Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art

In this engaging and insightful new treatise, Charles Green and Anthony Gardner examine in–depth the history and popularization of large–scale international survey exhibitions, or biennials , and their impact on contemporary art since the 1950s. From the 1972 director–driven documenta 5 at Kassel to the rise of mega–exhibitions across Asia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the renewed ascendancy of gargantuan biennials in the 21st century, Biennials, Triennials and Documenta offers a comprehensive history of biennialization that is global in scope. In addition to interrogating specific curatorial models and methods, Green and Gardner use the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art.

With a comprehensive global array of case studies seamlessly connected through shrewd narrative analysis, this innovative new book will be essential reading for curatorial and museum studies students and scholars, aspiring curators, gallerists, and all those interested in the exhibition of contemporary art.

Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001) and Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970–94 (1995) and co–author of Framing Conflict: War, Peace and Aftermath (2014, with L. Brown and J. Cattapan). As Adjunct Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria he co–curated 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). Green is also an artist working in collaboration with Lyndell Brown since 1989.

Anthony Gardner is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (2015), the editor of Mapping South: Journeys in South–South Cultural Relations (2013) and a co–editor of the journal ArtMargins.