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).