"Christ the King" by Mirosław Patecki, photo: Rafał Żwirek
The 7th Berlin Biennale tackled the important and difficult question of art’s transformative impact. Was its unequivocal answer persuasive?
After little more than two months of its official runtime, the 7th Berlin Biennale ended on the 1st of July. Or, as its curators would have it, it did not so much end (which would render it yet another art world enterprise come to a close), but rather departed from its venue. For not only are some of the projects still in progress but, more importantly, the main aspiration of the Biennale's curator in-chief Artur Żmijewski was to show "art that actually works, makes its mark on reality and opens a space where politics can be performed". What is of primary significance to Żmijewski, then, is not art itself but its effectiveness as "a device that produces impact" on existing socio-political circumstances - an agenda grounded in the Polish artist's notion of "applied social arts".
The intended strong focus on art's performativity, on what it actually does rather than merely presenting or communicating, took a relatively unified form at the 7th Berlin Biennale. First, most of the works in this way or another extended or actually evolved outside the spatial confines of the exhibition, thereby underlining their desire to break out of the institution's embrace and intervene directly in a wider socio-political arena. For example, young birches from the surroundings of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp were planted in Berlin parks (Łukasz Surowiec's Berlin-Birkenau) or an activist newspaper proposing alternative politico-economic scenarios for Belarus was circulated in the authoritarian East European country (Marina Naprushkina's Self # Governing). Moreover, the desire for direct intervention was in many of the projects paired with a clearly readable underlying "message" or objective and straightforward stance-taking toward the socio-political and historical issues they addressed. In order to be able to act, they seemed to renounce ambiguity and understatement – regarding both the communication of their agenda and the mode of viewer address. A visitor at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where most of the projects, or rather, their iconographies and operative frameworks were presented, found him or herself confronted with varied statements, one right after another.
However, the solid presence of activist-style rhetoric as a facilitator of art’s social impact led to another, inadvertent effect. It shifted the emphasis away from the works’ performative level (the Biennale's target) to their constative and conceptual dimensions: from what they (could) do and effect to what they "say" and how they are conceived. This shift was also related to other factors, concerning both the format of an art biennale and the works themselves. As a short-lived institutional affair, the Biennale in a sense reified the projects-in-progress seeking direct intervention "out there", such as Self # Governing, by presenting them as static exhibits, thereby foregrounding their informational content and agenda, rather than the prospects and challenges of their efficacy.
In a different way, this also applied to the projects that literally invited visitors to act - for instance, to take away Auschwitz birch seedlings. On the one hand, this action served as a means to the project’s desired effect: "work against forgetting" by letting the memory of the Holocaust take root in personal and everyday spaces. On the other hand, however, Surowiec's work seemed to run the risk of de-emphasizing the interventionist realm of its possible effect precisely due to its visitor-involving actionism, which could easily become an end in itself, as interactivity in art not seldom does - especially at the 7th Berlin Biennale which, considering the strong and not unproblematic focus on the viewer’s experience and involvement pervasive in contemporary art and curatorial practices, included only few works that literally involved the engagement-accustomed visitor.
A work by Khaled Jarar "State of Palestine", photo:. Marta Górnicka
In a related vein, Khaled Jarrar's State of Palestine invited visitors to become involved in an action-based agenda. Getting Jarrar's unique State of Palestine stamp in one’s passport was meant to provide an interventionist, not merely declarative means for people to voice their support of the Palestinian cause. This action could lead to real-life consequences for individuals who obliged, risking trouble when attempting to enter an anti-Palestinian country. In this sense, the project could "make its mark on reality" - beyond the marks of stamped ink. But does it mean that it "actually works" and "produces impact"? If so, how exactly? Or was it more a symbolic gesture, which, in addition to championing its own political cause, catered to the curators’ aim to overtly and unreservedly politicize the 7th Berlin Biennale? Indeed, the same question could be asked, with certain modifications, about other projects that took the form of short-lived events in demarcated micro-spaces, such as two congresses: Jonas Staal's New World Summit, which brought together political and juridical representatives of organizations from international terrorist lists and aimed to question and rectify the mechanisms of Western democracy, and Yael Bartana's Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, which proposed the return of 3.3 million Jews from Israel to Poland so as to work through the ills of the past for the sake of a more harmonious tomorrow.
A further question arises: did activist gestures, symbolic acts, critical and contestant operations, and consciousness-raising and discussion-provoking activities actually require – or justify - the rhetoric of radicality within which they were framed at the Biennale? For the Biennale positioned itself as radically parting with previous art world models of practicing and presenting politically and socially-engaged art, almost as an altogether new path: one of intervention rather than distanced critique. To mark the Biennale's departure from 'empty gestures' of the past, not only was there a conspicuous absence of reflection upon earlier endeavors to explicitly tie art to (subversive) politics, but art history as a point of reference was altogether displaced and replaced by politics, history and contemporary activism as a referential (and ideally operative) framework. This strategy was made vivid not only through the invitation of Occupy activists to KW, but also through a concerted recurrence of themes related to the manifold after-effects of the WW2 and the politics of memory – topics apparently seen as "at home" in Germany and hence as predisposed to reach out well beyond the confines of the art scene. By insisting on the re-contextualization of art “that actually works” from the sphere of the aesthetic into that of the political, the Biennale suggested not only that politically productive art today should be overtly political, but also pursue an imperative to literally "make a mark" and directly intervene in existing socio-political constellations – without necessarily thematizing the very possibilities and challenges of its efficacy by so doing.
Author: Vanja Sisek, July 2012