During the opening weekend of the city's fourth biennial, some 7,500 international art patrons milled up and down Auguststrasse, a storied street in the former East Berlin that starts poetically at one end with St. Johannes Evangelist Church and terminates at the other with the Old Garrison Cemetery.
But visitors were not simply making their way to and from a museum or some smartly retrofitted warehouse, the usual location for a big contemporary art survey. They were waiting in the cold spring air to enter private apartments, an office, a ballroom, a shuttered school, a former horse stable, the church, the cemetery, and the white-walled galleries of the Berlin Biennial's organizer, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
Inside this unusual array of sites, on peeling walls in several cases, or in someone else's living room, they viewed works that ranged from ominous -- Mircea Cantor's chilling video of a deer watched by wolves inside a stark white gallery; Robert Kusmir-owski's reproduction of a boxcar headed for the concentration camps -- to droll, like Aneta Grzeszykowska's deadpan family photo album, from which she digitally removed every single image of herself. The biennial, which runs through May 28, was a focus of intense art-world curiosity in the months before its opening in late last month -- not least because this year's curators, Maurizio Cattelan, Massi-miliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick, are art stars in their own right.
Apart from his renowned and darkly ironic artworks, Cattelan is internationally known for his curatorial partnership with Gioni and Subotnick, which famously spawned The Wrong Gallery, a sardonically named tiny exhibition space that closed last July in New York. (It moved on to the Tate Modern in London for a three-year run.) Together, the three publish books and articles, give lectures, open their nomadic galleries, and organize exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.
The question in the art world was, What would they do? Something clever and subversive? There was every reason to believe they would, when, six months before the biennial, they opened a gallery at 50A, Auguststrasse with a suspiciously familiar name: the Gagosian Gallery.
"We thought the real Gagosian might close us down," Subotnick said, laughing as she sat with Cattelan and Gioni at the KW Institute the night after the biennial opened. "But he never contacted us."
By using the Gagosian Gallery's international brand name in a humble space and highly local context, Gioni said, the curators sought to "create a kind of tension between the global and the local."
This was all part of their questioning of "what a biennial can be," he said.
By rough estimate, there are now some 200 biennials around the world. With so many similar festivals filling interchangeable white galleries, their usefulness is a subject for colloquiums and dinner conversations from Venice to Istanbul to Sao Paolo. Are they here to capture trends or to advance artists' voices in a larger social dialogue? Do they promote international understanding or local interests? Are they bully pulpits for curators turned ideologues, or are they simply there to tap the art market's stopwatch till the next survey of hot new things draws the attention of an ever expanding universe of collectors?
With a budget of about US$3 million from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and nearly two years to prepare, the curators had ample resources to come up with an answer of their own. Typically, they broke the standard biennial rules, focusing neither on new trends nor on the latest crop of artists.
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