Does ‘art in the city’ equal ‘art for the city’?

Transforming an entire inner city into one big festival zone and an art lover’s paradise is exactly what the 10th İstanbul Biennial achieved in 2007. This year İstanbul hosts its 11th Biennial, which runs until Nov. 8, modestly referred to as “11.B.” The wider thematic dimension centers on the question of what keeps mankind alive, taken from the closing song of the second act of the 1928 play “The Threepenny Opera,” written by Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Elisabeth Hauptmann.

In order to better understand the concept behind this year's biennial, I greatly benefited from having the opportunity to ask the curators a number of questions which formed the basis of this article.

Open to the public since September, 11.B aims to transform İstanbul into an arts platform presenting 141 projects by 70 artists and collectives from 40 countries.

My concern is not only whether 11.B will help to further establish İstanbul as an art enthusiast's destination of global proportions; it would be a very interesting undertaking to find out how local businesses -- in particular small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) -- benefit from events like these. In other words, there must be an economic stimulus attached to hosting large-scale cultural events as the biennial's opening alone was expected to welcome around 3,000 professionals such as art critics, museum and art gallery directors, curators and journalists from around the world.

WHW: 11.Bs curators’ collective

“What, How & for Whom” (WHW) is a non-profit organization for visual culture based in Zagreb and formed in 1999. Its members are curators Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic and Sabina Sabolovic, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršic. Since May 2003 WHW has been directing the program of the city-owned Gallery Nova in Zagreb.  Examples of previous success stories are “What, How & for Whom, on the occasion of the 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto,” “Apexart,” shown in New York in 2003 and “Ground Lost,” put on display at both Forum Stadtpark, Graz and Gallery Nova, Zagreb.

My first inquiry was to learn more about recent cultural developments in Croatia. I heard that addressing different, often suppressed social themes, and opening up the space for political imagination, which can help to get out of prefabricated clichés, are features of many Croatian artists' work. My interviewees mentioned that the Croatian art scene is very vivid and internationally connected as there are at present five generations of active artists. “In the contemporary Croatian context, one can speak of a kind of cultural continuity in which the activities of the earlier generations, who started to work in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, have today been intensified through various extra-institutional artistic and curatorial research.” The curators then remarked that “the 1990s were a period of extreme isolation as well as of passionate nationalism. The 1990s started with a war in ex-Yugoslavia and was finalized with the triumph of the capital and the rediscovery of the market economy. At that time a number of cultural initiatives emerged and started to create innovative forms of non-institutional cultural engagement based on the independent and non-profit form of civil association.”

Bertolt Brecht's relevance today

Moving on to the theme of 11.B, I wondered about Brecht's relevance today. According to WHW, the concept of the biennial proposes not to go back to Brecht as a classic to be rediscovered, but rather to investigate possibilities of art to re-examine old and open new relationships between social engagement and aesthetic gesture. “After his immense popularity in the 1960s and 1970s and a smooth transformation into ‘a classic,' it seems that today, Brecht is ‘forgotten' and ‘unfashionable.' It certainly seems that seen from the dominant contemporary perspective(s), Brecht's Marxism and his belief in utopian potential and open political engagement of art look somewhat dated and may appear irrelevant. However, this is precisely the indicator that something has gone wrong with contemporary society and with the role of art within it.”

Curators’ impression of Turkish arts

“Our impression is that the local scene has a lot of viable potential for further development. This is happening through different debates and activities which are not necessarily connected to İstanbul or its big institutions and cultural manifestations like the biennial. Of course, the biennial was and still is an important catalyst for the process of the internalization of the scene, but there are also many parallel channels and networks. As curators of the biennial we rather tried to re-think the biennial as a figure that has the capacity to join some discussions which already exist on that scene.”

A vital point was made when the curators remarked that they tried to avoid as much as possible to act as “arbiters” of the scene, saying: “We cannot offer you a coherent and homogeneous view on its possible future. Since 2003 we have been collaborating with numerous Turkish artists and curators in Zagreb and abroad. We were quite intrigued by the complexity and richness of the Turkish contemporary art scene while it is tackling Turkish social reality.”

Trying to add a different perspective to discussing culture, I then asked about the economic dimension of hosting a biennial. The curators said that “at the moment, when the current financial crisis is imparting a mighty blow to the ‘new world order' and when seemingly unquestionable premises on which the neo-liberal order is based are shaking, for us it was important to make visible within the biennial the concrete economic relations that form and influence the essential parameters of the exhibition. The questions form the name of our collective: what, how and for whom are three main questions for every economic organization.”

Mainstream product or luxury good

“As a genre, biennial exhibitions today mostly belong to mainstream culture. In a culture co-opted by capitalism and colonized by service and consumption, a generally accepted view is that biennial exhibitions of contemporary art are tools for the promotion of cultural tourism and the construction of a marketable image of a city. In spite of that -- or precisely because of it -- the fact is that biennials are flourishing and there are hardly any signs of their boycott.”

İstanbul -- transforming rapidly or steeped in history

“While working on the İstanbul biennial one cannot escape being fascinated and challenged by such extremely rich historical and social context and multifaceted urban environments; our curatorial decision was not to interweave the global with local specifics. We did not want to strive to reveal yet another aspect of fascinating İstanbul -- a metaphor city, the bridge linking Asia and Europe or a nostalgic symbol of the Ottoman Empire. The exhibition rather tried to address both local and international audiences with questions about a contemporary world amidst the current economic crisis, equally important everywhere.”

My final question was whether the curators are happy with the final choice of venues, and they are indeed. “When we included, along with the list of statistics and budgetary details, a wish list of five possible venues not considered for the biennial because of different bureaucratic, financial and organizational reasons, we were interested in revealing some important segments of the process of making the biennial that usually remain invisible.”

 Understanding art and engaging in a dialogue with artists is what I think is the key suggestion for civil society and city planners alike. The curators' answers underline the fact that art is not for art's sake but part of a dynamic development solidly anchored in society. So, do large-scale public events benefit the local economy? I would say yes, but what needs to be done is measure the net benefits as opposed to the net costs, a difficult but not impossible task. Actually, this is what the curators tried to do as well by adding financial data into the biennial guide. The impact on İstanbul and its residents should, however, not only be measured financially; for example, the quality of daily life enhanced by improved access to the arts and culture will not change a city's habitat over night or increase the average spend per visitor at once. It is a long-term approach. All in all, 11.B is a multifaceted, highly successful large-scale event that deserves applause.