Paper Monument

This year’s Berlin Biennale employed, for the most part, familiar curatorial strategies: interventions into the architecture of the exhibition space; artist as curator and vice versa; compulsory pilgrimages to off-site venues; and the recuperation of careers that had been long neglected—often due to the myopic institutional visions of galleries and museums. Yet, if Kathrin Rhomberg, the Biennale’s curator, was guided by any particular credo, it would be her evident belief in the efficacy of long-format, digital video — the exhibition was one hot little black room after another.

Nearly every video followed the same logic. At the outset, each stated its left-of-center political commitments and then proceeded to examine the semiotic framework from which these statements arose. Under this formula, the video artists maintained a reportage aesthetic, but preemptively defended themselves against criticisms of sensationalism and didactic simplicity by calling into question the neutrality of their narration. To name a few instances: in Renzo Martens’s work, the video camera documents the way in which hunger victims are photographically framed for the purposes of emergency food distribution; Marie Voignier’s Hearing the Shape of a Drum shows the manner in which the media has related an infamous criminal trial to the public; and Mark Boulos’s two channel exposé of the not-so-hidden relation between stock market values and the exploitation of oil reserves in the Niger Delta employs a cameraman who alternates between disguised voyeur and intrusive witness.

These works are not remarkable for any particular insights into the various geopolitical conflicts or capitalist pitfalls they choose to engage. To the contrary, it is precisely the artists’ reliance on self-reflexive hooks that forces them to parody those conditions. In one scene, Boulos hides behind some water reeds and tapes gun waving, masked-men in motorboats speeding along the delta while, on an adjacent screen, day traders buy and sell raw commodities at the NYSE. The juxtaposition of the two events, synched together with matching cuts, highlights their simultaneity in real life. Yet the artist gives no clue as to the complicated historical circumstances of the Nigerian insurgency that, since the rise and fall of Ken Saro-Wiwa, has involved the confluence of minor literatures, pirate media, environmental debate, and a mix of local violent and nonviolent resistance. To the extent that Boulos has neither the qualifications nor sense of responsibility needed to present this history, he ends up reiterating the sensationalist reporting conventions of American news outlets. Images without semi-automatic weapons, machetes, and methane explosions end up on the cutting room floor. Yet in order to show his disapproval of the reportage he is destined to produce, in a few scenes he shows himself being told to leave the premises, or threatened by whomever he is filming. Unfortunately, this self-effacing gesture fails to condemn the figure of the western journalist as Boulos presumably intends, but only furthers the impression that we are in the middle of a perilous, activist safari.

Ultimately, the remarkable aspect of these long format videos is their total lack of humor. Both their earnest demeanor and fairly low production values harken back to the anti-aesthetic biennials of the mid-90s that ended finally in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta XI of 2002 and distinguish them from the zeitgeist of the art world today, where inside jokes and referential puns lubricate the wheels of the market.

Oftentimes it seems as though the dual legacy of the avant-garde might be caricatured as follows:

   Earnestness                       Humor
   Simplistic Reportage        Complex Referential Network
   Committed Activism        Dilettantism
   Biennial Savvy                 Market Savvy

However, a binary where the Rodchenkos stand to the left and the Picabias to the right has its limits. Both artistic strategies inculcate a desire among their audiences to identify with their class in common lamentation — over the depredations of globalism on the left and over the impotence of contemporary art on the right (see above). The audience of the Berlin Biennale takes comfort in chastising itself for being a prime culprit of first world excess. Yet here, taking on the burden of neoliberal guilt means simply that one may gain entrance into more bohemian bourgeois circles. In parallel fashion, the audience of Art Basel, which opened contemporaneously, takes pleasure in the way the avant-garde project has been compromised, holding up work that prides itself on its ambivalence or bad faith. Artworks that critique their own market values while winkingly selling themselves for enormous sums—take the Cologne school for instance—would qualify here. In my view, it is the art that transcends this binary that will inherit the earth.