CLAIRE BISHOP'S REVIEW OF THE X HAVANA BIENAL

Any discussion of the Tenth Havana Bienal necessitates a brief recap of its particular history. In recent years it’s become a something of a cliché to lament the biennial as prime symptom of the art world’s increasing homogenisation. To visit the Tenth Havana Bienal, however, is to be confronted with an exception to this rule. This is partly due to Cuba’s unique situation as a country under economic blockade, enduring the final, disintegrating flourishes of state socialism. But it is also due to the specific remit of the Havana Bienal, which has since its inception asserted consciousness of centre-periphery relations and the need to establish an alternative model to the West. The first three biennials (1984, 1986, 1989) set out to promote dialogue across the Southern hemisphere – the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. As such it was the first international biennial to pay serious attention to the post-colonial theory and to reflect this in its selection of artists – a discourse that would become the norm, indeed the expectation, for most Western biennials after 1989. The early Havana biennials were also the first to support the exhibition with a conference – another innovation that would only later become current in the West a decade later. What this means historically, as Rafal Niemojewski has argued, is that the Havana Bienal arguably stands as the model for today’s discursive, transnational biennial – in contrast to Venice, which emerged from a nineteenth-century framework of the nation-state. (1) Yet although many of the characteristics of early Havana biennials have been absorbed by the Western model, there remain important differences that continue to reflect the anti-hegemonic attitude of the island...

(1) Rafal Niemojewski, The rise of the contemporary biennial: a new topography for the contemporary art world, forthcoming PhD, Royal College of Art, London.

*read more at http://clairebishopresearch.blogspot.com/
**The full review will appear in Artforum, Summer 2009.

CLAIRE AND PABLO STAY THE NIGHT AT MOTEL GUGGENHEIM

Philip Parreno's entrance


Angela Bulloch's ceiling


Maurizio Cattelan's Pinochio, after jumping down the atrium



Carsten Holler's 'Revolving Hotel Room'


Liam Gillick's sign and Angela Bulloch's light sculptures


Claire brushing her teeth next to Angela Bulloch's light sculptures



Rirkrit Tiravanija's cinema of censored films




Jorge Pardo's partition walls


Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's 'Panorama', empty space filled with the sound of rain






Rirkrit Tiravanija's lounge with video portraits of the artists


Pablo and Guggenheim's security



Claire and Pablo in bed



breakfast in bed


next day outside...


theanyspacewhatever
Guggenheim New York
October 24, 2008–January 7, 2009
Organized by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator.

During the 1990s, a number of artists claimed the exhibition itself as a medium. Working independently and in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the discrete aesthetic object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding in its physical and temporal parameters. For these artists, an exhibition can be a film, a novel, a shared meal, a social space, a performance, or a journey. Using the museum as a platform for projects that reach beyond the visual arts, their work often commingles with disciplines such as architecture, design, and theater, engaging directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life to offer subtle moments of transformation.

The Guggenheim’s exhibition, theanyspacewhatever, brings together 10 artists who exemplify this creative impulse: Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. While these artists all employ markedly different aesthetic strategies and do not constitute a formally affiliated group, their varying practices are conceptually unified by a desire to shift the terms of artistic practice beyond mimetic representation, and in doing so engender a kind of activated spectatorship. Invited to collectively formulate a scenario for an exhibition, they determined, in discussion with Nancy Spector, Chief Curator, that the presentation should comprise a series of individual projects that intersect and overlap in the museum’s spiraling rotunda. This layered installation thus reflects the dialectic between the group and the individual that informs their shared histories.

*****

About Carsten Holler's Project for people to sleep for a night in his bed at the Guggenheim:

From October 25 through January 6, guests can reserve an overnight stay in Revolving Hotel Room, a work of art created by artist Carsten Höller, at the Guggenheim Museum. Höller's fully functioning hotel room invites visitors to spend the night in the museum's rotunda on four slow-turning discs equipped with comfortable sleeping, dressing, and working areas. Members of the public can reserve the room for one night each and enjoy a leisurely private viewing of the entire exhibition at any point during their stay.

Revolving Hotel Room is an art installation comprising three outfitted, superimposed turning glass discs mounted onto a fourth disc that all turn harmoniously at a very slow speed. During the day the hotel room will be on view as part of the Guggenheim’s theanyspacewhatever exhibition, which runs from October 24, 2008–January 7, 2009. At night, the art installation becomes an operative hotel room outfitted with luxury amenities.

Offer is subject to availability. Rates do not include taxes, gratuities, or incidental charges. Stay may only include one night. Limit one night per person. A maximum of two people per night.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/past/exhibit/1896

'DOUBLE AGENT' AT BALTIC NEWCASTLE

Phil Collins, 'You'll Never Work in This Town Again', slapped art figures (Claire Bishop and Francesco Manacorda)


Phil Collins, 'You'll Never Work in This Town Again', slapped art figures (Vicky Hughes and Mark Sladen)

DOUBLE AGENT
21 May - 17 August 2008

Artists: Pawel Althamer / Nowolipie Group, Phil Collins, Dora García, Donelle Woolford, Christoph Schlingensief, Barbara Visser and Artur Zmijewski

Double Agent has been curated by Claire Bishop (Assistant Professor of History of Art at Warwick University) and Mark Sladen (Director of Exhibitions, ICA).

Double Agent is a group exhibition featuring artists who use other people as a medium. All of the works raise questions of performance and authorship, and in particular the issues that arise when the artist is no longer the central agent in his or her own work, but operates through a range of individuals, communities and surrogates.

The show contains works in a variety of media, including video and live performance – works which are often slippery in meaning or disquieting in effect. The exhibition tours to three venues in the UK, and includes the British premieres of a number of significant works, as well as new commissions specific to each venue.

Double Agent Tour dates

Institute of Contemporary Arts, London: 14 February – 6 April 2008

Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick : 26 April – 28 June 2008

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead: 21 May – 17 Aug 2008

http://www.balticmill.com