two years. Here

the operative words are, of course, ‘international’ and ‘festival’. On the first of these depends the

second: without the national diversity of its participants, there could be no real celebration or

TATE’S ONLINE RESEARCH JOURNAL

1

2

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 2 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

festivity. ‘International’ in this scheme of things means that artists, almost by definition, come from

all four corners of the world; even events with a specific geographical focus, such as the Fukuoka

Asian Art Triennale, cast their net far beyond their immediate backyard; they rightly see this as

imperative not only for their legitimacy but also for their success.

Artscapes

The fact that artists from remote areas now appear centre-stage in Western events such as the

Kassel documenta or the Venice Biennale is often taken as further proof that the distinction

between centre and periphery has collapsed. In his studies of global cultural flows, for example,

Arjun Appadurai uses the terms ‘artscape’ and ‘ethnoscape’ to characterise the space through which

uninterrupted flows of people – including artists, curators, critics – and high art criss-cross the

globe, as city after city vies to establish its own biennial in order to claim membership of the

international art scene. Like other globalisation theorists, Appadurai emphasises the growing

planetary interdependence and intensification of social relations. Nowhere, however, are we told in

what directions such ‘flows’ flow, nor what new configurations of power relations these seemingly

de-territorialising movements imply.

Hence this attempt to understand the power implications of biennials by looking more closely, and

empirically, at the artists themselves – a luxury in which most theorists have too little time to

indulge. I am, of course, well aware of the risks that a nation-based approach may involve,

including the possibility of inviting criticism from the pro-globalisation lobby in particular. I do not

wish to assert that the international art scene has not undergone significant changes over the last

two decades. But what ultimately is the nature of these changes, and for what reasons have they

taken place? Is the much-discussed collapse of the centre and dissolution of the periphery as

irrefutable as some people would have us believe? Has the global art world really become so

porous, open to all artists irrespective of their origins – even if they come from what Paris or New

York would consider the most marginal places?

To attempt to answer these questions on the basis of national statistics may be unexpected. But

the actual numbers of artists, and the range of countries they come from, prove to be centrally

embedded in the psychology of biennial organisers and feature prominently in their marketing

strategies. The 2006 Singapore Biennial boasted of ‘95 artists from over 38 countries’, while at the

Liverpool Biennial in 1999, ubiquitous banners proclaimed: ‘350 artists, 24 countries, 60 sites, 1

city’. In what follows, I shall take a closer look at the quantitative data underpinning such ‘flat-

world’ claims, by establishing not only where the artists come from, but also, in the case of those

who move or emigrate, which places they choose to emigrate to – in other words, the direction of

the cultural flows they personify. My purpose in examining these data was, firstly, to map out the

shifts that have taken place in the focus of large-scale international exhibitions, which have gone

from a marked Eurocentrism to encompass the world beyond the NATO-pact countries; and

secondly, to ask whether these events have become another powerful Western filter, governing the

access of artists from under-resourced parts of the world to the global mainstream.

3

4

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 3 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

In order to provide a long-term view of these developments, I shall focus here on the Kassel

documenta exhibitions, nine in all, between 1968 and 2007; examining firstly, where the artists

were born; secondly, where they are currently living; and thirdly, the relation between the two. I

use typical regional categories – North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Europe,

however, I have divided in two. For despite EU enlargement, there are still two Europes in

contemporary art practice: one comprises Germany, Italy, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, and

to a lesser degree Holland, Belgium and Spain, which supply the majority of European art figures –

‘Europe A’. The remaining countries, whose artists appear only sporadically at international events,

form what I call ‘Europe B’.

What conclusions, then, can we tentatively draw from this mass of statistics, which seems to

belong more to sociology than to art history? The first and most obvious is that until recently, the

vast majority of artists exhibited at documenta were born in North America and Europe – well over

ninety per cent in fact, reaching a record ninety-six per cent in 1972 (see table 1). Although the

1989 Magiciens de la terre exhibition at the Pompidou Centre is generally considered the first truly

international exhibition and a trend-setter for the next decade, North Americans and Europeans

were still predominant at the 1992 and 1997 documentas. The real change came with Okwui

Enwezor’s documenta 11 in 2002, when the proportion of Western artists fell to a more respectable

sixty per cent. It remained fixed at this lower level in 2007.

Table 1 Where documenta artists were born.

5

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 4 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

The figures on where artists are currently living, meanwhile (see table 2), show that a

substantial number of artists have moved or emigrated from the countries where they were born. In

some cases, of course, artists will divide their time, and their lives, between two or more places –

their birthplace, and where their artistic careers take them (or where they have a better opportunity

of succeeding). Up to and including the 1982 documenta, nearly one hundred per cent of

participating artists lived in North America and Europe. This proportion begins to fall from 1987;

for the 1992 and 1997 documentas it was around ninety per cent, dropping to seventy-six per cent

in 2002 and sixty-one per cent in 2007.

Table 2 Where documenta artists are currently living. (Source: documenta catalogues 1968–2007)

But it is the difference between these two sets of figures – where artists were born and where

they are currently living (see table 3) – that interests me most, because it shows what directions

artistic ‘flows’ have taken. Of course, artists do not move solely because of their work: there may

well be personal circumstances involved; but there is no denying that an artist from, say, Taiwan or

Indonesia stands a better chance of succeeding in the international art world if she lives in New

York or London. Before 1992, nearly all the artists originally from Latin America, Asia or Africa

had already moved to either North America or Europe before they exhibited in documenta. During

the 1990s, these ‘flows’ represented around four or five per cent of the total artists showing. By

2002, they had risen to nearly sixteen per cent.

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 5 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

Table 3 Comparisons between artists’ birthplace and current residence. (Source: documenta catalogues 1968–2007)

As table 4 demonstrates, the upshot of these movements is unmistakable. For artists born in

North America and Europe A, nearly ninety-three per cent of movements are within that region –

between London and New York, for example, where the conditions for artistic production and

reception may be considered more or less equal. Secondly, for artists born in Europe B, nearly

eighty-nine per cent of movements are towards North America and Europe A, presumably in search

of better support systems and infrastructures. Thirdly, for artists born in Latin America, Asia or

Africa, the overwhelming majority of movements – over ninety-two per cent – are to North

America and Europe A. They constitute a generalised one-way emigration from what I would call

the periphery to the centre, or centres; that is, in the direction of the USA, UK, France and

Germany. As we can see, seventy-two artists from Europe B and eighty-one artists from the rest of

the world have moved to North America and Europe A, making this region the most popular place

of residence for the majority of the artists who have figured in the last nine documentas. Rarely if

ever does an artist from London or New York move to, say, Thailand or Trinidad.

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 6 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

Table 4 Migration of documenta artists 1968–2007 (Source: documenta catalogues 1968–2007)

Flowing uphill

There is a Chinese saying: water flows downhill, people climb uphill. If, as some critics would

have us believe, centres and peripheries are a thing of the past, how are we to account for this

almost exclusively one-way flow of artists? Figures like this lead us to question claims that the

2002 documenta 11 represented ‘the full emergence of the margin at the centre’, or ‘the most

radically conceived event in the history of postcolonial art practice’, offering ‘an unprecedented

presence of artists from outside Europe and North America’. Whatever questions may be raised by

the hybrid make-up of the emigrant artists in question, there is something highly incongruous in

talking about an exhibition like documenta 11, in which nearly seventy-eight per cent of the artists

featured were living in North America or Europe, as illustrating ‘the full emergence of the margin’.

Although it is forever shifting, the global art world nevertheless maintains a basic structure:

concentric and hierarchical, we can imagine it as a three-dimensional spiral, not unlike the interior

of the Guggenheim in New York. Concentric because there are centres, or semi-centres, and

peripheries as well. To reach the centres you need to imagine an uphill journey, starting from the

peripheries and passing through the semi-peripheries and semi-centres before you reach the top –

though in some cases it may be possible to jump straight from a periphery to one of the centres.

Hierarchical because, like all power relations, the spiral has a central core, with clusters of satellites

orbiting it. Even those who champion the globalisation of the contemporary art world, and imagine

6

7

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 7 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

the biennial to be one of its most successful manifestations, recognise a political dimension to such

exhibitions. Okwui Enwezor, for instance, has advocated a ‘G7 for biennials … so as not to further

dilute the “cachet” of this incredibly ambiguous global brand’. Global the biennial perhaps is, but

global for whom and for what reasons? Whose interests are served by the ‘biennialisation’ of the

contemporary art world?

The rise of the biennial over the last twenty years has, of course, made it easier for a few artists

from less well-resourced countries to gain visibility in the art world. If, however, this is indeed part

of ‘globalisation’, it is very different from other manifestations of that process. The agents of

economic globalisation, for example, whether individuals or multinationals, have to invest

substantial amounts of time and money in order to establish themselves in their new location. The

people who curate most of the biennials these days, on the other hand, are constantly on the move.

Jetting in and out of likely locations, they have no time to assimilate, still less to understand, the

artistic production in any one place. From the viewpoint of those living and working in distant

outposts, mega-curators and global artists may seem well connected; but they remain, by the very

nature of the enterprise, more or less culturally rootless. At the same time, this deracination gives

them a position of advantage, if not of privilege; for them, biennials do indeed have no frontiers.

But for the majority outside the magic circle, real barriers still remain. The biennial, the most

popular institutional mechanism of the last two decades for the organisation of large-scale

international art exhibitions, has, despite its decolonising and democratic claims, proved still to

embody the traditional power structures of the contemporary Western art world; the only difference

being that ‘Western’ has quietly been replaced by a new buzzword, ‘global’.

Notes

1. Interview with Barbara Vanderlinden, co-curator of the 2004 Taipei Biennial, 26 October 2004,

Taipei. It turned out that the number of Taiwanese artists at the 2004 Shanghai Biennial was four. I

should like to acknowledge the kind help of Jui-Chung Allen Li (Institute of European and

American Studies, Academia Sinica) on the statistical work for this paper.

2. I use biennial as a convenient generic term that can also embrace less frequent exhibitions,

including the quinquennial Kassel documenta. Carlos Jiménez credits Gerhard Haupt for

formulating the concept of ‘biennialisation’ in ‘The Berlin Biennale: A Model for Anti-

Biennialization?’, Art Nexus, no. 53, July–September 2004.

3. In 1996, Appadurai identified five dimensions of global cultural flow: ethnoscapes (flows of

tourists, immigrants, refugees, guest workers, etc); mediascapes (flows of information and images);

technoscapes; financescapes; and ideoscapes (flows of cultural and political ideologies). Later, he

added ‘artscapes’ to this list. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization, Minneapolis 1996, pp.33–7.

4. A similar comment was made by Larissa Buchholz and Ulf Wuggenig, ‘Cultural Globalization

between Myth and Reality: the Case of the Contemporary Visual Arts’, Art-e-fact, no.4, December

2005.

8

3/17/11 11:07 PMTate Papers Issue 12 2009: Chin-Tao Wu

Page 8 of 8http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/chin.shtm

5. The total number of artists in this survey is 1,734. The data are primarily compiled from

documenta catalogues. There are five artists/groups whose place of birth it has not been possible to

trace. The places of residence of 168 artists are unknown, while 108 artists were deceased by the

time their work was exhibited.

6. Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Black Box’, in documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition: Catalogue,

Ostfildern-Ruit 2002, p.47.

7. Stewart Martin, ‘A New World Art: Documenting documenta 11’, Radical Philosophy, no. 122,

November–December 2003, p.7.

8. Enwezor, ‘Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form’, MJ–

Manifesta Journal, no. 2, Winter 2003–Spring 2004, p.19.

Acknowledgements

This article first appeared in the New Left Review, 57, May/June 2009 and is reproduced here with

the author and editor’s kind permission. Other papers relating to the Landmark Conference held at

Tate modern in October 2008 can be found in issue 12 of Tate Papers. The image alongside this

paper's abstract on the home page shows the Museum Fridericianum during documenta 12 2007,

Photograph © Simon Zirkunow.

Chin-Tao Wu is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies,

Academia Sinica, Taipei.

Tate Papers Autumn 2009 © Chin-Tao Wu