It is easy to feel trolled by the Ninth Berlin Biennale. The show, which is organised by the New York-based DIS collective (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro), is a belated conclave for several attitudes that are more affiliated socially than they are intellectually and that began proliferating on either side of the Atlantic at the turn of the decade.
After sorting through the artists that the New York collective has assembled into a deadlocked congress of corporate anthropologists, fashion hangers-on, low-rent philosophers, anxious leftists and media theorists, one might generously distil the biennial’s essence as a rejection of critique in favour of an extracurricular, exacerbated presentism. Extracurricular because, as the curators put it in a recent interview, the biennial is “not about objects, or about luxury, or about the ‘inside’ world of art,” and exacerbated because they instead conceive of “DIS as [a] space in which ideas and value systems are not overtly analysed or critiqued but re-presented in their most heightened configuration.”
There are two fundamental problems with this position. The first is that it rehearses an illusory, if historically familiar, exit of art from art, in favor of a non-existent “outside.” This approach forgets that “we can’t get outside of ourselves,” to borrow Andrea Fraser’s formulation in From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique (2005). The second problem is that DIS’s task of reflecting the present by exacerbation, or “re-presenting,” is itself an expository procedure beholden to forms of specialised knowledge—precisely the kind of knowledge DIS disavows. As Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Farnholtz of the German Federal Cultural Foundation aptly describe them in the catalogue’s preface, the members of DIS are “experts in not wishing to claim expertise.”
And so their plan to embody and exacerbate the present (DIS calls our period “post-contemporary”) is a funeral with neither corpse nor mourners: the curators deliver, under the sign of a provocative “re-presentation” without expertise, an ultimately inaccurate, homogenised and universalist account of what our epoch entails, such that their embodied present is virtually meaningless. It offers none of the stimulation they wish for. More troubling still, the biennial’s assumption of address perpetuates the neoliberal fiction of a reactive public primed to respond to the excesses of the present.
The result of this amalgam is that the handful of important works in the Berlin Biennale are lost in a conceptually unmoored exhibition veneered by easy-outrage, media-oriented provocations. Visitors to the exhibition’s spiritual home at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art are greeted in the courtyard by Juan Sebastián Peláez’s Ewaipanoma (Rihanna) (2016), a giant, headless cutout of the singer Rihanna wearing a bikini, her cheery visage superimposed on her glistening sternum. Upon entering the building, a stripper-pole accentuated installation (Privilege, 2016) features inane Snapchat footage shot by “selfie” feminist Amalia Ulman. At the Akademie der Künste, the show’s other major venue, one of Anna Uddenberg’s sculptures depicts a woman taking a picture of her posterior with a selfie stick—one of two such gauche prosthetics to appear in works at the biennial (the other features in a sculpture of found objects by Guan Xiao at the Feuerle Collection).
This low-stakes antagonism finds its apotheosis in Nicolás Fernández’s Everything needs its own absence, (2014-15), which, DIS is eager to point out, is the biennial’s “only traditional oil painting.” That this piece of trivia seems significant to them suggests a stunted understanding of where art is relative to its history, and what the terms of engagement with that history might be in the face of the globalised, late-capitalist present that they invoke at every opportunity. As curators, DIS correctly identify art’s urgent need to adapt itself to the vertiginous effects of our time, but they seem unable or unwilling to put forth any kind of coherent framework for such an engagement. Instead, they consider universal the highly specific conditions of their present and offer generic, quasi-avant-gardist reactions to millennial bourgeois affectations (organic juice, physical exercise, social media, start-up culture).
Nowhere is this more evident than in the biennial's scatterbrained catalogue. After riffing on some pop signifiers—SoulCycle, TED talks, Donald Trump, Shakira and Michael Jackson, to name a few—in their characteristically vapid style, DIS delivers in the catalogue’s introduction the closest thing to a précis for their project’s intended purpose. “Our proposition is simple: Instead of holding talks on anxiety, let’s make people anxious," they write. "Rather than organizing symposia on privacy, let’s jeopardize it.”
Since DIS positions their project as a form of address to the public, the absence of the actual parameters of this public is a devastating omission. They instead offer an indeterminately universal “people.” The presumption of address to an expanded, non-art public is central to DIS’s claimed pivot away from the “inside” of art, yet this audience is left entirely undeveloped in their actual project.
The apotropaic invocation of a spectral “public” is a hallmark of post-democratic neoliberal governance — democracy without a demos. Though DIS professes to react to the conditions of the neoliberal instrumentalisation of art and its alleged public, their escape itself enacts art’s ideological function as a space for the accumulation and assimilation of false alternatives in the name of an obviated public sphere.
“Contemporary international exhibitions, biennials, and events such as Documenta and Manifesta primarily address the general public, not the collectors of art,” Boris Groys dubiously asserts in one of two essays in the catalogue that deal exclusively with artistic production and exhibition-making. He continues: “And these exhibitions are conceived by their curators as vehicles for sending universal messages in the name of international art… The world of art should therefore not be ashamed of the bureaucratic structures and institutions that channel this public appeal.”
For Groys, as for DIS, such a will to universality is made ideologically palatable by portraying it as a necessary reaction to the exigencies of the present. In this convenient thinking, any engagement with the conditions governing art’s putative right to universal address amounts to petty cynicism. "We feel consumed by individualism staged in the face of the utter powerlessness of the individual in the age of the Anthropocene and big data," DIS's Lauren Boyle explained at a press conference in February. But it is well understood that the effects of climate change and “big data” are experienced asynchronously and heterogeneously throughout Western societies, to say nothing of the world at large.
Older styles of reckoning with art’s institutional nature may justifiably seem parochial and insufficient in the face of contemporary challenges. But doing away with critique altogether risks misdiagnosing both the conditions of the present and art’s capacity to respond to it, paving the way for blinkered exacerbation—art as pure flavour. For biennial artist Sean Raspet—who works for Soylent, Silicon Valley’s SlimFast, and who contributed an edition of the product to be bundled with the catalogue—art is indeed “a little extra je ne sais quoi to eventually be reabsorbed into our metabolic processes.”
(Such a position imbues the biennial’s most directly “political” work—a music video about the European migrant crisis by Halil Altındere, starring a Syrian-born rapper who came to Berlin as a refugee—with an unsavory flavour because its expression of marginal subjectivity is recast as empty aesthetic calories.)
Fortunately, several artists in the biennial escape DIS’s limitations to offer a productive engagement with the present’s unique conditions of power and image. In their installation at the Feuerle Collection, for example, the artist duo Korpys/Löffler present a work made of crisp footage shot in the European Central Bank building in Frankfurt designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, “a once radical, avant-garde architectural firm,” along with grainy, Super 8 documentation of the chaotic and ineffectual Blockupy anti-capitalist protests of 2015.
Hito Steyerl, in a two-part video installation screened in the basement of the Akademie der Künste, links geopolitics and aesthetic technologies, from drones to architectural rendering. Upstairs, Christopher Kulendran Thomas astutely connects the Sri Lankan contemporary art boom that followed the country’s brutal suppression of the Tamil Tigers with Silicon Valley globalism’s promise of “stateless” culture in New Eelam (2016), an installation that houses a speculative startup proposal in a corporate environment containing contemporary artworks purchased from Sri Lankan galleries.
Surpassing the biennial’s limitations, these three artists do not shirk away from the imbrication of art into the apparatus of spectacle and control, nor do they propose a kind of facile critique. They meet the treachery of the present unflinchingly, without ignoring their work’s irreducible institutionality as art. For that is perhaps the one negotiation art, even as it subverts its own historical character, is incapable of performing. The terms of the present require a reevaluation of art’s purchase on politics, but attempts at extracting art from itself—of extruding it as universal or as infinitely mutable—are more liable to emerge from the neoliberal playbook than expose it.
Ninth Berlin Biennale, various venues, until 18 September