Two recent books, both outstanding in their diferent ways, ofer us historical perspectives on the pivotal roles that recurrent survey mega-exhibitions—widely and more felicitously known as biennials—have played in making contemporary art what it is today. The “Directory of Biennials” on the Biennial Foundation website lists 225 active instances and ofers hemispheric maps showing their locations. The “Global Biennial Survey 2018” in the online journal On Curating lists 316 regularly recurring survey exhibitions and events that name themselves “biennial” and the like, and usefully tracks their histories and locations. There is a clear concentration in European cities, and in East Asia, with some hot spots in the Americas, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australasia. If one were to look at similar maps of the locations of industrial expositions—the most ambitious of which claimed the title “world’s fairs”— staged from the late eighteenth century to the present, one sees a similar distribution. The United States is exceptional in hosting many industrial fairs and relatively few biennials. Time spans, however, do not match. Contemporary art biennials have proliferated since the 1990s. The great age of world’s fairs was the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s, with around forty being staged somewhere in the world during each decade from the 1880s until World War II. In her long-awaited and eagerly anticipated book The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience, Caroline A. Jones takes up this conjunction (including its temporal lags) to boldly theorize the globality of contemporary art as one of its signature outcomes. She links large conjectures to in-depth archival research, and philosophical relection to lively reports of personal experiences, in order to craft a narrative of how the exhibitionary platforms of the modern era were transformed into those of a globalized world. She argues that the European expositions of industrial manufactures and commercial goods—paradigmatically, the 1851 World’s Fair in London—established recurrent, nationally competitive, and thus international “festal structures” that were taken up by art biennials, led by Venice in 1895, and that peaked in the art and architectural face-ofs at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. At São Paulo in 1951, a second wave of biennials was unleashed. Now ubiquitous throughout the world, this exhibitionary form is fully global, Jones insists, in the kind of world-making work that it requires from “three types of historical actors: organizers/curators, artists, and visitors” (Jones, xi). While not claiming to be all-inclusive, this is a strong historical hypothesis that these exhibitionary platforms are the key to how art became contemporary, and they continue to shape its core characteristics today. The broad strokes of this argument are commonplace in the collective memories of many institutions and participants, and within the growing body of scholarship concerning the history of exhibitions and of curatorship. In her preface Jones remarks, “While a growing number of publications have examined globalization in contemporary art, none situate ‘the contemporary’ within the lingering efects and remnant structures of nineteenth-century world’s fairs” (Jones, xi). It might be more accurate to say that most authors see such remnants as one among the many modern ruins that resonate in contemporary times, often in spectacularized versions of their former forms. She goes on to suggest, “If one focuses on the emergence of the contemporary biennial, one quickly realizes that the key structures of the current exhibitionary complex, the undisputed foundations of contemporary display, were put in place more than a century ago” (Jones, xi). Indeed, Tony Bennett’s foundational studies, notably his 1995 book The Birth of the Museum, have shown that, since the later eighteenth century, an interrelated complex of exhibitionary formats—museums, world’s fairs, entertainment zones, and publicity in its multiple forms—developed in the European metropolitan centers and spread throughout their cultural colonies, including the United States, with great efects on many dimensions of local and international cultures. This complex has expanded exponentially in size, variety, and indeed complexity. In the visual arts alone one can readily list over thirty speciic, specialized exhibitionary institutions and quasi-institutions, all expanding, interacting, competing, and combining, among which the biennial is but one. We might wonder whether Jones’s overall argument does not have the shape of an hour-glass, with the enormous energies of nineteenth-century nationalism, mercantile promotion, and individual self-interest lowing down through the rather narrow slot of the few biennials of the irst half of the twentieth century (it really is pretty much just Venice until 1951); then, since the 1990s, a lood is unleashed, leading to a biennialization of almost everything to do with contemporary art, thought, and life, an efect that she dubs “the aesthetics of experience” (Jones, 195). On this account, the work of museums, private galleries, art criticism, annual exhibitions, and some important recurrent exhibitions (the Carnegie International since 1896; the Whitney Biennial since 1932) recede into the background. Oddly, a dozen (fascinating) pages are devoted to an exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form, which was not a biennial; it was curated by Harald Szeemann, director of Documenta 5, to which appropriate importance is attached (Jones, 171–83). Similarly, her engrossing discussion of the origins of the Venice International Exposition (begun as an annual celebration of the king’s wedding anniversary, it became a regular biennial exhibition by 1897 and started adding in national pavilions in 1907, doing so in numbers, however, only in the 1950s), as both absorbing and transcending the festal logics of world’s fairs, becomes shaky when she moves from acute observation to exaggeration in statements such as “The biennial came into being as a trade-speciic miniature of, and antidote to, the exhausted and overanalyzed world’s fair” (Jones, 88). By numbers alone, it took until the 1980s for biennials to match international trade fairs, and for most previous decades, there is no comparison.

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双年展和全球艺术作品

最近的两本书都以不同的方式出类拔萃，为我们提供了关于重复性大型展览——广泛且更恰当地称为双年展——在使当代艺术成为今天所扮演的关键角色的历史视角。双年展基金会网站上的“双年展目录”列出了 225 个活动实例，并提供了显示其位置的半球地图。在线期刊 On Curating 中的“2018 年全球双年展”列出了 316 个定期重复的调查展览和自称为“双年展”等的活动，并有用地跟踪它们的历史和地点。欧洲城市和东亚城市明显集中，美洲、非洲、东南亚和澳大拉西亚也有一些热点。如果我们看一下工业博览会的位置的类似地图——其中最雄心勃勃的展会号称是“世界博览会”——从 18 世纪晚期到现在举办，人们会看到类似的分布。美国在举办许多工业博览会和相对较少的双年展方面非常出色。然而，时间跨度并不匹配。自 1990 年代以来，当代艺术双年展激增。世界博览会的伟大时代是 19 世纪中叶到 1930 年代，从 1880 年代到第二次世界大战，每十年在世界某个地方举办大约 40 场。在她期待已久和热切期待的《全球艺术作品：世界博览会、双年展和体验美学》一书中，卡罗琳 A. 琼斯利用这种结合（包括它的时间滞后）大胆地将当代艺术的全球性理论作为其标志性成果之一。她将大型猜想与深入的档案研究、哲学反思与生动的个人经历报告联系起来，以叙述现代时代的展览平台如何转变为全球化世界的平台。她认为，欧洲工业制品和商业商品博览会——典型的例子是 1851 年伦敦世界博览会——建立了反复出现的、具有全国竞争力的、因此被 1895 年威尼斯领导的艺术双年展所采用的国际“节日结构”，以及这在 1937 年巴黎世界博览会的艺术和建筑方面达到了顶峰。1951 年在圣保罗，第二波双年展掀起热潮。现在，这种展览形式在世界各地无处不在，这种展览形式是完全全球性的，琼斯坚持认为，它需要“三种类型的历史演员：组织者/策展人、艺术家和参观者”（Jones, xi）进行创造世界的工作。虽然并没有声称包罗万象，但这是一个强有力的历史假设，即这些展览平台是艺术如何成为当代的关键，并且它们今天继续塑造其核心特征。在许多机构和参与者的集体记忆中，以及在越来越多的关于展览和策展历史的学术体系中，这种论点的广泛性是司空见惯的。琼斯在她的序言中评论道：“虽然越来越多的出版物研究了当代艺术的全球化，没有一个将“当代”置于 19 世纪世界博览会挥之不去的影响和残余结构中”（Jones, xi）。可能更准确地说，大多数作者将此类遗迹视为在当代引起共鸣的众多现代废墟中的一个，通常是它们以前形式的壮观版本。她继续建议，“如果关注当代双年展的出现，人们很快就会意识到，当前展览综合体的关键结构，当代展览无可争议的基础，已经在一个多世纪前就位了”（琼斯, xi)。事实上，托尼·贝内特的基础研究，尤其是他 1995 年出版的《博物馆的诞生》一书表明，自 18 世纪后期以来，展览形式的相互关联复杂——博物馆、世界博览会、娱乐区、和多种形式的宣传——在欧洲大都市中心发展起来，并传播到包括美国在内的文化殖民地，对当地和国际文化的许多方面产生了巨大影响。这个综合体在规模、种类和复杂性方面呈指数级增长。仅在视觉艺术方面，人们就可以轻易地列举出三十多个特殊的、专门的展览机构和准机构，它们都在扩展、互动、竞争和组合，而双年展只是其中之一。我们可能想知道琼斯的整体论点是否不具有沙漏的形状，具有 19 世纪民族主义、商业促进、20 世纪上半叶为数不多的双年展（在 1951 年之前实际上几乎只是威尼斯），个人利益在相当狭窄的时间段内下降；然后，自 1990 年代以来，一场洪水被释放，导致几乎所有与当代艺术、思想和生活有关的事物都以双年展形式呈现，她称之为“体验美学”（Jones, 195）。因此，博物馆、私人画廊、艺术批评、年度展览和一些重要的定期展览（自 1896 年以来的卡内基国际；自 1932 年以来的惠特尼双年展）的工作退居幕后。奇怪的是，有十几页（引人入胜的）专用于展览“当态度成为形式”，这不是双年展；它由第 5 届文献展馆长 Harald Szeemann 策划，给予适当的重视（琼斯，171-83）。同样，她对威尼斯国际博览会的起源进行了引人入胜的讨论（作为国王结婚纪念日的年度庆祝活动开始，到 1897 年成为两年一次的定期展览，并于 1907 年开始增加国家馆，但数量上只有在 1950 年代），作为吸收和超越世界博览会的节日逻辑，当她从敏锐的观察转变为夸张的陈述时变得摇摇欲坠，例如“双年展是作为贸易特定缩影和解毒剂而诞生的精疲力竭和过度分析世界博览会”（琼斯，88）。仅从数字来看，双年展要到 1980 年代才能与国际贸易展览会相匹敌，而且在过去的几十年中，没有可比性。她对威尼斯国际博览会的起源进行了引人入胜的讨论（作为国王结婚纪念日的年度庆祝活动开始，到 1897 年成为两年一次的定期展览，并于 1907 年开始增加国家馆，但数量上只有在1950 年代），同时吸收和超越世界博览会的节日逻辑，当她从敏锐的观察转变为夸张的陈述时变得摇摇欲坠，例如“双年展是作为特定行业的缩影和解毒剂而诞生的过度分析了世界博览会”（琼斯，88）。仅从数字来看，双年展要到 1980 年代才能与国际贸易展览会相匹敌，而且在过去的几十年中，没有可比性。她对威尼斯国际博览会的起源进行了引人入胜的讨论（作为国王结婚纪念日的年度庆祝活动开始，到 1897 年成为两年一次的定期展览，并于 1907 年开始增加国家馆，但数量上只有在1950 年代），同时吸收和超越世界博览会的节日逻辑，当她从敏锐的观察转变为夸张的陈述时变得摇摇欲坠，例如“双年展是作为特定行业的缩影和解毒剂而诞生的过度分析了世界博览会”（琼斯，88）。仅从数字来看，双年展要到 1980 年代才能与国际贸易展览会相匹敌，而且在过去的几十年中，没有可比性。