“Of Mice and Men”: The Fourth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

The Fourth Berlin Biennial presents art about death, decrepit sculptures and rancid dreams. Tacitly it poses the question: “Is this a world in which you would want to live?” And gives the answer: “Too bad, because you already do.” Or, as the title of one of the works in the exhibition so aptly puts it: I cannot forward or rewind this state of being, this aged resign … (mixed media installation by Sebastien Hammwohner, Dani Jakob and Gabriel Vormstien, 2004). Charged with the task of putting a gloss on contemporary art practice, international art expositions rarely risk making a statement as strong as this—or, at least, rarely one that is so pessimistic.

Curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik, who are also responsible for the various initiatives of the Wrong Gallery, the Biennial lived up to the trio’s reputation for defying expectations, but, true to form, not in the way they were expected to do so. Other Wrong Gallery projects include a Manhattan exhibition venue of the same name that consists only of a street-front space confined to the dimensions of its door frame, and a 1:6 scale replica of the same that is available for purchase. Like the work of Cattelan himself, the Wrong Gallery’s modus operandi is to tweak conventions within the wellestablished confines of contemporary art practice. And, indeed, the Fourth Berlin Biennial started out in this mode. Expanding the Biennial’s boundaries in the year leading up to the event, the three conducted biweekly interviews with artists in the Berlin listings magazine Zitty, put together a photocopied tome, called Checkpoint Charley, of unauthorized reproductions of all 700 artists they met with who were not included in the Biennial, and, in September 2005, began presenting a series of exhibitions, using guest curators, in a space they called The Gagosian Gallery. Since the real Gagosian Gallery is well known and exists elsewhere, and the art world being the small ecosphere that it is, everyone could experience the fun of being in on the “joke.”

These projects did much to raise the profile of the event and the Biennial benefited greatly from its most inspired innovation: the presentation of the entire exhibition on a single street, Augustrasse, in the centre of the former East. Home to the KW, or Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, the major non-collecting contemporary art venue in the city, Augustrasse also has a preponderance of one of the most distinctive features of Berlin, disused buildings. Spaces richly evocative of the city’s complex and troubled history were put to powerful use by the curators. Naming the Biennial “Of Mice and Men” after the Steinbeck novel (the phrase is taken from a poem by Robert Burns) signals a narrative intent for the exhibition: like the street of Augustrasse, it has a beginning and an end—and it tells, however tangentially, a story. Similarly, the art presented in the show is, for the most part, figurative. The use of the street and, in some cases, the almost derelict sites was clearly intended to compound this impression. The romance of seeing promenading crowds on opening night combined with cold, wet March weather to reinforce the overriding tone of much of the work in the show, which was dark and gloomy; by forcing its audience to move between venues on the street, the curators created a fitting metaphor for the exhibition’s world view: a biennial about prevailing conditions.

More than one person I spoke with commented that the show’s narrative emphasis had its most obvious manifestation in the curators’ preference for so-called “mannequin art,” of which there seemed to be a lot. Mannequins, dolls and marionettes, defenceless as they are, lend themselves to abject statements, perhaps because of the ease with which they are dismembered or otherwise abused. The Glaswegian artist Kathy Wilkes’s mixed media installation, Non Verbal, 2005, provides a good example of this tendency. In the centre of a selection of disparate, scattered objects, a black mannequin stands mid-stride, her face obscured by a small, rectangular painting attached to it. The canvas is smeared by a few disconsolate brush strokes of colour, its placement where the sculpture’s face should be turning it into the very image of angry inarticulateness. Wilkes’s work is redolent of self-reproach, suggesting that in the 21st century, painters and sculptors of the human figure travel in dicey territory. If this is an ulterior thesis of the exhibition, it is one that the artists, in effect, wrest back from the curators; that thesis in this Biennial, especially for those works presented in the former Jewish School for Girls, is problematically dominant. Distrust of the figure could be considered a theme in the work of American sculptor Rachel Harrison, but it’s a distrust leavened by humour. Harrison refracts sculpture through its contemporary practice as installation, bringing the figure back into the work via the use of Pop cultural references. But shown in the girls’ school, with its peeling paint, dust and faded graffiti, her trademark sculptural combination of pink insulation foam, plywood and figurative elements—in this case a chair with insulation foam and a wig, and a related sculpture with plywood, insulation foam and a photo of Ronald Reagan taken from Hans Haacke’s 1984 piece for Documenta 7—gets dragged down into the firmament of the venue’s pathos-laden ambience.

Other works in this venue fare better, if to the perhaps questionable end of creating a macabre atmosphere. Markus Schinwald’s Otto, 2004, for instance, is a lifesized marionette that sits slumped in a chair. Guy wires are visible but Otto (get it?) doesn’t work. Similarly mawkish is late Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor’s The boy in the bench, 1983, in which a life-sized child doll sits at a 19th-century wooden school desk. More interesting and genuinely unsettling is Bulgarian artist Pravdoliub Ivanov’s Territories, 1995/2003, a mud-encrusted series of flags running along a hallway on the school’s first floor, or the Russian Viktor Alimpiev’s Summer Lightings, 2004, a video consisting of tight shots of young schoolgirls enigmatically drumming their fingers on their desks, intercut with distant glimpses of summer lightning. Most spectacular in this setting is Paul McCarthy’s Bang Bang Room, 1992. Flush with a platform, the four, mechanized, wallpapered walls of a room, each with its own door incessantly opening and banging shut, lever out to constantly make and unmake a room. The action of the walls is slow enough that viewers can safely step on and off the platform, but the effect of the work is manic and unsettling just the same, much like the Biennial itself. ■

“Of Mice and Men: The Fourth Berlin Biennial” will be exhibited in 12 venues along Auguststrasse, Berlin-Mitte, including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the former Jewish School for Girls, St. Johannes-Evangelist- Church, and the Post Office Stables, from March 25 to May 28, 2006.

Rosemary Heather is the editor of C Magazine.