Event and Counter-Event: The Political Economy of the Istanbul Biennial and Its Excesses

This is an militant and polemic article. As any other critical analysis on the political economy of spectacular events, such as the Istanbul Biennial, it should be welcomed for its effort to de-fetishize their contradictory unfolding, disclosing how their phantasmagoria rationales interweave with broader capitalist formulations. By exposing how the 'radical emancipatory' rhetoric of the 11th Istanbul Biennial contrasts with the neutralizing tendencies of creative industries, that insist on summoning radicality in terms of the value logic of the commodity, the authors foreground the 'reflexive' element of recent accumulation paradigms.

More precisely, the authors do a good job in exposing the structural contradictions within the 11th Istanbul Biennial, an event that took place in 2009. It was financially supported by the corporate capitalist giant Koc that uses the event so as to gratify its brand. The curatorial team mobilizes Brechtian ideas on emancipation, and re-mobilizes the idea of communism. According to the authors, this is just a dislocatory gesture as "Koc¸ and Brecht synergistically function as exchangeable signs among the endless circulation of other deterritorialized and decontextualized signs motivated by the production of specific desires". This leads them to a general attack against contemporary art: "....contemporary art lies in the fact that, while claiming an autonomous space for aesthetic production, the very conditions of this space are produced by economic and political interests". Even if this always more or less was the case, it makes sense indeed, and the deconstructive gesture is a move to welcome.

 

Despite these positive contributions of the article in the study of large scale exhibitions, there is a  twofold criticism that needs to be raised here. First, and interestingly enough, the article accuses the show of "functioning within a reformist paradigm" and of "existing within the already established institutional structures and trying to navigate within them rather than breaking away" because of its alleged "politically correct" move to provide information to the public about the "economy and distribution of money and labor of the Biennial". That is to say, the curators provided details about its sponsorship, age groups, gender statistics, geography, budgeting. It also makes allegations of the inappropriate 10 TRY (US$7) entrance fee. It would make much more sense if this critique was coming from a self-organized collective, an anarchist group or something of the like. One cannot help but notice though, that this very article that accuses someone of being complicit with the interests of industrial giants, is itself published under the publishing giant 'Taylor & Francis' as a commodity that costs 26 euros. This rather high price of 'critical knowledge' is of course not mentioned anywhere in the article and one is left wondering which is the best strategy eventually: to be a "reformist" by exposing your structural complicity with capital to the audience and thus making it aware of the limits of the 'critical' gesture, or to obscure this complicity entirely in order to pass as the 'real' revolutionary. It is as if the critical discourse produced by academic industry does not fall into the category of a value-adding enterprise. Knowledge industries are still considered for some in the academic left as autonomous sites that somehow have the carte blanche to employ criticality without reflecting on their own political economy.

Second, and again noticing that I generally endorse the aim of the article which apparently is to expose the ideological and economic role of this event, I would say that while the political economic critique has always to be taken into consideration, every object whether this is an art exhibition, a chair or indeed facebook itself, fortunately does not fully exhaust its possible uses and meanings in the intention of its funding bodies. If the authors were saying "Look, we undertake the task to examine the political economic role of this show, but we do recognize the capacity of cultural objects- even when these are produced in the context of cultural industries- to circulate meaning for groups of people that can differ from the logic of capital accumulation", then the whole polemic would make much more sense. I say this because I do feel that random encounters with cultural objects that were produced under the cultural or knowledge industries have contributed to my emancipation in various ways. My point is to emphasize that a critical project- again such as this very article- cannot afford exhausting its scope in terms of capitalist neutralization, especially at the current moment where critical voices are almost censored from public discourses. Of course we should as much as possible be aware of the ideological implications of their instrumentalization and direct our practice accordingly. The political economy critique has to be done and in this case is done in an very articulate manner, but things should not stop there. As Graeber puts it "capitalism will not be around for ever" and in this case I think it is rather awkward to discard an attempt for articulating a potential emancipatory framework altogether as a site where capitalism 'dressed in new clothes' just keeps on reproducing itself :

...An engine of infinite expansion and accumulation cannot, by definition, continue for ever in a finite world. Now that India and China are buying in as full players, it seems reasonable to assume that within fifty years at most, the system will hit its physical limits. Whatever we end up with at that point, it will not be a system of infinite expansion. It will not be capitalism; it will be something else. However, there is no guarantee that this something will be better. It might be considerably worse. Might we not do well at least to consider what something better might be like? If nothing else it seems an odd moment to call off all speculation about alternatives. And if one does wish to think about alternatives to capitalism, how better to do this than to engage with those building such alternatives in the present? David Graber- Resistance is Surrender

Perhaps a spectacular event such as a Biennial exhibition seems like an unlikely site where real alternatives will come up, but by considering its meanings overdetermined by the intentions of its sponsors one sees the world as a closed system where no escape is possible. It is as if authors wish things to be ordered according to the following paradoxical scheme: "Only self-organized -independent initiatives are legitimized to be critical because that is more consistent with their actual practice. All others should mind their own business, which is to produce commodities destined for sale".

Read the article for free here http://aaaaarg.org/node/27913