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.