Berlin Biennale as a Metaphor of Urban Post-Modernity

As urban studies develop into a post-deterministic direction (Amin and Ash 2002), in terms of Perniola such an epistemological transition parts ways with an expectation of a single discoverable truth in favour of multiple valid explanations that "open up an intermediate space that is not necessarily bound to be filled" (Perniola 1995: 10). Replacing knowledge as a destination point that upon arrival lends certainty is a complex configuration of continuous and simultaneous explanations (Perniola 1995: 10) that divorce communication processes from direct advantage in social, economic, cultural or political struggles. The enigmatic meaning of urban post-modernity as a "more complex, intricate, many-sided and contradictory" (Perniola 1995: 11) reality can be translated into simplistic explanations as little as can direct impact on it of art biennails or museums. As the struggles that structure contemporary cities play out across an urban geography of "point[s] of confluence of a great many plots" (Perniola 1995: 11), the social transformation that the international profusion of art biennials reflects remains constitutively enigmatic to all of its actors.

Absent anybody who "any longer knows what is really happening" (Perniola 1995: 11), lacking capabilities to "calculate exactly the manufacturing cost of anything" (Perniola 1995: 11), and ubuquitously dominated by "a state of organized uncertainty" (Perniola 1995: 11), contemporary society finds its urban metaphor in art biennials to a paradigmatic extent. Overflowing with events and happenings, separated from art market valuations, and epitomizing institutional uncertainty, art biennials retain their enigmatic character despite their increasing coverage, attendance and interconnection. Given "that art possesses a collective content and that the experience of art can itself become philosophy" (Perniola 1995: 11), the connection that art biennials make between urban space and global culture puts them into immediate contact with post-modernity of a world where rapid urbanization, interconnection and information lay waste to the certainties of knowledge, capitalism, and experience (Schulze 2003). Embedded into the strategies of urban development of cities, art biennials, as events that are equally aesthetic and philosphical, "stake their claim to the challenges of the contemporary world" (Perniola 1995: 11) as they become signs of successful management of social, cultural and economic uncertaintly on the urban level.

Occupying a position in between complexity and explanation, art biennials emerge both from the complexity of cultural, economic, social and political relations and from the continuous explanation of their causes and their effects. Within the discourse of urban strategies that take recourse to art biennials to put cities on the international or global map of contemporary art, the transitions between plan and realization of art biennials produce a radical difference in the cultural image of the cities where they take place. Even though the repeating editions of art biennails is a process that takes place within the same urban space and within the same global culture, the fascination of biennials consists in the transition between two points of urban cultural development that "are at once identical and radically different" (Perniola 1995: 12). Exploring the relations between diversity and uniqueness while documenting the transitions from uniformity to change, art biennials consist of events, works and statements that each represent "the smallest link" (Perniola 1995: 12) between urban space and global culture that through art biennales participate in continuous processes of transition from one spatial and aesthetic scale into another.

The enigmatic fascination of art biennials stands in stark contrast to the banality of contemporary society defined by the "processes of reduction, standardization and levelling" (Perniola 1995: 12). A city that in the 1990s made consistent efforts to attain greater centrality in local, regional and global networks of social, cultural, economic and political exchange, Berlin was coming to terms with postmodern "de-historicization" (Perniola 1995: 12) during the last two decades. The historical transition towards re-unification and incessant urban change coming in its wake position Berlin in the field of tension between postmodern banality and historical enigma. In analytical terms of Debord, the urban space of contemporary Berlin respectively integrates layered architectural memory and presence of "the concentrated spectacle of totalitarian regimes and the diffuse spectacle of Western democracies" (Perniola 1995: 12-13). This integrated spectacle that art biennials seem to stage differs from its Debord's understanding. A relatively small group of international curators "like Francesco Bonami, Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Rosa Martinez and Hou Hanru" (Tang 2007: 248) regularly circulates in a largely global field of art biennials, "20–30 per year, more than 60 active worldwide" (Tang 2007: 248), that cutting across political, economic, social and cultural international divisions challenges conventional geography of modernity.

The "enigma of art and philosophy" (Perniola 1995: 13) equally confronts "nihilism, anti-intellectualism, negative and weak thinking" (Perniola 1995: 13) wherever art biennials take place. Intergrated spectacle, rather than being a defining feature of Western societies of contemporary period, as Debord (1988) argues, is characteristic of both the spread of modernity and countervailing reactions to it (Munch 1995). The global spread of the banalization of social, cultural, economic and political life lets the "planetary dimension of the spectacle" (Perniola 1995: 14) be seen in art biennials. They confront the specifically modern relations "between rationality and society" (Perniola 1995: 14) with their limits. The diametrical oppositions of Western modernity and its counter-movements give way to interrelations of urban space and global culture organized around the "unfolding of the fold and the enigma of transit" (Perniola 1995: 14) of the explanation and transmission of urban post-modernity as "[e]xhibitions now pre-produce discourse rather than wait for its postproduction" (Tang 2007: 255). With respect to urban space, art biennials unfold it for the streams of visitors, professionals and artists who not only increase its discursive density but also promote the unfolding of interregional relations via networking of geographically proximate biennials.

Standing at the intersection point of urban strategies aimed at faciliating cultural tourism, accumulating cultural capital and mobilizing regional advantages (Tang 2007: 248), art biennials contribute to making transitions that seek to acquire for their cities a status of a cultural metropolis happen. Consequently, connections between urban and regional cultural clusters become forged, as Asian biennials of Singapore, Gwanju and Shanghai, European biennials of Venice, Kassel and Muenster and Mediterranean biennials of Athens, Istanbul and Tel-Aviv group together (Tang 2007: 248). While cultural capitals may hinge for their status on tautalogical self-designation, it is art biennials that draw attention to the co-denendency of both the unfolding of strategies of urban development towards self-culturalization of cities (Reckwitz 2009) and the transition of processes of economic, cultural, political and social accumulation (Munch 1991, 1995) towards urban post-modernity. Art biennials have the capacity to "draw strength from collaborative models of regional branding, cohering cultural difference rather than dispersing it, securing territorial power via inter-dependence" (Tang 2007: 248). For the acquisition of the status of cultural metropolises, however, art biennials are instrumental as events that are "rich in meaning, heavy with significance, fertile with valuable teaching" (Perniola 1995: 15).

In other words, becoming a cultural metropolis cannot be reduced to inter-urban competition, cultural diplomacy or branding campaigns. Concentration on the mere outcome of cultural competition between cities renders it banal in as much as it exhausts itself in city rankings (Perniola 1995: 15). As something acquired after "lengthy experience and profound meditation" (Perniola 1995: 15), cultural expertise brings urban space and global hierarchies together via art biennials as events based on "an experience of the distance, the difference and the radical foreignness" (Perniola 1995: 16). The experience of art taking place at the meetig point between the rational and the irrational (Perniola 1995: 16), neither art history nor art museums appear to be adequate for the task of turning a city into a cultural capital. The international growth of art biennials in the last two decades has only a marginal impact on the international positioning of the groups of artists that come from the countries where biennials are staged. Likewise, the international building boom of new art museums and of expansion and renovation of existing ones correspondingly reduces the impact a museum can have on a city's cultural profile.

"[E]nigmatic and indeterminable" (Perniola 1995: 16), art biennials connect the experience of art itself to urban modernity that in its contemporary form acquires enigmatic, equally rational and irrational, features. In the post-modern economy of signs and space (Lash and Urry 1995), cities become signs that derive from "the reality of things" (Perniola 1995: 17). Sites of simultaneous convergence of multiple forms of cultural, economic, political and social accumulation, cities are constantly defined by "a process of passing from same to same and a persistence of what is in itself different" (Perniola 1995: 17), as their constitutive exchange mechanisms change and maintain the make-up of cities as recognisable entities. As communication becomes increasingly central to the evolvement of modernity (Munch 1991, 1995; Perniola 2009), the growing intesity of urban exchanges makes the development of urban modernity increasingly dependent on communicative governmentality that maps its urban density on the revilalization of downtown areas, museum islands and cultural districts. Growing financial investment into culture-driven urban development projects apprears to revolve around the growing communication density that reinforces networks of collaboration on urban, regional and global levels.

As changes to urban fabric seeks to preserve the original character of a city and as the preservation of urban identity calls for active intervention into urban development, cities appear to "have been, and [...] become, what they are" (Perniola 1995: 17). In the meeting of urban space and global culture that art biennials stage the philosophical opposition between unfolding spaces of cities and enigmatic cultures of the worls comes into sharp relief. Whereas urban spaces come rich with "ex-planations, de-velopments, flections and declensions" (Perniola 1995: 18), world cultures are laden with "the coincidence of antagonisms, the concatenation of opposites, the contact of things that are divergent" (Perniola 1995: 18). Art exhibitions philosophically signify the environment of urban spaces and global cultures they take place in since in them "thought and reality are tied together by an essential reciprocal belonging" (Perniola 1995: 18). Thus art biennial assert "the certainty that they belong to a single world that is common to all" (Perniola 1995: 18). In the world of disorganized capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987), cities that are "locked into identity, into particularity, into [...] fixity" (Perniola 1995: 18) are out of touch with reality of global transoformations, dynamic transitions and communicative contradictions.

Bringing intellectual, emotional and sensitive dimensions of experience together (Perniola 1995: 18), art biennials explore the "inseparability of rational and emotional aspects" (Perniola 1995: 18) of contemporary experience. Art biennials join "intellectial, emotional and practical life into a single manner" (Perniola 1995: 18) of urban experience. Urban modernity that increasingly depends on communication for its operation is marked by "a dynamism and an immediacy that heralds surprises and unexpected events" (Perniola 1995: 18). Urban modernity goes beyond "any one-sided investigative approach to what is hidden" (Perniola 1995: 18) as it is irreducible to a fixed model of capitalism. Of necessity, modernity in its analytical dimensions (Munch 1982) brings into a system of relations culture, economy, society and politics that is neither static nor deterministic. Modernity on the urban level, however, individualizes these relations within the historical limits to variation and within the historical changes to regularity. As urban governmentality, urban modernity organizes processes of cultural, economic, social and political accumulation on the urban level. Moreover, since for metropolitan cities national sovereignty is staged within their urban spaces, urban governmentality of cities aspiring to claim the status of global cities goes hand in hand with staging urban sovereignty of international relations that events connected to globe-spanning networks and regimes construct.