Magazines, newspapers, loveletters, paperbirds, papershoes, paperplants, paperbodies, paperships, papercontainers, whipped cream paper, architectural ideas on paper, computerpapers, paperdrums, papertables, paperfossils, fluorescent papers... The 3rd International Biennale of Paper Art presented the work of fifty-one artists from fifteen countries on the theme Paper as Knowledge. The Biennale was divided into three sections: sixteen invited artists, seventeen artists from New York exhibiting under the title The Inverted Pyramid, and artists selected by a jury (eighteen members from the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists, known as IAPMA). The year 1990 marks the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the German Paper industry and the occasion was closely associated with the exhibitions at the Leopold Hoesch Museum and the new Paper Museum situated behind it. We all know our culture is inseparably associated with paper, and the Biennale was designed to express this. The theme Paper as Knowledge was an extremely abstract one and, commensurately, open to a variety of cultural interpretations. In the catalogue Dr. Dorothea Eimert (director of the Leopold Hoesch Museum and, until recently, president of IAPMA) attempted to define an approach. Paper as Knowledge is indicative of the philosophical dimensions paper works of art can have. They can store history, display landscape structures, be part of nature and take up nature, conceal secrets, carry sounds. The artist is challenged to discover "knowledge" in paper so as to give it depth in his own specific form of language. The beholder in turn, has the job of deciphering knowledge in the paper art object. . . . The expansion of the concept of "paper art," which as such only means works of art made of (or with) paper, to include the way paper has been used in art as a basis for "bearing" art, seemed legitimate on the exceptional occasion of the 600th anniversary of papermaking in Germany - indeed, it seemed a necessity. For only with art of paper and art on paper can the scope of the theme Paper as Knowledge be indicated in its historic dimensions. The diversity, quality, and direction of art of paper and on paper at the Biennale resembled nothing less than a supermarket for paper. The most popular brand names were clearly arranged alongside the special offers and the works of several artists were used as promotional window displays at strategic points in the shopping area surrounding the museum. A suburban hard sell designed to escort the consuming public into the exhibition, this was one of the least palatable features of the Biennale, particularly for those artists who found their work advertising a product that they might not otherwise have endorsed. If Dr. Eimert's approach to the theme provided the criterion for the selection and invitation of artists, the results were impalpable. Various works were grouped in catalogue sub-headings according to the intention of the artists: Paper and Symbols, the Picture is in Between, Paper - Colour and Light, Book Objects, Time Layers, Communication, Paper - a Preserver of Evidence, Paper - Rhythm of Nature, Paper and Music, Paper and Language. In this way a few of the concepts were illuminated, but only in so far as the recommended daily amount on the side of a cereal packet can guarantee your good health. The actual pieces in the exhibition fell short of the recommended daily dose of "pap." There was little evidence of work which demonstrated a synthesis of the craft and art of handmade paper in a striking, imaginative, or original manner. In her catalogue essay, "Art 1990," Else Bulow, a curator and juror for the 1990 Biennale, makes the following observation: As a museum director I am only worried when the reaction to works of art is one of indifference or apathy. If this is the case, I question the artistic values involved, either of the work of art itself or of how it is installed. Is it a poor work of art? Have its qualities been spoiled by poor hanging? Is it in the wrong environment? The best sort of education that a museum can offer its public is built from identifying the particular energies of each work and exposing them to the full. To achieve this also depends upon how these energies interact with those of the space in which the work is installed. Once it is arranged, the artistic energies in such a space should be inexhaustible. Cognizant of this aspect of presenting an exhibition (already separated into three sub-categories under one theme), the curators and jurors appear to have been poor judges of the situation: how to create a cohesive show encompassing such very different works in a building which does not lend itself easily to being designed. One remedial approach was to give each artist his or her own room. In this way it would be possible for the artist to create a singular visual statement. Yvonne Goulbier (Germany) created her own dark room for ALTAR 1990. Using the natural features of a small side room, notably a large arched window, a mass of small cut-out paper forms filled the entire aperture and cascaded onto the floor. The use of ultra-violet or "black" light activated the space and transformed it into a private chapel, glowing with color. Upon entering the room, the observer was immediately drawn towards an attitude of prayer of peacefulness. The fluxus artist Henning Christiansen (Denmark) presented his work in another small space. The walls and ceiling were papered with blank newsprint. Overhead, newspaper birds attempted to flap their wings, agitated by an indiscreet electric fan. A bird-cage housed an empty bottle of beer and a twittering tape of bird-song emanated from an invisible mouthpiece. Graffiti statements had been scribbled on the paper walls: "Freedom is around the corner." The work seemed to have been casually assembled in a newly appointed broom closet. A less confined space would have been a more effective foil to the symbols of captivity (bird-cage) and despair (empty beer bottle). Whatever comments the artist might have been trying to make through his choice of materials - the manipulation of language and information, the perversion of knowledge that poor journalism has come to represent - lacked subtlety in the manner of their presentation. An appreciable number of the invited artists in the Biennale created installation works, and therefore needed space. There are several large rooms in the Leopold Hoesch Museum suitable for such an emphasis. One such space was given over to the Danish artists Carsten Schmidt-Olsen and Mogens Otto Nielsen, together with paintings by Helmut Lohr (Germany). The first artist had been invited to address the topic "Paper and Human Relations" and, in response to this, had installed a Waiting Room. A row of chairs was arranged on either side of a long line of old weekly magazines that were stacked in high piles. Above them hung a row of naked light bulbs. The banality of the setting was overcharged. If the observer was being asked to reassess the nature of a waiting room as something other than an impersonal space littered with last year's medical journals, he would be hard pressed to do so. In a corner of this same gallery a portfolio lay open on a small table covered by an unremarkable cloth. The folio contained page upon plastic page of mail art memorabilia. An unremarkable suitcase lay open on the floor beside the table, the contents of which were without fascination. MAIL ART & Send a piece of your Nature was a potentially innovative representation in the Biennale. The artist, Nielsen, provided a hand-out about the piece: Mail Art is the answer to the lacking interest in experimental art - here and perhaps especially in the Eastern states where information about new art was oppressed until today - yet now there is hope. Nielsen is a most imaginative person. In other settings he bows a violin on a goat's tail and arranges unconventional video happenings. His work simply did not belong in this silent and motionless space and therefore offered us no message. The walls of the room were hung with collage-paintings, Africa meets the Western World, 1986-1989, by Lohr. Each canvas repeated the same profile of a black African with a brain construction and reflection of the Western world floating within it. What was the medium of knowledge here and how was the theme addressed? There was no tangible evidence that the work was linked to any other in the same room. There was no conceptual interaction between the works on the wall and those on the floor. Wreckage, a large-scale installation by Karen Stahlecker (USA), occupied a prime position in a central gallery on the ground floor at the Leopold Hoesch Museum. A gigantic up-ended wooden boat shape seemed to be sinking through the surface of the floor. The finely crafted open structure provided the framework for a covering of thin sheets of paper with veiled images of a world landscape. . Symbols of the international currency/money market were embossed onto stone-like forms set around the base of the wreck. The work was one of the most powerful statements in the Biennale, although the piece should have been back-lighted in order to fully effect the transparency of the paper hull. The theme was addressed as a pertinent contemporary issue; the artist's choice of material, a means to an end. The scale of the piece served to remind viewers of their relative position within the world. Gjertrud Hals (Norway) also exhibited a large-scale installation, Lava. Although the work was made in 1987 and is by now quite familiar, the universal shape of these monumental containers continued to invoke a timeless message. By virtue of the simplicity of its form (each of the nine vessels are the same shape), the work dominated the space in which it was placed. The artist gives a specific character to each piece by varying the colour and texture of the paper pulp. In both installations by Stahlecker and Hals, peripheral works by other artists were introduced as a supporting cast. The Surface is the Between by Shoichi Ida (Japan) suffered from a split viewing (the two related pieces were put in different rooms on different floors); one was made inaccessible by Hals' work and the other diminished by too much surrounding space. There was a retrospective air of heaviness about these fossilized desert landscapes, an alien western aesthetic, that belied the lightness and delicacy of feeling evident in other works by Ida from the same period. The third curator and juror for this section of the Biennale, Ibe Kyoko, offers a possible explanation: New movements in paper became evident in the 1960's, a period of experimentation in every artistic genre in Japan as well as in the rest of the world... Many artists interested in paper visited Japan or other Asian nations thus beginning an international artistic exchange... The current state of affairs with regard to paper art in Japan can be said to have its foundation in these events. The major exhibitions that were planned in conjunction with the 1983 International Paper Conference in Kyoto, Japan, provided an excellent opportunity to see how completely different the American artists' paperworks were from the Japanese. It could be that this match between Hals and Ida, a sense of gravity and richly textured earth surfaces, was a deliberate arrangement on the part of the curator-jurors to illustrate the harmony that can exist between an eastern and western approach. If so, introducing another work in juxtaposition to this match was a bad mistake. The illusory nature of Lost in a Sea of Dreams by Eng Tow (Singapore) demanded a far more sensitive handling than it was given. The artist describes his work as "perceiving" the esoteric presence of a solid void. The fragile quality of both pieces by Eng Tow was dwarfed by those of Hals and Ida. The particular energies of each work were thrown off balance. The most outstanding work among those of the invited artists was by Lena Liv (Italy). Her series And if shadows weren't shadows? comprised old family/portrait photographs of children. The original dimensions of the photographs had been greatly enlarged. Emerging from their dark background and set within rusted iron frames, the impact of the two pieces was overwhelming. Objects from within the photographs - a ball, a pair of shoes - were recreated out of paper pulp and set outside and in front of the "actual" detail in the photograph. Liv exhibited an installation piece in the 1st Biennale in Duren, in 1986, made of paper. The series of her work chosen to represent this year's theme projects the field of photography as a conveyor of knowledge. The work won the second prize (donated by the VDP, Verband Deutscher Papierfabriken, as part of the 600th anniversary celebration of the German paper industry) in the Biennale. The first prize was awarded to Morten Flyverbom (Denmark) for Loveletter. It was one of two constructions by him, the other entitled Siren Song, which occupied a small space to one side of a larger gallery, opposite Lena Liv's work. Flyverbom's work was full of wit and invention, but once again, left little more than a waggish impression of the theme Paper as Knowledge. The central part of this large gallery was one of most challenging in terms of resolving "the harmonies and contrasts" between the space and the works of art. Neither the work presented nor the manner of its presentation adequately met this challenge. The standard of work was simply not good enough. The annual conference of the IAPMA was held during the final week of the Biennale and, at this time, the works of art in this space were either moved aside to accommodate the social gathering of some eighty-odd people or partially obscured by the various pieces of equipment used to present slide lectures. The rout of paper in search of knowledge? The invited curator of the second section of the Biennale was Osvaldo Romberg (born in Buenos Aires, now living in New York). The title was of his own contrivance: The present project, which I have called The Inverted Pyramid, endeavors to construct a possible model of organizing a group show which does not fall into the category of the vacuous and depraved formula which perverts most of the Big Dinosaurious shows. By this I am referring to the multi-million dollar shows that cities, museums, etc. stage every year in order to compete in the Art War and develop its strategies. Romberg describes his master plan as follows: I selected four artist-curators with whose works and thinking I am well acquainted. These artists, whom I hold in high esteem, were each requested to select a theme concerning the main subject Paper as Knowledge. Following this, they themselves assigned between two and four artists of their own choice who, in turn, were asked to produce two works each. ... The participants, who vary in age, are marginal to the paper making and do not use paper as the only medium for their expression. The result was an undistinguished host of unknown artists grouped under the headings: Stuttering on Paper, Diagrams of Mind, This is not a Building, Paper and Memory. Only the last category included the work of an artist, Bob Nugent (the only non-New Yorker), who was familiar enough with the medium to create a work, Three Markers, that deserved a place in the Biennale. By switching the focus from paper as material to papers about knowing---"some kind of discursive poetics"---Romberg achieved his proclaimed objective of standing the apex of the art pyramid (the curator, the gallery, the organizer) on its head. Instead of the curator playing the artist, the artist could play the supreme curator-creator and invite his coterie of friends and countrymen to wax lyrical on this miraculous opportunity. The Inverted Pyramid should not have been represented in this biennale. The third section of the Biennale featured artists whose work is almost exclusively of paper. It was juried by Eimert, Bulow, Kyoko, Romberg, and Irmgard Gerhards. Application was restricted to members of IAPMA. Most of the work by the eighteen selected artists was exhibited in the new Paper Museum which does not have a gallery space for the display of art work. With the exception of a fine installation combining handmade paper and printmaking by Joan Hall and an extremely weak presentation of book objects and small sculptures, both in the Leopold Hoesch Museum, IAPMA artists were either introduced alongside the display of machinery and equipment in the Paper Museum, half-way up a narrow staircase, or in a small L-shaped grey carpeted classroom with a depressingly low ceiling. The section of work which might have been the saving grace of the Biennale was used as a gilded lily to advance the station of a new and relatively unknown paper museum. To summarize the work chosen to represent the theme Paper as Knowledge in this biennale one must look to the curators of the three sections of the exhibition. Each wrote an essay in the catalogue, offering an insight into the principles upon which their selection was made. In brief, there was a specific theme for the artists to consider and directions that they create new work in response to the given subject. That the artists had to have been previously working with the medium of paper was not an issue. That both the curators and artists were unable to effect the scope of the theme and its "philosophical dimension" became one. The sell-by date of many of the works had long since expired and the majority of the more recent works (1988-90) were singularly lacking in originality throughout the show. The lack of funds evident in the poor condition of the exhibition spaces in the Leopold Hoesch Museum exacerbated the most negligent aspects of the Biennale. The exhibition as a whole was a confused and damaging representation of paper art and a travesty of the most fundamental principles of an international biennale. At the top of the main staircase in the Leopold Hoesch Museum lies a work by action artist Bernard Aubertin (France). Aubertin works with fire. He burns books. Paper/fire happenings have become increasingly popular of late in the paper art milieu; a ceremonial gesture that has outworn its original intention. Pyrotechnics or pyromania: all that was left of the 3rd International Biennale of Paper Art was a heap of burnt matches and an empty shopping basket. Sophie Dawson & Anne Vilsboll

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