"Manifesta 4: European
Biennial of Contemporary Art," May 25-Aug. 25, 2002, Frankfurt/Main,
Germany
"Globalization" is on sale -- now for only for €8, the price of a
ticket to "Manifesta 4: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art"
in Frankfurt, Germany. Identity, difference, mobility, urbanity,
emigration, inclusion, exclusion, domination, dominated, authority,
technology, media -- Manifesta is a K-Mart of buzzwords.
Even clueless curators can hardly go wrong -- though it's hard
not to notice the total lack of focus in the current show. After
nine months of traveling throughout Europe, the three women curators
-- Iara Bourbnova, the founding director of the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Sofia, Bulgaria; Nuria Enguita Mayo, chief
curator of the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona; and Stephanie Moisdon
Trembley, an independent curator from Paris, where she co-founded
the Bureau des Videos -- have selected over 70 young artists, but
failed to find a common theme. Apparently, their souvenirs turned
out to be too diverse.
On the one hand, the show proves that there is a great pool of
talented people out there, but we suspected that already. On the
other, it also raises the question of what the curators actually
did, beyond picking up young artists. Bourbnova called Manifesta "an
open-ended and self-developing process to invite discourse of ideas,
opinions, and shared values." In the end, the show features artists
with talent but little else in common. Manifesta proves that the
next logical step after dropping the idea of an idea would seem to
be to drop the idea of having curators without ideas.
Manifesta is hosted at different locations every second year.
Since its inception in 1996 with the support of the European Union
Commission, Manifesta´s past three venues have been in Rotterdam
(1996), Luxembourg (1998) and Ljubljana (2002). This year, Manifesta
is in Frankfurt-am-Main, a village consisting of small,
unpretentious houses pinched between a huge airport and the city's
downtown skyline (of banks and insurance companies, giving the city
it's "Bankfurt" nickname).
The location proved to be good for fundraising -- Manifesta came
up with €2 million from the city, the giant Messe Frankfurt
fairgrounds and the German insurance company Allianz AG. For finding
thick-walleted sponsors, Frankfurt is surely a more sensible
decision than Moscow, which also competed to host the event. The
European Union paves the spiritual grounds, and the Medicis of
Hessen (the province to which Frankfurt belongs) provide the means.
The exhibition is spread through the city of Frankfurt/Main,
under the overall supervision of the Artists' House Mousonturm, a
contemporary art center. Other venues for the exhibition include the
Krankfurter Kunstverein, the outdoor area of the Schirn Kunsthalle,
the Frankensteiner Hof and the Städelsches Kunstinstitut.
This rule of the free market economy was cleverly exploited by
the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. Upon receiving the letter
of invitation to participate in the show, he promptly put his spot
in the show up for auction on eBay. The highest bidder was Sal
Randolph, a devotee of anti-market art (and organizer of the
recent http://www.freebiennial.com/ in conjunction with
the Whitney Biennial), who paid $15,000 to Büchel. Even if the
random selections of the curators make little sense by themselves,
they can be turned into hard cash, which does make sense after all.
The show is fueled by MTV and internet esthetics. The 23-year-old
Glasgow artist Luke Fowler exhibits a video document of a
psychotherapy session. Daniel Garcia Andujar, Davide
Grassi, the aforementioned Randolph and collaboratives that call
themselves 0100101110101101.org,
Construction/Deconstruction and Apsolutno all carry
out internet projects with clever concepts and witty twists which,
apropo of the Bankfurt site, comment on the state of capitalism.
Apsolutno´s The Apsolut Sale, a simulation of an auction,
addresses Western Europe's lukewarm attitude towards the integration
of immigrants from the East.
Increasingly, it seems, artists are acting not as individuals but
rather as groups, similar to pop music bands, for instance. As
collaborative groups, artists can more easily take advantage of
things like publishing, journalism, screenings, lectures and on- and
off-line temporary exhibitions. A work by Revolver (Archiv für
Aktuelle Kunst) called Kiosk consists of some 60
publications on contemporary art, displayed in piles. Finger,
a Frankfurt-based four-member team, picks up contemporary contexts
from different international locations and turns them into journal
and internet productions. The group Ohio Photomagazine makes
works that play with notions of commercialised esthetics in photo
and fashion magazines.
Complicating the matter further is the increasing
interdisciplinary and transnational nature of the artists' groups.
The Radek Community in Moscow includes not only visual
artists but also musicians and art critics. Among artists
participating in Manifesta, several have at least two different
places of residence, and many live and work outside their places of
origin. Surely, the boundaries within Europe are getting diffuse --
it is simply impossible to predict the nationalies of artists from
their works. In To Present the World, the Danish artist
Lise Harlev presents timely questions about what nationality
really means in the context of international art shows.
On the low-tech side, the show includes plenty of witty
commentaries about daily life in Western Europe, both through the
eyes of natives and outsiders. Frankfurt-based Dirk
Fleischmann's installation, The Bistro, is one of the
artist´s recent experiments toying with diverse facets of the local
service industry. The 45 year-old Bulgarian artist Luchezar
Boyadjiev, who previously produced a work called
GastARTbeiter ("gastarbeiter" are low-waged guest workers,
mostly from the poorer Eastern European countries), criticizes his
own selection to participate in the show, with his witty I Want
You for Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt.
The 24 year-old Austrian artist and magazine editor Andreas
Fogarasi created Europapark, an installation featuring designer
furniture and fancy supergraphics (the Rotis type font used by
Accenture, for instance). Turkey´s Halil Altindere, who is
known for his installations using Marlboro cigarette packs, here
devises the humorous I Don´t Like Long Good-Byes is not to be
missed at the Frankfurt Airport (terminal 1, hall1).
Generally, the artworks on display have a strong tendency to be
conceptual, ignoring visual esthetics. Mario Gagliardi, a
culture and design theoretician in Vienna, says that art first lost
the image with the invention of photography, and later "lost form
and esthetics to design, which now owns esthetics in service of the
market economy."
Art's lasting effects are, some say, discovered by the public. At
Manifesta, the art public is itself discovered in the work of
Portuguese artist Sancho Silva. He lures people from a
touristy street of Alt-sachsenhausen -- one of those open-air
shopping malls that prove that Disney has conquered Germany -- right
into an exhibition hall leading to a dark wooden room, where one can
secretly observe the other public trying to make sense of what they
see.
"Manifesta 4" will continue until Aug. 25, 2002. For the
Manifesta 5 two years later, hasta la vista in St. Sebastian, a
picturesque coastal city in the Basque region of Spain.