2009 Windsor Biennial: Kick Out the Jams
Dennis Jones Sometimes I wonder what you’d say if I let you speak 2008–9 / photo Frank Piccolo
With General Motors finally declaring bankruptcy this week, there’s no doubt that these are desperate times for industry and community on both sides of the Windsor-Detroit border. But this unprecedented socio-economic uncertainty might also signal a time for regrouping, reflecting and generating new ideas—prime territory for the region’s artists, many of whom are featured in the 2009 Windsor Biennal. Earlier this week, exhibition co-curator Lee Rodney—who recently completed a visiting Fulbright research fellowship at the North American Center for Transborder Studies—shared some thoughts via email with Canadian Art’s Bryne McLaughlin. Their exchange touched on regional perspectives, international trends, cultural restructuring and more.
Bryne McLaughlin: Biennial art exhibitions have become key points of convergence in an increasingly transnational or borderless art world. The Venice Biennale, which opens this week, is perhaps the foremost instance of this globalized art world phenomena. The Windsor Biennial is a regional exhibition, yet, situated in a border city, it is uniquely positioned to take up this larger discussion of the separations between and commonalities shared by nationalities and cultures, namely between Windsor and Detroit. The exhibition's title, “Nine Miles South of Eight Mile,” alludes to this idea of a close separation. How have you seen this dialogue play out in the work included in the biennial?
Lee Rodney: The Windsor Biennial was conceived by James Patten in 2005 as a kind of tongue in cheek response to the proliferation of international biennials, especially as destination points. Some people mistake it for an earnest or naive attempt to put Windsor on this circuit, but in essence it is a resolutely regional juried exhibition open to those artists living within a 100-mile radius of the Windsor/Detroit region. Even though globalization has increased the awareness of a geographically expanded art world, I think there has also been a reaction against the homogenizing tendencies of major biennials.
The Windsor Biennial breaks with the more general trend of having a specific curatorial mandate, so it’s really a snapshot of what’s been going on in the region over the last two years. The jury is comprised of one local and two external curator/jurors: this approach undoubtedly has its drawbacks, but it’s also quite interesting as you don't know quite what you're going to end up with.
Detroit is an exceptionally difficult place to read as an outsider and it has taken me the better part of five years to piece together and comprehend the city’s aesthetic tendencies. Conceptualism had no lasting impact and a lot of work is made up from the material history of the region—thus assemblage has become a dominant trend. When you start to understand the history of the region, it makes sense that artists working in the last four decades probably had no time for the abstractions of conceptualism. I can think of no parallel in Canada and I think both external jurors (David Diviney and Mathieu Beauséjour) were a bit perplexed by many of the submissions which seemed like a bad hangover from Abstract Expressionism: Joseph Cornell meets Jackson Pollock.
On the other hand, post-conceptualism is the dominant idiom in contemporary Canadian art and Iain Baxter& has had a major impact on pretty much everyone living and working in Windsor. The two cities are pretty disjointed in this respect and it’s impossible to suggest that there is a common regional approach of any kind. One of the aims of the Windsor Biennial is to get more dialogue going between the two cities. In the future it might be interesting to broaden the scope in terms of the region the Windsor Biennial could represent. Windsor has much in common with cities in the Rust Belt and the economic and cultural issues facing places like Cleveland or Buffalo are very similar. Hamilton is also interesting in this framework even though it is very close to the Greater Toronto Area.
Lucy Howe Untitled (Chair) 2009 & Brian Barr Tighty Whiteys 2009 / photo Frank Piccolo
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