Article published in A*DESK, 2012
Conscious of how vast and vague Biennials and other international exhibitions and events can be, Manifesta 9 focuses on a very specific subject that is currently highly significant.
The curator of Manifesta 9, Cuauhtémoc Medina couldn´t be clearer and more precise in the text he wrote for the catalogue: “For years now, visitors and participants to the world’s biennials have been complaining of a feeling of despair. Artists have the feeling that the specificity of their practices gets lost beneath the grand thematic and theoretical claims of the biennials organizers. Critics have the feeling that the tyrannical egos of the curators are given free rein. Audiences suspect that the proliferation of contemporary biennials around the world is contributing to a global cultural homogenization, favouring a ’usual suspects’ list of artists while perpetuating stereotypical representations of local or regional forms of practice. At best, biennials are regarded as a ’necessary evil’, rather than as an institutional structure that is constitutive of the experience of art today. Art biennials have become increasingly industrialised. With their lack of internal segmentation, hundreds of contemporary artists, and thousands of hours of videos, films, talks and actions, they demand days of hectic and frequently incomplete absorption from professional and amateur viewer alike. (…) It is no accident that the title of Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern insists on calling attention to the abyss of modernism’s temporality. Although modernisation and capitalism do indeed have a threatening and overpowering appearance, we, the curators, are not convinced that the best cultural strategy today is to mimic their monstrosity”.
Awareness, a self-critical attitude, precision and focus are implied in such a statement. This, and the claimed in-depth research into modernism and its individual and collective memories, may lead to a better understanding of the world we are living in today – a theme that had already been highlighted in diverse contributions at the Coffee Break (http://www.a-desk.org/spip/spip.php?article1281) at Manifesta 9 in December 2011.
Somehow it feels as if the party is over, the huge international art presentations are something of the past, as now they are financed and politically supported more for reasons connected to urban development and tourism, than for any genuine cultural function. Even worse, they have become increasingly self-alienated, increasingly resembling, moreover, the format of theme parks, with the adverse effects mentioned by Cuauhtémoc Medina above.
Totally in coherence with this, the international biennial Manifesta 9 is abstaining from any superficial glamour and doesn’t make any substantial compromises in either content or form: Cuauhtémoc Medina, together with the associate curators Dawn Ades and Katerina Gregos, takes the former mining site at Waterschei in Genk as a case study and point of departure for mapping the social, economic and political processes of the last century that have defined our present. And Manifesta 9 does it through quite a clear structure that occupies only one venue (the Waterschei), which is divided into different sections. These incorporate the pre-existing local museum dedicated to the history and memory of the miners in Genk. Thus Manifesta presents art works, from the 19thC up to the present day, in the same context as objects, documents and historical files all related to mining.
The exhibition and the catalogue, available online (http://catalog.manifesta9.org/en/) can be seen as an Encyclopedia (or better a Subcyclopaedia) where art works don’t just illustrate a curatorial idea but are respected in their specificity as self-contained sources of knowledge, in an interdisciplinary and penetrative analysis of modernism. Some of the issues explored by the exhibiting artists are; the extremely hard working conditions of miners, present in Henry Moore’s drawings that depict the underground as a sort of living hell, the photomontage “Mineurs au travail” by Olivier Bevierre and the film “Coal Face” by Alberto Cavalcanti, with music by Benjamin Britten, an experimental montage of industrial scenes. The repercussions of Fordism, the consequent alienation and repetitive labour are commented on by Kozakis & Vaneigem in the video “Un moment d’eternité dans le paysage du temps”, where some workers start to build a house at the foot of Mont Athos in Greece, but stop and stand still, just to look at the wonderful landscape. The organisation of mass manufacturing economies are considered by Jota Izquierdo in his research into fake brands and Edward Burtynsky with his photographic documentation of China’s industrialisation. The disempowerment of the labour force is the main subject of “The Battle of Orgreave” by Jeremy Deller and the filmmaker Mike Figgis; a documentary re-enactment of the clash between miners and police on the occasion of a mine closure in the 1980s. This disempowerment is also emphasized by Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow in their film of an ex-coal miners choir reproducing the sound of a working mine, as well as by Oswaldo Maciá, who brings back the working atmosphere via a sound composition based on hammers playing flamenco rhythms. Entrepreneurship and economic restructuring are explored by Duncan Campbell in the film “Make it New John”, a kind of parody of a real case, the DMC-12, a futuristic automobile whose production was thought to be a way of also solving conflicts in Ireland. A current topic, like the fictitious money and funding of capital is presented by Goldin+ Senneby through an installation that investigates the clandestine zones of global finance, exemplified by Headless Ltd., a real offshore company registered in the Bahamas.
The bottom line of it is: our present is no brighter (and in some aspects even worse) than it was in those mining times. Thus, Katerina Gregos summarizes in the catalogue “the principle of profitability is now imposed on society as a whole. This need for growth reinforces social regression and destroys social cohesion”. This statement can be considered an implicit, but urgent call, for a change in curatorial and artistic practices that have become rhetorical.
Indeed, contemporary artistic practices in particular, understood to be individual processes, have to take responsibility for once again defending the value of “Singularity” against the all-embracing culture industries. And art curators, critics, theorists and other art professionals ought and need to take seriously, once again, their role as independent, critical communicators of – and guides to – the world of art production. In this sense, Manifesta 9 has put up a strong and convincing statement for the biennial as an art institution that creates independent and even idiosyncratic knowledge beyond any short term and speculative interests. What is more, “Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern” is an art exhibition, which has voluntarily limited itself to an experience that can be undertaken within a reasonable time and in so doing returns the notion of sustainability to its primal meaning. And this eventually has motivated the title of this review, “Mastery is revealed in limitation”, which is actually taken from the sonnet “Natur und Kunst” (“Nature and Art”) written in the year 1800 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – more than 100 years before Ludwig Mies van der Rohe coined the iconic phrase “less is more”. The Modern is really deep.
