ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Biennial Boom, Paloma Checa-Gismero traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. Returning to the early post-Cold War years, Checa-Gismero examines the early iterations of three well-known biennials at the borders of North Atlantic liberalism: the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta. She draws on archival and oral history fieldwork in Cuba, Mexico, the US/Mexico borderlands, and the Netherlands, showing how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. Checa-Gismero argues that, in reflecting this optimism, biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange. By outlining how early biennials set the basis for what is now recognized as “global contemporary art,” Checa-Gismero intervenes in previous accounts of the contemporary art world in order to better understand how it became the exclusionary, rarified institution of today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Paloma Checa-Gismero is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.

REVIEWS

“Biennials are a definitive—some say, the definitive—exhibitionary form for contemporary art. This is a forensic study of three of the biennials that moved beyond the modern model of art battles between nations, staged at Venice since 1895, into contemporary modes. They laid key markers for the subsequent biennial ‘boom.’ Paloma Checa-Gismero combines archival research, personal experience, a wide-ranging knowledge of critical theory, along with an invigorating intolerance of cliché, to show the collisions between aspiration and reality in play at these times and places. She tracks how artists, critics, curators, and viewers from local communities responded to the ‘aesthetic conversions’ of social forces that these biennials enabled, paving the way for the multi-facetted phenomenon known as ‘global contemporary art.’”

-- Terry Smith, author of Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art

“In this erudite, insightful, and immensely readable book Paloma Checa-Gismero puts her finger on how the profound inequality, chauvinism, Eurocentrism, and problematic space of the contemporary art world came into being. While others may wax poetic on contemporary aesthetics without necessarily being aware of the conditions of the art world, Checa-Gismero actually shows what makes contemporary art take on its cultural capital. Biennial Boom makes an important intervention into historicizing and making sense of the global art world.”

-- Tatiana Flores, author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30!

TABLE OF CONTENTS