Meet Yvonne de Jopling

In 2001 artist Cindy Blazevic created the fictional character of Yvonne de Jopling while living in Zagreb, Croatia. Yvonne, famous gallerist, collector, self-proclaimed expert on art and culture, debuted as a response to the hunger of the Croatian media for foreign celebrities and western celebrity culture.

De Jopling – the name a brazen association with Jay Jopling, the very real English dealer and art collector who actually is a key figure in the art world – is the owner of the fictional Black Sphere Gallery, an obvious spin on Jay Jopling's infamous White Cube gallery in London, England.

For three years, Yvonne told her television or newspaper audience about discovering artists after reading their name on bird intestines encased in wax; she told of how they would become mega art stars in London. The media lapped it up. She gave interview after interview with banal, improbable information and opinions about herself, her gallery, art, artists, the “international art scene”. She became a sought-out celebrity diva, a loud, drinking, smoking mouthpiece on legs who, given the chance, would talk incessantly about art, about the Next Big Thing and how she’d be the one to spearhead it and bring it to the Croatian masses.

Upon returning to Toronto, it seemed only natural for Yvonne to continue her veneered questioning of authority and celebrity culture. This time she is hosting a "Biennale" – an event increasingly embraced worldwide in an attempt to validate local art scenes, to put a city on the international biennale circuit, to boost tourism, to engage in the international art world. A city is not a city unless it has a Biennale. In fact, the mere use of the word connotes a worldly status. It supposes a “big event”.

With The Yvonne de Jopling Biennale of Contemporary Art (YdeJBCA), Yvonne proposes to be the very first “individual” to hold a Biennale in her own name. Biennales are traditionally the exclusive domain of cities and major museums. By naming the event after herself, Yvonne implies she is more important than the geographical location. In other words, she is the event. However, just like herself, the event cannot be.

The work is a commentary on the proliferation of biennales and art fairs, and the casual use of the designation, which was once reserved as the exclusive definition of major international art events, such as that venerable Olympics of the art world, the Venice Biennale. It also raises questions about the growing necessity of cities, museums and individual artists to validate their existence by hosting/participating in such massive events. One has the impression that the sheer prevalence of such smaller “copies” renders the original goliaths of the art world (Venice, Manifesta, Sao Paulo, Istanbul) drowned in the flood of smaller fairs and festivals. The YdeJBCA brings up questions of ownership, of provenance and the increasingly institutionalized interaction between artist and viewer/buyer. Yvonne herself is a parody of the art world, a loose interpretation of the extent to which celebrity = authority.

A biennale – ideally in the form of a diverse, international group show – would be an incredible thing for Canada. In reality, it would be impossible for Yvonne to host it, financially and logistically. It would also be wonderful if, with an ambitious bi-annual art exhibition, Toronto became an art destination on such a scale that the city found a place in the international art circuit.

Thank you to the Toronto Arts Council for its support of this project.

Curatorial Statement: Katherine Dennis

I first encountered the work of the formidable Yvonne de Jopling through an ambitious exhibition proposal. Ambitious … and unrealizable. Without filters or a worry about logistics, monetary constraints or reality, de Jopling presented an intriguing idea: a biennale created by, named after, and in sole promotion of one individual.

Through this project, the performance of de Jopling – in person and in print – highlights several significant issues that plague the proliferation of mega, international exhibitions hosted around the world, drawing specific attention to the position of Canada within this context. De Jopling's humorous and, at times, outlandish statements offer more than a grain of truth to their reader. For example, if one believes in the existence and importance of centres and peripheries, then Toronto – a Canadian art centre – remains firmly located on the periphery of the international art world. This center/edge binary accounts in part for the vast under-representation of Canadian artists on the international scene, one reason many Canadian artists may find it necessary to leave the country in pursuit of their art career.

Not only does the hierarchy of art centres affect Canadian artists, it also affects audiences. De Jopling behaves as if she is "saving" the masses of Toronto and Canada, a pedestrian public lacking access to the celebrated art that the civilized peoples of European and American capitals stroll past without a second thought. With power and money comes the privileged availability of contemporary art, something Canadians can only dream of. Instead, Canadian artists, curators, writers and art lovers join the biennale circuit as employees of institutions, volunteers for the event, or as part of an expensive personal pilgrimage to witness in person the best of the best.

On a conceptual level de Jopling illustrates without pretence and with great clarity the role of vague themes assigned to these types of exhibitions. She highlights the impossibility for one individual to present a global perspective on contemporary art without gross oversights and significant exclusions. Indeed, de Jopling personifies the spectacle of mega-exhibitions that trumps curatorial research and artistic excellence. She lives, breaths and extols the understanding that money is power and power is prestige.

Each of these issues is subject enough for lengthy discussion and in-depth research and writing. Instead, the ruminations below present a brief overview and reflection on several ideas and issues regarding international biennales and mega-exhibitions from a few curators, art writers and critics who, over the last decade, have carefully considered the unique position of this platform for the exhibition of contemporary art.

Among the world's international art exhibitions, there are over forty recognized art biennales that do more than introduce the art-initiated to already familiar art-world superstars (Mesquita 2003, 63). These events help promote cultural tourism, present the host city or country in a positive international light, encourage economic development, and place far-reaching locations on more than a geographical map (63). In many cases the primary reason for the creation of these events, masked behind the façade of cutting edge contemporary art, is the revitalization of the host city. Documenta began as a political and economic attempt to rebuild Kassel, Germany, post-World War II. Similarly, the Johannesburg Biennale began during a moment of political and social transformation as a commemoration of history and trauma. The Biennale was initiated in celebration of the end of Apartheid, a history that will forever impact this event (Enzwor 2003, 21). This trajectory of economic and political revival hails back to the Industrial Revolution with the proliferation of World Fairs and in 1895 the launch of the Venice Biennale.

Economics is second then only to politics. Sarah Thornton's art-world exposé Seven Days in the Art World (2008) provides a humorous and honest behind-the-scenes look at the money, politics and people involved in the art world, with a chapter dedicated to the Venice Biennale. She explores the secondary part art plays to other agendas, including the ever-important roles and power of private, institutional or government funding. "Various art biennales served as covert art fairs," states Thornton. "[T]he Venice Biennale only discontinued selling the art it exhibited in 1968." The reader can all but hear the loud whisper of her side note, explaining how "(in 2007 a collector could still 'reserve' a work shown in Venice, but the word 'purchase' was never to be uttered)" (2008, 170). As her study takes on the emergence of each new national or regional pavilion, Thornton focuses on who funded the construction or rent of the building, who fundraised for the exhibition and who purchased the artwork on display.

In Canada a proliferation of recent news headlines listed the $1.5 million cost for Shary Boyle's Canadian Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale:

Mounting an exhibition in Venice is expensive, too – a daunting $1.2- to $1.5-million and rising – and in the face of minimal government support, it's not been uncommon for Canadian laureates to host art sales and fundraising parties and dinners to help get them and their art overseas. While Boyle's had to do some of this (including five appearances across the country between September last year and this past February, plus agreeing to produce, for big-dollar donors, two sets of multiples in limited editions of 30 to 50, medium still to be determined), the pressure on her has been "considerably lessened" by the National Gallery's decision to undertake the fundraising campaign through its Contemporary Arts Circle, says the gallery's deputy director of exhibitions and installations Karen Colby-Stothart. So far, the National Gallery has raised close to 90 per cent of Boyle's budget through donations from RBC Wealth Management, Aimia (formerly Groupe Aeroplan), the Canada Council for the Arts and various private-sector patrons. (A $250-per-person fundraiser, co-organized by the National Gallery, is set for April 30 at Toronto's Drake Hotel.) (Adams 2013)

If money, prestige and politics are the basis of mega-exhibitions, what impact does this have then, for the art world today? Certainly, international art exhibitions are riddled with challenges. One cannot help but wonder what happens when one person is asked to speak on behalf of artists, communities and their nation to address large, often unanswerable, social questions frequently situated in significant political, economic and historical frameworks?

Toronto's Jessica Bradley presents her hands-on perspective on the curation of these types of art events in her article "International Exhibitions, A Distribution System for a New Art World Order" (2003). Bradley reflects on her position as a representative of a specific nation at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and 1984. As curator of the National Gallery of Canada, Bradley had the opportunity to curate the Canadian Pavilion (91). Bradley contrasts the Venice Biennale to the very different exhibition model of InSITE, hosted on the San Diego/Tijuana border, which she helped curate in 1997 as a member of an international curatorial team (92). On an administrative level, several biennales select a team of curators to work together selecting art and artists, such as Bradley's InSITE97 curatorial project. Alternatively, the Venice Biennale follows a model of national representation with a curatorial representative from each nation invited to organize their country's pavilion (91). Each model presents strengths and weaknesses without establishing proven best practices.

De Jopling takes the search for the optimal organizational strategy to a new level, rejecting teams, national and institutional representation, instead positioning herself as institution. However, even art stars like de Jopling – those of the non-fictional variety, anyway – require something more than money and elusions of grandeur. International mega-exhibitions vet artists, curators and countries, providing the necessary cultural legitimacy that quality artworks and exhibitions alone cannot produce. Ivo Mesquita, Director of the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paolo, argues that such cultural legitimization that a biennale provides is what put Brazilian art on the map. He states, "[I]f today Brazilian art has asserted its cosmopolitan self-identity within the framework of art produced in Latin America, this self-assertion rests primarily on the accomplishments of the Bienal Sao Paulo" (64). Although de Jopling believes she offers as much clout as any institution, city or nation, clearly there is something unique to biennales otherwise beyond reach.

As someone who has read about and reviewed documentation of such mega-exhibitions, my only in-person experience was a whirlwind 24 hours at the 2009 Venice Biennale. I am therefore left without answers to the following questions posed astutely by Bradley:

"Does the wholesale transporting of art and artists to ever more exotic contexts impede or encourage understanding and communication within a globally dispersed and culturally diverse international art scene today?" (88)

"Do international exhibitions bridge the gap between centers and periphery or do the exhibitions create greater polarity between local and global?" (89)

"Who are these manifestations for? When the pilgrimage of curators, artists, dealers, and collectors has moved on to the next event, what is the effect of such exhibitions outside the art world, if any?" (88)

Although de Jopling does not claim to provide practical, achievable answers, her existence and enthusiasm for the world of spectacle, dominance and wealth draw awareness to these questions and encourage her audience to keep thinking through these ever-present, seemingly expanding issues.

Read Katherine's conversation with Yvonne de Jopling in KAPSULA magazine here

Bibliography

Adams, James. "14-hour days, $1.5-million cost, s six-month run: How Canadian Shary

Boyle is prepping for the Venice Biennale." Globe and Mail, March 30, 2013.

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Order." In Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices, edited by Melanie

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Enwezor, Okwui. "Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global

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Yvonne de Jopling’s Earlier Work