For the 2012 Taipei Biennial, the entrance to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum is obfuscated by a giant white screen. It has been placed a few steps inside the main doors, so to enter the museum, you must step onto a narrow, elevated catwalk, which forces you to go either right or left. Once you’ve made it around this wall of blankness, you’ll find the museum’s galleries are no longer spacious and open, as they usually are. They have been cut down into a labyrinth of smaller rooms. TFAM is no longer a grand, modernist white-walled palace of art. You have entered a maze of what curator Anselm Franke calls “mini-museums.”
The exhibition, titled Death and Life of Fiction, opened yesterday at TFAM and the Shilin Paper Mill (紙場1918). It contains contributions from over 50 international artists and runs through Jan. 13 next year.
As you wind your way through, you will notice several things. There are thousands of objects in glass cases, and there are extensive pamphlets and captions. It could take days to read it all. There is hardly any sense of artistic style in the displays, and it is difficult to identify works as created by individual artists. There is little to be found of human sentiment.
Photo courtesy of David Frazier and TFAM
Most of the objects on view are Duchampian selections — they were found by artists and chosen for us to consider. But departing from Duchamp, or perhaps in his original spirit, it is difficult to tell whether the objects are even intended as works of art. There are old magazines, old photos, photocopied pages of books, pretty rocks, medical equipment, clothing that may have belonged to suicide bombers and real and fake historical figurines. There are also lots of videos, some of them newly produced out of archival footage, while others are pure historical documents, like Peter Watkin’s 1965 film about the effect atom bombs would have on Britain, The War Game.
In many ways, entering this biennial is like exploring Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel. In the short story, Borges imagined an infinite library of identically shaped rooms, each holding a certain number of identically bound books. The books contained every permutation of every alphabet, so a very few volumes contained ultimate wisdom, while most were just gibberish.
Franke, a Berlin-based critic and curator helming his first large biennial, has created this exhibition out of an awareness of some obvious shifts in the artworld landscape. When the Taipei Biennial launched in 1998, it was one of the first international biennials in Asia and attracted considerable international attention. Since then, the number of international biennials has mushroomed, and Taiwan’s biennial has been overtaken by lavishly spending biennials in Korea, Singapore and Shanghai. The Taipei Biennial’s budget is around NT$40 million and has not increased in a decade, and as a platform for international recognition it has steadily fallen off.
Photo courtesy of David Frazier and TFAM
The rise of art fairs is another monster trend of the last decade. Fairs have popped up all around the world as giant shopping centers for expensive art, and most of it tends to be easily collectible paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs. Biennials have reacted against this elitist, commercialist trend by becoming more theoretical and academic, and by showing video, installation and other forms that auction houses don’t dare to sell. Biennials have also championed critical statements, and the norm is now for curators to produce a biennial as philosophical exposition on nothing less than the state of the world today.
Franke, however, sees this approach as hitting a dead end, and proposes instead to rediscover what is enjoyable about the museum experience.
“I’m trying to understand what’s good about museums,” says Franke. “The whole idea of using a biennial for some critical position is just dead. You need to know instead what a museum can do, and from there you can go ahead and explore the possibilities.”
Photo courtesy of David Frazier and TFAM
To this purpose, Franke has commissioned around a dozen mini-museums within the larger exhibition. They have curious titles and even more curious pretenses: The Museum of the Infrastructural Unconscious, the Museum of Stones, the Museum of Incest, the Museum of Martyrs and the Museum of Ante-Memorials, just to name a few.
These mini-museums have little to do with categorical thinking — this biennial seems violently opposed to rationalist ideas, which it equates with modernism. They are all quirky and idiosyncratic. Most are at least amusing, several are simply boring, and a few are incredibly fascinating. I suspect that everyone will have their own favorite.
My personal favorite was the Museum of the Monster that is History, by Franke and James T. Hong (洪子健). It’s most astonishing component is a history of Taiwanese weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, which details a history of Taiwan’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Photo courtesy of David Frazier and TFAM
The display includes a vial of radioactive uranium ore, a history of Taiwan’s nuclear program, precursor chemicals for nerve gas, and parts from a dual-use centrifuge that can be used to either produce industrial fertilizers or else enrich uranium or plutonium. In 2005, Taiwanese companies were investigated by US authorities for exporting these machines to Syria using invoices that stated, “Not to be used for WMD purposes.” Taiwan cannot join treaties that limit such sales to countries like Iran and Syria because it is not allowed to join the UN. Details of the US investigation were discovered on WikiLeaks.
Hong also created a House of Mini-Traitors, 20 GI Joe dolls in various costumes representing famous figures of historical betrayal, from Judas Iscariot to Hitler’s would-be assassin Claus von Stauffenberg and other 20th century newsmakers.
“These are mainly just products of my own obsessions,” says Hong. “I’m not sure if they have any educational value or not.”
Another exhibit, The Antiquity-Like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate, by Taiwanese artist Yeh Wei-li (葉偉立) is perhaps the largest single exhibit in the museum. It contains all manner of junk and artifacts that Yeh found on the beaches of Taoyuan and abandoned factories in the industrial countryside of northern Taiwan. There is a case of placards inscribed with factory slogans, a crate of speaker cones, lumps of melted plastic resin, a foam model of Taiwan with little toy penguins, a crate of dog skulls, and long tables of arranged wooden beams, chair legs and similar detritus. In one sense it is just the collection of a packrat, but on display these objects are often fascinating and even aesthetically mesmerizing. Yeh claims he is trying to probe the strange and arbitrary divisions that separate art and antiques from garbage. In the context of Taiwan — and I doubt this exhibition would work anywhere else — they also awaken ideas of nostalgia and ecological devastation.
Besides a thousand quirky fascinations, do these mini-museums have any point? In the Museum of Stones, Jimmie Durham has put a drawing and inscription by Adolph Hitler on the wall. The drawing is of a stultifyingly huge triumphal arch, and the inscription reads, “The great evidences of civilization in granite and marble stand through the millennia. They alone are a truly stable pole in the flux of all other phenomena.”
Despite Franke’s claim, it would be hard to say that his exhibition is really post-critical. It is obsessed with institutionalized violence, or the way governments and societies use laws, police, war and social norms to perpetrate violence against their citizens. Running themes include colonialization, women’s rights, man-made disasters, war, terrorism, martyrdom and national security.
One placard at the Museum of the Monster that is History explains this idea, saying that modern reason gave rise to a “systemic economy of terror,” and this is “modernity’s very means of constructing history.” It is a dark and important idea, and it is probably better elaborated in Slavoj Zizek’s book Violence than this exhibition. As one pores through all the literature on the walls and in the vitrines, one is reminded of Tom Wolfe’s quip that “modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works only exist to illustrate the text.”
But despite its text-heaviness, the 2012 Taipei Biennial is in fact an exhibition, and it functions ably as such. Moreover, Franke is content with the possibility of all sorts of divergent readings.
“I think it will be easy to misunderstand in productive ways,” he says.
Perhaps this article is one of them.
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