Curator Lance FungPossibly bionic, but noncommital on the role of emergency eyewash stations in the next biennial During one of his now-patented Rock n’ Roll flythroughs, Lance Fung blazed through town in the final week of August so quickly, and in such a torrential flurry of sneakers, eyeglasses, and raw art energy, it seems possible that a team of scientists may have bionicized him in an effort to create a better, faster, stronger, more exciting breed of curator. But during a few moments of what passes for calm, and armed with words like “ginormous” and phrases such as “shoot their wad” and “film-producer-rich-guy-in-London-type-of-thing,” Fung laid out his devious, yet ingeniously ordinary, plans for the next SITE Santa Fe biennial.

In part, we are back to square one: it will be an old school SITE event, if such a thing can be said to be possible, in which every single work will be created on location and be, if not site specific, then--in Fung’s terms--site inspired. True to a variant of SITE’s original vision, local partner institutions have been enlisted to serve as possible host locations for artworks, should a particular artist prefer to create and exhibit at one of the partner facilites, rather than at SITE’s Railyard location. Fung’s inspiration is nothing so obtuse and largley meaningless as the concepts which created Longing and Belonging: from the Faraway Nearby or Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, two previous biennials, curated, respectively by Bruce Ferguson and Robert Storr. In fact, Fung summarized his sense of such curatorial conceits as “a grandiose statement of some intellectual merit in which no one knows what they’re saying.”

Instead of following suit, Fung has been inspired by SITE Santa Fe itself. While Santa Feans have an apparently bottomless capacity to harp on SITE Santa Fe, outsiders, even those from coastal cultural capitals, often recognize its uniqueness within the United States. It hosts the only true biennial in this country and it’s kunsthalle ethic of commissioning, but not collecting, works of art is equally rare. In homage, Fung decided to locate SITE’s organizational peers around the world and invite the curators of those institutions to work with him in curating the biennial. Although he’s not relinquished complete control: each of 20 international partners (of which SITE is one), submitted five artists each, with Fung choosing one from among them. The result is a collection of mostly unrecognized artists, unfamiliar with fame and totally stoked to collect the $2,000 honorarium and build their work inside of a $7500 budget.

The artists will visit Santa Fe in January and then return three weeks prior to the biennial in order to construct their pieces. Fung’s only desire is that they do what artists are supposed to do: make some stuff. In his eyes, it could be one collaborative piece, 20 individual pieces or any combination therein. At the end of the biennial, everything (if there is anything) will be disassembled and donated to Habitat for Humanity or whatever other organization or project seems applicable. Fung’s contradiction is that, as a curator, he appears to be all personality and no hubris. The working title is even Lucky Number Seven: less an intellectual assertion and more a “dang, I sure hope people like it” kind-of title (It is SITE’s seventh biennial). Threre will no doubt be contradictions, conceits and chaos in the future, but such incidents are so welcomed by the curator that, so far, I’m drinking the kool-aid and it tastes fine.

Fung’s international partner organizations as revealed to date:

Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, England
CASM, Spain
Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Italy
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy
Gertrude Contemporary Spaces, Australia
Intitute of American Indian Arts Museum, United States
Institute of Contemporary Art, Bulgaria
Palais de Tokyo, France
Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Turkey
SITE Santa Fe, United States
Ssamzie Space, South Korea
Stowarzyszenie Integracji Kultury (Raster Gallery), Poland
Fruitmarket Gallery, Scotland
The Power Plant, Canada
Townhouse Gallery, Egypt
Ullens Center for the Arts and International Cultural Exchange, China

Four others are TBA