The Global Work of Art: World's Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience 9780226291888

Citation preview

The Global Work of Art

The Global Work of Art

World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience

Caroline A. Jones

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Caroline A. Jones All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in China 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29174-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29188-8 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291888.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jones, Caroline A., author. Title: The global work of art : world’s fairs, biennials, and the aesthetics of experience / Caroline A. Jones. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016011298| ISBN 9780226291741 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226291888 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Biennials (Art fairs) | Art fairs. Classification: LCC N4396 .J66 2016 | DDC 709.04—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016011298 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Saffron Jade, already enmeshed in the world

Contents

Preface

1

ix

The Blindman; or, How to Visit a World Exhibition Blind Epistemology

1

Optics and Encyclopedics

8

Universal Object Lessons

14

Sensory Alternatives

2

22

Desires for the World Picture Desires

35

36

Ars et Feriae

43

Publics, Infrastructures, Discourse Objects of Art / Difference

51

57

Art in the Age of Its Touristic Reproduction Architectures and Endings

3

Old World / Biennial Culture Old Beginnings in Venice Repetition and Difference Subjects, Nations, Artists Biennial Culture

vii

72

104

81 88 96

81

64

1

4

New World / Cold War

113

Hemispheric Rearrangements Arte Moderna

121

Difference and Repetition

125

From Museum to Bienal

5

113

127

Plastic Revolutions

134

Modulor Moderns

142

Transnational Openings Tactics of the Trans

151

151

Unities / the Differend

162

When Attitudes Became Norms Incorporations

6

171

183

The Aesthetics of Experience Tropes of Experience

195

196

Encounters and Emblems

202

Expérience, Erfahrung, and Event Economimesis at the Fair

7

217

Critical Globalism, in Practice The Worldly Subject Global Workings of Art

251

Bibliography Index

viii

Contents

311

293

225

225 233

Practicing Critical Globalism

Notes

211

244

Preface

Europe, as one, is germinating. . . . In the next century, it will spread its two wings, one made of liberty, the other of will. The fraternal continent—that is the future. When one takes up this position, immense happiness is inevitable. —VICTOR HUGO , “The Future,” apropos of the 1867 Paris world’s fair1 Invest in your lifestyle . . . a place beyond place, where journey and destination become one. —2010 ad copy for “The World, the first and only residential ship”2 While “geopolitical” can have . . . a prefix to cover its political nature, the politics in question had better be far, far away. —MARTHA ROSLER on globalism, 20033

Internationalism, a heuristic

How does a work of art, or an artist, become “international”? What are the conditions of possibility that enable a local maker to become “globally significant”? In opposition to the obvious answer (marketing), this book argues that these descriptors mark important changes in artistic tactics. Cognizant of a larger art world, and driven by the ambition to appear in it, artists make art that works differently. They, and we, desire work that is open enough to be taken up as international, or as global, once it enters circulation. And once it does, viewers in turn face the challenge of allowing the global to work on them, through the art. This book is a history of those effects. It focuses largely on the West and on European-identified contexts, but argues that the widening of the art world created new desires— first for the international, and then for the global. The longer history I

ix

narrate spans the internationalism of world’s fairs and the globality consolidated by biennials of contemporary art. The Global Work of Art began as an attempted shortcut. I was commissioned by UNESCO in the mid-1990s to produce an essay on “culture” in the twentieth century, for a publication that had already been given the extraordinary title The History of Humanity.4 Faced with that impossible brief (and in the pragmatic spirit I attributed to the United Nations), I proposed instead to produce a brief, incisive cut: “Nationalism and Internationalism in Modern Art.”5 Hopscotching from object to object, I skipped from the sharp shoulders of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon to the spiked sheet metal and torquing reach of Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs and Constructivist Monument to the Third International; soon I was attending to the polyglot shrieks of Carrá’s Futurist Interventionist Manifesto, and so it went. It began to seem that internationalism and its doppelgänger, nationalism, governed every object produced in that turbulent century. And I became less and less certain that the story was about objects at all. That realization was surprising to me, given my enthusiasm for “thing theory” and “material world history.”6 But as I dug back into the industrial modernity that pumped the categories of the “nation” and the “international” into the world, the objects of art themselves seemed to disperse into multiples, appearing in many different sites and forms, soliciting new kinds of responses from viewers who were themselves more mobile than ever. Artists were offering substitutes, illustrations, and accessible variants of their works, sometimes well outside canonized media. Was it a problem that Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave (cynosure of the US display at London’s 1851 Great Exhibition) had no precise “original” version, or that this figure circulated in the form of countless copies in marble, ceramic, bronze, and even human mimicry? The more I looked into matters, the less matter was speaking for itself. My project evolved to address how the nation and the international, the transnational and the global, were historically produced through the circulation of art. The world’s fairs were an obvious place to start, revealing some of the latter-day mechanisms by which artworks constituted “national representation” even as their physical collection, distribution, or reproduction circulated under signs of “the international.”7 Who desired these categories? Who benefited from them? The concatenation of artworks in the great world’s fairs offered one site x

Preface

of reception that formed a clear precursor to the contemporary global art world. The communities of interpretation that produced artworks as “modern,” “national,” or “international” were clearly evident at the fairs, and could be traced in biennials as well. Living abroad through the grace of two crucial fellowships (the first from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, in 2001– 2, the second from the Institut national d’histoire de l’art or INHA in Paris, in 2005– 6) sharpened these questions considerably. The links between world’s fairs and biennials became clearer as I attended the latter and began to see fossils of the former. Paris, in particular, stages the architectural remnants of its fairs as ornaments of a cosmopolitan urbanism. Some form artful ruins, as in the gardens of the Champ de Mars. Others strut as beautifully maintained peacocks, shimmering advertisements for the city as omphalos of the world— the Eiffel Tower, the (Czar) Alexander bridge, or the Grand Palais (in which my cover image was photographed on the journée du patrimoine in 2006). Back in the United States, fellowships at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities (at Wellesley) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (at Harvard) provided contexts in which the questions of nationalism, internationalism, and now globalization could ripen. In this, the resulting book, I attempt to untie knots of art and interpretation through specific cases, pursuing large theoretical concerns by following concepts and keywords— cosmopolitanism, nationalism/internationalism, judgment, experience, cultural capital, world, event, and the global— through three centuries of discourse and hundreds of artworks. Above all, I aim to reanimate a term that has ossified in art historical practice: the work of art. Art works. It is and has been active, working on the viewer historically, working on me still. My emphasis on art’s action, on work as a verb, reflects the historical shift this book narrates, from art as an object of craft to art as an expectation for experience. Far from confirming a stable context, ground, or backdrop for the figure of art-as-image or the object as work-of-art, the histories I recount suggest a dynamic and unfixed relation. The working of art— particularly since the late twentieth century— has destabilized the world-as-picture, that fixed specter that haunted Martin Heidegger, instantiated in the fairgrounds and still threatening today. The heuristic of internationalism remains, but it turns out to be a

deeply historical category that peaked (in my argument) in the art and architecture of the 1937 Paris world’s fair. While a growing number of publications have examined globalization in contemporary art, none situate “the contemporary” within the lingering effects and remanent structures of the nineteenth-century world’s fairs. If one focuses on the emergence of the contemporary biennial, one quickly realizes that key structures of the current exhibitionary complex, the undisputed foundations of contemporary display, were put in place more than a century ago.8 The book thus examines defining moments in an exhibitionary past beginning roughly with the French Revolution. In the course of this exploration from the present, and making use of specific workings of contemporary art throughout, I produce both history and criticism. The first chapter offers a philosophical slice through the entire project, tracing a trope of blindness and multisensoriality that emerges in reaction to the Enlightenment apparatus of ocularity permeating the nineteenth-century world’s fairs, that migrates through the twentieth-century avant-garde, and that proves surprisingly robust within contemporary artistic practice. This “blind epistemology” refuses to be overwhelmed by the spectacular. It insists on different kinds of thinking and feeling, pursues alternative sensory modalities, and exhibits an openness to difference. Digging deeper into the founding of the fairs as a precondition for today’s biennials, chapter  2 looks at relations between the Grand Tour and the festal structures that the fairs promulgated, and examines specific case studies (such as Hiram Powers’s multiply exhibited Greek Slave, considered in relation to the international abolitionist movement and to the pressure to produce collectibles for the vast public created by the fairs); these cases illuminate the mutually reinforcing categories of the national and international, and the productive tensions that could be staged between them. The possibility for an alternative “cosmopolitics,” confronting the conversion of fading cosmopolitan trading zones into city brands, is tackled in chapter 3, where I narrate the 1895 founding of the first biennial, in Venice, and explore the career of one of its foundational artists, Jozef Israëls. Here, the requirements that shadow the cosmopolitan, emerging in imperial Greek and Roman notions of the ecumene that inform Augustine and the ecumenical, show the rules of the game as Israëls inherited them: the cosmopolitan should ideally be a Christian citizen of the “city

of God” (a notion since complicated by late twentiethcentury calls for the openly cosmopolitical).9 As a kind of hinge between past and present concerns, chapter  4 offers a history of the 1951 founding of the Bienal de São Paulo, wherein the concept of the biennial and many of its attendant structures are appropriated from “the West” on behalf of “the South,” challenging internationalism itself as the “global” explodes into existence during the Cold War. The agency of Brazilian artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark plays a large role in this chapter and in the transition to chapter 5, which explores the emergence of new artistic tactics that rejected nationalism, in confrontation with a newly empowered actor: the guest curator, whose nomadic authority was used to resolve political conflicts on the ground. The particular case here is transnational Swiss gastarbeiter Harald Szeemann and the exhibitions he mounted, in Germany and elsewhere, from the late 1960s into the new millennium. The current emphasis on an “aesthetics of experience” is critically assessed in chapter 6, which examines the contemporary world of proliferating biennials as incorporating the festal apparatus of the fairs. Here I examine the turn from objects to experience in biennial culture after 1970, but argue on behalf of disorganization and perplexity rather than the blandishments of an “experience economy.” I conclude, in chapter 7, by interrogating contemporary practices I dub “critical globalism,” which I position against the pervasive effects of neoliberal globalization, offering an argument about what kinds of engagement with biennials (by artists, organizers, and viewers) might best be pursued. Throughout the book, I compare examples drawn from contemporary practice against historical cases; the arc of the narrative shifts under the steady gravitational pull of the present. The Global Work of Art nonetheless troubles current fixations on “the contemporary.” I ask how the purpose of art has changed over centuries but also, perhaps more importantly, how continuities sustain discourse and practice, or allow precise critiques to be performed. I trace developments by examining epistemologies evident among three types of historical actors: organizer/curators, artists, and visitors. I begin by noting the conditions that had to be in place before an artist or work could be described as “international,” and how the fairs stimulated an ambition to attain that status despite pervasive nationalist agendas; here, the role of organizers Preface

xi

emerges as crucial. Artists’ roles in responding to these preconditions constitute the primary case studies; in this regard I forward the concept of predicated internationalism (which emerges in these pages via appellations such as “today’s Rembrandt,” “the Dutch Millet,” or “the Brazilian Rodin”) to capture how artists were inserted into the fairs’ world pictures, and how such yokings produced the hierarchies of center and periphery, leader and follower, influencer and influenced, around which the inter/nation functions. The book tracks how visitors’ expectations for encounters at the fairs expanded from mere attendance to performative engagement with its objects; diaries and autobiographies enter as sources, but objects of art are also examined as material deposits of artists’ own responses, as visitors, to the fairs’ stagings of an internationalizing art world. Criticism and the exhaustive documentation of these events are further sources for reception, as well as reports on visitors’ surprisingly multisensory and embodied engagements, feeding a late twentieth-century aesthetics of experience. That aesthetics in turn leads to a generalized positioning within “the global,” from which I want to carve a specifically critical mode. This mode of critical globalism is promulgated actively here; the working of art is part of that emphasis. Globalism itself is carved out of the thicket of terms increasingly mobilized in contemporary culture— globalism, the global, globalization, globality. Each of these words has its own history and contemporary usage; what we can observe already is that such words blossom after World War II to proliferate dramatically in the current millennium, replacing “the international” in popularity.10 If the global is seen by some as an entirely Western obsession, born of the sudden certainty (post-1989, post-9/11) that the world is no longer organized by tidy national relations, I would suggest that the longer history of biennials puts that very “Eurologic” into question.11 Contrapuntal to the “world’s” fairs and born from their afflatus, the international biennial proliferated through the twentieth century and has evolved almost beyond recognition, extending well beyond the reach of Europe. What earlier presumptions does the form still carry with it? How does the transplantation of the event structure begin to express globalisms beyond “Western” conception? Many of these questions are posed here, but not all are answered; the current book openly acknowledges its situation as provincial, partial, and located within specific languages and hemispheric xii

Preface

histories. Yet there is still value in tracking those local sites at which “globalisms” are produced.12 As this book will suggest, artists who have engaged with the fairs’ and biennials’ world-picturing apparatus have found extraordinary ways to make viewers conscious of its machinery. Critics and philosophers are alive in this book; they mediate between viewers, spectacles, organizers, and artworks. For Continental philosophers in the early twentieth century— such as Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger— world’s fairs were seductive, and hence cause for philosophical concern. Heidegger described the moment grimly in “The Age of the World Picture” (1935– 38, a talk originally intended for insertion in the Paris world’s fair). Benjamin, around the same time, disparaged fairs as a commodity universe, “a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted.”13 Benjamin and Heidegger were writing at a moment of crisis in “the international” that the fairs instantiated and the new biennial would aim to correct. That Benjamin goes on to theorize distraction as itself a revolutionary mode of spectatorship is one of the paradoxes I explore. Distraction, disorganization, blindness— the politics of spectacle are underdetermined, and can be undermined. What was indispensable to a modernizing art world and its desiring viewers was the productive tension the fairs staged between local reference and international competition, between global styles and ethnic differences, between nation and world. These dialectics proved astonishingly productive, as I will aim to show. The separation of art from the fair, and its sequestration into the fairlike biennial, heightened tensions between the local and the international but offered an artist-organized “cosmopolitanism” as well; this would morph in the postwar context of Brazil and emerge in diasporal artistic practices within new tactics captured by the term transnationalism, along with new modes of art characterized by flux, duration, and ephemerality. The post-1960s history of recurring exhibitions such as documenta (which adopted biennial event structures) welcomed these transnational and eventful gambits as a way around contentious local politics, as I explore in chapter 5. My last two chapters examine the proliferation of such event structures and the emergence of a globalism so named. As the book moves toward a critical framing of the present, I emphasize the working of certain kinds of contemporary art that produce us as entangled and enmeshed in worldly being,

aware of multiple connections and critical of implicit hierarchies among them. This brief preface is necessarily synoptic. The book argues that “global” art history is itself a patchwork of multiplied views, notably confined by our ability as scholars to learn other languages, and to find archives we can work in and afford to visit. In my case, I was lucky to have research funds from MIT that enabled me to visit Brazil; I hope that my labors in the archives of the São Paulo biennial will serve at least one clear purpose: to demonstrate that historians from outside certain “field specializations” (patrolled as such) may bring useful analytics to bear. Leaving my own comfort zone was necessary to produce the comparative portion of my study, and the enthusiasm I already had for the works of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica was amplified by learning more about the historical context for their explosively critical globalism. The book conveys what I hope will be a richer understanding of these artists’ fundamental importance to the experiential, embodied, and relational aesthetics that have come to dominate contemporary art. The Brazilian case study in chapter 4 also proved crucial in measuring one of my core operating theses: artists who would enter large-scale repeating exhibitions’ competitions must adopt an international language, in which they are often required to speak of their own difference. Obvious in the predicated internationalism I’ve already mentioned, this operation continues into the present. In a recent reflection on globalism, for example, curator Okwui Enwezor criticized the postcolonial art world’s seeming desire for a kind of “visual Esperanto for a mediated Otherness.”14 By digging into specific cases, we can see exactly how this functions, and how it can be refused. The brilliance of the Brazilian artists and critics of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, lay in their incisive comprehension of this economy and their thoroughgoing rejection of its terms— in a first phase, by refusing to speak of difference, and in a second, through the instrumental revival of their own theory of antropofagia— metabolizing modernism on a molecular level to hybridize and syncretize a truly contemporary art.15

Critical Globalism, a polemic

In this book, artists will be taken to be powerful agents of change, as the Brazilian case demonstrates. Thanks

to the scores of contemporary artists and curators who have schooled me in the ways of biennial culture, I have been inspired to offer a polemic that culminates in the last chapter of this book: globalism is not the name of a condition from which we suffer, but a tactic to adopt. Following the historic change in art encounters that this book charts— from a viewer seeing an object to a visitor taking responsibility for an experience— artists working after the 1960s contributed to what I identify as critical globalism: an approach to art-making, a mode of reception for art-viewing, and a hermeneutic for curatorial practice. Globalism is conveniently parallel to modernism, without suffering from the “post,” the “neo,” or the “alter.” Further, yoking it to “critical” helps us see it as a stance and a site to occupy: I am asking you to understand the global as a domain within which you are already positioned, and to become aware of that position so as to adopt a critical and self-reflective relation to it. As Jeremy Bentham put it when he was plumping for the neologism “international” to summarize the “law of nations,” this proposed usage may be unfamiliar, “though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and intelligible” to serve its purpose.16 Rather than parasitizing earlier artistic movements, globalism can be seen as potential within them, emerging as a theoretical position from artists within the flux (as in 1943 New York, when a critic suggested “Globalism” to describe contemporary artists’ aspirations to universal meaning for their obscure, mythological, Surrealistic paintings.)17 Globalism is positioned in this study as an aesthetic response to economic, technological, and cultural processes of globalization; my account specifically privileges the critical mode. My polemical usage thus enters the fray of recent struggles over the term globalization itself— a contest in which the powerful advocates of neoliberal economics claim to own both the processes of globalization and the languages that discuss it. Only certain relations to earth (free trade, deregulation, market “wisdom,” untrammeled development, rampant extraction) are allowed to own globalization. By contrast, those who oppose these values are described as Luddites who supposedly have no standing to reject the terms of the discourse itself. Critical globalism refuses this binary and rejects the hierarchy it encodes. Culture can stake a claim on a seemingly smaller part of the discursive territory, then use that Archimedean lever to dislodge the entire stacked debate. Preface

xiii

Let’s seize the terminology as a first step to identifying the political nature of the negotiation, then utilize the public sphere of art for working out these differentials: occupy the global! Critical globalism places particular emphasis on the responsibility of artists, organizers, and visitors to think and feel differently, while working things out. I argue that large-scale recurring exhibitions have work to do, beyond branding, tourism, and development of a given city’s cultural sector. As the book narrates, recurring contemporary exhibitions have proliferated across the globe— are there one hundred biennials? Two hundred? It depends on how you count, and when.18 Some of the most exciting venues ( Johannesburg) have disappeared; other sites (Delhi) have embraced the art fair instead— an economic event structure that, as I will show, comes contrapuntally out of the biennial structure, reverting to the ur-form of its own origins in the market fair. The biennials of today display structures inherited from perennial international exhibitions of the past, yet they are also where an appetite for art-as-experience has been cultivated, its aesthetic codified and defined. The longer history that unspools in the ensuing chapters begins with artists “inserted” into world pictures, and concludes with them engineering altogether different relations to worldly being and becoming. Perhaps it will surprise some readers to discover that The Global Work of Art is optimistic, with critical globalism emerging to enmesh us in a connected and interdependent world, through the working of art and its elaboration in reception. This optimism acknowledges the market, but argues for its irrelevance in the longue durée. (The “stars” of the nineteenth-century market stoked by the fairs are virtually unknown today; there is no reason to believe the twenty-first century will be any different.) This longer view of market irrelevance uses the grain of art history to evaluate artists’ significance for other artists; yet I also cut against art history by taking the fairs and biennial phenomenon seriously, presenting these as forces that determine how art comes to be made and understood as a shared project of modernity/contemporaneity/globality. The insanely overheated realm of art speculation (the lone “investment opportunity” to survive successive collapses in capitalist markets besotted with junk bonds, speculative real estate, and computer trading) is now functionally independent from the biennial circuit, as chapters 5 through 7 explore. It is the xiv

Preface

emphasis on events and experiences, rather than objects, that constitute the surprising legacy of biennial culture. Within the baneful rise of the “experience economy,” I argue that aesthetic experience can still be transformative. Artists have agency in these sprawling, temporary “global villages,” and I hope to show how their instigations have refused the world-as-picture in favor of the global work of art.19

Acknowledgments, an itinerary

I was aware from the beginning of the debt I would incur to previous scholars, who have tackled the archives of expositions and biennials with incredible energy and panache, among them my mentor Wanda Corn. My colleagues and students in the History, Theory, Criticism program at the School of Architecture at MIT are reflected in these pages in countless ways, as the endnotes make clear— their worldliness, their incisive critical thinking, and their grasp of literatures well beyond my reach have given me the courage to enter these necessarily tangled histories, and provided much insight along the way. The kind criticisms by anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press contributed substantively to restructurings of the material; Naomi Krupitsky Wernham came to the rescue later on to help with cuts my perspicacious editor at Chicago, Susan Bielstein, rightly insisted on. Worldliness became proximate within the communities of scholars that I was privileged to join in Berlin and Paris (in 2001 and 2005, respectively), and in the conversations with foreign colleagues at institutes at Wellesley and Harvard (in 2009 and 2013). Citations tell the tale with greater precision, but I am particularly indebted to my writing group at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, in which Lucia Allais, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Ruth Mack, Francesca Orsini, and Sophia Roosth provided lively interdisciplinary coaching in how to trammel and shape my unwieldy themes. Drafts were also generously read and comments provided by Martha Buskirk, Mark Jarzombek, Amelia Jones, and Peter Galison (his contributions go beyond acknowledgment into something far more serious, fun, and enduring). Friendship and sounding boards were offered by Bruce Altshuler, Claire Bishop, Thomas Boutoux, Elena Filipovic, David Joselit, Pamela Lee, Rafal Niemojewski,

and Mignon Nixon; their insights helped me understand the implications of globalism in the contemporary world, while Laura Beiles, James Buzard, Carol Dougherty, Patricia Hills, Timothy Peltason, Monika Wagner, and Beat Wyss generously guided me with their scholarship about earlier periods. Joseph Koerner, Mara Mills, and James Meyer were each crucial at different points; I hope they will recall those junctures and see the effects of their words and work. Historians who apprentice themselves to archives in a foreign language will understand the enormous gratitude I feel to those whose kindness opened intimidating bureaucracies and smoothed the way. My friend and coconspirator Arindam Dutta shared his transcripts and scans of key Victorian materials, as well as the hard-tofind report on the Delhi conference on biennials; he also introduced me to the very existence of a Bureau International des Expositions (in Paris, of course), and his work informs me at every turn. Francesca Orsini likewise sent me uncommon materials that I would otherwise have missed, and demonstrated through her brilliant critique the important flaws of the “world literature” debates. Sebastian Schmidt helped locate and summarize key Japanese materials, and Reiko Tomii was generous in providing copies of her own pathbreaking work on the Osaka Expo and Tokyo biennials. In Paris, Alice Thomine took an unconscionable amount of time from her own scholarship to help me navigate the Bibliothéque nationale. For the Archivio Storico of the Biennale de Venezia, I have a host of angels to thank: Vittoria Martini, Andrea Mattiello, and Clarissa Ricci were each vital at different stages in unearthing the “Scatole nero” where the founding documents of the Venice biennial were housed, and getting me in to see the black box once the archives were finally open. Dr. Mattiello was also a fabulous guide to Venetian libraries, including the gem at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini; he also assisted with Italian translations. David Friedman and Marco di Michelis made Venice seem like home; Agnes Kohlmeyer was an indispensable native informant. In navigating the Wanda Svevo archives of the São Paulo Bienal, I was blessed with the friendship and recommendations of film scholar José Gatti; thanks to Zé, I benefited from the assistance of Deborah Magnani on my first visit to the archives. Crucially, via architect Luis Berrios-Negron and curator Benjamin Seroussi, I

was able to continue this work with art historian Renata Rocco as the project entered its final phases. Her insights and research capabilities proved indispensable as the Brazilian material was edited and my translations were proofed; my debt to her is profound, and I dearly hope our long-distance scholarly exchange may someday allow actual proximity. In my first attempt to write art history from Brazilian archives, I was lucky to have Robin Greeley, Alex Alberro, and Ana María León as sympathetic but eagle-eyed critics; I’m also thankful to the anonymous readers for ArtMargins who encouraged me to publish some of this material while giving me sensitive advice; Pedro Erber and Sérgio Martins contributed helpful corrections. These scholars remain blameless for any errors that remain. Working on curator Harald Szeemann, a prolific selfarchiver, presented its own intriguing challenges. While much material had been published by Szeemann himself, these representations would count as “self-fashioning” ebullience rather than archival records. The interview I conducted early on with Szeemann’s collaborating curator, Agnes Kohlmeyer, was incredibly helpful in pointing me to additional resources. Since Szeemann’s papers were in limbo when I began to work on this material, the artist Ingeborg Lüscher (his widow) was generous enough to point me to the first Szeemann biography by Hans-Joachim Müller, and Terry Smith introduced me to Christian Rattemeyer, who was kind enough to share an electronic copy of his indispensable study (now out of print) comparing Szeemann to Wim Beeren for the “afterall” series of exhibition histories. Once the Szeemann papers were acquired by the Getty, Andrew Perchuk intimated the existence of certain key files (which would certainly have remained unknown to me without his intelligence); my research assistant Casie Kesterson ably located them while also helping with the considerable task of obtaining Szeemann images. Assembling the illustrations and assuring their provenance required a cadre of assistants over the years, as well as the incredible generosity of contemporary artists, among them Willem Boshoff, Olafur Eliasson, Coco Fusco, Regina José Galindo, Cai Guo-Qiang, Hans Haacke, Joan Jonas, César Oiticica, Muntadas, and Cesare Pietroiusti (of the Oreste collective). Tino Sehgal would have nothing to do with illustrations, but I thank him anyway for talking with me more than once about the Preface

xv

workings of his art. Student research assistants boosted my technical competency over the years; to Greg Perkins, Ila Sherin, Mariel Villeré, Caspar Jopling, Schuyler Berland, Sarah Reilly, and Ryan Kuo I give thanks. James Whitman Toftness at the University of Chicago Press was indispensable in confirming the final image permissions. And again I must thank Renata Rocco for her diplomacy in negotiating with Brazilian newspapers, museums, and artists’ heirs; she carried my research farther than I could have dreamed when starting this project. Curators moving at the speed of thought and airplanes were willing to stop, occasionally, and discuss their work. For their great ideas, suggestions of artists to look at, and provocative exhibitions I am deeply indebted to

xvi

Preface

Daniel Birnbaum, Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, HansUlrich Obrist, and Molly Nesbit. The late Jane Farver was crucial; she is deeply missed. Along with the artists whose works are illustrated in the pages that follow, these curators were instrumental to my thinking; they may not agree with my ideas, but I appreciate their willingness to let the work go on working in all its forms. In the end, I owe the biggest thanks to the reader willing to open this book (or download its digital equivalent) and take the path of thinking and feeling laid out in its pages. By all means, argue and contest my readings, and make a critical globalism for yourself. As I hope to convince you, by so doing you will produce perhaps the most crucial component of the global work of art— its public.

1 The Blindman; or, How to Visit a World Exhibition

The freedom of wandering (libertas vagandi) is divided into two: the movement of the body through different places and the movement of the mind through different images. —Stephen of Tournai (1128–1203)1 WAKING WAKING BLIND IN LIGHTED SLEEPNESS

—Anonymous poem in The Blind Man, NY, 19172 Painting should not be exclusively visual or retinal. It must interest the gray matter; our appetite for intellectualization. —MARCEL DUCHAMP , 19483 I’m presenting a model of seeing and also facing the fact that my model cannot be a solution but rather a question, maybe a step in a process of some sort of self-realization or self-reflection. —OLAFUR ELIASSON , artist of The Blind Pavilion, 20034 Here, a “feeling” is not the experience of texture or form through physical contact, but an apprehension of an atmospheric change, experienced kinesthetically and by the body as a whole. This seems to point toward a need for a theory of multiple senses.5 —GEORGINA KLEEGE , “Blindness . . . An Eyewitness Account,” 2005

Blind Epistemology

São Paulo, 1996: You enter a room at the Bienal, installed with seventy-seven seemingly identical boxes on pedestals; a few lids are ajar so you can just see the smoothed edges of abstract-looking sculptures. You want to touch them, but you’re not allowed. 1

Perhaps you get lucky, and a blind person enters who happens to speak your language. She tells you she has been allowed to explore the boxes and read their braille labels— each is a unit in Blind Alphabet by Willem Boshoff, an Afrikaans artist from Johannesburg who also showed this piece at that city’s first biennial (plate 1, fig. 1.22). Venice, 2005: You are in the twelfth-century Arsenale at this year’s Biennale and come to a large metallic pod in a darkened room. Its iridescent surface has one opening, into which a translucent ladder is set. (The label reads, “Mariko Mori, b. 1967 Tokyo, Wave UFO.”) A whitecoated attendant lets you climb the ladder and settle into one of the three reclining seats— but only after swabbing your forehead with alcohol and attaching two electrodes. You lie back and try to follow her instructions to produce calm, meditative, alpha-state brain waves that might harmonize with those of the other visitors in the pod. You want this to work (fig. 6.6). New York, 2008: You enter a small darkened room at the Whitney Biennial and see a gorgeous, high-definition moving image of a person who appears to be blind, feeling his way across the mottled flank of an enormous animal. The camera pulls back, revealing a man and an elephant.

Five other individuals approach, encounter the beast, and return to their places in a row of folding chairs; some are exhilarated, but one is afraid. Occasionally, the elephant’s mysterious, coruscating hide fills the screen with slow elephant breaths, so close you could almost touch it. The label reads, “Javier Telléz, b. 1969 Venezuela, lives in New York, Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, 2007” (fig. 1.1; plate 36). Kassel, 2012: You’re at documenta 13, and you’ve heard there’s a good piece somewhere on this street; you enter what seems to be an abandoned garage. The room is utterly dark, but you hear people shuffling, breathing. Some begin to make chirping noises or sing bursts of notes; there seems to be some dancing. You discern a gathering rhythm, a beatboxing groove being laid down in syncopated fragments, a riff on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” You secretly sing along. Someone in the dark speaks the work’s label: “This Variation, January 2009, Tino Sehgal.” Later you find out the artist was born in London in 1970, and lives in Berlin. Patterns of visitor desire and global circulation characterize these snippets of contemporary biennial culture; the four narratives also evince a trope of blindness and alternative sensory modes of knowing. In service of what

Figure 1.1 Javier Téllez, Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (2007). Still from 16 mm film, black and white. Commissioned by Creative Time as part of the project Six Actions for New York City, coproduced by Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; shown at the Whitney Biennial. Photograph: Richard-Max Tremblay. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

2

Chapter 1

I call blind epistemology (more fragmented and tentative than an epistemology of blindness), these tropes surface a politics of the partial view. Blind epistemology sets out a framework for this book as a whole. The trope from which it emerges appears in the nineteenth-century reception of the world’s fairs but becomes a full-blown epistemology in the twentieth century, when artists get engaged. The biennial culture that inherits these strategies in the twenty-first century propels contemporary artists’ frustration of everyday vision, soliciting estrangement, visceral experience, and multimodal sensation— all in the name of art. Biennial curators choose such artists because they enact these strategies of refusal: incisions into spectacle, rejections of national posturing, grit in the gears of globalization.6 Contemporary invocations of sightlessness thus have a progressive, critical tenor; they seek to hoist viewers into new economies of experience, against those that are overcapitalized or touristic. The “Hypothetical Blind Man” was not always a positive tool to critique “ablist” assumptions, as disability theorist Georgina Kleege notes.7 This introductory chapter will track the blindman trope8 in Western culture, flagging a surprising intersection with international art exhibitions and tracing a genealogical legacy for the contemporary biennial. I will argue that the figure of the blindman, and the tools artists wrest from this tradition (blind epistemology), become crucial to the critical workings of a now global art. What is a blindman’s world picture? For over two hundred years, world’s fairs (and their biennial heirs) have dazzled spectators with metaphorical and material world pictures. Historians of these events risk reinscribing the technospectacular sublimity organizers intended. That is why the periodic emergence of blindness— as a philosophical trope, an actors’ category, and a tactic of contemporary artists— is so noteworthy. The blindman demands a rethinking of how we form knowledge, a skeptical tradition that usefully accompanies these exhibitionary forms. Precisely because tropes of blindness drove philosophies of Enlightenment, and fairs put Enlightenment philosophy (as well as its presumptions and prejudice) into material form, we need this past for any history from the present. This book’s chosen present is constituted by biennials’ world pictures. Biennials now take place in some

two hundred cities on every continent, looking back to the world’s fairs and forward to the art fairs they have spawned.9 As yet, no histories trace the precise relays between these festal forms. How did the world’s fairs serve art? Why was the biennial form invented? How did both form their publics? This book argues that the fairs are deeply significant for an understanding of the biennial form, producing the conditions of possibility for art to become an international, and now a global, semiotic. Both biennials and fairs implicate a larger public than art history traditionally encounters. Consider: A young Polish-American mathematician with a bilingual family wants to go to the 2013 Venice Biennale “because it’s fun” and showcases art from places he will never visit. An established New York artist (born in Britain) dourly criticizes “biennial artists” but wishes he was one; another, living in Berlin (also born in Britain), surely is, producing work more comfortable in such settings than in the museum. A Swedish curator (educated in New York) uses the biennial like a laboratory, posting notes about his process in the installation. These interventions in a largely EuroAmerican art world (where I am positioned to encounter them) reveal that biennials forcefully mold both art and its history. As a heuristic, “the biennial” can reveal intersections of state power, municipal ambitions, artistic intention, curatorial tactics, and public desires for a globalism that is not globalization. The concept of “critical globalism” is introduced in this book: once artists began to generate conscious tactics for their insertion into the fairs’ world pictures, such tactics were available to join conceptualism and institutional critique during the epoch after World War II, contributing to a “globalism” in art that critically reflects on globalization, often through a multisensoriality localized in the body.10 Reading spectacle against the grain, this and the six chapters that follow mine layers of historical data, visual materials, artworks, and criticism to form interlocking narratives: on how to turn from spectacle within the world picture (1), on publics and artists activating world’s fairs against their organizers’ ideologies (2), on the first biennial and the national/international circuitry it put into place (3), on the importation of the biennial model to the new world and the frictions that ensued (4), on the emergence of the transnational curator as a neutralizer of such frictions (5), on the emergence of an “aesthetics of experience” (6), and finally, on artists’ tactics of critical The Blindman

3

globalism against globalization (7). I attend to the world pictures that these exhibitions construct, tracing networks of national pavilions, state and corporate sponsors, city branding, global marketing, and the politics of prizes; the trope of blindness checks these vast apparatuses. Note that blindness is unlikely to occur in the prose of municipal boosters, state administrators, or corporate funders— it is the curators, artists, and attendees who take up the blindman trope. They bring Classical and Enlightenment references into the twenty-first century, where they use the critical probe of blindness like an Archimedean lever for extracting multisensory experience from the maws of spectacular excess. Learning from disability theorists, I argue that those who bring blindness into the world of spectacular exhibitions do so to become “whole human beings who have learned to attend to their non-visual senses in different ways.”11 These nongeneric, nonuniversal beings are nonetheless producing a resonant common sense. The blindman trope leverages understandings of the Western obsession with visuality and “perspective.”12 It also opposes the singular “world picture” bequeathed by philosopher Martin Heidegger, mindful of instrumentalizing world’s fairs (1937’s was particularly problematic) and campaigns against “degenerate” art (an international exhibition also mounted in 1937). In a crucial paper on “the age of the world picture” that he began in 1935 to give at the Paris world’s fair (but ended up delivering in 1938 Germany), Heidegger upended notions of Weltanschauung (a “world view” that could be held by any human in a given historical period), rejected Wilhelm Dilthey’s Weltbilder (the different “world pictures” held by various communities), and insisted instead on a historical threshold—Die Zeit des Weltbildes. In this argument, modern times produce a metaphysical “enframing” of the world, allowing it to be possessed as a single picture or concept. Heidegger’s dark vision saw one synchronized representation producing the worldas-object and facilitating human “mastery over the totality of what-is.”13 That moment will be historicized here (with Heidegger confronting French philosophy at the fair), and confounded by contemporary art. Against a hegemonic world picture, I find evidence for competing, multiplied, and critical world pictures, enmeshed in the complexities of the Anthropocene. Linked to our desires as global citizens and taking unruly form in bodies only partially colonized by ideologies imposed from above, 4

Chapter 1

our world is no longer a picture at all, but a careening event in being and becoming. Large-scale exhibitions reveal this trajectory with clarity, accompanied by the blindman as an actor’s category and receptive milieu. How does the visitor navigate the massive international exhibition? How does the critic “cover” it? What can the individual artist do to frame a critical position? To take only the examples introduced so far, some artists will be utopian: “Wave UFO believes that . . . as collective living beings [humans] shall unify and transcend cultural differences and national borders through positive and creative evolution” (Mariko Mori).14 Curators might emphasize critique: “If our senses disengage themselves from their assigned specificities, the world opens up, rules are shuffled and people fight for sensorial freedom, thus mining from the inside the arbitrarily instituted powers” (Nelson Aguilar, who chose Boshoff ’s Blind Alphabet for the 1996 São Paulo Bienal).15 Both anger and desire can fuel blind epistemology’s tactics; a participant experiencing Sehgal’s piece at the 2013 documenta termed it “addictive” and exhilarating: “This Variation left me breathless and overwhelmed. . . . I wanted to grab strangers on the street by their lapels and shove them through that doorway into the dark. You have to see this. Or rather, not see it.”16 Likewise, Telléz uses blindness to refuse empowered spectatorship: “It was . . . interesting for me to conceal the ‘real’ presence of the elephant and the people touching them [sic] to an audience who we could define as ‘those who see’ . . . a play on notions of visibility.”17 In these brief quotes, we see world pictures multiplied and divided, always already partial. With her “eyewitness account” Kleege supports my argument here that contemporary blind epistemology is distinct from the perpetual “hypothetical” who is invoked from Plato to Descartes, reinforcing the power of the sighted. Blind epistemology intends to alter the complacent subject; paradoxically, visual art contributes to this transformed “point of view” that might not be a view at all. Contemporary multisensorial tactics contrast with histories that find international displays compulsorily visible and philosophies that invoke rhetorical blindmen for mostly negative reasons. Such rhetorics long predate concepts such as “exhibition,” “picture,” or even “world.” Plato’s allegory of the cave (in Republic, book 7) offers a foundational instance, linking shadows with ignorance, darkness with deception, and knowledge with light and

Figure 1.2 Jan Saenredam, Antrum Platonicum, after Cornelis Cornelisz, The Cave of Plato, 1604, engraving.

sight (fig. 1.2). As centuries of commentary reveal, however, these binaries are neither simple nor fixed, nor is the specific architecture of display and revelation as clearly mapped as one might think. The minimum condition stipulates that the prisoners in Plato’s cave are shackled tightly. They can see shadows on the cave wall but are blind to the objects and light sources that cause these shadows, and thus represent (we are told) most people’s relation to everyday reality. It was only as the blindman trope moved unevenly through the European Enlightenment and into modernity that it could emerge as a crucial counterweight— at precisely those moments when spectacle seemed ascendant. At those moments (one of them being now), blindness comes out of philosophy to stage a counternarrative, often confronting the large-scale international exhibition. If, per Foucault and Deleuze, systems of visibility function in tandem with systems of invisibility, then blindness is implicated in these operations of revelation and occlusion.18 But by the same token, “blindness” confounds certain power relations by making them “recognizable” (literally, capable of being thought-again). Kleege and others will break the binary (sighted/blind) and insist on a spectrum of sensing and “feeling” that produces our knowledge of the world,

and even consciousness itself.19 Attempting this longer history of blind epistemology’s antispecular range helps articulate its politics of encounter with the world-picturing exhibitions and biennials this book aims to understand. This chapter explores such territory in four sections. The first summarizes the Western philosophical literature that establishes blindness as an epistemological trope. The second establishes the relation of the trope to the eighteenth-century encyclopedic impulse and its dependence on transportable objects. The third explores the nineteenth-century ways in which “object lessons” were mobilized for exhibition, calling up the blindman in response. The fourth hints at this book’s conclusion, in which blindness and its demand for multisensory knowledge might lead us to the twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury art of biennials, their critique of the world-aspicture, and their turn toward an aesthetics of experience. In diffuse installations, contemporary biennials confirm the human desire for a kind of knowledge that goes beyond the visible, the already known, and the local, to a place where embodied theory can be attempted and our enmeshment within a wider world can be sensed. Let us return to Plato’s cave to examine its intertwining narratives of vision and blindness, which explain the The Blindman

5

“dividing line” between knowing and mere existence. Everyday vision for the unreflective prisoners is “blind,” and there is no way they can attain higher knowledge unless they become free to move, physically and of course philosophically, to see beyond and behind what is before their eyes. True vision in this narrative necessarily involves movement: turning away, or if one cannot turn the whole body, closing the eyes on the visible world— or, as here, the shadowy image— to question what one sees. Thus there are two tropes of blindness in Plato’s narrative: the ignorant blindness of the everyday prisoners, and the volitional blindness of the turn to philosophy. To coin a phrase, we might call the prisoner’s vision “sightfull blindness” in contrast to the philosopher’s “blinding insight.”20 Classicist Andrea Wilson Nightingale provides a crucial reading of Plato, interrogating the embodied practices that the philosopher was himself occluding in his idealizing account.21 Nightingale reconstructs how “the philosophic theôros” (yielding our concepts of “theory”) emerged from the physical practices of theôroi— pilgrims who moved from one Greek region to another. Theôros also bears meanings of seeing— but always of a specific kind: embodied self-reflection in a comparative frame. Theôroi were important agents of migrant wisdom and cross-ethnic thinking, even for the Greeks.22 In part it is this anti-essentialist diversity that will make Heidegger rule out the possibility that the Greeks can have what he means by “a world picture.” Yet what we are interested in is not so much how various Greek thinkers might have congealed a Weltanschauung, but their notions of theory as friction and movement, disrupting any static, pictural world. It is contemporary philosophy that guides these interpretations of Classical theôroi and allows us to wreak new interpretations on Plato and Heidegger alike. The philosophy of Luce Irigaray, for example, insists in its feminism that Platonic blindness is principally concerned with expunging woman, of whom the cave “always already” speaks.23 This core feminist insight drives my analysis as well— the realm of the nonvisual is denigrated in the hierarchy of the senses, and hence often gendered as female.24 Blindmen (and they are always men in these accounts) often negotiate dangerous boundaries as part of their pursuit of nonvisual knowledge (for example, the gender-bending of Marcel Duchamp, whose journal The 6

Chapter 1

Blind Man we will get to further on).25 Such bending is characteristic of the radical sweep from Plato to Irigaray, which yields poststructuralism and Paul de Man’s deconstructive Blindness and Insight (1971) or Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind (1993)— comprising what amounts to a subdisciplinary philosophical “focus” on the trope of blindness that forces a moving, migrating, turning and re-turning.26 These are physicalized ways that nonvisible knowledge can be evoked and other forms of “speculation” entertained; they act out the restless search that is philosophy itself. So while sight is crowned “most noble of the senses” (by Diderot, among others) and remains an instinctive metaphor for understanding, philosophy also confirms that it is only in-sight (the trope of the turn away from the world) that allows us to reach what Socrates, earlier in Plato’s Republic, terms “intellectual,” as opposed to merely visible, understanding. Intellectual historian Martin Jay narrates the impact of this anti-ocular inclination very well; art historian Rosalind Krauss famously insisted on it in her postmodern revision of modernist art history.27 But blind epistemology, as I locate it in artists and critics of modern specularity, becomes more than simply a rejection of modernist ocularity. It calls forth new modes of multisensory being, experience, and politics that supplant the world picture with a critical globalism resonating in many nested and contiguous worlds. Theory is part of this development, and there is violence in the theoric process. If theôria (θεωρία) originally meant “viewing” or “beholding,” by the time of Plato it had expanded to denote an “intelligent, attentive pondering, especially when not directed to a practical goal”— leading to a hazarding of hypotheses (with the danger that verb implies).28 The deluded prisoner in the cave must be “dragged” upward into the sun, where at first he is dazzled (another form of blindness); once back, his insistence on another reality may get him killed. Socrates asks, “such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?” Further: “Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye” (Republic, book 7). What is needed then is the liminal zone— we call it theory— a

place of adjustment where blindness is patiently navigated to find the new, true sight. Here we can look again at Jan Saenredam’s early seventeenth-century engraving (fig. 1.2), which imagines this liminal zone physically occupied by academicians, not all of them ready to help. Such a narrow path to knowledge would be widened by the nineteenth-century great exhibitions, yielding the blindman trope once again. Coming out, and going in— the rhythm of the turn and re-turn governs this book and the world pictures it tracks. I want to insist that this is a physical as well as conceptual movement. Theôria in its cultural context relied on an actual pilgrimage; one could not linger in hesitation between knowing and unknowing— one had to move to learn.29 The “theoric” pilgrim in ancient Greece left his city of origin, where he might have spent his entire life, to make a ritual journey to an oracular center or religious site, perhaps at a time when it would be animated by a particular festival in honor of a cult figure— traditionally housed in its own cave.30 Theôria required participating in those ocular rites; the cycle remained incomplete until one returned home to theorize. In ancient Greece, such a path, or theôriai, produced “a neutral site where differences between Greek cities could be negotiated in a pan-hellenic context. . . . The pilgrim undergoes various transformations— perhaps religious, perhaps political or cultural— as a result of the freedom of the journey itself, as well as his exposure to the sacred mystery-objects and theôroi [pilgrims] from other parts of the Greek world.”31 Returning travelers were required to make sense of such experiences for those who had stayed at home. As this chapter imagines, they might also bring objects back from the distant cult, allowing them to be displayed for locals to theorize, and on it goes. The links to the “exhibitionary complex” of modernity should by now be clear: displays have theory behind them (travel, viewing, collecting, recollecting), and theory is necessary when confronting the spectacle being staged.32 Negotiating difference requires a kind of pilgrimage, characterizing knowledge production of every kind. Exhibitions and their objects prompt theories about what we know and how; tropes of the blindman appear in such contexts to support multisensorial cognition. To be polemical: theory requires movement, at every level. World’s fairs and biennials literalize that in soliciting travel to experience the event. Access to theory in this account is produced by turning from everyday vision and

routines, metaphorically entering the path of pilgrimage (whether practiced as tourism, research travel, library wanderings, going to a strange-making biennial exhibition— or something as simple as Duchamp’s “en tournant la tête,” a cock of the head yielding art’s conceptual basis).33 Knowing that we do not know, and that we seek to learn, is the operative condition. Politically, it must be acknowledged that theôria is a luxury. Rarely does the immigrant, the refugee, or the human struggling to survive (what Giorgio Agamben terms “bare life”) have the resources of the theôroi.34 But critical artists help us grapple with those very disparities, using art to leverage hegemonies of world-as-picture and preparing us to mobilize modest yet multiplied realities. I want here to underline the desires that motivate experiential theory, the pleasure that comes from building it and stretching it. (If the mind is a muscle, the body is a brain, and culture is the mysteriously networked harmonium we have invented to bring them into resonance.) It is significant that opaque objects are required for Plato’s narrative (shadows must be cast) and that they are “foreign” to the cave (outside its depths). The path to knowledge means turning from benighted comfort, wanting to get one’s head around those objects and learn something of their origin. Such a trajectory connects with my larger theme of international exhibitions and the paths we take to view them. There is an economic structure to these relations. Greek theôria was plied by free citizens (a concept the Romans codified as “liberal” or free arts), distinguishing theôroi from the slaves who kept everything humming.35 Similarly, the first world exhibitions depended on colonial and imperial orders, as revealed in their taxonomies, objects, and architectures of display. Yet the dream was there of democratizing knowledge, making it accessible, beyond the Grand Tour, to all citizens of a republic (one can argue whether Plato’s dream republic had similar goals). Such educational aspirations underlay making the objects and travel of theôria available through the metonymic exercise of the “universal” exhibition. Here the world and its products were available in mappa mundi formation. Historically, the tensions outlined by the ancient philosophers between intellectual and visual knowledge would materialize between the nineteenth-century exhibition and its discursive accompaniments. In the theoric journey of this book, the blindman is also myself, and my readers. Neither single narrative The Blindman

7

nor revelation, the book offers an accretion of episodes, assembling what I hope is a more nuanced history from the present. I will propose certain periodizations of what art has been taken to offer (from nationalist competition amid the “industries” of the world, to an internationalization of art, to globalist critique). While I depend on decisive scholars of this material, I will not rehearse their polemics.36 Metaphors of tapping through archives, and turning around the cases found there, suggest the winding path taken through the massive didactic, visual, and bureaucratic materials generated by the international exhibitions and their progeny in the biennials. The autonomous art object emerges as always entangled in a world from which its “autonomy” is polemically asserted. Marked by social historians of art and committed to critical theory, I assert an art world born within vast nationalist structures and ever aspiring to globality. Ensuing chapters interrogate what I call “predicated internationalism”: the “Dutch Millet,” for example, or the “Pakistani Picasso”— reminders that genius is claimed for places before it is granted to individuals. We no longer need to establish the rhythm of an avant-garde ever opposing itself to the academy by standing “outside” its exhibitions (here Courbet and Manet’s pavilions are enmeshed). To be in the art world is to be of it. This history reveals “avantgarde” artists engaging ambitiously with world pictures, curators employed to confound local politics in the name of the global, and viewers wresting reflective localisms from the orthodoxies of the universal. Through both minor and exemplary cases, I explore a variety of tactics and strategies in the tripartite epistemologies of organizers, artists, and visitors.37 The present chapter charts blind tropisms in each category. Chapter 2 explores the fairs’ amplifying apparatus in the case of midcareer artists (US sculptor Hiram Powers) and established artisan/tradesmen (Josiah Wedgwood’s firm). Chapter 3 presents the first biennial, via artists who solicited international cosmopolitan support through the fairs (Courbet, Manet, Picasso) and those entirely formed by these competitive nationalist arenas (Dutch painter Jozef Israëls). Chapter 4 interrogates national actors that sought to construct an international modernity through a frankly emulative Euro-biennial (in Brazil) and tracks the artistic backlash such efforts provoked (Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark). These artists’ embodied, eventful art opens chapter  5, which then turns to the emergence of transnational cura8

Chapter 1

tors in tune with this art (Harald Szeemann). Chapters 6 and 7 track artists who found, in biennials, a surprising vector for working out what I propose as a critical globalism within an aesthetics of experience— not a discipline for studying art after the fact, but a considered mode for opening ourselves to productive change. I thus invite the reader of this book to follow the blindman through Enlightenment reason to altogether different desires (and desires for difference). World’s fairs and biennials intend to stage the strange and wonderful. We consume, but are also consumed, in the exchange; in rare instances, we are transformed. Desires for that transformation fuel an aesthetics of experience and suggest the global workings of art.

Optics and Encyclopedics

How was blindness transvalued in modernity? The European Enlightenment provides a crucial hinge. Beginning with Descartes and robustly carried forward during the republic of letters, the trope of the blindman was taken up with revolutionary ardor by Denis Diderot, who used it to illustrate scientific inquiries about matter, knowledge, vision, and the functioning of mind (fig. 1.3).38 With incisive wit, Kleege notes how odd it is that Descartes’s hypothetical blindmen do not wake the sleeping dog to help them explore, but make do, poorly, with obdurate sticks.39 The sighted philosopher thus leans on the human (narcissistically), and his arguments rely on objects— formative biases that will govern the great exhibitions to come.40 The early Descartes of the Optics (1637) needs these concrete objects to bridge material and immaterial knowledge: “For instance, when our blind man touches bodies with his stick, they certainly do not transmit anything to him except in so far as they cause his stick to move in different ways. . . . This is what occasions his soul to have sensory awareness of just as many different qualities in these bodies as there are differences in the movements caused by them in his brain.”41 Knowledge depends on our actions in relation to objects. Granted the potential reductiveness of any brain-based extension of Descartes into contemporary neuroscience, cognition is still understood to require movement and material stimuli— even if, in the case of Olafur Eliasson’s Your Blind Movement (2010; fig. 1.4), our struggling eyes encounter only barely differentiated photons bouncing off “mist” particles.

Figure 1.3 Left: René Descartes’s blindman, with stick and dog; engraving accompanying the Optics (1637) as part of Discours de la methode (rev. ed.; Paris: Theodore Girard, 1668), 152. Right: Denis Diderot’s blindman (explicitly after Descartes); engraving in the first edition of Lettre sur les aveugles: A l’usage de ceux qui voyent (London, 1749), 19. Both courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Despite its intended role as “mere” analogy, the stick of Descartes’s blind man is importantly material— it meets resistance in the world. To extend the analogy, Descartes needed “ether” (thickened, it might look like Eliasson’s mist), propagating these forces to the mind. All of this was to provide a rational basis for experience— it wasn’t God putting pictures in our heads. And what Eliasson likes about his foggy rooms at biennials is the way in which disoriented visitors are compelled to call upon other sensory paths to feel, and experience, the working of this “blinding” art.42 For Descartes, it was precisely the stick’s own blindness that secured secular reason and gave his readers access to what had traditionally been the purview of religion: that which lies beyond the visible.43 The blindman’s stick defeated the magical and apparitional qualities of vision: even an eye removed from a cadaver will focus beautiful pictures on its interior. In confrontation with that wondrous paradox, Descartes concludes, “It is the soul which sees, and not the eye; and it does not see directly, but only by means of the brain.” The eye is

its own version of Plato’s cave, and we must move beyond it to get to the truth. But what of the soul’s deceptions in that larger cavern of the skull? The warped and shadowy perceptions of the madman/sleeper cannot be confirmed precisely because there are no objects in the mind’s eye to check reality. As Descartes imagines these unreal visions: “Certain vapors disturb their brains and arrange those of its parts normally engaged in vision exactly as they would be if these objects were present.”44 In that phrase, “if these objects were present,” Descartes reveals that the absence of such objects (like the lack of any resistant thing at the end of the blind man’s stick) leaves blindness unchecked by insight. Without objects to verify knowledge (through confirmatory touch, smell, taste, and sound, as well as vision), the percipient can wonder if she is dreaming, or has gone mad; just as without some thing at the end of his stick, the blindman must stop in uncertainty. Objects confirm knowledge, and by their means all knowledge is available to the blind. Or so Descartes— and perhaps also Boshoff— affirm (plate 1). The Blindman

9

Figure 1.4 Olafur Eliasson, Your Blind Movement, as installed at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2010. Fluorescent lights (red, green, blue), aluminum, steel, wood, foil, fog machine. Photographer: Jens Ziehe. © 2010 Olafur Eliasson.

The emphasis on the sensible— not merely visible— component of knowledge only grew stronger in the Enlightenment, and more central to philosophers’ understanding of how we make culture. (Kant would call it the sensus communis.) Language is key. Note that it is not the deaf mute who forms the central figure for knowledge in Enlightenment philosophy but the multisensory, communicative blind person who grasps real objects, questions master narratives, and contributes to knowledge through lots of tapping and talking. Paving the way for the great exhibitions of the industrial age, the Enlightenment blindman confirmed experience as the primary form of education and objects as key conveyors of experiential knowledge. Fifty years after Descartes’s Optics, for example, the philosophe William Molyneux introduced two platonic solids into the blindman’s world to prove that experience, and experience alone, was the teacher 10

Chapter 1

of men. Locke paraphrased Molyneux’s letter about the famous experiment (sent on July 7, 1688) as follows: Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?45

Note the phrase “before he touched them.” In Molyneux’s highly constrained experiment, the man born blind must be as shackled as the prisoners in Plato’s cave after he “be made to see”— there is no possibility of a journey,

a theôria that would go to the new place of vision with touch intact. But although this man-born-blind is not allowed to touch them, the physical cube and sphere are still necessary for Molyneux to prove that though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet obtained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube.

Locke comfortably agrees: “This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them.”46 When Diderot updated Molyneux, Locke, and even Bishop Berkeley’s blindman in the next century, it would also take the form of a letter— his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, written to one Madeleine d’Arsant De Puisieux in 1749.47 By this point, actual blind people had themselves become exhibited, in operating theaters where cataract surgery offered spectacles of scientific achievement (even if Diderot did not have the clout to gain entree to a

scheduled operation for his favored correspondent to attend).48 As his chosen illustration “after Descartes” suggests, for Diderot the blind man was not a totemic outcast but a fashionable gentleman. His literally encyclopedic ambitions wanted to build insights from real blind men, objects, empirical reports, and worldly operations, placing knowledge within reach of the literate general public and including them in the cumulative project of human progress. The Letter on the Blind revealed Diderot’s ambitions and began to build a radical new world-view, as philosopher Annie Ibrahim notes: “The project of constituting a ‘true’ metaphysical materialism . . . is first elaborated and tried out in the Letter on the Blind . . . . Diderot is able . . . to conjecture another metaphysics and another materialism, in which the power of the event and the force of singularity can govern worlds.”49 This is the moment Heidegger would identify as the world picture coming-into-being (Ibrahim’s “event  .  .  . of singularity” is suggestive). Significantly complicating Heidegger, it is also the moment when blindness begins to be deeply transvalued, troubling the “picture” and multiplying worlds. Diderot’s blindman becomes an active agent of change, departing from the fools of biblical parable and folk wisdom (for which see the tragicomic variations by Bruegel, from Descartes’s time, and Greuze, from Diderot’s own; figs. 1.5 and 1.6). In Diderot’s Letter, blind

Figure 1.5 Pieter Bruegel, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568, as reproduced by Friedrich Bruckmann Verlag (Munich, 1889). Courtesy Perkins School for the Blind Archives.

The Blindman

11

Figure 1.7 Nicholas Saunderson, the blind British mathematician, as engraved by J. Hinton, ca. 1740, from a 1718 painting by John Vanderbank in the Royal Society. Figure 1.6 Engraving by François Janet (active in Paris, 1824), after Jean-Baptiste Greuze, L’aveugle trompé, exhibited at the 1755 Paris Salon. Courtesy Perkins School for the Blind Archives.

individuals are intelligent rather than credulous; they are given histories and lively voices— even if some of these might be Diderot’s own. What matters for Diderot’s readers, as it will matter for visitors to the great exhibitions a century later, is that we believe in these blind people and trust that the object-based concreteness of their multisensory experience will bring entire worlds into being. In his letter to Madame De Puisieux, Diderot presents us with five different nonsighted individuals, all of whom unerringly reinforce and personalize the Optics of Descartes. Indeed, one of them describes the eye to Diderot as “an organ . . . on which the air has the effect this stick has on my hand,” leading the philosopher to exclaim, “Had Descartes been born blind, he might, I think, have hugged himself for such a definition.” Indeed, were Descartes blind yet blessed with unaltered genius, he would have “put the seat of the soul at the fingers’ ends.”50 12

Chapter 1

This robust, tactile, and embodied materialism gives objects— felt as well as seen— a large role to play in constructing the soul’s knowledge. Here, Diderot’s focus on the extraordinary blind British mathematician, Nicholas Saunderson, is revealing (fig. 1.7). For Saunderson’s abstract thinking required tactile objects, whether the armillary sphere (in posthumous portraits), or the elaborate pegboard he invented for working out his algebra, which he called “palpable mathematics.”51 Such materializations were important for Diderot, who would go on to produce an Encyclopédie full of levers and gears, pin factories, and other tools to think with (fig. 1.8).52 Once again, philosophy suggests that objects and images must be traveled toward, conceptually grasped, and then turned away from in order to construct encyclopedic understanding. Theôria requires the full trip. At the heart of this modern world picture, a blindman appears to grasp the contours of this representation and to assure us it makes sense. For Diderot, the blind had an advantage in charting the world, given the reflexive

Figure 1.8 “Pin Factory,” engraved by J. A. Defehrt (designer: Goussier) as an illustration for Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, or Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1762.

abstraction required for them to enlarge from a simple touch to matter and force, atmospheres and celestial objects. On this account, the abstracting blind are always already “turning away” or “detaching” from the world (as the Latin root for abstraction, ab strahere, implies). Diderot writes: But if the imagination of the blind man is no more than the faculty of calling to mind and combining sensations of palpable points; and of a sighted man, the faculty of combining and calling to mind visible or colored points, the person born blind consequently perceives things in a much more abstract manner than we; and in purely speculative questions,

he is perhaps less liable to be deceived. For abstraction consists in separating in thought the perceptive qualities of a body, either from one another, or from the body itself in which they are inherent.53

Recall that for Diderot’s most famous blind man, Saunderson, abstraction is wholly conceived in blindness, and the only reliable forms of knowledge are those that can still be tied to objects, from which theory travels and returns. Concepts with no analogue in direct sensory experience have no existence for Saunderson, whom, in Diderot’s report at least, speaks from his very deathbed to challenge complacent religious beliefs: “If you want to make me believe in God you must make me touch Him.”54 The Blindman

13

Angering the British for its elaboration (if not fictionalization) of Saunderson’s dying moments, Diderot’s celebration of secular empiricism also got him thrown into prison at Vincennes. Surely it is no coincidence that upon his release he immediately began the labor of his life, the robustly object-filled, entirely secular paper exhibition of the Encyclopédie. With the encyclopedic Diderot, our tale shifts from philosophers of stick-tapping blindmen to world-making purveyors of universal knowledge. As subscribers of the new Encyclopédie doubled (from two thousand in 1750 to four thousand in 1757— after which it was formally suppressed), we witness the birth of a res-publica (public thing).55 This is not simply a republic of letters populated by a few philosophers, but a true public sphere whose literate classes were growing and eager to gain access to the world. The Letter described how, although sensation by itself is indivisible, it occupies, if one may use the word, an extension in space to which the blind man is able to add and subtract mentally by enlarging or diminishing the parts affected. By this means he compares points, surfaces, and solids; and [speaking here of Saunderson] he could imagine a solid as large as this terrestrial globe, if he were to imagine his fingers’ ends as large as this globe, and occupied by sensation in its length, breadth, and depth. [Emphasis added.]56

With its empiricism, its secular confidence, and what Heidegger would call its “degodification,” Diderot’s philosophy makes real Descartes’s intuitions, inaugurating the “time of the world picture.”57 Contra Heidegger, it was sensed from palpable points rather than technical reproductions, haptically produced through a dynamic encounter with a hand-held, spherical orb— a cosmos graspable even by those who would never see a horizon. If such world-making was accessible for Saunderson, then surely the average shopkeeper, cutlery manufacturer, parfumier, or bookseller could at least attempt it— particularly with the prompt of the object-filled Encyclopédie close at hand. Over the next century, European men of action (and their colonial agents) were compelled by these books, images, figures, and object lessons to bring things back into direct experiences— giving the blindman, once again, an important job to do. 14

Chapter 1

Universal Object Lessons

In January 1863, an anonymous essay appeared in the Victorian literary magazine Temple Bar: “How a Blind Man Saw the International Exhibition.” By then, encyclopedic exhibitions had drummed a rhythm into Paris and London; the blindman was brought in to confront the latest behemoth, the International Exhibition of 1862 (which boasted three times as many exhibits as the first Great Exhibition of 1851; fig. 1.9).58 I parse the “blind man’s” report in depth, later in this section, as revealing aspects of the operative episteme in these large-scale international arrangements of the nineteenth century— how they were seen to produce knowledge and how they positioned their subjects. The Victorian blindman calls forth the sensory dynamics of visitor experience, but not yet to destabilize spectacle or the politics of empire in this “picture” of the world. If, in fact, “everyman” could form an opinion about these exhibitions— such as industrial paint salesman John Daws, who recorded his awe at both the first and second Great Exhibitions in his diary (fig. 1.10; Daws’s musings are now available on the next generation of encyclopedia, the World Wide Web)— then why would a blindman’s report be important for the cultured middleclass readers of Temple Bar? My intuition is that the trope of blindness emerges in the stream of exhibitionary discourse when needed, creating the space for reflection on these extraordinary displays of temporal, visual, and material modernity. By the same token, the blindman could be the everyman (as he was for Diderot)— attesting to a politics of populism in which all things worth knowing are available to the average man of sense. At a more prosaic level, this literary blindman reinforced for industrious Victorians the importance of difference in cultivating taste. The blind gentleman of Temple Bar encounters objects largely in their commodity form, arrayed in dizzying racks and rows, but encounters them individually and at a measured pace. This allows him to assemble his tactile impressions and then perform the leap to abstraction— here, an abstract conception of the British empire and its industrial sublime, the great exhibition’s world picture. But if the Victorian blindman thereby reinforces prevailing ideology, his very emergence establishes the possibility for critique, the rejection of shine for substance.

Figure 1.9 Engraved illustration showing the interior of the 1862 Great Exhibition, with the Majolica Fountain and Nave (as viewed from the Eastern Dome). From The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition 1862 (London), xi.

But no trope is inherently radical. By underscoring the object-based nature of knowledge, the Temple Bar’s blindman also confirmed both the consumer economies and industrial production modes of which Britain was the undisputed leader. Characteristic of this book will be such conundrums: the universal world picture determines no universal politics, and the site of reception can both confirm and confound hegemony. To the partisan nationalist politics of organizers must be added the practices making meaning in the polis to which visitors returned—

sometimes with surprising outcomes, as the blindman’s twentieth-century trajectory will show. Universal expositions did many things. Of interest here: (1) They materialized Diderot’s illustrated textual summaries of world knowledge, brought them up to date with the innovations of human industry, and infused them with debates on art. (2) They enabled this knowledge to come to the average merchant or customer, people not likely to have gone on the Grand Tour. (3) They spatially diffused the republic of letters via commisThe Blindman

15

Figure 1.10 Sketches from the diary of John Daws, “Commercial Traveller” for a paint manufacturer, showing the two Great Exhibitions in London: Crystal Palace under construction, October 1850 (top), and on its final day, October 11, 1851 (middle); exhibition hall for the second International Exhibition in 1862 in its closing days (bottom). Courtesy of Daws’s descendants in the Cryer and Daws family.

sioned knowledge from the peripheries of empire, even as they organized empire into a geographical picture. (4) They caused many foreign objects to arrive, many of which stayed to seed trade and taste, and (in the dramatic case of the Victoria and Albert Museum) to feed pedagogy and production. (5) They stimulated the largescale movements of other persons— as reflected in the paint-seller John Daws’s enthusiastic celebration of “every grade of mankind” appearing on London’s streets.59 As we’ll explore in chapters to come, all of these aspirations and effects would be brought into the biennial circuit, there to be transvalued and upended. The nineteenth-century fairgoer experienced worldly modernity amid a single nation’s assertion of dominance; by contrast, we who go to biennials today will often experience globality via the politics of fragmentary, partial, or incommensurate accounts. We can emerge as enmeshed in a contemporary world that is socially (not to mention biologically) interdependent, yet without the mastery of a unified perspectival view. Paradoxically, this is not an expansion in our world pictures so much as an invagination of ourselves within them— the globalist world is characterized by multiplicity, polyglot complexity, lumpy development, and local knowledge yet knit together as never before. Thus I argue: Heidegger’s world-as-picture 16

Chapter 1

was always in the process of dynamic compression and expansion, multiplication and dispersal, taken up by traveling peoples and unruly ideas. What the 1862 blindman visited in London was titled variously the “International Exhibition,” “World Exhibition,” and “Universal Exhibition.”60 It was understood to follow London’s “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” in 1851 (dubbed by Punch magazine “The Crystal Palace”) and Paris’s riposte, the “Exposition Universelle” in 1855. Some twenty other fairs would heave into view at regular intervals in numerous metropoles for the remainder of that century. These were provincial in the sense of being largely a product of industrializing Europe (fig. 1.11; with the United States and other former colonies joining in). The goal was not only to show citizens and foreign visitors “all” of the world’s productions (and human types) but to show off the capacity to orchestrate such a complex, and to repeat it. Great Britain’s Prince Albert and civil servant Henry Cole, the collaborators on that first Great Exhibition, had envisioned 1851 as merely the beginning of establishing London as “a metropolis of learning, organized around the production of useful knowledge.” They understood both the ancient role of trade fairs and more contemporary developments, such as workingmen’s congresses, and

Figure 1.11 “The Great Sugar Mill”: dynamos and the industrial sublime at the 1862 International Exhibition. Illustrated London News, June 11, 1862, 643.

Figure 1.12 “Articles in Glass” by the firm Dobson & Pearce of London. In Art Journal catalogue for the 1862 International Exhibition.

attempted to capture these energies for the twin bulwarks of capitalism and monarchy. According to historian Bruce Robertson, Albert in particular believed in “the benefits of learning based on objects, and the Exhibition of 1851 was simply a first step in waking up the country and the capital to these ideas.”61 There was a tension between revealing and concealing, sharing and spying, as the fairs spooled out. Britain

was by no means confident of its leadership in the world of design— indeed, the first Great Exhibition aimed to raise the level of taste and manufacturing skill in the rapidly industrializing nation by studying the work of “traditional artisans” as well as commercial firms in competing European states (fig. 1.12).62 The beaux arts exhibitions mounted by the French in response to the British affair would be a veritable boxing theater of national comparThe Blindman

17

Figure 1.13 Henry Fox Talbot, Articles of Glass, “talbotype.” Plate 4 from The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green, 1844–46). Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University.

atives (“schools” were now state-identified). Tracking all this were ministries of education, of commerce, of arts and industries, of agriculture, of fisheries, of transportation, of mining. These bureaus commissioned exhaustive reports spanning hundreds of volumes, returning us to the textual project of the Encyclopédie all over again, but with massively dispersed effects. And there were new media with which to form modernity and picture its world. Take William Henry Fox Talbot’s first book of photography (The Pencil of Nature, 1843– 46; fig. 1.13); the encyclopedic energy of the Enlightenment fueled his arrangements and his desire to include them in the Great Exhibitions. By contrast, the conservatism of the British academy and its artists caused them to shrink from the implications of all this industrial modernity and its new forms of technoscientific visuality. Aesthetic theorist John Ruskin refused to go to the first Great Exhibition at all; William Morris went, deeming the British sections “wonderfully ugly.”63 Aesthetes retreated back into “Pre-Raphaelitism” in England and Symbolism on the continent. But for Talbot and other 18

Chapter 1

modern image-making professionals not yet defined as “artists,” fairs promised to elevate the status (and price) of their new media. As Talbot wrote the commissioners in 1851 (complete with hesitations and amendments): Where there is no patent but unlimited competition Mr Hill of Edinburgh sells albums of Talbotypes photographic views and sketches, very fine portraits and at what price? Forty guineas for the volume. And that this such a price is not unreasonable is shown by the fact of several of our most eminent artists in London having purchased the volume. collection it. If I go into a printshop and ask the price of a fine engraving, I am told perhaps four or five guineas— what would be thought if I only tendered the price of the paper, together with the cost of the workman’s printing off that impression from the copperplate?64

Photography, Talbot was arguing, should be valued as an art, not an assembly of chemicals, treated paper, and wage labor. Artists were already purchasing them—

perhaps photography was already an art? In fact it would be almost a century before the medium was secure in its artistic status. As Talbot knew, these great exhibitions were tastemakers on a massively visual scale, seeding the “society of the spectacle” to come.65 Not only were the objects on display stunning, but the structures that housed them (most notably, Paxton’s innovative Crystal Palace of 1851 and its many imitators) glittered with colorful ornament under soaring roofs of transparent glass— a new architectural medium that seemed to materialize the Enlightenment’s clarity and communicative intent (plates 2 and 3). Owen Jones’s original color scheme sought to pay homage to ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Moorish Alhambra (as he explained in a published “Apology”). Such coloring would be duplicated assiduously in New York City’s 1853 Crystal Palace and in many structures thereafter, captured in Walt Whitman’s frequently revived oration on these hues as metaphors for diversity in the American nation: High and rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades, Gladdening the sun and sky, enhued in cheerfullest hues, Bronze, lilac, robin’s egg, marine and crimson, Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath they banner Freedom, The banners of the States and flags of every land . . .66

This reminds us that the “universal” can be localized and nationalized; there is no contradiction in these aspirations. Visibility required new material infrastructures— next to the 1853 New York Crystal Palace was built the 315-foot Latting Observatory, offering views to Brooklyn and New Jersey. Waves of grandes expositions in Paris produced new topographies dedicated to the urban view, such as Trocadéro hill in 1867 and, in 1889, the electrified icon of the Eiffel Tower, visible from every arrondissement (plate 8). The fairs were the machinery by which Paris branded itself as the city of lights and London advertised itself as capital of an empire on which the sun never set, interlocking metaphors of light coding for power and reach. Amid such beacons, what does the Temple Bar’s probably fictitious blind man have to offer? Strategic blindness helped the readers of Temple Bar examine the experience

of the fair, producing the “turning away” necessary for theory and knowledge to be made. Simultaneously, the blindman guaranteed the unassailable reality of the objects on display, underscoring their availability to all. Aware of the long philosophical tradition in which he participates, the Temple Bar blindman knows he is a guarantor of secular, rational truth, precisely (as in Diderot) because of his pastoral remove from the corrupting urbis. He is persuaded to write his report by the belief that what I have to say will interest many, and tend to throw some light [!] upon the manner in which the blind are impressed with that outer world in which they live and move,— a subject on which at present much ignorance prevails,— [and so] I conquer, not without effort, a reserve which is natural to me, and proceed to record as faithfully as I can, for the benefit of the public, the impressions left on my mind by the great . . . display that has been recently brought to a close at South Kensington.67

Rhetorically confirming his “real” existence, he provides details of his journey: “I love to hear the busy throng of men, the tramping of feet upon the pavement, the rattling of omnibuses and cabs, the crushing sound of cartwheels grinding the road, the hum of many voices, which go to make up the din of a crowded London street.”68 This capacity to synthesize such overall impressions fails him, though, when he comes inside: When I became aware of the vast area covered by the building, and the array of objects which appealed to the notice of the educated and thoughtful observer, I gave up as hopeless any attempt to form a general notion of its contents as a whole.69

The blindman confirms for the reader that he knows of the myriad seductions of visuality but chooses a different path. Resolved to guide us purely through the whim of his own interests, he is moved to visit the displays of foreign goods, arranged as they are by nation (or, in the case of Germany, by the Prussian principality). “They tempted you with the novelty of their attractions, and held out a thousand little inducements to the casual passer-by to come and inspect them. I walked through all, as in duty bound, noticing the various differences they presented.” The Blindman

19

Figure 1.14 Half of a hand-tinted photographic stereocard documenting the “Prussian Court” at the 1862 International Exhibition, published by London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company.

Following a set of robust tactile encounters, our guide concludes that German stuff from the “Prussian Court” (fig. 1.14) “had this remarkable peculiarity in common, that all the articles exhibited seemed made with the one sole object of lasting as long as possible.” Heavy in the hand, they were seemingly indestructible; the blindman even imagines hurling them to the ground, only to find them still intact. “Not so, however, in the French Court,” he observes. “Here every thing was light, effective, elegant in design, and calculated to attract the eye”— or so he tells 20

Chapter 1

us— “durability, apparently, not being considered essential, if obtained at a sacrifice of the general effect.”70 Thus national stereotypes condense to haptic and functional qualities: weight, effectiveness, elegance. Incapable of assessing the Swiss Court (everything was under glass), our blindman was welcomed by the caretaker of the Japanese display, whose civil assistance enables him to form a very correct estimate of the habits and general mode of life of this people. He put himself to

Figure 1.15 “Japanese Court” being visited by the first Japanese ambassadors to Europe, 1862 International Exhibition. Illustrated London News, May 24, 1862, 535.

infinite trouble, reaching down various interesting objects for my inspection, bringing them near to me that I might feel them. He showed me a specimen of their waterproof coats, which were strong, and remarkably light, made of paper; their weapons of decency, including the very sword— short in handle, but sharp in blade— taken from them on the occasion of their midnight attack on our envoy in the streets of Jeddo; also some specimens of ornamental work, including a box which, when opened, revealed twenty others, diminishing in size till the last, which was so small as to be capable of holding nothing larger than a sixpence.71

This character’s experiences in the so-called Japanese Court included feeling the sharp edge of a weapon wielded by an Edo partisan against the forced opening of the Japanese empire to Western commerce. These were not goods

assembled by the Japanese state and willingly sent to the Great Show— they were military contraband. Yet in an act of true political sublimation, Mr. Blind Man smoothly segues from the sword to the intricate pleasures of a lacquered box. The murderous conflicts of imperialism are reduced to a mere shiver in this theater of power, given added interest to the readers of Temple Bar by the fact that the 1862 Great London Exposition had formed the occasion for the arrival of the first Japanese envoy to Europe, amply covered in the Illustrated London News (fig. 1.15).72 The core of the blindman’s experience and the source of true sublimity were not, however, these objects of exotic difference, secured for British education and aesthetic delight.73 No, it was the hall of machines that eventually called him to a full sensory experience of the modern world picture. The headaches he got there compelled him “to visit it by fits and starts, and not to stay The Blindman

21

more than a quarter of an hour”; nonetheless, “Again and again I returned to the charge,” both drawn and repelled by the vibration underfoot and the smell of hot oil, “the deafening hiss from the different boilers which set the whole in motion, the whirling of innumerable wheels, and the crushing and stamping of the materials confided to the tender mercies of these iron monsters, [which] so confused me, that for a long time I was unable to analyse the diverse sounds I heard, and give to each its due significance.”74 Despite the palpable dangers— he recalls the sad history of unfenced machine-shafts in Manchester, where workers could be “caught up and torn to pieces” like chaff in the mill— his compulsive visits to the machines were where theôria was made. “I was brought into contact for the first time with that special branch of the industry of the present age, . . . the centres of which are to be found in the manufacturing districts of England.”75 The blindman thus gives us a localized center to the imperial picture of the world, with no stirrings of critique. His multisensory encounter allows him to report how the great exhibition penetrates the very body of its subjects with sublime shivers, vibrational energies, and hot odors; it contacts those bodies through sharp edges, papery surfaces, and delicate cultures— all under British control (or at least commercial management). Having achieved this peak experience, the blindman concludes his voyage with a report on the smells and sounds of various exhibition restaurants. The trip on our behalf is thus complete— the theoric journey from the country has brought him to an imaginative encounter with the cult objects of France, Germany, and even Japan, but it is the hall of machines that brings him back, in full knowledge, to the center of industrial Britain and the meaning of his age. What is radical here is not the message— this Victorian author lubriciously oils the gears of empire— but the medium. The blindman’s richly acoustic and olfactory endorsement of multimodal knowledge formation implicitly rebukes visuality, setting up a trope that will morph through modernism to contribute to a more progressive message of difference turning away from mechanics of power. In the satirical tradition of Addison’s Spectator (if less funny), the British blindman offers his guidance. We take his hand, we listen, and we smell, momentarily escaping the visual seductions of consumerist religion (French and German fancy goods) and moving fearfully toward

22

Chapter 1

modernity— where the dynamo reigns supreme. The Victorian blindman turns from spectacle to enmesh himself in knowledge and its infrastructures, in order to take into his very body the alienating cults of the machine.

Sensory Alternatives

Blindman tropes continue into the twentieth century, where they edge toward a full-blown epistemology, particularly after an episode in another machine hall— this time in Paris (plate 10). In his well-known autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, a young Boston “Brahmin” frames his visit to the 1900 Parisian Exposition Universelle as a transformative confrontation between “the Dynamo and the Virgin.” (See figs. 1.11 and 1.16.) The Harvard-educated historian was like any civilized man on the Grand Tour, except his itinerary had included a “journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District,” described by Adams as “another lesson, which needed . . . to be rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; . . . this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness . . .— the revelation of an unknown society of the pit.”76 Inverting the journey of the Temple Bar blindman (and perhaps his politics), the American Adams begins with the Satanic mills of industry, in order to prepare us for an encounter with industrialization’s sublime force. By the time he arrives in Paris to visit the universal exhibition and see European industrial culture on display, he is ready to adopt the blindman trope: In such labyrinths, the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of blind-man’s dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modeling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well. [Emphasis added.]77

Tactile probe in hand, Adams believes he has finally understood the impact of contemporary science and industrial technology, within which the massive dynamo becomes “a symbol of infinity,” the forty-foot generators becoming pal-

Figure 1.16 Galerie des Machines, by architect Ferdinand Dutert working with engineer Victor Contamin, for the 1889 Paris world’s fair (dismantled in 1910).

Figure 1.17 The “White City” at Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition, 1893. Black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.

pable, humming entities that “he began to feel . . . as a moral force.” The rule of the Virgin in past Christian centuries was waning, Adams reports, and the Dynamo becomes the new god: “Before the end, one began to pray to it; . . . the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”78 The technological sublime is secular in its force if inspirational in its emotions. For Adams, the blindman’s pen leads toward conclusions that are not religious leaps of faith but whole-person adjustments (as John Dewey would advocate a few decades later, for which see chapter 6). Measuring the span of his own education between the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 (fig. 1.17) and his sublime revelation in the 1900 Parisian display, Adams concludes, “In these last seven years man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. 24

Chapter 1

He had entered a supersensual world.”79 This world must be “supersensual” because it cannot be known by its visual presentation alone— indeed, Adams’s scientist friend Samuel Langley explains that the visible universe is but a tiny fraction of the energies science can now measure: as X-rays, infrared, radioactivity, or the vast play of electromagnetic forces that the dynamo infinitely embodies.80 In this supersensual world, one needs “super” technologies and enhancements. But apparently one also needs the humble blindman’s tactile staff, the guide dog with its animal capacities, the pen that can mold form from chaos, and a range of nonvisualizing modalities for making sense. This, then, is blind epistemology— a theory of how best to encounter and know the modern world, resolutely anti-ocular. The supersensual— arguably the blindman’s natural domain, as Kleege points

out— becomes a space for grasping one’s time. An entire cohort of writers and artists would take up Adams’s blind epistemology to craft alternative modernisms for the twentieth century (and conceptual thinking for the twenty-first). “The Dynamo and the Virgin” reports on mechanized models of force, which were soon to proliferate via Ford, Taylor, and newly mechanomorphic art, beginning with the New York Dadas, international Futurists, German Neue Sachlichkeit, architectural De Stijl, Purism from the 1910s and 1920s, and accelerating on to the 1939 New York World’s Fair with its technophilic “World of Tomorrow.”81 In a compelling resonance I am hardly the first to note, Adams’s virgin/dynamo connects forcefully to the machine forms of one New York Dadaist in particular: the Parisian Marcel Duchamp— who would help found a journal titled The Blind Man as part of his conscientious campaign for an “anti-retinal” art (later adapted to the goal of a “precision optics” that was not visual but embodied).82 Duchamp, too, was an attender of fairs. According to some, his anti-retinal revelation was sparked at the 1911 aviation fair in Paris, when the sight of a propeller drove him to declare the end of painting’s relevance to modernity.83 As if responding to Henry Adams (whom he claimed not to have read), Duchamp “blinded” himself to Impressionism (that “retinal” art par excellence) and began to hybridize virgins with dynamos.84 These were still painted on canvas, but rendered with flesh-colored pistons and vividly tubular mechanics, given titles such as Virgin, Bride, and finally Virgin Transitioning into a Bride (all 1912). Duchamp knew he was on to something, for he followed the brides with two iterations of the more androgynously titled Nude Descending a Staircase, one featured in the International Painting and Sculpture exhibition held in the New York Armory in 1913 (fig. 1.18). The Cubo-Futurist canvas created such a productive scandal (caricatured in one newspaper as “The Rude Descending the Subway”) that Duchamp was persuaded to come personally to New York. Confronting the shock of Manhattan’s full-tilt modernization upon his arrival in 1915, he inaugurated the concept of the readymade. Objects taken from commercial circulation were given “new thoughts,” a complex notion promulgated in The Blind Man (fig. 1.19)— itself launched, I note, in confrontation with the 1917 iteration of the International Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, whose 1913 edition had included Duchamp’s scandalous painting. By 1917 Duchamp was both inside and outside the

exhibition’s bureaucracy. On the one hand, he sat on its jury, but behind his other hand he scoffed at its stuff y conventionalism; what he submitted under a pseudonym took the form of the artistically signed urinal we know as R.  Mutt’s Fountain, with a world of art history and Conceptualism in its wake.85 What Duchamp was testing with his “blind” urinal (which was, after all, not usefully attached to any plumbing) were the legal guidelines set up for submission by the Society of Independent Artists, whose only requirement for inclusion was supposed to be a six-dollar entry fee.86 As the delivery of this bit of plumbing by an unknown artist was intended to prove, the Society’s open criteria concealed deeply held presumptions of artisanal craft, wedded to spiritual value and social elevation in works by artists ambitious enough to enter what was by then known simply as “the Big Show.” The affair of the urinal would have remained only an anecdote had it not been documented, by Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph in The Blind Man. The journal’s first number came to print in April 1917, directly following Fountain’s rejection; its cover bore a cartoon of Descartes’s and Diderot’s blindman with a stick, now turning up his nose at banal canvases pretending to be art. Its second number in May was more serious; it had Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder on the cover and focused largely on theorizing the French artist’s work and ideas as instigating a new American art. Here is critic Frank Crowninshield, plumping for the cause: Dear Blind Man . . . if you can help to stimulate and develop an American art which shall truly represent our age, even if the age is one of telephones, submarines, aeroplanes, . . . taxicabs, divorce courts, wars, tangos, dollar signs; or one of desperate strivings after new sensations and experiences, you will have done well.87

The call for “new sensations and experiences” foreshadows this book’s conclusion. For Duchamp and his riotous cohort, such experiences were still mostly to be found outside the official art world (as Henry Adams’s awe before the dynamo suggests). Duchamp struggled in his work to bring together the art and industry from a prior century’s fairs, spending decades developing sensory alternatives to passive sight. Finally believing he had a workable concept, he paid to display his wares at a 1935 inventor’s fair on the edge of Paris, where he introduced the “anti-retinal” rotary optical devices he was then attempting to patent (fig. 1.20).88 The Blindman

25

Figure 1.18 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (second version, shown at the 1913 Armory Show), 1912. Oil on canvas, 57.9 × 35.4 inches (147 × 90 cm). Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016.

The “Rotoreliefs” (as Duchamp called them) conducted the sensory politics of the blindman by other means. Not surprisingly, they found little purchase on the art world of the time, since they were not exhibited as “art.”89 Neither did their apparently purposeless rotations attract attention as inventions; indeed, Duchamp’s booth “went strikingly unnoticed” in one friend’s account.90 The 26

Chapter 1

devices displaced opticality itself, their slowly spinning, undulating patterns resembling the wheels used to induce hypnosis in mesmeric parlor acts. Theorizing them as “anti-ocular” in the early 1990s, Rosalind Krauss emphasized that Duchamp’s devices undermined a modernism that rationalized art as purely visual. She viewed the rotary devices as “carnal through and through,” activating

Figure 1.19 Covers from the first two issues of The Blind Man, April and May 1917, New York. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University.

the psyche’s infantile drives.91 But I want to argue that the claims of multisensory viscerality imply a more extensive political history than Krauss allows. Those politics were embedded in what Walter Benjamin analyzed as modernity’s “optical unconscious” (a term Krauss adopts but then strips of its politics). Theorized by Benjamin in 1931 as the “thoroughly historical variables” revealed by new media— namely photography and film— this was an unconscious operating below the surface of the world picture that was opened to analysis by the “tell” of new media. As in Adams’s supersensual brave new world, the kind of insight Benjamin theorized was outside the cave of everyday vision, revealed by turning to photography’s “material physiognomic aspects of pictorial worlds,” which functioned as visual parapraxes in a collective psychoanalytic exchange.92 Benjamin’s view could not be more significant for the critical globalism I identify in the contemporary art world. New media, rather than serving the technocratic “picturing” of the world that Heidegger abjured, have

critical potential that can be mobilized in the practices of artists and strategic uptake by audiences. Critical globalist art torques media to reveal the “thoroughly historical variables” of a contested present. Notably for the public and collective (not individual or infantile) desires I am theorizing here, Benjamin’s optical unconscious offered a “dialectical, Copernican turn of recollection” that could expose the “dreaming collective” inaugurated by capitalism’s commodity culture, which he elsewhere identified as contiguous with the great exhibitions’ “phantasmagorical” domain.93 Put more simply, new media could puncture the spectacle in favor of more critical modes. On this account, Duchamp’s rotary devices might be imagined to produce, if sequentially, such a dreaming collective, knitting together haptic, embodied worlds as carnally coextensive with their own breathing bodies. These bodies are returned to them, in a rejection of alienation— as Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious would endorse.94 Crucially, as Benjamin scholar Miriam Hansen insists, our analysis of The Blindman

27

Figure 1.20 Marcel Duchamp, photographed in 1946 (possibly by Arnold Eagle) with some of his Rotoreliefs. At right is Dada/Surrealist filmmaker Hans Richter, who was then completing Dreams That Money Can Buy, the 1947 film in which the Rotoreliefs are featured. Gelatin silver print, 10.2 × 8 inches (25.8 × 20.3 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001-62-2347.

the optical unconscious must precisely “get at the layer of dreams that both sustained and exceeded the historical order of production.” This is where Duchamp comes in. The blind(ed)man, or mesmerized subject of the rotary reliefs, turns from commodity spectacle toward another way of knowing. Othering the fair, these modes aim to convert “individual experience into collective form” via blind or haptic grasping after the optical unconscious.95 So much for today’s utopian aspirations. Admittedly, both demispheres and flat disks were difficult to collectiv28

Chapter 1

ize. Moving even slightly to the side defeats the “precision optics” in play. Intentionally erotic spatial probes, their undulations form voluptuously convex and then concave apparitions, thrusting out at us or sucking us in.96 Oddly, Duchamp suggested that closing one eye improved the effect (and of course his decision to film his devices in the 1926 Anemic Cinema, or in Richter’s 1947 Dreams That Money Can Buy, fixed monocularity permanently). Notably, Duchamp was never granted the patent for which he supposedly applied, and the rotary devices have faded into the

background of most art histories.97 In films (as in Richter’s, which won an award at the 1947 Venice film festival) or in the rare art museum activation, their mechanically pulsating patterns continue to demonstrate that the electromagnetic sense of sight, so convinced of its mastery of the universe, can be undone by the viscera claiming its own response. The experiential shift that Duchamp’s work promised— from objects to what they stimulated in “gray matter” (and thence to affect)— would bloom only after his death, in what I term the aesthetics of experience. That development will unwind in greater detail in the chapters that follow, stretching from the great exhibitions of empire through the biennial founded in their trade-specific image, through the replication of the biennial form in the cold war/new world, to the transfer of the fairs’ festal structures into the working of art— the covert source for much of today’s relational and situational aesthetics.98 In the ensuing chapters, the blindman’s supersensual experience moves from haptic encounters with objects toward the installation, projection, and performance art that propel the aesthetics of experience tout court. Blind epistemology so far has invoked key postmodern thinkers (Jay, Jameson, Krauss, Lyotard), but its real confirmation is found in newer work by art historians such as Laura U. Marks and Jane Blocker, and the nascent fields of sensory and affect studies.99 Marks has established “hapticity” in contemporary media screens and video projection, with pixelated grain and the friction of information loss (perhaps usefully “blinding” the intended image).100 Blocker has tracked “blindness” in viewers of specific kinds of installation art offered in the twenty-first century, describing how visitors to cinematized biennials “stumble about in disorientation, bumping into or treading on others . . . and so become skeptics who doubt vision and see with their bodies, groping with their hands.” In phrases resembling visitors’ accounts of certain performative situations instigated by Tino Sehgal (such as This Variation, narrated at the start of this chapter), Blocker characterizes “stricken audience members” as “people of memories and afterimages; they dwell in representations and reflections.”101 In place of those visual concepts (representation and reflection), recollection is what I want for my own account. Still, her brief argument— examining “blinding” works from the 2007 documenta and Venice biennial (by Gonzalo Diaz, Tobias Rehberger, and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, among others)— is clearly applicable to the longer history I trace:

These works produce sightlessness. They install our bodies as and at the center of works of art. My body is the wall on which the text is written, the surface off which the light bounces. . . . Such works do not consist, as in Derrida’s example, of the representation of something exterior to art, but rather of an experience that is immanent within art.102

I take viewer experience seriously in the chapters that follow, even as I hope to problematize the “experience economy” that haunts these engagements. As art separated itself more and more completely from the fairs, it incorporated more and more of the fair’s festal apparatus, producing leisure-through-education as a right and a politics. The world-as-picture is certainly still with us, but the global artist of today is brought into the biennial situation under very different circumstances from those of nineteenth-century representatives of Japan or China, confronting displays of their own confiscated cultural objects (much less the African or Filipino, his or her own body forced to display difference). Today, the artist is often nomadic, “glocal,” brought in to examine a biennial situation and contemplate a bespoke commission, poised to produce critiques in which we viewers are implicated. What are the circumstances that distinguish our consumption of cultural difference from the British blindman enjoying the pleasures of the lacquered box? Do the aesthetics of experience guarantee a politics? In practice, no— they merely demand that we craft one. That imperative pushes the viewer to take up a position in the “regime of the sensible.”103 There are strong continuities between the fairs of the past and the biennials of today, but also significant transformations— chief among them this critical pressure on artists and viewers to take responsibility, to adopt a politics of the partial view. This pressure accumulates, even as the super- and multisensory hermeneutic of the blindman is challenged by the continued drift toward spectacle: whether architecturally projected video, overwhelming installations, or performance works staged in vastly public arenas.104 Intriguingly, the genre of installation art, often incorporating the projected moving image, still reveals a yearning for the tactile and embodied encounter with difference (enhanced by haptics in the projected image). Polemically, I will claim throughout this book that such frictions and alternative sensory modalities form the basis for whatever The Blindman

29

progressive politics we can craft from these encounters, especially when blind epistemology is engaged by the artist and triggers the viewer’s own. Exemplary of this move is one of the artworks I began with— Javier Téllez’s exquisite Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (2007). Téllez’s performance and film were commissioned for one biennial (Performa) and shown in another (the Whitney Biennial). In its medium this artwork is entirely unexceptional; we encounter a projected moving image in a small dark room with no expectation of having a “supersensual” experience. But the work of art— its durational operation in and on the viewer— leverages affect and produces an event, meeting Benjamin’s requirement for the optical unconscious: “images which we have never seen before we remember them.”105 To take it from the top: the film documents an Asian elephant being led into the (emptied) McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn by a handler with a rope. The handler moves off screen, and we watch as six blind adults approach to encounter the patient beast. (A still photograph of a group encounter is offered by Téllez as a separate object; plate 36). Their voices range from echt New Yorker to accents of the Middle Eastern, Caribbean, and African diasporas. They touch whatever parts of the elephant they can reach and describe, in voice-over, their emotional response to the experience; intermittently, the artist cuts in a frame-filling shot of the elephant’s massive animal flank, breathing in and out (see fig. 1.1). Difference here is not merely ethnic/national/gendered/ blind but invoked at the level of the species. We become aware of being punily human before the quiet, captive creature; at the same time, we are divided by the screen in our “experience” of this animal. The artist’s invocation of Diderot (in his title) and the performance of an Eastern parable (in the documented event) invite a working of the art beyond the time of projection. Clearly we are presented with more than one kind of blind epistemology. Téllez stages the Asian legend of the six blind men incapable of describing an elephant— but this tale of blind, partial knowledge is mashed together with Diderot’s Enlightenment optimism. It is significant to my larger story of globality that Téllez produced this work as a nomadic expatriate artist (born in Venezuela, living in New York), first for an international festival (Performa) but then for a biennial of “national” art (the Whitney), the latter consciously retooled to encompass the 30

Chapter 1

glocal nomad. The work both exists and can be housed under all these rubrics, massaged by the cosmopolitan self-image of New York City. Creative Time, a nonprofit public art program committed to enlivening urban infrastructures, commissioned the piece in 2007. But as Téllez worked out his ideas for the commission, his tactics evolved. He initially intended to offer the performance piece live, with the elephant, during Performa. This plan was abandoned, for the elegant reason that the partial experience of the projected film would replicate the uneven conditions of sight: “There are two elements in the event: a group of six people who are blind, and an elephant. An image is produced by their encounter. I thought of the participants as the primary spectators of the event— the action of touching, smelling, and listening to a real elephant. Further spectators were not required.” The film’s “play on notions of visibility” was crafted by Telléz to confront and confound the hierarchy built into notions of spectatorship, particularly in the biennial’s world pictures: “Since film as a medium can only convey partial versions of events, the experience of the spectator looking at the film mirrors the parable.”106 We see the velvety black-and-white film, which the participants cannot. But they “see” the elephant in ways we never will— blind epistemology enforcing the politics of the partial view. As will unfold in greater detail in the chapters that follow, Téllez joins a sophisticated cohort of artists in biennial culture today who ply these boundaries between what can be known and who can know it in the global circuitry of contemporary art. Consider Kutlug Ataman’s Mediterranean Dramaturgies— an ongoing series of performance art/video works, a recent component of which (entitled Strange Space) was unveiled at the Art Dubai International Art Fair in 2009 (fig. 1.21).107 For this work, Ataman had himself filmed wandering through the desert, blindfolded and barefoot.108 Giving up his usual power of wielding the camera, he became “completely blind and deaf,” producing “a perfect metaphor for coming from an outside world into a local culture, which I had to accept as my own.”109 Ataman is intentionally ambiguous about where these “outside” and “local” cultures are in respect to his own biography. His author name a variation on “Ottoman,” the London-based artist is represented by a gallery in Istanbul and made this piece for showing at a biennial-type event in the UAE; he claims that Strange Space was inspired by a Mesopotamian folk tale in which a male lover is blinded by his desire for

Figure 1.21 Kutlug Ataman, Strange Space, from Mediterranean Dramaturgies, an ongoing series of performance art/video works, this one unveiled at the Art Dubai International Art Fair, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

an unattainable woman. The male lover is condemned to roam the desert fruitlessly searching for her, and when they finally miraculously encounter one another his love is too great and the pair burst into flames. Ataman notes this can suggest the volatile encounter between East and West, or, per the Dubai art fair’s catalogue, it could be “a metaphor for the encounter of modernity and tradition, for their reciprocal attraction and the trauma this attraction may cause.”110 Rarely can the blindman do his work without the shadow of trauma entering the frame. We saw for Socrates that blindness required violence to undo; and once enlightened, the philosopher returning with new insight could be

killed for his insistence on an unrecognizable truth. For her part, Krauss theorized anti-ocularity and the pulsative “unconscious” of modernism as directly referencing the classic Freudian trauma of castration. The rhetorical blindman of the Victorian Temple Bar wrote of the trauma of death for the industrialized worker, “like chaff ” thrown under the mill in what Adams described as the “society of the pit.” A few decades later, Benjamin theorized the optical unconscious’s “blind, senseless, obsessive . . . will to happiness” as negotiating the traumatic “shock” of modernization, with utopian possibilities for collective response as a result.111 In the contemporary frame, Blocker reads the blindThe Blindman

31

man’s trauma literally and physiologically, as a temporary wounding of sighted viewers’ faculties through assaultive combinations of searing lights, saturated monochromes, and other overwhelming phenomena that drown the would-be “viewer” in ocular impossibilities. But the blinding impulse of this art goes beyond trauma to reformulate the subject. Olafur Eliasson’s Blind Pavilion and his many other “blind” installations and artworks rely on such flooding or confounding of the visual system, in order to provoke an alternative phenomenological politics (alluded to in the epigraph to this chapter).112 In her own argument, Blocker examines Gonzalo Diaz’s Eclipse from 2007 (as installed at documenta 12), in which a phrase embedded in the piece can only be read when the viewer’s shadow blocks an “orb” of very strong light projected on the wall. The German sentence thus revealed in one’s silhouette translates as a directive: “You come to the heart of Germany only to read the word ‘art’ under your own shadow.” But I submit that Gonzalo Diaz’s alternatingly blinding and blinded Eclipse (seemingly borrowing from Natascha Haghighian’s tactics in her Empire of the Senseless from 2006) has a politics that goes beyond temporary disorientation.113 Located at documenta, Diaz’s work questions the world picture that this Europeanbased recurring exhibition inevitably purveys, suggesting that the only possible picture is under our own nose (and located in relation to our own bodies, right here now). To enlarge my claim: the artistic deployment of blind epistemology increasingly becomes a privileged strategy to force a rejection of the universalist terms of global capital, and the instrumentation and segregation of bodies within it. That will come to earn the name of “critical globalism,” in my argument, but such tactics take a long time to develop. The historical artists tracked throughout this book will be seen to navigate the world picture with varying success, but always under a specific set of rules: the artist must speak the international language, but use it to speak of difference. In Diaz’s own exegesis, Eclipse formalize[s] a kind of suspicion or alienation about the effectiveness of the social function of contemporary postmodern artistic production. . . . I suppose that the common spectators or those who might be called “specialists”— artists, curators, museum directors, galleries and magazines, critics, theoreticians and art historians, intellectuals and collectors— go to Documenta 32

Chapter 1

with certain expectations. . . . That which will finally be eclipsed will be precisely these expectations.114

Operative and ubiquitous today, the requirement that the global work of art navigate a local difference has a long history. This book argues for its origin in the earliest world’s fairs, which fueled the beginnings of our globally interconnected art system and its pulsing rhythms. The “othering” of difference is first forced on the display by its empowered and taxonomizing interpreters (the British blindman able to trump the Japanese envoy, whose only objects are confiscated markers of difference that the ambassadors from Japan have no power to control). In the chapters that follow, the rules shift over time. Sometimes, difference was mobilized by visitors, as when abolitionists and free slaves politicized Hiram Powers’s banal nineteenth-century Greek Slave (chapter 2). Difference could also become internalized and performed by the nomadic artist him- or herself; here, the case of Jozef Israëls (chapter 3) will be instructive. Modernism adapts, plumping for abstraction and universal messages (whether Mies in the 1929 Barcelona pavilion, Picasso in the 1937 Spanish one, or the Swiss artist Max Bill at the new world’s first biennial, in 1951 São Paulo). Difference seemed submerged under international style— but only temporarily. What was once a shackle has become a tool, in the tactics of artists deploying critical globalism. Less acknowledged is the continuing requirement that the artist wield an operative and recognizable style. Initially such styles were the price of admission (as interrogations of Powers’s Neoclassicism and Israëls’s Realism will reveal); today’s proliferation of ethnographic installations, projected video, and performative situations seem to present many alternatives but can nonetheless be examined as a loose constellation of global genres, if not “styles” per se.115 But my history remains optimistic about the global work of art. As my preface sets out, work in this context intends to function as a verb— holding off the reification of the object (“the-work-of-art”) and insisting on the mobility of cultural things and encounters— durational, subjectmaking, “desiring-production.”116 If Greek philosophers were anxious to escape the stigmatizing taint of blindness by leaving its dark cave, and Enlightenment theorists were eager to demonstrate the world of knowledge that could be constructed by a blind but rational empiricism, blindness now is summoned to

Figure 1.22 Willem Boshoff, Blind Alphabet, 1991–95. Installation view: Johannesburg Art Gallery, as documented for the 1996 São Paulo Bienal. Details: D6, Decacerous. Photographs courtesy of the artist.

invoke difference and force it upon us. Performing the multisensorial, blindness also emphasizes cultural, economic, and individual diversity— underscoring that we are each blind to something. This politics of the partial view opens the confident sighted audience to envulnerating weakness— as when Santiago Sierra, for the fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003 (chapter 7), bricked over the entrance to the modernist Spanish pavilion and allowed

only those with Spanish passports to enter, through the rear (where they could peek at the empty, dark interior). Such tactics also informed Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas in their Villa Lituania at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where Venetian visitors realized they were “blind” to the half of the work still in Rome (chapter  2). As briefly alluded to at the opening to this chapter, Willem Boshoff ’s Blind Alphabet (1991, ongoing; fig. 1.22) simThe Blindman

33

ilarly plunges its audience into difference. Installed at the first Johannesburg biennial in 1995, it was brought to the 1996 São Paulo Bienal a year later. Boshoff ’s original critique of language (he is Afrikaans in an Englishdominated state) was interpreted by Brazilians as a critique of race— as the curator for São Paulo put it: “To be truly blind, is also to be color-blind.”117 If the epoch of institutional critique somehow exhausted itself in art museums during the 1990s, the biennials of the new millennium reenergize the mode for a much broader political realm, expanding into new continents (where the biennial may be intended to foster local art institutions), and proliferating demands for reflection by local and foreign viewers alike. The longevity of blind epistemology and its current purchase on biennial culture expands with the ongoing increase in global exhibitions. The Western philosophical blindman began as “hypothetical,” directly begetting the “blind” Victorian who helped us make sense of the 1862 fair. But as the nineteenth segued into the twentieth century, “blind epistemology” as such emerged from inspired writers and artists— among them Henry Adams and

34

Chapter 1

Marcel Duchamp. Both navigated the vast international exposition by mobilizing the blindman trope for “supersensual” alternatives to dominant narratives. Their critical turn has ripened; the blindman is no longer just a rhetorical guide. Blind individuals are summoned as subjects we can see and hear but not know (Telléz), as powerful interpreters of things we cannot touch (Boshoff ), as performative agents in a world we may access only through representation (Ataman), as identificatory constructs that force us to take up the politics of the partial view (Mori, Diaz, Sierra, Eliasson, et al.). Our shadows on the wall, our haptic agnosia, our scopic confusion— all are imaginatively juxtaposed to the blind person’s active, embodied, experienced knowing. The blind have entered biennial culture (whether as trope or empowered agent) to illuminate the darkness of complacent sight and to leave us contemplating the finite limits of our situated knowledge. In sum, the most innovative and successful contemporary artists know that it is wise to think with the blindman and to follow a wider path toward knowledge— a knowledge that might be formed from all kinds of encounters with senses, and experiences, other than sight.

2 Desires for the World Picture

Elevate art, multiply artists, form the public. —LÉON DE LABORDE , reporting to the French state on what to do about the 1851 Great Exhibition1 O France, adieu! You are too great to be merely a country. . . . You will cease to be France, you will be Humanity; you will cease to be a nation, you will be ubiquity. You are destined to dissolve into radiance, and nothing at this hour is so majestic as the visible obliteration of your frontier. . . . Goodbye, people! Hail, man! Submit to your inevitable and sublime aggrandizement, O my country, and, as Athens became Greece, as Rome became Christendom, you, France, become the world! —VICTOR HUGO , guidebook to the 1867 Exposition Universelle2 The exhibition of the future will be an exhibition of ideas rather than of objects, and nothing will be deemed worthy of admission to its halls which has not some living, inspiring thought behind it, and which is not capable of teaching some valuable lesson. —GEORGE BROWN GOODE , preparing the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition3 [Chicago’s 1893 fair] penetrated deep into the American mind, effecting there lesions significant of dementia. —LOUIS SULLIVAN , The Autobiography of an Idea (1926)4 Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot, for “Transculture: 46th Venice Biennale”; installation incorporating wooden fishing boat from China (Quanzhou), plus 100 kg ginseng and other Chinese herbs, floating. —CAI GUO- QIANG , Venice 19955

35

Desires

A world brought to a city, a city magnified to a world, a country becoming universal, a luminous ubiquity without frontier— these were the encomia that nineteenthcentury world’s fairs and expositions universelles summoned for their nations’ intellectuals. Biennials would radically complicate the picture. Say you came to the 1995 Venice Biennale and decided to board Cai Guo-Qiang’s Chinese boat (moored at a seventeenth-century Venetian merchant’s palazzo). You’d be “invited to self-prescribe Chinese medicinal tonics,” unregulated because “alternative” to Western medicine— an instant lesson in what Occidentals forgot in their rush to establish trade with a constructed Orient.6 Or, say you came to the Bienal de Lyon in 2000 and wanted to experience the same artist’s Cultural Melting Bath with similar Chinese herbs (plate  34). Depending on local health regulations, you’d first have to sign a health waiver. This moment of real-world hesitation might have mimicked the one induced by the biennial’s title—Partage d’exotismes (Sharing Exoticisms). Desire had carried you over the threshold and into the biennial, and then again into the hot tub, but exactly what were you expected to share? In the tub, you could enjoy the sharp scents of ginseng and chrysanthemum in the bubbling steam, perhaps in the awkward presence of utter strangers. Sensuous enthusiasm would linger in memory, sharpened by trepidation and complicated by doubts about an exhibition promising “l’égalité et l’échange des cultures.” In the exhibition, installations by global artists rubbed up against floor paintings by Australian first peoples— the latter representing legal claims to land rather than “aesthetics” (that claim reserved for the curator, Jean-Hubert Martin).7 If Cultural Melting Bath invoked friendly cosmopolitan sociality, the staged dreams of exchange with aboriginals were little more than first world protagonism, as one curator has defined it: The minute one pronounces the words global art or global exhibition, one is already part of the problem, positioning oneself . . . as a First-World protagonist, as a dominant signifier.8

Are desires for the global really only the possession of the “first world?” And when did the world picture be36

Chapter 2

come a “problem”— one provoked by desire, and solved through art? Such epistemological questions thread throughout this book, examined in structures of knowledge formed by different agents: (1) organizers of a given fair or biennial, whose implicit beliefs guide themes, architecture, and selection; (2) artists, who enter these world pictures with or without tactics developed to confront them; and (3) visitors, who make common sense of the assembly. By way of introduction, I have marshaled Jean-Hubert Martin’s enthusiastic sampling of “exotismes” at the 2000 Lyon biennial, dominated by that organizer’s rubric. This biennial built on another, Martin’s provocative 1989 Magiciens de la Terre, curated to renovate the banal Paris biennial by revisiting the 1931 French colonial exposition, whose patronizing articulation of the white man’s burden bequeathed a toxic legacy that Martin valiantly hoped to correct. In both Lyon and Paris, the curator was exquisitely aware of his ethical responsibilities, but rather than blind epistemology there were many blind spots. The most trenchant observation on such attempts comes in another context from London-based postcolonial theorist, artist, and critic Rasheed Araeen: Why are they looking at faraway India, China, Central Asia, or Latin America? Postwar European cities . . . were transformed into multiracial and multicultural metropolises by the new immigrants, among them artists, from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. . . . Why do they not look at what these cities have produced? . . . The problem now is not Eurocentricity, but the institutional suppression of what has already challenged and demolished it.9

Thus, Martin’s admirable ambition of leaving what he called the “ghetto of contemporary Western art” did not extend to going into the actual ghettos of contemporary Paris.10 Easier to bring an indigenous muralist from Australia or South India than negotiate the problematic category of “magic” closer to home. By the 1980s, historical scholarship into the fairs’ “exhibitionary complex” incorporated ample postcolonial and institutional critiques. But it would take more time to analyze the seduction of difference itself, within which “the will to globality” and yearnings for crosscultural communication still turn.11 So much critique—

but we still want the exhibitions! These conundrums are inescapable for ambitious artists and curators today, and need to be historically examined; neither can the active viewer of contemporary art (or the art historian writing about it) escape from the force field of globalization. And in order to produce a critical globalism in response (chapter 7), we need to understand the longer histories of world-picturing, encrusted as they are with the layered sediments of prior epistemes.12 Notably, we must listen to the aspirations that render globality a good that cannot be deferred— even when forged in nationalism. As the commissioner for the first official representation of the United Arab Emirates at the Venice Biennale put it in 2009, “Displayed as if in a traditional World’s Fair . . . the Pavilion unapologetically presents the public face of today’s UAE . . . much as other nations have done for more than a century. . . . This Pavilion truly is not about you, the visitor. It’s about me, the child of this young nation.” That this was uttered by a UAE commissioner who hired a curator of Iranian descent, based in New York and Berlin, says a great deal about the global circuits, markets, and patterns of consumption for contemporary art.13 World pictures are both metaphorical and material. They are rooted in the real estate occupied by pavilions, they hover in mental maps of geopolitical relations, and they circulate as cultural capital. Heidegger cracked one aspect of their metaphysics— the very precondition for conceiving of the world-as-picture is constructing Nature and Earth as instrumentalized— but he missed out on the diversity of “worlding” that carries these images into the intimate spaces of desire. Those practices begin with the first world’s fairs and continue into the contemporary biennial, captured by Foucault’s productive concept of the heterotopia: “We are in the epoch of simultaneity . . . the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side by side, of the dispersed.”14 In this contemporary epoch, the world picture is everywhere and nowhere, governing our telecommunications but also inside the mind’s eye/heart’s desire. As the epigraphs to this chapter indicate, the fairs that seeded today’s biennials strategized how to produce the public. Were artworks jewels in the crown or flies in the ointment? Calls to hegemony or spaces of heterotopia? This chapter  charts multiple outcomes, largely determined by the tactics of artists (but sometimes, of curators or viewers). Such are the workings of art.

The world-picture metaphor is familiar— “worldview,” Weltanschauung, and at times even the totalizing Weltbild Heidegger theorized for a presentation at the 1937 Paris world’s fair (chapter 6). But pictured worlds could be material, almost comically so: giant globes with spiraling interiors, enormous mappa mundi moving visitors from raw to cooked (figs. 2.6, 2.7), ecclesiastical layouts with cardinal orientations. As Britain organized its 1851 Great Exhibition, four main categories formed an ascending hierarchy: Raw Materials, Machinery, Manufactures, and Fine Arts; the end design featured an “equator” through the cruciform floorplan, along which the royal procession would trace “a miniature tour of the world” in a bodily exercise of Christian cosmopolitanism.15 Material, discursive, desiring, and embodied practices were deposited in diaries, published in memoirs, registered in photographs, rehearsed in newspapers, cartooned and doggereled, figured in other artworks, mapped and collected in countless commercial souvenirs brought back from each temporary omphalos. Although commentators linked them to the Panhellenic festivals that halted the battles of warring Greek tribes, fairs were also as modern as railroads and the package tour. Potlatch events, they tracked disparities of power that became larger, more frequent, and more extravagant— but eventually their contribution to art was over. Central to my narrative is the arc of a transfer, by which the exhausted energies of the fairs broke apart into specialized new forms— notably the biennial (in 1895), which offered a more nimble artistic event (chapter 3). Fairs were obviously “politics by other means.” Explicitly posed as alternatives to military engagement, they were highly channeled expressions of imagined communities.16 Art was a contradictory part of the mix, seen either as the “expression of the nation’s genius” or, contrastingly, as setting universal standards for all nations to meet. Sorting “Art” into a comparative matrix of cultures and technologies created the ambition to be “international”; modernism, as a response to modernity and modernization, emerged from this crucible.17 Although artists and artisans have long been nomadic (indeed, the journeying of the “journeyman” is built into the German trades to this day), the fairs stimulated artistic pilgrimage. Artists embraced these workings of art— that is, those who desired to be part of the momentary world picture. Desires for the World Picture

37

The previous chapter touched on Heidegger’s Weltbild, which here titles the chapter. In a first departure from his metaphysics, I argue that our desires bring world pictures into being: sensuously and conceptually. There may be, per Heidegger, totalizing regimes that attempt to produce a singular world picture, but even singular representations are pluralized in multiplied and divergent subjects, which clash to produce the politics of the partial view (chapter 1). Second, once we accept that picturing comes alive through desire, those Bilder will leave unruly remainders. World pictures do not precede us; we assemble and distribute them to form a shareable consciousness of where and who we are, under constant revision. That there is a historical moment when it becomes possible to imagine and represent “the world-as-picture” is the Heideggerian insight I insist on; that art both participates in this picturing and profoundly critiques it is the thesis for this book. Heidegger belonged to a turbulent period that witnessed both the apogee of the fairs and their precipitous decline. He crafted his philosophical observations on the age of the world picture (1935– 38) to deliver at a world’s fair (see chapter 6); during the same intense period he delivered a lecture titled “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935– 36) and germinated the “Question Concerning Technology” (although that did not become a lecture until 1955). His philosophy responded to anxieties stimulated by the fairs— materialized in technology and artworks and world pictures— and buttressed the warped Nietzscheanism of the Nazi party. Rather than dodging this political reality for an earlier “uncorrupted” Heidegger, I want to see his thoughts about the world picture as belonging to the critiques of modernization that were endemic to the period. These critiques were shared by right and left— here Walter Benjamin can be invoked. And the stakes of the debate were unbelievably high. Where Benjamin would be driven to suicide by Fascism, Heidegger would be seduced by its fantasies of “renewal” for Germania (a nationalist reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire, only Teutonic).18 Both philosophers’ crucial essays on art, world, and technology would be tempered by the emerging realities of Nazi rule. Benjamin died in that maelstrom, but Heidegger served as the NSDAPappointed rector of the Universität Freiburg from May 1933 until April 1934, when he resigned and left the service of the Reich for what he later characterized as a re38

Chapter 2

treat to the philosopher’s cabin, where the “world picture” essay was conceived.19 Heidegger’s analysis confronted the aestheticization of politics and technology characteristic of the last burst of universal expositions, three of which were staged in Germany under Nazi rule.20 His remarks on the world picture were originally intended to be aired at the Paris world’s fair of 1937, where they would have been surrounded by the cartoon world picture such exhibitions constituted. Seemingly ignorant about the art of his own time, neither did Heidegger join accusations of “degeneracy” hurled at earlier modernist heroes; he chose van Gogh (tarred by Nazis as one of the sources for a problematic Expressionism) to theorize how we get from thing to art. In that theory, Heidegger offered a key principle for our use: the work of art exists not to “represent” a world but to bring one into being. Art originates in colloquy with the thing (e.g., the material constituents of canvas or wood, the “subject matter” of shoe or vase), but only to distinguish itself from thingness and equipment— it “opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force. / To be a work means to set up a world.”21 This the philosopher views as positive— not part of the dreaded “world picture.” Art separates itself from earth’s “self-seclusion,” yet it also brings earth (material) and world (concept) together in vibratory tension. “World and earth are always intrinsically and essentially in conflict.” It is the work of art to bring them together “in the unity of work-being.”22 “Unity” is always staked in an ideological battleground, and the fairs of the 1930s put things and ideas into world pictures that didn’t always stay put. The fairs produced piles of stuff, racks of goods, cascades of events, and clots of perambulating strangers. They were also machines for producing discourse and ordering knowledge, within which theôria proliferated— and for Heidegger, “thinking is not inactivity but is in itself the action that stands in dialogue with the fate of the world.”23 The philosopher was not concerned with the intellectual postures of fair organizers, however; what he cogitated on were the ways fairs materially staged earth for uniquely modern instrumentalization— as just so much “standing reserve.”24 Imagine entering the Russian pavilion in the 1900 Paris Exposition, right after crossing the new Czar Alexander bridge: immediately inside were piles of animal pelts (mink, ermine), heaps of mined and purified gold, cases of diamonds, a stuffed wolf. As we will explore, hu-

man displays were part of this instrumentalizing logic. Certain geographic sectors (south, east) were providers of “raw” materials and “hand” labor used by other sectors (north, west) to produce “cooked” or higher goods. Art was definitively “cooked”; artisanal goods by colonial subjects were somehow less so, “worked” but not “artwork,” staging what global curator Okwui Enwezor has identified as modernity’s “relations between power and subordination,” Enlightenment’s “dark core.”25 What were the conditions of possibility for something to become “international art” in such uneven terrain? How could artists work such disparities between raw material, “savage cultures,” artisans, technologies, and fine arts? The “work” of art refers simultaneously to these unstable categories, as put in circulation by the fairs, and to the active processes by which their manner of address is managed by artists and mobilized by audiences. Although eventually positioned in separate “beaux arts” pavilions and palaces (the conscious place of art), art was also juxtaposed with manufactured goods, raw materials, tourist entertainments, industrial reproductions, and above all new media— technologies priming Benjamin’s optical unconscious of the urban political sphere (chapter 1). New media included photography and cinema but also three-dimensional reproductive triumphs, such as “Parian marble” and “Etruscan jasperware” in industrial ceramics, or metallic “lithographic” printing. Juxtapositions of these new media could be jarring, stylized by one writer as a confrontation between “statuary representing the Madonna and Child and a sheet of galvanised tin iron.”26 Were new media best used to mimic traditional forms, or to revel in their shocking material newness? Would their destiny be utilitarian or aesthetic? While later chapters examine the notions of “salary” that delimit artistic labor from mere manufacture, or artisans from artists (Derrida’s “Economimesis”), this chapter  plunges into art’s robust entanglement with wares in newly global circuits of exchange.27 These were the preconditions for a given artwork functioning as “international” in the first place. Claims for art’s autonomy become vexed in this context. The separation of “art” from “industry” was often what the fairs set out to accomplish, and just as often failed to do. The organizers of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London made a weak attempt to exhibit the “beaux arts,” but when rebuffed by the French, they were happy to focus on “the Works of Industry of all Nations” (some-

times colloquially rendered as “the Works of Art and Industry . . .”). The tension between “art” as techne (as in les arts et métier, or arts and crafts) and “art” as liberal activity (beaux arts, or fine arts) was ignored by display organizers. A sweeping view of the US section of the 1851 Great Exhibition would make visible Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave (see fig. 2.3), along with a set of mannequins dressed in Native American garb, a giant pasteboard eagle, photographic portraits by Mathew Brady, and strange items from various states (including a “meat biscuit” from Texas; plate 5).28 Such objects were swept into the Great Exhibition’s earnest semiotic system (originally to be a material taxonomy, it ended up in ordered national booths), within which dynamos and mills provided modernizing lessons.29 Yet art as such continued to display an undeniable agency, serving as the focus of considerable journalistic and moral discussion.30 In comparison to the department stores and academic salons that also brought national goods into display during this period (sometimes in confrontation with foreign objects), the fairs staged explicitly international competitions, complete with juries, prizes, and honorific awards. Questions about the internationalization of modern art must address the vast circulation of objects that became international by virtue of their inclusion in the fairs, were produced as international through the fairsavvy tactics of their makers, or returned as international in the luggage of visitors to seed “cosmopolitan” production and consumption at home. In sum, the fairs produced a new task for artists—to be international, rather than satisfying a local patron or embellishing the academy back home. In this respect, objects made for trade or resembling trade objects (the mirrorlike symmetry is important) bear new relevance. “China” wares, “Paisley” fabric, Venetian grand tour vistas, Bohemian glass, and reproductive figurines join “art” objects to engender the kinds of questions I want to ask: How does an object made in one culture arrange itself to produce meanings in another culture? How are native attributes (however those might be construed) arranged to speak an international cosmopolitan patois? To take the example of export “China,” should Blue Willow ware suggest a Chinese landscape (as understood by the Dutch, and then commissioned from Asian craftsmen)? If the appropriated pattern is instead abstract, does it risk losing its origins— as in the converDesires for the World Picture

39

Figure 2.1 Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987–91. One hundred four-volume boxed sets of woodblock-printed books, variable number of scrolls hanging from the ceiling, and variable number of wall panels. Shown as installed at the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now Chazen Museum of Art), University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1991.

sion of an originally Chinese motif into the proprietary Royal Copenhagen pattern? By extension into the present, is an artist from Asia still required to signify “Asianness” in a given Western optic? Comparing Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky and Cai GuoQiang’s aforementioned Cultural Melting Bath reminds us that nothing is stable in the global art world, but the strategic contemporary artist can work that very flux. Xu’s Book was made in China from 1987 to 1991; it was exhibited in 40

Chapter 2

New York in 1998, the same year the artist was featured at the Taipei Biennial (fig. 2.1).31 The work of Xu’s Book after it left China exemplifies how a critical globalism can accrue around an artwork, even if it was not originally intended to leave home. How does this working begin? When confronted with the room-sized installation that is Book from the Sky, this Western viewer— using myself as a data point— felt awe. The space where Book was installed (a large gallery at the Asia Society) offered thousands

Figure 2.2 Cai Guo-Qiang, Cultural Melting Bath, 1997, in its first installation, as commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art. Among the bathers are MoMA curator Barbara London (at far left) and the artist (at right). Photograph: Jeff Rothstein; courtesy Cai Studio.

upon thousands of ideograms printed on different kinds of paper: arranged in large bound volumes, draping like sutra scrolls from the ceiling, or posted in the manner of Chinese newspapers on the walls. Only later (through the parerga of wall labels, journalism, webchat and the like) did I learn what the literate Chinese reader would have understood immediately: not one of Xu’s four thousand hand-carved characters is semiotically significant. Their woodblock strokes are convincingly arranged but convey no known words. By contrast, Cai’s Cultural Melting Bath (first produced in Queens, New York, in 1997) skirts the problem of language altogether— beyond its canny title, that is. As if in response to Xu’s work, which was initially subtitled An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century, Cai’s was subtitled Project for the Twentieth Century (fig. 2.2).32 Like Xu, Cai addresses translation, but only metaphorically. Assimilation and the possibility of “transnationalism” or “transcultural” values bubble up (in fact, Cai had been

awarded the Benesse Prize of Transculture just two years earlier, at the forty-sixth Venice Biennale in 1995— for that floating Chinese junk).33 For the Queens Museum commission, curator Jane Farver recalls, “Cai’s intention was to reflect the great diversity of Queens, which was new to him after China and Japan. He wanted a healing, restful place for Queens citizens to meet and bathe together.”34 But then Cultural Melting Bath was brought into “Sharing Exoticisms” in 2000, where it was acquired for the Lyon museum’s permanent collection. Was there irony in Cai’s chirpy concept of a hot tub, daring biennial visitors to strip down, don bathing suits, and join others in his Chinese herbal bath, surrounded by “scholars’ rocks,” stained hemp netting, tweeting parakeets, and a suspended windswept tree?35 One picture from the artist’s website seems to document tranculturation’s uneven success: Cai sits happily immersed in the bubbling water, but Museum of Modern Art curator Barbara London perches at the edge of the tub with upright posture, cauDesires for the World Picture

41

tiously examining the pot of vegetable matter floating nearby. Cai offers little commentary on his update of the early twentieth-century immigrant trope of the “melting pot,” deferring to the murmuring crowd for interpretive debate.36 Acknowledging the pressures of market and desire, both Xu’s project and Cai’s began as unique productions for specific sites, but then became multiples. After celebrating the precise materiality of Book from the Sky, one dealer exults that “Xu Bing’s book may be one of the greatest examples of ‘applied grammatology’ ever produced.”37 In other words, it is a reproducible text as well as a theoretical triumph, buffing the luster of the collectible. As Xu’s Book is multiplied (and only then), the artist signs each volume, in the place where the printer’s colophon would traditionally have been (Derridean economimesis).38 Similarly, Cai’s Cultural Melting Bath began to proliferate, between its commission for Queens and its transfer to Lyon. Around 1998, another version with a site-specific subtitle (“for Naoshima”) had been made for the luxury hotel– museum– nature reserve complex in that part of Japan: “Cultural Melting Bath invites visitors to take a dip and relax in the artwork itself, which is a hot tub (from the U.S.) with Taihu rocks (from China) arranged according to principles of Feng Shui . . . (Artwork Requiring Reservations).”39 Even in material terms, Cai’s piece is understood as inherently multicultural; for general reassurance, the Chinese medicinal herbs (selected by Cai’s hometown Chinese doctor) are identified on the artist’s English website by their Latin names.40 Likewise, Xu’s book includes everyone in its exclusions: the highly literate scholar of Chinese, the Western ignoramus, and the functionally illiterate migrant in Beijing. The global workings of art cross these linguistic, commercial, biennial, and museal realms, forcing us to ask whether culture melts, divides, or unites us in its complex operations. The structural thesis of this book is that the drives of desiring-production remain remarkably consistent in world pictures over time: Use the assimilated language of international art to speak of difference.41 With Xu and Cai, installation is the common koine. That “language” will change dramatically in the historical periods this book covers: (1) in the world’s fairs from 1851 through 1937, (2) in the recurring international biennial exhibitions staged by Venice after 1895, and (3) in the biennial cul42

Chapter 2

ture emerging from the first replication in São Paulo in 1951 to (4) the countless recurring exhibitions today (biennali, but also parallel entities such as documenta, Manifesta, and Performa). Since market success is an imperfect register of public desires, it is rather the accumulation of cultural capital that will be tracked. But even more important will be those moments of rupture when the viewer is shifted from the acquisitory mode, driven by difference to perform a critical globalism through the working of the art. By nesting difference within the languages of the art world, I stage an implicit dialectic. This rescues difference from simple romanticization, where it is held to resist “bad” globalization, as in Okwui Enwezor’s recent theorizations of the “altermodern”: The altermodern is to be found in the work of art itself, the work of art as a manifestation of pure difference in all the social, cultural, and political signs it wields to elaborate that difference. It is the space in which to fulfill the radical gesture of refusal and disobedience, not in the formal sense, but in the ethical and epistemological sense.42

I share Enwezor’s politics, but suggest that “pure difference” cannot exist since it is within those very comprehensible “signs it wields” that art submits to what Jacques Lacan so lugubriously called the Law of the Father. Difference can only register as such within the recognizable— this is the conundrum the fair/biennial enacts. Difference is mobilized in the voluminous literature generated by the fairs to implicate histories of religion, industrial capitalism, sporting events, state hygiene, architecture, urbanism, race and gender, travel, colonialism, civic museums, global finance, the birth of academic disciplines (among them sociology and anthropology), national and international politics, and much more. For my purposes, we’ll track macrohistories of the production, circulation, and reception of artworks (with microhistories of a few) in the globalizing Western world. Within this highly partial narrative, specific cases will reveal how artifacts became artworks and artworks became international. My claim is clear: the demands for internationalism confronting a nineteenth-century artist journeying from the low country to the center ( Jozef Israëls, chapter 3) or from the colonies to the colonizers

(Hiram Powers, chapter 2) were structurally similar to those girding the ambitions of twentieth-century figures such as Pablo Picasso (chapter 2) or Max Bill (chapter 4), and can usefully be analogized to the tactics required of global artists in the long postwar period, from Hélio Oiticica in the 1960s (chapters 4, 5) to Javier Téllez, Cai GuoQiang, or Tino Sehgal today (chapters 1 and 6). There is, however, a stark periodization in my narrative: postwar artists’ abilities to conceptualize their own insertion into world pictures drive critical globalism, a new feature in contemporary practice.

Ars et Feriae

Related to religious festivals and their accompanying markets, the earliest state-sponsored fairs appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth, they had become exhausted institutions, yielding the new Venice Biennale (chapter 3). Art’s progression from one artifact among others in national displays, to segregation in a separate beaux arts palace, to a “trade-specific” art biennial, is one of the arcs of this chapter. Some begin the history of the fairs by citing sanctified pagan parties such as the extravagant feast of Ahasuerus (the fifth-century BCE Persian king also known as Xerxes) from the Hebrew Torah; these holy-day roots are preserved in “fair,” whose English etymology borrows from the Latin for holiday: Feriae. Consistent in such narratives are notions of sacrificial sharing, the cessation of work, and uneven exchange within a carnivalesque upturning of the everyday (e.g., potlatch).43 This resonates with readings of the fairs such as art historian James Herbert’s: “In grasping after an excess of things, one (now as then) always ends up laying one’s hands on the excess, as a mere formal property.”44 A parallel accounting links the feriae not to sacrifice or holy excess but to goods-for-sale. Medieval markets staged themselves in synchrony with religious holy days, instituting repeating rhythms surviving well into the nineteenth century with events such as St. Bartholemew’s fair, famous for its “Mud and Mirth” and “Babylon of Booths.”45 The grand expositions were incomparably larger than these religious/market fairs, and exhibited a different rhythm, freed “from any context save that . . . of the expanding international economy.”46 For our purposes, the broad brush that connects a village fair to the more sym-

bolic trade in art and national culture might be the theoric pilgrimage itself (chapter 1)— in any case, it is the nineteenth century expositions that determined “world’s fair” dynamics, emerging with regularity in metropolitan venues throughout the British Commonwealth and continental Europe— Paris, London, Vienna, Brussels— joined by their close affines, new-world emulators in the northern hemisphere such as New York (1853, 1939, 1964), Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), and St.  Louis (1904), but also emerging metropoles south of the equator: Santiago de Chile (1875), Buenos Aires (1882), Caracas (1883), and Rio de Janeiro (1922).47 The cities of this emerging network performed themselves as centers of commerce and confidence, speaking loudly of national unity amid universalist claims that justified colonial expansion (if not to other continents, then over native populations). Suggestive in the list is the relative absence of Germany, Spain, Italy, or others who might be only barely nations— fragile federations rather than centralized republics, late to the race for empire. Clearly, centralization with its massing of resources and control was an essential impetus for a world’s fair; tapping recently acquired territories was useful to the sacrificial potlatch of a grand exposition. Sometimes the fairs could even be staged in imperial colonies themselves (Sydney, Delhi), resulting in what Dipesh Chakrabarty has identified as the “heterotemporal history” of modernity that mottles European central narratives.48 Copious images and architectures marketed the fairs as apotheoses of the modern: iron towers, steam engines, and palaces of glass appeared in the burgeoning visual culture produced by and for the rising technocracies on display.49 Where then was the art? As the system of the fairs became more regular, objects we would identify as art took a more predictable position. If they were initially only decor in national displays (plate 5), they quickly began to be sequestered in purpose-built palaces.50 In the vast literature generated by bureaucrats commissioned to report on these events, art might be deferred until volume 18 of a 20-volume series, or not mentioned until page 5078 of the overview report.51 But such dutiful prose would not determine the agency of art, or the impact of the fairs on artistic tactics. Consider the fairs’ internationalizing impact on the following artists: Courbet’s Realist pavilion, staged at the 1855 exposition (figs. 2.4 and 3.13) became a modernDesires for the World Picture

43

ist legend and set a new international standard. Gauguin would carom off the colonial displays of 1889 into an aesthetic-erotic engagement with France d’outre-mer’s Javanese and Tahitian Others. Jacques-Émile Blanche would stay home in Paris but similarly flirt with the “Moorish” in the 1900 Expo’s Café Maure (plate 12). For Rodin, it was the body disciplines of girl dancers from Cambodia that entranced at the 1906 colonial fair in Marseilles (fig. 2.9). Picasso’s Guernica, in the all-but-invisible 1937 Republican Spanish pavilion at the Paris world’s fair, used the fair to catapult itself into a world tour, and the artist’s fame became global (fig. 2.5; plate 22).52 It is precisely the scale and ambition of the fair, the confrontation of “all of Western knowledge” by the Others it could not fully master, that drove artists to forge an internationalism in or against its image. The first event we can consider as a bureaucratic forerunner of “world” fairs was staged for fancy goods in postrevolutionary France.53 The year was 1797. Fearing revolution-as-export, the British had blockaded French ports against Napoleon’s advance, paralyzing trade and precipitating a massive economic depression. The exroyal manufactories had goods galore— Savonnerie rugs, Sèvres porcelain, and Gobelins tapestry— but no way to display them (indeed, the concept of the multigood magasin did not yet exist).54 The fair was conceived as a way to raise spirits and produce a market. Was it despite, or because, such bibelots had been stripped from the Louvre under the direction of the Revolution’s curator, JacquesLouis David, that they were suddenly marketable for the many?55 It was the Marquis d’Avèze, the new commissioner of the art manufactories, who had the idea of organizing a national fair to repurpose monarchic furnishings; designs would be displayed and prizes given, even as the Revolution roiled: “Bonaparte, fearing an uprising, ordered [Avèze] to leave Paris the night before the official opening. . . . [H]e finally managed to hold the exhibition in 1797 in the Hôtel d’Orsay in Paris and added many other trades to the original three.”56 Although aimed at a national audience, the fair was also seen by curious foreigners; the displays were considered so successful that Minister of the Interior François de Neufchâteau (who was also engaged in setting up the Louvre as a public museum) was inspired to announce that as of August 28, 1798, the “public exhibition of the products of French 44

Chapter 2

Industry” would be annual.57 “Industry” meant different things here; on the one hand it designated the exhibition of decorative art objects, on the other a parallel “Temple of Industry” erected in the Champ de Mars. Neufchâteau had ordered these special buildings to be built in the active military parade ground (where David had staged his revolutionary fête just a few years earlier), playing openly on the significance of that locale: Our manufactures are the arsenals which will supply us with the weapons most fatal to British power.58

Since tradesmen continued to be the source of revolutionary opposition to centralized Bonapartist power, this patriotic rhetoric was also aimed at converting restive French workers into gloriously patriotic supporters of France. Although Anglophone chroniclers of world’s fairs like to claim that the British were the first to internationalize such events, Neufchâteau’s comments make it clear that rivalry with other nations was always the point. By the second of the putatively annual events (actually held in 1806), Neufchâteau moved the displays to the courtyard of the Louvre and included products of chemical and mechanical industries, as well as fine arts. By 1834 (under the newly reinstated monarchy of “citizen King” LouisPhilippe), Monsieur Boucher de Perthes, president of the Societé Royale d’Emulation, could argue: Why should we be afraid to open our halls to manufacturers whom we call foreign; to the Belgians, to the English, to the Swiss, to the Germans? How noble would be a European exhibition, and what a mine of instruction it would be for all.59

Note that Boucher’s is not yet a global imaginary; he sees the European theater of internationalism as sufficiently complete to constitute its own deep “mine” of enrichment. By the 1849 iteration (lasting six months, with fortyfive hundred exhibitors), many advocated that the French state make explicit what was de facto an international affair. A leading proponent was a former restauranteur (M. Buffet, the eponymous inventor of forage-dining).60 Britain too was rumbling with internationalist ideas, having included “foreign” participants in its 1849 Birming-

ham fair.61 The American Hiram Powers had arranged for some of his sculptures to be reproduced for Birmingham (in rehearsal for the Great Exhibition, as it turned out; see plate 5), just as a former maker of metallic jelly molds, John Hardman, was following the advice of architect Augustus Pugin to make objects reviving medieval art for the same event.62 British civil servant and designer Henry Cole had edited an extensive article on Birmingham’s design in anticipation of that city’s industrial exhibition.63 He burned to elevate the taste of his countrymen and had gained the ear of the royal consort, Prince Albert, who accompanied him to the 1849 Paris fair. In explicit response to that Exposition nationale, Cole proposed to Albert that the British mount a Great International Exhibition in London, which would also address the perceived failings of the provincial Birmingham display.64 Albert enthusiastically agreed, but Parliament would have to pony up. Cole and Albert’s internationalism was politically strategic, posed in relation to the international workers’ movements then spreading revolution from France to Germany, Italy, Austria, and Hungary. In correspondence with the remaining monarchs and aristocracies of Europe, Albert explained that by tapping the “loyalty of the country as a whole” he might avert “Chartist riots” through an inspirational and educational display that could benefit “millions of British workers,” who could feel proud of their nation’s accomplishments.65 Members of the British Parliament who agreed to fund the affair embraced its patriotic necessity; they also hoped to balance the flood of inexpensive luxury goods coming from India (such as “Kashmir” shawls) by prodding an entirely new kind of commodity: fine goods manufactured by industrializing Britain herself.66 Thus, rather than being a triumphant display of the United Kingdom’s industrial superiority, the Great Exhibition actually reflected a profound anxiety about the skills of British designers, the loyalty of her workmen, and the aesthetic tastes of her buyers.67 Did Britain benefit from the results, installed in Joseph Paxton’s soaring structure of wood and glass? Philosopher William Whewell took the measure of this question, asking readers of his commissioned review to begin by imagining the Crystal Palace as a single world picture— as if a photographer’s flash had illuminated, simultaneously, all nations young and old:

if we could suppose some one of the skillful photographers whose subtle apparatus we have had exhibited there, could bring within his whole field of view the surface of the globe, with all its workshops and markets, and produce instantaneously a permanent picture, in which the whole were seen side by side.

Whewell observed that this vast “photograph” showed that the ingenuity of the man without machinery was often superior in taste and skill to that of the industrialized worker: “What, then, shall we say of ourselves? Wherein is our superiority?”68 He was quick to settle the issue in favor of empire: where the “Orientals” labor by the thousands to work sumptuous materials for a few overlords, Britain’s less impressive arts are morally superior because they “supply the wants of the many” without despotism or duress.69 If predictably resolved, Whewell’s disturbing questions nonetheless outlined the parameters for a critical globalism to come: whose labor is being displayed, and how we will consume it, are queries that still fuel contemporary biennial culture. Such moments of hesitation are important windows into the ambiguities attending the world-as-picture. As grand expositions became more common, dialectics emerged in the gaps between “Art” and serially manufactured goods, not to mention between art and steam engines (recall Henry Adams’s “Virgin/Dynamo” binary). Particularly in the national groupings, works of art could appear cheek-by-jowl with tools or raw materials (as when Jasper Cropsey’s Autumn on the Hudson and Hiram Powers’s ever-reliable Greek Slave jostled with patriotic bunting and farm implements at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, all that could be mustered during the US Civil War; fig. 2.3). Art could be installed under breathtaking canopies of glass and steel, but then made virtually invisible in crowded clusters and Salon-style hangings (plate 11). And the stasis of art stood in contrast to mechanized displays, moving sidewalks, and illuminated fountains. Increasingly aware of these limitations, artists strategized their showings in dialectical relation to the official world pictures of the fairs: Courbet’s privately funded Pavilion du Realisme in 1855, Manet’s similar solo pavilion joining Courbet’s repeat in 1867, Rodin’s in 1900 (fig. 2.4).70 These intermittent pavilions stood against the far more regular rhythm of the repeating Academic salons, or energetic displays by Kunstverein (artist associaDesires for the World Picture

45

Figure 2.3 Hiram Powers’s omnipresent Greek Slave, shown as part of the US pavilion at the 1862 International Exhibition, London, and in tabletop bronze reproduction, 13.8 inches high, probably cast at the Bavarian foundry of Oscar Meyer, ca. 1860. Engraving from Report on the International Exhibition of Industry and Art (Albany, 1863); courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC. Bronze from private collection in St. Louis; courtesy of GRAHAM, James Graham & Sons, New York.

Figure 2.4 Contemporaneous caricatures of Courbet’s and Manet’s pavilions from Le Journal amusant, Paris. Left: “To the temple of memory: Courbet, Master Painter,” June 15, 1867. Right: “Exposition Edouard Manet, the Temple of Taste,” June 29, 1867. Courtesy Patricia Mainardi.

tions) and “Secessions” (young artists rejecting the academy) that provided further impetus for the biennial to come. All of these can be linked to the event structures of the fairs, and the French postrevolutionary stagings that inspired them. As early as 1799, when Jacques-Louis Da46

Chapter 2

vid mounted his Sabine Women and charged 1.80 francs for the privilege of a visit, the strategic solo exhibition was born in dialectic with the massive group show that was the Salon.71 Such gambits troubled the reign of the academies (French and otherwise) as sole arbiters of the

Figure 2.5 Modernism on location: José Luis Sert’s pavilion for the Spanish Republic, with Picasso’s Guernica (commissioned for the pavilion), at the 1937 Paris world’s fair. Sert papers, courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

beaux arts; Courbet’s pavilion at the 1855 fair, endorsed by Emperor Napoleon III in a populist swipe at the elitist Académie, became institutionalized as the imperially sanctioned Salons des Refusés— the political origins for modernism’s vaunted avant-garde.72 The nestedness of art’s location in, and dialectic against, the fairs also referenced the architectures around it— often extraordinary and experimental in their own right (as in the Crystal Palace), the subject of excellent scholarship not rehearsed here.73 Picasso’s Guernica was made in full awareness of the modernist pavilion that would house it, commissioned as it was by the pavilion’s architect José Luis (Josep Lluís) Sert (fig. 2.5). The pavilion’s modest tectonics of transparent glass, dark gridded beams, and homeosote walls was assertively “International Style” (named as such in MoMA’s 1932 exhibition), at-

tempting to associate Spain’s struggling republic with the progressive politics of modernist transparency. In turn, Sert was emulating an earlier fair’s landmark in which Mies van der Rohe’s nearly empty glass and marble jewel box represented Germany’s revolutionary Weimar Republic in the Barcelona world’s fair. Both Guernica and Mies’s socalled Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 (actually the Pabellón alemán) became canonical icons of international modernism, circulating in print and legend long after being dismantled. The recent reconstruction of Sert’s and Mies’s temporary pavilions suggest the tenacity of our desires for the world picture in which they were once embedded— even if they now float free of any engagement with the fairs’ original geopolitical situations (plate 20). Reconstructions always meet with mixed results. But we can utilize these simulacra to recall historical reDesires for the World Picture

47

ality: art formed only part of visitors’ emotional transport at the fairs.74 Emerging from an encounter with art, one could be refreshed by a “Moroccan” coffeeshop or a “Ceylon” teahouse, which then become part of the aesthetic (fig. 2.15). In the nineteenth century, one could be propelled by moving sidewalks to a luminous palace of electricity, travel in the first elevator, or seek refuge in the calm palace of beaux arts. Above all, the fair experiences were pegged as overwhelming. As Queen Victoria wrote in her journal after a visit to the London 1851 affair, “I came back quite dead beat and my head really bewildered by the myriads of beautiful and wonderful things, which now quite dazzle one’s eyes.” Or, as a visitor wrote of the 1855 French exposition, “It plunges the observer into a feeling which is more that of stupor than admiration.”75 So intense were the pressures placed on art and visitors in such contexts that many artists simply refused to participate. Although Eugène Delacroix’s famous competition with Ingres (couleur vs. ligne) was seen to fully flower in the beaux arts display of the Paris 1855 Exposition, he expressed only disgust, summoned by the vulgarity of a particular “fountain” made of artificial flowers: “I think all these machines are very depressing. I hate these contrivances that look as though they are producing remarkable effects entirely on their own volition.”76 Only art was supposed to do that. Visual artists knew that their own painted “machines” (as wags referred to academicians’ vast history paintings) were at risk of disappearing amid the contrivances of spectacle. But many literary types seemed remarkably sanguine about the aesthetic possibilities of the fairs, fulfilling the ancient modes of encomia and panegyric with actual commissions for opening ceremonies. See, for example, William Makepeace Thackeray’s May Day Ode to the just-opened Crystal Palace in 1851: Art unto man is a magician’s rod, Prolonging life, absolving from disease; Extracting good from out the meanest sod; Rivaling Nature’s works, and making him a God.77

“Art” for Thackeray is everything from hygienic science to cast bronze sculpture to the pavilion itself, and indeed the whole fair system; as we saw in chapter 1, Walt Whitman would dedicate one of his lesser poems to a similar task, and epigraphs from Victor Hugo’s univer48

Chapter 2

salizing panegyric to France opened both this and the previous chapter. A half century later, one guide to the 1904 St. Louis exposition put it this way: “The Fair is a colossal work of art, a method of expressing the large facts of industrial activity” (emphasis added). Part of a special feature in the periodical The World’s Work, this essay on St. Louis contributed to the education of thenpresident Theodore Roosevelt,78 whose annotated copy explained to him that the world picture at the fair was itself comprised of many other world pictures, a fractal model of meaning in which each fragment both played its discrete part yet implied the shape and geometry of the whole, amalgamating “manufactured products, from such things as are shown in the Palace of Varied Industries to the contents of the Palace of Fine Arts.”79 Long “nature’s rival,” art would play a part, just like the cotton gin, in making gods of men. The individual painting or sculpture was thus a microstructural component of a massive assemblage— part of the aesthetic, political, onto-theological, and geographical machine. Visual artists were forced to think more tactically about how their detachable, material things would work inside such contraptions. It was one thing to be illustrated in an encyclopedia or to write one, quite another to have one’s summa inserted into a spatialized encyclopedic display whose epistemic structures were largely beyond one’s control (plate 7). As Victor Hugo wrote in the 1867 fair’s official guidebook (the source of this chapter’s epigraph), he reveled in literary art’s capacity to master this world-making. Arranged by Frédéric le Play, the exposition’s concentric organization offered a circumnavigable map of global cultures and products, allowing Hugo, like Thackeray, to sense God: To make a circuit of this place, circular, like the equator, is literally to go around the world. All peoples are here, enemies live in peace side by side. As in the beginning of things, on the globe of waters, the divine spirit now floats on this globe of iron.80

Not all were so sanguine. London’s 1851 Crystal Palace and the 1862 International Exhibition were amalgamated in the recollections of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who condemned these concatenations for their “terrible force” uniting people into “a single herd . . . silently crowding into this colossal palace” in order “to idolize Baal”—

And you feel that here something final has been accomplished, accomplished and brought to an end . . . a kind of prophecy from the Apocalypse fulfilled before your very eyes.81

Such criticisms were seconded by intellectuals in Britain herself, from John Ruskin (who refused to attend, and who developed his contrarian “Political Economy of Art” in confrontation with such beasts) to Thomas Carlyle (who mocked the bombastic 1851 display as the “Winddust-ry of All Nations”).82 Walter Benjamin joined these acerbic critics decades later, articulating the ways in which the fairs were responsible for producing subjects as denizens of a “commodity universe,” an assertion echoed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s much later views that expositions and their commodities blunted fairgoer’s critical perspectives.83 Benjamin: World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value recedes into the background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted.84

Yet complicating his own argument is Benjamin’s vision of the potentially productive value of the distracted mass, encountering “images we have never seen before we remember them,” mediatic encounters that can break us out of the “dreaming collective” of capitalist false consciousness to provoke the incendiary awareness of a politically collective, urban, optical unconscious. Benjamin described the new image technologies popularized at the fairs as making visuality itself open to analysis: “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”85 Far from the Frankfurt School’s endemic pessimism, like Benjamin I see desiring-production in these events as potentially opening them for analysis— critical, redemptive, or even sublime, with all their technophilia. Thus within even the nineteenth-century fairs were heterotopias, interstices productive for critical thinking— ”Other spaces,” as Foucault theorized.86 If some artists in the fairs were simply cunning, aiming for the short-term market, others went for the long durée. If some visitors bowed to Baal, others took unpredictable paths (such as the workers whose congresses at the fairs inspired

the young Karl Marx).87 As state functionary Léon de Laborde put it in the epigraph, the fairs would “form the public,” but not always in the image of the state.88 Manet entreated visitors to his rebel pavilion at the 1867 fair to join him and increase the audience for modern painting and its critical world view: “To exhibit is to find friends and allies for the struggle.”89 By the time of the 1900 Exposition in Paris, the art world was indeed indisputably international— as recurring exhibitions had ensured. The internationalism evident in the 1900 exposition in Paris cut both ways. To Francophone critics, the beaux arts galleries of 1900 confirmed nothing but a flattening norm. Putting this in the language of my thesis, difference was seen to be crushed in the “universalism” of the Exposition Universelle. After a century of expositions (five decades of them explicitly international), the canonized “center” of the art world (Paris) now suffered under the law of the fairs: the loss of the “genius loci” of France herself. “Internationally,” commented French critic Arsène Alexandre, “the peculiarities of style are little by little dwindling and melting away in the most diverse countries.”90 Divided into a decade-long survey of French art called the Décennale, an even more comprehensive centenary exhibition, and the galleries of foreign artists, the beaux arts display was depressingly uniform for this critic. Between l’école français and les écoles étrangères (the French school and the schools of the foreigners), there seemed little difference. All spoke the international pictorial and sculptural language— in monotonous French. Partly this Francophone sameness was an artifact of the fair’s conservative commissioners. French innovators of bygone days, such as Claude Monet, were not helped by being represented through old works of middling importance (fig. 6.10) rather than the new series that had motivated him since the 1890s. Choosing 1888 paintings for 1900 meant looking decidedly backward (to a moment when Realism, one international style, had been overtaken by Impressionism, the next international style). The critic Alexandre damned the Décennale’s universalism as a moribund “world style”: Is it possible, at a Universal Exhibition like this, to have an absolutely accurate idea of what is called “l’art mondiale”? In theory, “yes,” in practice, “no.” . . . Juries are chosen from among the most celebrated men. Those who, so to speak, have “arrived.” Now, those Desires for the World Picture

49

who have “arrived” do not always understand those who are about to “arrive.”91

His differentials— the rhetoric of those-yet-to-arrive— are spatiotemporal metaphors for those-who-have-alreadygone-ahead, the avant-garde. Both conceits ideologically conceal how the fairs produced the avant-garde’s most profound condition of possibility: an international network in communication with itself, as well as a shared cosmopolitan audience looking to understand the cutting edge of the (Euro-American) world’s art. By 1900, the international style seemed a normative straitjacket. Here is Belgian Francophone poet and critic Emile Verhaeren sharing Alexandre’s dour prognosis: [Ever since David], France has monopolized the mass production of art. Schools no longer exist. There is only one School, unique and always the same, whether it is London, Berlin, Brussels. . . . And thus is the world geography of art fundamentally changed. Its regions are no longer specifically characterized, nor distinctively special.

Even “la peinture moderne” had become standardized: One paints, in accordance with this style, in Tokyo as well as in New York. . . . Uniformity reigns everywhere . . . covering the kilometers of carpet which determine the route through the Grand Palais . . . always the same from gallery to gallery, from country to country, one sees there the emblematic representation of the monotonous art of our time.92

The longing for “difference” among these Francophone critics is palpable. By contrast, foreigners saw the 1900 fair as lively and diverse, bringing together, “in such a manner as to invite comparison and criticism, the art workers of all nations and of every school.”93 From New York: Perhaps not at any Salon can the tendencies of modern art be judged so well as at a World’s Fair. Here every nation is apt to put its best foot foremost, no matter how apathetic it may show itself in other departments, and to exhibit what its experts regard as the best of its current work. And since here, at Paris, 50

Chapter 2

the exhibition is not of a single year but is at once extended and limited to a decade . . . since the last World’s Fair in 1889, we ought to be able to get a better notion than can be got in any other way of what is going on in the world in this department.94

“Ought to,” “should”— but possibly these optimistic goals went unmet. Outsiders’ cheerful perception of competition met pessimistic insiders’ despair at the grinding homogenization— the shared hope was for an international style featuring differences that it could still represent. American commissioners, in particular, had intentionally fashioned their 1900 selection to foreground “Americanness” within a standard that was nonetheless seen as shared. This was in reaction to criticisms of the US contribution to the 1889 exposition, which the French commissioner-general had described as “a brilliant annex to the French section,” dominated as it was by expatriates (Whistler, Sargent) who mostly lived in Paris and painted in the normative French style.95 Critic and novelist Gustave Geffroy framed the French disappointment with the 1900 exposition as a debate between two fictitious philosophers. One deplored the degradation of Paris into a trading post; the other celebrated her leadership in positivist knowledge.96 The synthesis of this dialectic tellingly takes place within the crucible of colonialism, where the crudities of the market could be reconfigured as gifts of knowledge, universalized for a benighted Other. The European debate between universal civilization and local Kultur is here implicit.97 Verhaeren concludes in a similar vein: “The universal spread of those essential elements of civilization— philosophy, religion and beauty— as demonstrated in this Exposition Universelle, while reducing individual national identities, ensured that the goal of the future would inevitably be the unity of mankind.”98 But was unity just the result of regulated quality control? The Belgian critic Eugène Demolder saw painting merely flattened in such a regime, relegated “to the commercial, to the insignificant place to which it has assigned itself, far from art, perhaps in the linoleum or the perfume sections.”99 Were desires for world pictures coopted by the new arts of publicity and advertisement? Yes— but. “Desire” is not only the place of seduction by false consciousness, it constitutes the source of embodied memory, and thus motivates all knowledge-production and technologies of

the self.100 Subjects are produced as international and cosmopolitan within these concatenations, but desire is both less trammeled and more unruly than capitalism can fully capture— it always exceeds the bounds of its ideological constraints, as Slavoj Žižek argues about the “remainder” (the ethnic thing, the cosmopolitan thing) that feeds but exceeds the nation-thing.101 Desiring-production is both heteronomous and autonomous, a folding of the variegated outside in. So yes, consumption— but of what and by whom? Consumption can take us back to Bartholemew’s fair or forward to Indian shawls around the hip polyglot crowd at the twenty-first-century V&A. It can export a view of tolerance from Holland through a painting by Jozef Israëls (chapter  3), practice the politics of the partial view in Javier Téllez’s Letter on the Blind (chapter 1), or force ruminations on the erotics of fascism in Tino Sehgal’s Kiss (chapter 6). Without closer analysis, the term consumption neither describes nor distinguishes among these encounters. It makes a difference what, when, and where— as, for example, when the not-then-extant “nation” of Poland, staging itself in a “Polish Café” on the grounds of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, made eating a kielbasa on the fair’s “Polish Day” a deeply political act. This would be quite different from the voyeuristic consumption of the “giraffe ladies of Africa” that twenty-first-century Parisians still hold in memory from their twentieth-century grandmothers.102 Consumption is both more, and less, than the whole story. It is a tool of our analysis, not an endpoint of our critique.

Publics, Infrastructures, Discourse

Fair organizers could be federal, monarchic, or municipal; today agency expands to include autarchy, NGOs, and the Communist party-state.103 Even in the strongly centralized nation of France (republics and monarchies both fueling empire), budgets in the millions of francs necessitated a combination of state funding, public subscription, and investment shell games soliciting concessionaires and foreign representatives eager to buy shares. For some publicly minded entrepreneurs (Gustave Eiffel; plate 8), a world’s fair could be an expensive personal investment that turned into a money-making machine; others (Louis Bonnier; figs. 2.6 and 2.7) found themselves cascading into bankruptcy as attractions failed to attract.

Speculation favored the state— in infrastructural as well as cultural and financial terms. With a sufficiently stable recurring rhythm (as in France and Great Britain), the cycle of world’s fairs could produce a stream of funds flowing from exhibitor fees and concession tariffs, resulting in substantial infrastructures for the modernizing host country— for Paris, a first Metro, sewer improvements, railroad lines, and grand public vistas; for London, a railway line and public design museum.104 In some cases, eager exhibitors could even be persuaded to build entire bridges (Paris’s Pont d’Alexandre, built by the Russian czar for the 1900 exposition); certainly the French expositions financed major epochs of what we think of as “Hausmannization”— leveling inhabited city neighborhoods to produce boulevards, promenades, parks, and museums, accompanied by the development of boundary properties as new speculative real estate. Chicago mapped a city plan for its waterfront and launched the “city beautiful” movement; San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York laid out parks and sturdy museums amid the pasteboard architectures of the fair. The goal was to stage the city as itself a spectacle, often facilitated by hummocks groomed for the purpose (Trocadéro hill) or towers from which a new grandeur could be produced and assessed. The Crystal Palace had a second story from which you could review the mass, and incorporated trees from the park, within which its own soaring architecture could be seen from afar.105 “Bird’seye” spectating had been a trope in European cartography and paintings long before, but it entered the fairs with a vengeance (plate 9).106 Even as posters imagined the “view from above,” visitors could bodily inhabit such views in towers, orbs, or wheels (as in Ferris’s innovation). Patrick Geddes’s seemingly eccentric conversion of an 1855 science museum in Edinburgh to an “outlook tower” in 1892 followed a template encouraged by the world’s fair staged there in 1886— a vista whereby the city below was discursively tied to a veritable universe, with the mastering observer as central producer of meaning.107 Towers, but also globes. Take “Wyld’s Great Globe,” developed by geographer James Wyld as a commercial attraction during the 1851 Great Exhibition and maintained through the next in 1862. Or the Villard-Cotard globe at the 1889 Paris exposition, “over 40 meters in circumference, showing mountains, oceans, and cities with what visitors took to be an astonishing verisimilitude.”108 Or Desires for the World Picture

51

Figure 2.6 Louis Bonnier, watercolor elevation drawing (based on ideas of the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus) for an enormous globe—160 meters high, representing the earth at a scale of 1:80,000—to be installed on the banks of the Seine during the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle.

Figure 2.7 Gustave Eiffel’s tower (1889) and Louis Bonnier’s Celestial Globe, built in 1900 as part of the Exposition Universelle. Jacques Duquesne, L’exposition universelle 1900 (Paris: Editions 1900). These were likely the inspiration for the Trylon and Perisphere, designed by architects Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux for the 1939 New York world’s fair (shown here on a 1939 postage stamp).

Spanish architect Alberto Palacio’s 1890 proposal for a $6 million iron sphere commemorating Columbus for the Chicago world’s fair.109 Or, as already mentioned, architect Louis Bonnier’s extraordinary design, installed on the banks of the Seine during the 1900 exposition: the largest globe yet at 160 meters high, it represented the earth at a scale of 1:80,000. A business failure (deemed dangerous for visitors owing to shoddy construction), it was based on ideas of the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus, who proposed “a model of the Earth . . . where every man will find himself at home [helping] strengthen within us the feeling that we are one and the same family.”110 (The oxymoron of an anarchist world order should be noted.) In a real world of compromise, the project had to be split between a “Celestial Globe” and a “Tour du Monde”— the one aping the form, the other the pedagogy of the

Reclus/Bonnier proposal. Although criticized as little more than ephemeral sideshows at the fair, dwarfed by Eiffel’s soaring tower, the world/tower pairing survived to inspire the fully abstracted Trylon and Perisphere in the New York World’s Fair of 1939: a “world of tomorrow” that might jump over the agonies of “today” as the world went to war. These attractions reinforced notions of the city as centralized spectacle, but there were staggering demands behind the scenes— temporary surges in population that necessitated upgrades in systems for transportation, lodging, feeding, and waste management. (A salient statistic: the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris had more visitors overall than the entire population of France at the time.)111 Fairs could bring as many as fifty million visitors into the nineteenth-century city, extending tourist desires Desires for the World Picture

53

along the spokes of empire, representing farther-flung destinations (France d’outre-mer, for example, or Britain’s colonies in Asia, or the American experiment in “not really colonizing” the Philippines). Infrastructures of spectacle were paralleled by a discursive apparatus intended to consolidate a single public, humming the celebratory-commodity tone gently mocked by Charles Dickens: I am a Catalogue of the Great Exhibition. You are the public. . . . I, as a celebrated Catalogue, had much to go through ere I learnt that which I now teach in the Illustrated Edition, the Official Edition, the French Edition, the German Edition, and the Twopenny Edition. I call Myself a celebrated Catalogue and I consider myself a work of great importance. My father, the Exhibition, certainly begot in me an illustrious son. . . . My mother, the Committee, by whom I was brought forth, has, I think, been abundantly rewarded for her pains. There would have been a visible blank in the world’s history if I had not been born.112

Dickens captures the nattering circularity of such publications, which differ from contemporary biennial catalogues in reporting on what was actually on view (twentyfirst-century practice often provides an account of what exhibited artists have done before and might be expected to do again). Governmental reports of these affairs were designed for accountability and intelligence back home, rather than circulation as souvenirs. (The Japanese delegation to the 1873 world’s fair in Vienna produced ninety-six volumes of description on Western displays for its home government). For developing countries (which included the United States and Japan in the nineteenth century), the impact of such reports could be immediate, as when news of innovative pedagogy became curriculum in US state “normal schools” almost overnight. Where did all these reports go?113 Destined for the libraries of government officials and the desks of bureaucrats and industrial exhibitors, they occasionally attempt to justify the whole enterprise: “[It] may be that there is a growing feeling against exhibitions,” we read in an official report on British participation in the 1873 world’s fair in Vienna— “which, however, should be dispelled at once”— because, clearly, exhibitions stimulate industry, a fact proven by “examining the present prosperous state of 54

Chapter 2

English industries, and comparing what these were previous to the Exhibition of 1851.”114 Such beliefs were echoed more aggressively by France, in responding to the epochal event of Britain’s 1851 Great Exhibition: The importance of the arts being generally recognized [in these exhibitions], it is necessary to oppose both the invasion of bad taste in France, [and] to fight against the renaissance of good taste abroad.115

We have met the author, the state’s commissioned analyst Comte Léon de Laborde. He used his report to exhort the new, self-appointed emperor of France on soft power: “Art is one: it is the source of all progress. . . . The prosperity of the arts is a force for the State, a glory to the Prince.”116 The summary of what the fairs enabled forms another of my epigraphs: “Élever l’art, multiplier les artistes, former le public.”117 This public (still construed as singular) was crucial to the cultural capital intended by these massive world pictures.118 For Laborde the arts were neither ancillary to public education nor irrelevant to state goals, but primary to both. Honed by postrevolutionary traditions (forged by David, among others), artists’ capacities to address a public, and indeed, to form one, were well-established in France. Americans, without a national arts pedagogy, viewed things differently, experiencing great exhibitions as “a colossal work of art” authored by anonymous free agents. For US commentators the education and forming of a public was not the state’s responsibility but visitors’ own. Walter Page, editor of the previously mentioned World’s Work special on the St. Louis exposition in 1904, reported to his mercantile readers on the event’s profound educational impact on its visitors: “Everywhere they are learning something. . . . It may be a typewriter that will write with two colors of ink; it may be a new kitchen utensil; it may be a new idea in education.” Calling this section of his report “The People as Exhibit,” Page claims to have overheard a woman looking at examples of school work from Wisconsin: “My husband is a member of the school-board in the town where I live, and we must have courses of study like these.”119 The journal advised visitors to follow the example of one earnest young businessman, who spent a month at the fair and studied a different aspect of its exhibits every day. Perhaps Queen Victoria was the origin of such advice, since she daily applied herself

to a different part of the 1851 Great Exhibition, invariably finding items “very interesting and instructive,” “very pretty,” “lovely,” “good and novel”— all ensuring that her “dearly beloved Albert” would be justly appreciated for “the impetus given” to the great event. One “American Lady” thought the “hundreds of sensible mechanics” who came on shilling day to the 1862 fair in London were exemplary subjects of these events; later thinkers would judge world’s fairs as important for conveying to “the average man . . . an understanding of the system that he is living under, and his own relation to that system.”120 If “the People” were the chief exhibit in St. Louis’s great public-making machinery, artists were not entirely off the hook. The 1904 journal’s writers encouraged them to join “this never-ending stream of intelligent, inquiring, cheerful men and women, whose dominant mood is a mood to learn”: “We need Japanese artists to work among us,” I heard one man say to another, at dinner in a public place. “We must teach their method— put their point of view to our pupils.”121

As some were doing at that exact moment, in New York.122 Far from the exhaustion the French expressed, US commentators on 1904 St. Louis suggested that the expositionary idea was only growing in importance. The 1904 fair had two goals: to stir pride in US development of the territories acquired from Napoleon in the Louisiana Purchase, and to bring Americans rapidly up to speed in matters of international taste and technology: “The teachability of the masses of the people is the great social fact that a fair demonstrates.”123 As with the British Great Exhibition, the nation was presumed to have accomplished much in the industrial development of its resources but to have just begun the work of art and making culture: “Everything is a passing show, except the soil and the people; and we have only begun to learn the capacity of either land or men.”124 The section titles in the World’s Work reveal what they were to learn: “A Measure of German Progress, a very full and varied display of resources and achievements— a marked advance in taste— an unprecedented educational exhibit— the story of a progressive people” (5153). Given the huge percentage of Americans of German descent (roughly 10 percent of the population at the

time), Germany was all the more admirable for having only recently come into federated nationhood (in 1871) while busily seeking an empire and managing its massive industrial sector with aesthetic tact:125 Germans can teach others how to live— German rooms, German carpets, German furniture, German ware, German food, German drink, are lavishly presented, with suggestive effect. . . . German genius has exploited itself richly and instructively. . . . [In sum,] a new esthetic sense has developed. . . . A new, distinctively German, art has begun to take shape. . . . “Not too much” is the motto everywhere.126

The rebuke to France (which had built a Rococo folly for its fair architecture) was quite explicit. Japan fit this “not too much” aesthetic as well: “Japan’s Extraordinary Exhibit, a wonderful display that tells the most remarkable story of commercial and industrial achievement in modern history” (5146). The Japanese display revealed “to Western civilization the social and economic progress of the people”: In arrangement and detail the national pavilion shows that, to the achievement of commerce and industry, the Japanese have brought the perfection of landscape beauty, another expression of the genius of a people who, in the art of war and the pursuits of peace, are steadily making their way to a large place in world power.127

The praises for Japanese aesthetics are embedded within a calculated appraisal of Japan’s role as a bulwark against Russia in the Pacific, realpolitik suspending the customary racism of exclusionary US immigration laws.128 Such appreciations for the Other form the other face of racism’s coin in the currency of extraction economies. In essays such as “Strange Races of Men,” the World’s Work’s author recounts “the race narrative of odd peoples who mark time while the world advances, and of savages [Native Americans] made, by American methods, into civilized workers.”129 Narratives of incommensurate progress drove the fairs from the beginning, intersecting with race “science” to inform the emergence of anthropology as fairground entertainment.130 “Villages indigènes” in Paris (1878), Dahomeyans in Chicago (1893) and again Desires for the World Picture

55

in Paris (1900), an entire Igorot tribe brought to St. Louis (1904), colonial artisans in Paris (1937), and the list goes on— relativized only by the willingness of the French, in “Vieux France” (1900) to make a display of their own rural peasants, since liberated by revolution.131 But if difference drove racism, it could also fuel an instructive criticality. Charles  H. Caffin’s 1904 coverage of “The exhibit of pictures and sculpture” for The World’s Work departs from the editors’ praise of all things German, and bemoans the imperial state’s exclusion of Secession artists from Munich. As Caffin conveys his appreciation for “the actual freedom of light” offered by the paintings of Claude Monet in the French display, the essay takes an intriguing turn. The author celebrates the “Kokoromochi”— feeling, mood— of Japanese watercolors in the exposition, praising these for leveraging the dominant international movement from France: For the motive of Japanese painting is not one of representation, as ours is, but of suggestion. . . . The artist, for example, in painting a tree or a mountain, is not seeking to deceive you, as he would, say, into the belief that it is a real tree that you are looking at, but to give you an impression of the relation— generally a decorative one— which the object bears to the rest of the picture, and of the sentiment with which the scene inspires him and, he supposes, will inspire you. . . . [Kokoromochi] seems to mean the vital character or essence of the object painted, which motive is not so dissimilar in a general way to that of our impressionists.132

Whether in ignorance or anxiety, Caffin ignores how “our impressionists” appropriated Japanese aesthetics in the first place, an influence made possible by trade and the exhibitionary complexes of the fairs.133 The coverage of the St.  Louis fair reveals not one public but many. Shelved in the library of then-president Theodore Roosevelt is an assortment of 1904 fair publications addressing various demographics, publics annealed by “print-capitalism,” as Benedict Anderson has theorized.134 For Roosevelt, who attended St. Louis more than once and addressed a crowd of fifty thousand at the pre-opening dedication, the goal was annealing that public— a goal urgently associated with the perils and potentials of democracy. After all, his ascendancy to the US 56

Chapter 2

presidency had been propelled three years earlier by the assassination of William McKinley by a Polish-American radical at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York— perhaps we should theorize this as a result of “print anarchism.”135 As Anderson surmised, publics can be tracked in part through the print forms that assembled them: newspapers, journals, catalogues. To these we can add the presidential orations that strove to bind them, and the bureaucratic reports on how cohesive were the results. Internal findings on the government’s own exhibits, and external reports on other nation’s displays, assembled yet another public of bureaucrats— nameless men and a few women who might have read (if they could bear it) the US government reports on the 1873 world’s fair in Vienna, which included a single 114-page volume focused on the secrets of Austrian bread. Then there was a proprietary public, constituted by commercial representatives of firms or industries conducting their own intelligence-gathering, or union representatives assessing labor conditions around the world. Commercial guidebooks, catalogues, and photographic albums in turn produced a “tourist” public— the word itself a product of the fairs. Finally, the modality of the academic conference was born at the fair— born in scientific, technical, or even religious congresses that generated their own published volumes, like the one on philosophy from the 1937 world’s fair, to which Heidegger aspired to submit “the world picture” essay. These might be said to construct an intellectual or scholarly public. Shadowing these official print publics are private ones, without official archives. Such unofficial narratives are challenging to locate, but when we find them we see tradesmen moved to eloquence, as in the diary we have already cited (chapter 1) from John Daws, the London paint salesman. On October 11, 1851, when he sketched the Crystal Palace for the last time (fig. 1.10), Daws enumerated its great effects: The Great Exhibition closed this day to the public. This great and wonderful Exhibition is now over. It has brought over to this country people of every nation. We have seen the Chinese, the Greek, the Turk, the black, the coloured and every grade of mankind walking our crowded streets of London, while Frenchmen, German, Dutch, etc with their great beards and moustaches are constantly about us. . . .

No less than the astonishing number of Six Million Sixty three thousand, nine hundred and eighty six persons visited the exhibition.136

In the hands of a gifted writer such diaristic responses could constitute, as we’ve explored, The Education of Henry Adams, in which the third-person autobiographical author “professed the religion of World’s Fairs, without which he held education to be a blind impossibility.”137 Of the “shilling days” public in London, Henry Mayhew agreed on the educational effect: “The fact is, the Great Exhibition is to them more of a school than a show.”138 The schooling of publics was also driven by the fairs’ proliferating visual materials, catalogues, and reproductions.139 Keepsake sculptures proliferated, commercial speculators fired up their own presses and hired engravers and lithographers, and “elephant” folios testified to the reproductive arts even as they illustrated reproductive industry (plates 2 and 5).140 Dickinson’s massive volume offered lithographs of the 1851 exhibition (based primarily on Joseph Nash watercolors), rehearsing proper gendered subject positions for the public: men point to things they think their wives should know, women consult their guides and look attentively at the exhibits, children receive their mother’s instruction. Art was only part of the learning available at the fairs, yet it provoked by far the most critical commentary.

Objects of Art / Difference

The British may have hoped to eliminate fine art from the 1851 Great Exhibition, but it came in anyway in the form of photography, statuary, and foreign artworks.141 For the French, there was no question that art would be a key component of their 1855 response to the Crystal Palace. With centuries of experience in art criticism (beginning with Diderot’s writings on the salons) and commitments to universal history, the French girded themselves for an unprecedented, self-appointed task: to examine progress, decadence, imitation, and innovation in the national schools of (mostly) European art.142 Reports on the 1855 exposition’s beaux arts display were numerous (one was written by a surprisingly confident twenty-three-year-old woman, Claude Vignon, who marshaled military metaphors for her art writing in order to gain credibility in this male-dominated field).143 For our purposes, of most inter-

est is the 1856 report by Étienne Jean Delécluze, a critic old enough to have witnessed David’s revolutionary festivals when he was a thirteen-year-old boy. Having joined David’s studio as a young artist during the reactionary Directoire, by the time of the 1855 exposition Delécluze was a solid conservative, writing criticism for a right-wing Orleanist paper.144 He titled his book-length report on the fair Les Beaux-Arts dans les deux mondes (The Fine Arts in the Two Worlds). Delécluze’s “two worlds” were simply Old and New, with the United States making its first appearance (dismissed by the author in a scant two and a half pages); all would be judged by universal criteria. The author is at pains to situate the exposition in the long stretch of Western history since the Greeks, analogizing it to ancient Panhellenic festivals and truces, noting that such events are possible in Europe only because “the reckless and brutal hatred that once divided the nations of Europe” had subsided in favor of “the ideas of general peace”— with the best proof being the universal exhibitions themselves. Delécluze notes that such a universal exposition is not a new idea. No, no— the exposition only “renews, revives, and maintains a tradition of great antiquity which tends to spread civilization equally in the world and bring peace.”145 As his title promises, Delécluze evaluates the “new world” and its aspirational beaux arts. But in the US section he finds far too little “difference” on display: From a country where art seems exhausted and nearly extinguished, we move suddenly to a new world where painting is still being tested. Unfortunately, we will not find the least trace of [that] powerful and naive beauty that new people sometimes show so richly; we observe to the contrary, effects of an almost instantaneous transmission of the theories and practice from an old world introduced into a new one. (65)

In fact, he begins to wonder “to what extent the works it contains are actually American,” alluding to the education of these artists “by Italian, French and English schools” (65– 66). The problem for Delécluze is that the objects are classed as national products, but the artists have too quickly accommodated the international styles. George Brown Goode, the young ichthyologist assigned the task of organizing the 1893 Chicago world’s Desires for the World Picture

57

fair, saw a much more radical solution to the problem, based on the transcendence of objects altogether. Things there would be, but only when they conveyed profound meaning. As excerpted in the epigraph: The exhibition of the future will be an exhibition of ideas rather than of objects, and nothing will be deemed worthy of admission to its halls which has not some living, inspiring thought behind it, and which is not capable of teaching some valuable lesson. [The Chicago fair will illustrate] the steps of progress of civilization and its arts in successive centuries, and in all lands up to the present time. [It will be,] in fact, an illustrated encyclopedia of civilization.146

We’ve already noted the connection between encyclopedias, encyclopedic exhibitions, and encyclopedic catalogues of exhibitions. Notions of objects as lessons (realia) dominated Cole and Albert’s plans for the first Great Exhibition and prevailed throughout, materiality vouchsafing truth. Goode summed up the “difference between hearing and seeing” with a pithy saying that echoed the legal differentiation between hearsay and “eye” witnessing: “To see is to know.”147 Goode thus captured the paradoxical logic of the fairs, in which vision is primary, but only for the knowledge it conveys. The blindman, of course, would tell a different tale (chapter 1). By contrast, Delécluze was so fixated by objects and schools that he failed to comment on a significant theoretical scission at that 1855 fair. After all, the approved beaux arts display had been confronted— on the same street, mere steps away— by the brash, manifesto-laden Pavilion du Realisme mounted by Gustave Courbet.148 Instead of acknowledging this most remarkable event, Delécluze rehearsed an old battle between “le laid” (the ugly) and “le beau” (the beautiful) dating from the 1824 Salon. But artists in 1855 were interested in the future— and Jozef Israëls (who had come to see his own academic history painting in the “foreign” section) was one of many who discovered it in Courbet (chapter 3). The official beaux arts narrative was not where one would find the future coming into being, as Henry Adams realized when he went sideways into the hall of machines in 1900. Similarly, what Francophone critics perceived as universal style would fall away if one examined what 58

Chapter 2

other nations put in their pavilions. As art historian Robert Rosenblum described that 1900 Exposition: Tens of thousands of works of art from all five continents gave rise to many towers of Babel, in which different national accents strove to be heard, young rebels jostled with moribund establishment figures, and a bewildering diversity of styles and subjects kept shifting the viewer’s allegiances and attention.149

Again, this “Babel” was heard only by those inclined to listen for difference rather than dull their eyes with a ubiquitous international style. One of the provincial artists who came to Paris in 1900 and experienced both the monotony (in the beaux arts pavilion) and the cacophony (in disjointed national pavilions, Dahomey villages, Ceylon teahouses, Moorish cafes, and the like) was the young Pablo Picasso y Ruiz. Like Israëls before him, he had traveled to the omphalos of the art world to see his work in the universal exposition, and was forever altered by the experience. Picasso, then age eighteen, had come from Barcelona with his friend Carles Casagemas. He was urgently interested in visiting the foreign section where his own painting hung: Last Moments, a pious deathbed genre scene in the latest Spanish modernista style.150 There can be little doubt that the encounter with the Paris fair as a world picture, and his own infinitesimal part in it, fired Picasso’s prodigious ambition. He began a restless oscillation between Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris; in February 1901, while Picasso was in Spain, his friend Casagemas shot himself in the head after being spurned by a Parisian laundress. All of this deposited itself in Picasso’s next canvas. Moving back to Paris and into Casagemas’s old apartment, Picasso took Last Moments (stored in the apartment) and painted over it with a new composition: La Vie (fig.  2.8). The new tableau inaugurated the melancholic “blue period,” starting with a self-portrait in the central figure, which resolved into the likeness of the dead Casagemas in the somber pose of a prophet. Decisively abandoning his academician father’s expectations (and dropping his name, Ruiz), Picasso relocated from Barcelona to Paris for good in 1904, living the Bohemian life that La Vie imagined. Only vestigial traces of Last Moments survive under La Vie, but conservation research has determined that it was a horizontal composition of a woman on her death-

bed attended by a white-collared priest.151 If it had been edging into the modernista style of strong outlines and saturated color (developing in Barcelona around the cafe Els Quatre Gats), in theme it hewed rather more closely to the sentimental genre paintings his father had encouraged, such as Picasso’s own similarly themed Science and Charity from a few years before (plate 14). This canvas from 1897 belongs stylistically to the international Realism that dominated European painting from the 1860s to the end of the century— a Realism that had transformed Jozef Israëls’ ambition back in 1855 and produced the opening-day scandal among visitors to the first Venice Biennale in 1895 (chapter 3, fig. 3.2). The emphasis in Picasso’s Science and Charity, as in Giacomo Grosso’s Supremo Convegno at that first Biennale, was to use narrative realism to convey an allegorical scene. One artist posed tradition against the progressive marker of “science” (Picasso), while the other chucked the moralizing tone in favor of an intentionally shocking fin-de-siecle eroticism (Grosso). What we can recognize in both is the international Realist style (now ensconced in the academy), tweaked for Grosso via the emerging international Symbolist movement, for Picasso via modernista style. The comparison makes one thing clear: what the international style might be at any one moment shifts, but the ambition to be part of it rules artists’ desires to enter the world picture of the fairs. The argument is simple: the fairs’ world pictures changed the task of the art embedded within them. It was the comparative logic of these assemblages that played the biggest role, internalized by the artists along with the often explicit hierarchies being staged. Although those hierarchies could be contested (even brilliantly, in the case of Picasso), they still ruled. France dominated the beaux arts from the beginnings of our history through World War II; its goading effect would drive Jozef Israëls to emulation and Picasso to rage. The latter’s encounters with expositionary world pictures would propel his most ambitious paintings, from Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) to the fair commission Guernica (1937). Paris was the capital of modernity, but for Picasso it also served as a clearinghouse for the formal innovations of the Other. These would include the African and Oceanic artifacts that came in with the 1878 world’s fair and ended up in the Trocadéro Museum, serving as “dusty manikins” that could help Picasso “exorcise” unnamed

Figure 2.8 Pablo Picasso, La Vie, 1903. Picasso painted over Last Moments, the genre canvas he had submitted for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, rejecting its “universal” Realist style for a different and more personal take on modernity. Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the Hanna Fund. Photograph © The Cleveland Museum of Art. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.

demons and propel a pictorial revolution in Demoiselles.152 Not only were these “tribal” objects accessible because of the fairs, they were contextualized there with the burgeoning publications of French anthropology— which Picasso avidly collected.153 Demoiselles can thus be examined (less personally than La Vie) as an epic driven by the fairs’ world pictures. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere, Picasso’s own status as an outsider— a dark, “Moorish” Spaniard, speaking only halting French— motivated his appropriation of African masks, Egyptian postures, and Iberian sculptures for the tableaux of Demoiselles. Signifying its antinationalist agenda, Picasso layered the canvas background with a French tricolor flag, torn violently apart by the aggressive “maidens” who enter through this signifier of French dominion, as if stepping onto the world stage purposefully to burlesque this sacrosanct emblem of “la France sublimée.”154 Picasso’s trajectory from Realist genre to this modernist salvo had passed through a palette of Symbolist hues— blue, rose, and ochre— now concertized for a defiantly antinationDesires for the World Picture

59

alist (and, I would argue, empathetically anticolonialist) “exorcism painting”— a therapeutic purging of the world-picturing colonialism of the 1900 fair. Demoiselles is a single canvas. Similarly, the art put into these vast fairground machines amounted to only a few hundred objects. Yet the agency of those objects could long outlive the ephemeral fair events. Asked to perform within theaters of nationalism and symphonic universalist agendas, art could nonetheless exceed or critique those constraints. Analogies can be made to far darker traditions of exhibiting humans, whose dignity and agency could survive the fairs despite the unalterable racism of their constructed positions. Surely, the village of “Dahomeyan Amazons” in the grounds of the 1900 fair is an aspect of Picasso’s experience that is underdiscussed in the literature thus far. These performing women, already experienced from the Midway at Chicago’s 1893 world’s fair, deserve more attention. They are doubtless among the mademoiselles Picasso called on to help him challenge the French Academy’s dominion over art.155 This is not a book about human displays, but it needs to understand them in order to chart the fairs’ normative ideologies and event structures. As social anthropologist Burton Benedict taxonomizes, humans on display formed a descending order as they were positioned ever further from the “universal” civilization in charge of the fair: (1) technicians (often uniformed, “part of the machinery,” and encouraged to be discreet), (2) craftsmen or artisans (where the emphasis was on tradition and ethnicity), (3) human curiosities (American sideshows featured “Dahomey cannibals”; in Paris they were “Amazons”), (4) “trophies” (Benedict’s interpretation of, for example, Native Americans being “educated” in a schoolhouse on the fairgrounds), and most horrifically, (5)  specimens (the long, prefair history of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman’s display would register here).156 Human displays preceded the fairs but took on a specific role once the fairs’ taxonomies were in place. Colonialism surged during the great age of the fairs (from the 1850s to 1900), even as notions of “nationalism” and “nation” were being worked out on the ground. One could follow the implications of ethnic/linguistic polity stemming from Johann Gottfried Herder (1744– 1803), according to which a German nation must consist of those born into varieties of the German language, peoples thereby connected to German spiritual values and 60

Chapter 2

presumed willing to craft a shared culture from the proud tribes of Germania. Or one could adopt the political and consensual theories of nation emerging from J. J. Rousseau, as developed by Joseph Ernest Renan (1823– 92), in which nations are voluntary associations that grow together toward universal values taken up by all: one chose to join the citizenry of the French Republic, and could learn its language and universal values in Senegal as well as Paris. The old competition was renewed and intensified in the nineteenth century under the law of the fairs: Kultur versus civilisation, with different racial presumptions and anxieties attending each model of “nation” being deployed.157 In either system, one traversed the fairs in constant colloquy with questions of nation and difference, epitomized by the native villagers first imported for a fair in 1878— this one in Paris— installed in temporary settlements of wattle and daub (or cement mimicking those materials). The maximum difference was extracted as those architectures of sticks and mud were posed against engineering triumphs associated with civilisation, such as the Hall of Machines or the Grand and Petit Palais. (In 1889, the native huts were located at the base of the Eiffel Tower.) Then there were the national pavilions, differentiated buildings that began right along with human displays in 1878, crystallized further in the 1889 and 1900 Parisian rue des Nations, and became functionally permanent in the evolving Venice Biennale. Bodies themselves were logical sites for inscribing difference or belonging, via headdresses, tattoos, clothing, and even hair; such costumed figures were routinely added to nineteenthcentury photographs of fairground vistas. (Recall John Daws’s diary: “the Frenchmen, German, Dutch, etc with their great beards and moustaches.”) We have little access to the subjectivity of the hundreds of people displayed as Other in these fairs, whether professional troupes of Cambodian dancers charming Auguste Rodin at the 1906 Colonial Exposition in Marseilles (fig. 2.9), Filipino Igorots living on the edge of the 1904 St. Louis world’s fair in a “village” they enterprisingly modified (plate 30), or those Dahomeyans installed across from the Eiffel Tower at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, while costumed “medieval” Frenchmen strolled Vieux Paris on the other side of Trocadéro hill. Human exhibits could also be shunted by officials to a commercial strip outside the fair “proper,” as in the 1893

Figure 2.9 Auguste Rodin drawing a young dancer from the Royal Cambodian dance troupe appearing at the 1906 Colonial Exposition in Marseilles. From E.-G. Güse, ed., Auguste Rodin (1985), 270.

World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the (literally) White City was one thing, the “Midway Plaisance” quite another. Here, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show employed Native Americans as entertainers, but you could also visit a Moorish palace, a Japanese bazaar, a French cider press, a German village, or the Dahomeyans (the very same).158 Set amid outlandish architecture, the entertaining motleyness of the Midway was a cardinal cause of what architect Louis Sullivan deemed the “dementia” lesioning brains exposed to the fairs.159 Well-meaning scientists, whether ichthyologist Goode or anthropologist F. W. Putman, struggled with the “ideas” that were to motivate the fair in Chicago and how “ethnographic displays” were to be handled; eventually they ceded the question to the barkers and hucksters of the sideshow.160 For all the mountains of research and publications on fairs, scholars have barely touched on the effects of these spatial and temporal dislocations on the actual people involved. We recapitulate domination in art history through our inevi-

table focus on Western objects and narrators; we have Rodin’s infatuated description of the girl-dancers from King Sisowath’s court, but no words from the girls themselves: They have brought antiquity to life again for me. They have shown me, in reality, the beautiful gestures, the beautiful movements of the human body which the ancients knew how to capture in art.161

These are the tiresome tropes that postcolonial theory has rightfully bashed to death. But questions of what world pictures the “natives” might have taken back to their home communities are just beginning to be asked.162 That is, if individuals were able to go back. Dislocated females (in particular) had very little chance of return.163 The bulk of these human displays were staged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, ramping up along with the industrial and military technologies that drove international standards, Desires for the World Picture

61

colonialist ambition, and nationalist architectural style. This simultaneous maximization of difference and global standardization is part of the logic of universal history, seen to culminate in technoscience and its triumphs over matter. Note an Almanac for the 1900 fair visitor, in which a page away from discussions of Dahomeyan women’s spears and stick fires is this celebration of the technological sublime: From the basement of the Palace leading in all directions, run miles and miles of wire transmitting power and light, along the walls, winding underground and crossing the Seine. A single touch of the finger on a switch and the magic fluid pours forth; everything is immediately illuminated, everything moves. The 16,000 incandescent lamps and the 300 arc lamps light up at the same time, at the Porte Monumentale, and the Pont Alexandre III, in the Champs Elysées, at the Invalides, on the Champ de Mars and at the Trocadéro; the Chateau d’Eau sets its cascades of fire streaming. Everywhere the soul of the Palace of Electricity brings light and life.164

How much did this performative modernity and its primitivizing foils contribute to the event-culture bequeathed to biennial culture and its aesthetics of experience? Nothing in the twenty-first century’s contemporary field would be so explicit as the catalogue for Chicago’s 1893 fair, labeling a case of Native American handicrafts “miscellaneous specimens of savagery.”165 But might there be something queasily similar at play when Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo’s location-specific performance in Guatemala City is transferred to the 2005 Venice Biennale as a documentary video? In the 2003 performance, ¿Quien Peude Borrar Las Huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces?), Galindo had walked from Guatemala’s Court of Constitutionality across an urban plaza to the National Palace, carrying a basin of blood, dipping her feet in the basin every few steps in order to leave a trail of dark red footprints protesting the rehabilitation of former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt and memorializing the victims of political killing (fig. 2.10).166 Could the economically cushy traveler in Venice feel that they were similarly contemplating “specimens of savagery,” viewing this video of a savvy artist performing “primitive” rituals in her own land to protest a certain lack of civilization? This is the 62

Chapter 2

risk when the international language of performance art is brought to articulate the violence inherent in negotiations over difference. (Lyotard would theorize such a confrontation as “the differend,” for which see chapter 5.) In another performance for an earlier Venice biennial (theme: Plateau of Humanity), Galindo shaved her entire body and walked naked through the streets of Venice (Piel— Skin, 2001), for political reasons that were more obscure. A video of this performance was also shown at the 2005 Biennale, where the artist’s live performance that year involved her crawling naked into a grey cube and whipping herself to commemorate Guatemalan victims of sexual violence. The liberal public sphere of art is reconfigured as a place of testimony about distant Others, as a strongly masochistic branch of performance art inserts itself into the world picture of the cosmopolitan biennial. I’ve posed a painful question: would such performances of violent difference place us in the position of earlier fairgoers, gawking at “specimens of savagery”? Perhaps all the difference in the world is made by Galindo’s status as a contemporary artist, in contrast to someone forced into the role of an anonymous villager tending a fire in a pasteboard landscape. The shift from anonymity to author name is crucial. The author name converts imposed abjection to a representation of abjection, performance becomes a commentary on indignities in the (savage) site to which they allude. Indeed, for these accumulated videos and performance pieces Galindo was “lionized”— awarded the coveted Golden Lion for best young artist at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Thus the radical assertion of identity politics, postcolonial discourse, and female “subalternity” mobilizes abjured human displays to critique politics back home. The Other chooses, herself, to exhibit herself (via the global medium of video, but sometimes in the street). Her intention and agency repurpose the toxic history of ethnographic exhibition, politicizing it: the subaltern speaks.167 Contemporary artists work their own agency to craft these admonitory displays of embodied difference, evoking the shame of nineteenth-century fairs’ human exhibitions in order to rebuke, educate, and overturn those politics— largely through the power of claims to speech, authorship, and authority granted by a global art world. But the performance of abjection (a long tradition in body art) is fraught terrain.168 This is exemplified in the darkly parodic 1992 cage performance that was doubtless an in-

Figure 2.10 Regina José Galindo, stills from video documentation of Piel (Skin), performed at the 2001 Venice Biennale (top), and ¿Quien Peude Borrar Las Huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces?), from a 2003 performance in Guatemala (bottom). Piel: color video, sound, 56’55”. ¿Quien Peude Borrar Las Huellas?: color video, sound, 37’30”. Both videos were shown at the 2005 Venice Biennale, at which Galindo was awarded the Gold Lion. Courtesy the artist and Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani.

fluence on Galindo— Coco Fusco and Guillermo GómezPeña, The Year of the White Bear, also known as Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid. In this project, the artists displayed themselves in public spaces as “natives” of an obscure island off Mexico, territory somehow missed by Columbus, living for days in a cage. The pair installed themselves in different venues: American museums and shopping malls, London’s Covent Gardens (which has a long history of human displays), as well as “Columbus Square” in Madrid during the quadricentenary of the European “discovery” of the new world (plate 30). One of the more interesting aspects of the piece is its documentation (the discursive working of the art). Fusco and GómezPeña chronicle moments when passersby seemed to be-

lieve they were actually encountering a lost “Amerindian” tribe, despite the artists’ banal everyday activities: Enacting rituals of “authentic” daily life such as writing on a laptop computer, watching TV, making voodoo dolls, and pacing the cage garbed in Converse high-tops, raffia skirts, plastic beads, and a wrestler’s mask, the two “Amerindians” rendered a hybrid pseudo primitivism that struck a nerve. Interested members of the audience could pay for dances, stories, and Polaroids.169

As Gómez-Peña recounted, “In all of the cities we have performed, there have been a range of responses from absolute Desires for the World Picture

63

tenderness and solidarity— people giving us presents, offerings, quietly being with us, sending notes of sympathy— all the way to extremely violent responses.” Fusco speculated in the same interview that the often sexualized responses to their performance were “provoked by us being presented as objects” in the manner of earlier European displays.170 There are few traces left by those subjects-as-objects in the histories of the fairs. Echoes of contemporary debates around globalization can be heard in interviews with descendants of the Filipino families brought as an entire village to the St. Louis 1904 world’s fair. During the fair’s long run, the Igorot children went to public school and the grown-ups engaged in improving their sparse accommodations with an ingenuity that impressed the US press. After their year in St. Louis, these families returned to their lives in the Philippines with commitments to literacy and education, with reportedly dramatic results.171 My skepticism about this contemporary legacy stems only from its perfect collusion with standard American accounts regarding the colonization of first nation peoples: The typical British exhibit showed a pile of raw material with a native working on it; the typical French exhibit a temple with dancers; and the typical American exhibit a school house with Native Americans being taught by whites.172

The emancipatory narrative of the education of the Igorots is thus fully ideological but also directly connected to our globalized and networked present— necessitating a critical globalism in response. Fusco and Gómez-Peña set up one possibility. But the moving edge of the problem demands ongoing improvisation. What are we to do with the articulate present-day Maasai from southern Kenya who is willing to work as a “cultural interpreter” in the African section of a Seattle zoo, dressed not in Kenyan clothing but in the zoo’s staff uniform, in order to reach out personally to tell visitors the need for conserving habitat and funding education in Kenya?173 Then as now, art and its biennials are only part of the roiling and ongoing discourses of difference, glancingly illuminating larger debates over empire, nationalism, resources, and “lumpy” globalization.174 What I want to emphasize are the ways in which art can use its privileged cultural position to leverage change and produce a usefully reflective subject in the global circuit, particularly in the contemporary domain. 64

Chapter 2

Implicit in the broad histories I am outlining here is the staging of visitor experience— the exotic dancer, the Igorot village, the national pavilions, the beaux arts display, the electrical “soul” with its miles of cable— eventually incorporated by contemporary biennial culture. I’m suggesting that sensing the circuitry of an electrical infrastructure, or grappling with difference in an internationalizing episteme, are contributors to twentieth-century modernist reflexivity— which in turn informs the criticality at play in the twenty-first-century biennial. Where nineteenth-century fair organizers scripted sober ideologies of progress, techno-sublimity, or colonial improvement, biennial curators today expect that artists will discover or produce viewers who are emotionally aware of multiplied positions: in the thick of spectacle, amid unevenly distributed wealth, and beset by the market for experience itself. Critical globalism wants all of these modes of address in order to both have an experience and then ruminate it into knowledge and critique. These arguments will continue to unspool in later chapters— the oscillation between market and education, from object to experience and idea, from a separated hall of technology to technologized new media as art. Those links and relations give off the clanking sounds of contemporary art at work.

Art in the Age of Its Touristic Reproduction

If the fairs enforced the idea of “nation” in a civilizational competition, they also detached the citizen from her locale and inscribed her in a stirring narrative of “man’s” universal progress. These dualities were perfected in the obsessively centralized fairs in France. Recall that it was the military training ground of the Champ de Mars that was given over to grands expositions— former site for the people’s revolutionary fêtes and Republican guard parades, rituals of mass subjectivation on a grand scale.175 Fair commissioners were forced to negotiate with successive military leaders of the French Republic until 1889, when the French state officially deeded the Champ de Mars to the city of Paris for a permanent park and fairground (simultaneously demolishing existing neighborhoods in favor of fashionable and lucrative apartment buildings at the fairground’s edge). As with the Giardini appropriated from churchyards by Napoleon and later ceded for the Venice Biennale, the terrain utilized for the

people of the French republic would maintain its dual park/military function, with an école militaire still in operation at the end of the Champ de Mars just as a working arsenale still skirts the Venetian exhibition. If this forms the military-touristic complex, what it serves to illuminate is the constituent link between tourism, defense, and industry in these affairs. “Tourism” begins with the Grand Tour— that crucial educational journey required of Enlightenment Northern Europeans once the Classical age moved from a literary corpus to a travel destination. But it was the fairs that produced a “tourist industry,” as the temperance businessman Thomas Cook invented the “package tour” to convey Britons to the Great Exhibition.176 Although relations between the Grand Tour, industry, and infrastructures of transportation existed previously, they would emerge as utterly codependent in the world’s fairs. Art features prominently in that circuitry. Here’s one example of how it worked: the British ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton (1731– 1803), had long provided genteel hospitality for Englishmen following the accepted itineraries of the Grand Tour. He also assembled an important collection of classical antiquities that both educated his visitors and later formed a key part of the classical holdings at the British Museum. Hamilton published numerous catalogues of his distinguished vase collection, but it was only after his return to England that his elite interests in classical antiquity were democratized and capitalized for industrial production, driven by the entrepreneurial desires of Josiah Wedgwood (1730– 1795), whose firm would feature prominently in London’s two Great Exhibitions (1851 and 1862). Wedgwood was potter to the queen but also a gifted chemist, ardent abolitionist, and businessman par excellence. Although he characterized the British fascination for antiquities as an “epidemical madness,” he nonetheless produced hundreds of (neo)classical designs to meet that middle-class desire.177 He borrowed or rented ancient Greek and Roman vases from Hamilton’s Italian sojourn, sometimes for inspiration, sometimes for precise copying, rendered in an innovative high-fired porcelain he called “jasperware.” Aspects of the fine-paste process were patented as early as 1769. Starting a British tradition of small-scale mercantile exhibitions that preceded the French installations of fancy goods, Wedgwood put his expanding neoclassical

corpus in a London showroom around 1765.178 He was one of the first to understand that the cost of a public exhibition could be amortized if it created a broader appetite for items that could then be produced on an industrial, rather than a custom order, basis. If the French royalist manufactories would “democratize” Sèvres porcelain by necessity, Wedgwood aimed to democratize the Grand Tour (while advertising his role as “supplier to the Queen”). Along with engraver and sculptor John Flaxman (whom he hired to produce drawings for porcelain casting), Wedgwood confirmed Britain’s participation in what was then the international style: Neoclassicism. Wedgwood did not intend this international style to speak of difference. On the contrary, he and Flaxman hoped to anneal British goods with the cosmopolitan tastes of Europe. “Art” was not a rarity from the past but a contemporary good, widely available in the age of its mechanical and touristic reproducibility. The most ambitious duplication undertaken by Wedgwood’s firm— of the ultimate prize in British antiquities, the “Portland Vase”— required three years of experiment (fig.  2.11). This first-century Roman masterpiece of cameo glass, formerly owned by the Barberini family, had been acquired by Hamilton in Grand Tour fashion and got its moniker from Hamilton’s sale to the duchess of Portland (whose son agreed to lease it to Wedgwood).179 Materializing nationalism and internationalism simultaneously, Wedgwood’s copies of the Portland Vase were celebrated for having improved on the Classical original, while making it democratically available: This was a technical challenge that would set British manufacturing skills— the result of middle class enterprise— on a par with those of the classical world. Public interest was such that “at least four different sets or single-sheet prints of the Portland Vase were issued in the 1780s.”180

Even cheaper than the vase were prints of the vase— besides providing excellent publicity, these representations of replicas were available to middle-class collectors who could not afford even the Wedgwood copies— much less embark on an upper-class Grand Tour. This mesh of objects and image surrogates would inform the national consumers at the Great Exhibition, who were offered the Wedgwood firm’s “Union Jug,” made specially for the ocDesires for the World Picture

65

Figure 2.11 Left: the Barberini (or Portland) vase, first-century Roman cameo glass, now in the British Museum, London. Right: Josiah Wedgwood’s mass-produced copy, ca. 1790, “jasperware” ceramics.

casion, annealing emblems of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland into Neoclassical ornament on its “black basalte” utilitarian form. Here difference might be spoken, as the proud constituents of a “united” kingdom fused into a Neoclassical tsotchke for the curiosity shelf back home. Such economies of emulation, reproduction, and distribution characterized the “fine” arts as well. The career-defining sculpture by Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave (first completed as a plaster model around 1843), provides a powerful example (plate 5; fig 2.3). Powers, although born in Vermont, set up his artist’s studio on a street in Florence, strategically located on the Grand Tour itinerary. The first of what would be many copies of the Slave was completed in 1845 for a British commissioner, John Grant, who arranged with Powers to have it sent from Italy by boat to be installed at the Pall Mall galleries in London. Classical in allusion but “modern” in 66

Chapter 2

subject, the marble depicted a contemporary Christian girl from Greece, taken by Ottomans during the Greek war of Independence (1821– 29), stripped naked, and put on the block, where she modestly endures her purchasers’ gaze (and ours) as she is sold into slavery. Grant’s Pall Mall exhibition of Powers’s sculpture was a London sensation.181 Reviewed in numerous papers, it inspired a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a burst of orders that streamed by post (or in person) from collectors in Britain and, eventually, the United States.182 Thus well before the Great Exhibition, The Greek Slave was established as an international marvel of manufacture, understood to have trained its Victorian public in how to view an artistic nude, politically palatable as a virtuous virgin exhibiting the stoic demeanor of a democratic people in duress. Here we see “desire” for a particular world picture twining through the depicted body, whose morally

sanctioned eroticism drove its viewers into paroxysms of ecstasy (“Pierce to the centre / Art’s fiery finger!” as Browning captured it). The body, rendered chaste, white, and thus available for projective affect, became a vehicle for world-changing empathy (“not alone  / East griefs but west”)— circulating even before the first world’s fair could assemble a proper “picture” around the sculpture. Intoxicating for its mid-nineteenth-century viewers, the Slave alluded to antiquity in pose and facial type, to purity in its medium of flawless white marble, to contemporary politics in its title. To Americans abroad (and to those reading the breathless accounts at home), she signaled the longed-for moment in which a US artist would create “a magic circle within whose precincts all are held spellbound and almost speechless,” successfully turning from heathenish pagan themes (so popular in the French Salon) “to found in sculpture the [new] school of Humanity.”183 Through her title and accouterments of dangling crucifix and virtuosic marble chain, she brought her viewers to contemplate “the fact of the exposure of female slaves for sale in the Turkish bazaar” (as the London Art Union put it on June 1, 1845)— innocence cruelly doomed by “man’s crimes in different lands.”184 Yet “Greek” slavery was not the only kind that could be imagined here. During the first Great Exhibition, when the sculpture became central to the US display, Powers’s Greek Slave was mobilized for the abolitionist movement, first by the British satirical magazine Punch, which asked wryly, “Why have they not sent us some choice specimens of slaves? We have the Greek Captive in dead stone— why not the Virginian slave in living ebony?”— and, later in the same spring 1851 volume— published a caricature by John Tenniel depicting just such a dark-skinned Virginian Slave (“Intended as a Companion to Power’s [sic] ‘Greek Slave’”; fig. 2.12).185 By the second London Exhibition in 1862, the association was fully authorized— the Slave was carted in to the US display yet again, this time to represent the beleaguered Union in the midst of the US Civil War— a salience magnified by its sculptor’s status as an American from the free state of Vermont, living tragically in exile from his warring nation (fig.  2.3).186 These exhibitions of the full-scale marble sculpture were auratic points of reference calling up already circulating discourses and reproductions, both the larger “art” marbles and the smaller cast reproductions that Powers authorized as early as 1844, notably in “Parian marble”

Figure 2.12 John Tenniel, The Virginian Slave, intended as a companion to Power’s [sic] “Greek Slave.” From Punch, or the London Charivari 20 (1851): 236.

(ceramics) for the national industrial fair in Birmingham in 1849. This was, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the work of art in the (discursive, industrial, touristic) age of its mechanical reproducibility. One early marble version of Desires for the World Picture

67

Powers’s Slave was “released” by its magnanimous commissioner so that the artist could put it on tour throughout the United States from 1847 to 1849, capitalizing on the public stir it had been causing in London since 1845 and surely fueled by the gathering storm around issues of chattel slavery.187 It was accompanied in its US travels by a small booklet reprinting international reviews and offering interpretations of the Slave’s enigmatic expression. If not written by Powers it was certainly authorized by him: Her thought is not of herself; she is recalling the struggling country she has left behind her, the friends she has lost, the blackened and desecrated home she may never see again, the lover of whose fate . . . she is still ignorant. . . . [T]he Greek Slave represents [woman] after the Fall has set its brand upon the race, suffering the chains of slavery and the brutal violence of her captors.188

Reading this today, it is difficult to imagine that viewers could have avoided thoughts of the “abominable institution” of contemporary African slavery— but the thirty pages of commentary whisper nothing of the slave markets in Charleston or Richmond, the subjectivity of Yoruba and Igbo peoples wrenched from their homes, or the boats still plying their human cargo across the Middle Passage. Enunciations and silences were paired with speech acts at another level, and this hackneyed Neoclassical sculpture met desires for a world picture that could change through the event of art in exhibition— as Browning implored, an Art that might “break up erelong / The serfdom of this world!”189 Powers’s silence on the subject of abolitionism was soon filled with Others’ noise. When the Slave came into the 1851 Great Exhibition, London’s abolitionist community moved into action. On a busy Saturday ( June 21, 1851), a small group of free blacks and other abolitionists entered the Great Exhibition to stage a demonstration around the statue. According to British abolitionist William Farmer, they hoped both to protest against slavery and to make it visible in the fair; as he noted in the Liberator (an American abolitionist journal): “Side by side with [US] specimens of cotton, sugar and tobacco, ought to have been placed the human instruments of their production.”190 The Greek Slave display featured an ingenious turntable on which the statue and her red velvet pedestal 68

Chapter 2

had been mounted (the Pall Mall’s setup had been green); viewers could rotate the covered base of the ensemble to ogle her from different angles. Into the niche, abolitionist and fugitive slave William Wells Brown placed the Tenniel engraving from Punch, loudly announcing, “As an American fugitive slave, I place this Virginia Slave by the side of the Greek Slave, as its most fitting companion.” In art historian Lisa Volpe’s study of the event, Brown’s performative summoning of a public used the techniques of the stirring panorama show he had been touring through the UK. In those performances, Brown often called upon the fugitive slave and fellow abolitionist Ellen Craft, who would stand in front of the image to describe her escape from Georgia (a daring charade, in which her paler skin allowed her to pretend to be her slave husband’s owner). Craft would then enact the most vivid lesson in this moral theater, as a kind of living exemplum of the Virginia Slave: “Standing silent before the audience and with downcast eyes, signaling her modesty, and her visibly white skin, Ellen embodied the ‘tragic octoroon.’”191 Volpe suggests that Craft (who was part of the protest that day at the Great Exhibition) would have brought this role into the Crystal Palace; it would have resonated uncannily with the Greek Slave: the latter’s stiff “virginity” confronted with Craft’s human decorum, the “tragic octoroon’s” very existence speaking to the sexual violence euphemized by the marble nearby. The abolitionists’ performance was dramatically narrated in their own publications, critiquing the celebratory world picture of 1851 with remarkable candor (matched by the wit of Punch in its ongoing commentaries)— the abolitionists’ performative speech acts had turned this art into event. As such, they are surprising precursors to the biennial circuitry of today, leveraging human display traditions with performative politics.192 Did Powers plan the association with abolitionism? There is no evidence of this cleverness; indeed, readings of the Greek war for independence were dominant in every part of the Slave’s original reception, analogized to the American revolution and its proud (if hypocritical) democratic tradition. But Powers learned from his audience. During the US Civil War, he proposed sending a new sculpture— an allegorical figure of America— to the 1862 Great Exhibition. This would assuage its rejection by his home nation, to whom he had offered it as an ornament to the US Capitol (it was seen as divisive, ostensibly

Figure 2.13 Abolitionist cameo, designed for Josiah Wedgwood by William Hackwood (modeler at the Wedgwood factory) for distribution through the British Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade; in production from 1787 at least until Wedgwood’s death in 1795.

because of his association with the abolitionist cause). When the war was over, Powers sought to reinterpret the broken chains of tyranny he had sculpted beneath America’s feet (initially a revolutionary war reference) as “the bonds of slavery which were broken by the victory of the Union in the Civil War.”193 Opportunism ruled the artist’s mobilizations of allegorical form. For my purposes, artistic intention is less important than the international desiring-production that drove the reception of the Slave. The countless reproductions of this statue can be understood as an abolitionist countertrade, balancing the noxious slave industry with symbolic substitutes— building on the earlier success of Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist cameo tokens. Begun as coinlike medallions, these were designed by William Hackwood at Wedgwood’s firm in 1787 and circulated by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the

Slave Trade, proliferating for almost a century as slavery dragged on and worn as necklaces, watch-fobs, or other tokens of opposition. Later visually associated with Powers’s figure through the shared imagery of chained hands, the Wedgwood abolitionist token is accompanied with the slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” (fig. 2.13; adapted, in some versions, to a female “Sister”). The small ornament became wildly successful for members of white society practicing empathy with and imagining salvation for the crouching, passive, shackled, suppliant African slave. Given the congruence between British industrial entrepreneurship and Powers’s own (whether streamlining procedures for Italian workers in his Florentine studio or patenting rasp designs), the amortization of the Slave’s popularity through reproductions was overdetermined. Produced at a variety of scales, The Greek Slave could be Desires for the World Picture

69

a full-size “marble copy” of Powers’s “original” plaster model (itself cast from clay), or it could be cast in bronze (a standard medium for small fine-art statuary), or it could appear in “Parian marble,” a fine-grained porcelain (like Wedgwood’s “jasperware”) made from a mold for ceramics, easily mass-produced. The “Parian” process was first marketed in 1849 by Summerley’s Art Manufacturers, a firm founded by none other than Henry Cole, who would mount the Great Exhibition only two years later (after exhibiting in the 1849 Birmingham fair).194 Through these various modes of reproduction, the sculpted female’s much discussed chastity and nobility could be made available at tabletop scale, recommended as an ornament for “the toilette of every young lady who is desirous of obtaining a knowledge of the proportions and beauties of the figure”— according to the 1853 Godey’s Lady’s Book— but potentially also politicizing that lady as she contemplated, empathetically, the plight of the slave, contrasting that maiden’s perilous fate with her own bourgeois comfort.195 In its association with both reproductive industry and abolitionism, The Greek Slave would proliferate politics by other means, using a then-international style (Neoclassicism) to speak, through the abolitionist countertrade, of violent difference. By consensus then and now, the best of the Greek Slave casts were judged to be “the white ones” made from ceramics by Cole. But others were made by porcelain competitors Copeland and Garrett in Staffordshire, or in dark bronze by the Meyer Foundry in Bavaria and Cornelius & Baker in Philadelphia (fig.  2.3).196 What Derrida calls “economimesis” (discussed more fully in chapter 6) is manifest in Powers’s scaled offerings: six to nine “Fine art” marbles from forty-five to sixty-five inches tall, signature duly inscribed, along with uncounted tabletop versions in a variety of industrial materials, most stamped by a responsible firm but some free of any imprint and possibly “counterfeit.”197 Powers assured his fine art clients of his choice of particularly pellucid Serravezza marble and his own patented rasps, which allowed the sculptor to leave the marble surface unpolished— breathing with pores, “like skin.” He ordered special pumice through the American consul in Vienna for the final polishing, to avoid the glassy finish of French academic nudes (Canova being a case in point) and to preserve a white, breathing surface; collectors were advised to clean the sculpture with white wine (vintage 70

Chapter 2

unspecified).198 But what of the deep brown, glossy, oiledlooking “skin” of the numerous bronzes? These set up an entirely different set of associations. Perhaps we can locate this “different” Slave in another kind of economy of desire— positioned on a libidinal spectrum linking the virgin to the Virginian octoroon. Copies of the Slave were not a weakening of the “magic circle” viewers generated around this Neoclassical form (the aura of the cultic object, as Walter Benjamin would later theorize it). Auratic presence (Benjamin’s “unique phenomenon of a distance”) could, in fact, be personalized and brought home with the collectible object, but home would then be opened to the unheimlich— difference and distance of another kind.199 As we have seen, the association with abolitionism came to the Slave explicitly through the Great Exhibition, an event that was also instrumental in the physical distribution and reproduction of many more Slaves. One could even argue that Summerley/Cole needed to produce the Great Exhibition for his market in Parian marble collectibles to expand— including the little Greek Slave, its market benefiting from a taste for elegant objects accelerated by the fair and made mordant by abolitionist politics. Magnified by the apparatus of the fairs, made accessible by industrialism, and fueled by international politics, the multiplied Slave was a commodity. But in the hands of the right visitor, it could also do the global work of art. Tourism, industry, politics, art, and display formed circuits robustly linked to artist studios such as Powers’s in Florence, firms such as Wedgwood’s Etruria (as he named his Staffordshire factory), or Cole/Summerley’s Art Manufacturers at Stoke-on-Trent.200 Art history ranks such sources in declining order: Fine art, decorative art, minor art, tsotchkes, kitsch. Yet we should not draw the line too firmly between a sculpture copied in marble by Italian artisans and one cast in bronze by those looking to capture, anonymously, the borrowed fame of an abolitionist icon. To force the analogy with the present, do we consider artist Tobias Rehberger’s café at the 2009 Venice Biennale an artwork or a work for hire supporting the biennial’s services? Were the water popsicles on offer by artist Cildo Meireles at documenta 11 art, politics, or refreshments? Was Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas’s take-away bag for Villa Lituania at the 2007 biennial in Venice mere “swag” or distributed, politicized textile art (fig. 2.14)? The lines were never entirely clear in the

Figure 2.14 Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas, Villa Lituania project for the 2007 Venice Biennale: “Pigeon Fancier’s Waterproof Bag,” Tyvek, displayed and in use. Courtesy of the artists.

nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they are even more productively vague now. To view an exhibitionary form as a syncretic assemblage of visual culture, design pedagogy, urban development, artworks, and educational programming is to loosen aesthetic questions from anxious, class-bound demographics into a more usefully comparative frame. “Fine” artists and “high” theorists shrank from the display in Great Britain— “Pre-Raphaelitism” and a spiritualized Gothic revival had little use for William Henry Fox

Talbot’s “pencil of nature” and its silvery encyclopedic images.201 John Ruskin’s lecture on “the political economy of art,” prompted by the fair, warned his listeners, “Do not force the multiplication of art, and you will not have it too cheap; do not wantonly destroy it, and you will not have it too dear.”202 Was art’s working merely a question of salary and the control of edition sizes? Talbot had asked the commissioners in 1851 to consider how photography should be sold— and explicitly analogized this new medium to fine art prints, arguing for more than “the price Desires for the World Picture

71

of the paper” and “cost of printing off that impression.”203 As even Ruskin came to understand, new media such as photography could attain the capacity for transformative becoming that Heidegger would celebrate as “the unity of work-being,” making us a new world in material and sensuous form.204 At the same time, these transcendental values could (and would) be converted back to capital easily enough. Considered of purely antiquarian interest today, Powers’s multiplied Slave and Talbot’s market negotiations echo in contemporary desiring-production at the biennial. The exhibitionary complex draws a loose net around mobile hordes of collectors, tourists, gallerists, curators, and manufacturers, occasionally assembling politics around seemingly apolitical art. Damien Hirst would solicit such behaviors in 2012 by letting visitors “collect” their experiences of his dot paintings at eleven galleries distributed around the world. Yes, a cynical marketing ploy— and yet, the paintings could be seen to comment (glancingly and polyvocally) on the global pharmaceuticals that occupy similarly extensive circuits in our economy.205 The aforementioned Villa Lituania by Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas similarly emphasized the nomadic, virtual, and ephemeral components of the artists’ own political situation. Commissioned as national representatives for Lithuania in Venice in 2007, the collaborative Urbonas studio turned that small pavilion into a dovecote for racing pigeons, deploying the semiotics of the “dove of peace” to sweeten their otherwise salty politics. For the supposedly “postcommunist” world, they trained pigeons to fly between the “free” pavilion of Lithuania in the Venice Giardini, and the former Lithuanian republic’s Villa Lituania in Rome, which remained Russian “property” long after the fall of the Soviet Union. The project also trained newscasters, critics, and art viewers (who learned to follow the pigeons and “connect the dots”). Such work is cumulative and cross-referential— alluding to Robert Smithson’s “Site/Nonsite” practices of the 1960s, as later chapters will explore. It also becomes actively marketed by the artists, with the dove forming an abstracted logotype (in the best Eastern European graphic tradition), printed on posters, booklets, flags, bags, and garments that artworld travelers are invited to port around. Having taken the rue des Nations concept from the Paris Expositions and allowed national follies to become a permanent feature of the Biennale, Venice curators are nonetheless 72

Chapter 2

pleased to let these subcontracted spaces drive global politics by other means (as in the Palestinian Stateless pavilion, discussed in chapter 3). In a sense, this echoes the medieval origins of pavilions as temporary royal encampments, diplomatic outposts always alluding to an elsewhere, calling on a distant power that just might authorize peace.206 Representation is a ludic domain.

Architectures and Endings

Indisputably, one result of the convergence of the industrial fair and the Grand Tour was the “tourist industry” itself. But the label “tourist” does not capture all trajectories of the visitor or the outcomes of their encounters. What kind of consumer would wear the Urbonas backpack-hoodie? Acquire a velvet-bound album of 1900 Expo photographs? Sketch in his diary a one-inch version of the Crystal Palace (fig. 1.10)? Read the blindman’s Temple Bar review? Purchase an elephant folio of the Great Exhibition, so large it requires standing to peruse? Clearly there are distinct demographic categories for these items; equally, we should imagine visitors to a given Paris fair including provincial Frenchmen, foreign heads of state, suffragists, industrialists, Dahomeyan villagers living in the fair’s colonies et pays de protectorats, and the young Picasso and his modernista friends. At least one copy of the luxurious elephant folio of London’s 1851 exhibition was acquired by an exhibiting artist, and one album from the 1904 St. Louis Fair wound up at a New Hampshire dairy farm.207 Newly digitized ephemera include the seven-day ticket book that allowed a Mr. John Jones to visit the 1900 Paris exposition over several days, perhaps enjoying the Café Maroc (fig. 2.15), the Ceylon Tea House, or the choreography of colored electric lights at the Palais Lumineux. Visitors coming to repeating surges of exhibitionary architectures would have witnessed the transformation of Paris into modernity’s “société du spectacle,” literalized in the incomparable and now permanent architecture of the Tour Eiffel.208 This festive industrial urbanism goes through the modernist wormhole and comes out as the postindustrial aesthetic in biennials of today. Take the case of the Palais de Tokyo, built for the last of the great Parisian fairs in 1937 by forgotten architects, converted to a modern art museum after the fair, supplanted by the 1977 opening of the Centre Pompidou, and in 2002 renovated and rescued as a cosmopolitan “site de création contemporaine”— an

Figure 2.15 Cafés at the Palais du Maroc (“la Belle Fatima”), 1900 Exposition Universelle, Paris, from Album de l’Exposition 1900: 120 vues, with figures and their shadows added for human interest.

emulation of biennial culture without the name (fig. 2.16). The logic of this trajectory was confirmed in 2012 when the physical plant was expanded by the same architects who had restored it a decade earlier, and La Triennale of Paris was announced in this site under the curatorship of Okwui Enwezor— well-known curator of the 1997 Johannesburg biennial, the 2002 documenta, and the 2015 Venice Biennale. Architectural critics praising Lacaton & Vassal’s 2002 renovations had described the liberation of the building from the shards of a decaying proto-Fascist past into an entirely experiential “future”: In crossing the threshold, the academic grandeur of the Neo-Classical exterior has given way to its antith-

esis: a light, open, industrial warehouse space, under the control of something akin to an artists’ squat. . . . [The architect Jean-Phillippe Vassal] dispenses with the idea of a definitive point of completion. Effectively, the site work is endless, as architecture-inprocess merges seamlessly with art-in-process.

This encomium riffs on the architects’ statements to offer an extraordinary metaphor of just what was coming into being: [The architects’] vision of social space is pervasive, inspired, partly, by the Djemaa El-Fnaa market square of Marrakesh— a space of movement and change, Desires for the World Picture

73

Figure 2.16 Palais des Musées d’Art Moderne, built for the 1937 Paris world’s fair as one of a pair of modern art museums—one run by the city, one by the state. Originally designed by Jean-Claude Dondel and Andre Aubert (working with Paul Viard and Marcel Dastugue), it was renovated by Lacaton & Vassal for the 2002 contemporary exhibition venue known simply as Palais de Tokyo. © Lacaton & Vassal.

constantly formed and reformed by the ‘whim of its actors.’209

Of course I want to emphasize the telling conjunction of an inspiring Moroccan market and its former colonizer’s French exhibitionary space, staked out on the rue de Tokyo, a street itself named in a spirit of Orientalizing fantasy. These are the “coincidences” that reveal the 74

Chapter 2

structural armatures for our world pictures that our own desires for difference bring into being. To reference our desires is not to mystify the very real state funds and neoliberal capital infusing the Parisian art world; it is to situate art’s Western audience as “first world protagonists” in establishing the global currency of eventful art and architecture. We can carve heterotopoi from our encounters with the art— but we are equally

Figure 2.17 Palais de Tokyo, site for “la création contemporaine.” Lounge with floor painted by Michael Lin. Photograph: Rory Hyde, ca. 2005.

bound to critique their economics and to reveal the long duration of these structures of interpellation. Categories of exotic amusement that were confected by the French empire for visitors to the Exposition Universelle in 1900 (recall Jacques-Émile Blanche’s seductive painting of friends, lovers, and waiters at the Café Maure; plate 12), and again in the African villages installed up river in the world’s fair of 1937, are now brought forcefully into the Palais de Tokyo via museal lounging and global curation, closing gaps for what Enwezor defined in 2012 as the new triennial’s “Intense Proximity.” With its “ethnographic poetics”— a type of self-reflexive Othering for which Enwezor has become famous— the announced ambition was nothing less than an experimental decentering of French national culture policy, perhaps uniquely possible in this venue, founded on a US model of entrepreneurial nonprofit “independence” from the state, originally un-

der the leadership of curator Jérôme Sens and sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud.210 The Palais de Tokyo site is historically loaded. The building, inaugurated in 1937 as Palais des Musées d’Art Moderne, was one of a pair whose symmetry ordered the fairground. As such, it was near the foreign section where Picasso’s Guernica then hung in its beleaguered modernist Spanish pavilion. Further down the river (but perhaps within sight of the elevated platform on Trocadéro hill) would have been the last gasp of the human displays: artisans of Africa, installed at the Centre des Colonies on the Île de Cygne, where they labored away on jewelry and weaving, living in cement dormitories built to mimic the impressive “mud” architectures of West African mosques. These echoing “proximities” were no doubt what expatriate Nigerian curator Enwezor had in mind when overlapping African and European artists, no longer segregated Desires for the World Picture

75

but thrust into the perpetually renewing aesthetics of experience for twenty-first-century subjects of biennial culture.211 In the narrative of this book, grand expositions declined as empire did, with Paris’s 1937 iteration and New York’s 1939 fair marking the last hopes of uniting the world in a single picture at a fair.212 This is not strictly true, of course— world’s fairs continued, with the largest one in history credited to Shanghai’s Expo in 2010. On October 16, 2010, this extravaganza witnessed, in a single day, one million visitors. Clearly, Brussels (1958), Moscow (1959), New York (1964), Montreal (1967), Osaka (1970), and other “Expos” (as they came to be called) marked the new phase of this technoscientific history in which international corporate capital played increasingly important roles— a saga not narrated here.213 Why? Because, with key exceptions (Brussels and Osaka chief among them), the art had largely gone elsewhere— into the biennial. Paris in 1937 thus serves to conclude one story of the fairs’ engagement of the international art world. It stands for the last moment when states were in charge of worldpicturing, a final occasion at which commissioners could pretend they would accomplish national or geopolitical goals by other means, a last gasp of the dream that “universal human progress” could be displayed in a cheerful competitive arena, and a fading snapshot of the enduring model by which art was waged next to colonial (im)postures. These endings were clear even for the organizers, who witnessed the looming national pavilions of Soviet and Nazi governments in construction (plate 21), facing off (as artist André Lhote said at the time) like “pretentious stone dragons” across the ostensibly neutral territory of the Trocadéro fairground.214 It was under these hulking monoliths that Picasso and José Luis Sert staged the Spanish Republican riposte to fascism in a modest, cheaply constructed building, with Guernica pointing to the very Nazi regime looming above. Picasso’s Guernica commission forms a telling coda to this chapter’s narratives of the workings of difference within an international style. Sert had given the artist an open brief for his contribution— and after the world’s first aerial firebombing of civilians by the German Luftwaffe at the small Basque village of Guernica in April, the artist had his theme. Furious weeks of studies ensued, documented by photographers who followed every move 76

Chapter 2

of the now-famous painter in his Paris studio. But despite the celebrated triumph of its iconography and the fame of its artist, Guernica failed to emerge from the overheated context of the fair. Behind schedule and underfunded, the little Spanish pavilion opened late. Despite some press coverage, the pavilion remained absent from the official album of photo-lithographs, reflecting a case of diplomatic nerves. (Unlike the pictured pavilions of the United States or Egypt, Spain’s sponsoring government was a rump state embroiled in a supposedly civil war heated up by Franco’s alliance with the Germans. France was “neutral” in this affair.) Picasso willingly inserted his work into this desperate propaganda machine for the beleaguered Spanish republic. But for his painting’s tactics to do their work, the canvas had to get rolled up and go on tour. It went, among other places, to London (1938), to Harvard’s Fogg Museum (1941), and, in 1953, to the second edition of the new-world biennial in São Paulo, Brazil (chapter 4). Guernica was autonomous yet also imbricated in specific local politics wherever it landed. It was successful precisely because it deployed canny tactics of international universalism that viewers could animate on their own, breaking through the particularities of a small Basque village to produce a global work of art. How? Picasso’s first tactic was a grayed-out palette and repetitive brushmarks that mimicked newsprint and news photography, but in generic and illegible ways. Second, the artist crafted his Surrealistically torqued figures to allude to a classical past, with broken swords, fallen warriors, and wounded horses rather than burn victims of the German Luftwaffe. Third, he emphasized the bombing’s impact on women and children rather than Republican militiamen, a tactic for summoning sympathy that goes back at least to Jacques-Louis David’s Sabine Women. Fourth, the whole ensemble is anchored by a pyramidal composition familiar from the Renaissance, with allusions to medieval triptych forms. Finally, the iconography of barbarity versus enlightenment— the central topos of the fairs— was taken up through Picasso’s adoption of the starburst iconography popularized by Frédéric Bartholdi’s nineteenthcentury Statue of Liberty (torch and rayed diadem), now ornamenting a bare lightbulb, a lone modern signifier of inspiration illuminating the universal chaos of war. Guernica, then, is a consciously worldly painting. It rendered a particular Basque town generic in order to

propagate globally, and successfully avoided placement in a nation for forty years. To me, it is crucial that such tactics were instigated by, and for, a world’s fair. If I position the 1937 fair as a logical endpoint for the world theatrics of state-sponsored universalism, it is only to observe those energies transposed to other venues— notably, the Venice biennial and the Olympics. Architecture would continue to play a role. From the rue des Nations to the young Biennale, “pavilions” formed emblems arrayed in a literal geography of political relations— a theatrum mundi in which art could generate critical globalism in friction with the nationalisms on display.215 But as the next chapter explores in greater detail, the quasi-diplomatic status of the pavilions— under the cultural supervision of the Biennale authorities— also provided a cosmopolitan hedge against the continuous posturing of Rome, reminding the new Italian nation that Venice had constituted its own empire, beyond the Catholic See.216 That this would be wiped out when Rome literally took over the autonomous Biennale under fascism is another chapter in the shifting fortunes of “cosmopolitanism” under war. Guernica and other examples show that national pavilions do not foreclose critical artistic tactics but propel them into worldly gambits. The chapters that follow are punctuated by accounts in which the perpetually dying national pavilion is the inspirational substructure for yet another incisive critique. Exemplifying the dramatic shift from object to experience that forms the overall arc of this book, Hans Schabus took the Austrian pavilion as itself an “object of experience” at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Schabus inherited the elegant but derelict pavilion commissioned at the tail end of Red Vienna. The first modernist pavilion in Venice, Josef Hoffmann’s 1934 structure was designed as a pale rectangular volume. In stark contrast to the preening colonnades and miniature pediments of other nations’ structures, Hoffmann’s understated geometry can be linked to biennial culture’s “export of the white cube,” in the incisive analysis of curator and historian Elena Filipovic.217 Schabus mastered this past by swallowing it whole— an anthropophagic move (the tactic of cultural cannibalism I’ll examine more fully in chapters 4 and 5). Building a vast Alpine shell over the Hoffmann cube, Schabus compelled visitors to climb the interior, a performative echo of the many navigable geographical globes from the world’s fairs (fig.  2.18). A fitting conclusion to our

labyrinthine chapter  on expos, objets d’art, and grand tourists, Schabus’s intervention brought the Alps to the sub-sea-level Venetian archipelago, but as playground and metaphor of Romanticism’s decline into touristic kitsch. Inside this Piranesian structure, one could find maps and models of echt Austrian alpine culture while wending one’s way up through the two-by-fours that permeated and penetrated Hoffmann’s now miniaturized building. Peepholes and trapdoors opened perspectives out of the building to reveal the summer fairground, confirming the charming ad hoc quality of the whole affair. The ending of the Austro-Hungarian empire that the modernist Hoffmann pavilion celebrated was framed by Schabus as just another pasteboard theme park. This chapter has reviewed a historical arc in worldpicturing via categories of organizers, artists, and visitors. Wedgwood pioneered the conversion of Grand Tour experience into consumable objects, displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition even as Thomas Cook made “tourism” a world’s fair neologism. Such initiatives satisfied the dreams of organizers, who yearned to stanch workingclass rebellions with the “gift” of a living world picture wherein the products of artisanal and industrial labor would be the stars of the show. The artist Hiram Powers, who had already adopted Wedgwood’s international style (Neoclassicism) for Grand Tour itinerants, realized a greater efficiency by bringing his multiplied Greek Slave into the universal expositions, “forming a public” as the French had long advised. Here, discursively connected to “abolitionist tokens,” the sculptor’s Slave garnered its greatest international fame, propelled by the global abolitionist movement into the homes and tabletops of sympathetic visitors to the fairs. In the abolitionist countertrade, we would also include the radical performance of Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown, who utilized the fair to produce alternative publics and critical heterotopias interstitial to ideologies of display. Architecture itself played a role, as the sculpture niche became the “pavilion” for the abolitionist performers, allowing them to work the art free from centralized fair bombast (as Courbet’s alternative Realist pavilion had worked free in 1855, joined by Manet’s in 1867). Pavilions then became a feature of the rue des Nations and the biennial, capable of swallowing a work such as Guernica but then spitting it out to go on the road. All of these restless movements constitute (in my argument) the seeds of performativity and reciprocity Desires for the World Picture

77

Figure 2.18 Hans Schabus, The Last Land, Austrian pavilion, 2005 Venice Biennale. Top: Schabus’s Alpine über-pavilion surmounting Josef Hoffmann’s smaller structure, as seen from the Rio Sant’ Elena, Venice. Photograph: Bruno Klomfar; courtesy Kerstin Engholm Galerie and Hans Schabus. Bottom: the author’s hand opening one of the über-pavilion’s trap doors.

between the artist and the viewing public, which ripen in critical globalism after the 1960s to seed sites such as Paris’s 2002 Palais de Tokyo, which domesticates biennial culture’s postindustrial cachet. Critical globalism navigates such dynamics, introduced here with examples such as Fusco and Peña’s White Bear performance, Cai’s Cultural Melting Bath, the Urbonas team’s Villa Lituania, Galindo’s difficult performances, or Schabus’s massive installation, in which I was a data point, navigating empire as playhouse.

The arc from organizer to artist to viewer is a narrative device, but it also points to the history in this book, charting the emerging aesthetics of experience. The visitor to the world picture must be willing to become blind to both spectacle and operative ideology, in order to parse alternative sensory paths that may yield other, more resistant interpretations. These tools and turnings (of bodies, of theories) will recur in the chapters to follow— desires for the world picture fueling a dynamic state of play.

Desires for the World Picture

79

3 Old World / Biennial Culture

National literature does not count for much now, it is time for the epoch of world literature and everyone must help to advance this epoch. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 18271 But I didn’t paint him because he was a Jew; a painter paints as a painter not because he’s a Jew. —JOZEF ISRAËLS , 19092 When the Archbishop of Paris saw his Cottage Madonna in the Salon, he said to the eminent Jew: “Mr. Israëls, you are a great Catholic.” —FRANK W. GUNSAULUS , of Jozef Israëls, 19123 Art is endless as the world: it is the world. —MAX LIEBERMANN , of Jozef Israëls, 19014 In reality, people muzzled by the economy can only think freely if they can free themselves in thought. . . . The recognition that thought has to be of some use is the first stage of knowledge. —BERTOLT BRECHT , “Who Needs a World View?” 19305

Old Beginnings in Venice

The Venice Biennale was born in the dusk of the nineteenth century, its ontogeny recapitulating the ontology of world’s fairs. Opening its doors in 1895, la biennale came to be celebrated by Venetian students parading as Renaissance proponents of the liberal arts, dressed for that moment when “genius” changed from an attribute of place to the possession of a cultured individual (fig. 3.1).6 Such festivities were expected in a biennial event dedicated “in perpetuity” to a celebration of the king’s wedding anniversary. Events could also be staged by works of art. The very first 81

Figure 3.1 Parade of art students dressed as the medieval “Liberal Arts,” at the opening of the first Venice Biennale in 1895, as documented in Lazlo Glozer, ed., Garten der Künste, Hundert Jahre Biennale: Souvenir de Venice, Jahresring 42, Jahrbuch für moderne Kunst (Cologne: Oktagon, 1995). Photograph from Osvaldo Böhm, Venice; photographer: C. Naya.

biennial in 1895 boasted one such work, designed to form a cosmopolitan public with scandalous flair. Propelled by rumors about this canvas, you would have entered the Palazzo dell’ Esposizione and headed toward the back. There it was, crammed into Gallery D on your left: Il Supremo Convegno (The Supreme Meeting; fig. 3.2), painted by Giacomo Grosso, famous professor from the Accademia Albertina in Turin (whose president had asked officials to place this work “of audacious and fantastical composition” in a good light).7 You would have stood close to the plane of Grosso’s canvas in this crowded room, sucked in by a vortex of painted fabric swirling up to a triumphant female nude straddling a coffin. In the surviving photographs we see her with other pearly-skinned nudes who peer cautiously into the coffin’s opening, where a ghastly yellow face can be made out. The snuffed candle, torn blossoms, and clerical interior reinforce the vanitas theme: Don Juan is dead. 82

Chapter 3

There’s nothing stylistically shocking here, but the scene (evocative of a Satanic mass or Bacchic celebration) pressed all the decadent, symbolist buttons there were to push in 1895. As with Picasso’s Science and Charity from that same year (plate 14; paralleling Last Moments, his genre painting destined for the 1900 Paris world’s fair), the international style was academic realism, larded with moralizing allegory and addressing a public assumed to be secular, modern, and cosmopolitan. As the leaders of that first biennial knew well, shock could be expected in the conservative Italian context: [Grosso’s] work reached the exhibition on the 10th April 1895. As soon as it was removed from its packing case, it astonished everyone who saw it. . . . For those whose task was to hang the artwork, the only worry came from the strong contrast of colors that could disturb the viewing of the surrounding paint-

Figure 3.2 Giacomo Grosso, Il Supremo Convegno, 1895, as installed at the first Venice Biennale, 1895. Photograph: Giacomelli (Venezia). Archives of the Venice Biennale (ASAC).

ings, whereas for the managers of the Exhibition, the unease was due to the subject matter of the painting, which could offend the morality of the visitors.8

The day after it was unpacked, the Catholic Patriarch of Venice wrote mayor Riccardo Selvatico (the biennial’s founder), “asking that the work which he had heard about, should not be exhibited.” Selvatico shrewdly submitted the question to committee, which helpfully refused to censor the painting. “The clerical press cried out about the scandal, the foreign and Italian press also mentioned the circumstance, fueling public curiosity all the more. At the end of the Exhibition, the prize assigned by a popular poll was awarded to Grosso’s painting, which resulted in yet further polemic.”9 Thus it becomes clear that Grosso’s provocation was welcomed into the first Biennale to “form the public,” defeating local conservatives and church leaders by attempting to modernize Venice.

The biennial’s characteristic mix of publicity and populism was born, its independence from state and church secured through the invocation of an “international” committee revoking local mores. Doubtless few knew of the strident pamphlet then circulating in Paris—Pas d’Exposition en 1900! The Venetian experiment opened just as the world’s fair was being deemed defunct. The relay is precise: in 1895 the city of Nancy, France (where the pamphlet originated), passed a resolution opposing funding for another exposition in Paris, while the city of Venice, Italy, funded the world’s first international biennial.10 The biennial concept aimed to break free from centralized national control, while seizing the publicity apparatus of a national world’s fair. Founded by artists and a mayor-poet in a modestly sized historic city, the Venice exhibition was free from distracting assemblies of goods, machinery, and sideshows; it constituted itself as a trade-specific venue for art. And Old World / Biennial Culture

83

trade was an explicit goal: it was hoped that La Serenissima would become a center for sales of contemporary art; the biennial would take a portion of the sales. Unlike the exhaustive and exhausted universal exposition, the new model would be precise, nimble, and frequent. The grands expositions had been fueled by rampant industrial competition— a contest Italy was bound to lose. Art was another matter. Venetians ruled a city thick with artists who prized its apparent indifference to the gears of industry. Even as rhetorical blindmen identified fairs’ engine rooms, propeller blades, and plumbing as the exciting impetus for a truly modern art, the biennial was born to rehabilitate the old machines of painting. Dusting off the prizes, anointing slightly worn-out art movements, and reproducing the national theatrics that the fairs had promulgated, la Biennale de Venezia arrived, plumping for cosmopolitanism in the world picture. How perfect that world’s fairs were being opposed at exactly the same moment! The screed from provincial Nancy didn’t stop the 1900 Paris exposition but certainly seeded the compensatory Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, which opened in Nancy in 1909.11 Once the 1900 Paris fair concluded, a young Parisian law student, H. Georges Berger, took up the history of the antifair sentiment. He decided in his published thèse that the politicking, the arguments, and the expositions themselves should come to an end; his arguments give the European background against which the biennial was emerging. As he summarized the claims of opponents to the expositions: The Expos are active agents of this bad politics that one calls internationalism and cosmopolitanism, which cause a country to lose its originality, its proper character, rendering it feeble because it becomes less coherent and placing it at the mercy of its neighbors who, better advised or stronger, have conserved intact the traditions that are most often instrumental to the grandeur of nations.12

Proponents just as fervently desired the mark of cultural leadership that the international expos represented, with toy palaces of a diplomatic rue des Nations lining the Seine (fig. 3.3): A city such as Paris, is it not made to be admired? Should it surround itself by a veritable great wall of 84

Chapter 3

China? Should it enclose itself like the sacred cities of Islamism? . . . No, we don’t live in a cloister, behind grillwork barriers, and an influx of foreigners should not terrorize us.13

Berger’s 1901 publication channeling these Orientalist specters found pro and con arguments both outmoded. The expositions universelles had done their job. If they had initially been indispensable for their didactic character, countering xenophobic protectionism and fostering free trade, at this dawn of a new century they seemed outré and passé. Berger thus endorsed the suggestion of one senator who called for the repeating expos to be replaced by permanent institutions—Musées généraux and Musées commerciaux (general and commercial museums)— freeing regions to conduct smaller, trade-specific events showing only art or only industry.14 Seemingly unaware that Venice was pioneering this very path, Berger concluded in favor of those many partial expositions of all imaginable types organizing themselves in many places— to the exclusion of the great international solemnities having the pretension of being universal.15

Venice was crafting just such a trade-specific substitute for those “great international solemnities,” hoping for a nimble market in contemporary art; critics in the twentyfirst century similarly ask whether biennials are still relevant, now that “art fairs are taking over.”16 Yet biennials still proliferate around the globe, suggesting the enduring appeal of the old world’s new model. This book would not have been written if biennials had not been replicated well beyond the originary instance in Venice; I argue that the contemporary art biennial is linked to a far longer past. This constitutes my first assertion, within which are two claims— that the biennial replaced the vast expositions that were the subject of the previous chapter, and that by inheriting and building on an “international” art audience, biennials have proved adaptable and resilient. Tracing continuities between the biennial and its antecedents in the fairs, I find evidence for historical connections linking fairs, tourism, biennials, and spectacular urbanism, but also contend that changing artistic tactics have reframed these discourses, offering a critical globalism for the present. Originally parallel to

Figure 3.3 Rue des Nations at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, showing the pavilions of Turkey, the United States, Austria, and BosniaHerzegovina, stretching on to Hungary, Great Britain, Belgium, Norway, Germany, and Spain, with the Eiffel Tower looming behind. Photograph from Paris Exposition Reproduced from the Official Photographs (New York: Peale, 1900).

salons, the biennial came to replace them. Originally a replacement for the world’s fairs, the biennial came to incorporate their event structures. We can debate the ethics or benefits of these types of exhibitions, but demonstrably the existing art world cannot live without them. Some estimate there are one hundred, others two hundred. Some say they have passed their peak; some argue that even more are needed.17 Biennials have proliferated, in part, through the support of supranational sources of funding— EU, Baltic, UNESCO, or Africalia— as well as the expected national cultural agencies and ministries. But such entities are themselves stimulated by the global pressure for representation, and public desires for the world pictures that

biennials induce. The benefit of the biennials’ discursive reach is likewise perceived by corporations such as Illy, Sonatel, Nivea, Tecno, Generali, BMW, Audi, and Hitachi (among hundreds of others; fig. 3.4)— duly noted in catalogues that associate them with highbrow cultural exchange. I asserted in chapter 2 that these quintessentially “contemporary” concatenations are structurally indebted to perennial international exhibitions of the past. This chapter  will examine just which features of those earlier world pictures were replicated. Openings for inter- and multinational capital and geopolitical ambitions— a key feature of the fairs— are clearly present in the much smaller biennials. More so than in the fairs, the multifarious global goals of biennials must contend with Old World / Biennial Culture

85

Figure 3.4 Pages of logos crediting sponsors of the Venice Biennale in catalogues for the 51st, The Experience of Art, 2005, curated by Rosa Martinez (left), and 53rd, Fare Mundo, 2009, curated by Daniel Birnbaum (right).

local politics, against which they are sometimes explicitly staged. At the same time that I argue for continuities with nineteenth-century expositions, however, I want to propose that the proliferation of the biennial format has stimulated aesthetic shifts, which in turn have changed the nature of the art world (an argument worked out most fully in chapters 5, 6, and 7). Eventually the working of art began to incorporate the festal structures of both fairs and biennials. Biennial culture grew to embrace experience— whether unknowingly echoing earlier displays or sagely upending them. “Biennial culture” has been my shorthand to designate the practices and appetites fueling artists’ and viewers’ commitments to art as experience— and correspondingly, biennials are the event structures in which this taste has been cultivated, its aesthetic codified and defined. Using the word culture aims at lassoing artists’ and visitors’ practices into a functional amalgam of cosmopolitan denizens who move into and out of this world— not an “art world” exclusively, since repeat visitors to biennials may be local citizens, students, or travelers who otherwise have little interest in art.18 As an art historian rather than 86

Chapter 3

a social scientist, I am primarily concerned about the fate of art and artists in this biennial circuit, but I am also after the desires of the subject constructed by these workings of art— of which I am one. I will interrogate my own experience to analyze the dominance of installation art and projected video during the rise of biennials in the 1980s, and the emergence of performative events in the 2000s, linked to specific geopolitical, economic, and aesthetic conditions. This leads to my second assertion: along with recurring exhibitions that do not use the word biennial in their titles— Manifesta, documenta, Monumenta, Guangzhou/Baltic Triennial, and Performa— such entities as the brand-new Bienal de las Fronteras (announcing itself in 2014) confirm that the recurring international show forms itself against the backdrop of the ur-biennial, la Biennale di Venezia.19 This history evolves in punctuated equilibrium: Venice was alone in its biennial for five decades, but after its bold replication in São Paulo by an Italian-Brazilian businessman in 1951, biennials instantly proliferated. Far from privileging contemporary biennali as exceptional, I suggest that their proliferation post-1990 is a second wave, echoing an earlier epoch in which inter-

national aspirations announced themselves in biennials founded in Tokyo, Madrid/Havana, Paris, and Alexandria (all in the 1950s), as well as Sydney, Rabat, and Baghdad (in the 1970s)— most of which have not continued to the present. Whatever the causes of this punctuated equilibrium, its bumpy rhythm echoes in the global biennali of today. Critics berate the biennial structure as being a bad way to present art or a miserable way to see it. Others praise the utopianism of biennials for achieving what the French call mondialisation (“worldliness-making”), in distinction to commerce-driven globalization.20 Yet the biennial infrastructure itself is rarely questioned, seen as little more than a contemporary container for existing works of art.21 I contend, however, that the biennial format played a significant role in what has come to be known as contemporary art in the age of its global circulation. It is because of the biennials’ links to event structures, tourism, and apparatuses of knowledge-production that these exhibitions have produced and participated in the longer-term epistemic shift from objects to experience chronicled in this book. The central question then becomes: What are the conditions of possibility for the global work of art? What are the situations that allow artists to be described as “international” in the nineteenth century or “global” in the twenty-first, when they might hold one nation’s passport or pay taxes in another? Cosmopolitanism plays an increasingly important role in this history. In the last chapter, we saw how Hiram Powers utilized the fairs, ramping up from grand tourism to build a larger public at multiple levels of the world economy, through the cosmopolitan circuitry of universal exhibitions. Yet the price of this was critique, as activists Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown performed a counternarrative of the differend (unspeakable sexual violence, adumbrated by Punch magazine’s Virginian Slave and Craft’s prior performances of the “tragic octoroon”).22 Such operations are paradoxical, initially diminishing the work’s cosmopolitanism— its status as exemplum of the “universal” aesthetic of the Neoclassical style— by revealing its links to “difference.” As the previous chapter describes, the market for Powers’s sculpture could recuperate this critique, adopting abolitionism’s own internationalism and embracing the “token” of proliferating Greek Slaves in tabletop reproductive forms.

Building on that analysis, in this chapter we will explore how relations of power and visuality, dominant and minority discourses, artist tactics, and receptive frictions worked in the case of an artist who did not just encounter biennials and fairs but grew up in their embrace. We will examine how a nineteenth-century Jewish painter from the Netherlands, Jozef Israëls, could win the international jackpot— but only by becoming the “Dutch Millet.” This leads to my third assertion: art objects are not fixed bearers of meanings that can be shipped around and translated so that locals “get” some universal message. To restate the book’s thesis in another form: the moment a work is inserted into a world’s fair or international biennial it becomes a matter of understanding how it is thereby produced as always already translated in order to speak of difference itself. Being able to “speak of ” difference allows the art work to begin to process the more resistant differend, examined more fully in chapter 5. As the case of Israëls will illustrate, the semantic analogy (an international language speaking difference) holds for the first biennials as well as the world’s expositions that sired them— since Israëls showed in both. Although ideologically constructed as autonomous art objects ready for comparison, the paintings and sculptures examined here signified by virtue of the world picture in which they were situated. Negotiating with that circumstance over a century, artists devised extraordinary tactics to contest and control their interpellations (we will return in this chapter to Courbet’s, Manet’s, and Picasso’s efforts in this regard, and the next chapter will broaden our survey to Latin America). Developing over decades, world pictures have now become active sites for artists’ explicit tactics of what I term “critical globalism”— a dialogical characteristic of the working of contemporary art. The shift from objects to experience will be addressed more fully in the concluding chapters. What I want to emphasize here is that the shift to “actions” includes the visitor, in a long history beginning with the “big shows” and the blindman’s trope of turning against spectacle in favor of multisensorial, reflective knowing. It is the visitor who must make sense, and as long as we are talking about biennials, we are talking about the multiplication and fragmentation of world pictures and the politics of the partial view. Philosophically trained curator Daniel Birnbaum Old World / Biennial Culture

87

echoed this way of thinking in his 2009 statement for the 53rd Venice Biennale, which he directed: A work of art is more than an object, more than a commodity. It . . . must be seen as a way of “making a world.” A few signs marked on paper, a barely touched canvas, or a vast installation can amount to different ways of world-making.23

Or, indeed, different worlds altogether. Birnbaum picks up on the time-honored trope of the artwork as a world (the quotation marks allude to Heidegger), an idea already evident in the Max Liebermann epigraph about Israëls, and dating back to the Renaissance.24 But I am arguing also that artworks are inserted into biennials’ representations of the world, multiplying perspectives on that very picture. Arguments with Heidegger’s singular world picture were already set out in previous chapters, but there is no denying that a concertized “world picture” is an ideological effect still propelled by “world” exhibitions. Certainly at the moment of the biennial’s founding in Venice, the modern world-as-picture was robust. As this book argues, however, such totalizing configurations would soon collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, art approached event; the viewing subject became a participant in the networked construction of meaning, and an epistemic shift was at hand. Subjects of art today must assemble fragments of multiple worlds, entangled and enmeshed in being. Today, there is no longer an “outside” from which “the picture” can be framed. Most crucially, I want to historicize theory and curatorial themes as themselves markers of the shift I want to trace— evidence of the moment at which they became not only possible, but necessary positionings of the contemporary subject molded and produced by biennial culture. Rather than works of art I want to interrogate how art works. Art circuits, once international, are now global.

Repetition and Difference

Because “perennial,” biennial culture is resistant to history; there is little scholarship examining its relation to the fairs, or how it works to mask that relation.25 The biennial came into being as a trade-specific miniature of, and antidote to, the exhausted and overanalyzed world’s 88

Chapter 3

fair. The Venetians intended to focus purely on art, long privileged within the cosmopolitan trading cultures that their city was keen to reinvent. And if world’s fairs had to be rejected to form the biennial, now it is the art fair that must be disavowed for the biennial to stay “contemporary.” Such relations are hidden because they are foundational, and foundations work best when buried. The repeating structure of the biennial, to retain and build an audience, must be renewed by an ever-emerging future; in this way the past is endlessly deferred, its lessons unexamined. As curator Rosa Martinez put it in her statement for the 2005 Biennale in Venice: [A biennial] looks beyond the present and into the future. . . . Biennials are the most advanced arena for this expanded field precisely because they do not function like museums. Museums are temples for the preservation of memory. . . . Biennials are a context for the exploration and questioning . . . of the present.26

Biennials’ perpetual construction of their futurity is rooted, of course, in the very “preservation of memory” that Martinez abjures. As Gilles Deleuze argued in Repetition and Difference, the recurring holiday that “differentiates” itself from the routine of passing days is constituted as such only in repetition.27 The storming of the Bastille is not yet Bastille Day— likewise, it is only in repetition that a biennial can be such, and only by linking to a recent past can it claim to have always shown us the future. While the concept of a recurring fair was not as explicit in the first international grand expositions, a decennial rhythm was quickly established. The biennial would reject that as being perpetually out of date. It adopted instead a more rapid cycle alluding to the shows mounted by national academies and independent artists’ groups, but consolidated as an every-other-year rhythm. It is astonishing but true that the principles we hold to be biennials’ definitional legacy— that they be international and recurring— only slowly took shape in the planning for that first art biennial.28 In documents from the earliest deliberations among Venetian town councillors in 1893, there is an expressed intention of “perpetuity” but only a passing indication that the institution being established was for a repeating exhibition— the key phrase is “ad ogni biennio”— every two years. As late as 1894 it

Figure 3.5 National Exposition of the Arts, Venice, 1887: plan of the Giardini showing location of the pavilion and elevation of the grand entrance as seen from the canal. Image courtesy John Clark.

was still assumed this would be a national show, modeled on the exposition of Italian art that had been mounted in 1887, also in the Giardini (fig. 3.5).29 The desire for an international purview was recognized by the town council only on March 39, 1894, when councillors voted that this biennial event would be “Nazionale ed Internazionale” (national and international). Vagueness about its repeating intentions remained endemic, however; the first exposition’s poster merely announces, “1895, Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Cittá di Venezia”; only in later materials do we read “Prima Esposizione Internazionale” (plate 13). All of this was worked out in town meetings led by the Biennale’s preeminent founder: poet and mayor Riccardo

Selvatico, along with radical politician Antonio Fradeletto and philosopher Giovanni Bordiga. In the first summary offered to the session meeting in Saint Mark’s square on April 19, 1893, the group proposed that the city create an unnamed “institution of public utility and benefit” with the intention to “record perpetually” the “twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of the Italian King and Queen”— Umberto and Margherita of Savoia. Thus commemoration was inserted at the heart of the putatively futureoriented event, only later determined to be biennial and international. Applause greeted the blatant flattery of the commemoration,30 but representatives also articulated pragmatic hopes for a future “benefitting the reputation [of the city, and] creating an art market” (that is, a market Old World / Biennial Culture

89

Figure 3.6 Max Liebermann, Munich Beer Garden, 1884. Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen a.k.a. Neue Pinakothek), Munich. Image courtesy bpk, Berlin/Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich/ Art Resource, NY.

for contemporary art) in a town long famous for its picture trade.31 To get all this done, and to guarantee international participation, the opening show was postponed to 1895. In that early stage of planning, the small Venetian committee advising Selvatico came to internationalism slowly, but it soon became the core of their ambition. They proposed that such a scope could only be guaranteed by a comitato di patrocinio (patron’s council, or committee on patronage) consisting of invited international artists. These would ostensibly serve as far-flung scouts determining artists to be invited to the first show, and as advisors to its jury; they would also spread word of the new event and create its international profile. Fradeletto and his colleagues seasoned the comitato with members of avant-gardes from around Europe: Secessionists, Symbolists, and international Realist artists. At the last minute, 90

Chapter 3

however, someone greased the list with a few conservative academicians, perhaps to smooth relations with the stillstrong Italian academies. (“Secessions” were precisely withdrawals from state-sanctioned academies.) The result illustrates the power of internationalism to overcome local fractures and produce the image of a united front. Artists who would have been in confrontation in their home situation, such as Max Liebermann, a Munich Secessionist in touch with colleagues across Europe, were brought together with arch-academicians, such as Anton von Werner, painter of nationalist history machines and director of the Munich Academy. They appeared on the Venetian roster as members of the German “team,” with Liebermann’s Impressionist Munich Beer Garden installed in the first Biennale (fig. 3.6). Von Werner’s meticulous, fossilized history tableaux, painted in the grand academic

Figure 3.7 Anton von Werner, Die Proklamierung des Deutschen Kaiserreiches (The Proclamation of the German Empire), 1885. Bismarck Museum, Friedrichsruh, Germany. Image courtesy bpk, Berlin/Bismarck Museum, Friedrichsruh, Germany/Art Resource, NY.

manner (fig. 3.7), were not represented. State-sponsored painting was ignored in favor of works made for cosmopolitan, bourgeois, private collections. While Fradeletto and his committee waged internationalist peace through such appointments, Venice’s mayor courted national approval through the planned homage to the “nozze d’argento delle loro maesta.” Prizes were solicited from the surrounding towns of the Veneto, much as taxes and tithes had once been demanded by the doges. The future gleamed, as Venice declared its independence from Paris and established a market for contemporary art. Such claims for futurity must always be placed in relation to a past, usually apostrophized as “the museum.” In the case of Venice, the “museum” was the city itself. The perceived decadence of La Serenissima had been festering ever since Napoleon’s conquest and art-extraction

a century before. But while the cultural fossilization of Venice was to be reversed by the dynamic Biennale, the two were in fact united through the touristic devices we have met in the fairs: the guidebook, the catalogue, the fairground map, the tourist-friendly hotel, transportation infrastructures, photographic mementos, and heritage sign systems— the importance of which had already been established by the Grand Tour. This history directly informed the biennial, as indicated by early posters, which often depict visitors consulting an authoritative guidebook— rather than looking at art. The 1920 poster by Augusto Sezanne is particularly apposite here (plate 19). The painting being ignored by the guidebook-consulting ladies recapitulates the vedute (views; fig. 3.8) produced by Canaletto or Guardi for British scions on the Grand Tour, emblematizing Venice’s twin gods (the church and the customs house) blessing the city’s rule of the Adriatic.32 Old World / Biennial Culture

91

Figure 3.8 Francesco Guardi, Venice: The Punta della Dogana, 1780s. Oil on canvas, 18.7 × 23.8 cm. National Gallery, London. Bequeathed by Mrs. Elizabeth Carstairs, 1952 (NG6156). © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

The guidebooks, itineraries, and secular perspectives on the city brought to the Biennale and its art something familiar from the Grand Tour. But despite its manifestly repetitive nature, the biennial also aspired to stage the city as freshly renewing. In such a dynamic, relations to the local are foundationally insecure (plate 19), as the wonderfully witty 2005 Venice Biennale poster series by the Milan branch of global advertising firm McCann Erickson made clear. Mimicking Sezanne’s poster from almost a century before, the image reveals bemused tourists consulting their guide— only they are in decidedly non-Venetian settings and don’t appear to be near any art. The 2005 poster may have mocked the tourist, but it also acknowledged the productive disorientation the art world seeks in the now expanded reach of the contemporary biennial. 92

Chapter 3

Parallels can thus be drawn among centuries of recurring exhibitionary forms; some suggest structural relations that endure over time, while others reveal punctuating events and ruptures that establish new traditions on the historical continuum. For example, when successive curators of the Venice Biennale pushed to open the formerly military and industrial buildings behind the Giardini in the 1980s, their initiative formed one moment of origin for today’s expanded urban biennials and the longer shift to experience this book explores.33 Standard art spaces, heavily decorated in the nineteenth century and slowly mutating into twentieth-century white cubes, were leveraged by a new postindustrial aesthetic in tune with rougher aesthetic operations and emerging attributes of the postmodern. As the twenty-first century opened, youthful experiments in process yielded uneven but dy-

namic experiences for the visitor, with objects giving way to environments and performative provocations. This is the trajectory that was fracturing the 1930s world picture of Heidegger into multiplied and contrasting views, in which both artist and public are always already enmeshed and actively producing. Venice set up that condition of possibility but did not contest the geopolitics of its day (indeed, national pavilions set them in concrete). The biennials mimicking Venice’s experiment— begun by the Brazilian city of São Paulo in 1951— would radically change and multiply world pictures; spaces for differends and dialogue emerged. Contemporary, post-1980s biennials often share the root condition of Venice: a historical city with humiliation in its recent past. The biennial is intended to announce a different future. It crafts a metropolitan destination imaginatively detached from national troubles (Havana, not a Cuban biennial; Istanbul, not a Turkish biennial; Johannesburg, not a South African biennial; and so on). Interestingly, as Lawrence Alloway points out in one of the few comprehensive histories of the Venice biennial— written just before it abandoned its market structure in 1969— the proximate inspiration and regulatory models for Venice were found in recently federated German cities’ art association exhibitions, rather than the equally repeating, but centrally funded Paris salons.34 If fairs were difficult for noncentralized nation-states to pull off (Germany and Spain, for example), biennials were surprisingly accessible. Cities with fragile or contested relations to their nation-states have tropisms toward biennial culture and prove attractive to the “world citizens” who want cosmopolitan identities and destinations to match. Grappling with modern histories of totalitarian regimes, or at the very least “complicated” pasts, presentday biennial cities range from Havana in the collapse of the Soviet imperium to Gwangju, Istanbul, Taipei, and the autarchies of the Arab Emirates. These aspiring institutions may deploy the art experience to galvanize an emergent polity or to frame and aestheticize aging urban facilities such as dockyards, schools, military depots, industrial plants, or religious establishments— structures that were never so loosely “public” before. Infusions of biennial culture can produce a future for these buildings and can even exorcise a painful past through explicit acts of site-specificity, as curators work with artists to produce event-based art and a kind of “documentary exorcism.”

Alternatively, sites are delocalized by equally explicit acts of disorientation. These modes of critical globalism are explored in chapter  7 and elsewhere. Not incidentally, these cosmopolitanizing operations also prove useful to tourism, expanding the base of the city’s attractions from a memorialized past to a more dynamic present and future. I take as exemplary this quote from the press release for the 2005 ninth Istanbul biennial: [Curators Charles] Esche and [Vasif ] Kortun will not be using any of the historic monuments located in the historical peninsula preferring to work in sites that have a more common reference to postindustrialization, the physical legacy of modernity and the shift to a consumer economy.35

Thus we may compare the Venice Corderie (cord-making factory) to an Istanbul tobacco warehouse or margarine plant, while acknowledging shared desires to position spottily modernized third-world cities as “postindustrial.”36 Again, it is not the viewing of discrete art objects that make latter-day biennials contemporary but their offer of experiences. Art is to be situated in an expanded urban situation or a global condition, the postindustrial seen as “more common” and contemporary than “the historical peninsula.” Even in Venice, claiming the Giardini for the biennial exposition had specific urban significance. Napoleon’s 1797 “liberation” of Venetians from the “tyranny” of the world’s oldest republic was sealed with a 1807 declaration that a giardini pubblici— a public garden— would be formed from property seized mostly from the church. When the founders of the biennial chose this same physical site, they did so cannily, effecting “the most decisive change for the area since Napoleon’s original decree” but in effect reprivatizing the territory and subtracting green space from public use. Venice, the former republican citystate capable of snubbing Rome’s authority for five hundred years, could now demonstrate its usefulness to the young nation of Italy by reasserting its former function as portal to the world (local park visitors be damned). This was a Janus-faced operation. In reclaiming its symbolic mantle as a former maritime empire, Venice could contribute worldliness to the nation-state, while at the same time invoking its past as a cosmopolitan hotbed of liberal arts, republican theory, and free speech— historically reOld World / Biennial Culture

93

sistant to the papacy and Rome. In this we see the pattern of so many other biennials, branding their cities as transformational sites or gateways mediating between the nation and a wider world. As the patterns examined here reveal, the biennial is politically statist but ideologically cosmopolitan— it secures a kind of nationalism only by transcending such a concept through appeals to a world-public, even as “national” pavilions clearly concretize and emblematize various states. The founding of a biennial pledges to renew knowledge, to belong to a wider international community, to brand a city, and to bring a new world picture to visitors through an encyclopedic art exhibition. Curator Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale, The Encylopedic Palace, makes these ties to the European Enlightenment project explicit. But biennials of the twenty-first century no longer necessarily refer to Euro-American Enlightenment precepts, particularly when party-state systems or autocracies are in charge. “Cosmopolitanism” may fit awkwardly within biennial culture as the model expands to Asia and the Middle East. Generated by the Greek Cynic Diogenes in the fourth century BCE and upgraded by the Stoics around 300, the concept of the kosmopolitês or “citizen of the world” stood in explicit contrast to the polis-specific advocacy of Plato and the Athens school. If the cosmopolitan could resist local law as unfairly constraining, his (rarely her) “cosmic” identity could also be swept into empire— as when Alexander or the Romans took over the local polis in the name of a “universal” imperial subject. “Politics” contests transcendence— and cosmopolitanism is haunted by the arrogance of a claim to power that authorizes itself through a transcendent identity answerable only to an “internal” government of the self. When we hear cosmopolitanism being claimed, we need to ask to what cosmos is this polity attached? The most powerful impetus for self-governance came with Augustine, whose fifth-century vision made a cosmopolitan city of god available to anyone, anywhere on earth. As long as they were Christian.37 More generously, perhaps the invocation of world-citizenship invites art and visitor alike to enter the place of protected free speech, a cultural space defined, for this book, by the recurring biennial. The cosmopolitan world picture in the contemporary ambit is ruled by the politics of the partial view. It is precisely unfixed and open to debate; blind epistemology is 94

Chapter 3

welcome. The invitation is tendered to a global art world, inviting all to an event that might (through the force of culture and discourse) balance geopolitics, leverage military risks, “represent” conflict but not enact it, and yes, lubricate capital— all by letting art work. The rule combines local pride with status travel appeal, attracting both nationals and foreigners whose business might replace the inherent inequality of extraction-based economies. From historic Venice, which yearned to expand beyond a waning Grand Tour into a contemporary art market, to the UAE, whose recently founded biennials are part of the Emirates’ plan for a future without oil— the rule of biennial culture holds that there is educational benefit in art, pitching the exhibition to a local or national population as something that will pay off in the “creative industries” and educated populace to come.38 Biennali thus conduct politics by other means. As with world’s fairs before them, they were staged as pacifist alternatives to other kinds of conflict. In the end, of course, such effects cannot be proven. Clearly, Paris’s 1937 fair could do nothing to stop world war. But we will never know whether London’s 1851 great exhibition actually did stop the spread of “Chartist riots.” And there is synchronicity in the founding of the modern Olympic Games at the same moment as the Venice Biennale (1894; fig. 3.9). French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin got seventy-nine delegates from nine nations to meet together in Paris to form the Comité Internationale Olympique, planning for the first modern games to be held in Athens. For Coubertin, there was added significance to creating an Olympian athleticism following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, which he blamed on a lack of vigor in his compatriots. Both Olympics and the Biennale were theaters of representation, sharpening competitive skills while lessening the risk that they would be tested in war. As Coubertin put it in 1892, “Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands [and] the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally.”39 In at least one documented instance, such contests did blunt military adventures— or at least French senators thought so when they argued in 1895 that the whole territory of Luxembourg had been lost while France was dithering over the next fair.40 A world picture was being shaped, but with merely symbolic rewards. The second half of the nineteenth century, when fairs peaked, was a time of expansionist nationalism, with borders, maps, and flags fluctuating as “the race for

Figure 3.9 Frenchman Paul Masson wins a cycling event at the first international Olympic Games (conceived in Paris in 1894, held in Athens in 1896), as envisioned by Henri Meyer for Le Petit Journal (Paris), April 26, 1896. Image courtesy HIP/Art Resource NY.

Africa,” the opening of Japan, independence movements in South America, and local wars carved continents into new configurations. Given the complexity of the period, what was bequeathed to the biennali from the fair’s world pictures? One huge shift would be from the fairs’ capacity to concertize representations of an entire nation to the biennial’s cosmopolitan urbanism, where space had to be allotted for little national “pavilions.” This toyland world-picturing in Venice followed the rue des Nations model from the 1878, 1889, and 1900 Paris expositions. Built deeper and deeper into the Giardini, the pavilions emerged in an order that represented the flows of colonial world power and the shifting status of nation-states.41 The “pavilion,” etymologically linked to the butterflied wingflaps of a royal tent, was theoretically temporary. But as

they became ever more permanent, pavilions ripened as sites for critical globalism. The previous chapters drew links between theory, pilgrimage, art, and tourism; these rituals were well in place when la biennale opened in 1895. But rather than blind epistemology comprehending “the meaning of the age” from the gnashing of dynamos in machine halls, the biennial offered merely the symbolic capital of art. The evolving set of economies that had replaced the aristocratic Grand Tour— universal expositions, crystal palaces, imported natives, industrial innovations, exotic goods, and package tours— would be converted in Venice to more mimetic aggregations as art itself was pressed to represent these aspects of the world picture. Artists themselves would need to bring the industrial, the mulOld World / Biennial Culture

95

Grand Tour. It advertises refreshments, fireworks, and regattas. Here the centuries-long role of Venice in establishing (grand) tourism itself as an “aesthetics of experience” cannot be overemphasized. Staging religious and civic ritual in the lagoons was routine at least since 1000 CE, when landed gentry would have their loyalties secured for the polity of the Venetian city-state via invitations to spectacular events such as the annual Ascension Day “Marriage of the Sea.” In that mystical rite, tax-paying visitors from the Veneto could see the sacred union of the city and the Adriatic consecrated in mid-lagoon, as the doge cast a gold ring off the official state barge into the water. In Venice, “experience” was always already aesthetic, with the brilliant banners of the doge whipping in the ocean breezes— later captured in the trembling emotion of Winckelmann’s ekphrastic prose, the Romantic tropes of Lord Byron, the resonating “stones of Venice” in Ruskin’s writings, Sargent’s limpid watercolors, or even Thomas Mann’s sublime limit-experience: Death in Venice. But “experience” was also a pedagogical directive: sexual and diplomatic mores were to be taught in Venice to the virginal and insular English gentleman, who thereby gained his education in the culture, and ways, of the world.43 Desire was thus robustly woven into the Venetian leg of the Grand Tour, and threads through the Biennale’s seductions even today. Figure 3.10 Jozef Israëls, a founding member of the Venice Biennale’s comitato patrocino, in a photograph taken in 1881, well before he won the gold medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. From Dieuwertje Dekkers et al., Jozef Israëls, 1824–1911 (Groningen, 1999).

tisensorial, the social, and the immersive into the working of art— gradually producing an aesthetics of experience. The objects in the fairs and biennials themselves had agency. Exhibitors didn’t always ship things back— goods were tendered to those who had paid for them at the fair, and local museums were seeded by purchase prizes.42 At the new Biennale, a percentage flowed into the coffers for every work sold, continuing the economics of the fairs and financing the recurring exhibition on an ongoing basis. It makes sense that this “trade-specific” relay passed to Venice. The fairs’ linking of tourism, the art market, and replication (artisanal if not industrial) were also robust in Venice, responding to centuries of trade. The poster for the very first Venice biennial (plate 13) suggests the festal structures long touted to upper-class travelers on the 96

Chapter 3

Subjects, Nations, Artists

The shared presumption of exhibitionary structures, from the Expositions Universelles to biennial “platforms” of experience, is that the artist must both represent her tribe and become transcendently international. The thesis articulated thus far still holds: the artist who would become international would need to speak a global language, but would just as often be understood to speak of her own representative difference. Difference could become differend, so linked to violent erasure of the human that only performative event could stage it. We have seen how this operated with Hiram Powers. He sought to be universal in his Neoclassical style but was reinscribed by desiring viewers into the racial politics of abolitionism; free men forcefully connected his anodyne work to the unutterable violence of slavery back in the United States. This chapter turns to another nineteenthcentury case study linked more closely to Venice, that of the Netherlandish painter Jozef Israëls (fig. 3.10). This

Figure 3.11 Rembrandt: In name van de Nederlandsche Schilderkunst breng ik u hulde (Rembrandt: “In the name of Dutch Painting, I bring you tribute”). This cartoon by Johan Braakensiek was published in De Amsterdammer, January 27, 1895, and shows Jozef Israëls being crowned with laurels by the most famous Netherlandish artist of all time. From Dieuwertje Dekkers et al., Jozef Israëls, 1824–1911 (Groningen, 1999), 42.

now-forgotten artist exhibited in the first great exposition in Paris to include the beaux arts, in 1855, was awarded a gold medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and was named a founding member of the Venice Biennale’s prestigious comitato. Israëls became a man of the world— within the constraints of what I call a “predicated internationalism,” which links across time or space to pronounce a “Dutch Millet” or a “Rembrandt for today” (fig.  3.11).44 Israëls has become sufficiently obscure to serve as a perfect case for studying what artistic tactics were needed for insertion into the world picture— whose moving scenography does not guarantee eternal fame.

Jozef Israëls was born in 1824 in Gröningen to a family of traders who kept ties to relatives in Germany but blossomed in their adopted Dutch home, where they founded a synagogue, a mikvah, and a cemetery.45 Young Jozef passed the state exams for the royal art academy in Amsterdam, where he was taught a slick history-painting style buffed by occasional trips to Paris and studies with François-Édouard Picot and Paul Delaroche.46 Interrupted by Paris’s 1848 revolution, he returned to his Amsterdam studio, where he came to the attention of Tobias van Westrheene, the man choosing Netherlandish contributors to the 1855 Paris fair.47 Israëls’s career was launched with this selection of his work Old World / Biennial Culture

97

for the Dutch section of the first beaux arts display in a world’s fair. A stylistic examination of Israëls’s oeuvre reveals how expositionary culture formed this artist and shaped his ambitions to figure on the world stage. Notably, Israëls showed in the 1855 Exposition Universelle before ever having a painting accepted at the Paris Salon. If Powers utilized the circuitry of the fairs to distribute, popularize, and internationalize his preexisting Greek Slave, Israëls would alter the very fabric of his artistic subjectivity in confrontation with the worldly strategies he encountered and internalized at these events. Israëls is documented in the biographical listing of the first Venice Biennale catalogue in 1895, information that is rehashed in the exhaustive report on the beaux arts from the 1900 Grand Exposition in Paris by Count Debord. These scripted biographies inevitably begin, as I have, with the artist’s humble and provincial origins.48 The artist is brought into the ruling capital of art and becomes transformed— becomes modern and international. In the case of Israëls, of course, the trope is sharpened by perceptions of race and religion that confronted anyone of Jewish background in the second half of the nineteenth century. If “cosmopolitanism” was increasingly used as a tag for the diasporal Jewish communities throughout Europe, this was because that attribute was shifting from its positive Augustinian valence to a negative cast suggesting “rootless outsider.” Racial science ripened toward the end of the nineteenth century, and by the 1930s, “cosmopolitan” was synonymous with a suspiciously nomadic foreign intellectual type.49 While the modern European Jew was cautiously tolerated as a token of (inter)national liberality, markers of ethnicity were blatantly produced around (and sometimes by) these historical figures. Thus we read in the first biennial catalogue that the young Israëls could only learn the “falsità della sua educazione” (the falsity of his development) by going to cosmopolitan Paris. Only after this, and only after a serious illness, could he rise into modernity as that predicated international, “the Dutch Millet.”50 By then, his paintings could be Dutch and international, local and cosmopolitan, modern and timeless, ethnic but also universelle.51 How did he get there? The history painting chosen by academicians for the Dutch section of that first French world’s fair was competent but stiff : William of Orange Meeting with Margaretha of Parma, completed in 1855 and 98

Chapter 3

rolled for shipment as soon as it was dry.52 The Parisian organizers had ostentatiously departed from the British by dedicating a building exclusively to the fine arts in their big fair; the stakes could not have been higher for a young foreigner entering the fray. Israëls’s earnest if lugubrious attempt (plate  15) depicts a sixteenth-century meeting between William of Orange, the Protestant-born, Catholic-raised favorite of Charles V, and Margaretha of Parma, designated regent of the Netherlands and halfsister to the Hapsburg emperor Philip II. Despite her title, Margaretha had no army— hence she needed the support of Prince William, the ruling Stadtholder and spokesman for local noblemen and their militias. The frozen moment the tableau records is a specific day in April of 1565, when Margaretha was presented with a petition from the noblemen demanding an end to the Spanish persecution of Protestants. As Israëls wrote to a friend, this moment seemed “really interesting” and useful for representing his “fatherland,” because Willem, who often acted secretively so that people never knew what he was thinking, at that Council meeting had openly aligned himself with the people, and with a wave of the hand had rejected Philip’s edicts that he did not wish to promulgate.53

Embodying two warring Christian faiths, William represents reason and tolerance for Israëls. His “single gesture” is a raised hand of restraint that can also be read as an admonition, a blessing, or a promise of grace. Margaretha sits forward anxiously in her almost liturgical throne, swathed in the fabrics of court luxury, while William stands calmly in sober Protestant black under a frame of Neoclassical architecture, his posture conveying rhetorical power and Ciceronian poise. Note that the William in Israëls’s painting is not the warrior he would become, thrown into martyrdom by a French Catholic assassin (the first political killing using a gun).54 What Israëls (and the curator of the Dutch section) wanted to put into the materialized world picture of the beaux arts pavilion was a reminder that tolerance and pacifism were Dutch contributions to the Enlightenment. This was a story of politesse and secular coexistence lobbed into imperial, Catholic France. Israëls must have swelled with excitement as he came to Paris and entered that beaux arts pavilion at the 1855

Figure 3.12 Exterior and interior of the Palais des Beaux Arts, avenue Montaigne and rue Marbeuf, photographed just prior to the opening of the 1855 Exposition Universelle, Paris. Images made available by Sylvain Ageorges.

Exposition, its dense hanging familiar from seasonal salons (fig. 3.12). French artists were in the front galleries; Israëls would have had to go around the sides and to the back to see the Dutch section. Reportedly, he and his compatriots did not fare well in this theater of comparisons; reviews were “far from flattering; nor did they look kindly on historical painting executed in Israëls’s style.”

The painter himself wrote a friend, “I’m sorry the picture did not turn out better.”55 Exacerbating this disappointment, right down the street and on the tips of every artists’ lips was Gustave Courbet’s freestanding Pavilion du Realisme (fig.  3.13). The sheer audacity of an artist mounting his own privately funded pavilion in confrontation with the federal Old World / Biennial Culture

99

Figure 3.13 Sketch by Gustave Courbet of his design for the Pavilion du Realisme (from a letter to his patron Alfred Bruyas), and a photograph by C. Thurston Thompson of the pavilion as built, at 7 avenue Montaigne. Photograph originally titled Fireman’s Station and Division Wall between the Picture Gallery and Sugar Refinery, from R. J. Bingham and C. T. Thompson, Paris Exhibition, 1855, vol. 1, no. 38, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Both images courtesy Patricia Mainardi.

apparatus of an entire world picture certainly contributed to Courbet’s scandalous success, which has gone down in art history as an avant-garde victory. But it’s important to note that Courbet’s enterprise was not opposed by the state. Located at 7 Avenue Montaigne, just a hundred yards from the official beaux arts pavilion, it was de facto endorsed by Napoleon III as a way of snubbing the “elitist” academy, which still controlled the official salons and selected works for the fairs.56 Courbet, well aware of what he owed to the self-appointed emperor (and what he could offer by way of a programmatic populism), embedded a flattering portrait of the French leader, dressed as a rural huntsman, in the Artist’s Studio— installed as the monumental centerpiece of his private display. We have to imagine Courbet’s paintings hitting the young Israëls like a slap in the face. These were thickly painted fusions of academic allegory and everyday being, with no great moments of history, no clear narrative, and only crusty brushstrokes knitting their motley figures into the landscape. Moreover, “Realism” was not realistic. If Israëls had labored to get a precise historical moment right, Courbet combined past, present, and future with fantastical abandon. Israëls would have grasped the pavilion’s polemical function, the style of Realism that had been appropriated as an idea from literature, the poses of figures that had been taken from provincial visual culture, and the paintings’ sympathy for the poor. With the memory 100

Chapter 3

of 1848 very close at hand, the ideology of Realism was supposedly accessible to the common folk, and in sympathy with their political struggle. Perhaps most salient for Israëls, Courbet depicted his workers— turned away from the viewer and absorbed in their labor— through references to Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting, adapted to a visceral materiality that was shocking at the time. This was universalism transcending or subtending the state— this was a new, populist model of visual art. Israëls’s Dutch teachers valued history and classical reference polished with skill, erudition, and varnish— priorities established by the French academy. Courbet— a Frenchman!— borrowed from a “lower” tradition of popular Dutch painting to upend that hierarchy. Courbet’s Realism announced its interest in honesty, warmth, and directness; tokens of life experience replaced careful academic research. In reckoning with Courbet, Israëls would have to go back to the old demotic language of Netherlandish genre painting, enlarged to a massive scale and anonymized into a quotidian everyman. Historians report that upon returning to the Netherlands from the fair, Israëls plunged into crisis. It could be resolved only by becoming blind to the fair’s official ideology. Israëls is said to have fallen dangerously ill, taking himself for a rest cure to the North Sea coast in Zaandvoort, about ten miles from Amsterdam. Here he sat by the sea and contemplated a shifted world picture.

No longer would he aspire to knit together academic episodes revealing the fatherland’s historical moments; now he had to imagine the universal solidarity of Realists, painting People, in a present-day World. Israëls returned to the studio and crafted his first response to Courbet: a humble fisherman and his children, haunted by death— Alongside Mother’s Grave (a.k.a. Passing the Cemetery, 1856; plate  16).57 Israëls’s composition split the difference between two works by Courbet— the striding selfportrait of Bonjour M. Courbet and the struggling family of Stonebreakers— set in the particular scenography of the Dutch coast.58 This is the microhistory of a single artist risking a new international language but using it to speak of local difference. Amsterdam critics were quick to praise Israëls’s new “sensitive poetry” of the crowd.59 A Francophone Belgian critic, on the other hand, disapproved of the artist’s use of the large format of history painting for genre scenes— an ambition traceable to Courbet, who had already been criticized on these grounds.60 The homologies with Courbet go largely unmentioned in the literature, however, despite obvious similarities in theme and format between a work such as Israëls’s 1861 Shipwreck and Courbet’s 1855 Burial at Ornans— both featuring a horizontal frieze of figures grappling with death (fig. 3.14).61 The latter was the centerpiece of the Realist pavilion, its refusal by the state what Courbet needed to justify his entire carnivalesque exhibition.62 Yet it was Israëls’s fate to become the “Dutch Millet,” not the “Dutch Courbet.” We have yet to explore why. Secession founder, and fellow member of the Venetian comitato, artist Max Liebermann wrote of the older painter he so admired: Israëls once said to me, “No painter except Millet has been less able to draw and paint than I, and yet made such good pictures.” In other words, like Millet, Israëls is not a man of talent, but a genius.63

This was written in 1901, as the aged Israëls was being lionized for a new century, celebrated by Liebermann as having “created the modern Dutch School”— including now-forgotten artists such as Bosboom, Maris, Mesdag, and Mauve, “each one [of whom] owes him something, just as today every painter has something of Manet about him.”64 Why the stubborn linkage of Israëls with Millet,

when Courbet’s Realist pavilion was clearly the source of most of these post-1855 paintings? Succinctly put, JeanFrançois Millet offered a better market. If Millet would learn to anonymize labor from Courbet, he would also domesticate and spiritualize it. Courbet was a communard painting the urban proletariat; Millet painted the rural poor in ways that could reinforce Jesus’s message: “The poor you shall always have with you.”65 Such biblical allusions are evident in Millet’s one canvas in the 1855 exposition, a kind of “holy family” approved by the cautious commissioners for the French display (plate 17).66 The “genius” of Millet or Israëls would be slotted into the fairs as a genius of place, not Romantic personality. This was how the gears of the world picture could keep turning: let French firebrands (Courbet) be tamed by Millet’s enduring religious themes, let that international style (Realism) be domesticated with local color and people. Israëls’s 1867 Cottage Madonna was shown in the 1882 Paris Salon, honoring the tutelary god of Dutchness via Millet-type sentimentality (fig. 3.15). For our larger arguments, the pertinent features are that a painter such as Israëls— a talented underdog enabled by tenuously secular state bureaucracies to find his way into international competition— had to learn his innocence, his “common” touch, and his channeling of a Protestant Christian “fatherland” in order to enter the international fray. That he achieved this synthesis is confirmed in my epigraph, from an anecdote reported by an American critic in 1912: “When the Archbishop of Paris saw his Cottage Madonna . . . , he said to the eminent Jew: ‘Mr. Israels, you are a great Catholic.’”67 Doubtless relayed to the critic by Israëls himself, the story’s “Catholic” reference could also be heard as “catholic,” channeling the kind of cosmopolitanism universalized by Augustine but in some danger of obliteration in the wake of the Dreyfus affair.68 Thus Israëls’s worldliness is not a critical globalism that pushes back against the forces of globalization, but rather, it is emblematic of the rules as they functioned for nineteenth-century artists. A British critic questioned the Francophone insistence on Israëls as a “Dutch Millet,” citing the fact that Millet was behind Israëls generationally and less successful on the exhibition circuit: To regard Israëls as being a kind of interpreter of Millet to Holland is not in accordance with the facts. . . . If we call Israëls the Dutch Millet, it must be by way Old World / Biennial Culture

101

Figure 3.14 Top: Jozef Israëls, De schipbreukeling (The Shipwreck), also known as Fishermen Carrying a Drowned Man, 1861. Collection of the National Gallery, London; documented here in a posthumous reproductive print (1912) made for Gilbert Chesterton, Famous Paintings (London: Cassell and Co.). Image courtesy HIP/Art Resource, NY. Bottom: Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849–50. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

of comparison, not of affiliation; and we must be at liberty to call Millet the French Israëls.69

But we are not “at liberty” in this way. The unreflective marketing via Millet continues, even in the website for Britain’s National Gallery, where Israëls’s Shipwreck— acquired following its successful showing at the 1862 102

Chapter 3

London fair— is dutifully celebrated as being “redolent of Millet.”70 Israëls was more than willing to accept the rules of the game. Consciously annealing Realist subjects with Rembrandt’s interiors and van Ruisdael’s landscapes, he redeployed these Dutch modes in a modern Realist vernacular governed by the French, thereby becoming

Figure 3.15 Jozef Israëls, The Cottage Madonna, 1867–70, shown in a reproductive print made for the journal The Studio in 1902. The original oil painting, then in the collection of “Alexander Young, Esq.,” is now at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The painting was shown in 1905 at the Venice Biennale; its title was probably provided by a London dealer.

highly successful on the international circuit— until the appearance of Cubo-Futurism and abstraction, which problematized Realism forever after. To suggest his reach by 1900, Israëls was celebrated in a series of German “Kunst der Gegenwart” monographs along with Rodin, Corinth, Degas, Delacroix, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti— but not Millet!71 His representation in the materialized world pictures of fairs and biennials reveals a career equal

in its success to any biennial artist working today, mingling commercial galleries and salons with expositions and biennials, showing in more than thirty venues on two continents, like clockwork, over five decades.72 To conclude our analysis of Israëls’s case is to see him edging into the twentieth century and grappling with Impressionism, the next international style (plate 18). Continuing the trope of provincialism, Israëls was described Old World / Biennial Culture

103

by a 1902 critic as a rough autodidact, admired “for the nervous vigor of an untaught hand, [laughing] at la belle peinture.”73 But “nervous vigor” would soon be reinterpreted as Impressionism, with France once again setting the standard— as we saw in chapter 2, contributing what would be celebrated in the United States as “our” Impressionist style during the 1904 exposition in St. Louis. Modernism, registered in the gestural, personal mark that fractures the sealed surface of academic finish, becomes not just a style but a geography (literally, a geo-graphy or world-writing), emanating from France to mark a universal cosmopolitanism. Achieved through pilgrimage and the channeling of international styles, Israëls’s worldliness could then be inhabited insouciantly. It is that secular, cosmopolitan style that garbs Israëls in the 1908 selfportrait illustrated here. Again: artists who will enter the world picture must adopt the prevailing international language and use it to speak of difference. Thus Israëls depicts himself as a contemporary urban European (watch fob, bowler, and all) but stands before one of his better-known Jewish paintings, David before Saul (1890s), as if acknowledging his delicately leveraged position.74 Attending the eighth international Zionist congress in the Hague in 1907, he was finally comfortable appearing in explicit relation to what Marx had identified as “the Jewish Problem.” Even while painting Jewish subjects as “old folk” or denizens of a biblical past, the artist utilized an increasingly Impressionist style, signaling a secular bourgeois attitude. Potentially, a given artist will be gifted enough to expand and extend a prevailing international style, perhaps even stretching it to set a new norm. A brilliant tactical move would be to reveal the centralized style’s debt to a peripheralized other, generalizing from an enforced difference to craft a universalized message— I have read Picasso’s Guernica in this light.75 Such maneuvers may require relocation to a center; Israëls was not willing to move to Paris, and so accepted terms that Picasso would refuse. For the founders of the first Venice Biennale, Israëls was just the man to grace their comitato; his art would provide the “proof of concept” for a safe, midcourse modernism that had been canonized in France, would be endorsed in Venice, and could be celebrated in Paris at the 1900 Grand Exposition with a medal for this master. Do such recipes for success extend into the twenty-first century? Most of the ensuing chapters at104

Chapter 3

tempt to answer this question; here, a prolegomena to that account.

Biennial Culture

Of course the media suffusing biennial culture have changed, with a dramatic shift from the once-stable typologies of sculpture, paint, and paper to the more openended modes of video, installation, performance, and other situations producing “experience” in the contemporary subject. But have the tropes identified with the case of Israëls vanished? Visitors today may be invited to examine “peasant da Vincis” at the Chinese pavilion in Venice (fig. 3.16), or enter Cai Guo-Qiang’s “cultural melting bath” in Lyon rather than look at a picture, but one wonders again at the marks of difference being represented— or ostentatiously dissolved. “Experience”— which once included taking a bone-rattling railroad or carriage trip to the metropolis to see an exposition, imagining the fate of (Powers’s) nubile Christian slave or (Israëls’s) shipwrecked Dutch family, then concluding with a restorative stop for tea outside the pavilion— may now be bundled into a total sensory package via immersion in Cai’s steaming bath of Chinese herbs (plate 34). Biennial culture is what results from artists metonymically capturing for art all of these energies, which accumulate as visitors trained from such experiences come for more. When Cai Guo-Qiang was asked to coordinate the representation of China five years after showing in Lyon’s biennial, he conveyed both utopian aspirations and technological simplicity in his staging, reinforced by Yung Ho Chang’s spindly bamboo “pavilion.” As if working the timeworn apparatus of the grand expositions’ display of colonial peoples, for this first “Chinese pavilion” in Venice, Cai put villagers themselves on display for his version of “predicated internationalism” (“peasant Da Vincis”). True, they were not asked to dance or cook in a “Chinese village”— their flying machines were ostensibly what was on view. But in the Biennale’s all-important opening events both the rural farmers and their homemade gizmos were rendered performative spectacles. As the rural inventors attempted to get their clattering machines to levitate, the resulting explosions and failures left art-world visitors nonplussed. Was the dysfunction anticipated by Cai, the canny global artist making a Surrealism out of his own rural Others’ utopian dreams? Or did Cai himself

Figure 3.16 Top: Sun Yuan (born 1972, Beijing) and Peng Yu (born 1974, Heilongjiang, China), installation view of Farmer Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. Photo by Sun Yuan. Courtesy of the artists and Cai Studio. Bottom: Yung Ho Chang, Bamboo Shoots, for the Chinese pavilion, installed in the Giardini Vergini at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. Courtesy Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu.

wish to admonish the worldly jet-setters with this display of Chinese ingenuity and materialized fantasy of an “escape” from everyday existence (and, Westerners would assume, political hegemony)? Cai’s 2005 event may have inspired the 2007 intervention by Ai Weiwei in which 1,001 Chinese citizens were brought to Kassel, Germany, at the expense of the documenta 12 exhibition budget “in order to observe and be observed,” mounting what the

artist termed an “invasion of the West” by people ranging in origin from rural peasants to art students from Beijing.76 Given these impresarial artists’ sophistication, these attempts must surely be interpreted as critical globalism— but are they successful? The answer is unclear. What is clear is the incorporation of the world’s fairs’ earlier festal structures not simply into the biennial, but into its art. The publicity machinery Old World / Biennial Culture

105

Figure 3.17 Carlo Scarpa, sculpture garden for the Venice Biennale, 1952. Photograph: Eamonn Canniffe, ca. 2006.

of the exhibitionary apparatus is now itself the subject of highly sophisticated curatorial critique, as in the new, floating United Arab Emirates pavilion that opened at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Artist-performers of the “Jackson Pollock Bar” were invited to present a reenactment of the 2008 press conference in which the objectives of the future UAE pavilion were first announced. Addressing all possible pedagogical resources, then Swiss-based curator Tirdad Zolghadr also produced what theorist Maria Lind termed “the wittiest, and yet most thoughtful audio guide I have ever come across,” detailing for visitors the “complex political, economic, social, and artistic situation . . . the curator worked through” as the autarchy’s agent, a working-out of art and politics that Lind calls “the curatorial.”77 Venice was not always hospitable to such nested parafictions and political metanarratives. It would take the strong arm of Hans Haacke’s institutional critique in 1993 to bring such tactics to the table, here forcing the history of Fascism’s role in the Biennale right into the exhibition (plate 23).78 Fascist modernizations had funded the Biennale’s archive, contributed a working library, and renovated the main exhibition hall. The formerly citybased event was nationalized, and an off-cycle film festival 106

Chapter 3

was instituted to seduce Hollywood as Fascism spread.79 Following the war, the instrumentalized and battered Biennale was hygienically cleansed with international modernism, represented by a Carlo Scarpa garden that opened off the side of the main building in 1952 (fig. 3.17). Symbolically puncturing the fascist facade, this would be the setting for event-based “Aperto” (Open) artworks, organized by the Oreste artists’ network in 1999. There, politics would infuse an increasingly global register, as later chapters detail. What the successful biennial format guaranteed, as it began to be replicated and exported, was an emphasis on internationalism— yet the very meaning of “international” would dramatically shift into “the global” as the century progressed. At the outset, the Venetian founders had decided in 1894 that the new institution needed to have international representation “in order to get an approximate idea of the movements and production of artists for the people and civilizations of Europe.”80 No mention of the United States, nor Asia, Africa, Latin America, or Australia. These were largely outside the nineteenth century’s “international” frame; the global was not yet at hand. The comitato as conceived in 1894 saw international representation as including “these names, the most

respected in the European arts, . . . chosen not only to represent individual truth and originality, and not only to write a luminous story in a varied contemporary art show, but also to distance the exhibition from the favoritism of a local consensus . . . so that our Venetian exhibition has from the first moment the best guarantee of a splendid success.”81 Importantly, this founding concept of international does not yet imagine the global; there was no sense that areas outside Europe even had “art” worth looking at. The “will to globality” would not emerge until the shift from Cold War spheres of influence to millennial configurations of BRIC nations, NAFTA “favored nations,” and Eurozones.82 Back when Venice founded its biennial, the comitato eventually saw fit to include US artists living abroad, Whistler notable among them, but little else was needed for “international” to be claimed. Broadening came incrementally, with the first pavilion awarded to then– colonial juggernaut Belgium in 1907. The US pavilion came only during the fascist expansion in 1930, and then after World War II the global inched into view: Brazil in 1950/53, Egypt 1952, Israel 1952, Japan 1956, Venezuela 1956.83 Global ambitions to include artists from regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and China— efforts that proved highly problematic— would become palpable only with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the definitive end of the Cold War.84 The question of “representation” (encapsulated by Israëls as the “Dutch Millet”) became acute in the 50th Venice Biennale, when curator Francesco Bonami had the idea of producing a Palestinian pavilion. After learning that only countries officially recognized by the government in Rome could be given a pavilion, Bonami backed down and hired two architects to come up with a compensatory project. The results were giant replicas of the passports of Palestinians, “traveling papers” (issued by Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, or other nations) that were erected throughout the Giardini as stand-ins for the wandering and “siteless” population, the whole titled Stateless Nation (fig. 3.18). Journalistic accounts found it important to recount that Sandi Hilal, one of the two architects, is “a Palestinian born in Bethlehem”; others described her Italian partner, Alessandro Petti, as also “Bethlehem-based.” Difference was thus marked and noted, identity politics secured (or possibly manufactured).85 But Hilal, who then lived with Petti in northern Italy, was also required

to speak a global language that allowed her design to function in the mise en scène of the spectacularized Giardini. She mutely represented some nation through her body and birth, yet together with Petti needed to comment on the constructed and negotiated nature of that condition. As Hilal explained the iconography of Stateless Nation: [Palestinians] are absolutely obsessed with travel documents of all kinds; we can’t afford not to be. . . . If Palestinians are dispersed all over the world, and if we think of the Biennale as a metaphor for the world, then Palestinians should be dispersed all over the Biennale. . . . For us, this is the Palestinian pavilion.86

The sited/nonsited aspect of these discourses is important. Hilal and Petti’s “pavilion” floated free of national architecture at Venice; it became truly global in its metaphorical dispersal through the mappa mundi of the Giardini’s world picture. But again, this is not inherent in the art. And this contextual and conceptual working happened only in the biennial setting. When Stateless Nation was relocated to Birzeit University on the West Bank, the complexities of diaspora and global languages flattened into nationalism pure and simple. “Critical globalism” became “nationalism” once art’s working encountered other politics on the ground.87 I have described a vast historical arc linking the search for world pictures and experience in the Grand Tour to the great expositions that industrialized that legacy for everyone. The Venice Biennale inherited and focused that trajectory purely on art. There was a utopianism in the Biennale’s patron’s committee, which would peacefully agree upon an established roster of fellow artists that might represent (European) international culture. Secessionists and academicians, expatriates and locals, but artists all, who would dispassionately adjudicate who could represent the world, and with what kinds of images. But all too soon the localizing ambitions of national pavilions emerged, carrying on the earlier formulae by which the artist would become “representative” of (his) national, ethnic, or civilizational difference. Objects in these pavilions would helplessly transmit differenced meanings, even as the commissioners of these national spaces would insist that they use international styles to do so. International styles shift, of course. Installation and video art came to prominence in the 1990s, simultaneous Old World / Biennial Culture

107

Figure 3.18 Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Stateless Nation, commissioned for the 2003 Venice Biennale. Top: as installed in the Giardini during the Biennale, June 2003. Bottom: as installed at Birzeit University on the Israeli West Bank (Palestine), October 2004. Courtesy the artists.

with an increase in global biennials. Perhaps the documentary “thereness” of much video recapitulated biennials’ own roots in the national theatrics of the fairs, with their imperatives to register difference. For the 2000s, eventful, immersive, and time-based art forms have emerged, bearing dynamic relations to spectacle. The national pavilions have played an interesting role in converting spectacle to globalist critique (plate 23). This more recent history claims Germania, Hans Haacke’s smashing of the German pavilion’s floor in 1993, as one of its inaugural moments. Haacke’s violent iconoclasm 108

Chapter 3

freed the viewer to have an opulently auditory rather than merely ocular experience. This, per disability theorist Georgina Kleege, feeds the “theory of multiple senses” that blind epistemology requires (chapter 1): the ambient sounds of visitors’ feet, crunching over the shards of marble from Albert Speer’s 1937 renovations for Hitler, also foregrounded for Haacke the violence of the exhibitionary complex’s continuation of “politics by other means.” Thus Haacke— exquisitely conscious of “representing” Germany after the fall of Soviet rule— purges the past through demolition. But the national pavilion survives:

Figure 3.19 Hussein Chalayan, video component of The Absent Presence, 2005, as installed at the offsite Turkish pavilion at the Fondazione Levi in the Palazzo Giustiniani, 2005 Venice Biennale. Top: urban citizens recount their nationalities. Bottom: a geneticist (played by Tilda Swinton) is confounded by the failure of genotypes to match phenotypes and nation types. Images courtesy of the curator, Beryl Madra.

as a concept, an ideology, a funding structure, and a foil for critical globalism. Comparatively recent biennali such as Istanbul or Guangzhou claim Venice’s creaky national pavilion system is obsolete— a position already taken by São Paulo in 1951. But in concluding this chapter I will argue that the very nationalism embedded in the pavilion has proven to have unique value for staging a critical position, allowing the problematization of both spectacle and the ethnic state. These remanent national spaces provide a rare opportunity for artistic agents to speak within power and

history, whether they are artists of established cultural capital (such as Haacke) or emerging potential (such as Hilal and Petti). Until the curtain falls on larger shows of power by nations, biennali have conceptual and political roles to play. That play was in force at one of the most interesting off-site pavilions of the 2005 Venice Biennale, the heavily advertised commission for the Turkish state (plate 35). Adopting the Palazzo Giustiniani as her site, the curator for Turkey chose to present designer Hussein Chalayan’s installation The Absent Presence (fig. 3.19).88 The title itOld World / Biennial Culture

109

self can be interpreted as a kind of nonsite joke. It may comment on Turkey’s nonpresence in the Giardini or reference the Ottomans’ pervasive and underacknowledged influence on historical Venetian urbanism as a whole. Chalayan’s installation, comprising projected digital video and sculptures, obsessively circulated around notions of national and ethnic identity in a surveillant society. It offered a world picture of picturing. Haacke’s Germania, Hilal and Petti’s Stateless Nation, and Hussein Chalayan’s Absent Presence surfaced the circuitry of biennial capital— a combination of real estate, historical positions, and current politics that assemble a world picture as seen from Venice at various moments. In the case of Chalayan’s projected video, a looping narrative cast British actress Tilda Swinton as a nervous scientist determining the identity of “anonymous donors” by analyzing their clothing for trace DNA. The only trait that each donor was said to have in common was that “all had come to the city from elsewhere.” Water was a pervasive metaphor for the London-based Chalayan’s parable of cosmopolitan baptism, as Swinton’s scientist peers into shallow basins, washes her face, or performs watery assays. “How accurate would our research prove to be?” questions the voice-over, and Swinton’s character asks, “How was I supposed to know? Do you have the answer?” After much washing and splashing, the results of the scientific analysis are revealed to be consistently wrong. In the end the “Serbian” identifies herself as Japanese, the Slovenian as Turkish. In the final sequence, Swinton undoes her hair to a whispered voice-over: “Is this all there is to know?” There were several risks here for commissioning curator Beryl Madra, most obviously the unproven “artist” (Chalayan is a professional fashion designer, not an artist per se). Turkey was at a delicate point in its political battle to be the first non-Christian country to enter the EU (described by some art-world denizens as “Fortress Europe” or the “Europe of Charlemagne”).89 Choosing Chalayan, a former Cypriot, to represent the Turkish state was itself incendiary, performing an aggressive cosmopolitanism in the face of Turkish-Greek tensions, smoothed over by the sponsor Turquality, which brands Turkish products for export.90 But if it had risks, Madra’s choice was also savvy: Chalayan was a two-time winner of the British Designer of the Year award, with a growing reputation as a global110

Chapter 3

ized “Muslim designer” operating on the edgy margins of the Western rag trade. His provocations had included a spring 1998 runway show called “Between,” centering on a display of models wearing strategically diminishing garments designed to evoke Muslim coverings, progressively “abstracted” until only a veil remained above an otherwise naked model. As catastrophe would have it, the events of 9/11 buried Chalayan’s explorations and they disappeared under a world of grief and suspicion. Subsequently he ventured back onto the scene with furniture that converted to precisely engineered nomadic garments with the hardened finish of airplane parts, accompanied by an escape-velocity space pod. The selection of this edgy fashion designer as a national representative was not as unusual as it seems. Designers model the capacity to define a “difference” that will emerge as desirable in the circuitry of international styles. Chalayan wants art so that he can move beyond garment choice to a wider field where information triggers yearning and deeper thought, by citizens of the world and also viewers of art. How did the Kuturstaatsministerin answer a question about why Germany should support the Venice Biennale? “A myth. A provocation. A desire to travel.” Less flippantly, Chalayan’s vanishing chador prompted tears in the fashion audience, addressing what the designer said was “the cultural loss of self.”91 Some observers of the global swirl have seen hope in such emotional connections, conveyed through “a commercialism that does not transmit a regime’s utopian dreams but addresses the personal dreams of the audience.”92 Critical globalism attempts to collectivize the personal, sharing experiences of the heterotopic to transformative effect. Venice Biennale pavilions— off - site and in the Giardini— play a role in fostering an emerging globalist critique by their very existence, but also in the “miniexhibitions” they increasingly stage. These can allow a single artist to develop a sustained meditation on the world picture in which the art works, and against which it labors to emerge. We have already touched on the traveling airships curated by artist Cai Guo-Qiang for the underfunded “temporary” Chinese pavilion constructed in the Arsenale at the 2005 Venice Biennale. In conclusion, I want to take a look at its architecture by Yung Ho Chang, providing one last example of the ways in which the micropolitics of art’s workings can gnaw away at the macrostructures of the state to produce disobedient world

Figure 3.20 Utopia Station in the Arsenale at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Left: curators Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist sitting on the platforms designed by co-curator Rirkrit Tiravanija and speaking with postcolonial theorist Edouard Glissant, June 2003. Photograph by participating artist Pierre Huyghe, courtesy Molly Nesbit. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Right: ongoing website of downloadable posters for Utopia managed by e-flux (as of June 2014), http://www.e-flux.com/projects/utopia/.

pictures (fig.  3.16). Constructed of imported Chinese bamboo that arrived already weathered from its maritime passage, the “pavilion” designed by Chang was merely an elegant open cage stretching over the grass at the end of the Arsenale in the “Garden of the Virgin.” Its construction required scores of skilled bamboo workers, who were also brought from China, in the mode of Chinese development projects all over the world. But Chang’s airy structure suggestively occupied the territory mapped in the previous Biennale, in 2003, as the site of Utopia Station— possibly the largest staging of “experience” ever offered within the official structure of the biennale.93 Utopia, devised by curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, art historian Molly Nesbit, and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (curators Chang knew well), had been a manifestly scraggly and conceptual project, spilling out of the Arsenale into the garden (fig. 3.20).94 By contrast, Chang’s ephemeral pavilion was intentionally empty, letting the Giardini continue its nonbiennial function as an urban garden. The only reference to the grand Western obsession with the good but perpetually unattainable place (eu-topos)95 was provided by Cai’s peasant imaginary of flying machines— the pure workers of the last great communist state paraded for a mortified art elite. With the “peasant da Vincis” sent back home and the rented large-screen plasma display returned after opening week, late visitors to the Chinese pavilion encountered

a few indoor works and a peacefully rotting bamboo structure.96 Such trajectories became interpretable: Was the deliquescence of China’s first national pavilion an authorized fall into grace? Was Chang alluding to a hidden power of the Chinese economy, to make peace with entropy? A dissolving pavilion undercuts the harsh edge of Chinese imperialism; yet peasant escape machinery (like the flying machine Tatlin built under Stalin) could not help but imply for Western viewers fantasies of escape from the gravity of the people’s republic. One concept of a Chinese “nation” might be needed to make sense of a “Chinese pavilion,” yet on another level, the world picture around it propels a much older cultural imaginary of “China”— as export material, as the source of demotic technical ingenuity, thrift, and gritty survival that both antedates the party-state and constitutes its enduring culture of admonition.97 These musings fuel a final provocation for this chapter from my own politics of world-picturing. Clearly, biennials are politically nationalist as well as utopian and globalist assemblies, but there is value in the very tension binding such divergent goals together in these recurring exhibitionary forms. I’d rather have had continuing repeats of the abandoned 1974 Arab biennial in Baghdad than a decade of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria. I’d rather have Chang’s pavilion than corrosive expansion by ethnic Han into Tibet. I’d rather have Chalayan’s video Old World / Biennial Culture

111

than Islamic nationalism from the Turkish right. I’d rather have Allora & Calzadilla representing “America” than more drones in Pakistan (chapter 7). We won’t be given these choices, of course. Usually we are required to accept biennials as a function of the opposite trajectory (first war, then art). Yung Ho Chang’s weathering pavilion is a perfect emblem in this respect, refusing imperial ambition for peaceful erosion before our eyes. Desires for world picturing enter a new phase in which the very terms of nation, internationalism, and world exhibitions must be subjected to skeptical pressure. My counterintuitive claim is that biennials’ theatrical sites prove to be incubators for critical globalist art. In sum, the international-universal and the nationallocal enter together in these exhibitions and are increasingly taken apart by the art within them. Tactics of savvy artists in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries inform the equally thoughtful audiences for this art, who have learned to be open to experience, and to continue to let art work on them. In the case of the nineteenthcentury visitors entering this game, experience-seeking

112

Chapter 3

subjects encountered art and accepted responsibility for making judgments, some at the level of radical appropriations (the abolitionists), and some on the bureaucratic plane of art history (Laborde, Delécluze). The rule of predicate internationalism reveals how the international implicates the nation, and how the universal summons difference. We will see in the next chapter how São Paulo tried to play this game differently— refusing the “difference” that Europe had always read into its art— but we will also see how incredibly briefly that strategy worked. Seemingly necessary to our present world, biennials are also necessary for questioning their own necessity. Spectacles to consume, but not be consumed by, biennials require us to work, in order that art can. Thinking while looking, ruminating while renting rooms, critically reflecting while chatting, questioning while reading, mulling while eating, musing while walking, dreaming while sleeping, and— for artists, curators, and visitors alike— understanding the continuity as well as the potential for rupture in our desires for the world picture.

4 New World / Cold War

The staging of Oriental plots in Brazilian theaters would help the local elite to forget what they saw in their own streets—the space of Blacks and mestizos—and to identify themselves with the European culture by choosing a common other. However, that did not work quite well, because actors on stage were usually Blacks, even when performing European roles. —ROGÉRIO BUDASZ , 20051 As to my exhibition in Recife, . . . part of it is didactic, showing the thinking of Cubism, of abstract art, of construction in art, with plastic Brazilian elements—with no romanticism and without photography, Negroes and mulattos [negros e mulatos]. . . . What if, in my small show of paintings, I start to announce your movement of art there in São Paulo. . . . It’s necessary that all of Brazil has a bit of a plastic commotion, but with the aim of quality. —CÍCERO DIAS TO CICCILLO MATARAZZO , director of the São Paulo Foundation for Modern Art, 19482 Country, now it’s time for art. Enough of being considered macumbeiros [macumba initiates] or aspiring soccer players. Now, we’ll be presented as artists! —LYGIA FAGUNDES TELLES on the opening of the first Bienal de São Paulo, 19513 Might there be a specific angle from which history can be seen in the underdeveloped countries? —FERREIRA GULLAR , 19694

Hemispheric Rearrangements

The São Paulo Bienal opened its doors in 1951 and forever changed art-world geography, producing a new, global work of art. The Bienal’s unlikely victory involved social and material agents as well as conceptual leaps, mixing modern furniture industries and MoMA reading lists, Cadillacs and fat-rendering magnates, New 113

York Rockefellers and Brazilian cultural attachés, coffee heiresses and dictators, in correspondence conducted by immigrants in at least four languages. Hybridizing the legal guidelines of the Venice Biennale and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo elites inaugurated a museum, using it immediately to instigate a Bienal, which became an enduring emblem of “third world” possibilities in the Cold War. Significantly for our narrative, this first southern hemispheric biennial announced itself through an international style of geometric abstraction calling itself “Concrete” art (concretismo), codified through prizes and explicitly staged competitions (between figuration and abstraction, generically construed). Antonio Maluf ’s handsome screen-print posters set the tone (plate 27). Two colors printed on a third delineate nested rectangles; in the first version of the poster, they are warm black, red, and mustardy orange on a cream stock. The same design printed on black asserts the bold primaries of European Constructivism: bright red, blue, and yellow; still other versions are printed on blue or red stock. The series suggests multiple futures, their very abstraction allowing the projection of innumerable fantasies of progress through rationally apportioned geometric space. The Bienal de São Paulo confounds our exhibitionary histories thus far. Where world’s fairs and the Venice Biennale had required artists from the margins to take up the international artistic language— but only to speak of difference— the early São Paulo biennial used geometric nonobjective art to eradicate signs of difference. A “marginal” country on the world stage simply arrogated the voice of the hegemon. This chapter recounts the implications of that institutional choice in the 1950s, and the rapid return of difference in the 1960s, through artists’ repurposing of earlier theories of cultural “cannibalism”— antropofagia. Contemporary art would never be the same.5 In its biennial, Brazil proved the replicability of the Venetian model but also transformed that (inter)national semiotic, amid a global Cold War, by eradicating national pavilions. The organizers’ arrogation of an international cynosure was not unprecedented— Paris and London (if not St. Louis) had claimed as much. It is São Paulo’s refusal of local and national difference that constitutes the exception that proves the rule. If artists themselves (rather than curators) would soon reintroduce the fric114

Chapter 4

tion of “local” difference, they would now do so with ambitions rendered “global” by this southern-hemispheric biennial. This marks the turn from modern internationalism into the present epoch of art’s working. The chapter’s case study is thus the hinge between a century of modernism (roughly 1855 to 1955) and what we now call “contemporary” art— presumed to be global. That globality was worked out in terms set by the São Paulo Bienal and marked by its ambition. If the North took little notice during the short twentieth “American century,” it would during the twenty-first. The commission for the first biennial’s poster was awarded to Maluf by a committee that included the biennial’s founding director, Francesco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo, and the socially engaged printmaker Livio Abramo.6 In selecting Maluf, they were choosing an engineer and industrial designer strongly identified with the Concrete Art movement— and Concretism signaled development. As Brazilian scholars have recently proclaimed, “The principle guiding the entire production of Antonio Maluf, from the design for the first Biennial poster to the present, is the concept of the development equation.”7 Desire for that equation distinguished the industrial center of São Paulo from Rio de Janeiro, then still the national capital. Development, and its propulsive, geometric edges, obsessed the Paulistas forging their version of a new Bienal, and concrete (in all of its senses) was how it would take form.8 The posters, people, papers, networks, and artworks promoting the Bienal converged in a city whose “business was business.”9 It was a city that had historically dominated the Brazilian heartland and ruled its extraction economies but had amassed little cultural capital— nationally or abroad. Elites in São Paulo yearned to change all that. Propelled by the urgencies of postwar development, they wanted to limn an entirely new world picture. Here hemispheric geometries, conventionally sliced between “the West and the rest,” would be remapped to form new north-south configurations, allowing Brazil to occupy the same art-world circuits as the European avant-garde, while economically and politically aligning itself with US institutional models.10 The country’s proximity to Africa would be artfully ignored. The global ambitions of the Bienal emerged from local motivations in a demographic characterized as agregado (dependent). Paulista landlords were dependent

on underlings for economic and political survival, as Brazilian Roberto Schwarz describes: “The basic social relationships and the ideological volatility of the ‘elite’ were both a part of the dynamics of capitalism as an international system, the part that it was ours to live out.”11 Brazil was fully implicated in a global mesh of colonial, then national, and eventually Cold War relationships. By replicating the Venetian biennial model, Paulistas also proved that biennial culture itself could be a transferable set of operations rather than a single city’s brand. The Bienal de São Paulo is thus literally exemplary— having copied, it was itself instantly copied. Biennials were founded within months of the opening in São Paulo, cropping up in Asia, the Middle East, back in Europe, and between enterprising absolutist partners (Batista in Cuba joining forces with Franco in Spain). Paulista founders and the artists supporting them set out to realign Brazilian culture— first, away from the ruling troika of Rio, its academy, and the international style of Social Realism that had been popularized by the Mexicans; second, toward the “liberal” rationalism forming around a competing international style of Concrete Art; and third, toward developmentalism (for better or worse, politically and economically linked to the postwar United States). This progression rehearsed earlier struggles between (indigenous/racialized)12 signs of Brasilidade (Brazilianness) and a perceived international (mostly European) avantgarde in the 1920s, propelled into Concrete (geometric) abstraction with the strong backing of the Bienal. As this chapter will conclude, artists with ambitions fired by the biennial turned to a global conceptualism in the 1960s, critiquing Concretism’s pretensions to universalism with a revived antropofagia. For Brazilian scholars, this trajectory is so well rehearsed as to be an irritating cliché. Recently, when the Brazilian pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale featured monuments from this history as a backdrop to some interesting young artists’ work, artist/philosopher/critic Amilcar Packer fumed: Official historiography [builds] a predominantly Eurocentric and linear narrative in a cause and effect logic trapping Brazilian art in an ever dependent colonized position. Rather than formulating a complex multi directional and layered panorama of long-term cultural exchange that could contribute to challenge

hegemonic and dominant narratives, the structure within the show reinforces prejudicial ideas such as origin, influence, and historical debt. . . . To what extent is [this] attempt at a national representation of Brazil not at the same time an erasure of Brazil’s possible construction of provisional identities for the sake of a static and instrumentalized global, modern image?13

In writing this chapter, I willingly enter this minefield. But I want to reverse Packer’s economy of debt, revealing what the “global, modern image” itself owes to a set of nomadic, syncretic, conceptually brilliant postwar Brazilian artists. What Packer presumes is an imported ethos, in my argument, was crucially informed by Brazilian artists’ local and then diasporal practices, albeit ones fired by European-fueled ambitions to compete on a global scale. This is a syncretism that returns us to the power of that very idea, which originated with disparate tribes in Crete who came together for temporary political purposes (syn-Cretism). Recently excavated by Brazilian scholar José Gatti and Cuban-born Marcos Becquer as cultural theory, “syncretism foregrounds the political. . . . It entails the ‘formal’ co-existence of components whose precarious (i.e., partial as opposed to impartial) identities are mutually modified in their encounter, yet whose distinguishing differences, as such, are not dissolved or elided in these modifications, but strategically reconstituted in an ongoing war of position.”14 Thus in place of a “static” narrative we will find, in archives on several continents, traces of this “ongoing war of position”— dramatic shifts as the early struggles between figurations of one kind or another turned, in the postwar period, toward the cool geometric international style promulgated by the Bienal— and then turned away again.15 The Bienal’s erasure of difference prompted an immediate backlash, as a younger generation forged global conceptual practices around specifically Brazilian concepts. “Historical debt,” in this account, flows in the other direction, as Anglo-American curators (and art writers such as myself) celebrated an aesthetics of experience that would be inconceivable without the syncretic works and theories of, among many others, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. The story begins with immigrants. Matarazzo, the operative founder of the Bienal, was an art-collecting businessman from an Italian-Brazilian family, fully conNew World / Cold War

115

scious of the Venetian model. Nicknamed Ciccillo, he navigated Brazil under the suffix “Sobrinho” (nephew), both distinguishing him from and connecting him to his famous uncle and namesake, the Italian-born “Count” Francisco Matarazzo (1854– 1937). The US Rockefellers also played an important role in setting up the infrastructure for a biennial. Further inspiration may have come from another Italian immigrant, the painter Danilo Di Prete, whose model wasn’t Venice, but rather the nationalist Quadriennale di Roma, which had thrived under Italy’s Fascist regime.16 Ensuring a future for capitalism was certainly a goal for all of these players, but that did not determine how the art would mean. While Nelson Rockefeller was instrumental in the founding of São Paulo’s art institutions in the late 1940s, he had little interest in either the Bienal de São Paulo or contemporary art. The Bienal’s director, artists, and curators crafted their own developmentalist rhetoric and imagery around the “concrete abstraction” thought to be continuing the Bauhaus project for a newly interlinked postwar world. This is a mesh of syncretizing influences— not a one-way street. For Brazil’s “Estado Novo,” inaugurated by President Getúlio Vargas in 1937 as the dictator’s corporatist path between Communism and homegrown Integralista fascism, the ambition was to develop the country with flare and self-determination.17 For artists and leftists, the Vargas compromise inaugurated the possibility of Brazil becoming an exporter of viable global culture. Even well after Vargas’s “new state” project petered out, “developmentalism” and “import substitution” remained explicit. The organizers intended for São Paulo “to conquer the position of a world artistic center”— even as they acknowledged, “Having Venice as a model was inevitable.”18 But São Paulo’s biennial would depart from Venice in significant ways. It was structurally unique at the time, perceived abroad to be a “privately funded” exhibition supported by Matarazzo. Unlike Venice, funded by municipal bursaries and art sales, the São Paulo event had prizes sponsored by corporations and was organized by a private museum. The museum staff were also tapped to produce “meaningful realizations” abroad, such as the Brazilian representation in Venice.19 Agency on this scale required managers capable of accessing the liquidity of economic and cultural capital. The founding of a new biennial was certainly enabled by preexisting museum 116

Chapter 4

relations with international political adepts (Nelson Rockefeller), gallerists (Leo Castelli, René Drouin), and cooperative foreign diplomats.20 What would be the significance of a Brazilian biennial? From the Enlightenment on, Brazilian artists had been welcome in the Old World as long as they were willing to narrate the exotic difference of their homeland: operas about Tupi-Guarani princesses, novels about life on the fazenda, paintings of misty jungle landscapes and cannibal queens.21 The biennial would change that equation. Artist Cícero Dias (author of one epigraph at this chapter’s head) provides a useful case study of this epistemic change. Born to an aristocratic planter family on an engenho (mill) fifty miles from Recife in the Northeast of Brazil, he started at Rio’s Escola Nacional de Belas Artes but dropped out to cultivate his “self-taught” art; he oscillated between Paris and his native Pernambuco throughout his professional life. A painting from the 1930s—A Espera (The Expected, 1932)— reveals techniques similar to Marc Chagall’s, a childlike depiction of a rural Brazilian “annunciation.” A woman in the foreground sits on a bench in her plantation hill town, flanked by a donkey and a child while eying a winged angel in a tree— Paul Gauguin’s folk-religious Breton paintings from fifty years earlier also come to mind. Dias is clearly aware of the international Surrealist movement then rendering spirituality as an anthropological dream; such a work might even have been painted in Paris, where he often visited with friends who were well connected to the Parisian Surrealist elites.22 As Dias began to appear in international venues, he would be given the liminal space of a “native informant.” In Espera, he seems comfortable with that role: agricultural tracts cover the hills behind the seated woman, opening out from the village in a promise of fecundity echoing the religious suggestion of conception in the foreground. The international style of a whimsical Surrealism is taken up to speak of a simple faith in the Brazilian countryside. This, then, is the norm. Back home, however, Dias had a strong anti-academic reputation, cemented in the Revolutionary Salon of 1931, where he showed an enormous, semi-erotic mural painting.23 After his arrest in Recife by Vargas’s counterrevolutionary forces in 1937, the artist moved to Paris, where he adopted a Picassoid Surrealism. Interned briefly at Baden-Baden by the occupying Germans, he served as cultural attaché in Lisbon’s Brazilian embassy from 1943

Figure 4.1 Left: Cícero Dias, Mulher sentada com espelho (Seated Woman with Mirror), 1940. Oil on canvas, 53.3 × 46.2 cm. Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM RJ Collection. Photograph: Romulo Fialdini/Valentino Fialdini; courtesy Waldir Simões de Assis Filho/Comitê Cícero Dias. Right: Cícero Dias, Pintura (Painting), as published in the 1949 catalogue From Figurative Art to Abstract Art (São Paulo Museum of Modern Art), 89. Courtesy Waldir Simões de Assis Filho/Comitê Cícero Dias and Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

to 1945. His postwar oscillation between Paris and Brazil informs the letter he wrote to Matarazzo cited as an epigraph.24 By then his work was completely abstract. Looking more closely at this 1948 missive, we can see agency within the tripartite epistemologies studied by this book. First there is the role of the artist, desirous of entering a particular world picture to negotiate its terms. The role of the organizer is of course played by Matarazzo and his team; the recipients would be critics, artists, and the general public later making sense of the contemporary art scene in Brazil. Notably, the blind epistemologies that constitute a delicate thread in the massive exhibitions we have been following thus far are completely absent at this point in Brazilian modernity: Dias wants a fully visible “commotion” in Brazilian art. Matarazzo had just accepted the directorship of São Paulo’s nascent Foundation of Modern Art, precursor to the Museu de Arte Moderna and the as yet unformulated Bienal.25 As Dias knew well, the industrialist was then organizing the Museu’s opening show, which would contrast figurative and abstract art (to which Dias had recently converted). At last, Dias exulted, Brazilian art could be fully modern, without “photography” (which, for this

painter, meant academic realism), and without romantic imagery of “Negroes and mulattos.” The avoidance of blacks and mixed-race bodies as subjects was not to negate their role as givers of artistic form; by then Dias was fully conscious of Picasso’s Afro-primitivist Cubism, as his painting Mulher sentada com espelho (Seated Woman with Mirror) reveals. Matarazzo would have been flattered by Dias’s injunction to spread a “little commotion” celebrating those modern artists who already “work closer to the primitives.” Embrace those primitives of Europe (e.g., Giotto)— but with quality and sophistication! Avoid images of “negros e mulatos” in favor of appropriations of their geometries and forms! Confront the nineteenthcentury Brazilian academic painters who, in their realist pictures, had merely “prepared the path for Kodak”!26 Dias’s invocation of Kodak is significant. A figure for tourism in general, the US corporation also stood for the industrialized globalization of a previously professional commodity into an amateur pastime. To refuse to “prepare the way for Kodak” was both to deny Brazil’s fate as a photo opportunity and to combat the onslaught of postwar US brands. Both cultural and economic imperatives were clear: it was time for Brazilian leadership, and for New World / Cold War

117

import substitution— the production of finished goods intended for uptake by Brazilians themselves. Refusing “representation” as likeness, Dias could still be “close to the primitives”— aligned with his Surrealist commitments from the Paris years. What happened to bury his “primitivism” (an intriguing aspiration for Dias, as a denizen of Afro-Brazilian Pernambuco) under the cool geometries of Northern European Concrete Art? The answer would come with the world-picturing apparatus that Matarazzo, as organizer, was bringing into São Paulo. Even before the Bienal, the figurative/abstract show would stage a material demonstration of the international styles within which local difference would be situated. Indeed, that was the point of the exhibition. If such a show in Venice would be just so much “reportage,” in São Paulo it would function as an implied rebuke. Matarazzo himself collected both Picasso’s and Dias’s work— as did his competitor in Brazilian cultural activism, the Paulista communications magnate Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Mello (better known as Chatô), in whose family Dias’s Seated Woman came to rest.27 And yet the nature of Dias’s work would change dramatically by the time Matarazzo’s plans for the abstract/figurative show became reality. When Dias’s work was chosen for that first exhibition at the new museum, he was more or less in line with the Concretist agenda, as his painting Pintura clearly demonstrates (fig. 4.1, right).28 For Dias in 1948, fostering an underdefined abstraction against a largely unspecified “Kodak” realism was the immediate goal, perfectly attuned to Matarazzo’s Museu de Arte Moderna inaugural exhibition, Do Figurativismo ao Abstracionismo (From Figurativism to Abstractionism, 1949). Matarazzo produced the show with artistic director Léon Degand (a Belgian critic whom Dias knew from Paris). Degand, embroiled in the intense European battle to redeem abstraction as a potentially socialist tool (in the face of Soviet Socialist Realism), was disgusted with Parisian attempts to revive flaccid French traditions of abstracted but figurative painting, and keen to establish a fully abstract revolution.29 Now he had an opportunity to do so, in the new world. Dias clearly knew that Matarazzo and Degand were committed to burying realist figuration— but the precise abstraction that would result could not be predicted. These Brazilians had company in the teleological view of progress in art, envisioned as an international 118

Chapter 4

project led by the (European) avant-gardes. Alfred Barr’s influential “flowchart” of influences producing abstraction had migrated from the dustjacket for the 1936 catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art to circulate as a poster distributed internationally by the Museum of Modern Art’s education program; one of the first things Matarazzo did as head of the new São Paulo foundation and museum was to acquire such materials from MoMA for display and sale.30 Nearby crucibles of modernism in Argentina were also plying notions of evolution, as the illustration from one 1949 exhibition catalogue shows (fig.  4.2).31 Such frankly Eurocentric models didn’t touch on the politics and ideologies of the new world, ignoring the impact of Mexican muralism, for example. That began with a Communist International, rapidly hardening in favor of Social Realism as the 1930s unspooled.32 Degand and Matarazzo joined forces in changing what “international modernism” would mean in the Brazilian context. Dias, who had met with them in Paris in 1947, thought he was agreeing by calling for “nada pitoresco” (nothing picturesque) and declaring his opposition to “false modern art.”33 What Degand (and Matarazzo in his wake) were programming had nothing Picassoid about it. This abstraction was total; nothing figurative remained in a hard-edged geometry borrowed from “international style” architecture, signifying rationality and technical prowess.34 São Paulo’s 1949 exhibition had an evolutionary implication built into its very title—from figuration to abstraction. Per Serge Guilbaut, Degand seized the opportunity to “overshadow Paris . . . incapable of opening . . . for the new age.”35 While Degand’s stringent curation was admired by many, some smelled a strictly European agenda. Argentinean artist and critic Julio E. Payró (practicing a modernismo style of abstracted but still figurative painting) wrote an open letter to one colleague, bemoaning local artists’ seeming irrelevance: I seriously doubt that either you or I, or both of us, from the city of Buenos Aires, could possibly have an influence on the universal acceptance of an appropriate term to qualify this art as, shall we say, abstract? Concrete? Non-figurative? Non-representational? Anti-naturalist?36

The iterations of the “non” and the “anti” suggest the blindman’s turn— away from the obvious, in favor of dif-

Figure 4.2 “Le peinture de 1905 à 1925,” explanatory diagram from the exhibition catalogue De Manet a nuestros dias (From Manet to the Present; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 1949), as reproduced in Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 43.

ferent conceptions that Payro felt helpless to predict. At this moment, Degand was the one who would decide. As he wrote to one of Dias’s Recifean colleagues in the fall of 1948, he was in São Paulo, “où la bataille s’engagera bientôt” (where the battle will soon be engaged).37 Manifestly, the battle would seek to marginalize the Mexicans (and their onetime Brazilian ally, Cândido Portinari), simultaneously sidelining the Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-García’s ideographic “School of the South.”38 More interestingly, Degand’s battle would also neglect emerging expressionist and “informel” tendencies. US Abstract Expressionist works had been left out of that 1949 inaugural show in São Paulo and were also minimized in the first Bienal— ostensibly because shipping and customs costs were too great. But if mere economics can explain the exclusion of Pollock and his ilk, neither did Parisian informel prove particularly salient to Brazilians, even when De-

gand included a few examples. Although Hans Hartung was illustrated right next to Fernand Léger in a newspaper review of the 1949 inaugural exhibition, the Brazilian reviewer ignored the gestural painter, dramatizing instead a struggle between the “relative abstraction” of Klee and Léger and the “pure abstraction” of the later Kandinsky. The battle was indeed engaged: “All these manifestations bring a double sign of newness and command us to think about the future of modern art.”39 The double sign of newness might refer to political as well as aesthetic economies, since “arte concreto” had already been publicized as progressive in the mid-1940s by Argentinean poet and Communist Edgar Bayley, among others.40 As Bayley argued in the local organ of the Communist Party, representational art must be replaced by arte concreto “because representation in art is the spiritual image of classist social organizations.”41 Such socialNew World / Cold War

119

ist judgments against figurative art favored geometric abstraction, fueled in this half of the Southern hemisphere by twin demographics: local intelligentsia (for Brazil, the Trotskyist art critic Mário Pedrosa), and diasporal leftist artists driven out of Europe by fascism.42 Take, for example, Slovakian-born Gyula Kosice, who had cofounded a journal with Bayley and others dedicated to geometric abstraction in Buenos Aires in 1944, the same year Max Bill founded konkrete kunst in Switzerland; both journals were fully devoted to the cause of international Concrete Art.43 Concretism was on the ground in Brazil as well, purveyed by immigrants Axl Leskoschek (1889– 1975) and Waldemar Cordeiro (1925– 73). The young Cariocan Ivan Serpa (a Leskoschek student) taught Concrete principles in the Rio art museum from the early 1950s— most notably to the brothers César and Hélio Oiticica. Concrete Art’s reception in the first São Paulo Bienal was already prepared: Argentina was humming with the new style by the mid-1940s, and Brazil joined in by the end of the decade. The Bienal, then, did not produce Concretismo, but it selected, curated, and consolidated it through publications that would circulate throughout the country and beyond. By 1954, Matarazzo had also commissioned the corresponding international architecture of abstraction in buildings for the Bienal. Harmonizing with Oscar Niemeyer’s medium of reinforced concrete in the Bienal complex, Concretismo bore a ready-made affiliation with pragmatic production. It both instantiated desenvolvimento (industrial development) for laissez-faire capitalists and signaled to left-wingers like Pedrosa the possibility for revolutionary subjects to carry on the aborted legacy of Russian Suprematism and the Bauhaus. Niemeyer’s own Communism stirred the progressivist pot. This mishmash— capitalist modernization and socialist internationalism larding a local project aiming at international prominence— was what exhilarated the Brazilians supporting the Bienal.44 Aspirations to globality soared. This globality, for Brazilian descendants of the colonizadores as well as recent transatlantic immigrants, was frankly Europhilic. It fed on decades of anxiety about how Brazil “appeared” to the old world, about the racial mixtures characteristic of the Brazilian population, and about presumptions of backwardness in this Latin American context. São Paulo’s embrace of internation120

Chapter 4

alist (European) abstraction can be interpreted as a corollary to “whitening” immigration policies dating from the turn of the century, by which Brazilian authorities encouraged Europeans to immigrate and form the new postslavery labor force, with “scientific” fantasies about how this would contribute to the gradual Caucasianization of the Brazilian population.45 To later critics, this was part of the entire modernismo culture that led up to the Bienal— castigated as a littoral society fixated on facing Europe, and thus never experiencing the deep interior of the country where “real Brazilians” lived.46 And in truth, following independence from Portugal in 1822, as the Empire of Brazil, and in the subsequent 1889 Republic, Brazilian elites (most indeed living on the coast in Rio and even those in the “hinterland” of São Paulo), continued to look to Europe for education, for hard capital for their businesses, or for the amusements of a leisure class. The magnet of Europe also drew members of São Paulo’s middle class and its artists, many of whom, like Matarazzo, were the descendants of entrepreneurial immigrants who flooded in after the 1888 abolition of slavery.47 Brazilian literature grew eloquent in this complex post-Independence situation, as “the juxtaposition of elements characteristic of colonial Brazil with those of bourgeois Brazil” forged poetry and fiction that immigrant Brazilian intellectual Roberto Schwarz could celebrate as constructing “the dignity of an allegory of the country.”48 Race and nation were never far from the puzzle that Brazilian allegory was asked to solve, as musicologist Rogério Budasz observes: The Iberian colonies in Latin America experienced a kind of identity search around the time of their independences. They have that striking Native and African presence, while ruled by an elite that still wanted to emulate their colonizers and ancestors, in other words to look Western— even if their concept of Western was seen by the people north of the Pyrenees as really exotic. To a large extent, Latin American culture is born out of that conflict.49

Ciccillo Matarazzo would rely on his wife, Yolanda Penteado (fig. 4.3), wealthy daughter of a planter family, and on interlocutors such as Cícero Dias to navigate this complex terrain, but his support for curators linked to geometric abstraction suggested his own conversion to

Arte Moderna

Figure 4.3 Photographic postcard of Ciccillo Matarazzo and Yolanda Penteado by Foto Vogt, Davos, Switzerland, 1940s. Courtesy of Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo, and the Matarazzo family.

a new, ostensibly “neutral” territory of modernism that was in fact oppressively Northern European. How influential this alignment would be is suggested by the work Dias himself contributed to From Figurativism to Abstractionism, the generically titled Pintura (Painting, 1949; fig. 4.1). No more the wistful allegories set in planters’ hill towns; the Surrealist women of the mid-1940s have also vanished. Their animist energies are manifest only in the colorful curvilinear shapes that swirl in the foreground of a bifurcated, geometrically segmented space. Perhaps it is the lamp of Guernica that peeks out at the top, its rayed-eye-lightbulb an Enlightenment allegory embedded in the automated, rational, developmentalist project.

Emiliano Di Cavalcanti was another Brazilian artist who wrote Matarazzo in praise of his project to found a Bienal, hoping “that this great adventure, 30 years after the Semana of 1922, would be just as successful as our old celebration.”50 The frequent summoning of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) as the precursor of the Bienal’s success belies its ephemerality— it lasted for one week and never recurred.51 But Paulistas in particular felt it set the terms for a modern Brazilian art; in its complex dialectics we can identify an oscillation between sublimation and abjection that would also haunt the Bienal. The Semana’s sublimatory mode was articulated by diplomat and intellectual José Pereira da Graça Aranha in his inaugural address on February 13, 1922: “A Emoção Estética na Arte Moderna” (Aesthetic Emotion in Modern Art), followed, two years later, by his Apollinairean call for “O Espírito Moderno” (the new spirit) in a speech given to the Brazilian Academy. Both orations argued for the subliming of the spirits of the nation’s various races into the singular “soul” of an elevated Brazilian culture.52 The more abject mode came in a twofold blast from poet and novelist Oswald de Andrade. First, a “Brazilwood Manifesto” (Manifesto Pau-Brasil), published in a Rio newspaper March 18, 1924; then his “Anthropophagite,” or Man-eating, Manifesto (Manifesto Antropófago) in the short-lived artistic journal Revista da Antropofagia (Review of Man-eating), published in São Paulo in 1928.53 For polemical purposes, the town of the manifesto’s signing was given as Piratininga (its Tupi Indian name), and the date as 374, the number of years since the Tupis’ ritual consumption of the first European— bishop Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha— on the Brazilian coast in 1556 (Andrade miscounted, believing the bishop’s death to have been in 1554). Where Graça Aranha called for the transcendent assimilation of the local, Andrade demanded an immersion in it. Both, however, were narrating parables of transformation: Andrade a body ritual by which “savages” would imbibe the meat of the powerful European to capture something of his strength, Graça Aranha a spiritual transmutation of all ethnic souls (including the European) into one. Syncretism was key for both.54 Internationalism was equally desired. Graça Aranha’s speech at the Semana had been staged as an alternative to Brazil’s noisy national celebrations of its centennial, while New World / Cold War

121

Andrade (writing mostly in Paris) sought to broadcast Brasilidade to an international literary audience through a vernacular rather than a nationalist mode.55 These were the paradoxical oppositions that would polarize with the Bienal’s opening support for Concrete Art (materializing sublimation, in my account) and the subsequent revival of Andrade’s antropofagia (which I position as an abjection). These would form historical relays in Brazilian interpretations of “the international,” and propel conversions to the global in the 1960s, with great consequence for contemporary practices of today.56 In 1922, the Semana audience thrilled to Graça Aranha’s call: “the mythical legacy of the Tupi Indian and the black slave” would be transformed, and being Brazilian would no longer imply “being a barbarian.”57 Graça Aranha’s audience, scions of coffee oligarchs, were at the top of the world economy, with Brazilian coffee “the largest item of international commerce in the whole world.”58 Participants in the Semana (including the Penteado family) are mapped by Roberto Schwarz as the engine of Brazilian modernism— educated Paulistas able to court an “indisputable cosmopolitan up-to-dateness,” yet “conservative in the domestic sphere” since their export monoculture relied on the continuation of archaic labor relations. Productively ambivalent, they were destined as patrons and artists to soar “far above the defensive, clumsy conservatism of the rest of the wealthy oligarchy of the country”— thereby opening a path to the newest modern art, if not always the best examples.59 Artistically, the Semana would have disrupted Rio’s academic diet of landscapes and discovery narratives with a more up-to-date European model: the modernismo that had already been embraced in literature during a 1920 poets’ banquet in downtown São Paulo.60 The Semana modernists focused on the visual arts: fusing the radical energies of Cubism with Futurism and Expressionism, absorbed from Paris, Berlin, and New York, all cooked into the accomplished works of Brazilian-born, Germaneducated, world-traveling Paulista Anita Malfatti.61 Malfatti’s first exhibition in Brazil opened in 1917 and was later deemed “incendiary” by Rio critic Mário Pedrosa. By endorsing this dynamic Cubo-Futurist, the 1922 Semana Paulistas set themselves apart from Rio’s elites (not that the latter noticed), lodging their modernist bets with a dramatic abstract visibility that was itself already syncretic. Malfatti fused the force-lines of Futurism 122

Chapter 4

with the crystalline facets of Cubism and the coloristic disjunctions of the Expressionists and Fauves. The New York Dadaists’ “blind” agenda was nowhere to be seen. Strategically sidelining the current Brazilian vanguard’s literary (French, Symbolist) textual forms, Paulistas thus placed “a certain plastic ‘sensibility’” at the forefront of their modernism, beginning to claim color in particular for a Brazilian agenda.62 For the first time, visual art would take a leadership role in modeling international modernism for Brazil. The enthusiastic response to Malfatti in São Paulo was no doubt leveraged by the very Africanisms that Picasso had appropriated in 1907 to produce Cubism, carried on into Futurism via F. T. Marinetti’s Sudanese nurse, into Expressionism by Ludwig Kirchner’s black models, and into Surrealism by flirtations with Europe’s dark-skinned Others.63 Given the absence of a surviving visual culture among Tupi Indians, Afro-Brazilian culture formed the local “primitive.” Pedrosa’s recollections of the Semana evoke this, as reported by Bienal scholars Francisco Alambert and Polyana Canhête: The movement [the Semana and Malfatti’s modernismo] began with a psychic experience, a preliminary magic experienced in the contact with modern painting. The starting point was not literary. The divine fire came not from reading, but from a direct experience between the young Brazilian— naive and barbaric— with powers of expression and pictorial forms of aggression that had so far been ignored.64

The Malfatti sketch I illustrate here (plate 24) justifies the praise, assimilating the “African moment” of Picasso’s Demoiselles from 1907 with a later Expressionism/Futurism that posed dynamic male bodies as the engine of agrarian modernization. Malfatti’s figure turns away, a “blinding” of its gaze allowing us to imagine or project identities and alterities, not to mention give play to our erotic imagination. The small sketch is linked with Afro-Cubism as Picasso had defined it— the curving draperies framing Malfatti’s muscular Torso resonate with the geometric folds around Picasso’s “African” and “Iberian” Demoiselles.65 The academic establishment in Rio performed according to the avant-garde script, castigating the Malfatti-centered Semana and ostracizing Graça Aranha for participating in such a scandalous event; São Paulo critics fanned the flames.66

The uproar secured a later nostalgia for this modernismo and its avant-garde celebrity, echoed thirty years later in Dias’s anticipation of Matarazzo’s “commotion” and Di Cavalcanti’s hope for a “return” to the Semana excitement. Complicating this narrative of an intentionally intercultural avant-garde (Malfatti), Cubism’s debt to African art went completely unacknowledged in Graça Aranha’s various speeches.67 Likely he had the more conventional deco sculptures of Italian-Brazilian Victor Brecheret in mind when “modernism” is mentioned (see fig.  4.11). Turning to Oswald de Andrade, we have a better case for the embrace of non-European motifs. Andrade’s twin manifestos (Pau-Brasil, 1924; Antropófago, 1928) rejected what I’ve termed sublimatory modernism, savaging Graça Aranha’s “spiritual” aspirations with a fiercely aboriginal and Afro-Brazilian set of possibilities— albeit expressed in largely French literary tropes. The first of Andrade’s manifestoes was blazoned in Rio’s daily newspaper Correio da Manhã (March 18, 1924); together with the 1928 Manifesto Antropófago, it launched an explicit demand for Brazilians to embrace the stereotype of their savagery and fully cannibalize all things European.68 Despite its mostly literary focus, Oswald’s poetic language was placed at the service of a visibility— a polychrome Brasilidade: The saffron and ochre hovels in the greens of the favela, under a blue from the age of discovery, are aesthetic facts. The carnival in Rio is the religious event of our race. Brazilwood. . . . The way we talk. The way we are. . . . Let us separate: imported poetry. And Brazilwood Poetry, for export.69

Andrade makes the narrative of this chapter explicit— the continuity of a Cold War Bienal with the Semana moderns lay precisely in the consistent search for a Brazilian art that could achieve import substitution, and even be worthy of “export,” thereby changing the world picture from within. Graça Aranha had aspired to this same goal through sublimation to universalist ideals; Andrade insisted it could only be done by cutting into the red lignum of Brazilwood after “eating” European modernism, syncretizing alien concepts at the molecular level and fusing them to local materials in root and branch. The stakes were clear in the cover designed by painter Tarsila do Amaral (Andrade’s partner) for the 1925 col-

Figure 4.4 Untitled Abaporu drawing by “Tarcila,” illustrating the Manifesto Antropófago, which appeared in the first “dentition” of the modernist magazine Revista de Antropofagia in May 1928. Courtesy Tarsila do Amaral family.

lection of anthropophagist poems Pau Brasil Cancioneiro (Brazilwood Songbook). Published in Paris by the Surrealist press Au Sans Pareil, the book clearly attempted to meet the manifesto’s call for “export poetry.” Like coffee or rubber, the “stuff ” of which the poems are made is packaged and stamped with a logo: Tarsila’s altered Brazilian flag. Transculturation, not translation, was the goal.70 As is well known, the work of visual art that became the icon of this hybridization (and the supposed inspiration for Andrade’s construction of antropofagia as a creative force) was Tarsila’s 1928 Abaporu (plate 25). Titled with the Tupi-Guarani word for “eater of men,” this bovine, honey-skinned creature has fully ingested Surrealism— her vast body alluding to slumbering, untapped power.71 Appearing again in the “Anthropophagite Manifesto” Andrade published in Rio that same year (fig. 4.4), the seated figure was destined to become a nationalist icon of multiracial Brazilian identity, forming the naked backdrop for a photo opportunity with President Dilma Rousseff and the visiting Obamas in 2011 (fig. 4.5; no one is there to look at the painting, but only to be compared to it).72 If Tarsila’s figures now seem naive icons of difference, we could see their postures as posed—whether coiling a New World / Cold War

123

Figure 4.5 March 19, 2011: “In front of the Abaporu, Obama, the U.S. first lady Michelle and [Brazilian President Dilma] Rousseff pose for a photo.” Photograph by Roberto Stuckert Filho; press release from Presidential Office, Brazil; caption as posted in “100 days of Dilma Rousseff,” http://noticias.terra.com.br/brasil. Courtesy Tarsila do Amaral family.

boa-like threat in Abaporu’s sinuous limbs, or letting dull wood block the “cosmic” Southern Cross in the national flag.73 The Pau Brasil flag thus replaces divine geography with commodity— a red-toned hardwood (pau = wood, brasil = red like an ember, from the Latin brasa) so valued by the French, Spanish, and Portuguese that its extraction both named the territory and cast the bulk of a continent into the colonial posture of “standing reserve.”74 The couple known as “Tarsiwald” lobbed their peculiarly provincial nugget (its Portuguese larded with indigestible Tupi) into a Paris pulsing with the 1924 Manifesto of international Surrealism, claiming the right to export this raw material as art. Manifestly, the export operation worked, as the very existence of this chapter for an English-language readership attests. But it worked initially through import substitution (even if the first publication was in Paris). The schism that now appears to separate Malfatti’s and Tarsila’s visual languages— dividing a Cubo-Futurism tinged with German Expressionism from a Purism-tinged proto-Surrealism— is not about freedom from European styles but about their relation to indigenous content. In 124

Chapter 4

my argument, this recapitulates the dialectic between Graça Aranha’s modernism of transcendence and Andrade’s of abjection— both part of the ambivalent project of early twentieth-century modernismo. Neither was opposed to nationalism, all were united in the project of Brasilidade, and each side aspired to international legitimacy for Brazil’s creative production.75 I have sharpened the contest between these protagonists because their crucial differences capture everything important about the founding of the São Paulo Bienal. In very real terms, the biennial’s founders and supporters were fighting these same battles decades later, arranging themselves in relation to the fertile muck of figurative indigeneity versus a deracinated internationalist abstraction, seeking import substitution and export developmentalism with equal intensity. What had changed by the time of the Bienal was the press of modernization itself, largely on hold during the Depression but reignited by a US-led war economy during the 1940s that matured into Brazilian populist campaigns after 1945. Between the two world wars, many other artist

groups had formed outside the Semana (and outside its upscale European neighborhood, Hygienópolis), sponsoring repeating exhibitionary structures that would be suggestive precursors to the Bienal.76 The technocratic, industrial thrust that came in the postwar period made the modernismo of the 1920s look quaint by comparison. “Modern art” institutions and independent salons were proliferating in nearby Argentina after the war, and in Brazil, museums featuring modern art took shape in Rio and São Paulo in the years following the removal of Vargas in 1945. That “bloodless coup” installed General/ President Eurico Gaspar Dutra, who restored constitutional democracy and inaugurated a neutral-seeming technocracy that promised a flattened political landscape in which to operate. In this new and shiny modernity, Oswald’s culture of antropofagia seemed confused and possibly even retrograde; Graça Aranha’s sublimating, international “modern spirit,” by contrast, was on the rise.77 The significance of Matarazzo’s emphasis on geometric abstraction for the first biennial in the southern hemisphere would be profound, constituting a unique pivot in the careening world pictures of the Cold War. More than mere “reportage,” the Matarazzo team engaged in advocacy for a specific kind of art that aligned with a technocratic future. Henceforth, the founding of an international biennial (or similar repeating exhibitionary complex) would be understood as a tactic in geopolitics as well as a gesture of national or municipal pride. It took the third world to teach the first world the value of emulation, the power of replication, and the utility of the “biennial” brand.78

Difference and Repetition

The borrowings of São Paulo’s Bienal were explicit— its Brazilian-born, Italian-educated, French-speaking, Swissvacationing founder, Ciccillo Matarazzo, was emulating the institutional organization of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, on the one hand, and the historic cosmopolitanism of Venice, on the other.79 When it opened, Brazilian artists understood the Bienal as “a well-oiled small replica” of the Venice model, but nonetheless believed it had been “adapted to our reality.” And therefore Brazilian artists “could start producing ‘stuff ’ for this confrontation.”80 Difference— allowed to refine itself in repetition— produced meaning and material in the world.

A singular historical event may erupt to mark “difference” from the everyday, but it only becomes salient, commemorated, through the act of repetition.81 Ironically, the differentiating repetitions of São Paulo’s Bienal would serve to eradicate other kinds of difference from the art. On the scale of events, repetition and difference involve contrasting agency: those who aim to differentiate are not necessarily those who will repeat. Thus Matarazzo’s “repetition” of MoMA was scripted by Nelson Rockefeller’s imperative to “differentiate” a museum of modern art from other São Paulo institutions. Venice intended to commemorate a kingly wedding anniversary with its repeating biennale; São Paulo wished only to repeat that repetition. Both Venice and São Paulo sought new reputations through their biennials. If Venice was at risk of being left out of newly nationalized Italy’s urban centers, then São Paulo was similarly aware of its denigration as crude industrial center, always in competition with Rio as the cultural and federal capital (until Brasília was dedicated in 1960). Similarly, just as Venice wished to demonstrate its capacity to be a gateway to the world for its new nation, São Paulo yearned to demonstrate its better grasp of a rapidly developing international economy and culture— no longer French expressive romantic, or Mexican revolutionary, but post-Bauhaus technorationalist. Venice would continue to endorse difference through the national “schools;” São Paulo eradicated difference in a brief for geometric abstraction. Also banishing the nationalist pavilions in which European culture had preened, the Brazilian biennial emerged from the crisis of that culture, even as the first biennial grew from the collapsing festal structure of world’s fairs. Most importantly for my purposes, where the Venice Biennale captured the geopolitics of imperialism, the São Paulo Bienal mirrored the coy geographies of the Cold War, in which Europe faced a new dynamic starring third world and nonaligned nations. In this context, Brazil’s traditionally “weak” nationalism (emerging without war or significant revolution) proved powerful, based as it was on diplomacy and creative interpretations of international law, a “nationalism for achieving ends” that had long wreathed itself in tropes of international universalism.82 Art played a major role in this project, as one art critic enthused: “Through Concretism we participate in this universal vision no longer as simple imitators of the School of Paris, New World / Cold War

125

but as participants in the creation of an international plastic language.”83 In the pithy summary offered by Brazilians Francisco Alambert and Polyana Canhête, to the Cold War nexus (among other forces), “the Bienal owes its existence.”84 Paulistas’ desires to become “a world artistic center” seemed newly possible in 1951.85 This would never be the materialized world picture of a European fairground, or even its ideational mapping on the terrain of the Venice Giardini. Instead the Bienal offered a dynamic universalism temporarily yoking together a polyglot population, eager for new information on the latest rhetorics of international art. Absent were the “schools” (of Paris, or New York); in their place came crowds of visitors, 99 percent of them Brazilian, seeing themselves mirrored and unified in universal geometry. Unlike Venice, São Paulo’s population was growing. From six hundred thousand in 1920, São Paulo had more than two million inhabitants by the time of the biennial’s founding in 1951. Thus the founders of São Paulo’s Bienal were not attempting to recapture their bygone leadership of a once vibrant world culture (à la Venice); they were moving as quickly as they could to give the rampant industrial and agricultural development of their region a specifically worldly, urban, cultural outline that might come to be recognized as Brazilian modernity. They utilized their Bienal to leverage participation by those who might have wearied of the Venetian routines. As of 1951, the United States had never won a gold medal in the Venetian show and was eager to strengthen a shared hemispheric culture. Indeed, São Paulo’s team was advised by interlocutors in the US to bring in new players beyond the reach of Europe— Haiti, Cuba, and others— becoming portal to a “third” world only then being articulated as such.86 As art historian Adele Nelson argues, the biennial complex built in 1954 constituted a visionary site “where collaboration with the states of the American hemisphere and nations of the world would bring about the industrial ascent of the newly democratic Brazil.”87 Rather than pavilions of specific nations, these would be pavilions of the concepts uniting them— a pavilion of all nations, a pavilion of all the Brazilian states, a pavilion shared between the biennial and “arts and industries.” The institutions sponsoring this new cosmopolitan identity had emerged in rapid succession: the São Paulo Galeria de Arte Moderna (1946), converted to the São 126

Chapter 4

Paulo Fundação (Foundation) de Arte Moderna (1947), paralleled by Chatô’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo (1947), accelerating (with Rockefeller’s help) the Museu de Arte Moderna (1949), which then, under Matarazzo’s leadership, inaugurated the Bienal (1951). Although eager gallerists such as Leo Castelli clearly hoped this activity might lead to a new market for New York artists, recent scholarship suggests that MoMA curators in particular wanted to avoid the impression they were touting purely American product; the museum thus deliberately sent European works to Brazil in order to appear “above” the Cold War propaganda campaigns.88 Paulista modernismo had flirted with Italian/German Cubo-FuturistExpressionism in the 1920s, but this postwar variant was predominantly French. Letters sent by curator Degand and director Matarazzo— even to Brazilians— were often in French, the diplomatic language of a colonial age.89 But this courtly lingua franca was only part of the story as Paulista industrialists increasingly kept an eye on the United States. The alliance between the United States and Brazil had deepened over the two world wars to inform the infrastructure of the Bienal, without fomenting allegiance to the emerging forms of US art. This involvement with the US on economic and political rather than cultural terms was well established. Although Nazi agents had played a role in a 1938 uprising against him, it took Vargas quite a while to embrace the “brothers to the North”; Brazil finally declared war on the Axis powers in August 1942, and his Estado Novo began to profit dramatically as US development moneys poured in.90 Not coincidentally, young Nelson Rockefeller timed his first visit to the country to follow that key decision, coming to stand at Vargas’s side on September 7, 1942, to celebrate Brazilian independence, once the country had sealed its “mutuality” with the Allies.91 Ciccillo Matarazzo Sobrinho was a direct beneficiary of US-funded expansion in Brazilian rubber and chemical production, as the Matarazzo enterprises diversified during the war. This rewarded decades of activity by the senior Matarazzo, who had immigrated in the late nineteenth century to build up a pork fat– rendering industry in the region of Sorocaba. He had worked his way up to steel and chemical industries by the time of World War I, which he spent in Italy. In the early 1930s he was named a count by the king of Italy; at this point the Matarazzo con-

glomerate had nearly four hundred factories throughout Brazil, generating corporate revenues surpassing those of the entire city of Rio and running a close second to São Paulo.92 The count died in 1937, but his family kept the multiple banks and factories humming. Ciccillo was one of the most productive scions of the Matarazzo fortune and, as such, was of great interest to the young Rockefeller most focused on Latin America: Nelson. By the time of the 1963 annual report sent to Nelson Rockefeller, the corporation Indústrias Reunidas F. Matarazzo listed assets of over $3 billion (roughly $78 billion today) in enterprises ranging from salt and cement to chemical textiles and finance.93 The Matarazzos and the Rockefellers were acquainted at least as early as 1947 and spent time together in Brazil in 1948, facilitated by Chatô (whom Matarazzo would soon eclipse in Rockefeller’s plans).94 Rockefeller’s staff helped Ciccillo’s wife, Yolanda, establish a modern furniture industry in Brazil, putting her in contact with the Knoll corporation in 1948 and supplying her with MoMA design books.95 The most colorful evidence of Rockefeller’s support for Matarazzo came in the fall of 1950, when Nelson arranged to send Ciccillo a Cadillac. (Alas, model and hue are not recorded.)96 There is no monolithic conspiracy here, but a relationship lubricated by social capital and gift exchange, personal enough to go under the radar of official business. As late as 1956 the Rockefeller man at the São Paulo office of the International Basic Economy Corporation (founded by Nelson Rockefeller after the war) was asking his New York colleagues if Nelson knew the Matarazzo couple: “She and her husband are both socially prominent and, I believe, intelligent people.”97 New York advisors were well aware of this fact, proudly identifying Matarazzo’s Museu de Arte Moderna to Rockefeller as “the Museum which you helped organize in 1946.”98

From Museum to Bienal

The postwar founding of the modern museum in São Paulo, and its subsequent biennial, built on extensive wartime relationships forged between Nelson Rockefeller and Brazil’s cultural elite of architects, critics, librarians, and modern artists.99 A complex tale, it can only be outlined here; key was Rockefeller’s personal stake in the postwar culture of Brazil. To the local aspirants for worldly cul-

ture, he recommended permanent nonprofit institutions in the image of his own mother’s Museum of Modern Art. Rockefeller’s postwar support was thus carefully leveraged: artworks were offered to two institutions— one led by Châto, the other by Matarazzo— but they would be handed over only when these entities constructed their organizational charts to the precise specifications of his staffers. The resulting institutions, the museums and thence the Bienal, would be privately funded, governed by nonprofit foundations, and advised by boards comprising citizens from the bourgeois sectors as well as the elites of Brazilian society. Before the war, Rockefeller had been instrumental in persuading President Franklin Roosevelt to match military interests in Latin America with “soft diplomacy.” FDR founded the US State Department’s Office for InterAmerican Activities (OIAA) under Rockefeller’s leadership; once the war was being won by the Allies, the OIAA was disbanded and reborn as the “Center” for those activities (CIAA, a private agency promoting “activities formerly carried on by the United States Government”),100 which in turn, by 1946, gave way to the more economically focused CIAC (Council for Inter-American Cooperation, Inc.), headquartered at 55 Wall Street.101 The CIAC continued soft diplomacy alongside its economic investments, reporting to Rockefeller in its 1946 final report that it had booked seventy-two exhibitions, handled five hundred artworks, and distributed seven thousand copies of an Art News special issue on Latin American art.102 The Art News feature distributed by CIAC was brief and serves to remind us that all of this cultural activity served fairly conservative aesthetic ends: four pages of pictures and three of text on Latin American drawings, some of which were already in US collections.103 The author, Cuban emigré José Gómez Sicre, served as MoMA’s advisor on Latin American art; his article featured Head of an Indian by Cândido Portinari, one of the “Good Neighbor” artists funded by the OIAA (fig. 4.6).104 Although the drawing was a 1937 study for Portinari’s mural for a Brazilian building, it bears a telling dedication: “For the American Department of State, Portinari, 1940.”105 Portinari’s dignified ethnographic portrait reminds us that those interested in stronger US-Brazilian ties were not necessarily plumping for abstract art. The difference of Brazilian subjects was very much on offer, within an international Realist style familiar all the way back to Jozef New World / Cold War

127

Figure 4.6 Cândido Portinari, Cabeça de Índio (Head of an Indian, 1937), crayon study for mural in Oscar Niemeyer’s Ministry of Education and Health, Rio de Janeiro. Support unknown, 55 × 44 cm. Inscribed “For the American Department of State, Portinari, 1940” at lower right; as published in Art News, October 1946. Courtesy of João Candido Portinari.

Israëls. This was the usual global working of art: a mainstream style presenting exotic difference, here Brazil’s indigenous Tupi population. It was precisely such an approach that would be marginalized by the coming Bienal, with Portinari a prime victim of its erasures.106 Thus it becomes explicit that vague US interests in familiar styles were often countered by the active agency of Brazilians themselves. These schemes to found museums in São Paulo were proxy struggles for regional politics and international esteem. On the one hand, real Brazilian institutions with buildings and artworks would be required to compete with Argentina, Uruguay, and the national capital, Rio. On the other, Rockefeller’s gifts to two institutions would 128

Chapter 4

balance power between the cultured Europhile Matarazzo (educated in Naples and Liège between the ages of ten and twenty) and the self-made Brazilian, Châto (who only learned to read at the age of ten). Often, their competition was played out in the tabloids as a drama of origins, as when Matarazzo threatened “to decide the question in napolitana fashion: with a foot to the chest and a razor at the throat,” to which Chateaubriand responded: “I will answer with paraibanos [rural coast] methods, using a fish knife to slice it off further down.”107 Both men held power in Paulista cultural circles; Rockefeller clearly favored Matarazzo’s suave managerial style. The New York philanthropist was led through the local tangle by Paulista art critic Sérgio Milliet, who was also head of the Municipal Library; the two had been put in contact by fellow librarian and Rockefeller advisor Carleton Sprague Smith. After months of careful background work, Milliet and Smith arranged for Rockefeller to visit São Paulo in November 1946 to announce his major loan of artworks to the city.108 It was clearly a promised gift, but there were strings attached. Thirteen works by blue-chip European modernists such as Léger, Chagall, and Masson, along with the American sculptor Alexander Calder and the emerging US painters Morris Graves and Byron Browne, were installed in São Paulo in the physical setting of the city library, supervised by Institute of Architecture director Eduardo Kneese de Mello (an “international style” architect featured in MoMA’s 1943 show Brazil Builds). While Rockefeller had agreed that half of the collection would be going to Chatô’s outfit, more exciting was the unnamed museum that had to be created to receive the other half. At the festive ceremony held at the Municipal Library that November, a commission was announced that would explore the possibility of founding (and funding) an actual modern museum. Its members initially included businessman and Semana intellectual Carlos Pinto Alves, modernist architects Kneese de Mello and Rino Levi, painter Quirino da Silva, and, ambivalently but necessarily, Milliet’s old friend Chateaubriand.109 Rockefeller’s holdings would remain in the art section of the library in curious limbo for three years, while Smith advised the Brazilian commission. At issue was the government’s interest in merging the promised gifts from Rockefeller with a recent bequest from Armando Penteado (Yolanda Matarazzo’s uncle) to form a state-

run “modern” museum. Working through details of the bequest, Rockefeller’s aides rejected this idea. Smith wrote the Paulistas in the summer of 1947 to ask one key question: “Is there anyone who can persuade the government to [leave] modern art to the private initiative of the gallery?” He explains that his would be “the ideal solution.” In this context— and explicitly on behalf of Rockefeller— Smith approves of engaging Ciccillo Matarazzo as director, explaining that he’d “already visited our museum here several times” and was “already engaged with our activities.” Smith’s advocacy was explicit: “The artistic circles [meios] here are sympathetic with the initiative of Ciccillo Matarazzo and the gallery.”110 Yoking Matarazzo syntactically to the new modern institution was the first step toward making it so. Finally, the museum’s board needed to be “representative” before Rockefeller would release his gift. It needed to have members from “the Paulista element [elementos paulistas] interested in contemporary art” (emphasis added), with such names as “Sérgio Milliet, Tarsila, Eduardo Kneese de Mello, Luiz Saia, Almeida Sales, etc.”111 The link to an earlier modernismo was clear. Advised by Brazilian modernists themselves, Smith declines to endorse the figurative artist Portinari, to take only one obvious omission. In place of his socially minded realism: Tarsila (still Brazil’s best-known international export) and Kneese de Mello (an early adopter of le Corbusier’s unite d’habitation international modernism). Saia and Sales were described elsewhere by Smith as “art critic” and “Chap most interested in moving pictures,” respectively.112 And most significantly of all, Milliet. Milliet’s liberal but by no means leftist views would function well in the Cold War; he would be the second Bienal’s director in 1953. For Milliet, modern art was best when freed from state control, under a government that protected such freedom. He had articulated this argument already in 1943, in a book he published in Brazil on art of the United States. Here he made a precocious anti-Soviet argument: “Today, anywhere in the world except perhaps in Russia, painting is well protected by government and has admirable prospects for renewal and for research open to artists.”113 For Rockefeller and Milliet— and as we’ll see, even for the leftist Pedrosa— the important thing was to keep culture “free.” This underdetermined idea would be key to the Bienal’s advocacy for geometric abstract art, art “free” from the requirement to educate

the people with pictures of indigenous heroes or state propaganda. The belief that art can be “free” in this way, yet also required to represent such freedom, is of course a prime Cold War ideology; figuration would be unnecessary in this geopolitical picture, a familiar constellation to historians of the Cold War.114 In August of 1947, Matarazzo agreed to become director; his return from a protracted stay in Switzerland was seen as nothing short of a “miracle” by Carlos Pinto Alves in a letter to Smith.115 Alves, still acting as director, assured Smith, “As soon as Ciccillo arrives I’ll let him know about your advice and suggestions and I’m sure that he will embrace everything that you’ve said with a lot of comprehension.”116 By January of 1948 Matarazzo was writing Rockefeller directly: “We trust we can count with the cooperation of the ‘Museum of Modern Art’ enabling us to realize some of these exhibitions,” signing officially, “Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho.”117 Swiftly, Ciccillo consolidated all of the stakeholders for an internationally modern museum under an explicitly MoMA-like chain of command that included an advisory board, plans for a bookstore, and ambitions to show cinema, photography, and design— consecrating the new museum’s statutes with an official signing in Rockefeller’s presence at the New York MoMA in 1949 (figs. 4.7 and 4.8). Within a year, as the fledgling museum prepared the first representation of Brazil at the Venice Biennale, Matarazzo conceived of a São Paulo Bienal as another front in the Museu’s uncompromising campaign to promote geometric abstract art. Taking up the reins, Matarazzo was explicit in his ambitions: “Having been in Switzerland last year,” he wrote to Rockefeller, “I was able to meet some artists and critics and had the idea that an exhibition of Abstract Art in São Paulo would cause a great repercussion and cause the public to discuss the particular form of painting. With this exhibition we have in mind to show international artist paintings, originating from New York London and Paris.”118 What, at that moment, did “Abstract Art” and “international” mean to Matarazzo, emanating from those three metropoles? The opening biennial two years later would provide an answer, but the first foray was this inaugural show for the new museum. Matarazzo’s pencil draft in French alludes to “Une exposition ‘De Cézanne á Picasso,’” a historical detail omitted in the final letter. Finessing exact contents allowed an abstraction to New World / Cold War

129

Figure 4.7 Penciled organogramme of the São Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna (in Matarazzo’s hand?), drawn on the back of museum stationery, ca. 1948. Courtesy Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo.

be made of the very concept of “international” and “Abstract Art,” allowing these to remain idealized and empty containers.119 What Rockefeller himself made of “Abstract Art” is unrecorded, but he did convey to Matarazzo that “the Museum is very glad to cooperate with you in any way possible,” releasing his works to join works from the Matarazzos themselves for the museum’s opening show of the evolutionary development from “figurativism” to “abstractionism” in 1949.120 Outside loans were to be secured by Parisian gallerist René Drouin as the paid European liaison for the exhibition, a move Carleton Sprague Smith approved: “René Drouin has already been talking with D’Harnoncourt, Nelson, and me. The idea of organizing an exposition of really modern and abstract art seems excellent, and we think that the time is right. The ‘rumors’ [boatos] from Rio are also very animated.” But the very 130

Chapter 4

next day Smith reminded the museum’s leaders, “You now need specialists who will take care of the artistic direction effectively and full time.”121 Matarazzo’s appointed curator, Léon Degand, would take up that position, actively filling the empty container of “modern abstract art” with what Serge Guilbaut characterizes as “utopian and optimistic geometric abstraction” rather than “individualistic and depressed informal abstraction.”122 Degand relocated to Brazil from Paris. Dealers such as Drouin (on retainer) and the young Italian-born gallerist Leo Castelli (on spec) would work out of Paris and New York. Eminence gris Marcel Duchamp was solicited by Matarazzo to work as an advisor: “I thank you deeply [vivement] for the part you have played in this enterprise of the Foundation of modern art.”123 Duchamp’s response is unrecorded, but Castelli was eager to support the Brazilians. As he wrote Matarazzo (in French!), “We’ve

Figure 4.8 Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo meeting with Nelson A. Rockefeller at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to sign the statutes of the São Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna, 1949. (In the background is Giorgio de Chirico’s Evil Genius of the King.) Photographer: Leo Trachtenberg for Trayton Studios, New York. Courtesy Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo.

chosen the works with much care to give the Brazilian public as exact and complete an idea as possible of the importance of Abstract Art in the USA.” Castelli then appends an astonishing list of promised loans: Josef Albers, William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Burgoyne Diller, Jimmy Ernst, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Fritz Glarner, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Graves, Stanley William Hayter, Hans Hofmann, Loren MacIver, Roberto Matta Echaurren, George L.  K. Morris, Robert Motherwell, Wolfgang Paalen, I. Rice Pereira, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Kay Sage, Attilio Salemme, Sonia Sekula, Leon Polk Smith, Mark Tobey, and even the obscure “Brooklyn housewife,” abstractionist Janet Sobel.124 Not a one of these canvases would make it to São Paulo. Millionaire “Maecenas” Matarazzo refused to pay

the outgoing customs or negotiate a waiver. As the deadline neared, Castelli wrote with exasperation: “That’s everything, dear sir. I now await with impatience . . . the customs exemption without which we have no power to proceed.”125 Having set the value for the export at two thousand dollars, he waited in vain. Degand complained to a Brazilian colleague (in French): “Matarazzo doesn’t accept, and there are so many chances for works not to arrive, and time goes by. With these conditions our exposition will be reduced, and will be nothing less than a catastrophe.” Degand mustered a final burst of optimism for his Rio correspondent: “[But] even in the absence of the New York works, it will constitute a show of the center of artistic activity, very demanding, as in Paris.”126 New World / Cold War

131

Figure 4.9 Trianon esplanade in São Paulo, prepared for the temporary installation of the first São Paulo Bienal, 1951. Photograph courtesy of Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, and Folhapress, São Paulo.

Was it purely a financial decision to cancel the shipment from the United States? Or was it Matarazzo’s ambivalence about installing the raw, alien works of the New York School, still relatively unknown and certified only by ambitious gallerists? Installing the managerial structure and organogramme of New York’s MoMA in his institution was one thing, but publicly identifying with US cultural exports was another. When the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art finally opened its inaugural show on March 8, 1949, there would be very few works from the United States. The installation was at the Trianon, where the first Bienal would open two years later (fig.  4.9). Not only had this municipal building been wrested from Chatô’s Museum of Art (which was initially to open there), but it was the site where the earlier modernismo had been declared, on the most fashionable shopping street in São Paulo. The contest between “figurativist” and “abstractionist” art was played out in the key of Paris. As Degand enumerated, works by “Léger, de Manessier, le Moal, Lapicque, Singier, Schneider, Magnelli, Deyrolle, etcetera” were shown, most of them now forgotten, but clearly “abstractions” of a kind.127 What kind? Increasingly nonobjective and intended to be universal. In place of Léger’s tubular Cubist workers, for example, an 132

Chapter 4

artist such as Jean Deyrolle would offer jagged intersecting planes of color, given cryptic, one-word titles— in Esperanto!128 Where was difference, local and embodied? Not all were willing to let that question go. Most movingly, one set of opponents to the teleological move to abstraction was a group of self-identified Paulista “colored intellectuals,” who published a plea on March 29 addressed “To the People of São Paulo” from “O Centro de Cultura ‘Luiz Gama,’” named for the former slave, Romantic writer, and prominent Brazilian abolitionist. The signatories wanted to “fight racism and see the Brazilian people happy and united without any international interference” (emphasis added), becoming “a nation which owns its own wealth.” “Neither racist nor Jacobin [nem jacobina]”, the collective included in its leaflet a long list of wishes, most importantly, “for support of all cultural movements for the benefit of the people and the support of needy students.” The problems in Brazil were not “isolated problems of white, black, and yellow”; they were national problems, “problems of all of us that must be solved for the benefit of the nation and its children.” Signed by journalists, surgeons, lawyers, a salesman, an accountant, a graphic designer, and an academic economist, the flier is particu-

Figure 4.10 Left: Military motorcade called out for the dedication of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo during the visit of Nelson Rockefeller, July 1950. Right: Rockefeller delivering his speech. Photographs courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center.

larly interesting in light of my claim that the adoption of “abstraction” was intended— and perceived— as removing difference from the face of Brazil. National problems of inequity— be they social, economic, or racial— were to be abstracted under the broad technocratic brush of a “nonobjective” art, seen to be aligned with foreign technocratic plans for the development of Brazilian resources.129 What these “thinkers of color” could not foresee was the evolution of this challenge over the long term— how the Museu and its Bienal would inject their provocations into the yeasty Brazilian art world, causing the rise of one of the most powerful critiques of racism and coloniality yet devised— the reconfigured antropofagia positioning “difference,” with a vengeance, into what thereby became a global art world in the late 1960s. As for Rockefeller, his objectives had been met, cemented by the transfer of gifts to the new museum and to Chatô’s more traditional Museu d’Arte, which postponed its official inaugural until the donor could attend in July

of 1950 (fig. 4.10).130 Rockefeller’s speech celebrated Brazil’s “private philanthropy” and drew heavily on President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1939 speech at MoMA during the rise of Fascism: “The arts that ennoble and refine life flourish only in the atmosphere of peace . . . only where men are free can the arts flourish. . . . The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same. What we call liberty in politics results in freedom in the arts. . . . In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things, we are furthering democracy itself.”131 Rockefeller’s own Cold War platitudes echoed FDR: “Except where it is controlled and subverted by reactionary totalitarian states [art] is the highest form of expression of free man.”132 Delivered in English, Rockefeller’s speech was immediately translated into Portuguese for the first number of the Chatô museum’s journal, Habitat (1951).133 Not only had the centrist Sérgio Milliet laid out a similar line in his 1943 history of North American art, but even the leftist Mário Pedrosa had come to praise art in terms of its freeNew World / Cold War

133

dom to be stylistically radical rather than convey socialist content.134 Like other formerly left-wing intellectuals in the Cold War, from New York’s Clement Greenberg to the Parisian Léon Degand, Pedrosa was acknowledging the new reality that Cícero Dias had celebrated and Matarazzo’s exhibition had proclaimed: instead of negros and mulattos, Brazil should foment artistic revolutions in painting “free” to be abstract.135

Plastic Revolutions

The Bienal reinforced a consensus emerging from the “figurativism to abstractionism” show, coming down definitively on the abstract side of the balance; lingering desires to figure difference would be replaced by forms held to be universal in their rational geometries. The conversion to European standards of abstraction was already prefigured in Degand’s brief for the modern Museu: “On the one hand, we will contribute to the expansion of the European schools. On the other hand, through this expansion, we will stimulate Brazilian artists, who have been deprived, with a few rare exceptions, of all real contact with the great masters.”136 Built up by the arrogant certainty of its first curator and fanned by repetition, the flames of the figurative-to-abstract teleology burned with a white heat in the first two Bienals, masking the underlying contest being staged between regionalist nationalism (difference, figuration, protectionism) and globalist internationalism (geometry, abstraction, developmentalism) in postwar Brazil.137 The surprise was that most influential Brazilian critics and artists put up with the neo-imperialism of its Europhilic agenda to craft their own syncretic world picture in the light of the Bienal’s ambitions. The principled absence of national pavilions played their part, since every Bienal would potentially be reporting on “universal” trends. Artists would continue to be seen and funded as national representatives, but this symbolic order of patriotic competition functioned within the universal-international. This allowed organizers to tap diverse sources of support from embassies, cultural agencies, diplomatic “pouches,” foreign chambers of commerce, and globally active businesses such as shipping firms— soliciting the likes of Japanese-Brazilian associations, or the US-headquartered Rotary Club, for prize money. Correspondingly, other countries’ press corps might show an interest if prizes had been funded 134

Chapter 4

by their own nationals, where an exhibition without this competitive sheen might pass without notice. Certainly the Brazilian press could not get enough of the staged drama featuring the home team versus the foreigners.138 The first iteration of the Bienal was begun by Degand but completed by Lourival Gomes Machado. Its Brazilian section was seen to favor “the abstract-geometric tendency,” featuring young artists such as Ivan Serpa, Almir Mavignier, Abraham Palatnik, and Antonio Maluf.139 Palatnik had at first been excluded, since his kinetic Aparelho Cinecromático (Kinechromatic Apparatus) did not fit the preexisting categories of “painting” or “sculpture,” comprised as it was of an electrified ensemble of colored bulbs framed behind a translucent screen, their lights and colors slowly animated by rotating baffles inside (plate 28). Only the passionate advocacy of Mário Pedrosa behind the scenes resulted in Palatnik’s inclusion and honorable mention award, well after the catalogue had gone to press.140 Such hip, technocratic experiments were balanced by the old heroes of modernismo— Victor Brecheret with Índio e a Suaçuapara (The Indian and the Mountain Lion— the latter rendered in Tupi; fig. 4.11), which won the national sculpture prize. Matarazzo’s friend Danilo Di Prete controversially won the national painting prize for his small, inconsequential still-life Limãos (Limes, or Lemons); some speculated it was payback for Di Prete’s having had the idea to mount a São Paulo Bienal in the first place.141 Apparently an abstract sculpture by a Brazilian— Franz Weissman’s Cubo Vazado, or “Emptied Cube” (1951)— was sidelined in the competition because of its obvious soldering marks, leading the artist to sputter, “No one had taken into consideration that it had not been made in Switzerland, but in Belo Horizonte!”142 The reference to Switzerland alluded to the most prestigious international award, which was given to a completely nonobjective work by Swiss Bauhäusler Max Bill. As art historian Michael Asbury theorizes, there was “no reconciliatory intent” behind the jury’s decision to make national awards to “modernist” but still vaguely figurative Brazilians, while giving international recognition to geometric abstraction: On the contrary, they emphasized the abyss that separated those who still held [figurative] Modernismo as the locus of national culture from a hitherto timid young generation of artists and intellectuals

Figure 4.11 Victor Brecheret, Índio e a Suaçuapara (Indian with Mountain Lion; the final word is in Tupi-Guarani, spelled as in the catalogue for the first São Paulo Bienal), 1951. Bronze, 79.5 × 101.8 × 47.6 cm (31 × 40 × 19 inches). Collection MAMSP—Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. Image courtesy Fundação Escultor Victor Brecheret.

interested in the rationalist possibilities for art in the post-war era.143

Per Asbury, the split emerged only because the international jury mostly ignored the national section. This had surveyed Brazilian modernism, extending from Tarsila’s 1924 Purist-style painting EFCB (which won an award), back to Malfatti’s modernist portrait from 1916, A Boba.144 Brazilian poet Décio Pignatari concurs that the jury’s “main concern was with the international prizes. . . . [T]he Brazilians were left to divide their share of the cake according to their own taste.”145 The “timid” young rationalists Asbury invokes were exhilarated by the prize for Max Bill, whose work formed a pointed contrast to Brecheret’s nativist narrative. The prize for Bill’s elegant nonobjective steel sculpture, Tripartite Unity (1948– 49; fig.  4.12), had been funded by a Federation of São Paulo Industries.146 The work’s “Unity”— split into a Christological trinity— was based on the geometry of the Möbius strip. Patinated in chrome and installed for full perambulatory viewing, the gleaming, flawlessly welded sculpture provided the perfect emblem for technocracy’s promise to “unify” mani-

fold global difference into a single dynamic form. As the modernist poet Murilo Mendes advised his Brazilian readers, visitors “should move around it several times,” the reward being that “your surprise will never diminish. It is a major work of our time, a happy point of encounter between science and art” that would provoke “a particular kind of revolving attention” by means of “dialectical work that proposes new forms of contemplation.” Its dynamic forms encapsulated “the strength of a whole culture.”147 The injunction to move, and move again, in order to create “new forms of contemplation” is a marker of blind epistemology’s multisensorial tactics. Mixed with other purely visual injunctions, Mendes intuits a profound turning of the Brazilian public, whose “revolving attention” (e.g., distracted, embodied, peripatetic) could be analogized to Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” (examined in chapter 1)— a new media processing that utilizes vision but intermittently blinds and illuminates it, propelling the sense of alternative worlds coming into being. Mendes’s encomium tracked with his view of the entire Bienal, in which “the interpenetration of ideas, permitted by the advance of technology, also causes a combination of elements that increasingly arrive to create an internaNew World / Cold War

135

Figure 4.12 Max Bill, Dreiteilige Einheit / Unidad tripartita / Tripartite Unity, 1948–49, awarded the International Sculpture Prize at the first São Paulo Bienal. Stainless steel, 47.9 × 34.8 × 38.6 inches (114 × 88.3 × 98.2 cm). Collection Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph courtesy Hans Gunter Flieg / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy Max Bill Archive at Max, Binia + Jakob Bill Foundation, Adligenswil, Switzerland.

tional visual language, without excluding artists’ own national values.” Positioned within a “visual” international language, the tropes of turning and multisensorial apprehension are nonetheless important for this perspicacious chronicler of the Bienal. Bill’s sculpture embodied “a new world in process [in which] the notion of space has changed,” reflected as well in “new architecture, to which painting and sculpture are linked so strongly.” Mendes’s exhilarated review concluded that “the world was at the Trianon,” making and feeling a new world picture.148 If Bill’s modest modern sculpture now seems banal in its tasteful abstraction, twisting smoothly on its pedestal and just waiting to be scaled up, in marble, for countless corporate plazas in the 1970s, it is important to emphasize that in 1951 Paulistas could look at it and see a careening new universe— with their own mobility supplying the velocity for revolution. If they turned to the local library or the Museu’s bookstore for illumination, Bill’s many publications on konkrete kunst would have given support to their feelings of cosmic universalism: Concrete art is ultimately the pure expression of harmonious measure and law. It orders systems and uses artistic resources to give life to these orders. . . . It strives for universality.149

Updated in 1949 for publication in Zürich, Bill’s 1936 manifesto continued to stabilize difference through mathematical universals, transcending the body that beheld the art. Yet Brazilian viewers in the 1950s insisted on the body, revolving and turning theirs to make “contemplation” visceral as well as reflective. This would later become a trope of Latin American kinetic art— work made with motors and gears in the North would seem noisy and crass compared to Southern tableaux that often relied on scintillations activated by a mobile viewer.150 Max Bill’s work was exceptionally well known in São Paulo, having been featured in a retrospective at (Chatô’s) Museu de Arte in March 1951 (fig. 4.13). Since works by Alexander Calder were also on view as part of the Rockefeller donation, Chatô’s exhibition staged a clear comparison between the European and the American, the geometric and the biomorphic, the industrially crafted and the whimsically engineered. At this early moment in the postwar story, Calder’s drifting, playful blobs recalled an

Figure 4.13 Max Bill retrospective at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, March 1951. Images are from Building on a Construct, ed. Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009), 85, and Max Bill Oeuvres (Centre national d’art contemporain, Paris, 1969), 44. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy Max Bill Archive at Max, Binia + Jakob Bill Foundation, Adligenswil, Switzerland.

old-fashioned Surrealism; Bill’s mathematical rhetoric and Bauhaus bona fides suggested, by contrast, pragmatic tools for building a rational, technocratic future.151 It was a natural segue to move Tripartite Unity to the Bienal that October.152 In 1951, Brazilian-born artists and immigrants, already exposed to Concretism through their colleagues in Argentina, found such ideas intoxicating. Clearly prompted by the Bienal, in December 1952 a group laid claim to their New World / Cold War

137

own brand of Concretismo, “erupting” in the modern museum as “O Grupo Ruptura” (the Rupture Group), with many signatories from Rio joining Paulistas’ opposition to the academy. Brazilian Concretismo emerged, but as already different from Bill’s Bauhaus-inflected geometries. In fact, Tripartite Unity was itself unusual in Bill’s oeuvre, which was otherwise dominated by hyperflat paintings of largely straight-edged diamonds, squares, and other polygons. For Bill, “concrete” retained the Suprematist ambition of certain Constructivist ideas emerging from Russia and percolating through Theo van Doesburg’s Amsterdam de Stijl group, where the “Concrete Art” ambition had first been announced.153 But if the DutchSwiss usage held onto the faint aura of a Theosophist spirituality (calling to Graça Aranha’s sublimation), the Brazilians’ countervailing interests in materiality would interpret “concrete” in substantive terms. These could begin to amalgamate aspects of Andrade’s abjection— whether the substance was physical, as in the lime-based building material “concrete,” or metaphorical, like the nativism of an earlier building material— “brazilwood.” Concrete Art could seem to promise an actual built thing, confirming the Paulistas’ pervasive ideologies of development over and above “abstraction”— a term that Bill himself rejected: We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules— without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction. [1936– 49; emphasis added]154

The highly positive São Paulo reception was gratifying to Bill, whose international fame was burnished by a grand prize at the Milan Design Triennial that same year. Following these triumphs, West Germany appointed him rector of a rehabilitated design school in Ulm in 1952; he modeled it on the Dessau Bauhaus and the pedagogy of his core mentors Albers, Kandinsky, and Klee.155 Bill traveled to São Paulo and proved both controversial and influential, recruiting Argentinean Tomás Maldonado to teach in Ulm while rendering derisive opinions about some Brazilian architecture: “utter anarchy in building, jungle growth in the worst sense.”156 Invited to serve on the international jury selecting the winners of the second 138

Chapter 4

Bienal, Bill was a key figure promoting rationalist, geometric, cool-headed art in the procapitalist “Rockefeller” Bienal— holding difference and “jungle” allusions firmly at bay. Bill’s own commitments to left politics provided no friction. As art historian Ronaldo Brito comments, the embrace of modern architecture and geometric abstraction during the heady years of the first and second Bienal was “the result of unusual compromises between the country’s right and left.”157 It helped that Bill had spent the war in neutral Switzerland and by 1952 headed a major design school rehabilitating “the damaged authority of science and rationality.”158 His belief was that good design—gute Form— could convert “consumer goods” to the status of good culture, “the route by which art can leave its ivory tower and return to life— no longer a substitute for life, but as an integral, supporting part of it.”159 Bill was the new hero of Brazilian developmentalism. If Bill’s award seemed justified, locals were shocked by the absence of any award for the fazenda-born, internationally known Portinari. Dubbed the “Picasso of Brazil”— predicate internationalism at work— Portinari had been Brazil’s choice to send abroad during the OIAA “Good Neighbor” days (figure 4.6). He was also chosen by his friend Niemeyer to adorn Brazil’s 1939 pavilion in the “World of Tomorrow” New York world’s fair, having provided decorative murals for Niemeyer’s buildings back in Brazil (probably the target of Bill’s “jungle” epithet, as they syncretically melded decorative Portuguese colonial azulejos— blue patterned tiles— with figuration).160 Perhaps nothing signaled “independence” from earlier internationalisms (and Rockefeller/US State Department/ Brazilian propaganda department [DIP] approval) more successfully than ignoring Portinari at the first Brazilian Bienal.161 The immigrant who won the “Brazilian” national award, Di Prete, added insult to injury. Asked “What happened in the arts in Brazil between 1922 and 1951?” he answered cruelly, “Nothing,” collapsing anything before his win at the Bienal into a provincial abyss.162 Mário Pedrosa reviewed this first Bienal as continuing the contest set up by the museum’s 1949 “figurative/ abstract” show, endorsing the wisdom of its teleology (and ignoring Bill’s insistence that Concrete Art was not abstract). “Real modernists,” in Pedrosa’s account, hewed as closely as possible to pure abstraction, as set out by the Russian Suprematists, whose nonobjective rigor stood in

contrast to the waning School of Paris, those “bastards of Picasso, Matisse, or Braque,” whose hackneyed, still figurative canvases were retardataire.163 Pedrosa approved Bill’s geometries— but rather than the Bauhaus, he situated them in an unbroken continuity with Malevich, granting to that lineage a progressive politics. Other committed leftists were not leaving the realist camp so easily, and they excoriated the politics of this developmentalist Bienal. The Communist described to Rockefeller as a “brilliant young chap,” architect Vilanova Artigas, penned his critique in the leftist daily Hoje (Today).164 Under the polemical title “The Bienal: An expression of bourgeois decadence,” Artigas wrote: The Bienal will create among us a comprador (shopper) class for abstract art, a class that already appears in the “sharks” who have linked their names to the prizes. This comprador class and the government will understand the importance of so-called modern art. They will create a market for artists who will thereby have their problems solved as long as they paint what buyers want, that is, as long as they paint like the Bienal.165

The “shark” was a consistent leftist moniker for capitalists in the Brazilian public sphere, also making an appearance on a placard carried by protesters during the opening: “one less cigar for the shark, and one more loaf for the banker,” a calculation of funds moving from one elite to another.166 But picketing leftists were outnumbered by the academicians, who roused some two hundred members of their Paulista Association for the Fine Arts to hold a “protest memorial” service lamenting the “fake artistic credo” of the modernist Bienal, which they found “antiChristian, anti-Latino, and anti-Brazilian.” Matarazzo could confidently assume his centrist agenda would win out, but poet Décio Pignatari recalled Ciccillo being ignored at the opening by the very elite he relied on for support: “drinking, laughing, and chatting in the hall, doubtless not even hearing his speech.”167 The Bienal raised the specter of a “shopping” class through its international prizes and national awards, part of the implicit marketing of style that we have tracked through exhibited objects throughout this book, from Powers’s Neoclassical Slave and its tabletop replicas, to Israëls’s Realist Cottage Madonna and its reproductive

prints, to the universalizing of Picasso’s Guernica, whose world tour would include the second São Paulo biennial. If the academicians’ right-wing criticism went unnoticed, Artigas’s leftist attack stung. Evidence for consumerism was right there, in the furniture ads at the back of the Bienal catalogue: developmentalism as commodity culture! our modern sofas and streamlined toasters! Yolanda Penteado Matarazzo had cultivated the Knoll corporation’s support, via MoMA, toward this very goal; and of course Artigas’s own modernist architecture would contribute the perfect environment for such furnishings. Younger artists were divided on the Bienal. Of course some, such as Palatnik, were lucky enough to be included; many were immigrants eager to make their mark. Others, more embedded in the community, issued a manifesto supporting the leftist position, railing against the “infamous propaganda of abstract art, disconnected from our life and our traditions.”168 Without a socially engaged realism, and its recognizable workers, peasants, “negros e mulatos,” how could the genuine concerns of the country be kept in view? How could stainless steel in an elegant curve possibly speak to Brazil’s contemporary realities? Brasilidade itself was at stake. Despite the Argentinean Bayley’s eloquent defense of abstraction’s classlessness, and Italian-Brazilian Waldemar Cordeiro citing Gramsci to call for Concretism’s “symbiosis with the masses” through which “art purifies itself of intellectualizing elements,” the Bienal’s brief for geometric abstraction left “the people” out of the picture.169 Most damningly, the Bienal was clearly identified with the most celebrated “sharks” of them all, the Rockefellers: A true party for the sharks: the opening of the Rockefeller Biennial inaugurated itself. Its teratological works were exhibited with great ceremony . . . , while the people who paid for it all stayed out in the rain, watching the fancy ones’ parade.170

Battles over the Bienal would continue, but the upshot was overdetermined. By the first Bienal’s opening, the call for an art that would figure the concerns of the working class, or the “intellectuals of color,” or the needy students, or those disenfranchised Paulistas in the rain, or even the diverse crowd straining to understand Rockefeller’s English in 1950, were swept into Brazil’s developmental obsessions. As the twin photos of crowds at the Trianon and New World / Cold War

139

Figure 4.14 Top: Under the new Oscar Niemeyer marquise, artists await their awards for the second São Paulo Bienal, 1954. Among those in the front row: Maria Martins, Antonio Bandeira, Alfredo Volpi, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, and Arnaldo Pedroso d’Horta. Courtesy Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo. Bottom: Audience for Nelson A. Rockefeller’s speech at the São Paulo Museum of Art, 1950. Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center.

in Rockefeller’s audience show, “the people” were mostly burning to see how modernity figured itself, yearning to become part of that picture (figs. 4.14, 4.15). Sheltered by Niemeyer’s generous open-air “marquise,” Paulistas were clearly quite interested in the art/developmentalism equa140

Chapter 4

tion and the cultural mobility it promised. Poet Murilo Mendes, who located that mobility in the very bodies of visitors turning and turning around Max Bill’s sculpture, had nothing but praise for “the special lunatics” who had the audacity to found a Brazilian Bienal:

Figure 4.15 Crowds pressing at the entrance of the first São Paulo Bienal, installed at the Trianon, 1951. Courtesy Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

Ciccillo Matarazzo and his direct collaborators restore to us the confidence in Brazilians’ ability to achieve. For those who know this country a little, given the delay of our culture, the difficulties and complications of all kinds, including those derived from the international situation, it is positively insane for a prodigy to organize a cultural totality of this importance and magnitude in a few months— a fairytale transposed into tangible and concrete reality.171

Pedrosa, too, was tireless in defending the Bienal’s importance, praising its emphasis on geometric abstraction and castigating the calls for an art of the working class as just so much pandering by “Stalinist Creole scribes” who “parrot the Kremlin bureaucrats,” in a riposte to Artigas titled “The São Paulo Bienal and the Communists.”172 Since he was one, he could criticize— citing Lenin and Trotsky with the best of them, he nonetheless joined Mendes and Milliet in backing what we can term, for Anglo-American readers at least, “MoMA liberalism.” Echoing the New York museum director Alfred Barr’s multi-editioned What Is Modern Art? (ten copies of which were stocked in the São Paulo modern museum’s bookshop along with the second edition of the Bienal catalogue), Pedrosa drew the history of abstraction as an evolution from Northern Europe— from Malevich, to Rodchenko, to Brazil— a story of heroic progress. These

uncompromising geometric abstractionists, once protected by Lenin’s revolutionary state, were now branded by Kremlin Stalinists as “degenerate” and “bourgeois” in Pedrosa’s stirring account.173 It was up to Brazil to pick up the baton. For Pedrosa then, the realist works of Portinari, with his heartbreaking renditions of St. Francis in Niemeyer’s church— this mendicant evocative of Brazilian poverty so realistically portrayed that Catholic authorities refused to consecrate the structure— were reclassified as derivative of imported styles. Somehow concrete abstraction was different; rather than “imported,” it was transferred to Brazil, neutralizing nationalism so that local artists could now be part of the global production of “transformative reason itself.”174 The Bienal had played the crucial role in effecting this transfer, in Pedrosa’s enthusiastic account: The artistic environment is now one of effervescence. Gone is the suffocating lethargy. Artists begin to fight for their ideas, and for their aesthetic convictions. Excellent! [Now we have] a kind of census of what is, after the fractious landmark that was our first Bienal.175

Making that landmark real, “concretizing” and converting it from an organogramme in the files to a significant institution, came with the first repetition of the Bienal. Capturing funds from São Paulo’s four hundredth anniverNew World / Cold War

141

Figure 4.16 Exterior and interior views of Oscar Niemeyer’s Pavilhão da Bienal, 1954, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo.

sary, Matarazzo commissioned permanent architectures of modernity, modernism, and modernization (fig. 4.16). These would triumphantly manifest the new Brazil and the Bienal that had envisioned it— a world picture that endorsed “international style modernism” with a Brazilian twist. Those ever so subtle adjustments— the landscaping by Roberto Burle Marx around the clean geometric abstraction of the new Bienal headquarters, the marquise that Oscar Niemeyer built to connect the biennial’s nonnational pavilions— would consolidate “Tropical modernism” in the world. In that accommodation with Brazilian particularities, difference would reemerge.

Modulor Moderns

The rapidity of Brazil’s uptake of abstract modernism was breathtaking: the 1949 figuration versus abstraction 142

Chapter 4

contest, the 1951 Max Bill retrospective, the inauguration of the Bienal and award to Bill’s Tripartite Unity shortly thereafter, and then the 1952 Ruptura show that exploded out of the modern museum in São Paulo to announce that Brazilian Concretismo had truly arrived on the international stage. (And, as Artigas had feared, the market.) Printing their manifesto in the museum catalogue, Grupo Ruptura announced themselves as “the first association of Brazilian artists to do research in geometrical abstraction,” noisily rejecting naturalism and its figurative affines.176 Artistsignatories included Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, Waldemar Cordeiro, Kazmer Féjer, Leopoldo Haar, Luiz Sacilotto, and Anatol Wladyslaw (plate 26). If Cordeiro was Italian-Brazilian (like Matarazzo himself), many of the other names were Central and Eastern European— for some a celebration of “São Paulo’s status as a city of immigrants,” while for others implying the reliance on Europeans, yet again, to form Brazilian culture.177 What the “rupture” was cutting into should now become clear— it wasn’t “tradition” per se, but old French modernismo: Tarsila and Portinari’s “negros e mulatos,” the marginalized avatars of first-generation antropofagia, and the folkloric or ethnic figurations of the earlier Dias. With the Rupture Group, the sublimation of difference seemed complete. As scholar Michael Asbury aptly puts it, the Ruptura manifesto was “associated with the transformation of the nation itself through its emphasis on the creation of objects in the world, as opposed to abstracting forms from it.”178 Bill’s Concrete Art was similarly opposed to “abstracting from the world,” but his was an ideational concretism— Brazilians would make it out of actual concrete. Certain Cold War objectives were satisfied by Concretismo. Without seeming crassly propagandistic, it could establish “a connection with the non-figurative tradition without subjecting itself to the North American model”— while keeping the fiduciary and institutional “freedom” from governmental influence that Rockefeller had advised.179 In the complex aesthetic rhetoric that floated above such political and economic contexts, the more Bill cited Albers, the more Pedrosa would cite Malevich— for both, Brazil would be the place where the interrupted trajectory of modernity could be continued, redeeming what a bellicose Europe had crushed under violent boots. And so plans for the 1953 Bienal got underway, amplified by Matarazzo’s much-desired appointment as coordinator of the 1954 celebration of São Paulo’s four

hundredth anniversary, signifying his close relations with the city’s mayor and the governor of São Paulo state. Ciccillo initially hoped to persuade the US Chamber of Commerce to invest in the planned Palace of the Arts; unfortunately Nelson Rockefeller’s business associates in Brazil had already written him that “the Chamber does not regard the Palácio das Artes as feasible.”180 But the municipal and state governments ponied up, and architecture soon rose in Ibirapuera Park.181 Painted luminously white with dynamically patterned geometric brise soleils, the new buildings expressed the vision of a team of transculturating designers, among them lead architect Oscar Niemeyer, architect Hélio Uchôa, structural engineer Joaquim Cardozo, and landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx. Together they produced a dramatic new environment for the second Bienal.182 Known as the “Guernica Bienal” for the inclusion of Picasso’s antifascist masterwork (plate 22), the exhibition’s second iteration soft-pedaled the polemics of the first, perhaps because Sérgio Milliet was now engaged as its artistic director. Offering a historical review of modernism and its “spirit of liberty,” Milliet ceded to Niemeyer’s architecture the role of contemporaneity.183 Thus the baton was passed from Concrete Art to actual concrete: a complex of buildings that seemed to manifest Concretist ambitions for a “total work of art,” despite Niemeyer’s cool relations with Concretism’s actual architectural proponents (Max Bill and the rationalist school).184 The second Bienal opened in December 1953, timed to run through February and coincide with the quadricentennial celebrations. It pursued the architecture theme by installing a room of designs by Bauhäusler Walter Gropius, awarding him the first prize in a newly synchronous “1st Architectural Bienal” (Venice would not adopt this idea until the mid-1980s). Gropius arrived to accept his award, toured the magical new Niemeyer structures, and rewarded the entire country by declaring that “Brazil is like no other place in the world in having so many public buildings of modern construction.”185 As we’ve noted, Bill was also there, souring the mood by accusing Niemeyer of backsliding with his Portinari murals, casting “jungle” allusions against the established architect.186 Part of the edge came from relationships both had with the titan of “international style” modernism, le Corbusier.187 In my account, Niemeyer’s biennial complex was an implicit goad to the anthropophagy revival to come.

How so? Niemeyer’s Ibirapuera Park pavilion seems International Style on its exterior— fully compatible in its massive rectangularity with the designs of Gropius being shown at that same Bienal. The complex featured buildings whose exteriors bore the characteristics of the dominant style: powerful glass curtain walls, sometimes with brise soleil or window cladding, accompanied by reinforced concrete supports (pilotis, in Corb-speak) to support floating rectangular slabs. But the labyrinthine ramps curving through the interior of the Bienal pavilion, freeing an open, airy center, revealed other ambitions. The argument for anthropophagy rests not on Niemeyer’s exteriors, but on these interiors, including the open air “living space” formed by the marquise, whose covered walkway connected all the buildings in the complex. This marquise visually unites the upright modernist slab buildings with fluid horizontality, its free-form biomorphic expanse weaving around Burle Marx’s key tropical plantings and in one instance even opening to incorporate them. It was a priority to Niemeyer to get this built; it covered the crowds during the second Bienal’s prize ceremony, sheltering both luminaries and hoi polloi from rain and the hot summer sun (fig. 4.14). What is striking is the walkway’s overall configuration. Evident in aerial views and in the map routinely handed out to Bienal visitors, and graphically clear to the team of architects and urbanists who awarded the commission to Niemeyer, the marquise forms a Corbusian “Modulor Man”— but with difference, not universalism, at its core. Corbu’s “module” (published in 1950) sought to update classical Greek and Vitruvian proportions, narcissistically codifying an erect, white, European, male figure as the measure of modern universalism.188 By contrast, Niemeyer’s completed modulor is massive, and shockingly abject. Anthropophagically digested and poured into a concrete mold, it is prone, flattened, stretched, and rhythmically distorted, constituting a sprawling aegis that connects the Bienal’s International Style modernism to a deeper substrate, a monstrous body analogous to Tarsila’s big-footed, heavy-limbed Abaporu (fig.  4.17).189 With stumpy limbs, a clubfoot, and a massive “head” (formed by the round building dubbed the “Oca,” Tupi for home), the figure’s smooth expanse has exactly one opening: suggestively located between its “legs,” which allows the luxuriant upfurling of Burle Marx’s tropical trees. In sum, New World / Cold War

143

Figure 4.17 Left: Aerial view of Oscar Niemeyer’s pavilions and covered walkway, or “marquise,” in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, ca. 1954. Right: Le Corbusier’s “Modulor Man,” ca. 1949, as reproduced in The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 65. © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016.

the ensemble returns to veiled symbolic figuration with a vengeance. Far-fetched as this reading may seem, available as it is only in plan or aerial view, it is a reading justified both by Niemeyer’s earlier marquise at Pampulha in Minas Gerais, commissioned when Juscelino Kubitschek was that state’s governor, and his later trajectory as the primary architect of Brasília— a city built during Kubitschek’s presidency and famously laid out in the form of an airplane (or an angel), visible as such only cartographically or in aerial view. We are, quite literally, in the realm of a new world picture, within which the future of “third-world” development would both beam its own image into space, and stretch itself from one edge of the horizon to another. Perhaps the aerialism of abjection (a silhouette of flight, crashed to clear the jungle for a new capitol/capital) is the perfect conundral figure to inaugurate the revival of antropofagia. Was it a result of planner Lúcio Costa’s inspiration (fig. 4.18), Niemeyer’s own contribution to the group’s discussions, some Latin American fantasy deriving from the ancient Nazca lines in Peru, a Brazilian obsession to create a national airline industry, or Kubitschek’s channeling of all these influences? Whatever the answer, Ibi144

Chapter 4

rapuera opened the question— its hybridizations and anthropomorphisms decisively torquing geometric abstraction for a post-Bienal generation of Brazilian artists. Not that its revolutionary implications would be immediately clear. Niemeyer’s paternalistic comparisons linked his architectural biomorphs to “the body of the beloved woman, . . . full of curves, like the mulattas painted by . . . Di Cavalcanti.”190 The reference to Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (predicated as another “Brazilian Picasso”) betrays Niemeyer’s ties to the earlier modernismo (à la Tarsila) with its ambivalent debates about vernacular Brazilianness. Yet Niemeyer’s forms and their indexing of difference proved salient for the younger generation galvanized by the biennial. And notably, the populism of the marquise’s “canopy-in-motion” is functional to this day, allowing visitors to the park to circulate and see into the buildings free from admission fees or museum protocols, a fact utilized by Olafur Eliasson to democratize access to his work at the 1998 “Antropofagia” Bienal. Eliasson’s Very Large Ice Floor extended from inside the Bienal building, out through the glass, and into the park, where anyone under the marquise could come and play on the extravagantly frigid open-air ice.191

Figure 4.18 Lúcio Costa, pilot plan for Brasilia, 1957. Public archives of Brasilia. Digital photograph: Uri Rosenheck.

Never openly acknowledged, Neimeyer’s prone figure may exist only in my reading, where architecture rejects rigid Concretism to produce abjection as an anthropophagic strategy that gets rain-sheltering priorities straight. This Modulor accepts that buildings and development will happen— but in service of play and difference rather than forced universalism.192 Reading the marquise this way, we can begin to celebrate Niemeyer’s anti-Bill agenda, imagining the ingredients for a molecular transubstantiation that younger Brazilian artists would take from the Bienal, confidently connecting abstraction to what Hélio Oiticica would call the “salad” of bodies that pulsed outside the official art world— in samba schools, on city streets, or under the Ibirapuera marquise. Intuiting this agenda, artists began to alter Concretismo immediately after that second Bienal. First, Grupo Frente (Front Group) formed in Rio in 1954, explicitly torquing the rigidities of Bill’s geometries. Then, even though she showed ostensibly “concretist” paintings in the second Bienal, Lygia Clark began to experiment with other kinds of objects she would soon call Bichos (“critters” or “little beasts”). Explored in the next chapter, these were entities that needed to be taken in the hands to

become “activated as art,” a dynamic whose logic moves from manipulation to other extensions of bodily action, as hinges shift and geometric shapes evolve. The illustration of the artist holding O dentro é a fora (The Inside Is the Outside) shows how it performs a material critique of Bill— his intersecting but rigid Möbius strips in Tripartite are restored to flexible form as malleable sheets (fig. 4.19). As she takes up and twists her sculpture, Clark puts the dynamic attributes of the Möbius strip’s geometry “into play”— the inside becomes the outside, and vice versa, a single surface that both articulates difference and demonstrates its paradoxical unity. I will argue that with this generation, exemplified by Clark and her younger friend and sometime collaborator Hélio Oiticica, the aesthetics of experience emerged. Clark and Oiticica’s critique would fuse, anthropophagically, the conceptualism of Concretism with the embodied turning that Brazilian audiences brought to these forms. As with Niemeyer, they thereby changed the global language and working of art. In the face of the consolidation of Concretism in national “Arte Concreta” exhibitions held in Rio and São Paulo in 1956 and 1957, Clark’s Bichos and related works led directly to the schism separating a more body-oriented Rio neoconcretismo from New World / Cold War

145

Figure 4.19 Lygia Clark manipulating O dentro é a fora (The Inside Is the Outside), 1963. Courtesy of “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

the idealizing geometric abstraction that had been forwarded by São Paulo’s Bienal. The dissenting Rio group issued a manifesto in which Clark was one signatory, along with Oiticica, both joining poet and critic Ferreira Gullar in his dramatic dissociation from the São Paulo “brand.” Oiticica was then making his Metaschema drawings, along with Penetrables, hanging installations of lacquered panels that invited viewer entry— opening Concrete absolutes through movement and turning into spaces suffused with saturated, close-toned color (fig.  4.20). Color formed the opening wedge in torquing Europhilic abstraction, particularly Oiticica’s intense and ambiguous tones: deep oranges and purplish reds that rejected Bauhaus primaries in a “search for [color’s] intrinsic, virtual, interior luminosity . . . as if it pulsed from within its nucleus and developed itself.”193 The passive voice of forms that “develop themselves” is adapted from the vocabulary of international Concrete Art, still haunting Oiticica’s essay on color, published as it was in the São Paulo Museum journal Habitat, where Bill had plumped for Concrete Art and Rockefeller for capitalist democracy. But the “puls146

Chapter 4

ing” of this color— the almost aromatic tomato and persimmon hues of the Spatial Reliefs, the citron yellows and fuchsia gauzes of the later Bólides (meteors or fireballs)— evoked sensations more Brazilian than Bauhaus, more gustatory than sublimed. Not surprisingly, it was this group inspired by Gullar who aligned with “concrete poets” such as Haroldo da Campos to revive antropofagia for the 1960s. We can hear in Oiticica’s color essay the echoes of Andrade’s original calls for the “saffron and ochre” colors of the favela under the intense cerulean sky of the “age of discovery.” As the next chapter  explores, Oiticica’s most dramatic critique of the Bienal structure— with its prizes and links to the chilled vaults of museums, its courtship of the Rockefellers and industrial sponsors— would come in the form of Tropicália, a return to the burning issues of Brasilidade and difference that the Bienal had done so much to suppress. The first salvo in Oiticica’s critique took the form of a Parangolé— a name coined by the artist, evoking street slang for a happening or “hubbub,” a spontaneous party or charivari— staged in Rio’s own museum of modern

Figure 4.20 Hélio Oiticica, “penetrable” environments. Clockwise from top left: detail of Grand Nucleus, NC3, NC4, NC6, 1960–63; Penetrável PN1, 1960, with user; Penetrável Filtro, 1972. Photographs by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy César Oiticica for Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

art during the exhibit Opinão 65 (Opinion ’65). The São Paulo Bienal was entering a period of crisis, as the government had become a military dictatorship in 1964, and support for authoritarianism swelled in Paulista ultraconservative groups.194 Culture had not yet been targeted by the dictatorship, and Rio could still imagine itself as free, experimental, and opinionated (the capital having relocated to Brasília).195 In Oiticica’s exuberant Parangolé, architectonic capes were danced by himself and fellow members of the Mangueira shanty-town samba school, astonishing onlookers until museum authorities threw them out. But briefly, one could see the passista (dancer) Oiticica animating this modernist architecture, fusing its geometry with the biomorphic energies of people dancing their way into Alfonso Reidy’s museum, where they

curved around its dramatic staircase and made an exuberant ruckus, the texts on their garments barely legible.196 Oiticica’s expressive capes were stringently numbered units; boxlike but flexible, they were hybridizations— buildings become fabric, texts become bodies, colors become motion. Oiticica’s strangely cumbersome cloaks became deliriously swirling nuclei of color, particularly when the skilled dancer Nildo activated these forms (fig. 4.21). Rather than the remnant Marxism of Oiticica’s slogans for these capes— “I embody revolt,” “Of adversity we live,” “We are hungry”— I am interested in the problem Guy Brett poses: “how the sensitizing process of the bodily participation in the object— the affective touch— could be applied to an ‘ethical’ dilemma arising New World / Cold War

147

tions and not a sum of significations apprehended by specific channels.198

Figure 4.21 Nildo with Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé P4 Cape1, 1964. Photograph Andreas Valentin. Courtesy César Oiticica for Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

out of Hélio’s Mangueira experiences” (plate 29).197 For Oiticica, this ethical dilemma inaugurated his decisive turn toward the blindman’s “supersensual” portals: The introduction, then, of the other senses, should not be concentrated or looked at from a purely aestheticist point of view; it is much more profound, [proposing] a new unconditioned behaviour possibility . . . smell-sight-taste-hearing and touch mingle and are what Merleau-Ponty once called the “body’s general symbolics,” where all sense relations are established in a human context, as a “body” of significa148

Chapter 4

These concerns— which I want to claim for “blind epistemology” and the opening of art to the event of being— would evolve toward the aesthetic of experience. Not “aestheticism,” but a profoundly conceptual, embodied, and materialized practice. In Oiticica’s work, this would take the form of an embrace of the precarious architectures of the favela, through an entire installation that drew visitors into its labyrinthine maw to be “swallowed” in rooms of leisure (or “cre-leisure” as he called the creative distraction he hoped to induce).199 This was Oiticica’s Tropicália, which the artist had to distinguish fiercely from the dictatorship’s appropriation of suddenly viable commercial exports, from bossa nova to cachaça spirits (fig. 4.22). Oiticica argued for a newly configured antropofagia in the Tropicália manifesto: “this accursed European and American influence will have to be absorbed, anthropophagically”— thereby consuming the consumers of “Brazilianness.” Oiticica’s integrity emerged forcefully in the reinvention and reconceptualization of his “tropical” installation when it was brought to London two years after the Rio showing. For the Whitechapel gallery, it became “export” instead of “import substitution”— rethought, it would now be “Whitechapel Experience,” an “Eden plan” reconfigured for pasty white Londoners wandering through and wondering what it could all be about (fig. 4.23). Oiticica’s polemics clarified that if visitors were encouraged to “consume” Brasilidade, they would also “be consumed,” by a television installed at the heart of this shantytown labyrinth, a TV intended for their “cannibalistic devouring.”200 Despite his anti-universalism, Oiticica was a global intellectual. His concept-driven art materialized a great deal of what others were thinking, and in the words of one Brazilian intellectual, revealed “how the cultural problems specific to a peripheral context could appear in universal terms.”201 In my argument, what became universal was Oiticica’s capacity to show “universal” postwar abstraction as itself a problem— his work revealed these modes as themselves peripheral, in the usage of newly global artists capable of “provincializing Europe.”202 What I characterized in chapter 1 as “the politics of the partial view” took shape in Oiticica as the multisensory tactics

Figure 4.22 Hélio Oiticica, variations on the Tropicália installation inside and outside Brazil. Left: Tropicália, Penetrables PN2 and PN3, in the 1967 exhibition Nova Objectividade Brasileira at the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (photographer unknown). Right: partial view of Eden with PN5 Gil and Caetano’s Tent (1969) installed as part of the “Whitechapel Experience,” at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1969 (photograph: John Goldblatt). Courtesy César Oiticica for Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

of blind epistemology, drawing on transfigured sensory relations to contribute a new criticality to the global contemporary scene. The transnational curator, explored at length in the next chapter, would respond to the agency of such artists, drawing on their mobilizations of embodied experience and event to transform the institutions of contemporary art. With the new world/Cold War Bienal, then, came a thorough reconfiguration of the geopolitics of the singular world picture. Initially through the notion that they could make their own contribution to an art of “classless,” deracinated geometric abstraction, the Brazilian/European team forging the first third-world biennial made it so. In their “lunatic” presumption of equality they achieved an unexpected success, upending first-world expectations of eternal belatedness with an art that could be exported to Paris and eventually transform first-world definitions of the cutting edge.203 At the same time, the Brazilians’ remarkable exception to the rule of this book— their adoption of the international language of visual art accompanied by an unprecedented refusal to speak of difference— would not hold. The vibratory tension between international abstraction and local concerns was already humming

in Murilo Mendes’s initial praise for the Bienal’s revelation of a technologically sophisticated art that formed “an international visual language” that nonetheless did not exclude “their own national values”— embodied by Brazilians moving, and moving, around Bill’s sculpture. As I argued above, the new forms of attention Mendes was identifying constituted blind epistemology in germ, refuting the legibility of an “international language” of rational vision in favor of Brazilians’ own embodied transformation of the concretist agenda. The synthesis of the dialectic Mendes himself identified would come in a surprising form. Rejecting the technologism of a universal Concrete Art and its identification with the development equation, the younger generation would also abjure “national values,” with their folkloric and indigenous referents. The resulting anthropophagic syncretism offered startling new modes in “the ongoing war of position.” As we will see in the next chapter, the new artistic agents saw themselves as enmeshed within the situation, never outside or above it. In this way, Heidegger’s spectral world picture lost its crucial status as “enframed.” No longer “outside us” as a controllable representation, the world-as-picture, along with the national/international New World / Cold War

149

Figure 4.23 Hélio Oiticica, The Eden Plan, “an exercise for the creleisure and circulations.” Installation drawing for the “Whitechapel Experience,” at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1969. Courtesy César Oiticica for Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

dyad on which it had always been dependent, collapsed. What replaced it could not be called a picture at all, but an expansion into “spheres” embedding artist, viewer, organizer, and art in continuous jostling, merging and disaggregation. Emerging within international Concep-

150

Chapter 4

tual Art during the 1960s and 1970s, and contributing to the powerful turn toward event-driven experience, the Brazilian solution— forced into diaspora by the dictatorship— would inaugurate a truly global working of contemporary art.

5 Transnational Openings

The artist is dissolved into the world. . . . Instead of interpreting a fact of the preexisting world, art changes this very world, through a direct action. —LYGIA CLARK , 19651 The longer we look through a camera or watch a projected image the remoter the world becomes, yet we begin to understand that remoteness more. —ROBERT SMITHSON , 19712 In the end, only he who imagines an entire world really makes use of the freedom of art. —HARALD SZEEMANN , 19833 MANIFESTA 1 is . . . about migration about having a place and having no place at all about integration about the necessity of imaginary worlds about the necessity of inventing new relations in this world —© 1996 by Manifesta If you ask me, I would claim that most biennials, however compensatory and impoverished they may appear, are the true sites of enlightened debate on what contemporary art means today, a position thoroughly abdicated by museums. —OKWUI ENWEZOR on “Global Tendencies,” 20034

Tactics of the Trans

Two documentary images of artworks, invidiously compared: Max Bill’s Dreiteilige Einheit (Tripartite Unity) from 1948– 49, and Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica’s 151

Figure 5.1 Left: archival photograph of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica manipulating their Diálogo de Mãos (Dialogue of Hands), 1966. Right: exhibition copies made for handling and eventual disposal. Courtesy of “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Diálogo de Mãos (Dialogue of Hands) from 1966 (fig. 5.1). The latter appears alongside an image of temporarily inactive exhibition copies of this “non-object” (as poet/ critic Ferreira Gullar was theorizing Clark’s art): a length of commercially produced elastic, cut, given a half-fold, and sutured together to form the geometrical figure called a Möbius strip. As with the cut and manipulable sheetmetal geometries Clark was making in 1963 (fig. 4.19), Diálogo encourages participants to discover for themselves that “the inside is the outside.” Such haptics and intimate turnings, as we’ve seen, reveal the presence of multisensorial yet actively theoretical blind epistemology. They are also tactics I call trans. The transnational openings announced in this chapter mark a periodization in the arc of the book, a transition from a former discourse stabilizing around “internationalism” and “the world picture” to a set of multiplied practices and discourses prefi xed by “trans” (translational, transactional, transnational, transcultural), which have had the effect of announcing the global as a newly insistent category. “Global” shifted from an adjective to a noun by the end of the 1980s, and “transnational” increasingly replaced “international.” New terms were needed for naming new states of being— no longer about relations between nations secured behind borders, but 152

Chapter 5

about a desiring and restless globality that knits citizens together through nets, nodes, and webs. The future art historian Yve-Alain Bois sensed the shift when he encountered Diálogo during his first meeting with Lygia Clark in 1968, in her Paris studio. He was then only seventeen; she was a well-established artist who had just returned from taking down a show of her sculptures at the Venice Biennale.5 Bois recalled the encounter as pivotal: “What struck me in particular was her Dialogue of 1966, an ‘object’ designed with Hélio Oiticica”: our two right hands joined in opposite directions, each in one of the loops of a little Möbius cloth ribbon (elastic, there again) and by joining or releasing them, we experienced the resistance of matter. . . . Lygia then told me about the beginning of the Neo-concrete movement in Brazil [in 1959], her own polemical starting point— that of breaking with the universalist claims of geometric abstraction. She had turned one of Max Bill’s most captivating sculptures, draped in its marmoreal autonomy, into the support for an experiment aimed at abolishing any idea of autonomy.6

Describing Bill’s sculpture as “marmoreal” (marble) is not, in the Brazilian case, materially accurate.7 The sig-

nature autonomy of his sculpture in São Paulo had been generated precisely through its twisting stainless-steel perfection, symbolizing “the connection between the forward-looking concrete art that he advocated and advances in science and industry.”8 Tripartite Unity’s prizewinning sheen emphasized what could be achieved by a developed nation capable of seamlessly engineering raw materials, standing for Brazilians as an object lesson about their own underdevelopment— such were the hierarchies of international competition inherited from the world’s fairs. But the artists of Diálogo were collapsing those hierarchies. Clark and Oiticica’s substitution of hands in floppy elastic for Bill’s steel is a compelling assertion of the local operating within the “international” discourses of an emerging conceptual art. In their wit and sophistication, works such as Diálogo began to put notions of first-world superiority— its technical advantage— into question. They engineered a conceptualism that could trump technique every time. They began to practice a blind epistemology that could stop the shiny and the ocular in its tracks, converting “viewers” to participants, fully enmeshed in an embodied and eventful world. “Elastic, there again,” as Bois put it: Brazilian stuff, exported to the world but still speaking of an organic source that would net and tangle the high-flying concepts of international Concrete Art through insistent references to the body and its dynamics of experience. These notions of capture invoke metaphors crucial to the operations this chapter  chronicles: snaring, cooking, consuming, digesting, and releasing a new amalgam— the operations of antropofagia transformed from the Surrealist 1920s and retooled for the Conceptualist 1960s, propelled by dramatically increased levels of international exchange and the new category of the “transnational.” In this chapter, transnational agency will be pursued through the interactive and dynamic art produced in the internationalist crucible that was the Brazilian 1950s, various “Zero” groups (in Japan and then Germany), “kinetic art,” Fluxus, Happenings, Environments, “situational aesthetics,” and finally, the practice of transnational curator Harald Szeemann. Emblematic of these energies, Clark and Oiticica’s Diálogo made kinetics a matter of the body and aesthetic theory, while literally weaving together the threads of the Brazilian economy in the mid-1960s— the country’s rubber industry having surpassed coffee as the largest export

from a still largely hand-labor, agricultural, and extraction economy. Their sophisticated knowledge of art-world hierarchies rendered such humble materials useful to artists who still thought of themselves as “international” above all.9 But as they wreaked havoc with Bill’s mathematical universals, the stability of what “international” could mean was put in question— after all, the Möbius strip of Diálogo is in constant motion and can be refabricated virtually anywhere it happens to land. Is “transnationalism” as a concept prefigured in Diálogo’s replicability, and its conversion of steel to rubber? If we trace the cruel strategies of international capital (later declared by economists to be multinational), we find the histories in which indigenous Brazilian rubber trees had already in the nineteenth century been smuggled out by the British for seeding in their more tractable colonies in India and Southeast Asia, a strategy quickly copied by Belgium for the different botany of the Congolese rubber plant. In other words, this dialogue of hands does not pretend to be universal, but is widely recognizable, cutting transversely across newly global “Concept Art” strategies to produce an embodied variant.10 The Brazilian artists confound Bill’s seamlessness with crude joints, rubbery materiality, and participatory event structures— tactics of the trans. What does “transnational” imply that “international” does not? International is an important precondition: it models relations of hubs and spokes, defined by the borders of nation states with their economies, official commissioners, and cultural ministers; movement is along “fronts” and across boundary lines, negotiated through alliances and treaties. “Trans” emerges in various formations to cut across or dissolve these units, even as it depends on their infrastructures. My privileged case studies were agents who were ambitious both at home and abroad, but who used their place of origin (in the etymology of nation, the natio or birth site) against essentialism, cutting vectors in space rendered smooth by the speed of their transfers.11 Even as their artforms could be exquisitely local in Brazil, embodying a riposte to the techno-optimism that had characterized each edition of the São Paulo Bienal, Clark and Oiticica also pitched their production with an eye on a larger, “international” art world. As he pushed to theorize that condition, Oiticica in particular would cut against it, attempting to dismantle the unit of “nation” in any practice he had a say in. Clark, Transnational Openings

153

older and more established, was more tightly framed by the older hierarchies. She represented Brazil in the Venice Biennale as early as 1960 and exhibited there frequently, despite its politicization and the protests directed against it. She remained tied to an earlier demographic of Brazilian artists, living in Paris much of the time. Oiticica was in every way harder to pin down; fluent in several languages, he supported himself by working as a translator. He had spent years in the United States as a child and piqued the interest of transatlantic curators soon after his earliest shows in Rio; the London scene interested and welcomed him. By 1969, he had a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel in London; by 1970, he was shown at MoMA in New York. But both Clark and Oiticica confronted these international venues fully conscious of the problematic— being inserted into a specific world picture. Refusing the traditional demand to offer a representative image— of Brazil or anything else— they emphasized the sited and the performative in intimate encounters, characterized by physical and conceptual turnings and sensorial play. The “viewer” became implicated in using and occupying objects and spaces that were difficult to slot into preexisting categories because always in flux. Increasingly the two artists theorized their work as “trans-objects,” imagining art as a proposition that would change in every site. “Trans” is thus an actors’ category that emerges in the historical period covered by this chapter, beginning around 1960, becoming explicit in the late 1970s, blossoming in the 1980s and 1990s, and extending robustly into the present. In the turning from “the international” and “the world” to “the transnational” and “the global,” there is also a shift from legislated orders to dynamism, from vertical hierarchies to horizontal spread. This was another kind of agency, mobilized by that very prefix, trans. It was a psychoanalytic sensitivity that led Clark and Oiticica to use “trans” to describe their liminal objects, eventually rejecting Gullar’s term “non-object.” Trans-objects evoke the psychology of object-relations theory, in which “transitional objects” are those that are powered by affect and desire, not by how they are crafted or what they look like.12 The trans enters often in narratives of these artists. Bois describes the Latin Americans who captivated him in late 1960s Paris as sharing “an essential condition that greatly impinged on their work— that of transculturalism.” Appropriate indeed, since “transculturation” was Cuban anthropologist Fernando 154

Chapter 5

Ortiz’s rejoinder to US sociologists’ “melting pot” theory of acculturation.13 Not all “trans” functions are global, but a great deal of global art activity after the 1960s is animated by trans operations. The relations of artists to the frame of the “international” in world pictures does not evaporate, but vocabularies shift from these official spaces to something less formal. A state of being: the condition of globality, the tactics of the trans, life “outside the frame,” as Brazilian art historian Sônia Salzstein described the work of Oiticica and Clark.14 Such unframed activity was also sought by more powerful actors, of course. Transverse mobility promised deregulation and new markets for multinational industries, as is evident in the corporate sponsorship given Szeemann’s exhibitions, examined later in this chapter. There is nothing in the tactics of the trans that ensures a critical globalism. It has to be earned in the intimate encounter between a subject and an artwork. “Trans” is a term I want to explore in registers other than the locational; I want to examine how temporal and discursive fluidity can be produced by artists to cut across institutional framings, and how the strategies of a transnational curator, or the geographies remapped by various biennials, might stimulate the tactics of the trans, producing new kind of subjects in the interaction with art.15 The trans can be regional, hemispheric, or global; what is consistent is that it seeks to chart a vector across national or international circuits of exchange, establishing alternate relations. This chapter argues that such tactics stimulated a newly critical globalism for contemporary art, and examines them in regard to the three epistemic categories of this book— organizers, artists, and visitors. How can artworks illuminate differences between internationalism and the globally viral trans? Formally, one could compare the photograph of Diálogo to Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968; fig. 5.2). Clark and Oiticica’s hands in play, Serra’s outstretched hand in tense anticipation— both black-and-white documents of conceptual art projects that allude to processes and actions, frozen by the photographic medium. But Serra’s films were read by critics and scholars at the time as located within a self-consciously international world of independent film, their existence as avant-garde cinema transcending their function as documents of local practices.16 Clark and Oiticica’s talismanic photograph, on the other hand, insists on process, discourse, exchange, dialogue:

Figure 5.2 Frame sequences from Richard Serra, Hand Catching Lead, 1968. 16 mm black-and-white film. © 2016 Richard Serra/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the image is merely a grainy index of a specific collaborative event.17 That event is materialized in one place, but can easily be replicated in another, and by others. The conceptual nature of the trans (here, the trans-object) is reinforced by historical accounts, such as that of Gullar, whose commitment to Concrete Art was thoroughly destabilized when he first encountered one of Lygia Clark’s Bichos (see fig. 4.19) at a Rio dinner party in 1959. As the narrative goes, Gullar gave up Concretismo on the spot. Manipulating Clark’s thing, he was riven by questions: Was it a relief? A sculpture? A nonordinary object of some kind?18 Turning and thinking, Gullar flashed on the concept of the não-objeto (non-object). That idea became central to his growing critique of (geometric) abstraction’s “dangerously acute rationalism,” and he got Clark and Oiticica to sign on to his manifesto of Neoconcretismo.19 But the artists themselves would eventually decline Gullar’s voided and static term in favor of “transobject”— these physical things existed in the world, and were meant to move.20 Concrete Art had given Brazilians an unprecedented sense of being active players in the international art world

(chapter 4). The mobilization against Concretismo, in the cases examined here (Gullar, Oiticica, Clark, and even Bois), did not forfeit this ambition entirely, but saw “the international” as part of the problem. The trans-object implied a questioning, dynamic subject— neither universalist nor subject to a constraining Brasilidade, but acutely aware of such polarities. Increasingly, the demand to “represent” Brazil on some international stage defined by an imagined universalism began to seem beside the point. By the time Oiticica wrote his statement for MoMA’s 1970 Information show, Brazil was for him “the country that simply doesn’t exist,” an alienation crafted in response to the violent turn in the Brazilian dictatorship, but also rooted in Oiticica’s refusal “to represent” a nation. Oiticica— whose patronym designates a nut tree native to Paraíba— became a zealot for the local event, against the bounded abstraction of “nation.” This was not provincialism. He expected the conceptual lessons from events to spread laterally to seed the global. His contribution to Information made this explicit, offering “a possibility: for a behavior”— wherever that activity might take place.21 Transnational Openings

155

Internationalism remained an important precondition for the transnational, and the categories would continue to coexist as critiques of “the nation” increased along with emerging references to “the global.” Thus curator Kynaston McShine commented in his essay for Information that “art cannot afford to be provincial” as artists participate in a communicational “global village.”22 Brazil’s everyday reality was now available in limited form as televised and photographed journalistic representation, and McShine noted that media coverage of state-sponsored violence brought distant politics closer to home for everyone in television’s new tribe.23 Oiticica in 1970 was himself invoking this worldly community (the show, recall, was titled Information), rejecting what he termed a “brainwashed” nation of origin for participation in a larger implied community— the international art world shading into the global village. He noted that his experimental proposals “can be exported and act intensely with different forces in brazil and other places . . . they exist as a plan for a practice . . . an open plan that can be expanded, gr o o o ow.”24 Thus the trans proceeds. It feeds on internationalism even as it alters the very meaning of the term; the artist is not an ambassadorial “representative,” he is invoking a radical community of equals with his open plan. These discourses were transforming the world picture by dissolving its national borders and blurring the mapped colors of its nation-states. Viewers were understood to be situated and local but were presumed to cultivate a worldly awareness whether in London, New York, Paris, or São Paulo. A climate of protest made artists newly sensitive to their own political agency, a key feature of the trans in an unprecedentedly networked art world. By the late 1960s, the Brazilian dictatorship had implemented increasing restrictions on cultural expression and intensified incarceration and violence against its own citizens; Brazilian artists responded with exile or veiled protest.25 The violence of the dictatorship prompted an international boycott of the São Paulo Bienal and inspired diasporal Latin American artists in 1971 to organize their own conceptual “Contrabienal,” free from any state’s agenda.26 The Contrabienal collected contributions from transatlantic, largely diasporal Latin American artists to produce a publication, much in the manner of Information’s catalogue. The regional identification transcended physical location, functioning as a conduit for a 156

Chapter 5

diaspora. Publications such as Artforum became Artforum International and linked these politicized artists; Robert Smithson used that forum in 1969 to publish a searing letter refusing to participate in the US contingent of the next São Paulo Bienal.27 Nine of the original twenty-three artists withdrew, ensuring there would be no US participation; protests spread like a virus. Even as its founder, Ciccillo Matarazzo, came from Brazil to persuade US government officials to commit to the next Bienal, artist/ architect Gordon Matta Clark called on artists to mount a transnational boycott of the event.28 The publication that was the Contrabienal timed its release precisely to coincide with the opening of the much diminished 1971 Bienal de São Paulo. Back home in Brazil, friends and former collaborators were imprisoned; Oiticica and Clark hardened their nomadism into exile. Artists and organizers were clearly using the art world as a public forum for political thinking. I am more interested, however, in the way the structures undergirding biennial culture were themselves beginning to crack, and what kinds of artistic agency was emerging. The Venice Biennale was attempting to transform statutes that had been in place since the Fascist takeover of the 1930s, while artists and radical student groups went much further, attacking the entire event as “the instrument of the bourgeoisie.” When the biennial opened in the fall of 1968 placards in San Marco square declared, “Biennale of the bosses— we’ll burn your pavilions!”29 In solidarity with student opposition that had effectively shut down the Milan design triennial that May, the 1968 Venice Biennale protests forced the termination of the biennial’s market function.30 This provision, under which a cut of the sales made during the exhibition went to keep the organization afloat, had been a core premise at the Biennale’s founding: Venice should become a market for contemporary art. Once terminated, that international market had to be replaced; the immediate upsurge in repeating art fairs offered that replacement.31 Yet banishing the market from the exhibition had other effects. It allowed the biennial structures to become more permeable to the very “non-objects,” concepts, and eventful art that had once constituted critical alternatives to their institutionalized offerings. As we shall see, the transnational curating of Harald Szeemann would take full advantage of this important shift. The trans was dissolving some polarities, with the

effect of increasing the left tenor of the art world in opposition to an emerging charismatic politics on the right. Initially artists and their curators had an edge on “information.” But as first-world economic downturns of the 1970s drove elections of conservative politicians (Thatcher in 1979, Reagan in 1980), those right-wing populists proved incredibly adept at strategies of mass communication and televisual spectacle. Thus began the “culture wars,” played out largely in media— including the materialized media of a new set of biennials. As discussed in previous chapters, this was a “second wave” of biennali, the first having come on the heels of São Paulo, opening in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Few of those were still active by the 1970s, so the founding of the Bienal de la Habana in 1984 was experienced as an entirely new initiative— well in advance of formal policies of glasnost and perestroika that would soon become evident in the USSR, Cuba’s chief economic patron. Calling on those who’d been active in the Contrabienal (such as Luis Camnitzer), Havana’s focus was explicitly regional— it would be the Latin American biennial (as against São Paulo’s “international” aspirations). By its second iteration in 1986 it channeled ambitions to represent the “third world”; its third show in 1989 is seen to have “extended the global territory of contemporary art and redefined the biennial model.”32 Possessed by the messianic utopianism of its leader and inspired by Cuba’s struggle against punishing US sanctions, Havana saw itself as offering the first real alternative to the dominant Western system. As such, it is seen as the watershed between an earlier configuration of national and international politics as usual, and a “new world order” of cosmopolitan “networks and flows.”33 Without entirely buying this rhetoric, we can observe how Havana’s state-driven enterprise imagined it was staging “an alternative cosmopolitanism . . . supported by a network of peers around the world.”34 Building on earlier discussions of cosmopolitanism in this book, I note here the important function of that term. Coupled with “alternative,” it becomes analogous to the discursive work done by “trans”— a dérive or detour that converts state capital into a transverse cosmopolitics.35 In the words of one of the Bienal de la Habana founders, curator Gerardo Mosquera: The Biennial thus embodied a convergence of governmental politics and a plausible commitment to

transform the circulation, knowledge, and legitimation of contemporary art on a global scale. . . . Never before had artists, curators, critics, and scholars from Buenos Aires to Kingston, and from Brazzaville to Beirut and Jakarta met “horizontally.”36

The spatial metaphor of horizontality articulates the function of the trans. If hubs and spokes organize hierarchies of movers and shakers around a central axis, the trans was about contacts spreading virally, creeping across a surface, or penetrating by osmosis. Horizontality in Havana was economically fostered by the lack of support from the financially impoverished Cuban state. Unofficial bars listed in the official catalogue created “a ‘horizontal’ South-South platform very much based on personal contact between people from different art worlds.”37 The notion of a “South- South platform” reveals the physics and architecture of the trans, while reorienting customary geographies and itineraries. This horizontal energy animated a global imaginary, characteristic of the trans.38 Cuba’s modestly funded biennial had to rely on metaphors— and artists— to do most of the work. Given links to the Soviet Union and sanctions from the United States, it was hardly possible to ask foreign ministries to help out. Artists had to locate their own funding and essentially mount their own individual showings without the “paternalism” of the curator. In expatriate artist/critic Luis Camnitzer’s account: “the works were essentially exhibited under the cultural responsibility of the artist.”39 Camnitzer’s Landscape as an Attitude (1979) exemplifies the nomadism undergirding this cultural responsibility: the Latin American (in this case, born in Germany, raised in Uruguay, living in New York) must assemble a landscape where he happens to be. Perhaps he carries it in his suitcase. Tellingly, it is modular, and there is nothing essential about its semiotic features— a Nordic evergreen, cows (is there also a burro?); an Alpine chapel, all perched precariously on the portable terrain of the artist’s skin. Camnitzer would choose an equally portable but much more polemical work for Havana itself, offering several prints from his Uruguayan Torture Series, a critique of dictatorship that would resonate with contemporary Cubans on both left and right (fig. 5.3). As Camnitzer’s title suggests, artists’ transnational strategies are not necessarily dissociated from the play of national difference. But with energies Transnational Openings

157

Figure 5.3 Top: Luis Camnitzer, Uruguayan Torture Series, plate 2, He Practiced Every Day, 1983 (among the prints shown in the first Bienal de la Habana, 1984). Photo etching, 9/15, 29.5 × 21.7 cm. Right: Camnitzer, Landscape as an Attitude, 1979. Silver gelatin photograph, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. Both images courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2015 Luis Camnitzer/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

driving across, between, under, and against the borders of nations, they may comment on these differences as play. Or tragic farce. Here, Camnitzer stages the experience of torture as if it were a wistful parable of education, a “practice” that one could eventually get right— familiar schooling for the “South-South” platform at this biennial. The Havana biennial was subnational in one context, but also supranational. Both could be positions of the trans, with the biennial’s hemispheric and regional reach fueling Havana’s ambitions to be cultural leader of the third world. This also worked as geopolitics. Contesting China’s stirring third-world aspirations, as well as those of pan-African and pan-Arabic movements, the city of Havana on the tiny island of Cuba broadcast the confidence of its historical cosmopolitanism, with that term’s covert access to rhetorics of (Western, Christian) leadership in the world.40 Launched by a new entity named for the late Chinese-Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, the statesponsored biennial aimed “to investigate and promote the richness of the artistic expressions of Latin America, Africa and Asia; . . . with a tone of Third-Worldism [tercermundista] and universalism” that would foster “Cuban culture itself ”.41 These brief histories make it clear that the transnational is riddled with many complicated agendas; we might stigmatize it as “a complex.” What is the history of this trans? Although coined during World War I by progressive US legal scholar Randolph Bourne, notions of the transnational only truly gained currency after World War II. “Transnational” experienced a revival through the 1980s that amounts to a reinvention.42 Initial usage bore a hint of Bourne’s 1916 utopian call for a “Trans-National America” celebrating difference (posed against the “melting pot” of assimilation).43 But by the 1990s the “transnational” was more often invoked by neoliberal economists and policymakers; the 1992 founding of a UN-sponsored journal with the title Transnational Corporations (and a slew of publications by this entity) is indicative.44 In the twenty-first century, “transnationalism” has been taken back by progressives, becoming a trope for left-leaning scholarship by social scientists who want to write about the unprecedented surge in global migration.45 The fluidity of the prefix makes trans seductive in many fields. Demonstrably, the trans announces that we are beyond the age of the singular world picture, inaugurated by situated, aesthetic “trans-objects” in the 1960s. The pro-

liferation of the term transnational suggests an attempt to picture new kinds of worlds. But contemporary uses of the prefix cannot be shielded from the neoliberal economic and diplomatic policies that have accrued around it since the 1990s.46 If I look back to artists’ critical intentions in the 1960s to spy a “transnational opening” in the making, it is to enter this largely economic discourse in order to alter it. I want to show how the transitive works of globalist artists questioned the very terms of pictorial representation, of a world “picture,” to shift art from representation toward an embodied enmeshment in a “world” that is always coming-into-being. In contrasting artistic agency to the work of historical curators such as Szeemann, I will be emphasizing that the “transnational” can be both utopian (for artists) and an instrument of neoliberal market penetration (for funders of biennials). The utopian moment is often transitory, the curator a translator or relay— thus the São Paulo Bienal came to incorporate Antropofagia as an official theme in 1998 (a utopian artists’ platform converted for institutional purposes), and the upstart Havana Biennial would become “a fossil” after the Cuban state failed to respond to the collapse of its Soviet sponsor.47 The trans had been attached to embodied and situational practices by artists in the 1960s, yet that dynamism attracted other agents. At the very moment in the 1990s when the term transnationalism came into heavy use at the United Nations, the “experience economy” was being monetized.48 Energies that were once generated by a diasporal Hispanic/Brazilian community of artists around “trans-objects,” fueling the grassroots efforts for a transnational Contrabienal, became institutional in 1996 as EU cultural agencies and NGOs announced an “anti-biennial,” Manifesta, in synchronicity with tourism via the “European Capital of Culture” initiative. Manifesta marks another milestone in the transnational opening of biennial culture, consolidating the European response to that “second wave” of biennials that had arisen to challenge the European agenda, among them, “Dak’Art  .  .  . Biennial of the Contemporary African Art,” founded in 1992, and Johannesburg’s sensational “Africus,” introduced in 1995 with a second iteration in 1997 under the direction of Okwui Enwezor.49 These were regionally ambitious but still sited biennials; Manifesta, in contrast, would be consciously nomadic. Responding to the fall of the Soviet Communist impeTransnational Openings

159

rium, Manifesta announced itself in 1996 as explicitly unsited, targeting “underdevelopment” and “marginality” by financing public exhibitionary culture in European loci less central to the standard tourist agenda, many in former Communist states: Rotterdam (1996), Luxembourg (1998), Ljubljana (2000), on up to Limburg-Genk (2012) and the still-Communist St. Petersburg (2014). The Manifesta agenda clearly echoed EU strategies of renewal following the end of the Cold War, which in turn recalled the origins of documenta— the heart of this chapter’s Szeemann case study— in a roving garden show intended to comb through Germany’s war-ravaged cities, rehabilitating their public spaces one by one. Like the German variant it mimics, Manifesta marks an end of hostilities; unlike documenta, it focuses not on the nation but on the goals of the European Union, announcing a “pan-European vocation” with “the desire to explore the psychological and geographical territory of Europe, referring both to border-lines and concepts.”50 The expansionary/exclusionary logic of “Europe” was built into Manifesta’s brief.51 Fundamental to the “trans” is its mobility as a sign; there is nothing inherently progressive in these formats. But the potential for sideways movement bears attending to. Havana confronted the “5 percent” of non-Europeans represented in the standard Venice Biennale with what Camnitzer experienced as a “Biennial of Utopias.”52 Manifesta felt “the necessity of inventing new relations in this world” soon after the Istanbul biennial announced its 1992 theme, “Production of Cultural Difference.”53 The proof is always in the working of the art. Artistic agency improvised the tactics of the trans— at times in confrontation with curatorial strategies. This is a general characteristic of the period in question (1960s to 1990s) in which international networks of Conceptual Art segued into institutional critique and critical postmodernism, with artists problematizing the very institutions and rubrics in which their art had to appear.54 Art is small, and encounters are local— but curators could still provide opportunities to contest the capitalization of transnational desire. Note London curator Guy Brett’s Transcontinental exhibition (1989), already interrogating and analyzing “our cultural consumption patterns which we might pride ourselves were becoming increasingly cosmopolitan.”55 In the American Midwest, the Walker Art Center mounted How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in 160

Chapter 5

a Global Age (2003), updating Szeemann’s international 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form (analyzed at length below) while pioneering a new “global” advisory board funded by a local foundation.56 Developing a rubbery, interactive web map boasting artists from every continent, Latitudes garnered considerable press around the world. In one South African journal, a reviewer anxiously questioned how art from other parts of the world is being conceived, made and displayed, and if the original intentions of the artist are met or mutated when the work moves away from the locale where it was made and into an international arena.57

The “trans” contests this paradigm of loss or inauthenticity in the movement of art. That art might “mutate” reveals an anxiety epistemologically linked to discourses of (racial) purity that fuel the salvage paradigm of anthropology— in Latin American terms, an indigenismo that sought a stable, autochthonic identity— before 1960s artists transformed those energies into a transvalued antropofagia, acute in its critical conceptualism and ambitiously global in its reach.58 Exemplified by those anthropophagic productions of Oiticica and Clark, the art I privilege from this period is transitive at its origin—that is, it logically accommodates (and in that sense anticipates) dynamic relations with a world beyond the local and unburdened by the international. Clark and Oiticica are thinking about Max Bill, in order to deconstruct him. They are making reconstitutable objects or environments that would be purpose-built for various situations around the globe, always enmeshed in their local situation.59 This returns us to the “ongoing war of position” that José Gatti and Marcos Becquer identified as a key component of syncretic cultural production (chapter 4).60 The artists I am interested in are, by the 1960s, participants in an art world whose concepts and discourses are global; even locally, they are celebrated for their deterritorializing tactics of the trans: “Hélio Oiticica, our national Flash Gordon / Flies not through sidereal space / Flies instead across social layers.”61 Even so striking a phrase as our national Flash Gordon in this appreciative bit of Brazilian doggerel reveals a knowing dislocation, a figure appropriated from globally distributed US mass culture only to fly perpetually sideways to the

Figure 5.4 Left: Hélio Oiticica, B15 Glass Bólide 4—“Earth,” 1964 (photograph: Claudio Oiticica). Right: Oiticica, B17 Glass Bólide 05—“Homage to Mondrian,” 1965 (photograph: César Oiticica Filho). Courtesy César Oiticica for Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

norm. This kind of play refutes the stability of “origin” in favor of modes of address on the part of the artist, desires on the part of the curator and viewer, and conditions of visibility in the field of reception. The aim to wield the tools of universal speech but maintain a complementary “local” accent is a recurring theme in this book; as with language, there is nothing stable about this dynamic. The problematic is particularly well rehearsed in Latin America (chapter 4). Oiticica and Clark rescue Mondrian from the likes of Max Bill, by returning what had been purged— Mondrian’s jazz and anthroposophist leanings, the viewer’s body. Mondrian is reborn through acts of strategic pollution and abjection, and a new history of modernism is given to the world.62 Earth and cloth were the substances Oiticica introduced to update the Dutch abstractionist— inviting manipulation of his “homage to Mondrian”— in what he called Bólides (a word that signifies meteors, shooting stars, fireballs; fig. 5.4). Just as Cícero Dias aspired in 1948 to a new art that would be “pure radio, like a bólide,” Oiticica intended a multisensorial assault.63 These works feature the play of fabric against glass, hands within soil, or eyedazzling enamel on little sets of drawers— assertively sensual and serialized works that still remained “objects.” Scaling up these locally redolent materials into an entire environment, Oiticica’s 1967 Tropicália (fig.  4.22) was installed in Rio in the unfinished museum of modern

art, offering shifting grounds of sand, straw, or pebbles, printed “tropical” fabric partitions, slippery piles of magazines, live parrots, and a cannibalizing television to demonstrate to Brazilians the potential for intimate transformations of the self, even (or especially) through the tropical tropes then being commodified for tourism. Oiticica’s critical globalism emerges when he “translates” this environment for London or New York, met halfway by curators willing to present his work as “Experiments” (at Whitechapel, fig. 4.23) or exercises in “Information” (at MoMA).64 It is clear that transnationalism operates by using some of the same circuits as internationalism, but in occupying those circuits it reroutes them. This is how to interpret Oiticica’s intervention in Information. The MoMA exhibition had been styled as an open channel bringing news from the “global village,” with implicit presumptions of representative content. Entering the circuit, Oiticica explicitly refused to represent. By acknowledging his interpellation but insisting that Brazil “simply doesn’t exist,” he revealed the constraints in the circuit and offered an “export” that was merely a “plan for a practice,” a proposition for a kind of lazy, ostensibly unproductive behavior in the “nests” he hammered together in MoMA’s galleries. If anything presented itself, it would necessarily constitute a hybridization of the situation in which the enunciation took place, together with the “exporting” Transnational Openings

161

culture supposed to have originated the message. What would once have been seen as noise in the circuit of information (mutating the “original intent of the artist”) was now essential to the message’s material form. Oiticica’s work altered the circuits by explicitly including local materializations and performances as part of the message. But of course he needed the presumption of international communication to produce this brilliant critique. This crystallizes a paradox: Oiticica’s art could open a transnational terrain only by producing conceptual and physical events on an international stage that had formed in part through nationally motivated biennials staging Latino scenography as “alternative” or “peripheral.” But a decade and a half of the prize-giving apparatus of the São Paulo biennial provided another way to be globally present. The first-phase internationalizing of São Paulo’s art world through a technocratic and “neutral” Bienal— fostered by multinational capitalism and “Rockefeller men”— produced the very ambitions through which artists’ “insertions into ideological circuits” could sharpen on the local scene. This was how another Brazilian artist, Cildo Meireles, would put it in conceiving his own project for MoMA’s Information show, to be put fully in play only in Brazil. Prefigured by the 1943 Brazil Builds and continued with Oiticica’s and Meireles’s inclusion in the New York show, curators in the North shared with artists in the South a desire for globality. MoMA would be international by showing Latin American art; artists would be international by being shown abroad, with Conceptualism the emerging common coin.65 These networks could then be tweaked to bring other “messages” into the system— “local” critiques were always already global. And this is precisely how Meireles’s intensely political Insertions series operates. The artist was uncertain as to whether the series was an artwork escaping from the constraints of the art world or a political protest using Conceptual Art’s tools. Piggybacking on the standard operations of a multinational corporation to carry very different messages to local consumers, Meireles’s altered Coca-Cola bottles were printed with, for instance, recipes for a Molotov cocktail, or the simple slogan “Yankees go home!” (fig. 5.5). These are tactics of the blindman, helping users to become “blind” to the corporate message in favor of an alternative, interestingly tactile message. Blind epistemology resurfaces during this period, taken up by artists 162

Chapter 5

themselves— particularly Brazilians aspiring to globality. Indeed, while he was in New York, Meireles began to develop Blindhotland, “the generic name given to a series of works begun in 1970,” one of which mobilized two hundred rubber balls on a rubber mat (“elastic, there again”) for an encompassing installation: Blindhotland . . . in which the dominance of the visual gives way to a “blind” perception of reality through the senses of hearing, smell and taste; through awareness of density, heat, and so on.66

As in Oiticica’s theories of the supersensorial, Meireles uses blindness (by now a familiar trope) to insist on alternative messages about this imagined “land.” The blindman enters to turn the viewer away from rapid visual “consumption” of some image, propelling alternate sensory paths through immersive installation art, via operations of the trans. The trans here is both transnation and translation— the nomadic artist in the granite canyons of New York produces a work about abject Brazilian materials and states, heat and rubber, employing them in service of an embodied, anti-ocular experience of an “other” realm (blind, hot, dense) materialized for bodies that happen to be in New York.

Unities/the Differend

Max Bill stood for the unmarked category of the universal in chapter 4, his neutral Swissness serving Brazilians who wanted to buffer the USA’s “unwanted world leadership” of the International Style.67 That cleansed history, by which even a typeface such as Bill’s “ArchiType Bill” (fig. 5.6) could work to eradicate the politics of pervasively Nazified, formerly Gothic fraktur, was imported by the São Paulo Bienal, galvanizing already existing local practitioners of geometric abstraction for a Brazilian Concretismo that could momentarily seem to unify the very real differences of Brazilians on the ground.68 At its apogee, the Bienal’s promotion of Concrete Art let Paulistas feel breathlessly cosmopolitan, instantly international, and completely up to date. But as I concluded the last chapter, the false universalism of Concretismo would not hold, once penetrated by difference and the transformations effected by a radically redefined antropofagia.

Plate 1 Top: the sensory mechanism of touch; detail of engraving from plates 32 and 33 of René Descartes, L’homme (written 1630–33 but published posthumously; this edition Paris, 1729). Courtesy of Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Bottom: Visitors encountering Willem Boshoff’s Blind Alphabet in two South African installations: in Johannesburg, 1995 (left), and in Bloemfontein, 2012 (right). Photograph: Maricelle Botha for OFM Radio; courtesy the artist.

Plate 2 The “Crystal Palace,” site of the International Exhibition of 1851 (also known as the “Great Exhibition”). Frontispiece from Dickinson’s comprehensive pictures of the great exhibition of 1851; from the originals painted . . . by Messrs. Nash, Haghe & Roberts (London: Dickinson, 1854); courtesy Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries. Plate 3 William Simpson, watercolor illustrating Owen Jones’s design for the interior of the Great Exhibition, 1850. Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 546-1897.

Plate 4 1862 Great Exhibition, London. Exterior view of the brick structure designed by the engineer Captain Francis Fowke for use in place of the Crystal Palace. Illustrated London News, May 24, 1862.

Plate 5 Left: Hiram Powers, original plaster model for The Greek Slave, 1843, Florence. Photograph courtesy Archives of American Art, Hiram Powers Papers, Smithsonian Institution. Right: detail of elephant folio chromolithograph from Dickinson’s comprehensive pictures of the great exhibition of 1851 (London: Dickinson, 1854), showing The Greek Slave installed in the United States display at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851.

Plate 6 Edouard Manet, Vue de l’Exposition Universelle, 1867, oil on canvas, 1.08 × 1.965 m. Collection of the Najonalgalleriet, Oslo, Norway.

Plate 7 Top: Taxonomy and geography in the circumnavigatory layout of the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris. Bird’s-eye view by Eugène Ciceri, Lemercier & Cie., Paris. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-00497. Bottom: Detail of floor plan from Exposition Universelle visitor guide, 1867.

Plate 8 Georges Garen, Illumination of the Eiffel Tower for the Universal Exposition of 1889—an infrastructure for visibility and the city-as-spectacle. Detail of color lithograph engraved from zinc plates, produced in the Galerie des Machines, by MONROCQ on the new press MARIONI, during the Exposition.

Plate 9 Luigi Loir, poster for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, Paris, showing the staging of the city as a spectacle observed by exotic visitors from France d’outre mer (J. Minot, lithographer).

Plate 10 Galerie des Machines at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, where Henry Adams experienced his epiphany regarding “the Dynamo and the Virgin.” Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection. Visual materials [6.1.015]: Paris Exposition lantern slides. Paris Exposition: Machinery Section, Paris, France, 1900.

Plate 11 Hand-tinted photographic image showing the sculpture court at the Grand Palais, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900.

Plate 12 Jacques-Émile Blanche, André Gide et ses amis au Café Maure de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. Oil on canvas. Museé de Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 13 Lithographic poster for the first Venice Biennale, 1895, printed by “award-winning firm” C. Ferrari in Venice. Historical Archives of Contemporary Art (ASAC), Venice Biennale.

Plate 16 Jozef Israëls, Langs moeders graf (Alongside Mother’s Grave, or Passing the Cemetery), 1856. The painting is considered a turning point in Israëls’s work. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Plate 14 Pablo Picasso, Science and Charity, 1897. The primary surviving work in Picasso’s “international Realism” genre style. Museu Picasso, Barcelona; Gift of Pablo Picasso, 1970. Photo: Gasull. MPB: 110.046. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York. Plate 15 Jozef Israëls, William of Orange Meeting with Margaretha of Parma (1855). Now in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Image from Dieuwertje Dekkers et al., Jozef Israëls, 1824–1911 (Groningen: Instituut voor Kunst- en Architectuurgeschiedenis, 1999).

Plate 17 François Millet, Un paysan greffant un arbre (Peasant Grafting a Tree), shown at the 1855 Exposition Universelle, Paris. Now in the collection of Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Munich Neue Pinakothek). Image courtesy bpk, Berlin/ Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 18 Jozef Israëls, Self-Portrait, 1908. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 31 × 21.4 inches. Inscribed “Jozef Israels fecit, for Mr. Libbey 28 Oct 1908.” Toledo Museum of Art; Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey 1914.117.

Plate 19 Left: poster for the 2005 Venice Biennial in situ, from the series by the Milan branch of the advertising firm McCann Erikson. Photograph courtesy John Clark. Right: poster for the 1920 Venice Biennale by Auguste Sézanne, printed at the Italian Institute of Graphic Arts, Bergamo. Historical Archives of Contemporary Art (ASAC), Venice Biennale.

Plate 20 Top: Josep Lluis Sert’s pavilion for Republican Spain, designed for the Paris world’s fair, 1937, and reconstructed in 1992 in Barcelona, where it serves as a center for international historic studies. Bottom: Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion for Germany (known commonly as the “Barcelona Pavilion”), designed for the Barcelona world’s fair, 1929, and reconstructed in Barcelona, 1983–86. Photograph: Ashley Pomeroy.

Plate 21 The 1937 world’s fair in Paris from the Trocadéro: color images from the album officiel, with a black-and-white postcard of the main view. Notice the Nazi eagle and swastika above Albert Speer’s German design, confronting Boris Iofan’s Soviet Pavilion surmounted by Vera Mukhina’s sculpture of revolutionary workers.

Plate 22 Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Oil on canvas, 349.3 × 776.6 cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 23 Hans Haacke, GERMANIA, German pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1993 (winner of that year’s Golden Lion). Left: entrance panel, with photograph of Hitler touring the Venice Biennale in 1934 (accompanied by Antonio Maraini, the Biennale’s artistic director). Right: interior view, showing the smashed marble of Albert Speer’s floor. Photographs: Roman Mensing; courtesy of the artist. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 24 Anita Malfatti, Ritmo (Torso), 1915–16. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 61 × 46.6 cm. Collection Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. Photograph: Asa 18 Produções Culturais; courtesy Instituto Anita Malfatti and the Malfatti family.

Plate 25 Top: Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (Eater of Men), dated January 11, 1928. Oil on canvas, 85 × 73 cm (33 × 29 inches). Collection Museu de arte latinoamericana de Buenos Aires (MALBA) Fundación Constantini, Argentina; courtesy Tarsila do Amaral family. Bottom: Pau Brasil, Tarsila’s cover design for Pau Brasil Cancioneiro (Brazilwood Songbook), a book of poetry by Oswald de Andrade (Paris: Sans Pareil, 1925). Image courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and the Tarsila do Amaral family.

Plate 26 Waldemar Cordeiro, Untitled, 1949. Oil on canvas, 28.5 × 21 inches. Photograph: Oriol Tarridas; courtesy the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection and Analivia Cordeiro.

Plate 27 Antonio Maluf, posters for the first São Paulo Bienal, 1951. Courtesy of Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and Projeto Antonio Maluf.

Plate 28 Abraham Palatnik, Aparelho Cinecromático (Kinechromatic Apparatus), 1957–58. Wood, metal, synthetic fabric, lightbulbs, and motor, 31.5 × 23.6 × 7.9 inches (80 × 60 × 20 cm). An early variant of Palatnik’s kinechromatic apparatus was on view in the first São Paulo biennial; since it did not fit any category of traditional media (painting, sculpture), it could only receive an honorable mention. Museum of Modern Art, New York; Latin American and Caribbean Fund through a gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Marnie Pillsbury. Courtesy of Abraham Palatnik. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 29 Miro with Hélio Oiticica’s P2 Parangolé Flag 1 (1964), at Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1965. Photograph: Désdemone Bardin; courtesy César Oiticica for Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Plate 30 Top: “Souvenir from Igorot Village” at the 1904 St. Louis world’s fair, manufactured by the “Philippine Photograph Company, St. Louis.” Courtesy Special Collections, University of Delaware Library. Bottom: Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid, 1992. Photograph documenting performance in Madrid’s Columbus Plaza—the spatiotemporal heart of the Quincentennial debate. Photo: Nancy Lytle; courtesy of Coco Fusco.

Plate 31 Harald Szeemann, notes from New York trip (1968–69), reproduced in When Attitudes Become Form (1969), as well as Museum der Obsessionen (1981). New photograph courtesy Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Plate 32 Michael Heizer, Bern Depression, 1969. Heizer’s act of “freeing the earth” in front of the Kunsthalle Bern was part of the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form. Photograph: Balthasar Burkhard; courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Plate 33 Photographs of “Himmelsrichtungen, 1976 / Reconstruction, 2009 / Steel, Glass, Paint,” as the installation was labeled. For the 53rd Venice Biennale, Fare Mondi (Making Worlds), curator Daniel Birnbaum refabricated a Blinky Palermo work that had been commissioned by Germano Celant for the 1976 Venice Biennale; the documents posted, drawn from Birnbaum’s research into the original installation and skeptical self-questioning, became part of viewers’ experience. Photographs: Adam Feldmeth.

Plate 34 Cai Guo-Qiang, Cultural Melting Bath, 1997, as installed at the 2000 Lyon Biennial, Partage d’exotismes (Sharing Exoticisms). It was subsequently acquired for the Lyon museum. Photograph: Tony Walsh; courtesy Cai Studio.

Plate 35 Poster mounted on a palace along the Grand Canal in Venice, advertising Hussein Chalayan’s The Absent Presence, shown in the off-site Turkish pavilion at the Fondazione Levi in the Palazzo Giustiniani, 2005 Venice Biennale. Photograph courtesy John Clark

Plate 36 Javier Téllez, The Elephant and the Blind Men, 2008 (detail). C-print mounted on aluminum, produced in an edition of five, plus two artist’s proofs. 96 × 167 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

Plate 37 Joan Jonas, It blew right in my ear like the wind, 2014, as installed at CCA (Center for Contemporary Art) Kitakyushu, Japan. Photograph: Ken’ichi Miura; courtesy of the artist.

Figure 5.5 Cildo Meireles, Inserções em Circuitoes Ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola (Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project), 1970. Coca-Cola bottles, transferred text. © Cildo Meireles. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica have been my case studies thus far for that shift. They began with difference as a quality of specific subjects— as with the class and racial markers attending the Afro-Brazilians with whom Oiticica danced his slogan-bedecked Parangolés before the mixed group was ejected from Rio’s modern museum. But the work of Clark and Oiticica entered the global scene, I want to argue, as something more than mere “difference.” Their trans-objects worked what I introduce now as the theoretical category of the differend. Juxtaposing unities (a modernist obsession) with the philosopher François Lyotard’s 1983 concept of the differend, this section aims to reveal the parallel transformation of the public sphere that characterized this period and its trans-objects.69 What is the differend? Lyotard’s complex concept crystallized decades of poststructuralist philosophy of

the 1960s and 1970s that examined how subjects are constructed in discourse yet manage to take up that very language to change the world. Grammatically, the differend entered English from French, taking on its own significance in the period under discussion. French exquisitely differentiates between the adjective “different” (différent), used to mark something or someone as distinctive, and the noun “difference” (différend), indicating discord and disagreement.70 Lyotard’s concept designates the hard truths of political being: the difference that is never spoken must become a “differend” in dispute. Without acknowledging difference, in other words, society cannot claim to have a public sphere. Indicative of the transition toward the differend are Lygia Clark’s Unidades, a series from 1958. The untranslatable Portuguese title for these carefully modulated Transnational Openings

163

Figure 5.6 Max Bill’s typeface ArchiType Bill (formalized in 1949), as used for the poster advertising the 1944 exhibition Konkrete kunst at the Kunsthalle Basel. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy Max Bill Archive at Max, Binia + Jakob Bill Foundation, Adligenswil, Switzerland.

geometric abstractions encompasses two quite distinct English words— “units” and “unities”— a marvelous ambiguity denoting how these monochromes are both activated and undone by the thin lines embossed into their surfaces. These “light lines,” as Clark referred to them, pop out optically and thus differentiate themselves from the support— they break with “unity.”71 According to the Neoconcrete thinking of the time, these units/unities were to produce “a total vision of the world” through activation and transformation of the perceiving subject.72 The paradox of a differentiated polyglot “unity” would motivate Clark’s hinged, manipulable, self-transforming Bichos as well— and as Gullar had realized, “unity” would never be the same. In the face of such art, curators evolved from behindthe-scenes unifiers of objects to purveyors of unpredictable events— a transition evident by the end of the 1960s. 164

Chapter 5

Note the shift as Kynaston McShine’s earlier thinking about Primary Structures (1966) evolved into Information (1970). Similarly, Harald Szeemann would begin with exhibitions of “kinetic art” and later explore “attitudes.” Global operations of transplantation, translocation, translation, and transference challenged Gestalt theories of stable forms and unified figures; Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology was circulating to support a view of perception as only operationally unified by a dynamically shifting and morphing subject enfleshed in the world.73 Szeemann’s practice exemplified the transnationalism required to shift from “objects” with their “schools” to the spaces of multiplied happenings. The entrance of the curatorial voice into this book’s narrative marks the arrival of postmodernism, full-blown globalization, and the age of the biennial. Szeemann both announces this condition and produces it. The emergence of the celebrity curator in the postwar period drives this chapter’s changed focus from institutions to their agents— with the agency of art still in view. Art’s history from the 1960s through the 1990s prompts such a move, but also allows us to shift attention from objects to contingent situations, some of which emerge from fundamental changes in the way art is to work. Crucial to the transnational as it gathered force during this period is artists’ recognition that in place of insertion into large world pictures, they could focus on the intimate disorientation that can be produced on the scale of a single person encountering an unsettling piece of art— at times oceans away from the place of its conception and departing entirely from the “intention” of a curatorial theme. Lyotard’s theory of the differend elucidates this epistemic condition, which he was negotiating in the 1980s: A phrase comes along. What will be its fate, to what end will it be subordinated, within what genre of discourse will it take its place? [What] comes along is put into play within a conflict between genres of discourse. This conflict is a differend.74

For Lyotard, the differend and its conflicts were exemplified by the historical event of the Shoah (Holocaust), which denied a voice to those it killed. This is the most extreme differential imaginable “between genres of discourse,” but for Lyotard it summons responsibility in those who survived to negotiate difference, to speak its

Figure 5.7 Map of Venice drawn by Harald Szeemann as a boy, included in his sketchbook Geographie von Europe, ca. 1948–52. Colored ink on paper. Courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

name not as differentiated “mark” but as ethical compunction. The Holocaust has little relevance for a discussion of Clark and Oiticica’s art. But negotiating the differend has significance for the postmodernism emerging during this period, generated in direct response to the “crisis” of the modernist object and the stability of art’s presumed transcendental subject. The differend, in this chapter, stands for the energy of signification itself, in the small-scale transaction of a sign from one person and its reception by another, or the evolving subjects produced by the kinetic, immersive, and eventful art we are focusing on here. Like Nietzschean sparks that fly from the philosopher’s anvil, signifying energy can be violent. But the sparks of conflict also cast light. They can be used to forge tools to think with, produce a fulcrum for political commentary, ignite local debates, or construct a more elastic public sphere. In this context, art becomes open to event. To cite Clark’s anthropophagic paradox, artists of the time wanted to be both “dissolving into the world” and “changing that very world” with the working of their art. Understanding the world would be a precondition for entering its discourses, as in the earnest geographical studies Szeemann made as a boy (fig. 5.7). As with all the artists examined in this book, another precondition was learning art’s international language. As a theater student, Szeemann examined early international avant-gardes

(first the Nabis, then Dadaism), became an art historian to understand their context, then moved as a curator to the systematic conceptualisms of the 1960s (Fluxus and Happenings) that drew on this past. Events characterize this historical art and inspired Szeemann’s curation— and it is here again that the periodspecific theories of Lyotard are suggestive, conceiving the differend as “phrases in dispute,” where phrases themselves are “events” whose linking in discourse happens locally, through a process that is durational, discursive, and nonessentialist. Although the linguistic metaphor does not hold for the visual, immersive, or “eventful” art that Szeemann presented, his reputation for opening museums and biennials to ephemeral events would contribute to the “relational,” situational, or experiential aesthetics celebrated today. This introduces a thesis that punctuates the historical arc of this book: art inserted into biennials in the postwar period came to incorporate the festal and ephemeral components inherited from the fairs. From art as object, we shift definitively to art as event. Szeemann was a key player in that trajectory, abetted by the proliferation of biennial culture itself following São Paulo’s initial replication. Events were already present in the Parisian Biennale et Internationale des Jeunes Artistes founded by state culture minister André Malraux in 1959.75 The impulse was even Transnational Openings

165

more strongly expressed in the “Museum of 100 days” founded as documenta in 1955, updated by Szeemann in 1972 as a “100-day event.” Roughly two decades later, Manifesta would name itself as such to evoke the “manifestation” of events (rather than the “documenting” of trends). These eventful infrastructures were founded in response to the restless and nomadic practices of younger artists, transnational modes that have now come to constitute globalist practice. Events, as per Lyotard, would suggest durational workings and negotiations, rather than static meaning. Documenta— which would reach out to Szeemann in its fifth iteration— registered at its origins both the singularity of “event” and the use-value of repetition. Initially, the repetition was not its own, but that of the roving and repeating garden fair that had finally come to town. Kassel had been heavily bombed during the war (it was the site of the Henschel tank factory, staffed by slave laborers from a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp). Awaiting postwar rehabilitation, the town finally won its spot in the traveling garden show by 1955. Well aware of the city’s Nazi past, local curator and educator Arnold Bode came up with the idea of adding contemporary art to the city’s “beautification,” in an explicit effort to address Western Germany’s perceived belatedness in relation to vanguard modernism. Inspired by a revived Venice Biennial (and by the seismic echoes from São Paulo), Bode put his head together with Hamburg professor and art historian Werner Haftmann, who had just published a book resuscitating German abstract painters from Nazi obloquy.76 Bode scraped together a budget from both city and federal sources, carving a modern display space out of the ruins of the Fridericanum— an enlightenment structure so devastated by Allied bombing raids that nothing remained but its Neoclassical facade. The “main event” of the garden show would take place in a fresh tented pavilion designed by Frei Otto, erected on the adjacent park amid thousands of new plantings and landscaping laid over rubble; art would be put into the Fridericanum’s hastily renovated shell, and would include photo documentation as well as “original” objects. The building’s raw, eviscerated state, fitted out with plastic sheeting for curtains, a rebuilt roof, and some whitewashing on the exposed brick, offered a first instance of the postindustrial look that would characterize biennials for the next five decades.77 And it was a huge success. With 166

Chapter 5

Haftmann’s agreement and continuing support from the West German state, Bode decided that documenta should become a repeating forum. It was restaged four years later (fig. 5.17), and it has endured far better than most recurring exhibitions, with its fourteenth iteration scheduled for 2016. Bode could thus be classed as one of the visionary curator-auteurs who inspired the young Szeemann, who came of age in this time of proliferating biennials. When he announced his documenta (number 5 in 1972) as a “100-day event,” Szeemann was pointedly renovating Bode’s “100-day museum.” He would tie his career to art as event. Such incorporations of the festal correlated with artists’ priorities, curatorial interests, and the biennial event structure itself. Artists’ tactics in the 1960s were keen to avoid both markets for art objects and static “museum-mausoleums”; events were attractive for these reasons (it was hard to put a happening into a private collection). The Venice protests of 1968 had targeted that biennial’s relation to the market; leaders of biennials on two continents suddenly severed the “purchase awards” that had once helped build municipal collections. The exhibitions, as a result, were freed to be events rather than object showcases.78 Events in the hands of artists were in tune with increasingly progressive politics; yet they were also built into the structure of biennial ephemerality itself, and to the cultural capital fostered by the repeating but everrenewing shows. Notable was the incorporation of these festal structures into the art itself. No longer adjunct for Szeemann and his ilk, performative rituals and educational marathons would build on the rise of Conceptual Art, but would also encourage a new aesthetics of experience (chapter 6) and its embodied idioms. In the urgent prose of Lyotard from the time: “What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them.”79 That “idiom” would increasingly be art in the form of durational event, pursuing tactics of the trans. Lyotard had presumed criticality in the event of signification, but event structures were also susceptible to the global culture industry with its menu of consumable difference.80 The differend concept would confront this emerging Panglossian account with a fierce ethical politics: “something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases

right away. [Humans] must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.”81 Artists were among the first to recognize that there was not a neutral map that all would agree was “the world picture”; contestation was required, transformation the goal. Clark insisted that her manipulable entities changed the world through viewers’ “direct actions,” edging toward her own practice as a therapist even as Oiticica argued Brazil “doesn’t exist” and invited participants in his Tropicália to consume, cannibalistically, the media designed to overwhelm them. These new registers of embodiment, these “wars of position,” figured viewers as always enmeshed in a world coming into being through the encounter with art. In my argument, what emerged was a critical globalism that could confront the economic logic of globalization and model alternative futures.82 None of this would be easy for the artgoing public. Participation was required for transformation to occur. As curator Guy Brett reported on the transformation of Oiticica’s Tropicália when it was reconfigured for London in 1969: On one level Tropicália is an environment of blatantly presented tropical images, and it would be easy to take it superficially as a piece of Brazilian folklore. But the hidden level of Tropicália is the process of penetrating it, the web of sensory images which produce an intensely intimate confrontation, specially perhaps with the innermost image of all, in pitch darkness, the universal switched-on TV set. [Emphasis added.]83

“Universal” here indicates a world-spanning channel, the McLuhanesque conduit to which McShine also alluded in Information— a cool (or low-definition) medium enabled by international communication protocols and the globally adjudicated bandwidth that nonetheless remained open to local content and transformative encounters.84 Oiticica specifically described the television inserted in his “Éden plan” in cannibalistic terms, as an anthropophagic element that “devours the participant, because it is more active than his sensory creating”— requiring the visitor to mobilize an alert and mediatic devouring right back.85 Rejecting the economic calculation of the multinational corporation, Oiticica recommended “crelazer”— the creativity of purposeful laziness in the face of instrumentalized labor-time.

Figure 5.8 Hans Haacke, Tokyo Trickle, 1970, Tokyo Biennial. Courtesy of the artist. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

At its best, art can still work this way. Through these turbulent 1960s and into the 1970s, “unity” talk was forced to surrender its remainders in and around São Paulo, just as kinetics and participatory public art emerged around the world in opposition to the collectible: entertaining labyrinths as the collective GRAV’s offerings in the 1959 Paris biennial, dribbling systems of water from Hans Haacke in Tokyo’s 1970 biennial (fig. 5.8), a foaming apparatus by David Medalla for Szeemann’s 1972 documenta (a show that also featured the performative human bodies of James Lee Byars and Joseph Beuys). By the time of the early Havana biennials in the 1980s, performance art was well established (by Tania Bruguera and others), characteristic of the developing event structure I’ve called bienTransnational Openings

167

Figure 5.9 Dutch curator Wim Beeren, photographed during the opening of the São Paulo Bienal in 1994, shouting at Vai Vai samba school dancers wearing Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé capes to get out of the gallery. Photograph by Renato Sousa, illustrating an article by Paulo Reis, Jornal do Brasil, October 13, 1994, 16.

nial culture.86 Abstraction was still a privileged global language, but it was joined by performative conceptualisms in which site, duration, and movement played significant roles. Dancing or leisured bodies could be launched into the machinery of globalized labor and the culture industry itself— still remarkably provocative in 1994, when the appearance of Oiticica’s Parangolés in the galleries of the São Paulo Bienal prompted Dutch curator Wim Beeren to wave imperiously at the samba dancers and shout, “Get out of here!”— reflecting the overall “tense atmosphere” between locals and foreigners at that year’s exhibition (fig.  5.9).87 What was being negotiated in that theater of the differend was nothing less than the hegemony of European modernism, a past that had already been cannibalized by Oiticica to mobilize a Brazilian present as a set of local bodies in motion, activating the space around dead objects that the curator flailed to defend. Szeemann would be adept at avoiding such explosions, taking up artists’ own tactics of the trans. 168

Chapter 5

A scholar of the Dada demimonde, a connoisseur of utopian anarchism, a collector of obsessive naifs, and a canny strategist using his “foreign-looking” name to configure himself as a free-floating Gastarbeiter— Harald Szeemann thoroughly enjoyed being a “neutral” Swiss contractor doing the global work of art.88 Szeemann’s Gastarbeiter title emerged around 1970, trans to categories such as Culture Minister, Chief Curator of the State Museum, or President of the Venice Biennale, but still in concert with privatized support for the arts. Less and less visible were the claims of centralized states (which still fueled Malraux’s Biennale des Jeunes in Paris); more salient were new commercial entities such as the art fairs thriving in the wake of the Venice biennial market’s closure. Older cosmopolitan cities were emerging— Havana, Istanbul, Johannesburg— where earlier traditions of trade and exchange were rendered into metropolitan identities. These formed the new biennial ideal, attempting to eradicate toxic histories of national or imperial pasts. The point

of biennials in the epoch of the trans was increasingly to erase nationalism and produce visitors as “global.” This kind of metropolitan cosmopolitanism was congenial to transnational capital as well as transient artists. If it alienated the local art world— sometimes still organized around a state academy— that would be the price of doing (global) business.89 Szeemann’s Gastarbeiter, and the category of guest curator that he inaugurated, was a function of this metropolitan cosmopolitanism. When experienced as imposed, cosmopolitanism’s arrogance could engender the violence of the differend— Manifesta 6 being a case in point. With three coordinators— “the German curator, critic and editor Florian Waldvogel, the independent curator Mai Abu El Dahab from Cairo, and the Russian-born New York artist Anton Vidokle”— the exhibition was announced as “anything but” a normal biennial, scheduled to open in Nicosia in 2006.90 Outdoing even the usual Manifesta “anti-biennial” polemics, the curators announced plans to set up an active school for occupied and divided Cyprus. (This echoes some of Szeemann’s intentions for the 1972 documenta, generated in collaboration with educator Bazon Brock.) In place of art objects, Manifesta would host discussions, offer educational curricula, and present spontaneous art events. When presenting his organizing rubric “Notes for an Art School” in Paris in the spring of 2006, Vidokle was asked how closely he was working with Nicosian artists and art schools; he answered airily that he and other guest curators weren’t interested in such provincial conservatives.91 The venture collapsed a few months later. Although the failure was diced differently by the various actors— poor administration and cold-feet politics, in Vidokle’s account; “the building of infrastructure in an illegal state,” per the Cypriot liaison— I propose that the doom of Manifesta 6 was sealed by cosmopolitan hubris. Not far from Augustine’s “City of God” (426) or Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784), this cosmopolitanism presumed allegiance to a specific Western ideal. As parsed in chapter 3, the “cosmopolitan” always resides within a specific “cosmos,” one not necessarily open to all. Manifesta’s variant of global cosmopolitanism was deaf to the idioms of its dialogical partners, viewing them as temporally belated rather than participants in an ethical exchange.92 Put bluntly, Manifesta’s curators thought their contemporary art event could leach the poison from Greek-Cypriot na-

tionalism, and their transnationalism was indeed sought by some locals precisely for such ends.93 The lesson for this chapter is that the Gastarbeiter is always brought in to trump local politics and therefore needs to tread cautiously in the paths of power worn in that terrain. Szeemann’s case brings these dynamics into sharp focus. Enabling his Cold War transnationalism— indeed, the very condition of possibility for the expansion of new biennial forms beginning in the 1950s— was the rapid expansion in infrastructures for the distribution of information and bodies in the art world after World War II. As McShine put it in the 1970 Information catalogue: “Photographs, documents, films, and ideas, which are rapidly transmitted, have become an important part of this new work. . . . [With] television, films, and satellites, as well as the ‘jet,’ it is now possible for artists to be truly international; exchange with their peers is now comparatively simple.”94 Note that “jet” is still in quotation marks, indicating how recently passengers had moved from cumbersome short-haul propeller planes to massive turbojet engines. Transnational tactics could still operate under the sign of the “international,” using old technologies such as boats (Oiticica took one to London) and trains— but telex, mimeographs, “Instamatic” and Polaroid photography, photo-offset lithography, facsimile machines, and photocopiers were increasing the speed and transitivity of contemporary currents. Szeemann was both marked by, and frozen in, this moment, remaining loyal to fax technologies, which staffers had to use for conveying printed emails well into the 1990s. Artists were already making art with these systems, modeling what Szeemann would bring to his local Bern Kunsthalle, and what he could propose once he became a freelancer for hire. As he put it, “I produced for export,” developing cooperative projects across four nations, working with museums in Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Düsseldorf to amplify his budgets.95 The more experimental these artistic developments aimed to be, the more transnationally they could be shown. David Medalla participated in Attitudes; Oiticica was in Information; Haacke and Michael Heizer were invited to both. This was a broad development— instructional telegrams and faxes carried Conceptual Art ideas across oceans and borders, facilitating a new kind of art that could “propose” an environment or a process to be activated on the ground.96 Transnational Openings

169

We can see this particularly well in Japan, which would take up many of the artists in Szeemann’s 1969 Attitudes for inclusion in the 1970 Tokyo biennial, under the curation of Toshiaki Minemura.97 Translation, transition, and transnationalism were personally motivated for Japan’s artists and curators, responding to Allied occupation and later the US-Japan treaty known as ANPO, which had already knit their country into the new world order; even as local artists might oppose these USmandated political strictures, an emerging “cosmopolitan law” was also at hand— conceptualist abstraction was the ascendant global style, contravening Socialist or Fascist Realism and displacing a Surrealistically inflected Pop.98 This neutralizing conceptualism had a prior history in Japan. Just as in Brazil, the period immediately following World War II witnessed a reinvention of abstraction; in this case, it was through the bootstrap radicalism of a “Zero Group” founded in 1952 Osaka, segueing into the collectivity calling itself Gutai after 1955. These Japanese artist groups both referenced a tabula rasa analogous to the rubble of nationalist figuration, now underfoot.99 If the art in Japan was more performative, it nonetheless tapped desires similar to those of the Paulistas, yearning for elementary forms of communication that would neutralize difference. As one radically abstract Japanese calligrapher described this postwar sentiment: “I have a feeling that West and East, each standing as a leg of a rainbow, will someday come together at some high place— the two becoming one.”100 Such hopes fed the biennial Tokyo opened immediately after São Paulo’s in 1952, and informed the syncretic cosmopolitanism of Gutai sensei Yoshihara Jirō in Osaka. “Gutai” stands for Concrete Art— signaling a kinship that brought Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa to Japan.101 This was hardly the geometric abstraction familiar from Max Bill, however. Yoshihara’s 1956 manifesto for Gutai instead sets up the differend. Praising Pollock and the “action” painter Georges Mathieu, the manifesto calls for an art that captures the “scream of matter itself ”— a violent materiality necessitated before “human spirit and matter” could shake hands in newly global, performative art.102 More proximately to Szeemann, syncretist internationalisms were cropping up in the 1957 founding of another “Zero” group— Gruppe Zero— announcing itself in Düsseldorf but soon reaching broadly across Europe.103 Humble, nihilistic, and purifying, the numerative sign of 170

Chapter 5

the null set symbolized “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning as at the count-down when rockets take off— zero is the incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new.”104 Specifically, the German Zeros linked themselves with Yves Klein in Paris, Piero Manzoni and Azimuth in Milan, nul in Holland, Gutai in Japan (which by then had incorporated the Japanese Zeros), and the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel (GRAV) in Paris. Even Eastern bloc groups such as Zagreb’s Nove Tendencije and Poland’s Unismus were drawn to this eager network, functionally transnational until the Soviets drew the iron curtain more tightly across these conduits of communication and travel.105 Of course such networks mimicked those earlier European art-world alliances studied by Szeemann— the Internationale du Surrealisme, itself reconstructing cross-border Dadaism as inflected by the Communist International in the years between 1915 and 1930. But in the decades after World War II, “international” no longer needed to be an explicit goal. It was more of a precondition. Artists chafed under its official-sounding mantle and sought a way to work across or under the radar of nation and inter-nation.106 As action and praxis, transnationalism was abroad. Transnational conceptual gambits evolved from permeable local conditions— as I have argued with Brazilians’ revival of antropofagia.107 This “local route to the transnational” might describe Italy’s intentionally vernacular and demotic Arte Povera as well. The earliest publications on this movement made visible the new idioms and implied that they reflected transatlantic trends: an image of “mirror displacements” by Robert Smithson in the Yucatan might be compared to a gallery in Rome filled with horses by Jannis Kounellis. As one artist collective associated with Arte Povera put it, “We do not work as spectators . . . there is a direct, perceptive, and instantaneous relation.”108 Similarly, Oiticica’s Mondrianic systems brought Dutch purities and Brazilian realities into contact, via earth and performative bodies in the Bólides and Parangolés, requiring antropofagia’s “distinctly harsh improvisation” to bring transnational subjects into being.109 Wielding the rigorously taxonomic tools of a conceptualism published in catalogues and journals from around the world, ambitious artists drew on cool cosmopolitanism even as they surfaced the incapacity of any such system to fully repress remainders of the local sit-

uation. The nomadic curator would trade in these mixed results, making strategy from the underdetermined praxis of the trans.

When Attitudes Became Norms

Harald Szeemann did not invent most of the things he is said to have invented, but he personified and publicized them in a corporatized author-function whose medium was the transnational exhibition of contemporary art. As a self-described apparatus or “bachelor machine,” Szeemann produced exhibitions that became models for late twentieth-century biennials even as they themselves drew from biennial event structures.110 Paradoxically, much later in his career Szeemann would also give voice to the unresolved differends haunting the European “Union,” particularly in former satellites of the Soviet bloc.111 Szeemann’s activities undid the binary of nation/internation, sometimes dissolving it through the surfactant of the transnational, and sometimes through the ethnic subnational, the philosophical metanational, or the genial subject whose “individual mythologies” ideologically transcended the nation-state. Although he had produced a few events as a student, Szeemann’s professional career as a curator began with his unexpected appointment to the Bern Kunsthalle as its young director. He booked solo shows and national groupings of foreign artists, mostly from the United States, alternating with Swiss artists’ retrospectives. There is little innovation here. The French had for a decade been showing US, French, and Japanese postwar painters under the French banner of informel in a pannational construct they called École du Pacifique (school of the Pacific), shown in Japan in 1957 and at documenta as early as 1959.112 Szeemann would have had access to Abstract Expressionist works from the US in many European venues; as if in recognition that this moment had already passed, he chose to show in Bern only secondgeneration Abstract Expressionists, as in 4 Amerikaner: Jasper Johns– Alfred Leslie– Robert Rauschenberg– Richard Stankiewicz, an explicitly national grouping from 1962.113 But in any case, painting was not his first love. Szeemann’s core research was in European Dada, which resonated with the US-based Happenings artists emerging in transnational Fluxus, and roaming German new music festivals as early as 1962.114 Szeemann created an ideology of “indi-

vidual mythologies” to handle such art, despite the artists’ own ostentatious practices of delegation, deskilling, and impersonal form-generation, which were intended precisely to question such tropes of authorship and creation. Szeemann’s signature move was to personalize creation in order to dissolve the pervasive Cold War apparatus of national art movements or political bloc statements. He favored assembled (not collective) actions. His best-known projects, such as the 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, and the 1972 documenta staged in its image, exemplify the transnational openings he engineered in biennial culture. The repeating exhibitionary structure of documenta formed Szeemann, even before he was tapped to direct it. Recall that he was an employee of the city of Bern, a small city in a small country; his job was to program the municipal Kunsthalle, legally owned by the Bernese artists’ union.115 But he was ambitious to break with these provincial constraints. So he designed Attitudes, his first major survey exhibition in Bern, to target the recently closed and roundly criticized 1968 iteration of Germany’s federally funded documenta. The now global audience that documenta garnered was addressed explicitly in Szeemann’s provincially staged exhibition. As he wrote in its catalogue: “Pointing to the 4th Documenta last year of art up til ’68, one should now mount a contemporary exhibition— put bluntly, to document newly developed art.”116 This Bern riposte was given a title that rehearsed most of Conceptual art’s extant theories: Live in your head. When Attitudes Become Form. Works– Concepts– Processes– Situations– Information. The exhibition, which traveled to multiple venues and was accompanied by a catalogue, set the terms by which Szeemann would become the celebrated fixer of recurring exhibitions from the 1970s until his death at the age of seventy-two in 2005. It ultimately launched him into a guest curator career. By the 1990s, Szeemann was more than ever the “go-to” man for upgrading an aspiring or deflated exhibition venue into a contemporary transnational happening— maximizing the potential for resonant global discourse. I realized in researching this chapter that I myself had followed the itineraries established by Szeemann’s practice, feeling compelled to follow documenta, as well as the Lyon and Venice biennials, in an unwitting echo of his having “put them on the map” through successive curatorial coups: Transnational Openings

171

Figure 5.10 Harald Szeemann’s sculptural assemblage of luggage tags, photographed in his Fabbrica office around 2004. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

a Szeemannian documenta 5 in 1972, a “turnkey” theme show for the 1975 Venice Biennale, a galvanizing Lyon biennial in 1997, and recurring Venice stints in 1980, 1999, and 2001. Szeemann’s carefully crafted biography was part of his oeuvre. Framed by bureaucratic protocols, he celebrated the ephemeral flotsam of the freelancer— notes, memorabilia, files, baggage destination tags— presented as if they were the relics of conceptual art practices, systems that could purge affect and “structure the chaos” of an experiential aesthetics (fig. 5.10).117 His files became machines for building serial concepts (now Freudian rather than Mondrianic), and artists were his models. Clippings and pamphlets fueled the Factory (a la Warhol) where he crafted his exhibitions, research drove an unbuilt “Museum of Obsessions” (recalling Marcel Broodthaers), 172

Chapter 5

and production was simultaneously deinstitutionalized and archived all over again via the guiding rubric of “Individual Mythologies” ( Joseph Beuys). Each element of the biographical infrastructure was used, bureaucratically, to check and balance the deep romantic conventionality of it all. And by reiterating constrained portions of the biography, the reality of Szeemann’s contractual relationships with state power or corporate clients could be decathected, in much the same way that he would deploy tropes of obsession, marginalization, and individualism to mask artists’ imbrication into academies, markets, industries, politics, and nations. This was in part a generous effacement, creating space for artists’ transnational agency. (Providing for “heterogeneous regimens and/or genres” that could thereby, potentially, find idioms and idiolects to negotiate what had been smoothed over in high modernism— those simmering occlusions Lyotard dubbed differends.)118 But effacement was also a professional tool. Highly valued by the commissioners who hired him, this “contractor’s neutrality” erased local politics in favor of cosmopolitan discourse and a refurbished concept of the avant-garde. The crafted biography emerged in phases, establishing early on that Szeemann was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1933, the first son of an immigrant. In a book on his exhibitions published posthumously in 2007, the curator wrote something about his parents for the very first time, describing a “healthy marriage” between his father, Etienne Szeemann, a master coiffeur from Hungary via London, and his mother, Julie Kambly, the orphaned daughter of biscuit makers in Trubschachen, canton of Bern: “The wealthy branches of the family were less than enthusiastic about her love for a poor hairstylist . . . of Hungarian stock.”119 In the early 1970s, Szeemann boisterously celebrated the paternal grandfather (also Etienne Szeemann, the founder of the hairstyling business), who became a hinge for the curator’s “Museum of Obsessions” and a node in his own “Personal Mythologies.” This hinge or node function emerged primarily through a curious, almost anthropological exhibition Szeemann mounted in 1974 after his grandfather’s death, installed at Galerie Toni Gerber in Bern: Grossvater: Ein Pionier wie wir (fig. 5.11). “Grandfather, a pioneer like us” fetishized the deceased Hungarian immigrant’s haircutting tools and inventions, laid out like a Surrealist cabinet of curiosities against Warholian wallpaper made of repeating

Figure 5.11 Installation views of Grossvater: Ein Pionier wie wir, Harald Szeemann’s staging of his grandfather’s haircutting implements (assisted readymades) at Galerie Toni Gerber, Bern. 1974. Photographs by Balthasar Burkhard. Courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

haircut ads, “as a visualization of a history, a record of a lifestyle, as an illustration of the knowledge that there is a point in every person’s life at which every sign becomes self-evident.”120 The clinically ironic yet melancholic distance Szeemann assumed here was emblematic of the curator’s emerging tastes (notably different, and hereby also distanced, from those of his coiffeur father). The frankly unheimlich attributes of hair and pomade in combination with the steel technical instruments devised to tame this abjecta formed a theater of the uncanny, an arch alienation buttressing Szeemann’s increasingly cosmopolitan framing of his origins. Fueled by frequent trips to Paris, Szeemann’s persona was metropolitan and urbane, with a cultivated edge of bearish Alpine heartiness. His undergraduate degree at Bern’s university in the early 1950s had combined art history, archaeology, and journalism; at age eighteen he had founded a cabaret with his university friends to pursue an interest in theater. But by age nineteen, he had switched to painting, “sick of intrigues and jealousies” in theatrical collaboration.121 The interest in art eventually became historical, and he enrolled for an art history doctoral degree at the University of Bern,

focusing on modernist artists and the theater, from the French Nabis to the international Dadaists. His dissertation research included classes at the Sorbonne, and by traveling back and forth between Switzerland and Paris from 1953 to 1960 he retraced the routes of the Dadaists he was studying.122 The first exhibition emerged from those trajectories, when Szeemann (age twenty-four) installed books, photographs, and manuscripts by Hugo Ball in a small theater in Bern, creating a local splash. Simultaneously he was on a committee that mounted the exhibition Malende Dichter– Dichtende Maler (Painter-Poets, Poet-Painters) for the Kunstmuseum of St. Gallen, opening close to the Ball exhibit in the late summer of 1957.123 The St. Gallen show required more extensive research, and when the two senior curators dropped out of the team Szeemann agreed to complete the project, taking advantage of trips across Europe and learning from museum professionals and collectors along the way.124 This self-designed apprenticeship was crucial, forging the beginnings of Szeemann’s network and styling a new transnational imaginary that soon dislodged Paris from the center of cosmopolitan modernism. As he later recalled to Swiss curator HansTransnational Openings

173

Ulrich Obrist, then eager to emulate Szeemann’s path, “There was an itinerary of hope and ambition: Pontus Hultén’s Moderna Museet, in Stockholm; Knud Jensen’s Louisiana, near Copenhagen; and Brussels”— but most of all, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam under William Sandberg’s leadership.125 Sandberg was then allowing artists to produce their own exhibitions, such as Dylaby by Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint-Phalle, and others. Szeemann recalled that during the early 1960s, “the whole art world converged in the Stedelijk cafeteria under a mural by Karel Appel.”126 This new, post-Parisian network was significant, since Szeemann’s paths were now more likely to include outposts of the Zero group than flaccid informel. These travels persuaded him in 1961 to give up his ambition of moving to the French capital, a decision confirmed when he was invited to head the Kunsthalle Bern at the age of twenty-eight.127 The youthful aura of a cosmopolitan wanderer gave him an advantage in provincial Switzerland, then struggling to define a place in international culture commensurate with its emerging role in international finance. The postwar field of forces was particularly charged, as Szeemann recalls: “Everybody was fighting to establish the significance of their institutions . . . art and culture started to be promoted by politicians and it became important which party you belonged to, especially in Germany.”128 That art fairs were on the rise in both Germany and Switzerland in the 1970s, following the Venice Biennial’s abandonment of this function, played a role in these nations’ rise as key markets for contemporary art. Neutral Switzerland, with its peculiarly local form of government, could set itself up as an impartial arbiter of cultural capital— aligned with its role as silent banker and technocratic designer for the developed and developing world. If politicians were only minor constituents for Szeemann’s actions in Bern, local artists were more actively so. Artists ran the Kunsthalle, so Szeemann’s early strategy was to alternate thematic shows featuring techno-hip movements from abroad (Light and Movement: Kinetic Art) with solo exhibitions of older luminaries: “Swiss artists I loved— people like Muller, Walter Kurt Wiemken, Otto Meyer-Amden, Louis Moilliet”— culminating in the 1968 retrospective of Switzerland’s most important international success, Max Bill. The locals were restless, however: “Isn’t the prevailing exhibition concept out of 174

Chapter 5

date, old-fashioned, focused too narrowly on the individual?”129 The Kunsthalle’s limited budget provided “initially 60,000 Sfr in 1961, then 200,000 in 1969,” but if Szeemann was to keep upping the ante he needed artists willing to invest in their own installations, and he needed other European museums.130 Thus an important transnational maneuver was Szeemann’s collaboration with Sandberg at the nationally funded Stedelijk, “which had the Holland American Line as a sponsor for transatlantic shipping, and I only had to pay for transport in Europe. In this way I was able to show Jasper Johns in ’62, Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz, and Alfred Leslie, and many more Americans later on.”131 This was trans in action, moving under the radar of the state, while feeding at its trough; the flows of transport logistics and international trade determined which artists would productively dislodge Swiss unities and bring Bern into colloquy with a wider world. Szeemann’s ambitions bloomed with the support; in 1968, after the Max Bill show, he opened 12 Environments, with works ranging from Konrad Leug’s shadow walls to Warhol’s Brillo boxes, “clouds,” and cow wallpaper, to a GRAV labyrinth, to ex-Bulgarian Christo’s sensational wrapped building— his first— the Kunsthalle itself (fig. 5.12).132 In fabulous synchronicity with the 1960s mood, the Environments catalogue was printed on newspaper stock but with a front page in lush metallic gold, illustrating the Christo wrapping. Like post-1968 Venice, the exhibition should be about the art experience, not objects for the market; the catalogue was “news,” not a coffee-table book. Art forms that resonated with this antimarket, antigallery position were Szeemann’s forte. Szeemann’s exhibition of the new, event-based art forms brought him a new set of patrons. Or at least this is how Szeemann tells it: The people from Philip Morris and the PR firm Rudder and Finn [Ruder & Finn] came to Bern and asked me if I would like to do a show of my own. They offered me money and total freedom. I said, Yes, of course. Until then I had never had an opportunity like that. . . . So getting this funding for “Attitudes” was very liberating for me.133

Rarely remarked in the encomia for Attitudes is the astonishingly brazen corporate envelope that wrapped it. Even

Figure 5.12 Top: Christo [Javacheff] and Jeanne Claude, Wrapped Kunsthalle Bern, 1968. Photograph: Thomas Cugini. © 1968 Christo. Bottom: Max Bill retrospective, Kunsthalle Bern, 1968. Photograph: Balthasar Burkhard; courtesy Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

the unique, notebooklike catalogue was initially to bear the imprimatur of “Philip Morris Europe” rather than Kunsthalle Bern; Szeemann’s sketch was quite clear on this point (fig. 5.13). In English, German, French, and a little Italian, Attitudes presented its public with the homology between “new art” and corporate innovation— “without which it would be impossible for progress to be made in any segment of society.”134 Preceding Szeemann’s text and the innovative artist proposals to follow, capital had the first word: “Just as the artist endeavors to improve his interpretation and conceptions through innovation,” the president of Philip Morris Europe writes, “the commercial entity strives to improve its end product or service. . . . As businessmen in tune with our times, we at Philip Morris are committed to support the experimental.”135 This puts a different gloss on the process-oriented art in Attitudes. Busting the decorum of the museal, these radical artworks can also be seen as preparing the way for a variety of transformations— from objects to events, but also from hardware to soft, from products to ideas, from knowledge to information— preparing the ground for the postindustrial society and its attendant service economy to come.

Significantly, Attitudes was preceded by another exhibition sponsored at the Kunsthalle by Philip Morris in 1966— a suite of prints commissioned by the corporation, packaged into a show, and exhibited in Bern as 11 Pop Artists: The New Image.136 Szeemann’s installation of these silkscreen prints was accompanied by James Rosenquist’s extraordinary wrap-around painting F-111, only just completed in 1965; in the rest of the Kunsthalle was another ambitious event-laden show, Weiss auf Weiss (which included a David Medalla Bubble-Machine and Herrmann Göpfert’s thunder-and-lightning kinetics, brought over from the 1964 documenta).137 The crowded hanging of the Philip Morris prints went without much notice, but clearly it was this exhibition that brought Szeemann to the corporation’s attention. Ruder & Finn was not yet part of this relationship; it was Philip Morris’s first female vice president, marketing director Elizabeth Margaritis, who had brokered the print show, realizing that “the changing notion of corporate citizenship . . . necessitated a global language. That language . . . was art.” In her recollection: Some of the very conservative [Philip Morris] executives in Switzerland thought I should be fired, Transnational Openings

175

Figure 5.13 Cover for the catalogue Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, as sketched by Harald Szeemann, 1968–69, and as typeset for the Kunsthalle Bern. Courtesy Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries.

for coming up with such a crazy idea. Little did they know that it was George Weissman, who was president of Philip Morris International at the time, that it was his brainchild.138

This would echo almost word-for-word the recollections of Ruder & Finn executive Nina Kaiden regarding her efforts to garner support for Szeemann’s Attitudes among the European executives of Philip Morris three years later.139 These pioneering women were themselves crafting transnational routes in the world, granted access by the freewheeling commodity capitalists and “Mad men” of midtown Manhattan. That they parlayed cultural capital as their prime investment merely parallels the twin trajectories of transnationalism in postwar art history. Szeemann’s German introduction to the Attitudes catalogue precedes an English essay by artist Scott Burton, a French contribution from critic and painter Grégoire 176

Chapter 5

Muller, and an Italian essay by critic Tommaso Trini. Szeemann’s text situates his show in an authorial sequence, mentioning his previous themed shows: kinetics in 1965, monochromes (Weiss auf Weiss) in 1966, the English-titled Science Fiction in 1967 and Environments in 1968. As I have noted, he explicitly contrasted Attitudes to the recent documenta 4, by presenting durational actions and propositions. Freed (as was the Kassel series) from any collecting ambition, Szeemann could turn away from objects. The 1968-style “Aktivitäten” he put in their place were designed to inform the viewer with “‘Werke’ nicht ausstellbar sind” (“works” that are not always exhibitable).140 Trans favors the durational working of art, which could be concept as easily as material. The “world system,” as it was then being dubbed, was no longer a picture but a set of flows.141 Touring Attitudes (to Krefeld and London) and going head to head with documenta 4, Szeemann began to speak what Margaritas

had termed the new “global language,” but the narcissism of small differences prevailed, as Bern was compared to Kassel and Venice.142 As it happened, Szeemann’s corporately funded Kunsthalle show did trump his competitors in scale, ambition, and impact, and Western critics took note. But I want to emphasize here that Szeemann’s claim that Attitudes offered a truer presentation of contemporaneity is all but incomprehensible without the festal model that Bode had established for documenta as a “museum of 100 days.” Prefiguring his approach to documenta 5, Szeemann announced that Attitudes would present activities rather than objects and trade in a cosmopolitanism of “individuals” rather than an internationalism of movements or styles. The activities, events, proposals, and ideas documented in Attitudes were radical by any measure. They ranged from Robert Barry’s shocking creation and distribution of a radioactive isotope on the Kunsthalle roof, to Joseph Beuys’s installation of site-specific shamanic sculptures, to Michael Heizer’s “freeing the earth” under the asphalt in front of the Kunsthalle by means of a wrecking ball (plate 32), to Robert Morris’s proposal to collect flammables each day for ignition in the galleries at the exhibition’s closing, to Hans Haacke’s unrealized project for an “Air and Water Pollution Control System (until pollution is completely stopped at the source).”143 This turn toward process had been quite social and political in the case of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, yet for Szeemann the apparent rejection of conventional art forms was to be viewed “als eine Addition von Erzählungen in Ich-Form” (as an addition to enumerations of individual ego).144 This pre-positioning of artists’ “attitudes” as deeply personal (remember, the catalogue is written before the events occur) was a strategic conservatism— an attempt to avoid the specter of collectivization via “actions” that was elsewhere driving the polarizing politics of the time.145 If these were additions to individual egos, then Szeemann’s own authority/authorship would be needed to conjure that sum. He would be a curate for souls, as well as producer, director, creative assembler, and manager of a “temporary world,” offering a theatrical platform for the experience of purely individual views.146 Platform formalism is born here.147 Szeemann’s depoliticization of Attitudes was partially successful. It seems to have convinced Philip Morris. But as an employee of the city of Bern, he was duty-bound

to listen to its artists. Most locals did read the events on exhibition as political— but primarily in local and individualistic terms. Buffed by subsequent Szeemann hagiographers eager to celebrate the curator’s rattling of the bourgeoisie, complaints mostly followed the avant-garde script to the letter: all naysayers were philistines unable to get the latest thing. Closer analysis is more revealing. Take the official public “interpellation” made on May 5, 1969, to the Bernese Cantonal Parliament by a local schoolteacher named Paul Johann Kopp, then serving as a parliamentary representative but locally known as an activist for the disabled and a beloved school playground monitor. In his official statement, Kopp asked why Szeemann’s personal experiments needed the Kunsthalle? Why not use a temporary shed, construction site, or tent for this “provocation” with its “obvious mischief ” and negativity? The brief remarks by Kopp surface the inherent tension between the global desires of capitalism to penetrate “horizontally” into all markets, the parallel flows of globalist artists eager to enter a “free” space of cultural cosmopolitanism, and the residues of local difference and simmering differends. In his concluding paragraph, Kopp aimed directly at Szeemann’s attempt to dodge questions of the collective good in favor of “individual mythologies.” As a tuberculosis survivor, Kopp was keen to question the presence of a multinational corporation inside a municipal cultural organization, particularly a corporation responsible for marketing lethal tobacco products as global commodities. He called on the state to increase its own funding levels so as to obviate such problematic situations in the future: Is the State Council prepared [for such] principles of artistic promotion . . . ? Is it not of the opinion that the “Kunsthalle” is too good to serve private companies as a playground [Tummelplatz] for dubious experiments? Is it prepared to devote increasing resources to initiate in our youth the knowledge and contemplation of works of art?148

Kopp seems to view the corporation as having had an instrumental role in the experiments on view— and the CEO for Philip Morris Europe had claimed as much. Perhaps if the city, canton, and artists’ association were to increase the Kunsthalle’s funding, the pernicious hand of global (cancer-mongering) capitalism would be unnecTransnational Openings

177

essary and art’s traditional enlightenment role could be restored. Kopp’s official interpellation was delivered to Szeemann on May 12, with a request for the curator to report back by July 15. But by then Szeemann was no longer employed by the Kunsthalle Bern.149 And it appears that no one else paid attention to the corporate sponsorship or its global implications. If the show advertised itself as a collection of “individuals,” then one might be demanding freedom, another propounding antisocial nihilism. There is no mention by historians or local critics of the collectives then forming in New York, Europe, Asia, and South America to fuse art and activism.150 And of course the Bern press had no theories for how an exhibition of “Activitäten” might coopt radical action, adding a frisson of youthful rebellion to the dance of smoke perfuming a Philip Morris world. Student activism had by then penetrated Switzerland, and this local circumstance did seep in to color the Bern response to Attitudes’ “individuals” and their mythologies. As Hans-Joachim Müller, one of Szeemann’s more perspicacious chroniclers, explains, the “Globe Riots” had taken place in Zürich only months before the Bern exhibition’s opening: And now this: a man from Berkeley wearing a cowboy hat [Michael Heizer] has the Helvetiaplatz demolished under the guardianship of the director of the Kunsthalle and says his violent act, Berne Depression, sounded as though it was sung by Jimi Hendrix.151

Müller’s musical note— ostensibly quoting Heizer— refers explicitly to the riots that began in the exuberant melee following a Hendrix concert in Zurich in 1968, morphing into students’ occupation of the Globus department store.152 But since Szeemann presented mere “attitudes,” radicalism would be staged entirely in the terms of an aesthetic “avant-garde”— an assemblage of extraordinary individuals, all but three of them male, and almost all of them white people of European descent.153 This echoes precisely the first moment of Concretismo as we have examined it in Brazil, when aesthetic strategies could deflect local politics by being radical in purely aesthetic terms. Bernese conservatives helped the avant-garde cause by responding as outraged philistines. One announced his intent to drive a truck up to the steps 178

Chapter 5

of the Kunsthalle and drop a load of manure, declaring in the conservative Appenzeller Zeitung: “The Answer to Shit: Shit.” The equally conservative president of the Reinach Association for Cultural Events, from the nearby Aargau region, wrote Szeemann with another proposed gift, this time of dynamite: “We shall drive it to your place in Bern, and we sincerely hope you will be at home (in the Kunsthalle) when we try out the artistic qualities of the powder.”154 Per Müller, even local officials sympathetic to “innovation” took the exhibition as a signal of troubled times; the city’s financial director wrote in the local paper, “It is to be ascribed to the current expressions of protest against the structures of society and therefore mainly seems to be meant as a provocation.”155 Müller himself praises Szeemann’s apolitical bent: In retrospect, it was perhaps the only authentic ’68 exhibition that was not about political statements, but about opening, and especially about transcending even the forms of protest, about regaining the utopian paradigm that had long ossified in left-wing thought and action.156

Long ossified? To the contrary, Mai ’68 was barely a year past. Mere months before Attitudes, the Venice Biennale had been forced by protesters to abandon its marketlinked funding system, while sympathetic artists from abroad asked the curators in Venice to turn their paintings against the wall in an interesting “exhibition” of refusal. Documenta had nearly been shut down by art students demanding greater relevance, and the Zurich protests Müller himself brings into the equation were ongoing during the Attitudes run, as young people continued to occupy the Globus building and demand a cultural center of their own. And there were Bernese students burning their military uniforms in front of the Kunsthalle itself. Respectfully, I submit that Attitudes was not about regaining a “utopian paradigm” by “transcending” protest. Rather, the exhibition marked the sublimation of protest into artists’ disparate ego statements, annealed in a “structured chaos” of artistic attitudes. This is not to say that the show was not radical in its way. It modeled a new left politics of “the personal” against the old left structures of worker solidarity. Nor was its aesthetic radicality “wasted.” The durational and embodied activities that Szeemann plumped for contrib-

uted to the new millennium’s aesthetics of experience, the precondition for a critical globalism that works the biennial circuit in our own time (chapters 6 and 7). Truly, Attitudes had numerous futures in potentia. One was reified with the bizarre reinstallation of the exhibition during the 2013 Venice Biennale— this time under the aegis of Prada rather than Philip Morris. With phenomenological fetishes of the original Bern galleries constructed inside a local palazzo (down to the Kunsthalle’s plugs, radiators, and floor treatments), Attitudes became a “total work of art” conveyed with arch postmodern simulacra by Rem Koolhaas and Thomas Demand.157 The entire assembly reinforced curator Germano Celant’s main message— in 2013, when art fairs and auctions threaten to convert contemporary art to pure fiduciary good, the visionary curator must be saved, along with the eventful postwar biennial culture in which he first emerged. More generously, the canonization of Attitudes can be seen as a product of the Szeemann model itself: a mise en abyme of memories, anecdotes, and an ongoing collective history of experiential aesthetics— restaged for the present as ever-performative documents that only we, as their recipients, can keep alive.158 In the tradition of “the open work” that became a trope in the 1960s, the art works through the participation and interpretation of the visitor, who encounters the relativity of heterogeneous perspectives and must negotiate the differend for herself.159 But in the context of this discussion of Attitudes I want to be clear, even clinical— utopian possibilities coexist with cooptive ones. The choice among “individual mythologies” can be compared to “choosing” one’s brand of smoke, selecting among the varieties in Philip Morris’s near monopoly, which becomes a mark of personal style rather than a sign of the failure of public health policy in the face of toxic profits. In this account, via the sublation of capital, Szeemann produced a brilliant exhibition that capped his emergence into a global art world and in some ways signaled its arrival.160 As a transnational opening, Szeemann’s political ambiguating had the virtue of clearing space for variable reception and resignification. Literally: into the space set aside for building the “knowledge and contemplation” of art for Bern’s youth (per Kopp), Szeemann initiated an emerging world conversation about the nature of art objects, the role of event, the rule of conceptualism, and the kinds of subjects that might be produced in conjunc-

tion with all these discourses.161 What if we could talk to one of Kopp’s students after they visited Attitudes and encountered Lawrence Weiner’s A 36” x 36” Removal to the Lathing . . . from a Wall? Perhaps they would have needed to have the piece pointed out to them in the stairwell— a neat square from which the decorative plaster had been entirely cut away from the Kunsthalle wall, a square in which the hair, straw, and grit of the kunststoff underneath could be seen. Would they have admired the technical craftsmanship of limiting the “damage” to this one clean square? Could they have imagined the transportability of this gesture to any other building, with different results? Could it have made them think about what else gets “plastered over” through operations of cultural smoothing, euphemism, cooptation, hypocrisy? This is another kind of “knowledge and contemplation” altogether, and it is potentially open to the differend. If only Kopp could have been included in the negotiation! But this was not to be. This is how I want to position Szeemann’s apoliticism: the gestures of a once political avant-garde could apparently be revived, kept independent from Cold War nationalism, and negotiated in a public sphere through individual artistic actions— but only at the cost of immediately collective politics: The generation of young artists we showed in the Kunsthalle Bern replaced the faith in technological progress— the faith of our grandfathers—by the faith in their own subjective gesture. [Emphasis added.]162

This ideology of no-ideology is familiar, of course, from the very Cold War discourses exported by nationalist US culture industries in the decades Szeemann inherited, characterized by much talk about the freedom of “subjective gestures.”163 No surprise that Philip Morris found this perfectly congenial. As Szeemann articulated in the catalogue’s introduction, the curatorial amalgamation in Attitudes could only be seen as the “sum of narrations in the first person singular”— no collectives, no messy social formations, no manifestos, no movements, no return to or reinvention of left or right politics. Although the contemporary art world feels much more political now, in practice we are still talking about spaces of representation— politics by other means.164 The exhibition’s strategic apoliticism was underlined by Szeemann’s oft-forgotten uber-title Live in Your Head— Transnational Openings

179

which remains untranslated at the top of the catalogue’s colophon (see fig. 5.13).165 It is an ambiguous phrase. We want to hear it spoken in order to understand its idiom: Is live here a verb (rhyming with give)— go ahead and live in your head? Or an adjective (rhyming with jive)— there it is, psychedelically live in your head? Although most historians simply ignore it and the curator himself often inverted its position, Szeemann’s biographer Müller glosses it with subtle complexity. On the one hand, it was a description— the work should be seen as uninterpretable madness; on the other, it was an injunction— viewers should become “infected” by conceptualism, “take part in the art process.”166 This confirms the view of one essayist in the catalogue who theorized a “transfer of interest from the object to the subject, from the things to human beings” (emphasis added).167 The multiplication of titles is itself interpretable, “in your head” giving Szeemann an opening to muse on the hippies emerging from the West Coast of America: “Sooner or later the hippy movement, the existence of rockers, and the use of drugs were bound to affect the behavior of a younger generation of artists.”168 Attitudes could be productively cool, capturing Philip Morris’s strategy to affiliate its addictive exports with youthful innovation and drug-fueled experiment. Confirming this homology, the Attitudes title seems to have come from exchanges with the PR team for Philip Morris, as Szeemann reports from his own diary: “Even now, I only know what it shall not be: AntiForm is too negative, Micro-emotive (Galardi’s expression) is incomprehensible” (December 13). Nina Kaiden, art director with Ruder & Finn, the advertisement agency for Philip Morris (who sponsored the exhibition) pressed for a title: “And voila: When Attitudes Become Form happened to result of [sic] the conversation” (December 18).169

In harmony with the individualist strategies of consumer capital, Attitudes announced the transfer of political agency to the sovereign consumer.170 Were these consumer strategies also conducive to the tactics of the trans? Discussed above is the uptake of transnational talk in the business world following cultural models pioneered by artists. Incursions of “Capitalist Realism” around the world (notably German artists’ ironic responses to commodity capitalism, echoed in Japan) certainly stimulated the emer180

Chapter 5

gence of critical globalism— as Meireles’s “insertions” and disruptions of Coca-Cola distribution strategies proved. The United States came late to the critical edge of this discourse— the trans was adopted as a tool among Latin American artists more quickly and effectively. In the 1960s, “corporate cool” was a look— indeed, an attitude— that had already marked the movements of Pop, Minimalism, and the aforementioned Capitalist Realism. These were wars of position elsewhere before they were understood that way in the US. Ideologically, Szeemann wanted the mobility of the trans. He wrapped Ruder & Finn into an aegis of curatorial autonomy and authorship that could still be “cool,” because Philip Morris products were the accouterments of intellectuals and cineastes, not yet cancerous cowboys.171 Corporations in turn wanted the sign of Szeemann’s autonomy as guarantor of the consumer’s freedom to choose among “attitudes” (and brands) of the present. As Kaiden emphasized, the contents of the exhibition were untouchable: “I never had anything to do with the content.” What was being packaged was the excitement of innovation parlayed by a European cultural institution and its hip young curator, for citizens and leaders otherwise “wary” of American products.172 Part of Szeemann’s power lay in his independence from municipal, state, or foreign institutions— it was not the US State Department’s Advancing American Art (1946), nor even MoMA’s New American Painting (1958); neither was it the choice of Bern’s artist advisory board. Of course Szeemann’s “individualism” was ideological, but our task is to unpack its ideo-logic, and to understand what spaces it might have opened up for more critical activities, then and now. Szeemann’s constant staging of his own “process” as a curatorial author was itself a new tactic, suggesting an equivalence with the artists he admired and thus detaching him further from municipal and state functions (or public corporate ones). This is accomplished with the first two illustrations in the Attitudes catalogue (plate 31), which documented a durational project that was not found in the exhibition yet resembled others that were. If we discover only after inspection that it is not an artist’s conceptual project but the curator’s research itinerary, then Szeemann has accomplished his goal, to blur those very distinctions. Illustrated in Attitudes (and here) is a single talismanic sheet of paper listing Szeemann’s US contacts.173 Close to the top of the list and written with

the same pen as the header, “new york,” is Szeemann’s contact at Ruder & Finn: “Nina Kaiden”— the first person he needed to meet upon arrival.174 Six lines down, “Philip Morris, Int[ernational].” In response to his letter in August proposing the exhibition as “a confrontation of the artists of the Cold Poetic Image,” Kaiden finally sent a telegram November 5, 1968: “Exhibition idea accepted.”175 Szeemann made his travel plans immediately and arrived in New York in December, pursuing his list of New York galleries, museums, and curators, followed by a loosely alphabetical roster of artists and gallerists in Los Angeles and Vancouver. This tattered document, with its doodles, tears, taped-together creases, and antiquated aura, does the job of positioning Attitudes as the result of a pilgrimage or theoric journey. And despite what this framing document really suggests— corporate funding implementing a US-dominated show—Attitudes entered art history as just the kind of quirky, attitudinal, “structured chaos” that Szeemann and even Philip Morris wanted. The sense of risk and unpredictability that the show achieved was as edgy and sexy as a mentholated cig. On the opening day in March 1969, over a thousand visitors pressed through the Kunsthalle doors. Serra’s lead had been cast, Beuys’s synthetically yellow margarine was exuding its oily halo, De Maria’s telephone was ready to ring. Szeemann’s diary records how an uninvited artist from Paris, Daniel Buren, arrived to post his abstract striped papers illegally throughout the city— “There is no end to the stir.”176 It is surely significant that even in his diary, where most artists are referenced only by author name, Szeemann identifies one person in full: the innovative gallerist, businessman, conceptual artist, and entrepreneurial curator Seth Siegelaub.177 Unmentioned in his later litany of curatorial influences, it is the New Yorker Siegelaub more than any other art-world figure whose intellectual imprint we recognize on Szeemann, and in his US choices for Attitudes.178 In one publication compiling documentation from his 1967– 70 files, Szeemann carefully reproduces Siegelaub’s entire “Xerox book” from 1968— both to continue Siegelaub’s project of infinite reproduction and to emulate Siegelaub’s strange balance of demotic, populist, low-key, give-away publishing methods and proprietary corporate technology— made explicit in the Siegelaub copyright on the title page.179 This productive ambiguity synchronized well with Kaiden’s characteriza-

tion of the Ruder & Finn brands: “We had clients looking to separate themselves out, and figure out who they were.” Szeemann and Siegelaub had similar objectives. Siegelaub’s short-lived entrepreneurial success was also influential on Szeemann’s practice of preparing “turnkey” traveling exhibitions for various museums (and soon biennials as well).180 But Siegelaub’s New York provincialism left an open field for the peripatetic, multilingual Szeemann. In place of Siegelaub’s tidy white cubes and vacu-formed colored plastic wall reliefs (available for mail order and in New York galleries), Szeemann knew how to stage a European drama. Like the materialized world pictures of the fairs, this drama materialized in Attitudes as casual placements, odd juxtapositions, abject ephemera, sudden events, and sheer hugeness in the postindustrial spaces that soon became Szeemann’s trademark. And if Siegelaub ultimately disappeared behind the conceptual art he promoted, Szeemann was successful in establishing himself, in the words of one adoring French sociologist of art, as “un cas singulier.”181 No longer as singular as it once was, the model of the curator-auteur who reveals his process has become a powerful trope in itself, from the festal structure of Barbara Vanderlinden and Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s Laboratorium in 1999 to the 2009 Venice Biennale, in which curator Daniel Birnbaum exhibited his own musings together with archival documents on the wall of an otherwise apparently seamless reconstruction of a Blinky Palermo installation (figs. 5.14 and 5.15; plate 33). Birnbaum turned the tables on the artistic tactic of institutional critique, opening the exhibition to searching debates among curators about the survival of “site specific” artworks and the desires that motivate their contemporary reconstructions.182 It is never a bad trick when the curator can both stage the spectacle and invite us behind the scenes to have the pleasure of deconstructing it. Birnbaum certainly knows of his Swiss predecessor’s genius at documentary (self-) revelation— letting us feel as if we, too, could reach in and pull the strings of the exhibitionary complex. Among Szeemann’s many strings were those resonating with the sexual politics of a European theater slow to adopt feminist theories, pharmaceuticals, and laws. Here it is useful to recall that women could not vote in any Swiss cantons for federal elections until 1971, and the last hold-out, Appenzell Rhodes– Intérieures (near the Austrian border), legalized female suffrage for local Transnational Openings

181

Figure 5.14 Laboratorium bookmachine, 2001, designed by Bruce Mau for the Antwerp exhibition of the same name, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden.

elections only in 1990. Theorized within the curator’s own “obsessions,” gender was a major component of Szeemann’s announced core mythologies: (1) the bachelor machine, which included himself and those like him— Jarry, Duchamp, Tinguely, et al.— in a theater of erotic mechanics; (2) la mamma, an allegorical goddess: the supposedly unattainable, essential, and enduring feminine; and (3) the Sun, whose enduring Greco-Roman personification as Helios/Sol undergirded the French arrogation of it as symbol of the king’s divine rule. In this typical description of Attitudes’ success, Szeemann’s gendered metaphors stalk the scene: . . . bits and pieces that squatted the rooms like an invading horde and did not distance themselves from each other in defined allotments. Things were erratic, more parked than placed. . . . [T]he unmistakable Attitudes picture [was] an art arena that, even after the matadors had left, did not seem to cool down, and in which the things left behind were a testament to unspent energy.183

The Abstract Expressionist vestiges here— where “arena,” “unspent energies,” and even “testaments” are connected to heterosexual heroism— help secure the curator’s agency in an uncertain field of forces.184 It is as if the un182

Chapter 5

easy boundaries of Cold War Europe could be defended by a cowboy (excuse me, a matador) leading in the “invading horde” of Philip Morris suits, many of them actually worn by women. What Szeemann had achieved that Siegelaub did not, despite the latter’s actual cowboy hat, mustache, and cigar, was a functional hybridization of the cool bureaucracies of conceptual art and corporations with free-range, masculine action— radical chic within the gendered consumerist message pumped out by the United States during the global Cold War. Attitudes made Szeemann’s reputation but cost him his job. According to Szeemann, it wasn’t the Bern populace, press, or city leaders who drove him to resign (although we might question this, given the evidence of Kopp’s interpellation). It was the local artists on the Kunsthalle board who made his role untenable. Conspicuously absent from the installation of Attitudes, he paints them as opposed to everything he wanted to do. United under the banner of the Bern-based Gesellschaft schweizerischer Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten (Swiss Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) they blocked Szeemann’s strategy of alternating modest local shows with well-funded international ones. Per Szeemann: “They rejected the Edward Kienholz show and the solo show of Beuys, to which he had already agreed. Suddenly it was war, and I decided to resign.”185 As Szee-

Figure 5.15 Notes posted on the wall in Daniel Birnbaum’s curatorial reconstruction of the site-specific Blinky Palermo installation Himmelsrichtungen from the 1976 Venice Biennale. The notes developed and proliferated over the course of Birnbaum’s 2009 Venice Biennale, Fare Mondi (Making Worlds), in dialogue with artist Adam Feldmeth. Photograph: Adam Feldmeth.

mann wrote to Walter De Maria once Attitudes closed, “I also felt a little bit like Professor Barnard who after some heart-transplantations can only with difficulties treat local diseases . . . and there are so many local taboos here in this small town.”186 He then made the most important decision of his career thus far, absconding with all of the files from his seven-year tenure at the Kunsthalle Bern. Legally the property of the institution but physically in his possession, they became intellectual assets for his new bureaucracy of transnational curating— the Agentur für geistige Gastarbeit.

Incorporations

Enabling the multiplied vectors of the trans, a corporation is a fictional person. Its legal body shields the more vulnerable human one from assaults on physical freedom, financial assets, or proprietary information. Its role as a sign allows rapid mobilization and transfer. Most dramatically for our story, it is designed to transcend “local diseases” in favor of global mobility in the bloodstream of capital, ever more fluid as electronic funds transfer became a reality during the 1980s in the Transnational Openings

183

conceptualizing the project to hanging the works. It was the spirit of ’68. [Emphasis added.]187

Figure 5.16 Harald Szeemann, rubber stamps, 1970–80, as reproduced on the endpapers of his Museum der Obsessionen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1981).

developing world. In Szeemann’s case, the Agentur für geistige Gastarbeit was even more fictional than usual, since he seems never to have filed any papers to incorporate it as a business. Founded in the spirit of Fluxus— another fictional corporate-artistic entity (established in 1964)— the 1969 entity’s name can be variously translated. It could be the Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor, or the Office for Spiritual Migrant Work, or some combination of these variants. It was, as Szeemann later described it, a one-man enterprise, a kind of institutionalization of myself, and its slogans were both ideological “Replace Property with Free Activity” and practical, “From Vision to Nail,” which meant that I did everything from 184

Chapter 5

Capturing artists’ own 1960s antipathy to the market and the establishment, mocked by the playful adoption of power’s costumes (think of “Sergeant Pepper” or “Big Brother and the Holding Company”), Szeemann’s “free activities” would nonetheless be paid for by both state and corporate sponsors, eventually fueling an economy and aesthetics of experience (chapters 6 and 7). The “Agency” formalized what Attitudes had already proposed: the future of collective political action lay in individuality, and the future of single subjects was to collectivize as fluid corporate entities (the “sum of narrations in the first person singular”). The Agency’s “slogans” were ordered as rubber stamps, the first of which were made in April 1970, including the radical socialist slogan referenced above: “Besitz durch freie Aktionen ersetzen” (Replace Property with Free Activity; fig. 5.16). The more pragmatic ones— “From Vision to Nail”— came much later; some gave recipients a choice of greeting: “salu / ciao bella,” concluding with “meine agentur liebt sie” (my agency loves you). Also offered were a range of German prepositional actions: “mit / von / durch / wegen / gegen / trotz” that semiotically mobilized the “trans” and organized many of the curator’s later archival publications.188 Szeemann pinpointed the Agency’s founding as coincident with his departure from the Kunsthalle— Oct 1, 1969: [The] Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor . . . is seasonal, even mercenary, because the labor can be exported. . . . Open as it is to every suggestion and stimulus, filtered through a single ego, the Agency combines all authorities (legislative, executive, administrative, etc.) and all specialized departments.189

It amused Szeemann to be a Gastarbeiter, a transient. The German euphemism was used throughout Europe to signify a low-paid migrant worker; this particular “guest worker” extracted money from the Eurozone and brought it back to Switzerland. And far from being “without papers,” Szeemann had legal citizenship, voting and property rights, and two valid passports.190 He was also fully whitecollar. The Kunsthalle that had fired him even reemployed him— but now as a freelancer with contractors’ immunity— no longer answerable to the citizens of Bern.

The Agentur and its artfully misaligned rubber stamps were an immediate success, never to disappear from Szeemann’s letters, faxes, postcards, and books. One of its first corporate acts was to mount an exhibition of itself (those files!): 8½: documentation 1961– 69 at the Galerie Claude Givaudan in Paris. The Bernese flag hung by a pole outside the gallery, with the single word Agence blazoned on the shopfront windows. Szeemann somehow got the attention of the press for his odd archival show. One French interviewer alluded to recent protests against Swedish curator Pontus Hultén for accepting tobacco money, and asked Szeemann whether his alignment with Philip Morris might be a problem. The curator cheerfully revealed his financial model: a Philip Morris fee of $25,000 for Attitudes, with a “budget global” in 1969 of 200 thousand Swiss Francs incoming but 500 thousand outgoing, the missing 300 thousand recuperated with “catalogues, publicity, posters, entrance fees— and the sale of my exhibitions abroad.” For the eight and a half years referenced in the exhibition’s title, surely intended to resonate with Federico Fellini’s 1963 film of the same name, he claimed, “J’ai vécu dans l’illégalité totale”— “I’ve been living in total illegality.” A good avant-gardist, assuming the identity of the guest worker, sans papiers.191 It was this bureaucratized, archived, “institutionalized” but fictionally illegal self that became the soughtafter agent of transnationalism. Confirmation of the strategy came in a single stroke, when the well-respected founder of documenta, Arnold Bode, dissolved its artist council in 1970 and invited Szeemann— its erstwhile critic— to be the sole “Secretary General” in charge of the next installment, scheduled to open in 1972. The exhibition in Kassel had usually been a decade behind (as when Hartung, Pollock, Mondrian, and Klee were shown in 1959; fig. 5.17). Szeemann’s criticism of documenta 4 in Attitudes had paid off, resonating with leftist critics who accused it of being a slave to the market and a copycat “American Documenta,” out of touch with global trends. In particular, local Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell— a member of the exhibition’s artist council— had criticized documenta 4 for failing to “document” any event-based art, depriving the show of “the only guarantee for a liberation of art exhibitions from the deadly embrace by the art market.”192 Bode’s invitation for documenta 5 acknowledged that it was time for an outside contractor. After hiring Szeemann, Bode announced,

“No documenta council anymore; a small group shall do the job.”193 Szeemann’s attractiveness for Bode doubtless lay in the guest curator’s relations to Vostell and leftist politics. After he left the Bern Kunsthalle, Szeemann had collaborated with Vostell to mount a 1970 exhibition, Happenings and Fluxus, which opened in Cologne and traveled to Stuttgart, Amsterdam, and Berlin, virtually surrounding the territory of documenta 4 with a buzz of eventbased art. Behind the buzz, Bode would have learned of Szeemann’s emerging difficulties with Vostell, who had published his own highly opinionated account of Happenings that excluded Joseph Beuys as well as Vienna’s “Actionists”— both of whom Szeemann snuck back in around the edges of the traveling exhibition.194 Bode was incredibly canny to anoint the critic of documenta 4 to introduce event-based art to the documenta format, circumventing his own leftist critics by employing a “known collaborator” of the local Vostell who was nonetheless willing to go mano a mano with that opinionated artist. At the same time, Bode was delegating leadership to an agent contractually freed from the “small group” of local interests he held to be encumbering the Kassel exhibition. Szeemann’s emerging reputation for theatrical, thesis-driven shows of multinational “individual mythologies” was what Bode wanted. As Müller admits: The actual trick . . . was that appointing Szeemann meant virtually un-democratizing documenta and dethroning the commission that had voted on almost every position up until then. . . . Szeemann made no secret of the fact that he was not willing to accept participatory structures.195

Thus Bode cleaned house, depoliticized documenta, and protected himself from the risk of both decisions by outsourcing agency to a (fictive) Swiss firm. As Szeemann described his democratic despotism: I am convinced that, the more authority I have, the less I will have to play safe and be secretive during the preparations, and the more I will be able to be open to all sides.196

The dynamism of the trans emerged in the event culture Szeemann brought to documenta 5, announcing his Transnational Openings

185

Figure 5.17 Hans Haacke, “Photographic Notes” of documenta 2 installation (one of twenty-six photographs), 1959. Courtesy of the artist. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ambition to produce a “100-day event” that would further break with the “triad in which art takes place”— studio, gallery, museum— a refusal that Attitudes had inaugurated. If we can see this as biennial culture announcing its festal opposition to the market, we can also recognize its synchronicity with other event structures then emerging in capitalism: art fairs (swelling in importance after the Venice Biennale closed its market operation), rock concerts, PR pseudo-events, countercultural “be-ins.” Szeemann’s initial intentions were radical; he wanted to work with the pedagogy devised by German philosopher and “artist without artworks” Bazon Brock, in charge of a “Besucherschule,” or visitors’ school (shades of Manifesta 6 to come). This had to be abandoned when the exhibition’s budget was cut from 5.6 to 3.5 million Deutschmarks. Although convinced that the days of object-based art were numbered, Szeemann absorbed the budget cut by canceling Brock’s events. He added the Swiss curator Jean-Christophe Amman, and announced an elaborate Hegelian thematic, Bildwelten heute— “Pictorial Worlds Today.” Resolving the hodgepodge of “individual mythologies,” this would construct a dialectical triad (thesis/antithesis/synthesis) in semiotic form: “reality of the representation, reality of what is represented, identity or non-identity of the representation and what is represented.”197 The heavy thematic made theater of the differend, while lessening its stakes. The Hegelian rubric alarmed Szeemann’s key group 186

Chapter 5

of New Yorkers, that talismanic list still in place from Attitudes. A protest telegram arrived from a collective of signatories on May 3, 1972, stating a series of conditions— among them, “a work of art should not be exhibited in a classification without the artist [sic] consent,”198 clearly referencing the activism of the recently formed Art Workers Coalition and its brief for artists’ rights. The implied threat from these crucial artists— Andre, Haacke, Judd, Le Va, LeWitt, Morris, Rockburne, Sandback, Serra, and Smithson— was to withdraw from documenta 5 altogether (fig. 5.18). Szeemann smoothed it over, and it became another blip in the process, artist rejections archived and eventually published as just so much Szeemanniana, as in this statement from Robert Morris: I do not wish to have my work used to illustrate misguided sociological principles or outmoded art historical categories. I do not wish to participate in international exhibitions which do not consult with me as to what work I might want to show but instead dictate to me what will be shown. . . . Finally, I condemn the showing of any work of mine which has been borrowed from collectors without my having been advised.199

For Szeemann it was all grist for the mill, positioning him as beholden to no one, a truly “free” agent whom even artists couldn’t rattle. In the event, the heavily philosophical

Figure 5.18 Protest telegram (three pages) sent to Szeemann on May 3, 1972, as reproduced in Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology (Zurich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag, 2007), 142–43.

Figure 5.19 James Lee Byars on the pediment of the Fridericanum for documenta 5, 1972. Photographer unknown. © The Estate of the Artist.

thesis satisfied the critics. As John Russell wrote for the Times of London: “For the people under 30, who make up some 90 percent of its audience, [documenta 5] has completed the demystification of art.” Described by conservative critic Hilton Kramer as “at times resembling a carnival, at times a political convention or an academic seminar,” documenta 5 did everything Bode wanted by seemingly incorporating protest safely into the exhibitionary complex.200 Documenta was on the map again, and the moribund routine in Venice was put on notice explicitly by one critic after another: The status quo, carefully maintained at Venice where all the serene conventions of the international exhibition operated to the full, was rudely tilted at documenta, where a polemical and historical event, assembled under provocative categories, redefined for the 1970s the nature of the “official” show.201

And: Unlike the Venice Biennale, which feels like an almshouse for decayed art-movements, this show [documenta 5] is alert, militant, intelligent, arcane, erotic, and wonderfully sensitive to the agitated gusts of change which are blowing across the art scene.202

The global art world that had missed Bern’s Attitudes caught Kassel’s Bildwelten heute (where 217 artists were seen by 229,000 visitors). Indeed, these “Pictorial Worlds” 188

Chapter 5

were interpreted as an intimate transformation of the subject: “What’s being questioned is not yesterday, today, or tomorrow,” wrote one rattled but excited critic “—it’s us.”203 The thesis got through, particularly to the philosophically inclined French belle-lettrists: “documenta 5 is the most important international show of recent years . . . d5 is a coherent, personal, and personalized work. This major work by Harald Szeemann sheds brilliant light on the fact that artistic practice is first of all a working-out of ideas” (emphases added).204 Let us note, in passing, how Szeemann’s Pictorial Worlds Today sounded the death knell to Heidegger’s “age of the world picture.” The totalizing episteme of the world picture was being multiplied deliriously. The durational, exuberant cacophony of these many “worlds” could only be grasped if the whole noisy scene could be read as a “major work” by a curatorauteur, who claimed it as an assemblage of individual egos and mythologies. Thus despite budget cuts and a lawsuit brought against him by Documenta GmBH (the institution attempting to recover costs for the vastly over-budget exhibition), Szeemann had leveraged his growing cultural capital for another noisy triumph. The list from New York had grown larger, with newly added performance artist James Lee Byars holding forth from the pediment of the exhibition hall in one highly publicized event (fig. 5.19). Buren, once an uninvited guest at Attitudes, was now a major player. Free of Vostell, Szeemann could indulge his penchant for Beuys, who came daily to the exhibition to man his Informationsbüro der Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung (Information Office

Figure 5.20 Joseph Beuys, manning his Informationsbüro der Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung (Information Office of the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendums) during documenta 5, 1972. © documenta Archiv.

of the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendums)— an actual political agency serving throughout the hundred-day run of the show and seeding the future Green party (fig. 5.20). In the raft of photographs documenting this daily performance, many show earnest visitors actually tendering proposed referenda to Beuys, who stands behind the daily flower that confirmed this was a real office, with real amenities for its clients, in the event-theater of art. Venice had to respond. Its commissioners first invited Szeemann to produce a “turnkey” show; the theme he developed harked back to his doctoral research on Dada performance: Junggesellen-maschinen/Les Machines célibataires/The Bachelor Machines/Le Macchine celibi. Having newly institutionalized its assets as a “Museum of Obsessions,” Szeemann’s one-man corporation perhaps best expressed itself in this confessional project: The exhibitor . . . is in the desperate situation of having to use the exhibition to give a form to something that, for him, is not yet completed. He chooses an epoch which must be overcome in order for things to go on (for him? For others as well?).205

Thus, as the sexual revolution percolated through Europe in the 1970s, and Szeemann dodged criticism from Lucy Lippard and the Feminist Art Journal, the “bachelor” (in real life he was on his second wife) prepared a show to

insert in the mother of all biennali as an “international laboratory.”206 Venice struggled to comprehend the transnational openings Szeemann was engineering. After Venice, Bachelors went on a two-year transEuropean tour.207 Its technosexual framing as mechanical bachelor figured the exhibition itself as an assembly of parts equipped with an autopoietic function, allowing a subtle retooling in each venue. Documentation is spotty, but it seems that most of the showings would include the Arturo Schwarz remake of Duchamp’s greatest work of “precision optics,” the bachelors trapped with the bride in their Large Glass.208 At Venice, the show could also sweep up some Futurists, one of Peggy Guggenheim’s Ernsts, a Tinguely, and an Olivetti computer. Venice also witnessed the bachelor’s spiritual ascendence above fleshly reproduction, in the erotically titled James Lee Byars Does the Holy Ghost, in which a vast, neatly folded cloth silhouette of a male body was carried by Byars into the Piazza San Marco on the afternoon of the opening day. Lifting sections of cloth, Byars was “unfolding the ghost into the hands of the gathering crowd. . . . Throughout the action, the cloth does not touch the ground.”209 Trans as transcendence, with the erotics of a mass event. The Venice Biennale sparkled with the brilliance of Bachelors, its multilingual, multiauthor catalogue bristling with scholarship and thick with footnotes. It corporatized what had been individual— since the bachelor machine was above all a figure for Szeemann himself. An amortiTransnational Openings

189

zation of all that PhD research, bachelor mechanics animated the uncanny Agentur, but rather than see himself as merely a cog in the exhibitionary machine, Szeemann chose to emphasize the celibate but seminal agency of the Idea. His Agency was in beautiful syllogism with its “celibate” creator: I have an idea. Under the guise of an Agency, I take on the job of making the idea a reality. The Agency devises the keyword and the overall plan and assigns the development of the concept to me. In turn, I assign its execution to the Agency. The Agency informs me that I am the only one appointed. I ask the Agency what resources are available. The finance office informs me that no resources or staff can be put at my disposal at least for the moment . . . until the start of the preparation stage, when one cannot do without assistance from others.210

These unnamed “others” were the Swiss bankers who advanced Szeemann the money to produce the Bachelors exhibition, which he promised would eventually pay back the investment (it did). So in this instance, Szeemann operated as a state agency might have, obtaining private capital in advance of buy-in from others. Crucial to the ideology of the bachelor machine was the existential fiction of its autonomy as a male generator of forms and activities (no females reproducing here). As Duchamp once remarked of his own obsessional machinery, “the bachelor grinds his chocolate himself.”211 Thus the individuation that had depoliticized the work in Attitudes and de-democratized documenta would continue to be attractive to biennial culture more generally. And sure enough, a few years after hosting Szeemann’s turnkey exhibition, Venice offered the Swiss contractor the role of co-commissioner for its 1980 Biennale. The first non-Italian to so serve, he was paired with Italian curator Achille Bonito Oliva. Perhaps as an anxious counterbalance to the “foreign” commissioner, a new section of the Biennale was to be devoted to Italian art (in the event, dominated by the conservative oil paintings of the transavangardia, another kind of trans). In homage to this “opening” of its formerly international purview, the entire Biennale was titled Aperto 80 (Open ’80). Paradoxically, this “opening” was specifically not transnational but an insertion of the national into the in190

Chapter 5

ternational biennial. Neither was it aesthetically radical. The Italian scene had become regressively postmodern, as reflected in the transavangardia’s revival of monumental figurative oil painting, self-consciously Italianate in style.212 The “trans” in the movement’s title was in part a postmodern rejection of the requirement to be “ahead” in an avant-garde sense. Not quite what Szeemann might have wished to come in through the Biennale’s “opening,” but he was not in charge. As the official historian of the Biennale reports, Aperto 80 was intended to assert “European intensity” in place of loosely transnational (e.g., American or Latin American or even Asian) conceptual abstraction. Curator Bonito Oliva offered “European art . . . that has a qualitative definition and is self-sufficient” (emphasis added).213 Openly retro and subtitled L’arte degli anni Settanta (Art of the ’70s), Aperto 80 seemed to swallow Szeemann, whose theatrical flair was nowhere in evidence. As he wrote Byars with exasperation, “It is not my show and you are just 1 artist among 92. . . . I don’t see another possibility in this show which will be the last one under committee conditions.”214 What made it notable at all was the decision to expand into new spaces beyond the Giardini— specifically, the Magazzini del Sale, an old salt warehouse. This pioneered the choice of postindustrial spaces for massive art exhibitions in the biennial form, a move often credited to Szeemann. But even this spatial stroke of genius had been pioneered by architectural historian Paolo Portoghesi, whose pathbreaking (and equally retro) exhibition Presenze del Passato (The Presence of the Past) had closed earlier that same year as the very first architecture biennial, and the first of Venice’s shows to use the postindustrial space of the Arsenale. Although Szeemann claimed to have created the 1980 Aperto, the Biennale’s official historian, Enzo Di Martino, credits the “open” move entirely to Bonito Oliva, identifying Szeemann merely as one of “a committee of critics.”215 Szeemann’s account, by contrast, is almost comically selfaggrandizing: “I was only able to curate it by threatening to resign and on the condition that I was able to work alongside Achille Bonito Oliva.”216 Aperto “became a bureaucratic appendix,” in Szeemann’s view, since it was restricted to artists under thirty-five.217 For our purposes, what matters were his aspirations to activate transnationalism and “open” the Biennale’s ossified nationalist structures; what Szeemann wanted to claim was the idea

of opening. He got a second chance in 1999, when he was finally invited to be sole commissioner of the Venice Biennale. This time he had help from Agnes Kohlmeyer, a German-born art historian and curator who had moved to Venice in the mid-1980s. The difference was marked. Aperto had long since lapsed by 1999, creating a gap cited as one of the instigations for the 1996 founding of Manifesta.218 For Venice, the opening of Manifesta in Rotterdam may have been the jolt that led once more to Szeemann, always reliable for putting an exhibition venue back on the map. This time fully in charge, Szeemann rendered the forty-eighth Venice Biennale more open than anything previously imaginable. At the cusp of the new millennium, it would absorb all of the unsuccessful “Apertos” before it, reclaiming them in the theme of d’APERTutto— open for all. This version also condemned its predecessors by announcing it would be “breaking . . . the Biennale’s self-imposed rules” with an aggressively transnational and socially networked incursion into the structure and architecture of the biennial system itself: a new viral organism calling itself “Oreste” (whose key curatorial contact seems to have been Kollmeyer).219 MoMA’s Information show and Oiticica’s part in it opened this chapter, and Oreste will serve to close it. Marking the shift from boat transport, fax machines, and xerox mailings to novel infrastructures called email, listservs, and the “World Wide Web,” the Oreste collective published a pre-catalogue and a post-catalogue documenting their blizzard of actions at the biennial (fig. 5.21). The first shows a hive of networked relations from the collective’s website, the second features the smudged and suddenly archaic profile of a portable typewriter. The corporative Oreste handily surpassed Szeemann’s small Agentur. A transnational network of “roughly one hundred and sixtyfour members” made appearances in Venice; Oreste incorporated a significant fraction of the younger artists in Italy and connected with “more than five hundred people from the whole world,” who participated virtually or otherwise in the project.220 The group organized, facilitated, and documented a range of events and gatherings. These were often held in “Spazio Oreste,” situated on the edge of the Italian pavilion, where the high-profile international exhibition had long been staged. Oreste’s incursion energized the spot where the crusty old edifice opens onto the terrace designed by Carlo Scarpa in 1952, marking the rehabilitation of the postwar Biennale (fig. 3.17).

“Art vs. Economy: A Cultural Emergency?” was one meeting on July  9, 1999, with Turkish curator Beryl Madra and Istanbul “cultural management” expert Serhan Ada; “Contagious Lunch— Live” was orchestrated by artists in the same space on the next day, with support from the Swedish Art Fund. A program on the “San Francisco video scene” was mounted intermittently, discussions were held with “foreign students in Italy” throughout the biennial’s duration, and an interactive performance was offered in October by German artist Regina Frank, with the trademarked title “The Artist is Present®.”221 Later in the month, at the same “Spazio Oreste,” a review of what French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud had just dubbed l’esthétique relationnelle was offered by two Italian artists incorporated as “artway of thinking”: “Con molto piacere / You are welcome: Assaggio d’arte relazionale / A taste of relational art.”222 Typical of the confused, passionate, and provocative meditations on the connected but still largely powerless globalized artist was an intervention by the “Foreign Investment” group, claiming participants (in their nervous typography) from “London * New York * Liverpool * Berlin * Istanbul * Zurich * Kyoto * Singapore”: foreign investment This auspicious and select group has been driven together by destiny, the melting of the poles, the urgent imperatives of a world in which art has been staled [sic] by property and commodification, and in which shared authenticity is rare. cultural capital / outrage and exchange223

Perhaps for the first time since its founding, the Venice Biennale’s main “international” show was invaded by raw transnational agency— self-organizing, uncurated, and utterly of the moment. A seeming reference to tragedy— Orestes avenging his father’s murder by murdering his mother— the collaboratively generated title “Oreste” was in fact hilarious in the ear of its founders, simultaneously evoking a cheap Roman trattoria and the Italian term for “network”: rete.224 Utilizing the tiny space of the Scarpa garden as an open site, the group brought visitors back more than once. The garden was a randomizing event structure, hosting “collective organisms” and chance encounters where visitors could be surprised by relational art, might become “the involuntary protagonists of an artistic performance,” Transnational Openings

191

Figure 5.21 Oreste artists’ collective, covers for publications relating to the 48th Venice Biennale. Top: home page of the online project www.undo.net/oreste, reproduced on a small booklet listing all activities hosted by Oreste at the 1999 biennial. Courtesy Oreste member Cesare Pietroiusti. Bottom: book, also by UnDo.net, published after the biennial, with photographic documentation and curator essays (Milan: Charta, 2000).

might enjoy “the offering of a piece of bread fresh from the oven,” or at the very least could find a place to sit and breathe.225 Szeemann was ultimately humbled by its five months of ceaseless activity: “Oreste offered to the Biennale a nucleus of positive agitation. Thanks.”226 The model of a “platform” for social energy and knowledge production would not be lost on the curators of the next generation of biennali, then exploding around the globe. As Agnes Kohlmeyer put it, Oreste “is also quite simply devoted to the peaceful sharing of experiences.”227 The next chapter will examine this aesthetics of experience and its emergence as a key characteristic of our current condition; Oreste marks one point of entry. As discussed above and elsewhere, such “platforms” risked becoming a kind of formalism, with “experience” a frenzied demand supplanting contemplation or reflection.228 Event-driven platforms at recurring exhibitions exhibit the risks, and legacies, of Szeemannian transnational openings. Some, such as those directed by Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor, were staged around the world for documenta 11, rendering the exhibition only a partial manifestation of the curator’s now global ambitions.229 Incorporating the festal apparatus of past world’s fairs, biennials would foster an emerging artistic agency— expressed first as an aesthetics of experience and eventually as critical globalist art. As the next chapters will explore, artists of the new millennium often enter the biennial structure to radicalize it, taking its core premises— repetition, city branding, national posturing— and questioning each one in turn. (Whether these actions have invigorated those very structures and allowed them to prevail is an excellent question.) As model and flashpoint of the ambiguities that still operate within biennial culture, Szeemann has offered a rich case study. His tactics can be compared to Max Bill’s: assembling a multiplicity (tripartite or chaotic), converting it to some kind of unity through narratives of the individual, and masking the need to negotiate with difference, or stage the differend.230 But unlike Bill, he insisted on transnationalism and refused universalism. In the end, his openings to experimentalism fostered new kinds of artists. Yet the intimate encounters demanded by Oiticica and Clark seem never to have been included by the Szeemannian auteur; theirs were tactics designed to eschew corporative strategies by curators in favor of immersive interactions, constituting new subjects in the

process. Their profoundly anthropophagic theorizations of difference, I predict, will only become more influential on the contemporary art world, particularly within the emerging aesthetics of experience fostered by the biennial form. In the narrative of the present book, organizers of the materialized world pictures that constitute fairs, biennials, and other recurring international exhibitions have sought “to free the art from the constraints of local artistic culture and events,” as one author said, approvingly, of Szeemann’s documenta 5; increasingly in the period from 1960 to our present, they did so by neutralizing nation and inter-nation in favor of the trans.231 That Szeemann’s Venice triumph in 1999, “Open for all,” was a riposte to a new and vibrant anti-biennial, Manifesta, reminds us of the complex trading that goes on between and among event-driven global exhibitions, where “nation” may simply be giving way to regional economic units in a new world order.232 The inflationary impulse was obvious in 2012 with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s documenta 13, which some jokingly described as “too big to fail,” like the giant investment banks at the heart of the neoliberal debt crisis that had crashed the world into recession in 2008. Could the demotic energy of events still emerge in these massively capitalized platforms? Could a politics still be constructed by the visitor in the small-scale encounter and the ongoing working of art? Artistic tactics responding to curatorial strategies often insist on fleshy experience as a site for knowledge in the twenty-first century. These tactics will recur in the next two chapters, effecting modes that are by now familiar: blind epistemology fostering a multisensory “feeling out” of art’s meaning, the “viewer” as increasingly enmeshed in worldliness and experience, exploring the politics of the partial view. We are no longer capable of framing a world-as-picture. We are less interested in “individual mythologies”. At the same time, conceptualism and individual artistic agency survives to impel visitors to engage in deep reflection on the apparatuses of biennial culture and the worlds connected by them. As the next chapter will argue, in art’s “accursed share,” nested as a sacrificial offering within the neoliberal economy, there are still interstices for alternative subjects to emerge. They do so over time, in capillary networks and negotiations with unspoken difference. They do so increasingly, I argue, through an aesthetics of experience. Transnational Openings

193

6 The Aesthetics of Experience

There can be no doubt that all our cognition begins with experience [Erfahrung]. For what else might rouse our cognitive power to its operation if objects stirring our senses did not do so? —KANT , 17811 Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung]. —HEGEL , 18072 Because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that delightful perception which is aesthetic experience. —JOHN DEWEY , 19343 When we speak of ideology we should know that ideology slides into all human activity, that it is identical with the “lived” experience of human existence itself. . . . This “lived” experience is not a given, given by a pure “reality,” but the spontaneous “lived experience” of ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real. —LOUIS ALTHUSSER , 19664 We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network. —MICHEL FOUCAULT , 19675 It is not individuals who have experiences, but subjects who are constituted through experience. [The point is] to refuse a separation between “experience” and language and to insist instead on the productive quality of discourse. —JOAN WALLACH SCOTT , 19916

195

Tropes of Experience

Martin Heidegger worried about “experience” as he prepared for the 1937 world’s fair in Paris and its associated philosophical congress. To be modern required one to embrace the industrialized world and its new experiences; to be a philosopher, one needed to turn away. Heidegger’s mentor Edmund Husserl had produced one kind of turning, the inward turn of phenomenology, where “experience” itself was examined as a structure in consciousness. This philosophical legacy was still fragile in the 1930s; Heidegger knew the wrong relation to experience could be dangerous. He even coined a neologism with which he castigated the rising apparatchiks of the National Socialist party: they were possessed by Erlebnistrunkenholdigkeit (experience-drunkenness).7 By embracing “lived” action (Erlebnis) in distinction to the cumulative kind of experience considered by philosophy (Erfahrung), they were courting trouble: rushing pellmell into technocratic fantasies of world domination and militarism rather than undertaking the sober questioning of technologism Heidegger wanted. As we saw in chapter 1, philosophical treatments of “experience” had been crucial to Enlightenment thinkers, feeding encyclopedism and its object lessons. But in Heidegger’s view, that trajectory had led to a merely instrumental relationship to the world, based on a Cartesian dualism between subject and object that produced Nature as an “object of technology,” fueling “science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the certainty of representation.”8 Confirming his worst fears, the French conveners of that Ninth International Congress of Philosophy for the 1937 world’s fair were planning a full-blown celebration of the “quantitative rationalism” of René Descartes (it was the tricentenary of the 1637 Discourse on Method).9 Heidegger had to respond. He spent the summer of 1935 in Paris working on his retort, which would eventually reach the public as Die Zeit des Weltbildes (The Age of the World Picture). If the “World Picture” lecture had ever been delivered in Paris, its auditors would have heard both a description and an admonition: “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”10 For Heidegger, the aggression in such a “conquest,” the fully technological compression of being and experience into picture, the ontological violence of this representational 196

Chapter 6

regime, were all to be questioned. But his confrontation with Cartesianism didn’t make it to France. He declined to attend the congress, snubbed in favor of Hans Heyse (nicknamed the “Nazi Party Plato”) who proved more compliant with Germany’s racialist program.11 Nonetheless, the confrontation Heidegger intended in articulating the risk to authentic experience posed by the world’s enframement as picture is as good a place as any to assess what has happened since. The early twenty-first century is besotted with world pictures, digitally circulated as well as biennially experienced. This chapter will examine the long arc this book has posited— between the earliest “international” expositions and the mappa mundi they materialized, and the immersive art on offer in the contemporary biennial— with particular focus on the past few decades’ emphasis on experience. In parallel to the fairs and their art, philosophies have worked through experience: first as an object of conscious attention, and then as the mode by which we are constituted as subjects within a network of relations. My thesis will be that not all of these pictures collapse into “representation”; some remain active within us, modeling and instantiating ways of being that productively destabilize business as usual. This, I will argue, is the global working of art. Let us start with the politics of that 1937 world’s fair, with philosophy in tow. In addition to elevating rational calculation above “spirit,” the French celebration of Descartes reeked of nationalism. To the Germans, it was an arrogation of “the role of France as the spiritual guide for Europe.” Philosophers in the Reich planned to parry this “intellectual isolation of Germany” with a deft “German intellectual thrust.” Surely the right one to bring it was Heidegger, who wrote the authorities that “this Conference centered on the anniversary of Descartes was a conscious attack coming from the dominant liberaldemocratic concept of science and that therefore we had to prepare a strong and effective German delegation.”12 The Weltbild lecture was intended to expose Cartesian empiricism as fomenting “the unrestricted power of calculation, planning, and cultivation of all things”— and for the mid-1930s Heidegger, “calculation” stood for the Americans, “planning” for the Communists, and “cultivation” for the more extreme forms of National Socialism (a movement the philosopher otherwise supported).13 Heidegger judged the result to be a toxic subjectivism

also fueling “the event of art’s moving into the purview of aesthetics” and hence “the object of mere subjective experience”— that is, detached from true collective feeling.14 World’s fairs had long functioned to throw “subjective experience” and art into relief, figured against the “objective” displays of technoscientific wonders and the industrial sublime. Heidegger may well have had the fair mentality in mind when he criticized his epoch’s “dreary technological frenzy” and the “unrestricted organization” of the world in 1935.15 Yet I find it hard to summon the fear and loathing that the philosopher brought to this conjunction— is it because I occupy the episteme he most feared, “drunk” with experiences obtained at one biennial or another, fully organized in an instrumentalized and networked world? With a closer examination of the historical shift that has brought us to the contemporary aesthetics of experience, it becomes clear that we have gained something in the ensuing decades— tools for critical problematization, reconfigured by philosophers such as Foucault or the critical historian Joan Scott. This chapter explores the problematics Heidegger posed: of the world picture, of art, and of “experience” itself, but in light of almost a century of art that has changed the terms of these encounters. Philosophers taking up the challenges Heidegger posed also play major roles in this chapter’s account. Art is no longer seen as merely “expressive” of an individual author; it is now more likely to be a durational event, broadly contextualized, stimulating both phenomenological reflection and conceptual searching, the matter of a subject in transformation through the working of art— it has become Heideggerian. As the previous chapter set out, these changes in what “the work of art” might mean began in the postwar period and gathered force in the long 1960s.16 They now proliferate around the globe. Rejecting Harald Szeemann’s oppressive Hegelian rubric for documenta 5 in 1972, for example, the artist Robert Smithson demanded a dialectics in relation to exhibitionary picturing— one “that seeks a world outside of cultural confinement.” Uninterested in “art works that suggest ‘process’ within the metaphysical limits of the neutral room,” Smithson castigated tendentious theme exhibitions as “metaphysical junkyards” and sought ways to bring experience and theory into confrontation. His “Site/Non-site” works were exemplars of the concep-

tual turning required of the responsive and responsible viewer, complications of “point of view” and “Nature as object” worthy of Heidegger himself.17 As this chapter will argue, experience now includes both embodied contact and a working of art as idea, part of the legacy of Smithson’s generation that marks our time. For Heidegger, it was the threat to collectivity posed by subjective notions of experience that he worried about, with the modern “cult of the individual” corroding true community. Walter Benjamin, from the other side of the political spectrum, was grappling with similar questions, probing for the “optical unconscious” of collective urban experience just before the Fascists practiced their urban air-raid techniques on the village of Guernica, the subject of Picasso’s “individualist” yet “universalizing” painting for the 1937 fair (chapter 3). How modern experience could be produced in the encounter with art, what that experience would have to do with the everyday, whether publicity was enough to collectivize such experience in the massive world-picturing machines of the fair, and how such dynamics could be reformed in the national theaters of the biennial— these questions have threaded through the previous chapters. They can now be taken up explicitly. The historical moment of Heidegger’s warnings regarding an instrumentalized “world picture,” the aestheticization of “the work of art,” and an unreflective “experience” of both, constitutes a pivot in the fortunes of these concepts. It was, for example, in full cognizance of Heidegger’s ideas that Theodor Adorno insisted philosophy had a responsibility to take up “experience” and theorize it anew. Returning to Hegel’s supposedly “Idealist” philosophy, Adorno argued in the 1960s that it was fundamentally experiential—even Heidegger had pointed out that Hegel’s original title for The Phenomenology of Spirit was The Science of Experience of Consciousness. Husserl, Heidegger, and Adorno were all anxious to move beyond the idealist, subjective context for Hegel’s philosophy, allowing a broader view of the negotiations embedded in experience. The emergence of art as event in the postwar period concretized this turn, producing other conditions of possibility for experiencing the event-ofbeing. Shadowed by that which withdraws into unrepresentability (Heidegger’s forte), art nonetheless works from within the polis— as Adorno argued— working in materials, in history, and as idea, to build us as a public. The Aesthetics of Experience

197

Working through the trauma of fascism, Adorno argued that the Arbeit des Begriffs— the work of the concept— is labor as such, and that “synthetic apperception” (what I want to understand as “experience”) “is none other than social labor”— not mere subjectivism (emphasis added).18 This chapter will argue that these kinds of developments retooled phenomenology for present-day purposes— the working of concepts are how contemporary art transforms its global condition into critical globalism. Experience becomes a layered event; it is durational, elaborated in physical encounters, in cognition, and in the “social labor” of shared discourse. Individual mulling drawn into collective re-membering, this is what I’ve been calling the working of art. More like John Dewey’s vision than Heidegger’s, this working of “art as experience” replaces notions of art as representation or “expression,” with the idea that above all art registers experience, and inaugurates it in the recipient. Dewey’s pragmatist insight— that the working of the art is always both a sensual and a cognitive working— anticipated and influenced developments in the art world that followed.19 Since the 1970s, the global work of art has emerged out of such openness to experience, captured in art historian George Kubler’s response to Artforum in 1973: “Experience is opened up to esthetic sensibility. . . . [Art] must open up as widely as possible to see the esthetic possibilities of other domains.”20 The last chapter  focused specifically on the neutralization of nationalism under the tactics of the trans; this one examines how experience became the site at which local difference was to be negotiated. Global concepts would be reconfigured as critical; they would become situated questions rather than universal presumptions. Increasingly, the global work of art would emphasize its function as a verb. How to think about the claims to experience that form a recurring trope in postmillennium biennials? Can we carve from the microcapitalization that attaches itself to every aspect of contemporary existence any space for what we call “the aesthetic” in experience? I yoke the two— as the “aesthetics of experience”— to claim a positive answer, but not a generic one. Drawing on both historicized philosophy and critique (a.k.a. the work of judgment), this chapter provides a critical analysis of art in the contemporary moment, examining when and where the aesthetics of experience inaugurates the work of art. The recent intensification in tropes of experience 198

Chapter 6

is significant. This book has drawn a historical arc from the search for aesthetic and worldly competence via the Grand Tour, to the great expositions that attempted to industrialize and democratize that experience, to the artspecific biennial form that explicitly nominates “experience” as a key motive. In place of what previous chapters may have examined loosely as “aesthetic experience,” this one theorizes an “aesthetics of experience” both to capture mobilizations of experience by artists, curators, and exhibitions, and to suggest the analytical tools we must use to unpack them. This is not Heidegger’s or Benjamin’s “aestheticization”— a pejorative denoting conventional preparations of culture given to an audience to be passively consumed. Rather, this is an “aesthetics” that requires work by artists and recipients; it begins as a full sensory encounter but then invites critical judgment to make sense of that experience. Biennial culture, disparaged by art historians and critics alike as a market phenomenon, does occasionally produce space for critical reflection. This chapter will explore where and when that happens and how thought can be mobilized as part of the embodied experience of art. As we have seen, the experience offered in worldpicturing exhibitions was often driven by frenetic intensity and dramatic contrast: beaux arts galleries were juxtaposed with moving sidewalks, Dahomeyan Amazones, luminous electrical follies, and throbbing dynamos. Today every one of these entities could be art, a development paradoxically made possible by art’s very withdrawal from the fairs into the specialized biennial form. But even in the trade-specific biennial, national pavilions complicated the experiential formula by framing the artist as “representative” in his/her contrastive national identity, articulating the apparatus of signification as “national,” within the demands of the prevailing international style. Such demands bred new tactics, leading artists to shift toward worldly commentaries on peripheral populations— whether Israëls’s Cottage Madonna, Picasso’s Guernica, or Téllez’s Letter on the Blind. As that very litany reminds us, once the nineteenth century stretched into the twentieth and twenty-first, the drift of artistic developments led away from objects per se. This was not a problem for fairs and biennials, since it was part of their exhibitionary logic to emphasize events as well as material. Moving from festal structures outside the fine arts building to transnational openings that brought events

inside the ambit of art, we have seen how the arc of the fairs eventually segued into an aesthetics of experience itself. For good and ill, we occupy this episteme. I argue for the necessity of criticality within it. First, to examine the term aesthetics: building on classical rhetoric and the medieval separation of the seven liberal arts, “aesthetics” was articulated as a separate part of philosophy only by 1750, when it appeared in a learned treatise as Aesthetica, a Latin neologism coined by Enlightenment thinker Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. In Baumgarten’s Naturphilosophie, Greek notions of simple aisthesis (sensory perception) were systematized into a moral economy of bodily sensation and cognitive pleasure. These notions were taken over by Kant (1763) and reached a high point with Gotthold Lessing’s genre enforcements on the sculpted body of Laocoön in 1766.21 “Laocoön,” in fact, became a touchstone for aesthetics as sensory regulation— with Lessing chastising Johann Joachim Winkelmann for his excessive libidinal attachment to a Hellenistic marble of writhing male bodies in pain, Romantic poet William Blake transposing the sculpture’s pagan eroticism into a Christian struggle, and Harvard literature scholar Irving Babbit carrying the whole sublimatory project into the twentieth century with his 1910 book A New Laokoon; An Essay on the Confusion in the Arts. Warning his Anglo-Saxon readers against the French Romantics’ “breaking down of all barriers and boundaries,” Babbitt railed against a dangerous “mingling of the flesh and spirit,” culminating in what he astonishingly termed a “priapism of the soul.”22 Via Clement Greenberg, this was the highly constrained form of aesthetic experience that dominated high modernism through the mid-twentieth century, paralleled by record low attendance at the Venice Biennale in the 1950s, even as the first wave of post– São Paulo biennali proliferated. An elite cultural discourse outside the low amusements of the fairs, formalist hygiene aimed to produce the transcendental Kantian subject by isolating aesthetic experience from an awareness of the body as such— a separation taken from Greenberg by Michael Fried and deployed in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” with its famously spiritual conclusion: “Presentness is grace.”23 Presentness was not an embodied condition; it was the “grace” of total absorption into aesthetic experience that yielded the sublime values of high art. This was “aesthetics” before the 1970s; this book argues that art, working on a restless public, transformed

what aesthetics could mean in the decades that followed. Tactics of the trans, event-driven exhibitions, and a revived anthropophagia produced entirely new conditions for the working of art. Addressing the meaning of experience has, in some sense, been the labor of this book. Much more widely and loosely used than aesthetics, the word is correspondingly much harder to define and historicize. For certain, the Greek empeiria and Latin experientia meant historically specific and distinctly different kinds of knowing, not necessarily mappable onto our present English word and its Enlightenment legacies.24 As an opening, let me point to two elements in contemporary usage: experience occurs in time, and it requires an encounter with the material world as mediated by the body’s senses. How those senses might be “partitioned,” how much time is involved, and how experiential learning is to be organized, are the sticking points.25 For Hegel, philosophy itself was none other than the mind in confrontation with the actuality of body sensations: “At first we become aware of these contents in what we call Experience.” But by the 1930s, Heidegger was critiquing Hegel’s idealism and the “objectivity” that came in its wake. With the emergence of Logical Positivism, Gaston Bachelard could state in 1937, “Scientific thought turns against sensations, and . . . one must construct a theory of the objective against the object.”26 This was exactly what Heidegger found anathema. Powerful criticisms of “mere” experience would endure on both sides, yet phenomenology would be reworked by Merleau-Ponty and others to allow embodied experience to make its way back to art. The ebb and flow between these terms— aesthetics, experience— will serve to recapitulate and summarize the histories narrated in this book. The aesthetics of experience, as I’m framing it, can be positioned as a long, fleshy, sometimes performative rejection of the dominant hygiene of modernism found in that fetishization of “the objective” in Bachelard— a rejection in which curators of biennials and the artists they showed played a large role. Becoming explicit in the 1960s, this aesthetics of experience bloomed in Happenings, Oiticica’s Parangolé, Fluxus performances, Conceptual artists’ “event scores,” Vienna Actionism, the peripatesis of Earthworks, and other time-based or spatially distributed art (fig. 6.1). As we’ve seen, Harald Szeemann featured this broad gamut as part of his transnational cuThe Aesthetics of Experience

199

Figure 6.1 Announcement, printed on a paper bag, of George Brecht’s exhibition toward events. an arrangement, at Reuben Gallery, New York, October 16–November 5, 1959, as reproduced in George Brecht: Events, a Heterospective (Cologne, 2005), 42. This particular copy of the multiple is in the Hermann Braun Collection, Archiv Sohm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

ratorial strategy. He drew from the changing terrain of contemporaneous artistic practice but also, I’ve argued, on the larger set of experiential histories common at the fairs. In this, he was merely participating in the energies of artists themselves, exemplified in the previous chapter by the networked collective Oreste. It was only in the postwar period that such festal, heterogeneous, socially dense, 200

Chapter 6

and technologically extreme experiences were routinely utilized as the very medium of art. This book has argued that the histories leading up to contemporary event-based art are significant. Even the isolated art of painting could, on rare occasions, register the motley forms of experience catalyzed by the fairs. Apostrophized by Baudelaire as “the painting of modern

life,” Manet’s art provides a key example (plate 6).27 His View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle— a disjunctive, saccadic tableau painted when his own pavilion was soliciting viewers at the same exposition— can be read not merely as another illustration of the fair’s modern experience, but an intensified form of it, as T. J. Clark explores: The paint is put on in discriminate, sparse patches which show off their abbreviation— puffs of smoke eat into the dome of Les Invalides, streamers and flags blend with the foliage, the shape of a dog is left shadowed and blurred, water hisses from the gardener’s hosepipe in neat, dry strokes of colour (as if the hose were the handle of a giant paintbrush), and the hooves of the Amazon’s horse are moving just too fast for us to see them. There is even a passage at the left-hand side, between the geraniums and the river, where abbreviation frankly becomes absence of sense. [Emphasis added.]28

Historicized in terms of an individual “impression,” these patches of sense and non-sense can also be understood as collecting and producing us as disjointed subjects of the exposition. Patricia Mainardi emphasizes how Manet’s painting forms its own “universal exposition of Paris”— that is, of city types embedded in a world picture.29 But there is a strong contrast here with Frédéric le Play’s organization of world knowledge, which preened with a fixity later pegged as “the apparatus of domination in advanced industrial society.”30 Manet’s background blurs le Play’s astonishingly precise geopolitical architectures. In their place, the painting deposits disjointed experience, and solicits our own, forecasting the proliferation of unpicturable worlds and the breakdown of universal experience. In English, the ambiguous noun experience can assert the presence of either immediate or cumulative impacts, “lived” or “acquired” knowledge, unencumbered freshness or seasoned professionalism. In Western philosophy, it is foundational— yet buffeted by centuries of competing claims.31 These are made all the more complicated for Continental philosophy by the splitting of the word in German between the earlier Erfahrung and later Erlebnis, and the compression of its meaning in French, where expérience is both experience and experiment.32 Polemically, “experience” is usually interjected to interrupt the flow of thought and theory and to stage itself empirically against

“bookish” philosophy, scholasticism, and received tradition. This rhetoric of authenticity has been thoroughly deconstructed by contemporary anthropology, yet “experience” still remains “evidence for the fact of difference” in the critical historiography of Joan Scott, and in my own analysis here.33 In its current obsession with experience, the art world wants it to be populist, accessible, and gratifying of every visitor’s desire. Yet history shows that mobilizations of such notions can be as elite as any other, as class-bound as the experience economy itself. Not everyone can afford the leisure to have “an experience.” Aesthetics is always haunted by economics, as we will explore below. Functionally, claims to experience in the art world act as space holders, allowing something (we call it “an experience”) to form in the bodies of visitors in the risky but protected space of art. What the aesthetics of experience leads me to claim is that the activities occurring in this space of fluid negotiation can be called the work of art. Art works over time, as event and in duration, by virtue of a community. In this sense I am echoing Adorno’s reading of Hegel’s “conception of experience as a ‘dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object.’”34 The art, socially conceived, works on the recipient, who takes that new knowledge back into society through a transformed self: Experience’s advance to consciousness of its interdependence with the experience of all human beings acts as a retroactive correction to its starting point in mere individual experience.35

Thus a given experience, identified as such, coalesces in memory as coherent— often through the social act of sharing itself.36 This book has been a collection of such experiences, worked over centuries through histories, theories, and contemporary phenomena. What I propose as the “aesthetics of experience” is a recent, tactical heightening of these effects. A roughly coherent system of values governing the production and reception of art today, it is characterized by multiple claims for embodied knowledge, shared to produce publics for the present.37 My framing is both descriptive and normative. Descriptive, because these aesthetics can be identified in biennial thematics, in the artworks The Aesthetics of Experience

201

installed there, and in the reception of those artworks. Normative, because in the critical reflection implied by the term aesthetics, I am also advocating a specific kind of working for art (over time, in reflection and discussion, as critical globalism). The foundations for this aesthetics of experience were laid in recurring fairs, but it becomes explicit and productively critical only in the last decades of the twentieth century, extending into the twenty-first century and the epoch marked out as “contemporary.” By implying a systematic invocation of experience that is already yoked to critical judgment (an aesthetics), contemporary usage puts into question those long traditions of philosophical thinking in which “experience” was an a priori to “aesthetics” (and, per Kant, preceded by a rational a priori that made the very coordinating of experience possible). This is not to upend Western philosophy but to foreground the interesting ways in which artists deploy “experience” as available throughout the processing of art’s working, complicating the traditional sequence, in which experience inaugurates a process that ends up with discrete judgments (viz., Laocoön). Contemporary art presumes a critical frame, then induces experience to dislodge and reassemble the subject within judgment’s preexisting frame. While I believe this inversion to be characteristic of the past few decades, I am also spoken by it, signaling the newness of a present in which the art world is no longer a place where representations picture an external world, but a potentially eventful site in which a different world might not merely be pictured, but produced. That this requires reflection is assumed.38 That such reflection is part of the aesthetics of experience is asserted.

Encounters and Emblems

Biennial culture has expanded since the 1990s to jumble the previous Cold War order with formerly thirdworld venues, pursuing the production of new experiential worlds through more open exhibitionary forms.39 Contemporary artists, artworks, and art-world agents increasingly seek to produce conditions of possibility for event structures— what I will characterize throughout this chapter, following philosopher Alain Badiou, as “sites événementiel,” captured by the awkward English neologism “evental sites” that I will sometimes nickname “eventful.”40 The very fact of a biennial stages the artwork as an event, of course, allowing for the possibility that 202

Chapter 6

what can happen in the encounter will be new: a future coming-into-being, a performative subject produced in praxis (e.g., “experience”) that nonetheless allows for “the long slow process of supplementation that may follow the occurrence of an event” (per Badiou) to produce new knowledge and new modes of being.41 What does it mean to know you are coming to a temporary exhibition that nonetheless recurs? You are entering an event, but there are ritual aspects in this tradition, and a promise of recurrence or eternal return.42 The eventful structure of biennial culture also forces visitors to consider locales, but as eventful sites I argue that they comprise time, place, history, and body.43 It is often in artist’s and viewers’ embodied engagements with locality that a critical globalism emerges, whether or not the art is “site-specific.” Site governs a crucial aspect of the duration involved in attending a biennial: how long we have traveled to get there, what histories are embedded in the site, the where-ness we feel ourselves to be, what local knowledge is referenced by the art, how all this is assembled in the event, how media unspool or perform over time, how we discuss the art afterward. All of this is what I have been calling the work of a given “work of art”— responsibilities borne by art visitors that keep the experience economy from consuming all possible outcomes of aesthetic encounters. The biennial forms an event in the sense of its place- and time-specificity, its theme, its temporary importance, but it also promises a next and a next after that. This produces an interesting echo for experience— the possibility that art’s working will extend to the next visit, when the next biennial has appeared. A first task is to trace how a “market” for experience announced itself within art (as opposed to its packaging as tour) and to disaggregate that from the kinds of experiences I consider productive. Prehistories abound in the market fairs discussed in chapter 2, or the “attractions” marketed well before world’s fairs, with exotic humans and curiosities staged in metropoles by 1800, and in aristocratic court culture as early as the sixteenth century.44 While we have traced marketing gambits in all the chapters of this book, experience becomes an explicit brand by the first decade of the twenty-first century, reaching a kind of apogee around 2005. That year’s Lyon biennial was titled Expérience de la durée (Experiencing Duration); in it, one could have stumbled through Ann

Veronica Janssens’s room of intense green fog, waded through Martin Creed’s statically electric installation of pink balloons, engaged with psychosensory experiments in Carsten Höller’s Experience Corridor, resonated with other bodies in the reconstruction of La Monte Young’s Dream House, or been temporarily blinded by one of Olafur Eliasson’s kaleidoscopic visual devices. The art on view in Lyon fulfilled the consistent requirement for biennials to provide experiences— in this case described as both embodied and psychedelically “out of this world.” The explicit spaciness may have been designed to counter the unfortunately earthbound tourist geographies of a notorious Lyon biennial from 2000, Partage d’exotismes, accompanied by the curators’ slogan: “From revolution to tourism!” (plate  34).45 That edition, led by art historian Jean-Hubert Martin, participated in the requirement from the earliest expositionary world pictures: the artist must utilize the international lexicon of global art— in this case, installation edging into the new modality of “relational” aesthetics— but must deploy it to speak of difference. For example, Cai Guo-Qiang’s Cultural Melting Bath was brought from its first showing in Queens (chapter 2), but in Lyon in 2000 it would illustrate the theme of “sharing exoticism,” leaving behind the US rhetoric of the multicultural “melting” pot of humanity. Marketing experience in its own way, the 2005 Biennale de Lyon nonetheless had durational ambitions that complicated simple tourist agendas. The show’s curators bragged that it would take more than thirty hours to see all the videos, and their curatorial framing directly invoked the philosophy of Henri Bergson, nostalgic for a lost future of “élan vital” and life in the body— itself generated in the face of late nineteenth-century industrial world’s fairs.46 The theme addressed a genuine desire on the part of contemporary subjects to resist spectacle in favor of a more complex, “supersensual” way of knowing, as Henry Adams termed it. Invoking “the idea of art as experience” (an implicit nod to Dewey), curators Jérôme Sens and Nicolas Bourriaud sought “to reaffirm that a work of art is first and foremost an event . . . and that aesthetics are more about energy than they are a marketing plus.”47 Of course, saying so does not obviate the marketing nor guarantee success. On the face of it, Lyon in 2005 was not so much about what was to be known as how (embedded in a when).

Posters invited a psychedelic mode of perception, romantically reviving the 1960s. Note that “the ’60s” here form their own world picture (fig. 6.2). They are invoked as a decade of global remapping that catalyzed a world youth populace against empire and announced Paris as a site for liberating the beach under the street.48 Intriguingly, Lyon had been precociously in advance of Paris, and more aggressively leftist and working-class in the sharpness of its protests in the 1960s— but the city’s biennial in 2005 paid no attention to this, invoking a Parisian or Haight-Ashbury hippy rather than a Lyonnaise labor activist. Expérience de la durée stripped away the politics that suffused everything in 1968, giving visitors a dream of simplified praxis— “the hippy experience is a model for rejecting the consumer society”— and a Romantic/ Surrealist/psychopharmaceutical phenomenology of escape. As with the earlier internalized politics of Surrealism, the politics of psychedelia are quite literally “unproductive.” Recalling Szeemann’s bachelor machine Agency from the previous chapter, rubrics of individual choice in Lyon seemed to vitiate any real potential for rupture and collective politics. The outlines of the subject remained hazy and indistinct. This nostalgia also operated in the postindustrial sites of the 2005 Lyon biennial, sites that were potentially even more pungent in this former economic powerhouse than in long-touristic Venice or Paris. It was Szeemann who had first opened Lyon’s commercial architectures for use by the biennial, taking over the vast Halle Tony Garnier for his 1997 edition. As of 2005, this postindustrial requisite was filled by the Sucrière, a former sugar factory that had been part of Lyon’s biennial for a few years (fig. 6.3). For Expérience, the structure was decorated for the first time with an artist’s mural— by Michael Lin, the same artist chosen to inaugurate the lounge in Sens and Bourriaud’s Palais de Tokyo (chapter 2). Whatever critical implications might have been latent in this repurposed site, they were neutralized with this blast of psychedelic universalism: in the biennial we might escape the worst of a colonial past of slaves, cane plantations, and sugar refineries, while exchanging our present for a utopian time outside capital, outside labor, and outside instrumentalization— a time-honored aesthetic response in life(style)-as- art. The curators connect this “experiential consumerism” directly to the information economy they inhabit: The Aesthetics of Experience

203

Figure 6.2 Catalogue dust jacket opened out to form a poster for Expérience de la durée, the 2005 Lyon Biennial curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans (with MAC Lyon director Thierry Raspail). Design by Laurent Fétis for Biennale de Lyon and Paris Musées.

The narrative structures of daily life— work and social advancement, the couple, marriage, children— are being replaced by flexible, combinatory microscenarios, which allow an average individual today to live in . . . frameworks that are less constricting and more mobile, but also less secure than before.49

The breezy neoliberalism of this libidinal economy was questioned by philosopher Michel Maffesoli, invited into the catalogue to argue for duration not in order to amalgamate us to flex-work, but to support a subject broughtinto-being by experience: “We are witnessing . . . a return to the body, to the senses, to life as experience in the true meaning of the term. Experiencing things is not simply thinking the world in cognitive terms, but touching it.”50 Too bad the guards were instructed not to allow anyone to touch Erwin Wurm’s interactive sculptures (fig. 6.4) or Saâdane Afif ’s mesmerizing, automatically 204

Chapter 6

strumming guitars.51 Wurm’s disputatious title, Adorno was wrong with his ideas about art, signals his intent to argue through the haptic interactivity of experience that art could be dialectical in and of itself, without the philosophical “reflection” or “negation” that would happen in text or criticism. But denied the fantasy of “unmediated” expérience, visitors were left thinking Adorno sadly right. The biennale remained visual, the haptic withdrawn whenever “art objects” actually entered the room. Nonetheless, Lyon’s rhetoric of experience is historically interesting, particularly since this exhibition was curated by the nominator of “relational aesthetics,” Nicolas Bourriaud— a founding director of the 2002 Palais de Tokyo (chapter 2) whose influence on the artist collective Oreste was evident already at the 1999 Venice Biennale (chapter 5).52 Trained as a sociologist, Bourriaud positions his curatorial work (and thus this biennial of “experience”) in relation to the economy and to its

structures of “flex time” and the unresolved precarity that allows globalized labor and cognitive capitalism to happen.53 Any profound critique of capitalism is coolly suspended in Bourriaud’s theory, which presents sociology as what-is, not what-should-be.54 Art historian Claire Bishop, in her salty critique of these complacent “relational aesthetics,” channels Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theories of democracy to get at the need for greater confrontation with capital-as-usual.55 This would be closer to my own arguments about art’s capacity to produce negotiation with the differend; this negotiation is summoned as the viewer’s responsibility for the working of art (chapter 5). What this all reminds us is that relational “experience” is underdetermined; how it is framed and what supplements the event has everything to do with its politics. This helps me get to a more general argument. The emblematic contemporary biennial stages the exhibition, its artworks, and its texts within postindustrial architectures in order that the visitor might “experience” some distanced relation to everyday labor. (This is, of course, a traditional role for the aesthetic.) But the escapism of Lyon in 2005 did not push this into a plausibly political form. The curators’ invocation of immersive and material experience was a crucial tell of the transformation from aesthetic experience to the aesthetics of experience, but the valence of that move remained unconnected to Lyon’s own labor history or that of metropoles more generally (not to mention denied by the guards). There’s some sense the curators were trying. With its sociological musings about new forms of work and life, Bourriaud and Sens’s catalogue attempted to argue that the experiential workings of art, embodied, could stand in contrast to work that is labor in its increasingly virtual form— labor that denies the body’s claims. The argument for a distinction between cognitive capitalism and experiential art resided in claims to a ludic, sensory materialism. Allowing visitors to resonate with the sine waves propagating in Marian Zazeela and Le Monte Young’s Dream House was a good move (fig. 6.5); not letting me play with Wurm’s sculpture was a bad one. But let us give the curators the benefit of the doubt. We could experience the rapture of collective resonance in Dream House. And we could imagine refusing office work at Wurm’s odd desk, and instead wearing it. The space of the aesthetic offers precisely such sites (physical

Figure 6.3 Postindustrial spaces at the biennial. Top: Halle Tony Garnier, utilized by Harald Szeemann for L’Autre, the “4ème Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon,” in 1997, seen here in a press kit poster. Design © Intégral Ruedi Bauer et associés; courtesy Biennale de Lyon. Bottom: Le Sucrière, a former sugar refinery now utilized for the Lyon biennial, shown with the “first ever Sucrière artist’s façade,” for the 2005 iteration, a mural by Michael Lin. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra.

The Aesthetics of Experience

205

Figure 6.4 Erwin Wurm, Adorno was wrong with his ideas about art, 2005. Documentary photograph showing installation at the Biennale de Lyon, comprising pedestal, objects, and instruction drawing, to be realized by the public. (Unfortunately, guards informed actual visitors not to touch.) Photo: Studio Wurm. Collection of the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon; courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

or ideational) for thinking through embodied feeling, positioned in contrast to unreflective drudgery. By interrogating the complexities of “sensed” experience in such staging, we get to how art works— how it can appropriate fragments or settings of present-day labor but couch them in productively alienated aesthetic terms. The alienation begins in the body: the walking, the looking, the thinking, the reading, the ruminating, and the placing 206

Chapter 6

of limbs, head, segments or the whole of the body into strange openings, spaces, rooms, pods, and substances; the proprioceptive navigating of disorienting spaces, atmospheres, or configurations— these attributes of contemporary art in biennials problematize the time-honored opposition between “aesthetics” and “labor.” In other words, the kind of “micro-scenarios” Maffesoli points to are enacted in contemporary art’s working— at its best—

Figure 6.5 La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Dream House (ca. 1965) in its installation form (1990), MAC Lyon collection, during the 2005 Biennale de Lyon. Photograph © Blaise Adilon. Courtesy Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, Biennale de Lyon, and Blaise Adilon.

thereby reversing the standard economy of aesthetics that Jacques Derrida parsed so brilliantly as “economimesis” (about which more below).56 Rather than leading away from our working conditions, the working of art can performatively and experientially unpack them. The once-embodied laborer who became a transcendent subject through disinterested contemplation of aesthetic objects in Kant has given way, in this argument, to the virtual information worker who becomes embodied through the aesthetic encounter with experiential art. When it works, this emphasis on experience calls us to understand the kind of labor in which we are increasingly engaged (virtualized, informational) by constructing its foil (materialized, visceral, embodied). The working of art in biennial culture— physical, material, cumulative, embodied, social, cultured, and collective— is not thereby “brute.” Still an elite culture, it depends on viewers willing to take its differentiating, disorienting, and subjectivating path to a sometimes rupturing destination. The results can be intensely informative and politicizing, in contrast to the everyday informatic. Experience clearly has a labored history in this book. If the blindman trope set up the call for theory in the first chapter, here “experience” appears to be theory’s counterweight. But that theory was already embodied; yoking experience to aesthetics also brings theory back in. Some

argue that theory is always already embedded in claims to experience, as Scott’s critical historiography set out in 1991: “Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the site of history’s enactment. Historical explanation cannot, therefore, separate the two.”57 The Western discourses that set up blind epistemology in chapter 1 return here, since Enlightenment-age empiricists were already utilizing “experience” to hold theory at bay (and then to build new theory). To recap that analysis briefly: experience was political. It allowed these philosophers to question the need for any authority save the thinker’s own body as adequate for building knowledge, from the blindman’s tapping cane (Descartes) to the trajectory of a billiard ball (Hume) to skepticism about the existence of God (Diderot). Experience was being repositioned as “the only possible theoretical knowledge of what is,” in Heidegger’s gloss of Kant.58 Kant, in 1790, had taken up Baumgarten’s neologism— the aesthetic— to criticize its fuzziness. The Third Critique needed to systematize how experience led to “disinterested” reflection as the basis for judgment.59 In Songs of Experience, Martin Jay’s magisterial exploration of literary and philosophical “variations on a universal theme,” he traces how Kantian “distinterest” became modalized: fractured into religious, aesthetic, or workaday experience, a history I would gloss as parallel to the bureaucratization of the senses during this same time.60 The Aesthetics of Experience

207

Not coincidentally, the concepts of experience that prove most useful for this book are the ones engaged with labor. They come often from Anglo-American educators such as Matthew Arnold or John Dewey, whose more pragmatic approach directly influenced the design and interpretation of exhibitions and the practicing of durational modes of art (e.g., Allan Kaprow’s Happenings).61 These were thinkers who felt experience was not simply an empirical precondition for the subject, it was in and of itself the subject’s way of coming into being. To cite Arnold’s activist rendition in 1869, culture would consist “in becoming something rather than in having something”— becoming through repeated exposure to forms “through culture, which teaches us.”62 Little could have facilitated such teaching and “becoming something” more rapidly than the kind of encounters Arnold would have had at the great fairs. “The whole scope of the essay,” Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy: is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.63

Such confidence in the ameliorating effects of cultural experience was precisely what propelled Britain’s anxious staging of the first explicitly international exposition— as Arnold well knew.64 For the current postindustrial subject (inconceivable at those first Great Exhibitions), experience is what we leave our dematerialized work-world to seek, hungry for the regrounding of embodiment and the potential rupture of event. In biennial culture, of course, there is the matter of the supplement to consider— the theme of the exhibition, the curatorial conceit, the label and the catalogue, the brand designating recurrence— these are emblems that float over our encounters.65 Found throughout biennial culture, claims to experience themselves become emblematic. In Lyon, they signified: (1) psyche208

Chapter 6

delia (“out of this world”-ness), (2) a phenomenological turn (“in this body, not virtual”), (3) a radical empiricism (“experience” as “experiment”), (4) a geopolitics (“an Other’s world, another’s shoes”), (5) a path to nostalgia and materialized history (“not now but then”), and (6) a provocation to an Event that might unfold over time. The supplement of the emblem enters to announce or entrain all these modes of experience; there is no experience that has not already been mediated, and a remembered experience will contribute to mediation in turn.66 A single biennial, or even a single work of art, dreams for a cumulative effect. Indeed, some curators are explicit about this aspiration, as Maria de Corral suggested when introducing the theme The Experience of Art at the 2005 Venice Biennale: I am interested in the ideas that emerge like a mix of ruins, fragments, tests and sketches; the works that allow the observer to recreate his/her own aesthetic experience: the slow time of lived experience . . . those artists who know how to renew our ability to imagine different ways of inhabiting the world and enabling emotions.67

Corral then lists what she hopes her “ruins” and “fragments” will stimulate in visitors, whom she intends “to make . . . participants” in experience, viz “nostalgia” (as in Lyon), “the world of affections and psychological stimuli that form our identity,” the body, power, sociopolitical critiques of the present, the archive, abstraction, word and image, painting, “the cultural and economic restructuring of this post-industrial society, along with the transformation of the individual and social identity,” and “art as an act of resistance.”68 The curator’s jumbled emblem risks signifying very little, other than the capaciousness of experience. The Experience of Art was in fact only part of the fiftyfirst Venice Biennale’s organizing rubric; the other, at the Arsenale, was Always a little further, arranged by Corral’s cocurator Rosa Martinez. The choices of what to put where, as always in post-1970s Venice biennials, seemed to owe more to the spatial requirements of a given installation than to a governing theme. So it was in the Arsenale that Mariko Mori’s trippy spaceship EEG feedback pod (Wave UFO, 1999– 2003; fig. 6.6) promised visitors their most extreme Experience. With what could be considered

Figure 6.6 Mariko Mori, Wave UFO, 2003, as installed in the Arsenale at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Lower photos show the author being fitted with EEG sensors in preparation for experiencing the artwork.

a new-age update of Lyon’s hippie nostalgia, the piece was linked by the artist to calls for the transformation of the individual: “It is a symbol of the acceptance of otherness and a model for overcoming national and cultural borders. It also is a representation of the Buddhist concept of oneness, of the world existing as one interconnected

organism.”69 Mori wanted viewers’ experience to upend standard gallery body disciplines. Rather than the usual walk-around-and-look-without-touching, visitors could become participants by entering the gleaming pod. Waiting in line, we were grouped in threes to take our turn. Electrodes were taped to our swabbed foreheads by The Aesthetics of Experience

209

white-coated lab assistants, and we were instructed to try controlling the abstract biomorphic imagery that would be floating above with our brain waves as we reclined for the duration of the seven-minute program: “The forms change shape and color in response to three types of brainwaves. Alpha (blue) waves indicate wakeful relaxation, Beta (pink) waves indicate alertness or agitation, and Theta (yellow) waves indicate a dreamlike state. Two cells coming together demonstrate “coherence” between the two lobes of the brain.”70 Mori’s piece could function within the sets theorized by Venice’s curators as going “a little farther” with the “experience of art” on a psychedelic, phenomenological, and empirical level. There was even nostalgia for the future— the one that promised us transponder decks, telepathy, and time machines. What Wave UFO did not achieve, at least in this installation, was the status of event. Indeed, its podlike form spoke of a self-contained entity, discounting the presence of white-clad assistants and despite the artist’s aspirations to an extended universal mind-meld. This formal containment enabled it to be installed, variously, at the hermetic Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2003, in the glassed-in garden of the IBM building lobby in New York that same year (courtesy the Public Art Fund), in the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands in 2007, and at an art museum in Århus, Denmark, in 2008, as well as that 2005 Venice Biennale. If there was any resonance to its specific siting in Venice, it might have been to prompt reflection on the production values of the Turin car factory nearby, where its extraordinary iridescent surface had been perfected. Ultimately, Wave left this visitor in a state of comic/cosmic failure: how could I meditate to produce alpha waves while anxiously watching to see if I was achieving “coherence” in my brain’s image surrogates? How could I attend to the encounter while mesmerized by the morphing “emblems” of mind-melding staged above me? Mori’s UFO was an extraordinary technoscientific fetish, but it failed to activate any relationship between my body and art, working out of an eventful site. On the other hand, precisely through its failure as an event, Wave could work to surface an important aspect of the aesthetics of experience. Experience and discourse amalgamate disjunctively in this artwork, working a dialectic; experience never stops sedimenting, if the art keeps working. Working goes on well after the encounter, with all supplements in view and in full awareness of the 210

Chapter 6

amalgamating force of the emblem.71 Here, in my reflection upon this elaborate dead end, I’m doing the work of experience and art. Mori’s apparatus might be parafictional, or it might actually be capable of uniting viewers into a hive mind. In this viewer’s experience (as experiment), an event emerged in my relief at its failure. Recalling blind epistemology from chapter 1 may be useful: the viewer looking at the light show overhead cannot induce the mindfulness of the meditator whose eyes turn or close to “focus” inwardly on the mental task at hand— Plato’s cave as frustrated feedback mechanism. Is Wave then a hilarious send-up of contemporary art’s ever-renewed incapacity to serve religion? Mori’s invocation of Buddhism seems more earnest than that. But my judgment is independent of her intention. Rather than despair at the emblem’s failure to cohere, I can reframe Wave’s dysfunctional groupthink as positively emblematic: universalist dreams should crumble in contemporaneity, yielding a more appropriate subject who must take time to learn from experience, coming together only later and on her own steam. The aesthetics of experience demand from us just this kind of temporal commitment. Psychedelia thus has a role to play in the aesthetics of experience, and the artist’s disorganization of the viewer (in Wave UFO as well as Dream House) is effectively utopian— though perhaps not in the manner Mori or Young and Zazeela intended. Rather than a technologically administered satori (three at a time, every fifteen minutes), Mori’s work may temporarily achieve a body without organs.72 This concept from Deleuze and Guattari addresses how a work that leaves us open and puzzled may also leave us available for re-organ-ization in terms we might be able to negotiate for ourselves. Disjointed contemporary art experience refuses to yoke us together under a cartouche but can be assembled as— and in— a puzzling self.73 Wave UFO certainly makes itself available to the pell-mell, media-besotted, fossil fuel– guzzling “experience economy,” originally identified and criticized by cultural sociologist Gerhard Schulze in 1992.74 Only the participant who has experienced it can work Mori’s art away from technofetish toward dis-organized experiential and experimental being. Aesthetics entails precisely this working. Aesthetics must be also an ethics of the subject— ongoing, in what Pierre Hadot, Foucault, and now Arnold Davidson emphasize are pratiques de soi, or

“technologies of the self.”75 These can never be universalist, although they can be shared. And they are up to us. They must be generated by specific bodies confronting locales, over time, and in distributed articulations— this is the subject-making work that art does, if we are open to it. Such ethics become collective only when we choose to aggregate them as a culture— even a biennial culture. Multiplied agency, on the one hand, includes the fabricators, gallerists, curators, and (in Mori’s artwork) technicians in lab coats who inaugurate the experience for the viewer/participant. On the other, it includes the agents who participate and make sense of their encounter in discourses such as this. The passive viewer will get nowhere. Claims to “experience” depend on humans with bodies, minds, and cherished identities that might be jeopardized in the encounter; outcomes can never be predicted and must prompt reflection if they are to succeed.

Expérience, Erfahrung, and Event

That the French word expérience means both experiment and experience reminds us of the modernist culture of empiricism that ripened with the world pictures of the fairs, to Heidegger’s dismay. To take only the examples covered in this book, the Impressionists’ goal of fixing petit sensations marks one juncture, Talbot’s determination to draw with “the pencil of nature” another, Duchamp’s “precision optics” in the Rotoreliefs yet a third. Monet’s practices in particular marked a moment when vanguard art implied a kind of sensory training, and knowledge production included explorations of perception itself. The experimental meaning of expérience triumphs in this tradition, replacing the idea of merely “having” an experience with the notion of earning one. Paradoxically, this intensification of the durational aspect of experience, already embedded in the traditional German word Erfahrung— experience gained from “moving” over space and time— produced the need for a new word, Erlebnis—a sudden kind of “life” experience as it burst on one unannounced in the violence of modernity. This life (Leben) experience became appropriated (by the Nazis in particular) for false populism: no need to reflect on experience and its mediations! Erlebnis became part of the package that qualified you to pose as Nietzschean übermensch. Heidegger would identify the cult of empiricism as

the source of this “bad” experience-as-Erlebnis. Certainly empiricism helped produce the universalisms of the first fairs, still in play at the celebration of Cartesian rationalism in 1937. The flaws in such presumptions would be identified by artistic tactics, exemplified in this book by the anthropophagic agents of chapters 4 and 5, but even earlier by Dadaists and Surrealists— they surfaced the need to negotiate the differends of geopolitical and economic disparities among bodies and their situations. These critiques pluralized experience still further, captured by poststructuralist philosophy as producing kinds of knowledges, with attention paid to the ethical frame articulated in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Foucault: Everything is knowledge, and this is the first reason why there is no “savage experience”: there is nothing beneath or prior to knowledge. But knowledge is irreducibly double, since it involves speaking and seeing, language and light.76

Beyond double, in fact, for to the twinned systems of statements and visibilities we now add proprioception, ratiocination, instinct, memory, the mesh of virtual sociality, and the multiplied flows on which the body surfs to constitute a constantly morphing subjectivity— called upon metaphorically and literally by artists pursuing the “supersensual.” Duchamp’s mesmeric Rotoreliefs of the 1930s aimed to dislodge the retinal and shake up standard art experience; he transposed his art’s working to an inventor’s fair to seize and carnalize vision (chapter 1). From that same chapter, Javier Téllez’s 2007 encounters with the elephant manifestly do not add up to a single “impression”— yet collective reflection on that fact is the nuanced lesson of his Letter on the Blind. Experience as a set of experimental fragments— or productively fragmenting encounters— was where we located the utopian body-without-organs in Mori’s 2003 pod. Presaged in Manet’s disjunctive picture of the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, these are emblems that fail to cohere, providing a useful friction against universalism. The self works the art in complex and cumulative encounters, and the best art works over a long period of time— even a lifetime. Contemporary biennial culture clearly pushes such unsettling experience as a positive agenda. Take Carsten Höller’s Experience Corridor from that 2005 Biennale de The Aesthetics of Experience

211

Figure 6.7 Carsten Höller, The Pinocchio Effect, 1994–2000, vibrator, two chairs, shelf, drawing (variable dimensions). Left: as installed in the exhibition Synchro System at Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000). Photograph © Attilio Maranzano. Right: in the “Experience Corridor” of Expérience de la durée, Biennale de Lyon (2005). Photograph © Blaise Adilon (for the Biennale de Lyon and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon); courtesy Air de Paris Gallery.

Lyon celebrating duration. Höller, described by the curators as “a prominent specialist of experimentation both sensorial and scientific,” offered a multistation lab where viewers could test their reflexes, induce psychotropic states, or participate across a gender divide to share the psychological illusion dubbed the “Pinocchio Effect” (fig.  6.7).77 Trained as an “agricultural scientist” whose doctorate focused on insect olfaction, Höller has emerged as a key purveyor of such experiential research, as his 2011 retrospective Experience announced. Since Mori and Höller exemplify the dis-organizing politics of extreme phenomenology and “expanded consciousness,” they clearly fit the psychedelic component of our experiential taxonomy. More fruitful than these may be the more openended encounters found elsewhere in the aesthetic realm of experience. Exemplifying, for me, Badiou’s politics of the evental site are the performative practices of Tino Sehgal, specifically as localized at the 2006 Berlin Biennale. Believing that documentations fix or congeal experience, Sehgal refuses to use official photography or video 212

Chapter 6

for his constructed situations; what I illustrate here is a documentary image of the space in which his work became experience at the Berlin biennial (fig. 6.8). Although Sehgal is not an experimentalist in quite the same way as Höller, his work bears a similar fondness for protocols, logical serialization, and embodied platforms for experience. Where Höller uses animals, as in his collaboration with Rosemarie Trockel, A House for Pigs and People at documenta 10 in 1997, Sehgal uses only humans.78 Trained in choreography and economics, Sehgal was brought into the fourth Berlin Biennale in 2006 to arrange the “constructed situation” of his Kiss (2002).79 As is typical of this artist’s work, Kiss involved several bodies in choreographed moves; the work is recalled primarily through textual description and oral reports, which affirm that “you had to be there.” The literature about Sehgal obediently repeats: “Upon completion of the exhibition, no physical trace of the work of art remains.”80 (Yet of course, “virtual” and discursive traces of the pieces are all over the web.)81 The experience offered by the piece

is constitutively different at each site, yet the continually refreshed labor of the performers is carefully choreographed as invariant. As Jörg Heiser aptly described it: An eight-minute choreographed loop, Kiss presents a man and a woman rapturously embraced and enacting different interpretations of some well-known kisses from art history— such as those by Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, Edward Munch and Jeff Koons. Alternating couples act as interpreters of Sehgal’s work, moving constantly and morphing slowly from one kiss to the next. At the end of the sequence, the man and woman seamlessly change roles and the continuum is reenacted. Kiss is danced continuously during all public gallery hours.82

“Danced” is to be understood in unconventional terms: Kiss presented two young people— a man and a woman, when I saw it— intertwining on the floor of a decaying dance hall on Auguststrasse, sometimes upright and sometimes prone, surrounded by corroding mirrors that reflected the awkward “viewers” and performers back on themselves as part of the piece. Important to this version of Kiss was this location. In my case, I learned before ascending to the second floor that this Berlin Ballhaus had been opened in 1913 and remained an active dancehall throughout the Fascist period. Flirtation, love, and erotic coupling had taken place here, no doubt given urgency by the schismatic violence of the two world wars. There was neither theatrical lighting nor stage— ballroom architecture being unique in producing everyone in its confines as both spectator and “performer.” What constituted Kiss as event was twofold. In the first instance, the corroding daylit space was haunted by the German past, discursively induced by the curators of this biennial and saturating all of the Auguststrasse sites. Adding to this infusion of ghosts was the sense of being folded as a viewer into that history, reflected in those corroded mirrors. A deeper level of reflection occurred during the shivering, rupturing moment when the performers made eye contact with each of us— presumably as directed.83 This Brechtian break in performance conventions produced a radical empiricism and a phenomenology of reflective practice. This was, in other words, Badiou’s site événementiel— the site had become eventful.84 As discussed above, Badiou is importantly con-

Figure 6.8 The Spiegelsaal (mirror room) of Clärchen’s dance hall in Berlin (Auguststrasse 24), where Tino Sehgal’s “constructed situation” The Kiss (2002) took place during the 2006 Berlin biennial. The artist prefers that there be no official documentation of his work; this image represents only the site. Photograph: Ulrike Küchler, Berlin.

scious of the supplementation that often follows the event and allows a “concrete analysis of the locality of the procedure”— which I here apply to the visitor and the biennial’s repurposed urban sites.85 The site, then, plays a crucial role. Compare the Kiss at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where it was located in the center of the rotunda— a place of transit and distraction, largely overshadowed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture and often ignored by museum visitors. Most of them were entrained instead in Sehgal’s This Progress, which made extraordinary use of Wright’s modernist spiral ramp— anthropophagy on an architectural scale.86 The Berlin Ballhaus was crucial to my experience of Kiss as rupture and event. As I saw myself in the corroded mirrors, visually “behind” the performers, as they made cold eye contact with me and forced me to acknowledge The Aesthetics of Experience

213

my voyeuristic posture in relation to their choreographed erotics, I was interpellated into the entire history of Auguststrasse, the Ballhaus, biennial culture in operation— and the seductions of power then and now. Locality, duration, the punctum of event were annealed into the shiver of embodied knowledge, accumulating in time— Erfahrung, I want to claim, not Erlebnis— constituting, in my argument, the elements of art that keep the experience economy from consuming all possible outcomes of the biennial encounter. Sehgal’s work is productive for my analysis. Rhetoric produces Kiss as being as close to “pure” experience as the contemporary art world can manage, and Sehgal himself enforces an emphasis on direct encounter through his proscription of documentation. Yet I believe there is nothing pure about experience, with Kiss a case in point.87 Not least, there was the pervasive supplement of curatorial discourse about the site that preceded my entry (sitetalk infused the press for this Berlin biennial); then also the work itself was rife with quotations of prior artworks. Some were knowingly choreographed by Sehgal, but for me they were supplemented further by the contingent presence of mirrors, calling up Dan Graham’s literally self-reflexive minimalist performance piece, Performer/ Audience/Mirror from 1975.88 Kiss did the work of art for me by surfacing the contradictions in its own conjunction of aesthetic plus experience— most notably, by scripting a direct address to the viewer that then weaves her awkwardly into the moment, torn from her passive artgoing distraction precisely by being locked into social being through a suddenly mutual gaze. As with the dialectic between world and locality, this one is unresolvable. A Sehgal piece will inevitably invoke consciousness of its existence as a portable conception within global commodity exchange— the interpreters uttering “promised gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario”— together with its temporal, specific, intense localization “right in front of us.” Kiss incorporates the public as performative, following the path articulated by Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler, 1980s crafters of philosophies of the subject in their very different mediums. As Dorothea von Hantelmann has modified the concept of the performative for the new millennium, artists now “do things with art.”89 The rupture of Sehgal’s contribution to the Berlin biennial is also a suture. We are thrown into selfconsciousness by mirrored eye contact with the perform214

Chapter 6

ers, but then integrated back into the ongoing unfolding of the piece. We are torn from spectatorship, then sutured as the performative public through which the art does its work.90 In the locale of Berlin in 2006, Sehgal’s piece proved the most capable of performing the global work of art, which is to say it drew on the extensive historical and geopolitical situation into which it was inserted only to “rupture with the established order of things” and produce an eventful site for new knowledge and exhilarated being, the aesthetics of experience in its most productive form.91 Wouldn’t Badiou’s requirement for a site événementiel and the politics of “rupture” seem mere romantic avantgardism, all over again? Potentially. But my experience of Sehgal’s Kiss in Berlin, duly deconstructed to acknowledge the subjectivating discourses preceding it, helps put the more useful components of Badiou’s set theory into practice. The art historical tropes of Kiss interpellated me as the gendered desiring subject of Western art, with all of the ideologies of individuation that this erotic differentiation implies. In my case: the fully participating female to Rodin’s relaxed male, the phallic abstraction of one of Brancusi’s kissers, or even the successive experiments-inrepetition of Andy Warhol’s Couch, which I insert into the authorized litany. The way that the Berlin Kiss also collectivized its viewers, writing us into an awkward, posttotalitarian present of togetherness in all our separation, allowed the production of a multiple without requiring a “universal.” As Badiou theorizes it, “The multiple . . . is neither supported by the existence of the one nor unfolded as an organic totality.”92 The philosopher uses mathematical set theory to avoid the ontological baggage of “oneness,” addressing philosophies of spirit and metaphysical unity along the way. In my reading of Badiou, the noncollapse of units— the stubborn multiplicity of individual/collective— allows for the scalar jump that makes an event of experience, and a slowly accruing politics of that encounter. Scalar ambition was built into that 2005 Berlin biennial, its Weltbild specific to this corner of “formerly Eastern” Europe but hoping to emblematize the whole postcommunist world. The biennial infiltrated thirteen buildings on the Auguststrasse in Berlin’s Mitte district, ranging “from a church to a cemetery.” In a historically loaded, now abandoned East German “School for Jewish Girls,” biennial art could appear on the wall right next to

Figure 6.9 Simon Starling, installation view and still from Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006), a four-minute black-and-white 35 mm film, with sound, projected via a purpose-built film loop machine (projected dimensions variable), as shown at the Venice Biennale, 2009. Installation photo: Giorgio Zucchiatti; Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia. Film still: Simon Starling; courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

faded pictures of Soviet apparatchiks and tentative graffiti from the long-gone teenagers.93 The European visitor was encouraged to read such historical traces back into the art, inserting contemporary productions into that melancholic world picture from 1989, with its updated vanitas about socialism in the face of capital. But the forced conjunction was overburdened; most of the artworks could hardly match the flood of associations in the site. An exception to this script of European decadence and despair was Paul McCarthy’s manic Bang-Bang Room from 1992, which overwhelmed the lugubrious hush of history with noisy exuberance, despite curatorial efforts to describe it as having a “haunted-house like atmosphere and looming paranoia.”94 Sehgal’s work entered this framing, to draw on his own site’s decaying atmosphere, producing a resonating knowledge by inference and echo. The work may have been programmed with a capacity to signify “Rodin” (for example), but as the ballroom site made evident, this was only one ostensive layer that became contextually adumbrated by many others— fueled by the shock of a viewer implicated by the glance of a performer, and imbricated in a hall of mirrors with an eroticized political past. Standard biennial offerings of large-scale video projection only rarely achieve the status of evental site. Spectacle via projection usually bears only the most tenuous

virtual relation to the site, putting the fantasy of embodied experience into tension, if not fatal doubt. But then, “medium” can function, in the art world, as an effective ground for rupture, its own kind of event— in confrontation with experience, medium reminds us that all encounters are mediated. This dawning awareness is often deployed by the biennial artists engaging in projection— as when Simon Starling, for the 2009 Venice Biennale curated by Daniel Birnbaum, made the projecting device itself an eventful, performative apparatus, stimulating reflection on its own autopoiesis. Wilhelm Noack oHG was a film about the making of the device that projected it, shot at the Berlin metal factory of that name (fig. 6.9). While it had nothing to do with Venice, it stimulated reflection on the eventful sites of industry and their index in art, as Starling’s film wound through its spidery purposebuilt projection apparatus, “suspended from a metal helix where the film shuttles along vertical spindles with the ease of a zipper, deconstructing the familiar guise of the reel while keeping its precise mechanical logic intact” in the words of reviewer Cora Fisher. To suggest the experiential oomph of all this clattering metal, she concluded that Starling’s art worked to provide “firm resistance to the virtual in favor of veritable physical presence.”95 Here, of course, I revirtualize it as text and printed illustration— necessary supplements to art’s working in global culture. I The Aesthetics of Experience

215

Figure 6.10 Claude Monet, Morning in Antibes, 1888— possibly one of the several Monet paintings featured at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 82.1 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Charlotte Dorrance Wright, 1978.

articulate how, for me, the intensely artisanal work of the filmed metal fabricators merges with the extraordinary projection apparatus to produce something akin to Henry Adam’s early twentieth-century sublime: alienation and awe before the dynamo. At the Biennale, Starling’s work reinforced one thesis from the previous chapter: fair modalities, machines, and festal event structures have now been incorporated as part of biennial culture. Medium-specificity is not denied by this amalgamation, but sharpened in it, reinforcing historian Pat Mainardi’s claim that modernism’s aesthetic experience of medium was born in the crucible of the fairs.96 This was so because of the repeating spectacle, as Manet had realized already in 1867: To exhibit is the vital issue, the sine qua non for the artist, for it so happens after several confrontations that one becomes familiar with what had been surprising and, if you will, shocking. Little by little one understands it and accepts it. . . . To exhibit is to find friends and allies for the struggle.97 216

Chapter 6

“Experience” in the fair and biennial is thus equal parts experiment and education— hence the revived importance of Dewey for our time. For Manet, cumulative experience aimed at turning the viewing subject into an “ally” for new modes of modern expression— in part by conditioning the perceptual apparatus. Claude Monet’s Impressionism brought this conditioning to vision with Comtean positivism but with no interest in controlling the appearance of his works at the fairs. Thus the Decennale at the 1900 exposition represented Monet with an odd group of earlier pictures unconnected to his radical late series (fig. 6.10).98 Those had begun encoding the artist as a registration device for sense data, while requiring the viewer to make sense of that dazzling, data-driven experience. The regulation familiar from factory-time is opposed by the universalism of timeless motifs (the cathedrals, the haystacks)— yet the very contrast surfaces the labor of the viewer. Similarly, Starling juxtaposes the “viscerality” of clanking machinery with the cool projected images of a film abstracting industrial craft. These relations to labor, spanning centuries of fairs and biennials, prompt further reflection.

Economimesis at the Fair

The relation of aesthetic experience to labor comes into focus here, where the maker’s wages, and how they are paid, determine whether the work is to be read as art, or craft. This is Derrida’s economimesis, which I lean on in this section— a theory that aesthetics involves separating art from the labor and wage relations that characterize everyday operations, yielding an art doomed to mimetically reference its own economic relations.99 This paradox continues the project of complicating “pure” experience and grounding “disinterested” aesthetics. The work of critical globalism requires this complexity, and this critique. The working of art at fairs, and now biennials, often engaged its economic context. Courbet charged admission to his Realist pavilion in 1855, staging direct competition with the fair’s ticketing apparatus. Powers and Israëls both reveled in the market for reproductions made possible by their expositionary success. In 1867 Manet depicted both disjunctive experience at the fair, and the immigrant gardener being paid to smooth over its confected landscape. Attempting to ignore the fairs’ machinery, Monet nonetheless turned himself into a semimechanical photon-registering device, often to record the accumulation of agricultural labor. This legacy continues as the biennial artist incorporates aspects of the fairs’ festal apparatus. Starling designs a custom-built projection device to surface the disappearing craft of factory metalwork in Germany, paralleled by the disappearing artisanal skill of shooting and editing celluloid film, which is now preserved largely by artists rather than “the film industry.” Metalwork and films would once have been in different booths at the fair; now they provide components for a single installation. In Monet’s moment, the fairs wanted only his escapist landscapes; biennial culture can now accommodate artists such as Starling, Sehgal, or Mori, with her useful derangements. Politically, the aesthetics of experience can rearrange its subjects in productive ways with regard to the economics of labor usually occluded by aesthetics. Monet’s pictorial economy surfaced at least two agents: the imagined collective— the eternal agricultural grounds of nation— and the refined individual. The latter is both the highly developed artistic sensibilité (in which a dab of paint registers a petit sensation) and the responsive viewer who learns how to anneal those sen-

sations in new protocols for viewing art. We have seen how multiple experiences were available at the fairs (the collectivizing of the crowd, the individual tactics of the artist, and the aesthetic practices of viewers on multiple visits and in repeating exhibitions). Similarly, Starling invokes a postindustrial subject capable of “retooling” its human viewing apparatus; we viewers become aware of our perceiving bodies in relation to the clanking projective machinery, and achieve different levels of focus to “see” the work. In Molly Nesbit’s recent formulation of pragmatist philosophy (echoing the artist Olafur Eliasson as well as Dewey), we look “to see sight” as we encounter the fact of medium and the event of experiencing it; this is art working to surface the labor of the senses.100 Eventually, Monet was able to persuade his nation that this kind of aesthetic practice was in itself therapeutic, codified in his gift of the Nympheas to the people of France following the devastation of World War I. Monet showed how the machinic subject of industrialization could be mobilized in mediation despite being veiled by subject matter; this kind of operation is paralleled in Starling’s installation, as its reviewer noted: “We don’t think of the oppressiveness of factory production; instead, our understanding of the physical configuration in front of us is actively constructed as the physical expression of how things are made, their ontological form.”101 The craft of custom metalwork (subject matter) only occasionally conceals the precise, no-doubt digitally mediated fabrication of the projecting machine and its film. The analysis of the economics (and hence politics) of these artistic relations takes time. Monet can reflect Henri Bergson’s contemporaneous claim for embodied time in the face of industrialization— philosophy that is acted out in the flow of brushstrokes and encoded in Monet’s rural or religious motifs— but it takes some thinking to feel that.102 And it requires yet another optic to perceive Monet’s brushstrokes as labor, in the repetition of invariant strokes and compositions. This all takes effort, as Derrida reminded us, because modernity bequeathed to us a relation to “art” in which the making of meaning is actively located in a reflexive subject already carved out of an economic existence, poised in contemplation and freed from labor into leisure. It took certain historical developments (Impressionism into Expressionism, for example) to show the working of medium as its own kind of labor, opening viewers to notions of working at another The Aesthetics of Experience

217

level. Parsing Starling’s tripartite system (the film, the apparatus, the content of the film being the making of the apparatus) requires label reading and thinking, alongside being jolted by the sensory impact of the ongoing machinic activity. As Jacques Rancière describes it, “aesthetic acts” are “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.” The aesthetic sets itself off from everyday “distributions of the sensible,” even as art surfaces the labor of working the material (and, I would add, working the ideas), yielding Rancière’s sometimes utopian politics of aesthetics.103 To Rancière’s renovation of modernist, avant-garde theories, I add the aesthetics of experience, which forces another turn in these politics. Fleshing out his “configurations of experience,” I want to insist that experience is not free from what we might call the Begriffsarbeit— conceptwork. A given artwork’s conceptual underpinning itself becomes materialized for the body, as part of the experience, as when our embodied jolts before Starling’s machine are coupled with jolts of recognition in parsing the film as documentation of its own making. The concept can be enjoyed and then agonized over “as something with its own tensions and contradictions, which include those of the thought that tries to comprehend it.”104 When it works best, art both gives an experience and demands that we as viewers excavate the ideologies, politics, and hierarchies embedded in its layered folds. The contemporary biennial’s proliferation after the 1980s takes its place in this economy of experiment and subjectivation, experience and critique. Critical globalist practices emerged within this expanding order and brought a politics of implication: there can be no “outside” to these world pictures, only contested positions within them (chapter  7). In this way, the aesthetics of experience offers something engaged— as when Adorno celebrates the tactile “grasp” (greifen) at the etymological root of Begriff (concept).105 Such relations to labor and the haptic stand in ambivalent negotiation with Kant’s philosophy, in which “disinterested contemplation” was fundamental to the aesthetic.106 At midcentury, this ghost of aesthetics occupied a dull space where it lurked “as an anti-intellectual form of cultural elitism, the claims to universality of which are based on little more than a mystical veil of intuition shrouding a defence of inherited authority.”107 Adorno and Max Horkheimer attacked this 218

Chapter 6

remnant as a function of the culture industry, and Derrida’s “economimesis” lampooned it with merciless wit. But I want to avoid an easy dismissal of Enlightenment metaphysics via a “critique of cynical reason,” particularly since I think contemporary biennials function with Enlightenment engines at their core.108 Enlightenment optimisms coexist with critical globalism. In this we can agree with Kant that “the aesthetic” preserves some special space for experience in culture, while disagreeing with his concept of disinterest. The exploration of biennialinstigated “experience” can thus be seen as a material, sensory, and cognitive shuttle between the constructed antipodes (work and art). Biennials are not the only place where this happens, of course, but they are often eventful sites for weaving meaning between matter and mind. We arrive now at the polemical part of this book: the aesthetics of experience demands more of you than “having” an experience of art— it demands that the art encounter be actively negotiated and consciously explored. I want the work of art to rupture complacent orders by being an event. I want it to be possible for the eruption of art’s performatives to stage a strong utopian counternarrative to the separation of labor that has traditionally characterized “the aesthetic.” I want this all to be understood first viscerally, and then conceptually: art works. And if art works on the subject (as the art in this book is still working on me), then contrary to Kant, this kind of labor cannot be excluded from the aesthetic operation. This justifies the blindman trope with which I began this book— a multisensorial place where theory was impelled to pause in confrontation with the blindman’s laborious “experience,” contributing to theôria’s productive entanglement with embodied practices of turning and experiencing. Significantly, as Georgina Kleege pointed out, blind epistemology feels its way, and that link between embodied knowledge and affect should interest us, even if art is inevitably also something for contemplation— Kant’s analytic, but no longer transcendental.109 The old relay between experience and understanding is not so much undone by the contemporary biennial as self-consciously enacted by it, performed in relational, situational, and durational terms, and not always in “the right order.” Thus we have not altogether eliminated Kant’s implicit trajectory, which takes us from the prior organization of the subject into an aesthetic encounter that can then lead to transformations of the self. But

through the centuries of commentary and critique I’ve been alluding to (Hegel, Heidegger, Dewey, Adorno, Derrida, Lyotard, Rancière, Badiou), art has become more active. The aesthetics of experience foreground the agency of the art in transformation, and also call to the responsibility of the viewer. Kant’s aesthetic judgment— a faculty of the imagination— was something generated by the viewer in contemplation of things from nature or art. What remains useful about this is that the aesthetic is not embedded in the object, but in the reactive, reflective subject— for Kant no less than for contemporary curators. Unlike random materials, objects of art are governed by rules; yet the imagination of the Kantian subject is constructed as consummately free of such mechanisms— an enabling myth of the aesthetic that we find hard to give up. This is where Derrida becomes useful, identifying that in this mythic framing of the mechanics of art and the freedom of the imagination we have a fable of labor. The conduit is experience, connecting both the imagination in its contact with an exterior world, and the art object in its appeal to sensory cognition. Experience in general (and of artistic things in particular) is essential for meaningful knowledge to be produced; “knowledge of things independently of experience (and thus knowledge of ‘noumena’) is illicit.”110 But then, the labor of imagination itself needs reckoning, its “debt” to the apparatus begs accounting for. Along these lines, postcolonial theorist Arindam Dutta reads Kant’s connection of art to labor as peculiarly tied to the emerging instruments of capital: Liberal art is labor that is not labor (in the economic sense), its surplus value is not yielded up under compulsion of contract, but accrues only to the maker of art who indulges in a play that is not mere play. . . . The realization of beauty is therefore posed in an antithesis to the economic realm: its relative preponderance becomes— by dint of negation— “each time . . . a question of salary.”111

Is all aesthetic experience then “a question of salary”? To concretize this from an earlier example: do we read Wurm’s furniture aesthetically because it is already removed both from the businessman’s calculus of materials and labor and from the domestic world of function?

Because it is made for “play,” and given to our imagination for “free” by Erwin Wurm, this analysis would see it as also untethered from wages, given without debt incurred that would need to be paid in labor or coin. Similarly, I “play” at being Höller’s experimental subject, and thus forfeit what I might otherwise be paid (a standard $50 fee for participating in psychological experiments); the data generated is also “free” of instrumentation— it will not be put to use as table, scientific publication, or industrial trial. Likewise, Mori’s pod does not gather my brain waves for analytic purposes, and what I do once I’m inside the exhibitionary complex is unscripted play, “free.” I am allowed to model affective states without fully occupying them, in Sehgal and Mori; this too is a ludic rather than an economic relation. Yet I have the responsibility of judgment, of “making sense.” Sehgal’s interpreters periodically remind me (with little speeches and aphorisms, often quotes from economists) that this sense-making is always already intellectual as well as sensory. Experience is the “coin” of this Kantian realm in which imagination rules. We can mint this currency as long as we live above “bare life,”112 and that richness is what makes us responsible for judgment. This is to underline the utopian construction I’ve offered here of the rupture from (virtual) labor relations in (embodied) aesthetic experience. Their dialectical relation is inescapable, and situates the eu-topos in the actual, political world— perhaps as a chronotope, the durational space of art. We are in territory that we have already been mapping, via Adorno— even if Wurm wants to argue explicitly against his negative dialectic. For Adorno, negating instrumental labor is the avant-garde’s most distinctive contribution to human liberation, part of the ongoing struggle against the predations of capital. If I tweak those negative dialectics here, it is not to return naively to Kant. It is to give up the avant-garde notion of unidirectional progress (the “avant” always pictured itself above and beyond); on the contrary, we are within and amongst. Following Dutta, it helps to historicize Kant’s Enlightenment context as one in which capital was less globally monolithic, industrialized labor was on the rise, and the redundancy of artisans was perceived as a greater threat to elite culture (e.g., Kant’s Critiques defended certain interests). Reconfigured by Joan Scott for a feminist present, the “labor” going into the “mechanism” that is art must make room today for the play of difference and The Aesthetics of Experience

219

aesthetics. I have claimed this as a tactic that the artist deploys in advance of the disinterested observer, chancing that we will continue the labor. In this sense, the art is not a static repository of work, but itself works in us and through us. Or it dies. Kant himself cannot easily explain the relation between the rules of art and the tweaks of innovation, as Dutta quotes him: The rule must be abstracted from the deed, i.e. from the product, against which others may test their own talent, letting it serve them as a model not for copying [Nachmachung] but for imitation [Nachahmung— a sort of being inspired by the exemplary]. How this is possible is difficult to explain. The ideas of the artist arouse similar ideas in his apprentice if nature has equipped him with a similar proportion of mental powers.113

These have become the rules of cutting-edge practice— not simple mimesis (the copy of a model) but an exploration of the exemplary, based on a deeper understanding of the systems in which art happens. These systems can include the ecos (the “house,” environment, spatial concerns), the polis (political), the economy (libidinal or financial), or the self (identity, mind, gender, body, sociality)— hence biennials’ experiential forms, and the debated sociologies of “relational art” and “participation” that accompany their rise.114 For the global work of art to happen, the artist releases a premise into a situation, and the viewer or participant takes it up. The sophisticated practitioners examined in this book have developed extraordinary tools by this point in their careers; they can anticipate the forms of discourse (the supplement) and accommodate the site— often they succeed in inducing an event.115 The optimism in my account relies on the fact that these operations are rarely cynical; they are part of the generous “open” work. This stands in contrast to those global artists— and there are many— who claim to have “cracked the code” for a successful career.116 They may be correct in economic terms, but fulfilling investment portfolios is not what art is primarily about. The case studies in this book clarify that an artist’s lifetime market is a bad predictor of his or her long-term impact on culture. I’m neither celebrating the market nor pretending to avoid it; it is just not very 220

Chapter 6

useful in determining the most effective of the “global” aspirations in artistic practice. That effectiveness is made possible by the historical arrival of the aesthetics of experience— accompanied by plaintive refrains that yearn for the body, location, site-specificity, events, stuff, “things,” sometimes asking for an unmediated access to the real that even Kant was eager to problematize. For all the sophistication of our exhibitionary complexes, we can still see how, paradoxically, experiential work may be infected with fantasies of escaping from mediation (Sehgal)— or, in complete inversion, may imagine working through totalized mediation (Mori). This aspect of contemporaneity muddles what was, for Kant, a conventional distinction between mediation and “the thing.” Even Derrida could keep this relation simple in his magisterial deconstruction of the Kantian parergon.117 The medium in question was text, paper, drawing, painting, or sculpture. The parergon was supplementary to the main event: the gilded frame or text label positioned to the side, “incidental” to meaning. For Kant these would be outside the judgment of aesthetics; for Derrida they announced the aesthetic as a disciplinary regime. By taking the simplest example of the frame or the signature, Derrida pressured us to consider how despite being excluded from “the work of art,” the parergon is precisely that which “proceeding from this exclusion, gives it form, limit, and contour” and thus initiates art’s working.118 That poststructural insight has everything to do with how I have constructed the operations of the global in art— “work” as an operation performed on media, “work” as result, but most importantly, “work” as the discursive and visceral process that unfolds as the working-of-the work on, in, and as the subject. Perhaps Derrida helps us understand how the Duchampian inframince— a difference eluding perception that can nonetheless be thought— complicated matters for the Kantians among us.119 Aren’t the flat printed disks of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (chapter 1) only a tiny part of the working of the art, which requires the disk in motion, the noise of the motor, the carnalized vision of us viewers and perhaps the environs of the inventors’ fair? That which cannot be stabilized in contemporaneity— where medium can be “the media,” data, or our bodies (to name only a few of the delirious and proliferating possibilities)— is both the parergon after deconstruction and the intensely mediated experience of contemporary art.

Some of the complexity of the term experience could fuse in this mediated active thing, recalling that even thing has an etymology in gatherings of social subjects.120 In this reading, res and media alike must be amalgamated to another Derridean concept, one related to the supplement of the parergon as that which is “ejected” by the discerning viewer— becoming the subjectile. Typical of the wordplay of deconstruction, the subjectile, a word appropriated in the 1920s for theater by Antonin Artaud, becomes in Derrida the sujet-il, the “subject-he” (I insist that we also hear sujet-elle, subject-she) who haunts the thing of art and prefigures the conscious projection or introjection that will defeat the object’s collapse into inertness. In the German tradition, Heidegger had been keen to emphasize the work done by such a subject, creating its ground in modernity through visual dominion: This word subiectum . . . names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything unto itself. . . . That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is.121

The dangers of subjectivism were real for Heidegger, yet “only where man remains subject does the positive struggle against individualism and for the community as the sphere of those goals that govern all achievement and usefulness have any meaning.”122 Only by seeing how the world has become picture can we undo some of the violence of subjectivism, and mindfully construct another critical path. Tweaking such solemnity, Derrida’s subjectile refers to the dynamism of a shuttle— it corrupts notions of stasis in the subject or distanced “thingness” with movement: moving emotions of visceral empathy, animist imagination, or conscious interpretation that bring the object of art closer to Being. This favors eventful art (chapter 5) and the productive instabilities of Manet’s stuttering 1867 tableau, Vue de l’Exposition, or Duchamp’s rotating disks for the 1930s inventor fair. As philosopher Michael Marder glosses Derrida, the subjectile productively engages such movement, fudging the distinction between sub-ject as that which is thrown below and the object as that against which the subject is thrown. . . . [The subjectile] isolates the moment of hurling, or “-jection,” before its interiorization in “introjection”

and its exteriorization in “projection”; what remains is the throwing gesture of a send-off indifferent to who or what is being thrown.123

The subjectile for Derrida creates a putatively neutral terrain of physical relations or movements outside ontology. With experience as the name for that movement between thing and theory, the subjectile might be experience’s trajectory— the dynamic of an “indifferent” encounter with art that could turn out differently, using the rupture of the event to unthink the very fantasy of “immediate” contact. This helps decode how the rhetoric of experience can work as art, or not. Badly deployed, experience-talk can trade in an ideology of “immediacy,” handmaiden to the experience economy. If experience can construct an active trajectory or willed suspension from the media (the middle thingness) of art, then it also risks neutralizing the labor that media offers (the cut in film, the stroke of paint, or even the huffing “interpreters” of a Sehgal). When experience is invoked meretriciously, it attempts to erase medium with putative revelations of “presence” that become metaphysical erasures of the “question of salary.” This is not an effective way to do the global work of art. If we would encounter art, and seek out its best workings, we also have responsibilities: we need to listen as Sehgal’s interpreters iterate the circumstances of ownership or intone aphorisms from Adam Smith or Kenneth Galbraith; in those vocalizations, we are being given tools to unpack the economimesis of this art’s working. The interpreters are salaried, and yet their economic patter often addresses the “priceless” value of Art. This is, precisely, Derrida’s economimesis, now put into play. Without the human interpreters, there is no medium to produce the friction with economists’ complacent theories. Thus, savvy artists structure experience to include a critical consciousness of their own operations, in media, often in cross-modal senses. This includes the blind voice-overs in Téllez’s projection, which summon a yearning for attribution that cannot be satisfied, because film only fictively attaches voice to image. Or it could account for Mori’s instruction to merge our brain waves with her animation, which forces participants to be conscious of both. Boshoff ’s split between the seeing audience and the Blind Alphabet surfaces mediation with a vengeance; Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s performative “nativeness” places us as viewers of Two Undiscovered Amerindians, as does Cai’s The Aesthetics of Experience

221

Melting Bath, into acute awareness of our bodies as already mediated by colonialism and unexamined notions of the racialized Other. These are the workings of critical globalism, explored more fully in the final chapter of this book. What I offer here is evidence for a productive oscillation in ideologies of experience: one might have the im-mediate experience of being folded into Kiss, an immediate event brought im-moderately close through interpellation by the performer’s gaze and reflection in the corroding mirrors of the Berlin ballroom. But to become knowledge, this elision into immediacy has just as immediately to be undone through the paradoxical subjectile: the subject becoming conscious of being stranded in the middle of this thing: awkward, alienated, voyeuristic, aroused. To become aware of immediacy is, immediately, to tear oneself away from that illusory condition. The tearing of the subjectile brings us to an important conclusion regarding the aesthetics of experience— one summarized by Michel Foucault’s comment that his own works constitute a series of “experience-books.” For Foucault, experience has the task of “tearing” the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely “other” than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation. It is this desubjectifying undertaking, the idea of a “limit-experience” that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson.124

The protected realm of the aesthetic offers a process by which experience can undo the subject, but it simultaneously offers a path toward transformation and reconstruction. The social working of art then allows this process to become collective: Starting from experience, it is necessary to clear the way for a transformation, a metamorphosis which isn’t simply individual but which has a character accessible to others: that is, this experience must be linkable, to a certain extent, to a collective practice and to a way of thinking.125

The idea of rupture and limit-experiences becoming “accessible to others” recalls discussions of the differend from the previous chapter. Conflicts, power disparities, 222

Chapter 6

fantasies and realities of “the Other” all have roles in the aesthetics of experience. Foucault’s experiences invoke this register of alterity; Lyotard tackled it directly in theorizing the differend, and so it is for Derrida reading (and raiding) Artaud. Specifically, the subjectile in Artaud comes from his reading of Tarahumaran dancing “in which the body becomes the living subjectile, a body which both draws and writes, a living pictogram, rather than a receptacle for the exteriorization of something dead (such as words).”126 The connection between Artaud’s “living pictogram” and Hélio Oiticica’s attempts to produce a revolutionary body in the Parangolés is historically direct, since Artaud’s Théâtre de la Cruauté (Theater of Cruelty) was translated and widely deployed throughout Latin America during the 1960s.127 Acknowledging the characteristically Surrealist appropriation of indigenous rituals to think away the effects of Western metaphysics (the Tarahumara are the largest indigenous group in what is now the Mexican state of Chihuahua), we have traced how artists of the 1960s could extract the poisonous exoticism of such fantasies for the postcolonial operations of antropofagia (chapters 4 and 5). Notably, anthropophagia theorized mediation at the cellular level; Oiticica’s conceptualism worked through chains of mediations, allowing his capes to keep working both in the Mangueira community where he lived at times and in the art world where these Parangolés made their global mark. This is how we might understand Sehgal’s performatives as well. Singing their identifiers at the 2005 Venice Biennale— “This is so contemporary, contemporary! Tino Sehgal . . .”— the interpreters embedded in these “constructed situations” work the parergon, their scripted performances forcing the supplement into hearing with jiving force.128 As with the nesting of locations and practices referenced in Oiticica’s work, this gives a forceful “gesture of a send-off indifferent to who or what is being thrown”— an indifference that ultimately propels auditors to develop some view, wherever they might be going. This is the productive fragmentation and reflective work I am privileging as an aesthetics of experience. Neither passivity nor complacence rule this unsettled dynamic. Efforts to fix it (in the manner of philosophy) should remain in flux, announcing themselves (like this one) as experience-books in process. In this contemporary poetics of experience, the visitor/ viewer/auditor has a crucial role. Jacques Rancière cel-

ebrated this, also via Artaud, staging a split between the “magic power of theatrical action” and the intellectualism of necessary but often awkward critique— which he personified as “Artaud/Brecht” in his 2004 construction of “the emancipated spectator.”129 The aesthetics of experience cherishes such emancipation, even if that dream of the Enlightenment may not quite be as independent of capital as it fantasizes. But the critical globalism I have been celebrating (tactics of artists, worked by viewers) can certainly be recognized in Rancière’s dream of “a theater where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance.”130 So even if I was captured as image by the gaze of interpreters in the Berlin Kiss, it was this very “tear” in the eye

of the spectacle, this fly in the ointment, that produced for me the rupture of an event. Don’t get me wrong. The dregs of capital were present in Berlin, infusing the corroded spaces of the ballroom and giving Kiss a role in that history— capital and desire subtending this ballroom’s survival during Weimar, Nazism, Russian occupation, East German socialism, German reunification, until it could emerge like a phoenix in the EU’s sacrificial economy at the Berlin Biennale. But in the rupturing subjectiles of Kiss, I’ve argued, the performative audience found space to reflect on their suspension within capital’s very pervasiveness, entertaining visceral thoughts about eroticism’s occasional routes of escape— and engaging some part of the aesthetics of experience. Art’s workings should always leave us with work to do.

The Aesthetics of Experience

223

7 Critical Globalism, in Practice

So far Globalism seems to guarantee a rather bleak and cheerless future. —EDWARD ALDEN JEWELL , 19431 I am a field, an experience . . . the world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted. —MAURICE MERLEAU- PONTY , Phenomenology of Perception, 19622 It is better to disclose the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom. —ROBERT SMITHSON , criticizing documenta 5, 19723 Rational utopianism [uses] the knowledge of the probable to make the possible come true. —PIERRE BOURDIEU AND LOÏC WACQUANT , Reflexive Sociology, 19924 It is therefore essential to retain that the definition of evental sites is local, while the definition of natural situations is global . . . . The idea of an overturning whose origin would be a state of totality is imaginary. Every radical transformational action originates in a point, which, inside a situation, is an evental site. —ALAIN BADIOU , Being and Event, 20055 How is experience possible? —IMMANUEL KANT , Preisschrift, 17916

The Worldly Subject

The merely “comparative universality” of experience, per Kant, leads to corollaries explored in this book: experience has a history, and common sense is made, not born.7 “Common sense” takes discursive and perception-sharing work— as the New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell recognized in his nomination of 225

the new style he saw in Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman in 1943, as “Globalism”: “I do not recommend it but the fearless might gingerly poke . . .”8 Was that the moment when globalism became our next “international style”? It is difficult to see any formal stylistic commonalities today, but this conclusion argues for an emerging common practice that I have been referring to as “critical globalism,” historically specific to the present. If the transnational openings promulgated by Szeemann (exemplum of the curator-auteur, chapter  5) marked the full-bore turn to experience that has come to an apogee since 2005 (chapter 6), then one of its prior conditions was the Cold War founding of the São Paulo Bienal (chapter 4), which set up the possibility for the proliferation of biennali. In turn, the calving off of the first biennial from the fairs (chapters 2 and 3) allowed art to incorporate festal structures that it had long been shielded from by the disciplining of “beaux arts” institutions and their separated pavilions. Throughout this long history, commentators and artists have taken up blind epistemology (chapter 1) as a way to navigate increasingly massive exhibitions, assessing, with the tools of theory, the spectacles on display. “Hypothetical” blindmen are ripe for criticism, but the philosophical construct nonetheless compels consideration of alternative ways of knowing, staging a clear precedent for contemporary artistic practice: emphases on the multisensory, durational, and affective work of “feeling,” constructing an aesthetics of experience that has worked to displace Western modernity’s ocular confidence in the world-as-picture. The history this book has charted was embroiled with experience from the beginning. Extending from the nineteenth-century fairs well into the 1930s, “experience” was the product of an encounter with the exoticism of the Grand Tour, compressed temporally into the space of display. Goods and humans, art and industry all “represented” the world-as-picture. In such grand expositions, experience was a transaction with the visitor for whom the fair was “a school, not a show.” As the biennials took up this legacy, their early twentieth-century organizers replicated the fair’s terms: experience was the result of a pedagogical transfer of knowledge and aesthetic standards from “central” civilizations to aspirants, who were expected to acquire cosmopolitan understanding through their apprenticeship to the event. Catalogues and photocompendia reinforced these representational and educa226

Chapter 7

tional goals. The fair and its entertainments constituted an “experience economy” that would not be named as such until the 1990s (chapters 5 and 6), but its rules were clear: the “viewers” or “audiences” were passive and undifferentiated populations. If “shilling days” brought members of the working classes into confrontation with royals, the fair’s contents were understood to be stable object lessons for both; like goods, recipients would be packaged (e.g., the “package tour”). Municipal managers included art-as-objects within the fair, nested in the beaux arts pavilion within a rebranded cosmopolitan center, the ensemble characteristic of the age of the world picture as instantiated in the map of national pavilions. By the 1960s, this model had collapsed. Artists and audiences participated in dismantling the centralized message and passive model of experience. Prefigured in the thread of critique (blind epistemology) that wove through the discourse around such recurring exhibitions from the beginning, philosophical skepticism fueled artistic tactics that constructed multisensory, durational, and theoretical experiences as alternatives to the scripted path. Even at the peak of the fairs, theorizing artists and “blind” commentators refused the emerging experience economy and offered other kinds of experiences. Powers’s anodyne Neoclassical sculpture The Greek Slave was confronted by performative abolitionists surfacing the racial politics of the “tragic octoroon” and the “Virginian slave” (figs. 2.3, 2.12). Neither Hiram Powers nor Jozef Israëls offered any friction with the fair apparatus, but Manet registered his experience of the fair’s world picture in his large “sketch” in oil (plate 6) that looked down over the taxonomic display of the 1867 Parisian fair through disjunctive modern figures— classed and gendered “types” indexing a motley population. Manet, a centrally located and culturally empowered artist, followed Courbet in staging an alternative pavilion, outside the fair boundaries but drawing on its attentional infrastructures. Similar alternatives were pursued in the early twentieth century by Henry Adams and Marcel Duchamp, imaginatively fusing the virgins of traditional art with the dynamos that were the fairs’ most sublime offerings; their blind metaphors contributed to “supersensual” subject positions and “carnalized” experience. The anthropophagy revived by Brazilian artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark (chapters 4 and 5) confronted the neutral units of geometric abstraction in the new Bienal de São Paulo with a

violent gustatory metaphor. In all of these turnings by audiences and artists, an alternative epistemology was being established. This conclusion claims them as constituting critical globalism in germ. Previous chapters have explored how “experience” was radically reformed by artists and their agents, who embraced, multiplied, and ingested that category into the working of the art itself. A Heideggerian world-as-picture was transformed into nomadic curators’ multiplied worlds and peripatetic artists’ roving critiques. As Oiticica’s Tropicália installations made explicit, experience and event were now the unpredictable outcomes of a live, durational engagement with sites and propositions, configured as the ongoing becoming of local but mobilized subjects. Another instance was documenta, first established as a “100-day museum,” then delocalized and depoliticized by Harald Szeemann, who made of it a “100-day event.” This in turn became a model for the “Aperto” structure in Venice, whose suspension instigated the founding of Manifesta, the mobile “anti-biennial.” Even trenchant critics of Szeemann, such as artist Robert Smithson, were themselves pioneering duration and movement as key components of a peripatetic contemporary praxis. The market and the “experience economy” continued to boom, but the cancellation of the fair/biennial’s long relation to the market for art objects in 1968 had some effect. In addition to producing the compensatory rise of the art fair (repeating only as of 1968), the severing of market relations freed biennials to experiment even more freely with experience, ostensibly unburdened from concerns about how durational or spatially contingent forms (video, performance, installation) could enter the art market. Even though art fairs themselves now embrace eventful art in emulation of biennials, I have argued that the monetizing of art-as-experience does not yet rule us as worldly subjects. The contingency of this twisting, turning, but ever more transnational and transcultural set of developments has had both local and global impact, involving specific curators and exemplary artists as well as flows of cultural, political, and financial capital.9 Optimistically, I have charted artistic tactics throughout this book as powerful alternatives to the market, on one hand, and to organizers’ strategies of sublimation, on the other. From the first replication of the Venice Biennale in 1951 by São Paulo, through the Cold War orienteering of documenta in 1955,

to expansions of the biennial form into Asia, Africa, and the Islamic Middle East, to Manifesta’s curious migratory model, the recurring exhibitionary form has revealed its surprising suppleness, and artists have taken full advantage. By visiting and theorizing a set of those experiences, I have accepted that I myself am their subject, remaining open to the possibility of event, yet with a responsibility to unpack what Adorno would have called their “agonistic totalities.” I nominate this process of openness, reflection, turning (and tossing) critical globalism, as both a posture of reception and a tactic by artists. As explained elsewhere in this book, I intend “globalism” here not to refer to a passive condition or context, but an aesthetic operation. It is analogous to “modernism” in its construction, in that I want it to designate the response of creative artists, who through stylistic and formal operations in their media, distinguish their art from industrial, technological, and mediatic processes. That is, modernism is to “modernization” as globalism is to “globalization.” Following this rhetorical model, I take globalism to mark the active production of the subject, through aesthetic operations that take stock of contemporary modes of subjectivization in order to intervene in them. I might declare myself to be globalist, taking up this process to take control of it. Distinct from the common presumption of a pervasive logic of globalization, globalism here takes cognizance of the condition of being globalized to induce a reflective practice, either by artists or by the publics they form.10 Globalism, in this argument, emerges at the critical edge of an aesthetics of experience. The previous chapter claimed that the festal epiphenomena of the fair were eventually incorporated into art, producing in turn the aesthetics of experience and further intensifying broad transnational and transcultural effects. This is the logic connecting Manifesta, with its rhetoric of being an “antibiennial,” to the roving EU program for European Capitals of Culture (chapter 5), and the further proliferation of biennials. The potential for globalism, as a critical aesthetic practice, is effected by the art that curators invite into a given Manifesta iteration. Yet both Manifesta and the Capitals of Culture campaign bear traces, typical of our time, of efforts to construct the subjectile as an experiential self; the difference in outcomes can be attributed to the agency of art. Scrutinizing such parallels, I want to conclude by asking: What kinds of subjects have resulted from all this? What kind of imaginary worlds are Critical Globalism

227

produced in the wake of the recent modes I’ve identified by which curators have structured experience in the postmillennium biennial (psychedelic, phenomenological, empirical, geopolitical, nostalgic, eventful)? Can we identify a new episteme in the recent hints of being enmeshed in spheres rather than “picturing” a world from without? To paraphrase Kant: How is experience of this world possible? The cynical view holds that the subject of that experience is inevitably a neoliberal one (an update to Kant’s “cosmopolitanism”). This was the logical accusation hurled by Russian artists Aleksandr Brener and Barbara Schurz at the June 2000 press conference for Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, where they brandished the slogan “Demolish Neoliberalism, Multiculturalist Art-sistem” and asked others to join their protest, aimed at taking the exhibition out of circulation. The many uprisings against neoliberal, market-driven globalization that began to coalesce around 1999 (with protesters confronting World Trade summits in Seattle and Genoa, for example) fueled a populist resistance to the global as only signifying “free market” conditions. “Antiglobalization” became the name for this opposition, castigated as protectionist, nostalgic, or resistant to progress. Suggesting the power wielded by world economic organizations— the World Trade Organization, Group of Eight, Organization for Economic Co-ordination and Development, and World Bank, among others— this nomenclature is dichotomized as “progrowth” versus “antiglobalization,” with linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky protesting the binary from the left: No sane person is opposed to globalization, that is, international integration. Surely not the left and the workers movements, which were founded on the principle of international solidarity— that is, globalization in a form that attends to the rights of people, not private power systems.11

I want to avoid this binary altogether. Art, artists, and visitors certainly navigate within the considerable flows of capital from these power systems, and yet their more demotic forms of “globalization from below” can be parsed for traces of critical globalism. The system feeds both “good” and “bad” globalization; criticality contests their collapse into each other. 228

Chapter 7

The complex maneuvers required are evident in the epistemological category I identified in chapter 1 as the organizers of art-world event structures (as opposed to the other two categories of artists or audiences, who encounter power in its capillary forms). During the postwar period when the aesthetics of experience were codified, curators and their commissioners (Szeemann and Bode, for example) constituted the interface between “publics” and governmental/fiduciary entities. Initially this would not be described in any way as globalization from below. Entering the game in the 1990s, Manifesta organizers could claim that their attempts to engage the underdeveloped East were responding to locals’ professed desires for global capital. While seemingly demotic, this tracks well with the developmentalist agenda of the World Bank and other NGOs. Supposedly, artists from these formerly socialist economies craved a market for their works and didn’t care if this meant accepting the cultural boundaries of “the Europe of Charlemagne.” Or at least this is how Manifesta president Henry Meyric Hughes saw it: “Artists from the geographical periphery were much more interested in gaining exposure to and contact with the markets and media in the West than in conducting a muted conversation among themselves.”12 The “geographical periphery,” in Manifesta-speak, is of course embedded in the medieval imaginary of a Frankish king, implying that artists have little access to a putatively global conversation except via the European, white, Christian market and its Western-educated curators. Thus we arrive at the question: If capital wants to be global, is it merely the cultural telos of the biennial to advance that goal? Must the world picture always be dominated by mimetic relations to a hegemonic monetary system? Monetization does not foreclose micropolitics, in my argument. Artists have agency, and the “micropolitical” can become macro via the infrastructures of visibility built into art itself, potentially magnified by a massive exhibition. That is to say, the micropolitics of an intimate encounter with the working of art will produce heterotopic effects on the grounds of a single transformed subject, but those subjects will form collectives and aggregates in the massive discourses (blogs, Tumblr feeds, and standard journalism) launched by the biennial apparatus. Take the negotiations of difference that a fluent navigator of the global such as artist Yinka Shonibare produces, identified in his statements from a recent roundtable on

globalism: “The artist working in Delhi or South Africa can no longer fulfill an exotic desire, but they can surely construct one.” The mordant commentary here is twofold: the artist can either pander to the desires of a centralized Western market for ethnic difference, or can negotiate the violence of the differend in full knowledge of its seductive alterity, equipping the viewer with the tools for deconstruction and the “tearing” of the subject (as Foucault would demand). Shonibare’s position is one that I would identify with critical globalism: The aesthete does not have to be reactionary. My reclamation of aesthetics has more in common with the strategies of a trickster who is utterly impossible to place . . . at home with confusion yet politically astute. Beauty is political when it is appropriated by the “other.”13

Paraphrasing Bourdieu, critical globalists use the probable as their medium, entering the spectacle of the contemporary biennial and transforming what happens in that glare to make room for other possibilities to emerge. This is the utopian precondition for building a different relation to world, enmeshed in its lively confusions rather than fixing it as a picture. In clear distinction from neoliberal globalization, yet fully aware of its logic, critical globalism makes demands on the viewer to question what conditions their view, curated as it is by a range of nomadic global curators coming in the wake of Szeemann in the new millennium. This curating now confesses itself as explicit, thematic, opinionated— as when Daniel Birnbaum posted his curatorial travails on the walls of his 2009 Venice Biennale and incorporated feedback from others entering the fray (plate 33, fig. 5.15). The valiant efforts of commissioner Okwui Enwezor (the first non-European curator of a documenta) to hold neoliberal capitalism at bay in his sometimes tendentiously political documenta 11 (2002) reflected similar ambitions, and met with mixed success. The pioneering documenta 10 by Paris-based curator Catherine David had produced the conditions of possibility for such an openly political edition, identified by Enwezor in particular as revelatory. In her critical assessment of the exhibitionary form in 1997, David produced 100 Days, 100 Guests, an eventful structure that explicitly addressed the demolition of “universalism” and the emer-

gence of globalized modernities, yet insisted that her curatorial vision had not pandered to exoticism or folklore: The problem of universalism also arises with respect to non-Western cultural zones where the object of “contemporary art” is often no more than a very recent phenomenon, even an epiphenomenon, linked, in the best of cases, to an acceleration of the processes of acculturation and cultural syncretism in the new urban agglomerations, and in the worst, to the demand for rapid renewal of market products in the West.14

David goes on to observe that in using media, those emerging from colonial situations have “privileged avenues in music, oral and written language (literature, theatre), and cinema forms,” which she views as having traditionally contributed to “strategies of emancipation.”15 Those durational and alternative sensory media (acoustic, performative, projective) were indeed increasingly important in the critical globalism taken up after the turn of the millennium, as witnessed in the next documenta by Enwezor. In specific encounters in that 2002 exhibition, the trajectory of the visitor/subjectile could do the global work of art. Take the installation produced by the Atlas Project, in which the artist Walid Ra’ad traded in doubt, opening a productive aporia in the smug left politics that sometimes afflicted documenta 11 (figs.  7.1, 7.2).16 Utilizing the apparatus of a fictive bureaucracy (à la Szeemann) to produce distance from the emotions of war and the bombast of Western postures of engagement, Ra’ad’s Atlas Group presented its dry forensics, producing a symphony of dubiety in the biennial subject. The skeptical visitor found herself wondering: could science really restore a color photograph found at the bottom of the Mediterranean, and identify it as a disappeared Lebanese citizen? The micropolitics of one’s own position were also “on view.” Visitors to documenta 11 from the United States would certainly feel the force of such a question differently from, say, a Syrian, especially given the timing of the exhibition’s opening, just months after September 11, 2001. Thus the traumatic subjects evoked in the Atlas Group narratives, which include disappeared citizens, mutilated cars, and trapped historian-gamblers, stimulated other kinds of questions as well, heightened Critical Globalism

229

Figure 7.1 A viewer at documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, 2002, looking at Secrets in the Open Sea, 1975–94, by the Atlas Group (Walid Ra’ad). Photograph: Ryszard Kasiewicz. © documenta Archiv.

by Ra’ad’s sophisticated graphic style: Who is manufacturing the carefully catalogued bullets that have entered these Beirut apartment buildings? How are the stolen European cars transported, and to whom are they sold? Are the proceeds funding Hezbollah in the Golan Heights or Syrian bombings in Beirut? As the Atlas Group’s parafictional installation unfolded, the darkly sub- or supranational narratives of terrorism became metanational sagas of entanglement, a critique of capitalism and brutality that had no certain villains, but only constant questioning as its goal.17 The working of Ra’ad’s art is only one example of the leveraging of spectacle that I have argued is an important aspect of the aesthetics of experience, itself a precondition for critical globalism. Blindness, experience, event, 230

Chapter 7

doubt— these are seductions to knowledge that interrupt the aura of accurate reportage often claimed by the surrounding exhibits (“document,” “manifest”) and the municipal, national, or regional preening behind them. These interruptions also nuance the documentary textuality that Catherine David identified in 1997 as the evident vehicle for “strategies of emancipation” from Western peripheries, since Ra’ad is limning a melancholic poetry of entanglement in a world that is always suffused by global economies and politics. This is posed definitively against any essentialisms that imagine “picturing” or “documenting” difference as stable constructs. Critical globalism makes use of the spectacle, like a lens turned just the right way to illuminate— or burn— suffusing doxa. Whether biennial culture is offering art that nego-

Figure 7.2 Walid Ra’ad/Atlas Group, Notebook volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire_ Plate 57–58, 1991/2003 (one of nine digital color prints, each 30 × 42 cm). Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Ra’ad.

tiates differends, fosters imaginary escape, or immerses us in media, its infrastructures increasingly acknowledge diffuse and distributed forms of knowledge production that can achieve remarkable democratization. These cascading chains of mediation may mimic the circulation of global capital, but they are also vectors for its critique. For example, although the perceiving “you” is continually emphasized in Olafur Eliasson’s biennial installations, that only gives a name and an address for the tension between technological mediation and the ever-renewing rhetoric of experience that saturates biennial culture. Eliasson’s pronomial “you” is the site at which various apparatuses come into focus, and experience juggles the local and the cosmic, the material and the sublime. That is, transnational subjects can certainly lubricate globalization and global capital (not the least as tourist dollars saturate each biennial hub). But they can also convey the tools for implementing their own power/knowledge effects. Eliasson, drawing from the countercultural edge of systems thinking, wants to leave the power plug visible, or engage the city’s inhabitants through posters and surveys. This stands in poststructural opposition to Szeemann’s romantic hope that art might be a closed system where the artist “imagines a world” in autochthonic bachelor fashion. It also provides a more optimistic gloss on Althusser’s notions of interpellation— by

becoming aware of the apparatus, you have some agency within it, entering a world that is “never completely constituted,” as Merleau-Ponty put it, in a phenomenology that would profoundly affect Eliasson and other postwar artists. The task of artists and their curators is amenable to traditional descriptions: they must produce sensible boundaries between art and everyday existence. They must inaugurate the viewer’s awareness of having an experience in the presence of art, and augment that viewer’s aesthetic recollection. The responsibility of art-world visitors is to craft from this a judgment— seemingly, we are still subjects of the Enlightenment (chapter 6). What has changed is the tactics of artists who would be global. Increasingly, they work any one of these encounters as medium and open it for rupture and reflexivity. This, I have argued, is how the aesthetic of experience can be productive, and how critical globalism can emerge. If we would be nonpassive visitors, then we have to enter Eliasson’s titles, and interrogate, for example, the circumstances of Your Black Horizon (fig. 7.3). An off-site pavilion staged in contrast to the “branding” of national pavilions elsewhere in the 2005 Venice Biennale, the purpose-built (but eminently movable) structure was designed by London-based architect David Adjaye in collaboration with Eliasson, and put in place for the sole purpose of offering a complex Critical Globalism

231

Figure 7.3 Olafur Eliasson and David Adjaye, Your Black Horizon. Left: off-site pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Right: interior shot of the installation, with visitors. Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

experience of contemporary art. The collaboration was commissioned by the Thyssen-Bornemizsa Art Contemporary Foundation (TBA21), Habsburg-era aristocracy melded with German steel fortunes. Wanting to build on the success of his discursive, spectacular Weather Project at the Tate Modern in 2002, Eliasson nonetheless aimed for something edgier as an experience. Adjaye’s architecture led viewers into gradually deepening darkness; finally they entered a dark room embedded with strips of LED lights, occluded so that only a glow was faintly visible. Your Black Horizon foregrounded the experiencing body and the ruminating discourse of the visitors bumping around within. But then its working spooled out over time. It is not enough that the dim illumination waxed and waned in a twelve-minute cycle; biennial culture ensured that wall labels, webchat, flickr photos, exhibition catalogue, press coverage, and word of mouth were part of the production of the subject. We learned through these supplements that the lights cycled as a function of photon levels measured at this site in the Venetian lagoon from dawn to dusk. Suddenly the embodied experience of wandering in the near dark (or the memory of having done so) was amplified by questions about the compression algorithm. Was it temporal— each hour sped up to yield a single minute? Or was it a stochastic sampling, one minute sampled every hour? Your Black Horizon even wormed its way into a darker space of anxiety about a global future without oil, an “event horizon” of black nights and lurking silhouettes. 232

Chapter 7

Experience thus blossoms out from the individual body, potentially to inform a body politic with actionable views on global warming and our role in the Anthropocene. These works of Ra’ad and Eliasson are exemplary of many that construct us as situated in a world of complex geopolitical dimensions. They are in a market (Ra’ad’s works can be sold as objects, Eliasson and Adjaye’s assemblage was commissioned and later moved to Croatia, where its reference to Venice will be lost), but for the biennial visitor they offered themselves as “free” experience.18 They suspended the immediate referents of economimesis for the longer working in which we might contemplate economies; this is what I take to be critical globalism. Such experiential art occupies the legacy propelled by a Clark or Oiticica (chapters 4 and 5), staged by visionary curators such as Guy Brett in London or Kynaston McShine in New York, and fostered by Szeemann and others eager to mark the historical shift from object to subject in biennial culture. At the same time, these exquisitely critical practices revive phenomenology’s intersubjective side, now expanded to reference our networked interdependence. Just as the once peripheral networking activities around fairs and biennials were inserted into its very structure (chapter 5), so the contemporary aesthetics of experience extends beyond the moment of contact. Discourses and memory-work adumbrate and construct experience as such, reinforced by flows of information forming their own technologies of memory, reproducing

“experience” in its virtual forms online. We should savor the irony of the fact that this configuration of flows— the very sign of contemporaneity— links us back to the systematic bureaucracies of empirical knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, moving from Enlightenment encyclopedic ambitions, to the apparatus of the world’s great expositions, through their publications, souvenirs, and encounters, to the inheritor and archive of all these modes: the World Wide Web. The bureaucratic division of human activity that was bequeathed by the fairs to the world, and which the contemporary biennial both confounds and recapitulates, had perhaps no better advocate than Victor Cousin (1792– 1867), the French philosopher and educator who spoke of art’s autonomy as if it were a product of the fairs’ divisions: “Il faut de la religion pour la religion, de la morale pour la morale, comme de l’art pour l’art.”19 Far from producing art as strictly autonomous, however, the kind of taxonomies that Cousin’s philosophy bequeathed to the exposition (plate 7) would challenge art’s very “aura.” As Walter Benjamin put it, “The phantasmagoria of capitalist culture attains its most radiant unfolding in the World Exhibition of 1867.”20 What neither Benjamin nor Cousin could have imagined was how the expansion of “art” (post-Duchamp, and then post-Oiticica) would turn these bureaucratic designations inside out. Art as antiretinal, art as event, would benefit the aesthetics of experience rather than the traditions Cousin had in mind. Duchamp’s urinal worked through the Blind Man to turn us from spectacles of “international painting and sculpture” toward “new thoughts” for objects, later invested in the precision optics of the artist’s carnalizing rotary devices (chapter 1). Many decades later, Haacke’s smashing of the Nazis’ marble floor works to expose us kinesthetically to the turning of globalism against a nationalist history (chapter 3), and the posthumous mobilization of Oiticica’s Parangolé inside the 1994 São Paulo biennial (fig. 5.9) summons a specifically Brazilian history to tear subjects from complacent colonialism, while troubling the covert universalisms of globalization. Such spatialization and specialization are part of what the fairs bequeathed, codified by Cousin, or framed for Teddy Roosevelt as The World’s Work, parsed in sections for visitors to the 1904 St.  Louis exposition (chapter  2). The subject of such events was occasionally configured as capable of supersensory theory: the exploratory and theorizing blindman,

the progeny of bachelor machine and dynamo at the fair, the creative appropriator (via anthropophagy) of commodity culture. That the sensing turned out to work the differend in an expanded aesthetics of experience offers hope. The history summarized in this chapter suggests that “experience” is most often promised during intense spikes in technological change and transformations in human labor, the latest being “cognitive capitalism.”21 That hypothesis governs as well the case of Heidegger, in his troubled yearning for an age before the one in which the world picture was enframed by modern technologies of the image, enabled by epistemologies of scientific rationality and “standing reserves.” In the face of taxonomized bodies and structures of knowledge, Heidegger imagined a lost experiential wholeness, an art and culture that would be unbureaucratic, unmediated, untranslated. In this concluding chapter, Heidegger’s totalized world picture is accepted as a component of what is. But various artistic tactics have destabilized its instrumentality and opened onto alternatives that just might be changing “the age” of the world-as-picture, politicizing and historicizing it, while enmeshing us in its visceral realities through art, viewer activation, and desire. To contest the lapsarian aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy, I have emphasized the possibilities worked out in encounters with art and the ruptures they engender: the politics of the partial view, the multiplication of world pictures, and entanglement rather than enframement. Such alternatives have emerged in my narratives as a result of desiring-production in mobilized local viewers, subsequently shared. Globalist art can only work on the ground of individual theoric journeys, punctuated by ruptures and misprisions that construct subjects who entertain productive criticality and doubt. Claims to “experience” are, at their best, components of an injunction to the viewer: think, participate, challenge first impressions, be alive in your embodied head.

Global Workings of Art

In this penultimate section, I want to explore how and when world pictures give access to critical globalism: What practices induce that kind of politics? When are eruptions of “experience” articulated and valued as a critical rhetoric in art, and against what implied alternatives? Critical Globalism

233

American pragmatist John Dewey has emerged periodically as a theorist of the tension between experience and the regimentation of modern life; he remains pertinent for the globalist.22 Dewey’s opinion of the political importance of experience for democracy was foreshadowed in his rejection of the epistemic plans for unifying knowledge in advance of any encounter with the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.23 Bemoaning the division that organizer Hugo Munsterberg had blithely placed between “phenomena and purposes” for the first scientific congress on social psychology to be held at the fair, Dewey made a rousing plea for experience as unifying both: Such divisions, if they have any effect at all, can only operate prejudicially to the freedom and completeness of the intellectual discussions of the congress. The essential trait of the scientific life of today is its democracy, its give-and-take, its live-and-let-live character. Scientific men of today are struggling hard and successfully to break down previously existing artificial walls separating different sciences, and to secure a continuous open and free field of inquiry.24

For Dewey, the open field of inquiry was what the 1893 Chicago Exposition had already put on view, its rising outlines on a literally “open field” could be seen from his nearby office at the young University of Chicago. The extraordinary wonders of electricity and magnetism “did not come from the business men” in Dewey’s account. They came from the play of ideas born of open inquiry and from collegial encounters, gifts given freely by men of science— a parallel to the inherently democratic gifts of art.25 This is the heart of Dewey’s 1934 opus Art as Experience, where the pleasures of aesthetic play inevitably triumph over monetization or instrumentalization. Aesthetics in this pragmatic account emerge from fresh encounters that propel “an adjustment of our whole being with the conditions of existence.”26 Rather than Heidegger’s nearly simultaneous musings on art as a redoubt from modernity, Dewey positioned aesthetics as the site where modernization might be processed kinesthetically, through direct experience. This would guide a kind of new knowledge that could be restorative rather than destructive. Our being will be adjusted to the new industrial forms of existence— but art will also produce 234

Chapter 7

the space for doubt, reflection, discussion, democratic debate— and an enrichment of the subject so produced. For Dewey, the aesthetic of experience was both sensualist and indebted to technology— the “push-pull” engineering theories of mind that were even then being codified as Gestalt psychology.27 Stimulated by modernists such as John Marin, who would be the US representative (along with Jackson Pollock) at the 1950 Venice Biennale, Dewey saw how art could “organize energies” for progressive politics: Repetition of uniform units at uniform intervals is not only not rhythmic but is opposed to the experience of rhythm. . . . As the eye moves it takes in new and reënforcing surfaces, and careful observation will show that new patterns are almost automatically constructed. . . . The organic demand for variety is such that it is enforced in experience, even without much external occasion.28

Life and art work in rhythms that are dynamic, not machinic or mathematically regular. As we look at the reproduction of Movement: Seas after Hurricane from 1947 (fig. 7.4), we have Marin’s cues (in the painting’s title and loose brushstrokes) to what Dewey was thinking about, and with. Marin’s repetitions refuse “uniform units,” replacing the mechanical measures of the geometer with the intuitive riffing of jazz or the dynamic countersteps of boogie-woogie. These negotiations with the differend of African-American culture would also inform Pollock’s work, there with Marin’s in the theater of nations at the Venice Biennale (fig. 7.5).29 Such ambitions would become more explicit in Dewey’s wake, as a generation of “American-type” painters brought mythic themes together with a gestural “automatism” to confront the actual automation then going on in rapidly industrializing nation-states. Their hopes to bridge past and present, native and international, local and cosmic, were what led critic E. A. Jewell to announce: “‘Globalism’ pops into view.”30 Linked increasingly (through discourse and the bodies of its painters) to masculine “action,” this gestural painting defied the intellectualism of postwar existential philosophy. Such “acts” were quasi-physical rather than metaphysical; even poetry became “the act of the mind” and “the act of finding” in Wallace Stevens’s formulation (emphases added).31 In this ambiance, the curators

Figure 7.4 John Marin, Movement: Seas after Hurricane Red, Green, and White, Figure in Blue, Maine, 1947. Marin was a US representative at the 1950 Venice Biennale. Courtesy Peter A. Juley & Son Collection. Smithsonian Museum of American Art, J0045311. © 2016 Estate of John Marin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

preparing the US pavilion for the 1950 Venice Biennale (two Alfreds: Frankfurter and Barr) put their retrospective of John Marin together with a survey of six younger artists— Pollock was identified by critics as a “special case” among them. Quite consciously, the two curators intended to signal the emergence of a new generation, but also an ideology of “freedom” in their own eclectic choice of gestural, expressionist artists for a European biennial still recovering from the Fascist regime, and dominated by a conservative Realist style.32 While this display certainly traded in Cold War ideologies, my invocation of Dewey is meant to complicate that now reflexive interpretation of “top-down” programming for the subjects of newly global art, and to point out the many alternatives that were proliferating on the ground. Dewey was plumping for art as experience at the most demotic level possible. Many kinds of art could remain open, as free experience, for people in the fragile democracies of the postwar epoch. What was important was keeping the subjects of those democracies open and adaptive, informed and engaged, in a world that would not remain a “picture” but was evolving rapidly into “spheres” of influence and codeterminacy. It is a truism that there was a politicization of art in the newly reenergized biennial culture during the im-

mediate postwar period. The conjunction of Marin and Pollock at the US pavilion in Venice was poised between Dewey’s writing on “art as experience” and the triumph of São Paulo’s Concretist Bienal. As a marker of the tentative and extemporaneous nature of the art world of 1950 Venice versus 1951 São Paulo, we have no installation photographs of the interior of the US pavilion, only indications of what specific paintings were inside.33 What the US showing did was participate in the staging of figurative versus abstract (as in São Paulo’s 1949 museum show), while alluding to the US shift toward a gestural expressionism that was bidding to be the next international style.34 More speculatively, by positioning Marin as the “tradition” that might anchor an artist such as Pollock for European viewers, the curators contested alternative legacies for postwar abstraction (whether Mondrian or Max Bill, these were strictly European and geometric). While some US writers alluded to a specific European Existentialist discourse in discussions of the canvas as an “arena in which to act,” they also hoped to find a nativist origin for their art.35 Whether existentialism was itself responding to Dewey is a useful question, but in any case it would contribute to a coding of Pollock’s traces of body movement as unalienated “free” labor, paralleled on the Critical Globalism

235

Figure 7.5 Jackson Pollock, No. 12, 1949. Oil on paper laid down on Masonite, 31 × 22½ inches. Shown at the US pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1950. © 2016 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

European side by theories of informel (the unformed existential act), and in Asia by emerging Zero and Gutai “concrete” actions. In this dramatically transnational conversation, objects began to be read as merely the repositories of event-traces, migrating through the next generation of artists as Happenings and later “Pollockian performatives.”36 As we’ve seen, Happenings became a worldwide movement that fed artists such as Oiticica and drove curators such as Szeemann. The desire was clear: to free the exhibitionary complex from its strictly nationalist orientation (chapter 5)— diagnosed by Oiticica as “diarrhea” and by artist Michael Heizer as Bern’s “depression” (plate 32).37 Dewey helps us to understand that while Szeemann certainly served the grinding machinery of neoliberal capitalism, this does not foreclose the parallel possibility for producing critical subjects or openings from eventful art. Dewey’s Art as Experience provided one significant pathway out of the 1940s, equipping readers to address the congealed problematic attached by Heidegger to phenomenal experience.38 With further contributions by Adorno and the posthumously published writings of Walter Benjamin, a critical attitude evolved that would 236

Chapter 7

continue to question the terms of experience, and resist its instrumentalization by commodity capitalism. This criticality threaded through branches of Conceptual Art that began to engage in events and restore contact with the body.39 Szeemann’s curation followed this lead, bringing erotic (if hypergendered) stylings and a romance with “mythologies” to make eventful art happen, diverting expositionary culture from its object-driven logic to more diffuse openings onto the subjectile. The cracking of the art world’s media bureaucracies and sensory hierarchies were part of the demand to represent difference and eradicate nationalism— all systematic gains for contemporary artists and visitors to the art world. In sum, world pictures curated within Cold War constraints could always be processed under the reign of capital, but an emerging openness to process and event also undid some of that logic. Pollock and Marin were paraded under nationalism’s banner, but via Dewey they gave us the tools to unlock painting from vision, to engage the body in visceral perception, to feel rhythms contrapuntal to industrial order, and to embrace a future of critical globalism. The moment of critical globalism even allows us to feel an embedded suffusion in the world rather than a place of distanced or transcendental reason. Without abdicating our responsibility to reflect on all the nets, webs, and forces in which we are entangled, we have considerable space for aspirational globality. The information flows generating 1970s art prefigured this pairing of experience and engagement— as the rigorous conceptualism and antropofagia of Oiticica showed. Was there an “international style” that Oiticica had to enter in order to speak Tropicália’s difference? Suggestively, we can now amalgamate his works to the hybrid genre of “installation art,” canonized in the 1980s.40 Installation came of age within an already global art circuit that was not necessarily “Western.” Although dialectically connected to the now globalized parergon of the white cube, installation formed its negative critique as specifically engaged with the Other, from Beuys’s Eurasian assemblies of the early 1960s, to Oiticica’s Babylonests or the Blindhotlands of Cildo Meireles in the 1970s, to Betye Saar’s retablo-like environments of the 1980s, and on to artists of the 1990s and turn of the millennium I will be discussing below.41 The global workings of art came to rely on installation, along with its partners, performance and projected film/video. Installations took advantage of

the redolent postindustrial sites that became common aspects of biennial culture after the 1990s; multisensory approaches were typical. Chapter 5 recounts the ways in which Oiticica and Szeemann played different roles in installation art’s emergence, noting the former’s immersive Tropicália (1967) and the latter’s Grossvater (1974), where the “white cube” model of gallery space derived in Secession-style modernism became definitively corrupted. The subtle shift in terminology passed through the curator-as-auteur (where the curator would offer “an installation of art”) to the artist-as-curator (where “installation art” was the thing). Installation art’s relation to difference is historically linked to the emergence of critical globalism. As with Lyotard’s agonistic differend, the “otherness” in installation art is not an easily consumable image but a place to be and become different, an immersive site for negotiating the ethical existence of the Other. This situational aesthetic includes various setups from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Oiticica’s Tropicália and Cildo Meireles’ Blindhotland (chapter 5). But I would also extend it to include more recent formations, whether they propel visitors to wander among parafictions presented by the Atlas Group, or invite them to come repeatedly to experience the accumulated écriture feminine of Ann Hamilton’s whispering, bleeding walls in the 1999 Venice Biennale (fig.  7.6). Hamilton’s differend is literally without speech; she works the ur-difference of the nonverbal, of craft labor, of “woman’s work.” The Other surfaced in installation art can be this fully distributed difference inflicted on gender, or the geopolitical differencing of nation or indigene. Within European biennials, this genre can merely revive a European “Other”— as in the 2013 edition of the biennial in Venice, where posthumous “installation art” was made from the neogothic manuscript pages of Carl Jung’s 1913– 40 “Red Book,” unbound and mounted in an immersive configuration behind an entrance guarded by the spectral mask of Surrealism’s founder, André Breton. This edition of the biennial had many such moments, in which curator Massimiliano Gioni staged Germanic visionaries such as Jung or Hilma af Klimt as the repressed Other of European rationalism, kindred spirits to self-taught artists now propelled from obscurity.42 A more sophisticated positioning was the 2009 installation resulting from curator Daniel Birnbaum’s invitation to George Adeagbo, whose magpie Af-

rican studio setups reference an always already globalized consciousness. Adeagbo’s installation was positioned in a corner between two galleries in this biennial thematized as Fare Mondi (Making Worlds). Arranged around the visitor were Bulgari ads, newspaper pages, canned homilies (“art is love, and love is art”), Jesus imagery, African wood sculptures, and stylish Venetian boots.43 Even the trinity of plugs left dangling from the ceiling’s corner by the biennial maintenance crew seemed to hold some kind of cross-cultural significance in Adeagbo’s installation (fig. 7.7). Installation fosters immersive speculation. Is it purely coincidence that the codification of installation art in the 1990s came at the same cultural moment that biennials proliferated to form a network around the world? Was it the new biennials of the 1990s, emerging from the end of apartheid in Africa or Soviet clientism in Eastern Europe or Cuba, that rendered the art world truly global for the first time? Such correlations are never simply causal. But I suggest that the shift from object to experience codified in installation art became the canon of twenty-first-century biennial culture in part because the immersive experiences thus fostered meet our most fervent desires to know a complex, anthropological world in an experiential way. Suspended, in this account, are any claims to “authenticity” in this experience of the Other. We enter the realm of representation at the biennial and become aware that we too are representing. In this way there is a remarkable leveling of the playing field on which the differend can be negotiated, and can potentially be heard. The offering of “experience” and the multiplying of worlds that installation art made vivid also presented a pragmatic solution to economic limits on curatorial or artistic emplotment. As Doris Salcedo commented about her Istanbul biennial installation of old chairs tumbled into an alley, the resulting metaphor for the chaos of war was all-purpose: “I’m not narrating a particular story, I’m just addressing experiences” (fig. 7.8).44 Her personal negotiations with violence in her native Colombia became generalized in Istanbul’s global biennial, forming floating metaphors via the homeless furniture of peoples displaced by globalization more generally. And while installations could have complex moving parts and durational components (Hamilton’s weeping walls) or stimulate an eventlike forensic among surprised viewers (what happened here? How did those chairs get there? Is this part of Critical Globalism

237

Figure 7.6 Ann Hamilton, views of the installation myein in the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 1999. Materials: four skylights, glass and gridded steel wall (18 × 90 feet), wood table, white cloths, mirrored glass, vinyl powder, auger system, electronic controllers, plaster, recorded voice, digital audio, computer, sixteen speakers. Photograph: Thibault Jeanson; courtesy Ann Hamilton.

Figure 7.7 George Adeagbo, La Creation et les Creations! (2009). Installation in three parts with found, bought, and commissioned objects from Western Africa and Europe, at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Making Worlds (curated by Daniel Birnbaum). Photograph: Giorgio Zucchiatti. Historical Archives of Contemporary Art (ASAC), Venice Biennale.

the biennial?), event-based programming could also be a bargain. Fly in the artist instead of shipping expensive, indemnified artworks. Let her find some chairs, bring in some pigment, hire a local set of workers (job-creation!), or otherwise make do. Sometimes, contributing the sweat equity of your own installation art is the price of being a critical globalist, as artist Martha Rosler commented after participating in the Venice Biennale of 2003: “I see the international exhibition as a grand collector and translator of subjectivities under the latest phase of globalization. This is far from trivial.”45 Szeemann himself noted prophetically in 1971, when he had to cut the budget for documenta 5: “We can’t rely eternally on moving originals around.”46 When artists began to move faster than objects, and information more easily than either, it reinforced pressures already coming from the radical edge of art practice, and events emerged as fundamental to the biennials’ art, rather than just its festal peripheries.47 Af-

ter controversially winning the Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964, American artist Robert Rauschenberg declared that he was giving up painting in favor of performed events. By the time Tino Sehgal won the same award in 2013, eventful art had itself become central to the biennial apparatus. What I have claimed is that this emphasis on ephemeral experience now drives the working of art and critical globalism, giving increasing responsibility to the public for making a common sense. The crisis of the object in the art world of the 1960s entered our story through the “vanguard” that curators wanted to program in Rio, London, Tokyo, New York, and Bern (chapter 5). It was already seen as political in those contexts but became dramatically more so during the protests at the 1964 documenta and 1968 Venice Biennale. Local art students and international biennial artists coordinated attacks against the continuing sale of art objects out of the exhibition in Venice, which had Critical Globalism

239

Figure 7.8 Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 2003. Installation for the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, comprising 1,550 wooden chairs. The location is Yemeniciler Caddesi No. 66 in the Karaköy neighborhood of central Istanbul. Photograph: Muammer Yanmaz. Image courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

provided the main revenue for the event since its founding in the 1890s. Documenta, which wasn’t selling works, could nonetheless be tarred with the same brush, as when Smithson harangued it for peddling “visual fodder and transportable merchandise.” Smithson also participated vociferously in the boycott of the 1971 São Paulo Bienal, castigating the US organizer (Gyorgy Kepes) for technophilia and “crewcut teamwork” that masked the darkness of ongoing political violence.48 Venice ceded to these new 240

Chapter 7

realities, and stopped functioning as a broker of sales. Art fairs immediately took up the slack.49 Yet the forced conversion from a market economy to a nonprofit environment did free biennial art. Smithson’s call for “a dialectics that seeks a world outside of cultural confinement” and his judgment that “it would be better to disclose the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom” were at least conceivable within the new nonprofit status of biennials— difficult for the fundraisers but inspiring for

artistic agency.50 Again, pragmatic considerations played a role; high-definition projected video, when it emerged in the 1990s, was an attractive late-coming alternative to the complexity of installations. Szeemann had consigned video to a separate program at documenta 5 in 1972, as did Catherine David at documenta 10 in 1999, analogizing it to cinematic forms. By the time of Szeemann’s Venice offering in 2001—Plateau of Humanity— white cubes were tessellated with black boxes, and installations were balanced by durational video as a core constituent of his ongoing “Museum of Obsessions.” Video’s emergence as a spectacular addition to biennial culture can be dated with some precision to Jean Clair’s Venice Biennial in 1995, where commissioner Marilyn Zeitlin presented Bill Viola in the US pavilion. Viola’s video installations did not engage the biennial’s rubric of “identity and alterity”— while commissioners and artists are “encouraged” to attend to the theme, they often don’t. In the event, Viola’s Buried Secrets brought computer-orchestrated, extremely high-definition recording and projection technologies into viewers’ experience in a way that seemed to go beyond cinema. Visitors entering the dowdy pavilion moved into blackness, where they were drawn in by large-scale rear projections that felt intensely proximate and nothing short of magical. The exhibition catalogue’s cover captures the set up: hovering figures, larger than life, in stunning detail, at the end of a darkened room (fig. 7.9). The image illustrated is from The Greeting, completed that year. Accompanied by a sound track in which a muffled roar comes into audition, then fades away, the ten-minute sequence shows two women joined by a third, the third moving ever-so slowly into contact with the woman in front, to whom she whispers something, then pulls away. Significantly softening his startling deployment of these new, high-definition technologies with slow-motion playback and sumptuous color, Viola’s imagery also mined the traditional forms and compositions of devotional art from the Italian Renaissance (the primary iconographic inspiration is Jacopo Pontormo’s annunciation painting The Greeting, from 1528– 29). Augustinian brands of cosmopolitanism can be heard in the pavilion curator’s claim: “The cultural references are comprehensible and reverberate for everyone.”51 Everyone? Despite the artist’s avowed interest in Buddhism, the “cultural references” of The Greeting are

Figure 7.9 Bill Viola: Buried Secrets, cover of the catalogue for Viola’s exhibition at the US pavilion for the 46th Venice Biennale, June 11–October 15, 1995. The cover illustration shows a still from The Greeting. Photograph: Kira Perov.

embedded in a very Christian iconography, and a very Western history of art. Markers of difference elide in this sublimation of experience, and the reverberations here work mostly for citizens of Augustine’s City of God, invited in “to experience states of being that hover between polarities: between the normative and the extraordinary, waking and sleep, order and chaos, quietude and violence, life and death.”52 Viola’s techne— in this case gorgeous computerized projection— was made approachable through the iconography of a two-thousandyear-old faith. This encapsulation does not open onto the kind of fragmented and questioning subject generated by critical globalism. Not that immersive video is incapable of producing the useful state of the subjectile. Pipilotti Critical Globalism

241

Figure 7.10 Pipilotti Rist, Homo sapiens sapiens, as installed in the off-site Swiss pavilion at the Chiesa San Stae, Venice Biennale 2005. Photograph: A. Burger. © Pipilotti Rist; courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.

Rist’s off-site installation for Switzerland in 2005 managed to pull this off, in the projection-installation Homo sapiens sapiens (fig. 7.10). Rist’s lush and sensual imagery did not seek the comfort of traditional iconography but bared its feminist agenda via angels of libido, released to flow over the interior spandrels of the baroque church of San Stae in Venice. Rather than demanding a black cube to “suspend” the viewer outside of time and space, the artist used the architecture, taking advantage of the next generation of digital technology to “tie” her imagery to 242

Chapter 7

the symmetries of its ceilings’ peaks, punctuating the traditional devotional space. Rist thus opens a dialogue between architectural projections of religious transcendence and virtually embodied ones— with frictionlessness converted from spiritualism to the body’s lubrication of itself in the throes of desire. As if responding to her compatriot’s nonprocreative bachelor machines (Szeemann died that year and was honored at the Biennale), Rist’s projection turned the essentialized terrain of Szeemann’s “la Mamma” into a polymorphous playground.

Was there a global subject in this mockingly Technicolor Switzerland? Earth mothers were simply girls playing in dirt; the demands of sexual reproduction shifted to ludic encounters of supple, near-androgynous bodies without a care in the world; scopophilia was ever-so-slightly queered (“Homo” sapiens) in a countercultural Eden playing out for viewers lying prone on cushions down below. Rist’s installation should ring familiar. Resonating with Mariko Mori’s Wave or Oiticica’s Eden Plan, its viewers are pushed to reflect on meditative states and creative leisure. But Rist’s delirious dis-organization of the oceanic, so satisfying to the Swiss commissioners and most art-world visitors, nonetheless ended up triggering a clash of nations. Homo sapiens sapiens became a problem for the Holy See, which forced the closure of the installation and its removal from the (supposedly decommissioned) Catholic premises. We can consider this exemplary of the contestations of the differend, where silencing is one available move in response to the Other. Allowing art to continue its negotiation through visitors’ aesthetics of experience would be preferred. Performance, installation, and video— genres examined in this chapter— can choose to be oblivious of the global apparatus or can take up tactics that focus on its effects. Surprisingly, traditional national pavilions (inspired by the rue des Nations at the 1889 and 1900 Parisian expositions and built into the Giardini at Venice as early as 1904) have proved productive in opening onto critical globalism. A signature moment came in 1993, with Hans Haacke’s smashing of the German pavilion’s Fascist floor (discussed briefly in chapter 3). Invited to demonstrate a newly united Germany’s leadership of the twenty-first century, the German-born, US-based Haacke was simultaneously excavating the complex past of the German state and creating the circumstances to visualize its desire for a tabula rasa on which to erect an ambitious future, in which, post-Wende, it could aspire to be the cosmopolitan leader of twenty-first-century globality. Reinforcing the message was the pavilion’s pairing of Haacke with Nam June Paik, the unusual duo (two New York artist-immigrants from West and East) providing an indication of the reunited German state’s global inclusiveness. The noise of Paik’s booming videos was balanced by the crunching of Speer’s marble floor under visitors’ feet, Haacke’s austere intervention more than holding its

own in experiential terms. Paik fully engaged with the requirement to both represent and transcend difference for the new world: he positioned himself in the catalogue and statements as a mudong (Korean shaman), in an intentional echo (“from the East”) of German artist Joseph Beuys’s shamanic performatives. Haacke, in turn, made sure visitors got the point of his creative destruction, posting a photograph on the entrance to the pavilion documenting Hitler’s visit to the charged site sixty-one years earlier (plate 23). We might point to this as a moment of canonization, both for the aesthetics of experience (Haacke: the multisensorial crunch, the clouds of dust, the violent work of the concept, the “earthworks” ambiance; Paik: the immersive video environment, the Global Groove tradition) and for a politicized critical globalism. Both artists were awarded that year’s Golden Lion for the best national pavilion, a ringing endorsement for Germany’s embrace of cosmopolitics.53 The previous chapter insisted that “experience” encompasses such complexity, particularly as it plays out over time and accrues depth in its discursive extensions. Indeed, the importance of Tino Sehgal to this argument is not yet exhausted. I alluded earlier to his 2005 contribution to that same German national pavilion in Venice: “Tino Sehgal! Tino Sehgal! It’s so contemporary, contemporary! Two Thousand Five, courtesy the artist” (if memory serves). As the sponsor, German investment firm DekaBank, described it on their website, Sehgal was “assembling meaning through directing people rather than creating objects,” aligning with their stated motto of “making opportunities possible.”54 The potential for critique emerges in Sehgal’s own telegraphic reference to the economics of biennial desires— viewers and curators’ valuation of the “contemporary”— and the biennials’ offer of “free” experience that is nonetheless already delivering us to the corporate sponsor and multiplying cultural capital for all concerned. Recalling the resonance of Philip Morris’s multinational goals with Szeemann’s transnational ones, such a statement from DekaBank’s global capital does not own all the “opportunities” here. Nor does Sehgal’s readiness to sell his works and to offer, like the culture industry itself, “an organization of subjectivity” deny the potential for a critical globalism.55 In the illusion of self that I carry with me, I remember and report this piece in my own way— as my first experience of “a Sehgal.” It was, for this unwitting visitor, a disarmCritical Globalism

243

ing and charming experience, destabilizing the “invisibility” of the guards and putting them front and center as amused, and amusing, interlocutors. In that first encounter, I didn’t know that one could discuss art and the global economy with Sehgal’s interpreters, but I would know better the next time around.56 The discursive layering onto experience is often where a critical globalism accrues. Sehgal’s work certainly managed to churn the butter of the German state in 2005— “After all, the pavilion is an advertisement for our country, an opportunity for Germany to show itself to the world from its best side: outward-looking, creative and up-to-date.”57 But it could also be positioned by the pavilion’s curator, Julian Heynen, as an implied critique of the object and its (national/globalized) economies: Tino Sehgal’s work, as a bold extension of conceptual art, is at the same time an attempt to rethink notions of production in a globalized world fighting over resources.58

Heynen’s reference to “resources” might be colored by the experience of working with Sehgal, who refuses to fly in airplanes, with their large carbon footprints, and insists on slower forms of transport such as boats and trains.59 Questions of globalism increasingly entail not just reflection on the “fight over resources” but economimesis writ large— the recognition that the art world itself models and instantiates economic relations. Can we practice a globalism that is more about attitudes and less about altitudes in transit? Can we have that “hive mind” promised in 1980s postmodernism, so that we can think together about thinking, in order to think, and act, differently?

Practicing Critical Globalism

These questions, and this rhetoric, reveal the tangled aspirations of critical globalism, which is not a movement but an assemblage of agents whose collective momentum does not always push in the same direction. Generated by artistic practices and curatorial ambitions, critical globalism is also mobilized by visitors in reception of these workings in biennial exhibitions. “Rethinking notions of production in a globalized world,” for example, might also have described curator Heynen’s choice for the 2003 Biennale, Martin Kippenberger (1953– 97), whose Ventila244

Chapter 7

tion shaft, METRO-Net World connection, Venice was posthumously installed in the suddenly localized “German” pavilion, conceptually tunneling from the empty vestibule in Venice into “connector shafts” in Leipzig, Los Angeles, and Kassel (fig. 7.11).60 It is hard to reconstruct from the available documentation whether visitors to the German pavilion in 2003 actually felt the gusts of wind and heard the rumbles from the global subway— or whether these were haptic and auditory hallucinations induced by the famous jokester’s last gambit. Similarly, while most recognize the ironic thrust of Kippenberger’s notion of a massively linked world— a global village connected by simple subway stops— others earnestly explain that these “faux subway entrances lead nowhere physically, but conceptually link the major cities and people of the world.” If Syros, Greece, and Notre Dame des Bois, Quebec, count as “major cities,” then we can agree with this optimistic reading— definitely a possible utopia given the friendly cosmopolitanism that Kippenberger counted on in “spreading a good mood.”61 Conceptualism is the crucial coin of critical globalism. And conceptualism allows problematization of the located biennial, as when Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs was asked in 1997 to produce a piece for the apodictically named In-Site biennial near the USMexico border. For this supposedly “site-specific” biennial, Alÿs created The Loop (Tijuana– San Diego), “us[ing] his commission fee to travel south from Tijuana, across to Australia, north up the Pacific Rim and south through Alaska, Canada, and the United States, reaching San Diego without having crossed the Mexico-US border.”62 Far from the dissolving tactics of the trans, Alÿs limns the arbitrary but deadly border through a paranoid operation of avoidance. What is exhibited is an empty gallery space and a postcard describing this political mapping of the globe; visitors are encouraged to take one and “wish you were here” (fig.  7.12). Alÿs’s deft gesture— whether or not he really caused so much fuel to burn, or subjected himself to so much jet lag— surfaces the preening localisms that undergird every biennial infrastructure (even the “nomadic anti-biennial,” Manifesta), in this case savaging the art-world utopianism of In-Site’s “in-sight” with a brutal assertion of the border’s actual violence for those at its uneven edge. An homage to this precedent was Javier Téllez, who accepted an invitation to the same biennial in 2005 and offered One Flew over the Void (Bala

Figure 7.11 Martin Kippenberger, Ventilation shaft, METRO-Net World connection, Venice, 1993–2003, as installed posthumously in the German pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. Other connections could be found in Syros, Greece; Dawson City, Canada; and Gaubuenden, Switzerland (among other sites). © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

Perdida), a performance that similarly “transcended” the border, this time by means of a human cannonball shot from the Mexican side to the United States. Carrying his US passport, the trained cannonball gymnast constituted the “stray bullet” of the work’s title (bala perdida), freely passing over the border that others would find violently shut against them.63 Politics are embedded in such suggestive stagings, giving critical globalism’s conceptual rhetorics a distinct advantage. The subject’s world picture can be altered by merely thinking about Alÿs’s absurd trajectory (one needn’t even engage the phenomenology of looking at the postcard). Watching the video of Téllez’s performative gesture does a lot of the work of art: cheers and ma-

riachi songs from the Mexican side accompany the hired human cannonball in his successful transit to the completely empty US beach. These asymmetries echo the previous chapter’s point about economimesis and the parergon, where the discursively informed operations of “reflection” and interpretation become wrapped into the aesthetics of experience as it unfolds in time. The gestures made by Kippenberger, Téllez, and Alÿs make it clear that if we understand the national pavilion or sited biennial as a collection of architectures and places, then its capacity for meaning is limited. But in this book the national pavilion, site-specificity, and even “biennials” are understood as concepts, ideologies, and funding structures that give artists’ transnational and transcultural critiques Critical Globalism

245

Figure 7.12 Francis Alÿs, The Loop (Tijuana–San Diego), 1997. Ephemera of an action (postcard produced for In Site biennial on the Tijuana–San Diego border). Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York / London.

traction and bite. The structures erratically incorporated into the Venice Biennale, built for other mercantile and diplomatic purposes, have increasingly been repurposed and drawn into the mercantile and diplomatic workings of biennial culture. The theatrical politics of “nation” are manipulable signs, engaging with architecture in a most productive way. 246

Chapter 7

This is how we might understand the contrapuntal interventions set up in the Spanish pavilion at the 2003 and 2005 Biennales. The first was by Santiago Sierra, who underscored the remanent nationalism of a Europe only partially unified as the EU (fig. 7.13). Blocking off the austere modernist entrance of the Spanish pavilion with crude cement blocks mortared together, Sierra engaged

Figure 7.13 Santiago Sierra, Muro Cerrando un Espacio (Wall Enclosing a Space), intervention at the Spanish pavilion, 2003 Venice Biennale. Visitors turned away at the front (shown at left in a photograph by Walter Robinson for Artnet online magazine, June 13, 2003) could, with a Spanish passport, enter in the rear (shown at right in a photograph by Javier San Martin).

in his characteristic combination of negative aesthetics and the foregrounding of working-class trades.64 What viewers could discover only by asking around or peering behind the pavilion was that some people were getting in. Those with current Spanish passports (supposedly obviated by the EU) were allowed to enter through the back door after submitting themselves to a guard instructed to inspect their documents. They could then wander in the eerie darkness of the unreconstructed black interior, littered with remnants from its previous installation in the off-cycle architecture biennial: a cave for the blindman’s ruminations. What could Antoni Muntadas do in the Biennale’s next iteration to trump such a darkly nihilistic, conceptual move? As Arman once responded with Le Plein (1960) to Yves Klein’s Le Vide (1958) in the Parisian gallery of Iris Clert, so Muntadas stuffed the pavilion Sierra had voided. Muntadas aimed for bureaucratic plenitude, filling the pavilion with information and an impersonal ambiance that evoked the anodyne architectures of transportation hubs (fig. 7.14). Part of his decades-long interrogation of translation as a transcultural operation, Muntadas’s Spanish pavilion was a magisterial summary of all things transitional, transnational, transitory— yet endlessly durational. “Waiting” was apostrophized as a standard bu-

reaucratic position as well as a prerequisite for the experience of hotly desired sites of culture: lines at the Uffizi were equivalent, visually, to lines at an immigration office or airplane hub. In contrast to the impatience solicited by Sierra’s closure, Muntadas invited us to wait. As usual in these spaces of global administration, we were given stuff to do. One could spend hours (as I did), hanging on the telephones and listening to the coolly narrated history of the Venice Biennale: states buying their way into the Giardini, or invited by Italians eager to curry favor with this year’s oil barons (Venezuela) or that year’s colonialists (Belgium). Through the thick and thin of Fascism, war, and revolution, the history Muntadas “translated” for us revealed how the national pavilions had sprouted or put on new facades, how nations had appeared and disappeared, how these shifting world pictures changed the context for art’s working.65 Critical globalism does not want to destroy biennial culture (viewers’ habitus of going to these events in regular rhythms to “see what’s new” in the art world, curators’ ambitions to take aim at one in a series, municipalities’ desires to host one and brand themselves forever). It thrives on the rupture of the event— which, as I’ve argued, has everything to do with biennials’ recurring structures. Artists who are parts of this culture use its everCritical Globalism

247

Figure 7.14 Antoni Muntadas, On Translation, intervention at the Spanish Pavilion, 2005 Venice Biennale. Top: visitors in the installation–as– “waiting room.” Bottom: On Translation: Stand By, duratrans lightbox (edition of three), one of several installed in the pavilion. Courtesy of the artist.

enlarging venues to focus on where we are in an entangled world, to make us aware, through experience, not of our distanced relation to a picture but of our enmeshment in situations. But even as these modes proliferate, some metropolitan intellectuals have gone on record to question whether their cities should found such a seemingly inevitable cosmopolitan event. “To Biennial or Not to Biennial?” asked Bergen, Norway.66 Art-world agents in New Delhi similarly queried in 2005 whether a biennial would be “appropriate to urban developments that envisage the statist capital becoming a global city in the near future.”67 Entertaining concepts such as “Venture Cultur248

Chapter 7

alism,” these Indian cosmopolitans eventually decided no, even though they dreamed that a biennial could “push against the conservatism of art markets” with eventful art forms.68 This book is necessarily a history of biennials that happened but with an interest in the interstices of capitalized infrastructures: little gaps or larger fissures in which we might find and nurture the essential biota of critical reflection. Critical globalism, of course, is only part of the lumbering beast that is biennial culture. It is fatuous to think that an artist inserted into these vast assemblies could single-handedly dismantle them. Yet we have witnessed

periodically how an artist might publicly withdraw from “fraudulent categories [of ] cultural confinement,” as did Smithson in 1972, or might use the small lens of the biennial apparatus to protest rampant nationalism.69 More typically, the artist confronting a biennial opportunity accepts the risk and hopes that somehow they will be able to generate something open to art’s working. Of course there are anxieties about reputational failure, particularly for artists agreeing to the burden of “representing” their country. The artist entering a world picture approaches such a challenge knowing there will be a staggering investment of time, creative energy, and grinding labor. The global languages available since the late 1990s allow for video, installation, and performance as “new media,” joining enduring traditions of painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, an artist team from Puerto Rico, made the most of this range in their 2011 US pavilion in Venice, using extravagant combinations of sculptural installation, projected video, and performance for a meta-installation they named Gloria. With endearing idealism before the opening, Allora described the project as “an important reaction to everything else in our so-called contemporary society, where it’s all about texting and instant messaging and everything is so far away from the here and the now and the present. Anything that refocuses the moment is a luxury” (emphasis added).70 With a commissioning curator who wanted them to “make work that critically engaged the notion of national identity and Americanism,” the artists produced a biting constellation in which trained gymnasts (many with experience representing the United States at various Olympics) performed lengthy routines on sculpted effigies of American culture, from American Airlines seats to a treadmill running on an overturned military tank.71 In the juxtaposition of such mordant critique with Allora’s idealism, we can see how critical globalism still wants the magic of a focused encounter with art’s working. “Refocusing the moment” might rupture the everyday, constituting the luxury of art’s working and yielding the special aesthetics of experience. Visitors inculcated with the “expectancy register” fostered by contemporary art, exaggerated in the festal impermanence and recurring rhythms of biennials, will know the rules of this game that has expanded to emphasize duration and openness

to event.72 From the subset of the art world that is biennial culture, visitors demand the rupture of embodied experience, and artists work the differend. Subjects of art’s working will expand to form a larger public. How does the artist approach such a task? Joan Jonas, selected to represent the United States at the 2015 Venice Biennale, began by building on an installation she had previously mounted for Kitakyushu, Japan. Already global, her work incorporated Arctic indigenes and Nordic myths; now her imagination was following a set of kites made in traditional shapes and intense colors during a residency in Japan, reflecting on an Asian vernacular tradition but bringing transcultural metaphors to bear: Kites soaring like birds or used to judge distance, to signal, to carry fire, to banish evil, for communication, to carry a child, to carry an adult, to bear a message, for psychological warfare, to lift a thermometer, to collect electricity, . . . hung in partly random formation from the ceiling and backlit with paper forms emphasizing translucent fragility. I think of this as a setting for a play about presences, whisperings, startling reminders, sounds of wind in the eaves of a shelter, and an invisible force of wind to complete the picture.73

As a subject formed by biennials, I was eager to engage Jonas’s “startling reminders,” mobilized by her characteristic admixtures of videos, evocative drawings, and sonorous performances with/within recordings (plate  37). Within the endlessly charged space of the US pavilion, Jonas’s work necessarily engaged relations between the local and the global, the national, and the para-/supra-/ infra-national. In the event, it also lyrically engaged the question of the world as a planet full of creaturely experiences, human and nonhuman.74 What seems certain in approaching any biennial is that art now helps us experience enmeshed existence in a world that is no longer masterable as picture. What do I continue to hope for, as one viewer among hundreds of thousands? For small ruptures, new experiences, and reframings of the urban context to which I’ll return (the “invisible force of wind” at my back); for art’s working on me to produce new ways of being in a time that is suddenly Anthropocene. And ultimately, through this “experiencebook,” I seek ways of forming a common sense and findCritical Globalism

249

ing a shared public. Visiting the 2015 Venice Biennale confirmed this ambition. It involved, as I have advocated throughout this book, a turn into the blindman’s path. To exit the searing sunlight and enter a dark, cool pavilion was just to begin the process of feeling my way. Sharpening the need for blind epistemology, “a theory of multiple senses,” I attended to things as slight as “an apprehension of an atmospheric change,” perhaps a room with trees that slowly approached, or one whose walls were flecked with minute geometries of precisely cut paper (what the artist could fit in his suitcase en route to Venice), or Joan Jonas’s shifting soundscapes of wind, wheat, water, and oral epic.75 Blind epistemology doesn’t mean closing your eyes to the constraints and circuits of globalization. It demands layering them onto the kinesthetic appreciation of an installation, so that the humid experience of the weird pink fluid suffusing Pamela Rosenkranz’s Swiss pavilion,

250

Chapter 7

for example, can be knowingly connected to the corporate promises of the global pharmaceutical industry.76 What Goethe called “tender empiricism” is in order when approaching any art’s working, never more so than with the blind epistemology I’m advocating in service of a critical globalism.77 As we surface our presuppositions, layer discursive experiences onto sensorial ones, and bring sense memory to cognitive reflection, we all have work to do. With little but the imaginaries of art in my narrations, I have polemicized for the “tearing” of the subject from complacency. I’ve written the trajectories of those subjectiles as a critique of the normative world-aspicture, through acknowledgments of viewer desire and durational, enmeshed becomings. The aesthetics of experience does not explicitly offer a politics. Experiencing and desirous viewers need, continually, to make one.

Notes

Preface 1. “Au moment où nous sommes, une gestation auguste est visible dans les flancs de la civilisation. L’Europe, une, y germe. Un peuple, qui sera la France sublimée, est en train d’éclore. L’ovaire profond du progrès fécondé porte, sous cette forme dès à présent distinct, l’avenir. Cette nation qui sera, palpite dans l’Europe actuelle comme l’être ailé dans la larve reptile. Au prochaine siècle, elle déploiera ses deux ailes, faites, l’une de liberté, l’autre de volonté. / Le continent fraternel, tel est l’avenir. Qu’on en prenne son parti, cet immense bonheur est inévitable.” Victor Hugo (1867), v, my translation. 2. Worth magazine (Sandow Media), December– January 2010, 9. 3. Martha Rosler, in Meyer et al. (2003), 154. 4. The idea for these volumes came in 1946, close on the heels of the founding of the United Nations and its Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (unesco). A first edition was completed in 1966 and the second was prepared beginning in 1980, concluding in 2008. My contribution, C. Jones (2008b), was supported by a segment on “Asian Modernism” by John Clark; our fused contribution appears as chapter 26.2 in History of Humanity: Scientific and Cultural Development, vol. 7, The Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2008), 408– 46. Clark’s contribution can be found on pages 434– 36. See http://www.unesco.org/culture/humanity/ for further information and a few online features. 5. C. Jones (2008b). 6. See Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 1– 22; and Pinney (2002). I’m grateful to Holly Clayson for drawing my attention to Pinney’s argument. 7. I say “latter-day,” because schools associated with the birth-land or natio were already functioning during the eighteenth century in the collecting and taxonomies of J. P. Mariette, for which see Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014). 8. Most histories of contemporary biennials obscure this longer history. For important recent interventions claiming a vantage from the South, see Gardner and Green (2013), followed by Green and Gardner (2016). 9. Cheah and Robbins, eds. (1998); Stengers (2010– 11).

251

10. As a crude indication of this history, a Google Books Ngram crossing the terms international and global in the corpus of English books shows a flatline for “global” until 1940, by which point the term enters and begins a very slow rise until around 1989; from there it ascends more steeply and seems to plateau around 2005 (close to 2008, when the Ngram function terminates). “International” emerges visibly around 1860, steadily increasing with noticeable upticks around 1920, a trough until 1930, and a steady rise after 1945 until 2000, when it begins to decline. 11. For the “Eurological” versus the “Afrological,” see George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2005), 272-84. 12. For one take on this see Bruno Latour, “First Move: Localizing the Global,” in Latour (2005), 173– 90. Closer to my approach would be Pinney’s creolization of Europe (2002) or Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provincializing move (2008). For “the politics of the partial view,” see esp. chapter 1. 13. From his writing on Grandville and the world’s fair, with particular attention to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867. These meditations began to crystallize in 1928, when Benjamin wrote Gershom Scholem that a first draft was nearing completion; the form we know today is “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” which was submitted to the Institut für Sozialforschung in 1935. See Benjamin (1935); Benjamin (1999a), 1– 13. 14. Okwui Enwezor in Meyer et al. (2003), 157. 15. For antropofagia, or “anthropophagy,” see chapter 4, n5. 16. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (written 1780, published 1789), section 17: “The word international, it must be acknowledged, is a new one; though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and intelligible. It is calculated to express, in a more significant way, the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations: an appellation so uncharacteristic, that, were it not for the force of custom, it would seem rather to refer to internal jurisprudence.” See the University College London “Bentham Project,” http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ Bentham-Project/tools/neologisms (accessed October 2014). 17. As reported by Jewell (1943). 18. This number is almost impossible to verify or bring to consensus. Robert Storr, at the conference on biennials organized in December 2005 by the Biennale de Venezia, put the number at 110; Rosemary O’Neill, co-organizer of the February 2006 College Art Association panel “Installation Art in the Age of Globalization,” estimated 200. Some biennials seem to appear and disappear; others shift venues or genres; some scholars are willing to count biennials of decorative arts or design or architecture, while others restrict their enumeration to those showing contemporary art. 19. The “global village” was a concept popularized by Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s. It was immediately adopted by artists, such as Nam June Paik (whose Global Groove first broadcast in 1973). Chapter 1 This chapter began in a seminar, “Power and Display,” taught with my colleague Arindam Dutta in the spring of 2005; it ripened 252

Notes to Preface and Chapter 1

as a paper at the Zentrum für Litteraturforschung in Berlin and was translated for publication as “Der blinde Mann, Oder: Wie man eine Ausstellung besucht,” in Caroline Welsh and Stefan Willer, eds., Interesse für bedingtes Wissen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008). The version here has been considerably revised with the helpful comments of Irit Rogoff, Okwui Enwezor, Anne Middleton Wagner, Ruth Mack, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, among others. 1. As Stephen continues: “The curious wander with their eyes. . . . Those fickle and unstable in mind also wander. . . . This freedom of wandering in the mind through different images tires and impedes scholars in their studies and the cloistered in their prayers.” Stephen of Tournai, from the sermon “Cum esses iunior,” as cited in translation by Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100– 1215 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 275. 2. “To be read beginning with the lowest line. Top line last.” Blind Man, no. 2, May 1917, 12. The journal can now be found online at http://www.toutfait.com, issue 3. 3. Marcel Duchamp, in Cleve Gray, “The Great Spectator” (interview), Art in America 57, no. 4 (July– August 1969): 21. 4. Olafur Eliasson, interviewed by Chris Gilbert, BOMB 88 (Summer 2004), http://bombsite.com/issues/88/articles/2651 (accessed August 2012). 5. Kleege (2005), 187. I am grateful to Mara Mills for directing me to Kleege’s work. 6. The curators in question were, respectively, Nelson Aguilar of the 1996 São Paulo Bienal, Rosa Martinez of the 2005 Venice Biennale, Henriette Huldisch of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev of the 2012 documenta— all in collaboration with teams who share responsibility for suggesting artists and consolidating the final selection. 7. Kleege (2005). 8. For clarity, I will use “blindman” to refer to the trope, and “blind man” if I am speaking about a particular individual. 9. I argue in this book that contemporary art fairs date primarily from the termination of the Venice Biennale’s market function after the protests in 1968. The founding in Cologne of the Kölner Kunstmarkt in 1967 was, notably, a purely German affair prior to its repetition in 1968 as “international” following the events in Venice. 10. See Jones, “Globalism/Globalization,” in Elkins et al., eds. (2010). 11. Kleege (2005), 187. 12. See Damisch (1995), and Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927; New York: Zone, 1991), among others. 13. Heidegger (1938), 132. 14. Mariko Mori, cited in marketing blurb associated with Mori and Eckhard Schneider, Mariko Mori: Wave UFO (Cologne: W. Konig, 2003), http://books.google.com/books/about/Mariko _Mori.html?id=ikxTAAAAMAAJ (accessed January 2014). 15. Aguilar (1996), 24. 16. Adrian Searle, “A Piece of Performance Art Set in Darkness Made Me See the Light,” Guardian online, June 14, 2013, http:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jun/14/tino-sehgal-this-variation (accessed January 2014).

17. Javier Téllez, interviewed by Creative Time curator Mark Beasley in 2007, http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/ performance/tellez_interview.html (accessed September 20, 2008). 18. For the visibility see Deleuze (1988), and Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 19. See, for example, Noë (2004) and (2009), Magee and Milligan (1995), and Kleege’s books Sight Unseen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) and Blind Rage (2006). 20. Happily, recent neuroscience using fMRIs claim to show that the brain site activated during the “aha moment” of insight is located in the higher motor cortex, an area associated with planning future movement. See Lisa Aziz-Zadeh et al., “Exploring the Neural Correlates of Visual Creativity,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Oxford), 2012; abstract at http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/ content/early/2012/02/19/scan.nss021. 21. Nightingale (2004), 104– 5. 22. “Theôroi in this sense are representatives of their communities, sent to Delphi to ‘see and observe,’ to sacrifice, and perhaps to consult the oracle. Thus, the institution of the theôria crisscrosses the Greek world in a multidirectional network, [forming] a social organization that often competes with or bypasses political and ethnic groupings. Theoric cult breaks up local boundaries and allows new ways of relating to other communities.” Malkin (2011), 115. 23. Irigaray (1985). 24. The hierarchy of the senses has its own long history; a typical quote would be “As for Smelling, Tasting, and Feeling, they have their subservient Parts, which upon Consideration would stand us in no less Admiration than the former [Eyes and Ears].” From Matthew Beare, The Sensorium: A Philosophical Discourse of the Senses: wherein their anatomy, and their several sensations, functions, and offices, are succincty [sic] and accurately describ’d (London, 1710), 2. See also Howes, ed. (2005); Jay (1993); and my own polemic in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: List Visual Art Center/MIT Press, 2006), 5– 49. 25. For the gender liminality of Helen Keller, see Serlin (2006). 26. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Derrida (1993). 27. Jay (1993); Krauss (1993). 28. “Before we turn to the ethical implications themselves of this, something must be said about the meaning of ‘theoria’. We should not reduce it by the translations ‘study’ or ‘speculation’ though these may be suitable in some contexts. The first suggests laboriousness, the second the posing of questions and hazarding of hypotheses. These are features of much of what passes as theoria on the human level, but they do not easily transfer to a god’s activity or capture the measure of what Aristotle means by ‘the divine element in us’. ‘Theoria’ covers any sort of detached, intelligent, attentive pondering, especially when not directed to a practical goal. . . . The traditional word ‘contemplation’ would still be preferable if we could overcome its suggestion of a locked gaze.” The same author glosses the term as properly designating “mobile receptiveness.” Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 401.

29. “Moving to learn” elicits literature on embodied practices in science. See Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Bourdieu (1998); Latour (2005); David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Natasha Myers, “Dance your PhD,” Body & Society 18, no. 1 (March 2012): 151– 89. Thanks to Sophia Roosth for our ongoing conversations about this material. 30. See Malkin (2011); Nightingale (2004), 40. Deeper in the past than the theôroi that Malkin and Nightingale chronicle were the cave-cults of local deities in Crete, where, for example, the Minoan snake goddess thrived around 1600 BCE. 31. Alan Kim, review of Nightingale (2004), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, May 2, 2005, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm ?id=2461 (accessed September 2005). 32. Bennett (1988). 33. This “turning of the head” was recommended by Duchamp as the best way to view one of his readymades— the bottle rack— through a distracted sidelong glance. See Krauss (1993), 140. 34. Agamben (1998). 35. Kurt Raaflaub, “Democracy, Oligarchy, and the Concept of the ‘Free Citizen’ in Late Fifth-Century Athens,” Political Theory 11, no. 4 (November 1983): 517– 44. 36. Those I found most influential are by Burton Benedict, Zeynep Çelik, T. J. Clark, Arindam Dutta, Paul Greenhalgh, Pat Mainardi, Timothy Mitchell, and Robert Brain. 37. For tactics and strategies, see Certeau (1984). 38. Goodman (1994); Prendergast, ed. (2004). My conversations with Francesca Orsini have been crucial in my understanding of the “republic of letters” and the “world literature” debate. 39. “In fact, the image that illustrates [Descartes’s] discussion shows the Hypothetical’s dog sound asleep on the ground, indicating that the Hypothetical is going nowhere.” Kleege (2005), 180. 40. Kleege disagrees specifically on this point with Descartes: “In fact, then as now, a stick or cane is a poor tool for this kind of mental imaging. The stick serves merely to announce the presence of an obstacle, not to determine whether it is a rock or a tree root, although there are sound cues— a tap versus a thud— which might help to make this distinction. In many situations, the cane is more of an auditory than a tactile tool.” She notes the narcissism by which Descartes’s stick merely confirms his own visual paradigms of knowing. Kleege (2005), 180– 81. 41. Descartes (1637), 62 (4:114). 42. Confirmed by the artist Olafur Eliasson in discussion with the author, August 5, 2014. 43. One could speculate that it might have been even more important for Descartes to explore this secular empiricism from a position of safety in the Netherlands, at a time of great struggle between Christian iconoclasts and iconodules. 44. Descartes, “Discourse Six: Vision” (1637), 68 (4:141). 45. Cited by Locke (1690) book 2, chapter 9, section 8; http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/locke/Essay.htm (accessed September 2005). 46. Locke (1690). 47. Diderot (1749). Notes to Chapter 1

253

48. Diderot apologizes to Madame for not being able to take her to see the bandages come off “the blind girl whom Monsieur de Réaumur had couched for cataract” as he had promised, but in the event, his philosophical investigations will have more rigor: “How happy should I be, if the narrative of one of our conversations might stand instead of the spectacle I so rashly promised you!” Ibid., 149. 49. Ibrahim (2000). 50. Diderot (1749), 151– 52, 159. 51. There is a history of blind mathematicians waiting to be written. See one preliminary account by a nonhistorian, mathematician Allyn Jackson, “The World of Blind Mathematicians,” Notices of the AMS 49, no. 10 (November 2002): 1246– 51. Thanks to Alma Steingart for this reference. 52. But for all his investment in material objects, Diderot has little patience for British empiricists such as Locke, whom he describes as arguing that “matter thinks.” Voltaire would enter the fray and explain in his own Lettres Philosophe in 1778 that what Locke had actually said was “We shall, perhaps, never be capable of knowing whether a being, purely material, thinks or not.” The far more memorable coinage that Diderot offers in his letter on the blind— that “matter thinks”— would nonetheless stick, and it would come back demonstrably as a positive virtue of objects and physical displays in Victorian scientist T. H. Huxley’s planning and justification for the Great Exhibition of 1851. See Dutta (2006). 53. Diderot (1749), 159– 60. 54. Ibid., 172. 55. Facts on publication size from “Denis Diderot,” English Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot (accessed October 2006). 56. Diderot (1749), 157. 57. Heidegger’s term is Entgötterung, in “The Age of the World Picture” (1938). 58. The next chapter relates this history in greater detail, but suffice it to say that in the wake of the stunning success of Britain’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, there were immediate emulations in New York (1853), Munich (1854), Melbourne (1854), and of course Paris (1855). The rivalry between London and Paris would dominate these events for the remainder of the nineteenth century, with Vienna, Kyoto, Sydney, Rome, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Chicago, and other would-be metropoles all attempting to join the circuit. As for the Temple Bar blindman and the British tradition of satire, an important precedent was established during the early eighteenth century with Joseph Addison’s Mr. Spectator, who observes much, speaks little, and reflects a great deal on London’s emerging public sphere. See Buzard (1993; 2002); Buzard et al., eds. (2007). 59. Diary of John Daws, October 11, 1851, from online resource posted by his descendants, http://www.cryerfamilyhistory .btinternet.co.uk/daws-London.htm (accessed December 2005). 60. Sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Trade, the 1862 exhibition was titled more simply than its 1851 forbear. Alternative titles proliferate. 61. Robertson (2004), 1. 62. Ibid.; Dutta (2006). 254

Notes to Chapter 1

63. Asa Briggs, Victorian People (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 40. 64. William Henry Fox Talbot, letter to the Executive Committee for the Great Exhibition, November 9, 1851, collection Fox Talbot Museum, online Talbot Correspondence Project, University of Glasgow, WHFT Document Number 06512; http://www .foxtalbot.arts.gla.ac.uk/corresp/06512.asp?target=2 (accessed fall 2005). 65. Guy Debord crafted this theory at the long, long end of the epoch of European world’s fairs; see Debord (1967). 66. Walt Whitman, “Song of the Exposition” (1871), later published in book 7 of Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1900), 441– 50 (quote from stanza 6, p. 444). Whitman orated the poem again for the 1876 world’s fair in Philadelphia. The first New York Crystal Palace was built in 1853 on what is now Bryant Park, designed by Georg Cartensen and Charles Gildemeister of glass and metal with a domed roof one hundred feet in diameter. See http://www.bryantpark .org/about-us/history.html (accessed January 2014). 67. Anonymous (1863), 227. I am grateful to Arindam Dutta for sharing his transcription of this essay, rendered from the journal clipping housed at the National Art Library, London; Henry Cole Archives— Miscellaneous files. 68. Ibid., 228. 69. Ibid., 230. 70. Ibid., 232. 71. Ibid., 232. 72. The exhibition opened less than twenty-four hours after the envoy’s arrival. See literary scholar David Ewick’s thorough entries at http://themargins.net (accessed April 2006). 73. Ewick (2003). 74. Anonymous (1863), 234, 233. 75. Ibid., 233. 76. Adams (1907), 65. 77. Ibid., 389. 78. Ibid., 380. 79. Ibid., 381. 80. The electromagnetism of these enormous dynamos disrupted visitors’ wristwatches: “The power generating plant is one of the most interesting features of the Exposition, and the halls are constantly thronged with visitors, whose watches suffer greatly from magnetization.” “The Foreign Power Section of the Paris Exposition,” Scientific American Supplement 50, no. 128 (July 21, 1900): 20535, cited in Dickran Tashjian (1977), 105, 107n23. 81. The full official theme of the 1939 New York World’s Fair was “Building the World of Tomorrow.” 82. Thanks to Anne Middleton Wagner and Ewa LajerBurcharth for helping me think through both the “anti-retinal” and “precision optics” of Duchamp. See also Tashjian (1975, 1977). 83. The story comes from Fernand Léger: Before the World War, I went with Marcel Duchamp and Brancusi to the Salon de l’Aviation. Marcel, who was a dry type with something inscrutable about him, walked around the motors and propellers without saying a word. Suddenly he turned to

Brancusi: “Painting is finished. Who can do anything better than this propeller? Can you?” Léger, interviewed by Dora Vallier, Cahiers d’Art (Paris) 29, no. 2 (1954): 133– 77, translated and excerpted in Pontus Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York: MoMA, 1968), 140. See also Antoine Picon, ed., L’art de l’ingénieur: constructeur, entrepreneur, inventeur (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou/Le Moniteur, 1997). Rosalind Krauss (1993) places the turn against painting later, in 1915– 16, when Duchamp abandoned the Large Glass and began the experiments that would lead to the Rotoreliefs. Dickran Tashjian discusses the ambiguities around the date of the Aviation Fair (which was annual between 1909 and 1914) and points out that Duchamp claimed to have no memory of the event— similar to the artist’s claim never to have known of Henry Adams; Tashjian (1977), 104. Tashjian points out— to my mind convincingly— that immediately after the 1911 Salon de l’Aviation and the propeller revelation, Duchamp’s work began to explore a range of “rotational” motives— from the early Coffee Mill sketch made for his brother-in-law to the Chocolate Grinder, the water wheel in the Large Glass, and other rotary devices culminating in the Rotoreliefs. I follow Tashjian’s proposed date of 1911 here. 84. See Tashjian (1977), and the important dissertation he cites by Lawrence D. Steefel, in which Steefel reports that Duchamp was “delighted” by Adams’s writing when it was brought to his attention by Steefel in 1956. I suspect he knew about it far earlier. Steefel, “The Position of La mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, meme (19181923), in the Stylistic and Iconographic Development of the Art of Marcel Duchamp” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1960), 144. 85. Modeled on the state-authorized Salon des Refuses, which became in 1884 the artist-run Société des Artistes Indépendants, the US group of “Independents” came together after the International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show) in 1913. The new association’s first display, in 1916, consisted of two thousand art objects from artists around the world; the second, in 1917, comprised “the largest exhibition in American history” (twentyfive hundred works by twelve hundred artists); see William Clark, “Katherine Dreier and the Société Anonyme,” Variant 14 (Winter 2001), http://www.variant.org.uk/14texts/William_Clark .html (accessed September 2010). Duchamp’s famous urinal, not yet termed a “readymade,” was discarded after the crucial photograph was taken by Alfred Stieglitz for publication in The Blind Man. The first “readymade” titled as such (specifically, Unhappy Readymade) was constructed according to Duchamp’s instructions by his sister Suzanne in 1919. 86. See Helen Molesworth, “Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades,” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 50– 61, and Molesworth, ed., Part Object Part Sculpture (University Park: Penn State University Press/Wexner Center for the Arts, 2005). 87. Letter to The Blind Man (May 1917), 10. Online facsimile in tout-fait, http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Collections/ girst/ (accessed January 2012). 88. The investor behind Duchamp’s foray was Henri Roché, who confirmed that Duchamp entered the Concours Lépine, Salon

des inventions, 1935; for a different account see Tashjian (1977), 107n11. Roché’s memoir is in Lebel (1959), 84-85. 89. After the first rotary device (from 1920) broke the second time it was turned on, André Breton urged Duchamp to build a new one; this became the Rotary Demisphere, Precision Optics, exhibited (and funded) by Jacques Doucet in Paris, 1923. See Tomkins (1996), 254– 55, 301– 3. 90. Henri Roché (investor in the Rotoreliefs and cofounder, with Duchamp and Beatrice Wood, of The Blind Man), recalled Duchamp’s stand with the rotating disks as “a regular carnival . . . but I must say that his little stand went strikingly unnoticed. None of the visitors, hot on the trail of the useful, could be diverted long enough to stop there. A glance was sufficient to see that between the garbage compressing machine and the incinerators on the left, and the instant vegetable chopper on the right, this gadget of his simply wasn’t useful. When I went up to him, Duchamp smiled and said, ‘Error, one hundred percent. At least, it’s clear.’” In Lebel (1959), 84-85. 91. Rosalind Krauss (1993), 114 et passim. 92. See Benjamin (1931), 8– 9. The reference to the optical unconscious is differently translated in Benjamin (1999b), 511– 12: Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. Details of structure, cellular tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally concerned— all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. Yet at the same time, photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things— meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable. (Emphasis added.) 93. Benjamin, in the pre-1935 sections of the unfinished Passagenwerk, for which see Hansen (1987), 179– 224, these quotes from 191. For Benjamin on the “phantasmagoria” of the universal exhibitions, see Benjamin (1999a), 7. 94. Jameson (1981). 95. Hansen (1987), 221. 96. Krauss (1993: 96) gets this vividly right, describing the “Chinese Lantern” pattern as mobilizing into “a breast with slightly trembling nipple,” the “Corolla” becoming “an eye staring outward.” The rotary reliefs “produce a fairly explicit sexual reading.” Her work bears an open debt to theories of Duchamp’s “carnal” vision in Lyotard (1990). See as well Richmond (2016). Duchamp’s importance to postmodern theory more generally is chronicled in A. Jones (1994). 97. With its dependence on print and photographic documentation, art history would largely pass over Duchamp’s rotary devices to feature the readymades as his answer to Crowninshield. 98. Situational aesthetics predates relational aesthetics in the English-speaking art world; see Burgin (1969), 118– 21. “L’esthetiNotes to Chapter 1

255

que relationnel” emerged from a French sociologist and Bourdieu student, Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). See also the important addendum by Claire Bishop (2004). 99. See the journal Senses and Society, founded in 2006, and the exchange over affect theory between Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 434– 72, and (among others) Elizabeth Wilson and Adam Frank, “LikeMinded,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Summer 2012): 870– 77. 100. See Marks (2000; 2002) and her essay “Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes,” Framework: The Finnish Art Review 2 (2004): 79– 82. 101. Blocker (2007), 9. 102. Ibid. 103. The allusion is to Jacques Rancière, whose body of work continues to explore, restlessly and in precise encounters with creative objects, how art works. See, most recently, his Aisthesis (2013). 104. On public performatives versus performative publics, see C. Jones (2010), 214– 20. See also Alva Noë on Tino Sehgal’s work at the 2013 Venice Biennale: “There are people on the floor moving slowly, making noise; there are dozens of visitors milling around them in the gallery. The work is invisible at first, just as it is unclear what, if any, logic or rule governs what is going on.” Noë, “An Object of Contention at the Venice Biennale,” May 31, 2013, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/05/31/ 187477642/an-object-of-contention-at-the-venice-biennale (accessed January 2014). 105. In this aspect of his theorization of the optical unconscious from around 1931– 32, Benjamin muses on Proust and the mémoire involontaire— unbidden remembrance as opposed to conscious, socially reinforced memory. Quoted in Hansen (1987), 179. 106. Téllez, interviewed by Beasley, http://creativetime.org/ programs/archive/2007/performance/tellez_interview.html (accessed September 20, 2008). 107. The art fair will be addressed only glancingly in this book, although it is poised to replace nonprofit municipal or stateorganized events such as the world’s fairs and biennials chronicled here. Upon entering a “global salon” convened by Venice Biennale commissioner Rob Storr, future commissioner Daniel Birnbaum announced to the assembled crowd that he had come fresh from the Miami/Basel art fair, having struggled to get in to that exciting bazaar, and worried about whether that might be where the action was. See Storr, conv. (2005); C. Jones (2006); Thornton (2008). 108. I am grateful to Irit Rogoff for bringing Ataman’s 2009 work to my attention, and to Nasser Rabbat for recalling its similarity to an earlier projected video by Janane Al-Ani called The Muse (2005), in which a “smartly suited man emerges from a desert heat-haze and proceeds to walk restlessly back and forth along the same strip of barren earth. The camera returns to this view on seven different occasions; the passage of time marked by changes in the light and a shift in the lengthening, deepening shadows.” See the website of the commissioners, Film and Video Umbrella, http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/details/the-visit/ (accessed January 2013). 109. Kutlug Ataman, quoted in Florence Waters, “Kutlug Ataman: From Turkey with love / Artist Kutlug Ataman talks about 256

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

his film installation fff, at the Thomas Dane Gallery,” Telegraph online, March 11, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/ 4967200/Kutlug-Ataman-from-Turkey-with-love.html (accessed September 22, 2009). 110. Short note by Rebekah Drysdale, “Kutlug Ataman,” The Daily Serving: An International Forum for the Contemporary Arts, March 31, 2009, http://dailyserving.com/2009/03/kutlug -ataman/ (accessed May 2009). See also Cüneyt Çakirlar, “Aesthetics of Self-Scaling: Parallaxed Transregionalism and Kutlug Ataman’s Art Practice,” Critical Arts 27, no. 6 (November 2013): 684– 706. 111. Benjamin, in the 1932 remarks on Proust, cited by Hansen (1987), 202. For “shock,” see ibid., 184– 85 et passim. 112. See Eliasson’s website for documentation of Blind Pavilion (2003), Din blinde passager (2010), Your Blind Movement (2010), and Your Black Horizon (2009), http://www.olafureliasson.net/ works.html. 113. In the original from Gonzalo Diaz’s piece: “du kommst zum herzen deutschlands nur um das wort kunst under deinem eigenen schatten zu lesen.” Haghighian’s Empire of the Senseless Part II (2006; now in the collection of MoMA, among other institutions) is a precursor to Diaz’s piece: a jumble of words are superimposed on the wall (“young,” “woman,” “doctor,” “prince,” etc.) and can only be disambiguated when one interrupts competing projections— which is to say, when a single word can be read in one’s shadow, with another “labeling” one’s back. 114. Diaz, in translation from a Chilean website; see Blocker (2007), 11. 115. For an argument about the “ethnographic turn” in the art world (but not specifically in the legacy of the fairs/biennials), see Foster (1996). 116. For “desiring-production,” see Deleuze and Guattari (1977). 117. Ashraf Jamal, text on Willem Boshoff, Blind Alphabet,” from the site “Artists of South Africa,” reprinting the brochure for the São Paulo Bienal in 1996, available at Boshoff ’s website, http:// www.art.co.za/willemboshoff/blind/blind.htm (accessed December 2009). I am grateful to Okwui Enwezor for drawing Boshoff ’s work to my attention. Chapter 2 1. Laborde (1856), 422. 2. Hugo (1867); also see Greenhalgh (1988), 116. 3. Goode (ca. 1890), 656. 4. L. Sullivan (1926), 305. 5. Paraphrased from Cai Guo-Qiang’s English website, http:// www.caiguoqiang.com/projects/bringing-venice-what-marco-polo -forgot (accessed February 2014). 6. Melissa Chiu, “Cai Guo-Qiang,” Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press, 2009), featured on the Museum of Modern Art website, http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id= 8073 (accessed July 2014). 7. Artistes et Associés, video posted in 2013, http://vimeo.com/ 75553018 (accessed February 2014). 8. Vergne et al. (2003), 20.

9. Rasheed Araeen, “Letter on Globalization,” in Elkins et al., eds. (2010), 140. 10. Jean-Hubert Martin, 1989 interview in Steeds et al. (2013), 237. 11. For “exhibitionary complex,” see Bennett (1988); for “will to globality,” Enwezor (2010). 12. On “globalism” as an aesthetic tactic in confrontation with “globalization,” see Jones, “Globalism/Globalization,” in Elkins et al., eds. (2010), 129– 37. See also chapter 7. 13. Lamees Hamdan, “Epilogue,” in Zolghadr, ed. (2009), 144. 14. Foucault (1967). 15. See Buzard et al., eds. (2007), 44. 16. Anderson (1991). 17. Mainardi (1987). 18. On Heidegger, see Farías (1989) and Safranski (1998); see also chapters 6 and 7. Walter Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 near the border in Portbou, Spain, upon learning that Franco had rescinded permission to cross into neutral Portugal and would ship Jewish refugees back to occupied France. Benjamin’s brother George was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. 19. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on May 3, 1933, backdated to May 1 to coincide with his assumption of duties as rector of the university. Although he resigned his rectorship in April 1934 to protest Nazi interference with his appointments of various deans, he kept his party membership until the end of the war, when he was stripped of his professorship during postwar denazification; this teaching ban was lifted in 1949. For Heidegger’s tortuous navigation of his own history, see the 1966 interview in Heidegger (2009), 313– 33. 20. There were twenty-six exhibitions staging themselves as “world’s fairs” between 1933 and 1939 in old and new worlds— more than in the 1940s and 1950s put together. For one count, see “List of World’s Fairs,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_world%27s_fairs (accessed February 2014). 21. Heidegger (1936), 39. 22. Ibid., 43, 53– 54. 23. Heidegger (2009), 329. 24. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” delivered as “Die Frage nach der Technik” at the Technische Hochschule, Munich, November 18, 1955 (although his biographer Rüdiger Safranski says it was given even earlier, in 1953, at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts). English version from Heidegger (1977), 27. See also Safranski (1998). 25. Enwezor (2010), 609. 26. Patrick Howarth, The Year Is 1851 (London: White Lion Press, 1975), 232, cited in Buzard et al., eds. (2007), 86. 27. Derrida (1981), 3– 25. 28. Lisa Marie Volpe, “We Exhibited Fugitive Slaves: American Display and Conflict at the Crystal Palace,” paper delivered at College Art Association annual meeting, February 14, 2014. See also Volpe (2013). 29. Buzard et al., eds. (2007). 30. “Although the Exhibition was devoted to the achievements of modern industry, some of the objects receiving the most comment at the time belonged to the category of ‘fine

art.’” Rachel Teukolsky, “Sublime Museum,” in Buzard et al., eds. (2007), 84. 31. The transliterated title would be Tian Shu or Tianshu, formed from Chinese characters that also denote “celestial script,” with a connotation of “incomprehensible scribbling.” For the Chinese bookbinding traditions exemplified in Xu’s work, see Hanshan Tang Books website, http://www.hanshan.com/specials/xubingts .html (accessed February 2014). 32. “The work was originally [sub]titled An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century but the artist soon accepted the popularized title, A Book from the Sky.” See Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/A_Book_from_the_Sky (accessed February 2014). 33. For “transnationalism,” see chapter 5. 34. Email to the author from Jane Farver, February 10, 2014. Farver was curator at the Queens Museum at the time, and commissioned Cai’s Cultural Melting Bath in 1997. 35. Farver continues: “We had new rocks quarried, secured the hot tub from a guy on Long Island, spent days shopping for birds (finches were too aggressive, and the Queens Zoo said parakeets were the only ethical option). When the rocks arrived by boat, the netting came with them. It had been badly stained by mold, and we thought we should throw it away. However, when we spread it out to dry in the park, Cai saw mountain patterns in it and decided to keep it. Most people thought he painted the mountains. We originally wanted the netting to enclose a bad gallery space at Queens and create an enclosure for the piece. The tree branch was from a Banyan tree, I believe. . . . It was amusing when Lyon wanted the piece, they kept the netting even though they had better galleries, and they inquired if they needed to import the water from Queens. Sweet.” Email to the author, February 10, 2014. 36. The Melting Pot was a play written by Russian immigrant Israel Zangwill around 1905, adapting a “Romeo and Juliet” plot to plump for cultural intermingling in the American republic (in Zangwill’s version the lovers don’t die). 37. Anonymous entry (probably by John Cayley), Hanshan Tang Books website, http://www.hanshan.com/specials/xubingts .html (accessed February 2014). The reference in scare quotes is to Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (1967). 38. Derrida (1981). On copyright and “Signature event context,” see Derrida (1988). See also Wong (2013). On Xu Bing’s signature practice, see the Hanshan Tang Books website, http://www .hanshan.com/specials/xubingts.html (accessed February 2014). 39. Website for Benesse House Museum, Naoshima, Japan, http://www.benesse-artsite.jp/en/benessehouse-museum/ program.html (accessed February 2014). 40. See Cai Guo-Qiang’s English website, http://www .caiguoqiang.com/projects/cultural-melting-bath-projects-20th -century-1997-queens-ny-usa (accessed February 2014). The selection of the herbs by “Cai’s old doctor in his hometown” was confirmed by curator Jane Farver, email communication to the author, February 10, 2014. 41. For “desiring-production,” see Deleuze and Guattari (1977). 42. Enwezor (2010), 620n15. 43. On potlatch and capitalism, see Bataille (1988). 44. Herbert (1998), xiii. Notes to Chapter 2

257

45. “All Mud and mirth, and gingerbread, and joy: / Prancing in puddles, passing thro’ each pen, / Into that Babylon of booths— the Fair.” St. Bartholemew’s Fair, 1816, Anon. As cited in Allwood (1977), 9. 46. Brain (1993), 9. 47. See Beatriz González-Stephan, “A Gothic Glass Case in the Tropical Forest: The First Venezuelan National Exhibition of 1883,” in Buzard et al., eds. (2007), 216– 30. 48. Chakrabarty (2008), xvii. For Germany’s indifferent participation in the fairs, see Kroker (1975); for more on the exhibitionary complex in the non-West, see Kal (2005). 49. Brian Maidment, “Entrepreneurship and the Artisans . . . ,” in Purbrick, ed. (2001), 79– 113. See also Wyss (2010). 50. This autonomy would be reversed in the twentieth-century expos such as Montreal in 1967 (when art was juxtaposed with icons of the space race) or Osaka in 1970 (when it was in commercial pavilions, e.g., Pepsico). 51. See the strange order of the chapters in The World’s Work, The St. Louis Exposition, vol. 7, no. 4 (August 1904): power, electricity, transportation, people, education, forestry, filippines, japan, german, england, other foreign, how to see the fair, states, pictures and sculpture, strange races of men, agriculture, mining, map, government, editorial interpretation. The section on “The Exhibit of Pictures and Sculpture” is by Charles H. Caffin, on pages 5179– 84. 52. For the full argument, see C. Jones (2008b). 53. Cf. Mandell (1967). 54. Lewis (1983). 55. McClellan (1999). 56. Allwood (1977), 10. See also Rydell (1992). 57. Proclamation by French Minister of Interior François de Neufchâteau in 1798, as cited in Mandell (1967), 4. 58. Allwood (1977), 12. Paul Greenhalgh also quotes Neufchâteau on the point of his expositions: “This is not merely an episode in the struggle against English industry, but also the first stone in a mighty edifice which time alone can complete and which will be adorned each year by the joint efforts of industry and commerce.” Greenhalgh (1988), 5. 59. Cited in Greenhalgh (1988), 10. 60. Allwood (1977), 12. 61. According to Allwood, the British first attempted to emulate the popular French events in the Royal Mews in London; it was deemed a “toy shop” by its critics. The first purpose-built hall for an “exhibition of the French type” was erected in Birmingham for the national industrial fair in 1849. Allwood (1977), 12; see also Ainsworth (2006). 62. Ainsworth (2006), 4. 63. Henry Cole’s Journal of Design and Manufactures 2 (1851): 1– 17. 64. John Swift, “Birmingham and Its Art School: Changing Views,” in Mervyn Romans, ed., Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005), 67– 89. 65. “Chartist riots every night” and “loyalty of the country as a whole,” Albert to Baron von Stockmar, March 30, 1848; “millions of British workers,” Albert to Frederick William IV, April 14, 1851, for which see Rydell (1992), 3. 258

Notes to Chapter 2

66. The commissioners aimed to “raise the level of English design standards, design education, and taste.” See Norris Pope in Technology and Culture 42, no. 2 (2001): 342. Also see Dutta (2006), 1– 38. 67. Auerbach (1999); Dutta (2006). 68. Whewell (1852), 360. 69. Whewell (1852); also see Lara Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” in Purbrick, ed. (2001), 158. 70. Rodin chose Place de l’Alma (the site of Courbet and Manet pavilions in 1867) to offer a retrospective of 150 works, “attended by everyone from Oscar Wilde to the Minister of Education.” Rosenblum et al. (2000), 30. 71. Lajer-Burcharth (1999), 130 ff. 72. Comte Nieuwerkerke, in a public feud with the artist, declined the largest of Courbet’s paintings for the Universal Exposition of 1855; Courbet then withdrew from the state display and built the Pavilion du Realisme with private funds, from which he launched his Realist manifesto. Emperor Napoleon III, in a stroke of political genius, declared himself a man of the people by endorsing Courbet’s actions and founding the Salons des Refusés (which opened in 1863). See Mainardi (1987). 73. Çelik (1992); Van Wesemael (2001). 74. Bruno (2002); Maes (2013). 75. Gustave Claudin, L’exposition à vol d’oiseu, suivi d’une lettre á M. Maxine du Camp, 1855, quoted in translation in Brain (1993), 22. For Queen Victoria, see Gibbs-Smith (1950), 16. 76. Delacroix, 1855, in Allwood (1977), 25. 77. William Thackeray, “May Day Ode,” London Times, May 1, 1851, in Allwood (1977) and Rydell (1992), 3. 78. Page, ed. (1904). 79. Ibid., 5054, 5057. 80. Victor Hugo, “To the Peoples of Europe,” introduction to Lacroix’ Paris-Guide (1867), cited without page number in Greenhalgh (1988) and Allwood (1977), 43. Hugo’s essay, published in the guidebook to the fair and in numerous other venues that same year, is available as Hugo (1867), scanned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k200159t.r =.langFR. It is also referenced in Benjamin (1935). 81. Dostoevsky (1863): 36. Quotes from Dostoevsky bemoaning “this epitome of soulless materialism, this apocalyptic monster of iron and glass” (as in Rydell 1992) are actually citations to his early biographer Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Dostoevsky: A Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1934), 167. My thanks to Bill Todd for clarifying Dostoevsky’s precise words. 82. Carlyle, in Rydell (1992), 4. For the context of Ruskin’s “Political Economy of Art” lecture (1857) see Pergam (2011). See also Hughes (1953), 181– 83, who notes Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? placing future communists in crystal palaces in 1862. 83. Benjamin (1935); Horkheimer and Adorno (1972). 84. Benjamin (1999a), 7. 85. These Benjamin quotes are, respectively, from “A Short Speech on Proust” (1932) and the Passagenwerk (a 1935 section), as cited in Hansen (1987), 179, 191. “The camera introduces . . .” is from Benjamin (1936), 237.

86. As opposed to the eu-topos which can essentially be nowhere, Foucault theorized “Des espaces autres” in a 1967 lecture, approving its translation and linkage to “heterotopias” in 1984. See Foucault (1967). 87. See Marchart (2008), 153. 88. Laborde (1856), 422. 89. Manet (1867), 6. See Mainardi (1987). 90. A. Alexandre, “Continental Pictures at the Paris Exhibition,” in “The Paris Exhibition 1900,” Art Journal (London, May 1901), 323, in Rosenblum et al. (2000). 91. Ibid., 322, again in Rosenblum et al. (2000). 92. E. Verhaeren, “Chronique de l’Exposition,” Mercure de France, June 1900, in Rosenblum et al. (2000), 69– 70. 93. D.C.T., “The Paris Exhibition, 1900,” Art Journal (London, May 1900), 372, in Rosenblum et al. (2000), 62. 94. M.S., “French Art at the Fair,” New York Times, September 9, 1900, in Rosenblum et al. (2000), 62. 95. Alfred Picard, cited in Moore (2003), 54. 96. Gustave Geffroy, “Revue des Idées: L’Exposition de 1900 et les Expositions: Plaidoyers pour et contre,” Revue Encyclopédique, 10:611– 12, in Rosenblum et al. (2000). 97. The long history of this debate is summarized by Norbert Elias: “The concept of civilization plays down the national differences between peoples [while] the concept of Kultur delimits.” Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 5. 98. E. Verhaeren (1900), in Rosenblum et al. (2000), 62. 99. E. Demolder, “Au Palais des Champs-Elysées,” L’Art Moderne, June 24, 1900, in Rosenblum et al. (2000), 61. 100. “Pratiques de soi,” translated as “technologies of the self,” is best articulated in the magisterial Collège de France lectures in Foucault (2005). 101. Žižek (1991), 162– 69. 102. Here I am grateful to Ben Matteson, whose 2007 seminar paper on the tortured Polish presence in the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago (as a Polish restaurant, and a “Polish Day” at the fair) offered me an exemplary education in that event. I am also grateful to Marianne Cassavetta, who shared with me in 2006 her grandmother’s tales of the “giraffe women” at the 1937 Paris world’s fair. 103. I’m referring to the autarchy of the United Arab Emirates, and to the party-state of Communist China, both of which now have several regional or global biennials. 104. Britain built a commuter railway to connect Londoners with the Crystal Palace after it had been moved to Sydenham, and the city’s major design museum (the Victoria and Albert) came explicitly from the proceeds of the first Great Exhibition in 1851. Infrastructure continues, for which see James Pickford, “Six of UK’s Top Architects Shortlisted for Crystal Palace Revival,” Financial Times (London), February 25, 2014, posted at FT.com. 105. On that staircase: “I managed . . . and with some difficulty ascended the gallery overlooking the transept, to look down on the sea of heads beneath. All was in motion, every one was moving on, whether they would or not. [To pretend that this] can be appreci-

ated by the ignorant mobs who frequent it, is truly absurd.” Journal entry by Gideon Mantell from 1851, quoted in Brain (1993), 30. 106. For the literature on aerial and cartographic views, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Giulano Briganti, The View Painters of Europe, trans. Pamela Waley (London: Phaidon, 1970); P. D. A. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980); and Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500,” Art Bulletin 60, no. 3 (September 1978): 425– 74. Bruno (2002) makes a stunning contribution. 107. On Geddes’s Edinburgh tower and “its relation to the world at large” see Anon., Geographical Teacher 3 (1906): 268– 71. 108. Gregory (1994), 38. As Gregory notes, these were the first globes so large they needed to be set outdoors; previous “géoramas” had been installed in Paris in 1823 and 1844. For 1889, see the designer’s own account, Th. Villard and Ch. Cotard, Le globe terrestre au millionième à l’Exposition Universelle de 1889 (Paris, 1889). 109. Pitched in a Scientific American essay October 1890, Palacio’s 1,312-foot-high marvel was never built. 110. [Jean Jacques] Elisée Reclus, “A Great Globe,” Geographical Journal 12 (1898): 406. 111. Visitors numbered over 50 million; the population was 38.9 million. Of course, this takes little account of how the fair administration counted “visitors.” 112. Charles Dickens, Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, vol. 1 (London, 1851), supplement p. 5, as cited in Rydell (1992), 47– 48. 113. The research engine WorldCat will sometimes reveal a single copy of some massive tome, viz., the book known as Report of the Sub-Committee of the World’s Fair Committee on Organization and Classification: On the history, influence & classification of fairs: Made to the World’s Fair Committee, on Monday evening, October 6, 1879 (New York: World’s Fair Committee, Sub-Committee on Organization and Classification, 1879). With current search algorithms, it appears that this book is held only by the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, WI. 114. British report on the Vienna exhibition, The Weltausstellung 1873 Wien, whose motto was Kultur und Erziehung (Culture and Education). See facsimile posted by the library of the University of Glasgow, http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/images/century/y2e9 _17.jpg (accessed March 2014). 115. “L’importance des arts est généralement reconnue; efforts fait pour nous disputer notre supériorité. . . . Necessité de s’opposer à l’envahissement du mauvais goût en France, pour lutter contre la renaissance du bon goût à l’étranger.” Laborde (1856), 382, 397 (reordered; translations are my own). 116. “L’art est un: il est la source de tous les progrès. . . . La prospérité des arts est une force pour l’Etat, une gloire pour le Prince.” Ibid., 407, 443. 117. Ibid., 422. 118. I am indebted to Patricia Hills in our many discussions on the role of gender, class, and race in complicating this hypothetical “public.” See also Habermas (1962) and the commentary in Calhoun, ed. (1992). Negt and Kluge (1993) continue the debate. Notes to Chapter 2

259

119. Page, ed. (1904), 5110. 120. Victoria’s journal entries for April 29, May 1, May 14, and May 17, 1851, in Brain (1993), 16– 19. On “sensible mechanics,” see Margaret Blount, “An American Lady’s Visit to the Exhibition,” in Johnson (1863), 55. For “the average man,” see Edward L. Bernays, The New York World’s Fair— A Symbol for Democracy (New York: Merchants’ Association and Wickersham Press, 1937), n.p. 121. Page, ed. (1904), 5111. 122. Encouraged by Ernest Fenellosa from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow spent three months in Japan in 1903, passing what he learned of “essential harmonies” on to student Georgia O’Keeffe, among others. 123. Page, ed. (1904), 5111. 124. Ibid., 5113. 125. As of the 1900 census, 7,250,000 people living in the United States had either been born in Germany or had one parent born there, out of 76,000,000 in the total population— so just short of 10 percent. Thanks to Lauren Kroiz for her data on the subject. 126. Page, ed. (1904), 5153, 5154. 127. Ibid., 5146, 5153. Rather chillingly to my mind, the author reports the following exchange over the map on exhibit: “‘How about Mukden and Harbin?’ I asked a Japanese in charge of the exhibit. ‘Just wait a little,’ he replied, ‘the war is not over.’” 128. The St. Louis 1904 fair took place between the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which benefited Japanese laborers) and the National Origins Act of 1924, which banned East Asian immigration entirely. Japan’s war with Russia over territory would find sympathy among Americans in 1904; President Roosevelt would broker the peace treaty between them in 1905. 129. W. J. McGee, in Page, ed. (1904), 5185: Strange Races of Men, The indoor anthropology exhibit a record of the development of prehistoric man— the outdoor exhibit a reservation of villages of some of the most peculiar peoples in the world— hairy ainu, patagonian giants, african pygmies, living as they do at home— the remarkable progress of the american indian. 130. Benedict (1983). 131. See Corbey (1993), 338– 69. 132. Page, ed. (1904), 5182– 84. 133. See Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., Japonisme (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975). 134. Anderson (1991). 135. McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, by Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-American anarchist inspired by an Emma Goldman speech he had heard in Cleveland (in May) and a brief conversation he had with Goldman in Chicago some weeks before. On Roosevelt’s appearance in St. Louis, see Francis (1913). 136. Diary entries posted by the descendants of John Daws, http://www.cryerfamilyhistory.co.uk/daws-London.htm. I am deeply grateful to Daws descendants Wendy Herbert, Pat Cryer, Nick Daws, and Sandra Daws for sharing with me a digital scan of these informative diaries. 137. Adams (1907), 465. 138. Henry Mayhew, “The Adventures of Mr. And Mrs. Sandboys, and Family, who came up to London to ‘enjoy themselves’ and to see the Great Exhibition” (1851), quoted in Brain (1993), 29. 260

Notes to Chapter 2

139. The Bureau of International Expositions in Paris has a 357-page finding aid for its materials; the US Smithsonian Institution numbers over a thousand individual items dealing with the fairs; a search for the term “World’s Fair” on WorldCat yields over sixteen thousand items, half of them books and many of them singular examples. 140. Dickinson Co. (1854). 141. Bennett (1988). 142. Patricia Mainardi, “Les premiers essais de synthèse d’une critique d’art contemporain international,” in Jean-Paul Bouillon, ed., La Critique d’art en France 1850–1900: Actes du colloque de ClermontFerrand (CIEREC: Université de Saint-Etienne, 1989), 53-54, 60. 143. “Military metaphors would constitute another technique of captatio benevolentiae, for the male identity they suggest would serve to enhance the credibility of her critical voice.” Guentner (2005). 144. Delécluze would go on to publish a controversial 1857 biography of David; its politics were so problematic the author had to withdraw and rewrite it. See Mainardi (1987), 68. 145. Delécluze (1856), vi, vii; translations my own. 146. Goode (ca. 1890), 656. 147. Goode (1898), 243– 62. See also Rydell (1984), 44. 148. Scholars place Courbet’s 1855 pavilion either “next to” the official pavilion or “across” from the fair at avenue Montaigne. For the former, see Fabrice Masanès, Gustave Courbet (Taschen, 2006), 52; for the latter, Altshuler (2008), 12. Courbet would repeat the highly successful gesture in 1867, with a pavilion he installed at the Place de l’Alma. See Mainardi (1987; 1991) for a definitive discussion. 149. Robert Rosenblum, in Rosenblum et al. (2000), 30. 150. Although generalized in its reference, the deathbed scene is thought to revolve around the death of Picasso’s sister Conchita of diphtheria at age seven. 151. See Cleveland Art Museum, “Last Moments Discovered beneath La Vie,” http://www.clevelandart.org/exhibcef/picassoas/ html/8605877.html (accessed March 2014). 152. Richardson (1991: 275) sees La Vie as the “first major manifestation” of the exorcism theme. 153. “Musée Trocadéro” is shorthand for the Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques (Ethnographic Museum of Scientific Expeditions), founded in 1878 by the Ministry of Public Education and housed in the Trocadéro Palace built for the third Paris world’s fair that year. By 1900 the displays were indeed “dusty”; in her forthcoming work on Picasso, Suzanne Preston Blier will provide a full accounting of the ethnographic and anthropological material amplifying what the artist encountered at the Trocadéro museum. 154. C. Jones (2008b). For “la France sublimée,” see Hugo (1867). 155. The “Dahomey Village” (identified in postcards as “Village Indigène à Abomey”) was prominently featured in popular literature and souvenirs from the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. 156. Benedict (1983), 43– 46. Benedict notes that all colonial powers exhibited their “dependents”— Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Denmark, and the United

States. See also Qureshi (2011), as well as Crais and Scully (2009). For a recent exhibition that unwittingly replicates these problems, see Blanchard et al. (2011). 157. Nation is a Latinate translation, not always appropriate, for older Semitic concepts (such as the Islamic millat) linked to “people” rather than territories. For modern European usage, see Zernatto (1944), 351– 56. 158. See “The World at the Fair, Experiences of the 1893 Columbian Exhibition,” UCLA, http://uclawce.ats.ucla.edu/ items/show/100 (accessed February 2014). 159. Cited in the epigraph from Sullivan’s Autobiography (1926), 305. Further: “The architectural generation [seek] to secure a special immunity from the inroads of common sense, through a process of vaccination with the lymph of every known European style, period and accident.” See also Hugh Morrison, Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935), 187– 88. 160. Benedict (1983), 49. See also Corbey (1993). 161. Rodin, in Ernst-Gerhard Güse, Auguste Rodin: Drawings and Watercolors, translated from the German by John Gabriel and Michael Taylor (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 271. 162. See Timothy Mitchell (1988). 163. The economics of sex trafficking and relations to military movements inform these histories. Saartjie (or Sarah) Baartman, mentioned above, became an orphan during military scuffles in southern Africa, was imported to Europe and put on exhibition, and died destitute; see Crais and Scully (2009). Much less is known about Annah la Javanaise, photographed in a group with Paul Gauguin in front of the 1889 Grand Exposition in Paris, painted by Gauguin as “not yet breached” in 1893, and identified as “Gauguin’s mistress” in a photograph taken by Alphonse Mucha in 1894. 164. Hachette’s 1900 Almanach, cited in Allwood (1977), 102. 165. Bancroft (1895), 634. 166. Galindo’s performance piece was produced in specific confrontation with the constitutional court, which had recently allowed Ríos Montt to run for president despite the Constitution’s barring of candidates who had previously gained power in military coups. For an excellent interview with Galindo, see Francisco Goldman, “Regina José Galindo,” Bomb 94 (Winter 2006), http:// bombsite.com/issues/94/articles/2780 (accessed February 2014). 167. Galindo’s prize reveals how we still nurse the ideology of universal history, central to notions of progress made possible by a liberal public sphere— shadowed by an elsewhere that can be projected onto Guatemala. On speaking for the subaltern (a concept from Gramsci), see Gayatri Spivak’s classic “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 271– 313. 168. I am alluding to exemplary work by Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, Linda Montano, and Tehching Hsieh. 169. A. Johnson (1993). The work nicknamed Cage Piece (a.k.a. Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid) was produced, among other places, in Irvine, California; Madrid’s Columbus Plaza; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC (where it appeared at the National Museum of Natural History); and Covent

Gardens in London; the artists were particularly aware that the London venue had historically hosted human displays. 170. Ibid. 171. Greg Allen, “‘Living Exhibits’ at 1904 World’s Fair Revisited: Igorot Natives Recall Controversial Display of Their Ancestors,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, May 31, 2004, text online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId= 1909651 (note that the headline still refers to “Natives”): Mia Abeya, a Maryland resident whose Igorot grandfather was among those on display, says Igorots ate dog only occasionally, for ceremonial purposes. During the fair, they were fed the animals on a daily basis. “They made them butcher dogs, which is really abusing the culture of the Igorots,” Abeya tells NPR’s Greg Allen. But Abeya says the experience had a positive side, too. She notes that many Igorots attended school for the first time while in St. Louis. After returning to the Philippines, Abeya’s grandfather made sure all of his children and grandchildren received an education. I’m grateful to novelist Miguel Syjuco for our conversations about these histories, occluded in the United States. 172. Benedict (1983), 51. 173. Kakuta Ole Maimai Hamisi Jr. from the town of Merreushi in southern Kenya, serving on the Woodland Park Zoo Staff as of 2002 (per Maasai Association website in Olympia Washington, http://www.maasai-association.org/Merreushi_school.pdf). On the controversial arrangement, see Manuel Valdes, “Guide and Zoo President Defend Maasai Role,” Seattle Times, August 9, 2007, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003828258 _maasai09m.html (accessed June 2009). Journalist Valdes quotes another Kenyan, Femi Taiwo, director of African Studies at Seattle University: “The irony is lost on him [Hamisi], Seattle kids are being taught about Kenya at a zoo.” 174. On “lumpy” globalization, see Dan O’Brien, “Education and Globalisation,” in Zajda, ed. (2005), 496. 175. This was where, for example, Jacques-Louis David staged his revolutionary Festival of the Supreme Being on June 8, 1794, to honor Robespierre’s wish that the new revolutionary nation of France would still have something to worship: a divinity incarnated in the revolutionary mass. 176. Thomas Cook invented the package tour to the Great Exhibition at the invitation of Crystal Palace designer Joseph Paxton, per “History, Thomas Cook Company,” http://www.thomascook .com/about-us/thomas-cook-history/ (accessed January 2012). 177. Josiah Wedgwood, letter ca. November 21, 1768, to Mr. Bentley “to tell you that an epidemical madness reigns for Vases, which must be gratified.” Smiles (1895), 124. 178. This date is approximate. Some sources note the showroom as opening on St. James Street in Westminster in 1774. The Wedgwood Family Blog records the date as 1765 and the location as Charles Street, off Grosvenor Square: http://wedgwoodfamily .blogspot.com/2009/03/josiah-wedgwood-frs-1730-1795.html (accessed February 2014). Notes to Chapter 2

261

179. See the British Museum website, http://www .britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/t/ the_portland_vase.aspx. A different account is offered by the Metropolitan Museum, regarding one of Wedgwood’s copies: http:// www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/94.4.172 (both accessed fall 2013). 180. Dahn (2001); internal quote from Hilary Young, ed., The Genius of Wedgwood (London: V&A, 1995), 117. 181. The collector John Grant picked up the statue from the London docks on May 3, 1845, and by May 7 it was “installed on its pedestal in Graves’s rooms at Pall Mall, the celebrated print publisher, whose facilities Powers and Grant considered particularly suitable for the exhibition of the Slave.” Reynolds (1977), 148. 182. For excerpts from print coverage in London and New York, see Anonymous (1847). I deduce that this is the promotional pamphlet accompanying the touring exhibition, since readers are instructed: “Communications in regard to the ‘Greek Slave’ should be addressed to Miner K. Kellogg,” the man in charge of supervising the lucrative US tour. Here is the Browning poem, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave,” written in 1850: They say Ideal beauty cannot enter The house of anguish. On the threshold stands An alien Image with enshackled hands, Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her (That passionless perfection which he lent her, Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands) To so confront man’s crimes in different lands With man’s ideal sense. Pierce to the centre, Art’s fiery finger! and break up ere long The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone, From God’s pure heights of beauty against man’s wrong! Catch up in thy divine face, not alone East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong, By thunders of white silence, overthrown. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poetical Works (London: Smith Elder, 1886), 2:302. 183. Reviewers for the New York Courier and Enquirer (August 31, 1847) and the New York Times (September 15, 1847), respectively, as excerpted in Anonymous (1847), 26, 27. 184. “Fact of the exposure” in Anonymous (1847), 25; “man’s crimes” in Browning, as in n182, supra. 185. The John Tenniel engraving from Punch 20 (1851): 236, is illustrated here as figure 2.12. The textual question was posed on page 209 of the same volume. See also Volpe (2013), 9. 186. Powers had written to the commissioner of 1862 to advocate for including his gigantic statue America, for which see Reynolds (1977), 200– 201. The reproduction showing the 1862 display (here fig. 2.3) shows the Slave along with a sculpture titled America, but not Powers’s! In the appreciation by Margaret Blount, “An American Lady’s Visit to the Exhibition,” the statue is identified as “a fine statue of America by E. Kuntze,” for which see B. Johnson (1863), 53. There is some evidence that the Greek Slave came late into the exhibition, as Blount does not mention it and neither does 262

Notes to Chapter 2

The Illustrated Record of the International Exhibition of All Nations in 1862, by Taliaferro Preston Shaffner and Rev. W. Owen (available in digital form on Google Books). 187. James Robb of New Orleans ordered one in December 1845 and agreed to release it for tour throughout the United States. Later there was a litigious disagreement between Robb and Powers; Robb did not like the sculpture that was eventually substituted for the one he had commissioned; see Reynolds (1977). 188. New York Tribune, September 15, 1847, in Anonymous (1847), 27, 28. 189. Browning (1850), and in n182, supra. 190. William Farmer, “Fugitive Slaves at the Great Exhibition,” Liberator, July 18, 1851, as cited in Volpe (2013), 14– 15. See also Knadler (2011). 191. Volpe (2013), 39. See also Barbara McGaskill, “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft— The Fugitive as Text and Artifact,” African American Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 509– 30. 192. Volpe (2013, 45) notes that the chained hands of the Greek Slave had been associated with the chains of African slavery as early as the work’s exhibition in 1845, when the London Times proposed a companion work: “a negro, with his hands fastened with a chain [in a] crouching attitude”— describing the abolitionist medallion produced by Wedgwood discussed below. 193. Citing letters from Powers to various patrons, Reynolds (1977), 205. On Powers’s failure to gain a commission for the US Capitol and the 1861 exhibition of America at the (Italian) National Exhibition in Florence, see Sandra Berresford, “Hiram Powers and Contemporary Appraisals from The Art Journal,” in Del Vivo, ed. (2007), 130. 194. See Denker (2002). 195. Mrs. Merrifield, “Dress as Fine Art,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 47 (1853): 20; cited in Denker (2002), n8. 196. Communication with Cameron Shay of James Graham & Sons Gallery, New York City, February 27, 2014 (fig. 2.3). See also Reynolds (1977); Wunder (1991). 197. Whether “counterfeit” makes sense in this sea of reproductions is debatable. Richard P. Wunder (1991, 158– 68) notes that there are two surviving plaster “originals” (never meant to be exhibited), the first roughly twenty-six inches high to be scaled up in marble to sixty-five inches; the second itself sixty-five inches high and fitted with bronze pins for pointing (part of the replication process). The small bronze in figure 2.3 bears no foundry stamp, so its attribution to the Meyer firm is conjectural. 198. Reynolds (1977), 238– 44. 199. Benjamin (1936), 224. In regard to the subject-making potential of collected objects, Benjamin (2006) writes of the bourgeois home in which he grew up as a “mausoleum long intended for me”; see also Jasanoff (2005). 200. Henry Cole’s “art” manufacturing firm, Felix Summerley’s, shopped out its designs, often to be produced by top makers such as Minton & Co. at Stoke-on-Trent in the nineteenth century. Already in the eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood had purchased land in Staffordshire as a home and factory site, which he dubbed Etruria in homage to the Italian pottery he aimed to replicate. To this day the inhabitants of the town’s council flats call themselves “Etruscans.”

201. William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature was published in six installments from 1844 to 1846 by Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans in London. See also M. Harvey (1985). 202. Ruskin (1857), 91. 203. William Henry Fox Talbot, letter to the Executive Committee for the Great Exhibition, November 9, 1851 (see chapter 1, n64). 204. Ruskin: “It is no more art to use the cornea and retina for the reception of an image than to use a lens and a piece of silvered paper.” See M. Harvey (1985), 32–33. For “unity,” see Heidegger (1936). 205. In various “key paintings” Hirst links the colors and arrangements of the dots to psychogenic drug compounds, themselves modeled on the chemistry of indigenous botanical hallucinogens gleaned from third-world medicinal plants. 206. On pavilions, see Beatriz Colomina, “Pavilions of the Future,” in Eliasson et al. (2007); and my own “Brave New Morning,” in Ritchie et al. (2009). 207. See Dickinson Co. (1854); the example in the Rotch Library of MIT has a penciled name at the front matching that of an exhibiting artist. One photographic publication from the 1904 St. Louis fair was in the collection of farmers in Greenfield, New Hampshire, whence it came to me. 208. Debord (1967). 209. Robin Wilson, “Art in Process: The Palais de Tokyo,” Architectural Review, February 2003. Quotations slightly reordered for clarity. 210. See Vivian Sky Rehberg’s review in Frieze 149 (September 2012), http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/la-triennale-2012/ (accessed February 2014). 211. Enwezor thus engaged with the Palais de Tokyo’s complex relation to an ethnographic past and a multicultural present; in publicizing his exhibition for February 2014, the Palais de Tokyo paid homage to two self-taught African artists, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere. Contradictorily, the artists were celebrated for “the mission to convey a universal world and specifically its Bete people” (Bouabre) and for photographs that go “beyond the aesthetic” to construct “a unique heritage that is at once anthropological, ethnographic, and documentary” (Ojeikere). http://www.palaisdetokyo.com/en/exhibition/alerts/hommage -frederic-bruly-bouabre-et-okhai-ojeikere (accessed February 25, 2014; translation my own). 212. The 1937 Paris world’s fair was officially titled l’Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life), May 25– November 25. The New York World’s Fair that opened in 1939 had several themes and slogans, the most familiar being The World of Tomorrow. It extended into 1940, when the title changed— For Peace and Freedom— in face of escalating war in Europe. 213. The most famous pavilions reveal this shift from state to corporate agency: Philips in Brussels (1958), General Electric’s kitchen inside the American National Exhibition in Moscow (where the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” took place, 1959), IBM in New York (1964), and PepsiCo in Osaka (1970). Montréal’s Expo 67 was still organized by nation, with Frei Otto’s West German pavilion and Buckminster Fuller’s US pavilion constituting notable architectural-nationalist triumphs.

214. Quoted in Ellen C. Oppler, ed., Picasso’s Guernica (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 58. 215. This “literal geography” does not follow the map, but geopolitical affiliations. See Muntadas (2005). 216. Pavilions have different legal and economic groundings. Some plots are owned by foreign governments, some are on leased land, and some are in the awkward position of outliving their nation-states altogether. See Mulazzani (1996). 217. Elena Filipovic, “The Global White Cube,” in Vanderlinden and Filipovic, eds. (2005), 63– 84. Chapter 3 1. Goethe, January 31, 1827, as cited in translation in Prendergast, ed. (2004), 34. 2. Jozef Israëls, 1909, cited in Dekkers et al. (1999), 226. 3. Frank W. Gunsaulus, Chicago pastor, educator, art collector, and writer, reviewing Jozef Israëls’s work in 1912, as quoted in Dekkers et al. (1999), 168. 4. Liebermann (1901), 36. 5. Cited in the website of Brian Holmes, anti-neoliberal economist participating in the 2009 Istanbul biennial; http:// brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/istanbul-biennial/ (accessed September 2012). 6. The “liberal” arts encode, in their title, their status as pursuits of free men, aligned with Plato’s celebration of the philosopher-king. See chapters 1 and 6. 7. Quotation from letter in the Archivio Storico Arte Contemporanea, Foundation of the Venice Biennale (hereafter ASAC), posted online as “The Grosso case,” http://www.labiennale.org/ en/art/history/grosso.html (accessed March 2014). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. “In 1895, the municipal council of Nancy passed a resolution opposing the proposed exposition in Paris. J. Léon Goulette, editor of the Nancien journal L’Est républicain, published a strident pamphlet, Pas d’Exposition en 1900!, in which he forcibly stated the feelings shared by many opponents of the Parisian fair. His most critical points were that the provinces lost revenues during the fair years, and that the exposition (and Paris) contributed to dissipation and depravity.” Alfred Chandler, “Culmination: The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900,” World’s Fair Magazine 7, no. 3 (1987), expanded and revised January 2000 at http://charon .sfsu.edu/publications/PARISEXPOSITIONS/1900EXPO.html (accessed September 1, 2009). 11. Offering a celebration of Art Nouveau and a strong industrial economy in the contested area of Alsace-Lorraine, the Nancy exposition was considered a success and drew 2.2 million visitors. This should be compared to the count of 50.8 million visitors to the 1900 Parisian expo— some 12 million more than the population of France at the time. 12. H. Berger (1901), 111; translations my own. 13. Ibid., 112– 13. 14. Ibid., 155. This proposal was also made after the very first French world’s fair in 1855, owing to its staggering loss of 8 million French francs. Officials reported that “the days of the great Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

263

Universal Exhibitions were numbered and that special exhibitions, dealing with one particular subject only, should replace them.” This judgment did not prevail. Allwood (1977), 36. 15. H. Berger (1901), 160. 16. Daniel Birnbaum, opening remarks in Storr, conv. (2005). 17. See preface, n18. 18. This public is looser and less defined than that described in Arthur Danto’s “The Artworld” (1964). Biennial visitors may read no criticism or theory, yet they are part of the culture I want to address. 19. The “Biennial of the Frontiers” announced itself through an e-flux listserv blast on July 11, 2014, sponsored by the Instituto Tamaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes (ITCA) of the state of Tamaulipas, in collaboration with Mexico’s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. For the claim that Venice is the ur-form of such events, see Ricci, ed. (2010). 20. Distinctions between mondialisation and globlisation are common in French discourse post-1989, opposing a cultured cosmopolitanism to brute economic imperialism, which is abjured as an Anglo-American model. In this regard, see Spanish curator Rosa Martinez: “Biennials are transgenerational and transnational . . . an opportunity to break through the centers, like New York and London.” Martinez, in Thea, ed. (2001), 79. 21. The exceptions here are scholar-curators such as Rafal Niemojewski and Gerardo Mosquera, who see Havana and post-Havana biennials as ontologically distinct. See chapter 5 and bibliography. 22. The “differend” is Lyotard’s theorization of a violence wreaked on the signifying capacity of difference, which is thereby rendered mute— his model being the Holocaust. This theory is taken up more extensively in chapter 5; Lyotard (1988). 23. Biennale di Venezia website, with opening statement by Daniel Birnbaum, http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/index.html (accessed September 2, 2009). 24. For an early example of the artwork as a world, see Hieronymus Bosch, The Creation of the World, 1510, at the Prado (the outer panels of this triptych contain the Garden of Earthly Delights). 25. For notable exceptions, see Marian Pastor Roces in Filipovic et al. (2010) and Alloway (1968). Relations to the art fair are discussed briefly in chapter 5; roughly the same moment that the Biennale’s tight relation to the art market was broken (1968– 69), the Cologne art fair became international (1968– 69) and the Basel art fair was conceived (1970). 26. Rosa Martinez, interviewed in Thea, ed. (2001), 79– 80. See also anthropologist Thomas Boutoux: “All eyes, paradoxically, are never focused on Manifesta’s past editions, but on future ones”; Boutoux (2005), 213. 27. Deleuze (1968). 28. Unless explicitly cited otherwise, all references and quotes are from the founding documents in the “black box series” (Serie Scatole Nere), Box 1: “Periodo dell’Organizzazione 1894– 1895,” ASAC; translations my own. 29. See Plant (2002), 215. 30. From the minutes: “. . . come omaggio aquella Monarchia che ha dato agli Italiani la Patria. (Applausi prolongati.)” ASAC, Box 1. 264

Notes to Chapter 3

31. Minutes of the town council, April 19, 1893, as translated in Di Martino (2005), 10. 32. Emulated in the nineteenth century by journeymen such as William James Muller, the standard Venetian veduta for tourists shows the Grand Canal with Baldassare Longhena’s great Salute church (1630), which sits adjacent to the punta della dogana, or “Customs point,” which was rebuilt in this same period, with the triumphantly pagan customs house globe supported by a statue of Atlas and surmounted by winged Fortune, completed around 1677 by Giuseppe Benoni. The resulting dialectic is both worldly and divine, mercantile and blessed. 33. Architecture had been shown at the São Paulo Bienal since 1954, but the first dedicated architectural biennale in Venice opened only in 1980. Curated by Paolo Portoghesi, its theme was The Presence of the Past, marked by a “strada novissima” of postmodern architectural facades lining the postindustrial Arsenale, opened for exhibition for the first time. 34. Munich set the most persuasive model with its 1888 Der III Internationalen Kunstaustellung (third because they counted a very early 1788 show, allowing this one to become a jubilee); this city was also home to important Kunstvereins and of course the Munich “Secession.” See Alloway (1968), 33. 35. Press release, 2005 Istanbul biennial, online at http://www .universes-in-universe.de/car/istanbul/eng/2005/press-01.htm (accessed July 2010). 36. In a 2006 presentation on Matthias Müller held at Boston University, “Ruins in Reverse: Matthias Müller’s Vacancy” (unpublished), I argued that the German artist/filmmaker’s take on an “abandoned modernism” in Brasilia became, for the Istanbul biennial, a signifier of a shared postindustrial status that may not be accurate for either locale. 37. Augustine (426). I am grateful to Andrei Pop and Sigrid Weigel for their insights on cosmopolitanism. For philosophical histories, see Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, “Cosmopolitanism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/ entries/cosmopolitanism/ (accessed July 2014). See also Kleingeld (2012), Stengers (2010– 11). 38. The art activity of the United Arab Emirates includes huge new research universities and franchise museums like the Louvre Abu Dhabi. These initiatives can be viewed cynically as (1) buttressing a reputation abroad among the Western militarized democracies, which will invest optimistically in the enlightenment aspirations of the Emiratis so that (2) if the latter are endangered by, say, an expansionist nuclear Iran, there will be a cultural investment in the region justifying military intervention. Noncynically, these initiatives can also be seen as the clearheaded acknowledgment that art may be the shortest path to the information economy that will need to emerge following the end of oil. The art world is willing to overlook the fact that Emiratis are not citizens, do not have a democracy, cannot vote for their government, and represent a tiny fraction of those who live and work there, under problematic conditions. Periodic flare-ups (as when the Sharjah Biennial fired its curator, Jack Persekian, who defended a French Algerian’s provocative sculptures in 2011) mark the nodes of conflict.

39. Pierre de Coubertin, at a meeting of the Union des Sports Athlétiques in Paris, November 25, 1892, as quoted in “Olympic Games,” Britannica.com, http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0 ,5716,115022+1+108519,00.html (accessed August 10, 2000). 40. Berger (1901), 117. Quoting from Le Figaro, August 21, 1895, Berger cites a member of the Chambre des Deputies: “On simplifia la question. Nous abandonnâmes le Luxembourg qui fut déclaré pays neutre. Et, au détriment de nos intérêts extérieurs, l’exposition fut sauvée!” (Let’s simplify the question. We abandoned Luxembourg which then declared itself a neutral country. And, at the expense of our external interests, the exhibition was saved!) 41. These pavilions were usually built with a combination of foreign and local funds and then leased to national entities. They began with Belgium in 1907 (its economy flush from domination of the “Belgian” Congo), then were joined in 1909– 10 by Hungary, France, Great Britain, and Bavaria. By 1912 Bavaria had become Germany, and a pavilion had been added for Switzerland. By 1920 the Netherlands, Poland, and USA were represented— not necessarily in their own pavilions; the US pavilion was completed in 1930, the same year as Russia’s. In 1922 Spain occupied a new pavilion and was represented for the first time. By 1932, under Fascist reorganization and expansion, the island of St. Helena (Sant’ Elena) was connected with a bridge to the Giardini complex, and new pavilions were built; visitor maps enticingly proclaim “spazio riservato construendi padiglioni.” By 1934 Greece and Austria occupied new pavilions in the “reserved spaces” on St. Helena. Development froze during World War II; then during the Cold War, pavilions proliferated: Israel, Egypt, Japan, Venezuela, the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and finally Australia, Brazil, and Korea. Representation of the country’s delegation usually precedes an actual building. For this map-based forensic, see Muntadas (2005), 110– 29. 42. As of the second Venice Biennale in 1897, the city council inaugurated the Municipal Collection of Modern Art, linked to the Musei Civici di Venezia (the former was to be housed in Ca’ Pesaro and the latter in the Museo Correr). Since the 1990s, all city museums have been unified under a single administration; the point here is that purchases were made from the biennial for the municipal collection, and the biennial also supported itself from these and other sales. 43. See Redford (1996). 44. “Predicated internationalism” is my neologism designating the familiar art-world semantic describing the implied foreigner adopting an international style for a local condition: the “Pakistani Picasso,” for example (in an advertisement that arrived over e-flux, for a December 2013 exhibition of the work of Syed Sadequain) or the “Brazilian Rodin” (chapter 4). 45. Around 1754, Israëls’s forebears migrated from Mappel Drenthe to Gröningen, where they built facilities for the Jewish community and conducted a flourishing trade with Emden and other parts of Germany. Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www .jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11450-netherlands (accessed September 2013). Also see Dekkers et al. (1999). 46. Israëls’ first documented artworks come from his years as a student in Amsterdam, studying with Jan Willem Pieneman (a

history painter) and Louis Royer (a sculptor) in the early 1840s; they were echt academic machines. Israëls was certainly adept in this vein; his achievements were recognized with prizes: in 1844 for his plaster of Germanicus, and in 1845 for an Orientalist painting, Een Turk in verpozing (Turk in Repose). It is tempting to see these themes as triangulating the edge points of Israëls’s own identity around the twin polestars of German history and Orientalism; his success led supporters to encourage a stay in Paris to study with two academic painters: François-Edouard Picot (trainer of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, master of fini) and Paul Delaroche (student of Baron Gros). While in Paris he also began to model himself on a successful precursor, Ary Scheffer, a Netherlandish painter who had become a naturalized Frenchman. But although in 1853 he would visit Scheffer’s studio as an admirer, by 1855 he had begun to pull away from the painter, whom Charles Baudelaire vilified as “a sentimental monkey” in his Salon reviews. See Dekkers et al. (1999), 21. 47. Dekkers et al. (1999), 134. 48. The trope is examined in Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New York: Random House, 1963). 49. These sentiments have their own histories, fully elaborated in Germany, as one can see in the Enlightenment jurist Johann Georg Schlosser, whose critical eighteenth-century poem “Der Kosmopolit” opines that “it is better to be proud of one’s nation than to have none.” Schlosser, in “Politische Fragmente,” Deutsche Museum (1777), 106, as cited in Kleingeld (2012), 6. The particular “problem” of Jewish rootlessness is famously posited by Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question” (1844), http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ (accessed June 2015). 50. Biennale di Venezia (1895), 51. 51. Israëls’s “universalism” could even play a role in the complex nationalism of the Zionist movement, within which the artist became celebrated as “a model of the Jew who can succeed as an artist and gain an international reputation” while still holding on to the signs of difference that could be codified, without too much exaggeration, as the essentialist basis for an eventual Jewish state. Sorin Heller, curator of the exhibition Jozef Israëls, A Heart’s Desire, at the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel, 2004; http:// research.haifa.ac.il/~hecht/israels-exhibition.html (accessed May 2012). Zionist activist Theodor Herzl visited Israëls in 1899, and the artist attended the Eighth Zionist Congress in the Hague, but scholars even now are quick to say that his work did not “serve” those ideas. Dekkers et al. (1999), 38 et passim. 52. The academician [T.] Van Westrheene visited Israëls’s studio at the turn of 1854– 55 and tapped the young artist for inclusion in the Dutch contingent at the 1855 grand exposition. Dekkers et al. (1999), 134. 53. Letter from Israëls to Jan Veth, July 10, 1900, as quoted in Dekkers et al. (1999), 132. 54. A militant Catholic from Franche-Comté, Balthasar Gérard, shot William of Orange to death with a pistol in 1584 and was executed for the assassination. 55. Dekkers et al. (1999), 21; Israëls to Veth, July 10, 1900, as quoted in Dekkers et al. (1999), 132. Notes to Chapter 3

265

56. Mainardi (1987; 1991). 57. See Dekkers et al. (1999), 21 et passim. The reference to Israëls’s illness comes from the British critic J. Ernest Pythian (1912), 11– 12. 58. Certainly Stonebreakers was in the 1855 Realist pavilion; it appears in caricature behind a self-congratulatory Courbet in Journal pour rire, January 12, 1856, for which see Mainardi (1991). 59. Review in Algemeene Konst- en Letterbode (1856), as cited in Dekkers et al. (1999), 22. 60. Unnamed critic, “Exposition de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles,” L’Indépendance Belge, September 27, 1857, as cited in Dekkers et al. (1999), 138. 61. Dekkers does acknowledge that Courbet’s “own entry at the World Exhibition of 1855 could not have escaped him.” Dekkers et al. (1999), 22. 62. See Mainardi (1991), for a convincing discussion of Courbet’s considered choice of the English term exhibition in place of the French exposition. Mainardi also surfaces the specter of carnival that haunted Courbet. 63. Liebermann (1901), 26. 64. Ibid., 27. 65. The remark is prompted when a woman applies expensive oil to Jesus’s head, and the apostles complain that the money might better be spent on the poor. Jesus’s response is glossed variously in Matthew 26:6– 13, Mark 14:3– 9, and John 12:1– 8. 66. Following a thorough state evaluation of his political background in 1852, Millet was “pre-approved” for the important venue of the world’s fair: “Millet tempered his usual brutal realism, perhaps in response to government pressure to display noncontroversial themes for an international audience. . . . Millet’s friend Sensier occupied a key post in the Ministry of the Interior and regularly mediated between the government of Napoléon III and the painter.” Boime (2007), 199. See also Herbert (2002), 35-40. 67. Gunsaulus, reviewing Israëls’ work in 1912, as quoted in Dekkers et al. (1999), 168. 68. Augustine (426). The enabling myth of cosmopolitanism that I’ve touched on so far finds an eerie echo in Arthur Danto’s important essay “The Artworld”: “The artworld stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the Earthly City.” Danto (1964), 582. The Dreyfus affair, an antiSemitic campaign against a Jewish officer in the French army who was convicted of treason using forged evidence, was not resolved until 1906; Captain Dreyfus went on to serve during World War I, and the case remains salient in debates over French “universalism” to this day. 69. Pythian (1912, 60) justifies his argument thus: “Though Millet was ten years older than Israëls, he had only just left the studio of Delaroche when the latter entered it. The year . . . Millet painted the first of his great peasant pictures, The Winnower, was the year that Israëls left Paris, soon to come to his awakening at Zandvoort. In 1857 Israëls exhibited at the Paris Salon two seashore pictures. In 1859 Millet’s Death and the Woodcutter was rejected at the Salon.” 70. National Gallery of Art, London, http://www .nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jozef-israels-fishermen-carrying -a-drowned-man (accessed January 2013). 266

Notes to Chapter 3

71. Dake (1900). 72. Compiled from Dekkers, a list of showings for Israëls includes most major fairs and biennials: Grand Exposition, Paris, 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1900 (with a gold medal for the last); Great Exhibition, London, 1862; Philadelphia world’s fair, 1876; International Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1886 and 1901; International Exhibition, Stuttgart, 1891; Chicago world’s fair, 1893; and the first Venice Biennale, 1895. He also exhibited in academic or commercial galleries— fifteen Paris Salons, 1861, 1868– 69, 1876– 77, 1880– 84, 1888, 1890, 1892, and 1895– 96; French Gallery, London, 1864; Allston Club, Boston, 1867; Boston Art Club, 1873; Les XX, Brussels, 1884; and Brooklyn Art Association, 1887— and in museums: Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1875; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which hosted six paintings shown at Chicago’s 1893 fair. 73. Jan Veth, “Modern Dutch Art: The Work of Jozef Israëls,” Studio 26 (1902): 114, as cited in Alloway (1968), 42. 74. Cf. Storm (2008). 75. See chapter 2 in the present book, and C. Jones (2008b). Since Guernica was also channeling the peasant interior from Vincent van Gogh’s Potato Eaters (1885), we can say that Picasso indirectly referenced an earlier painting that influenced van Gogh: Peasant Family at the Table (1882). Now at the Van Gogh museum, it is by the artist van Gogh described to his brother Theo as “the Dutch Millet” (i.e., Jozef Israëls). 76. For Fairytale, Ai Weiwei’s complex project for documenta 12 in 2007, see Charles Merewether and Ai Weiwei, Under Construction (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2008), and Lia Vivian Monti, “Beyond the ‘Fake Smile’: Ai Weiwei’s Vision for Individual Rights in China,” Duke East Asia Nexus (2012), http:// sites.duke.edu/dean/2012/04/17/beyond-the-fake-smile-ai-weiweis-vision-for-individual-rights-in-china/ (accessed July 2014). 77. Lind (2009), 103. 78. The history of the Venice Biennale under Fascism involves the Futurists; Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who had distributed leaflets against the Biennale in 1910 and had been barred from appearing there in 1924, was a key player four years later once the Fascist state had put the Biennale under its direct control. A crucial role in this history was played by the Sindacato [Fascista] Belle Arti, which had become official in Italy after World War I. Its syndicalist system built from small shows in small cities, through regional exhibitions, to the “Nazionali,” which took place in Florence (1933), Naples (1937), and Milan (1941). Venice is conspicuously absent from this list, as is Rome (for different reasons). See Salvagnini (2000). With thanks to Renato Dias Ferraretto Moura Rocco for this reference. 79. See Stone (1997), 206. 80. “Relazione della Commissione consultiva, 1894, Exposizioni biennali artistiche da tenerdi in Venezia” (dated March 27, 1894), 5; ASAC, Box 1. 81. Ibid., 16. 82. For “will to globality,” see Enwezor (2010). 83. The biennial was transformed into an “autonomous body” under central (Fascist) governmental control through a law passed January 13, 1930 (see n78, supra); the US pavilion, completed that year, would have had to negotiate with that authority.

84. This moment is often cited as marking the periodization of “contemporary” (as opposed to modern or postmodern) art; see, e.g., Kocur and Leung, eds. (2012). 85. See, for example, Marisa Mazria Katz’s essay on Stateless Nation, where Hilal and Petti are described as “Bethlehem-based,” on the website More Intelligent Life, http://moreintelligentlife.com/ content/marisa-mazria-katz/stateless-nation-palestine-venice -biennale (accessed September 2012). 86. Sandi Hilal in Christopher Hawthorne, “The Venice Biennale’s Palestine Problem,” New York Times, June 1, 2003, archived at http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000189.php (accessed May 2009). 87. Hilal and Petti have gone on to direct a “Decolonizing Architecture” residence program in the disputed West Bank, engaging an extensive collaboration with Israeli-born, Londonbased architect and theorist Eyal Weizman, through funding provided by the US-based Haudenschild Foundation (founded by Argentinean art collector Eloisa Haudenschild). The residency is run out of Bethlehem, with an experimental site in Beit Sahour, Palestine; http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/ (accessed September 2012). 88. The Turkish pavilion, curated by Beryl Madra, was housed by Fondazione Levi, which owns the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, built by Baldassare Longhena overlooking the Grand Canal of Venice. 89. For Henry Meyric Hughes on Manifesta as recapitulating the “Europe of Charlemagne,” see Vanderlinden and Filipovic, eds. (2005), 199. 90. “What Is Turquality?” information cards were distributed at the 2005 Turkish pavilion, explaining the goal of helping Turkish companies “differentiate their brands, promote positive consumer perception, and ensure long-life satisfaction in the highly competitive global markets.” 91. “Three Questions to the Minister of State for Culture Dr. Christina Weiss,” in DekaBank (2005), 16. Hussein Chalayan, quoted in Constance C. R. White, “Chalayan’s High-Wire Act,” New York Times, April 21, 1998, Style section. 92. Freund (2003). Freund, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, interprets the sultry music videos of Arabic-speaking female pop singers (most of them Christian) in a way that opens the door for a discussion of youth culture in the Middle East but also smooths the way for future exports of American mass media, and US imports of North African pop. 93. The 1999 Oreste alla Biennale— Oreste at the Venice Biennale was certainly an avatar of the 2003 Utopia Station but had none of its real estate. See chapters 5 and 6. 94. Yung Ho Chang also collaborated with Hans Ulrich Obrist on Cities on the Move, a cumulative exhibition that toured the world (1997– 99) and focused on Asian art and urbanism. 95. Utopia was one of curator Harald Szeemann’s core “obsessions,” as discussed in chapter 5; Obrist’s affinity for Szeemann’s practice is well documented and formed an acknowledged source for Utopia Station. 96. The Chinese government refused to provide funds for dismantling the piece, leaving Biennale administrators with the six-

figure expense. Informal interview with curator Agnes Kohlmeyer, October 29, 2005. 97. For experimental Chinese artists of the 1990s as continuing a Confucian practice of admonition, see Oen (2012). Chapter 4 1. Budasz (2005). 2. Letter from Cícero Dias to “Ciccillo” Matarazzo, Director, Fundação de Arte Moderna, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (henceforth Svevo/SPB Archives), folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Received.” The dating of this letter is conjectural. A date of “July” is visible, someone has penciled “1949” onto the inked manuscript letter, and the same date is written on a transcript of this letter; however as of August 2014, the folder for these materials is still labeled 00/07/1948. Based on internal evidence, and on a previous letter from Cícero Dias to Matarazzo referencing similar matters and dated June 1948, I believe the second letter to be dated July 1948. I am grateful to my Brazilian research assistants Deborah Magnani and Renata Rocco for assisting with these translations. For all non-English materials from Svevo/SPB Archives, final translations are my own unless otherwise noted. NB: the labeling of Svevo/SPB folders is somewhat erratic, owing to the multiple roles played by a figure such as Ciccillo Matarazzo, who was director of the Gallery, the Foundation, the Museum, and the Bienal by turns or simultaneously. 3. “Pois agora chegou a vez da arte. Basta de sermos considerados apenas macumbeiros ou espertos jogadores de futebol. Agora seremos apresentados como artistas.” Lygia Fagundes Telles, “I Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna,” A Manhá (Rio de Janeiro), July 15, 1951, as cited in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 37. Translations from the Portuguese are my own unless otherwise noted. 4. Ferreira Gullar, Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento (Ensaios sobre a arte) (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969), 21, as translated in Ramírez, Olea, et al. (2004), 329. 5. The choice of antropófago, Portuguese for “man-eating,” was purposeful, since the word canibal exists. It refers to the powerful agenda announced by poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928 in the “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” inspired by the paintings of his partner Tarsila do Amaral, discussed below. Although not officially Surrealist, anthropophagia originated in the penumbra of that movement, then being canonized where Andrade was writing, in Paris. As Andrade wrote in the “second dentition” of the Revista de Antropofagia, “After Surrealism, only Anthropophagy,” for which see Carlos Augusto Machado Calil, “Translators of Brazil,” in Schwartz et al. (2002), 568. 6. See correspondence between Abramo and Matarazzo, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Diretoria Executiva (Exec Dir: Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho).” 7. “O princípio que norteia toda a produção de Antônio Maluf, desde o desenho que deu origem ao cartaz da 1 Bienal até a atualidade, é o conceito de equação dos desenvolvimentos.” Regina Teixeira Barros and Taisa Helena P. Linhares, Antônio Maluf, Arte Concreta Paulista (São Paulo: Ed. Cosac Naify, 2000), 13. Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

267

8. The Portuguese moniker for a citizen of São Paulo takes the feminine form Paulista, with no gender implied.. 9. Hilton Kramer (1967b), 137, paraphrasing Calvin Coolidge and denigrating São Paulo’s Bienal. 10. The campaign for centrality was mounted from a position Brazilians themselves understood to be peripheral and sluggish; as one São Paulo curator wrote to a MoMA staffer in 1947, “Unfortunately, everything in Brazil takes time: you talk there in terms of weeks, and we in terms of years.” Carlos Pinto Alves (listed as “director” of Galeria de Arte Moderna) to Carleton Sprague Smith (associate of Nelson Rockefeller, part-time MoMA employee, some-time cultural attaché in Brazil, and long-term staff member at the New York Public Library), August 4, 1947. Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Galeria de Arte Moderna, Director, Correspondence Sent.” 11. Schwarz (1992), 27, 30. For the agregado, or sharecropper— the supposedly free man who was neither the proprietor of the latifundium nor the slave who worked its fields— Schwarz argues a similar codependency, for which see ibid., 22. See also Caio Prado Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil, trans. Suzette Macedo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 12. A note on my use of “indigenous,” here yoked to “racialized”— I mean to allude to the problem whereby references to native peoples (in this case, Tupi Indians) or Afro-Brazilians are collapsed into “national” or “vernacular” categories. I also mean to avoid triggering “indigenism”/indigenismo, a programmatic component of Romantic– Latin American modernism that wielded symbolic tropes of the native in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries (these were not the speech acts of actual indigenous people). Finally, “indigenous” is here distinguished from “indigeneity,” which has come to designate the radical ontological difference or specific sociohistorical experience of native peoples. My thanks go to the anonymous reviewer for Art Margins who insisted I clarify these points. 13. Amilcar Packer, “Her Eminence the Influence,” in Brazil/The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide 2013, http://venicebiennale2013 .ideologicalguide.com/pavilion/brazil/ (accessed March 2014). For an earlier related critique, see M. Coelho (1998). 14. Becquer and Gatti (1991), 69. 15. Guilbaut (1997) offers a related account. 16. For the Quadriennale’s role in Fascism, see Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Di Prete’s claim to have first had the idea for a Bienal in São Paulo is oral history, alluded to in Pedrosa (1960). For a full discussion see Rocco (2015). 17. Vargas is credited with the production of a new urban middle class in Brazil, if only by “an ad hoc response to market conditions rather than an attempt to change the economic bases of the system of power.” Cardoso and Faletto (1979), 90– 93. 18. “Ao mesmo tempo em que, para São Paulo se buscaria conquistar a posição de centro artístico mundial. Era inevitável a referência a Veneza.” Machado (1951), 15. 19. Ibid. The São Paulo Museum of Modern Art organized Brazil’s national representation in the twenty-fifth Venice Biennale the year before launching their own Bienal. 268

Notes to Chapter 4

20. Drouin was working on retainer for the Bienal, while he maintained the Galerie René Drouin on rue Visconti in Paris. The Wanda Svevo archives of the Bienal are replete with telegrams and internal communications about the letters of credit the first exhibition required, together with the free or discounted shipping negotiated with business partners of Matarazzo and diplomatic “pouches” imaginatively enlarged to cover art, which would then be free of customs or duties. Matarazzo was a genius of the shoestring enterprise. 21. While Brazil was still a colony, composer Antonio Carlos Gomes received royal patronage to write an opera in Italy on a Brazilian subject. Gomes chose the Brazilian writer José de Alencar’s Romantic novel O Guarani (1857), which tells the tale of a conquistador falling in love with an Indian (Tupi-Guarani) princess. The opera premiered in May 1870 at the La Scala Theater in Milan as Il Guarany, and caused a sensation. Thanks to film scholar José Gatti for an introduction to this material. 22. Dias would have known Tarsila do Amaral and her sometime partner Oswald de Andrade in Paris. For the Surrealist context, see K. David Jackson, “Oswald de Andrade e André Breton: Paixoes loucas, loucos textos,” Remate de Males (Campinas, São Paulo) 33, nos. 1– 2 ( January– December 2013): 149– 68. 23. During the Second Republic (1930-45), architect Lúcio Costa was briefly named director of the National School of Fine Arts in Rio, opening the “Revolutionary Salon” in 1931 and inviting Cícero Dias to present a massive screen, approximately twenty feet long and featuring childhood and erotic scenes, which was subjected to violent public attacks. See the Brazilian Art Education website, http://www.arteducacao.pro.br/artistabrasil/Cdias/cdias .htm (accessed April 2014). 24. Dias’s letters to Matarazzo were sent from Recife in June and July of 1948, but by November Matarazzo was corresponding with him at a Paris address (the Brazilian embassy on avenue Montaigne). Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Exec. Dir. Correspondence.” Also see entry for Cícero Dias, posted 2/12/2005, in Encyclopedia Itaú Cultural, http://www.itaucultural.org.br (accessed September 2011). 25. Different sources give founding dates for the Foundation and Museum as 1946, 1947, 1948, or even 1949. Certainly the inaugural exhibition opened in 1949. But Dias’s letter to Matarazzo of summer 1948 indicates the museum is well under way, and the Rockefeller Archives contain correspondence as early as 1946 alluding to a modern museum in the making. 26. “Preparando o caminho da Kodak”— Cícero Dias, letter to Ciccillo Matarazzo Sobrinho, July 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fund., Exec. Dir. Corres. Rec’d.” 27. The work in question, Dias’s Mulher sentada com espelho, was given to the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro by Gilberto Chateaubriand, son of “Chatô” Assis de Chateaubriand, about whom more below. 28. As the critic Mário Pedrosa asked of Dias’s turn to abstraction in 1948, “To what extent is this cerebral and instinctive artist, this Parisian by adoption, who stays in his cosmopolitanism with its roots deep in Pernambuco earth, even a Brazilian artist?” Pedrosa (1952a), 229– 37; this quote from 231, my own translation.

29. See Guilbaut (2007; 1997). 30. On MoMA director Barr’s talismanic diagram, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 348– 71. 31. Giunta (2007), 43. 32. I’m grateful to Robin Greeley and to Alex Alberro for discussions on these points. Within the huge literature on “internationalism” in Latin American art, see Anreus et al., eds. (2012); Fox (2013); Michela Rosso, “Joaquin Torres-García y David Alfaro Siqueiros: Una historia de encuentros y desencuentros,” Materia 5 (2005): 129– 44; Gianmarco Visconti, “Universal Constructivism and Politics: Torres-García in Conversation with Siqueiros,” Constellations 5, no. 1 (2013): 67– 84. 33. “False modern art”— letter from C. Dias to F. Matarazzo, June 23, 1948; “nothing picturesque”— Dias to Matarazzo, July 1948 (see n2 above). Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fund., Exec. Dir. Corres. Rec’d.” On the meeting in Paris, see Guilbaut (1997), 813. Guilbaut’s account is richly detailed but has few cited sources. 34. Léon Degand may have been the primary inspiration for Matarazzo’s own turn to the more experimental art of post-Cubism, per Siwi (2009). On the other hand, Matarazzo was familiar with Swiss collections of modernism before coming to direct the Museu, and he had visited MoMA many times, per Rockefeller Archives. 35. Guilbaut (1997), 812. 36. Julian Payró, “¿Arte abstracto o arte no objectivo? Carte abierta a Guillermo de Torre” (ca. 1949), translated and cited without publication details in Giunta (2007), 46. 37. Léon [Fréderic] Degand to Lula Cardoso Ayres in Recife, September 14, 1948; Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “MAM [Museu de Arte Moderna/Museum of Modern Art] Correspondence, Director.” 38. For Torres-García’s “School of the South,” see Giunta (2007), 46 et passim; Ledezma (2007); Ramírez, Olea, et al. (2004), 73– 83; M. Sullivan (2013). On Brazilian artist Cândido Portinari as presenting a “third term” in the Siqueiros/TorresGarcía debate, see Gabriel Peluffo Linari in Anreus et al., eds. (2012). I have also learned from Vicario (2015). 39. Michel Simon, “A proposito do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo,” Correio da Manha, 27 March, 1949. Svevo/SPB Archives, Press Clippings, Box 1. 40. The group Arte Concreto-Invención, of which Bayley was a part, was founded in 1944. See Edgar M. Bayley, “Sobre arte concreto,” in Orientación, the “órgano central del Partido Comunista” (Buenos Aires, Argentina), no. 327 (February 20, 1946), translated as “On Concrete Art,” in Suárez et al. (2011), 422. 41. Ibid. 42. Adrian Anagnost, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, presented a compelling argument on the impact of the European diaspora, for which see Anagnost (2012). While the argument about the specific contributions of Eastern Europeans should not be overstressed, a typical case is Brazil’s first modernist architect, Gregori Warchavchik, who arrived from Russia in 1923, married the daughter of a Paulista industrialist, built the first modernist dwelling in the São Paulo neighborhood of Vila Mariana, and published a manifesto on modernist architecture in Correio da

Manhã, November 1925. Niemeyer, with his German and Swiss roots, and Kubitschek, with his Czech gypsy mother, somehow fit this broad pattern. 43. Born Fernando Fallik (April 26, 1924) in Košice, Slovakia, Gyula Kosice was brought to Argentina in 1928 and took the name of his city of origin when he became an artist. He studied at the art academy in Buenos Aires and cofounded Arturo— the original journal of the Arte Concreto-Invención group— with Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, and Edgar Maldonado Bayley. By 1946 the group split in two; Kosice, Rothfuss, and others formed Madí, while Bayley, his brother Tomás Maldonado, and others consolidated as the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención. Thanks to Tomás Saraceno, Ana María León, and Alexander Alberro for information on Kosice. 44. Lula Cardoso Ayres was “happy as a burro!” to have his paintings included, and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti hints to Matarazzo that a prize for his three new paintings would make for “total happiness.” Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Correspondence from Participants [in First Bienal].” 45. On Latin American “whitening” doctrines, see Skidmore (1990); Williams (2001); Lopez-Duran (2009). 46. Note the exoticism that Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, and other cosmopolitan Brazilians experienced in the state of Minas Gerais, north of São Paulo, during the caravana modernista that set off during 1924 with visiting poet Blaise Cendrars from Paris. See White (2004). Amaral (1997) notes that despite being invited by industrialists of the region to visit its modern housing and up-to-date mining facilities, the modernistas chose instead the old colonial churches and favelas whose colors would appear, a few months later, in Andrade’s Manifesto PauBrasil in Paris. The critique of Brazilian cultural elites as a coastal fringe ignoring a real Brazil of the interior was mounted by Roland Corbisier as early as 1976: “This Portuguese and tropical America, with its littoral (coastal) civilization [that] originated from European capitalism, cannot be the forerunner of a nation, but only a disjointed aggregation still firmly attached to colonial mentality . . . this littoral civilization, which is a mere reflection and subproduct of European trends, can only create alienation and estrangement.” Quoted in translation with no citation by Guilbaut (1997), 809, but likely Corbisier (1976). 47. The shift from slave labor began already in 1870, as the “coffee growers of São Paulo began to replace slaves with immigrant labor” to form “a pure capitalist situation . . . in the ‘agroexport system’,” for which see Cardoso and Faletto (1979), 90. US xenophobia during the same period is marked by the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. 48. Schwarz (1992), 110. 49. Budasz (2005). Note that Budasz minimizes the intermediate population: the criollos or creole population, native Latin Americans of mostly Spanish/Portuguese parentage (with some indigenous and African contributions), who would organize most of the continent’s revolutions, but figure as “on the way to white” in the unspoken hierarchy of the hemisphere. See Fry (2000). 50. Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, letter of July 25, 1951, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Correspondence from Participants.” Notes to Chapter 4

269

51. In fact, I became so convinced by numerous sources of its importance that I mistakenly assumed its recurrence; thanks to Sérgio Martins for catching this error. See C. Jones (2013), plus letter to the editor and response. 52. Aranha’s inaugural address was delivered in 1922 at the Teatro Municipal in São Paulo; the Brazilian Academy oration was given on June 19, 1924. Aranha’s sublime racial theory no doubt influenced José Vasconcelos, minister of education in postrevolutionary Mexico, who published “La Raza Cósmica” (The Cosmic Race) in 1925, arguing that the mixture of indigenous “Indian” and immigrant European peoples (Africa is notably absent here) would produce a fifth or “cosmic” race. Related to the “whitening” theories (n45, supra), miscegenation was transvalued in these theories, as it was through the 1930s in the landmark study by Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (student of Boas), Casa grande e senzala: Formação da familia brasileira sob o regimen de economia patriarchal (Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt, 1933), translated as The Masters and the Slaves. See Fry (2000) and Skidmore (1990) for more on these topics. 53. Literary theorist Erdmute Wenzel White has crafted a different binary, using the writers Mário de Andrade and (no relation) Oswald de Andrade, arguing that Mário precedes Oswald in anthropophagic ideas. See White (2004). 54. The Brazilian case is thus quite distinct from the indigenismo advocated elsewhere in Latin America. 55. See Asbury (2006). 56. Thanks to Alexander Alberro for sharing with me a draft of his forthcoming book on concretism on both sides of the Atlantic (Alberro 2017). In Alberro’s view, the “sublimation” I’ve imputed to abstraction is contested by a close reading of these works’ sheer materiality. Indeed, I will later want to see Niemeyer’s “concrete” in just such a way. But at this point in the chapter, I am focusing on the function of concretism within a more general public agenda set by the biennial director and curators— as smoothing over, transcending, and subliming difference. 57. Aranha, cited in Benedito Nunes, “Anthropophagic Utopia: Barbarian Metaphysics,” in Ramírez, Olea, et al, (2004), 60. See also Graça Aranha, O Espirito Moderno, 2nd ed. (1922; São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1966), 59. 58. Schwarz (1992), 119; emphasis in the original. 59. Ibid. For the critique of Paulista collectors as less discerning and likely to end up with poor examples of “modern masters,” see Miceli (2003). Thanks to Rafael Cardoso for this reference. 60. The embrace of modernismo occurred when poet Menotti del Picchia (born in São Paulo, 1892) was presented with a bronze mask by the “incontestable Brazilian Rodin” (note the predicated internationalism), Victor Brecheret, at a banquet celebrating del Picchia’s new book of poems, As Mascaras, held in 1920 at the Trianon in São Paulo’s central district. Asbury (2006), 77. Per Asbury, “Central to this group were the figures of Malfatti as the scandalous painter and Brecheret as the reconciliatory sculptor.” 61. For a view that sees the Semana as more conservative, see Asbury (2006), 74, and Brito et al. (2011). See also Annateresa Fabris, “Forms of (Possible) Modernity,” in Schwartz et al. (2002), 539ff. 270

Notes to Chapter 4

62. Although Floyd O’Neale, Sara Friedman, and Abraham S. Baylinson also showed during this period, Malfatti’s works made the biggest impact, particularly her solo show in 1917. Asbury cites the excoriating criticism of that exhibition by regionalist novelist and critic Monteiro Lobato, for which see Asbury (2006), 77n29. Mário Pedrosa recalled Malfatti’s exhibition favorably, but misdated it to 1916 in his history of the Semana modernists. In Alambert and Canhête’s paraphrase: “This situation was contagious for intellectuals brought into direct contact with the exhibition of Anita Malfatti. During the war, in 1916, the modernist veteran was in São Paulo with a show of Expressionist and Cubist paintings. ‘Those paintings,’ Mário [Pedrosa] confesses, ‘were a revelation.’ Contamination by the new spirit was instantaneous, with burning youth predisposed to its message.” See Mário Pedrosa (1952c), 136; Alambert and Canhête (2004), 22. Translation my own, with the assistance of Renata Rocco. 63. For analysis, see Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Petrina Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 64. Alambert and Canhête (2004), 22, paraphrasing Pedrosa (1952c), 137. 65. See the discussion of Picasso’s 1907 Demoiselles in C. Jones (2008b). For Brazilians, “The daring shocks administered by Picasso . . . at bottom fitted our cultural heritage better than theirs.” Antônio Cândido, “Literatura e cultura de 1900 a 1945,” (1965), cited by Schwarz (1992), 124n3. 66. Notably critic Monteiro Lobato in his reviews from 1917; Alambert and Canhête (2004); Asbury (2006). Asbury notes Lobato would later become “a main reference for regionalists,” as the experimental realist Mário de Andrade had also been, for which see Asbury (2003), 166n17; White (2004). 67. I adopt “intercultural” from global curator Okwui Enwezor; see Meyer et al. (2003), 211. 68. Andrade (1924; 1928); Bary (1991), 35– 44. 69. Andrade (1924), as translated by Héctor Olea and published in Ramírez, Olea, et al. (2004), 465. 70. The concept of “transculturation” was invented by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 as a specific rejection of the Anglo-American term “acculturation,” which assumes simple assimilation of the dominated other into the hegemonic mainstream. For a strong transculturalist reading, see Rama (2012). 71. Asbury importantly deviates from this usual translation, substituting simply “the one who eats.” This cuts against decades of interpretations of “Abaporu” as cannibal owing to its association with antropofagia. Asbury (2003), 152. 72. The painting is now owned by a private collector in Argentina; hence it had to be specially borrowed for the photo-op. Reporting President Obama’s response to Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who asked about the “prospects of repatriating Abaporu as part of Brazil’s cultural heritage,” the Buenos Aires Herald quoted him saying “Dilma, ask Cristina,” directing her to Argentinean president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. “Obama in Brazil, Far from Argentina,” March 22, 2011, on the Argentinean government’s press

website, http://prensa.cancilleria.gov.ar/noticia.php?id=22564051 (accessed January 2012). 73. The reputation of Tarsila do Amaral has fallen since the interwar period. Schwarz cites Gilda de Mello e Souza on the nationalism of her works: “[Tarsila] did not essentially alter the nature of the fruits, the birds, the boats; but the same technique applied to a black lad removed dignity from him, and made the whole thing look decorative in the manner of a poster advertisement.” Souza, “Vanguarda e nacionalismo na década de vinte,” in Exercícios de leitura (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1980), 268– 69; as cited in Schwarz (1992), 125. Asbury notes the details of Abaporu’s genesis in “her comments following a humorous and nonsensical impromptu speech given by Oswald de Andrade at a dinner party” and culminating with the painting being given its title by Andrade in collaboration with Raul Bopp, “after consulting a dictionary of native Brazilian Tupi-Guarani language.” Asbury (2003), 152, 168nn42– 43. Tarsila herself proudly quotes from reviews of the Pau-Brasil exhibition in Paris where Abaporu was first shown: “Here there are purely Brazilian autochthonous or imaginary scenes: the outskirts of São Paulo, families of Blacks, children in the sanctuary, and angels with a wholly animal mysticism.” Comments attributed to Maurice Raynal in Tarsila do Amaral, “Pau-Brasil Painting and Antropofagia,” Revista Anual do Salão de Maio 1 (São Paulo, 1939), as translated in Schwartz et al. (2002), 594. For the theory that Abaporu is a self-portrait, forwarded by the artist’s granddaughter, Tarsilinha do Amaral, see Edison Veiga, “Traços de Família,” Jornal do Estado de São Paulo, Artes Visuais (Visual Arts section), May 14, 2014. 74. For “standing reserve,” see Heidegger (1938). The first mention of “pau-brasil” is in Os Lusíadas, the epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões published in 1572, which identifies the redwood tree Caesalpinia echinata as the basis for the new land’s export economy. See also Lafer (2000), 207– 38. 75. Not discussed here are competing formulations in Latin America, such as indigenismo and regionalismo, which favored rural tropes from the interior of Brazil. Modernismo was an urban development. See White (2004); Corbisier (1976). 76. Post-Semana associations included “proletarian artists” who formed the St. Helena Group; the Sociedade Pro-Arte Moderna (SPAM) and Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM), both of which formed in 1932 to push the Semana goals into real politics; and the Club of Artists and Friends of the Arts (Clube dos Artistas e Amigos da Arte), formed in 1945. As sociologists Alambert and Canhête point out, these collectivities were active long after the Semana had waned: the May salons were held in São Paulo from 1937 to 1939. Along with the first Salon of Art at the National Industrial Fair in Rio de Janeiro in 1941, they offered important small-scale repetitions. Alambert and Canhête (2004), 24. 77. Andrade’s manifesto had a trademark phrase— “Tupi or not Tupi”— that revealed a muddled indigeneity that only articulates itself in relation to European tropes of artistic individualism, melancholy, and the literary canon (the Hamlet pun only works if you know Shakespeare’s English). 78. The conceptual division of the world into first (the developed, capitalist West), second (the industrializing, communist

East), and third (the contested South) was announced only shortly after this biennial, in 1952, by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in the French magazine L’Observateur. 79. These influences are confirmed by Ciccillo’s wife, Yolanda Penteado, the coffee fazenda aristocrat who proved instrumental in negotiating— in person— the participation of numerous countries as the Bienal’s “ambassador,” bearing letters of introduction from good old developmentalist President Getúlio Vargas (rehabilitated and newly elected for a second term). According to Yolanda’s memoirs, Ciccillo asked for her help: “I wrote to several countries, suggesting the idea [of a Bienal], but no response came. You want to try?” Penteado (1977), 178; translation my own. 80. Bonomi (2001– 2), 31– 32. 81. Deleuze (1968). 82. Lafer (2000), 219, 226– 27. 83. Flávio de Aquino, “As razôes do concretismo,” Jornal do Comércio, June 7, 1959, clipping from Svevo/ SPB Archive, as cited and translated in Nelson (2010), 131. 84. Alambert and Canhête (2004), 14. The “nexus” they examine includes the broad campaign on the part of the United States to promote American modern art abroad, another component of the Cold War context. 85. For “centro artistico mundial,” see Machado (1951), 14. For a useful set of quotes from this first catalogue and reflections on its implications, see Mesquita and Cohen, eds. (2008). I’m grateful to Ana Gonçalves Magalhães for bringing this edition to my attention. 86. José Gómez Sicre, head of the Visual Arts Section for the Organization of American States, Pan American Union, headquartered in Washington, DC, wrote to the new artistic director of the Bienal, Lourival Gomes Machado, suggesting that artists from Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico should be invited. Svevo/SPB Archives, Box 1/11, folder: “Washington, DC, March 2, 1951.” 87. Nelson (2010), 127– 28. 88. Siwi (2009). 89. French was Ciccillo Matarazzo’s preferred language. Svevo/ SPB Archives are full of typed translations into French from the Portuguese, which he must not have read very well. 90. After receiving a coded cable from Washington promising support for the Brazilian steel industry, Vargas wrote in his diary in 1940: “It is a new sort of life for Brazil: wealth and power.” See Lafer (2000), 225. 91. See Prutsch (2010), 184. 92. See “Matarazzo Family History” on the website of the Italian international school founded by Matarazzo’s descendants, http://www.littlestardaycare.it/matarazzo-family-history.php (accessed April 2012). 93. Report and Balance sheet for s/a Indústrias Reunidas F. Matarazzo (IRFM), the holding company headed by Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho (“Francisco Matarazzo Junior” in the English translation), São Paulo Brazil. Consulted in the Rockefeller Archives, Nelson A. Rockefeller [NAR] RG4 (personal)/ Countries/Box 17/Folder 132: Brazil: Matarazzo Sobrinho, Francisco, 1950– 1970 Mr.& Mrs. (Yolanda Pentendo [sic]). Calculation of contemporary economic value via the website of Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a Notes to Chapter 4

271

U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to present,” Measuring Worth, 2014, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php (accessed August 2014). 94. “I was very glad to have the opportunity of visiting with the Matarazzos,” writes Nelson Rockefeller in an edited draft for a letter sent September 23, 1948, to Mr. Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand, Diarios Associados, [avenida Rio Branco 129] Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rockefeller Archives, NAR RG 4 (Personal)/ Projects, MoMA/Museums Brazil: Museu de Arte– São Paulo, Box 149 Folder 1471. 95. See the letter from Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (then director of the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art) to Hans Knoll of H. G. Knoll Associates, October 15, 1948; a copy was sent to the Matarazzos along with a mimeographed list headed “Recommended Books on Industrial Design” for Yolanda. Svevo/ SPB Archives, folder: [MAM] “Communication to Director.” A letter from Carleton Sprague Smith to the director of the Gallery of Modern Art in São Paulo, 23 July, 1947, recounts that Rockefeller had received visits from Matarazzo at the museum “several times already” and would approve of him as director. Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Galeria de Arte Moderna, Dir., Corres., Receipts.” 96. As Rockefeller wrote his facilitator, “Mr. and Mrs. Matarazzo are simply delighted with the car and I just want you to know how much I appreciate all the time and trouble which you took in getting it for them. They had been trying for weeks to get one and had just about given up hope— congratulations!” Letter from Nelson A. Rockefeller to Robert W. Gumbel, October 13, 1950, Rockefeller Archives, RG4 (personal)/Countries/Box 17/ Folder 132/Brazil. In a letter grouped with this one, Gumbel responds: “The Cadillac will be ready by Monday— ok to send check when I get the bill?” 97. Letter from Henry W. Bagley of International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC, São Paulo branch) to Francis A. Jamieson (IBEC, Rockefeller Plaza) regarding Yolanda Penteado Matarazzo (“wife of the president of the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art”), September 17, 1956; Rockefeller Archives, Matarazzo Sobrinho file. 98. Carleton Sprague Smith, “Memorandum to NAR, Summary on Brazilian Museums,” June 23, 1950, 2; Rockefeller Archives, NAR Personal, RG4, Box 149, Folder 1471. 99. See C. Jones (2013). 100. Statement of the Council for Inter-American Cooperation (CIAC), prepared for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund [1946], Rockefeller Archives, Family RG2, Box 8, Folder 60. Per this statement, the CIAC “was formed in September 1944, by men prominent in the fields of business, finance, education and labor [with] years of first hand experience in Latin America [who] had witnessed the important results of the Good Neighbor Policy. . . . Today, our national welfare and our continuance as the world’s greatest democracy depends upon complete understanding and adherence to common objectives by all nations of the Western Hemisphere.” 101. Culture became CIAC’s brief, even as IBEC (the International Basic Economy Corporation) became the Rockefeller Brothers’ Latin American investment arm. See the discussion of IBEC by John Oswin Schroy, http://www.capital-flow-analysis.com/ investment-tutorial/case_1w.html (accessed November 2011). 272

Notes to Chapter 4

102. Arnold Tschudy, CIAC director, to Nelson A. Rockefeller, December12, 1946. Rockefeller Archives, NAR World Affairs, Council for Inter-American Cooperation, Inc., 12/46-6/56, Box 187.3 103. The article was written by José Gómez Sicre, for which see n86, supra. For Sicre’s role during the Cold War, see Fox (2013) and Menand (2005). 104. José Gómez Sicre, “Dibujos Latin-Americanos: Latin America Sends Its Good Drawings North,” Art News 25 (October 1946): 40– 44. 105. The mural Portinari was planning in 1937 was for Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s famous Ministry of Education in Rio, begun in 1938 and completed in 1942. Likely this gift exchange occurred during Portinari’s “Good Neighbor” visit to the United States, where he worked on murals for the Library of Congress. 106. It is Maria Alice Milliet who includes Emiliano Di Cavalcanti along with Portinari as major artists who were made irrelevant by the São Paulo Bienal. Milliet, “Bienal: Percursos e percalços,” Revista USP (São Paulo), 52 (December 2001– February 2002): 94, as cited by Alambert and Canhête (2004), 44. 107. Brazilian/Portuguese Wikipedia entry on Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Melo: “Farto de ver seu nome na lista de insultos, o industrial Francisco Matarazzo ameaçou ‘resolver a questão à moda napolitana: pé no peito e navalha na garganta.’ Chateaubriand devolveu: ‘Responderei com métodos paraibanos, usando a peixeira para cortar mais embaixo.’” A peixeira (its etymology from “fish-woman”) is a knife for cutting fish (or their fleshy analogues); paraibanos is untranslatable, referring to the northeastern, coastal, semi-arid state of Paraíba where Chatô was raised, and connoting rough methods. Thanks to Renata Rocco for help with this translation from http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assis _Chateaubriand (accessed August 4, 2006). 108. A note on Carleton Sprague Smith: in archives of the Bienal and of the Rockefeller Brothers, Smith signs for Nelson Rockefeller (“in his name”) in November 1946. He appears as a MoMA employee writing for Rockefeller in 1947 and shows up also as head of the New York Public Library’s Music Division with interest in Latin American culture in 1948. In fact, I think Smith was all these things simultaneously. In the indispensable history of the Bienal provided by Alambert and Canhête (2004), Smith is the link used by Sérgio Milliet to reach Rockefeller in advancing local plans for a museum. Milliet began his relationship with Rockefeller and Smith well before the war, during the Good Neighbor period when he was director of the São Paulo Municipal Library. See Milliet (1943). 109. Horta (1995). See also Dalton Sala, “Arquivo de Arte da Fundação Bienal de São Paulo,” Revista USP (University of São Paulo) 52 (December 2001– February 2002): 122– 46. 110. “Será que alguem não persuadiria o governo a se dedicar só à arte clássica, deixando a arte moderna à iniciativa particular de Galeria?” Carbon copy of letter signed by Carleton Sprague Smith, MoMA, to Carlos Pinto Alves of the SP Galeria, dated July 23, 1947. Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Galeria de Arte Moderna, Dir., Corres., Receipts.” 111. Ibid.

112. Smith, “Summary on Brazilian Museums,” June 23, 1950; Rockefeller Archive Center, NAR Personal RG4, Box 149 Folder 1471. 113. S. Milliet (1943), 31. Translations are my own. 114. Guilbaut (1983) offers the best-known art history of Cold War ideology; for the “ideology of no-ideology,” see my Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For the Latin American– French connection, see Guilbaut (1997; 2007) and the forthcoming Alberro (2017). Such “freedom” from politics could only be illusory for actors such as Penteado, with her letters of introduction from President Vargas, or for Matarazzo, the businessman enriched by industrial-federal contracts. These “private” citizens were deeply imbricated in the business of the state. 115. Carlos Pinto Alves to Carleton Sprague Smith, February 2, 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Sent.” 116. Carlos Pinto Alves to Carleton Sprague Smith, August 4, 1947, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Galeria de Arte Moderna, Director, Correspondence Sent.” 117. Letter in English, from a Portuguese draft, with a French version in pencil; sent by Ciccillo Matarazzo to Nelson A. Rockefeller, January 30, 1948; Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Sent.” A penciled note on the file copy indicates that another version of the same letter had been sent to the Guggenheim’s director, Hilla Rebay. 118. Ibid. 119. The possibility exists that the draft was actually written by an advisor and that Matarazzo edited it to produce the necessary vagueness. Was Léon Degand already on the scene? For one local intervention in what abstracionismo might mean, see the defense of realism in Di Cavalcanti (1948). 120. “The Museum is very glad to cooperate with you in any way possible and although I am leaving Monday for Central America, I will be in touch with you again as soon as our plans are more clearly formulated. In the meantime, I should like to take this opportunity to tell you, both personally and on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art, how much we are all looking forward to the association with you and the other officers of the Fundação.” Nelson A. Rockefeller to “Mr. Matarazzo Sobrinho,” March 5, 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Received.” 121. First quote from Carleton Sprague Smith to Rino Levi, March 4, 1948; second from Smith to Carlos Pinto Alves, March 5, 1948; Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Received.” 122. Guilbaut (2007), 70. 123. Pencil draft in French marked July 48, with final typed letter of August 5, 1948, Ciccillo Matarazzo to Marcel Duchamp; Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Sent.” Per Guilbaut (1997, 814), Drouin was paid the rather large sum of $5,000 by Matarazzo, and dealer Sidney Janis was also enlisted (if not paid). The archives show that Castelli was the most eager to do business with the museum.

124. Letter from Leo Castelli to Matarazzo, July 21, 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Received.” On Sobel, see C. Jones (2005b), 297– 98 et passim. 125. Leo Castelli to Director, August 1, 1948. Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Received.” 126. Degand to Paulo Bittencourt in Rio, October 14, 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “MAM Correspondence, Director.” 127. Degand to Emile Langui in Brussels, October 11, 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “MAM Correspondence, Director.” 128. An image of Jean Deyrolle’s painting Malon (“Otherwise” in Esperanto; 1953) is obtainable from La Humiere gallery, http://lahumiere.com/spip.php?article250&lang=fr (accessed August 2014). 129. All quotes are taken from the O Centro de Cultura ‘Luiz Gama’ flier dated March 29, 1949, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Press Clippings.” See also Fry (2000); Skidmore (1990). 130. Rockefeller’s staff commented on the photograph reproduced here: “Incidentally, it is a great pleasure to see that the troops were called out for the opening.” Memo from Howard N. Knowles to Miss Martha Dalrymple, December 6, 1950, NAR papers, RG 4 (Personal)/Projects, MoMA/Museums Brazil: Museu de Arte– São Paulo, Box 149 Folder 1471. 131. Franklin Delano Roosevelt as quoted in “Address by Nelson A. Rockefeller at the inauguration of the museum of art of são paulo on July 5, 1950,” Rockefeller Archives, NAR RG 4, Box 122, Folder 1192. 132. Ibid. 133. Habitat: Arquitetura e artes no Brasil, 1 (São Paulo: Habitat Editora Ltda., MASP, 1951), edited by Roman-trained architect Lina Bo Bardi. See Lima (2013); Léon (2014). Although a prior publication (focused on Corbusier) was released in 1950 by the Habitat Editora, the Rockefeller issue in 1951 is given the number 1. 134. Pedrosa debuted as an art critic with an essay on Käthe Kollwitz, first delivered as a speech at the Clube dos Artistas Modernos: “Originally titled ‘Käthe Kollwitz and her red way of perceiving life,’ it was later renamed ‘The social trends of art and Käthe Kollwitz.’” Alambert and Canhête (2004), 25. 135. Like Pedrosa, Greenberg moved from strict Trotskyism, but unlike Pedrosa he became a political right-winger. See my Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On Pedrosa, see Erber (2014). 136. Degand to Emile Langui in Brussels, October 11, 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “MAM Correspondence, Director.” 137. See Amaral (1984), 229– 30; also see Aldana (2007). 138. As in the “Capulets and Montagues” review of the Museu’s inaugural show by Michel Simon, “A proposito do museu de arte moderna de São Paulo,” Correio da Manhã, March 27, 1949; Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Press Clippings.” 139. “Tendências abstrato-geométricas”— numerous online sources, among them the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo website (accessed July 2010) and the journal Pequisa (July 2013 Notes to Chapter 4

273

edition), which reports that Maria Martins may have abandoned sculpture in recognition that her primarily Surrealist style did not fit the geometric abstract tendency. See Maria Hirszman, “Ruptura sem volta,” Pequisa 209 ( July 2013), http://revistapesquisa.fapesp .br/2013/07/12/ruptura-sem-volta/ (accessed May 2014). 140. Asbury (2006), 76. 141. See n16, supra, and Rocco (2015). Although Asbury (2006) spells the Tupi title “Suassuapara” and translates it as “fallow deer,” I have used the spelling “Suaçuapara” from the original Bienal catalogue and followed the translation of “mountain lion” provided by Sandra Brecheret of the Fundação Escultor Victor Brecheret, in email correspondence with the author, July 2014. 142. See Caroline Lewis, “Brazilian Sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds,” Culture 24, February 7, 2006, http:// www.culture24.org.uk/places-to-go/yorkshire/leeds/art33920 (accessed April 2012). 143. Asbury (2006), 75. 144. Tarsila’s EFCB stands for “Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil,” the railway station; Malfatti’s A Boba portrays her as “the silly [one].” 145. Pignatari (2001), 12, as translated and cited in Asbury (2006), 77. 146. “Premio Federação das Industrias de São Paulo.” 147. Murilo Mendes, “Sugestões da Bienal,” Diário Carioca, December 2, 1951, Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Press Clippings.” 148. Ibid.; “the world” paraphrase is in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 43. 149. Max Bill’s “Concrete Art” manifesto is dated variously from 1936 to 1949. First published in Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik in 1936, the manifesto was revised in 1949 for Zürcher Konkrete Kunst; what circulates now is usually jointly dated. The translation of the German offered here was published in the Daimler corporation’s collection database, http://collection .daimler.com/sammlung/werke_bill_e.htm (accessed March 2012). For an alternate English translation, see Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 74. 150. Palatnik, of course, used motors to animate his “cinematic apparatus.” But this form of kineticism was less common in Brazil. The comparison I’m drawing sharpens in the “penetrables” Jesús de Soto began to make in 1967 (following Oiticica’s Penetrávels, inaugurated in 1960). Earlier work by de Soto already relied on the moire effect produced by one’s own moving head and scanning eyeballs. 151. This would change later on. Nelson (2010, 137, 142n53) surfaces a distinctly different reading by Mário Pedrosa, who by 1960 had amalgamated Calder to the constructivist tradition stemming from Mondrian and Malevich! Calder’s Triple Gong at the second Bienal in 1953– 54 was especially salient, and Pedrosa judged Calder as articulating “a vision for abstract art in Brazil steeped in his nation’s yearning for economic development and international significance” (ibid.). If Bill would deny Calder’s inclusion in the rigorous abstract tradition because of his biomorphism and referential titles, Pedrosa would put him right back in. Nelson 274

Notes to Chapter 4

cites, in particular, Mário Pedrosa, “Calder e Brasília,” Jornal do Brasil, March 9, 1960. 152. The date of this retrospective, originally planned for the summer of 1950 and given this date in numerous sources, has now been definitively anchored by Adele Nelson to the spring of 1951, for which see Nelson (2010), 139n8. 153. The first and only issue of Art Concret was published by Van Doesburg in April 1930, presenting the manifesto “The Basis of Concrete Art.” Max Bill’s 1936 pronouncement was written in explicit allegiance to this manifesto. In one Kunstmuseum Bern handout, Concrete Art is identified as both “European” and “international:” “This is an era where one speaks no longer of Swiss art, but of international modernism.” Kunstmuseum Bern, “Highlights of the Collection from Seven Centuries of Swiss Art,” gallery guide, 2011. 154. See online translation, http://collection.daimler.com/ sammlung/werke_bill_e.htm (accessed March 2012). 155. Bill proposed a new name for the school: Hochschule für Gestaltung, alluding to the subtitle Gropius had given the Bauhaus when it moved to its own set of buildings in Dessau. My understanding of Bill has benefited from the research of Nicola Pezolet (2012). 156. Bill (1954), 238. Bill was also interviewed for the Brazilian magazine Manchete, where he first aired his negative opinions, leading Italian architect and Casabella editor Ernesto Rogers to chide him for “the error of abstraction, which leads fatally to the extreme polarities of formalist criticism.” Rogers’s comments are in the same issue as Bill (1954), 239. For an overview see Richard J. Williams, Brazil, from the series Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). 157. Ronaldo Brito, “Fluid Geometry,” in Brito et al. (2011), 17. 158. Paul Betts, “Science, Semiotics and Society: The Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung in Retrospect,” Design Issues 2 (Summer 1998): 67– 82. 159. Max Bill, “Continuity and Change,” in his Form, Function, Beauty = Gestalt (London: Architectural Association, 2010), 28– 31. See also Pezolet (2012). 160. Portinari’s exterior azulejos (blue patterned tiles) were coupled with a mural of St. Francis for the church Niemeyer designed at Pampulha, part of the extensive compound developed for the state of Minas Gerais and its governor Juscelino Kubitschek in 1940. Portinari had also designed azulejos for Niemeyer’s Palácio Gustavo Capanema, the Ministry of Education and Health Building in Rio, planned and begun in 1935– 36 and completed in 1943. These “Baroque” flourishes were condemned by many rationalist architects, chief among them Max Bill (1954). For an account of Portinari’s fame in the United States during the “Good Neighbor” years and beyond, see Williams (2001), 205– 20. 161. Many agitated behind the scenes to compensate for Portinari’s slighting. Someone promised the wounded artist a prize at the next Bienal, a plan that would be thwarted by the international members of the second Bienal’s jury, which included Max Bill and the British critic Herbert Read, eager to be rigorous regarding Brazilian awards. This according to poet Décio Pignatari in 2001, as cited in Asbury (2006), 77.

162. See Amarante (1989), 24, as cited in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 43. 163. Mário Pedrosa, “The First Bienal,” as anthologized in Aracy Amaral, org., Mário Pedrosa: Dos murais de Portinari aos espaços de Brasília, vol. 2 of the collected writings of Pedrosa (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1981), and cited in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 42. 164. Carleton Sprague Smith describes Artigas to Rockefeller as a “Communist architect who was in U.S. for a while. Brilliant young chap.” Smith, “Memorandum to NAR, Summary on Brazilian Museums,” 23 June 1950: 2; Rockefeller Archives, NAR Personal, RG4, Box 149, Folder 1471. 165. Artigas (1951), quoted in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 46. Brazilian shoppers were certainly looking for things French. As Tarsila do Amaral supposedly said to a friend, “When the store windows at Mappin [the Paulista department store] start to look good to me, that is when I know it is time to return to Paris.” See Aldana (2007), 42. 166. “Um charuto a menos para o tubarão, e um pão a mais para o bancário”— protest placards described in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 41. How much money was moving around? Diário Oficial reported on April 25, 1950, that the state awarded the Museu de Arte Moderna a five-year grant; together with gifts to the Pinacoteca (which eventually took the Penteado collection) and the school of fine arts, the state funding totaled 600,000 cruzeiros. Also receiving funds were the São Paulo Fine Arts Association (i.e., the academy) and the Association of Brazilian Geographers. Svevo/SPB Archives, Press Clippings. 167. The academy’s organization, Associação Paulista de Belas Artes, described in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 41; Pignatari (2001), 12. 168. The manifesto was titled “Manifesto Conseqüência,” as referenced in Amaral (2001– 2), cited in turn by Alambert and Canhête (2004), 45. 169. Waldemar Cordeiro, “O objecto,” Arquitetura e Decoração (December 1956), as cited in translation in Aldana (2007), 47, n44. 170. The reviewer also described Matarazzo as worrying “about the ‘gaffes’ of provincial governor Adhemar [Pereira de Barros].” Author unknown, Hoje, October 21, 1951, as reproduced by Dalton Sala (image 13) in Revista da USP 52, no. 146 (December 2001– February 2002), 128, 140, http://www.usp.br/revistausp /52/15-dalton.pdf (accessed August 2014). 171. Murilo Mendes, “Perspectivas de uma exposição,” Diário Carioca, November 11, 1951. Svevo/SPB Archives, Press Clippings. I am grateful to Renata Rocco for providing me with this reference; translation my own. 172. Mário Pedrosa, “A Bienal de São Paulo e os comunistas,” Tribuna da Imprensa, 1951 (month and day not given), quoted in Alambert and Canhête (2004), 46. 173. Ibid. Pedrosa’s use of “degenerate” was particularly savvy, calling up for any educated reader the Nazi’s castigation of modern art in 1937, and thus bringing up the other side of Brazilian politics, the Mussolini-inspired Integralista fascists who agitated in São Paulo before Brazil entered the war.

174. Brito: “If not the only, it was certainly the main alternative to those opposites that, at least culturally, enclosed us in a vicious circle: the nationalizing elitism of the right and the no less nationalizing populism of the left.” in Brito et al. (2011), 17. 175. Emphasis added. Pedrosa wrote this in the catalogue for an “International Exhibition of Abstract Art” that he helped organize for the Rio museum explicitly responding to the first Bienal; the exhibition opened on January 20, 1953, in the Quitandinha Hotel. Pedrosa’s catalogue text celebrated Brazilians’ embrace of abstraction, their readiness for an art that “serves to free man, and lifts him above the quotidian”— again contrasting this sublimatory potential against those (figurativists) for whom art was “a prime instrument of education, but stripped of its autonomy.” Pedrosa (1952b), 242, 243. 176. Website of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), http://mam.org.br/ (accessed June 2009). 177. Per Erin Aldana, signatories Sacilotto and de Barros were Brazilian, but Charoux was Austrian, Fejer and Wladyslaw were Polish, “and Cordeiro himself was the son of an Italian father and a Brazilian mother.” Leopoldo Haar, a Hungarian, eventually joined the group. Aldana (2007), 45. 178. Asbury (2006), 78. 179. Ibid. 180. First letter from S. G. “Stig” Palmgren to Nelson A. Rockefeller, September 12, 1952 (on International Basic Economy Corporation letterhead); Rockefeller confirming the bad news to Matarazzo, September 24, 1952; Rockefeller Archives, RG 4, Box 149 Folder 1478. 181. Ibirapuera is a Tupi word, signifying the “rotten wood” associated with the area’s swamps. 182. While many of the buildings would take decades to complete, Niemeyer prioritized the Palace of the Arts for the Bienal, along with the marquise, or covered walkway, and both were complete by 1954. 183. With its historical look at Picasso, Italian Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, and a curious Ferdinand Hodler show from Switzerland, the second Bienal consolidated what Sérgio Milliet described as “nota introdutória uma análise hisórica da arte moderna” and its unassailable “espírito de liberdade” (an introductory note with historical analysis of modern art [and] its spirit of liberty). Milliet et al. (1953), xvii. 184. The extensive English-language literature on Niemeyer parallels but does not intersect art historical explorations of Concrete Art and antropofagia in Brazil; Philippou (2008) mentions “anthropophagia” only briefly as context for Niemeyer’s architecture. My own capacities to bridge the two bodies of literature are limited, but I am informed by León (2014), Lopez-Duran (2009), Martins (2013), Pezolet (2012), Stierli and Widrich, eds. (2015), M. Sullivan (2013), and the forthcoming Alberro (2017). 185. “Como no Brasil, em nenhum lugar do mundo existem tantos edifícios públicos de construção moderna.” Walter Gropius, as quoted in S. Coelho (1954), Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Press Clippings.” 186. Kenneth Frampton reviews Bill’s criticism of Niemeyer in Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical Theory (London: Notes to Chapter 4

275

Thames & Hudson, 1992), 257. Daryle Williams makes a nuanced argument regarding the presence of Portinari’s social realism in Niemeyer’s modernism, for which see Williams (2001), 228– 51. 187. Bill had published a monograph on Corbusier in 1937 while Niemeyer and Burle Marx were collaborating with the French architect on the Ministry of Education in Rio (1936– 43). Unlike Bill, Niemeyer had actually pushed back against Corbusier successfully, forming a key trope in the Brazilian architect’s mythos as a modernist contender. See Philippou (2008); Lopez-Duran (2009). 188. Modulor was chosen by Corbusier to mingle the words module and nombre d’or, the latter a reference to the golden mean (golden section, golden ratio) of classical Greek architecture. Amalgamating the French ideal of the bodiless meter to the body remnant registered in the Anglo “foot,” the modulor stretched from the ground plane to the cosmos, reaching up his “constructor” hand wherever in the world Corbusier’s commissions could be planted. See C. Jones (2013). 189. Philippou notes reluctantly in a footnote, “Niemeyer, however, never referred explicitly to Antropofagia” (2008), 11n16. Daryle Williams (2001) asserts anthropophagy unproblematically in his discussion of Niemeyer’s 1939 modernist pavilion in the New York World’s Fair, which included tropical gardens and Portinari’s assertive Social Realist paintings: “Thus, the pavilion included a sense of lyricism and tropicalism that would seem wholly out of place in any Radiant City. In echoes of Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy, the national had overcome the international by consuming it” (212). Niemeyer’s architectural anthropomorphism is also seen in the plan for his private home, Casa das Canoas (1950– 54), interpreted by some as mapped on the intersection of male and female genitalia. See also Lopez-Duran (2009), with specific reference to anthropophagy in Niemeyer’s frequent collaborator Roberto Burle Marx. 190. From Niemeyer’s “Poem of the Curve” (“O poema da curva,” published in 1988 but probably written in the 1940s), cited in conjunction with the first of the architect’s free-form marquises at Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte, by Philippou (2008), 101. The line of the poem that refers to Cavalcanti is missing from most published versions of the poem. 191. Olafur Eliasson’s The Very Large Ice Floor (1998) was produced for the twenty-fourth iteration of the Bienal, whose theme explicitly invoked antropofagia. See Jones, “Users in the Field,” in Olafur Eliasson, Spatial Experiments (Berlin: Studio Eliasson; London: Thames & Hudson, 2016). For “canopy-in-motion,” see Philippou (2008), 101. 192. See the moving video by Pedro Kok dedicated to Niemeyer’s marquise, shown at the exhibition Arquitetura Brasileira— Viver na Floresta (Brazilian Architecture— Living in the Forest), held at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo in 2011; http:// www.pedrokok .com.br/en/2010/06/marquise-do-parque-do -ibirapuera-sao-paulo-sp/ (accessed August 2012). 193. Hélio Oiticica, “A transição da or do quadro para a espaço e o sentido de constructividade,” Revista Habitat (São Paulo), no. 70 (1962), 52, as cited and translated in Brett, “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” in Oiticica (1992), 226. 194. Aldana (2007), 47. 276

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

195. Guy Brett, one of the most discerning writers on Oiticica in English for over four decades, noted the artist’s frequent use of a phrase by critic Mário Pedrosa to describe the Brazilian avantgarde in the 1960s: “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” which Brett himself uses to title his essay in Oiticica (1992). 196. On his (useful?) failures as a passista, see Asbury (2008), 52– 65. For an instructively different take on the first Parangolé, see Dezeuze (2004). 197. Brett in Oiticica (1992), 229. Illiteracy in Brazil would have prevented Oiticica’s collaborators from reading the slogans on the Parangolés. A consistent problem for the country, it formed the basis for limiting suffrage in every Brazilian government until 1985. Illiterates at that point still comprised over thirty million people, 20– 25 percent of the population, “with a large proportion being black.” Bethell (2000), 9. 198. Hélio Oiticica, “The Senses Pointing towards a New Transformation,” manuscript submitted to Studio International but never published; this is the version from December 22, 1969, as quoted extensively in Braga (2008), 279. 199. As Sérgio Martins points out, it was significant that this working out of the vernacular took place deep within the trajectory of concretist modernism, now coded as an incomplete project in a building that was itself still “under construction.” Martins (2013), 71. 200. Hélio Oiticica, Tropicália, March 4, 1968, as translated in Oiticica (1992), 125. On his use of the term anthropophagically, Oiticica comments: “Those who speak of ‘tropicalism’ just pick up the image for consumption . . . the existential life-experience escapes them, because they do not have it. Their culture is still universalist, desperately in search of folklore, or, most of the time, not even that.” Ibid. 201. Sônia Saltzstein [Goldberg], “Autonomia e subjetividade na obra de Hélio Oiticica,” Novos Estudios, no. 41 (March 1995), 152– 57. 202. Chakrabarty (2008). 203. Alex Alberro’s forthcoming book Abstraction in Reverse examines the impact of Latin Americans on postwar Parisian abstraction. Chapter 5 1. Lygia Clark, “Concerning the Magic of the Object,” 1965, translated in Bois and Clark (1994), 102. 2. Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia,” Artforum, September 1971, anthologized in Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 107. 3. Harald Szeemann, interviewed in 1983; translated in Müller (2006), 111. 4. Okwui Enwezor, in Meyer et al. (2003), 163. 5. The clearest account of the meeting and how it came about is in Yve-Alain Bois, “Some Latin Americans in Paris,” in Bois et al. (2001), 77– 104. 6. Yve-Alain Bois, in Bois and Clark (1994), 86. 7. Max Bill later made numerous versions of the Möbius form in marble; these are doubtless what Bois is recalling from corporate plazas around the world.

8. Website entry for Tripartite Unity in the exhibition Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s to 1970s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2004, http://www.lacma.org/beyondgeometry/ artworks1.html (accessed June 2010). 9. See Megan M. Sullivan (2013). 10. For the global eruption of “Concept” art, see Farver, ed. (1999). Per Farver, “From the beginning we understood the territory of ‘globalism’ as having multiple centers in which local events were crucial determinants.” Jane Farver, “Global Conceptualism: Reflections,” posted April 29, 2015, on the Museum of Modern Art website, http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/580-global-conceptualism-reflections (accessed August 2015). 11. The reference here is to “The Smooth and the Striated,” in Deleuze and Guattari (1987), 474– 500. For these authors, the state has as a primary function the striating and organizing of fields; the privileged space of the nomad is “smooth,” which they theorize as “filled with events” and haptic rather than optical. Thanks to Lucia Allais for discussions about hubs, spokes, and the “trans.” 12. The worn but beloved stuffed animal is the talismanic example of the transitional object. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). 13. Bois, in Bois et al. (2001), 78. On Ortiz and transculturation, see chapter 4 and Rama (2012). 14. Oiticica and Clark “produced their works [and] asked their questions, outside the frame of the provincial v. international, archaic v. modern . . . , polarities which have dominated Brazilian cultural processes up to today.” Sônia Salzstein, letter to Guy Brett dated November 1993, as cited in Brett, “A Paradox of Containment,” Witte de With, Cahier #2 ( June 1994; Rotterdam: Witte de With), 18. 15. The use of “strategy” versus “tactics” here alludes to Certeau (1984). 16. See Annette Michelson’s important interview with Serra, with the participation of Clara Weyergraf: “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview,” October, no. 10 (Autumn 1979), 68– 104. Serra speaks of the “indigenous American poetry” in films by Bruce Connor and Jack Smith, but Michelson speaks of showing his films to “a number of people from Europe” and presses Serra to speak to his interest in “early Eisenstein and Vertov”; and the two discuss relations between Serra’s Railroad Turnbridge, Eisenstein’s October, and Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mechanique (75). 17. Following the insight of performance art theorist Mechtild Widrich, we can argue that the 1966 photographs of Diálogo become performative documents, activating in present-day viewers a visceral sense of processes and aesthetics orthogonal to objectbased economies. See Widrich (2014). 18. Art historian Sérgio Martins offers a description of what, specifically, Gullar was given to manipulate at Clark’s home: “a diagonal construction of interlocked painted wooden plaques, connected at the edges.” Martins (2013), 19. 19. Ferreira Gullar, “Neo-Concrete Manifesto,” March 1959, translated in the bilingual edition of Suárez et al. (2011). See also Gullar’s “Teoria do não-objeto,” Sunday supplement to the Jornal do Brasil (Rio), December 19– 20, 1959, translated in Asbury (2005), 170– 73, and Martins (2012b).

20. Clark, dissatisfied with Gullar’s reading of her work, discussed matters with the more senior critic Mário Pedrosa, whose proposal “trans-objects” was more appealing. See L. Clark (1998), 141– 43; also see M. Sullivan (2013) and Martins (2013). 21. “i am not here representing brazil; . . . the ideas of representing-representation-etc. are over; . . . exportation and the take-over of an universal face that can be the possible brazil, the country that simply doesn’t exist— i propose a possibility: for a behavior . . .” Hélio Oiticica, statement in McShine, ed. (1970), 103. The oiticica nut comes from “a typical leafy tree of the sertão’s riparian vegetation,” according to the Fazenda Tamanduá Institute (a botanical reserve in Paraiba, Brazil), for which see http://www.fazendatamandua.com.br/enginst-pesqflor.htm (accessed July 2014). 22. Citing McLuhan, “It is now possible for artists to be truly international; exchange with their peers is now comparatively simple. . . . For both artists and their public it is a stimulating and open situation, and certainly less parochial than even five years ago.” McShine, ed. (1970), 1. 23. Ibid., 140. 24. Oiticica, “Untitled,” in ibid., 103. 25. See Calirman (2012); Alves (1985); Skidmore (1988). 26. For an account of American-based boycotts of the Bienal over the years, see Green (2010), 124 ff. For the 1971– 72 Contrabienal, see Camnitzer (2007), 240– 41; and Camnitzer in Falconi and Rangel, eds. (2006), 216– 29. 27. MIT professor Gyorgy Kepes had hoped to produce an ambitious “Environmental Art” show representing the US for the Brazilian venue. For Robert Smithson’s 1969 letter of refusal to Kepes, see Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 369. 28. Gordon Matta (not yet “Matta Clark”) submitted his letter to Artforum for the May 1971 issue, and (in Spanish) to the organizers of the Contrabienal; it is published by Luis Camnitzer in Falconi and Rangel, eds. (2006), 224– 25. 29. Quoted in Di Martino (2005), 61. 30. The 14 Milan Triennale (a design exhibition) opened on May 30, 1968, and was immediately occupied by a group of artists and students who remained there for the duration of the exhibition. 31. See chapter 3 for a brief discussion of art fairs as being founded in response to the closing of the market from the Venice Biennale. 32. Back cover blurb for Weiss et al. (2011). 33. See Rojas-Sotelo (2009), Niemojewski (2010), and the essays by Niemojewski and Gerardo Mosquera in Filipovic et al. (2010). 34. Rojas-Sotelo (2009), 4. 35. For the theory of the dérive, see Guy Debord’s mid-1950s Psychogeographic Guide of Paris, with its “descents of drifting and localisation of ambient unities,” per Tjebbe van Tijen’s Imaginary Museum Project, http://imaginarymuseum.org/LPG/Mapsitu1 .htm (accessed March 2014). For cosmopolitics, see Cheah and Robbins, eds. (1998), and Stengers (2010– 11). 36. Gerardo Mosquera, “The Havana Biennial: A Concrete Utopia,” in Filipovic et al. (2010), 202– 3. Notes to Chapter 5

277

37. Ibid., 205. 38. For the “imaginary” as a term in sociology and cultural theory, see Anderson (1991). 39. Camnitzer is referring to the third iteration of the Havana Biennial, but the circumstances of mounting its inaugural exhibition were similar. Camnitzer (1990), anthologized in Weiss et al. (2011), 207. 40. See Mosquera’s frank description: “And as part of the role of beachhead for communism and Soviet policy that Cuba had always played, its peculiar character was used in those days to try to make Cuba into a Third World leader. In aspiring to this status it was competing with China . . . the reason why neither Chinese artists nor artists of Chinese descent were invited to the first Havana biennials.” Mosquera, in Filipovic et al. (2010), 200. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) was founded in Addis Ababa in May 1963 (dissolved in favor of the African Union in 2001). The Arab League had been founded in 1945; this and other pan-Arabisms foundered following the loss to Israel in 1967. On the covert European/Christian roots of contemporary cosmopolitanism, see chapter 3. 41. Nelson Herrera Ysla, “Años intensos en pocas palabras,” dated November 2008, on the Havana Bienal’s official website, “History” tab: http://www.bienalhabana.cult.cu/?secc=historia &lang=spanish (accessed March 2014; translation my own). Note that the website is garnished with logos from Air France, KLM, the Austrian Embassy, and other sponsors. 42. Transnational is not in the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary of 1971. 43. The first usage of a still hyphenated trans-nationalism is usually credited to legal theorist Randolph Bourne, “TransNational America,” Atlantic Monthly, no. 118 (1916), “discussing the failure of the melting pot theory while advancing his view of America’s destiny as a cosmopolitan mixture of cultures,” as cited by Paul Enriquez, “Deconstructing Transnationalism: Conceptualizing Metanationalism as a Putative Model of Evolving Jurisprudence,” in Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 43, no. 5 (November 2010): 1265– 1336. 44. The journal Transnational Corporations began publication in February 1992, sponsored by the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations (founded in the mid-1970s), which partnered with Routledge Press on a three-volume series also titled Transnational Corporations, with the following subtitles: A Historical Perspective (1993), Transfer Pricing and Taxation (1994), and The International Legal Framework (1994). 45. In The Transnational Villagers, Peggy Levitt (2001) traces emigrant remittances linking Boston workers from the Dominican Republic to their families at home. 46. Searching transnational in WorldCat and Google Ngrams reveals a spike in the early 1970s. Most of these publications revived Bourne’s progressive sense explicitly: e.g., Elise Boulding, “The Measurement of Cultural Potentials for Transnationalism,” Journal of Peace Research 11, no. 3 (1973): 189; or Carl Wilms-Wright, Transnational Corporations: A strategy for Control (Fabian Society Research Series, Pamphlet 334, 1977). Postmillennial usages have proliferated wildly; a Harvard Library search yields 278

Notes to Chapter 5

over fourteen thousand records, of which over a third have been published since 2000, dividing between sociological/anthropological and neoliberal law/economics. 47. Geraldo Mosquera, in Filipovic et al. (2010), 205. 48. Schulze (2000, first published in German in 1992); Pine and Gilmore (1999). See chapter 6 for extended discussion. 49. For a brief history of the Dak’Art biennial organized by the Senegalese Ministry of Culture, see the entry on the Biennial Foundation’s website, http://www.biennialfoundation.org/ biennials/dak’art-the-biennial-of-the-contemporary-african-art/ (accessed March 2014). Johannesburg’s biennial was sponsored by the Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council; the curator of the first edition was Christopher Till. As for Manifesta, “The Board of the Manifesta Foundation prides itself on following the Code of Cultural Governance as formulated by the Dutch Ministry of Culture to ensure appropriate and transparent governance”; logotypes on its website indicate support from the European Commission’s EACEA (Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency), the Mondrian Foundation, and the Netherlands’ Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap (Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science). See http://manifesta.org/ about-us/structure/ (accessed March 2014). 50. These phrases are taken from http://manifesta.org/ biennials/about-the-biennials/ (accessed March 2014). 51. Ibid.: “With the expansion of the European community from 12 to 25 countries, and with the possible target of around 30 nations in the foreseeable future, Manifesta also realizes the importance of creating links with Europe’s neighbours in Asia, the eastern Mediterranean and northern Africa.” 52. Mosquera, in Filipovic et al. (2010), 202– 3; Camnitzer (2009), 208– 29. 53. The 1992 Istanbul biennial, “Production of Cultural Difference,” was led by curator Vasif Kortun; Manifesta’s 1996 founding statement is cited in this chapter’s epigraph. 54. See Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, no. 55 (1999), 105– 43. 55. Brett (1990), 5. 56. Under the leadership of then Walker director Kathy Halbreich, the Global Initiative was convened in 1998 as “a case study for transforming institutional practice” and funded by the Bush Foundation of Minneapolis, per the website for the exhibition How Latitudes Become Form, http://latitudes.walkerart.org/committee/ index.html (accessed March 2014). The museum’s Global Advisory Committee included curators Hou Hanru, Vasif Kortun, Paulo Herkenhoff, and many others. See Vergne et al. (2003). 57. “Going Global at the Walker Art Center,” Artthrob: Contemporary Art in South Africa (on-line journal), no. 68 (April 2003), http://www.artthrob.co.za/03apr/listings_intl.html#wac (accessed May 2014). 58. See chapter 4. One way this complex debate has permeated Anglo-American scholarship is in a revaluing of hybridity. The classic text informing postmodern discussions of hybridity is Bhabha (1994). For a probing discussion of hybridity in regard to Brazil, see Asbury (2003), 139– 70.

59. This is not a question of “marketing,” as literary theorist Pascale Casanova might argue; the visual arts have always been able to fantasize floating free of language groups and their publishing conglomerates. Casanova (2004); cf. Dena Goodman (1994) and Christopher Prendergast, ed. (2004). 60. Becquer and Gatti (1991), 65– 81. 61. The poem was offered to a newspaper reporter by a “Romanian art dealer” in Rio, as described by Sérgio Martins (2013, 103), who reports the gallerist responding to questions regarding the exhibition Opinão 65. 62. It is this “rescued” Mondrian that has entered art history through the advocacy of Lygia Clark’s friend, art historian YveAlain Bois, for which see Bois et al. (2001), 86. 63. Cícero Dias to Ciccillo Matarazzo, July 1948 (chapter 4, n2), Svevo/SPB Archives, folder: “Foundation Exec. Dir., Corres. Rec’d.” 64. Kynaston McShine’s inclusion of Oiticica in the 1970 Information exhibition at MoMA needs further study. Who introduced him to Oiticica? Did McShine visit the Babylonest that Oiticica had constructed in his Manhattan apartment? Along with a range of surprising artists, from Franz Erhard Walther to Vito Acconci, Information represented the radical edge of an art world that would not make it back into MoMA (outside the “Projects” ghetto) until the 1990s: “The exhibition will demonstrate the non-object quality of this work and the fact that it transcends the traditional categories of painting, sculpture, photography, film, drawing, prints, etc.” Kynaston McShine, memorandum to Arthur Drexler dated February 5, 1970, Information Exhibition Research files, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 65. Per McShine in the memo to Drexler (ibid.): “As you know my exhibition ‘Information’ is primarily concerned with the strongest international art movement or ‘style’ of the moment which is ‘conceptual art,’ ‘art povera,’ ‘earthworks,’ ‘systems,’ ‘process art,’ etc. in its broadest definition.” 66. Meireles, Eureka: Blindhotland (1970– 75), Tate Museum website, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/meireles -eurekablindhotland-t12605/text-summary (accessed March 2014). 67. “Unwanted leadership” per Walter Gropius. This comment was made in many contexts, most consistently in a lecture the architect delivered in São Paulo and elsewhere on “the architect within an industrialized society,” for which see the typescript in the Gropius papers in Houghton Library, Harvard University. See also León (2014), 78. 68. Fraktur, of course, is more than just a Nazi story. See Bain and Shaw (1998). 69. Lyotard (1988). On the public sphere, see Habermas (1962); for two approaches to agonism in that sphere see Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and Negt and Kluge (1993). 70. Lyotard clearly draws on but does not engage the important discussion by Jacques Derrida of his neologism différance, which plays on the French distinction between the adjective différent (different), which must agree in gender and number with the noun it accompanies, and the participle of the verb différer, which forms the invariable différant (“differed”). See Lyotard (1988); Derrida (1973).

71. See M. Sullivan (2013). 72. Lygia Clark, unpublished manuscript dated 1960, cited in Martins (2013), 208n25. 73. A close reading of this transformation in the Brazilian context can be found in Martins (2013; 2012a; 2012b); see also Erber (2014) for Mário Pedrosa’s deep interest in Merleau-Ponty. 74. Lyotard (1988), 136. 75. The first French Manifestation Biennale et Internationale des Jeunes Artistes was held at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1959. As inspector of the beaux arts, Raymond Cogniat wrote in the inaugural catalogue that international “confrontations” were on the rise: “France, which occupies a prominent place in the arts, could not stay out of a movement of this nature. . . . In contrast to prestigious exhibitions in Venice and São Paulo that pay tribute to artists who have already been able to assert their personality and whose influence marks the art of their time, we have chosen to make the Biennale de Paris a place of encounter and experiment for young people, a place open to uncertainty and hope. Reserved for artists under thirty-five years, this event cannot, like other expositions, shine with the brightness of its stars. It wants instead to be a working tool put in the service of those who seek, and seek to find themselves.” Posted in the “Chronologie” section of the website art-contemporain, http://art-contemporain.eu .org/base/chronologie/11.html (accessed March 2014; translation my own). 76. Haftmann was teaching at the painting school in Hamburg at the time of his collaboration with Bode in founding documenta. His art history publications had just put him on the map: Werner Haftmann and Will Grohmann, Deutsche abstrakte Maler, 2 vols. (Baden-Baden: Verlag Woldemar Klein, ca. 1953-54); Haftmann, Malerei im Zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1954). This led to him being invited into a project spearheaded by MoMA, German Art of the Twentieth Century, edited by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie and published by MoMA, the City Art Museum of St. Louis (MO), and Simon & Schuster in 1957. 77. See Villeré (2013). 78. If certain biennials began in association with institutions— São Paulo’s with the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Havana’s with the Wifredo Lam Center— they often came to overshadow their sponsoring organizations. Collecting practices were similarly vexed. São Paulo Bienal founder Francisco Matarazzo would reassign his art collection from the Bienal-linked MAM to the city’s university museum in the late 1960s. In Venice, the biennial’s second iteration prompted the city council to inaugurate the Municipal Collection of Modern Art, to be seeded with purchases from the exhibition; this collection was housed after 1902 in the Ca’ Pesaro palazzo and became increasingly detached from the Biennale, particularly after the cessation of the Biennale’s market function in the late 1960s. The more recent model links biennials to nonprofit foundations, with no relation whatsoever to collecting— routine practice by the time Manifesta was founded in 1996. 79. Lyotard (1988), 13. 80. For a blithe model of cultural globalization as ethnic restaurant, see Cowen (2002). A review that captures the problems Notes to Chapter 5

279

with this approach is Clifford Geertz, “Off the Menu,” New Republic 205, no. 4596 (2003): 27-30. 81. Lyotard (1988), 13. 82. For my argument, see Jones, “Globalism/Globalization,” in Elkins et al., eds. (2010), 129– 37. Also see Giunta (2007). 83. Brett (1969), n.p. 84. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), which Oiticica would certainly have known. 85. Hélio Oiticica, “Tropicália,” from Folha de São Paulo, as translated and reprinted Oiticica (1992), 124. See also Catherine David, “The Great Labyrinth,” from the same volume (255). 86. David Medalla was a Filipino expatriate living in London in the early 1960s, who founded Signals gallery and Signalz journal; Haacke was a German expatriate living in New York by the late 1960s. On Tania Bruguera (a Cuban artist now teaching in Chicago), see Gerardo Mosquera, “Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s Work: The Body Is the Social Body,” in Bruguera (2009), 23– 35. 87. Paulo Reis, “Biennial Opens in a Tense Atmosphere,” Jornal do Brasil, October 13, 1994, for which see fig. 5.9. With thanks to Renata Rocco for help tracking down the article and finalizing the translation. 88. Gastarbeiter =“guest” or migrant worker. “Szeemann” does not sound foreign to the high German speaker but is spelled with a foreign-seeming zed. The German analogue is simply Seemann, meaning “sailor.” Thanks to Hans Haacke for this nuanced reading. 89. See the numerous publications of sociologist Saskia Sassen (1998; 2001; 2006; ed., 2002) for theorizations of “nodes” of finance in urbanism, a network of metropoles knit together by flows of capital rather than international or state regulations. 90. Zenakos (2006). 91. Anton Vidokle, March 8, 2006, speaking to the seminar “Something You Should Know: Artistes et praticiens aujourd’hui,” organized by Patricia Falguières, Elisabeth Lebovici, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Natasa Petresin, and the staff of l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. Vidokle spoke in English; notes are my own. 92. Lyotard works through Emmanuel Lévinas to understand that the relation to the other (the precondition for the differend) is not one of space or time but of ethics. For Lévinas “the other is not localizable. If he or she were, I would be your master, and be presumed to know you.” The ethical realm is not a territory but a “mode of the I/you situation”— evoking Martin Buber and drawing on Lévinas (1976), 46– 47, cited in Lyotard (1988), 111. For Kant’s universal history, see Kant (1784; 1795). Isabelle Stengers (2010– 11) offers a critical revision in which cosmopolitanism is reconfigured as “the cosmopolitical,” arguing against the pose of objectivity and authority arrogated by the twentieth-century physical sciences. An excellent overview can be found in the entry on Cosmopolitanism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/ (accessed March 2014). 93. The opposition to Manifesta 6 is clearly articulated by Yiannis Toumazis, who had been selected as general coordinator of the exhibition in Nicosia but explicitly objected to the idea of “a school department in the occupied part of Nicosia,” adding, “We 280

Notes to Chapter 5

will not cancel out our own existence”— as quoted in Zenakos (2006). In addition to his role in Manifesta, Toumazis was local director of the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, an affiliate of the Pierides Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. A Greek Cypriot, he also ran Nicosia for Arts, the funding branch of Manifesta on the ground. My general point is that the failure can be construed as a confrontation between an arrogant guest curator and a local agent, subject to local politics and inevitably contesting “neutral” globality. 94. McShine, ed. (1970), 1. 95. “I produced for export. That was the way to get the most done on a tight budget in the sixties.” Szeemann (2007), 27. 96. See Medalla’s promise to send “some drawings for an environment involving sand + capillary action”— this may never have taken place; see documentation in the original catalogue for Attitudes (1969), n.p., and in Celant, ed. (2013), 569. 97. The exhibition theme for this tenth Tokyo Biennale was Between Man and Matter, commissioned by Yusuke Nakahara and curated by Toshiaki Minemura. It opened at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Gallery, May 10– May 30, 1970, then traveled to the Kyoto Municipal Art Museum, June 6– June 28; Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery in Nagoya, July 15– July 26; and Fukuoka Prefectural Culture House, August 11– August 16, 1970. Among the participating artists associated with Szeemann were Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Christo, Jan Dibbets, Ger Van Elk, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier. I’m indebted to the presentation by Reiko Tomii, “From Dantaiten to Interactivity,” which focused on this Tokyo biennial for a workshop on Gutai sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and held at Harvard University in 2011. “Gutai,” because it means “concrete” in Japanese, attracted strong attention from Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa, who traveled from Brazil to meet these Japanese “concretists.” This connection was discussed at the same 2011 workshop by Pedro Erber, “Search for Concreteness.” See Erber (2014). 98. Kant (1784) theorizes a “cosmopolitan law” resulting in a “league of nations,” but this Enlightenment utopian vision was unmilitarized— a far cry from the US occupation in Japan, formalized by the ANPO treaty signed in San Francisco in 1952, which prompted protests back home. 99. The Japanese Zero Group was founded in 1952 by Osakabased artists Kazuo Shiraga, Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami, and Keiko Tanaka. Named from the conviction that works of art must be created from nothing, this group merged in 1955 with the Osaka Gutai (Concrete) Art Association, led by Jiro Yoshihara. 100. Quoted in Ryan Holmberg, “Dragon Knows Dragon: The Encounter between Japanese Avant-Garde Calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism,” Independent Work for Distinction (unpublished, Boston University, 1998), 58. 101. See Erber (2014). 102. Yoshihara Jiro, Gutai manifesto, proclaimed in October 1956 and published as “Gutai bijutsu sengen,” Geijutsu Shincho 7, no. 12 (December 1956): 202– 4. Translated by Reiko Tomii for the Guggenheim Museum exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground, http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/gutai/data/manifesto .html (accessed March 2014).

103. In response to the author’s question to Otto Piene in 2010 as to whether the German Zero Gruppe (which he founded in 1957) knew of Japan’s 1952 Zero Group, the answer was no. 104. Otto Piene, “The Development of the Group Zero.” Text taken from the first Zero publication, published by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, 1957 (publication details not given), translated in Times Literary Supplement (London), September 3, 1964, and anthologized in 1957– 1966 Zero New York 2008, an English adaptation for Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York (2008), of the Museum Kunstpalast catalogue from Dusseldorf, 2006. 105. Heinz Mack traces these connections in a drawing reproduced as the endpapers for Sperone Gallery’s 2008 Zero catalogue. 106. The exception that proves the rule is the 1960s “Imaginist Bauhaus,” which also announced itself as the Situationist International. 107. See chapter 4 and bibliography. 108. See Celant (1969). Some editions of this Arte Povera book placed the Walter De Maria Mile Long Drawing on the cover. Quotation is from the artist group The Zoo (231). 109. White (2004), 115. Although discussing the literary antropofagos of the 1920s, White’s characterization could cover Oiticica; White explicitly refers to the novels Macunaima by Mário de Andrade (1926) and Serafim Ponte Grande by Oswald de Andrade (1933). 110. The bachelor machine was a concept Szeemann adopted from the artist Marcel Duchamp: celibate but seminal, chthonic yet hygienic, in perpetual motion with no means of support, and for our purposes, a rootless transnational cosmopolitan. 111. Here I am referring to the several exhibitions of smaller European countries deemed magically eccentric by Szeemann, who attempted to channel their essence: Visionäre Schweiz (Visionary Switzerland, 1991), Austria im Rosennetz (Austria in a Lace of Roses, 1996); Blut & Honig: Zukunft ist am Balkan (Blood and Honey: The Future Is in the Balkans, 2003), and finally La belgique visionnaire (Visionary Belgium, 2005, posthumously installed). 112. Mostly this was due to the tireless activity of Parisian curator Michel Tapié in the 1950s, for which see Guilbaut (1983) and Ikegami (2010). 113. MoMA’s exhibition The New American Painting traveled to Basel, Milan, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, and “other major cities,” according to the press release dated March 11, 1958; https:// www.moma.org/pdfs/docs/press_archives/2342/releases/MOMA _1958_0025.pdf ?2010 (accessed March 2014). 114. For an exhaustive exhibition history, see Szeemann (2007). 115. “My monthly salary [was] 50 francs more than the building custodian received.” Szeemann (2007), 26. 116. Emphasis added to capture the sense of the sentence: “Zeigte die 4. Documenta letztes Jahr die Kunst bis Anfang 1968, so soll nun die gegenwärtige Ausstellung, grob gesagt, das bisher Neuentstandene dokumentieren.” Harald Szeemann, introduction, When Attitudes Become Form (London, 1969), n.p. Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own. 117. Paraphrasing Szeemann’s description of his office/archive/factory as “structured chaos,” and Mario Merz’s praise for how Szeemann “visualized the chaos we, as artists, have in our heads.” Both cited without source in Obrist (1996).

118. Lyotard (1988), 55. 119. Szeemann (2007), 13. 120. Cited in translation by Müller (2006), 50. See also Szeemann (1981), 95, 113 ff., and Søren Grammel (2005), 31– 32. 121. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996). 122. His dissertation concerned the Revue Blanche and Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi), who would become the patron saint of French Dadas and of Szeemann’s own célibataires. The dissertation is described as finished in 1960 (various biographies), yet Szeemann’s mother urges him to “shorten your dissertation . . . and it would be finished” in a letter dated April 29, 1968, as translated in Szeemann (2007), 200. 123. The St. Gallen show was timed to coincide with a writers’ conference, and opened August 3, 1957; the Ball exhibition opened September 24 that fall in Bern. The sequence is confirmed in Szeemann (2007), although the curator’s incorrect provision of a date of 1956 for the Ball exhibition is also given in the same reference (38). 124. The trips began when Szeemann served as translator, guide, and travel companion for Henry Clifford, former director of the Philadelphia Museum, in the mid-1950s. See Szeemann (2007), 34. 125. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996). 126. Ibid. 127. Müller (2006), 10. 128. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996). 129. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996), and writing to a local critic in 1968: “I, for one, would have been happy to see only Bill’s sculptures at the Kunsthalle, along with Mattioli’s sculptures and Tinguely’s mobiles— what a sensation that would have been: exhibition 1968, the exhibition of a polycentric world that is gradually overcoming the extremes of bourgeois individualism.” For the observation that monographic exhibitions were “out of date,” see Konrad Farner, Vorwärts (May 9, 1968), as excerpted and translated in Szeemann (2007), 196. In the same volume, Szeemann recalls having met Bill “from my early visit to the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm in 1954” (39). 130. Szeemann (2007), 27. 131. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996). 132. What precisely was on view is difficult to determine from the newsletter catalogue assembled by pioneering educator Bazon Brock, who provides documentation of prior works rather than photographs of the Bern installation— with the stunning exception of Christo’s wrapped building, which is illustrated on the floppy catalogue’s gilded cover page. See Szeemann (1968). 133. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996). Szeemann’s frequent misspelling of “Ruder & Finn” as “Rudder & Finn” is a revealing parapraxis. (The firm has since dropped the conjunction and is now simply Ruder Finn.) 134. John A. Murphy, president of Philip Morris Europe, in the preface to Szeemann (1969). 135. Ibid. 136. See Szeemann (2007), 144, 148– 49. Other venues for the exhibition from Philip Morris included Washington, DC, New York, Munich, London, and Montreal. Notes to Chapter 5

281

137. See press notice by Maria Netter, Weltwoche (June 3, 1966), excerpted and translated in Szeemann (2007), 145. 138. Profile of Elizabeth Margaritis Butson, “A Lifetime of Firsts,” June 28, 2012, City University of New York Newswire, http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2012/06/28/a-lifetime-of -firsts/ (accessed March 2014). 139. Nina Kaiden Wright, telephone interview January 25, 2012. Unless otherwise specified, all quotes from Wright are from this interview. 140. All of these quotes and paraphrases are in Szeemann (1969), n.p., also reprinted in Szeemann (1981), 44 ff. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 141. The “world-system” was theorized in the early 1970s by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, building on Fernand Braudel, for which see Braudel (1985). All but forgotten is the pioneering Franz Rosenzweig (1917), but see Gordon (2003). There are many critiques of the “center-periphery” aspects of these theories; see Janet Abu Lughod’s counter-European analysis (1989), Fredric Jameson’s postmodern take (1991), and Anthony King’s edited anthology (1997). 142. For “narcissism,” see Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Bern and Kassel are similar in scale, with population currently 137 thousand for Bern versus 196 thousand for Kassel. Bern is the capital of Switzerland, where Kassel is an otherwise unremarkable industrial town in the former Landgrafschaft Hessen (domain in the Holy Roman Empire), near West Germany’s Cold War border with East Germany. 143. Translations mine. Some of these projects are documented in the Attitudes catalogue (Szeemann 1969), some in Szeemann, comp. (1972). 144. Szeemann (1969). 145. Protesters would burn their Swiss military uniforms in front of the Kunsthalle during the exhibition, for which see Szeemann (2007), 262– 63, but collective actions such as these were not Szeemann’s idea. Likewise, the curator politely declined to allow an artists’ congress to be organized during the event, as noted in correspondence presented in Celant, ed. (2013). 146. In his shift from theater to exhibitions, Szeemann recalled: “I had found my medium of expression: the exhibition as the creation of a temporary world. The rhythm of preparation is much like that of a stage production, but once an exhibition has opened, you can hide behind the temporary world, while in the theater you must go there personally every night.” Szeemann (2007), 15. 147. On “platform formalism,” see Albrethsen (2003). 148. Paul J. Kopp, “Interpellation,” May 5, 1969, Szeemann papers, Getty Research Institute, Collection B289 F3, in my own translation from the different originals in French and German. The official document is marked “Directed to the Department of Education to answer before the Great Parliament RRB (Bern) from 6 May 1969, State Chancellery— Kopp,” sent to Szeemann in photocopy on May 12, 1969, with instructions to report back to the Chancellery by July 15. For information as to the identity of “Kopp,” ephemera in the Szeemann files referred to him as “teacher 282

Notes to Chapter 5

Paul Kopp,” which then made it possible to locate a memorial essay describing his activities on the primary schoolyard, his status as a victim of tuberculosis, and his lifelong advocacy for the disabled. See Eva Michaelis, founder of UNIFEM Switzerland: “Paul Johann Kopp: Ein Pionier im wahren Sinn des Wortes, Erinnerungen einer langjährigen Mitarbeiterin der Vereinigung ‘Das Band,’” http:// www.tagderkranken.ch/fileadmin/archiv_de/paul_johann_kopp .pdf (accessed July 2014). 149. Whether the Kopp affair was part of why Szeemann resigned is open to question. I am grateful to Getty deputy director Andrew Perchuk for alerting me to the existence of these files, which are not referenced in Szeemann’s numerous publications, and to research assistant Casie Kesterson for finding them. 150. These include the late 1960s groups such as Art Workers Coalition in New York, the Situationists in Paris and London, Hi Red Center in Tokyo, and most proximately to Szeemann, an incipient Green Party— of which Joseph Beuys would be a founding member when it was finally formalized in 1980. If they didn’t know the art collectives, the Bern journalists would soon know of the militarized Weathermen in the United States (1969) and the Red Army Faction/Red Brigades in Europe (notably Germany and Italy, 1970s). 151. Müller (2006), 19. 152. A motion had been made on May 29, 1968, to the Zurich Town Council for converting the Globus-Provisorium of Zurich into a youth center. Following the failure of this initiative, protests first erupted following a Jimi Hendrix concert May 31; students then began occupying the empty Globus department store and rioted in earnest in July. For photographs and a brief history, see http://www.ringier-specter.ch/index.cfm?id=847&showAlbum =50 (accessed June 2013). 153. The three female artists were Jo Ann Kaplan, Hanne Darboven, and Eva Hesse, the last of whom Szeemann probably met when he gave her husband Tom Doyle an exhibition in 1964. 154. Müller (2006), 14. There’s no evidence that the manure dump actually happened, although Müller cites it as fact. Clippings in the Szeemann papers include “Anonymous,” writing for the GAG-AG, Bern, March 26, 1969: “1 Kilogram Kunst-Dünger” to be delivered as “responsive art” (this phrase in English); and in a different communication from the same date on letterhead from “Vereinigung für Kulturelle Veranstaltungen Reinach/Argau,” the offer of “ein Legat von einigen Zentnern Dynamit” (a legacy of several hundred pounds of dynamite); Getty, Szeemann papers, B289 F3. 155. Müller (2006), 156n14, quoting Gerhart Schürch, financial director of City of Bern, in an article for Berner Tagblatt, April 19– 20, 1969. 156. Müller (2006), 19– 20. 157. When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 was curated by Germano Celant “in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas,” installed at, and supported by, the Fondazione Prada in Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice, June 1– November 3, 2013. See Buskirk et al. (2013). Notably, Szeemannian reinstallations continue, with ephemera from Szeemann’s documenta 5 in a circulating exhibition for Independent Curators International

offered in 2011. It was shown in an expanded installation at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. 158. For “performative documents,” see Widrich (2014). 159. See Eco (1989). 160. Assessing Celant, ed. (2013), critic Holland Cotter wrote, “I learned that Szeemann’s show, enshrined by history, . . . was not quite the avant-garde ideal it was cracked up to be. Rather, it was the end of that idea and the beginning of another. It was the end of a brief, illusory effort by art to create an existential economy outside the market, and the beginning of art business as we know it now.” Cotter, “Art’s Future Meets Its Past,” New York Times, August 14, 2013, Arts section, C6. 161. This is one way to interpret the recent spate of historical explorations of such exhibitions, as in Jens Hoffmann’s exemplary Other Primary Objects, installed in two successive segments at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 2014. Hoffmann returned to the rather restricted brief of Kynaston McShine’s original 1966 exhibition of British and US abstract sculptors, Primary Objects, exhibiting in their place artists from Africa to Asia who could have been included in a less provincial selection. 162. Harald Szeemann, quoted in Hegewisch and Klüser, eds. (1991), 219, as translated in Müller (2006), 20. 163. The definitive account is Guilbaut (1983). See also my Machine in the Studio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Eyesight Alone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) for the “ideology of no-ideology.” 164. In this regard, see Rattemeyer (2010). 165. Supposedly gleaned from the title Keith Sonnier proposed for his own neon and plastic contribution to the show. Szeemann (2007). 166. Müller (2006), 20. 167. Translated in Müller (2006), 21, from Tommaso Trini, “Nuovo alfabeto per corpo e materia” (New Alphabet for Body and Material), in Attitudes, n.p. 168. Szeemann, introduction to Attitudes, as translated in Müller (2006), 15. 169. Müller (2006), 156n11. 170. Newly branded corporate American topoi were fascinating emblems in this part of the world— one thinks of the red “garland” produced by Thomas Schütte for Kaspar König’s office when the latter was organizing the Westkunst art fair in Cologne; at the time, König called Schütte’s garland Marlboro Rot, 1979, since it came from abstracting the red wedge at the top of the Marlboro cigarette pack. (Thanks to art historian Kirsten Weiss for this information, per our email exchange March 20, 2014.) Thomas Schütte now calls the work Rote Girlande (Red Garland). 171. Szeemann was urged to give up his chain-smoking habit by his mother in a letter from April 1968; apparently she had paid for a medically sanctioned cure, to no avail. Szeemann (2007), 198– 200. 172. Nina Kaiden Wright interview (2012). 173. The front of the sheet is also reproduced in Szeemann (1981), 73, indicating its continued importance. 174. Shortly after the Attitudes show, Nina Kaiden became Nina Kaiden Wright; in 1970 she left Ruder & Finn to found her

own corporate philanthropy consultancy and PR firm in Toronto, still operating as Arts and Communications Counselors, as of 2014. In our telephone interview, January 25, 2012, Kaiden recalled a very different trajectory from Szeemann’s published accounts: I remember it differently. . . . I honestly think that the name of Ruder and Finn was very well known and my name was well known, and Harald Szeemann came to see me (if you ask me, this is how it went), and said, “I have a very interesting exhibition.” . . . I knew about his reputation. It was very new, but it was coming from someone who’d already established himself as a singularly brilliant and important curator. It was a very anxious [decision] for Philip Morris. Published diary entries by Szeemann (2007, 244– 45) show a visit from Kaiden and a Philip Morris representative from Lausanne in July 1968, with Szeemann submitting a proposal for “artists of the Cold Poetic Image” to Kaiden in August 1968. 175. Szeemann (2007), 245– 46. 176. Szeemann diary entries from March 20, 21, and 22, 1969, translated in Müller (2006), 14. 177. As he wrote in his diary in late March 1969: “The more artists come, the less is done. The Kunsthalle is becoming a meeting point and a forum. Beuys is painting the Fettecke [Fat Corner]. Arrival of Ruthenbeck, van Elk, Dibbets, Boezem, Flanagan, Louw, Buthe, Weiner, Kosuth, Artschwager, Kuehn, Sarkis, Jacquet, Lohaus, and then Seth Siegelaub . . .” Ibid. 178. On Siegelaub, see Alberro (2003). 179. “First Edition / 1000 / December 1968 / Copyright Seth Siegelaub and John W. Wendler 1968. All Rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without permission in writing from the publisher.” One has to wonder, did Szeemann receive permission in writing from the publisher, Siegelaub himself? Only the archives, recently deposited with the Getty, will tell. See Szeemann, comp. (1972), n.p. 180. Attitudes traveled to museums in Krefeld and London, recuperating most of the $300,000 Swiss francs Szeemann had spent over the initial budget. While this practice of amortizing expenses over a number of institutions is often credited to Szeemann, he was hardly its inventor. There were precedents in the world’s fair structures, as individual entrepreneurs took human exhibitions or entertainments (for example) on the road after the fair, expecting to pay back lenders or investors. And as chapter 4 recounts, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had founded an International Council in the 1950s that was responsible for marketing traveling shows a decade before Szeemann got into the act. Unexplored here is the forgotten exhibition packager John Gibson, documented in Szeemann, comp. (1972), n.p. 181. Heinich (1995). 182. For a probing account see Feldmeth (2011). 183. Szeemann, in Müller (2006), 16. 184. For Abstract Expressionism as a heterosexual discourse, see my “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 628– 65. 185. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996). Notes to Chapter 5

283

186. Harald Szeemann to Walter De Maria, November 6, 1969, documented in Szeemann (2007), 245. Christiaan Barnard was the South African inventor of heart transplant surgery protocols, the first of which made international news in 1967. 187. Szeemann, in Obrist (1996). 188. For the emergence of the stamps, see Fabien Pinaroli, “The Agency for Intellectual Guest Labour,” in Derieux, ed. (2007). 189. Harald Szeemann, “Comment on pourrait imaginer une collaboration entre les scientifiques et les organisateurs d’expositions” (How to Devise a Collaboration between Academics and Exhibition Organizers, 1996), as translated in Derieux, ed. (2007), 63. 190. Sans papiers is the French phrase for illegal immigrant. Szeemann’s British passport, a document obtained through his father’s side of the family, is referenced in Szeemann (2007), 198– 200. 191. “Les catalogues, la publicité, les affiches, les entrées— et la vente de mes expositions à l’étranger”; translations my own. This gleeful gesture of making the Kunsthalle files public was echoed (and partially recapitulated) in Szeemann, comp. (1972), where this early interview with the French journalist is published. 192. Wolf Vostell, quoted in Müller (2006), 157n38. 193. Arnold Bode, cited in Nachtigäller et al., eds. (2001), 23, and translated in Müller (2006), 157n38. 194. Vostell, who began his own active archive early on, was a model for Szeemann in more ways than one. The artist’s first significant book was Bilder, Verwischungen, Happening– Notationen 1961– 1966 (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1966); his second was Aktionen, Happenings und Demonstrationen seit 1965: Eine Dokumentation, 1970 (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1970), in which he agitated against “All Daliesque, pseudo-religious personality cult performances that center on an artist and do not include the audience . . . they are neither new nor of politico-cultural interest” (as translated in Müller 2006, 35). Szeemann included a “Documentation Path” in their collaborative 1970 Happenings show, exhibiting 646 Fluxus items in small vitrines, including a Beuys Fluxus stamp; he also arranged for a rowdy nude action by Vienna Actionist Otto Mühl (Der geile Wotan) in the Cologne venue, for which see Müller (2006), 27. See also Lütticken (2012). 195. Müller (2006), 38. 196. Harald Szeemann, interviewed by Petra Kipphoff, in Szeemann (1981), 85, as translated in Müller (2006), 38. 197. See Manfred Schneckenberger, ed., Documenta: Idee und Institution. Tendenzen, Konzepte, Materialien (Munich, 1983), 116, as translated in Müller (2006):42. 198. Reproduced in Derieux, ed. (2007), 142. 199. Robert Morris to Harald Szeemann, May 6, 1972, in Derieux, ed. (2007), 144. 200. John Russell, “Expand your Notions,” Sunday Times (London), July 16, 1972, in Derieux, ed. (2007), 145; Hilton Kramer, “Art: German documenta,” New York Times, July 1, 1972, Leisure section, 11. 201. Van Der Mark (1973), 129. 202. Nigel Gosling, “Crystal Balls in Kassel,” Arts Guardian, September 10, 1972, in Derieux, ed. (2007), 146. 284

Notes to Chapter 5

203. Probably responding to the incendiary interventions of the Viennese Actionists, this writer for Le Monde drew lessons “in the realms of industry, sociology, psychopathology, and psychoanalysis. . . . Fear, violence, mutilation, castration, and sex constantly crop up as leitmotifs.” Claude Bouyere, “documenta 5 or The Man,” in Le Monde, 1972, translated in Derieux, ed. (2007), 145. 204. François Pluchart, “Documentally Well Done!” in arTitudes, nos. 8/9 (August/September 1972), translated in Derieux, ed. (2007), 146. 205. Szeemann (1975), 9. 206. See “Complaint Department,” Feminist Art Journal, May 1972 (referenced in Derieux, ed. 2007, 144), and Lucy Lippard’s letter, reproduced in Szeemann (2007), 365– 66. 207. Under the auspices of the Agentur, “Bachelors” toured to Bern’s Kunsthalle, Brussels, Düsseldorf, Paris, Malmö, Amsterdam, and Vienna. 208. See the installation sketch by Szeemann in Derieux, ed. (2007), 215. 209. Caption to pages 402– 3 illustrating James Lee Byars, James Lee Byars Does the Holy Ghost, September 6, 1975, in Szeemann (2007), 401. 210. Harald Szeemann, “Les Machines célibataires,” in Junggesellenmaschinen/Les Machines célibataires (Venice: Alfieri, 1975), 11, as translated in Derieux, ed. (2007), 68. 211. Duchamp’s note is scribbled (in French) at the bottom of a drawing for the chocolate grinder that serves as a study for the Large Glass. It is a quintessential double entendre in the original French, where it connotes masturbation. The isolation of the bachelor machines from the disrobing bride in the upper register of the Large Glass completes the metaphor of autopoiesis, autonomy, onanism, and/or sterility. 212. Italy’s transavangardia “bad boys” were Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, and Enzo Cucchi, the latter openly emulating a Michelangelesque erotics in large-scale oil paintings of muscled men. 213. Di Martino (2005), 70. 214. Harald Szeemann to James Lee Byars, no date (but in response to Byars’s communication of 7 April– 1 May, 1980), as reproduced in Szeemann (2007), 425. 215. The committee included Michael Compton and Martin Kunz, who were charged with the “disappointing” international survey of the 1970s, per De Martini (2005), 70. By contrast, Szeemann claimed, “In 1980 I created ‘Aperto’ for the Venice Biennale,” in Obrist (1996). 216. Szeemann (2001), xvii. 217. Ibid. 218. See René Block and Henry Meyric Hughes, debated by Hedwig Fijen, in “How a European Biennial of Contemporary Art Began,” in Vanderlinden and Filipovic, eds. (2005), 189– 91. 219. The full title is even more delirious: dAPERTutto/APERTO overALL/APERTO parTOUT/APERTO überALL, for which see Szeemann (1999b). 220. Per the back cover of Norese, ed. (2000). I am immensely grateful to Agnes Kohlmeyer for the gift of this book during our interview in Venice in 2005.

221. Marina Abramovic may need to be notified of trademark infringement, dating from her 2010 MoMA retrospective under the same name. For Frank, see Norese, ed. (2000), n.p. 222. Nicolas Bourriaud’s l’esthétique relationnelle began with a set of essays published in Documents sur l’art in 1995, and was put into practice in his exhibition Traffic at CAPC Bordeaux in 1996; see Bourriaud (2002). The “relational” Oreste authors identifying themselves as “artway of thinking” are Stefania Mantovani and Federica Thiene, who posted an Italian email address in 1999: artway @tin.it. See Norese, ed. (2000), n.p. 223. Norese, ed. (2000), n.p. 224. Per participating artist Cesare Pietroiusti: “since i had proposed a very complicated and ‘stiff ’ name for the residency— something like ‘first experimental laboratory of artists’ residency and exchange blablah’ someone (mario pieroni, one of the initiators), who wanted to make fun of me, proposed ‘oreste’ because, he said, it sounded like the name of a whatever roman trattoria. i immediately liked it not because of Aeschylus but because that name somehow included the term ‘rete’ (net, network).” Email to the author, July 30, 2014. 225. Agnes Kohlmeyer, in Norese, ed. (2000), 18. 226. Szeemann, in ibid., 28. 227. Kohlmeyer, in ibid., 17. 228. For which see Albrethsen (2003) and Lamoureux (2005). For an interesting take by the organizer of Platform 1: Democracy Unrealized for Enwezor’s documenta 11, see Marchart (2008). 229. The resulting publications from 2001– 2 are Documenta11_ Platform 1— Democracy Unrealized; Documenta11_Platform 2— Experiments with Trust: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation; Documenta11_Platform 3— Creolité and Creolization; Documenta11_Platform 4— Under Siege: Four African Cities; and Documenta11_Platform 5: Exhibition (2 vols.). All are published by Hatje Cantz Verlag; see Enwezor, ed. (2002) for platform 5. 230. In this Szeemann stands in contrast to one of his favorite collaborators, Bazon Brock. Brock’s contribution to the catalogue is partially titled “Problems Unite More Than Beliefs,” while Szeemann’s essay is “The Timeless, Grand Narration of Human Existence in Its Time.” Szeemann (2001), xiv– xv, xvii– xxv. 231. Denise Frimer, “Pedagogical Paradigms: Documenta’s Reinvention” (ca. 2010), on art & education, the e-flux scholarly site, http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/pedagogical-paradigms -documenta’s-reinvention/ (accessed January 2012). 232. “One of our board members calculated that at least seventeen artists in Harald Szeemann’s first [sic] Venice Biennial (1999 d’APERTutto) . . . had been included in the first and second editions of Manifesta.” Henry Meyric Hughes, president of the Manifesta foundation, in Vanderlinden and Filipovic, eds. (2005), 197. For a working out of his “trading zones” theory in the context of documenta and other large-scale repeating exhibitions, see Peter Galison, “When Thought Collectives Collide,” keynote delivered July 17, 2015 at “Erweiterte Denkkollektive/expanding thoughtcollectives,” the sixtieth-anniversary symposium on documenta organized by Dorothea von Hantelmann at Kassel, Germany; http:// www.documenta60.de.

Chapter 6 1. Kant (1781), 43. 2. Hegel (1807), 55. 3. Dewey (1934), 19. 4. Louis Althusser, “Letter on Art” (1966), in Althusser (1971), 223. 5. These are the opening lines from Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” first written in French (“Des espaces autres,” 1967), translated into English by Jay Miskowiec in 1984, and available online at http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/ foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (accessed October 2014). 6. Scott (1991), 777, 793. 7. Heidegger, as cited in translation by Safranski (1998), 312, drawn from handwritten notes in German later collected in Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol 65, Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975), 67. See also Heidegger (1950) on Hegel. The philosopher’s wariness of Erlebnis is further glossed by Michael Inwood, who quotes Heidegger and paraphrases his view thus: “‘Fortunately, the Greeks had no experiences.’ . . . Hence they did not believe that the point of art is to provide them.” Inwood (1999), 63. 8. Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead’” (1943) and “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), translated in Heidegger (1977), 100, 127, respectively. 9. The Cartesian descriptor is from Abel Rey, in an entry in the French Encyclopedia on “L’outillage mental,” as summarized in D. Parodi (1939), 12. Parodi’s account of what the Paris congress produced is explicit in cautioning against “the anti-rationalist tendency which today attracts many of our young metaphysicians who . . . glory in an existential philosophy and in certain versions of German phenomenology.” Heidegger is cited: “The increasing number of translations . . . mark the importance of this tendency” (22). 10. Emphasis added. Heidegger (1938), 134. 11. Per entry on Heyse in German Wikipedia, http://de .wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Heyse (accessed July 2014). 12. “German intellectual thrust”— letter from Heyse, Heidegger’s former student, August 1936; see Safranski (1998), 324. Second quote from Heidegger’s letter to the rector of Freiburg University, July 14, 1937, explaining why he was not going to accept the insultingly belated invitation to be part of the German delegation to Paris; see Farías (1989), 246– 47. 13. Heidegger, Holzwege (1950), as cited in Safranski (1998), 296. 14. Heidegger (1938), 116. 15. From the set of lectures Heidegger delivered the summer after his inauguration as rector of the University of Freiburg; Heidegger (1935), 37. 16. Historian Paul Greenhalgh notes that world’s fairs “slide . . . into confusion and decline after 1970.” I have argued that 1937 marks the beginning of the fairs’ irrelevance for art. See Greenhalgh (2011), 42. 17. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” written as his contribution to Szeemann’s catalogue for documenta 5 (1972), and published in the October Artforum that same year. For my take on Notes to Chapters 5 and 6

285

the “Site/Non-Site” works, see C. Jones (1996). For a sustained Heideggerian reading of Smithson, see Gary Schapiro, Earthwards (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 18. Adorno (1993), xxiii. In his reading of Hegel, Adorno explicitly works to counteract a Heidegger statement such as this: “But man will never be able to experience and ponder this that is denied so long as he dawdles about in the mere negating of the age.” Heidegger (1938), 136. For Heidegger’s own view of Hegelian “experience,” see Heidegger (1950). 19. Dewey (1934); Ursprung (2013). 20. Cited in Nesbit (2013), 66, where she quotes Kubler from Robert Horvitz, “A Talk with George Kubler,” Artforum, October 1973, 32. 21. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), translated from the German by Edward Allen McCormick (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). 22. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon; An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 105– 6. 23. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), originally published in Artforum, then anthologized as the title essay in Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 24. See Martin Jay for a helpful discussion of empeiria, noting its link to empiricism and its role in ancient medical education, which was divided into empiricki, methodiki and dogmatiki. Jay (2005), 12. I note here that concordances will turn up scores of words that are translated as “experience” from the ancient Greek, including dokimé, peira, geuomai, horaó, paschó, and theóreó, among others. 25. For the “partitioning” of the senses, see Jacques Rancière (2004). 26. Hegel (1807), 10. Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique (Paris: J. Vrin, ca. 1938), 290, as excerpted by Parodi (1939), 12. 27. T. J. Clark (1999). 28. Ibid., 62. 29. Typical of the Northern genre of the cityscape, “The staffage indicate ‘all the world,’ thus adding overtones of universality, civic pride and world view.” Patricia Mainardi (1987), 147– 48. 30. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy Schapiro, “Introduction,” in Adorno (1993), ix. 31. See Jay (2005). 32. It was World War I that galvanized German philosophies of experience. Claims to experience were seen either as a dangerous mass formation around cryptofascist Lebensphilosophie (with its relatively new term for experience, Erlebnis, developing out of Dilthey but edging toward Ernst Jünger’s militaristic “lived experience”) or as a site of melancholic loss (the traumas of industrialization stimulating the yearning for “real experience” that Benjamin and Adorno constructed around the earlier term Erfahrung). 33. Scott (1991), 777. 34. Adorno (1993), 54, citing Hegel (1807), 487 and 55, respectively. 35. Adorno (1993), 64. 36. The aesthetics of experience is a reflective, tactical working (and working out) of such effects. Here I am thinking 286

Notes to Chapter 6

of the philosophies recently emerging around neuroscience, such as “embodied cognition,” “social ontology,” “social epistemology,” and other theories of collective knowledge. I thank philosopher Mattia Gallotti and my colleagues at Neuroscience Bootcamp (U. Penn, summer 2012) for alerting me to this important scholarship; see also philosopher Selim Berker, “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 37, no. 4 (2009): 293– 326, and C. Jones et al. (2016). 37. For a superb example of such an analysis in literature, see Peltason (1999). 38. Contemporary art’s fusion of experiential and theoretical working contrasts with the Romantic epoch’s “poetry of experience,” in which “the imaginative apprehension gained through immediate experience is primary and certain, whereas the analytic reflection that follows is secondary and problematical. [The] poetry of experience . . . makes its statement not as an idea but as an experience.” Langbaum (1957), 35– 36. 39. See Eco (1989). 40. Badiou (2005). 41. Oliver Feltham, in Badiou (2005), xxviii. 42. Friedrich Nietzsche brought questions of the “eternal return” or “recurrence” of the universe and its events into Continental philosophy; these notions are approached in §285 and §341 of The Gay Science, further developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and finally addressed head-on in the essay “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same.” See Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche, published in English in four volumes; “Eternal Recurrence” is in vol. 2, translated by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 43. Feltham, in Badiou (2005), xxx. 44. See Blanchard et al. (2011), and Qureshi (2011). Columbus came back from the new world bringing Native Americans with him to the Spanish court in 1493, but it is unclear whether this was a “display” or part of an established custom to have diplomats from other realms as ambassadors in the court. 45. Raspail and Part (2000), 20. 46. Raspail, Sens, and Bourriaud (2005). 47. Ibid., 44. 48. “Sous les pavés le plage” (under the cobblestones, the beach) was one famous slogan of the student protesters in Paris during Mai ’68; see Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www.bopsecrets .org/CF/graffiti.htm (accessed January 2012). 49. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Time Specific: Contemporary Art, Exploration, and Sustainable Development,” in Raspail et al. (2005), 52. 50. Michel Maffesoli, interviewed by Jérôme Sens, “Living One’s Death Every Day,” in Raspail et al. (2005), 53. 51. It’s hard to say whether this haptic inviolability was mandated by the artists, the owners of the works, or the Lyon biennial curators. The works in question are Saâdane Afif, Power Chords, in which a number of electric guitars are set up to play variations on the so-called “money chord” of rhythm and blues, and samples of the one-minute sculptures of Erwin Wurm, similar to the set illustrated here as fig. 6.4. 52. Bourriaud (2002). 53. Cf. Boutang (2007).

54. The tradition referenced here goes back to Courbet’s heroes Joseph Fourier and Jean Journet, where sensual pleasure and leisure confront capitalist demands to be “productive,” and extends into the brilliant economic theory of Surrealist Georges Bataille (1988), which informed the Situationist détournement, for which see Debord and Wolman (1956). Ken Knabb’s translation of the Situationist declaration is online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/ detourn.htm#1 (accessed August 2012). 55. Bishop (2004), drawing on Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Also see Negt and Kluge (1993). 56. Derrida (1981). 57. Scott (1991), 793. 58. See Jay (2005), 351. 59. Kant (1790). 60. Hegel and Schopenhauer play large roles in the “modalization” of experience, for which see Jay (2005). See also C. Jones (2005b). 61. See Ursprung (2013); Nesbit (2013). 62. Arnold (1869), 14, xxxv. 63. Ibid., viii. 64. See Dutta (2006); Auerbach (1999); Robertson (2004). 65. The Parergon is discussed in Derrida (1987). 66. Adorno insists on this in Hegel, that there is nothing that is not always already “vermittelt” (mediated): “Immediacy itself is essentially mediated.” Adorno (1993), 57. 67. Corral (2005), n.p. 68. Ibid. 69. From press release regarding Wave UFO at Deitch Projects website, http://www.deitch.com/artists/sub.php?artistId=15 (accessed August 2012). 70. Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO discussed by “Regine” on June 14, 2005, in the art blog “We Make Money Not Art,” http:// www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2005/06/wave-ufo -by-mar.php (accessed September 2005). 71. Emblem theory is particularly useful for thinking about how discourse and interpretation fuse with image or object. An effective summary is Peter M. Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). See also Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 72. The “body without organs” is a chief figure of utopian disorgan-ization offered by Deleuze and Guattari (1977). 73. Echoing James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York: Routledge, 1999). 74. Schulze (2000), from the German, 1992; repackaged by Pine and Gilmore (1999). 75. I apprentice myself to these “technologies of the self ” via Arnold Davidson’s incomparable readings of Foucault and Hadot, as in Hadot (1995). I have also been deeply affected by Davidson’s joint lecture-performance “Improvisation,” with musician George Lewis at Wellesley College in the spring of 2012. 76. Deleuze (1988), 109. 77. “It is, in the same way, that the two chairs in the Pinocchio Effect equally displace the field of artistic discourse: a chair for man, the other for women, and the possibility for the two to feel

the lengthening of their noses by activating a vibrator placed on the body. Carsten Höller’s art disrupts our certitude and weakens our convictions requiring us to otherwise feel what we reference. The artist invites us to modify our points of view and see a different reality.” Official website of the 2005 Lyon biennial, http://www .biennale-de-lyon.org/bac2005/angl/artistes/holler.htm (accessed June 2010). 78. Rosemarie Trockel and Carsten Höller, A House for Pigs and People, at the 1997 documenta; or see Höller’s use of reindeer in his installation Soma, at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, 2011. 79. The 2006 Berlin Biennale was curated by artist Maurizio Cattelan along with curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. 80. Ontario (2006). 81. See Jones, “Event/Site,” paper presented at the CIHA conference in Nuremberg, Germany, “Charged Sites/Ereignisorte” session, July 20, 2012, published in the congress proceedings, The Challenge of the Object: 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, edited by G. Ulrich Großmann und Petra Krutisch (Nürnberg: Verlag des Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013). 82. Heiser (2004). 83. This description is not determinative for Kiss. When installed as part of a Sehgal retrospective at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau in August, 2015, one rendition of Kiss was entirely in the dark, and the interpreters were nude. 84. Badiou (2005). 85. Ibid., xxx. 86. C. Jones (2010). The digestive aspect of Wright’s architecture is well-known, and by inserting “anthropophagy” I’m alluding to Sehgal’s canny digestion of Wright, confronting the architectural metaphorics melding progress through ascension and excretion through descent by drawing visitors along “life’s path” for This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum. 87. This would take more extensive argument, but the fantasy of pure experience is simply that. Even the limit-experience of almost dying draws on prior training to form as experience: light that our eyes have learned to see, music that our ears are accustomed to hearing. The organism’s sensory neurons become capacitated only in an encounter with an environment, which primes these cells for further experience in, or imagined simulations of, that environment. See C. Jones et al. (2016). 88. Luckily, in this case we have a video that authorizes itself as a comparable experience of the event; see Dan Graham, Performer/ Audience/Mirror (1975), distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. 89. The term performative comes from philosopher J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, exemplified when the utterance “I do” at a wedding completes the legal act of marriage. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (William James lectures, 1955; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). For an explicit insertion of Sehgal into this legacy, see Hantelmann (2010). Hantelmann has been crucial to the development of Sehgal’s work, as the two are partners. 90. See C. Jones (2010). 91. Oliver Feldham, in Badiou (2005). 92. Badiou (2005), 81. Notes to Chapter 6

287

93. See archived Berlin Biennial 4 website, http://alt .berlinbiennale.de/eng/index.php?sid=bb_11_02 (accessed October 14, 2009). 94. AJS (Ali Subotnick), “Paul McCarthy,” in the exhibition guide, Cattelan et al. (2006), 105. 95. Fisher (2009). 96. Mainardi (1987) argues that the two expositions of the Second Empire— 1855, 1867— were catalysts for “the collision of art and politics which produced many of the institutions and attitudes which we still associate with Modernism” (1). 97. Manet (1867), 6. See Mainardi (1987), 141. 98. Monet was represented in the 1900 Decennale with older works, the most recent being two views of Antibes from 1888. For Monet, the market was where he turned to solicit a new viewing public, showing “no fewer than 10 Japanese Bridge pictures, 7 from 1899 and 3 from 1900.” Paul Tucker, email to the author, July 28, 2012; see also Tucker, Monet in the ’90s: The Series Paintings (exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1990). 99. Derrida (1981), 3– 25. 100. Molly Nesbit locates art historian Meyer Schapiro as the scholar who gave particular heft to John Dewey’s pragmatism; “to see sight” is her formulation of Schapiro’s practice, echoing Dewey’s charge to live forward: “event and fact enter together as inscriptions of new events and new things to be done.” Nesbit (2013), 40, 41. 101. Fisher (2009). 102. For a more detailed articulation of this argument, see my “Rendering Time,” in Galison et al., Einstein for the Twenty-first Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 130– 49. 103. Rancière (2004), 12. 104. Jeremy Schapiro and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, “Introduction,” in Adorno (1993), xv. 105. Adorno, “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in ibid., 69. This “grasping” of the concept echoes the antinomy set out by German sculptor Adolf Hildebrand in 1907, when he compared the ideational work of “seeing” to the haptic work of abtasten— a kind of “scanning” by the viewer of a sculpture or space— a verb related to palpating, feeling, or sizing up. See Hildebrand, “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, eds. (1994), 227– 80. My thanks to Alla Vronskaya for this reference. 106. Immanuel Kant (1790). Throughout this chapter I am indebted to the work-in-progress of Arindam Dutta on Kant, labor, and design, and to our Technopolitics seminar at MIT in 2011. 107. Peter Osborne, “Introduction,” in Osborne, ed. (2000), 2. 108. Sloterdijk (1987). 109. Kleege (2005). See also Osborne, ed. (2000). 110. Michelle Grier, “Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/kant -metaphysics/ (accessed October 2009). 111. Arindam Dutta, work in progress. The internal quotes are from Derrida (1981), 4. 112. Art has always required living above “bare life.” See the analysis of biopolitics in Agamben (1998). 288

Notes to Chapters 6 and 7

113. Kant (1790), 188. 114. Bourriaud (2002); Bishop (2006). 115. Thus, while Tino Sehgal refused to allow documentation of his piece at the 2012 documenta 13 in Kassel, its location was still marked on the guide, and it was massively covered by journalists and bloggers, thus accommodating the exhibition’s discursive apparatus. The artist’s policy may be changing; viewers of the Sehgal in the 2013 Venice Biennale were not stopped from taking photographs or videos. 116. See Takashi Murakami, The Art Entrepreneurship Theory (Geijutsu Kigyo Ron, 2005) and, in Chinese, The Art of Fighting: You Can Also Become an Artist (2011). Both translations and transliterations courtesy of Amazon.us; thanks to art historian Yukio Lippit for bringing these writings to my attention. 117. Derrida (1987). 118. Derrida (1981), 21. 119. Duve (1996). The inframince (French for “ultra-thin”) was analogized by Duchamp to the flavor of a mouth lingering in exhaled smoke, or the difference in volume between a clean shirt and a shirt worn once. 120. For the thing as a gathering of social subjects, see Latour and Weibel, eds. (2005). 121. Heidegger (1938), 128, 132. 122. Ibid., 133. 123. Marder (2009), 117. 124. Foucault (1991), 33– 34. 125. Ibid., 38– 40. 126. Brian Singleton, review of Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (1998), Theater Journal 51, no. 1 (1999), 94. 127. I am grateful to the scholarship of Niko Vicario, and his unpublished seminar paper on Artaud’s impact in 1960s Latin America. 128. For Sehgal’s This Is so Contemporary, see Heiser (2004), “Three guards jumped up from their chairs and hopped around in loose circles, raising their arms and proclaiming ‘This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!’ One then uttered, ‘Tino Sehgal’, then all in unison ‘This is so contemporary’, another ‘2003’, and the third ‘courtesy Galerie Mot!’ . . .” The guards were trained in opera, so when I experienced the work these words were sung in rich tenor and baritone voices. 129. See Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” given at the Fifth International Summer Academy, Frankfurt, Germany, August 20, 2004. First translated into English in Rancière (2007). 130. Rancière (2007), 272. Chapter 7 1. Alden Jewell (1943). 2. Merleau-Ponty (1962), 406, 453. 3. Robert Smithson, in Szeemann (1972). 4. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), 197. 5. Badiou (2005), 176. 6. The question is embedded in a larger meditation— “Die höchste Aufgabe der Transscendentalphilosophie ist also: Wie ist Erfahrung möglich?” (the foremost vocation of transcendental

philosophy is to ask the question: how is experience possible?)— part of an essay on metaphysics submitted to the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berlin) in 1791, just after the Third Critique. See Kant’s handwritten manuscript Preisschrift über die Fortschritte der Metaphysik (Prize Essay on the Progress of Metaphysics), in vol. 20 of Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: German Academy of Sciences), 275, http://www.korpora.org/Kant/aa20/275.html (accessed July 2014). 7. Judgments of experience are “synthetic judgments a posteriori” in Kant, and “possess only a comparative universality,” in the summary provided by Holzhey and Mudroch (2005), 119. 8. Jewell (1943). See Gary Comenas’s excellent and wellsourced website (2001– ongoing) for a full account of the exchange between Jewell and the group that would become known a decade later as the Abstract Expressionists; accessed July 2014. 9. As my colleague Mark Jarzombek opines with caustic wit, “Nothing has been better for the global expansion of art history than the globalized claim for a local resistance to globalization.” In James Elkins et al., eds. (2010), 191. As to capital, the budget for documenta 13 was rumored to be 35 million euros, with the 2013 Venice Biennial reported to cost $4.3 million, approximately half of which had to be raised from private sources. See Carol Vogel, “New Guide in Venice,” New York Times, May 26, 2013, AR1. 10. See my “Globalism/Globalization” in James Elkins et al., eds. (2010), 129– 37. 11. Noam Chomsky, “Noam Chomsky Interviewed,” Croatian Feral Tribune, April 27, 2002, reprinted at ZNet, May 7, 2002, and now at http://www.architectureink .com/2002-06/chomsky4.htm (accessed October 2014). 12. Henry Meyric Hughes, “How a European Biennial of Contemporary Art Began,” in Vanderlinden and Filipovic, eds. (2005), 199. Hughes served as president of the International Board of Manifesta at least through 2008; see Debrett’s Peerage entry, http://www.debretts.com/people-of-today/profile/14091/Henry -Andrew-Carne-MEYRIC-HUGHES (accessed May 2014). 13. “Globalization has produced a fantastic opportunity for visibility; let’s take the next step.” Yinka Shonibare in Meyer et al. (2003), 154, 161, 206. 14. Catherine David, curator of documenta 10 ( June 21– September 28, 1997), in the introduction to the short guide, as excerpted online in the documenta website, http://universes-in -universe.de/doc/e_zitate.htm (accessed October 2014). 15. Ibid. 16. See C. Jones (2005), 24– 35. 17. On Ra’ad and parafictions so named, see Lambert-Beatty (2009), 51-84. 18. Intrepid art pilgrims in 2015 could still visit Your Black Horizon by taking a boat to the island of Lopud from a location on the coast of Croatia, as part of TBA21’s semi-public art installations, for which see http://www.tba21.org/visit/lopud. 19. Victor Cousin, Cours de Philosophie (1836), as cited in Jay (2005), 154n 85. For the earlier history of the “art for art’s sake” concept, see Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 32 ff.

20. Benjamin (1935), as in Benjamin (1999a), 8. 21. See Boutang (2007). 22. In addition to Nesbit (2013), a search under the keyword “John Dewey” in the Harvard Library system reveals a doubling from 105 publications in the 1980s to 246 in the 1990s, quadrupling to 428 in the 2000s. 23. Dewey (1903). 24. Ibid., 278. 25. “It was Faraday and Maxwell and Helmholtz and Roentgen” whose disinterested inquiries were taken over for profit, “instead of utilizing them as widely as possible for the public benefit.” John Dewey, “Needed: A New Politics,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 11, 1935–1937, ed. Joann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987/2008), 279. 26. Dewey (1934), 16. 27. Ash (1995). Ash, in passing, explores the complex relationship between Dewey and the European Gestalt theorists. 28. Dewey (1934), 174. 29. For an argument about Marin, Pollock, and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie in this cultural field, see my Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 30. Jewell (1943). 31. Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry” (1940); online, e.g., at http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/2004/wsmodpoetry .html (accessed July 2014). 32. There are scant records for the US pavilion at this tenth Venice Biennale, curated by Artnews editor Alfred Frankfurter and MoMA director Alfred Barr. Gary Comenas (2001– ongoing) has pulled together a few accounts, clarifying that Barr chose works by Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock, the latter represented with Number 1A, 1948; Number 12, 1949; and Number 23, 1949. Frankfurter selected works by Hyman Bloom, Rico Lebrun, and Lee Gatch. Comenas notes that critic Aline Louchheim complained in the New York Times (September 10, 1950) that Europeans did not take American art seriously, but noted that Pollock was a “special case,” his methods creating “violent arguments pro and con all abstract and automatic art.” 33. Neither the Cleveland Museum nor MoMA (the museums with which curators Frankfurter and Barr were associated) possess installation photos of the 1950 US pavilion. 34. Alfred Barr described the young artists he’d chosen as a “predominant vanguard” that went under several names: “symbolic abstraction,” “abstract expressionism,” “subjectivism,” and “abstract surrealism.” Barr, Art News (June 1950), cited by Comenas (2013). 35. See Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51, no. 8 (December 1952). Debra Bricker Balkan’s forthcoming literary biography of Rosenberg will anchor these ideas in their fullest context. 36. For the “Pollockian performative,” see A. Jones (1998); for a strong reading of Kaprow and Happenings, see Ursprung (2013). A crystallizing moment in this trajectory and its conceptual underpinning is Lippard (1973). 37. Oiticica, “Brazil Diarrhea” (1973), in Oiticica (1992), 17– 20. Notes to Chapter 7

289

38. Importantly, Allan Kaprow was an extremely close reader of Dewey, whose impact on other students passing through Columbia (Donald Judd, for example) needs to be more closely examined. See Ursprung (2013). Even Clement Greenberg could not avoid Dewey: “I know my style is too much like Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey, but I’ll be damned if I can deliver the birth otherwise.” Greenberg, letter to Harold Lazarus, August 28, 1940, in C. Jones (2005b), 236. 39. See Ursprung (2013) on Matta Clark and Kaprow, paralleled by Molly Nesbit’s discussion of these same embodied conceptualists in Nesbit (2013). 40. Paradoxical, because “genre” exists to purify and racinate, not hybridize. But installation is nothing if not motley as a genre (as the number of competing monographs attempting to define it attest): video, props, architectural elements, “things,” piles (bones, coffee, fat, pollen), accumulations on the floor/walls/ceilings— these are all found in artists’ installations. 41. See Elena Filipovic, “The Global White Cube,” in Vanderlinden and Filipovic, eds. (2005), 63– 84. 42. Massimiliano Gioni, commissioner-curator, Biennale di Venezia (2013). Gioni’s exhibition in the Italian Pavilion (where the international group exhibition is mounted) mixed extraordinary, often obsessive works made by nonartists with massive sculptures or wall works by well-known contemporary artists. 43. Adeagbo’s inscriptions were in French— “l’art qui est l’amour, et l’amour qui est l’art”— adding another layer of allusion to globalization via the colonial distribution of “world” languages throughout Africa. 44. “Doris Salcedo, Istanbul,” 2010, for Art 21, a production of the Public Broadcasting System; excerpted at http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=ZjYuDKFvsjY (accessed January 2012). 45. Martha Rosler, in Meyer et al. (2003), 161. 46. “Dropping The Visitors’ School has forced us to make the exhibition more spectacular by including expensive original artworks. . . . In that way, documenta 5 will be more of a traditional art exhibition. . . . Real innovation has fallen through, I think.” Harald Szeemann, interviewed by Irmeline Lebeer in 1971, translated and excerpted in Derieux, ed. (2007), 131. 47. An important episode revealing the impact of peripheral festivities occurred in 1964 when Robert Rauschenberg performed with the Merce Cunningham troupe at Venice’s Teatro Fenice— outside the biennial proper but timed to capture its glittering crowd. Hiroko Ikegami argues that this contributed more to the American artist’s triumphant award than did his controversial canvases. See Ikegami (2010). 48. First quote from Smithson (1972); per Szeemann’s capacity to absorb critique, Smithson’s criticism was originally published in the exhibition catalogue as the artist’s contribution to documenta. Second quote from Smithson’s searing letter to Gyorgy Kepes, resisting inclusion in the São Paulo biennial in 1969; Archives of American Art, Smithson papers. For discussion and full citation, see C. Jones (1996), 330, 457n163. 49. Since a definitive history of the art fairs has yet to be written, this book has ventured a hypothesis: the art fair distinguished itself as international only following the cancellation of the market 290

Notes to Chapter 7

function of the Venice Biennale. Before the 1968 elimination of the biennial as market, the small-scale Kölner Kunstmarkt, which opened in 1967, only had eighteen exhibitors, all from Cologne, Hannover, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Berlin— it was national only. The second iteration of Cologne’s event, in 1968, included galleries from Paris, and by 1974, in its eighth iteration, its name had changed to Internationaler Kunstmarkt Köln. Basel now dominates the global art fair business, with a franchise in Miami attracting Latin American collectors and galleries. 50. Smithson (1972). 51. Marilyn Zeitlin, quoted in the press release for the US pavilion at the forty-sixth Venice Biennale, April 26, 1995, cited on the Guggenheim Venice website, http://www.guggenheim-venice .it/inglese/pavilion/padiglione.php?id_pad=14 (accessed October 2014). 52. Zeitlin (1995). 53. Stengers (2010– 11); Cheah and Robbins (1998). 54. DekaBank website, http://www.dekabank .de/db/en/ engagement/kuw/bildendekunst.jsp (accessed May 2015). For motto, see “Three Questions to Fritz Oelrich, Chairman of the Board of Management of Dekabank,” in DekaBank (2005), 17. 55. Tino Sehgal, in conversation with Peter Sloterdijk, Die Zeit (2005), http://www.zeit.de/2005/24/Sehgal_2fSloterdijk, quoted in Madra (2006), 530– 31. 56. Sehgal’s interpreters in This Is So Contemporary, many of them trained opera singers, had been directed to steer visitor conversations to the economy and cultural valuation. This function took front and center in the later work This Situation (2007), which was acquired in a bilingual version by the Montréal contemporary art museum and put into motion in the spring of 2013, with conversation sparked by quotations from Adam Smith and John Kenneth Galbraith (if my identifications were correct). 57. Kerstin Müller, Minister of State in the German Federal Foreign Office, quoted in DekaBank (2005), 15. 58. Although the author is not cited, I am presuming this statement was approved by curator Julian Heymen: “Tino Sehgal (*1976),” in DekaBank (2005), 7. 59. Sehgal’s producer, Asad Raza, certainly has to travel rapidly and globally to inaugurate the elaborate process of training interpreters. 60. The Kassel Metro-Net connector was designed by Kippenberger for documenta the year the artist died. 61. “Major cities” quote is from John Craig Freeman’s charming blog Metronext, http://metronext.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/ martin-kippenbergers-metro-net/ (accessed July 2014). Kippenberger’s “good mood” quote is from a 1990 interview with Jutta Koether published in Flash Art, cited by David Gauntlett in the blog Some things about art and cities, from the theory.org.uk and newmediastudies.org.uk organizations, created April 2000: http:// www.newmediastudies.com/art/mk.htm (accessed July 2014). Kippenberger built only a few of these sites during his lifetime, and the total thus depends on whether you count those posthumously erected from his Unsinnige Bauvorhaben (Nonsensical building plans) or those built in his spirit, such as the Notre Dame des Bois site, titled Extending Kippenberger’s METRO-NET, by sculptor Klaus Scherübel.

62. Quoted from the website description of this piece for Alÿs’s 2010 retrospective at the Tate Modern, http://www.tate.org .uk/modern/exhibitions/francisalys/roomguide2.shtm (accessed January 2012). 63. In addition to employing Dave “Cannonball” Smith, Téllez worked with patients from a Mexicali state hospital for the mentally ill, whom he enlisted as actors to participate in a carnival on the beach on the Mexican side of the border during the event. As the crowd chanted a countdown (in Spanish), Smith was shot over the border to cheers and hollers. Landing on the deserted American side, he bounced briefly in a net and climbed down to terra firma. A YouTube video captures Smith’s classic answer to the reporter’s question, “Why did you do it?” Making the universal hand gesture for cash sliding in his fingers, Smith smiled: “Money.” See “Human Cannon at Border,” https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=OX9S_m7W4UA (accessed July 2014). For a broader context, see Sheren (2015). 64. In addition to rough cement block masonry, the workingclass trades Sierra has surfaced in his difficult artworks include tattooing, hair-dying, and prostitution. 65. See Muntadas (2005). 66. The conference titled “To Biennial or Not to Biennial?” was convened in Bergen, September 17-20, 2009, as the Kunsthalle director’s considered response to the municipality’s desire to found a Bergen biennial. See Filipovic et al. (2010). 67. Geeta Kapur, “Concept Note,” in Sundaram et al. (2005), 3. 68. “Venture Culturalism” was proposed by Eddie Berg from Liverpool, regarding his Foundation for Art, Culture, and Technology (FACT), in Sundaram et al. (2005), 5. 69. Most recently, artist Ekaterina Degot, who withdrew from the 2014 Manifesta in St. Petersburg rather than appear to support Russia during its annexation of the Crimea. See Ekaterina Degot, “A Text That Should Never Have Been Written?” e-flux journal posting, June 26, 2014. The St. Petersburg Manifesta opened without Degot’s work, and without a hitch. 70. Jennifer Allora, interviewed by arts reporter Carol Vogel. See Vogel, “War Machines (with Gymnasts),” New York Times, May 12, 2011, Arts section, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05

/15/arts/design/allora-calzadilla-gloria-venice-biennale.html ?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed July 2014). Reviews after the show opened were not so enthusiastic; Roberta Smith admitted that the show had a “clenched, unforgiving energy [whose] starkness has stuck with me” but castigated Allora and Calzadilla for “an angry, sophomoric Conceptualism that borders on the tyrannical and that in many ways mimics the kinds of forces they criticize.” Smith, “Combining People and Machines in Venice,” New York Times, July 8, 2011, Arts section, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/07/09/arts/design/allora-and-calzadilla-at-venice-biennale -review.html?pagewanted=all (accessed July 2014). 71. Vogel, “War Machines,” New York Times, May 12, 2011. 72. “Expectancy register” references the work and discourse of Olafur Eliasson. 73. Joan Jonas, statement for Kitakyushu regarding “Kites: Uses over Time,” http://www.cca-kitakyushu.org/english/project/ joanjonas_2014.shtml (accessed June 2014). 74. Joan Jonas, They Come to Us without a Word, installation at US national pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. See Jonas (2015). 75. Kleege (2005), 187. Descriptions from the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale: “trees”—Rêvolutions, 2015, by Céleste BoursierMougenot, French pavilion; “cut paper”—Global Myopia, 2015, by Marco Maggi, representing Uruguay; Jonas, They Come to Us, US pavilion. 76. Pamela Rosenkranz, Our Product, 2015 installation in the Swiss Pavilion, fifty-sixth Venice Biennale, engaging materials identified in the accompanying brochure as “bionin, evian, necrion, neotene, silicone, viagra,” etc. For a discussion with Rosenkranz in which she describes how “the knowledge mobilized in the technological, scientific and conceptual development of products” subverts “the culturally consolidated meanings of art,” see http:// www.designboom.com/art/swiss-pavilion-venice-biennale-2015 -pamela-rosenkranz-05-08-2015/ (accessed 2015). 77. “Zarte Empirie” was theorized by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1829, shortly before his death; it is Lisbet Koerner who instructed me in the translation of Zarte as “tender” rather than “delicate,” for which see “Goethe’s Botany: Lessons of a Feminine Science,” Isis 84 (1993): 485.

Notes to Chapter 7

291

Bibliography

Primary Sources/Archival Finding Aids

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA. Archivo Storico Arte Contemporanea (Historical Archives of Contemporary Art), Foundation of the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (cited as ASAC). Materials relating to the founding of the Biennale. Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (cited as Svevo/SPB Archives). Materials relating to the founding and early years of the São Paulo biennial. Bureau International des Expositions, Paris, France. Guide de la bibliotheque du B.I.E. Materials relating to world expositions from the 1850s to the present. Daws, John. Diary, ca.1830– 95, London. Digital scan of manuscript original, held by descendants of John Daws. Courtesy Wendy Herbert, Pat Cryer, Nick Daws, and Sandra Daws, Australia. documenta Archiv, Kassel, Germany. Documentary photographs of events and installations. e-flux. Archived and cached email bulletins relating to recurring exhibition structures. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy. Catalogues and ephemera documenting the Venice Biennale from 1895 to the present. Kaiden Wright, Nina. Telephone interview with Caroline A. Jones, January 25, 2012. Hiram Powers files. Smithsonian Institution, American Art Museum, Research Collections, Washington, DC. Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers. Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York. Theodore Roosevelt Collection. Harvard University Libraries, Cambridge, MA. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Special Collections, Washington, DC. Documentation of various US world’s fairs. Harald Szeemann Papers (2011.M.30). Getty Research Institute, Santa Monica, CA. Published/Secondary Sources

Abbas, Ackbar, and John Nguyet Erni, eds. 2005. Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology. London: Blackwell. 293

Abu Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250– 1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Adams, Henry. 1907. The Education of Henry Adams. Washington, DC: privately printed. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Adorno, Theodor W. 1993. Hegel: Three Studies (1963). Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer (1995). Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aguilar, Nelson. 1996. 23 Bienal Internacional São Paulo/23rd São Paulo Bienal. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Ainsworth, William S. 2006. “Birmingham Exposition of Arts and Manufactures.” Chapter 4 of Bingley Hall. Privately published. http://www.local-history.co.uk/hg/BingleyHallChapter4.pdf. Alambert, Francisco and Polyana Canhête. 2004. As Bienais de São Paulo: Da era do Museu à era dos curadores (1951– 2001). São Paulo: Boitempo. Alberro, Alexander. 2003. Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2017. Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming. Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson. 2000. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Albrethsen, Pernille. 2003. “Platform Formalism.” Nordic Art Review (September). Archived at New York– based 16beaver, http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/ 000873print.html. Alloway, Lawrence. 1968. The Venice Biennale 1895– 1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society. Allwood, John. 1977. The Great Exhibitions. London: Studio Vista. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Altshuler, Bruce. 1994. The Avant-garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century. New York: Abrams. ———. 2008. Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History. Vol. 1, 1863– 1959. London: Phaidon. ———. 2013. Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History. Vol. 2, 1962– 2002. London: Phaidon. Alves, Maria Helena Moreira. 1985. State and Opposition in Military Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press. Amaral, Aracy. 1987. Arte para que? A preocupação social na arte brasileira, 1930– 1970. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Nobel. ———. 1997. Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os modernistas. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Editora. ———. 1998. As artes plásticas na semana de 22: Subsídios para uma história da renovação das artes no Brasil. 5th ed. São Paulo: Editora 34. ———. 2001– 2. “Bienal ou da impossibilidade de reter o tempo.” Revista USP (São Paulo), no. 52 (December– February), 20ff. Amarante, Leonor. 1989. As Bienais de São Paulo— 1951 a 1987. São Paulo: Projeto. Anagnost, Adrian. 2012. “Peripheral Conversations: Concrete Trajectories from Southeastern Europe to Brazil.” Lecture 294

Bibliography

at “Transcultural Constructivism: International Contexts of Swiss Konkrete Kunst” conference, University of Zürich, December 3– 4. ———. 2016. “Contested Spaces: Art and Architecture in Brazil, 1928– 1969.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Andrade, Oswald de. 1924. “Manifesto Pau-Brasil.” Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), 18 March. ———. 1928. “Manifesto Antropófago.” Revista de Antropofagia (São Paulo) 1, no. 1 (May). Anonymous. 1847. Powers’ [sic] Statue of the Greek Slave. New York: R. Craighead. Anonymous. 1863. “How a Blind Man Saw the International Exhibition.” Temple Bar ( January), 227– 34. Anreus, Alejandro, Robin Adele Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait, eds. 2012. Mexican Muralism: A Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 2002. Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appiah, Kwame A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton. Arantes, Otília, ed. 1998. Acadêmicos e modernos: Textos Escolhidos III. São Paulo: EDUSP. Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy, an Essay in Political and Social Criticism. London: Smith, Elder. Art Journal. 1851. Special issue, The Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of London. Kennebunkport, ME: Milford House. Artigas, Vilanova. 1951. “A bienal: Expressão da decadência burguesa.” Jornal Hoje (São Paulo), 12 August. Asbury, Michael. 2003. “Tracing Hybrid Strategies in Brazilian Modern Art.” In Jonathan Harris, ed., Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting: Hybridity, Hegemony, Historicism, 139– 70. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press/Tate Liverpool. ———. 2005. “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non-Object.” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 168– 89. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2006. “The Bienal de São Paulo: Between Nationalism and Internationalism.” In Penelope Curtis and Stephan Feeke, eds., Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado: Sites for Sculpture in Modern Brazil, 72– 83. Exh. cat. Leeds, UK: Henry Moore Institute. ———. 2008. “O Hélio não Tinha Ginga (Hélio couldn’t dance).” In Braga, org., Fios Soltos— A Arte de Hélio Oiticica 52– 65. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Ash, Mitchell G. 1995. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890– 1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Auerbach, Jeffrey. 1999. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Augustine of Hippo. 426. De Civitate Dei contra Paganos. Translated as The City of God against the Pagans by R. W. Dyson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translation of L’être et l’événement (1988) by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum Books. Bain, Peter, and Paul Shaw. 1998. Blackletter: Type and National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed. 1996. Mapping the Nation. New York: Verso. Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1991. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso. Bancroft, Hubert Howe (and James B. Haynes). 1895. The Book of the Fair: An Historical and Descriptive Presentation of the World’s Science, Art, and Industry, as Viewed through the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893; Designed to Set Forth the Display Made by the Congress of Nations, of Human Achievement in Material Form, so as the More Effectually to Illustrate the Progress of Mankind in All the Departments of Civilized Life. 2 Vols. Chicago and San Francisco: Bancroft Company. Bandera, Maria Cristina. 1999. Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini, Le prime Biennali del dopoguerra, 1948– 1956. Milan: Charta. Barth, Volker, ed. 2001. Identity and Universality: A Commemoration of 150 Years of Universal Exhibitions, BIE Bulletin. Paris: Bureau international des expositions. Bary, Leslie. 1991. “Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto.’” Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 ( July– December): 35– 44. Bataille, Georges. 1988. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translation of La part maudite (1949) by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Zone Books. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Baumgarten, Alexander. 1750– 58. Aesthetica. Translated from Latin into German by Hans Rudolf Schweitzer, as Theoretische Aesthetik (Hamburg, 1983). Bayart, Jean-François. 2004. Le gouvernement du monde: Une critique politique de la globalisation. Paris: Fayard. Beck, Ulrich, and Danilo Zolo. 1999. “What Is Globalization? Some Radical Questions.” Reset 5. http://dex1.tsd.unifi.it/ juragentium/en/pages/wlgo/beck .htm. Becquer, Marcos, and José Gatti. 1991. “Elements of Vogue.” Third Text 5, nos. 16– 17: 65– 81. Behnke, Christoph. 2010. “The Curator as Arts Administrator? Comments on Harald Szeemann and the Exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form.’” Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 40, no. 1: 27– 42. Beiles, Laura. 2007. “Creating National and International Identities: The Futurist Exhibitions at the Venice Biennale under Fascism, 1928– 1942.” MA thesis, Hunter College of the City University of New York. Belting, Hans, et al. 2006. Global Art and the Museum. Online consortium, www.globalartmuseum.de. Karlsruhe: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie. Benedict, Burton. 1983. The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter J. 1931. “A Small History of Photography.” Translated by Stanley Mitchell. Screen 13, no. 1 (1972): 5– 26. doi:10.1093/screen/13.1.5.

———. 1935. “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century.” Translated by Edmund Jephcott. In Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 146– 62. New York: Schocken Books, 1979. ———. 1936. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Benjamin, Illuminations, 218– 42. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. 1999a. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. ———. 1999b. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, 1927– 1934. Translated by Rodney Livingstone et al.; edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. ———. 2006. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Bennett, Tony. 1988. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4 (Spring): 74– 102. Bentley, Jerry H. 1993. Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press. Berger, H. Georges. 1901. “Les Expositions Universelles Internationals (Leur passé, leur rôle actuel, leur avenir).” Doctoral thesis, Université de Paris, Faculté de droit. Paris: Librairie Nouvelle de Droit et de Jurisprudence. Berger, Suzanne. 2003. Notre premier mondialisation: Lecons d’un echec oublie. Paris: Seuil. Besse, Jean-Marc. 2003. Face au monde: Atlas, jardins, géoramas. Paris: Éditions Desclée de Brouwer. Bethell, Leslie. 2000. “Politics in Brazil: From Elections without Democracy to Democracy without Citizenship.” In “Brazil: The Burden of the Past, the Promise of the Future,” special issue of Daedalus 129, no. 2 (Spring): 1– 27. Bhabha, Homi, ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. ———. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bienal de la Habana. 1986a. Sobre Wifredo Lam: Ponencias de la conferencia internacional, I Bienal de La Habana [Proceedings of International Conference on Wifredo Lam, held as part of the First Havana Bienal, May 23– 25, 1984]. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Biennale de Paris. 1959. Manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes. Paris, Musée moderne de la ville de Paris + Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Association française d’action artistique. Biennale di Venezia. 1895. Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia. Venezia: Fratelli Visentini. ———. 1932. La Biennale di Venezia: Storia e Statistiche. Venice: Ufficio Stampa dell’ Esposizione. ———. 2009. Fare Mondi/Making Worlds: 53rd International Art Exhibition. Venice: Marsilio Editori. ———. 2013. Il Palazzo Enciclopedico: 55 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte. Venice: Marsilio Editori. Bibliography

295

———. 2015. All the World’s Futures: 56 Biennale Arte. Venice: Marsilio Editori. Bill, Max. 1954. “Report on Brazil: 4.” Architectural Review 116, no. 694 (October): 238– 39. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications. Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October, no. 110 (Fall), 51– 79. ———. 2006. Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Blanchard, Pascal, Gilles Boëtsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep. 2011. Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage. Paris: Museé du Quai Branly, Acte Sud. Blocker, Jane. 2007. “Blink: The Viewer as Blind Man in Installation Art.” Art Journal 66, no. 4 (Winter): 6– 24. Boime, Albert. 2007. Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848– 1871. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Lygia Clark. 1994. “Nostalgia of the Body.” October, no. 69 (Summer), 85– 109. Bois, Yve-Alain, et al. 2001. Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bonami, Francesco, with Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Tricia Van Eck. 2005. Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art. Bonomi, Maria. 2001– 2. “Bienal sempre.” Revista USP (São Paulo), no. 52 (December 2001– February 2002), 26– 37. Boulatta, Kamal, ed. 2008. Belonging and Globalisation: Critical Essays in Contemporary Art and Culture (Essays commissioned for the 7th International Biennial of Sharjah). Beirut and London: Saqi Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Translated from the French by Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992). Translated from the French by Susan Emanuel. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. ———. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics (1998). Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel. ———. 2009. Altermodern. London: Tate Museum. Boutang, Yann Moulier. 2007. Le capitalisme cognitif: La nouvelle grande transformation. Paris: Multitude/Idées, Editions Amsterdam. Boutoux, Thomas. 2005. “A Tale of Two Cities: Manifesta in Rotterdam and Ljubljana.” In Vanderlinden and Filipovic, eds. (2005). Braga, Paula. 2008. “Conceptualism and Life-experience.” in Braga, org., Fios Soltos— A Arte de Hélio Oiticica, 277– 87. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Brain, Robert. 1993. Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions. Cambridge, UK: Whipple Museum of the History of Science. 296

Bibliography

Brain, Robert, with Jim Bennet, Kate Bycroft, Simon Schaffer, Heinz Otto Sibum, and Richard Staley. 1993. Empires of Physics: A Guide to the Exhibition. Cambridge, UK: Whipple Museum of the History of Science. Braudel, Fernand. 1985. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th– 18th Centuries. Vol. 3, The Perspective of the World (1979). Translated from the French by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper Collins. Brett, Guy. 1969. Helio Oiticica Whitechapel Experience. London: Whitechapel Gallery. ———. 1990. Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists. Exh. cat., Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Cornerhouse, Manchester. London: Verso. ———. 1992 . “Venice, Paris, Kassel, São Paulo and Habana.” Third Text 6, no. 20 (Autumn): 13– 22. Brito, Ronaldo, Guilherme Bueno, and Sonia Salcedo. 2011. Art in Brazil, 1950– 2011. Brussels: Europalia. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. 1850. “Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave.” In Browning, Poetical Works, 2:302. London: Smith Elder, 1886. Bruguera, Tania. 2009. On the Political Imaginary. Milan: Charta. Bruno, Giulana. 2002. Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso. Buck-Morss, Susan. 2006. “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and the Citizen: Interview with Susan Buck-Morss.” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 3: 325– 40. Budasz, Rogério. 2005. “New Sources for the Study of Early Opera and Musical Theater in Brazil.” Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil. http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/ cpa/spring05/missa/budasz.pdf. Burgin, Victor. 1969. “Situational Aesthetics,” Studio International 178, no. 915 (October): 118– 21. Buskirk, Martha, Amelia Jones, and Caroline A. Jones. 2013. “The Year in ‘Re-.’” Artforum International (December). Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. Buzard, James. 1993. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800– 1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. “The Grand Tour and After (1660– 1840).” In Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 37– 52. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Buzard, James, Joseph W. Childers, and Eileen Gillooly, eds. 2007. Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bydler, Charlotte. 2004. The Global Art World, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art. Figura Nova Series. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet. Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Calirman, Claudia. 2012. Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Camnitzer, Luis. 1990. “The Third Biennial of Havana.” Third Text 4, no. 10 (Spring): 79– 93.

———. 2007. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2009. On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias. Edited by Rachel Weiss. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America (1971). Translated by Marjory Mattingly Urquidi. Berkeley: University of California Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translation of La république mondiale des lettres (Paris, 1999) by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cattelan, Maurizio, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick. 2006. Von Mäusen und Menschen/Of Mice and Men: 4th Berlin Biennial. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Celant, Germano. 1969. Arte Povera. New York: Praeger. Celant, Germano, ed. 2013. When Attitudes Become Form, Bern 1969/Venice 2013. Exh. cat., Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina. Milan: Progetto Prada Arte. Çelik, Zeynep. 1992. Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Çelik, Zeynep, and Leila Kinney. 1990. “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles.” Assemblage, no. 13, 34– 59. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translation of Arts de faire (1980). Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. New Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chard, Chloe, and Helen Langdon, eds. 1996. Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600– 1830. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cheah, Peng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chin-Davidson, Jane. 2006. “Performing Chineseness: Locations of Knowledge— from the Colonial Exhibitions to the Venice Biennale.” PhD diss., University of Manchester. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. 2012a. dOCUMENTA (13): Catalog = Katalog. Kassel: Documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, and Hatje Cantz. ———. 2012b. What/When: A Guide to the Maybe Education and Public Programs of Documenta (13). Kassel: Documenta and Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH. Ciotti, Manuela. 2012. “Post-Colonial Renaissance: ‘Indianness,’ Contemporary Art and the Market in the Age of Neoliberal Capital.” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 4: 633– 51. Clark, John. 2006. “A Spectacle of Questions: Asian Biennali.” Asian Art News ( January/February), 69– 72. Clark, Lygia. 1998. Lygia Clark. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Clark, T. J. 1999. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Clark, Vicky A., et al. 1996. International Encounters: The Carnegie International and Contemporary Art, 1896– 1996. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Museum of Art. Clüver, Claus. 2006. “The ‘Ruptura’ Proclaimed by Brazil’s SelfStyled ‘Vanguardas’ of the Fifties.” In David Hopkins, ed., Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Coelho, Marcelo. 1998. “Antropofagia é hoje sinônimo de imortação.” Folha de S. Paulo, October 14. http://www1.folha.uol .com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq14109822.htm Coelho, Saldana. 1954. “Gropius para o repórter.” Diario de Noticias (São Paulo), January [date illegible]. Cole, Henry. 1851. “Introduction.” In The Catalogue of the Great Exhibition (vol. 1 of 5). Colomina, Beatriz. 2001. “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture.” Grey Room, no. 2 (Winter), 6– 29. ———. 2007. “Pavilions of the Future.” In Eliasson, Adjaye, et al. 2007, 152– 59. Comenas, Gary. 2001– ongoing. “Abstract Expressionism” timeline (online resource). http://www.warholstars.org/ abstractexpressionism/timeline/abstract_expressionism.html. Contemporary. 2005. “Special Issue on Curators,” 21, no. 77. London: Contemporary. Corral, Maria de. 2005. “The Experience of Art.” In La Biennale di Venezia, 51 international art exhibition: The Experience of Art. Venice: La Biennale. Corbey, Raymond. 1993. “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870– 1930.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 3 (August): 338– 69. Corbisier, Roland. 1976. Filosofia e Crítica Radical. São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades. Corbusier, Le. 1968. The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics. (Orig. pub., 1954.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Corn, Wanda. 2013. Women Building History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Costa, Eduardo. 1998. “Report from Havana: The Installation Biennial.” Art in America 86, no. 3 (March): 50– 57. Costa, Francisco, ed. 2001– 2. “Cinquenta anos de bienal internacional de São Paulo.” Revista USP 52 (December– February): 1– 147. Cowen, Tyler. 2002. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crais, Clifton, and Pamela Scully. 2009. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Curti, Merle. 1950. “America at the World’s Fairs, 1851– 1893.” American Historical Review 55, no. 4: 833– 56. Dahn, Jo. 2001. “Mrs. Delaney and Ceramics in the Objectscape.” Interpreting Ceramics, no. 1. http://www.interpretingceramics .com/issue001/delany/delany.htm. Dakar. 1992. Biennale internationale des arts. Paris: Nuit et Jour. Dake, Carel L. 1900. Jozef Israëls, Kunst der Gegenwart, Sammlung Moderner Künstler-Monographien. Berlin: Internationale Verlagsanstalt für Kunst und Literature. Damisch, Hubert. 1995. The Origin of Perspective (1987). Translated by John Goodman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bibliography

297

Danto, Arthur. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, Sixty-First Annual Meeting, October 15, 1964): 571– 84. David, Catherine. 1997. dX Shortguide (English). Kassel: Cantz, Documenta und Museum Fridericianum VeranstaltungsGmbH. David, Catherine, and Jean François Chevrier. 1997. Politics, Poetics: Documenta X, the Book. Kassel: Cantz, Documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH. Debord, Guy. 1967. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red Press, 1983. Debord, Guy, and Gil J. Wolman. 1956. “Mode d’emploi du détournement.” Les Lèvres Nues 8 (May). DekaBank. 2005. Magazin des deutschen Pavillons auf der 51st Internationalen Kunstausstellung der la Biennale di Venezia 2005. Newsprint pamphlet in German and English accompanying the German pavilion. Dekkers, Dieuwertje, et al. 1999. Jozef Israëls, 1824– 1911. Groningen: Instituut voor Kunst- en Architectuurgeschiedenis. Delécluze, Étienne Jean. 1856. Les Beaux-Arts dans les deux mondes [The Fine Arts in the Two Worlds]. Paris: Charpentier. Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Différence et répétition. Translated as Difference and Repetition by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. 1973. “Nomad Thought.” Translation of “Pensée nomade,” in David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, 142– 49. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. ———. 1988. Foucault. Translation of French edition (1986) by Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation of L’anti-Œdipe (1972) by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking. ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 2. Translation of Mille Plateaux (1980) by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Del Vivo, Caterina, ed. 2007. Hiram Powers a Firenze. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Denker, Ellen Paul. 2002. “Parian Porcelain Statuary: American Sculptors and the Introduction of Art in American Ceramics.” In Robert Hunter, ed., Ceramics in America (Milwaukee: Chipstone Foundation). http://www.chipstone.org/issue.php/3/ Ceramics-in-America-2002. Derieux, Florence, ed. 2007. Individual Methodology. With Harald Szeemann et al. Zürich: JRP/Ringier. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. “Différance.” translated by David Allison. In Derrida, Speech and Phenomena. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1981. “Economimesis.” Translated by R. Klein. Diacritics 11, no. 2 (Summer): 3– 25. ———. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translation of La vérité en peinture (1978) by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. “Signature Event Context.” In Derrida, Limited Inc. (1977). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 298

Bibliography

———. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Parti-Pris). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Descartes, René. 1637. “Discourse Four: The Senses in General.” Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. In Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Detroit Institute of the Arts. 1983. The Quest for Unity: American Art between the World’s Fairs, 1876– 1893. Detroit, MI. Dewey, John. 1903. “St. Louis Congress of the Arts and Sciences.” Science, n.s., 18 (August 28): 275– 78. ———. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin. Dezeuze, Anna. 2004. “Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés.” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (Summer): 58– 71. Di Cavalcanti, Emiliano. 1948. “Realismo e abstracionismo.” Fundamentos (São Paulo) 3 (August): 241– 46. Dickinson Co. 1854. Dickinson’s comprehensive pictures of the great exhibition of 1851; from the originals painted [ . . . ] by Messrs. Nash, Haghe & Roberts. London: Dickinson. Diderot, Denis. 1749. “Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See.” Translated by Margaret Jourdain (1916). In Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature and Other Philosophical Works, 147– 201. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999. Di Martino, Enzo. 2005. The History of the Venice Biennale 1895–2005. Venezia: Papiro Arte. Dirlik, Arif. 1994. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter): 328– 56. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1863. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Translated by David Patterson (1998). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dougherty, Carol. 2003. “Towards an Itinerary of Culture in FifthCentury Athens.” Parallax 9, no. 4: 8– 17. Dulles, John W. F. 1970. Unrest in Brazil: Political-Military Crises 1955– 1964. Austin: University of Texas Press. Durant, Mark Alice. 1990. “Havana Biennial: A Question of Context.” New Art Examiner 17, no. 9 (May): 38– 41. Dutta, Arindam. 2006. “The Department of Science and Art: The Aesthetic in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility.” In Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, 1– 38. New York: Routledge. Duve, Thierry de. 1996. Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eco, Umberto. 1989. The Open Work. Translation of Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milano: Bompiani, 1962) by Anna Cancogni, with an introduction by David Robey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ekstrom, Anders. 1989. “International Exhibitions and the Struggle for Cultural Hegemony.” Uppsala Newsletter 12 (Fall): 6– 7. Eley, Geoff, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. 1996. Becoming National: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. Eliasson, Olafur, et al. 2007. Your Black Horizon Art Pavilion. Cologne: Walther König Verlag. Elkins, James. 2006. Is Art History Global? Vol. 3 of The Art Seminar. New York: Routledge.

Elkins, James, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, eds., 2010. Art and Globalization. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Elsner, Jás, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, eds. 1999. Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel. London: Routledge. Enwezor, Okwui. 2010. “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer): 595– 620. Enwezor, Okwui, ed. 2002. Documenta, Platform 5, The Exhibition. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Erber, Pedro. 2014. Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan. Berkeley: University of Califormia Press. Eulau, Heinz H. F. 1944. “The New Soviet Nationalism.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 232, “A Challenge to Peacemakers” (March): 25– 32. Everett, Marshall (pseud.). 1904. The Book of the Fair [ . . . ] the greatest exposition the world has ever seen. Photographed and explained. A panorama of the St. Louis exposition. Philadelphia: Ziegler. Ewick, David. 2003. “Orientalism, Absence, and Quick-Firing Guns: The Emergence of Japan as a Western Text.” In The Margins (online resource), http://themargins.net/bib/front/ intro2.htm#_edn13. Exposition de Paris 1937. 1937. Exposition de Paris 1937: L’Illustration, no. 4928. Paris : L’Illustration. Falconi, José Luis. 2013. “No Me Token; or, How to Make Sure We Never Lose the * Completely/No Me Token: o, cómo asegurarnos de nunca perder el * por completo” (blog entry). Guggenheim UBS Map, Latin America/Perspectives, October 13. http://blogs.guggenheim.org/map/no-me-token-or-how-to -make-sure-we-never-lose-the-completely. Falconi, José Luis, and Gabriela Rangel, eds. 2006. A Principality of Its Own: 40 years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society. New York: Americas Society. Farías, Victor. 1989. Heidegger and Nazism. Translation from the French (1987). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Farver, Jane, ed. 1999. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950– 1980s. Queens: Queens Museum. Featherstone, Mike. 1990. Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 1995. Global Modernities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 1999. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Feldmeth, Adam. 2011. “The Demagnetized Compass.” X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Fall). http://x-traonline .org/article/the-demagnetized-compass/. Filipovic, Elena, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø, eds. 2010. The Biennial Reader. Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall; and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Fisher, Cora. 2009. “The 53rd Venice Biennale.” Brooklyn Rail ( July 9). http://brooklynrail.org/2009/07/artseen/the-53rd -venice-biennale. Foster, Hal. 1996. Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Foucault, Michel. 1967. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22– 27.

———. 1991. “How an ‘Experience-Book’ Is Born.” In Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Tombadori, translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito, 30– 45. New York: Semiotexte. ———. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974– 1975. Vol. 6. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fox, Claire F. 2013. Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Francis, David Rowland. 1913. The Universal Exposition of 1904. 2 vols. St. Louis, MO: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company. Freedberg, Catherine Blanton. 1986. The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. 2 vols. Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts. New York: Garland Publishing. Freund, Charles Paul. 2003. “Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah.” Reason. http://www.reason.com/0306/cr.cf.look .shtml. Frey, Bruno S. 2003. Arts and Economics: Analysis and Cultural Policy. Berlin: Springer. Frey, Bruno S., and Werner Pommerehne. 1989. Muses and Markets: Explorations in the Economics of the Arts. Oxford: Blackwell. Fry, Peter. 2000. “Politics, Nationality, and the Meanings of ‘Race’ in Brazil.” In “Brazil: The Burden of the Past, the Promise of the Future,” special issue of Daedalus 129, no. 2 (Spring): 83– 118. Gabara, Esther. 2008. Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Galloway, David. 1982. “Kassel Redux: A History of Documenta.” Art in America 70 (September): 7– 10. García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (1990). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2014. Imagined Globalization. Translated by George Yüdice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gardner, Anthony, and Charles Green. 2013. “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global.” Third Text 27, no. 4 (July): 442– 55. Garlake, Margaret. 1991. “The British Council and the São Paulo Bienal.” In Britain and the São Paulo Bienal. London: British Council. Geddes, Patrick. 1877. Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress. Edinburgh. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1994. Encounters with Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1997. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press. Gibbs-Smith, C. H., comp. 1950. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Commemorative Album. London: Victoria & Albert Museum/ His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Gibson, Jeff. 2007. “South of the West: Jeff Gibson on the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial.” Artforum International (March), 111. Giedion, Siegfried. 1938. “Can Expositions Survive?” Architectural Forum 69 (December): 439– 43. Gielen, Pascal. 2009. “The Biennial: A Post-Institution for Immaterial Labour.” In Open 16: The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon: Strategies in Neo-political Times. Rotterdam: NAi). Bibliography

299

Gilbert, James. 2009. Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giunta, Andrea. 2007. Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties. Translated by Peter Kahn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation (1990). Translated from the French by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Godley, Michael R. 1978. “China’s World Fair of 1910: Lessons from a Forgotten Event.” Modern Asian Studies 12:503– 22. Gold, John R., and Margaret M. Gold. 2005. Cities of Culture: Staging International Festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851– 2000. London: Ashgate. Goode, G. Brown. Ca. 1890. “First Draft of a System of Classification for the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 70, Box 37. ———. 1898. “The Museums of the Future.” Address at Brooklyn Institute in early 1889, published in Annual Report of the United States National Museum: Year Ending June 30, 1897, 243– 62. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Goodman, Dena. 1994. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gordon, Peter. 2003. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grammel, Søren. 2005. Ausstellungsautorschaft: die Konstruktion der auktorialen Position des Kurators bei Harald Szeemann: eine Mikroanalyse. Frankfurt am Main: Revolver. Grasskamp, Walter. 1996. “For Example, Documenta, or, How Is Art History Produced?” In Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne 1996. Green, Charles Rick, and Anthony Gardner. 2016. Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Green, James. 2010. We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Greenberg, Reesa. 2005. “Identity Exhibitions: From ‘Magiciens de la terre’ to Documenta 11.” Art Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring): 90– 94. Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. 1996. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge. Greenhalgh, Paul. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851– 1939. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ———. 2011. Fair World: A History of World’s Fairs and Expositions, from London to Shanghai, 1851– 2010. Winterbourne, Berkshire, UK: Papadakis. Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Guentner, Wendelin. 2005. “The Rhetoric of Salon Criticism: Claude Vignon’s Exposition universelle de 1855— Beaux-Arts.” Nineteenth-Century Prose 32, no. 1 (Spring): 26– 27. http:// 300

Bibliography

www.thefreelibrary.com/The+rhetoric+of+salon+criticism %3a+Claude+Vignon’s+Exposition . . .-a0208109734 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 2004. “Marking Independence: The Ritual of a National Art Exhibition.” Journal of Arts & Ideas, nos. 30– 31, 89– 114. Guilbaut, Serge. 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. “Dripping on the Modernist Parade: The Failed Invasion of Abstract Art in Brazil, 1947– 1948.” In Gustavo Curiel, ed., Patrocinio, Colección y Circulación de las Artes, proceedings of the XX Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte (CIHA), 807– 16. Mexico: UNA de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. ———. 2007. “Squares and Stains: The Impossible Mix in ColdWar Paris.” In Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, ed., The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, 62– 72. Houston TX: Blanton Museum of Art/Funcación Cisneros. Habermas, Jürgen. 1962. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. ———. 1997. “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press): 113– 53. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited and with an introduction by Arnold Davidson. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Haltern, Utz. 1973. “Die ‘Welt als Schaustellung.’” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 60:1– 40. Hansen, Miriam. 1987. “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology.’” New German Critique 40 (Winter): 179– 224. ———. 2012. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hantelmann, Dorothea von. 2010. How to Do Things with Art. Zurich: JRP/Ringier; Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. Harris, Jonathan. 2011. Globalization and Contemporary Art. Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Harris, Neil. 1990. Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Geography of Uneven Development. London: Verso. Harvey, Michael. 1985. “Ruskin and Photography.” Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2: 25– 33. Heesen, Anke te. 2002. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. Translated by Ann M. Hentschel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1807. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Hegewisch, Katharina, and Bernd Klüser, eds. 1991. Die Kunst der Ausstellung: Eine Dokumentation dreissig exemplarischer Kunstausstellungen dieses Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Insel Verlag. Heidegger, Martin. 1935. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by R. Mannheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. ———. 1936. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Translated by Albert Hofstadter. In Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 15– 86. New York: Harper Collins, 1971. ———. 1938. “The Age of the World Picture.” Translated by William Lovitt. In Heidegger The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 115– 54. New York: Harper Torchbook, 1977. ———. 1950. Hegel’s Concept of Experience. Published with G. W. F. Hegel’s introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit, as translated by Kenley Royce Dove. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. ———. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbook. ———. 2009. The Heidegger Reader. Edited by Günter Figal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heinich, Nathalie. 1995. Harald Szeemann: Un cas singulier. Paris: L’échoppe. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heiser, Jorg. 2004. “This Is Jörg Heiser on Tino Sehgal.” Frieze, no. 82 (April). http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/this_is _joerg_heiser_on_tino_sehgal/. Herbert, James. 1998. Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Herbert, Robert. 2002. From Millet to Léger: Essays in Social Art History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1784. “Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind.” Excerpt (in translation) at http:// www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1784herder-mankind.html. Herkenhoff, Paulo. 2001– 2. “A Bienal de São Paulo e seus compromissos politicos.” Revista USP (São Paulo), no. 52 (December– February), 118. Herkenhoff, Paulo, and Adriano Pedrosa, eds. 1998. Vol 1, XXIV Bienal de São Paulo. Vol. 2, Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Vol. 3, Arte contemporanea brasileira: um e/entre outro/s. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Higher Committee of the Arab Art Biennale. 1974. First Biennale of Arab Art. Baghdad: [Iraqi] Ministry of Information. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1991. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hoffmann, Jens. 2003. “Running on Empty: The Biennial Is Dead! Long Live the Biennial!” NU-E (Nordic Art Review), no. 1 (September 24). ———, ed. 2012. Life in Your Head: When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes. San Francisco: California College of the Arts. Holzhey, Helmut, and Vilem Mudroch. 2005. Historical Dictionary of Kant and Kantianism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). New York: Seabury Press.

Horta, Vera d’. 1995. MAM: O Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. São Paulo: DBA Artes Gráficas. Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the Senses. Oxford: Berg. Hsieh, Shih-chung. 1999. “Representing Aborigines.” In Kosaku Yoshino, ed., Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences, 89– 110. Surrey, UK: Curzon. Hughes, Thomas. 1953. “Industry through the Crystal Palace: A Study of the Great Exhibition Held in London, 1851.” PhD diss., University of Virginia. Hugo, Victor. 1867. Paris-guide: Par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France. Paris: Librairie internationale; Brussels: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, eds. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ibrahim, Annie. 2000. “A Philosophy of the Blind: Matter Makes Mind.” Diderot Society Revue, no. 28 (April). http://www.univ -paris7.fr/diderot/societe/revue28.html. Ikegami, Hiroko. 2010. The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Inaga, Shigemi. 2001a. “Additional Recommendations for a Dialogue between Civilizations.” International Conference on the Dialogue of Civilizations, United Nations University, Tokyo, July31– August3. http://www.unu.edu/HQ/japanese/ dialogue/dialogue-programme-j.html. ———. 2001b. “Between Revelation and Violation: Ethics of intervention.” In Inaga, ed., Crossing Cultural Borders: Toward an Ethics of Inter-Cultural Communication— Beyond Reciprocal Anthropology, 125– 38. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo, eds. 2002. Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. International Istanbul Biennial. 1997. Bienal: Uluslararasi Istanbul Bienali [International Istanbul Biennial]. Istanbul: Kültür ve Sanant Vakfi. Inwood, Michael. 1999. A Heidegger Dictionary. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman (1974). Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Isaac, Maurice. 1928. Les expositions en France et dans le Régime international: Intervention de l’État— Les Récompenses industrielles . . . Paris: Dorbon Ainé. Jachec, Nancy. 2007. Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948– 64— Italy and the Idea of Europe. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1991. “Spatial Equivalents in the World System.” In Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric, and Masao Miyoshi, eds. 1998. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jardine, Lisa. 1998. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton. Jardine, Lisa, and Jerry Brotton. 2000. Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bibliography

301

Jasanoff, Maya. 2005. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750– 1850. New York: Knopf. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2003. “Kwangju: From Massacre to Biennale.” In Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence. New York: Routledge. ———. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jewell, Edward Alden. 1943. “‘Globalism’ Pops Into View: Puzzling Pictures in the Show by the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors Exemplify the Artists’ Approach.” New York Times ( June 13), 9. Johannesburg Biennale 1. 1995. Africus: Johannesburg Biennale. Johannesburg, South Africa: Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council; distributed by Thorold’s Africana Books. Johnson, Anna. 1993. “Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.” BOMB 42 (Winter). http://bombmagazine.org/article/1599/. Johnson, Benjamin Pierce. 1863. Report on International Exhibition of Industry and Art, London 1862. Albany: Steam Press of C. Van Benthuysen. Jonas, Joan. 2015. They Come to Us without a Word. Cambridge, MA: List Visual Arts Center; New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co. Jones, Amelia. 1994. Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press. ———. 1998. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, Caroline A. 1996. Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005a. “Doubt Fear.” Art Papers 29, no. 1 (January– February): 24– 35. ———. 2005b. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. “Troubled Waters: Venice Biennale.” Artforum International (February), 91– 92. ———. 2008a. “Der Blinde Mann, oder: Wie man eine Austellung besucht.” In Caroline Welsh and Stefan Willer, eds., Interesse für bedingtes Wissen, 153– 78. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. ———. 2008b. “Nationalism and Internationalism in Modern Art.” In The History of Humanity, vol. 27. Paris: UNESCO/ Routledge. ———. 2010. “Staged Presence.” Artforum International (May). ———. 2013. “Anthropophagy in São Paulo’s Cold War.” ArtMargins 2, no. 1 (February): 3– 36. Jones, Caroline A., David Mather, and Rebecca Uchill. 2016. Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense. Cambridge, MA: Center for Art, Science &Technology/MIT Press. Judd, Dennis R., and Susan S. Fainstein, eds. 1999. The Tourist City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kachur, Lewis. 2001. Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 302

Bibliography

Kal, Hong. 2005. “Modeling the West, Returning to Asia: Shifting Politics of Representation in Japanese Colonial Expositions in Korea.” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 47, no.3 (August): 507– 31. Kant, Immanuel. 1781. Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft]. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. 1784. Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. Translated by Lewis White Beck. In Kant, On History. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. ———. 1790. Critique of the Power of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft]. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. 1795. Toward Perpetual Peace. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. In Kant, Practical Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kapur, Geeta. 2005. “Concept Note.” In Sundaram et al. 2005, 2– 3. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. 2004. Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. “The Geography of Art: Historiography, Issues, Perspectives.” Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. ———. 2008. “Pintura de los Reinos: A Global View of the Cultural Field.” In Juana Gutiérrez Haces, ed., Pintura de Los Reinos/Painting of the Kingdoms. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex. Khagram, Sanjeev, and Peggy Levitt, eds. 2008. The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. New York: Routledge. King, Anthony, ed. 1997. Cultural Globalization and the World System. Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press. Kiralfy, Imre. 1891. Venice: The Bride of the Sea; A Grand Historical and Romantic Spectacle and Aquatic Pageant. London: George Newnes. Kleeblatt, Norman. 2005. “Identity Roller Coaster.” Art Journal 64:61– 63. Kleege, Georgina. 2005. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2: 179– 90. ———. 2006. Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Kleingeld, Pauline. 2012. Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Klingmann, Anna. 2007. Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Klonk, Charlotte. 2009. Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800– 2000. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung, eds. 2012. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley. Kohn, Hans. 1938. The Roots of Modern Nationalism. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1940. The World Must Federate! Isolation versus Cooperation. New York: privately printed, Press of the Woolly Whale. ———. 1942. World Order in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1960. Nationalism, Anticolonialism, Neutralism. Washington, DC: Industrial College of the Armed Forces. ———. 1976. The Age of Nationalism: The First Era of Global History (1962). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Knadler, Stephen. 2011. “At Home in the Crystal Palace: African American Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of Representative Democracy.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56, no. 4: 328– 62. Kramer, Hilton. 1967a. “Art: Rootless Exhibition.” New York Times, August 27. ———. 1967b. “Art and Politics in São Paulo.” New York Times, December 24. Krauss, Rosalind. 1990. “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum.” October, no. 54 (Autumn), 9– 11, 18. ———. 1993. Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kriegel, Lara. 2007. Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kroker, Evelyn. 1975. Die Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert: Industrieller Leistungsnachweis, Konkurrenzverhalten u. Kommunikationsfunktion unter Berücks. d. Montanindustrie d. Ruhrgebietes zwischen 1851 u. 1880. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kultermann, Udo. 1997. “Histoire de l’art et identité nationale.” In E. Pommier, ed., Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; xviie et xixe siècles, 2:223– 47. Paris: Kleinsieck. Laborde, Léon de. 1856. “Beaux Arts.” In Laborde, De l’union des arts et de l’industrie. Vol. 8, pt. 1– 2, of Travaux de la commission française sur l’industrie des nations. Paris: Commission française de 1851. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Translated by Winston Moore and Paul Cammack. London: Verso. Lafer, Celso. 2000. “Brazilian International Identity and Foreign Policy: Past, Present, and Future.” In “Brazil: The Burden of the Past, the Promise of the Future,” special issue of Daedalus 129, no. 2 (Spring): 207– 38. Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. 1999. Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. 2009. “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” October, no. 129 (Summer), 51– 84. Lamoureux, Johanne. 2005. “From Form to Platform: The Politics of Representation and the Representation of Politics.” Art Journal 64:64– 73. Langbaum, Richard. 1957. The Poetry of Experience. New York: W. W. Norton. Larner, Wendy, and William Walters, eds. 2004. Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge. Lassaigne, Jacques, Pierre Faucheux, and Catherine Millet. 1977. Biennale de Paris: Une anthologie. Paris: Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques. Lassalle, Hélène. 1986. “Biennales et grandes expositions internationales.” Museum 38, no. 3: 201– 4. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2005. Making Things Public. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lebel, Robert. 1959. Marcel Duchamp. Translation of Sur Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Éditions Trianon, 1959) by George Heard Hamilton. New York: Grove Press. LeBlanc, Aleca. 2012. “Palmeiras and Pilotis: Promoting Brazil with Modern Architecture.” Third Text 26, no. 1 (February): 103– 16. Ledezma, Juan. 2007. “The Sites of Abstraction: Notes on and for an Exhibition of Latin American Concrete Art.” In Ledezma, The Sites of Latin American Abstraction. Vicenza: Charta. Lee, Pamela. 2012. Forgetting the Art World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. León, Ana María. 2014. “Designing Dissent, Vilanova Artigas and the São Paulo School of Architecture.” In Ines Weizman, ed., Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence. New York: Routledge. Léon, Dermis P. 2001. “Havana, Biennial, Tourism: The Spectacle of Utopia.” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (Winter): 68– 73. Lévinas, Emmanual. 1976. Noms propres. Montpellier, France: Fata Morgana. Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2015. Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lewis, Russell. 1983. “Everything under One Roof: World’s Fairs and Department Stores in Paris and Chicago.” Chicago History 12:28– 47. Liard, Louis et al. 1904. Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris, Rapports du Jury International. Vol. 1, Instruction Publique et Beaux Arts. Paris: Imprimerie national. Liebermann, Max. 1901. “Jozef Israëls: The Man and His Work.” Translated from the German by Albert Kinross. Pall Mall Magazine 25, no. 101 (September): 25– 36. Lima, Zeuler Rocha Mello de Almeida. 2013. Lina Bo Bardi. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lind, Maria. 2009. “Active Cultures: Maria Lind on The Curatorial,” Artforum 47, no. 2 (October): 103. Lippard, Lucy. 1973. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger. Locke, John. 1690. “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” London: Printed by Eliz. Holt for Thomas Basset. http:// socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/locke/Essay.htm. Lopez-Duran, Fabiola. 2009. “Eugenics in the Garden: Architecture, Medicine and Landscape from France to Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century.” PhD diss., MIT. Louisiana Purchase Exposition. 1904. The Greatest of Expositions Completely Illustrated: official publication / illustrations reproduced from Goerz Lens photographs made by Official Photographic Company, William H. Rau, director of photography. St. Louis, MO: Official Photographic Company. Luhmann, Niklas. 1997. “Globalization or World Society: How to Conceive of Modern Society?” International Review of Sociology 7, no. 1 (March): 67– 79. Bibliography

303

Lütticken, Sven. 2012. “General Performance.” E-flux Journal 31 (January). http://www.e-flux.com/journal/general-performance/. Lyotard, François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983). Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1990. Duchamp’s TRANS/formers. Translation of Les Transformateurs Duchamp (1977). Venice, CA: Lapis Press. MacCannell, Dean. 1989. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books. Machado, Lourival Gomes. 1951. 1 Bienal do museu de arte moderna de São Paulo. São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Madra, Yahya M. 2006. “From Imperialism to Transnational Capitalism: The Venice Biennial as a ‘Transitional Conjuncture.’” Rethinking Marxism 18, no. 4 (October): 530– 31. Maes, Ives. 2013. The Future of Yesterday. Ghent, Belgium: Ludion. Magee, Bryan, and Martin Milligan. 1995. On Blindness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mainardi, Patricia. 1987. Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1991. “Courbet’s Exhibitionism.” Gazette des Beaux Arts 118, no. 1475 (December): 253– 66. ———. 1993. The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Malkin, Irad. 2011. A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mallgrave, Harry Francis, and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. 1994. Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873– 1893. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Mandell, Richard. 1967. Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Manet, Edouard. 1867. “Motifs d’une exposition particulière.” In Catalogue des tableaux de M. Edouard Manet exposés avenue de l’Alma en 1867, Paris. Paris: self-published. Marchart, Oliver. 2008. Hegemonie im Kunstfeld: Die documentaAustellungen dX, D11, d12 und die Politik der Biennalisierung. Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. Marcus, George E., and Fred R. Myers, eds. 1995. The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marder, Michael. 2009. The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s PostDeconstructive Realism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Martin, John, and Dennis Romano, eds. 2000. Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297– 1797. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Martins, Sérgio. 2012a. “‘Bursting on the Scene’: Looking Back at Brazilian Art— Introduction.” Third Text 26, no. 1 (February): 1– 4. 304

Bibliography

———. 2012b. “Phenomenological Openness, Historicist Closure: Revisiting the Theory of the Non-Object.” Third Text 26, no. 1 (February): 79– 90. ———. 2013. Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil 1949– 1979. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Massa, Ann. 1974. “Black Women in the White City.” Journal of American Studies 8:319– 37. May, Jan Andreas. 2009. La Biennale di Venezia: Kontinuität und Wandel in der venezianischen Ausstellungspolitik 1895– 1948. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Mazower, Mark. 2012. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. New York: Penguin. McClellan, Andrew. 1999. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press. McEvilley, Thomas. 1993. Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale. New York: Museum of African Art/Prestel Verlag. McFadden, Sarah. 1997. “The ‘Other’ Biennial.” Art in America 85, no. 11 (November): 84– 91. McShine, Kynaston, ed. 1970. Information. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Medalla, David, et al. 2012. London Biennale in Nevada 2012. [Gisborne, New Zealand]: Couper Publishing. Menand, Louis. 2005. “Unpopular Front: American Art in the Cold War (Critic At Large).” New Yorker, 81, no. 32 (October 17): 174– 79. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translation of Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) by Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press. Mesquita, Ivo, and Ana Paula Cohen, eds. 2008. 28a Bienal de São Paulo/28th Bienal de São Paulo. Exh. guide. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Meteyard, Eliza. 1866. The Life of Josiah Wedgwood: From His Private Correspondence and Family Papers. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett. Meyer, James, Tim Griffin, et al. 2003. “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition.” Artforum 42, no. 3 (November): 152– 63, 206, 212. Miegroet, Hans van, and Neil De Marchi. 2006. Mapping Markets for European Paintings in the Early Modern Period. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miller, Nicola. 1999. In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America. London: Verso. Milliet, Maria Alice. 1992. Lygia Clark: Obra-trajeto. São Paulo: EDUSP. Milliet, Sérgio. 1943. A pintura norte-americana: Bosquejo de evolução da pintura nos EE. UU. São Paulo: Livraria Martins. Milliet, Sérgio, et al. 1953. II Bienal do Museu de arte moderna de São Paulo. São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.

Miscevic, Nenad. 2001. “Culturalist Graded Cosmopolitanism: An Alternative to Nationalism.” Chapter 20 in Nationalism and Beyond. Budapest: Central European University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1989. “The World as Exhibition.” Comparative Studies in Society & History 31, no. 2: 217– 36. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2006. “World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture.” Paper delivered at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, August 13. Revised version in Jonathan Harris, Globalization and Contemporary Art (Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 253– 64. Mitter, Partha. 2007. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947. London: Reaktion Books. MJ—Manifesta Journal. 2003–4. “Biennials.” 2 (Winter–Spring): 6–31. Mondloch, Kate. 2010. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moore, Sarah J. 2003. John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880– 1915. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar. 2012. The Rumor of Globalization: Desecrating the Global from the Vernacular Margins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mulazzani, Marco. 1996. I padiglioni della Biennale a Venezia. 4th ed. (Orig. pub., 1988.) Milan: Electa. Müller, Hans-Joachim. 2006. Harald Szeemann Exhibition Maker. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz; New York: Distributed Art Publishers. Muntadas, [Antoni]. 2005. On Translation: I giardini. Spanish Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale. Barcelona: Actar. Murphy, Alexandra R. 1984. Jean-François Millet. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts. Nachtigäller, Roland, et al., eds. 2001. Weidervorlage d5: Eine Befragung des Archivs zur documenta 1972. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1998. The Sense of the World. Translation of Le sens du monde (1993). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Translation of Etre singulier pluriel (1996). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. National Centre for Fine Arts, Cairo. 1998. International Biennale of Cairo. National Museum of American Art et al. 1993. Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World’s Fair. Washington, DC: NMAA and National Portrait Gallery; Hanover, NH: University Presses of New England. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung (1972), translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Foreword by Miriam Hansen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nelson, Adele. 2010. “Monumental and Ephemeral: The Early São Paulo Bienais.” In Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s– 50s, edited by Mary Kate O’Hare,

127– 43. Exh. cat. Newark, NJ: Newark Museum; San Francisco: Pomegranate Press. Nemiroff, Diana. 1996. “Modernism, Nationalism and Beyond: A Critical History of Exhibitions of First Nations Art.” In Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne 1996. Nesbit, Molly. 2013. The Pragmatism in the History of Art. New York: Periscope. Ngugi, [ James] wa Thiong’o. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: J. Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Niemojewski, Rafal. 2010. “The Rise of the Contemporary Biennial 1984– 2009.” PhD diss., Royal College of Art, London. Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Nord, Deborah Epstein. 2002. “London and the World.” Journal of British Studies 41, no. 1: 131– 38. Norese, Giancarlo, ed. 2000. Oreste alla Biennale/Oreste at the Venice Biennale. Milan: Edition Charta. Norton, Charles B. 1980. World’s Fairs from London 1851 to Chicago 1893. Chicago: Milton Weston Co. Norwich, John Julius. 1982. A History of Venice. New York: Knopf. ———. 2003. Paradise of Cities: Nineteenth-Century Venice Seen through Foreign Eyes. London: Viking. Nouvelle Biennale de Paris. 1985. Biennale de Paris 13e. Milan: Electa; Paris: Moniteur. Obrist, Hans-Ulrich. 1996. “Mind over Matter: Interview with Harald Szeemann.” Artforum 35, no. 3 (November): 74– 79. Oen, Karin. 2012. “Admonition and the Academy: Installation, Video, and Performance Art in Reform Era China.” PhD diss., MIT, Cambridge, MA. Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. 2005. “Ordering the Universe: Documenta 11 and the Apotheosis of the Occidental Gaze.” Art Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring): 80– 89. Ohmae, Kenichi. 1990. The Borderless World. New York: Harper Collins. Oiticica, Hélio. 1992. Hélio Oiticica. Exh. cat. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center; Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Olea, Héctor, and Mari Carmen Ramírez, eds. 2009. Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa, and Stephen Collier, eds. 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ong, Aihwa, and Donald Nonini, eds. 1997. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. Bibliography

305

Ontario, Art Gallery of. 2006. “Swing Space: Tino Sehgal.” http:// www.ago.net/swing-space-tino-sehgal. Osborne, Peter, ed. 2000. From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art, and the Senses. London: Serpent’s Tail. Page, Walter, ed. 1904. The World’s Work, The St. Louis Exposition. Vol. 7, no. 4 (August). New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.; London: William Heinemann. Papadaki, Stamo. 1960. Oscar Niemeyer. New York: Braziller Books. Papastergiadis, Nikos, ed. 2003. Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference. London: Rivers Oram Press. Paret, Peter. 1983. “The Artist as Staatsburger: Aspects of the Fine Arts and the Prussian State before and during the First World War.” German Studies Review 6 (October): 421– 37. Parodi, D. 1939. “Philosophy in France, 1937– 1938.” Philosophical Review 48, no. 1 (January): 1– 30. Pasadena Art Museum. 1967. United States of America: V Paris biennale: Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum. Pedrosa, Mário. 1947. “Um modelo de tenacidade revolucionária.” Vanguarda Socialista (Rio de Janeiro) 111 (October 17). ———. 1952a. “Cícero Dias, ou a transição abstracionista,” Correio da Manhã. Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 229– 37. ———. 1952b. “O momento artístico.” In Exposição de Artistas Brasileiros, exh. cat. Rio de Janeiro: MAM do Rio de Janeiro. Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 241– 44. ———. 1952c. “Semana de Arte Moderna.” Politika (15– 21), Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 134– 52. ———. 1957. “Pintura brasileira e gosto internacional.” Jornal do Brasil. Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 279– 82. ———. 1960. “Ainda o envio a Veneza.” Jornal do Brasil (May 4). Clipping from Danilo Di Prete papers, São Paulo. ———. 1961. “Os projectos de Hélio Oiticica.” In Projecto Cães de Caça, exh. cat. Rio de Janeiro: MAM do Rio de Janeiro. Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 341– 43. ———. 1963. “A obra de Lygia Clark.” O Estado de S. Paulo (December 28). Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 347– 54. ———. 1966. “Arte Ambiental, Arte Pós-Moderna, Hélio Oiticica.” Correio da Manhã (June 26). Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 354– 60. ———. 1967. “Da dissolução do objecto ao vanguardismo Brasileiro.” Correio da Manhã ( June 18). Reprinted in Arantes 1998, 360– 66. Peltason, Timothy. 1999. “The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism.” ELH [English Literary History] 66:955– 1014. Penteado, Yolanda. 1977. Tudo em cor-de-rosa. São Paulo: Edição da autora. Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel, ed. 2007. The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. Houston, TX: Blanton Museum of Art/Fundación Cisneros. Pergam, Elizabeth A. 2011. The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs, and the Public. London: Ashgate. Pevsner, Nikolaus. 1951. High Victorian Design: A Study of the Exhibits of 1851. London: Architectural Press. 306

Bibliography

Pezolet, Nicola. 2012. “Spectacles Plastiques: Reconstruction and the Debates on the ‘Synthesis of the Arts’ in France, 1944– 1962.” PhD diss., MIT, Cambridge, MA. Philippou, Styliane. 2008. Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pignatari, Décio. 2001. “Desvio para o concreto.” Folha de São Paulo, Caderno Especial 2 (May 20), 12. http://www1.folha .uol.com.br/fsp/especial/fj2005200111.htm. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage: Goods and Services Are No Longer Enough. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Pinney, Christopher. 2002. “Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection.” New Zealand Journal of Literature 20:125– 61. Plant, Margaret. 2002. Venice: Fragile City, 1797– 1997. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Poinsot, J.-M. 1996. “Large Exhibitions. A Sketch of a Typology.” In Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne 1996, 27– 47. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (Modern Language Association), 33-40. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. 2004. Debating World Literature. London: Verso. Preziosi, Donald. 1998. “Avoiding Museocannibalism.” In Antropofagia e Historias de Cannibalismos, edited by A. Pedrosa, 57– 63. Exh. cat., XXIV Bienal de São Paolo. Preziosi, Donald, and Claire Farago, eds. 2004. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Hants, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Prutsch, Ursula. 2010. “Americanization of Brazil or a Pragmatic Wartime Alliance? The Politics of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in Brazil during World War II.” Passagens: Revista Internacional de História Política e Cultura Jurídica (Rio de Janeiro) 2, no. 4 (May– August): 181– 216. Przyblyski, Jeannene M. 1998. “American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Photographs.” Art Journal 57, no. 3 (Autumn): 60– 68. Purbrick, Louise, ed. 2001. The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Pythian, J. Ernest. 1912. Jozef Israëls. London: George Allen. Quondam [pseud. of Charles Stevens]. 1893. The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair. Chicago: Laird and Lee. Qureshi, Sadiah. 2011. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rama, Ángel. 2012. Writing across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America. Translation of Transculturación natativa en América Latina (1982) by David Frye. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ramírez, Mari Carmen. 1996. “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation.” In Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne 1996, 15– 26. Ramírez, Mari Carmen, Héctor Olea, et al. 2004. Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts.

Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translation of La Partage du sensible: Esthetique et politique (2000) by Gabriel Rockhill. Afterword by Slavoj Žižek. London: Continuum Books. ———. 2007. “The Emancipated Spectator.” Artforum (March), 270– 81. ———. 2013. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. London: Verso. Raphanel, Jacques. 1977. “L’art d’aujourd’hui à travers la Biennale de Paris, 1958– 1975: Une enquête sur les idéologies culturelles et la representation de l’art.” PhD thesis, 3e cycle Histoire de l’art et Archéologie Paris I. Raspail, Thierry, and Thierry Prat. 2000. 5e Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, Partage d’exotismes. 2 vols. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, diff. Seuil. Raspail, Thierry, Jérôme Sens, and Nicolas Bourriaud. 2005. Expérience de la durée, Biennale de Lyon 2005. Paris: Paris musées. Rattemeyer, Christian. 2010. Exhibiting the New Art: ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969. London: Afterall Books. Redford, Bruce. 1996. Venice and the Grand Tour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Renan, Ernst. [1882]. “What Is a Nation?” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha, 8– 22. London: Routledge, 1990. Reynolds, Donald Martin. 1977. Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture. New York: Garland Publishing. Ricci, Clarissa, ed. 2010. Starting from Venice: Studies on the Biennale. Preface by Angela Vettese. Milan: Et Al. Richardson, John. 1991. A Life of Picasso. Vol. 1, 1881– 1906. New York: Random House. Richmond, Scott. 2016. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ritchie, Matthew, et al. 2009. The Morning Line. Vienna: ThyssenBornemisza Art Contemporary. Robertson, Bruce. 2004. “The South Kensington Museum in Context: An Alternative History.” Museum and Society 2, no. 1 (March): 1– 14. Rocco, Renata Dias Ferraretto Moura. 2015. “O caso Di Prete e a pintura de Di Prete.” Archivo ( July 31), online journal of the Bienal de São Paulo. http://www.bienal.org.br/post.php?i =2233. Rojas- Sotelo, Miguel Leonardo. 2009. “Cultural Maps, Networks and Flows: The History and Impact of the Havana Biennale from 1984 to the Present.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh (PA). Rose, Barbara. 1972. “Art as Experience, Environment, Process.” In Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology, edited by Billy Klüver et al., 60– 104. New York: Dutton & Co. Rosenblum, Robert, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas. 2000. 1900: Art at the Crossroads. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Rosenzweig, Franz. [1917]. “Globus— Studien zur weltgeschichtlichen Raumlehre” [Globus: Studies towards the WorldHistorical Doctrine of Space]. Reprinted in Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (of 4),

Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, edited by Reinhold Mayer and Annemarie Mayer. Medford, MA: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012. Royal Commission. 1851. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Art and Industry of All Nations. 4 vols. London: Spicer Brothers. Ruskin, John. 1857. The Political Economy of Art: Being the Substance (with additions) of Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester July 10th and 13th, 1857. London: Smith, Elder. Rydell, Robert W. 1984. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876– 1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. The Books of the Fairs: Materials about World’s Fairs, 1834– 1916, in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Chicago: American Library Association. ———. 1993. World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Safranski, Rüdiger. 1998. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (1994). Translated by Ewald Osers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salvagnini, Sileno. 2000. Il Sistema delle arti in italia, 1919– 1943. Bologna, Italy: Minerva. Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press. ———. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Cities in a World Economy. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Sassen, Saskia, ed. 2002. Global Networks, Linked Cities. New York: Routledge. Saunders, Frances Stonor. 1999. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press. Sawaragi, Noi. 2005. Senso to Banpaku [War and the World’s Fair]. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha. Sayer, Derek. 2004. “The Unbearable Lightness of Building— A Cautionary Tale.” Grey Room 16 (Summer): 6– 35. Schneckenburger, Manfred, ed. 1983. Documenta: Idee und Institution: Tendenzen, Konzepte, Materialien. Munich: Bruckmann. Schneider, William. 1981. “Colonies at the 1900 World Fair.” History Today 31:31– 36. Schober, Felix. 2005. “China’s Spectacular Emersion versus the Spectres of Bureaucracy Looming in Taiwan, the Singaporean Art of Deconstructing National Symbols, Wordless Dialogue from Hong Kong or Greater China at the 2005 Venice Biennale.” In Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, no. 3, edited by Keith Wallace (September): 18– 35. Schulze, Gerhard. 2000. Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (1992). 8th ed. Frankfurt; New York: Campus. Schwartz, Jorge, et al. 2002. Brasil 1920– 1950, de la Antropofagia a Brasilia. Exh. cat. São Paulo: Museu de Arte Brasileira/ Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, Cosac & Naify. Schwarz, Roberto. 1992. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. London: Verso. Scott, Joan W. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer): 773– 97. Bibliography

307

Serlin, David. 2006. “Disabling the Flâneur.” Journal of Visual Culture 5:193– 208. Servant, Claude, and Ippei Takeda. 1996. Study on the Impact of International Expositions. “Etudes” 1. Paris: Service de documentation du BIE. (Translated into Chinese, 2003.) Shaffner, Taliaferro Preston, and Rev. W. Owen. 1862. The Illustrated Record of the International Exhibition of All Nations in 1862. London: London Print. and Pub. Co. Shapiro, David. 1971. “Imago Mundi.” Artnews 70, no. 6 (October): 40– 41, 66– 68. Sheren, Ila N. 2015. Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sikkink, Kathryn. 1991. Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Silverman, Debora. 1977. “The Paris Exhibition of 1889: Architecture and the Crisis of Individualism.” Oppositions 8 (Spring): 71– 91. Sindaco di Venezia. 1895. Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, Catalogo Illustrato. Venice: Fratelli Visentini. ———. 1897. Seconda Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia. Venice: Carlo Ferrari. Siwi, Marcio. 2009. “U.S.-Brazil Cultural Relations during the Cold War: The Making of Modern Art Museums in São Paulo.” Paper delivered at Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 11– 14. Skidmore, Thomas. 1988. The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964– 1985. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1990. “Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870– 1940.” In The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870– 1940, edited by Richard Graham, 7– 36. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sloan, Kim. 2003. “‘Aimed at universality and belonging to the nation’: The Enlightenment and the British Museum.” In Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Kim Sloan, 12– 25. London: British Museum Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason (1983). Translated by Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Small, Irene. 2016. Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smiles, Samuel. 1895. Josiah Wedgwood, F.R.S.: His Personal History. New York: Harper and Brothers. Smith, Terry. 2012. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International. Smithson, Robert. 1972. “Cultural Confinement.” Artforum 11, no. 2 (October): 39. Sommer, Doris. 2014. The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stallabrass, Julian. 2004. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stamper, John W. 1989. “The Galerie des Machines of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.” Technology and Culture 30:330– 53. Steeds, Lucy, et al. 2013. Making Art Global (Part 2): Magiciens de la Terre 1989. London: Afterall Books. Steger, Manfred B. 2009. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 308

Bibliography

Stengers, Isabelle. 2010– 11. Cosmopolitics. 2 vols. Translated by Robert Bononno. (Orig. French ed., Editions La Decouverte, 2003; 7 vols.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stierli, Martino, and Mechtild Widrich, eds. 2015. Participation in Art and Architecture. London: I. B. Tauris. Stone, Marla. 1997. “The State as Patron: Making Official Culture in Fascist Italy.” In Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, edited by Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, 205– 38. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. “The Last Film Festival: The Venice Biennale Goes to War.” in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922– 1943, edited by Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, 293– 314. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Storm, Jill. 2008. “From Zandvoort to Tangier: The Artistic and Religious Identities of Jozef Israëls.” Journal of Jewish Identities 1, no. 1 ( January 2008): 67– 88. Storr, Robert, conv. 2005. “Where Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and the Global Salon.” International symposium, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, December 9– 12. Suárez, Osbel, María Amalia García, et al. 2011. Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934– 1973). Exh. cat. Madrid: Fundación Juan March. Sullivan, Louis. 1926. The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects. Sullivan, Megan. 2013. “Locating Abstraction: The South American Coordinates of the Avant-Garde, 1945– 59.” PhD diss., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Sundaram, Vivan, Pooja Sood, et al., 2005. Making of International Exhibitions: Siting Biennales. Proceedings of an international symposium, New Delhi, January 16– 18. Sussman, Elisabeth. 2005. “Then and Now: Whitney Biennial.” Art Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring): 74– 79. Sussman, Warren. 1983. “Ritual Fairs.” Chicago History 12:4– 7. Szeemann, Harald. 1967. Science Fiction. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern. ———. 1968. 12 Environments 50 Jahre Kunsthalle Bern. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern. ———. 1969. Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works– Concepts– Processes– Situations– Information/ Wenn Attitüden Form werden: Werke– Konzepte– Vorgänge– Situationen– Information/Quand les attitudes deviennent forme– Oeuvres– concepts– processus– situations– information/Quando attitudini diventano forma: opere– concetti– processi– situazioni– informazione. London: Philip Morris Europe. ———. 1972. Documenta 5, Befragung der Realität: Bildwelten heute. Exh. cat. Kassel: Documenta Verlag. ———. 1975. Le Macchine Celibi/Bachelor Machines (with Jean Clair), Italian/English ed. (New York: Rizzoli), and Junggesellenmaschinen/Les machines célibataires (with Marc Le Bot), German/French ed. (Venice: Alfieri edizioni d’arte). ———. 1981. Museum der Obsessionen/von, über, zu, mit Harald Szeemann. Berlin: Merve Verlag. ———. 1994. Zeitlos auf Zeit: Das Museum der Obsessionen. Regensburg: Lindinger + Schmid.

———. 1999a. “Ecce Museum: Much Chaff, Little Grain.” Translated by Michael Robinson. In Art Museums into the 21st Century, edited by Gerhard Mack. Basel: Birkhaüser. ———. 1999b. La Biennale di Venezia: 48a esposizione internazionale d’arte: dAPERTutto/APERTO overALL/APERTO parTOUT/APERTO überALL. Venice: Biennale di Venezia/ Marsilio. ———. 2000. “Thoughts on the Year 2000, Reflections of a Time Traveler.” In Sydney 2000 Biennial, edited by Ewen McDonald. Sydney: Biennale of Sydney. ———. 2001. 49 Esposizione internationale d’arte: Plateau of Humankind. English ed. Venice: Biennale di Venezia. ———. 2007. Harald Szeemann: With by through because towards despite: Catalogue of All Exhibitions 1957– 2005. Edited by Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer. Zürich: Editon Voldemeer; Vienna: Springer. Szeemann, Harald, comp. 1972. Dokumente zur aktuellen Kunst 1967– 1970: Material aus dem Archiv Szeemann. Text by George Jappe, Aurel Schmidt, and Harald Szeemann. Lucerne: Kunstkreis. Tashjian, Dickran. 1975. Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-garde, 1910– 1925. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1977. “Henry Adams and Marcel Duchamp: Liminal Views of the Dynamo and the Virgin.” Arts Magazine, 51, no. 9 (May): 102– 7. Taussig, Michael. 1997. The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. Tenkotte, Paul A. 1987. “Kaleidoscopes of the World: International Exhibitions and the Concept of Culture-Place, 1851– 1915.” American Studies 28 (Spring): 5– 29. Thea, Carolee, ed. 2001. Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators. New York: Apex Art. Thornton, Sarah. 2008. Seven Days in the Art World. New York: W. W. Norton. Tirana National Gallery. 2001. Tirana Biennale 1: Escape. Text by Giancarlo Politi. Milan, Italy; Tirana, Albania: Tirana National Gallery. Tomkins, Calvin. 1996. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: H. Holt. Tota, Antonio Pedro. 2000. O imperialismo sedutor: A americanização do Brasil na época da segunda guerra. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Rev. ed. in English: The Seduction of Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Touré, Younoussa. 1996. “La Biennale artistique et culturelle du Mali 1962– 1988.” PhD dissertation in sociology, EHESS, Paris. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. United States Commissioners. 1862. International Exhibition, 1862: United States Official Catalogue. London: C. and F. Bell. ———. 1900. Official Illustrated Catalogue: Fine Arts Exhibit, United States of America at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Boston: Noyes, Platt and Co. (Smithsonian Reel 138, no 5.)

Ursprung, Philip. 2013. Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Der Mark, Jan. 1973. “Venice and Kassel: The Old and the New Politics.” Art in America 61, no. 130 (November/December): 129– 37. Vanderlinden, Barbara, and Elena Filipovic, eds. 2005. The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Brussels: Roomade. Van Rensselaer, Mariana G. 1893. “At the Fair.” Century Magazine 46:12– 13. Van Wesemael, Pieter. 2001. Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798– 1851– 1970). Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Vergne, Philippe, et al. 2003. How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center. Vermeulen, Marco, et al. 2002. City Branding: Image Building and Building Images. Rotterdam: Nai. Vicario, Niko. 2015. “Import/Export: Raw Materials, Hemispheric Expertise, and the Making of Latin American Art, 1933– 1945.” PhD diss., MIT, Cambridge, MA. Villerè, Mariel. 2013. “Life behind Ruins: Constructing Documenta.” SMArchS thesis, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Vogel, Sabine. 2010. Biennials: Art on a Global Scale. Vienna: Springer Verlag. Volpe, Lisa Marie. 2013. “On Display: American Photography at Three Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Wagner, Monika. 1994. “Die erste Londoner Weltausstellung als Wahrnehmungsproblem.” Ferrum: Nachrichten aus der Eisenbibiothek, no. 66 (April), 31– 38. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. The Essential Wallerstein. New York: New Press. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 2001. Nationalismus, Geschichte, Formen, Folgen. Munich: C. H. Beck. Weibel, Peter, ed. 2002. Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded, Essays on Space and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weiss, Rachel. 2007. “Visions, Valves, and Vestiges: The Curdled Victories of the Bienal de La Habana.” Art Journal 66, no. 1, (April): 10. Weiss, Rachel, et al. 2011. Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989. London: Afterall Books. Weiss, Robert Stuart, and Serge Boutourline Jr. 1962. Fairs, Pavilions, Exhibits and Their Audiences. Armonk, NY: Commissioned by David Holzman and Robert S. Lee of IBM Communications. Whewell, William. 1852. “On the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science.” American Journal of Science and Arts, 2nd ser. (New Haven, CT: B. L. Hamlen), 13, no. 39 (May): 352– 70. White, Erdmute Wenzel. 2004. “Night Train to Belo Horizonte: South American Travels.” in Perspectives on Travel Writing, edited by Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, 99– 119. Studies in European Cultural Transition, vol. 19. Hants, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Bibliography

309

Widrich, Mechtild. 2014. Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press. Williams, Daryle. 2001. Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930– 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilson, Rob, and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds. 2007. The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press; Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Wilson, Rob, and Wissal Dissanayake, eds. 1996. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wolfe, Joel. 1993. Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900– 1955. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Wong, Winnie Won Yin. 2013. Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. World’s Columbian Exposition. 1893– 95. The Art of the World Illustrated in the Paintings, Statuary, and Architecture of the World’s Columbian Exposition. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Wunder, Richard P. 1991. Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805– 1873. Vol. 2, Catalogue of Works. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Wyss, Beat. 2010. Bilder von der Globalisierung : Die Weltausstellung von Paris 1889. Berlin: Insel Verlag.

310

Bibliography

Ysla, Nelson Herrera. 1994. “Art, Society and the Habana Biennial = Arte, sociedad y Bienal de la Habana.” Atlántica: Internacional Revista de las Artes, no. 8 (October), 70– 79, 156– 62. Yúdice, George. 2003. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zajda, Joseph I., ed. 2005. International Handbook on Globalisation, Education and Policy Research: Global Pedagogies and Policies. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag. Zeitlin, Marilyn. 1995. Bill Viola: Buried Secrets. Tempe: Arizona State University Museum; Hannover, Germany: KestnerGesellschaft. Zenakos, Augustine. 2006. “Manifesta No More.” Artnet Magazine, June 5, 2006. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/ zenakos/zenakos6-5-06.asp (accessed November 2011). Zerilli, Linda. 1998. “This Universalism Which Is Not One.” Review of Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipation(s). Diacritics 28, no.2 (Summer): 2– 22. Zernatto, Guido. 1944. “Nation: The History of a Word.” Review of Politics 6, no. 3 (July): 351– 56. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. “The Nation-Thing.” In Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, 162– 69. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zolghadr, Tirdad, ed. 2009. It’s Not You, It’s Me. Dubai: Emirates Foundation and Dubai Culture and Arts Authority.

Index

8 1/2 (Szeemann), 185 11 Pop Artists (exhibit, 1966), 175 12 Environments (exhibit), 174, 176 36” x 36” Removal to the Lathing, A . . . (Weiner), 179 100 Days, 100 Guests (David), 229 Abaporu (Tarsila), 123, 123–24, 124, 143–44, 270–71nn71−73, plate 25 Abeya, Mia, 261n171 abolitionism, 68, 69, 70, 77, 112 Abramo, Livio, 114 Abramovic, Marina, 285n221 Absent Presence (Chalayan), 109, 109–10, 111–12, plate 35 abstraction: Abstract Expressionists and, 171, 182; alternative legacies for, 235; Brazilians’ embrace of, 275n176; Cícero Dias and, 113, 268n28; color and, 146; Concretism and, 114, 119–20, 138, 270n56; as dangerous rationalism, 155; Europhilic, 146; from figurativism to, 117, 117–18, 120–21, 124, 129–30, 134–35, 138; flowchart of artistic influences and, 118; free art and, 129, 134; as globalism, 226; internationalism and, 103, 120, 149; modernism and, 32, 138–39; Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo) and, 129–31, 132; postwar reinvention of, 170; praise for, 133–34; as privileged language, 168; 311

“salad” of bodies and, 145; São Paulo 1951 biennial and, 118, 120–21, 125; São Paulo 1954 biennial and, 142; sublimation and, 270n56; universal, 148 Acconci, Vito, 279n64 Actionists, 185, 284n203 Ada, Serhan, 191 Adams, Henry: art and technology and, 226; blind epistemology and, 24–25, 34; Chicago 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition and, 24; the dynamo and, 22, 25, 45, 216; Marcel Duchamp and, 254–55nn83−84; Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle and, 22, 24, 58, plate 10; religion of the world’s fairs and, 57; society of the pit and, 31; supersensual world and, 27, 203 Addison, Joseph, 22, 254n58 Adeagbo, George, 237, 239, 290n43 Adhemar, Pereira de Barros, 275n170 Adjaye, David, 231, 232, 289n18 Adorno, Theodor: Adorno was wrong . . . (Wurm) and, 204, 206; on agonistic totalities, 227; Begriffsarbeit, or concept-work, and, 198, 218; experience and, 197, 201; Hegel and, 286n18, 287n66; negation of labor and, 219; phenomenology and, 197, 236; real experience and, 286n32; world’s fairs and their commodities and, 49 Adorno was wrong . . . (Wurm), 204, 206 Advancing American Art (exhibit, 1946), 180

advertising. See publicity and advertising aesthetics of experience: versus aesthetic experience, 198; aesthetics as term and, 199, 202; agency of art and, 219; arc from artist to viewer and, 79; art and everyday existence and, 232, 234; art as event and, 166, 214, 233; art as experience (Dewey) and, 86; artistic agency and, 193; biennials and, xi, 93, 104; blind epistemology and, 148–49, 207; bodily experience and, 205–7, 211; codification of, 228; cognition and, 195; concept-work and, 218; consciousness and, 195; cumulative effect of art and, 208; Derridian subjectile and, 221–22; Dream House (Zazeela and Young) and, 210; economimesis and, 217; emancipation of the spectator and, 223; emergence of, 145; ethics of the subject and, 210–11; experience and language and, 195, 207; experience as end in itself and, 208; experience as term and, 199, 201–2, 211, 221, 286n32; experience economy and, xi, 29; Grand Tour and, 226; Harald Szeemann and, 178–79; historical shift leading to, 197; John Dewey and, 234; Kantian parergon and, 220–21; Kiss (Sehgal) and, 214; leveraging of spectacle and, 230; Lyon 2005 biennial and, 204, 205; Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs and, 29; Martin Heidegger and, 196; meaning of, 201–2; mediation and, 220; memory and, 232–33; modalization of experience and, 287n60; monetization of art-as-experience and, 227; multisensory engagements and, xii; neuroscience and, 286n36, 287n87; open-ended encounters and, 212; politics and, 205, 207, 218, 250; psychedelia and, 210; rupture and, 218, 219, 232, 233; syncretism and, 115; tourism and, 96; Wave UFO (Mori) and, 208–10; work of art and, 198, 201, 206–7, 218; world pictures and, 197, 202, 226 Afif, Saâdane, 204, 286n51 Agamben, Giorgio, 7 Aguilar, Nelson, 4, 252n6 Ahasuerus, feast of, 43 Ai Weiwei, 105 Alambert, Francisco, 122, 126, 270n62, 270n76, 271n84, 272n108 Al-Ani, Janane, 256n108 Alberro, Alexander, 270n56 Albers, Josef, 131, 138, 142 Albert (British prince), 16–17, 45, 55, 58 Aldana, Erin, 275n177 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 13 Alencar, José de, 268n21 Alexander the Great, 94 Alexandre, Arsène, 49, 50 Allen, Greg, 261n171 Allora, Jennifer, 249, 291n70 Alloway, Lawrence, 93 Allwood, John, 258n58 Alongside Mother’s Grave (Israëls), 101, plate 16 Althusser, Louis, 195, 232 Alves, Carlos Pinto, 128, 129 Alÿs, Francis, 244, 245, 246 Amaral, Aracy, 275n163 America (Powers), 68–69, 262n186, 262n193 Amman, Jean-Christophe, 186 Anagnost, Adrian, 269n42 312

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict, 56 Andrade, Mário de, 270n53, 270n62, 270n66, 281n109 Andrade, Oswald de, 121–23, 138, 146, 267n5, 268n22, 269n46, 270n53, 271n73, 271n77, 276n189, 281n109 Andre, Carl, 280n197 André Gide et ses amis . . . (Blanche), plate 12 Anemic Cinema (film, Duchamp), 28 anthropophagia. See antropofagia antropofagia: Abaporu (Tarsila) and, 270–71nn71−73; anthropophagic paradox and, 165; argument for, 143; artistic tactics and, 211; Concretism and, 114, 122, 145; cultural appropriation and, 222, 233; cultural cannibalism and, 113, 121, 123; difference and, 133, 162, 193; first-generation, 142; Frank Lloyd Wright and, 287n86; Hélio Oiticica and, 236, 276n200; international language of art and, xiii; literary theory and, 270n53, 281n109; meaning of, 267n5; modernism and, 125; Oscar Niemeyer and, 275n184, 276n189; Oswald de Andrade and, 276n189; revival of, 143, 144, 146, 170; São Paulo biennials and, 159, 276n191; syncretism and, 149; This Progress (Sehgal) and, 213; transnationalism and, 153, 160, 170, 199; Tropicália and, 148 “Antropofagia” Bienal (1998), 144 Antropófago (Andrade), 123 Antrum Platonicum (Saenredam), 5, 7 Aparelho Cinecromático (Palatnik), 134, plate 28 Appel, Karel, 174 Arab League, 278n40 Araeen, Rasheed, 36 Aranha, José Pereira da Graça, 121–23, 124–25, 138, 270n52 architecture: abolitionist protests and, 77; anthropomorphism in, 276n189; architectural generation (Sullivan) and, 261n159; Concretism and, 145; le Corbusier and, 276n187; “Decolonizing Architecture” program and, 267n87; documenta 2002 and, 73–74; Eiffel Tower and, 72; of the favela, 148; glass in, 19, plates 2−3; International Style in, 47, plate 20; London 1851 Great Exhibition and, 19; modernist, 269n42; Neoclassicism and, 73; Paris 1889 exposition and, 23; politics of “nation” and, 246; São Paulo biennials and, 143, 264n33, 279n67; Venice biennials and, 264n33 Arman, 247 Arnold, Matthew, 208 art: arbiters of, 46–47; artifacts versus artworks and, 42; arts education and, 54, 57, 166, 169; versus “bare life,” 288n110; biennials as necessary for, 85; as closed system, 232; educational benefits of, 94; engaging the intellect with, 1; as experience, 86, 216; free, 129, 133–34; freedom of art and, 151; versus industry, 39, 44, 45; as international and global semiotic, 3; making gods of humans (Thackeray) and, 48; as matrix of cultures and technologies, 37; national representation and, x; as object versus event, 165–66; political economy of, 71–72; reciprocity between artist and public and, 77, 79; reproductions of, 65, 67–68, 69–70, 77, 87; science of creativity and, 253n20; as source of progress, 259n116; state-supported versus nonprofit-sponsored, 73; thing theory and, 38; value of, 221; world-as-picture and, x; from world’s fairs to biennials, 76. See also event, art as; work of art; specific schools and styles Artaud, Antonin, 221, 222–23

Arte Povera, 170 art fairs: history of, market function of, 174, 186, 227; as successor to biennials, 252n9, 256n107, 290n49 Articles of Glass (Talbot), 18 Artigas, João Batista Vilanova, 139, 141, 142, 275n164 artists: agency of, 193, 228; as agents of change, xiii; associations of, 45–46; increasing internationalism of, 277n22; significance for one another and, xiv; structures of knowledge and, 36; success for, 220 Artist’s Studio (Courbet), 100 Art Workers Coalition, 282n150 Asbury, Michael, 134–35, 142, 270n62, 270n66, 270n71, 271n73 Ataman, Kutlug, 30–31, 31, 34 Atlas Group, 229, 231, 237 Attitudes (exhibit, 1969), 169–70 Aubert, Andre, 74 Augustine of Hippo, xi, 94, 101, 169, 241 Autumn on the Hudson (Cropsey), 45 aveugle trompé, L’ ( Janet), 12 Avèze, Marquis d’, 44 Ayres, Lula Cardoso, 269n44 Azimuth, 170 Baartman, Saartjie, 60, 261n163 Babbitt, Irving, 199 Babylonests (Oiticica), 236, 279n64 Bachelard, Gaston, 199 Bachelors (exhibit, 1975), 189–90, 203 Badiou, Alain, 202, 212, 213, 214, 225 Baghdad 1974 Arab biennial, 111 Ball, Hugo, 173 Ballet Mechanique (Léger), 277n16 Bamboo Shoots (Yung Ho Chang), 105 Bang-Bang Room (McCarthy), 215 Barcelona 1929 world’s fair, plate 20 Barnard, Christiaan, 284n186 Barr, Alfred, 118, 141, 235, 289n34 Barry, Robert, 177 Bartholdi, Frédéric, 76 Basel art fair, 264n25 Bataille, Georges, 287n54 Batista, Fulgencio, 115 Baudelaire, Charles, 200–201, 265n46 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 199, 207 Bayley, Edgar, 119–20, 139, 269n43 Baylinson, Abraham S., 270n62 Baziotes, William, 131 Becquer, Marcos, 115, 160 Beeren, Wim, 168, 168 Benedict, Burton, 60 Benjamin, George, 257n18 Benjamin, Walter: aestheticization and, 198; on capitalist culture, 233; collected objects and, 262n199; on cultic objects, 70; mechanical reproducibility of art and, 67–68; Nazis and, 38; optical unconscious and, 27–28, 30−31, 39, 49, 135, 197, 255n92,

256n105; phenomenology and, 236; real experience and, 286n32; suicide of, 38, 257n18; world’s fairs and, xii, 49, 252n13 Benoni, Giuseppe, 264n32 Bentham, Jeremy, xiii, 252n16 Bergen biennial, 291n66 Berger, H. Georges, 84, 265n40 Bergson, Henri, 203, 217 Berkeley (bishop), 11 Berlin 2006 biennial, 212–13, 213, 214–15, 223, 287n79 Bern Depression (Heizer), plate 32 Beuys, Joseph: documenta 5 and, 167, 188–89, 189; Fluxus and, 284n194; Green Party and, 282n150; Happenings and, 185; individual mythologies and, 172; Informationsbüro and, 188, 189; installation art and, 236; rejected show of, 182; shamanic performatives of, 243; When Attitudes Become Form exhibit and, 177 biennial culture: accommodation of new art forms and, 217; art as experience and, 32, 86, 104; blind epistemology and, 3, 34; blindman trope and, 2; buildings and, 93; components of, 216; critical globalism and, 45, 247–49; curation and, 179; democratization and, 230−31; differend and, 249; diplomatic workings of, 246; disparagement of, 198; educational benefit of art, 94; emulation of, 72−73; event-culture and, 62; experience and, 208, 211−12; Harald Szeemann and, 193; human exhibits and, 64; installation art and, 236−37, 239; opposition to the market and, 186; as perennial, 88; politicization of art and, 190, 235; proliferation of, 165, 202; rupture and, 156, 249; shift from object to subject in, 232; transnationalism and, 115, 159, 171; white cube and, 77; work of art and, 207 Biennial of the Frontiers, 264n19 biennials of contemporary art: architecture and, 72–73; art as event and, 202; art fairs as successor to, 252n9; art speculation and, xiv; associations of artists and, 45–46; blindness trope at, 2–3; catalogues for, 54; cinematized, 29; cognitive shuttle between work and art and, 218; commercial goal of, 83–84; corporate sponsors of, 85, 86; cosmopolitanism and, 93–94, 95; criticism and praise for, 87; culture wars and, 157; debate about art and, 151; emergence of, xi, 3; Enlightenment and, 94, 218; ephemerality of, 166; Eurologic and, xii; experience in, 216; experiential forms of, 220; under fascism, 77, 106; globalism and, x, 16; glocal artists, 29; goals of, 85–86, 88, 93–94; Harald Szeemann and, 171; human exhibits at, 104, 105; installation art at, 86, 107–8, 237; institutional support for, 279n78; internationalism and, 106; language of, 42; market function of, 166, 174, 186, 227, 240–41, 264n25; nationalism and internationalism and, x, 93, 94; necessity of for art world, 85, 112; number of biennials and, 252n18; number of visitors to, 85; opposition to, 239–40; pavilions at, 77, 93−95, 104, 110, 114, 198; performative events at, 86, 105–6; platform for social energy and, 193; proliferation of, xiv, 86–87, 165, 218, 227, 237; reasons for visiting, 3; replicability of, 114, 115; second wave of, 157, 159; sites for, 92–94; social media and, 228, 232; speculation on art and, xiv; tourism and, 91−92, 96; trade-specific, 43; transnationalism and, 264n20; work of art and, 207; world pictures and, 111; world’s fairs and, x−xii, 3, 29, 37, 83–86, 88, 108, 165, 226. See also biennial culture; specific biennials Bibliography

313

Bill, Max: 1968 retrospective of, 174; abstraction and, 138, 170, 235, 274n156; Alexander Calder and, 274n151; antropofagia and, 160; ArchiType Bill typeface and, 164; background and career of, 138; Candido Portinari’s work and, 274nn160−61; Concretism and, 120, 137–38, 142, 145, 162, 274n153; le Corbusier and, 176n187; Habitat journal and, 146; Harald Szeemann and, 281n129; Hochschule für Gestaltung and, 274n155; “jungle” epithet of, 138, 143; mathematical universals of, 153; Möbius form and, 276n7; Oscar Niemeyer and, 138, 274n160; Piet Mondrian and, 161; reception of work of, 138–39, 149; São Paulo 1951 biennial and, 32, 134–35; São Paulo 1953– 1954 biennial and, 140, 143; Tripartite Unity by, 135, 136−37, 137−38, 142, 145, 151–53; universalism and, 193 Birmingham 1849 fair, 44–45, 70, 258n61 Birnbaum, Daniel, 87–88, 181, 183, 229, 237, 256n107, plate 33 Bishop, Claire, 205 Blake, William, 199 Blanche, Jacques-Émile, 44, 75, plate 12 Blind Alphabet (Boshoff ), 1–2, 9, 33, 33–34, 221, plate 1 blind epistemology: aesthetics of experience and, 148–49, 207; Brazilian art and, 149, 162; cosmopolitanism and, 94; critical globalism and, 6, 32; feeling its way, 218; Henry Adams and, 25, 34; history of, 2, 5, 22, 34; kinesthetic appreciation and, 250; navigation of spectacles and, 226; optical unconscious and, 135; postmodernism and, 29−30; tactics of, 4, 135, 152, 193, 226; “tender empiricism” and, 250; theory of multiple senses and, 108; viewers converted into participants and, 153; Wave UFO (Mori) and, 208–10 Blindhotland series (Meireles), 162, 236, 237. See also blindman trope Blind Leading the Blind, The (Bruegel), 11 Blind Man, The (journal), 25, 233, 255n85, 255n90 blindman trope: abstraction and, 12–13; administrators of arts events and, 4; anti-ocular art and, 25–27, 28; Blindhotland series (Meireles) and, 162; blindman as everyman and, 14; blindman’s visits to world’s fairs and, 19–22; blindman versus blind man and, 252n8; blind mathematicians and, 254n51; Brazilian art and, 118–19; British blindman and Japanese envoy and, 32; colorblindness and, 34; cultural appropriation and, 29; Dadaists and, 122; Denis Diderot and, 8, 11–14, 19, 254n48, 254n52; difference and, 33; Enlightenment and, xi, 3−5, 8, 10, 32; experience as teacher and, 10–11, 14; hearing versus seeing and, 58; Henry Adams and, 22, 24; hierarchy of senses and, 253n24; hypothetical blind man and, 3−4, 8, 34, 226, 253nn39–40; Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (Téllez) and, 211; multisensorial cognition and, 7, 12, 21−22, 24–25, 29–30, 84, 87; philosophy and, 4–6, 31, 32; race and, 34; René Descartes’s blind man and, 8–9, 9; at specific biennials, 2–3; supersensual experience and, 29, 30, 34, 148, 233; in the Temple Bar literary magazine, 14–15, 19, 21–22, 254n58; theory and, 6–8, 207, 218; transnationalism and, 162; trauma and, 31–32; Venice 2015 biennial and, 250; world pictures and, 3, 79. See also blind epistemology Blind Pavilion (Eliasson), 32 Blocker, Jane, 29, 31–32 314

Bibliography

Bloom, Hyman, 289n32 Blount, Margaret, 262n186 Boas, Franz, 270n52 Boba, A (Malfatti), 135 Bode, Arnold, 166, 177, 185, 188, 228, 279n76 Bois, Yve-Alain, 152–53, 154, 155, 276n7, 279n62 Bonami, Francesco, 107 Bonjour M. Courbet (Courbet), 101 Bonnier, Louis, 52, 53, 53 Book from the Sky (Xu Bing), 40, 40–41, 42, 257n31 Bopp, Raul, 271n73 Bordiga, Giovanni, 89 Boshoff, Willem, 1–2, 4, 9, 33, 33–34, 221, plate 1 Bouabré, Frédéric Bruly, 263n211 Bourdieu, Pierre, 225, 229 Bourne, Randolph, 159, 278n43, 278n46 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 73, 191, 203, 204, 204–5, 285n222 Boutoux, Thomas, 264n26 Braakensiek, Johan, 97 Brady, Mathew, 39 Brancusi, Constantin, 213, 214 Braque, Georges, 139 Braudel, Fernand, 282n141 Brazil: 1960s political crisis in, 147; agricultural arrangements in, 268n11; artist collectives in, 271n76; art world’s freedom from politics in, 273n114; Brazil Builds (1943) and, 162; illiteracy in, 276n197; indigeneity and racialization and, 268n12, 269n49, 270n52, 270n54, 271n75; political violence in, 156, 240; restrictions on cultural expression in, 156; shopping in, 275n165; slavery in, 269n47; temporal culture in, 268n10. See also Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo); specific São Paulo biennials Brecheret, Victor, 123, 134, 135, 135, 270n60 Brecht, Bertolt, 81, 223 Brecht, George, 200 Brener, Aleksandr, 228 Breton, André, 237, 255n89 Brett, Guy, 147, 160, 167, 232, 276n195 Bride (Duchamp), 25 Brito, Ronaldo, 138, 275n174 Brock, Bazon, 169, 186, 281n132, 285n230 Broodthaers, Marcel, 172 Brown, William Wells, 68, 77, 87 Browne, Byron, 128 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 66, 68, 262nn181–82 Bruegel, Pieter, 11 Bruguera, Tania, 167 Brussels 1958 Expo, 76, 263n213 Buber, Martin, 280n82 Bubble-Machine (Medalla), 175 Budasz, Rogério, 113, 120, 269n49 Buffalo 1901 Pan-American Exposition, 56 Buren, Daniel, 181, 188, 280n97 Burial at Ornans (Courbet), 101 Buried Secrets (Viola), 241, 241

Burle Marx, Roberto, 142, 143, 176n187, 176n189 Burton, Scott, 176 Butler, Judith, 214 Byars, James Lee, 167, 188, 188, 190 Byron (Lord), 96 Cabeça de Índio (Portinari), 128 Café Maure (Blanche), 44, 75 Caffin, Charles, 56 Cage Piece, 261n169 Cai Guo-Qiang, 41; Chinese pavilions and, 104–5, 105, 110, 111; Cultural Melting Bath by, 40, 41, 41–42, 79, 104, 203, 221–22, 257n35, 257n40, plate 34; journey from periphery to center and, 43; Venice 1995 biennial and, 35, 36 Calder, Alexander, 126, 128, 274n151 Calzadilla, Guillermo, 249, 291n70 Camnitzer, Luis, 157, 158, 159, 160, 278n39 Canhête, Polyana, 122, 126, 270n62, 271n76, 271n84, 272n108 Cardozo, Joaquim, 143 Carlyle, Thomas, 49 Carrà, Carlo, x Casagemas, Carles, 58 Casanova, 279n59 Castelli, Leo, 116, 126, 130–31, 273n123 Cattelan, Maurizio, 287n79 Celant, Germano, 179, 282−83n157 Certeau, Michel de, 277n15 Cézanne, Paul, 129 Chagall, Marc, 116, 128 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 43, 252n12 Chalayan, Hussein, 109, 109–10, 111–12, plate 35 Charoux, Lothar, 142, 275n177 Chateaubriand, Gilberto, 268n27 Chatô (Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Mello), 118, 126–28, 132, 133, 137, 268n27, 272n107 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 258n82 Chia, Sandro, 284n212 Chicago 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition: city beautiful movement and, 51; effects of on visitors, 61; exhibition of the future and, 35; Henry Adams and, 24; human exhibits at, 55, 60–61, 62; John Dewey and, 234; Louis Sullivan and, 35, 61, 261n159; organization of, 57–58, 61; Polish Day at, 51; proposed exhibits for, 53; White City at, 24 China biennials, 259n103 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (US), 260n128, 269n47 Chocolate Grinder (Duchamp), 25, 254–55n83 Chomsky, Noam, 228 Christo, 174, 175, 280n97, 281n132 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, 193, 252n6 Clair, Jean, 241 Clark, Gordon Matta, 156, 277n28 Clark, Lygia: aesthetics of experience and, 145, 232; antropofagia and, 160, 165, 226; Bichos and, 145–46, 155, 164; Brazilian polarities and, 276n14; Concretism and, 146; Diálogo de Mãos (Clark and Oiticica) and, 151–53, 152, 154–55, 277n17; differ-

end and, 163–64; exile of, 156; Ferreira Gullar and, 277n18, 277n20; international art world and, 153–54; Mário Pedrosa and, 277n20; Neoconcretismo and, 155; O dentro é a fora (The Inside Is the Outside) by, 145, 146; Piet Mondrian and, 161, 279n62; rejection of nationalism and, xi; syncretism and, 115; tactics of, 193; turn toward process and, 177; Unidades series by, 163–64; Venice biennials and, 152, 154; world-changing art and, 151, 167 Clark, T. J., 201 Claude, Jeanne, 175 Clemente, Francesco, 284n212 Clert, Iris, 247 Clifford, Henry, 281n124 Coca-Cola, 180 Coffee Mill (Duchamp), 254–55n83 Cogniat, Raymond, 279n75 Cold War, 142, 171, 215, 227, 235−36, 271n78, 271n84 Cole, Henry, 16–17, 45, 58, 70, 262n200 Cologne art fair, 264n25 colonialism and imperialism: artifacts and, 59; Brazilian art world and, 133; Christopher Columbus and, 286n44; “Decolonizing Architecture” program and, 267n87; documenta 2002 and, 74; empire as playhouse and, 79; human bodies and, 222; human exhibits and, 55–56, 58, 60–62, 64, 260–61n156, 261n169, plate 30; industrialization and, 45; London as capital of empire and, 19; national pavilions at world’s fairs and, 265n41; new metropolitan identities and, 168–69; opinionated curation and, 229; Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle and, plate 9; rubber industry and, 153; sex trafficking and, 261n163; world pictures and, 14−15, 60; world’s fairs and, 7, 19, 22, 43, 54, 94–95 Columbus, Christopher, 286n44 Comenas, Gary, 289n32 Compton, Michael, 284n215 Comte, Auguste, 216 Conceptual Art, 150, 160, 162, 166, 169–71, 199, 236, 244, 277n10, 291n70 Concretism: versus abstraction, 138, 270n56; Art Concret and, 274n153; bodily references and, 153; Cícero Dias and, 118; Cold War and, 142; concrete poets and, 146; deflection of local politics and, 178; Existentialism and, 236; Ferreia Gullar and, 146, 155; Grupo Frente and, 145; Grupo Ruptura and, 138, 142; Gutai group and, 170, 280n97; konkrete kunste and, 137, 164, 274n149; manure dump and, 178, 282n184; the masses and, 139; Max Bill and, 120, 137–38, 142, 145, 162; modernism and, 276n199; Neoconcretism and, 145−45, 155, 164; versus representational art, 119–20; São Paulo biennials and, 114−15, 122, 125–26, 137–38, 141−42; technologism and, 149; universalism and, 115, 149, 162 Connor, Bruce, 277n16 Constructivism, x, 138, 274n151 consumption, 51, 65−66, 72, 180, 182 Contamin, Victor, 23 Contrabienal, 156−57, 159, 277n28 Cook, Thomas, 65, 77 Bibliography

315

Corbisier, Roland, 269n46 Corbusier, Le, 129, 143, 144, 276nn187−88 Cordeiro, Waldemar, 120, 139, 142, 275n177, plate 26 Corinth, Lovis, 103 Corral, Maria de, 208 cosmopolitanism: Absent Presence (Chalayan) and, 110; alternative cosmopolitics and, xi; artworld and, 266n68; Augustine of Hippo and, xi, 94, 169, 241, 266n68; biennials and, 77, 81−82, 84, 93−95, 153, 157, 159, 168–69; Brazilian, 269n46; Catholicism and, 101; globalist artists and, 177; global work of art and, 87; history of, 94; Immanuel Kant and, 169, 228, 280n98; Jewish communities and, 98; Manifestas and, 169; modernism and, 104; publicity and advertising and, 51; racism and, 98; transnationalism and, 157; universalism and, 98, 104; world’s fairs versus biennials and, xii Costa, Lúcio, 144, 145, 268n23, 272n105 Cottage Madonna (Israëls), 101, 103, 139, 198 Cotter, Holland, 183n160 Coubertin, Pierre de, 94 Couch (Warhol), 214 Council for Inter-American Cooperation (CIAC), 127, 272nn100−101 Counter-Reliefs (Tatlin), x Courbet, Gustave: admission fees and, 217; Artist’s Studio by, 100; Bonjour M. Courbet by, 101; Burial at Ornans by, 101; influence of, 58; influences on, 287n54; pavilions of, 8, 43–45, 46, 47, 77, 99–100, 100, 101, 217, 226, 258n72, 260n148, 266n58, 266n62; Realism and, 43–45, 77, 100, 100, 101; Stonebreakers by, 101, 266n58 Cousin, Victor, 233 Craft, Ellen, 68, 77, 87 Creation et les Creations!, La (Adeagbo), 239 Creative Time (public art program), 30 Creed, Martin, 203 critical globalism: as aesthetic operation, 227, 229; art and everyday existence and, 232; artistic agency and, 193, 243; aspirational globality and, 236; biennial culture and, 247–49; biennial sites and, 93; Book from the Sky (Xu) and, 40; colonial industry and, 45; economic logic of globalization and, 167; emergence of, 79; Enlightenment and, 218; experience and education and, 64; global condition of art and, 198; globalization from below and, 228; Hélio Oiticica and, 161; human bodies in art and, 222; installation art and, 237, 239; interdependence and, xiv; international style and, 226; leveraging of spectacle and, 230; meaning of, xiii, 32; nationalism and internationalism and, 107; neoliberalism and, 229; pavilions and, 77, 95, 108–9; performance art and, 105–6; practice of, 244–50; pure experience and disinterested aesthetics and, 217; resistance to globalization and, 101; transnationalism and, 149, 154; Walter Benjamin and, 27; work of art and, xii, 42, 249; world pictures and, 6, 37, 87, 218, 233–34 Cropsey, Jasper, 45 Crowninshield, Frank, 25, 255n97 Cubism, 113, 118, 122−23, 132, 270n62, 275n183 Cubo-Futurism, 103, 124, 126 316

Bibliography

Cubo Vazado (Weissmann), 134 Cucchi, Enzo, 284n212 cultural appropriation, 29, 39−40, 59, 77, 114, 222, 233 Cultural Melting Bath (Cai Guo-Qiang), 36, 40−42, 41, 79, 104, 203, 221–22, 257n35, 257n40, plate 34 culture wars, 157 curation, 164, 181, 228, 229, 237 Czolgosz, Leon, 260n135 da Campos, Haroldo, 146 Dadaists, 122, 168, 170–71, 173, 189, 211 Dak’Art 1992 biennial, 159 Danto, Arthur, 264n18, 266n68 Darboven, Hanne, 282n153 Dastugue, Marcel, 74 David, Catherine, 229, 241 David, Jacques-Louis, 44, 46, 54, 57, 76, 230, 261n175 David before Saul (Israëls), 104 Davidson, Arnold, 210–11 Daws, John, 14, 16, 56–57, 60 Death and the Woodcutter (Millet), 266n69 de Barros, Geraldo, 142, 275n177 Debord, Guy, 112 Degand, Léon, 118–19, 126, 130–32, 134, 269n34, 273n119 Degas, Edgar, 103 Degot, Ekaterina, 191n69 de Kooning, Willem, 131, 289n32 Delacroix, Eugène, 48, 103 Delaroche, Paul, 97, 265n46, 266n69 Delécluze, Étienne Jean, 57, 58, 112, 260n144 Deleuze, Gilles, 5, 88, 210, 211, 277n11 del Picchia, Menotti, 270n60 de Man, Paul, 6 Demand, Thomas, 179, 282−83n157 De Maria, Walter, 181, 183 Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), x, 59–60, 122 Demolder, Eugène, 50 De Puisieux, Madeleine d’Arsant, 11, 12 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 29, 39, 42, 70, 207, 217−23, 279n70 Descartes, René: blindman trope and, 8–9, 9, 11–12, 14, 207, 253nn39–40; Cartesian rationalism and, 211; Heidegger versus, 14, 196−97; L’homme by, plate 1; neuroscience and, 8; Paris 1937 world’s fair and, 196; secular empiricism and, 253n43 desire: for antiquities, 65; The Greek Slave (Powers) and, 69; reproductions of art and, 42; as source of embodied memory, 50–51; technophilia and, 49; world-as-picture and, 233, 250; world pictures and, 38, 42, 50, 59, 66–67, 85, 112 de Soto, Jesús, 274n150 Dewey, John, 24, 195, 198, 208, 216−17, 234−36, 288n100, 290n38 Deyrolle, Jean, 132 Diálogo de Mãos (Clark and Oitica), 151–53, 152, 154–55, 277n17 Dias, Cícero, 113, 116−21, 117, 123, 134, 142, 161, 268nn22−23, 268nn27−28 Diaz, Gonzalo, 29, 32, 34, 256n113

Dibbets, Jan, 280n97 Di Cavalcanti, Emiliano, 121, 123, 144, 269n44, 272n106 Dickens, Charles, 54 Dickinson Company, 57 Diderot, Denis: art criticism and, 57; blindman trope and, 8, 11–13, 14, 19, 254n48, 254n52; British empiricism and, 254n52; Encyclopédie of, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18; Enlightenment optimism of, 30; existence of God and, 207; imprisonment of, 14; on sight as a noble sense, 6 Die Proklamierung des Deutschen Kaisserreiches (von Werner), 91 difference: antropofagia and, 133, 162, 193; Brazilian art and, 123–24, 127–28, 132; différance (Derrida) and, 279n70; ethical politics and, 166–67; European art and, 112; globalist artists and, 177; human exhibits and cultural interpreters and, 64; installation art and, 237; internationalism and, 96, 101, 104, 114, 134; international style and, 32, 57, 76, 118; Istanbul 1992 biennial and, 160; Oscar Niemeyer’s works and, 144; Paris 1855 Exposition Universelle and, 57; pure, 42; repetition and, 88, 125–27; room for in art, 219–20; São Paulo biennials and, 115, 125, 138, 142, 149; Stateless Nation (Hilal and Petti) and, 107; theories of nation and, 60; transnationalism and, 159; Tripartite Unity (Bill) and, 135; versus universalism, 49; violent negotiations over, 62, 70; work of art and, 87. See also differend (Lyotard) differend (Lyotard): aesthetics of experience and, 233; biennial culture and, 230–31, 249; definition of, 163; differend as word and, 279n70; globalist artists and, 177; installation art and, 237; knowledge and contemplation and, 179; meaning of, 264n22; negotiation with, 172, 205, 211, 237; precondition for, 280n92; the Shoah and, 164−65 Diller, Burgoyne, 131 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 4, 286n32 Di Martino, Enzo, 190 Diogenes, 94 Di Prete, Danilo, 116, 134, 138, 268n16 disability theory, 3, 4 documenta: art as event and, 166, 185, 227; de-democratization of, 190; École du Pacifique and, 171; first non-European curator of, 229; Hans Haacke and, 186; leadership of, 185; versus Manifestas, 160; market function of, 240; museum of 100 days and, 177, 227; opinionated curation and, 229; protests against, 178. See also Bode, Arnold; Christov-Barkargiev, Carolyn; Enwezor, Okwui; Szeemann, Harald; specific documentas documenta 1, 166 documenta 2, 186 documenta 3, 175, 239 documenta 4, 176, 185 documenta 5, 188; as 100-day event, 166, 189; activities versus objects and, 177; criticism of, 186, 187; ephemera from, 282−83n157; goals of, 169; Harald Szeemann and, 171, 185, 193, 197, 239, 241, 290n46; kinetic art and, 167; politics and, 188–89 documenta 10, 212, 229, 241 documenta 11, 73−74, 193, 229−30, 230 documenta 12, 105

documenta 13, 193, 252n6, 288n115, 289n9 Do Figuratismo ao Abstracionismo (exhibit, 1949), 118−19, 138, 235 Dondel, Jean-Claude, 74 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 48–49, 258n81 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 260n122 Doyle, Tom, 282n153 Dream House (Zazeela and Young), 203, 205, 207, 210 Dreams That Money Can Buy (film, Richter), 28 Dreyfus affair, 101, 266n68 Drouin, René, 116, 130, 268n20, 273n123 Dubai 2009 International Art Fair, 30–31, 31 Duchamp, Marcel: anti-retinal work and, 25–27, 28, 28–29, 233; art and technology and, 226; art history and, 255n97; bachelors and, 182, 190, 281n110; blind epistemology and, 34; The Blind Man (journal) and, 25, 27, 233; carnal vision of, 255n92; Chocolate Grinder by, 254–55n83; cock of the head and, 7; Coffee Mill by, 254–55n83; funding for work of, 255n88, 255n90; gender-bending and, 6; Henry Adams and, 254–55nn83–84; inframince and, 220, 288n119; inventors’ fair and, 25−26, 220; Large Glass by, 254–55n83, 284n211; Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo) and, 130; optical unconscious and, 27−28; on painting and the intellect, 1; postmodernism and, 255n96; precision optics and, 189; Rotary Demisphere, Precision Optics by, 255n89; Rotoreliefs and, 26–29, 28, 211, 220, 233, 254–55n83, 255n90; turn against painting and, 254–55n83; Unhappy Readymade and, 255n85; urinal and, 233, 255n85 Duchamp, Suzanne, 255n85 Dutert, Ferdinand, 23 Dutra, Eurico Gaspar, 125 Dutta, Arindam, 219–20 Dylaby (exhibit, 1962), 174 Earth (Oiticica), 161 Echaurren, Roberto Matta, 131 Eclipse (Diaz), 32 École du Pacifique, 171 economimesis, 39, 42, 70, 207, 217–23, 232, 244 Eden Plan, The (Oiticica), 150, 243 Edinburgh 1886 fair, 51 EFCB (Tarsila), 135 Eiffel, Gustave, 51 Eiffel Tower, 51, 53, 72, 85, plate 8 Eisenstein, Sergei, 277n16 Elephant and the Blind Men, The (Téllez), plate 36 Elias, Norbert, 259n97 Eliasson, Olafur: 1998 “Antropofagia” Bienal and, 144; blind installations of, 32; blindman trope and, 34; kaleidoscopic visual devices and, 203; model of seeing and, 1; perceiving “you” and, 231–32; pragmatist philosophy and, 217; Very Large Ice Floor by, 144, 276n191; Weather Project by, 232; Your Black Horizon (Eliasson and Adjaye), 231, 232, 289n18; Your Blind Movement by, 8, 9, 10 Elk, Ger Van, 280n97 Empire of the Senseless (Haghighian), 32 Bibliography

317

Enlightenment: biennials and, 94, 218; blindman trope and, 3−5, 8, 10–11, 32; boundary between art and everyday existence and, 232; critical globalism and, 218; dark core of, 39; emancipation of the spectator and, 223; experience and, 196; glass in architecture and, 19, plates 2−3; Immanuel Kant and, 219, 280n98; photography and, 18; reaction to ocularity of, xi; tolerance and pacifism and, 98 Enwezor, Okwui: on the altermodern, 42; on biennials and debate about art, 151; curatorial work of, 73; on intense proximity, 75–76; interculturalism and, 270n67; Johannesburg biennials and, 159; Palais de Tokyo and, 263n211; on power and subordination, 39; transnational openings and, 193; on visual Esperanto, xiii epistemology, 10, 14, 36, 211. See also blind epistemology Ernst, Jimmy, 131 Espera, A (Dias), 116 event, art as: 100 Days, 100 Guests (David) and, 229; aesthetics of experience and, 197, 214, 233; Alain Badiou and, 202, 212, 213, 214, 225; “Apertos” and, 106, 190–92, 284n215; demotic energy of, 193; documenta and, 166, 185, 189, 227; installation art and, 239; Kiss (Sehgal) and, 213–14; leveraging of spectacle and, 230; Lyon 2005 biennial and, 202–4; market function of biennials and, 166; monetization of art-as-experience and, 227; phenomenology and, 197–98; rupture and, 213–14, 215, 218; transnationalism and, 198–99; video projection and, 215; work of art and, 202. See also Szeemann, Harald Existentialism, 235–36 experience: Erlebnis versus Erfahrung and, 196, 201, 211, 214, 286n32; expérience and, 201, 211. See also aesthetics of experience Experience Corridor (Höller), 203, 211–12 Expressionism, 122, 124, 126, 171, 270n62, 275n183 F-111 (Rosenquist), 175 Farmer, William, 68 Farmer Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer, 105 Farver, Jane, 41, 257n35, 257n40, 277n10 fascism: biennials and, 77, 106, 156, 266n78; Brazil and, 175n173; early fascist air raids and, 197; Hans Haacke’s smashing of marble floor and, 233, 243; Theodor Adorno’s work and, 198 Fauves, 122 Féjer, Kazmer, 142, 275n177 Fenellosa, Ernest, 260n122 Fernandes Sardinha, Pedro, 121 Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina, 270–71n72 Ferris wheel, 51 Filipovic, Elena, 77 film and video, 39, 151, 154, 236–37, 241, 249 Fisher, Cora, 215 Fishermen Carrying a Drowned Man (Israëls), 102 Flaxman, John, 65 Fluxus artists, 153, 165, 171, 184−85, 199 Ford, Henry, 25 Foreign Investment artists group, 191 Foucault, Michel, 5, 37, 49, 197, 210−11, 222, 259n86, 259n97 318

Bibliography

Fountain (Duchamp), 25 Fourier, Joseph, 287n54 Fowke, Francis, plate 4 Fradeletto, Antonio, 89–91 Franco, Francisco, 115 Franco-Prussian war, 94 Frank, Regina, 191 Frankfurter, Alfred, 235, 289n32 Frankfurt School, 49 Frelinghuysen, Suzy, 131 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 172 Freund, Charles Paul, 267n90 Freyre, Gilberto, 270n52 Fried, Michael, 199 Friedman, Sara, 270n62 From Figurativism to Abstraction (exhibit, 1949), 118−19, 138, 235 Fuller, Buckminster, 263n213 Fusco, Coco, 63–64, 79, 221, plate 30 Futurism, 122, 189, 275n183 futurity, 88, 91, 93 Galbraith, Kenneth, 221 Galindo, Regina José, 62–63, 63, 261nn166–67 Garen, Georges, plate 8 Gatch, Lee, 289n32 Gatti, José, 115, 160 Gauguin, Paul, 44, 116, 261n163 Geddes, Patrick, 51 Geffroy, Gustave, 50 Gérard, Balthasar, 265n54 Germania (Haacke), 108, 110, 233, 243, plate 23 Gestalt psychology, 234 Gioni, Massimiliano, 94, 237, 287n79, 290n42 Giotto, 117 Glarner, Fritz, 131 Glissant, Edouard, 111 global financial crisis of 2008, 193 Global Groove (Paik), 252n19 globalism: antiglobalization protests and, 228; bad globalization and, 42; biennials and, x, 16, 114; curatorial voice and, 164; global as word and, xiii−xiv, 152, 252n10; globalization versus, 3, 227–28; global village and, 156, 252n19; glocalism and, 29, 30; internationalism versus, xi, xii, 106−7, 252n10; as international style, 226; international versus global art circuits and, 88; market for non-Western art and, 228–29; nationalism and, 8, 37; navigation of local difference and, 32; pessimism about, 225; polyglot complexity of, 16; transnationalism and, 154, 156; Walter Benjamin and optical unconscious and, 27; widening of the art world and, ix; will to globality and, 36. See also critical globalism; globalization; internationalism globalization: blindness trope as response to, 3; critical resistance to, 101; debate over meaning of, xiii–xiv; economic logic of, 167; as ethnic restaurant, 279−80n80; globalism versus, 3, 227–28; Kodak and, 117; lumpy, 64; versus mondialisation, 87, 264n20; Noam Chomsky and, 228; tourist dollars and, 231–32

global work of art. See work of art Globe Riots, 178 Gloria (Allora and Calzadilla), 249 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 81, 250, 291n77 Goldman, Emma, 260n135 Gomes, Antonio Carlos, 268n21 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 63–64, 79, 221, plate 30 Goode, George Brown, 35, 57–58, 61 Göpfert, Herrmann, 175 Gorky, Arshile, 131, 289n32 Gothic revival, 71 Gottlieb, Adolph, 131, 226 Goulette, J. Léon, 263n10 Graham, Dan, 214 Gramsci, Antonio, 139 Grant, John, 66, 262nn181–82 GRAV collective, 167, 170, 174 Graves, Morris, 128, 131 Greece, ancient, 7, 37, 57, 94, 253n22, 253n28 Greek Slave, The (Powers), x–xi, 32, 39, 45, 46, 66–70, 72, 77, 87, 98, 104, 139, 226, 262n192, 262n197, 262nn181–82, 262nn186–87, plate 5 Greenberg, Clement, 134, 199, 273n135, 290n38 Greenhalgh, Paul, 258n58, 285n16 Green Party, 189, 282n150 Gregory, Derek, 259n108 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 11, 12 Gropius, Walter, 143, 275n185, 279n67 Grosso, Giacomo, 59, 82–83, 83 Grossvater (exhibit, 1974), 172–73, 173, 237 Guangzhou biennials, 109 Guardi, Francesco, 91, 92 Guattari, Félix, 210, 277n11 Guernica (Picasso), 44, 47, 75–77, 104, 121, 139, 198, 266n75, plate 22 Guggenheim, Peggy, 189 Guilbaut, Serge, 118, 130, 273n123 Gullar, Ferreira, 113, 146, 152, 155, 164, 277n18, 277n20 Gunsaulus, Frank W., 81 Gutai group, 170, 236, 280n99 Haacke, Hans: background of, 280n86; documenta, 186, 186; exhibit invitations and, 169; fascism and biennials and, 106; Germania by, 108, 110, 233, 243, plate 23; Golden Lion award and, 243; pavilions and, 109; Tokyo 1970 biennial and, 280n97; Tokyo Trickle by, 167, 167; When Attitudes Become Form exhibit and, 177 Haar, Leopoldo, 142, 275n177 Hackwood, William, 69, 69 Hadot, Pierre, 210–11 Haftmann, Werner, 166, 279n76 Haghighian, Natascha, 32, 256n113 Halbreich, Kathy, 278n56 Hamilton, Ann, 237, 238 Hamilton, William, 65

Hand Catching Lead (Serra), 154, 155 Hansen, Miriam, 27–28 Happenings, 153, 165, 171, 185, 199, 208, 236 Happenings and Fluxus exhibition (1970), 185, 284n194 Hardman, John, 45 Hartung, Hans, 119, 185 Havana biennials, 157, 159, 167−68, 264n21, 278nn39−40, 279n78 Hayter, Stanley William, 131 Head of an Indian (Portinari), 127, 128 Hegel, G. W. F., 195, 197, 199, 201, 286n18, 287n60, 287n66 Heidegger, Martin: aestheticization and, 198; antirationalism and, 285n9; art and modernity and, 234; cult of empiricism and, 211; cult of the individual and, 197; Denis Diderot and, 14; experience and, 196, 199, 207, 285n7; Hegel and, 286n18; International Congress of Philosophy and, 196, 285n9; Nazis and, 38, 257n19; phenomenology and, 197, 236; subject and, 221; thing theory and, 38; on unity of work-being, 38, 72; world-as-picture and, x, 16, 37, 38, 149–50, 227, 233; worldmaking and, 88; world’s fairs and, xii; yearning for an earlier age and, 233. See also world pictures Heiser, Jörg, 213 Heizer, Michael, 169, 177, 178, 236, plate 32 Hendrix, Jimi, 178, 282n152 Herbert, James, 43 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 60 Herzl, Theodor, 265n49 Hesse, Eva, 282n153 Heynen, Julian, 244 Heyse, Hans, 196, 285n12 Hilal, Sandi, 107, 108, 109, 110, 267n87 Hildebrand, Adolf, 288n105 Hilma af Klimt, 237 Hi Red Center (Tokyo), 282n140 Hirst, Damien, 72, 263n205 Hitler, Adolf, 108, 243, plate 23 Hodler, Ferdinand, 275n183 Hoffmann, Jens, 283n161 Hoffmann, Josef, 77 Hofmann, Hans, 131 Höller, Carsten, 203, 211–12, 212, 219 Holocaust. See Shoah Homage to Mondrian (Oiticica), 161, 161 homme, L’ (Descartes), plate 1 Homo sapiens sapiens (Rist), 241–43, 242 Horkheimer, Max, 49, 218 House for Pigs and People, A (Höller and Trockel), 212 How Latitudes Become Forms (exhibit, 2003), 160 Hughes, Henry Meyric, 228 Hugo, Victor, ix, 35, 48 Huldisch, Henriette, 252n6 Hultén, Pontus, 174, 185 Hume, David, 207 Husserl, Edmund, 196, 197 hybridity, 278n58 Bibliography

319

Ibrahim, Annie, 11 Ikegami, Hiroko, 290n47 imperialism. See colonialism and imperialism Impressionism, 49, 103–4, 211 Independents group of artists, 255n85 Índio e a Suaçuapara (Brecheret), 134, 135 industrialization: art versus industry and, 39, 44, 45; in Brazil, 126–27; colonial goods and, 45; the dynamo and, 22, 24–25; embodied time and, 217; images of industry and, 216; Kodak and, 117; making gods of humans and, 48; military-touristic complex and, 65; rubber industry and, 153; world’s fairs and, 21–22, 24 Information (exhibit, 1970), 155–56, 161–62, 164, 167, 169, 191, 279nn64−65 Ingres, Dominique, 48 Inserções em Circuitoes Ideológicos (Insertions series, Meireles), 162, 163 Inside Is the Outside, The (Clark), 145, 146 installation art, 236–37, 239, 241, 249, 290n40 internationalism: abstraction and, 120, 149; artists and, 277n22; biennials and, 106; conditions underpinning, xi–xii; difference and, 96, 101, 104, 114; the dynamo and, 45; globalism versus, xi, xii, 106–7, 252n10; heuristics and, ix, x–xi; international art and, 39; international as word and, 252n10, 252n16; international versus global art circuits and, 88; international visual language and, 135, 137; modernism and, 37; versus nationalism, x, 134; from periphery to center, 42; predicated, xii, 8, 97−98, 265n44, 270n60; publicity and advertising and, 51; São Paulo 1951 biennial and, 138; syncretism and, 170; transnationalism and, 152−54, 156, 161–62, 169; universalism and, 112; visual Esperanto, xiii; world’s fairs and, x, 43–44, 45, 49. See also globalism; globalization; international style; transnationalism and transculturalism international style: adaptation for local conditions and, 265n44; Concretism and, 114; critical globalism and, 226; Dadaism and, 165; difference and, 32, 57, 76, 118; expansion of, 104; globalism as, 226; Impressionism as, 103–4; modernism and, 142, 143; Nabis and, 165; Neoclassicism as, 65, 70, 77; as normative straitjacket, 50; pavilions and, 47; São Paulo 1953–1954 biennial and, 143; shifting definition of, 59, 107–8. See also Bill, Max; Corbusier, Le; Niemeyer, Oscar; Sert, José Luis (Sert, Josep Lluis) internet. See social media and the internet Interventionist Manifesto (Carrà), x Inwood, Michael, 285n7 Iofan, Boris, plate 21 Irigaray, Luce, 6 Israëls, Jozef, 96, 97; Alongside Mother’s Grave (or Passing the Cemetery) by, 101, plate 16; as autodidact, 103–4; background of, 97–98, 265nn45–46; commentary on, 81, 88; cosmopolitanism and, 104; Cottage Madonna by, 101, 103, 139, 198; David before Saul by, 104; as Dutch Millet, 87, 97−98, 101–3, 107, 266n75; Een Turk in verpozing (Turk in Repose) by, 265n46; fair apparatus and, 226; Fishermen Carrying a Drowned Man by, 102; illness of, 100–101; influences on, 58−59, 98, 100−102, 265n46; Jean-François Millet and, 266n69; Jewishness and, 81, 98, 104; 320

Bibliography

journey from periphery to center and, 42; list of showings of, 266n72; market for reproductions and, 217; as nomadic artist, 32; Paris world’s fairs and, 97–99, 100, 104, 265n52; Peasant Family at the Table by, 266n75; predicated internationalism and, 97−98; Realism and, 32, 100–103, 127–28; Self-Portrait by, plate 18; The Shipwreck by, 101−2, 102, 104; tolerance and pacifism and, 51, 98; turning point in work of, plate 16; Venice 1895 biennial and, xi, 97, 104; William of Orange Meeting with Margaretha of Parma by, 98, plate 15; Zionism and, 265n49 Istanbul biennials, 93, 109, 160, 168, 237, 240, 264n36, 278n53 It blew right in my ear like the wind ( Jonas), plate 37 James Lee Byars Does the Holy Ghost (Byars), 189 Jameson, Fredric, 27, 29 Janet, François, 12 Janis, Sidney, 273n123 Janssens, Ann Veronica, 202–3 Jarry, Alfred, 182, 281n122 Jarzombek, Mark, 289n9 Javanaise, Annah la, 261n163 Jay, Martin, 6, 29, 207, 286n24 Jensen, Knud, 174 Jesus Christ, 101, 266n65 Jewell, Edward Alden, 225–26, 234 Johannesburg biennials, 73, 159, 168, 278n49 Johns, Jasper, 171, 174 Jonas, Joan, 249–50, plate 37 Jones, Owen, 19, plate 3 Journet, Jean, 287n54 journey. See pilgrimage and movement; theory Judaism and Jews, 81, 98, 101, 104, 265n49, 266n68 Judd, Donald, 290n38 Jung, Carl, 237 Jünger, Ernst, 286n32 Kaiden, Nina, 176, 180–81, 283n174 Kambly, Julie, 172 Kanayama, Akira, 280n99 Kandinsky, Wassily, 119, 138 Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics as term and, 199, 202; aesthetics of experience and, 207, 218–19; on cognition and experience, 195; cosmopolitanism of, 169, 228, 280n98; Enlightenment and, 219, 280n98; judgments of experience and, 289n7; parergon and, 220–21; possibility of experience and, 288−89n6; sensus communis and, 10; universality of experience and, 225 Kaplan, Jo Ann, 282n153 Kaprow, Allan, 208, 290n38 Kepes, Gyorgy, 240, 277n27, 290n48 Kienholz, Edward, 182 Kippenberger, Martin, 244, 245, 245, 290n60 Kirchner, Ludwig, 122 Kiss (Sehgal), 51, 212–14, 213, 222, 223, 287n83 Klee, Paul, 119, 138, 185 Kleege, Georgina, 1, 3−5, 8, 24−25, 108, 218, 253nn39−40 Klein, Yves, 170, 247

Kneese de Mello, Eduardo, 128, 129 Kodak, 117 Kohlmeyer, Agnes, 191, 193 Kollwitz, Käthe, 273n134 König, Kaspar, 283n170 Konkrete kunst (exhibit, 1944), 164 Koolhaas, Rem, 179, 282−83n157 Koons, Jeff, 213 Kopp, Paul Johann, 177–78, 179, 282n149 Kortun, Vasif, 278n53 Kosice, Gyula, 120, 269n43 Kounellis, Jannis, 170, 280n97 Kramer, Hilton, 188 Krauss, Rosalind, 6, 26–27, 29, 31, 254–55n83, 255n96 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 144, 269n42, 274n160 Kubler, George, 198 Kunz, Martin, 284n215 labor: aesthetics of experience and, 208; images of industry and, 216; makers’ wages and, 217, 219; making of art as, 217–18, 219; negation of, 219; at world’s fairs, 49 Laboratorium (exhibit, 1999), 181, 182 Laborde, Léon de, 35, 49, 54, 259nn115–16 Lacan, Jacques, 42 Lacaton & Vassal, 73, 74 Laclau, Ernesto, 205 Lam, Wifredo, 159 Landscape as an Attitude (Camnitzer), 157 Langley, Samuel, 24 Laocoön, 199, 202 Large Glass (Duchamp, Schwarz), 189, 254–55n83, 284n211 Last Land, The (Schabus), 78 Last Moments (Picasso), 58–59, 59, 82 Lebrun, Rico, 289n32 Léger, Fernand, 119, 128, 132, 254n83, 277n16 Lenin, V. I., 141 Leskoschek, Axl, 120 Leslie, Alfred, 171, 174 Lessing, Gotthold, 199 Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (Diderot), 11–12, 14 Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (Téllez), 2, 2, 4, 30, 51, 198, 211 Leug, Konrad, 174 Levi, Rino, 128 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 280n92 Levitt, Peggy, 278n45 Lhote, André, 76 liberal arts, 82, 82, 263n6 Liebermann, Max, 81, 88, 90, 90, 101 Light and Movement (exhibit), 174 Limãos (Di Prete), 134 Limburg-Genk 2012 Manifesta, 160 Lin, Michael, 75, 203, 205 Lind, Maria, 106 Lippard, Lucy, 189

Live in Your Head (exhibit, 1969), 179–80 Ljubljana 2000 Manifesta, 160, 228 Lobato, Monteiro, 270n66 Locke, John, 11, 254n52 Loir, Luigi, plate 9 London, Barbara, 41, 41–42 London 1851 Great Exhibition, 16; abolitionist protests at, 68; art versus industry and, 39; categories of exhibits at, 37; Chartist riots and, 94; color scheme for, 19; Crystal Palace at, 19, 45, 47−48, 51, 56−57, 68, plates 2−3; design standards and, 258n66; emotional impact of, 48–49; emulations of, 254n58; exhibits at, x, 14, 39, 51, 60; government reports on, 54; The Greek Slave (Powers) and, 67, 68, 70, plate 5; Henry Cole and, 70; industry and, 45, 257n30; John Daws’s diaries of, 14, 16, 56–57, 60; Josiah Wedgwood and, 65; objections to, 18; photography sales and, 71; plans for, 58; Queen Victoria’s and, 55; reproductions of antiquities and, 77; shilling days at, 57; souvenirs of, 72; staging of, 208; structures and infrastructure and, 259nn104–5; subsequent world’s fairs and, 16, 17–18; tourism and, 65, 161n175; working class and, 77, 226 London 1862 International Exhibition, 15, 16, 17; America (Powers) and, 68–69; art versus industry and, 45; blind man and, 14−15, 19−21, 31; emotional impact of, 48–49; first Japanese envoy to Europe and, 21; The Greek Slave (Powers) at, 46, 67; Josiah Wedgwood and, 65; names for, 16; national courts at, 20–21, 20–21; quantity of exhibits at, 14; shilling day at, 55; structure built for, plate 4; Wyld’s Great Globe at, 51 Loop (Tijuana–San Diego), The (Alÿs), 244, 246 Louchheim, Aline, 289n32 Louis-Philippe (king of France), 44 Louvre, 44 Lyon biennials, 36, 171−72, 202−5, 204−7, 208−9, 211−12, 286n51, plate 34 Lyotard, Jean-François, 29, 163–66, 222, 237, 255n96, 264n22, 279n70, 280n92. See also differend (Lyotard) Machado, Lourival Gomes, 134, 271n86 MacIver, Loren, 131 Mack, Heinz, 281n105 Madra, Beryl, 110, 191, 267n88 Maffesoli, Michel, 204, 206–7 Magiciens de la Terre (exhibit, 1989), 36 Mai Abu El Dahab, 169 Mainardi, Patricia, 201, 216, 288n96 Maldonado, Tomás, 138, 269n43 Malende Dichter–Dichtende Maler (exhibit, 1957), 173 Malevich, Kazimir, 139, 141, 142, 274n151 Malfatti, Anita, 122, 122–23, 124, 135, 270n62, plate 24 Malkin, Irad, 253n30 Malraux, André, 165, 168 Maluf, Antonio, 114, 134, plate 27 Manet, Édouard: economimesis and, 217; on exhibiting, 216; pavilions of, 8, 45, 46, 49, 77, 226; Vue de l’Exposition Universelle, 1867 by, 201, 211, 221, 226, plate 6 Manet a nuestros días (exhibit, 1949), 118, 119 Bibliography

321

Manglano-Ovalle, Iñigo, 29 Manifesta: as antibiennial, 169, 227, 244; art as event and, 166; founding of, 159–60, 191, 193, 227, 279n78; globalization from below and, 228; goals of, 151, 278n51; market function of, 228; as nomadic, 159–60; opposition to, 280n93; past and future of, 264n26; Russian annexation of Crimea and, 291n69; support for, 278n49; Venice biennials and, 285n232. See also Limburg-Genk 2012 Manifesta; Ljubljana 2000 Manifesta; Nicosia 2006 Manifesta Mann, Thomas, 96 Mantovani, Stefania, 285n222 Manzoni, Piero, 170 mappa mundi, 37, 107, 196 Marder, Michael, 221 Margaritis, Elizabeth, 175, 176–77 Mariette, J. P., 251n7 Marin, John, 234–36, 235 Marinetti, F. T., 122, 266n78 Marks, Laura U., 29 Marseilles 1906 colonial fair, 44, 60, 61, 61 Martin, Jean-Hubert, 36, 203 Martinez, Rosa, 88, 208, 252n6, 264n20 Martins, Maria, 273−74n139 Martins, Sérgio, 276n199, 277n18 Marx, Karl, 49, 104 Masson, Paul, 95, 128 Matarazzo, Francesco “Ciccillo”: as art collector, 118; art prizes and, 269n44; background of, 115–16, 120, 121, 126–27, 142; boycott of São Paulo biennials and, 156; centrist agenda of, 139; Cícero Dias and, 117, 123; Danilo Di Prete and, 116, 133; as Europhile, 126, 128, 271n89; federal contracts and, 273n114; financial transactions and, 273n123; management style of, 268n20; modern architecture and, 142; Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo) and, 117, 118, 129–31, 130, 131; Nelson Rockefeller and, 272nn94−96; Recife exhibition of, 113; São Paulo biennials and, 114, 116–18, 120−21, 125−26, 134, 141, 279n78; São Paulo’s four hundredth anniversary and, 142–43; schools of art and, 269n34 Matarazzo, “Maecenas,” 131–32 Mathieu, Georges, 170 Matisse, Henri, 139 Mavignier, Almir, 134 Mayhew, Henry, 57 McCarthy, Paul, 215 McKinley, William, 56, 260n135 McLuhan, Marshall, 252n19, 277n22 McShine, Kynaston, 156, 164, 167, 169, 232, 279nn64−65, 283n161 Medalla, David, 167, 169, 175, 280n86, 280n96 Mediterranean Dramaturgies (Ataman), 30–31, 31 Meireles, Cildo, 70, 162, 163, 180, 236–37 Melbourne 1854 world’s fair, 254n58 Mello e Souza, Gilda de, 271n73 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill), 257n36 memory: aesthetics of experience and, 232–33; biennials and preservation of, 88; embodied, 50–51 Mendes, Murilo, 137, 140–41, 149 322

Bibliography

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 148, 164, 199, 225, 232 Merz, Mario, 280n97 Meyer, Henri, 95 Meyer-Amden, Otto, 174 Michelson, Annette, 277n16 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 32, 47, plate 20 Milan 1951 design triennial, 138 Milan 1968 design triennial, 156, 277n30 Millet, Jean-François, 87, 97–98, 101–3, 107, 266n66, 266n69, plate 17 Milliet, Maria Alice, 272n106 Milliet, Sérgio, 128−29, 133, 141, 272n108, 275n183 Minemura, Toshiaki, 170 Minimalism, 180 modernism and modernity: abstraction and, 32, 138–39; acceptance of, 104; aesthetic experience of, 216; aesthetics of experience and, 199, 234; the altermodern and, 42; avant-garde and, 47; Brazilian, 122–26, 132, 142, 144, 264n36, 269n42, 270n60, 270n62, 271n75; caravana modernista and, 269n46; Concretist, 276n199; critiques of modernization and, 38; the dynamo and, 22; Eiffel Tower and, 72; European past and, 168; exhibitionary complex and, 7; globalism and, xiii; heterotemporal history of, 43; human exhibits at world’s fairs and, 62; human relation to art, 217; internationalism and, 37; international modernism and, 118, 129; international style and, 142, 143; Martin Heidegger’s subject and, 221; new media and, 18; painting as irrelevant to, 25; pavilions and, 47; power and subordination and, 39; sublimatory, 121, 123, 125; transvaluation of blindness in, 8; universal cosmopolitanism and, 104; Venice 1952 biennial and, 106; white-cube gallery space and, 237 “Modulor Man” (le Corbusier), 144 Moilliet, Louis, 174 Molyneux, William, 10–11 Mondrian, Piet, 161, 170, 172, 185, 235, 274n151, 279n62 Monet, Claude, 49, 56, 211, 216, 216–17, 288n98 Montreal 1967 Expo, 76, 258n50, 263n213 Monument to the Third International, x Mori, Mariko, 209; biennial culture and, 217; blindman trope and, 34; extreme phenomenology and, 212; multiplied agency and, 211; totalized mediation and, 220; Wave UFO by, 2, 4, 208–10, 211, 219, 221, 243 Morning in Antibes (Monet), 216 Morris, George L. K., 131 Morris, Robert, 177, 186 Morris, William, 18 Moscow 1959 Expo, 76, 263n213 Mosquera, Gerardo, 157, 264n21, 278n40 Motherwell, Robert, 131 Mouffe, Chantal, 205 Movement: Seas after Hurricane (Marin), 234, 235 Mucha, Alphonse, 261n163 Mukhina, Vera, plate 21 Mulher sentada com espelho (Dias), 117, 117, 118, 268n27 Muller, Gregoire, 174, 176 Müller, Hans-Joachim, 178, 180, 185, 282n154 Müller, Matthias, 264n36

Muller, William James, 264n32 Munch, Edward, 213 Munich 1854 world’s fair, 254n58 Munich 1888 fair, 264n34 Munich Beer Garden (Liebermann), 90, 90 Muntadas, Antoni, 247, 248 Murakami, Saburo, 280n99 Muro Cerrando un Espacio (Wall Enclosing a Space, Sierra), 246–47, 247 Muse, The (Al-Ani), 256n108 Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 126, 132–34, 133, 137, 139–40, 140, 273n130 Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo), 117−18, 126−32, 134, 130−31, 268n19, 268n25, 273n120, 275n166 Museum of 100 Days (Bode), 166 Museum of Modern Art (New York): Carleton Sprague Smith and, 172n108; Cubism and Abstract Art catalogue of, 118; Francesco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo and, 269n34; Franklin Roosevelt and, 133; Hélio Oiticica and, 155; Information exhibit and, 155–56, 161–62, 164, 167, 169, 191, 279nn64−65; international style and, 47; Latin American art and, 118, 127, 128; liberalism and, 141; Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo) and, 132; Nelson Rockefeller and, 125, 127, 129, 131; New American Painting (exhibit, 1958) and, 180, 281n113; São Paulo 1951 biennial and, 125, 126, 139; traveling shows and, 283n180 Mussolini, Benito, 275n173

New York City 1939 world’s fair, 25, 53, 53, 76, 138, 254n81, 263n212, 276n189 New York City 1964 Expo, 76, 263n213 New York City 2008 Whitney Biennial, 2 Nicosia 2006 Manifesta, 169, 280n93 Niemeyer, Oscar: antropofagia and, 276n189; architectural anthropomorphism and, 276n189; background of, 269n42; Catholic Church and, 141, 274n160; Concretism and, 120, 270n56; le Corbusier and, 176n187; global language of art, 145; literature on, 275n184; Max Bill and, 145, 274n160; Ministry of Education and, 272n105, 274n160; modernism and, 144, 275−76n186; New York City 1939 fair and, 138, 276n189; “Poem of the Curve” by, 276n190; São Paulo 1953–1954 biennial and, 140, 140, 142−45, 142, 144, 275n182 Niemojewski, Rafal, 264n21 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38, 165, 286n42 Nieuwerkerke (Comte), 258n72 Nightingale, Andrea Wilson, 6, 253n30 Nildo of Mangueira, 147, 148 No. 12 (Pollock), 236 Noë, Alva, 256n104 Notebook volume 38: Already been a lake of fire (Ra’ad/Atlas Group), 231 Nove Tendencije, 170 Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp), 25, 26 Nympheas (Monet), 217

Nakahara, Yusuke, 280n97 Nancy 1909 Exposition Internationale, 84, 263n11 Napoleon Bonaparte, 44, 55, 93 Napoleon III, 47, 100, 258n72 Nash, Joseph, 57 nationalism: agency of objects at world fairs and, 60; artistic rejection of, xi; aspiring to globality and, 8, 37; Brazilian, 124; civilization and, 259n97; critical globalism and, 107, 236; versus internationalism, x, 134; meaning of nation and, 261n157; metropolitan cosmopolitanism and, 169; politics of left and right and, 275n174; schools and, 251n7; state-identified schools of art and, 17–18; statelessness and, 265n49; theatrical politics of, 246; theories of nation and, 60; transnationalism and, 171; world’s fairs and, x, 16, 94–95; Zionism and, 265n49 Nazis: Brazilian politics and, 126; false populism and, 211; Fraktur and, 179n68; Kassel’s Nazi past and, 166; Martin Heidegger and, 38, 257n19; Paris 1937 world’s fair and, 76, 196–97, plate 21; Walter Benjamin and, 257n18 Nelson, Adele, 126, 274nn151−52 Neoclassicism: architecture and, 73; critical globalism and, 32; Hiram Powers and, 32, 96; as international style, 65, 70, 77; reproductions of antiquities and, 65–66, 68, 70 neoliberalism, 228, 229 Nesbit, Molly, 111, 111, 217, 288n100 Neufchâteau, François de, 44, 258n58 New American Painting (exhibit, 1958), 180, 281n113 Newman, Barnett, 226 New York City 1853 world’s fair, 19, 254n58, 254n66

Obama, Barack, 123, 124, 270–71n72 Obama, Michelle, 123, 124 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, 111, 111, 174, 181, 182 October (Eisenstein), 277n16 O dentro é a fora (Clark), 145, 146 Office for Inter-American Activities (OIAA), 127 Oiticica, César, 120 Oiticica, Hélio: aesthetics of experience and, 145, 232; antropofagia and, 160, 226, 236, 276n200, 281n109; Babylonests by, 236, 279n64; background and career of, 154; Bólides and, 161, 170; Brazilian avant-garde and, 276n195; Brazilian polarities and, 276n14; Concretism and, 120, 146; Diálogo de Mãos (Clark and Oiticica) and, 151–53, 152, 154–55, 277n17; differend and, 163; Earth by, 161; The Eden Plan by, 150, 243; exhibitionary complex and, 236; exile of, 156; Homage to Mondrian by, 161, 161; Information exhibit and, 161–62, 169, 279n64; installation art and, 236–37; journey from periphery to center and, 43; Metaschema drawings and, 146; Parangolés and, 146−48, 148, 163, 168, 170, 199, 222, 233, 276n197; as a passista, 276n196; patronym of, 155, 277n21; Penetrables by, 146, 147, 149; Piet Mondrian and, 161, 170; politics of the partial view and, 148–49; P2 Parangolé Flag 1 by, plate 29; purposeful laziness and, 167; rejection of Brazil by, 156; rejection of nationalism and, xi; syncretism and, 115; tactics of, 193; technology and, 169; trans-objects and, 154–55, 163; Tropicália and, 146, 148, 149, 161, 167, 227, 236−37; turn toward process and, 177 Ojeikere, J. D. ‘Okhai, 263n211 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 260n122 Bibliography

323

Oliva, Achille Bonito, 190 Olympics, 77, 94, 95. See also Coubertin, Pierre de O’Neale, Floyd, 270n62 One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) (Téllez), 244–45 O’Neill, Rosemary, 252n18 On Translation (Muntadas), 248 Oreste artists’ network, 106, 191, 192, 193, 200, 204, 267n93, 284n222, 284n224. See also Pietroiusti, Cesare Organization of African Unity, 278n40 Ortiz, Fernando, 154, 270n70 Osaka 1970 Expo, 76, 258n50, 263n213 Other Primary Objects (exhibit), 283n161 Otto, Frei, 166, 263n213 P2 Parangolé Flag 1 (Oiticica), plate 29 Paalen, Wolfgang, 131 Packer, Amilcar, 115 Page, Walter, 54 Paik, Nam June, 243, 252n19 Palacio, Alberto, 53 Palais de Tokyo, 72, 74, 75, 75, 79, 263n211 Palatnik, Abraham, 134, 139, 274n150, plate 28 Palermo, Blinky, 181, 183, plate 33 Parangolés (Oiticica), 146–48, 148, 168, 168, 170, 199, 222, 233, 276n197 Paris 1849 fair, 44, 45, 258n61 Paris 1855 exposition: admission fees and, 217; art at, 57, 58; financial losses of, 263–64n14; Gustave Courbet’s pavilion at, 43–45, 47, 77, 101, 258n72, 260n148, 266n58, 266n62; IngresDelacroix competition and, 48; Jean-François Millet and, 101; Jozef Israëls and, 97–99, 100, 265n52; London 1851 Great Exhibition and, 16, 254n58; modernism and, 288n96; Palais des Beaux Arts at, 98–99, 99; selection of contributors to, 97 Paris 1867 exposition: capitalist culture and, 233; economimesis and, 217; guidebook to, 35; layout of, plate 7; modernism and, 288n96; pavilions at, 45, 46, 49, 77, 260n148; Trocadéro hill and, 19, 51; Vue de l’Exposition Universelle, 1867 (Manet) and, 201, 211, 226; writings about, 252n13 Paris 1878 exposition, 55, 59, 60, 95, 260n153 Paris 1882 salon, 101 Paris 1889 exposition: Eiffel Tower and, 19, plate 8; Galerie des Machines and, 23; human exhibits at, 60, 261n163; rue des Nations at, 95, 243; US contribution to, 50; Villard-Cotard globe at, 51 Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle: André Gide et ses amis . . . (Blanche) and, plate 12; Auguste Rodin and, 45, 258n70; Café Maroc at, 72, 73; city as spectacle and, plate 9; colonial displays at, 58, 60, 75; dynamos at, 254n80, plate 10; Eiffel Tower and, 51, 53, 53; Henry Adams’s visit to, 22, 24, 58, plate 10; human exhibits at, 55–56, 60, 62, 260n155; internationalism and, 49; Jacques-Émile Blanche’s work at, 44; Jozef Israëls and, 96, 97, 98, 104; Louis Bonnier’s Celestial Globe at, 51, 53; number of visitors to, 53, 259n111, 263n11; opposition to, 83, 84, 263n10; Pablo Picasso and, 59, 82; Rue des nations at, 85, 95, 243; Russian pavilion at, 38–39; sculpture court at, plate 11; US contribution to, 50 324

Bibliography

Paris 1911 aviation fair, 25 Paris 1935 inventor’s fair, 25 Paris 1937 world’s fair, plate 21; architecture and, 74; concentric organization of, 48; demise of world’s fairs and, 76, 77; heuristic of internationalism and, x–xi; historical context of, plate 21; human exhibits at, 56, 75; Martin Heidegger’s world picture and, 4, 37, 38, 196; official title of, 263n212; Pablo Picasso and, 76, 197; Palais de Tokyo and, 75; pavilions at, 32, 44, 76, plate 20; philosophy congress at, 56, 196, 285n9; politics of, 196–97; World War II and, 94 Paris 2012 triennial, 73, 75, 79 Paris biennials: Biennale . . . des Jeunes Artistes (1959) and, 165, 167, 168, 279n75; Magiciens de la Terre (Martin) at, 36 Parodi, D., 285n9 Passing the Cemetery (Israëls), 101 Pau Brasil (Tarsil), plate 25 Pau-Brasil manifesto and exhibition, 123, 124, 271nn73−74 Paxton, Joseph, 19, 45 Payró, Julio, 118–19 Peasant Family at the Table (Israëls), 266n75 Peasant Grafting a Tree (Millet), plate 17 Pedrosa, Mário: aesthetic rhetoric and, 142, 275n175; Alexander Calder and, 274n151; Anita Malfatti’s exhibition and, 122, 270n62; Brazilian intelligentsia and, 120, 276n195; career of, 273n134; Cícero Dias and, 268n28; fascism and, 175n173; free art and, 129, 133−34; Japan and, 170; Japanese Concretists and, 280n97; Lygia Clark and, 277n20; politics of, 273n135; São Paulo 1949 exhibition and, 138–39; São Paulo biennials and, 141 Penetrables (Oiticica), 146, 147, 149 Peng Yu, 105 Penteado, Armando, 128–29 Penteado, Yolanda, 120, 121, 127, 139, 271n79, 272nn94−96, 273n114 Pereira, I. Rice, 131 Performa biennial, 30 performance art: abolitionist protests and, 68, 77; art as event and, 166; auditory experience and, 108; Bachelors exhibit and, 189–90; biennial culture and, 167–68; at biennials of the 2000s, 86, 105–6; documenta 5 and, 167, 186; embodied practices and, 253n29; human exhibits and, 104–5; installation art and, 236–37; masochistic branch of, 62; as new media, 249; performative as term and, 287n89; performative public and, 214; refusal to record, 212, 213; Regina José Galindo and, 62 Performer/Audience/Mirror (Graham), 214 Persekian, Jack, 264n38 Perthes, Boucher de, 44 Petti, Alessandro, 107, 108, 109, 110, 267n87 phenomenology, 164, 212, 213, 232, 236–39 Philadelphia 1876 world’s fair, 254n66 Philip Morris (corporation), 174–76, 177–78, 179–81, 182, 185, 243, 281n136, 283n174 Philippou, Styliane, 275n184, 276n188 photography: artistic status of, 18–19; Cícero Dias and, 117, 118; Kodak and, 117, 118; as new media of modernity, 18, 39, 49;

optical unconscious and, 255n92; psychoanalytic exchange and, 27; remoteness of the world and, 151; sales of, 71–72; W. H. F. Talbot and, 71−72 Picasso, Conchita, 260n150 Picasso, Pablo: Africanisms in works of, 122; “Brazilian Picassos” and, 138, 144; collectors of works of, 118; colonial artifacts and, 59; Cubism and, 122; cultural appropriation and, 59; Demoiselles d’Avignon by, 59–60, 122; Guernica by, 44, 47, 75–77, 104, 121, 139, 198, 266n75, plate 22; imitators of, 139; influences on, 266n75; journey from periphery to center and, 42–43; Last Moments by, 58–59, 59, 82, 260n150; as Pablo Picasso y Ruiz, 58; “Pakistani Picasso” and, 265n44; Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle and, 58, 60; Paris 1937 world’s fair and, 76, 197; pavilions of, 32, 47; provocative work of, 270n65; São Paulo biennials and, 129, 275n183; Science and Charity by, 59, 82, plate 14; La Vie by, 58, 59, 59, 260n152 Picot, François-Édouard, 97, 265n46 Pictorial Worlds Today (exhibit, 1972), 186, 188 Piel (Skin) (Galindo), 62, 63 Piene, Otto, 180n103 Pieneman, Jan Willem, 265n46 Pietroiusti, Cesare, 285n224 Pignatari, Décio, 135, 139 pilgrimage and movement, 1, 7, 10–12, 42–43, 252n1 Pinney, Christopher, 252n12 Pinocchio Effect, The (Höller), 212, 287n77 Pintura (Painting) (Dias), 117, 118, 121 platform formalism, 177 Plato, 4–6, 7, 9–11, 94, 210, 263n6 Play, Frédéric le, 48, 201 Plein, Le (Arman), 247 Pollock, Jackson, 119, 131, 170, 185, 234–36, 236, 289n32 Pop, 170, 180 Portinari, Cândido, 119, 127, 128, 129, 138, 141–43, 272nn105−6, 274nn160−61, 275−76n186, 276n189 Portoghesi, Paolo, 190, 264n33 post-Cubism, 269n34 postmodernism, 164, 165, 190, 244, 255n96 poststructuralism, 6, 163, 211, 220 Potato Eaters (van Gogh), 266n75 Power Chords (Afif), 286n51 Powers, Hiram: abolitionism and, 68; America by, 68–69, 262n186, 262n193; art marbles and, 67; Birmingham 1849 fair and, 45; The Greek Slave by, x−xi, 32, 39, 45, 46, 66–70, 72, 77, 87, 98, 104, 139, 226, 262nn181−82, 262n186−87, 262n192, 262n197, plate 5; journey from periphery to center and, 42–43; market for reproductions and, 217; Neoclassicism and, 32, 96 Prada, 179 Pre-Raphaelitism, 18, 71 Preston, Suzanne, 260n153 Prete, Danilo Di. See Di Prete, Danilo Primary Structures (exhibit, 1966), 164 Proust, Marcel, 256n105 publicity and advertising, ix, 50–51, 56, 83 Pugin, Augustus, 45

Purism, 124 Putnam, F. W., 61 Pythian, J. Ernest, 266n69 ¿Quien Puede Borrar Las Huellas? (Galindo), 63 Quin, Carmelo Arden, 269n43 Ra’ad, Walid, 229–30, 231, 232. See also Atlas Group race and racism: Africanisms in art and, 122, 123; Barack Obama and, 123−24; Brazilian art world and, 133; Brazilian history and society and, 120, 123, 268n12; Cícero Dias’s artistic principles and, 117–19; cosmopolitanism and, 98; human exhibits at world’s fairs and, 55–56, 62; Pablo Picasso’s works and, 117 Railroad Turnbridge (Serra), 277n16 Rancière, Jacques, 218, 222–23, 256n103 Rauschenberg, Robert, 171, 174, 239, 290n47 Raza, Asad, 290n59 Read, Herbert, 274n161 Reagan, Ronald, 157 Realism: versus abstraction, 118; accessibility of, 100; Brazilian art and, 127–28; capitalist, 180; critical globalism and, 32; displacement of, 170; domestication of, 101; Giacomo Grosso and, 59; Gustave Courbet and, 43–44, 45, 77, 100, 100−101, 266n58; Impressionism and, 49; Jozef Israëls and, 100–101, 102–3, 127–28; Kodak and, 117, 118; Pablo Picasso and, 59, 59, plate 14; Venice biennials and, 90, 235. See also Social Realism Reclus, Elisée, 53 Rehberger, Tobias, 29, 70 Reidy, Alfonso, 147 Rembrandt, 102 Rembrandt: In name van de Nederlandsche Schilderkunst . . . (Braakensiek), 97 Renan, Joseph Ernest, 60 representation, 196, 197, 198 res-publica, 14 Richardson, John, 260n152 Richter, Hans, 28 Rio de Janeiro 1941 industrial fair, 271n76 Ríos Montt, Efraín, 62, 261n166 Rist, Pipilotti, 241–43, 242 Ritmo (Torso) (Malfatti), plate 24 Robb, James, 262n187 Robertson, Bruce, 17 Roché, Henri, 255n88, 255n90 Rockefeller, Nelson: 1950 speech of, 133, 140; artistic freedom from governmental influence and, 142; Brazilian art world and, 116, 125, 126, 127, 272nn94−96, 272n108; Brazilian industry and, 126–27; courtship of sponsors and, 146; Habitat journal and, 146; João Batista Vilanova Artigas and, 275n164; leftists and, 139; Museu de Arte de São Paulo and, 133, 133, 137, 139–40, 140, 273n130; Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo) and, 128–30, 131, 133; Museum of Modern Art (New York) and, 125, 127, 131; Office for Inter-American Activities (OIAA) and, 127; São Paulo biennials and, 140, 143 Rodchenko, Alexander, 141 Bibliography

325

Rodin, Auguste, 44–45, 60–61, 61, 103, 213–15, 258n70, 265n44, 270n60 Rogers, Ernesto, 274n156 Romanticism, 203 Rome, ancient, xi Roosevelt, Franklin, 127, 133 Roosevelt, Theodore, 48, 56, 233 Rosenblum, Robert, 58 Rosenkranz, Pamela, 250, 291n76 Rosenquist, James, 175 Rosenzweig, Franz, 282n141 Rosler, Martha, ix, 239 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 103 Rotary Demisphere, Precision Optics (Duchamp), 255n89 Rothfuss, Rhod, 269n43 Rothko, Mark, 131, 226 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 60 Rousseff, Dilma, 123, 124, 270–71n72 Royer, Louis, 265n46 Ruder & Finn, 174–76, 180–81, 281n133, 283n174 Ruisdael, Jacob van, 102 Ruskin, John, 18, 49, 71, 96, 263n204 Saar, Betye, 236 Sabine Women (David), 46, 76 Sacilotto, Luiz, 142, 275n177 Sadequain, Syed, 265n44 Saenredam, Jan, 5, 7 Sage, Kay, 131 Saia, Luiz, 129 Saint-Phalle, Niki de, 174 Salcedo, Doris, 237, 240 Salemme, Attilio, 131 Sales, Almeida, 129 Salon des Refusés, 47 Salzstein, Sônia, 154 Sandberg, William, 174 São Paulo 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna, 121−22, 125, 270n51, 271n76, 279n59 São Paulo 1949 exhibition, 118, 119, 138–39, 235 São Paulo 1951 biennial, 132; abstraction and, 120–21, 125; awards and, 134–35, 136, 138, 139; Brazilian history and society and, 114–15, 120–22, 124–25, 126, 139; conceptual leaps of, 113–14; Concretism and, 114, 115, 120, 122, 125–26, 137–38; crowds at entrance of, 141; funding of, 116, 134; goals of, 116, 120, 125–26, 134; international visual language and, 135, 137; leftist politics and, 138–39; Max Bill and, 32; multiplication of world pictures and, 93; Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo) and, 129; Museum of Modern Art (New York) and, 139; origins of exhibitors at, 126; pavilions and, 109, 114, 126, 134, 235; posters for, 114, plate 27; proliferation of biennials and, 86; recruitment of participants and, 271n79, 271n86; refusal of difference and, 112; replicability of biennials and, 42, 114, 115; Tripartite Unity (Bill) at, 135, 136, 137, 137, 142; Venice biennials and, 227; the West versus the South 326

Bibliography

and, xi; works displayed at, 275n170, plate 28; works excluded from, 119 São Paulo 1952 Ruptura show, 142 São Paulo 1953–1954 biennial, 76, 129, 138–40, 140, 142−43, 142, 144, 146, 275nn182−83 São Paulo 1971 biennial, 156, 240 São Paulo 1996 biennial, 1–2, 4, 33, 34, 252n6 São Paulo 1998 biennial, 159 São Paulo biennials: abstraction and, 275n175; antropofagia and, 276n191; architecture and, 264n33; collecting practices and, 279n78; Concretism and, 162; difference and, 115, 125, 138, 142, 149; gustatory metaphor and, 226–27; influence of, 166; institutional support for, 279n78; Latin American 1971 Contrabienal and, 156, 157; origins of, 268n16, 268n19; Parangolés (Oiticica) and, 168, 233; period of crisis in, 147; proliferation of biennials and, 165, 226; resistance to inclusion in, 290n48; techno-optimism and, 153; unity and, 167. See also Kepes, Gyorgy; Matarazzo, Francesco “Ciccillo”; São Paulo Fundação de Arte Moderna; Smithson, Robert; specific São Paulo biennials São Paulo Fundação de Arte Moderna, 126 Sargent, John Singer, 50, 96 Sassen, Saskia, 280n89 Saunderson, Nicholas, 12, 12, 13–14 Sauvy, Alfred, 271n78 Scarpa, Carlo, 106, 106, 191, 193 Schabus, Hans, 77, 78, 79 Schapiro, Meyer, 288n100 Scheffer, Ary, 265n46 Schlosser, Johann Georg, 265n49 Scholem, Gershom, 252n13 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 287n60 Schulze, Gerhard, 210 Schurz, Barbara, 228 Schütte, Thomas, 283n170 Schwarz, Arturo, 189 Schwarz, Roberto, 115, 120, 122, 271n72 Science and Charity (Picasso), 59, 82, plate 14 Science Fiction (exhibit, 1967), 176 Scott, Joan Wallach, 195, 197, 201, 207, 219 Seated Woman with Mirror (Dias), 117, 117, 118 Secessionists, 90, 101 Sehgal, Tino: Berlin biennials and, 212–13, 213, 214, 215; biennial culture and, 217; environmentally friendly practices of, 244; escape from mediation and, 220; Frank Lloyd Wright and, 287n86; Gold Lion award and, 239; interpreters of, 221, 222, 290n56, 290n59; journey from periphery to center and, 43; Kiss by, 51, 212–14, 213, 222, 223, 287n83; performance art and, 29; refusal to record works and, 212, 213, 288n115; sales of works of, 243–44; sense-making and, 219; This Is So Contemporary by, 288n128, 290n56; This Progress by, 213; This Situation by, 290n56; This Variation by, 2, 4, 29; Venice biennials and, 222, 243, 244, 256n104 Sekula, Sonia, 131 Self-Portrait (Israëls), plate 18

Selvatico, Riccardo, 83, 89–90 Sens, Jérôme, 73, 203, 204, 205 September 11, 2001, attacks, 110, 229 Serpa, Ivan, 120, 134 Serra, Richard, 154, 155, 181, 186, 277n16, 280n97 Sert, José Luis (Sert, Josep Lluis), 47, 47, 76, plate 20 Sezanne, Augusto, 91, 92, plate 19 Shanghai 2010 Expo, 76 Sharjah Biennial, 264n38 Sherman, Cindy, 214 Shipwreck, The (Israëls), 101, 102, 102, 104 Shiraga, Kazuo, 280n99 Shoah, 164–65, 264n22 Shonibare, Yinka, 228–29 Sicre, José Gómez, 127, 271n86 Siegelaub, Seth, 181 Sierra, Santiago, 33, 34, 246–47, 247, 291n64 Silva, Quirino da, 128 Simpson, William, plate 3 Situationists, 181n106, 182n150, 287n54 slavery: American, 32, 67, 67–68, 87; Brazilian, 120; “Greek,” 67. See also abolitionism Smith, Adam, 221 Smith, Carleton Sprague, 128–29, 130, 272n108, 272n110, 275n164 Smith, Dave “Cannonball,” 291n63 Smith, Jack, 277n16 Smith, Leon Polk, 131 Smith, Roberta, 291n70 Smithson, Robert: boycott of São Paulo biennials and, 156, 240; on confinement and freedom, 225; documenta and, 186, 240; Harald Szeemann and, 227, 290n48; photography and film and, 151; “Site/Nonsite” practices of, 72, 197; transnationalism and, 170; withdrawal from “fraudulent categories” and, 249 Sobel, Janet, 131 social media and the internet, 228, 232, 233 Social Realism, 114–15, 118, 129, 139, 141, 276n189 Society of Independent Artists, 25 Socrates, 6, 31 Sonnier, Keith, 280n97, 283n165 spectatorship and spectacle: blind epistemology and, 226; blindman trope and, 29; distraction and, xii; Eiffel Tower and, plate 8; emancipation of the spectator and, 223; human exhibits and, 104; importance of exhibiting and, 216; infrastructure of world’s fairs and, 54; leveraging of spectacle and, 230; London 1851 Great Exhibition and, 19; Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle and, plate 9; politics of, xii. See also Debord, Guy Speer, Albert, 108, 243, plate 21, plate 23 Stalin, Joseph, and Stalinism, 111, 141 Stankiewicz, Richard, 174 Starling, Simon, 215, 215–16, 217, 218 Stateless Nation (Hilal and Petti), 72, 107, 108, 110 Statue of Liberty, 76 St. Bartholemew’s fair, 43, 51, 258n45 Steefel, Lawrence, 255n84 Stengers, Isabelle, 280n92

Stephen of Tournai, 1, 252n1 Stevens, Wallace, 234 Stieglitz, Alfred, 25, 255n85 St. Louis 1904 exposition: commentary on, 48, 54, 55, 56; German Americans and, 55, 260n125; goals of, 55, 234; human exhibits at, 56, 60, 64, 261n171, plate 30; Impressionism at, 104; many publics of, 56; national displays at, 55, 260n127; souvenirs of, 72; Theodore Roosevelt and, 233; US immigration policy and, 260n128; The World’s Work and, 48, 54−56, 233, 257n51 Stonebreakers (Courbet), 101, 266n58 Storr, Robert, 252n18, 256n107 Strange Space (Ataman), 30–31, 31 Subotnick, Ali, 287n79 Sullivan, Louis, 35, 61, 261n159 Sun Yuan, 105 Supremo Convegno, Il (Grosso), 59, 82–83, 83 Surrealism: Africanisms in, 122; Alexander Calder and, 137; André Breton and, 237; antropofagia and, 267n5; artist networks and, 170; Brazilian poetry and art and, 123–24; Cícero Dias and, 116, 118, 121; cultural appropriation and, 222; displacement of, 170; Guernica (Picasso) and, 76; Harald Szeemann and, 172; human exhibits and, 104; Lyon 2005 biennial and, 203; Maria Martins and, 273−74n139; negotiation of differends and, 211 Swinton, Tilda, 110 Symbolism, 18, 59–60, 90, 122 Synchro System (exhibit), 212 Szeemann, Etienne, 172 Szeemann, Harald: 11 Pop Artists (exhibit, 1966) and, 175; 12 Environments (exhibit, 1968) and, 174, 176; aesthetics of experience and, 178–79; Agentur für geistige Gastarbeit “Agency” and, 183–85, 191; “Apertos” and, 190–91, 284n215; apoliticism of, 178–80, 282n145; art as closed system and, 232; art as event and, 165–66; art business and, 283n160; Bachelors (exhibit, 1975) and, 189–90, 203, 281n110; background and career of, 165, 171–76, 182–83, 184; corporate sponsorship and, 154; critics of, 227, 290n48; curation strategy of, 164, 165, 236; as curatorial author, 180, 181, 226; curatorial interface and, 228; Dadaism and, 171, 173, 189; death of, 242; dissertation of, 281n122; documenta and, 166, 171–72, 176, 185–86, 187, 188, 193, 197, 227, 239, 241, 282−83n157, 290n46; eccentric exhibitions and, 281n111; Eva Hesse and, 282n153; fictive bureaucracy and, 229; financial practices of, 185, 280n95, 283n180; on freedom of art, 151; Grossvater (exhibit, 1974) and, 172–73, 173, 237; immigration status of, 284n190; influences on, 166, 170, 172–73, 284n194; installation art and, 237; Kopp affair and, 282n149; Live in Your Head by, 179–80; luggage tags assembly by, 172, 172; Lyon biennials and, 203, 205; Malende Dichter–Dichtende Maler (exhibit, 1957) and, 173; map of Venice by, 165; Max Bill and, 281n129; name of, 280n88; as “neutral” Swiss contractor, 168–69; nomadic curators and, 229; note from 1968−1969 New York trip of, plate 31; personal life of, 189, 283n171; Pictorial Worlds Today (Bildwelten heute; exhibit, 1972) and, 186, 188; rejection of conventional art forms and, 177; rejection of nationalism and, xi; reputation of, 283n174; rubber stamps and, 184, 184–85; salary of, 281n115; Bibliography

327

Szeemann, Harald (continued) Science Fiction (exhibit, 1967) and, 176; sexual politics and, 181; shift from theater to exhibitions and, 242n146; shift in market function of biennials and, 156; threats against, 178; Tokyo 1970 biennial and, 280n97; transnationalism and, 153, 159, 168, 171, 174, 193, 199–200, 226, 243; turnkey shows and, 189, 190; Venice biennials and, 189–91, 193; Weiss auf Weiss (exhibit, 1966) and, 176; When Attitudes Become Form (exhibit, 1969) and, 160, 170−71, 174–79, 176, 180–85, 190, 282−83n157, 283n180, plate 31; Wolf Vostell and, 185, 188, 284n194; work style of, 281n117; “Xerox book” (Siegelaub) and, 181 Taipei 1998 biennial, 40 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 18, 18, 71–72, 211 Tanaka, Keiko, 280n99 Tapié, Michel, 281n112 Tarsila do Amaral: Abaporu by, 123, 123–24, 124, 143–44, 270– 71nn71−72, plate 25; change in painting themes of, 270n59; Cícero Dias and, 268n22; EFCB by, 135; exoticism and, 269n46; granddaughter Tarsilinha and, 271n73; modernism and, 144; museum leadership and, 129; Oswald de Andrade (“Tarsiwald”) and, 124, 268n22, 269n46, 271n73; Pau Brasil by, plate 25; reputation of, 271n73; Rupture Group and, 142; on shopping in Brazil, 275n165 Tashjian, Dickran, 254–55nn83–84 Tatlin, Vladimir, x Taylor, Frederick, 25 technology: aesthetics of experience and, 234; dynamos and, 226, 254n80; experience and education and, 64; human exhibits at world’s fairs and, 62; Martin Heidegger and, 197; São Paulo biennials and, 153; of the self, 210–11, 259n97; technophilia of world’s fairs and, 49; world picture and, 233 Telles, Lygia Fagundes, 113 Téllez, Javier: background of, 30; blindman trope and, 34; blind voice-overs and, 221; The Elephant and the Blind Men by, plate 36; journey from periphery to center and, 43; Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See by, 2, 2, 4, 30, 51, 198, 211; One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) by, 244–45, 291n63 Tenniel, John, 67, 68, 87 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 48 Thatcher, Margaret, 157 Théâtre de la Cruauté (Artaud), 222 theory: aesthetics of experience and, 207, 286n38; blindman trope and, 6–8, 207, 218; emblem theory, 287n71; history of, 253n22, 253n28, 253n30; pilgrimage and movement and, 7, 11, 12; speech act theory and, 287n89; theôria (theôros, theôroi) and, 6−8, 12, 21, 38, 218, 253n22, 253n28; thing theory and, x, 38 Thiene, Federica, 285n222 This Is So Contemporary (Sehgal), 288n128, 290n56 This Progress (Sehgal), 213 This Situation (Sehgal), 290n56 This Variation (Sehgal), 2, 4, 29 Till, Christopher, 278n49 328

Bibliography

Tinguely, Jean, 174, 182, 189 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 111, 111 Tobey, Mark, 131 Tokyo biennials, 153, 170, 204, 280n97 Tokyo Trickle (Haacke), 167, 167 Torres-García, Joaquin, 119 Torso (Malfatti), 122, plate 24 Toumazis, Yiannis, 280n93 tourism: aesthetics of experience and, 96; cultural interpreters and, 64; global capital and, 231–32; Grand Tour and, 65, 72, 77, 91–92, 94−96, 107, 226, 261n175; military-touristic complex and, 64–65; origins of tourist industry and, 65, 72, 77; Thomas Cook and, 65, 77, 261n176; in Venice, 264n32; world pictures and, 107 toward events (exhibit, 1959), 200 transnationalism and transculturalism: versus acculturation, 270n70; antropofagia and, 153, 160, 170, 199; art as event and, 198–99; art fairs and, 174; artist networks and, 170; artists’ biting critiques and, 245–46; biennials and, 264n20; blind epistemology and, 152; blindness trope and, 162; Book from the Sky (Xu Bing) and, 42; Brazilian art and, 155; Capitalist Realism and, 180; changing curation strategies and, 164; complicated agendas of, 159; Conceptual Art and, 160, 169, 170–71; conceptual gambits of, 170; corporation as person and, 183–84; cosmopolitanism and, 157, 169; critical globalism and, 149; Cultural Melting Bath (Cai Guo-Qiang) and, 41, 42; curation and, 154, 171; Diálogo de Mãos (Clark and Oitica) and, 153; dissolution of polarities and, 156–57; emergence of, xii, emigrant remittances and, 278n45; Environments and, 153; Fluxus and, 153, 165; global capital and, 231–32; Happenings and, 153, 165; Harald Szeemann and, 153, 193, 199–200, 226, 243; history of, 159; indigenismo and, 160; interculturalism and, 270n67; internationalism and, 152−54, 156, 161–62, 169; Joan Jonas’s work and, 249–50; Latin American artists and, 180; Manifestas and, 169; meaning of trans and, 154, 160; versus melting pot theory of acculturation, 154, 159; mobility of the trans and, 180; nation/internation binary and, 171; postmodernism and, 190; subnationalism and supranationalism and, 159; tactics of the trans and, 168, 193; Tokyo 1970 biennial and, 170; transnational as word and, 278nn42−43, 278n46; Transnational Corporations journal and, 278n44; trans-objects and, 154–55, 159, 163; Venice biennials and, 190, 191; work of art and, 176, 199; world pictures and, 156, 159, 193; Zero groups and, 153 trauma, 31–32 Trini, Tommaso, 176 Tripartite Unity (Bill), 135, 136, 137, 137–38, 142, 145, 151–53 Triple Gong (Calder), 274n151 Trockel, Rosemarie, 212 Tropicália (Oiticica), 146, 148, 149, 161, 167, 227, 236–37 Trotsky, Leon, 141 Turk in verpozing, Een (Turk in Repose, Israëls), 265n46 Two Undiscovered Amerindians (Fusco and Gómez-Peña), 221, plate 30. See also Year of the White Bear, The (Fusco and GómezPeña)

Uchôa, Hélio, 143 UNESCO, x Unhappy Readymade (Duchamp), 255n85 Unidades series (Clark), 163–64 Unismus, 170 United Arab Emirates, 94, 259n103, 264n38 universalism: abstraction and, 148; agency of objects at world’s fairs and, 60; blind epistemology and, 32; colonialism and, 43; Concretism and, 115, 149, 162; cosmopolitanism and, 98, 104; Décennale and, 49–50; demolition of, 229; Diálogo de Mãos (Clark and Oiticica) and, 153; versus difference, 49; Dreyfus affair and, 266n68; European white male and, 143; international communication and, 167; internationalism and, 112, 134; mathematical, 153; Max Bill and, 193; origins of, 94; São Paulo 1951 biennial and, 126; state-sponsored, 77; timeless motifs and, 216; transcending the state, 100; universality of experience and, 225; universal speech with local accent and, 161; Zionism and, 265n49 Untitled (Cordeiro), plate 26 Untitled (Salcedo), 237, 240 urbanism, 280n89 Urbonas studio, 33, 70, 71, 72, 79 Uruguayan Torture Series (Camnitzer), 157, 158, 159 utopianism, 225 Utopia Station, 111, 111, 267n93. See also Nesbit, Molly; Obrist, Hans-Ulrich; Tiravanija, Rirkrit Vanderlinden, Barbara, 181, 182 van Doesburg, Theo, 138, 274n153 van Gogh, Vincent, 38, 266n75 van Westrheene, Tobias, 97, 265n52 Vargas, Getúlio, 116, 125−26, 268n17, 271n79, 271n90, 273n114 Vasconcelos, José, 270n52 Vassal, Jean-Phillippe, 73. See also Lacaton & Vassal Vaz de Camões, Luís, 271n74 Veblen, Thorstein, 290n38 Venice 1887 National Exposition of the Arts, 89 Venice 1895 biennial: cosmopolitanism and, 81–82, 84; founding of, xi; goals of, 89–90; Il Supremo Convegno (Grosso) at, 82–83, 83; Jozef Israëls and, 97, 98, 104; Olympics and, 94; past humiliation of Venice and, 93; patrons council (comitato di patrocinio) for, 90, 96, 97, 104, 106–7; planning for, 88–91; poster for, 96, plate 13; students dressed as “Liberal Arts” at, 82; as successor to world’s fairs, 43, 83 Venice 1905 biennial, 103 Venice 1920 biennial, plate 19 Venice 1934 biennial, plate 23 Venice 1950 biennial, 234–35, 235, 289n32 Venice 1952 biennial, 106, 106 Venice 1964 biennial, 239 Venice 1968 biennial, 92, 156, 166, 168, 178, 186, 239, 252n9, 264n25, 279n78, 290n49 Venice 1980 biennial, 190 Venice 1993 biennial, 106, 108, plate 23 Venice 1995 biennial, 35, 36, 41, 59, 241, 241

Venice 1999 biennial, 204, 238, 267n93 Venice 2001 biennial, 62, 63, 241 Venice 2003 biennial, 33, 111, 111, 239, 245, 246–47, 247, 267n93 Venice 2005 biennial, 242; The Absent Presence (Chalayan) at, 109, plate 35; curation of, 252n6; Harald Szeemann and, 242; human exhibits at, 105; pavilions at, 77, 78, 109, 109–10, 246−47, 248, 267n88, 267n90, 267n96; poster for, plate 19; poster series for, 92; purpose of biennials and, 88; Regina José Galindo performances and, 62, 63; Tino Sehgal and, 222, 243, 244; Wave UFO (Mori) at, 2, 208–10, 209; Your Black Horizon (Eliasson and Adjaye) and, 232 Venice 2007 biennial, 29, 33, 70, 71, 72 Venice 2009 biennial: Adam Feldmeth on Blinky Palermo at, 183, plate 33; Daniel Birnbaum and, 181; installations at, 215, 215–16, 239; opinionated curation and, 229; pavilions at, 37, 106; Tobias Rehberger’s café at, 70; world-making and, 88 Venice 2011 biennial, 249, 291n70 Venice 2013 biennial, 3, 94, 115, 179, 244, 256n104, 288n115, 289n9, 290n42 Venice 2015 biennial, 73, 249–50, 291n76 Venice biennials: “Apertos” and, 190–91, 227, 284n215; architecture and, 264n33; attendance levels at, 199; Bachelors exhibit and, 189–90; biennial culture and, 94; birth of, 81–82; collecting practices and, 279n78; corporate sponsors of, 86; curation and, 171–72; documenta and, 188; fascism and, 156, 266n78; funding of, 116; global salon and, 256n107; goals of, 88, 125; Harald Szeemann and, 189–91, 193; history of, 93, 96, 247; human exhibits at, 60; internationalism and, 106–7; Lygia Clark’s work and, 152, 154; Manifesta and, 285n232; market function of, 156, 166, 168, 174, 178, 186, 239–40, 252n9, 290n49; museums and, 129, 265n42; national follies and, 72; opposition to, 156; Oreste artists’ network and, 192; organizing rubrics of, 208–9; origins of participants in, 160; pavilions at, 93, 95, 107, 110, 243, 266n83; protests of 1968 and, 166; replicability of, 114, 227; revival of, 166; São Paulo biennials and, 268n19; site for, 92–94, 190; state-sponsored universalism and, 77; transnationalism and, 191; working of art and, 95–96 Venice: The Punta della Dogana (Guardi), 91, 92 Ventilation shaft (Kippenberger), 244, 245, 245 Verhaeren, Emile, 50 Very Large Ice Floor (Eliasson), 144, 276n191 Viard, Paul, 74 Victoria (queen of England), 48, 55 Victoria and Albert Museum, 16 Vide, Le (Klein), 247 Vidokle, Anton, 169 Vie, La (Picasso), 58, 59, 59, 260n152 Vienna 1873 world’s fair, 54, 56 Vignon, Claude, 57, 260n143 Villa Lituania (Urbonas studio), 33, 70, 71, 72, 79 Viola, Bill, 241 Virgin (Duchamp), 25 Virginian Slave (Tenniel), 67, 67, 68, 87 Virgin Transitioning into a Bride (Duchamp), 25 Volpe, Lisa, 68, 262n192 Bibliography

329

von Hantelmann, Dorothea, 214 Vostell, Wolf, 185, 188, 284n194 Vue de l’Exposition Universelle, 1867 (Manet), 201, 211, 221, 226, plate 6 Wacquant, Loïc, 225 Waldvogel, Florian, 169 Walker Art Center, 160, 278n56. See also When Latitudes Become Form (exhibit, 1998−2003) Wallerstein, Immanuel, 282n141 Walther, Franz Erhard, 279n64 Warchavchik, Gregori, 269n42 Warhol, Andy, 172–73, 174, 214 Wave UFO (Mori), 2, 4, 208–10, 209, 211, 219, 221 Weather Project (Eliasson), 232 Wedgwood, Josiah, 65–66, 66, 69, 69–70, 77, 161n177, 262n200 Weiner, Lawrence, 179 Weiss auf Weiss (exhibit), 175, 176 Weissman, George, 176 Weissmann, Franz, 134 Weizman, Eyal, 267n87 Werner, Anton von, 90–91, 91 When Attitudes Become Form (exhibit, 1969), 160, 170–71, 174–79, 176, 180–86, 188, 190, 282−83n157, 283n180, plates 31−32 When Latitudes Become Form (exhibit, 1998−2003), 160, 278n56 Whewell, William, 45 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 50 White, Erdmute Wenzel, 270n53, 281n109 Whitman, Walt, 19, 48, 254n66 Whitney Biennial, 30, 252n6 Widrich, Mechtild, 277n17 Wiemken, Walter Kurt, 174 Wilhelm Noack oHG (Starling), 215, 215–16 William of Orange, 265n54 William of Orange Meeting with Margaretha of Parma (Israëls), 98, plate 15 Williams, Daryle, 275−76n186, 276n189 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 96, 199 Winnower, The (Millet), 266n69 Wladyslaw, Anatol, 142, 275n177 Wood, Beatrice, 255n90 work of art: aesthetics of experience and, 197, 198, 201, 206–7, 218; agency of objects and, 60; art as event and, 202; Brazilian artistic diaspora and, 150; changing global language of art and, 145; conditions of possibility for, 87, 93; cosmopolitanism and, 87, 94; critical globalism and, xii, 42, 249; experience undoing the subject and, 222; festal structure of fairs and biennials and, 86; global reach of, 113; Guernica (Picasso) and, 76–77; installation art and, 236–37; Jacques Rancière and, 256n103; labor and, 217–18; Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs and, 220; market’s role in, 220; meaning of, 197; mechanical reproducibility and, 67–68, 70; openness to, 249; present epoch of, 114; rupture and, 218, 222, 249; salary and, 221; trans and, 176, 199; unstable categories and, 39; Venice biennials and, 95–96; viewer’s responsibility for, 205; visitor/subjectile trajectory and, 229; 330

Bibliography

Wilhelm Noack oHG (Starling) and, 215–16; work as verb and, 32, 198; world-changing art and, 151, 196; world-making and, 88; world pictures and, 37. See also Benjamin, Walter; Heidegger, Martin; Lyotard, Jean-François World Bank, 228 world pictures: the ’60s and, 203; aesthetics of experience and, 197, 202, 226, 250; architecture and, 74; art versus industry and, 45; biennials and, 88, 94, 111; blindman trope and, 79; Brazilian art world and, 123, 144, 149; Cold War and, 215, 236; colonialism and imperialism, 60; contestation and transformation and, 167; contested pictures within, 218; critical globalism and, 87, 218, 233–34; desire and, 38, 42, 50, 59, 66−67, 85, 112; goals of, 77; Grand Tour and, 107; history and, 77, 233; internationalism and difference and, 104; Jozef Israëls and, 100–101; mappa mundi and, 37, 107; Martin Heidegger and, 4, 6, 11, 27, 37, 38, 56, 93, 149–50, 196, 197, 211, 254n57; as metaphorical and material, 37; multiplication and fragmentation of, 87, 93; Pictorial Worlds Today exhibit and, 188; politics by other means and, 94; rules of navigation of, 32; transnationalism and, 156, 159, 193; world’s fairs and, 95, 126; versus world system, 176 world’s fairs: accomplishments of, 15–16; aesthetic possibilities of, 48; agency of objects at, 60, 96; apogee and decline of, 38, 43, 76, 77, 285n16; arc of transfer from, 37; art’s location in and dialectic against, 47; arts pedagogy and, 54, 57; art’s separation from, 29; art versus industry and, 39; autonomy and, 258n50; biennials and, x−xii, 3, 29, 37, 83–86, 88, 93, 108, 165, 226; bird’s eye view of, 51, plate 7, plate 9; blindman’s visits to, 19–21; bureaucracy and, 233; catalogues for, 54; city and world and, 36; colonialism and imperialism and, 7, 19, 43, 94–95; color schemes for, 19; congresses held at, 49, 56; critics of, 49; cultural appropriation and, 29, 39–40; exhibitionary complex and, 36; experience economy and, 226; Expos and, 76; formation of the public by, 35, 49, 54−55, 259n115; globes at, 51, 52, 77, 259n108; government reports on, 54, 56; human exhibits at, 55–56, 58, 60–62, 64, 75, 104, 198, 260–61n156; industrialization, 22, 24; international competitions and, 39; internationalism and, xii, 43–44, 45, 49; keepsakes of, 57; nationalism and, 94–95; navigation of local difference and, 32; number of, 257n20; number of visitors to, 53–54; opposition to, 83–84; origins of, 43, 44; pavilions at, 72, 243, 263n216, 265n41; permanent structures built for, 51; politics and, 37, 94, 265n40; prehistory of, 161n175, 202; repeating displays at, 45–46; rue des nations at, 60, 72, 77, 84, 85, 95; sites for, 64–65; from state to corporate agency and, 263n213; subjective art versus objective technology and, 197; touristic devices at, 91; unity and, 38, 50; world-as-picture and, x, 29; world pictures and, 95. See also Adams, Henry; specific fairs World Trade Organization protests, 228 World War II, 76, 94 Wrapped Kunstalle Bern (Christo and Claude), 175 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 213, 287n86 Wright, Nina Kaiden. See Kaiden, Nina Wunder, Richard P., 262n197 Wurm, Erwin, 204, 205, 206, 219, 286n51

Wyld, James, 51 “Xerox book” (Siegelaub), 181 Xu Bing, 40, 40–41, 42, 257n31 Year of the White Bear, The (Fusco and Gómez-Peña), 63–64, 79. See also Two Undiscovered Amerindians (Fusco and GómezPeña) Yoshihara Jirō, 170, 280n99 Young, La Monte, 203, 205, 207, 210

Your Black Horizon (Eliasson and Adjaye), 231, 232, 289n18 Your Blind Movement (Eliasson), 8, 9, 10 Yung Ho Chang, 104, 105, 110–12 Zangwill, Israel, 257n36 Zazeela, Marian, 203, 205, 207, 210 Zeitlin, Marilyn, 241 Zero groups, 153, 170, 174, 236, 280n99, 281n103 Žižek, Slavoj, 51 Zolghadr, Tirdad, 106

Bibliography

331