OP-ED: Unintelligible Horizons: CAB5 & The Urgent Need For New, Relevant Global Perspectives

Image of the World's Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World's Fair). Looking West From Peristyle, Court of Honor and Grand Basin of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago, Illinois)

OP-ED
Unintelligible Horizons: CAB5 & The Need For New, Relevant Global Perspectives

By Michael Workman

The Chicago Architecture Biennial recently opened the fifth edition of its international exposition to a decidedly mixed reception. Organized by museological local celebrity collective the Floating Museum (two of the collective’s members are former contributors to the Bridge Journal), the event was moved to a phased opening starting with previously scheduled local events, and the main program set to open earlier this month. Giving up the prime time opening at the start of the fall season was already, I thought, something of an indicator as to the event’s faltering ambitions. Despite half a million dollars in state funds and several tens of thousands from various private foundations (including a reported $110,000 from the Terra Foundation and $40,000 from the Graham Foundation for a Mecca Flats “architectural scale” inflatable monument that has yet to materialize), reviews so far seem to indict the event planner’s insular lack of intellectual rigor about architecture’s role in a world with serious problems.

I don’t hope to sound mean or derogatory, but early speculations voiced concern about the approach of an architecture biennial without a well-articulated focus, including the Architect’s Newspaper, which noted one of the event’s stated intentions was to feature “artists and designers whose body of work is not limited to traditional architectural production.” Indeed, the emerging consensus appears to be, aside from some bright spots, that despite the celebrity imprimatur and piles of cash, the Biennial hasn’t risen to the challenge of justifying its own global cultural relevance. That’s big, and worth public notice. More than one review echoes this sentiment, with the Chicago Sun-Times, for example, laying out a litany of qualms, including that the event “offers very little about how the city is solving or should solve global design problems,” and the Architect’s Newspaper, in its official review noted that “the horrors and gravity of the global moment seemed to outweigh the content on display.” It’s a sentiment that seems to echo across the critical reception to this year’s event, alongside a culmination of predictable, long-trending challenges to its international relevance.

Previous, earlier editions drew a much larger list of architectural participants from around the globe, to be sure. Numerous media outlets have been reporting declines since after its earliest first few editions, and though the Biennial did not respond to repeated requests for attendance numbers, it’s clear that sustainability problems with recent editions had been deeply exacerbated by the ongoing ripple effects of the pandemic. Still, rather than just adding yet another assessment to the pile – plenty of outlets will kibbitz on the assorted final historical merits and shortcomings of the event, which continues through February – I’d prefer here to offer something more of a longer view of the background against which it takes place, then articulate a bit about why that’s important.

A point of pride for Chicago as an international city, of course, has always been its ability to participate in a discourse about ideas, present and future, and to present innovations on the state of the arts that Chicago, as a global city, both informs and is informed by. This goes back throughout the city’s place history, of course, to at least the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a point of pride enshrined in one of the four stars that make up our state flag. Part of a global trend itself, the opportunity to present it followed on the heels of the first world’s fair, London's Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851.

Far from mere presentation of “manifestos” or circuses of current artistic or institutional dogma, these events have historically (and simultaneously) been defining markers for advanced nations to strut their place in the cosmopolitan firmament, and living laboratories for yardstick displays of all ranges of human invention. More than mere parades of wealth and privilege, these events double as opportunities to affirm the necessity of knowledge exchanges in the interest of human advancement, and at times as critical rebukes to xenophobic, supremacist or other types of purely self-interested, nationalist ideologies. This has historically largely been done by joining the voices of a field’s best and brightest to an ongoing historical document that the exposition represents, one written by participants and visitors from across civilizations, who come together to help advance those fields. This is why the publications left by them are an often an underrated and underrecognized source of scholarship.

It’s also no surprise that producers would fail to account for several important historical contexts. It’s hard to be a visionary when you’re checking the wind. Since the later days of these world’s fair-scale events, the variety of expositions, convenings and common assemblies have splintered into strands of a sprawling history – conferences, biennials, olympic events, art fairs – that has included, for example, Germany’s ongoing post-Imperialist reconciliation with the world (Documenta), art’s ability to heal and look past borders and differences of custom to interrogate mutually-beneficial utopian ideals (Manifesta), establishment of a contemporary art as conciliatory economic prop event post-Katrina (Prospect New Orleans) the transition of the world’s social center of artistic innovation from Paris to New York (The Armory Show — the original 1913 edition, not the current market vehicle), and on and on in a nearly interminable list of other global-interest aligning (and realigning) events. At the heart of all these productions is a recognition of the need to affirm that deliberative Democracy, of course, is the secret sauce that can lead to true, groundbreaking innovation, not any single industry or practitioner, regardless how celebrated. In fact, these affirmations of cosmopolitan ideals often take place despite the envy of dictators, despots and strongmen-led nations excluded from participation due to their defining willingness to tolerate human rights violations. You can’t have an honest conversation about the future of supply chains, technology or any artistic discipline with someone pointing a gun at your head, after all, and it’s often why authoritarian countries lag behind economic, technological or artistic advancements.

As well, art and creative industry interests in the last century have driven a parallel proliferation of biennials around the globe, on the model of the Venice Biennial (launched in 1895, nearly concurrent with the Chicago Exposition) and its role in the “Grand Tour” that would attract visitors across Europe from Münster for the once every decade sculpture exposition, to the annual art fair at Basel, then to Documenta and culminating in the Venice Biennale, often referred to as the “Olympics of the art world,” with each country staging its own national pavilion across the sprawling, water-bound failed merchant capital. Venice, of course, began in an era when the Secession movements were ascendent, with the roots dating back to the French and American Revolutions as an art event reframing artistic innovation through a lens celebrating King Umberto and Margherita of Savoy, the ruling royals of the day who weren’t above a little massacre now and again if the poor got out of hand.

As an evolution of the European model, the first international contemporary art exposition premiered in 1967: the Cologne KUNSTMARKT, which seemingly appropriated these Secessionist-liberationist model of artists protesting against the constraints of the imagination by those in power, with the goal of privately redirecting resources in a more self-directed way through the gallery system. It’s a model which persists to our present moment, due largely in part to its utility for city officials constantly seeking ways, as art historian Christine Mehring has written, to burnish both “their cultural capital and their tax revenues.” Art Basel, of course, got the idea from Cologne and, coupling a willingness to undermine the economic functions of Democracy that resulted in the piercing of the Swiss banking secrecy veil with Swiss tax dollar investments to prop it all up, the event since its founding has been able to out-compete most all global competitors forced to rely on mere private investment.

Prior to the ascendance of Basel and its incursion into the American domestic market by way of Art Basel Miami Beach, (by some reports targeted for its largest-in-the-nation wealth investment client base in neighboring Palm Beach), Chicago was the only example of the Basel-style art exposition in North America. In 1980, inspired by a visit to Basel’s home-country event in Switzerland, when these events were more statements of an international community and less dark-money style investment opportunities, Michigan print dealer John Wilson founded the Chicago International Art Exposition – an event that in one form or another survived several decades, throughout which Chicago was an annual global destination for the state of art in America, and around the world. Every year, artists, practitioners and influential banking-center gallerists from New York, Paris, London and elsewhere around the globe would make the pilgrimage to the event at Navy Pier, dine in the city’s restaurants, rent it's hotel rooms, attend parties, and buy a lot of pricey art.

Those decades were in part buoyed by the emergence of a newly global market supercharged by increasing trade liberalization policies. Yet, the same forces that built this phenomenon also proved the engine of its downfall when, reduced to a function of this expanding global economy, competition from Basel in the south split its audience and investment dollars, and slowly drained away that support until Art Chicago, the successor event to Wilson’s Chicago International Exposition, ended in a disastrous 2006 collapse caused by financial mismanagement. Though salvaged in a reduced form that now soldiers on year after year at Navy Pier, in the years following there was a lot of speculation about what type of event would provide a suitable replacement of comparable stature to the International Exposition. Chicago artists like Tony Fitzpatrick and a great many others were outspoken proponents of a biennial to fill the void, and for its first few years, the Chicago Architecture Biennial established impressive credentials, worthy of maintaining.

But one of the greatest shortcomings may actually be the decision to play it safe, simply repeating a formula that has worked in the past, at a time when things have changed so dramatically. What’s clear in this new moment of global discourse – of a world in violent crisis – is that experimentation that amounts to any blinkered horizontal approach may not suffice when attempts at actual solutions are critical, and what’s needed most.

Michael Workman is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Bridge.

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