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 InAugust 1997fifteencuratorsfrom Africa,Asia,Australia,LatinAmerica,
Europe,and the United States met at the RockefellerFoundation'sConference
and StudyCenter in Bellagio,Italy,to considerthe rapidlydevelopingfield of
internationalcontemporaryart exhibitions.Conceived by Noreen Tomassi,
directorof Arts International,and TomasYbarra-Frausto, associate directorof
Arts & Humanitiesat the RockefellerFoundation,the conferencewas designed
to enable curatorsstrugglingwith the extraordinaryand in some ways unpre-
cedented challengesposed by internationalcontemporaryart exhibitionsto
sharetheir ideas and concerns.The moderatorwas KinshashaHolmanConwill,
directorof the StudioMuseumin Harlem,who helped shape the program.Each
curatormade a presentation,as did Betye Saar,representingthe artists'per-
spective, and SaskiaSassen, professorof urbanplanningat the Universityof
Chicagoand an expert on globalism.Tomassiasked if Iwould be interested
in attendingthe conference and then writinga report that would be made
availablethat fallto the participants,as well as to other curatorsand funders.
Tomassiknew of my interestin internationalexhibitions
Michael Brenson when Iworked for the New YorkTimes(1982-91). In
Barcelonain 1993 I had attended CrossingCultures,one
of severalinternationalconferencesArts International
The Curator's Moment has organizedto considerpressingissues in art and cul-
ture. I hadwritten on the issue of art and community
and hadworked as a consultantfor the RockefellerFoundation,whichfinanced
the Bellagioconference,an event that was remarkablein its thoughtfulness,
intensity,and candor.

Introduction
After listening to heads of international biennials and triennials speak with one
another for three days about their hopes and concerns, it was clear to me that
the era of the curator has begun. The organizers of these exhibitions, as well
as other curators around the world who work across cultures and are able to
think imaginatively about the points of compatibility and conflict among them,
must be at once aestheticians, diplomats, economists, critics, historians, politi-
cians, audience developers, and promoters. They must be able to communicate
not only with artists but also with community leaders, business executives, and
heads of state. They must be comfortable with people who have devoted their
lives to art and culture, with people who neither like nor trust art, and with
people who may be willing, if they are convinced that art serves their interests
or is sufficiently connected to their lives, to be won over by an artist or an
exhibition. As much as any artist, critic, or museum director, the new curator
understands, and is able to articulate, the ability of art to touch and mobilize
people and encourage debates about spirituality, creativity, identity, and the
nation. The texture and tone of the curator's voice, the voices it welcomes or
excludes, and the shape of the conversation it sets in motion are essential to
the texture and perception of contemporary art. The focus on Catherine David
throughout the one hundred days of her 1997 Documenta X was not an aberra-
tion. For the foreseeable future, the ambitions, methodologies, and personal
styles of the curators responsible for major international contemporary art exhi-
bitions will be as essential to their content as any artist's work. Throughout the

16 WINTER 1998
three days of meetings in Bellagio, Germano Celant, cura-
tor of contemporary art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum and the commissioner of the 1997 Venice
Biennale, insisted that the language and identity of the
curator be considered with a new kind of seriousness. He
was right.
In the midst of the recent chapter in the history of
museums that was largely defined by the ethnic- and
identity-based exhibition, Mari Carmen Ramirez, curator
of Latin American art at the Jack S. Blanton Museum
of Art in Austin, Texas, and another participant in the
Bellagio meetings, recognized the importance of curators
working across and between cultures. In her 1994 essay
"Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of
Cultural Representation," an analysis of the history of
Latin American and Latino exhibitions in the United
States, she noted the "transformation of the curator of
contemporary art from behind-the-scenes aesthetic arbiter
to central player in the broader stage of global cultural
politics." If this transformation was evident to her in
1994, how much more complete it must have been in
1997, the year of five international biennials-Cairo,
Havana, Venice, Istanbul, and Johannesburg-as well as
Documenta. Look at the issues embedded in these exhibi-
tions: nationalism versus internationalism or transnation-
alism; indigenous cultures versus global media; handmade
traditions versus technological networks; respect for the
intimate experience of art versus a belief in curatorial
interventions that can make the artistic message, and
sometimes even that intimacy itself, broadly accessible;
belief in the intrinsic value of art versus an obligation to
put art in the service of extraordinary social and political
needs. The urgency of these issues underlines the chal-
lenges facing the curatorial profession to think deeply
about multiple audiences and to allow individual curator-
ial perspectives to be invigorated by radically, even shock-
ingly, different experiences of space and time, memory
and history. These unframable high stakes biennial pro-
jects do not reward curatorial business as usual. Like the
independent curator Mary Jane Jacob, whose public art
projects outside galleries and museums propose reimagin-
ing the site, the audience for, and perhaps even the nature
of the art experience, the biennial curator cannot succeed
without a hands-on involvement in every aspect of his or
her program. For the new curator, the clear-cut division
of responsibilities between the curatorial, administrative,
education, marketing, and public information departments
that has been a reality in large museums in the United
17 art journal
States for well over a decade-a division that has tended
to detach many curators from their audiences and blind
them to the nonaesthetic interests their museums are serv-
ing-is inconceivable. If this division exists, meeting their
responsibilities is impossible.
While large international contemporary art exhibi-
tions are helping to expand the roles and responsibilities
of the curator, many artists find themselves having to
develop in aesthetic and political climates of increasing
suspicion and constraint. Throughout the United States the
political right is ridiculing artists, and even the idea of the
artist; within the art community, there is widespread con-
tempt for any tendency to romanticize the individuality,
personality, hand, and heroism of the artist. Monograph
and biography are now the most disparaged forms of art
history. Not surprisingly, much of the most respected
new art in Europe and the United States is defined by a
noticeable degree of self-effacement. It is intended to
draw attention to ideas, processes, and situations-not to
itself as an object (if that is what it is) or to its makers.
In October 1997 I heard Kristaps Gelzis, a young sculptor
in Riga, Latvia, say that he liked Documenta X because "it
was not concerned with the artist but with process," and
Andy Goldsworthy, an English landscape sculptor, remark,
while constructing one of his delicate, undulating walls
of unattached stones, at the Storm King Art Center in
upstate New York, that he wanted to make work that
"would take credit for itself." In other words, as the cura-
tor becomes a more and more visible player in the world
of contemporary art, more artists are concealing their egos
to prove to the art community, to the general public, and
to themselves that they are worthy of respect.
At the same time, the presentation of art is more
dependent on the curator than ever. There seems to be
a consensus that when art from one culture is shown in
another, it cannot speak for itself. Because of the inevit-
ably loaded nature of the responses of a museum-goer in
New York, let's say, or Washington, D.C., to contempo-
rary art from Zaire, Colombia, or Cambodia, the idea of a
museum's presenting an object from one culture in such
a way that it would offer an intensely private object-to-
visitor encounter to someone from another culture, in
which no one or nothing else is welcome and viewers
are free to respond as they please, is increasingly unac-
ceptable in the United States. Sufficient clues must be
given to enable viewers to orient themselves to the work
and to provide viewers unfamiliar with the conditions in
which it was created at least some sense of what it means
to appreciate it on its own terms. Hand in hand with an
awareness of the challenges of presenting art from one
culture in a very different cultural context is a growing
awareness within museums that art exhibited in any
museum is seen by many people who feel they have little
or no access to it and that they need to be encouraged
to feel that the aesthetic experience belongs to them as
much as to anyone else. The perplexing combination
of curiosity and distrust, respect and exploitation, that
defines many institutional approaches to audience cannot
be explored here. What needs to be stated is that the
increasing institutional awareness of the importance of
the audience has made curators more visible as mediators
between art and its publics.
The increasing centrality of the curator has also been
reinforced by the emergence of installation as the stan-
dard form in which contemporary artists around the
world are working. Installations involve selecting and
arranging in a space often shared by visitors. They may
also involve writing and educating. Installations were
designed, in part, to contextualize and therefore empower
themselves by inscribing within them an awareness and
even the look of a gallery or museum. By so doing,
however, they implicitly acknowledge the curator's in-
escapable authority. Blurring the line between artist and
curator builds into the experience of art a heightened
awareness of the curator's reality.
I would not be emphasizing the importance of the
curator if I did not believe that in a decade that has
blurred the distinction between artists and curators, cura-
tors have become more like artists. What gives biennials
their emotional and intellectual pressure is the sense of
curatorial mission. The candor with which many curators
are willing to reveal their doubts as well as their certain-
ties gives these spectacles some possibility of a human
scale. The ability of curators to see these doubts as
sources of creative energy gives their exhibitions some-
thing of their hopefulness and freedom. Their concerns
for the wounds of countries trying to use culture to
rebuild and reinvent themselves gives some biennials
poignancy. And the inevitable solitude of curators
throughout the development of their exhibitions, despite
the teams they assemble, suggests to me that their situa-
tions are not unlike those of many of the most significant
artists of the twentieth century, whose abilities to bring
something necessary into the world required not only
vision but also an inexhaustible supply of belief, focus,
resiliance, and nerve.
18 WINTER 1998
I am not saying curators are identical to artists.
Because of the fragile institutional machinery most bien-
nial curators must work within, which prevents them
from taking anything for granted, and the nationalistic
needs to which every major international exhibition, even
Documenta, must respond, these curators cannot be as
independent as artists, some of whom are free to make
work that can support or offend anyone or anything. It
goes without saying that curators cannot create an exhibi-
tion experience that offers the intimacy and intensity of a
painting, sculpture, or photograph. However, they can
bring into their projects, and to the issues that drive
them, many, if not all, of the emotional and intellectual
components of the artistic process. The curatorial and the
artistic imaginations may not be identical, but the border
between them has become harder to define.
Yet I have so many questions. How did we reach the
point where we expect art to respond to the needs and
aspirations of peoples and nations? Are there limits to
what art can be asked to do? Why have the expectations
for art increased at a time when the individual artist is
feared, not only in the United States but in many other
countries as well, and the artist's voice is being systemati-
cally deconstructed? What are the political implications
of approaching art as a means to an end, rather than an
end in itself, or both a means and an end? What is the
responsibility of the curator to ensure respect for the
integrity of a work of art, which can survive, miracul-
ously, even if the art points everywhere but toward itself
and all the walls between it and the world around it seem
dissolved? At what point does approaching a work of art
in terms of what it can do, rather than in terms of what
makes it unlike any other work, or indeed anything else,
bring to mind nightmares of instrumental thinking?
Several times in the last couple of years, after listening
to people speak about the profound representational and
national needs art is expected to meet, I have found my-
self yearning to curate an exhibition about an eccentric
visionary tradition in U.S. art that includes loners like
Forrest Bess and Albert York, whose small paintings are
obsessive, hypnotic, intensely personal worlds. I have
also dreamed of an exhibition in which materials are
approached, not as things to be used, but as realities in
themselves that allow artists to physically enter the per-
ceptual process and to introduce themselves and their
audiences to the intimacy and otherness of matter. I am
profoundly committed to the effort to reintegrate art
with life, or, in cultures where they have always been
 integrated, to continue to articulate and expand their
connectedness, but I believe the particularity of art must
be respected. Sustained attention to the life of an object
is no less of a moral act to me than sustained attention to
situations and communities artists enable me to enter.
Biennials cannot succeed unless they engage their com-
munities and make enough sense within them that the
communities infuse the exhibitions with a vibrant and
almost palpable sense of place; but respecting artists who
are determined to retain their independence from audi-
ences and categories, and being able to argue for the
importance of this resistance, are also essential to a bien-
nial's potential for growth.
I believe the best way to write concretely about the
issues that affected me with the most immediacy in the
Bellagio meetings is by responding to the curators' for-
mulations, to their anxieties and insights, to their eager-
ness for exchange. Since I am a writer, this commentary
was shaped by my response to language, in particular to
words the curators used that continue to occupy a great
deal of space in my head. The intensity with which I
have lived with these words since leaving Bellagio located
my personal struggle with the meanings of the confer-
ence. I am aware of the mistakes that can result from
basing a commentary on discussions of some of these
exhibitions rather than on firsthand experience of the
Johannesburg, Havana, Istanbul, or Dakar biennials. I
realize that the curators' understanding of some of the
issues I discuss may be very different from or far more
developed than mine. I also realize that the primary
concerns of some or many of the curators may be only
peripherally related to those addressed here. Even when
this is the case, I hope this commentary will make it eas-
ier for those who read it to respond better to their own
situations, to our situations, to the situations of so many
people trying to come to terms with the meanings and
possibilities of art and culture in a post-Cold War, post-
colonial, fin-de-siecle moment, in which I am surely not
the only one who feels he is continually picking up and
losing the threads of the conversation, absorbing and los-
ing its voices, believing it is my conversation while won-
dering whose conversation I'm in.
Transparency
The discussions in Bellagio underlined the importance of
several related constellations of words. The constellation
that includes impurity, partiality, and incompleteness
suggests the rejection of any assumption of absolute
19 art journal
authority, conclusive knowledge, or human or cultural
essence. Another constellation includes words like
hybridity, reciprocity, negotiation, and reconciliation,
suggesting the pressing need many people feel to listen
to one another and to acknowledge and communicate
with realities different from their own. These constella-
tions are familiar and, among many cultural communities
in the United States, widely accepted. Their usefulness in
helping people to consider themselves and their relation-
ships to others in an increasingly decentralized yet inter-
connected world is, to me, incontestable. These constella-
tions of words clarify not only the attitudes of curators
but also the complexity and the general goals of many of
the big international contemporary art exhibitions. It was
apparent from the meetings that all the biennials are
hybrids, shaped by different interests, some of them
competing. Many are conceived within a nationalistic
framework intended to develop national confidence and
pride, yet the art they present may argue against nation-
alism and even against the idea of a nation. It was also
apparent that if it were possible to produce a cross sec-
tion of the structure of any of these exhibitions, it would
show layer upon layer of negotiation and reconciliation.
And many of the curators want the actual exhibitions to
inspire both local dialogues and dialogues with other
biennials and nations.
What concerns me here is a third constellation. It
includes words like self-consciousness, openness, and
transparency and phrases such as "declaring yourself."
Several of the curators emphasized the importance of
self-consciousness, which implies a sophisticated aware-
ness of the histories and implications of the ideas they
are working with and of the economic and political sys-
tems they are working within, as well as an ability to
build this awareness into their curatorial presentations.
Vishakha N. Desai, director of the galleries at the Asia
Society in New York, asserted that curators must "own
up to taste," define their positions, and explain where
they are coming from and what they cannot yet under-
stand. She spoke about "recognizing our own fallibility"
and sharing that recognition with audiences. "We are as
much products as creators," she said. For Okwui
Enwezor, the artistic director of the i997 Johannesburg
Biennale, "part of the responsibility of the curators is to
say, This is what I am doing, and it is not the final
word." In a private conversation, Enwezor spoke about
"creating a space of vulnerability." This wonderful phrase
reflects the wish of many of these curators to conceive an
 ANN

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Alexis Rodriguez Duarte.

Untitled, 1997. Color pho-
tograph from the forth-
coming book May 1997.
Taken in Havana in May
1997, this photograph
shows the city during the
Bienal.The capitol build-
ing is to the left and a
billboard advertising the
Bienal is to the right of
center.

20 WINTER1998
exhibition experience in which intimacy, accessibility,
and self-disclosure are welcomed, and audiences are
encouraged to express their ideas and feelings by partici-
pating in the collective production of meaning. The
importance of participation and interactivity in Docu-
menta X helped convince some of the curators in Bellagio
that, in the words of Virginia Perez-Ratton, the director
of the Museo de Arte y Disefio Contemporineo in San
Jose, Costa Rica, "Documenta was coming into another
century with this show." This constellation of words
indicates how much the generation of curators now com-
ing into power believes in responsibility and generosity.
It also reveals how essential hospitality and trust have
become to the success of most ambitious cross-cultural
curatorial endeavors.
The issue for me is not the spirit of these words or
their importance to this artistic moment. The issue is
ensuring that the difficulty of being self-conscious, of
making oneself transparent, of declaring oneself, is
understood. When I recently heard U.S. politicians at an
economic conference talk about the need to be more
"open and transparent," it was clear to me how easily
these words can become conventions. One of the prob-
lems is that words or phrases calling for greater openness
and transparency tend to be understood politically, eco-
nomically, sociologically, or aesthetically. Rarely are they
understood to be meaningful within all of these frame-
works. Even more important, rarely are they understood
psychologically. The confidence with which the words
are now being used in the field suggests less an unending
process in which any sense of control is ultimately illuso-
ry than finality, as if it is possible to declare oneself once
and for all in that moment, or as if it is enough to be
able to declare oneself in such a way as to get what one
desires from a specific situation. As a result, these words
tend to promise the relinquishing of authority without
delivering it. If the difficulty of the words is not acknow-
ledged, then their use can become pat and manipulative.
When this is the case, they do not become a way of
sharing power-or, in the words of the Brazilian artist
Mauricio Dias, of "exchanging territories"-but rather
simply of reinforcing power at the curatorial, institution-
al, or political end.
The currency of words like openness and transpar-
ency leads me to ask, How much can we reveal and how
much must we hide, and how does the line between
revealing and concealing structure the tone and conversa-
tion curators are trying to create? How much does being
21 art journal
open and transparent challenge power and how much
does it reinforce it? What is the relation between trans-
parency and mastery? What kind of sharing of power is
really desirable, or possible, within an exhibition that
must communicate authority to be credible? Which
artists, curators, and peoples are likely to support these
words, and which are not? Is a curator trying to put a
biennial on the map in a part of the world largely re-
moved from the immediate possibility of economic and
political power more or less likely to argue for these
words than a curator in a country where such power is
taken for granted?
What does it mean to "declare yourself'? Does it
mean being up front about the goals of a show? And is
that possible when the goals of these exhibitions may be
manifold, from supporting art and artists in one place, to
providing an overview of the contemporary art situation,
to putting an entire culture, country, or even part of the
world on the international art map? Does "declaring
yourself" mean defining taste when an exhibition driven
by both transnational awareness and national needs will
always go beyond individual taste? Does it mean sharing
with audiences the ideological premises and aims of an
exhibition likely to overflow any ideological framework
in which anyone tries to put it? Arguing for a particular
kind of art and for thinking about it? Situating the exhi-
bition within the history of exhibition approaches and
curatorial methodologies? Historicizing the exhibition
and its place within the tradition of that biennial and of
the city itself, as Paulo Herkenhoff did in Bellagio in his
cogent overview of the 1998 Sdo Paulo Bienal, of which
he is chief curator? Discussing funding sources and defin-
ing the problems and compromises that are inevitable in
biennials, and how these compromises end up shaping
the show?
What about the personal implications of openness
and transparency? Do these words mean defining oneself
in race, class, and gender terms-terms that are evolving
all the time? Do they mean defining oneself in terms of
geography, of family history, of the psychological and
social formation of one's style? What about individual
ambition? How is that talked about? And the kind of
obsessiveness and narcissism that, as Herkenhoff indicat-
ed, are inextricable and indeed necessary components of
most meaningful curatorial ventures?
In short, while words and phrases like "declaring
yourself" and "making yourself transparent" can help
establish a climate of exchange and engagement, they do
 not, in themselves, lead to what I think most of the cura-
tors want to encourage but are also somewhat wary of
encouraging: risk. In addition, they do not, by them-
selves, acknowledge that the candor and honesty many of
the curators were calling for depend not only on intro-
spection and goodwill but on performance and style. In
the best memoirs, which have become one of the domi-
nant literary forms of this time, candor is always both
exposure and creation. Openness and transparency must
have a form to inspire people to believe in them, and
when they have that form they are already both an un-
masking and a transformation. Just as important as the
will to be open, then, is the form in which a curator is
able to be open. This form, in turn, will affect the tone
and texture of the exhibition. The ability to be open and
transparent in ways that inspire trust and risk is one of
the talents that can link curatorial and artistic creation.
The ultimate test of the form may be whether, and in
what ways, it allows itself to be open to question.
As Desai recognized, these words lead directly into
the identity issue. "Making transparent and self-conscious
brings identity to the fore," she said. At the same time,
the words expose the immense complexity of the concept
of identity. Anyone using this constellation of words is,
in effect, acknowledging this complexity. He or she is
also suggesting that words like negotiation, reconcilia-
tion, and hybridity apply not just to people's relations
to others and to the world around them but to the pro-
cesses of everyone's inner life. These words and phrases
-openness, transparency, self-consciousness, declaring
yourself-therefore have the potential to restore the radi-
cality that has been largely lost from the other two con-
stellations of words. When the difficulties of these words
emerge, the meanings of hybridity, negotiation, reciproc-
ity, and partialness become dramatic. Self-consciousness,
openness, and transparency call attention to an instability
and danger that seems so much of the moment and yet
so basic to the human condition that it is both topical
and primal. At the same time, these words pose a ques-
tion many artists and curators are struggling with: How
can awareness and acceptance of instability and uncer-
tainty become a source of community, knowledge, won-
der, and revelation?
Heroic/Nonheroic
Although the constellations of words that shaped the dis-
cussions of curatorial identity in Bellagio are insistently,
even adamantly, nonheroic, the exhibitions discussed are,
22 WINTER 1998
with the exception of the Venice Biennale and the
Carnegie International, both of which have been around
since the nineteenth century, heroic at their cores. In the
biennials that have emerged since the Havana Bienal was
inaugurated in 1984, art is a means that enables curators
to work toward breaking the isolation of their peoples
and regions and redefining national and international
relationships. In most of these exhibitions, art is also seen
as a means of improving society and making the world
better. Enwezor expressed his hope that the Second
Johannesburg Biennale would be "a celebration of South
African independence" that worked toward the "recon-
nection of South Africa to the world." Remi Sagna, the
secretary general of the 1998 Dakar Biennial, defined one
aim of his show as making Dakar a pan-African center.
Herkenhoff said the goals of his 1998 Bienal included
"the formation of the gaze of young Brazilians" and re-
forming Sdo Paulo's institutions. "It's not for art's sake,"
he said. "It's for the sake of the education of society."
Caroline Turner, the director of the first Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993, in Brisbane,
spoke of the importance of educating Australians about
the changing identity of Australia, "which is no longer a
Western outpost," and, by so doing, to "change the way
Australians see the region through the art." For Llilian
Llanes Godoy, the director of the Centro Wifredo Lam in
Havana and the organizer of all five Havana biennials,
"art is very important for the survival of humanity." She
is convinced her biennial and other exhibitions of this
genre can contribute to "the construction of a more
balanced world."
For the curators in Bellagio, as a group, a more bal-
anced world is not possible without more equal repre-
sentation in the corridors of cultural power. Margaret
Archuleta, curator of fine arts at the Heard Museum in
Phoenix, made clear that her responsibility at the meet-
ings, "and it's a heavy responsibility," was to speak for
Native Americans who are almost always excluded from
the most prominent international artistic events. "How
do they get to participate in this arena?" she asked. This
was a question, she said, that she had to answer to her
people. Ramirez, too, like several others, raised the issue
of representation. Part of her job as a curator and scholar,
she said, is to understand why artists from Brazil, let's
say, are often included in these shows while artists from
Bolivia are left out. For her, it is imperative to render
visible the dynamics of those international circuits that
give artists in some countries, and from certain ethnic
backgrounds, a greater chance of being recognized inter-
nationally than others.
Curators did communicate their passion for art and
the importance of standards. Llanes: "Our aim is to show
the best art in our country." Perez-Ratton: "I have been
traveling for years, and I am sick of all the bad Central
American art I saw. . . . We have to try and get the qual-
ity people into these shows." Enwezor: "We have to deal
with issues of art." His responsibilities in Johannesburg,
Enwezor said, included making distinctions in quality and
clarifying the different ways in which "artist" is defined.
Being an artist is not the same in Africa as it is in the
United States, he said, and not the same in Nigeria,
where he was born, as it is in South Africa, which he
described as "a divided country, horribly wounded,"
where the "situation of the artist is a life-and-death
matter." Enwezor indicated his discomfort with any cura-
torial or critical language that does not allow for the pos-
sibility of using passionate words, like love and beauty,
to describe the encounter with art.
One of the reasons that the Havana Bienal is so
widely respected among biennial curators is that the aes-
thetic and the political were inseparable and equal in it
from its inception. Llanes believed in Cuban and other
Latin American artists. She wanted to provide a space for
artists "who do not have space in the world." She want-
ed to enable countries and regions that were strangers to
understand one another better. In biennials that emerged
in the nineties, however, the relationship between aesthe-
tic and political needs has been less seamless. The need to
empower and connect regions and peoples can seem so
great, in fact, that the first message sent out by recent
biennials as a group is not: see what the art in them and
in their countries or regions has achieved and has to say
to the world, but rather: consider what the art in them is
intended to do. The issue here is tricky. The same politi-
cal needs and circumstances that define the urgency of
these exhibitions-if they were just surveys of good art,
few people in other countries, and perhaps even in the
countries where the exhibitions were held, would feel a
desire to visit them-can also make them seem contrived
and manipulative. The same needs that convince some
people to take these exhibitions seriously make others
uneasy with them.
The conflict between a commitment to art and a
commitment to using art to serve other agendas is not
just a biennial issue. In the fiercely contested yet unfor-
gettable "Magiciens de la terre," in Paris in 1989, its
23 art journal
curator, Jean-Hubert Martin, in his effort to reveal to the
West the continuing vitality of artistic traditions in non-
Western cultures, installed almost all the non-Western
works in an exhibition context that had little or nothing
to do with the intentions of the artists who created the
works and the traditions they served. In many of the
multicultural, identity-based exhibitions of the early
nineties, there were layers of disjunctiveness: between
the art (non-Western in origin) and the site (often de-
signed for modernism), between the art and many of its
audiences, between the personal nature of some of the
art and the representational or liberation causes the cura-
tors were asking the exhibition to serve.
While the new biennials grow out of the climate that
produced exhibitions like these, they also reflect the con-
flict between the commitment to and the use of art in
museums whose narrowness helped make multicultural
exhibitions necessary. In New York, hardly anyone in-
formed about art institutions is under the illusion that
any of the city's big museums cares first and foremost for
art, no matter how brilliant and sustaining their exhibi-
tions may be or how exemplary they may be in caring
for the art entrusted to them. Curatorial programs serve
institutional and board interests and agendas that are eco-
nomic, social, and political as much as they are aesthetic.
These interests, more than the needs of artists, or of
contemporary art, are at the forefront of exhibition pro-
gramming in powerhouse museums in the United States.
Using art in the service of causes that may not be its own
is a complicitly accepted part of U.S. museum life. The
news media not only refuse to question the ideological
structures of big museums, but hold up some of them as
models of aesthetic responsibility. The more blatant con-
flict that can exist in biennials between commitment to
art and commitment to using art should be considered
with this recent exhibition history and with museums
in mind.
The first biennial issue is legitimation. "The entire
debate about legitimation is at the center of what interna-
tional biennials are trying to do," Enwezor said. What is
being legitimated? Art? Artists? Curators? Institutions?
Traditions? Cultures? Communities? Cities? Regions?
Nations? What is the process of legitimation? It certainly
involves giving exhibition space to local and national
artists and showing the people who live in those loca-
tions what the artists can do. It involves showing people
from different parts of a continent and from other conti-
nents what the artists, cultures, and inhabitants of a
region are capable of. By becoming a recognized event,
covered by newspapers and art magazines and attended by
people from the region and perhaps from all over the
world, the local is validated in a way in which a few local
cultures anywhere-not even in urban centers like New
York, Los Angeles, Berlin, or Tokyo--can now validate
themselves. While perceiving the local's desire and claim
for international recognition, international and transna-
tional communities are not only pressured into focusing
attention on the local but they are also given evidence of
their own authority by recognizing the power of their
legitimizing machinery in the local's eyes. In this aston-
ishingly complex and frequently collusive game that
demands as much self-consciousness as possible, the local,
the regional, and the international can legitimate one
another.
What legitimates most? Is it that art from a region
appears in an international exhibition? Is it that a region
that may have been previously unidentified in technologi-
cally advanced nations with contemporary art, and, as a
result, with modernity, mounts such an exhibition and
therefore takes its place in its own eyes, and in the eyes
of the world, as a nation with a rightful claim to the pre-
sent? Is it critical acceptance and appreciation? By whom?
Is it market interest that enables local and regional artists
unknown before a biennial to enter major collections and
participate in other international exhibitions? Is it the
effect of the exhibition two, five, and ten years later on
the artistic life of the region? If the Dakar Biennial, as
Sagna defined it, has multiple goals-including making
known the art in Africa without ghettoizing Africans, pro-
viding a place where African artists can meet and debate
with one another, and generating interest in African art
outside Africa-what most determines success or failure?
If the Havana Bienal is, in Perez-Ratton's words, a "legiti-
mator of Latin American art"-an exhibition many artists
from Africa and Latin America attend to understand what
other artists from these regions are doing-with minimal
attention from the mainstream Western news and art
media, is the biennial nevertheless enough of a legitimat-
ing force that it should require, in its own eyes and in
the eyes of all those who depend on it, no other form
of legitimation? What does the value still placed on the
machinery of recognition in Western Europe and the
United States mean in postcolonial exhibitions born from
liberation struggles?
"What is it we are making?" Madeleine Grynsztein,
curator of twentieth-century art at the Carnegie Museum
24 WINTER 1998
of Art and the director of the i999 Carnegie International,
a triennial exhibition, asked. "Why? For whom?"
While the burden of legitimation is enough by itself
to suggest the heroic nature of the new biennials, just
putting these shows together is heroic as well. The leg-
work, tenacity, tact, forbearance, flexibility, assertiveness,
and cunning demanded of a biennial curator are startling.
Many must negotiate with unreliable funders and fight for
their artists and ideas within chronically unstable political
conditions. "Every day the government changes," N. Fulya
Erdmeci, director of the International Istanbul Biennial,
said. In every city that is the site of a developing biennial,
the art infrastructure is limited at best. Erdmeci spoke
about asking for help from everyone, including her
brother and other family members. Her photographer
was her best friend. She herself helped to pack the art
"like babies." Llanes spoke about the absence of a budget
from the Cuban ministry of culture in the last two Havana
biennials and "solving problems day by day." She got
help from the mayor, institutions, the army. After listen-
ing to her talk about the physical and mental exhaustion
she has felt after her biennials ended, describing her effort
as heroic seems like an understatement.
While trying to understand the nature of biennials, it
is important to consider the contrast between the heroic
nature of most of these exhibitions and the language of
modesty and humility curators use to define an appro-
priate curatorial style. It is also important to consider
the contrast between a profound suspicion of religious
responses to art in some of the curatorial presentations-
and of the kind of theological language that was com-
monplace not too long ago to describe the encounter with
a painting or sculpture-and the widespread faith in the
transformative, even healing power of biennials. Herken-
hoff, who was incredulous when he cited an example of
the eucharistic language with which the encounter with
modernist art has sometimes been described, nevertheless
asserted that the Sdo Paulo Bienal has the ability to give its
city a "soul." Many of the curators would be extremely
wary of any messianic view within an artist's work, yet
many biennials have a messianic dimension. While the art
many of the curators in Bellagio support is conscious of
itself as art and limited in its spiritual claims, the causes
the art are intended to serve may be as idealistic and grand
as those served by early and mid-twentieth-century paint-
ings and sculptures inspired by spiritual or utopian beliefs.
Is the conflict between faith and knowledge still
appropriate in an age in which the nearly irresistible ap-
peal of the new technology seems to be its combination
of information and magic? Any large overview of con-
temporary art is likely to swing between faith and con-
sciousness, balancing either toward skepticism or belief
but never entirely eliminating the other side. Certainly no
biennial can afford to dismiss the spiritual and hope to
appeal to multiple audiences. Soon after the Bellagio con-
ference, I visited a sculpture park near Vilnius built after
Lithuania's independence in i991 called the Sculpture
Museum of the Centre of Europe. On a Saturday after-
noon, two couples came to the park directly after their
weddings. They wanted to touch the sculptures and be
photographed around them. Clearly they believed the
sculpture and the park blessed them. I asked its founding
director, thirty-year-old Gintaras Karosas, how often this
occurred. He answered, "All the time." Whether it is in
the art shown or in the belief in what art can accomplish,
the biennial curator, however strong his or her insistence
on self-consciousness and context, takes the human faith
in artistic magic seriously.
The contrasts, or tensions, within the languages of
the curators, or between their words and their exhibi-
tions, lead me to what I see as one of the major unre-
solved issues in the new biennials: modernism. In the
three days of meetings at Bellagio, modernism was a
purely negative presence. It was acknowledged as the
driving cultural force when the Venice Biennale, the
Carnegie International, the Sdo Paulo Bienal, and Docu-
menta were founded. Once this acknowledgment was
made, declaring the need for a new biennial model
inevitably followed. The kind of faith that characterized
the responses to a great deal of modernist art by many
people devoted to it was assumed to be antithetical to
the kind of engaged, questioning response many of the
biennial curators are after. Modernist exhibitions like
"Qu'est-ce que la sculpture moderne?" in Paris in 1986
were cited as examples of the kinds of narrow and exclu-
sionary museum surveys unacceptable now. For these
curators as a group, modernism, with its essentialism and
its totalizing, unifying impulses, was so objectionable in
today's postmodern world that it had to be either ostra-
cized or singled out as an enemy to be overcome.
But I can't imagine these shows without modernism.
Only in modernism do I find a comparable concentration
of belief in progress, education, healing, and transforma-
tion. Only in modernism do I consistently find that acute
awareness of vulnerability and limits combined with
heroic ambition and will that is shaping the identities of
25 art journal
a number of the biennial curators. This combination has
been a decisive feature in some of the best European and
U.S. art from Paul Cezanne and Jackson Pollock through
Bruce Nauman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Thinking about the identity of the biennial curator,
I can't help feeling the presence of Joseph Beuys, even
though the consensus among curators is that he is no
longer relevant. This may well be true for younger art-
ists, and in an exhibition like Documenta X that was
relatively free of nationalistic aspirations and of any
responsibility to represent the struggles of peoples and
nations, Beuys can, perhaps, be relegated to the past. In
her conversation with Robert Storr, curator of contem-
porary art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
published in the May 1997 Artforum,Catherine David
compared Beuys with Marcel Broodthaers, the highly
self-conscious artist/curator, or curator/artist, who was
one of the signposts of her show, and made it clear that
Broodthaers, not Beuys, was an artist of this moment.
"I think it's very difficult these days not to privilege
Broodthaers' vision," David said. "I think Broodthaers
was not romantic, but radical and sometimes cynical. He
was very attentive to superstructures, to the limitations of
aesthetic practice. . . . [T]hese days it's harder to show
Beuys." She may be right-for the purposes of her show.
In some of the biennials outside the West, however, it is
Beuys-with his concept of social sculpture, concern for
education and political activism, commitment to total
societal change, and awareness of the wounds that result
from fragmented perspectives and depersonalized behav-
ior-who seems to me the more irrefutable figure.
By raising the issue of modernism, I mean to be nei-
ther provocative nor accusatory. My aim here is to try
and make it easier for curators at the end of the century
to use whatever art and ideas are available to help them
develop and clarify their positions. I don't think it is pos-
sible to understand the level of hope and faith in these
shows-to understand how curators reached the point
where they believe art can meet such overwhelming
needs-without being open to the many sides of mod-
ernism. The curators of these extraordinarily hybrid
shows cross many worlds. Any attitude or position that
prevents them from using any of the art in this century
to clarify their aims and develop their ideas, and to
make sure this hybridity can be rendered visible and ap-
proached as a source of knowledge and strength, particu-
larly in countries where modernism has never been seen
in depth, is not helpful.
The Future
Despite all the crucial questions they raise, and also
becauseof these crucial questions, biennials born from
deep cultural and political needs will make a difference.
They will be festivals for art in which all those who
attend will find something that pleases or moves them.
They will create new audiences and new bases of infor-
mation. They will introduce different regions to unfamil-
iar approaches to art and people in art-world centers to
unfamiliar regions. They will foster debate about the
meanings of national and international and about what it
means to be an artist at the end and at the beginning of
a millennium. They will encourage other cities and
countries to consider building artistic and cultural infra-
structures. They will make clear that many cities and
countries are capable of being seats of cultural power.
These exhibitions will also help build respect for
art and culture throughout the world. Perhaps the most
important message of the biennials as a phenomenon is
that the curators who organize them and the organiza-
tions that sponsor them believe in the future. The newer
biennials argue implicitly that the places and countries
that house them have a future, that the future is there to
be built collectively by people of goodwill everywhere
who want to join in, and that in the process of concep-
tualizing the future, art matters.
If this message is so moving to me, it is partly be-
cause my country does not seem to believe either in art
or in the future. In the United States, only a relatively
small number of people believe that art can have an
impact on the world. The assault against the National
Endowment for the Arts, the government agency that has
given a limited but decisive amount of funding to the
arts since 1965, has been relentless for nine years. The
United States Information Agency, which for years sent
U.S. artists abroad and enabled them to establish connec-
tions with other artists and bring the lessons they
learned from their contacts back home, now provides
almost no money for cultural programming and largely
defines U.S. culture in terms of Hollywood and the
entertainment industry. The assault on art and artists in
the U.S. media, and the exploitation of the anxieties
about artists by conservative political interests, has made
it impossible for the United States, as a nation, to view
art with confidence. It will be a long time before the
United States is remotely comfortable with artists, con-
temporary art, and the artistic imagination.
In short, at the moment when many other countries
26 WINTER 1998
with little or no immediate possibility of economic and
political power have set out to realize dreams of gaining
power through art, the government and mass media of
the United States have been trying to evict art and artists
from the American Dream. One of the telling ironies of
this discomfort with art and artists is that it is helping
to level the playing field internationally. By inhibiting
the ability of U.S. art to function as an aesthetic, eco-
nomic, and political force, the government and media
have ended up serving postcolonial cultural aspirations
outside the United States. As a citizen of this country
who believes in the artists here, who has spent years
fighting for them, and who will always fight for them, I
find this situation painful on many levels. But it must be
acknowledged. And curators in other countries must
know that while there is an extraordinary breadth of
knowledge and experience among art professionals in
the United States, and while art and artists here will con-
tinue to be essential players on the world's artistic and
cultural stages, the art system in the United States can no
longer dominate as it did. The eruption of biennials is
evidence of a historic change.
Three interrelated issues must continue to be debat-
ed if the new biennials are going to be clear about what
they are and what they want to achieve. The first issue is
legitimation. To what degree are the sources of legitima-
tion for the biennials that have emerged since 1984
determined by geopolitical conditions? By practical
necessity? By emotional and psychological needs? If exhi-
bitions do not depend at all on Western goodwill and
support, like the Asia-Pacific Triennial, which looks
toward Asia, do they become more or less necessary and
desirable in other parts of the world? Where? To whom?
Can biennials with shared histories and goals help legiti-
mate one another? What legitimates most? What needs
most to be legitimated?
The second issue is audience. It came up constantly
in Bellagio without ever being engaged. It inspired some
fertile remarks. Llanes's statement-"a lot of artists I
detest, but I respect the audience"-made sense on
many levels. It reminded me of all the artists I now
value whose work I did not like or respond to for years,
but whom I kept in the back of my mind because of my
respect for their supporters. It reminded me that art can-
not gain a real foothold anywhere unless it is engaged
by the communities who live with and around it,
regardless of whether the curators are sympathetic with
the tastes and aesthetic assumptions of community mem-
bers. Is it possible for curators to have candid, even con-
tentious discussions with colleagues about the many
audiences they are trying to reach, which ones they feel
most and least responsible to and why, how to build last-
ing relationships with them, and how these relationships
shape the understanding and possibilities of art within an
exhibition or museum?
The final issue is the one that will not go away:
quality. The language in which art from non-Western
cultures is being defended is still often one of representa-
tion. The focus of attention is not on what a work has
to offer-poetically, thematically, psychologically, philo-
sophically, and politically-but the cause the artist serves
and the political struggle with which he or she is identi-
fied. Biennials offer an opportunity to transform the
chasm between the language of representation and the
language of quality into a space in which many of the
people demoralized by this split can make a place for
themselves. We have to begin to talk about art in ways
in which everyone has something to lose. People have
to write and lecture about art in ways that leave them
exposed. If a critic were asked to argue for an artist in a
public event in an unfamiliar country, it would all but
oblige him or her to think in terms of issues and words
that could cross cultures. Both the positive and negative
responses to the presentation and to the artist would be
27 art journal
revealing. If cross-cultural debates about art and artists
continue to be part of the programs of biennials, and if
these debates are published, perhaps in some collective
biennial publication, they could help locate the words
and the approaches to language that now carry maximum
feeling and thought. The biennials can help develop a
poetics for contemporary art that has not been recognized
or that does not yet exist.
Michael Brenson is a critic and curator. Recent publications to which he
has contributed include Maya Lin:Topologiesand Conversationsat the Castle:
ChangingAudiencesand ContemporaryArt. He is also contributing a major essay
to a forthcoming book on the history of the National Endowment for the Arts
VisualArtists Fellowship Program.
Participantsin the Bellagio Conference
MargaretArchuleta, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, The Heard Museum,
Phoenix; Rene Block, Director, Museum Fridericianum,Kassel;Michael
Brenson, New York; Germano Celant, Curator of Contemporary Art,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; KinshashaHolman Conwill,
Director, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York;VishakhaN. Desai, Director
of the Galleries, Asia Society, New York; Okwui Enwezor, Artistic Director,
Second Johannesburg Biennale; N. FulyaErdemci, Director, International
IstanbulBiennial;LillianLlanesGodoy, Director, Centro Wifredo Lam;
Madeleine Grynsztejn, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Carnegie Museum
of Art, Pittsburgh;Paulo Herkenhoff, Chief Curator, FundaCgoBienal de Sdo
Paulo;VirginiaPerez-Ratton, Director, Museo de Arte y Disefo Contempor-
aneo, SanJose, Costa Rica;Apinan Poshyananda,Associate Director, Centers
of Academic Resources, ChulalongkornUniversity, Bangkok;MariCarmen
Ramirez, Curator of LatinAmerican Art, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art,
Austin; Remi Sagna, Secretaire General, Dakar Biennale;Caroline Turner,
Deputy Director, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane