|
Indepth Arts News:
"4th International Biennial - Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism"
2001-07-14 until 2002-01-06
SITE Santa Fe
Santa Fe, NM,
USA United States of America
This year SITE Sante Fe's International Biennial is curated by noted art historian, essayist and critic Dave Hickey. This exhibtion features works by over 27 artists and includes painting, sculpture, video film and multi-media installations. Dave Hickey states - I begin this project without any preconceived notion of what a beau monde, or a beautiful world, might be, only with a confirmed confidence that most artists have their own ideas about it--their own vision of how
a beau monde might look--and that this vision is somehow embodied in their work.
Mr Hickey continues -
For the SITE Santa Fe 2001 Biennial, I plan to mount an
exhibition entitled Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed
Cosmopolitanism. My task in mounting this exhibition
will be to create a confluence of such concrete visions--a
melting pot in which nothing melts, in which works of art from
around the world, experienced in relation to one another in a
space designed for them, will invest the elusive idea of a
beau monde with new specificity and complexity, new
meaning and resonance. The exhibition will come first, in
other words. Meanings will arise as a consequence, since
what I have in mind is not an ideological point that I wish to
prove, but an exhibition that I want to see, and hope that
others might, as well--a small beau monde, a place unto
itself, informed by the complexity of global culture at the
millennium.
Mounting the exhibition that I want to see requires
redesigning the priorities of international exhibitions, like the
SITE Santa Fe biennials, as they have evolved over the last
30 years. In the now-traditional biennial format, a neutral,
international-modernist, factory-kunsthalle space (concrete
floors, white walls, industrial ceilings) is installed with
site-specific, regional artworks theoretically informed by a
critical rhetoric that insists upon the primacy of the local, the
imperatives of group identity, and the ineluctable logic of
historical necessity. As a consequence, most of these
international exhibitions may be more properly described as
multiregional exhibitions in which the only international
element is the prevalence of post-minimalist aesthetics.
Moreover, as these multiregional internationals have evolved,
their appeal and function has become increasingly
professional, and the secular museum visitor gradually
deprioritized. Today, such exhibitions are essentially trade
shows for the curators of museums and kunsthalles the
world over, who arrive at the site in search of internationally
certified art installations to fill out their exhibition schedules.
I have no quarrel with exhibitions that serve this necessary
function or with sociological exhibitions of multiregional,
post-minimal art. I am just not that sort of curator. My
curatorial virtues are concrete and hands-on: I know how to
look and I remember what I see. I have seen a lot of art and
my enthusiasms are catholic. In the past I have designed
spaces and installed them with dissimilar works of art so
that each work may be seen to its best advantage. More
specifically, I believe that one's aim, when working as a
curator in a public space, is to create art lovers, not to
impress one's fellow professionals with expertise. As a
consequence, I aspire to mount an exhibition that is variously
interesting rather than generally relevant--an exhibition
whose visibility will empower the general public while
challenging the professional art world as well.
With the aid of Graft Design (a Los Angeles-based design
firm), I plan to design a complex, coherent exhibition hall
composed of interlocking spaces that are physically (not
iconographically) evocative of various regional cultural
milieus (Mediterranean, Japanese, Western American,
Northern European etc.), then install within them singular
works of art, which, rather than demonstrating the isolated
(and often abject) integrity of specific regional and cultural
identities, celebrate the global field of overlapping and
interfused idiomatic expression--the virtuoso
accommodation of one cultural idiom to another that
constitutes the very definition of cosmopolitanism.
To achieve this goal, I plan to invest the artistic population of
Beau Monde with length as well as breadth. Over the last 20
years, a great deal of valiant and successful effort has been
expended to enrich the art discourse by expanding the ethnic,
regional, and gender diversity of exhibiting artists and of the
subjects they address. This effort has been so successful
that, today, any selection of serious contemporary artists
reflects this diversity as a matter of course. Unfortunately, in
my view, this diversity has too often been achieved at the
expense of stylistic and generational diversity. In Beau
Monde, I would like to correct this almost inadvertent brand
of censorship by including artists from as many generations
as possible, working in a variety of modern and postmodern
styles. In this way, I hope to reflect the actual circumstances
of day-to-day contemporary art-making and dramatize the
tides of artistic influence and reaction as they manifest
themselves temporally as well as geographically.
Dave Hickey
August 2000 IMAGE:
Photo: Jeff Burton
Tattoo: Gajin Fujita
Model: Corina Van de Vyvere
Related Links:
| | 
|
