Biennale gamble: doubling down: spawned by a curatorial feud, two international biennials now vie for viewer attention in the Czech capital

Is there a glut of international art biennials? More than 50--an average of one every two weeks--now operate across the globe, many in places where the desire for tourism and critical validation far outstrips day-to-day support for local artists. Veterans of the circuit, who sometimes lament that keeping up with the rotation is a full-time job in itself, confront a new complication this season, as the city of Prague (population just 1.2 million) hosts not one but two concurrent, fiercely competing biennials, both running through mid-September. Far from being a result of Czech national pride or global marketing imperatives--South Korea, after all, currently sustains five such events every two years--this face-off is a matter of personal acrimony translated into cultural combat.

Two years ago, the Prague Biennale was cofounded by Giancarlo Politi, editor and publisher of Milan-based Flash Art magazine, and his longtime friend Milan Knizak, director of the National Gallery in Prague. By Politi's account (which zipped around the Internet last spring in highly vituperative e-mails addressed to many art-world professionals), the Italian critic-curator and his Czech-born co-publisher and wife, Helena Kontova, originated the 2003 biennial plan, and went to Knizak for curatorial input and access to exhibition space in the National Gallery. Bitter disputes soon erupted, encompassing artist selections, biennial staffing, gate receipts, and even postage and electric bills. Consequently, each of the two principals decided to head his own biennial this time around.

Neither 2005 show is a totally autocratic affair, however. Knizak, working with Tomas Vlcek, director of the collection of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery, assembled an international advisory board consisting of Robert Fitzpatrick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; David Joselit, professor of art history at Yale; and Maria Anna Potocka, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cracow. This five-member team in turn chose 31 project curators (including Knizak and Vlcek) to present groups of artists and performers. The International Biennale of Contemporary Art (IBCA) thus grew to encompass works by nearly 400 participants at three major venues: Veletrzni Palace (as the National Gallery's modern building is known), Kinsky Palace on the city's central square, and the medieval Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia. Official sanction--and considerable government funding--is signaled by the imprimaturs of the president of the Czech Republic, the national minister of culture and the mayor of Prague.

Across town, in a disused factory building called Karlin Hall, Politi and Kontova present the work of 200 artists, organized into 12 major sections with the aid of 14 curators and 16 curatorial advisers. Supported by corporations and foreign government sources, the Prague Biennale 2 is endorsed in a four-sentence catalogue preface by former Czech president Vaclav Havel. Both shows entail a plethora of experimental dance, theater and music performances.

For all their differences, the two surveys share one critical quirk--that of ignoring vast portions of the globe. Australia and most East Asian countries, except for now-fashionable China, are absent. Politi's exhibition also excludes the U.S., while Knizak's gives it only token attention in a six-artist section organized by Chicago curator Lynne Warren.

At the IBCA

Balkanized as any show of 31 separate curatorial ventures must be, the IBCA nevertheless has a certain organizational coherence derived, perhaps, from Vlcek's avowal in conversation that "not every place, not every show, can be first tier." ... And that's OK, as Stewart Smalley used to say on "Saturday Night Live." There truly is something refreshing about a roster of curators and artists who are not the usual international-circuit darlings. Emphasis on Central and Eastern European sources--what is happening on the Romanian art scene these days?--partially redresses the usual geographic imbalance. And the event's titular theme, "A Second Sight," nicely puns on the organizers' resolve to take a second look, beyond the media limelight, for work that might yield unexpected insights.

The results, naturally, are mixed--particularly at Veletrzni Palace. Section curator Lu Jie, attempting to put China's recent folk- and tradition-based work on an equal footing with Western-influenced experimental art, includes a few portraits by Li Tianbing, a 71-year-old itinerant photographer who works with vintage equipment in the remote villages of his native Fujian Province. Unfortunately, these examples offer no evidence that Li can create a compelling image. Wang Wei, meanwhile, the most avant-garde of Lu Jie's 12 picks, makes one of the strongest impressions in the entire IBCA with his video and light-box photos of bricklayers who first erect and then dismantle a small building within the close confines of another structure. One of Qin Ga's color photographs, from a series of 14 chronicling the successive inscription of place names onto a map of China tattooed on the artist's back (thereby marking his colleagues' partial retracing of Mao's 1934-35 Long March), has become an informal logo for the IBCA itself.