Neil Powell MA Head of Sculpture Staffordshire University

In and Out of The White Cube

Introducing this year's Harlech Biennale of Contemporary Art presents a number of challenges, not only in bringing a coherent commentary to an essentially diverse range of artworks, but also in bringing the idea of the exhibition itself closer to the viewer. One cannot discuss the Biennale without touching on the broader context for the exhibition, its past, its future, and its developing role in the cultural life of the region and beyond.

In characterising the Harlech Biennale, the juxtaposition of place and frequency of the exhibition is self evident, but, as much as the title informs, it also serves to problematise. The quasi Olympian ideal of the Biennale, conjured as it is from the near-definitive mandate of the legendary La Biennale di Venezia, has come to mean the grand cyclical gesture toward culture, whether in the heady segregation of a national pavilion, or in the somewhat misleadingly titled Aperto. Whilst the Harlech Biennale can claim neither the ambience or romance (or budget) of its more celebrated counterparts, it certainly is in no need of an apologist, nor is it faltering in its progress to establish itself as a growing presence in the international arts calendar. The Harlech Biennale differs from its antecedents most crucially in its positive and pragmatic philosophy and what I would suggest is a unique sense of itself as a burgeoning and blossoming entity within Wales and a wider Europe.

When the critic Hal Foster recently commented: "critics have followed artists forced to exchange critical practice for survival"1, he was describing a predicament recognisable to the audiences for art and only too familiar to artists themselves. The Harlech Biennale constitutes a clear response from artists, critics and a resistant Welsh culture to the compromises forced on creative quality by the demands of populism and economic necessity.

Over the past fifty years, the shift in critical resources for artists, academics, critics and curators has been no less than tectonic. The reciprocal traumas of the artist becoming theorised and the theorist becoming Post modernised seem to have contributed to what might best be described as a cultural 'stand-off' in many larger art institutions. Despite the fact that under the various assaults of Conceptual Art and the neo-avant-garde the fabric of Modernism became fundamentally unravelled, we again find ourselves amid a critical and curatorial malaise historically associated with the commodification of art and the aggrandisement of its purveyors. It is fascinating to revisit Lucy Lippard's 1970's journal of the crisis in Modernism, 'Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object...' . In what Lippard describes as " A Biased History", we are given cause not only to reflect on the idealistic drive of that period to democratise art, but we are also clearly able to recognise many issues that artists were able to confront so meaningfully at that time that seem to be re-emerging in the present.

The sheer vitality of critical theory in the 1970's and the blurring of the edges of theory and practice deliberately exposed by groups such as Art & Language and critics such as Lippard, led many artists to misunderstand the relationship of theory to practice. Inevitably, theory became a form of ornamentation and art became interesting not because of some vestigial notion of quality but because it could function as a tool to demonstrate a convenient social proposition.

Undoubtedly some artists thought it wiser and more credible to replace practice with theory or to mistakenly think that by claiming practice as unprescribed theory that it would become mystically elevated in a way that qualitative criteria would not allow. From here it is a small leap back to the Modernist (Kantian) assertion that (good) art is imbued with undefinable intrinsic value only available to the cognoscenti. This view has, to some extent, gradually been reanimated by the critical neglect, visual opacity and box office curatorship of a number of major international exhibition venues and museums. For a while in the 1970's, the social meaning of art was allowed to levitate away from the idea of historical antecedence as the major determinant of quality, but more and more it seems we are returning to a model of art as being a repository for artistic competence retrieved on our behalf by cultural and fiscal mediation. From the turn of the twentieth century onwards, history repeatedly teaches us of the naivety of assuming that the raison d'etre of major international art exhibitions is to promote a qualitative and democratic survey of artistic output. In truth, the vested interests and demographic predilections of major museums, collectors and market makers are rarely far from the fray.

It is with at least some of these rather heady issues in mind that one comes to this year's Harlech International Art Biennale, a countercultural event that openly subverts institutionalisation and whose motives are genuinely to exhibit art that is interesting as opposed to being the manifestation of defensible regional arts policy. Many of these issues may seem a world away from the exhibition that is being held in Harlech this year, but, in a society where the value of cultural events is frequently measured in column inches, audience participation and viewer entertainment it seems important to consider for a moment the historical and contextual dimension to this year's exhibition.

Clearly though, as well as the exhibition in itself being a statement and a gesture, it is also about the work included in it. This year's Harlech Biennale includes artists from Wales, England, Scotland, Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, the United States and too many other nations to mention. Within the limited scope of this essay, I do not propose to offer an interrogative of all the works of artists included in the exhibition and frankly it seems a pointless exercise to explain some artists' works at the expense of others. Suffice to say that if one could attach a thematic to this year's exhibition, the artists involved could be said in their own very unique ways to be highlighting the tension between officially sanctioned culture and the maker as individual.

A prime example is the work of Scottish artist and Concrete Poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay's well documented conflicts with 'official' culture ("The Battles of Little Sparta" 2) and his often controversial critique of contemporary culture are clear testimony not only to the artist's willingness to contest the ownership of culture but also to test out the beaurocratic means by which it is regulated. "Arcadia", a representation of an elaborately decorated W.W.II Panzer tank speaks of a similarly conflated relationship between on the one hand, decoration and camouflage and on the other, idealism and terror. Offering a neat convenient segue, Anselm Kiefer is perhaps best known for his painted representations of guilt in post-war German culture. His presence in the Biennale is particularly relevant he is one of the few contemporary artists to struggle with the conversational awkwardness of a vanquished overtly nationalistic heritage. Of course not all of the artists in the exhibition are so explicit in their commentaries on history, and nor is it desirable for them to be so.

A certain famous prologue from the 1950's stated that: 'In the city there are a thousand stories...", in the 2002 Harlech Biennale there are certainly around fifty that are succinctly told by works which reflect a diverse range of media, visual ideas and philosophies. The fun, the enjoyment and the whole point of the Biennale is that the visitor, the viewer, the audience, shouldn't take anybody's word for it. The works included speak for themselves and they speak to anyone who is prepared to listen, or more accurately look. Works were not selected to demonstrate a foregone conclusion nor to garnish a curatorial whimsy but they are there to be looked at, talked about, enjoyed, criticised, applauded and perhaps even ridiculed; The focus of the exhibition is primarily that the works may become a cause for discussion and interaction.

The extraordinary fact of the continuing existence of an exhibition such as the Harlech Biennale, the venues it adapts itself to and its potential to become a national/international cultural event in Wales is nothing less than remarkable. The courage of the organisers in resisting the temptation to localise the exhibition is to be commended, it is certainly in the interests of the region and in the interests of Harlech itself to be able to reach out and invite a diverse new set of influences that can add to the attractiveness of an area rich in both natural beauty and native Welsh culture.

Neil Powell - August 2002

Bibliography:
1. Hal Foster 'The Return of the Real' MIT Press 1996, Massechusetts USA ISBN 0-262-06187-2
2. For further reading see: Yves Abrioux 'Ian Hamilton Finlay A Visual Primer' Reaktion Books, London, UK
ISBN 0-948462-35-3