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).