Art Biennials in Berlin and Jerusalem

Art biennials, especially in their internationalization, pit place and flows, global and local, permanent and ephemeral against each other. Apart from belonging to the same category of event, however loosely defined, the differences among art biennials bring both theoretical advantages, as one can learn most from variation within the same category of phenomena, and practical drawbacks, as their research risks to reinforce their incommensurability. However, it is their close relation to the universal expositions that makes art biennials productive cites for the theorization of modernity. This paper reaches back to German classics of social and cultural theory in order to tentatively chart the urban geographies of alternative modernities. It is also an attempt to theorize space as site of social, cultural, political and economic accumulation. However, here accumulation is approached philosophically (Perniola), rather sociologically (Munch) since the question of the end of modern capitalism (Schulze), similar to the theorization of the end of art, society and politics, understood as final arrival points of long histories of development, shifts the theoretical focus from time to space. The previous neglect of space (Foucault) justifies this present attempt at its theorization on the urban level, even though the spatial turn is not free from criticism (), as it itself has come of age as an intellectual fashion.

I borrow Perniola's philosophical categories of transit, ritual without myth and simulacrum to address the intellectual challenge of thinking of the arrival point of the processes of economic, social, cultural and political development. Endless development theoretically allows for growth that only quantitatively differs from its previous stages. In this sense it is linear since both its assumptions and measurements remain unchanged from one point in time to another. The histories of modern capitalism in Dickens' London and in contemporary Dubai expressed in qunatitiative terms plot on an upward line a chart of their accumulated economic capital might show. However, it is the factoring in of their urban space that lets the qualitative differences between these two processes of accumulation to come to light. Perniola theorizes the transitions from the same to the same as a source of radical difference. Linear growth as a transition from one point in time to another differing from each other only quantitatively lets their qualitative uniqueness remain the same. Nevertheless, the radical difference between the nineteenth and the twentienth, and even more so twenty-first, centuries suggests opening the discussion of the philosophical approach to social and cultural theories of modernity.

In this respect the German classical social and cultural theory, such as that of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, already is cognizant of the philosophical problem of grasping the radical difference that defines modernity. This point would call for a theorization of multiple modernities. However, there are grounds to conceive of moderntiy as a singular phenomenon allowing for local variation. In this regard, Benjamin spoke of Paris as a capital of the nineteenth century, which corresponds to a singular moment of modernity. Since in Benjamin's conception it is also a place, or more precisely a space of Parisian arcades, an alternative path to take appears to lead in the direction of alternative capitals of the nineteenth century. The same would hold for the contemporary period when different cities vie for their status as global or world cities. While their rankings () remain bound to a linear concepton of being sites of global modernity, a city can be more or less modern on any quantitatively organzied measurement or ranking scale, a different qualitative approach may be in order to the processes of economic, social, political and cultural accumulation that in their sum compose the project of modernity that defines each particular city. In this respect, art biennials in Berlin and Jerusalem provide theoretically privileged vantage points on what respective relation their respective urban spaces maintain with global culture. This approach limits the scope of this paper to the relations between urban modernity and modern culture since art biennials are expressions of both.