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.