Manifesta is a large biennale that has appeared in different European cities since 1996. Manifesta 11 took place in Zurich between June 11th and September 9th 2016.
Christian Jankowski brought a number of interesting ideas to his role as creative director of Manifesta 11. Unfortunately, some of these did not serve the biennale well. One idea was to be explicit about which works were new, created specifically for the show, and which were older. The fact that most of the show’s best works were older is a weakness that most biennales would have hidden. His other idea was too ambitious, and this partly explains the weakness of the work created for the show. Jankowski wanted the artists creating new work to look at how our professions affect the way we see the world, so he paired them with local professionals. However, as a theme, this was too demanding; it did not fit the amount of time that artists devote to biennales or that biennales allocate to artists creating new work. This is too bad; the theme seemed to promise interesting results. It was hard not to be excited about artists choosing to work with policemen, firemen, and coroners—professions that necessarily impact one’s view of the world.
Marco Schmitt’s film The Difficulturist is an example of the problems that an artist faced trying to be faithful to Jankowski’s theme: Schmitt partnered with the Swiss police. He decided to express Jankowski’s theme by referencing Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel. The fact that the film is commonly understood as a criticism of fascist Spain under Franco made Schmitt’s task more complicated. This is because partnering with four real police officers precluded Schmitt from doing anything that would embarrass them or that would impugn their reputation or that of their department. Working with them also suggested that the film would be dependant on their experiences. Schmitt had to be careful. Finding a productive way to navigate these obstacles would have taken time, more time than perhaps is afforded by most biennales. In the end, Schmitt did have the officers recount some of their personal experiences, but this was an insignificant part of the work. He did not engage with Buñuel’s ideas but instead used the officers to help him ape the plot of The Exterminating Angel.
A few artists were able to use Jankowski’s theme of “Working Worlds” to create quick and dirty projects. A good example is the work that Mike Bouchet created with the Werdhölzli Wastewater Treatment Plant. Wrapping the abject in the look of Minimalism, Bouchet created a decent little project: it smelled awful and seemed certain to trigger allergy attacks, but it was a good visualization of the amount of human waste Zurich produces in a day and likely approximated a waste treatment engineer’s vision of the city.
Some artists had a more pragmatic approach to the show’s theme; they used their host as a resource without much pretense about seeing the world from that professional’s perspective. John Arnold’s Imbissy was an example of this. It was a work that had much to recommend it. Arnold used his host, Fabian Spiquel, a Michelin-starred chef, to recreate a number of formal state dinners served in Switzerland by different embassies, modifying them so that the meals could be served by a local imbiss (imbiss is the German word for a restaurant that sells street food). The imbisses were of the same nationality as the embassies. The project produced mixed results. Associating the restaurant’s regular customers with biennale viewers was a nice gesture. Arnold’s archive of historical state dinners was engaging and the food was delicious. But the optics of having a single western chef interpret the dishes for each of the different foreign countries represented was not great.
A few artists seem to have ignored Jankowski’s theme completely, as did John Rafman. Rafman has been in an amazing number of biennales of late. He chose to be paired with Oscar Trott, the founder and manager of Float Center Zürich, a spa that offers sessions in sensory deprivation tanks. The artist met with Trott, tried out the tank and then seemingly created the sort of work he always makes. This might have been the most rational approach to the difficulty of Manifesta’s theme. Clearly the theme was too ambitious. But even independent of this, the show’s new works were mostly disappointing.
The artists creating new work for Manifesta suffered an additional indignity. Each artist was paired with a high school student who created a diary of the artist’s project, often recording the artist’s initial meeting with the hosting professional and following the artist through the project’s development. Manifesta had already burdened the artists with a difficult theme. Asking them to be filmed while creating was too much, and having high school students conduct the interviews was bound to lower the level of discourse.
Manifesta’s greatest strength, then, was its older work. This is true for many biennales, but, because most are less explicit about which of their works were made specifically for the show and which were created earlier, these seemed stronger. Manifesta showed the older pieces in the same rooms as new ones, differentiating them by placing the older works on frame-like structures. This was an interesting idea; it gave the impression that the older work was functioning like those historical shows that are occasionally included in biennales in which older works contextualize the new ones. But the proximity of the older work to the new and the fact that much of the older work was relatively recent—most created since the year 2000—meant that this never felt like a historical show. And the more one looked, the more one realized that because the older work was much different than the new, the old work was unable to create a context for the new. The older pieces roughly fit into the show’s theme of art about work; the new pieces often did not. This gap made the rooms feel disjointed and highlighted how much better the older work was.
Taken together, the older work formed a well-curated show that included some lovely projects. The following is a small selection of the projects that were explicitly on the theme of work. One interesting essay film by Harun Farocki explored the theme by using found footage. Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory (Click on the title to see the film online) turned around the Lumière Brother’s famous film of the same title, which was reputed to be the first film shown commercially. Coco Fusco’s video installation Dolores from 10 to 10, bi, was another powerful project focused on work; dispersed over ten different monitors, it told the story of a woman trapped in a factory by her employer. Pilvi Takala’s strange and uncomfortable film The Trainee (Click to see the film online) resembles Melvilles’s Bartley the Scrivener. It seems to document a performance by Takala; she worked as an intern at an insurance company, spending her time engaging in activities like riding the elevators for hours in order—as she told her bemused fellow employees—to think. The historical part of Manifesta also included a number of seminal projects, notably Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Washing/Tracks/Maintenance; Inside. Ukeles’s project focuses on women’s work. This historical part of Manifesta also contained a number of wonderful projects that were harder to relate to the theme of work, including Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons, and a beautiful film on the alps by Armin Linke, called Alpi: a film by Armin Linke based on a research project of Piero Zanini, Resato Rinaldi and Armin Linke.
Fuelled by interesting ideas, Jankowski’s Manifesta 11 was an interesting failure. But in a world desperate to avoid failure, and so filled with repetitive and unambitious shows, the worst thing that Manifesta 11 could have done would have been to discourage biennales from taking risks.