On the Crisis of Public Space in the Twentieth Century

Research on urban space makes attempts to go beyond the current polarizing discussion of its future (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225) that, on one hand, highlights the negative aspects of downtowns' loss of civic purpose, social centrality, surveillance-free spaces, non-commercial festivities, and local cultural establishments while, on the other hand, celebrating an increase in urban diversity, urban uses, everyday appeal, and public optimism with regard to city cores (Breuer 2003b; Selle 2002). To avoid the pitfalls of proclaiming either a devaluation or a renaissance of public spaces (Breuer 2003a), it is worthwhile to bring an empirical, historical, and theoretical analysis to bear on this topic (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225). However, understanding of urban space presupposes forming a consensus over their functions, such as transport and transit accessibility, trade and market infrastructures, political and public representation, and leisure and entertainment qualities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225). It appears, furthermore, that the public space of modern cities, considered from the point of view of cultural and aesthetic experience (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225-226), is primarily defined by works of Walter Benjamin (1980) and Siegfried Kracauer (1987) that reach back to Baudelaire's city flaneur, Poe's urban crowd, and Simmel's blasé attitude that capture the attraction, tempo, and diversity of urban life.

Among the factors that have historically created urban space in its modern form are the technical innovations behind the gas and, later, electric street lighting that, although predated by similar attempts since the 17th, took hold in the 19th century, when the brightly lit urban nightlife became commonplace (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 226). Through artificial lighting, the nightlife of metropolitan cities has been able to turn its previously less explored darker as well as brighter sides to both experience and representation, as its pleasures (Schloer 1994), fascinations (Benjamin 1988), and insecurities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 226-227) found their depiction in literature and painting. The figure of flaneur stepping unto the urban scene in the 19th century might hark back to comparable periods of flourishing culture and economy (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227), such as Greek city-states where Socrates would entertain a comparable relation to urban space (Benjamin 1980: 247). It is these forms of access to urban space that flaneur typifies that, according to critical accounts of the transformations befalling public spaces of cities, become extinct under the influences of commercialization, privatization, and standardization that make the unfamiliar, foreign and different rare that call for a reorientation of analysis of urban experience (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227).

Even though the notion of public sphere (Habermas 1971: 8) has been ideal-typically connected to the forms of public space characteristic of Greek or Roman antiquity (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227), the advent of democratic forms of governance has obviated any obvious connections between public space (Flierl 2002: 18) and urban society in favour of local and supra-local interest groups that configure the relations between political transparency, public involvement and modern state to bring a fundamental structural change about (Bahrdt 1961). From an historical perspective, an urban public sphere always deviated from its ideal type so that public space has been constituted as much through its inclusive effects on ancient slave-holders, medieval guild-members, independent male citizens, political client groups, totalitarian party-members, and democratically elected parties (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227-228), as through those of exclusion on correspondingly disenfranchised groups, such as women and workers in the 19th century and homeless, drug-addicts and immigrant youth presently (Siebel 2003: 252). In this respect, exemplary urban projects, such as Humboldt Forum for World Cultures in Berlin, serve as focal points for symbolic struggles among various interest groups for appropriation, instrumentalization and functionalization of public space that characterize urban change, crises, and discontinuities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 228).

In Germany, the 1920s of the Weimar republic saw attempts to re-shape public space into an architectural crowning achievement of the democratic break with the class-divided past standing in stark contrast to socialist conception of community oriented edifices of theatre, library or concert hall that held the urban space around them culturally together (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 228). In Berlin, where such projects failed to materialize during the years of Weimar democracy (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229), the surroundings of the Parliament [Reichstag] building not far from the riverbanks of Spree did continue to inspire visions of how through a public forum construction the relations between exemplary architecture, urban space and democratic government could be changed through their radically new visualization (Nerdinger 1993: 30). The rarity of the success with which urban visions of community oriented public sphere could meet, such as collectively-minded plans for inner yards and urban quarters in Vienna, Berlin or Frankfurt (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229), indicates the limits and crises of architectural re-interpretation of urban space in response to social, cultural and economic problems of metropolitan centers. The political confrontations and economic crises of the Weimar republic also put their stamp on its urban spaces, as the carousing and revelry of big cities neighbored with street fights among political antagonists (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229).

In Nazi-Germany, the exclusion of Jewish citizens from the public sphere was followed by total prevention of their access to urban space that was planned to be transformed around the concept of totalitarian cities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229-230) where urban cores, central axes, and open space were aimed to be instrumentalized in accord with imperialist claims to power and domination that where channeled into monumental architecture and overpowering shows, lighting techniques and mass processions, and intensive choreography of public participation (Brockhaus 1997: 58). After the WWII, the reconstruction in East-Germany has developed a relation to city centers and main avenues that, unconstrained by real estate profit considerations, was oriented to the welfare of city dwellers (Durth/Duewel/Gutschow 1998), while borrowing its planing models from Moscow, as a communist forerunner-city (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 230-231). In East-German cities, the city-planning principles pushed mixed use and multiple cores aside in favour of concentrating in city centers the functions of government, culture, and politics within a hierarchical structure of urban space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231). In these cities, along with the satisfaction of functions of work, residence, recreation, and transport, urban spaces had to meet the needs for demonstrations laying a party-controlled claim to city centers and squares that also registered the crises in political relations, such as repressions of people's protest on May 17, 1953 (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231).

West-Berlin, by contrast, seeking to escape the pre-WWII monotony of tenement-construction, oriented itself to models of garden city that shortly gained upper hand in the late 1940s and 1950s, as reconstruction efforts created urban landscapes loosely put together out of open spaces that, as in Berlin's Hansa city-quarter, scattered stand-alone architectural structures across park-like areas north of Tiergarten (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231-232). In the 1960s, the modernizing transformation of German cities gave way to the imperatives of highway-construction that serving a booming car-owning population (Suedbeck 1993: 171) cut through urban quarters and city squares in a widely criticized turn away from post-war principles of city-planning (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232). As the domination of city structure by transportation lanes started to hurt the revenues of shopping districts, first urban areas reserved for pedestrians started to be established, even though the urban qualities of the historical shopping arcades were lost, as suburbs grew hand in hand with historical restoration in city-centers (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232). However, tendency to put higher value on urban density has led not only to formation of urban spaces in city centers that offered little more than shopping opportunities but also to convergence in urban structures in East and West Germany (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232).

As in the 1970s the re-orientation away from the extensive and large scale urban growth towards inner cities and urban fringes has become increasingly pronounced, the European movement for urban heritage preservation expanded from Bologna, that spear-headed it, to Germany (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232-233), where the rediscovery of historical urban quarters and architecture has come under criticism for the risk it courted of being generically functionalized for the competitive purposes of unique identity creation, aesthetic image making, and urban spectacle generation (Durth 1987). That urban revitalization hardly ameliorates social polarization, has a checkered success record, and seeks to elide quarters and areas lacking in visual appeal has been in the focus of critical attention since the late 1980s (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 233-234), as sprouting new museums, shopping malls, and postmodern skyscrapers put their spectacular qualities to the functional use of urban memory, history and locality (Durth 1987: 163). The economic crisis that cities seek to offset with festivals and promotion has its roots in the loss of relevance and function of urban cores (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234) that become marginalized through development of transport, communication and decentralization making other forms of planned and arbitrary urbanization possible (Haeussermann 1998: 80).

Booming in Germany, suburban shopping centers attract purchasing power away from smaller retail outlets of inner cities that facing massive emptying out become increasingly protected through regulation against urban sprawl (Popp 2002), receive growing attention in urban development plans, and provide incentives for downtown shopping malls without, however, reversing the trends of profile and identity loss of urban centers (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234). Despite the fears that a growing role of information, globalization and communication would lead to further decline of cities (Cairncross 1997), distance-contracting global networks bring urban deindustrialization and restructuring to bear on the renewed importance of urban space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234-235) that regains relevance under the changed circumstances of information economy where cities become sites of recentralization that depends on tacit, place-bound, and complex knowledge emergently finding its concentration in metropolitan inner cities (Laepple 2003: 19). A complex and contradictory change that public space goes through demands an analysis that goes beyond descriptive categories of crisis, such as privatization, surveillance and security, for which shopping malls, entertainment centers train terminals and airports serve as prime examples, in order to capture the emergent balance between public and private spaces that defines anew contemporary urban culture (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235).

Indeed, in Germany the oft decried tendency of public space privatization (Ronnenberger, Lanz and Jahn 1999) purportedly deriving from private despoliation or giveaway of cities (Helms 1992) is hardly born out by the empirical reality of net gains in favor of public space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235) stemming from handing over into public hands of dilapidating factory floors spurred by deindustrialization with counter-tendencies being an exception rather than a rule (Breuer 2002: 10). A further threat to public space is reported to come from the spread of surveillance technologies from gated communities, themselves a rapidly growing global trend, to shopping malls and entertainment areas served by private security companies through the disciplining and constraining effect of closed-circuit video cameras (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235-236). However, social curbs and security provisions against threats to personal integrity, such as rape prevention (Siebel 2003: 253), belong to the basic characteristics of accessibility and anonymity that define public space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 236). Rather, driven by growing share of the elderly, insufficient integration of immigrants, and increasing social marginalization of city-dwellers, informal social control over metropolitan urban space gives way to its formalization under the weight of correspondingly shifting balance between open access to public space and its protection (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 236-237).

Deriving from developments in the 1970s and 1980s in the US, the thesis of decline of the public sphere via emptying out of downtown areas and tourist oriented museum investment is not born out by developments in Europe that since the 1990s see an explosive growth in forms of appropriation of urban spaces that go beyond the strategies of commercial mobilization of event economy towards urban celebrations, processions, fairs, and concerts as a prevalent trend (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 237). This Europe-wide transformation has increasing opportunities to experience urban space at its core (Gehl 2001), as open air seating at cafes and restaurants allows prolonged and leisurely contact with adjacent urban environments that increasingly gain both in currency and importance for both business operations and municipal regulation, in order to lend to historical urban spaces novel relevance through urban design and street furniture, as piazza development initiatives in Barcelona, Rotterdam, Rome and Lyon show (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 237-238). For this urban change, not least decisive is political will to create interconnected pedestrian areas combined with underground garage facilities, so that a different urban aesthetics of public squares could take root (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238).

In Germany, this trend brings private urban planning initiatives (Raumbureau 2001) into contact with political decision-making on the municipal level (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238) aiming at innovative use of urban spaces to make the most of the aesthetic qualities of geography and architecture of cities. As in Stuttgart, among other urban landmarks city castles came to occupy a special position bearing upon adjoining public squares that develop into locations of overlapping day- and nightlife scenes, of public visibility of multiple groups, and of dominant vistas on downtown quarters eventually becoming embedded into upscale metropolitan redevelopment with the help of ambitious architectural projects (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238-239).

Der Berliner Schloss as ein barockes Gefuege

In vielen Hinsichten, kann die Wiedererrichtung des Berliner Schlosses mit der Hilfe von Strukturelementen barocken Theaters intepretiert sein. Das kann man Anhand der entscheidenden Punkten des Schlossprojektes zeigen. Der Berliner Schloss wurde zum Architekturwettbewerb angeboten. In anderen Woertern sollte es eine Vision der einzigen Person sein, die einen herrschenden Ueberblick ueber das gesamte architekturelle Ensemble haben sollte. Die barocke Buehe bietete auch einen priviligierten Gesichtspunk dar, der nur der Person des Fuertstes zugaenglich war. Alle andere waren nur bedingt anwesende Zuschauer davon, war den Augen der autorisierten Persoenlichkeit gegenueber verlief. Diese Darstellungstruktur, die auf einen einzigen Gesichtspunkt aufgerichtet ist, kann man als diese der Perspektive des italienischen Renaissances bezeichnen.

In diesem Sinne fuehrt diese Tradition Architektur fort. Die barocke Buehne, aber, hat eine weitere Verbindung zum Berlinerschlossprokekt, weil in seinen Vorschriften es erfordert war, dass der Architekt auf moderne Weise nur den vierten Wand gestaltet. Die andere drei Waende sollen eine genaue historische Rekonstruktion des originellen Schlosses darstellen. In Bezug auf Stil also soll die vierte, moderne Fassade historisch unsichtbar sein, als ob es eine Oeffnung zu den in Theater sitzenden Zuschauern waere. Die anderen drei vertikalen Bauflaechen sind also die urbanen Kulissen. Im Theater representieren die Kulissen die Tiefe der kuenstlichen Perspektive, wo es keine in Wirklichkeit gibt.

Mit anderen Woertern dienen die Kulissen dem selbstbewussten Zwecke der Taeuschung der Zuschauer gerade in der Uebergangszone zwischen zweidimensionalem Raum der Representation der Malerei und dreidimensionaler Darstellung der Theater, die nur in den barocken Zeiten erst zum Ausdrueck kommt. Obwohl die Kulissenarchitektur nach Aussen und nicht nach Innen aufgerichtet ist, bildet die genaue Wiederspiegelung des historischen Plans in dem neuen Schlossprojekt eine dreiseitige Buehne der spielerischen Darstellung, wo das Echte und das Kuenstliche ihre Merkmahle gegenseitig verwechseln. Die vierte, unsichtbare Wand der theatralischen Schaubuehne unterstreicht nur die Bereitschaft, den Unterschied zwieschen Fantasie und Wirklichkeit in dem Theaterraum ausser Kraft zu setzen.

Wann die urbanen Raeume auf eine zunehmende Weise von Fantasmagorien des von der Kultur getriebenen Kapitalismus gepraegt werden, nimmt das staedtische Leben die barocken Merkmahle an. Dementsprechend wird Berliner Schloss zu einer Staette, wo die Prinzipien des barocken Theater sichtbar sind. Nicht zuletzt ist Berliner Schloss eine oeffentliche Buehne der Auffuehrung und der Suspension der Emotionen, die in ihrem Raum emotionslos ausgetragen werden. Wiederholung und Abschiebung, Werwickelung und Aufloesung, Authentizitaet und Schauspielerei praegen die Geschichte des Wiederaufbaus des Schlosses und verschmelzen sich in ihrem Ablauf. Diese Verschmelzung dieser Gegensaetze praegt die barocke Sensibilitaet ebenfalls.

Das barocke Theater, das von fein regulierten Wiederholungen seiner aesthetischen Muster, das den Emotionen nur in einer hoechst kuenstlichen Form zutage treten laesst, das die schoene Flaeche der authentischen Tiefe bevorzugt, und das die Trennlinien zwischen Kunst und Leben symbolisch aufloest, kann als eine vorlaufende zur Gegenwart der heutigen nachmodernen Periode Erscheinung gepriesen sein. Deswegen kann Berliner Schloss in den Begriffen der Analyse des barocken Theaters als nicht gerade postmodernes, sondern barockes Raum interpretiert sein.

Berlin Biennale as a Postmodern Form of Urban Governmentality

At the point where "speed and slowness, decisiveness and waiting, timely action and delay" (Perniola 1995: 18) become mutually integrated, art biennials represent not only a transition towards urban governmentality but also to post-modernity. As sites where new possibilities of capitalist development are born (Lazzarato 2004; Lefebvre 1969), cities play an increasingly important role in the changing landscape of rights, authority and governmentality (Sassen 2006). Not just sites of inclusion and exclusion on an urban level, cities play an increasingly dominant role in the processes of economic, social, political and cultual accumulation. From these accumulation processes a different form of action arises that takes as its point of departure the late modern experience of reaching limits to accumulation within purely modern parameters (Schulze 2003). Rather than a matter of an agreed upon historical periodization, post-modernity comes into effect through principles of effective action under the contemporary conditions. As "strategic, sharp and pungent" (Perniola 1995: 18) appearance, representation of the "tension of contrary forces" (Perniola 1995: 18), and communication as "the transmission of knowledge and experience" (Perniola 1995: 18) increasingly bear on economic, political, social and cultural accumulation, art biennials become paradigmatic representations of post-modernity on the urban level.

Berlin Biennale as a Metaphor of Urban Post-Modernity

As urban studies develop into a post-deterministic direction (Amin and Ash 2002), in terms of Perniola such an epistemological transition parts ways with an expectation of a single discoverable truth in favour of multiple valid explanations that "open up an intermediate space that is not necessarily bound to be filled" (Perniola 1995: 10). Replacing knowledge as a destination point that upon arrival lends certainty is a complex configuration of continuous and simultaneous explanations (Perniola 1995: 10) that divorce communication processes from direct advantage in social, economic, cultural or political struggles. The enigmatic meaning of urban post-modernity as a "more complex, intricate, many-sided and contradictory" (Perniola 1995: 11) reality can be translated into simplistic explanations as little as can direct impact on it of art biennails or museums. As the struggles that structure contemporary cities play out across an urban geography of "point[s] of confluence of a great many plots" (Perniola 1995: 11), the social transformation that the international profusion of art biennials reflects remains constitutively enigmatic to all of its actors.

Absent anybody who "any longer knows what is really happening" (Perniola 1995: 11), lacking capabilities to "calculate exactly the manufacturing cost of anything" (Perniola 1995: 11), and ubuquitously dominated by "a state of organized uncertainty" (Perniola 1995: 11), contemporary society finds its urban metaphor in art biennials to a paradigmatic extent. Overflowing with events and happenings, separated from art market valuations, and epitomizing institutional uncertainty, art biennials retain their enigmatic character despite their increasing coverage, attendance and interconnection. Given "that art possesses a collective content and that the experience of art can itself become philosophy" (Perniola 1995: 11), the connection that art biennials make between urban space and global culture puts them into immediate contact with post-modernity of a world where rapid urbanization, interconnection and information lay waste to the certainties of knowledge, capitalism, and experience (Schulze 2003). Embedded into the strategies of urban development of cities, art biennials, as events that are equally aesthetic and philosphical, "stake their claim to the challenges of the contemporary world" (Perniola 1995: 11) as they become signs of successful management of social, cultural and economic uncertaintly on the urban level.

Occupying a position in between complexity and explanation, art biennials emerge both from the complexity of cultural, economic, social and political relations and from the continuous explanation of their causes and their effects. Within the discourse of urban strategies that take recourse to art biennials to put cities on the international or global map of contemporary art, the transitions between plan and realization of art biennials produce a radical difference in the cultural image of the cities where they take place. Even though the repeating editions of art biennails is a process that takes place within the same urban space and within the same global culture, the fascination of biennials consists in the transition between two points of urban cultural development that "are at once identical and radically different" (Perniola 1995: 12). Exploring the relations between diversity and uniqueness while documenting the transitions from uniformity to change, art biennials consist of events, works and statements that each represent "the smallest link" (Perniola 1995: 12) between urban space and global culture that through art biennales participate in continuous processes of transition from one spatial and aesthetic scale into another.

The enigmatic fascination of art biennials stands in stark contrast to the banality of contemporary society defined by the "processes of reduction, standardization and levelling" (Perniola 1995: 12). A city that in the 1990s made consistent efforts to attain greater centrality in local, regional and global networks of social, cultural, economic and political exchange, Berlin was coming to terms with postmodern "de-historicization" (Perniola 1995: 12) during the last two decades. The historical transition towards re-unification and incessant urban change coming in its wake position Berlin in the field of tension between postmodern banality and historical enigma. In analytical terms of Debord, the urban space of contemporary Berlin respectively integrates layered architectural memory and presence of "the concentrated spectacle of totalitarian regimes and the diffuse spectacle of Western democracies" (Perniola 1995: 12-13). This integrated spectacle that art biennials seem to stage differs from its Debord's understanding. A relatively small group of international curators "like Francesco Bonami, Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Rosa Martinez and Hou Hanru" (Tang 2007: 248) regularly circulates in a largely global field of art biennials, "20–30 per year, more than 60 active worldwide" (Tang 2007: 248), that cutting across political, economic, social and cultural international divisions challenges conventional geography of modernity.

The "enigma of art and philosophy" (Perniola 1995: 13) equally confronts "nihilism, anti-intellectualism, negative and weak thinking" (Perniola 1995: 13) wherever art biennials take place. Intergrated spectacle, rather than being a defining feature of Western societies of contemporary period, as Debord (1988) argues, is characteristic of both the spread of modernity and countervailing reactions to it (Munch 1995). The global spread of the banalization of social, cultural, economic and political life lets the "planetary dimension of the spectacle" (Perniola 1995: 14) be seen in art biennials. They confront the specifically modern relations "between rationality and society" (Perniola 1995: 14) with their limits. The diametrical oppositions of Western modernity and its counter-movements give way to interrelations of urban space and global culture organized around the "unfolding of the fold and the enigma of transit" (Perniola 1995: 14) of the explanation and transmission of urban post-modernity as "[e]xhibitions now pre-produce discourse rather than wait for its postproduction" (Tang 2007: 255). With respect to urban space, art biennials unfold it for the streams of visitors, professionals and artists who not only increase its discursive density but also promote the unfolding of interregional relations via networking of geographically proximate biennials.

Standing at the intersection point of urban strategies aimed at faciliating cultural tourism, accumulating cultural capital and mobilizing regional advantages (Tang 2007: 248), art biennials contribute to making transitions that seek to acquire for their cities a status of a cultural metropolis happen. Consequently, connections between urban and regional cultural clusters become forged, as Asian biennials of Singapore, Gwanju and Shanghai, European biennials of Venice, Kassel and Muenster and Mediterranean biennials of Athens, Istanbul and Tel-Aviv group together (Tang 2007: 248). While cultural capitals may hinge for their status on tautalogical self-designation, it is art biennials that draw attention to the co-denendency of both the unfolding of strategies of urban development towards self-culturalization of cities (Reckwitz 2009) and the transition of processes of economic, cultural, political and social accumulation (Munch 1991, 1995) towards urban post-modernity. Art biennials have the capacity to "draw strength from collaborative models of regional branding, cohering cultural difference rather than dispersing it, securing territorial power via inter-dependence" (Tang 2007: 248). For the acquisition of the status of cultural metropolises, however, art biennials are instrumental as events that are "rich in meaning, heavy with significance, fertile with valuable teaching" (Perniola 1995: 15).

In other words, becoming a cultural metropolis cannot be reduced to inter-urban competition, cultural diplomacy or branding campaigns. Concentration on the mere outcome of cultural competition between cities renders it banal in as much as it exhausts itself in city rankings (Perniola 1995: 15). As something acquired after "lengthy experience and profound meditation" (Perniola 1995: 15), cultural expertise brings urban space and global hierarchies together via art biennials as events based on "an experience of the distance, the difference and the radical foreignness" (Perniola 1995: 16). The experience of art taking place at the meetig point between the rational and the irrational (Perniola 1995: 16), neither art history nor art museums appear to be adequate for the task of turning a city into a cultural capital. The international growth of art biennials in the last two decades has only a marginal impact on the international positioning of the groups of artists that come from the countries where biennials are staged. Likewise, the international building boom of new art museums and of expansion and renovation of existing ones correspondingly reduces the impact a museum can have on a city's cultural profile.

"[E]nigmatic and indeterminable" (Perniola 1995: 16), art biennials connect the experience of art itself to urban modernity that in its contemporary form acquires enigmatic, equally rational and irrational, features. In the post-modern economy of signs and space (Lash and Urry 1995), cities become signs that derive from "the reality of things" (Perniola 1995: 17). Sites of simultaneous convergence of multiple forms of cultural, economic, political and social accumulation, cities are constantly defined by "a process of passing from same to same and a persistence of what is in itself different" (Perniola 1995: 17), as their constitutive exchange mechanisms change and maintain the make-up of cities as recognisable entities. As communication becomes increasingly central to the evolvement of modernity (Munch 1991, 1995; Perniola 2009), the growing intesity of urban exchanges makes the development of urban modernity increasingly dependent on communicative governmentality that maps its urban density on the revilalization of downtown areas, museum islands and cultural districts. Growing financial investment into culture-driven urban development projects apprears to revolve around the growing communication density that reinforces networks of collaboration on urban, regional and global levels.

As changes to urban fabric seeks to preserve the original character of a city and as the preservation of urban identity calls for active intervention into urban development, cities appear to "have been, and [...] become, what they are" (Perniola 1995: 17). In the meeting of urban space and global culture that art biennials stage the philosophical opposition between unfolding spaces of cities and enigmatic cultures of the worls comes into sharp relief. Whereas urban spaces come rich with "ex-planations, de-velopments, flections and declensions" (Perniola 1995: 18), world cultures are laden with "the coincidence of antagonisms, the concatenation of opposites, the contact of things that are divergent" (Perniola 1995: 18). Art exhibitions philosophically signify the environment of urban spaces and global cultures they take place in since in them "thought and reality are tied together by an essential reciprocal belonging" (Perniola 1995: 18). Thus art biennial assert "the certainty that they belong to a single world that is common to all" (Perniola 1995: 18). In the world of disorganized capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987), cities that are "locked into identity, into particularity, into [...] fixity" (Perniola 1995: 18) are out of touch with reality of global transoformations, dynamic transitions and communicative contradictions.

Bringing intellectual, emotional and sensitive dimensions of experience together (Perniola 1995: 18), art biennials explore the "inseparability of rational and emotional aspects" (Perniola 1995: 18) of contemporary experience. Art biennials join "intellectial, emotional and practical life into a single manner" (Perniola 1995: 18) of urban experience. Urban modernity that increasingly depends on communication for its operation is marked by "a dynamism and an immediacy that heralds surprises and unexpected events" (Perniola 1995: 18). Urban modernity goes beyond "any one-sided investigative approach to what is hidden" (Perniola 1995: 18) as it is irreducible to a fixed model of capitalism. Of necessity, modernity in its analytical dimensions (Munch 1982) brings into a system of relations culture, economy, society and politics that is neither static nor deterministic. Modernity on the urban level, however, individualizes these relations within the historical limits to variation and within the historical changes to regularity. As urban governmentality, urban modernity organizes processes of cultural, economic, social and political accumulation on the urban level. Moreover, since for metropolitan cities national sovereignty is staged within their urban spaces, urban governmentality of cities aspiring to claim the status of global cities goes hand in hand with staging urban sovereignty of international relations that events connected to globe-spanning networks and regimes construct.

Berlin Biennale as a Global Structure of Contemporary Modernity

The emergence of a new global geography of creativity, of which contemporary art is only a component, requires a reconsideration of the notion of modernity from a perspective that goes beyond Enlightenment framework. Urban modernity, being famously identified by Georg Simmel with modern culture, is distributed georgaphically according to the respective weight of large cities that set the parameters of cultural exchange. As modernity becomes globalized, the corresponding weight of mega-cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Mosquera 2005) owerwhelms both quantitatively and qualitatively the relative share in urban modernity that cities in Europe can claim. While the concept of globalization alone can be found wanting in its explanatory potential of the contemporary changes in contemporary modernity (Buchholz and Wiggenig 2005), a philosophical interpretation of modernity (Perniola 1995) may shed light on how geography and culture relate to one another within the changing relationships that have been taking shape in the last decades.

As a UNESCO City of Design, Berlin belongs to the Creative Cities Network that brings urban centers from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, China, Egypt, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Span, UK, and USA into mutual contact around topics of literature, music, craft and folk art, design, gastronomy and media arts (UNESCO 2007). Berlin's development as a creative city leads it to discover affinities with periods and places of creativity that lay a stress on structures that bring cities together rather than set them apart. For a city it becomes as important to "remain in a direct contact with social and historical reality" (Perniola 1995: 6) as it is for a philosopher or an artist. Moreover, Berlin biennale has consistently raised its international profile by bringing artists, curators, and institutions from around the world into the shared process of cultural development. Its definitive feature is precisely that for these actors their points of departure and arrival become infrastructurally, aesthetically and culturally comparable with each other, as increasing number of countries become comparably modern.

This global transition towards a developmental plateau that increasingly holds for countries around the world for metropolitan centers translates into a need to re-imagine themselves beyond the dychotomy between modern and traditional. Not incidentally, globalization is not an exclusively modern phenomenon as interrelations between flows and places far apart has not infrequently characterized traditional societies and pre-modern epoches. Globalization builds upon and affirms inter-regional, inter-cultural and inter-national affinities. In urban terms, the interconnections between metropolitan developmental strategies and global cultural events that art biennails stress draw their importance from an epistemological approach to cities as dynamic rather than static entities. The fixed terms of reference of a static theorization of urban development promised to deterministically explain the causes of wealth and poverty of cities. In contrast, the fluid theoretical terms of a dynamic exploration of how cities develop dissolve the binary oppositions between "progress and regression, advantage and disadvatage, improvement and deterioration" (Perniola 1995: 6). As cities develop into metropolitan centers their complex dynamics is increasingly derived from "incessant micro-movements, minuscule shifts" (Perniola 1995: 6) that add up to "a real, continual and almost imperceptible transformation" (Perniola 1995: 6).

From 1990s on, Berlin has discovered the limits of static visions of its development as plans for its urban revitalisation left the city burdened with multi-billion debt. The long-awaited transformation of Berlin into a regional and global metropolitan center has trumpted deterministic expectations that straightforward office district, downtown and governmental compound renewal would bring urban development in its wake. The dynamics of metropolitan development of Berlin proved to be following a slower, less explosive scale than the shelved plans for its speculative development would demand. The hesitant start of Berlin biennale that had its second installment take place after a three year hiatus in conjunction with a downtown redevelopment project in 2000 points to a gradual reorientation to an exploratory approach to urban development that Berlin began to apply as it arrived at the limits of static models of its development. It is art biennails that map almost imperceptible changes in local and global cultural landscapes that both internationally and particularly in Berlin open a large discussion on metropolitan modernity that Perniola captures in philosophical terms.

Not unlike Jameson's (1991) discussion of the relations between late capitalism and post-modernism, cities of metropolitan modernity favor "the labyrinthine paths of experience and thought" (Perniola 1995: 7) over the domination of the ideal of "absolute transparancy" (Perniola 1995: 7) over urban space. Famous Jameson's (1991: 39) example of Bonaventure Hotel as a structure the ways of access to which and of interior orientation are far from transparent casts a philosophical shadow on Los Angeles as a metropolitan center that contradicts the principles of tranditional modernity (Davis 1990). Rather than uncovering their truth before a quest for knowledge (Shields 2008), metropolitan cities leave in the folds of their multi-dimensional existence spaces for "embracing and interweaving of different things" (Perniola 1995: 7). Hitting the boundaries of urban growth that economy, politics and society set, metropolitan centers enter the stage where deterministic visions of development have to step aside in a process of culural reorientation.

Urban change governed by the "fluctuation of the norm" (Perniola 1995: 7) replaces the belief into the "permanence of the law" (Perniola 1995: 7) that stood behind modern visions of progress. Becoming a metropolitan center itself a process that cannot be located within clear-cut geographical or temporal boundaries of a city's size or history, urban centers that vie for recognition of their position on the global map of metropolises do so by "minute transitions" (Perniola 1995: 7). Built on continuity between stages of slow change, metropolitan modernity bases its development on inflection as a "modulation, a fashioning, a continual and perpetually variable modelling process" (Perniola 1995: 7). Each metropolitan modernity a possible ideal-type in itself, it is notable that even though it is New York that provides the prototylical art museum to Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, it is the development of Bilbao into a metropolitan center that has become an ideal-type of urban revitalization. The folding of its urban space into an innovative architectual shape points to urban development as an inflection of urban design that seeks to avoid the setting in of rigidity and inflexibility of historical urban centers.

Deleuze develops his philosophy of the fold into the further direction of trasversality. As a relation established among different dimensions, it interprets urban modernity as a phenomenon defined by infinitely small scale on which it is being formed, by emergence from micro encounters at its lowest levels, by slight and almost invisible lateral shifts. Perniola's theorization of conemporay modernity sees it arising from "infinitely small displacements" (Perniola 1995: 8) as belonging to the semantic field of the notion of the fold pointing to the possibilities of exploration of cities as folded spaces rather than of uncovering of their hidden truth. Cities as sites where the Barock character of their development as decline stands revealed in the "immense subtlety of things" (Perniola 1995: 8) are nevertheless gripped in a dynamic process of transition "from one determination of being to another" (Perniola 1995: 8). Fully beloning to the world of urban modernity, where "everything exists in the present, is availanle in the here and now, and nothing is in short supply" (Perniola 1995: 8), art biennials as sites that are "full, indeed crammed, packed to overflowing, in which there is a maximum matter in a minimum of space" (Perniola 1995: 8) are urban metaphors of the fold.

Rather than drawing the impetus of their international spread from "the negative aspects of reality" (Perniola 1995: 8) and from "a world in which nothingness is triumphant" (Perniola 1995: 8), art biennials respond to the strategies of urban development that come to the fore after modernity based on overcoming existing problems succeeds. As modern capitalism destroys reasons for its own development by dint of its successful replacement of lack with abundance, the hidden truth of the development of urban modernity becomes replaced by the folded reality of metropolises of post-modernity as a driving force of its development. When, as Schulze (2003) demontrates, the development of capitalist modernity was driven by the negative contrast between exisiting reality and the best of all worlds capitalism promised to bring about, urban post-modernity turns the relation between the world as it exists and its negation in the name of a better world on its head. As possibilities for further improvement of the existing world are exhausted (Schulze 2003) and as any intervention into exisiting social order repeatedly creates new problems instead of old (Münch 1991), urban development of metropolitan centers has to prize "remaining in direct touch with reality" (Perniola 1995: 9) in order to be adequate to the present moment of modernity.

As the project of modern capitalism makes a transition from managing a legitimation crisis (Habermas 1972) to coping with a loss of orientation (Schulze 2003) that could guide its development, "[p]hilosophical reason merges with both poetic and social reason" (Perniola 1995: 9). It is at this juncture that urban spaces for art exhibitions receive increasingly prominent position in metropolitan centers where industrial disticts, port areas, and business cores cede their terrains to global museums, entertainment quarters and festival grounds. Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Museum of Modern Art New York, Museumsquartier Vienna illustrate long term strategies of urban development that become adopted to different degrees in cities that see global culture as a route to participation in capitalist globalization. The urban scale of financial investment into these and similar projects seems to belong to what Debord calls society of spectacle that by "inflating the importance of novelty [...] destroys every yardstick" (Perniola 1995: 9). These cultural projects, however, serve "a mode of feeling both anti-nostalgic and anti-utopian" (Perniola 1995: 9) that defines Deleuze's philosophy of the fold.

Thus, urban space of metropolitan modernity becomes increasingly beholden to a continuous experience of the present that "is weighed down by the past and pregnant with the future" (Perniola 1995: 9). In this respect, different metropolises represent different points of arrival at one and the same condition of urban modernity. Not infrequently talking about a global map of contemporary art, art biennials map from different points of view a single universe of contemporary sensibility. Conferring "a new and essentially mundane significance upon the experience of absorbed concentration" (Perniola 1995: 10), art biennials by rendering aesthetic experience mundane gain, however, in seriousness and permanence as they become increasing amount of institutional support and recognition. It is from the crisis of capitalist modernity (Schulze 2003) that urban preservation, museum projects, restauration works, and community diversity immensely gain in collective respect and individual importance.

Berlin Biennale as an Urban Structure of Modernity

Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, the curators of the fourth Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, show in their exhibition "das Leben als eine Reihe von Traumata und Kunst als ein Rätsel" (Press Release 2006: 4). This combination of individualization of life and of estrangement of art opens itself to Perniola's conception of modernity in the horizon of simultaneity. When neither past nor future represent any longer a radical difference to the present, "a return of the repressed" (Perniola 1995: viii) and "future shock" (Perniola 1995: viii) pass into one another. The resultant configuration of contemporary modernity plays out in the "relationships between humans and things" (Perniola 1995: viii). A paradigmatic expression for the crisis of historical modernity that the collapse of both past and future into the present represents can be found in art biennials. Combining the characteristics of historical museums, universal expositions and shopping malls, art biennials stand for "the contemporary imaginary" (Perniola 1995: viii) that in the contemporary configuration of moderntiy allows the society of the spectacle to unfold as a combination of urban space and global culture.

In contrast to Guy Debord's (1967, 1988) conception of the society of the spectacle that characterizes its current stage as an integration of its concentrated type of totalitarian societies and its diffuse type of liberal capitalism, Perniola understands the society of the spectacle beyond the Enlightenment categories of truth and reason (Perniola 1995: 4). Modernity that goes beyond the Enlightenment dialectics of past and future as a process in which truth and reason uncover themselves passes into the society of the spectacle where the only possible transitions are from one picture, one constellation, and one reflection to another. As a particular instance of an emergent institition of this society of the spectacle, Berlin biennale offers "Reflexionen über die conditio humana im Spannungsfeld von Angst und Unterwerfung, von Unbehagen und Offenbarung, aber auch spontane, lichte Intermezzi des Schönen" (Press Release 2006: 4). Rather than offering an aesthetic experience that is nourished by truth that encounter with artworks might reveal or is governed by reason that artistic discourse makes visible in exhibitions, the Berlin biennale stages "ein absurdes Theater, in dem Tiere, Menschen und Geister ihre tragische Rolle spielen" (Press Release 2006: 4).

The Enlightenment movement towards truth and reason founds the certainty of their arrival on overcoming the problems of knowledge that become thematized as secrets. In contrast, Gilles Deleuze (1988) introduces "a world not of secrets but of folds" (Perniola 1995: 5). Connected to "a merely empirical field of application" (Perniola 1995: 5), folds thematize the practice of "the drawing out, the unwinding, the ex-pression of something that is tangled, wound up, gathered in" (Perniola 1995: 5) that seeks to gain a direct access to "complexities and the sinuousness of concrete reality" (Perniola 1995: 6). The place of truth and reason take fiction and feeling as a development, an unfolding of thinking meets a sensuous exploration of reality. Itself taking its thematic inspiration from a work of fiction, the Berlin biennale likens the urban spaces its appropriates as exhibition halls to a narrative constellation that can serve as "ein Mikrokosmos einer ganzen Gesellschaft betrachtet werden oder als ein fiktiver Schauplatz für einen Roman" (Press Release 2006: 5). The folds of exhibition spaces explain social, economic, political and cultural reality through the affinities of its direct contact with humans and things that "belong to one and the same world" (Perniola 1995: 6).

Berlin Biennale as a Structure of Aesthetic Transit

The fourth Berlin biennale, by taking a modern classic of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men as its title and emphasising "ornament above all else" (Fricke 2006), operates from within a post-modern situation of constant availability of information on past works, styles and events. As a major binary opposite of the architectural principles of modern architecture, ornament makes a come-back in post-modernity understood as a historical reflection on the cultural, social, economic and political foundations of modernity (Munch 1984). If modernity was associated with linear progress as a transition that can be described as a movement within a well-defined set of coordinates having a hierarchical organization, post-modernity is defined by a spatial structure that no longer allows relations of hierarchy, linearity, or utility (Perniola 1995). Rather than a complete break with modernity as a form of cultural, social, political or economic accumulation (Munch 1986), post-moderntiy is closely related with the growing role of information in contemporary society (Lyotard 1979; Perniola 1995). Via information technology, data storage, transmission protocoles, ubiquitous access, internet usage, telecommunication infrastructures and visual interface, the simultaneity of transmission of information brings any two points in its networks into immediate contact that replaces linear transitions of modernity with instant transits of post-modernity (Perniola 1995).

The Berlin biennale offers many points of departure and arrival in its complex topology of exhibitions, schedule of events, and information coverage. Not offering a hierarchical, linear or instrumental vision, the biennale "meanders through countless rooms and apartments" (Fricke 2006). Its visitors are confronted with the Berlin biennale as an event that for the time of its duration remains available, accessible and unavoidable. Daily and weekly press made the Berlin biennale into a highly publicized urban, regional and international event. Journalists of Tageblatt, Switzerland, La Repubblica, Ilaly, The Guardian, UK, Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland, and The Japan Times, Japan, to name a few, extensively covered the Berlin biennial. Newspapers with global circulation, such as International Herald Tribune and The New York Times paid much attention to the biennial as well. More specialized audiences were able to read reviews in Artforum International, USA, Frieze, UK, Flash Art, Italy, and Das Kunstmagazin, Germany, among other sources. However, it becomes the urban space of the Berlin biennale that receives constant attention in the reviews. The Berlin biennale serves as a structure of aesthetic transit that brings into immediate contact the urban space it takes place in and the information media that secure its public resonance.

The curators of the biennale are seen as "attempting an archaeological exploration of the shaky foundations on which the New Berlin rests" (Maak 2006). On one hand, Berlin biennale brings urban space of Berlin in contact with global culture. On the other hand, contemporary art that Berlin biennale exhibits becomes mixed with the urban space that surrounds it. This immediate contact between urban space and contemporary art is one of many configurations that it can have, as the number and frequency of art biennials around the world constantly grows. The joint impact of banalization of art (Perniola 2004) and of globalization of cities that increasingly become both homogenized architecturally and individualized historically turns art biennials into a type of institution that undergoes neutral variation each time it takes place (Perniola 1995). Success or failure of contemporary art biennials becomes less predicated on whether they implement an institutional variation that is inherently better than others. It is their neutral variation both from one edition to another and from one art biennial to another than increasingly favours the environmental factors, such as urban culture, international curators and inter-urban relations, that determine their urban, regional or international visibility. Indeed, for art biennials of utmost importance are "la topologie, le paysage, le voisinage, les conditions du milieu" (Perniola 1995) in which they take place.

As a site of aesthetic transit, the Berlin biennale brings into immediate contact "long-past fates and fortunes" (Maak 2006), the memory of which urban spaces of Berlin hold, with "the history of the way art is seen and shown" (Maak 2006) that does not grant privilege to contemporary art among other forms of cultural expression. The qualities of precision, melancholy and earnestness (Maak 2006) that the Berlin biennale evinces do not describe it in terms of either advantage or disadvantage vis-a-vis other art biennials. As an example of institution of art biennale, the Berlin biennial represents a neutral variation that thanks to the fixation over time of its institutional contours becomes included into the circuits of contemporary art as a form of global culture. The essence of this neutral variation is the immediate contact between urban space and global culture that as a form of transit does not involve any qualitative change in either of them (Perniola 1995). However, this phenomenon of transit between urban space and global culture that art biennials make possible "permet que s'établisse une situation complètement différente" (Perniola 1995). The efforts of the Berlin biennale are directed at achieving "pathos, shock and catharsis through art" (Maak 2006). To function as a site of aesthetic transit (Perniola 1995), Berlin biennale depends on the technologies of storage and transmission of information that its uses with increasing intensity over its history.

As a space where the more urgent problems of contemporary art are addressed, the Berlin biennale is "clearly structured along specific works rather than oeuvres in general" (Heiser 2006). It is as a site of aesthetic transit between different works, genres and cultures (Perniola 1995) that Berlin biennale finds its place among other art biennials. As a post-modern departure from a hierarchical attribution of superior value to particular artworks, artistic media and national cultures becomes more widely institutionalized (Munch 1991, 1995), it is less the case that the Berlin biennale becomes more differentiated from other art biennials. It is the growing consistency (Heiser 2006) of the generic features of ever more numerous art biennials that precisely prevents a reductionist approach to artists, media and cultures that would make their differences of no significance (Perniola 1995), as critique of globalization maintains. It is the replication and mutation of art biennials that opens a theoretical horizon beyond the pitfalls of hierarchical or reductive evaluations (Perniola 1995). In this perspective, Berlin biennale not having a definitive identity becomes accessible as a performative product of action networks (Latour 2005) that across modifications, displacements and localications produces "un sens, une qualité, une sélection" (Perniola 1995).

Berlin Biennale as a Site of Aesthetic Mixture

The Berlin biennale is reported to be driven by a "strangely naïve hunger for the authentic" (Fricke 2006) that the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics connects with the mixture between art and life. The mixing takes its impetus not from juxtaposing works, bodies and sensations, but from a mutual contact that leaves respective identities, boundaries and foundations intact. As the art biennial focuses upon "real, genuine, undeniably lived life" (Fricke 2006), it opens itself up towards the exploration of possibilities of combination and hybridity between cultural and artistic dimensions that while remaining well defined come into intimate contact with each other (Perniola 1995). Thus, contemporary art turns its attention towards "le dérivé, la répétition, l'hybride" (Perniola 1995) as it incorporates into its spaces of representation artefacts, memories and narratives that derive from outside its institutional boundaries. The secondary, the repeated, and the hybrid character of everyday life becomes both a background for biennial art exhibitions and part and parcel of their operation as events that through bringing into contact of multiple disciplines, genres, and institutions de-emphasise the original, the proper, and the authentic (Perniola 1995) in their aesthetics.

This contemporary emphasis of art biennials upon mixture of art and life goes against the grain of the historicist model of artistic origin, tradition and nationality. It is in confrontation with art market, educational institutions, and art museums that art biennials lay claim to their autonomy and authority to pursue forms of exhibition, participation and representation that allow communication, transmission and enjoyment of multiple cultural forms. Thus, not only local cultures increase their possibilities to come into contact with society, economy and politics, but also global cultures. Art biennials become sites where multiple cultures become reconfigured beyond their existing processes of aesthetic legitimation. This might explain the growing number of institutional participants that on local, regional and international scales make Berlin biennale into a space where multiple actors from cultural, economic, political and social organisations come into regular contact at "opening days and during the exhibition" (KW press-release 2006).

The Simultaneity of Impersonal Feeling at Berlin Biennale

Simultaneity, understood as as "un sentiment cosmique de participation collective à l'unité du monde" (Perniola 1995), privileges touch over view as a mode of aesthetic experience. Indeed, the audience of the fourth Berlin biennale is in a grip of "obsessive phantasmagorias" (Fricke 2006), as in the spaces of its exhibitions artworks bridge the distances between themselves and their viewers via affect, the differences between form and function by decoration, and the distinctions between individual and impersonal with fiction. The biennial offers to its visitors an experience that is "[v]isually striking, often decorative and with a predilection for private mythologies en miniature" (Fricke 2006). These qualities of contemporary art are implicated in the aesthetics of simultaneity that proposes a re-evaluation of the interstices, the in-between, and the intermediary (Perniola 1995).

Berlin Biennale as a Reflection of Aesthetic Topology

The fourth Berlin biennale reflects the "melancholia and insecurity" (Mack 2006) of contemporary art. Born of the spatial dynamics of circulation of artworks, artists and curators, the Berlin art biennial translates their nomadic movement into the space of possibilities of sensation and emotion that draw on "le déplacement, la répartition/déploiement, la dérive" (Perniola 1995) as their conditions. No longer based on the experiences of "la permanence, l'enracinement, le domicile" (Perniola 1995), contemporary art mourns the loss of models of secure cultural belonging. As a space that is dedicated to the transgressive marginality of contemporary art, Berlin biennale is shaped by the melancholia that spatial unmooring of individual and collective identities calls forward in the present post-national moment. Urban spaces in which the Berlin biennale installed its exhibitions also document the melancholia and insecurity deriving from their witness to the passage of historical time. As a temporary backdrop to contemporary art, these urban spaces connect the city the biennial takes place in and the aesthetic sensibility of global culture to each other.

Positioned at a spatial intersection between the nomadic topologies of cultural flows and the sedentary topologies of urban places, Berlin biennale strives for a resolution of the contradictory relation between art and space. The resultant topology of art takes inspiration from the notions of simultaneity, mixture, and transit (Perniola 1995).

Berlin Biennale as a Site of Aesthetic Transit

The media response to the fourth edition of Berlin biennale decidedly stresses contact over perception as it is seen to bring "a new art scene to an old city" (Smith 2006). The biennale delineates the increasingly enigmatic nature of contemporary society as it "forms a kind of rebus about the arc and tumult of life itself" (Smith 2006). Resisting "something-for-everyone impulse that plagues so many big shows" (Smith 2006), the Berlin biennial turns away from the academic aesthetics that in a large scale exhibition would indeed lead to an overwhelming emphasis on historical discourse, a bewildering multiplicity of artistic movements, and an incessant interrogation of relevance of artworks. On the contrary, the intensive exploration of the relations between artistic media, genres, and institutions that the Berlin biennial has continued on a larger scale has let to its taking of a spatial turn that has allowed it to stage a "brilliant installation" (Smith 2006) of its works, events, and contexts. In theoretical terms, this process corresponds to the transition from history to topology of art (Groys 2007; Perniola 1995). As the dynamics of circulation of artistis movements, artistic production, and cultural fashions amplifies in scope and scale, the relations between past, present and future become conflated in a space of instant availability (Perniola 1995). Installation, as a spatial aspect of art exhibitions, takes over contemplation as a guiding mode of contemporary experience of art that favors contact, enigma and anti-aesthetics over perception, explanation and beauty.

The critical response to the fourth Berlin biennale refers to its inclination to highlight the "dark, irrational and impermeable" (Thon 2006) side of aesthetic experience. In rejecting a historicist or an over-theoretical organising scheme - the "leitmotif" (Thon 2006) -, contemporary art affirms a transition to "narrative approaches" (Thon 2006). The institutional format of art biennials explores novel theoretial possibilities that release art from the necessity to establish relations with its history. This radical transition from theory to narrative has a corresponding developent in the emphasis that geography of art receives at the expense of history of art. The more widely recognized statement of the Berlin biennale becomes the urban space where it takes place - the building where its main exhibition was installed. The building, concentrating layered memories of Jewish, Communist and post-Soviet past, has "such a strong aura, that all art seems to pale beside it" (Thon 2006). It is the terms of reference of synchronicity and spatiality that organize the experience of contemporary art in terms that are proper to itself as its strives to think itself "selon l'ordre des coexistences, non selon l'ordre des successions" (Perniola 1995).

Contemporary art, exploring the possibility of a topology of art (Perniola 1995), explicitly seeks to avoid a close association with a "hermetic discourse interesting only for an exclusive coterie" (Fanizadeh 2006), as Berlin biennale is reported to attempt. As "everyday life and history in its urban context" (Fanizadeh 2006) has become increasingly central for this beiennial, it has followed a larger trend of the cultural turn of aesthetics that seeks to analyse and consider "les expériences artistiques les plus variées et contradictoires dans leur continuité et dans leurs limites" (Perniola 1995). This approach to art that is sensitive to its interconnections and its urban spaces maps the transitions "from the sublime to the private, from private space into the museum, from the museum to the scrapheap" (Rauterberg 2006) to chart a topology of contemporary art that opens it towards the possibilities of intensified sensation, feeling and thought. As the visitors of the biennial are invited to "gain surprising insights" (Fanizadeh 2006) rather than to consign themselves to the traditional aesthetic experience (Fanizadeh 2006), the anti-aesthetics of modernity of Baudelaire that explores an expanded field of intensified interest (Perniola 1995) corresponds to the intention of the Berlin biennial to adequately represent aesthetic experience in its variety and complexity (Fanizadeh 2006).

Going beyond theoretical discourse, artistic fashions and aesthetic pleasure (Searle 2006), the Berlin biennale is organized around the key reference points of placement, timeliness and journey (Searle 2006). These features of the biennial that emerge from its press reviews, visitor experience and declared mission correspond to the relations "entre lieux et formes, entre régions et langages, entre zones et styles" (Perniola 1995) that the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics makes visible in this case study of Berlin biennial. The Berlin biennale places the emphasis on the "selection of the right works" (Searle 2006), on the "either forgotten, or never seen before" (Searle 2006) artworks, and on the claim to be "not just another biennial" (Searle 2006). Engaged in public discourse on forms, spaces and styles, Berlin biennial, along with other art biennales around the world, "identifie avant tout des identités culturelles particulières, étudie leurs caractéristiques et se préoccupe de leur conservation" (Perniola 1995). From its first edition onwards, Berlin biennale has increased its visitor, institutional and media resonance. Open to urban culture in the multiplicity of its genres, forms and periods, the Berlin biennale has followed a decidedly urban strategy in its changing reflection of contemporary aesthetics that demands "favoriser le développement, promouvoir la circulation, encourager la consommation" (Perniola 1995). Art biennials as a distinctive institutional form of global culture strike urban roots in each city where they take place via responsiveness to the needs of urban development, the velocities of information exchange, and the seductions of cultural consumption.

Berlin Biennale in the Inter-Urban Relations of Cultural Accumulation

The Berlin biennial has evolved in its relation to global culture as it emphasised the inter-urban relations that the event participated in by reorganisation of urban spaces where it took place around thematic platforms, media specificity. public communication, professional collaboration and scholarly discourse. Conceived from the start as a city-oriented event, Berlin biennale, to succeed to take place for the second time in 2001 three years since its inauguration, has shifted its emphasis from the participation of international artists, in 1998 the number of invited artists was 70 as opposed to the group of 50 in 2001, to a wide panel of eighteen international curators that contributed to podium discussions embedded into the schedule of the biennale and printed publications that documented works of and interviews with artists. While the first Berlin biennale sought its place among other international art exhibitions, as its Berlin/Berlin title enters into dialogue with the New York/New York exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the second biennial has developed the relationship between arts festival and scholarly symposium that provided its initial template towards merger between the two around conceptual focal points that organised the relations between artists, curators and the public within each urban location.

As Perniola (2007) points out, the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics cannot avoid its philosophical reconsideration since the relations between culture and society differ from place to place and from time to time. That Berlin biennale had to reorganize itself around thematic platforms, as it made efforts to ensure that its second edition takes place, points to the necessity to bring a philosophical discussion to bear on the aesthetic representation of global culture. Rather than being borne of homogeneity, global culture is made of areas of heterogeneity that in their spatial organization establish variously durable connections between space and culture. Thus, the second Berlin biennial was following in the steps of the spatialization of the relations between aesthetics, society and culture as it put the topics of corporate art, curatorial business, recycling of the conceptual, post national, and digital verite into the center-stage of its theoretical reflection. This embedding of theory and philosophy into the operational structure of art biennials, as Berlin biennale shows, becomes necessary since "from the moment we attribute a decisive importance to the self-reflection of societies, even the presumed unity of the Western point of view breaks down in a multiplicity of different perspectives" (Perniola 2007: 39-43).

While the first Berlin biennial seems to follow the principle of aesthetic disinterestedness, as it remains restated in art reviews (Plagens 2009), the second biennale opens up towards what Perniola calls Baudelaire's "anti-aesthetic orientation" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Baudelaire's prose works prefigure the sociological theorization of "important phenomena of modernity such as fashion, the city, material life, drugs, prostitution, conflict, and exoticism" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Already proposing the terms of connectedness, contribution and commitment as keywords for its second edition, the third Berlin biennale explicitly organizes its artwork exhibitions around the thematic hubs that deal with migration, urban conditions, sonic landscapes, fashions and scenes and another cinema. This approach to art and culture that art biennials spearhead follows in the steps of the revolt against aesthetic disinterestedness and academic aesthetics of the European enlightenment, such as it is represented in Kant's position on aesthetic judgment as divorced from any practical interest or purpose par excellance. This anti-aesthetics of Baudelaire, moreover, rather than ruling out any connection to interest and desire lays an explicit emphasis "on the intensity of feeling and on the splendor of what presents itself to the imagination" (Perniola 2007: 43-46).

Indeed, Berlin biennale appeals to an ever wider range of cultural, professional, governmental, institutional and aesthetic interests each time it takes place. If the first biennial cuts across art, architecture, design, literature, music, choreography, fashion, film and theatre in its effort to establish itself as an interdisciplinary forum, the second biennial expands the focus of its operation towards translation between art and culture that renders life into an object of insatiable interest. This transition from interdisciplinary abstraction towards intensification of interest is accomplished by stressing the relationship of Berlin biennale to its visitors, viewers, organizers and critics. In the second biennial, films, videos and installations that aim at interaction with the public receive special emphasis in its exhibition program. Cinema screenings are paired with podium discussions with international curators that cover topics of professional and general interest. An orientation towards public interest supplies an institutional framework for Berlin beinnale as it is measured, documented and staged. Beginning in 1998 for each biennial show, attendance numbers are measured, local, national and international media coverage is documented, and prominent urban locations for the majority of the biennial exhibitions are chosen.

In its opposition to academic aesthetics, Berlin biennale puts into practice the defining characteristics of anti-aesthetics that consist in "rejection of conventionality, openness to extra-European cultures and attention to alternative and even pathological experiences" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). This anti-aesthetics performs cultural turn as it intensifies the relations between art and society in the form of the surplus of interest that is invested by aesthetic imagination into the world and by society into art via financial, affective and symbolic expenditure. Save for the first biennial with higher than average attendance numbers based on its editions for which comprehensive data are available, Berlin biennale has registered an unchanged number of visitors of its second and third instances. As a transition from the same to the same in Perniola's terms, the repetition of Berlin biennale produces the radical difference of "emotional over-investment" (Perniola 2007: 46-49) that indicates a more general social transition towards a culture of performance that is "not directed toward the fulfillment of pleasure but toward the preservation of excitement" (Perniola 2007: 46-49). Thus, art biennials become quintessential sites of cultural accumulation as an addictive transition from the same to the same that in the contemporary society of the spectacle performatively "constitute a global alternative that, however, is not programmatic but factual" (Perniola 2007: 49-51).

Urban Space and Global Culture in Art Focus Jerusalem

The trajectory of development of Art Focus Jerusalem to its present format from its inception in 1994 as an Israel-wide event to a city-oriented international exhibition shows a connection between urban space and global culture that became closer over the years. As a review of its third installation in 1999 indicates (Vine 2000), the first Art Focus did not have international artists take part in its show and it took place across a bewildering array of spaces across Israel. In 1996, international artists become invited to Art Focus 2 that became primarily restricted to Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, while the next installation of Art Focus have become exclusively associated with Jerusalem that in 1999 hosted 95 Israeli and 25 international artists across the five venues of the Sultan's Pool, the Teddy Kolleck Stadium, the Israel Museum, the Bezalel Academy of Arts, and Ticho House. In its aesthetics the event that in 1999 made a claim to find a place among the burgeouning circuit of international art biennials exhibits both a cultural and an urban turn. Art Focus Jerusalem joins within a single network of spaces both Israeli independent and internationally established institutions, those that experienced international exposure and beginning artists only entering into media limelight, and site specific and local artworks and representative objects and travelling exhibits of global artists. The event critically engages the open space across the walls of the Old City, the intersticial space of leisure and entertainment of the sports complex, the gallery space of classical and contemporary art exhibitions of the museum, the studio exhibit halls of the graduating art students' show, and the alternative spaces of out-of-the-way museum locations, auction houses and commercial galleries (Vine 2000).

This transformation of Art Focus Jerusalem into an event that takes place on the cross-section of urban space and global culture has its parallel in the cultural turn in aesthetics as it became progressively divorced from philosophy (Perniola 2007). Perniola notes that as early as a decade ago aesthetics has widened its disciplinary reach to the widest possible extent that bridges across multiple domains by creative interchange of codes (Kelley 1998). As the "gap between aesthetic knowledge and contemporary society" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) closes, the emerging articulation of contemporary aesthetics opens up "an epistemological horizon characterized by flexibility" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) that in case of art biennials takes the form of the aesthetic principle that makes "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43). International art biennials bring urban space, as a multidisciplinary subject of knowledge, into immediate contact with global culture, as a carrier of aesthetic knowledge. It is the margins and boundaries of contemporary aesthetics that art biennials explore while becoming increasingly relevant to cities where they take place. In Benjamin's terms it is the "sex appeal of the inorganic" that art exercises as it attracts the millions of visitors that visit art museums, fairs and biennials (Plagens 2009). It is not aesthetic knowledge or appreciation of art that brings mass attendance to art events internationally, as the time-span of viewing that artworks can statistically expect from an average visitor viewer fits the pace of walking rather than of studied contemplation, but the relations between space and pleasure in which art participates. As it becomes more important for cities to be attractive, to investors, tourists, and professionals, the nexus between urban space and aesthetic pleasure becomes one of the key factors in the globally increasing prominence of art biennials.

The relations between art and society rest as much upon their theoretical discussion as upon the institutional structures that carry them. The relations between modernity and art, since their discussion by Baudelaire, occur on the background of rapidly growing cities that in their linear transition towards modern metropolises become scenes of radical difference that the aesthetic gaze of modern art documents both in its subject matter and in its aesthetic representation. In this respect, the modern period appears to be one long transition from the same to the same with only rare moments of radical difference that puncture the narrative of modern history. As representation, in its aesthetic, scientific or literary form, approaches in its understanding the status of a simulacrum, as the relations between represented original and representational copy enter into circuits of scrutiny, criticism and contestation, representation can no longer pretend to be a straightforward copy of an original. Instead, it becomes a playful simulacrum that as a copy let loose from the foundational ties to an original becomes not so much hyperreal, as Baudrillard's nostalgia for the good original of reality would suggest, but appealing and pleasant, as Perniola's discussion of the sex appeal of the inorganic suggests.

The perfection of the simulacrum on its linear trajectory of its growth in intensity of similitude to its original - as Shanghai's skyline takes over that of New York both in its present execution and in its projected future - dissolves the hierarchy between the copy and the original. As it is no longer possible to be true to the original, the copy, in its theoretical status, becomes interchangeable with the original. Nostalgia for reality interchanges with the fascination with simulacrum. The aesthetic gaze charges with the sex appeal of the inorganic the artistic simulacra that cities, in the process of their aestheticization, turn themselves into. Art biennials become occassions not so much for seeing art as for seeing cities as aesthetic copies of themselves that stand ever closer to reality. The transition from the same to the same of cities marks philosophically their becoming simulacra, as in art biennials the difference between cities celebrating art and art celebrating cities disappears. The radical difference of contemporary art is this cultural turn of the aesthetics that follows not so much from the internal development of art theory but from the contemporary transformation of social reality. As art meets reality and theory meets society within the environment of playful interchange of codes, as the theories of postmodernism (Baudrillard; Jameson), poststucturalism (Deleuze and Guattari; de Landa) and postmodernity (Bauman; Harvey) have historically indicated, simulacrum becomes not a negative category of analysis that would point out to a lack but a positive term of reference that stands for excess.

Art museums, having stock presence on the urban topography of art biennials, with collections in excess of their exhibition capacity, with artworks on display in excess of one-day overview, and with event calendars in excess of individual time budgets are transformed into simulacra of themselves that develop strategies for urban, media, and global presence that dissolve the difference between their real condition and represented status. While global art museums, such as Guggenheim Museum make a transition from artworks to cities in order to become as institutional simulacra extremely attractive objects of investment, globalizing metropolitan centers make a transition in the opposite direction from cities to artworks in order to turn themselves into urban simulacra that irresistibly attract investment flows of desire, money and interest. As focal points of emotional, financial, and social investment, increasingly cities seek to intensify their hold on individual and collective attention that becomes aesthetic, sexualized and abstract as it becomes stronger. Detaching themselves from any straightforward relation to the circuits of either use value or exchange value, cities become simulacra that acquire fetish value that melts together their materiality and abstraction. Art biennials are material abstractions and abstract materials of this twofold process of investing urban space with aesthetic pleasure. In the age of urban repoducibility, art biennials lend to cities their aura of Benjamin's sex appeal of the inorganic through precisely what Perniola calls making "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43), since this is how Benjamin defines the experience of aura in his essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproduction, as its famous English translation has it.

First Berlin Biennale: Instroduction

What, from the first, makes Berlin biennale into an international and interdisciplinary event is its begining at the 1995 Venice biennale. In that year, the Venice Aperto, an independent exhibition of contemporary art, was discontinued. To the first Berlin biennale, to take place in 1998, there still was three years, but an inclusive forum for cultural producers was felt missing among those who convened at that traditional event of the international cultural calendar. In other words, rather than a deviation from the concept of art biennial as a stage to which different nation-states send their representatives, Berlin biennale was conceived as a complementary event. It intentionally takes a distance from nationally-oriented representation towards conceptually-driven presentation of contemporary art. Thus, Berlin biennale, as do other international art events around the globe, continues the tradition of intependent artistic spaces that give wide berth of liberty to both curators and artists.

This kind of event takes leave of the intention to represent the possibly fullest palette of artists according to their place of origin. Complex international careers, overlapping geographical imaginaries, and on-going cultural exchanges appear to have legitimized the post-traditional approach to art biennials that Berlin biennale exemplifies. To the Europe of nations and ethnicities there appeared to be added another one - Europe of art biennials. It is not only that the number of various city-based art biennials has greatly grew over the last two decades, symbolically commenced with the fall of the Berlin wall. But it is also the umbrella, regional events have increased in number - Venice biennale and documenta quinquennial were joined by the travelling biennale of Manifesta. A second geography (de Certeau) of cultural exchange has put a host of cities-of-culture on the European, as well as international, map.

In Europe, and increasingly internationally, art biennials have become a matter of course. However, a look back towards the first Berlin biennale brings home how new - lasting for slightly over a decade - the phenomenon is. Notably, the scope of the issues that articles, artworks, conferences, books and commentaries that document each art biennial reaches wide beyond the ambit of art history. They cover the shadows of history, theory and space that lie thickly on these biennial events. If anything, they are ephemeral. Drawing the energy of their staying power from the forces that make fetish-objects irresistible - namely, from the intersection of materiality and abstraction (Perniola) that their exhibition halls and catalogues do not tire of mapping out -, art biennials are intermittent splashes of discursive, performative, and artistic activity.

Whether they dissipate with little trace left or whether they leave a lasting stamp on their hosting cities, art biennials challenge their commentators, narrators, and historians to explore the limits of their assumptions in their consideration of repetition and difference, contemporary art and institutional forms, and philosophical reflection and aesthetic analysis. It could be that art biennials are paradigmatic spaces of the present global moment of modernity (Appadurai). If so, one might be well advised to consider both the theoretical accounts of modernity and philosophical inquiries into aesthetics.

Art Biennials as Spaces between Philosophy and Aesthetics

Art biennials pose the question of an aesthetic tour d'horizon that they represent. Rather than resolve the aporias of the theory of art - such as representation vs. reality, artworks vs. merchandise, artist vs. laborer -, art biennials lead to concentration of genres, events, and scenes. Such a situation throws the epistemological question that one might address to them upon themselves to turn these into self-reflexive ethnographies of flanerie, part theoretical and part aesthetic. The plane of discussion shifts into a space between philosophy and aesthetics. This is where the more enigmatic figures of German theorists of modenity, such as Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin, might have lines of connection with the philosophy of aesthetics of Mario Perniola.

Taken more concretely, art biennials invite exploration of the aesthetical situation of the time and place of their appearance. Visiting artists and curators increase the contrasts between works, places and imaginaries that in their meeting points create interpretive highlights that give guidepoints to narratives that connect philosophy and aesthetics. The events, cities, and artworks of art biennials self-reflexively relate to modernity as a topic of constant discussion taking place without a hope for a definitive resolution. The previous attempts at theoretical closures of the problematique of modernity - be they sociological or art historical -, appear singularly dated to the time and place of their appearance. The repetition of the questions of what is modern, what does it mean to be modern, and what relation modernity has with the present moment and a particular place relativizes the difference that previous theoretical constructions aiming to definitely answer these questions could claim for themselves as unique moments in their intellectual history. These questions seems to be trapped in the space between philosophy and aesthetics where art biennials explore both the possibilities of repretition and of difference.

A not uncommon junction between art biennials and art museums, whether through a series of events working around a set of pre-existing architectural spaces or as a development towards the erection of their respective built environments, feeds upon the tension that defines the relations between modernity and cities, art and society, and ethics and aesthetics. Allowing both for aesthetic and philosophical treatments these relations become activated whenever a museum becomes an architectural metaphore for a city, whenever a cultural event tests the boundaries between representation and reality, and whenever a city becomes a site for aesthetic exploration of its identity and difference. Art biennials occur at the intersection of various media, discourses, and spaces where these tensions, relations and questions play out.