Manifesta 11: What Artists and Curators Do for Money

Manifesta 11
Various venues, Zurich
11.06.16 – 18.09.16

It is a very small, and no doubt unintentional, victory for the curatorial concept of Manifesta 11: What People Do for Money – Some Joint Ventures that I found it more interesting to consider the biennial by way of its producers and coordinators than its curators and artists. The work involved in manifesting ‘joint ventures’ between thirty contemporary artists and non-artist professionals must have been titanic, both in quantity and character. Certainly, it would have been more illustrative of the relationships between art and labour than the fruits of that labour.

A case in point was artist Mike Bouchet’s collaboration with Philipp Sigg, a process engineer at Werdhölzli Wastewater Treatment Plant. This commission brought into the first-floor gallery of the Löwenbräukunst a day’s worth of Zurich’s ‘human sludge’ ( i.e. 80,000 kilos of whatever the Zurichois are flushing down their toilets ) formed into pseudo-minimalist cubes. I am less compelled by this one-liner – humans shit and other humans clean it up, thus is the world both functional and depraved – than I am in the fine print of the information panel positioned outside the air-locked gallery door: ‘All aspects of the art-work ( research, logistics, installation, conservation, and disposal ) meet the appropriate requirements for public display and environmental safety.’ The mind boggles at the labyrinth of logistics and bureaucracy this project must have engendered for the biennial’s producers and coordinators. Before they began tackling practicalities there must have been a significant amount of reverse engineering – cajoling into existence, so that they can be met, official requirements for the public display of human faeces.

This is perhaps the most challenging and illuminating part of the commissioning and exhibition-making process: when the unstoppably abstract meets the immovably practical, and all the resulting micro-incidences of political and ethical implication, emotional and physical absurdity, defeat and triumph. Once, when working on a site-specific installation at a zoo, I received a phone call from the Curator of Mammals, threatening to cancel the project because the artist’s fabricator had climbed into the African wild dogs’ enclosure in order to take measurements. After several minutes of politely hysterical dialogue ( during which I received a crash course in the, frankly terrifying, hunting and feeding behaviour of sub-Saharan canids ), I managed to secure the curator’s green light on the strength of the argument that the technician had meant no harm, evidenced by his only having entered the ‘outer defensive ring’ of fencing, and not the ‘inner enclosure’ of the little hut, where the dogs slept. At no point did I seek to discern whether the zoo’s concern was for the technician or the dogs, and in the end those measurements proved to be invaluable to the installation. We each have stories about finding ourselves in this perilous zone between the ‘outer defensive ring’ of the real world’s rules and the ‘inner enclosure’ of the artwork’s needs.

This is not to say that curators and artists do not play an active role in negotiating these zones – indeed, their level of skill and interest here is often integral to the success of a project. Presumably the Manifesta 11 commissions enjoyed above-average attention in this regard, given how closely the conceit of the biennial mirrors curator Christian Jankowski’s own practice as an artist, which often finds him interlocuting outside the art world. As evidence of the close interaction between the commissioned artists and their ‘professional’ counterparts, the What People Do for Money website showcases candid photographs of just this: artist Fermín Jiménez Landa and meteorologist Peter Wick consider the Swiss skyscape together, Michel Houellebecq reviews scans of his brain with Dr Henry Perschak, and Torbjørn Rødland holds forth in Dr Danielle Heller Fontana’s office, while gripping some sort of dental apparatus, etc. In fact, aside from the press downloads, these are very nearly the only images representing the commissions online. It is possible that this inattention to the finished product was born less of a desire to give primacy to the collaborative work of the projects, than it was the result of inevitable incompatibilities between the artists’ timelines and that of the communications team. For a biennial, consistency between projects in their PR presentation is often valued over the quality/quantity of information available ( never mind that each work may necessitate a different communication strategy ). Therefore, although one work might be complete with Web-ready photographs, another may be handwringingly behind schedule; and so the common denominator must be sought or staged. Thus is a biennial both functional and depraved.

These may seem like insignificant administrative details-distractions from reading the actual exhibition. On the contrary, I have found that looking closely at what came after an artist or work was selected can quickly reveal how and why decisions critical to the artist and work were made. Unlike a professional framer, whose entire visit to a gallery could be spoiled by spotting an overcut passepartout, or the way an AV technician may experience the quality of a projection as directly linked to that of the projector, looking closely at what is going on around the works in What People Do for Money greatly improved my ability to understand some of its more baffling curatorial decisions. Consider again, for instance, the first floor of the Löwenbräukunst, which, at the time of my visit, contained the work of three artists: the aforementioned Zurich Load by Mike Bouchet, inflatables by Bhakti Baxter and video works by Roman Štětina. Unfortunately, the overwhelming smell of human waste made it terribly difficult to give the last two works more than a moment’s attention. This was a particular shame in the case of Štětina’s videos-precisely composed meditations on the obsolescence of radio-play foley artistry. Specifically, Studio No. 2 ( Slapstick ) ( 2013 ) is a 5-minute-long film that requires focus on the part of the viewer to parse the subtle aural differences between first- and second-generation audio after-effects. Needless to say, focusing my senses-aural or otherwise-was precisely the last thing I wanted to do while standing in such close proximity to 80,000 kilos of shit.

Thus, on the one hand, pairing these two works appears to have been a poor curatorial decision; detrimental both to the work of the artists and to the audience. On the other, the Manifesta 11 guidebook ( presumably printed before Bouchet’s installation ) indicates that three additional works were slated for this gallery: a slide series by Martin Kippenberger and Achim Schächtele, and elements of commissioned works by Evgeny Antufiev and Fermín Jiménez. It is not unusual that artworks should shift around at the last minute. This is the hazard of including floorplans in a guidebook, printed before the show has settled into its final form. That said, this little glance at the intended placement of several prominent elements of the exhibition combines intriguingly with rumours ( N.B. utterly unsubstantiated ) that the magnitude of the stench was in fact not anticipated; that technicians were retching during the installation; that there are now concerns about the gallery walls continuing to ‘off gas’ once the installation is removed, thus jeopardising the organisation’s ability to claim air quality in keeping with high-level conservation standards. Rumours aside, the fact that a Kippenberger was planned for that gallery does seem to suggest that, at a relatively late stage, Bouchet’s work was considered neither a threat to the safety of the other works nor to the viewers’ ability properly to experience them. However, once this changed ( whether by decree of the curators, the conservators, the artists themselves or their dealers ) that perilous zone must have cracked wide open, resulting in a series of negotiations and decisions that may have had very little to do with the finer academic aspects of curatorial practice.

Add to all of this the fact that that there was more than one curator in the mix: Jankowski was joined by Francesca Gavin, who co-curated The Historical Exhibition: Sites Under Construction – a kind of through-line of existing works that provided the opportunity to see loads of terrific art, presented in a way that managed to be both didactic and opaque. Štětina’s work was part of this project, as was Kippenberger’s, while Bouchet was part of the programme of commissioned works, or Joint Ventures. There were several points of clash between the The Historical Exhibition and the Joint Ventures, but what both projects seem to agree upon is a dichotomy between people who do things for money and the Manifesta 11 artists, who – to paraphrase the guidebook – ‘portray, question, and interact with the ideas and processes of occupations’. Although Jankowski does acknowledge his ‘changing guilds, from artist to curator’, he doesn’t appear to see the role of the curator as an overarching joint venture with the commissioned artists. Perhaps because curators are also not seen to be professionally occupied in the same way as, say, a waste-treatment engineer. There is a difference, apparently, one that Manifesta 11 labours to delineate, on the pretext of bringing the two together. And maybe the only reason I was able to stomach this blind elitism was because I know exactly what artists and curators do for money: they produce and coordinate biennials.