Manifesta 9
Manifesta, the nomadic biennial initiated in the early 1990s, could be forgiven for feeling a little unsure of itself. Borne out of a mixture of cultural opportunism and optimism in an expanded Europe, with the aim of (re)invigorating peripheral regions, its founding principles – echoing those of the EU project at large – feel in need of revision. Alongside this, the European continent sits at the centre of a global recession, due in large part to the collapse of new forms of capital accumulation that resulted from post-industrial, neoliberal policies. The site of ‘Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern’, is a fitting place to take stock of Europe’s recent cultural, economic and political shifts and to see whether it can embed itself meaningfully in this historically laden location.
The exhibition’s sole venue is a vast Art Deco building in the former coal-mining site of Waterschei in Genk, Limburg, in northern Belgium, once home to a burgeoning coal industry that closed in the late 1980s along with several mines across northern Europe. Led by Cuauhtémoc Medina, the exhibition is split into three separate exhibitions; it opens on the top floor with ‘Poetics of Restructuring: Contemporary Art’ and moves downward, back in history. ‘Poetics of Restructuring’, curated by Katerina Gregos, was a reflection on shifts in modes of production and labour relations in the post-industrial era, interspersed with calls for a re-activation of radical thinking. While many of the stories and arguments put forward are well rehearsed, works such as Duncan Campbell’s Make it New John (2009), a portrait of the rise and fall of the Dolorean sports car in the 1980s and the ramifications for the Belfast workers who produced it, is particularly resonant within the vacated Waterschei building. For the most part, Gregos opted to look back to the lost age of the worker, lamenting the current state of globalized capital. Amongst her considered selection, however, there is limited space given to the imaginative or fictional, with a noticeable absence of speculations on where to go from here. Moments of visual and aural surprise lift the largely polemical tone: Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow’s Sounds from Beneath (2010–11) shows a former coal miners’ choir vocalizing the sounds of the mine, while Ben Cain’s Work in the Dark (2012), a configuration of hanging beams and a functioning leather belt drive, adds a sense of spatial surprise to the otherwise conventional, if sensitively presented, installation.
Occupying the central floor, ‘The Age of Coal: The Art Historical Section’, curated by art historian Dawn Adnes, calls into question the exhibition’s much vaunted ‘mining’ of history. It opens with Coal Sacks Ceiling, an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s 1200 Coal Sacks, originally shown in Paris in 1938. From here, ten groupings of works that use coal – and its mining – cover nearly 200 years of artistic production, from John Martin to Jeremy Deller via Henry Moore, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Bolanski and many more. Adnes’s display lumps vast swathes of art and social history together through the works’ use of, or reference to coal, creating an overbearing, one-dimensional display. The most problematic grouping is ‘Dark Matter’, where mounds of coal are scattered across the concrete floor: Marcel Broodthaers’s Trois tas de Charbon (Three Heaps of Coal, 1966–67), a pile of the black lumps with a Belgian flag lodged at its peak, a dig at Belgium’s troubled national identity (and presumably colonial antics) funded by its mining riches, sits across from Richard Long’s Bolivian Coal Line (1992), a 26-metre strip of coal constructed on his visit to the Bolivian mines. In between these two works is David Hammons’ Chasing the Blue Train (1989), an installation of upturned pianos and a large pile of coal with a toy train track running between, evoking the transformation of the US as a result of the introduction of railways. To limit these artists’ concerns to their material is reductive to the point of negligence. This section feels like a missed opportunity to extrapolate the positions put forward in the floor above. To understand the current state of post-industrial production through the legacies of coal, a more complex historical lens is required to give equal space to the politics behind the material. As a result, Gregos’s self-described ‘archipelago’ of propositions jars with Adnes’s encyclopaedic history of the use and representation of coal in art.
‘Seventeen Tonnes: The Heritage Section’ is the most compelling exhibition, focusing on cultural production in Europe after the closure of its mines in the second half of the 20th century, with particular attention to the region of Limburg. This part of the show was curated by a group of local historians and experts on the region’s mining history, fulfilling Manifesta’s repeated aims to engage with its adopted context. On a large projection screen plays The Mines: 14 Films About Belgian Coal Mines (2012), a collection of films that reconstructed the history of the lives of miners in the region. Behind this is Zwartberg Drama: Police Files (1966), which gathers archival material from the strikes and riots resulting from the Zwartberg mine closure. Prayer Mats (1950s–60s) comprises a collection of prayer mats from first-generation Turkish immigrants, who contributed to the region’s rapid industrial success by working in the mines. Here, notions of economic migration and political unrest are effectively bought back to the venue and surrounding area. Another welcome inclusion is ‘Mijndepot Waterschei’ (2004–12), a temporary museum devoted to the history of coal mining in the region, where an eclectic collection of photographs, documents and objects conveyed the sense of collectivity surrounding the miners and their daily grind underground.
Isolated within its own sub-section, however, the ‘Mijndepot Waterschei’ is symptomatic of an unanimated, unresolved relationship between contemporary art, (art) history and heritage. The museological strategy of drawing on a vast pool of local, historical and contemporary material to engage with a specific context is a welcome departure for a biennial, especially one that needs to adapt to better reflect Europe’s perilous position. But by isolating different chronologies and categories, the threads between the local and global, past and present become clouded by didacticism and nostalgia. As we urgently need to identify what we should use from our Modernist antiquity, as well as what we must discard, looking both back and down can only go so far.
