Sunday, January 11, 2009

Last Art Focus Jerusalem, an art biennial taking place in 2008, has asked a question: "What art can do?"

According to Perniola, public is a philosophical remainder of art in that the residual attention that artistic representation enjoys in the public sphere finds its reflection in the institutional closure that sets museums, galleries, and foundations at a no longer bridgeable distance from the impact that art and society could have on each other. Groys argues that as modern art has breaken the boundaries that used to separate artistic forms of representation from all others, to borrow Perniola's formulation, society stands in the shadow of art. To go back to the question of last Jerusalem biennale, one may reforumulate it as: "What society can do?"

This way a visit to an art exhibition brings us as much into contact with the representations of received ideas as with the documentations of historical acts. Between Warhol's theorization of the fifteen minutes of fame for everyone - a formulation of the modern obsession with uniqueness for the mass society -. and irreversible moments of change that put a select configuration of people, things, and ideas into a representational frame that retains its identity over time.

These strands of reflection come to mind together with historical precedents for cities that have entered into historical accounts as focal points of cultural configurations that found their reverberations far beyond their city walls.

The Austrian Hospice, to which lead labyrinth-like passages from the Damascus gates of the Old City of Jerusalem - no map can adequately represent the disorientation that the kasbah-style, narrow market-steets put between an evening visitor and the securitized door of the Oesterreichische Hospiz -, brings before the eyes of its exhibitions' visitors the memory of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the figures of Franz Joseph, Kronprinz, and the military and courtly retinue that came at one time or another to have their pictures taken against the backdrop of this urban environment.

Past position in the shifting geographies that one-time empires drew around Jerusalem on their maps telescopes the present moment into the spheres of international concern that continue to be relevant wide beyond the borders of this Old City, this urban space, and this communication map.

To echo the question of what art can do, a beginning of an institutionalized discussion for possibilities for urban co-existance, creative city, and alternative media for a plural, open, and changing society can be a fitting answer to the question that art events invite their audiences to ponder.

Theory of art biennials may have to become a theory of space, performance, and representation as its attemps to provide illuminating accounts of historical and emergent metropolitan concentrations.

From the room of one's own that modern literature made an important contribution to creation in other, social, political, economical and cultural, spheres, for these continue to defend individual integrity within the optics of modern representation of unique individuality, it may be necessary to make a transition to shared spaces of social, political, economical and cultural representation that arise not on the basis of a poisited unity but drawing on already found heterogeneity.

The Old City could be a concrete parable for the actual possibilities for daily life that bridges differences, resists generalizations, and offers hope.