Cornucopia articles: Dan Cameron and the 8th Istanbul Biennial 2003, by Andrew Finkel

SHOCK TACTICS Dan Cameron, curator of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, which opened September 20, 2003, talks to Andrew Finkel			This article was published inCornucopia Magazine Issue no 29 See the highlights of Cornucopia 29 Add Cornucopia 29 to basket See Hettie Judah's cornucopia.net venue-by-venue guide to the 8th Istanbul Biennial

	Dan Cameron Photograph courtesy of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York			Festival facts: The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (www.istfest.org) has details of the 2003 Biennial (Sept 20 - Nov 16) and the annual Film, Theatre, Music and Jazz festivals.
		For a guide to exhibitions and the performing arts in Turkey, visit Cornucopia's online arts diary


SHOCK TACTICS BY ANDREW FINKEL From Cornucopia's Istanbul Diary, Cornucopia 29 As high concepts go, this one is stratospheric. The world is gripped by twin crises of the political and the spiritual, and any art worth the label ‘global’ must engage with the two. So runs a broad reading of the theme underlying this autumn’s Istanbul Biennial, which is being curated by Dan Cameron. Mr Cameron, however, has been imported from one of New York’s most uncompromising cultural concerns, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and lurking beneath a polished exterior could be another, entirely different agenda. “No one is going to be bored,” he says with the understated confidence of a comic-book villain about to terminate Cleveland. The New Museum is one of those places where anyone straying into lower Manhattan is grabbed by the jugular and shaken hard. On display last year was the Belgian artist’s Wim Delvoye’s ultra-automated digestive system, complete with feeding and excreting times or what the jaded denizens of SoHo must have referred to as “the shock of the poo”. Cameron says that the works on display in Istanbul will not necessarily be as visceral but he aims all the same to have visitors “blown away” by the work of artists he admires. Somehow I got the impression that those attending Istanbul’s eighth biennial will begin to understand what the ball in the pinball machine experiences between being flicked into play and disappearing down the slot. Cameron describes that same sense of being metaphysically flippered while attending Istanbul’s 1995 biennial, organised by René Block. That was a vast exhibition of well over a hundred artists which jettisoned completely the notion of national displays or pavilions in favour of a “curated” concept and world art. For a time the centre point of that world was Istanbul, Cameron says, and he is clearly determined it should be that way again. The title of his biennial is Poetic Justice, and it attempts to create a common ground for an artistic community which he describes as unnecessarily divided between the pursuit of justice and the need for poetry the politically didactic and the “touchy-feely”. “It shouldn’t have to be either/or,” he says. His aim is to reconnect people to contemporary art. Poetic justice, Cameron happily confessed, covers a wide spectrum of meanings to contrast the worldly and the contemplative. The only usage he avoids is the accepted one of being hoist with one’s own petard. Even so, you cannot help but wonder if his other intention is to give his audience sufficient rope to hang themselves on their own preconceptions. When coaxed, Cameron gives as an example of poetic justice the work of Marlene McCarty, an American whose drawings of childlike but sexually precocious young women are accompanied by written accounts of the brutal crimes they have committed. The drawings are elaborately penned in the naive style of illustrations for a short story in a teen magazine, except that the clothing of the young girls is in disarray or semi-transparent and the high jinks they are up to is savage murder. The viewer is lured into a sort of complicity. Cameron cites as an important influence in his own curatorial work the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, organised by Jean Hubert Martin in 1989 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where non-Western and Western art were presented on an equal footing. That exhibition has been both emulated and attacked, largely for seeing the developed world in terms of conceptual art and the developing as untutored and primitive. The New Museum, where Cameron has been senior curator since 1995, has made a particular point of promoting the work of artists from around the globe, including Latin America, Bulgaria and even Turkey. In Istanbul Cameron will find fertile ground for his interest in the interplay of cultural relativism and the universality that underlies cultural variety. The Istanbul Biennial has the peculiar distinction of being the largest art event in the Islamic world, yet it has acquired a global character. Since René Block, there have been two other European curators. The last biennial was organised by Yuko Hasegawa from Japan. Now the organisers have sought out an American curator, albeit one whose initial reputation was made outside his own country. Cameron conceives of the biennial as a complete “world”, or at the very least a single “curatorial structure in which artists and ideas in a post-internet world meet on the same ground”. Istanbul, a city he describes as “heart-stoppingly beautiful”, lends itself to his purpose, and the venues for the works of eighty-five artists from forty-two countries represent a vast confluence of history and culture. They include the 1950s customs shed built by American military architects, and the underground cistern which the Emperor Justinian commissioned over a thousand years earlier. Also being used is the early nineteenth-century armoury at Tophane, built on the site of the original canon foundry of Mehmed the Conqueror, and the most important building of late antiquity, the cathedral-basilica of Ayasofya. ©Andrew Finkel