Organizers instead of curators. Researchers instead of artists. An assembly instead of a biennial. Institutes instead of galleries. Including the work of around fifty participants in a series of small exhibitions spread across eleven cultural centers, the first Bergen Assembly sought to avoid biennial jargon at all costs. It did not occupy any abandoned industrial buildings, as has become common in many recently established biennials ^[1]. Nor was it a global exhibition: the origins of the participants—mostly from Germanic, Scandinavian, and Slavic territories—reflected the background of organizers Ekaterina Degot and David Riff, both based in Moscow.

In truth, the curators partly inherited this elusive language from the creation process of the Bergen Assembly, initiated at the Bergen Biennial Conference (2009) and the publication The Biennial Reader (2010), where the question “To biennial or not to biennial?” was addressed ^[2]. Judging by the name of the resulting event, Bergen Assembly – An Initiative for Art and Research, the answer seems to have been “yes, but”: they decided to create a triennial instead of a biennial, and not on art, but about (or literally, for) art and research. For its first edition, curators Degot and Riff chose to use a literary reference to question the very definition of the triennial and its focus on artistic research. Their project, Monday Begins on Saturday, took its title from a Russian science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, described in the first English edition as “a bestseller on the other side of the Curtain, written by two Soviet scientists… about a secret and heavily guarded institute in Solovets where the most interesting research on black magic… and the secrets of super-science and paranormal talents takes place!” ^[3] A story about the Institute of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, the novel is set in the struggle for cultural, economic, and technological supremacy during the Cold War and uses the fantasy genre to forge a satirical commentary on secrecy, bureaucracy, and inefficiency in Soviet socialism of the mid-1960s.

Far more than a mere reference point, the novel acted as a true catalyst for the exhibition. In many of the displayed works, the literary resources of the Strugatsky brothers were recognizable—especially in the use of irony, fiction, and narrative to speculate on the social, cultural, and economic conditions of our present. In turn, the curatorial strategies mirrored the parallels with the novel: the various venues were renamed with somewhat ironic titles (from the Institute of Imaginary States to the Institute of Defensive Magic or the Institute of Perpetual Accumulation), all welcoming visitors with austere decor that vaguely resembled a bureaucrat’s office—a plant, an electronic clock, and a copper plaque engraved with a fragment of the novel. While the Strugatsky brothers used the figure of the pseudo-scientific researcher to criticize the atrophies of the Soviet political system, Degot and Riff examined the paradoxical relationship between artistic research and the neoliberal context in which this term has gained traction in Norway and Europe over the past decade. The exhibition thus posed the question of how much artistic research—as the quintessential product of art academies in post-social-democratic Europe—can articulate a critique of the system that nurtures it ^[4].

It is not easy to translate such abstract questions into a coherent exhibition narrative, let alone weave them with a literary reference. Perhaps, in order to tackle such a challenge, Monday Begins on Saturday did not limit itself to addressing artistic research processes but also their various subjects: the capitalization of knowledge and life; the magic of the state and the rituals of power ^[5]; tropical fascism, or the resurgence of fascist symbols in the homosexual subcultures of Latin America; or the connections between affect and technology, to mention a few. Given that each of these topics was addressed in a separate exhibition (more or less related to the profile of the cultural center hosting it), both the concept and the experience of the triennial were relatively atomized, and the thematic organization of the exhibitions largely obscured the aesthetic relationships between the works.

Drawing a comparison between the Strugatsky brothers’ fantastic researcher and the artist as a researcher, the exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall (renamed as the Institute of the Disappearing Future) came closest to the curators’ intention to rewrite the novel in another space and time ^[6]. This often translated into a somewhat literal transposition of references, such as in the combination of black-and-white photographs of Soviet researchers taken by various authors in the 1960s with Icarus 13 (2008) by Kiluanji Kia Henda, a series of eight color photographs that recontextualize the everyday landscape of Luanda (a cement monument resembling a rocket, construction workers wearing helmets like astronauts, a sky tinted green) to construct a fictional narrative about an Angolan mission to the sun; or in the fragments of science fiction films from the Eastern Bloc that literally guided the viewer to the projection of 2084 (2011-13), a science fiction video by Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan, a sarcastic vision (or inside joke) about the art world. Other works in this exhibition countered nostalgia for a past future with more skeptical, though somewhat didactic, reflections on the language of utopia and its commercialization. The documentary Fictions and Futures – Happiness in the Abstract (2013) by Minze Tummescheit and Arne Hector, for example, adopts the style of investigative journalism to portray the future as a product of financial speculation. Meanwhile, in the installation Island (2013), Ivan Melnychuk and Oleksandr Burlaka (Grupa Predmetiv) juxtapose images of utopian buildings with an architectural model and a letter in which an urban planner reports to his megalomaniac master (presumably an oligarch) on the progress of his titanic project to transform an island in central Kiev into a private fortified city, suggesting that the future might resemble a feudal past.

The triennial was at its best the further it strayed from its literary source. The Institute of Anti-Formalism (at Kode4, a municipal art history museum) historically anchored the triennial’s themes with a sophisticated analysis of how artists have responded to the threats of various forms of academicism under different political regimes and historical contexts. Some display cases with archival documentation narrated the reverse trajectories of two public sculptures on either side of the Iron Curtain, tracing their transformation from autonomous sculpture to social monument and vice versa: Detroit (1977), a black steel abstract sculpture conceived by artist Jack Ward as a modernist work to adorn a disadvantaged neighborhood in the city, has become, in Detroit’s collective imagination, a monument to the civil rights riots that began there in 1967 ^[7]; on the other hand, the figurative relief created by Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko at a cemetery in Kiev, Wall of Memory (1968-82), was erased shortly after its completion for failing to meet the principles of Socialist Realism, leaving behind a wavy cement wall that more closely resembles modernist aesthetics. Moreover, fascinating iconographic studies from the early 1950s by Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński, which combined motifs of socialist realism with geometric abstraction, and intricate textual drawings by East German artist Carlfriedrich Claus invoked a long history of artistic resistance to the aesthetic dogmas of state socialism.

Moving to current academicism, perhaps less rigid but still widespread, the work of Norwegian artist Ane Hjort Guttu updated the reflection on the dangers of aesthetic doctrines, or what we might call today’s cultural policies. Each of Guttu’s three works in the exhibition can be understood as a reflection on a tripartite typology of the artist: the academic, the naive, and the researcher. In the video Untitled (The City at Night) (2013), one of many works produced specifically for this triennial, Guttu interviews an anonymous artist who has been working for over twenty years on a research project in which she has created thousands of colored scores, in the tradition of geometric abstraction, supposedly representing the city’s underworld at night. In the context of Monday Begins on Saturday, such a mismatch between content and form could be read as a sharp commentary on the pitfalls of a well-intentioned but not very incisive critical practice, in which social reality is abstracted to the point of losing any connection with its reference, and the artwork becomes not only autonomous from the context in which it exists but also indifferent to its audience.

Guttu’s portrayal of the artist as a delirious researcher who has lost touch with reality expanded the terms of the discussion to raise questions that went far beyond the volatile terminology surrounding the debate on art as research, thus pointing to a deeply rooted crisis about the role of art and culture in society. Installed in the artist-run space KNIPSU (renamed as the Institute of Love and Its Absence), alongside two other pieces also produced for the exhibition, the filmed play Love Machines (2013) was perhaps one of the most ambitious works in the exhibition for its use of science fiction not to comment on specific political or aesthetic aspects, but to portray a more generalized affective crisis. Performed on a bare stage, with minimal costumes and set design, Chukhrov’s work revolves around two bio-robots, or love machines, programmed to instrumentalize desire with disturbing effects, to the point that a cow ends up being the only remaining source of emotions like love or compassion. Invoking the managed heart typical of the post-Fordist economy ^[8], Love Machines alludes to the erosion of affective experiences in a system where the ability to care for and to empathize has become a highly valued skill.

In another exhibition that also brought together the work of three artists at the Museum of the School (a museum about the history of Norwegian education and society renamed the Institute of Lyric Sociology), Josef Dabernig’s film Hypercrisis (2011) also portrays a world in decline where any emotion has been transfigured into a pathological condition. Shot in a former residence for Soviet filmmakers in Armenia, whose modern architecture evokes a glorious past, Hypercrisis depicts a poet in the midst of a creative crisis against the backdrop of a lethargic institution inhabited by white-coated bureaucrats. The film combines handheld shots of the tormented writer walking through the forest while reviewing the manuscript, accompanied by the repetitive and unsettling drumbeat of CAN’s Halleluhwah (1971), with long, static shots of idle administrators, quietly passing the time in the luxurious interiors of the residence, with Verdi’s Messa da Requiem accompanying their languid and sparse movements. At the triennial, it was hard not to read Dabernig’s apathetic institute as a not-so-distant dystopian horizon, in which starving artists would become the patients, rather than guests, of a bloated institutional machinery concerned only with its own survival.

Hypercrisis clearly identifies the problem of the institutionalization of contemporary artistic practices, one aspect of which is their equation with a neoliberal notion of research as a measurable and quantifiable activity. However, considering the multiplication of institutes in the exhibition, it is surprising that this film was one of the few works that questioned the consequences of framing artistic activity within an institutional context—whether exhibition centers, museums, or universities. This also contrasted with the criticisms of the concept of artistic research in curatorial discourse; Degot, for example, aptly asked in the seminar coinciding with the exhibition’s opening whether the term art as research has not ended up meaning the institutionalization of critique ^[9]. Given the complex articulation of this problem in the discourse surrounding the triennial, the exhibition could have addressed issues such as self-organization and institutional creativity practices. However, these themes were conspicuously absent in both the works and the curatorial grammar of the exhibition.

It should be said that perhaps this is a problem beyond the reach of a single exhibition. Nevertheless, given the richness and diversity of its content, Monday Begins on Saturday ended up presenting a somewhat uniform image of the artist as a researcher, if not in their objects of investigation, then at least in terms of their tools of work. With some notable exceptions, the predominance of video essays that relied too heavily on text (whether as voice-over or subtitles) suggests that the exhibition could have gone further in questioning the commonplaces about artistic research, rather than reflecting a relatively closed view of this type of work that risks becoming a style. Ultimately, such a monochromatic portrayal of the artist as researcher functioned mainly as an invitation to think about how artistic research can avoid becoming a victim of the standardization processes associated with an increasingly corporate academic and institutional environment, an invitation especially relevant to those of us who, like Degot and Riff, still prefer the difficult marriage of art with the university and the state over its complicity with the market.

This article can also be found at the following link: Afterall Online

Notes:

[1] Although two of the nine exhibition halls were located in former industrial buildings, these had long since been converted into cultural institutions, an indication that Norway’s second city does not seem to need a contemporary art exhibition to draw the attention of tourists or investors. The two venues were Bergen Kjøtt, a former meat factory transformed into studios for artists and musicians in 2010, and USF Verftet, a former canning factory that has been functioning as a cultural center since 1993. USF Verftet also hosted a two-day symposium held from August 31 to September 1, 2013, coinciding with the exhibition’s opening.

[2] FILIPOVIC, ELENA, VAN HAL MARIEKE AND ØVSTEBØ SOLVEIG: The Biennial Reader, Bergen and Ostfildern, Bergen Kunsthal and Hatje Cantz, 2010.

[3] See the back cover of ARKADI and STRUGATSKI, BORIS: Monday Begins on Saturday (1964, translation by Leonid Renen), New York, Daw Books, 1977.

[4] For an exchange of opinions on what “artistic research” means, see the recording of the roundtable “Artistic Research in Embattled Institutions,” held on August 31, 2013, at the opening symposium of Monday Begins on Saturday at USF Verftet, Bergen. Available online: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/38044943

[5] See TAUSSIG, MICHAEL: The Magic of the State, New York, Routledge, 1997.

[6] The back cover of the exhibition guide, for example, states: “The project —which takes the form of an exhibition and a book— imagines a contemporary rewriting of the novel as an archipelago of fictional research institutes.” DEGOT, EKATERINA and RIFF, DAVID: Monday Begins on Saturday, Berlin and Bergen: Sternberg Press and Bergen Assembly, 2013.

[7] The documentation of this sculpture is part of a research project by artists Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.

[8] RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD, ARLIE: The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983.

[9] During the symposium, Degot and Riff explained that the exhibition’s conceptual framework is inspired by the thinking of humanist materialist philosophers like Mikhail Lifshitz. Although the discussions provided an interesting gateway to this school of thought, the opening symposium format proved not to be entirely suitable for a philosophical discussion of this caliber, particularly because the references were new to a predominantly Norwegian and European audience. However, it seems important to find a more appropriate channel to continue introducing this thinking to old Europe.