The Global Work of Art: World's Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience

The Global Work of Art

The Global Work of Art

World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience

Caroline A. Jones

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by Caroline A. Jones

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in China

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29174-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29188-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291888.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones, Caroline A., author.

Title: The global work of art : world’s fairs, biennials, and the aesthetics of experience / Caroline A. Jones.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016011298| ISBN 9780226291741 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226291888 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Biennials (Art fairs) | Art fairs.

Classification: LCC N4396 .J66 2016 | DDC 709.04—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016011298

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Saffron Jade, already enmeshed in the world

Contents

Preface

1  The Blindman; or, How to Visit a World Exhibition

Blind Epistemology

Optics and Encyclopedics

Universal Object Lessons

Sensory Alternatives

2  Desires for the World Picture

Desires

Ars et Feriae

Publics, Infrastructures, Discourse

Objects of Art/Difference

Art in the Age of Its Touristic Reproduction

Architectures and Endings

3  Old World/Biennial Culture

Old Beginnings in Venice

Repetition and Difference

Subjects, Nations, Artists

Biennial Culture

4  New World/Cold War

Hemispheric Rearrangements

Arte Moderna

Difference and Repetition

From Museum to Bienal

Plastic Revolutions

Modulor Moderns

5  Transnational Openings

Tactics of the Trans

Unities/the Differend

When Attitudes Became Norms

Incorporations

6  The Aesthetics of Experience

Tropes of Experience

Encounters and Emblems

Expérience, Erfahrung, and Event

Economimesis at the Fair

7  Critical Globalism, in Practice

The Worldly Subject

Global Workings of Art

Practicing Critical Globalism

Plates

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Europe, as one, is germinating. . . . In the next century, it will spread its two wings, one made of liberty, the other of will. The fraternal continent—that is the future. When one takes up this position, immense happiness is inevitable.

—VICTOR HUGO, The Future, apropos of the 1867 Paris world’s fair¹

Invest in your lifestyle . . . a place beyond place, where journey and destination become one.

—2010 ad copy for "The World, the first and only residential ship"²

While geopolitical can have . . . a prefix to cover its political nature, the politics in question had better be far, far away.

—MARTHA ROSLER on globalism, 2003³

Internationalism, a heuristic

How does a work of art, or an artist, become international? What are the conditions of possibility that enable a local maker to become globally significant? In opposition to the obvious answer (marketing), this book argues that these descriptors mark important changes in artistic tactics. Cognizant of a larger art world, and driven by the ambition to appear in it, artists make art that works differently. They, and we, desire work that is open enough to be taken up as international, or as global, once it enters circulation. And once it does, viewers in turn face the challenge of allowing the global to work on them, through the art.

This book is a history of those effects. It focuses largely on the West and on European-identified contexts, but argues that the widening of the art world created new desires—first for the international, and then for the global. The longer history I narrate spans the internationalism of world’s fairs and the globality consolidated by biennials of contemporary art.

The Global Work of Art began as an attempted shortcut. I was commissioned by UNESCO in the mid-1990s to produce an essay on culture in the twentieth century, for a publication that had already been given the extraordinary title The History of Humanity.⁴ Faced with that impossible brief (and in the pragmatic spirit I attributed to the United Nations), I proposed instead to produce a brief, incisive cut: Nationalism and Internationalism in Modern Art.⁵ Hopscotching from object to object, I skipped from the sharp shoulders of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon to the spiked sheet metal and torquing reach of Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs and Constructivist Monument to the Third International; soon I was attending to the polyglot shrieks of Carrá’s Futurist Interventionist Manifesto, and so it went. It began to seem that internationalism and its doppelgänger, nationalism, governed every object produced in that turbulent century. And I became less and less certain that the story was about objects at all.

That realization was surprising to me, given my enthusiasm for thing theory and material world history.⁶ But as I dug back into the industrial modernity that pumped the categories of the nation and the international into the world, the objects of art themselves seemed to disperse into multiples, appearing in many different sites and forms, soliciting new kinds of responses from viewers who were themselves more mobile than ever. Artists were offering substitutes, illustrations, and accessible variants of their works, sometimes well outside canonized media. Was it a problem that Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave (cynosure of the US display at London’s 1851 Great Exhibition) had no precise original version, or that this figure circulated in the form of countless copies in marble, ceramic, bronze, and even human mimicry? The more I looked into matters, the less matter was speaking for itself.

My project evolved to address how the nation and the international, the transnational and the global, were historically produced through the circulation of art. The world’s fairs were an obvious place to start, revealing some of the latter-day mechanisms by which artworks constituted national representation even as their physical collection, distribution, or reproduction circulated under signs of the international.⁷ Who desired these categories? Who benefited from them? The concatenation of artworks in the great world’s fairs offered one site of reception that formed a clear precursor to the contemporary global art world. The communities of interpretation that produced artworks as modern, national, or international were clearly evident at the fairs, and could be traced in biennials as well.

Living abroad through the grace of two crucial fellowships (the first from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, in 2001–2, the second from the Institut national d’histoire de l’art or INHA in Paris, in 2005–6) sharpened these questions considerably. The links between world’s fairs and biennials became clearer as I attended the latter and began to see fossils of the former. Paris, in particular, stages the architectural remnants of its fairs as ornaments of a cosmopolitan urbanism. Some form artful ruins, as in the gardens of the Champ de Mars. Others strut as beautifully maintained peacocks, shimmering advertisements for the city as omphalos of the world—the Eiffel Tower, the (Czar) Alexander bridge, or the Grand Palais (in which my cover image was photographed on the journée du patrimoine in 2006). Back in the United States, fellowships at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities (at Wellesley) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (at Harvard) provided contexts in which the questions of nationalism, internationalism, and now globalization could ripen.

In this, the resulting book, I attempt to untie knots of art and interpretation through specific cases, pursuing large theoretical concerns by following concepts and keywords—cosmopolitanism, nationalism/internationalism, judgment, experience, cultural capital, world, event, and the global—through three centuries of discourse and hundreds of artworks. Above all, I aim to reanimate a term that has ossified in art historical practice: the work of art. Art works. It is and has been active, working on the viewer historically, working on me still. My emphasis on art’s action, on work as a verb, reflects the historical shift this book narrates, from art as an object of craft to art as an expectation for experience. Far from confirming a stable context, ground, or backdrop for the figure of art-as-image or the object as work-of-art, the histories I recount suggest a dynamic and unfixed relation. The working of art—particularly since the late twentieth century—has destabilized the world-as-picture, that fixed specter that haunted Martin Heidegger, instantiated in the fairgrounds and still threatening today. The heuristic of internationalism remains, but it turns out to be a deeply historical category that peaked (in my argument) in the art and architecture of the 1937 Paris world’s fair.

While a growing number of publications have examined globalization in contemporary art, none situate the contemporary within the lingering effects and remanent structures of the nineteenth-century world’s fairs. If one focuses on the emergence of the contemporary biennial, one quickly realizes that key structures of the current exhibitionary complex, the undisputed foundations of contemporary display, were put in place more than a century ago.⁸ The book thus examines defining moments in an exhibitionary past beginning roughly with the French Revolution. In the course of this exploration from the present, and making use of specific workings of contemporary art throughout, I produce both history and criticism.

The first chapter offers a philosophical slice through the entire project, tracing a trope of blindness and multisensoriality that emerges in reaction to the Enlightenment apparatus of ocularity permeating the nineteenth-century world’s fairs, that migrates through the twentieth-century avant-garde, and that proves surprisingly robust within contemporary artistic practice. This blind epistemology refuses to be overwhelmed by the spectacular. It insists on different kinds of thinking and feeling, pursues alternative sensory modalities, and exhibits an openness to difference. Digging deeper into the founding of the fairs as a precondition for today’s biennials, chapter 2 looks at relations between the Grand Tour and the festal structures that the fairs promulgated, and examines specific case studies (such as Hiram Powers’s multiply exhibited Greek Slave, considered in relation to the international abolitionist movement and to the pressure to produce collectibles for the vast public created by the fairs); these cases illuminate the mutually reinforcing categories of the national and international, and the productive tensions that could be staged between them. The possibility for an alternative cosmopolitics, confronting the conversion of fading cosmopolitan trading zones into city brands, is tackled in chapter 3, where I narrate the 1895 founding of the first biennial, in Venice, and explore the career of one of its foundational artists, Jozef Israëls. Here, the requirements that shadow the cosmopolitan, emerging in imperial Greek and Roman notions of the ecumene that inform Augustine and the ecumenical, show the rules of the game as Israëls inherited them: the cosmopolitan should ideally be a Christian citizen of the city of God (a notion since complicated by late twentieth-century calls for the openly cosmopolitical).⁹

As a kind of hinge between past and present concerns, chapter 4 offers a history of the 1951 founding of the Bienal de São Paulo, wherein the concept of the biennial and many of its attendant structures are appropriated from the West on behalf of the South, challenging internationalism itself as the global explodes into existence during the Cold War. The agency of Brazilian artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark plays a large role in this chapter and in the transition to chapter 5, which explores the emergence of new artistic tactics that rejected nationalism, in confrontation with a newly empowered actor: the guest curator, whose nomadic authority was used to resolve political conflicts on the ground. The particular case here is transnational Swiss gastarbeiter Harald Szeemann and the exhibitions he mounted, in Germany and elsewhere, from the late 1960s into the new millennium. The current emphasis on an aesthetics of experience is critically assessed in chapter 6, which examines the contemporary world of proliferating biennials as incorporating the festal apparatus of the fairs. Here I examine the turn from objects to experience in biennial culture after 1970, but argue on behalf of disorganization and perplexity rather than the blandishments of an experience economy. I conclude, in chapter 7, by interrogating contemporary practices I dub critical globalism, which I position against the pervasive effects of neoliberal globalization, offering an argument about what kinds of engagement with biennials (by artists, organizers, and viewers) might best be pursued.

Throughout the book, I compare examples drawn from contemporary practice against historical cases; the arc of the narrative shifts under the steady gravitational pull of the present. The Global Work of Art nonetheless troubles current fixations on the contemporary. I ask how the purpose of art has changed over centuries but also, perhaps more importantly, how continuities sustain discourse and practice, or allow precise critiques to be performed. I trace developments by examining epistemologies evident among three types of historical actors: organizer/curators, artists, and visitors. I begin by noting the conditions that had to be in place before an artist or work could be described as international, and how the fairs stimulated an ambition to attain that status despite pervasive nationalist agendas; here, the role of organizers emerges as crucial. Artists’ roles in responding to these preconditions constitute the primary case studies; in this regard I forward the concept of predicated internationalism (which emerges in these pages via appellations such as today’s Rembrandt, the Dutch Millet, or the Brazilian Rodin) to capture how artists were inserted into the fairs’ world pictures, and how such yokings produced the hierarchies of center and periphery, leader and follower, influencer and influenced, around which the inter/nation functions. The book tracks how visitors’ expectations for encounters at the fairs expanded from mere attendance to performative engagement with its objects; diaries and autobiographies enter as sources, but objects of art are also examined as material deposits of artists’ own responses, as visitors, to the fairs’ stagings of an internationalizing art world. Criticism and the exhaustive documentation of these events are further sources for reception, as well as reports on visitors’ surprisingly multisensory and embodied engagements, feeding a late twentieth-century aesthetics of experience. That aesthetics in turn leads to a generalized positioning within the global, from which I want to carve a specifically critical mode.

This mode of critical globalism is promulgated actively here; the working of art is part of that emphasis. Globalism itself is carved out of the thicket of terms increasingly mobilized in contemporary culture—globalism, the global, globalization, globality. Each of these words has its own history and contemporary usage; what we can observe already is that such words blossom after World War II to proliferate dramatically in the current millennium, replacing the international in popularity.¹⁰ If the global is seen by some as an entirely Western obsession, born of the sudden certainty (post-1989, post-9/11) that the world is no longer organized by tidy national relations, I would suggest that the longer history of biennials puts that very Eurologic into question.¹¹ Contrapuntal to the world’s fairs and born from their afflatus, the international biennial proliferated through the twentieth century and has evolved almost beyond recognition, extending well beyond the reach of Europe. What earlier presumptions does the form still carry with it? How does the transplantation of the event structure begin to express globalisms beyond Western conception? Many of these questions are posed here, but not all are answered; the current book openly acknowledges its situation as provincial, partial, and located within specific languages and hemispheric histories. Yet there is still value in tracking those local sites at which globalisms are produced.¹² As this book will suggest, artists who have engaged with the fairs’ and biennials’ world-picturing apparatus have found extraordinary ways to make viewers conscious of its machinery.

Critics and philosophers are alive in this book; they mediate between viewers, spectacles, organizers, and artworks. For Continental philosophers in the early twentieth century—such as Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger—world’s fairs were seductive, and hence cause for philosophical concern. Heidegger described the moment grimly in The Age of the World Picture (1935–38, a talk originally intended for insertion in the Paris world’s fair). Benjamin, around the same time, disparaged fairs as a commodity universe, a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted.¹³ Benjamin and Heidegger were writing at a moment of crisis in the international that the fairs instantiated and the new biennial would aim to correct. That Benjamin goes on to theorize distraction as itself a revolutionary mode of spectatorship is one of the paradoxes I explore. Distraction, disorganization, blindness—the politics of spectacle are underdetermined, and can be undermined.

What was indispensable to a modernizing art world and its desiring viewers was the productive tension the fairs staged between local reference and international competition, between global styles and ethnic differences, between nation and world. These dialectics proved astonishingly productive, as I will aim to show. The separation of art from the fair, and its sequestration into the fairlike biennial, heightened tensions between the local and the international but offered an artist-organized cosmopolitanism as well; this would morph in the postwar context of Brazil and emerge in diasporal artistic practices within new tactics captured by the term transnationalism, along with new modes of art characterized by flux, duration, and ephemerality. The post-1960s history of recurring exhibitions such as documenta (which adopted biennial event structures) welcomed these transnational and eventful gambits as a way around contentious local politics, as I explore in chapter 5. My last two chapters examine the proliferation of such event structures and the emergence of a globalism so named. As the book moves toward a critical framing of the present, I emphasize the working of certain kinds of contemporary art that produce us as entangled and enmeshed in worldly being, aware of multiple connections and critical of implicit hierarchies among them.

This brief preface is necessarily synoptic. The book argues that global art history is itself a patchwork of multiplied views, notably confined by our ability as scholars to learn other languages, and to find archives we can work in and afford to visit. In my case, I was lucky to have research funds from MIT that enabled me to visit Brazil; I hope that my labors in the archives of the São Paulo biennial will serve at least one clear purpose: to demonstrate that historians from outside certain field specializations (patrolled as such) may bring useful analytics to bear. Leaving my own comfort zone was necessary to produce the comparative portion of my study, and the enthusiasm I already had for the works of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica was amplified by learning more about the historical context for their explosively critical globalism. The book conveys what I hope will be a richer understanding of these artists’ fundamental importance to the experiential, embodied, and relational aesthetics that have come to dominate contemporary art.

The Brazilian case study in chapter 4 also proved crucial in measuring one of my core operating theses: artists who would enter large-scale repeating exhibitions’ competitions must adopt an international language, in which they are often required to speak of their own difference. Obvious in the predicated internationalism I’ve already mentioned, this operation continues into the present. In a recent reflection on globalism, for example, curator Okwui Enwezor criticized the postcolonial art world’s seeming desire for a kind of visual Esperanto for a mediated Otherness.¹⁴ By digging into specific cases, we can see exactly how this functions, and how it can be refused. The brilliance of the Brazilian artists and critics of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, lay in their incisive comprehension of this economy and their thoroughgoing rejection of its terms—in a first phase, by refusing to speak of difference, and in a second, through the instrumental revival of their own theory of antropofagia—metabolizing modernism on a molecular level to hybridize and syncretize a truly contemporary art.¹⁵

Critical Globalism, a polemic

In this book, artists will be taken to be powerful agents of change, as the Brazilian case demonstrates. Thanks to the scores of contemporary artists and curators who have schooled me in the ways of biennial culture, I have been inspired to offer a polemic that culminates in the last chapter of this book: globalism is not the name of a condition from which we suffer, but a tactic to adopt. Following the historic change in art encounters that this book charts—from a viewer seeing an object to a visitor taking responsibility for an experience—artists working after the 1960s contributed to what I identify as critical globalism: an approach to art-making, a mode of reception for art-viewing, and a hermeneutic for curatorial practice.

Globalism is conveniently parallel to modernism, without suffering from the post, the neo, or the alter. Further, yoking it to critical helps us see it as a stance and a site to occupy: I am asking you to understand the global as a domain within which you are already positioned, and to become aware of that position so as to adopt a critical and self-reflective relation to it. As Jeremy Bentham put it when he was plumping for the neologism international to summarize the law of nations, this proposed usage may be unfamiliar, though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and intelligible to serve its purpose.¹⁶ Rather than parasitizing earlier artistic movements, globalism can be seen as potential within them, emerging as a theoretical position from artists within the flux (as in 1943 New York, when a critic suggested Globalism to describe contemporary artists’ aspirations to universal meaning for their obscure, mythological, Surrealistic paintings.)¹⁷ Globalism is positioned in this study as an aesthetic response to economic, technological, and cultural processes of globalization; my account specifically privileges the critical mode. My polemical usage thus enters the fray of recent struggles over the term globalization itself—a contest in which the powerful advocates of neoliberal economics claim to own both the processes of globalization and the languages that discuss it. Only certain relations to earth (free trade, deregulation, market wisdom, untrammeled development, rampant extraction) are allowed to own globalization. By contrast, those who oppose these values are described as Luddites who supposedly have no standing to reject the terms of the discourse itself.

Critical globalism refuses this binary and rejects the hierarchy it encodes. Culture can stake a claim on a seemingly smaller part of the discursive territory, then use that Archimedean lever to dislodge the entire stacked debate. Let’s seize the terminology as a first step to identifying the political nature of the negotiation, then utilize the public sphere of art for working out these differentials: OCCUPY THE GLOBAL! Critical globalism places particular emphasis on the responsibility of artists, organizers, and visitors to think and feel differently, while working things out.

I argue that large-scale recurring exhibitions have work to do, beyond branding, tourism, and development of a given city’s cultural sector. As the book narrates, recurring contemporary exhibitions have proliferated across the globe—are there one hundred biennials? Two hundred? It depends on how you count, and when.¹⁸ Some of the most exciting venues (Johannesburg) have disappeared; other sites (Delhi) have embraced the art fair instead—an economic event structure that, as I will show, comes contrapuntally out of the biennial structure, reverting to the ur-form of its own origins in the market fair. The biennials of today display structures inherited from perennial international exhibitions of the past, yet they are also where an appetite for art-as-experience has been cultivated, its aesthetic codified and defined. The longer history that unspools in the ensuing chapters begins with artists inserted into world pictures, and concludes with them engineering altogether different relations to worldly being and becoming. Perhaps it will surprise some readers to discover that The Global Work of Art is optimistic, with critical globalism emerging to enmesh us in a connected and interdependent world, through the working of art and its elaboration in reception. This optimism acknowledges the market, but argues for its irrelevance in the longue durée. (The stars of the nineteenth-century market stoked by the fairs are virtually unknown today; there is no reason to believe the twenty-first century will be any different.) This longer view of market irrelevance uses the grain of art history to evaluate artists’ significance for other artists; yet I also cut against art history by taking the fairs and biennial phenomenon seriously, presenting these as forces that determine how art comes to be made and understood as a shared project of modernity/contemporaneity/globality. The insanely overheated realm of art speculation (the lone investment opportunity to survive successive collapses in capitalist markets besotted with junk bonds, speculative real estate, and computer trading) is now functionally independent from the biennial circuit, as chapters 5 through 7 explore. It is the emphasis on events and experiences, rather than objects, that constitute the surprising legacy of biennial culture. Within the baneful rise of the experience economy, I argue that aesthetic experience can still be transformative. Artists have agency in these sprawling, temporary global villages, and I hope to show how their instigations have refused the world-as-picture in favor of the global work of art.¹⁹

Acknowledgments, an itinerary

I was aware from the beginning of the debt I would incur to previous scholars, who have tackled the archives of expositions and biennials with incredible energy and panache, among them my mentor Wanda Corn. My colleagues and students in the History, Theory, Criticism program at the School of Architecture at MIT are reflected in these pages in countless ways, as the endnotes make clear—their worldliness, their incisive critical thinking, and their grasp of literatures well beyond my reach have given me the courage to enter these necessarily tangled histories, and provided much insight along the way. The kind criticisms by anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press contributed substantively to restructurings of the material; Naomi Krupitsky Wernham came to the rescue later on to help with cuts my perspicacious editor at Chicago, Susan Bielstein, rightly insisted on.

Worldliness became proximate within the communities of scholars that I was privileged to join in Berlin and Paris (in 2001 and 2005, respectively), and in the conversations with foreign colleagues at institutes at Wellesley and Harvard (in 2009 and 2013). Citations tell the tale with greater precision, but I am particularly indebted to my writing group at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, in which Lucia Allais, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Ruth Mack, Francesca Orsini, and Sophia Roosth provided lively interdisciplinary coaching in how to trammel and shape my unwieldy themes. Drafts were also generously read and comments provided by Martha Buskirk, Mark Jarzombek, Amelia Jones, and Peter Galison (his contributions go beyond acknowledgment into something far more serious, fun, and enduring). Friendship and sounding boards were offered by Bruce Altshuler, Claire Bishop, Thomas Boutoux, Elena Filipovic, David Joselit, Pamela Lee, Rafal Niemojewski, and Mignon Nixon; their insights helped me understand the implications of globalism in the contemporary world, while Laura Beiles, James Buzard, Carol Dougherty, Patricia Hills, Timothy Peltason, Monika Wagner, and Beat Wyss generously guided me with their scholarship about earlier periods. Joseph Koerner, Mara Mills, and James Meyer were each crucial at different points; I hope they will recall those junctures and see the effects of their words and work.

Historians who apprentice themselves to archives in a foreign language will understand the enormous gratitude I feel to those whose kindness opened intimidating bureaucracies and smoothed the way. My friend and coconspirator Arindam Dutta shared his transcripts and scans of key Victorian materials, as well as the hard-to-find report on the Delhi conference on biennials; he also introduced me to the very existence of a Bureau International des Expositions (in Paris, of course), and his work informs me at every turn. Francesca Orsini likewise sent me uncommon materials that I would otherwise have missed, and demonstrated through her brilliant critique the important flaws of the world literature debates. Sebastian Schmidt helped locate and summarize key Japanese materials, and Reiko Tomii was generous in providing copies of her own pathbreaking work on the Osaka Expo and Tokyo biennials. In Paris, Alice Thomine took an unconscionable amount of time from her own scholarship to help me navigate the Bibliothéque nationale. For the Archivio Storico of the Biennale de Venezia, I have a host of angels to thank: Vittoria Martini, Andrea Mattiello, and Clarissa Ricci were each vital at different stages in unearthing the Scatole nero where the founding documents of the Venice biennial were housed, and getting me in to see the black box once the archives were finally open. Dr. Mattiello was also a fabulous guide to Venetian libraries, including the gem at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini; he also assisted with Italian translations. David Friedman and Marco di Michelis made Venice seem like home; Agnes Kohlmeyer was an indispensable native informant.

In navigating the Wanda Svevo archives of the São Paulo Bienal, I was blessed with the friendship and recommendations of film scholar José Gatti; thanks to Zé, I benefited from the assistance of Deborah Magnani on my first visit to the archives. Crucially, via architect Luis Berrios-Negron and curator Benjamin Seroussi, I was able to continue this work with art historian Renata Rocco as the project entered its final phases. Her insights and research capabilities proved indispensable as the Brazilian material was edited and my translations were proofed; my debt to her is profound, and I dearly hope our long-distance scholarly exchange may someday allow actual proximity. In my first attempt to write art history from Brazilian archives, I was lucky to have Robin Greeley, Alex Alberro, and Ana María León as sympathetic but eagle-eyed critics; I’m also thankful to the anonymous readers for ArtMargins who encouraged me to publish some of this material while giving me sensitive advice; Pedro Erber and Sérgio Martins contributed helpful corrections. These scholars remain blameless for any errors that remain.

Working on curator Harald Szeemann, a prolific self-archiver, presented its own intriguing challenges. While much material had been published by Szeemann himself, these representations would count as self-fashioning ebullience rather than archival records. The interview I conducted early on with Szeemann’s collaborating curator, Agnes Kohlmeyer, was incredibly helpful in pointing me to additional resources. Since Szeemann’s papers were in limbo when I began to work on this material, the artist Ingeborg Lüscher (his widow) was generous enough to point me to the first Szeemann biography by Hans-Joachim Müller, and Terry Smith introduced me to Christian Rattemeyer, who was kind enough to share an electronic copy of his indispensable study (now out of print) comparing Szeemann to Wim Beeren for the afterall series of exhibition histories. Once the Szeemann papers were acquired by the Getty, Andrew Perchuk intimated the existence of certain key files (which would certainly have remained unknown to me without his intelligence); my research assistant Casie Kesterson ably located them while also helping with the considerable task of obtaining Szeemann images.

Assembling the illustrations and assuring their provenance required a cadre of assistants over the years, as well as the incredible generosity of contemporary artists, among them Willem Boshoff, Olafur Eliasson, Coco Fusco, Regina José Galindo, Cai Guo-Qiang, Hans Haacke, Joan Jonas, César Oiticica, Muntadas, and Cesare Pietroiusti (of the Oreste collective). Tino Sehgal would have nothing to do with illustrations, but I thank him anyway for talking with me more than once about the workings of his art. Student research assistants boosted my technical competency over the years; to Greg Perkins, Ila Sherin, Mariel Villeré, Caspar Jopling, Schuyler Berland, Sarah Reilly, and Ryan Kuo I give thanks. James Whitman Toftness at the University of Chicago Press was indispensable in confirming the final image permissions. And again I must thank Renata Rocco for her diplomacy in negotiating with Brazilian newspapers, museums, and artists’ heirs; she carried my research farther than I could have dreamed when starting this project.

Curators moving at the speed of thought and airplanes were willing to stop, occasionally, and discuss their work. For their great ideas, suggestions of artists to look at, and provocative exhibitions I am deeply indebted to Daniel Birnbaum, Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Molly Nesbit. The late Jane Farver was crucial; she is deeply missed. Along with the artists whose works are illustrated in the pages that follow, these curators were instrumental to my thinking; they may not agree with my ideas, but I appreciate their willingness to let the work go on working in all its forms.

In the end, I owe the biggest thanks to the reader willing to open this book (or download its digital equivalent) and take the path of thinking and feeling laid out in its pages. By all means, argue and contest my readings, and make a critical globalism for yourself. As I hope to convince you, by so doing you will produce perhaps the most crucial component of the global work of art—its public.

1

The Blindman; or, How to Visit a World Exhibition

The freedom of wandering (libertas vagandi) is divided into two: the movement of the body through different places and the movement of the mind through different images.

—Stephen of Tournai (1128–1203)¹

WAKING WAKING

BLIND

IN LIGHTED SLEEPNESS

—Anonymous poem in The Blind Man, NY, 1917²

Painting should not be exclusively visual or retinal. It must interest the gray matter; our appetite for intellectualization.

—MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1948³

I’m presenting a model of seeing and also facing the fact that my model cannot be a solution but rather a question, maybe a step in a process of some sort of self-realization or self-reflection.

—OLAFUR ELIASSON, artist of The Blind Pavilion, 2003⁴

Here, a feeling is not the experience of texture or form through physical contact, but an apprehension of an atmospheric change, experienced kinesthetically and by the body as a whole. This seems to point toward a need for a theory of multiple senses.⁵

—GEORGINA KLEEGE, Blindness . . . An Eyewitness Account, 2005

Blind Epistemology

São Paulo, 1996: You enter a room at the Bienal, installed with seventy-seven seemingly identical boxes on pedestals; a few lids are ajar so you can just see the smoothed edges of abstract-looking sculptures. You want to touch them, but you’re not allowed. Perhaps you get lucky, and a blind person enters who happens to speak your language. She tells you she has been allowed to explore the boxes and read their braille labels—each is a unit in Blind Alphabet by Willem Boshoff, an Afrikaans artist from Johannesburg who also showed this piece at that city’s first biennial (plate 1, fig. 1.22).

Venice, 2005: You are in the twelfth-century Arsenale at this year’s Biennale and come to a large metallic pod in a darkened room. Its iridescent surface has one opening, into which a translucent ladder is set. (The label reads, "Mariko Mori, b. 1967 Tokyo, Wave UFO.") A white-coated attendant lets you climb the ladder and settle into one of the three reclining seats—but only after swabbing your forehead with alcohol and attaching two electrodes. You lie back and try to follow her instructions to produce calm, meditative, alpha-state brain waves that might harmonize with those of the other visitors in the pod. You want this to work (fig. 6.6).

New York, 2008: You enter a small darkened room at the Whitney Biennial and see a gorgeous, high-definition moving image of a person who appears to be blind, feeling his way across the mottled flank of an enormous animal. The camera pulls back, revealing a man and an elephant. Five other individuals approach, encounter the beast, and return to their places in a row of folding chairs; some are exhilarated, but one is afraid. Occasionally, the elephant’s mysterious, coruscating hide fills the screen with slow elephant breaths, so close you could almost touch it. The label reads, "Javier Telléz, b. 1969 Venezuela, lives in New York, Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, 2007" (fig. 1.1; plate 36).

Figure 1.1 Javier Téllez, Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (2007). Still from 16 mm film, black and white. Commissioned by Creative Time as part of the project Six Actions for New York City, coproduced by Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; shown at the Whitney Biennial. Photograph: Richard-Max Tremblay. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

Kassel, 2012: You’re at documenta 13, and you’ve heard there’s a good piece somewhere on this street; you enter what seems to be an abandoned garage. The room is utterly dark, but you hear people shuffling, breathing. Some begin to make chirping noises or sing bursts of notes; there seems to be some dancing. You discern a gathering rhythm, a beatboxing groove being laid down in syncopated fragments, a riff on the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. You secretly sing along. Someone in the dark speaks the work’s label: "This Variation, January 2009, Tino Sehgal." Later you find out the artist was born in London in 1970, and lives in Berlin.

Patterns of visitor desire and global circulation characterize these snippets of contemporary biennial culture; the four narratives also evince a trope of blindness and alternative sensory modes of knowing. In service of what I call blind epistemology (more fragmented and tentative than an epistemology of blindness), these tropes surface a politics of the partial view.

Blind epistemology sets out a framework for this book as a whole. The trope from which it emerges appears in the nineteenth-century reception of the world’s fairs but becomes a full-blown epistemology in the twentieth century, when artists get engaged. The biennial culture that inherits these strategies in the twenty-first century propels contemporary artists’ frustration of everyday vision, soliciting estrangement, visceral experience, and multimodal sensation—all in the name of art. Biennial curators choose such artists because they enact these strategies of refusal: incisions into spectacle, rejections of national posturing, grit in the gears of globalization.⁶ Contemporary invocations of sightlessness thus have a progressive, critical tenor; they seek to hoist viewers into new economies of experience, against those that are overcapitalized or touristic.

The Hypothetical Blind Man was not always a positive tool to critique ablist assumptions, as disability theorist Georgina Kleege notes.⁷ This introductory chapter will track the blindman trope⁸ in Western culture, flagging a surprising intersection with international art exhibitions and tracing a genealogical legacy for the contemporary biennial. I will argue that the figure of the blindman, and the tools artists wrest from this tradition (blind epistemology), become crucial to the critical workings of a now global art.

What is a blindman’s world picture? For over two hundred years, world’s fairs (and their biennial heirs) have dazzled spectators with metaphorical and material world pictures. Historians of these events risk reinscribing the technospectacular sublimity organizers intended. That is why the periodic emergence of blindness—as a philosophical trope, an actors’ category, and a tactic of contemporary artists—is so noteworthy. The blindman demands a rethinking of how we form knowledge, a skeptical tradition that usefully accompanies these exhibitionary forms. Precisely because tropes of blindness drove philosophies of Enlightenment, and fairs put Enlightenment philosophy (as well as its presumptions and prejudice) into material form, we need this past for any history from the present.

This book’s chosen present is constituted by biennials’ world pictures. Biennials now take place in some two hundred cities on every continent, looking back to the world’s fairs and forward to the art fairs they have spawned.⁹ As yet, no histories trace the precise relays between these festal forms. How did the world’s fairs serve art? Why was the biennial form invented? How did both form their publics? This book argues that the fairs are deeply significant for an understanding of the biennial form, producing the conditions of possibility for art to become an international, and now a global, semiotic.

Both biennials and fairs implicate a larger public than art history traditionally encounters. Consider: A young Polish-American mathematician with a bilingual family wants to go to the 2013 Venice Biennale because it’s fun and showcases art from places he will never visit. An established New York artist (born in Britain) dourly criticizes biennial artists but wishes he was one; another, living in Berlin (also born in Britain), surely is, producing work more comfortable in such settings than in the museum. A Swedish curator (educated in New York) uses the biennial like a laboratory, posting notes about his process in the installation. These interventions in a largely Euro-American art world (where I am positioned to encounter them) reveal that biennials forcefully mold both art and its history. As a heuristic, the biennial can reveal intersections of state power, municipal ambitions, artistic intention, curatorial tactics, and public desires for a globalism that is not globalization. The concept of critical globalism is introduced in this book: once artists began to generate conscious tactics for their insertion into the fairs’ world pictures, such tactics were available to join conceptualism and institutional critique during the epoch after World War II, contributing to a globalism in art that critically reflects on globalization, often through a multisensoriality localized in the body.¹⁰

Reading spectacle against the grain, this and the six chapters that follow mine layers of historical data, visual materials, artworks, and criticism to form interlocking narratives: on how to turn from spectacle within the world picture (1), on publics and artists activating world’s fairs against their organizers’ ideologies (2), on the first biennial and the national/international circuitry it put into place (3), on the importation of the biennial model to the new world and the frictions that ensued (4), on the emergence of the transnational curator as a neutralizer of such frictions (5), on the emergence of an aesthetics of experience (6), and finally, on artists’ tactics of critical globalism against globalization (7). I attend to the world pictures that these exhibitions construct, tracing networks of national pavilions, state and corporate sponsors, city branding, global marketing, and the politics of prizes; the trope of blindness checks these vast apparatuses. Note that blindness is unlikely to occur in the prose of municipal boosters, state administrators, or corporate funders—it is the curators, artists, and attendees who take up the blindman trope. They bring Classical and Enlightenment references into the twenty-first century, where they use the critical probe of blindness like an Archimedean lever for extracting multisensory experience from the maws of spectacular excess. Learning from disability theorists, I argue that those who bring blindness into the world of spectacular exhibitions do so to become whole human beings who have learned to attend to their non-visual senses in different ways.¹¹ These nongeneric, nonuniversal beings are nonetheless producing a resonant common sense.

The blindman trope leverages understandings of the Western obsession with visuality and perspective.¹² It also opposes the singular world picture bequeathed by philosopher Martin Heidegger, mindful of instrumentalizing world’s fairs (1937’s was particularly problematic) and campaigns against degenerate art (an international exhibition also mounted in 1937). In a crucial paper on the age of the world picture that he began in 1935 to give at the Paris world’s fair (but ended up delivering in 1938 Germany), Heidegger upended notions of Weltanschauung (a world view that could be held by any human in a given historical period), rejected Wilhelm Dilthey’s Weltbilder (the different world pictures held by various communities), and insisted instead on a historical threshold—Die Zeit des Weltbildes. In this argument, modern times produce a metaphysical enframing of the world, allowing it to be possessed as a single picture or concept. Heidegger’s dark vision saw one synchronized representation producing the world-as-object and facilitating human mastery over the totality of what-is.¹³ That moment will be historicized here (with Heidegger confronting French philosophy at the fair), and confounded by contemporary art. Against a hegemonic world picture, I find evidence for competing, multiplied, and critical world pictures, enmeshed in the complexities of the Anthropocene. Linked to our desires as global citizens and taking unruly form in bodies only partially colonized by ideologies imposed from above, our world is no longer a picture at all, but a careening event in being and becoming.

Large-scale exhibitions reveal this trajectory with clarity, accompanied by the blindman as an actor’s category and receptive milieu. How does the visitor navigate the massive international exhibition? How does the critic cover it? What can the individual artist do to frame a critical position? To take only the examples introduced so far, some artists will be utopian: "Wave UFO believes that . . . as collective living beings [humans] shall unify and transcend cultural differences and national borders through positive and creative evolution" (Mariko Mori).¹⁴ Curators might emphasize critique: If our senses disengage themselves from their assigned specificities, the world opens up, rules are shuffled and people fight for sensorial freedom, thus mining from the inside the arbitrarily instituted powers (Nelson Aguilar, who chose Boshoff’s Blind Alphabet for the 1996 São Paulo Bienal).¹⁵ Both anger and desire can fuel blind epistemology’s tactics; a participant experiencing Sehgal’s piece at the 2013 documenta termed it addictive and exhilarating: "This Variation left me breathless and overwhelmed. . . . I wanted to grab strangers on the street by their lapels and shove them through that doorway into the dark. You have to see this. Or rather, not see it.¹⁶ Likewise, Telléz uses blindness to refuse empowered spectatorship: It was . . . interesting for me to conceal the ‘real’ presence of the elephant and the people touching them [sic] to an audience who we could define as ‘those who see’ . . . a play on notions of visibility."¹⁷ In these brief quotes, we see world pictures multiplied and divided, always already partial. With her eyewitness account Kleege supports my argument here that contemporary blind epistemology is distinct from the perpetual hypothetical who is invoked from Plato to Descartes, reinforcing the power of the sighted. Blind epistemology intends to alter the complacent subject; paradoxically, visual art contributes to this transformed point of view that might not be a view at all.

Contemporary multisensorial tactics contrast with histories that find international displays compulsorily visible and philosophies that invoke rhetorical blindmen for mostly negative reasons. Such rhetorics long predate concepts such as exhibition, picture, or even world. Plato’s allegory of the cave (in Republic, book 7) offers a foundational instance, linking shadows with ignorance, darkness with deception, and knowledge with light and sight (fig. 1.2). As centuries of commentary reveal, however, these binaries are neither simple nor fixed, nor is the specific architecture of display and revelation as clearly mapped as one might think. The minimum condition stipulates that the prisoners in Plato’s cave are shackled tightly. They can see shadows on the cave wall but are blind to the objects and light sources that cause these shadows, and thus represent (we are told) most people’s relation to everyday reality.

Figure 1.2 Jan Saenredam, Antrum Platonicum, after Cornelis Cornelisz, The Cave of Plato, 1604, engraving.

It was only as the blindman trope moved unevenly through the European Enlightenment and into modernity that it could emerge as a crucial counterweight—at precisely those moments when spectacle seemed ascendant. At those moments (one of them being now), blindness comes out of philosophy to stage a counternarrative, often confronting the large-scale international exhibition. If, per Foucault and Deleuze, systems of visibility function in tandem with systems of invisibility, then blindness is implicated in these operations of revelation and occlusion.¹⁸ But by the same token, blindness confounds certain power relations by making them recognizable (literally, capable of being thought-again). Kleege and others will break the binary (sighted/blind) and insist on a spectrum of sensing and feeling that produces our knowledge of the world, and even consciousness itself.¹⁹ Attempting this longer history of blind epistemology’s antispecular range helps articulate its politics of encounter with the world-picturing exhibitions and biennials this book aims to understand.

This chapter explores such territory in four sections. The first summarizes the Western philosophical literature that establishes blindness as an epistemological trope. The second establishes the relation of the trope to the eighteenth-century encyclopedic impulse and its dependence on transportable objects. The third explores the nineteenth-century ways in which object lessons were mobilized for exhibition, calling up the blindman in response. The fourth hints at this book’s conclusion, in which blindness and its demand for multisensory knowledge might lead us to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century art of biennials, their critique of the world-as-picture, and their turn toward an aesthetics of experience. In diffuse installations, contemporary biennials confirm the human desire for a kind of knowledge that goes beyond the visible, the already known, and the local, to a place where embodied theory can be attempted and our enmeshment within a wider world can be sensed.

Let us return to Plato’s cave to examine its intertwining narratives of vision and blindness, which explain the dividing line between knowing and mere existence. Everyday vision for the unreflective prisoners is blind, and there is no way they can attain higher knowledge unless they become free to move, physically and of course philosophically, to see beyond and behind what is before their eyes. True vision in this narrative necessarily involves movement: turning away, or if one cannot turn the whole body, closing the eyes on the visible world—or, as here, the shadowy image—to question what one sees. Thus there are two tropes of blindness in Plato’s narrative: the ignorant blindness of the everyday prisoners, and the volitional blindness of the turn to philosophy. To coin a phrase, we might call the prisoner’s vision sight-full blindness in contrast to the philosopher’s "blinding insight."²⁰

Classicist Andrea Wilson Nightingale provides a crucial reading of Plato, interrogating the embodied practices that the philosopher was himself occluding in his idealizing account.²¹ Nightingale reconstructs how "the philosophic theôros (yielding our concepts of theory") emerged from the physical practices of theôroi—pilgrims who moved from one Greek region to another. Theôros also bears meanings of seeing—but always of a specific kind: embodied self-reflection in a comparative frame. Theôroi were important agents of migrant wisdom and cross-ethnic thinking, even for the Greeks.²² In part it is this anti-essentialist diversity that will make Heidegger rule out the possibility that the Greeks can have what he means by a world picture. Yet what we are interested in is not so much how various Greek thinkers might have congealed a Weltanschauung, but their notions of theory as friction and movement, disrupting any static, pictural world.

It is contemporary philosophy that guides these interpretations of Classical theôroi and allows us to wreak new interpretations on Plato and Heidegger alike. The philosophy of Luce Irigaray, for example, insists in its feminism that Platonic blindness is principally concerned with expunging woman, of whom the cave always already speaks.²³ This core feminist insight drives my analysis as well—the realm of the nonvisual is denigrated in the hierarchy of the senses, and hence often gendered as female.²⁴ Blindmen (and they are always men in these accounts) often negotiate dangerous boundaries as part of their pursuit of nonvisual knowledge (for example, the gender-bending of Marcel Duchamp, whose journal The Blind Man we will get to further on).²⁵ Such bending is characteristic of the radical sweep from Plato to Irigaray, which yields poststructuralism and Paul de Man’s deconstructive Blindness and Insight (1971) or Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind (1993)—comprising what amounts to a subdisciplinary philosophical focus on the trope of blindness that forces a moving, migrating, turning and re-turning.²⁶

These are physicalized ways that nonvisible knowledge can be evoked and other forms of speculation entertained; they act out the restless search that is philosophy itself. So while sight is crowned most noble of the senses (by Diderot, among others) and remains an instinctive metaphor for understanding, philosophy also confirms that it is only in-sight (the trope of the turn away from the world) that allows us to reach what Socrates, earlier in Plato’s Republic, terms intellectual, as opposed to merely visible, understanding. Intellectual historian Martin Jay narrates the impact of this anti-ocular inclination very well; art historian Rosalind Krauss famously insisted on it in her postmodern revision of modernist art history.²⁷ But blind epistemology, as I locate it in artists and critics of modern specularity, becomes more than simply a rejection of modernist ocularity. It calls forth new modes of multisensory being, experience, and politics that supplant the world picture with a critical globalism resonating in many nested and contiguous worlds.

Theory is part of this development, and there is violence in the theoric process. If theôria (θεωρία) originally meant viewing or beholding, by the time of Plato it had expanded to denote an intelligent, attentive pondering, especially when not directed to a practical goal—leading to a hazarding of hypotheses (with the danger that verb implies).²⁸ The deluded prisoner in the cave must be dragged upward into the sun, where at first he is dazzled (another form of blindness); once back, his insistence on another reality may get him killed. Socrates asks, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness? Further: Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye (Republic, book 7). What is needed then is the liminal zone—we call it theory—a place of adjustment where blindness is patiently navigated to find the new, true sight. Here we can look again at Jan Saenredam’s early seventeenth-century engraving (fig. 1.2), which imagines this liminal zone physically occupied by academicians, not all of them ready to help. Such a narrow path to knowledge would be widened by the nineteenth-century great exhibitions, yielding the blindman trope once again.

Coming out, and going in—the rhythm of the turn and re-turn governs this book and the world pictures it tracks. I want to insist that this is a physical as well as conceptual movement. Theôria in its cultural context relied on an actual pilgrimage; one could not linger in hesitation between knowing and unknowing—one had to move to learn.²⁹ The theoric pilgrim in ancient Greece left his city of origin, where he might have spent his entire life, to make a ritual journey to an oracular center or religious site, perhaps at a time when it would be animated by a particular festival in honor of a cult figure—traditionally housed in its own cave.³⁰ Theôria required participating in those ocular rites; the cycle remained incomplete until one returned home to theorize. In ancient Greece, such a path, or theôriai, produced "a neutral site where differences between Greek cities could be negotiated in a pan-hellenic context. . . . The pilgrim undergoes various transformations—perhaps religious, perhaps political or cultural—as a result of the freedom of the journey itself, as well as his exposure to the sacred mystery-objects and theôroi [pilgrims] from other parts of the Greek world."³¹ Returning travelers were required to make sense of such experiences for those who had stayed at home. As this chapter imagines, they might also bring objects back from the distant cult, allowing them to be displayed for locals to theorize, and on it goes.

The links to the exhibitionary complex of modernity should by now be clear: displays have theory behind them (travel, viewing, collecting, recollecting), and theory is necessary when confronting the spectacle being staged.³² Negotiating difference requires a kind of pilgrimage, characterizing knowledge production of every kind. Exhibitions and their objects prompt theories about what we know and how; tropes of the blindman appear in such contexts to support multisensorial cognition.

To be polemical: theory requires movement, at every level. World’s fairs and biennials literalize that in soliciting travel to experience the event. Access to theory in this account is produced by turning from everyday vision and routines, metaphorically entering the path of pilgrimage (whether practiced as tourism, research travel, library wanderings, going to a strange-making biennial exhibition—or something as simple as Duchamp’s en tournant la tête, a cock of the head yielding art’s conceptual basis).³³ Knowing that we do not know, and that we seek to learn, is the operative condition.

Politically, it must be acknowledged that theôria is a luxury. Rarely does the immigrant, the refugee, or the human struggling to survive (what Giorgio Agamben terms bare life) have the resources of the theôroi.³⁴ But critical artists help us grapple with those very disparities, using art to leverage hegemonies of world-as-picture and preparing us to mobilize modest yet multiplied realities. I want here to underline the desires that motivate experiential theory, the pleasure that comes from building it and stretching it. (If the mind is a muscle, the body is a brain, and culture is the mysteriously networked harmonium we have invented to bring them into resonance.) It is significant that opaque objects are required for Plato’s narrative (shadows must be cast) and that they are foreign to the cave (outside its depths). The path to knowledge means turning from benighted comfort, wanting to get one’s head around those objects and learn something of their origin. Such a trajectory connects with my larger theme of international exhibitions and the paths we take to view them.

There is an economic structure to these relations. Greek theôria was plied by free citizens (a concept the Romans codified as liberal or free arts), distinguishing theôroi from the slaves who kept everything humming.³⁵ Similarly, the first world exhibitions depended on colonial and imperial orders, as revealed in their taxonomies, objects, and architectures of display. Yet the dream was there of democratizing knowledge, making it accessible, beyond the Grand Tour, to all citizens of a republic (one can argue whether Plato’s dream republic had similar goals). Such educational aspirations underlay making the objects and travel of theôria available through the metonymic exercise of the universal exhibition. Here the world and its products were available in mappa mundi formation. Historically, the tensions outlined by the ancient philosophers between intellectual and visual knowledge would materialize between the nineteenth-century exhibition and its discursive accompaniments.

In the theoric journey of this book, the blindman is also myself, and my readers. Neither single narrative nor revelation, the book offers an accretion of episodes, assembling what I hope is a more nuanced history from the present. I will propose certain periodizations of what art has been taken to offer (from nationalist competition amid the industries of the world, to an internationalization of art, to globalist critique). While I depend on decisive scholars of this material, I will not rehearse their polemics.³⁶ Metaphors of tapping through archives, and turning around the cases found there, suggest the winding path taken through the massive didactic, visual, and bureaucratic materials generated by the international exhibitions and their progeny in the biennials. The autonomous art object emerges as always entangled in a world from which its autonomy is polemically asserted.

Marked by social historians of art and committed to critical theory, I assert an art world born within vast nationalist structures and ever aspiring to globality. Ensuing chapters interrogate what I call predicated internationalism: the Dutch Millet, for example, or the Pakistani Picasso—reminders that genius is claimed for places before it is granted to individuals. We no longer need to establish the rhythm of an avant-garde ever opposing itself to the academy by standing outside its exhibitions (here Courbet and Manet’s pavilions are enmeshed). To be in the art world is to be of it. This history reveals avant-garde artists engaging ambitiously with world pictures, curators employed to confound local politics in the name of the global, and viewers wresting reflective localisms from the orthodoxies of the universal. Through both minor and exemplary cases, I explore a variety of tactics and strategies in the tripartite epistemologies of organizers, artists, and visitors.³⁷ The present chapter charts blind tropisms in each category. Chapter 2 explores the fairs’ amplifying apparatus in the case of midcareer artists (US sculptor Hiram Powers) and established artisan/tradesmen (Josiah Wedgwood’s firm). Chapter 3 presents the first biennial, via artists who solicited international cosmopolitan support through the fairs (Courbet, Manet, Picasso) and those entirely formed by these competitive nationalist arenas (Dutch painter Jozef Israëls). Chapter 4 interrogates national actors that sought to construct an international modernity through a frankly emulative Euro-biennial (in Brazil) and tracks the artistic backlash such efforts provoked (Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark). These artists’ embodied,