Lecture: Charles Green – Biennales, Triennales and documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art

We will work through a typology of biennial formats, noting that each appears in turn as an answer to a set of problems and contingencies, whether these are artistic, political, or economic, but always in relation to globalisation (a process that we carefully distinguish from globalism, as the desire to be recognisably global). Since 1972, it is through biennials, triennials, and documenta that contemporary art migrates from its often hermetic, often politically reconstructive, avant-garde and experimental origins into the realm of the spectacular, garnering global public attention to contemporary art. And as we are seeing now, in the early twenty-first century, biennials may also be leading the reconsideration and reconstruction of art’s histories towards properly global narratives.Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has written Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970–94 (Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995), The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001), and (with Anthony Gardner) Biennials, Triennials, documenta (Boston, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). He was Australian correspondent for Artforum for many years. As Adjunct Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, he worked as a curator on Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968–2002 (2002), world rush_4 artists (2003), 2004: Australian Visual Culture Now (ACMI/NGVA, 2004) and 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth (ACMI/NGVA, 2006). He is also an artist who works collaboratively with Lyndell Brown since 1989; they were Australia’s Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan.