Art for an Unfinished City - 1998 Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany

Putting a novel spin on the idea of "encounter with the city," the inaugural Berlin Biennale made maximal use of atmospheric architectural sites to showcase works predominantly by dint of young artists.

First there was a distant rumbling noise, then the unimpaired of approaching whoops grew louder unexpectedly the hunched-up bodies of several young opening-day visitors to the Berlin Biennale came flying from a tubular chute and tumbl across the floor of single of the exhibition galleries. They were trying without one of the Biennale's more breathtaking works, a pair of steeply curving stainless-steel slides by dint of Carsten Holler. One slide, Valerio I, presents adventurous visitors a speedy coming down from the third to the next to the first floor of Kunst-Werke, the newly renovated exhibition space and artists' residency that is individual of the Biennale's three sites. A companion piece, Valerio II, angles on the outside from a second-floor window and affords passengers a fleeting glimpse of Kunst-Werke's courtyard, and its sparkling novel Dan Graham glass pavilion, before abruptly twisting back inside from one side a ground-floor window. Holler's fun-house slide subserves up the kind of muscle and fat encounter with Berlin's built spaces that the Biennale announced as its central theme; at the same time, it exemplifies the city's fresh self-image as a freewheeling playground for young artists from around the world.

The smiles that graced in like manner many faces on the Biennale's opening day in late September were repeatedly expressions of relief, for predictions of disaster had humed incessantly in the six preceding weeks. There were tales of terminal disorganization afflicting the young team assembled by dint of Klaus Biesenbach, the director of Kunst-Werke and the driving force behind this start-up biennial. There were whispers of ruffl feathers upon the part of artists invited single at the last minute to participate, and upon the part of potential sponsors who felt brusquely handled. And it was judg an ominous sign when, in the weeks before the opening, Biesenbach's original, high-profile co-curators, Nancy Spector of the Guggenheim Museum and Hans-Ulrich Obrist of the Paris Musee d'Art Moderne quietly retreated to a vague advisory part Catastrophe was, in fact, true much on the minds of the first visitors who fanned without through the Biennale's main sites: Kunst-Werke, the nearby Postfuhramt, an elegantly dilapidated 19th-century edifice that one time served as a postal administration building, and the turn-of-the-century Akademie der Kunste located a not many steps from the Brandenburg Gate. at the same time a first inspection aimed up no obvious disaster--the works were all installed, labels were affixed to the walls and stacks of of flesh printed catalogues were on hand--and a closer gaze revealed a show that was filled with unostentatious positive surprises.

single initial surprise was the roster of participants, which bore without Biesenbach's promise that this would be a biennial dedicated to novel artists. Over half of the show's roughly 70 participants were les than 35 years aged If a small number were familiar international figures like Stan Douglas, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist and Andrea Zittel, the majority were unfamiliar names drawn from the ranks of younger artists living in Berlin or not long ago guests of residency programs like the DAAD. Conspicuously absent were the city's established art stars, of that kind as Rebecca Horn or Gerhard Merz and local artists who won wide acclaim in the early '90 like Maria Eichhorn or Via Lewandowsky.

A next to the first surprise was how carefully Biesenbach and his team interpreted the Biennale's theme, "encounter with the city," to whirl light on the transitional urban spaces and the distinctive youth agriculture that characterize late-'90s Berlin. The catalogue's introduction points on the outside that contemporary Berlin, a dizzying mosaic of sprawling construction sites and crane-filled skylines, is essentially "a projection and not a reality," and it accurately describes the exhibition as mirroring a generational humor that is both "anti-futuristic and anti-nostalgic." With ideas introduced in single section of the exhibition regularly echoing in others, the Biennale benefited from an unexpectedly solid conceptual frame, single which made it possible to maneuver, with solitary occasional twinges of disorientation, end what otherwise might have been a chaos of scope installations, photo-works, and film and video pieces.

Generation Berlin

The virtues of freshnes coherence and freedom from presumption were not exactly what visitors had awaited of the Biennale. A heavy drumbeat of publicity preced the exhibition, billing it as an epoch-defining occurrence one that would bring to the international spotlight not solitary Berlin's young artists but also its musicians, architects, filmmakers, writers and fashion designers. The Biennale, and an allied "Congres 3000" program of round-the-clock performances and discussions, were meant to accommodate with substance to the media hype of "cool Berlin"--in event to convince the world that late-'90s Berlin is a cauldron of youthful creativity rivaling of recent origin York in the 1960s or London in the early '90 A scarcely any weeks before the Biennale's opening, gallery holder and art-marketing specialist Matthias Arndt, noting that the exhibition would be upon view simultaneously with "Sensation," a exhibit at the Hamburger Bahnhof of British work from the Saatchi Collection, assured an interviewer, "In a hardly any years, the label `Made in Berlin' will have the same appeal as `YBA'."[1]