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.