The global work of art : world's fairs, biennials, and the aesthetics of experience

"Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists' engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world's fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that "globalism" was incubated in a century of international art contests, and today constitutes an important tactic for practicing artists. As world's fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a "theater of nations," which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies for the first time. From Gustave Courbet's rebel pavilion near the official art exhibit at the 1855 French World's Fair to curator Beryl Madra's choice of London-based Cypriot Hussein Chalayan for the off-site Turkish pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale, artists have used these exhibitions to reflect on contemporary art, speak to their own governments back home, and challenge the wider geopolitical realm changing art and art history along the way. Ultimately, Caroline A. Jones argues, the modern appetite for experience and event structures, which were cultivated around the art at these earlier expositions, have now come to constitute contemporary art itself, producing encounters that transform the public and force us to reflect critically on the global condition."--Rabat de la jaquette The first major history of the glamorous art biennial. Biennials have proliferated across the globe since the end of the Cold War and have now stabilized at about 200 a year. While this quintessentially contemporary form has significant roots in the world expositions of the 19th century, Jones argues that the biennial is also the platform for an important new aesthetic shift. Moving away from a focus on visual looking in the mid 20th century, the art world today embraces experience: art fairs give the feel of closeness and spaciousness, crowds, and they engage all our senses, even taste. Jones argues that the dominance of installation art and the simultaneous rise of biennialsor recurring art fairsneed to be examined as joint phenomenamutually reinforcing and linked to specific geo-political and aesthetic conditions. From the rise of tourism to the flows of art commerce, Jones hatches a new way to track the development of international art fairs in nearly every corner of the globe: from the early world fairs of London, Paris, Chicago, and New York to art fairs proper in Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Berlin, Lyon, and Beijing, as well as Kassel s Documenta, Whitney Biennial, and moreall explained through a rapidly evolving aesthetics of experience that has never, until now, been addressed in such a substantial way. Contents 8 Preface 10 1. The Blindman; or, How to Visit a World Exhibition 18 Blind Epistemology 18 Optics and Encyclopedics 25 Universal Object Lessons 31 Sensory Alternatives 39 2. Desires for the World Picture 52 Desires 53 Ars et Feriae 60 Publics, Infrastructures, Discourse 68 Objects of Art / Difference 74 Art in the Age of Its Touristic Reproduction 81 Architectures and Endings 89 3. Old World / Biennial Culture 98 Old Beginnings in Venice 98 Repetition and Difference 105 Subjects, Nations, Artists 113 Biennial Culture 121 4. New World / Cold War 130 Hemispheric Rearrangements 130 Arte Moderna 138 Difference and Repetition 142 From Museum to Bienal 144 Plastic Revolutions 151 Modulor Moderns 159 5. Transnational Openings 168 Tactics of the Trans 168 Unities / the Differend 179 When Attitudes Became Norms 220 Incorporations 232 6. The Aesthetics of Experience 244 Tropes of Experience 245 Encounters and Emblems 251 Expérience, Erfahrung, and Event 260 Economimesis at the Fair 266 7. Critical Globalism, in Practice 274 The Worldly Subject 274 Global Workings of Art 282 Practicing Critical Globalism 293 Notes 300 Bibliography 342 Index 360