Istanbul Biennial
If you are looking for somewhere that embodies the confused state of contemporary art, then Istanbul is as good a place as any. It's an evasive city, noisy but kind of secretive and way too restless to be confined to a single continent, idea or intention. (Forward-thinking Muslim city or bastion of reactionary politics?). Split by the Bosphorus, the grand waterway that divides Europe and Asia, the city's skyline is breathtakingly dominated by absurdly graceful minarets and giddy swallows. That Turkey was recently devastated by earthquakes merely adds to the unsettling atmosphere of instability.
If these sound like the besotted impressions of a tourist, well, that's because they are. That's the thing about biennials: the locations are usually interesting, you get to meet new people, you can always find something in the art to recommend it, and then you get home and wonder what it was all really about. Were you a pawn in some underhand and politically motivated PR exercise? Was the host country trying to persuade you how liberal and open-minded it is? Was it trying to impress upon you that, despite being ignored by 'international' critics, it too, produces great art?
Who knows. Big international (oh, that word is getting tricky) bonanzas - in this instance, 56 artists representing 32 countries - every two years in a city like Istanbul, which has few museums, galleries or libraries, must surely be a good thing. Nonetheless, biennials mean something entirely different to the inhabitants of the city than they do to the art tourist. Despite a few reservations, I enjoyed the show - it was unpretentious, not too huge and had some nice, if predictable, work in it - but the few inhabitants of Istanbul I talked to felt it was too polite and unadventurous for a city in which, in terms of art, very little ever happens, while politically the place is a hot-bed of conservative nationalism.
Neatly side-stepping Istanbul's murkier problems, the Biennial's curator Paolo Colombo titled the show 'Tutku ve Dalga' (The Passion and the Wave), a linguistic pun you'd have to be fluent in Turkish and Greek to understand. One of Turkey's greatest singers was a man called Dalgas or Dalga, a name which translates as 'passion' in Greek and 'wave' in Turkish. Apparently an indication of the show's 'conceptual matrix', the title also, so I'm told, exemplifies the spirit of Alexandrine poetry. Diplomacy (the title's reference to Turkey's multi-lingual heritage) permeated the show - full of good intentions, it nevertheless (like so many diplomats), felt a little evasive when it came to a spirited exchange of ideas.
Of the three main venues, each of which is extraordinary, the Dolmabahce Cultural Centre, an example of Ottoman secular architecture, is the most conventional, a quality which served the work well. In marked contrast to the Venice Biennial, there was some good painting. Highlights were Lukas Duwenhögger's achingly romantic and odd lilac enclosure The Go-Between (1999), which housed an oval painting of an elegant, louche man and a sculpture of a bird with a note in its mouth; Margherita Manzelli's and Lisa Yuskavage's paintings of intense girls; Mutlu Cerkez's album covers and Haluk Akakce's slick, trippy, strangely lovely wall paintings.
The other two venues - Hagia Eireni, a former 5th century church which contained mainly installation work, and the 900 year old underground Yerebatan Cistern, which was sparsely populated with projections, are such astonishing places that the work installed in them was doomed to die a little death in comparison. On the whole, the pieces that worked best were the ones that refused to compete with the beauty of the space - Candice Breitz's cacophonic room of TV monitors 'Babel Series' (1999), for example - second-long grabs of pop stars singing - was as irritating and intense as a teenager arguing with her elders and refusing to shut-up. Ugo Rondinone's seductive When the Sun Goes Down and the Moon Comes Up (1999), a demented, compelling homage to love gone wrong, was fascinating and creepy - a reminder of how gratuitous the rest of the world feels when your heart is breaking.
The gorgeous, gloomy cistern is full of ancient columns and black pools of water inhabited by golden fish. Despite the fact that Tony Oursler's projections of eyeballs looked at home for once, walking across the ramps it became apparent that most of the work needed a clean white wall and a good sound system to do it justice. William Kentridge's Shadow Procession (1999) was an exception - a piece about oppression and the metaphorical power of shadows, projected in a place that really emanated the subterranean blues, it made me realise what the problem was with this and so many other Biennials - you can put the art in the city but, once installed, you can't take the city out of the art.
