Biennale Strategies : Anthony Bond

The original Biennale was the Venice Biennale and that has been going for the best part of a century. This began as a series of National pavilions that displayed flagship artists selected by the funding governments and the Giardini pavilions remain at the core of it today.

By contrast Documenta that occurs every 5 years was always seen as a curatorial overview of developments in the past 5 years. This is usually thematic in that it attempts to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. These constitute the two alternatives and most Biennales follow one or the other model or a compromise between the two.

Sydney started as national representations in 1973 but in 1975 it graduated to being a curated exhibition. Since then the curatorial vision has gained increasing independence from funding governments� interventions. Even in 2000 when we went to a jury system rather than a single curator the selection was determined here.

The jury system tends towards a top 10 system of selection
With each curator indicating their preferences to produce a broad survey of current practice and it will be as broad as the interests of the selected jury members. The individual Curator or small collaborative group usually works with a theme more along the lines of Documenta. The Latter approach may tell us more about a particular topic or way of working that prevails at a given time and is not simply an expression of individual preference.

Biennale Curators
In recent years a new generation of independent curators has sprung up to curate the burgeoning number of Biennales in Asia, Africa, America and Europe. The presentational strategies of these curators are increasingly geared to create novel viewing conditions and they may sometimes have competed with the creativity of the artist. To what extent can and should the curator be a collaborator in the making and presentation of art? Many of these curators take it for granted that they are equal partners in the making and presentation while others feel the curator should be completely invisible.

I want to underline a very important distinction between the importance of a clear curatorial position that is concerned with making the best possible exhibiting context for the artist and the best possible viewing experience for the visitor as against the exhibition as a vehicle for self expression on the part of the curator.

In this sense I agree about the invisible curator, however I strongly believe in the responsibility of the curator to structure exhibitions. There may well be a strong subjective element to their decision-making but the objective must be to optimize the public experience not to run an agenda of their own. A fair analogy might be the theatrical director I do not go to the theatre to admire the personality of Barry Koski but to enjoy the writers text and the performances. A director is essential to get the best out of both but it is very irritating when their style overrides the play itself.
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The following quotes from curators come from FOCI a series of interviews with Carolee Thea published by Apexart in 2001.

C.T. Regrettably, some curators create exhibitions in the service of their own ideas, contributing to their own power.

H.H. Curating an exhibition can be a very contradictory practice. The role of the curator contains a delicate, sophisticated, and subtle borderline. It is the worst of circumstances to use the artist just as an illustration of your ideas.

C.T. How would you describe the curator�s role?

H.H. The role is to pose a question, and the artist should participate in the formation and the answering with different solutions so that the process is a collaboration. But yes, there are moments when you can see the excessive hand of the curator.
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R.M. When I organize an exhibition my first step is always to define a conceptual framework. The conceptual framework is based on a series of updated reflections on the problems of contemporary life and art that correspond to a larger cultural framework. I then start thinking about artists and specific works. I might select an existing piece that an artist has produced because it connects to my concept. In other cases, a work may be site-specific in relation to my proposal, a city, a context, or a situation; in still others, the artist may create an entirely new project. I like to create a common ground of understanding and after exchanging ideas, to negotiate and feel a full communication and an enthusiastic agreement to develop the project.

C.T. I have heard you say that you don�t wish to impose �themes� on the exhibition.

K.K. First of all, we do not suppress anything. I think that if the curator has a theme, then quite often he manipulates, controls, and tries to influence the artist to succumb to an overall idea. The work of the curator is successful when it shows what the artist is thinking, when the curator disappears behind what is being presented. Otherwise, the curator quite often compromises the process. So you have to share a risk. It is more interesting, really, to take this idea of �theme� out of the process so that the artists themselves are quite often surprised by what they eventually do

K.K. There is a method of protection by not making the theme overly important and allowing a sense of proportion, a sense of �give-and-take�; otherwise, the exhibition becomes incredibly pretentious and condescending.

Who is interested in the curator looking at their own navel? I don�t think the artists or the interested public want to know the opinion of the curator; they want to see what the artists are doing. This is very important. Ultimately, the work of the curator is successful when they disappear behind what is being presented and still have an intellectual overview.
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We must distinguish between curatorial themes designed to enhance reception of the works of art and strategies that may promote the presentational context at the expense of the individual artist. I will come back to that later.

One of the persistent themes discussed by the new generation of independent curators is whether there is still a place for the Museum in the presentation of contemporary art? They argue that the limited and static environment of the museum makes art shown there irrelevant in a new and dynamic technological environment. They argue that the real life situation of the street is the only place it can have relevance today.

The use of non-museum spaces however has been very productive as a critical and aesthetic strategy for artists but also for curators: Hou Hanrou for example created a series of exhibitions in a corridor of his house in Paris. Obrist curated an exhibition in his kitchen and in an airplane, Jerome Sans in an airport; Jan Hoet made a biennale in private houses in Ghent. But I suggest that there is still a place for art that requires a calm and contemplative environment or just clear space and separation from the noise of the everyday.

C.T. Can you define the role of the biennial vis-�-vis the museum?

R.M. Biennials are transgenerational and transnational and describe newly interconnected strategies. The discourse that separates is over, and while the barriers are toppling, the artist�s multiple modes of expression must be exhibited. Biennials are the most advanced arena for this expanded field precisely because they do not function like museums. Museums are temples for the preservation of memory where the art works are fetishized and displayed to create reverence and distance.

C.T. In Dennis Oppenheim�s 1971 work, Protection, he blocked the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum with guard dogs to question the sanctity of museums. Today, structures have changed and museums contain project rooms for contemporary installations that are less precious than what you describe.

R.M. I am an art historian. I appreciate all moments in art and I defend the existence of the museum. Museums are rarefied sometimes but they are also trying to renovate their strategies.

C.T. Does the artist impart a new way of thinking to the observer?

R.M. Yes, the autonomy of the artwork is put into question. When the spectators interpret the work they create it in another way. We no longer think in mirror aesthetics, with only two sides: active artist/passive spectator. Now the visions are prismatic. When I speak about prismatic views I do not mean only visual perspectives; I mean emotional, ethnic, symbolic, and others.

K.K. Yes, but the artist is also an observer of himself or herself. You can�t clearly participate or anticipate between reception and production. The criteria for understanding are quite often being offered along with the work. It�s a very dialectical relationship between the maker, the viewer, the museum, or the places where you expect art.

C.T. In a 1971 essay entitled �The Dilemmas of the Curator�, Edward Fry listed what he saw as the three roles that define the curator�s position: first, as �the caretaker of the secular relics of a nation�s cultural heritage�; second, as �the assembler�, through acquisition, �of an otherwise non-existent cultural heritage�; and third, as �ideologue�. As a contemporary curator, do you see your role as the un-doer of this traditional description.

H.U.O. I think Fry�s definition is partially obsolete, partially valid. The museum has a storage function, for which the curator is caretaker. What is clear is that amidst all the changes within the museum, the collection of the museum remains its backbone. Artists, especially in the last decade, have made clear that art works have to be taken care of, but this is only one aspect of a greater complexity. So rather than an un-doer, I am a negotiator of new forms of curating; a catalyst, someone who builds pedestrian bridges from the art to many different audiences. There is now an oscillation between museum and non-museum spaces, a back-and-forth movement through which to negotiate new exhibition positions��.

I have never believed that there is such a thing as audience in this abstract sense. Encounters are more to the point. Yes, exhibitions can create very unexpected encounters.

The ideology supporting a move away from the formal space is one that many artists would embrace and in some cases the collaboration of Curators is very welcome to the artist in connecting with a community outside the traditional art world or market. For others however the appropriate framework for their work may be something that requires uncluttered space and clarity of presentation best provided by the white cube and a curator whose interpretation begins after the work is completed.

The Theme:
The theme as an organising principle for selection is very different from curatorial strategies for presentation but this distinction is often overlooked in a simplified argument that is about positionality, power relations and institutional critique rather than interpersonal exchange and creativity.

When artists work with a single curator (or curatorial collaboration) on a theme of common interest it can be a very productive situation for everyone. The curator acts as an intermediary to negotiate space and context to facilitate new and relevant work in the right space and at the right time and in collaboration with fellow artists with common interests.

In this way the exhibition is constructed as a social exchange not as a competition. Common artistic goals bring additional energy to the exhibition. For the artist it is clear from the outset how their work is to be presented and selection of work can be negotiated in relation to sites and social/historical context.

TRACE 1999
Slides of Liverpool sites
In 1999 I was invited to curate the first Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary International Art. I was excited by the opportunity because Liverpool is a relatively small city but densely packed with history and richly endowed architecturally.

The foundation of Liverpool's wealth in the nineteenth century was based on the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Manufactured goods were sent from Liverpool to Africa and traded for slaves who were shipped to The Americas where in turn they were traded for sugar, tobacco, rum and cotton for the mills in Manchester. Each leg of this triangle would render the Liverpool ship owners substantial profits.

The history of the port was also implicated in the export of orphans and children of unsuitable parents a trade that continued up to the 1950s. So in addition to tracing the city I also wanted to trace the resulting Diasporas. I invited a significant number of Artists from Latin America and several African American artists.

The people of Liverpool are also very special. This seafaring community characteristically displays tough intellectual independence and fierce solidarity - they would be profoundly sceptical of the Biennial but if they could be won over they would defend it to the death.

This gritty environment seemed ideal for an exhibition that would extend beyond the museum. The old city can be traversed in a comfortable 20-minute walk and provided many potential sites. I chose the theme TRACE because of my continuing research into artists who employ objects and materials as triggers for memory in contemporary practice. To help anchor the exhibition in the community and take advantage of the physical space of the city I selected artists who would also be interested in tracing its history. The current renaissance in public art and the engagement of artists in specific sites and communities made this an ideal opportunity. Most of the artists came to Liverpool twice, for an initial research trip to negotiate sites and later to install their work. Nearly all of them came for the installation and typically spent two weeks in Liverpool.

I used TRACE rather than traces because it allows an ambiguity between noun and verb. In other words it would trace a path or search for clues and present material evidence. The evidence of materials and objects has a strong affective component. Implicit or bodily memory is triggered in the individual through sensory responses to objects and places. This exhibition would therefore privilege Affect however its objectivity was to be secured by its specificity to site and history.

There were 60 artists in the exhibition showing at a dozen locations and a number of billboard projects, but I will just show a few examples to demonstrate how the theme worked in practice in particular in relation to sites.

L&R Salcedo installation in the Cathedral
The Cathedral was a demanding site because of its monstrous scale and its spiritual purpose. In my judgement Doris was one of the few artists capable of holding the space and making a work that was also an appropriate memorial for the building. Although the 14 individual sculptures already existed their selection for this installation was based on her prior study of the space. Their placement took 4 days to refine making the installation exquisitely site specific.

Doris Salcedo traces the distortion of reality that occurs when power and violence are used as means of social control. What comfort resides in the bed you once shared with a missing lover? What pleasure can one take in the intimate possessions of one�s spouse or child when they have been dragged away with no explanation? Objects retain traces of those who have used them. It is difficult to throw away such traces of an absent loved one, and yet it is equally difficult to continue using them as though nothing had happened.

Here at the Cathedral wardrobes and beds are rendered monstrous by their merger. All the holes, gaps and cracks in the wood have been meticulously sealed with white cement. It is as if they have been rendered blind and mute, just like those whose silence is ensured by the threat of further violence. This careful sealing of the cracks is also read as an attempt to keep something out or in. But in this case the �something� is elusive, like the nebulous fear of some unforeseen tragedy. Salcedo�s fusion of inanimate matter and human remains provokes a sense of abomination.

Juan Munoz at Old Oratory
Juan Munoz specifically designed these new works for the old Oratory. I gave him images of the space with the existing objects in it and asked him if he would like to work around them and the architecture. He indicated that this kind of challenge was the only circumstance in which he would agree to participate in a group show. Even so I did not expect new work, we originally discussed ways to adapt existing projects to the space so it was a great privilege to have his commitment to this extent.

The tragi-comic acrobats are even patinated to match the formal Victorian bronzes.

Julie Gough at Bluecoat
Julie Gough came to Liverpool to research local histories. Her work was displayed at Bluecoat Art Centre that had been an orphanage in the eighteenth century connected to the continuing deportation of children from Britain to work in the colonies through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The children were employed making pins and sewing. At the cathedral cemetery she discovered a whole wall of memorials to children who had died at the orphanage. The palettes in this installation replicate the children's beds and the mattress carry the text frottaged from their memorials and then rendered in pins.

This work has been retained in Liverpool.

Maria Magdalena Campos Pons at Bluecoat
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pon's Yoruba grandfather was transported from Nigeria to Cuba to work on the Vega sugar plantation where her family still lives and works. With an oral tradition that kept their connection to Africa very much alive, the artist�s friends and family were a living testament to a history of displacement.

The Seven Powers are based on templates for the stowing of slaves on the transport ships that once sailed from West Africa to the Caribbean after trading manufactured goods brought from Liverpool. The layout of the bodies on the slave boards is a powerful image of the conjunction of mathematical efficiency and brutality.

Unfolding desires refers to the labour of her people at the same time as it suggests a fleet of slave ships at sea.

Roslynd Piggott La Somnambule 1997 and Arranged meeting, breath of 2 men 1999 at Bluecoat
Roslyn took an interesting space that was a kind of anteroom with two entrances and a window as well as an alcove. Her installation worked formally for the space while evoking ghostly figures from the past of the centre and in the window space she mounted two glass vessels one blown in Melbourne one in Liverpool and engraved with the text to that effect.

L&R Costantino installation at littlewoods

Nicola Costantino made her installation in a prominent Liverpool shop window. The window display includes an array of stylish garments presented on mannequins. Seen from a distance, the costumes could be made from suede, with a fur trim and a subtle pattern of flowers or some other simple motif. The garments are sufficiently intriguing to attract closer inspection but, as one approaches, the whole ensemble is radically transformed. The suede turns out to be latex and now seems more like human skin than leather. Worse still, the motifs that relieve the surface turn out to be directly moulded from the human body. Far from being florets they are revealed as direct body casts of navels, nipples and arseholes.

L&R Domnenico de Clario performance
De Clario performed on 14 nights centred on the opening of the Biennial. (By chance, the opening night coincided with the equinox and was also, unusually, a night of the full moon.) Each night at a new site he played the piano accompanied by a saxophonist. The duration set by the interval between moonrise and sun set. The sites were illuminated with a different colour for each of the first seven nights on the outward journey repeating on the return. These colours were associated with the seven energy centres of the body (chakras). The audience were led to unusual and often very beautiful sites such as the crypt of a Cathedral, the roof of an old building and an abandoned church. A video of the journey was installed in the exhibition.

L&R Alan SekulaFreeway to China (Version Two: for Liverpool) 1998-99
Allan Sekula continued his conversations with dockworkers that started in Los Angeles and included Australian and European ports. In Liverpool he documented the lives of workers who lost their jobs when the port collapsed including some poignant images of workers gazing through wire at the machines they used to operate.

One of the most interesting by-products of his involvement was a conference with a group of ex-Dockers who have set up an Internet system to monitor the operations of shipping companies. Seamen on vessels around the world email them with details of improper working conditions and unseaworthiness and this information is immediately sent to the authorities at the next port of call where the ship is impounded.

Reinhard M�cha at Tate
Reinhard M�cha uses objects and furnishings to evoke specific memories, and to reflect on the nature of memory itself. Sometimes he places these objects in boxes lined with dark felt, which are reminiscent of jewellery cases, or cabinets for cutlery or valuable scientific instruments. Seen through glass against the dark interior, the objects become difficult to decipher. A clear view is prevented by our own reflection, and the fact that M�cha defines the surface of the glass by adding metallic strips that suggest an elaborate security device. The works are therefore layered with different views. We look at the surface of the glass. We look through the glass. We look at what lies behind the glass. And while trying to overlook the glass and its effects, we also look at ourselves and others reflected in the glass. This Duchampian strategy complicates � if not frustrates � the physical experience of looking. It can also be seen as a commentary on the processes and structure of memory.

M�cha�s work often concerns (and is literally gathered from) sites of passage or transit. For TRACE he has relocated the installation Eller Bahnhof to the Tate Gallery. Originally constructed in D�sseldorf, the work was subsequently installed in Stockholm, where it was set into the newly built walls of the renovated museum. Mucha was so surprised by the hasty carpentry of the walls that he decided to work with this exposed structure in subsequent manifestations. He did this by cutting around the segments of wall, removing them from the gallery, and then displaying them in glass cases on the wall of the new space: first at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, and now (in their fourth manifestation) in Liverpool. In this way, each successive installation contains physical traces

Ernesto Neto Densidade e Buracos de Minhoca 1999

Alasdair Maclennan at Exchange Flags
Alasdair MacLennan installed trestle tables running the entire length of his space and set them for absent guests at a wake. Their uneaten feast includes pigs� heads, fish and other items symbolic in the Irish Catholic tradition. The table is strewn with ticker tape listing the names of those who have died in the conflict in Northern Ireland. MacLennan�s performance took place, on alternate days, and consisted of his sitting next to the table dressed in black holding a branch and reciting the names of the dead. The length of the list was intellectually disturbing but the powerful sensation of mortality conveyed by the smell of the pigs heads made the experience literally gut wrenching.

L&R Anne No�l in the shopping centre
Ann No�l set up a stall in the shopping centre and engaged passers by in conversation. She asked them to give her some object from their bag or pocket that held some significance for them. For example you may find that you have kept a bus ticket for years without consciously acknowledging the reason. Its significance may be recalled as a result of No�l's invitation often unleashing a flood of memories. No�l would then sew these fragments into her quilt of memories while writing down your story in her book. The book was indexed to the quilt. These quilted local stories have been retained in Liverpool.

Stephen Willats
Steven Willats devised a collaborative activity for 32 local people. They were invited to spend a day working on his project. He showed them photographs of details from a walk round Liverpool. Then each person was given a small square of paper with a black margin. In this they were asked to describe a journey in images words or maps or a combination of all three.

After a period of time he blew a whistle and made them stop. They discussed the images then Steve formed them into pairs selected at random the 16 couples now repeated the process collaboratively. After the allocated time he stopped them again and formed them into 8 groups of 4. Now there was a bit more discussion but consensus was reached. When it became 4 groups of 8 it was harder still to get agreement but they worked hard at it and succeeded.

Two groups of 16 were very difficult! Much argument was taken to arrive at strategies all 16 could work with. The two groups had adopted opposite positions one was very organised each had a given task to perform within an overall structure, they were dominated by control freaks. The other group opted for a "go for it" anarchy. Both worked up to a point but were very different.

The final step of forming one group was now doomed to disaster the control freaks and the anarchists became very cross with eachother some stormed out some became abusive. It took a great deal of negotiation to get the survivors to cooperate.

Basically Steven had demonstrated the structural limits of consensual society.

Erwin Wurm
Erwin Wurm�s performance sculptures arise from simple daily actions: trying on new clothing, driving by a billboard, or opening a box. At the Exchange Flags in Liverpool, Wurm displayed drawings as instructions for one-minute performances. Each performance entailed everyday objects being used to complete an action, based solely on the criterion that the action was possible. The audience was encouraged to participate by following the instructions rigorously. A billboard was created in Liverpool displaying examples of these performances.

Global art after 1989 Represents a very particular challenge that demands some radical rethinking of critical and strategic frameworks for contemporary art particularly in Biennales which seek to be inclusive.
Throughout the 1980s post-modern theory had embraced the theory of regionalism but in practice this was mainly concerned with centre/periphery oppositions within the Western mainstream avant-garde.

In Australia Aboriginal art began to take off as a market commodity and to be included by curators in surveys of contemporary art. Internationally Russian avant-garde art began to be celebrated towards the end of the 80s when of the modest relaxation of control under glasnost began to make communications possible. It was clear that there was a growing appetite for difference of another kind to relieve the enervating repetition of the new.

Rubin�s exhibition Primitivism at MOMA in 1984 stimulated heated discussion about appropriation of tribal art by modern artists but it was not till 1989 that Jean-Hubert Martin really attempted to bring objects from different cultural sources together as contemporary art. Magiciennes de la Terre was a landmark exhibition. The thesis was that you could exhibit tribal and sacred art from other cultures along side western avant-garde practices by embracing it under the umbrella of spiritual commitment to the earth.

The fall out from this project has been extraordinary and we all know the arguments for and against Jean Hubert�s strategy. Because spiritual attachment to the earth is not an end normally embraced by conceptual art it seemed inappropriate to many, however it was an attempt to be inclusive and to find a cultural strategy to in some way contain the diversity. Art that had been subject to anthropological study now needed to be seen in the light of contemporary visual art theory. Some more acute artists and curators from the third world saw this as moving from one hegemony to another.

There is a critical issue here for the West; if objects created under different systems of belief could be included within the cannon of contemporary art we might no longer be able to understand art through a system of shared histories and theories. If this was to be the case, what was to become of all our art historical and theoretical scholarship? Some saw this as undermining their life's work while others revelled in the inevitable relativism that this would bring into our discourse.

In 1990 at the Venice Biennale there was a major conference organised by Arts International from NY where for 3 days we broke up into small groups of curators to discuss specific topics within the agenda of the expanded international as we called it then. My group included a curator from Benin, another from Cyprus one from Slovenia, a very senior US museum director and another leading US curator. It was a fascinating experience. At the end of each day we reconvened for plenary sessions where each group presented their findings and members of the audience responded.

I recall The Yugoslavian artist Braco Demitriejvic saying " The avant-garde is exhausted we are all tired, here is some fresh blood lets drink!" Vampirism was often referred to in anticipation of the market response to come. We were already seeing African exhibitions in the west, mostly based on Andre Magnin's, research for Jean-Hubert. I recall that we finally agreed that this was an interesting and urgent challenge but I am still not sure if we have lived up to that challenge.

I think there are still very good arguments to be made for recognising categorical differences between systems of signs and the weight of cultural traditions that inform our art. One of the bonuses of this new dispersed perspective has been to draw our attention to differences that exist within the cultures that have already been loosely integrated into modernism. Arte Povera for example carries a great deal of baggage from antique Greece and Rome as well as an interest in science and nature. Like wise Gutai and Monoha in Japan drew on ancient Japanese traditions.

Italy and Japan clearly navigated modernism and the avant-garde in their own ways but what would happen where modernism had never been part of the language and is not relevant to the cultural and spiritual source of the work? Aboriginal art has been adapted to work in a contemporary market context but its driving ethos is traditionally based on tribal practices where the meanings of the work are often sacred secrets not necessarily exchangeable, even between clans of aboriginal people. There are also complex sign systems in Voodun and other cults in West Africa that fundamentally inform readings of the work by those who make use of these traditions. Would such work have to be detached from its origins to participate in a wider community of ideas or could some third way be established that would exceed purely formal relations without falling back on spiritual claims? It has been suggested that Anthropology might be brought into the equation but this is not always popular with those who are emerging from a century or more when they were suitable objects for study. In my view the jury is still out on this issue.

Curatorial Strategies to accommodate diversity

Mexican Border photographed 1991 during Biennale research
It was against this background that I began work on Boundary Rider the 9th Biennale of Sydney. Sydney Biennale depends substantially on participating government's contributions to bring the artists and their work to Sydney. This typically restricts the ambition and scale of work that can be brought from developing countries or from places with no government infrastructure to support the arts. However I was determined to include as many artists not represented by the wealthy and traditional participants and had to find strategies to deal with the issues of difference outlined above and to avoid obvious demarcations between the haves and the have nots as well as to attempt some kind of rational for their inclusion.

I decided that if the spirit of place was found to embrace works that were incommensurable and set up false correlations perhaps politics might be a more coherent guide to my selection. It was after all a time of heightened political tension coming at the point when the cold war alignments were unravelling and economic realignment seemed inevitable. This was to be my underlying guide; however I needed an aesthetic or curatorial strategy to make sense of the diversity.

Put very briefly I employed two strategies; Material strategies by artists that related to bricollage and then juxtaposing works of differing levels of apparent sophistication or �finish� from both developed and developing countries. Dan Cameron noted the latter strategy when he developed his exhibition Raw and Cooked, Cocido y Crudo in 1994-5. It was no coincidence that we both drew on Levi Straus; this is in part an anthropological debate.

I decided to work as much as possible with artists who use found materials or other forms of cultural bricollage. In this way there would be a material consistency that might diffuse the technological divide while providing a shared language facilitated by the capacity for everyday objects to trigger memories and associations. For example Anselm Kiefer might have been one of the most celebrated artists of the day but his choice of poor material and rough finish might make the work open to aesthetic juxtaposition with works that were emerging from less known artists around the world.

The following slides demonstrate a few examples of how these strategies played out in practice. Bricollage as an artistic strategy and site specificity first
Ashley Bickerton Stylepiece headtrip 1992
Kamol Phaosavasdi Repercussions of Agriculture 1992
Phaosavasdi made a work critical of the process of modernisation concentrating on the pollution that is poisoning the once beautiful countryside and urban waterways of Thailand. Kamol used found objects to make his point including the rubber gloves provided to protect us from the poisoned earth.

Mladen Stilinovic Dead Optimism 1989-90
Like many artists emerging from the old soviet block Mladen looks back to the old avant-garde for inspiration rather than to an easy adaptation of everything capitalist or American. His installations take the form of Suprematist exhibitions but make use of found objects.

Doris Salcedo Los atrabiliarios 1990-92
Was in many ways the central figure of the exhibition for me. Her installation of Los Atrabilliarios depicts embodied memory as it addresses the dialectics of violence that have ruined her country of Colombia. It is a personal memorial that in a way breaks the silence imposed by the disappearance of villagers all over the country. The shoes of the disappeared are enclosed behind animal caul sewn into niches in the wall as a silent testimony of loss.

Dolly Nampajimpa DanielsUntitled (my place)1992
Dolly normally made dot paintings of the landscape but her main concern was working to improve the lot of her people. Through an interpreter I invited her to show us about her life - not in painting that would have been at odds with the prevailing strategies of the exhibition - but rather to find some way of bringing objects from her daily life that would convey her circumstances to the world.

After some Months Dolly called for a truck and loaded her home and transported it in its entirety to the Biennale. For some time she lived within the exhibition, playing cards and talking to the curious. It could not more clearly have shown the world the extraordinary conditions many Aboriginal people experience.

Jean-Hubert Martin of all people asked my if I thought it was really art, It was not a question I had even considered in the context of this exhibition, it was certainly in keeping with the artistic strategies outlined in the theme and it was one of the most articulate political expressions in the Biennale. Could it be a question of intentionality? Dolly certainly liked the outcome and subsequently repeated the exercise elsewhere. It was a significant curatorial intervention however It was my clear understanding from Dolly that she was more interested in getting social change than in showing paintings which she said were also a means to an end.

Here are some other artists whose work was site specific in different and sometimes complicated ways
Art Gallery fa�ade with Michiel Dolk
Art Gallery fa�ade with Hany Armanious,
Michiel Dolk placed two containers at the entrance to the gallery and he had other elements inside He was living in Mozambique in those days and the work ironically referenced dislocation and cultural exchange.

Armanious appeared with unexpected interventions throughout the Biennale in both major venues. The riders at the entrance to the Gallery became Clansmen.
Hany Armanious,
Hany Armanious,

Dan Wolgers,
Dan Wolgers,
I asked the Swedish artist Dan Wolgers if he would be interested to take a very challenging site as a problem for him to solve when he arrived. This appealed to him as I had expected it would this row of windows was the challenge it took him 3 days to come up with the solution which in effect was a very subtle and rich play on the theme of boundaries. By breaking all 360 panes of glass he drew attention to the fact that although this part of the show was outside the museum it was still a contained exhibiting space. Through the opaque glass we could now see beyond the museum to the world outside thereby rendering the boundary of the exhibition literally permeable.

BAW,
BAW,
These artists part from Mexico part from San Diego worked first with children on the border of Mexico to make much of the material for the installation in the Bond Store. They then worked for several weeks with children from Cabramatta where there was a significant installation by them recording stories of boatpeople there.

Pena/Fusco,
Pena/Fusco,
Guillermo Gomez Pena and Coco Fusco performed in the Australian Museum where they posed as previously unknown Indigenous Amazonian Indians discovered by or rather discovering the West. They lived in the cage for the first two weeks of the Biennale then we replaced their presence with a video of their interactions with the bemused audiences who came across them there.

Richard Wilson,
R. Melanie Counsell.
Counsell and Wilson both agreed to come and make site specific woirk in Sydney and I located them in the Bond Store. This was a space just outside the entrance to the exhibition. I sent them both detailed video tapes with verbal descriptions of the whole space. Richard moved the fire doors from the entrance to the exhibition and laboriously spent the next week carefully inscribing my words from the tape onto the doors. He made the point that my description just did not match the actual experience of the room.

Melanie decided to build a glass wall completely closing off the room I offered her making it seem as if it were an image of the space. By framing reality this way she made it somehow all the more strange.

Cocido y Crudo
In 1994 Dan Cameron presented his exhibition Cocido y Crudo..... He wrote in the catalogue:
"When it became clear that the interchange between multiple cultural positions was in fact the primary topic of this exhibition it was necessary to indicate as clearly as possible that an alternative was being proposed to the West's dichotomy of raw vs cooked, and that this alternative could be signalled through an attempt at dehierarchizing the point of view of the speaker. In other words, although reversing the order of the variables might assist in signalling our awareness of the dilemma created once any form of culture is relativised, it was not enough to indicate our wish that the contrast become defused, or that the variables actually be brought together. To achieve this, it has been necessary to eliminate the ingredient that has been cooked or left raw from the proposition, and concentrate instead on the activity involved.

....A certain ambiguity is created for the role of the artist as one who discovers and then recontextualises found materials, images, sources and situations. Is this a shamanic figure we are speaking of, or a kind of grand chef to the public? Or perhaps it means that the artist is the one who prefers to keep the distinction between the one who acts upon situations and the one who records and interprets those actions, as deliberately blurred as possible. Either way the title seems apt for incorporating a breadth of interpretive possibilities within its scope, and not limiting the viewer's imagination to a finite number of meanings.�

This strategy reflects the tendency in certain conceptual art practices since the 1960s to weaken the boundaries between the authorial voice and that of the interpreter, curator, and between studio, white cube/museum or other public space as both medium and content in artworks. It seems the Avant-Garde contained all the techniques for its dissolution or put more positively for a new way of adapting to difference.

Subsequent strategies
Several independent curators since then have elected to work with this situation to further loosen the definitions, blurring art and life both in the works selected but also in the design of exhibitions and the manipulation of site as content. Curators have directly collaborated with artists or created scenarios in which the role of the artist becomes ambiguous within a broader scheme devised by the curator and or architect.
I think it is fair to see these strategies as a continuation of the attempt to avoid the hegemonic aspect of western art history. Cities on the move may be a clear case in point. It had no fixed shape but changed as it toured. I saw it in London at the Hayward Gallery but they had goner out of their way to disrupt the logic of the building such as it is and to bring the street into the space which was further articulated temporally and aesthetically by the recycling of the props and furniture from the previous Fashion in Art exhibition.

Many of the projects designed to be inclusive such as the APT in Brisbane have favoured installation art, the use of found objects and new technologies. The exhibition strategy in Brisbane has been to have a very strong exhibition design and presentation that suppresses the appearance of difference. This has been critiqued as undue interference and even the emergence of installation art where none was to be found before has been put down as a curatorial intervention by Apinan Poshyananda.

New technologies have also appeared as a material solution to the problems of difference particularly the prevalence of documentary film - is its rise connected to the fact that it does not require the history of the avant-garde to interpret the work? Has it has been an interesting coincidence that these media have come to the fore during this interesting decade? They are certainly favoured by many artists from Africa, India and the Middle East; take the example of Documenta 11.

Documenta was criticised for being too documentary although it managed to be a beautiful and engaging experience, Okwui argues that documentary content is not mutually exclusive of aesthetic experience, indeed many would argue that empathy in documentary material is crucial to its effect and that this is usually tied to its aesthetic qualities. I cite the film makers Trin-ti-Mihn-Ha and Bimji as a cases in point.

Unfortunately not all curators seem able to achieve this balance and on occasion the attempt to de-centre authorial voices and engage audiences in a dialogue becomes little more than a belated illustration of late 1960s theories on the death of the author and the demise of individual practice and the denial of �quality� as being an elitist term, These issues are back on the agenda backed by the attempt to be inclusive which is itself good but more insidiously by the Creative Industries push! The Berlin Biennale manages to do all this. It does everything Okwui�s critics unfairly accused him of and if nothing else shows just how well made his exhibition was.

If such strategies are to prevail what of Thomas Messer's point made at Venice in 1990 �I have spent my life working within a historical and theoretical framework and see no reason to simply abandon that now!" Cameron argued in Raw and Cooked that this was a view that protected an increasingly obsolete privilege of the west, however simply finding ways to have cultures meet does not replace the valuable role of a common theoretical framework. I am still wondering how much we do need to abandon and whether a bundle of theories can be developed (and by whom?)