Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global

by Paloma Checa-Gismero

Overview

In Biennial Boom, Paloma Checa-Gismero traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. Returning to the early post-Cold War years, Checa-Gismero examines the early iterations of three well-known biennials at the borders of North Atlantic liberalism: the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta. She draws on archival and oral history fieldwork in Cuba, Mexico, the US/Mexico borderlands, and the Netherlands, showing how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. Checa-Gismero argues that, in reflecting this optimism, biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange. By outlining how early biennials set the basis for what is now recognized as “global contemporary art,” Checa-Gismero intervenes in previous accounts of the contemporary art world in order to better understand how it became the exclusionary, rarified institution of today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478059486
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	07/05/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	64 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Paloma Checa-Gismero is Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Biennial Conversions at the Borders of Liberalism: An Introduction  1
Part 1. Anticolonial Collaboration in the Bienal de la Habana’s Early Iterations, Havana, 1984–1991  29
1. Polyphonic Internationalism  29
2. Curating the Third World  53
3. An Aesthetics of Production  72
Part 2. Cosmopolitan Dreams at the US-Mexico Borderlands in inSITE94 and INSITE97: San Diego and Tijuana, 1994–1997
4. Sovereignty Claims over the Borderlands  99
5. Fears of Provincialism and the Desire to Be Global  123
6. Globalizing Mexican Art  146
Part 3. Art for a Unified Europe: Manifesta 1, Rotterdam, 1996
7. Manifesta: Placenta Europa  173
8. Curating Conflict  193
9. The Art of Belonging 217
Epilogue  241
Notes  253
Bibliography  285
Index  301

Editorial Reviews

“Biennials are a definitive—some say, the definitive—exhibitionary form for contemporary art. This is a forensic study of three of the biennials that moved beyond the modern model of art battles between nations, staged at Venice since 1895, into contemporary modes. They laid key markers for the subsequent biennial ‘boom.’ Paloma Checa-Gismero combines archival research, personal experience, a wide-ranging knowledge of critical theory, along with an invigorating intolerance of cliché, to show the collisions between aspiration and reality in play at these times and places. She tracks how artists, critics, curators, and viewers from local communities responded to the ‘aesthetic conversions’ of social forces that these biennials enabled, paving the way for the multi-facetted phenomenon known as ‘global contemporary art.’”

-- Terry Smith, author of Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art

“In this erudite, insightful, and immensely readable book Paloma Checa-Gismero puts her finger on how the profound inequality, chauvinism, Eurocentrism, and problematic space of the contemporary art world came into being. While others may wax poetic on contemporary aesthetics without necessarily being aware of the conditions of the art world, Checa-Gismero actually shows what makes contemporary art take on its cultural capital. Biennial Boom makes an important intervention into historicizing and making sense of the global art world.”

-- Tatiana Flores, author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30!

"Checa-Gismero’s careful consideration of the myriad political, social, and economic shifts of the post–Cold War neoliberal world order positions biennials as critical to the construction of what is referred to as 'global contemporary art,' laying the groundwork for future study. Her study is a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of exhibition histories, through its critical examination of the politics of display. With it, artists and curators can be cognizant of how their work might be operationalized on a global stage, to envision more equitable art worlds."
-- Leah Triplett C Magazine

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