Manifesta 4: defining Europe? Acting more as facilitators than as curatorial stars, the organizers of last summer's Manifesta created an experimental visual forum—with mixed results - Report From Frankfurt

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Susan Snodgrass

The fourth and latest edition of Manifesta, the itinerant pan-European biennial, took place this summer in Frankfurt, Germany. Capitalizing on its temporal overlap with and geographic proximity to Documenta XI in Kassel, Manifesta 4 achieved greater visibility than previous installments, yet still remained overshadowed by its well-known forebear on the international exhibition circuit. Nonetheless, this year's presentation offered an important alternative to the high production values of Documenta, which, in my view, once again favored established artists and curatorial practices, despite organizers' statements to the contrary. Since its origin in 1993, Manifesta has sought, with, varying degrees of success, to represent Europe, including the former East Bloc countries, as it has evolved since the fall of the Berlin Wall, while showcasing emerging artists and new artistic developments within this entire geopolitical region.

Avoiding the pitfalls of the last Manifesta, whose imposing theme, "Borderline Syndrome," proved rather problematic [see A.i.A., Nov. '00], Manifesta 4 proclaimed no overriding premise. Neither was it simply another survey of contemporary European art. Instead, co-curators Iara Boubnova, Nuria Enguita Mayo and Stephanie Moisdon-Trembley established what critic-curator Jochen Volz, in his contribution to the catalogue, declares a curatorial system of "radical transparency." The intention was that traditional institutional and curatorial structures should give way to more organic processes centered on dialogue and community exchange, practices whose tenets align more readily with various public or "new genre" art models. Thus, the co-curators assumed the role of facilitators, rather than curator-superstars, mediating between the artists and the city of Frankfurt. The result was mixed, but closer to what I think Manifesta should be--an alternative forum for artistic and curatorial experimentation.

By their decision to abdicate strong artistic control, the organizers produced an exhibition that was often physically and conceptually disjunctive, so that viewers were left to create their own sense of its meaning and overall shape. However, this process of discussion, intervention and negotiation allowed many works to germinate in dialogue with the host venues, which included, in addition to various public, nonart sites, the Frankfurter Kunstverein and the outdoor spaces of the nearby Schirn Kunsthalle, both just off the Romerberg, the city's historic center; Portikus, a former library and more recently an exhibition space near the north bank of the River Main; the Frankensteiner Hof, a renovated water-processing plant on the south bank of the river; and the nearby historic Stadel Art Institute and Municipal Gallery, in the district of Sachsenhausen. It also enabled artists to develop their own subjects in relationship to the city itself. Frankfurt, Germany's fifth largest city, is home to the European Central Bank and is a major transportation hub for Europe. What emerged within the exhibition, then, were several intersecting themes--urbanism, public space, travel, immigration and civic responsibility--often explored within the shifting framework of local or global identity.

These themes provided the exhibition with some unity, and were explored in a variety of ways by the approximately 90 artists and collaboratives who participated. Painting, as in 2000, was almost absent. One of two exceptions was Icelandic artist Anna Gudmundsdottir's mural installation created for a second-floor rotunda space of the Stadel Art Institute. Images from science, art, politics and religion were rendered in bold black outlines against painted expanses of peach and gray; the work's partial success was due more to its eye-catching size than to its painterly execution.

Like most contemporary biennials, Manifesta 4 was dominated by new media and video. The curators must be applauded, however, for the presentation of the video program, which consisted of works that were separate from the video-based installations on view within the various venues (although the logic behind which projects were presented where was never really clear). Instead of the usual series of curtained black booths, the setup featured eight screens suspended from the ceiling of a darkened gallery of the Stadel. On entering, viewers were given headsets that played the audio track for the monitor of their choosing when they approached the screen. The videos running on each monitor were organized around a particular topic--the most interesting of these being European youth. Polish artist Artur Zmijewski's Singing Lesson (2001), for example, shows a choir of deaf teens singing parts of Jan Maklakiewicz's Polish Mass to very moving effect.

Information and Intervention vs. Objecthood

The curator's methodology of "radical transparency" was echoed in several projects that served as centers of communication and information-sharing, tasks for which they proved to be far better suited than the catalogue, which reads like a spate of e-mail exchanges rather than real conversations or essays. French artist Mathieu Mercier designed the Manifesta 4 Archive in a gallery of the Kunstverein, where textual, audio and visual documentation of the artists whom the curators considered including in the exhibition was displayed for public use. A series of sleek, black wood modules housed information fries on all the artists, those ultimately accepted for Manifesta and those who were not, and these modules were arranged in various semicircular configurations, alongside umbrellalike fluorescent lamps and several computer stations. By these means, Mercier transformed the gallery into an active site for learning and exchange, simultaneously offering a postmodern view of visuality that conflates ephemerality and objecthood, producer and user. Ironically, the supposedly transparent nature of Mercier's project still failed to reveal the curators' criteria for ultimately including some artists while excluding others. Such conundrums seemed to abound at Manifesta, where theory and practice were often only loosely related.