***image1***SITE Santa Fe's Biennial curator says his show has no theme and is bound to fail-and that's a good thing.
Last time I sat across the table from a well-known German contemporary art curator, it didn't go well at all. I was a guest in his country and he was taking time out of his busy schedule to play host to the American for an afternoon, which he seemed to view as a particularly torturous kind of babysitting. He thought I was ignorant, I thought he was pretentious; we hated each other. It was raining heavily, so we passed the afternoon in a small bar sucking down
hefeweisen
with competitive alcoholic machismo while half-heartedly arguing about corporate influence in art and the role of critical theory. It was a boring and beery experience with each of us playing our respective cultural clichés to the hilt. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had donned his turtleneck and said, "Now izz der time vee dance on Schprockets." He, I'm sure, expected me to pull up my boots, spit some chaw and maybe lasso a heifer.
So when I sat down with Klaus Ottmann, curator of SITE Santa Fe's sixth biennial, opening this July 7-9 weekend, I was ready for a rematch. Although SITE hosts art exhibitions
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throughout the year, the biennial is its signature event and an outside organizer is always brought in to keep new ideas flowing. Ottmann professes big plans to change the nature of the once-every-two-years art exhibition, arguably formulaic in its schedule, its roster of international artists and the predictable, confusing artspeak that curators always use to explain the ever-changing theme around which the exhibit is organized.
"All right you overbearing European art whore," I thought to myself, "you're on my turf this time. One high-minded peep from you about how your art show is supposed to represent the 'new global cosmology of the really unreal' or the 'horrific beauty of the mildly boring,' and I won't rest until you're revealed for the pseudo-academic charlatan that you are!"
But Ottmann doesn't say anything like that. "There is no theme," he tells me. "This biennial is not about my ideas. It's just about looking at art." He goes on to explain that, in his mind, biennial art exhibitions have become too much about the curator and the curator's theories, effectively blocking the public from having a pure experience in response to the art being exhibited. Ottmann admits to never having seen a previous SITE biennial, but he doesn't hesitate to be critical of the most recent-2004's
Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque
-in terms of its oppressive theme. "If I say the art is about something grotesque, everyone has to look for the reason why. They will stand in front of a painting wondering, 'Why is it grotesque?' I want to remove that barrier and allow people to have a less filtered encounter."
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Ottmann's eyes, framed by his just-graying, shoulder-length hair and crouched behind thin eyeglasses, beam with enough clear-eyed earnestness for me to know he's telling the truth;
he may be in charge of one of the most significant international contemporary
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art exhibitions in the United States, but all he wants is for folks to come down and take a look without worrying about what it means. What's more, and I don't know if it's because he lives in New York instead of Germany or because we're drinking water instead of beer or what, but it occurs to me he's making entirely unpretentious sense.
Like a lot of things having to do with artists, the exhibition format
known as a "biennial" really began in a café. The city of Venice, Italy-approximately 111 years before "creative economy" and "cultural tourism" became
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the buzz words
del giorno
in Santa Fe, New Mexico-decided the tradition of nightly artist gatherings at the Caffé Florian in the Piazza San Marco could be more than an exercise in debauchery (bawdy tavern is a more apt translation for "caffé" than, say, Starbucks); the artists' meeting could instead be parlayed into an
opportunity for prestige and economic development. A dubious plan, I know, but it worked. Like Venice itself, against all odds,
la Biennale di Venizia
is still going strong, having paused only during world wars, and otherwise sticking to its every-two-years schedule of international art hoopla. The idea of bringing artists together regularly to exhibit their most current works caught on and, over the last century, other cities like Sao Paolo, Brazil and Havana, Cuba capitalized on the biennial concept. In 1995, SITE Santa Fe opened and hosted its first biennial. Now there are more than 50 active biennials occurring around the world.
The biennial format is attractive to scholars, artists and the growing numbers of professional, independent
curators who desire to work in a less restrictive situation than that provided by conventional museum exhibitions. The dialogue and cross-pollination of ideas
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that naturally occurs when artists and critics from around the world are brought together can be a vibrant and heady stew with lasting repercussions in terms of how art is made and understood. The chance to guide or alter this discussion has lead curators to organize biennials around increasingly elaborate and nuanced ideas about art.
"Imagine a bunch of curators all standing together in a tight clump muttering about something or other," says SITE Executive Director Laura Heon by way of analogy. "Every once in a while, one
of them says, 'I CAN'T TAKE IT ANY MORE' and busts out, leaping into the void. Sometimes the curator sails away and everybody ooohs and ahhhs. Other times the curator
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goes splat and everyone says, 'What a stupid jerk.' That is what it's all about. It's an attempt at a paradigm shift."
The problem is that the paradigm a given curator is attempting to shift can be awfully narrow, to the point of being blatantly exclusionary. Even if the artwork inside the door was amazing, how many average Joes wandering past the first SITE biennial were likely to be drawn in by the theme
Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby?
How many students were in a quandary about spending 5 bucks on SITE's fourth biennial,
Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism
, versus catching a matinee of that other summer of 2001 temptation:
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
? In the same way that there can be a man's man or a king of beers, biennial themes have achieved the acme of jargon, the ultimate way to fire syllables off into the distance like cheap ammunition without managing to hit any kind of significant target.
Fortunately, it's not just me and a bunch of average Joes who are repelled by these unconvincing qualifiers-there's Klaus Ottmann. Ottmann isn't exactly a rebel populist;
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he's written a book called
The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition
, as well as books on Mark Rothko and quixotic artist James Lee Byars, so he's comfortable with obtuse theorizing and has the bibliography, black-on-black clothing scheme and German accent to prove it. Ottmann parts ways with the biennial trend of celebrity curators and overtly conceptual themes, however, because of a belief that information should be desired, not de facto.
"I believe art is open to everyone. You don't need any prior experience or specialized knowledge," Ottmann says. "In
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this exhibition there will be guides and information available if someone decides they want it or if they become too confused." But, Ottmann says, nothing will be pushed on people as necessary for understanding the art, least of all grappling with a curator's theory. Art is too personal an experience, he claims, to be placed under any one rubric.
"It's an experience that can't be shared-not really. I can describe a work for you, its size and appearance, but that never explains how it makes me feel."
Yet given the modest list of 13 artists-fewer than ever
before-and the manner in which Ottmann's arranged for each of them to have a personal and intimate exhibition space within SITE's building, I get the distinct feeling that Ottmann is, in fact, trying to let
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us know how he feels about art. If the easiest metaphor for a biennial is to explain it as the visual equivalent of a literary anthology-the
curator as editor, assembling a collection of complementary works-what Ottmann is doing is more like a mix-tape. You remember…that late-night obsession that would overtake you after meeting a new friend or lover? The need to assemble the perfect musical expression of all the emotions you were experiencing in relation to that person? It requires a careful balance of hard rocking and slow balladeering, of quirk and poignancy and at least one inside joke. With his long, thin physique, a bit spiderish and pale, it's easy to picture Ottmann up late at night, prowling his New York apartment and considering which artists to include in his biennial with the same sense of passion and paranoia that goes into making a mix-tape, or an iPod playlist or whatever it is the kids are into these days. For the rest of us, it's an art show
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that may or may not capture our imagination but, for Ottmann, the biennial is a medley of love songs to art, belted out live from Santa Fe.
But with no theme to rally around, how did Ottmann choose the artists? Is it strictly a Top 13 of All Time list for him? Random names from a hat?
"Of course I drew on my own memories of artworks I've seen over the last several years," Ottmann says. Artists who popped onto his memory radar were then matched against the criteria he had developed.
"I wanted diversity in several ways. I wanted all mediums to be represented-sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, sound, performance art-everything. And another consideration was varied ages, I didn't want only hot, young artists or established people, but a blend. Gender, of course, plays a role and so does geography. It was not possible to make it truly global, but it is as international as I could
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do." Stirring his artist blend with a line from TS Eliot's
Burnt Norton
that refused to leave his head, Ottmann chose
Still Points of the Turning World
as the title for his exhibition. Although
Still Points
manages to describe both the concept of different artists caught in the act of creation around the world and the sensation that getting particularly grooved out on a piece of art can give you, Ottmann is careful to reinforce that it is not a theme, just an idea. In a cynical moment, I could get to thinking that he is on a slippery slope by claiming the gimmick of no agenda while keeping a defense in his back pocket to trot out for theory wonks. Heon, though, in the midst of helming logistics like bringing the biennial in on budget and arranging to have trucks with 6 tons of art gingerly unloaded in a too-small cargo bay, feels entirely comfortable with what Ottmann is bringing to SITE.
"I don't think Klaus' strategy is gimmicky," Heon says. "The worst that can be said is that he is simply reminding us of something very basic to the experience of art, which many in the 'biz' seem to have lost sight of or which has been obscured by other trendier things recently. The best that can be said is that it's fairly heroic to be so sincere and to believe so fervently in the ability of art to touch people."
Still, in a country where we have trouble deciding whether or not we care if the CIA spies on us and we
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don't really mind if a branch of government, rather than the voice of the people, determines a national election and
BladeRunner
had to be released with a plot-clarifying voiceover, it's worth wondering if we might not need a bit of theme to guide us through something as seemingly intangible as art.
Why couldn't Ottmann have just gone with a more blue collar theme, some friends of mine recently wondered aloud over dinner, like Autumn or Hawaiian? I have to admit-they have a point. Not that the biennial should be organized around a tailgate, but themes, when not needlessly complex, often encourage people to get excited about participating. Just look at Halloween. But then, art can really only extend so many concessions to the public. You don't see science or religion kowtowing to the lowest common denominator (well, OK, not science anyway)
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and Ottmann believes they are all after the same essential thing, necessitating that viewers arrive prepared to have an experience more meaningful than a costume party.
"These are the basic existential questions that science and religion look for answers to as well-viewers can relate to the idea of trying to give meaning to life," Ottmann says. Just because the curator believes art to have a potential universal value, however, doesn't mean
Still Points
is going to be easy, or even always pleasant.
"I don't expect controversy," says Ottmann, "but I don't mean for it to be a feel good experience either. There's no new age, safe place atmosphere; there are plenty of things with edges and also plenty that is uplifting."
Indeed, Ottmann's biennial appears engineered to keep people
teetering between peaceful contemplation and nervous breakdown, which, honestly, is a natural enough state if one is shooting for universal appeal. At one moment visitors will confront Wolfgang Laib's monolithic sculptures-pure, formal and
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calming-and at another moment, the world of Jonathan Meese, a kind of spastic, warmongering, Christian simpleton, Gestapo PeeWee Herman of a performance artist who may, at any time, shout: "I am wearing the meat
helmet!" His paintings and sculpture are equally unsettling. Wangechi Mutu, whose collage work (seen on the cover of this issue) really does embody the otherwise pointless phrase "terrible beauty," may end up creating an installation that is overtly gorgeous and underhandedly terrifying, or vice versa. Two weeks before the opening, it's too soon to know for sure. THORNS LTD, an experimental sound project born from a Norwegian black metal group, will create a composition that takes six months to complete itself, never repeating as it plays all day and all night. No one knows what such a thing could possibly sound like.
None of the work shown in the biennial has ever been exhibited in the United States before,
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which is the way Ottmann and SITE prefer it. Around half of the works are commissions created specifically for
Still Points
. This instills a thrilling charge of newness, but also the sometimes frightening prospect of the unknown. Brooklyn-based Patty Chang is one of the few artists to have spent a good deal of time in Santa Fe working on her piece. Before I visited with her, about a month before the opening, Heon sent me this e-mail by way of clarifying Chang's process:
We are building a big structure out of scaffolding out in Galisteo. She is talking to a guru at Ojo. For a while, she was quite taken with the Eaves movie ranch. She has thoughts about skin and conflict and submarines. She needed a giant memory card for her camera. She will be here for about a week.
The scaffolding structure turns out to, in fact,
be
the submarine, and Chang is filming a video piece around it that
involves a sofa and a parachute and a lot of time standing around and waiting for wind. She's not sure
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what the final result will be yet.
Whatever it is, Ottmann assures me that it will fail. His biennial, with its audacious theme of themelessness, will also fail, he says. "The artist always struggles. It's not possible to quite achieve what is intended." Given an intimate enough space to look at the artist's work, a viewer will begin to see and experience this struggle, as well as the inevitable failure, Ottmann says. The goal, both for the artist and the viewer aiming to understand the work, is to come closer, to fail a little bit better.
In Ottmann's art-maddened head, he sees a space where artists put forward the very best they have, failing as eloquently as possible and an audience that fails to understand them with equal, promising beauty. It is a room full of people and strange, almost unexplainable objects that just might evolve into ecstasy, anger, confusion and collaborative enterprise of the queerest and most unpredictable kind. It's worth a shot.
SITE Santa Fe events:
Friday, July 7
Patrons' Preview and Cocktail Party.
6-8 pm. $250.
SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199
STUDIO SITE Party.
9 pm. $20.
Swig, 135 W. Palace Ave., 955-0400
Saturday, July 8
Members Preview.
(SITE Members Only; free with current membership.) 1-5 pm.
SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199
Jonathan Meese Performance Art.
5 pm. $20/$15 Students, Seniors & SITE members.
Paolo Soleri Amphitheater
Sunday, July 9
Panel Discussion with Klaus Ottmann and biennial artists TBA.
Noon. $10/$5.
The Lensic, 211 W. San Francisco St., 988-1234
Public Preview.
Noon-5 PM. $10/$5.
SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199
THORNS LTD.
Concert. 6 pm. $20/$15.
Paolo Soleri Amphitheater
Upcoming:
Thursday, Sept. 21
alva noto (Carsten Nicolai) concert.
$10/$5. Location TBA.
Tickets available at SITE Santa Fe, 989-1199.
