Tempus Fugit in English

When art and technology find the wrong person

13.12.06

SECOND EDITION OF THE CATALAN ASSOCIATION OF ART CRITICS SYMPOSIUM: MEDIA BIENNALES

(Previous Spanish version posted on 11.14.06. It has been partially edited to be self-contained).

The second edition of the local symposium (with an international focus) on art criticism was devoted to the biennale phenomenon: what are they, what are they for and why do they exist. Generally speaking, as it happened in the previous edition, most of the presentations of the keynote speakers featured a highly intelectualized (academical?) discourse, the round table of local curators and critics added some fresh air to the event (maybe those three speakers where the ones most able to understand the intention behind biennales), and there was a minimal, but significant intervention halfway between contemporary and digital art.

That presentation was given by curator and critic Gunalan Nadarajan, who has specialized in “media biennales” and who’s going to work as the artistic director for ISEA 2008. After presenting the features of biennales in general, Nadarajan went further on his analysis of the specific traits of media biennales.

The proposed criticism turned out to be very suggestive: institutionalized indifference towards media arts, exclusive focus on video, technofobia and lack of infrastructure and adequate technical resources, among others, and of course the prime category (at least according to my analysis up to date), existence of parallel communities (the curator put a very understable exemple: why a media artist and a painter both working on minmalism can’t communicate with each other?)

Nadarajan talked about his experience in the recent Ogaki biennale and the Perth biennale (whose next edition is to be held in 2007): following the speaker’s ideas, these biennales share the basic features of any other biennale (the exhibition ones) but have an additional feature (the ability to become platforms of research and production).

The presentation ended by highlighting the size, time, distribution and relation with technology divides separating the two kinds of biennales, and stressing that technological fetishism does not only belong to the biennales that make it explicit, but to any art having an instrumental and uncritical relation with the materials is working with.

To the criticism of Nadarajan I would like to add a couple of ideas in both directions, to balance things up:

-When someone is talking about media art, there tends to be an explanation of how things work often because is necessary, because the work is interactive). That’s not so usual with contemporary art works. A discourse has to be articulated in all circumstances to explain what is being presented, no matter its nature. “Throwing” the work at the audience with a defiant attitude which seems to say “I dare you to understand this!” doesn’t suffice.

-The problem of the content happens with any kind of biennale. Not only because there could be technofilia (actually, there is), but precisely because biennales show too much content. It’s something similar to the syndrome of festivals of any kind: there are many things, but, will I be able to see them all?

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