Street life: the fourth Berlin Biennial drew on the complex history of a single street, and on art of the past 30 years, to provide a rich context for new work by an international roster of artists

Art in America, Oct, 2006 by Richard Kalina

This Biennial was clearly a serious affair, but one irresistible bit of foolishness was included. The curators dubbed a very modest street-level gallery space, which they used as a venue for a series of changing group exhibitions, the Gagosian Gallery Berlin. Their venture was wholly unauthorized, an appropriation of a brand name. Apparently the real Gagosian was amused and did not object. There are echoes here of the curatorial trio's defunct Wrong Gallery, an inoperable glass doorway on West 20th Street in New York with what looked like a functioning gallery behind, though in fact there were only a couple of square feet of floor space. (There was, for a time, a Will Return sign--an artwork by Jamie Isenstein--with a clock set a quarter of an hour fast.) The Wrong Gallery resided in Chelsea from 2002-05 and is now at the Tate Modern in London.

A number of publications and activities preceded the Biennial proper, among them the opening of the Gagosian Gallery Berlin in September 2005. It ceased operation at the end of the Biennial's run. "Homework," the show it had up when I visited, had a vaguely domestic agenda. The work on display, for example a fake potted plant fashioned by Peter Rosel from pieces of German police uniforms and other items of clothing, was professional and nicely made but decidedly not big-time--scarcely the blue chip material that one would find at any of the legitimate Gagosian locations.

Biennials and triennials are common enough these days, and you need something special to have yours stand out in the crowd. Berlin's Biennial is a fairly new entry in the field, and its fourth round had a lot going for it. The curators did some real digging and did not favor the latest crop of young talent, the local artistic power structure or the high-end international art-star crowd. It was good to see, for example, a contribution from the eccentric and always interesting Bay Area artist Bruce Conner, along with such other '70s work as Christopher Knowles's compulsively typed lists and Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's Evidence (1977/2001), which culled odd and disturbing photographs from the archives of corporations, research institutes, government agencies and police departments, and presented them, uncaptioned and unexplained, in a deadpan way.

The well-seasoned curatorial team worked to create an exhibition that amounted to an artwork in itself. (Cattelan, well known for such provocations as the life-size sculpture of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite, was not represented as a sculptor in this Biennial.) They were helped, in no small part, by the political, social, historical and artistic complexity of the city of Berlin itself. To be sure, some of the curatorial rhetoric in the catalogue was overheated, and some of the artwork seemed well intentioned but thin. As a whole, though, the exhibition provided not just a chance to look at engaging art, but also a means to take the measure, in a way that only art can do, of an important city still in the midst of change and consolidation.