Band of Outsiders

Art in America, April, 2000 by Christopher Phillips

Taking place in the aftermath of a calamitous earthquake, the recent Istanbul Biennial emphasized low-key, inward-looking art works

Seldom has a major exhibition seemed so hostage to circumstance as the Sixth Istanbul Biennial. Four weeks before the biennial's scheduled opening last fall, a devastating earthquake throwing the country into crisis. Nearly, 20,000 stunned survivors found themselves without food or shelter. As Turkish and international relief teams pulled bodies from the rubble and began to erect tent cities, deadly aftershocks continued claiming lives right up to the biennial's opening days.

The earthquake presented the biennial's organizing body, the Istanbul Foundation for Art and Culture, with a crisis of its own. Several key biennial sponsors announced that they would with-draw their promised contributions, directed to emergency relief efforts. As a result, a frantic last-minute round of biennial fund-raising had to be undertaken. Only because the Norton Family Foundation and others came to the rescue was the exhibition able to open on schedule. Its problems did not end there, however.

Although the quake left few visible traces on central Istanbul, visitors arriving for the biennial's launch found that the catastrophe cast an inescapable shadow. Turkish press and TV reports were dominated each day by harrowing tales of those who had lost everything--family, friends and possessions. I heard nightmarish accounts of the scene at the quake's epicenter, about 150 miles away, from the local as well as visiting artists who had volunteered to transport food and medical supplies there.[1] The Istanbul residents with whom I spoke were all eager to talk of the ways in which the quake had dramatically altered their lives; every discussion, it seemed, was filled with metaphors having to do with fissures, fault lines, upheavals and tectonic shifts. People talked of being prey to constant feeling of anxiety, and of being haunted by a sense of the futility of making long-term plans when the ground might literally open up at any moment. I encountered, too, widespread indignation at the Turkish government's fumbling response to the disaster, as well as seething anger at the official corruption that had allowed countless dwellings to be built of substandard concrete, which had precipitously crumbled with the first violent tremor.

Such were the powerful currents of private and public emotion that preoccupied Istanbul during the week of the biennial's debut, and they helped to determine the decidedly mixed initial reaction that it encountered. Months before the show's opening, its curator, Paolo, Colombo, director of the Centre d'art contemporain in Geneva, had made clear that his would be a biennial favoring esthetic over worldly concerns, whose touchstone would be "poetic catharsis rather than pragmatic solutions to political and social problems."[2] The potential problem with this approach became apparent only in the quake's aftermath. An early warning sign was the exhibition's official poster, which showed a happy clown (Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone) sleeping contentedly on the ocean floor. Meant to introduce the idea of the artist as a visionary outsider cut off from the concerns of the everyday world, that insouciant poster seemed jarringly inappropriate at a moment of national trauma.

Even though it was quickly announced that all of the biennial's admission proceeds would be donated to ongoing relief operations, and despite the fact that a benefit auction of art works by the show's participants raised over $200,000 for humanitarian aid, there were many who felt that the exhibition ought simply to have been canceled, as had most of the country's other fall cultural events. In a review laced with bitter reproach, German critic Sabine Vogel wrote that at a time when all of Turkey's resources were needed to assist disaster victims, an exhibition emphasizing private artistic obsessions could only be regarded as an "obscene luxury."[3]

The exhibition's organizers countered that it was precisely the bleakness of the occasion that made art seem, more than ever, a necessity. Nevertheless, with real-world tumult providing the biennial's unavoidable back-drop, it proved extremely difficult to get a true fix on the exhibition itself, which had been planned by Colombo with the far less dramatic oscillations of the contemporary art world in mind.

In an effort to distinguish the 1999 Istanbul Biennial from those of his immediate predecessors Rosa Martinez and Rene Block, and to set it apart from the host of competing events that have sprouted around the world, Colombo took two calculated risks. With extravagant new-media and installation works having dominated so many recent biennials, he claimed to detect a swing in the opposite direction, toward what he called a new "skepticism about overtly assertive artistic gesture."[4] In practice, this led him to fashion an exhibition with an unusually subdued and scaled-back look, in which relatively self-contained works in such familar mediums as painting, drawing, photography and video held center stage. Equally telling was the fact that the specific works he chose for the biennial were more likely to involve moody expressions of individual emotion than explorations of urgent social issues.