Asian Biennial Forum is extended one more week and will end November 25.

Asian Biennales: Nationalism in a post-colonial world

Internationalism versus Nationalism

Currently, one third of the world’s biennales take place in Asia, with the first being the Tokyo Biennale in 1952. Yet, the international art biennale started with the Venice Biennale which was founded in 1895, a year before the Olympic games, at a time when world’s fairs and international exhibitions started growing in popularity with the idea that nations can showcase the best of their talents. However, this type of showcasing of national pride often leads to nationalism and sometimes to conflict.
What do you think about exhibiting art in national pavilions? Are artists and their works defined by their birthplace, their nationalities or their current places of residency? Isn’t this idea of nationalism carried over into today’s biennales? In the case of Taiwan, I would say yes, as the artists representing Taiwan, either in the Taipei Biennial or in the Taiwan Pavilion at Venice, are ethnic Chinese/Taiwanese and never aboriginal, Japanese or Western. Contrast this with Singapore that includes a diverse ethnic population of its local artists in its biennale.

We are all Errorists: mixed media installation by the Internacional Errorista from Argentina, courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Post-colonialism

“Farewell to Post-colonialism” is the theme for this year’s Guangzhou Triennial. For the catalog essay, curator Gao Shiming wrote:
“Of course, the Triennial is primarily a reflection on the exhibition experience and its “internationalism”. The questioning of the international exhibition platform is not new. In 2007, a book titled The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by An Artist was released at the opening of Documenta 12 in Kassel. It alluded to the fact that artists’ discontent with curatorial practice had reached an intolerable capacity, compelling one to ask: What, exactly, are artists dissatisfied with? Are they unsatisfied with the international exhibition system, the spectacle of discourse, or the plethora of euphemistic cultural-political strategies deployed in curatorial practices? All these troubles seem to stem from the “international” element. However, for contemporary artists, what kind of space is considered “international”?
and:
“If the key issue of post-colonialism in international curatorial practice is negotiating value, then is the final value based on a consensus? Or rather, do we need to reach a consensus? Can the consensus eliminate difference?”

Let’s also discuss the political issue of the biennale’s structure and organization, and in particular the selection of biennale curators. In the case of Taiwan, since 2000, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum first picks a Western curator via committee. The appointed Western curator then chooses the Taiwanese curator. This happened in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. I find this highly problematic.

Taipei tomorrow's a lake again by Wu Mali: Vegetable container gardens outside the lobby's windows

Art Compass 2008

September 2008 saw several Asian biennales and triennales: Sydney(6/18-9/7) http://www.bos2008.com/app/biennale, Gwangju (9/5-11/9) http://www.gwangju-biennale.org, Busan (9/6-11/15) http://www.busanbiennale.org/, Guangzhou Triennial (9/6-11/16) http://www.gztriennial.org, Shanghai (9/8-11/16) http://www.shanghaibiennale.org/, Singapore (9/11-11/16) http://www.singaporebiennale.org/, Taipei (9/13-1/4) http://www.taipeibiennial.org/, Yokohama Triennale (9/13-11/30) http://yokohamatriennale.jp/2008/en/.

With so many Asian biennales, what does this say about the current art situation in Asia?

What is the function of a biennale?

Rotterdam Dialogues The Critics I'd like to respond to Thomas Berghuis' latest entry 'Time will Tell', in which he asks 'Do we need art critics to establish a dialogue about contemporary art? -- The recent forum at de Witte de With in Rotterdam may provide some answers (see: http://www.wdw.nl/project.php?id=183). I am hoping to hear/read more.'

Rich Streitmatter-Tran and I both took part at this symposium. Rich took part at discussionpanel in day 3: 'What can D-I-Y Criticism offer?' I was the host for the day 2: Positions, outlining the theme of the programm and responding to the various contributions during the day. As a first response to Berghuis' request, I'd like to post my introduction talk which relates a lot to some questions Thomas Berghuis posed, hoping it will provoke others to join in!

Finally I got some time to respond, including my initial thoughts on from Renee's and Stephen's recent postings on 'time' and 'commodification'. At the same time I am watching the news unfold on the latest burst of the world economy (at one point I imagined I was imagining looking instead at Tatsuo Miyajima 'Counting' installations).

I cannot help thinking on whether the next bubble to burst - in similar fashion to the dot com and housing market bubble - will indeed be the art market (give and take a few monts or years from now)

On 24 September n.e.w.s was introduced in an interview with FBI Radio, FBi 94.5FM, an independent, community-based radio station in Sydney, Australia. The interview was part of FBI's Artscape program, and introduced n.e.w.s. to their listeners of Sydney - many of whom are hopefully joining us online.

As I try to seize the moment after reading Stephen's post: ‘The Fate of Public Time: toward a time without qualities’, I cannot separate myself from my recent trip to the U.S., the place where I was born and raised but do not reside.

The last two weeks of the global economic crisis might be termed as the end of the era of borrowed time. Beginning with deregulation during the 1980's Reaganomics and exascerbated by greed, borrowed money -‘leverage’ has lead to the crash on Wall Street. Central to the bailouts and interrelationship of a networked world are these ‘credit default swaps’ (coined 'weapons of mass destruction' by Warren Buffet). A kind of insurance sold by financial institutions, they insure against a possible default by an issuer of debt. Privately written, in unknown terms, the financial entities are now expecting to cash in. Culminating in the government bail out of the national mortgage company, insurance company, Wall Street firms (not all), the 700 billion dollar bill that doesn’t state the ‘value’ of these assets (though includes an option for a stock injection plan! with preferred stock) was finally passed by the congress. The US government has never been so directly involved in the financial market since the Great Depression. Has America gone social? I doubt it. But look at how time has changed the financial world: the investments of 'long-term' securities, savings and pension plans aren’t secure, contrasted by the banning of short-selling, making a quick buck, futures. Gambling was somehow deemed legal - outside of the casinos, certain Native American reservations and the state of Nevada. Deregulation on Wall Street had reinvented the art of speculation - borrowing shares and betting on the fact that their value will go down in order to pocket the difference, accounting for potentially the largest purchase of nothingness (devalued stock- assets without price) in history. What happened to the coined ‘treadmill of progress’ in the 'United States of Capital?'

Returning to Boym, briefly, one value of reflective nostalgia is its defense of idleness and of recapturing leisure time. ‘Time is money,’ she says, ‘but we want time that is not money.’
Gotham 2008

http://www.karbonjournal.org/

Some friends of mine are hosting a "competition of ideas," the object of which is to rethink the social and economic conditions of art, explicitly breaking with twentieth-century conventions. The winner gets 10 000 euros -- not bad; both the winner and the runner-up get the expanded (100 page) version of their initial three-page proposal published. Bear in mind that this is how a hitherto unknown proto-blogger by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau got started (winning a competition for his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences)... For funding reasons, it's open only to residents of the European Union. But as n.e.w.s. is registered in Europe, and collectively authored proposals are encouraged, I figured that we might take a multi-handed stab at rethinking the material conditions of art. Wouldn't it be a boost for our collective energies if we won? And even if somehow we didn't, we would at least have cured our twentieth-century hangover and gone some way to creating a twenty-first century We. Beyond that, I would encourage everyone using and reading n.e.w.s. to take part. Deadline: 15 November 2008.

I’m very much of two minds about the whole issue of “data-mining,” as Lev Manovich puts it – or “data-recovery” as others might say inasmuch as we have all contributed to that ever-expanding mother-lode – with which Renée Ridgway has invited us to engage in her recent, thought-igniting post. The sheer magnitude of data accumulation is positively diabolical – or at least demonic, to use a more genteel term for the hellish little fellow. Indeed, in a fascinating if somewhat sibylline passage in his deliciously premonitory novel, The Crying of Lot 49, written in the early 1960s, Thomas Pynchon imagines an ambivalent character whom I see as Data’s Demon.