back
to the
library
|

Venice Biennale: be careful what you wish for.
Vetrocq, Marcia E.
Despite the unprecedented appointment of two women as visual-arts directors,
the 2005 Biennale is a cautious affair, marked by close administrative
oversight and curatorial temperance. More garden party than free-for-all,
the event just might leave some visitors nostalgic for the undisciplined--and
occasionally spectacular--displays of years past.
After the
satanic heat and Babylonian excess of the last Venice Biennale preview,
the survivors of 2003 sounded downright catechistic when reciting their
common hopes for this year's edition: greater thematic coherence, a more
restrained roster of artists, shorter entry lines, fewer on-your-feet
screening marathons and--admittedly beyond bureaucratic determination--less
punishing temperatures in which to tackle a citywide event that has become
a test of time management and physical endurance. Meteorological prayers
were answered in full, but, as if by the malign volition of a devil who
corrupts each wish even as he grants it, the desired clarity and numerical
abstemiousness (91 artists in the international group shows compared to
380 in 2003) became the attributes of an exhibition that is all but purged
of risk and surprise. Well-groomed, responsible and as eager to please
as a new suitor, the 2005 Venice Biennale serves up contemporary art (and
some less-than-contemporary art) that is market wise, celebrity conscious
and chary of offending. That the exhibition comes wrapped in a self-satisfied
mantle of better-late-than-never feminism is cause for some dismay.
It's necessary,
of course, to distinguish between the presentations in the national pavilions,
which are determined by each participating country, and the large international
group shows, which are curated by visual-arts directors appointed by the
administrative board that oversees the event. Yet throughout all the sections
this year, there prevails a reassuring air, attributable in part to the
sheer familiarity and even seniority of many of the participants. For
example, four of the national pavilions that claim a hefty share of the
limelight are showcasing high-profile artists age 60 or older, with Prance,
Great Britain, Spain and the U.S. presenting, respectively, works by Annette
Messager, Gilbert & George, Antoni Muntadas and Ed Ruscha that are
unlikely to arouse any controversy. An almost deferential atmosphere permeates
the two international shows as well, thanks to the relatively high number
of well-known (and some deceased) artists, and to the inclusion of a fair
number of works that have already garnered critical attention.
For this
outing, the visual-arts directorship saw its first joint appointment,
that of Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez, whose nationality (Spanish)
and gender (female) are likewise unprecedented in the organization's history.
Installed in and outside the mazelike Italian pavilion in the Giardini,
de Corral's show of 42 artists, "The Experience of Art," is
dedicated to mapping the terra firma of art today. The presence of Marlene
Dumas, Gabriel Orozco, Rachel Whiteread, Cildo Meireles, Dan Graham and
other landmark figures is reasonable if not stirring, while the inclusion
of Francis Bacon, Philip Guston, Agnes Martin and Juan Munoz arguably
carries the enterprise too far into retrospection. Martinez's "Always
a Little Further," a presentation of works by 49 individuals and
teams that is intended to be the more forward-looking of the two shows,
occupies the expansive spaces of the Arsenale, the past home of "Aperto,"
"Utopia Station" and other edgy or youthful manifestations.
Yet Martinez's roster inexplicably includes Samuel Beckett and Louise
Bourgeois--inspirational, yes, up-to-the-minute, no--along with Jimmie
Durham, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum and others who might have easily
been at home in de Corral's overview of contemporary art's establishment.
Both group
exhibitions include good works, but the overwhelming impression is of
a project of confirmation spiced with a bit of novelty, rather like the
audience-survey-driven programming of summer repertory theater. Some of
the responsibility for this pervasive caution, perhaps the lion's share,
rests with Davide Croff, the current president of the Biennale's board
[see "Front Page," Oct. '04]. Croft took the step--previously
the prerogative of the visual-arts director--of articulating the Biennale's
prudent theme, which he then entrusted to de Corral and Martinez. Moreover,
for the first time the board named the directors of two successive biennali,
with Robert Storr's appointment for 2007 preempting a second outing by
de Corral and Martinez. The board further determined that Storr would
be enlightened by the collected wisdom of veteran biennial and Documenta
curators and other high-profile art professionals, a group of whom have
been invited to Venice for a summit in December.
One recalls
past editions directed by Achille Bonito Oliva, Jean Clair and Harald
Szeemann as expressions of strong and compelling, though certainly not
infallible, curatorial vision. Francesco Bonami's 2003 extravaganza, engorged
and unfocused, seems to have been the last straw, the Heaven's Gate of
biennali. The potential consequences of the administration's clipping
the director's wings and casting a net of circumspection over all operations
were nearly ignored in last summer's stir over the superficially radical
step of appointing de Corral and Martinez. But in truth, the designation
of a woman or women to direct the Biennale was so belated, the curators'
resumes are so long and distinguished, and the outcome, after all, is
so mainstream, that this appointment really has caused no more of a ripple
than, say, last year's casting of Denzel Washington in the wan remake
of The Manchurian Candidate: the public, as they say, was ready for it.
Grrrrrrl
Power and (A Few) Bad Boys
De Corral
and Martinez open each section of the international show with an assertive
graphic display: a digitally printed vinyl mural (called a "wall
tattoo" in the catalogue) by Barbara Kruger on the facade of the
Italian pavilion, and enormous posters by the Guerrilla Girls in the Arsenale.
Thus we enter, lashed by the irony of one ("YOU MAKE HISTORY WHEN
YOU DO BUSINESS"; "ADMIT NOTHING. BLAME EVERYONE") and
prodded by the sarcasm of the others ("Where are the women artists
of Venice? Underneath the men"). Two ceiling-hung pieces by younger
women follow the works of the veteran feminists. Above the entrance foyer
of the Italian pavilion is suspended Monica Bonvicini's Blind Shot (2004),
a menacing-looking but ultimately pointless jack hammer that cycles on
like a thunderous automatic weapon every two minutes or so. In the Arsenale
is Joana Vasconcelos's The Bride (2001), an enormous teardrop of a chandelier
that proves, upon inspection, to be made of tampons (14,000 of them) on
a steel armature.
Contributing
to the Biennale's current of feminist triumphalism--the title of Pilar
Albarracin's flamenco video, I Will Dance On Your Grave, may say it best--are
the unprecedented numerical strength of women artists in both shows (less
remarked upon is the equally dramatic spike in the representation of artists
from Iberia and Latin America) and the awarding of three of the Biennale's
four Golden Lions to women artists. Kruger received the award for lifetime
achievement, and Annette Messager, the first woman to represent France
in Venice, was cited for the outstanding national pavilion. The Golden
Lions reserved for the international show were apportioned between the
two sections. Germany's Thomas Schutte, in de Corral's survey, was recognized
for his supremely accomplished ensemble of framed engraved heads and pedestal-borne
metamorphic figures, the latter acquiring supplemental gravitas from the
adjacent hanging of Francis Bacon's tortured anatomies. Regina Jose Galindo,
a Guatemalan artist from Martinez's roster, was declared the best participant
under 35 for her viscerally political performance videos.
As a feminist
declaration, however, much of this feels more wishful and nostalgic than
pungent and present. Posters by the Guerrilla Girls, a 20-year-old collective
("fighting discrimination with facts, humor and fake fur since 1985")
tick off a series of distressing statistics (fewer than 40 of the roughly
1,240 artworks on view in six major museums of Venice are by women; only
9 percent of the artists in the 1995 Biennale were women). But it all
seems like so much crabby shop talk when, far from the spotlight, in the
little pavilion of the Republic of Armenia in Palazzo Zenobio, Diana Hakobian's
three-channel video, Logic of Power (2005), offers an altogether more
sobering and consequential-seeming set of numbers about deaths resulting
from illegal abortions, the depressed level of women's wages and the denial
of higher education to women in much of the world. While the Guerrilla
Girls have updated their iconography to include bimbo-of-the-moment Pamela
Anderson and the terror-alert color code system remade into an index of
the Bush administration's hostility to women, their construction of the
gender problem nevertheless feels dated, and the humor has grown slack.
Is there
something in the nature of triumph delayed that makes a bit of slackness
inevitable? Is it possible to match the initial jolt delivered by Kruger,
or by her sister text-messager Jenny Holzer, represented in the Italian
pavilion by a dramatic, Flavinesque corner piece? The punch line of Vasconcelos's
feminine hygiene fixture seems like a small "gotcha!" when one
thinks of the shocking absorbent armory arrayed by Judy Chicago in her
1972 Menstruation Bathroom for Womanhouse in L.A. The videos of Galindo--whom
we see shaving her body hair and striding nude through town, walking through
basins of blood and in close-up footage of her hymenoplasty--strike one
as too serf-consciously beholden to Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta and
Orlan. Meanwhile, in Runa Islam's film Be The First To See What You See
As You See It (2004), the affectless young woman who tentatively coaxes
pieces of period china (tired emblems of women's domestic entrapment and
presumed fragility) off their platforms to a crash landing is a mere Stepford
vandal compared to the delirious slugger Pipilotti Rist, who demolished
the windows of parked cars with a long-stemmed red flower in an unforgettable
video in the 1997 Biennale. Even Eija-Liisa Ahtila, the author of tart,
tough minidramas probing the psychological and sexual pressures that bear
down on women and families, is represented in the Italian pavilion by
a cloying work, The Hour of Prayer (2005), a four-screen projection in
which a blonde Nordic beauty, grieving over the death of her fluffy dog
Luca, escapes to dusty, crowded Benin, where the church bell-triggered
barking of the lean local mutts becomes a healing canine ritual.
With the
curators showcasing women artists, you can't resist searching for constructions
of gender in the works of the men they selected. For example, William
Kentridge's installation in the Italian pavilion's elevated gallery is
an affecting visualization of two realms of enchantment--the intimate
space of the studio and the vast reaches of the Milky Way--that pays tribute
to the early days of film-making. Still, the presence in these projections
of an elusive nude model/muse and Kentridge's imagining of the galaxy
as great coiling spermlike streams invoke the hoary erotic tradition of
Courbet, Rodin and Matisse.
More overtly
testosterone-fueled is Willie Doherty's Non-Specific Threat (2004), a
looped game of chicken in which the camera circles an utterly impassive
yet stereotypically tough-looking man. It's not clear whether man or camera
is the more predatory, since the menacing voiceover--"I have contaminated
you"; "You create me"--could be speaking for either. Robin
Rhode (who may owe something to fellow South African Kentridge for his
halting, low-tech method and incorporation of hand-drawn elements) is
perhaps the most evolved male in de Corral's show, with his PBS-friendy
videos of children at play. Bruce Nauman remains the baddest boy on the
block with Shit in Your Hat--Head on a Chair, which offers a thoroughly
gratifying lesson in mime abuse. (Did de Corral reach back to that work
from 1990 merely because it's in the collection of the Fundacion "la
Caixa," which she directed from 1981 to '91?)
Some highly
caffeinated guy art can be found over at the Arsenale, too, with John
Bock's obsessive-expulsive installation (the site of a preview performance
on the durable topos of taming a feral child) incorporating athletic equipment,
projectors and battered teddy bears, and the videos of Blue Noses, a Moscow-based
group whose unapologetically sexist antics with naked girls, baguette
phalluses and a mechanical alligator are displayed on 12 monitors arranged
face-up in a circle of cardboard boxes. For a sharp behavioral alternative,
C-prints, videos and garments on mannequins capture the gender-bending
outrageousness of performance artist and super-size model Leigh Bowery.
During the Biennale, Bowery can be seen as painted by Lucian Freud in
a retrospective at the Museo Correr.
Fundamentally
more tame and far too satisfied with its own leering naughtiness is Francesco
Vezzoli's Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula (2005), which
is playing to packed houses in the Italian pavilion. A steamy come-on
for a fictional remake of the legendary smut chestnut of 1979, the video
features Helen Mirren and Adriana Asti (who appeared in the original)
hamming it up with Courtney Love, Karen Black, Milla Jovovich, Benicio
Del Toro, Barbara Bouchet and Vidal himself. Notwithstanding long-term
support received from the Fondazione Prada (which organized the concurrent
collateral show of Vezzoli's work on view at the Fondazione Cini), the
artist turned to Donatella Versace for costumes that are the last word
in imperial glare. During the preview days, only Candice Breitz's videos,
Mother and Father (both 2005), came close to Vezzoli's in audience draw,
and they, too, feature Hollywood actors and actresses, though the stars
are not co-conspirators but rather the digital raw material of highly
edited sequences that mock the cliches of family life.
Some Politics,
Some Installations, Lots of Video
Compared
to biennali past, you have to look hard in the Arsenale to avoid concluding
that the world is in pretty good shape, AIDS has been cured and stability
has been achieved in the world's trouble spots. The Guantanamo Initiative
of Christoph Buchel and Gianni Motti (the latter also one of four artists
representing Switzerland) requires a small detour to a shipping container
parked outside the building. Launched last year, the documentation-rich
project calls upon the Castro government--which does not recognize U.S.
rights to Guantanamo and has not cashed checks paid on the lease since
1959--to seize the base, with its controversial military-run prison, and
convert it into a cultural center. For Palabras/Words (2005), within the
Arsenale, the Cuban-born Diango Hernandez arranges a tangle of wires and
fallen electrical poles, a symbol of failed planning and broken promises,
through which we view a projection of vintage news images and a scroll
of the names of former Communist-bloc nations and their leaders. Fidel
Castro is the last intransigent survivor of the lot.
If the Buchel-Motti
initiative is quixotic, Emily Jacir's Ramallah/New York (2004-05), which
juxtaposes footage of the ordinary activities of small businesses in both
cities, is, sad to say, altogether too reasonable in its plea for mutual
understanding. Meanwhile, Gregor Schneider's desire to construct a black
cloth-draped, metal cubic structure that resembles the Ka'ba, the centerpiece
of Islam's holiest shrine in Mecca, is inexcusably naive. Wounded by the
Biennale's refusal to back his plan (the administration not surprisingly
concluded that the piece, to be sited in the city's congested tourist
heartland, the Piazza San Marco, could be offensive to Muslims), Schneider
is showing a video in the Arsenale with an animation of his proposal and
an explication of his soft-headed conviction that East and West can find
common ground in their shared preoccupation with simple formal elements
(think Tony Smith's Die). Schneider seems rather more sulky than idealistic
in the Biennale catalogue, where his six alotted pages have been printed
in solid black.
Kidlat Tahimik,
from the Philippines, and Sergio Vega, a Buenos Aires-born and Gainesville-based
artist, offer their own insights into cultural difference. A favorite
of film buffs, Tahimik's The Perfumed Nightmare (1977) follows the disillusionment
of a young Filippino taxi driver who dreams of traveling to the American
paradise--Florida--to become an astronaut. Transferred to video, the work
is screened in the Arsenale above an ad hoc installation that incorporates
burned "relics" from the artist's fire-ravaged studio and some
dubious artifacts--like the statue of a "wind goddess" who faces
a headless Marilyn Monroe statuette with her skirt lifted by the draft
from a subway grating--that gently mock the equivalences people discern
across cultures.
Referencing
a different paradise, Vega's hot-hued ensemble comprises a number of individual
objects, environments and photo-and-text-based pieces that debunk--though
not without affection--the centuries-old myth of Brazil as a tropical
paradise. Despite some discordant notes struck by shantytown views with
irate chickens and dogs, the installation is wholly seductive, with inviting
chairs, spongy floor cushions and bossa nova grooves from vintage LPs.
The environment is surely more relaxing than the other participatory works
by Brazil's Rivane Neuenschwander, who invites visitors to type wordless
love letters on "modified" typewriters; by the Centre of Attention,
a London-based collective that allows you to recline on a mortuary bier
after you've scored your own funeral with music downloaded from the Internet;
and by Mariko Mori, who has dusted off her brain wave interface pod for
those in need of a quick kip--by appointment only.

From full-room
installations to individual monitors, video emerges as a dominant medium
in both sections of the international show. Often the least visually flashy,
like Doherty's, have the most staying power. Another such strong entry
in the Italian pavilion is Vasco Araujo's The Girl of the Golden West
(2004). But for a handful of intertitles, Araujo's camera never leaves
the face of a white-capped "Mammy" character (actually an employee
of Houston's Glassell School of Art), who informally but solemnly recapitulates
the plot of Puccini's eponymous opera, which she knows only from a 1934
performance film shown to her by the Portuguese artist. In the course
of its nearly 19 minutes, the initially incongruous video becomes an affirmation
of storytelling that leaps across languages, countries, races and centuries.
Imagery,
not words, is the point of Berni Searle's Vapour (2004) and Adrian Paci's
Turn On (2004), two nocturnal videos that face one another in the Arsenale.
Both artists withhold details of place and character, striving for dramatic
effect with intermittent and mysterious illumination, she by showing shadowy
figures gliding between glowing cooking fires and steaming cauldrons,
he with an array of stony-faced men seated on concrete steps and holding
illuminated bare bulbs powered by hand-cranked generators. Almost entirely
verbal, by contrast, is Paci's second video, Piktori (2002), which offers
a bitter monologue by a once-noted artist now reduced to supporting himself
as a forger. Inexplicably, in view of the Arsenale's abundant area, the
work has been shorn of the detailed and moody workshop environment that
housed the video when it was shown three years ago at Turin's Fondazione
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
For sheer
modesty, and the wit to carry it off, there is Donna Conlon's Urban Phantoms
(2004), a fast-paced little animation that shows the skyline of Panama
City being overtaken by grand high-rises made of stacked bottle caps,
matchboxes and other bits of refuse that suggest the scavanged materials
of which the lowliest slum dwellings are built. An Atlanta native and
Panama resident, Cordon has another animation in the pavilion of the Istituto
Italo-Latino Americano. (Another standout there is by Colombia's Oscar
Munoz, who is screening a sad/funny video of an artist's hand endeavoring
to finish a portrait that keeps leaching into the paper even as the brush
returns again and again to fix the vanishing image.) Finally, the Arsenale
award for understated elegance goes not to a video but to Bruna Esposito's
Scattered Precipitation (2000-05), a distribution piece of multicolored
onion skins tossed onto a grid of marble slabs that may be the most inspired
pairing of vegetable and mineral since Giovanni Anselmo wired a head of
lettuce to a block of granite in 1968.
What's New
When the
Biennale administration commits to a program of summation and consensus,
one looks hopefully to the individual national pavilions for something
more eccentric or unexpected. One unpromising new trend is the denial
of visible art, an option that has emerged in the wake of 2003, when censorship
led Javier Tellez to withdraw his work from the Venezuelan pavilion, and
Santiago Sierra barred visitors from entering the pavilion of Spain unless
they were citizens of that nation. Once inside, you found the Spanish
pavilion strewn with debris from the previous show. This year, the Romanian
pavilion has been left untouched in an arrogant gesture of renunciation
by the Bucharest-born, Berlin-based Daniel Knorr, who is distributing
a hefty anthology of critical texts on the eastward expansion of "European"
culture. The extensive glass walls of the Nordic pavilion have been removed
by Norway's Matias Faldbakken and Sweden's Miriam Backstrom and Carsten
Holler to create an open platform that the artists use on alternate days.
Faldbakken is showing a video and artist's book, while the Stockholm-based
duo are presenting a sound work, which generally frees up the pavilion
to serve as a shady transit between the Giardini's dusty paths.
Other pavilions
are showing art that reduces the risk of scandal. Gilbert & George
are unusually circumspect about homoerotic display in their new suite
of photographs. Guy Ben-Ner, the New York-based artist representing Israel
with a new video, retains only one of his signature images, a tree, in
his new video, having opted to leave out his home, his kids and his penis,
which had action roles and singing parts--OK, the penis just did karaoke--in
his previous work. As for artists behaving badly, there is only Tino Sehgal,
whose gnat of a concept is to hire performers to pose as guards who "unexpectedly"
lurch around the German pavilion, derisively chanting "This is so
contemporary, contemporary, contemporary." Such mockery is rendered
pointless by being heaped upon an utterly defenseless target, the ingratiating
sculpture and canvases of pavilion-mate Thomas Scheibitz, which are worked
in conventional materials, honestly rooted in the formal investigations
of 20th-century modernism and just plain good-looking.
Whatever
Gilbert & George have moderated in the flagrant sexuality of their
work, they do make up for in electronically cooked splendor. Their 25
"Ginkgo Pictures" (2005) are so named for the ubiquity of the
golden foliage of the Ginkgo biloba tree, whose twin-lobed leaf serves
as an emblem of the pair's enduring collaboration and as the basis for
opulent designs that evoke exotic brocades and the stylized acanthus and
palm patterns of Deco movie palaces. The black and Asian youths who join
the artists in several of the pictures are less eroticized than their
predecessors; indeed, given such titles as Hooded, Hoodoo, Hoodooed, the
elder gents seem to be declaring a sort of outsider solidarity with the
young men, whose hooded sweatshirts have been demonized by the British
police as telltale signs of "yob" culture (which, according
to the BBC, is associated with "lager louts, soccer hooligans, and
teenagers who hang out on street corners"). With their racially mixed
cast, Arabic- and Hebrew-looking lettering, citations from Islamic texts,
mystical hand gestures, golden egg of Buddhist creation myths, Snapple
logos, athletic wear and disembodied digital trickery, "The Ginkgo
Pictures" seem like omnibus artifacts of London's tense, rich global
culture.
If the British
pavilion can feel a bit overripe, the U.S. pavilion is regrettably half-baked.
There is ample reason to cut Ed Ruscha some slack, since his belated selection
in October 2004 [see "Front Page," Dec. '04] left little time
for grand planning, but there is also no way to overlook the fact that
his trademark cool understatement here comes off as a kind of patrician
obliqueness. Ruscha has chosen to revisit the five imagined sites--four
commercial buildings and a telephone booth--depicted in black and white
acrylic in his 1992 "Blue Collar" series. The newer views (2003-05),
rendered in color, retain the original long rectangular format, which
crops the bottom of each structure and accentuates its flat, functional
roofline against the sky. The two series are installed in the opposing
wings of the pavilion, compelling visitors to shuttle back and forth to
tabulate the unremarkable transformations: the trade school is boarded
up, the home of the tool and die company has a bright Asian sign and graffiti,
the tire building has a new wing, and the site of the vanished telephone
booth features a lamp post and tree (in a truncated composition that brings
Neil Jenney's work to mind). The show's title, "The Course of Empire,"
is appropriated from Thomas Cole's five-painting allegorical cycle of
1834-36, a cautionary tale for the America of Manifest Destiny that traces
human progress from pristine wilderness through grandeur to final decadence.
But Ruscha's tight-lipped canvases, which track generic urban change,
possess neither the urgency nor the provocation to make good on Cole's
title.
For a more
particularized rumination on the course of empire, one should visit James
Luna's "Emendatio" (Emendation), a collateral show organized
by the National Museum of the American Indian and displayed at the Fondazione
Querini-Stampalia. A Luiseno Indian from California and a performance
artist of considerable discipline and humor, Luna is showing a group of
photo- and video-based works plus one elaborate installation, Chapel for
Pablo Tac, in what becomes the "American" pavilion to Ruscha's
"U.S." pavilion. Pablo Tac was a young Luiseno who journeyed
from Mission San Luis Rey to the Vatican in 1834 to be trained as a missionary
and, before his death in Rome seven years later at age 19, wrote about
his tribe's life and language.
The story
presages Luna's own journey to Italy and poses the question of how much
one culture can ever fully understand another--without ever suggesting
that anyone stop trying. During the preview, Luna appeared in several
marathon performances in the Querini-Stampalia's little garden, sometimes
in hides and feathers, sometimes in a gondolier's hat and striped jersey,
often wielding a whip or rattle, occasionally pausing like James Brown
for an assistant to deliver not a silk cape but a soothing cappuccino.
Of the nations
making Biennale debuts, the People's Republic of China, delayed by the
2003 SARS outbreak, and Afghanistan may have aroused the most anticipation.
Afghan-born and U.S.-trained, Lida Abdul returned to her native country
to shoot the three videos presented at the Fondazione Levi. Careful to
keep the mood restrained despite the violence that continues to grip her
country, Abdul shows a crowd of men at Bamiyan clapping in unison with
potato-size stones, remains of the towering rock-cut Buddhas obliterated
by the Taliban; a man who cuts down a tree from whose branches his people
were hung; and footage of herself, ritualistically whitewashing the remains
of two bombed structures whose simple Mediterrannean beauty is recalled
by fluted columns. The perpetrators of destruction in the last two remain
unspecified, as if there is blame enough to go around. Ignoring governments,
armies and religions, the ensemble celebrates small gestures of defiance
and renewal in the aftermath of unfathomable loss. In a similar spirit,
an adjacent room has been given over to displaying handsome geometric
weavings from Kabul in a show sponsored by Le Studentesse di Faizabad--Sapere
e Liberta, an Italian philanthropic group that supports higher education
for Afghan women.
While other
countries have had to content themselves with buildings in remote reaches
of Venice, the maiden pavilion of the PRC is ensconced at the rear of
the Arsenale in a garden and an adjacent industrial structure. Curated
by the internationally renowned artist Cai Guo-Qiang, the show seems purpose-built
to demonstrate the open-mindedness and diversity of Mainland culture.
In a room clogged with rusted fuel containers, visitors are mildly disoriented
by the two most conventionally contemporary entries, Xu Zhen's projection,
Shout (2005), footage of busy locales where individuals suddenly collapse
(like the video itself, which appears and goes dark without warning),
and Liu Wei's Star (2005), a set of spotlights tripped by motion detectors,
like the maniacal flashbulbs of old papparazzi cameras. Outside, rural
China meets pop culture with the DIY UFOs of Du Wenda, an enterprising
farmer whose homemade spaceships caught the attention of artists Sun Yuan
and Peng Yu. The pair brought the farmer and his contraptions to Venice,
a gesture reminiscent of Cai's own entry as an artist in the 1999 Biennale,
when he re-created the Mao-era sculpture ensemble called Rent Collecting
Courtyard and engaged one of the original artisans for his team in Venice.
Sharing the garden are two works that embody traditional arts along with
China's quite contemporary ambition to have a permanent pavilion: a sweeping
"amphitheater" constructed of enormous stalks of bamboo by architect
Yung Ho Chang, and Fengshui Project for Venice (2005), a computer simulation
analyzing the Giardini and Arsenale by Wang Qiheng, an expert in the field
of felicitous architectural arrangement.
Territorial
Perspectives
By the preview's
end, rumors were flying that China had been granted permission to erect
a new pavilion within the Giardini, which has been closed to permanent
construction since 1995. The Biennale's press office denies the story,
which may have been fueled by local resentment over Italy's long spell
of homelessness. With the Italian pavilion given over to the international
show, the extent and nature of the host country's representation has been
in the hands of the Biennale's visual-arts director. This year, as in
2003, the little Venice pavilion is housing a show of the four finalists
for the "Prize for Young Italian Art," a juried award instituted
four years ago by the culture ministry's department of contemporary architecture
and art. (In 2003, in a gesture of resistance against the Rome bureaucracy,
Francesco Bonami invited Massimiliano Gioni to present a show of young
Italian artists in a temporary structure erected not far from the Italian
pavilion.) The 2005 prizewinner, announced with the recipients of the
Golden Lions, is Lara Favaretto, who is showing a day-in-the-country fantasy
complete with enigmatic effigies, gliding boats and ceremonially robed
figures. The large projection within the pavilion is viewed only by peering
through a monitor-size aperture that pierces the exterior wall, a presentation
that contributes to the piece's considerable preciousness. Next year,
the Biennale has announced, there will be a genuine Italian pavilion in
the far reaches of the Arsenale, where this year's press office is housed.
And in what has to be considered an excessive exercise of its new advance-planning-above-all
mode, the administration also named the pavilion's 2007 curator, Ida Gianelli,
director of the contemporary art museum at Castello di Rivoli outside
Turin.
If the prospect
of the PRC having a strong presence in the Biennale poses a challenge
to anyone, it probably isn't Italy but Taiwan, which is showing its sixth
high-energy ensemble in the Prigioni of the Palazzo Ducale. Under the
title "The Spectre of Freedom" (from a 1974 film by Luis Bunuel),
curator Chia Chi Jason Wang has assembled four artists whose works make
for a challenging mix of idealism, outright slapstick, dark beauty and
anxiety. With a Net-based project (www.de-strike.com) that she presents
in a kiosk of terminals in a red-painted room, Hsin-I Eva Lin recalls
her 45-day strike (no art making, empty studio, leafleting) during a 2004
residency in New York, directing attention to the insecurity of all labor
in the global economy. In performance videos shown on suspended monitors,
Kuang-yu Tsui engages in extreme repetitive behavior, running headlong
into obstacles (the side of a bus, a tree, a McDonald's take-out window),
vomiting at a succession of urban and parklike sites, and serving as a
research subject while a series of objects (shoe, bucket, teddy bear,
book, bottle, frying pan, vacuum cleaner, television, chair) is flung
at the back of his head for him to identify on the basis of impact.
Dominating
the Taiwan pavilion are works by the senior artist, Chung-li Kao, who
is showing hand-drawn animations and stop-motion photography on film strips
fed through 8mm projectors that have been modified to look like alien
apparatuses. His generally dark imagery (a military execution, a pigtailed
caricature of a "Chinaman," a bomb falling from a plane as a
man and girl look up, a jacket-wearing Christ figure seated before an
easel whose model and painted motif keep morphing from crosses to winged
jets and back again) is rendered all the more dreadful by the occasional
cartoons of playing children and by the nostalgia of the medium. I-chen
Kuo, the fourth participant, has a more covert presence with a sound and
video installation. Periodically, unpredictably, a roar makes the pavilion
tremble and the menacing shadow of a low-flying plane is projected slowly
across the vaulted ceiling.
One response
to those countries desiring a pavilion of their own comes from Hans Schabus,
who all but obliterates the Austrian pavilion, a primly classsicized rectangle
by Josef Hoffmann dating from 1934, with a 130-foot-high "Alp"
fabricated of spruce timber, hemp fiberboard and sanded tarpaper. Comically
fake (the pavilion's corners protrude) but nonetheless imposing, The Last
Land lightly alludes to the utopian architecture of early 20th-century
expressionists like Taut, Steiner, Hablik and Scharoun, even as it deposits
a load of incongruity onto the pastoral rear acreage of the Giardini.
Supporting Schabus's magic mountain is a crazed-looking but sturdy network
of struts and stairs--the work of a carpenter channeling Venice's own
Piranesi--through which the visitor ascends to enjoy a privileged panorama
of the gardens, the city and the lagoon beyond. This suggestive vista
of land and sea is not merely incidental to the alpine construction, for
beyond castigating the nationalistic pride of pavilion ownership, Schabus
is concerned with the imperial geopolitics that bound Venice to Austria
until World War I. The Last Land has two affiliated works, the video Val
Canale, shown on a monitor in the pavilion, which "records"
the topographical details of a fictional trip from an Alpine valley to
the broad plains of the Veneto, and Mare Adriatico, Venezia, 13 Maggio
2005, a staged photograph that appears on the pavilion's catalogue's cover
and shows the "seafaring" artist approaching the shores of La
Serenissima in his little boat.
A preoccupation
with the voyage and a reference to Venice's Hapsburgian interlude also
characterize the imposing works presented in the pavilion of Hungary,
the other great landlocked entity that emerged from the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. The video- and assemblage-based art in Balazs Kicsiny's "An
Experiment in Navigation" offers sufficient strong images and absurdist
humor to offset their well-worn Magrittean Surrealism. Two cassock-wearing
mannequins, with fencing masks containing light bulbs where their heads
should be, comprise Winterreise (Winter Journey), 2005, named for Schubert's
24-song setting of Wilhelm Muller's poetry. The dynamically posed clerics
face opposite directions on the same pair of outlandishly long skis, with
17th-century cross staffs (navigating tools that look like exotic crucifixes)
inverted and useless in their hands, and two tram power poles connecting
their headgear to electric wires strung above.
Futility
and absurdity continue with the dire figure of a man carrying battered
suitcases and draped in heavy chains attached to anchors that evoke the
pair prominently displayed outside Venice's maritime museum (relics of
an Austro-Hungarian warship), and with 12 pajamaclad aquanauts who sport
antiquated diving helmets and acqua alta boots while holding up chalices
in a pantomime of impossible communion. In The Cobbler's Apprentice (2005),
a vertiginous video projected on the floor in each of the pavilion's flanking
rooms, a Dali-meets-Hitchcock timepiece with oversized Roman numerals
rotates counterclockwise. Veiled women in black and white, like a nefarious
chamber ensemble, occupy workbenches; the "apprentice" creeps
around the perimeter; and a prone figure, identified as the Wandering
Jew, replaces the hands of the clock with his own limbs and walking stick.
In Kicsiny's realm, progress is thwarted, time runs backward, and travel
is not liberty but damnation.
Other Artists
Weigh In
If Schabus's
mountain humbles Austria's architecturally prestigious pavilion, Messager
and Muntadas set out to overcome the exclusive national identities marked
on their edifices' facades, she by slapping a red neon sign reading "casino"
over the word "Francia," he by draping a red banner with the
message, in Italian, "Warning: Perception Requires Involvement,"
over the name "Espagna." Both renowned artists, who seem more
than a little off their game here, then proceeded to cram the pavilions
with installations that are overwrought and serf-indulgent.
Messager's
prize-winning "Casino" is a sequence of three shadowy and mechanized
installations that yoke the theme of gambling and fate to the tale of
Pinocchio. In this misbegotten environment, which recalls nothing so much
as a Halloween spook house, Messager arrays Pinocchio figures, stuffed
dice and other toys, bits of fake "internal organs," assorted
goth-looking items like black vinyl gloves and guns, yards of billowing
blood-red silk, rope-bound pillows, spiders, phallic-nosed Pulcinella
masks, etc. Our long-suffering Tuscan puppet (I pause here to plead for
a voluntary moratorium by visual artists on using Pinocchio, Heidi and
abused stuffed animals in their work) is drawn along the floor on a bolster
like a model train car and tossed aloft in a giant net trampoline like
a little kernel in a loudly snapping popcorn maker. Messager, we are told,
identifies with both the creator, Geppetto, and his wooden masterpiece,
and she relies on both of them to assist in conjuring cloning, robots,
Frankenstein, kinship, birth myths and other weighty matters.
The Catalan-born
artist Muntadas takes a more retrospective approach, assembling 11 of
the 35 works in his series "On Translation," with which he has
been occupied for a decade. An international exhibition might seem an
apt occasion for meditating on linguistic and behavioral codes, on the
arbitrary assignment of value to exchange items and on the development
of social rituals across cultures. But the works, generally smart and
humane when considered one by one, in aggregate seem blustery and a touch
condescending in their simplistic sociology. The author of discerning
context-sensitive works earlier in his career, Muntadas here misfires
with his site-specific entry, On Translation: I Giardini (2005), which
incorporates a list of countries (Fiji, Georgia, Saint Kitts, Syria, etc.)
that don't have pavilions (are we to feel indignant?) and photographs
of the entrances of existing pavilions, historical-looking black-and-white
for the original ones in the Giardini, and color for the newer, off-site
venues. In the catalogue interview, Muntadas pronounces Venice a theme
park and the national pavilions obsolete. Stop the presses.
Another
artist who admonishes nationalism is George Hadjimichalis in the Greek
pavilion, which flies flags that are not the blue and white standard of
the Hellenic Republic but rather white fields with a red cross and a red
crescent. Given the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and a deadly shortage
in the world's blood supply, Hadjimichalis's reference to the Christian
and Muslim humanitarian agencies could not be more timely, and it is further
grounded by the distribution of cards urging visitors to donate blood
at Venice's hospital. The flags further suggest that the ensemble of works
within the pavilion, collectively called "Hospital" (2004-05),
alludes to a facility for the victims of catastrophe.
"Hospital"
centers on The Building, a crisscrossing double layer of 49 long rectangular
aluminum units laid out on a platform, rather like the components of a
modular sculpture. Through apertures at the ends of each unit are visible
little figures roughly modeled in bronze--the staff, patients and visitors
who haunt these endless, uniform corridors. The handsome and reductive
acrylicon-canvas Plan of the Building, which hangs on a nearby wall, in
no way corresponds to the structure on the platform. After this intellectual
game of architectural visualization, Hadjimichalis arrives at the heavy
heart of the matter. A Moment in the Mind of Mr. A.K. is a 58-second sequence
of images that race through a lifetime's remembered album--a child, a
woman, a landscape, a ruined building. The View From the Windows, shown
in two rooms, features carousels that clatter and rotate, only to project
another slide of the same image. It's a laconic but effective transcription
of monotony, confinement and despair.
Individual
countries are sponsoring a good deal of video, some of it straight up,
some with a twist. Luxembourg and the Netherlands offer the most literal
treatment of the pavilion as a single-screen theater. In the Ca del Duca,
Antoine Prum's 30-minute Mondo Veneziano (2005) gathers four insufferable
"intellectuals" on a film set of Venice (built in Luxembourg
for a 2001 feature) that becomes a sort of false-front Western town--Doge
City?--for a showdown of pretensions. It climaxes in bloodshed at an overhead
projector. Holland's Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij are winking just
as vigorously with Mandarin Ducks (2005), a 36-minute soap opera that
is named for the distinctively striped fowl that, according to one character
in the video, mate for life. Here, the blatantly artificial setting is
a soundstage with spare modernist furnishings, perfect for a Sunday gathering
of family and friends in which the endless conversation is by turns arch,
bitchy, flirtatious, racist, vapid and vicious. The script aspires to
an Albee-esque acidity, or perhaps it's just sophomoric parody. In either
case, the result is juiceless.
Just as
knowing, though more approachable, is the work of Estonian photographer
and video artist Mark Raidpere, who blends a fashion-insider's narcissism
with an ambiguously confessional mission. Raidpere's little retrospective
at the Palazzo Malipiero goes back to pictures from his first solo show
in 1997. Among the newest works is Shifting Focus (2005), which begins
as a grainy document of what may be the painful moment in which the artist
comes out to his mother ("spill it, sonny," she urges him) at
the kitchen table. But the episode devolves into an almost comic series
of sobbing false starts, until the scene flushes with color, and the artist
pulls back the curtain on the staging behind this phony little heart-to-heart.
In the Turkish
pavilion at the Fondazione Levi, Hussein Chalayan's The Absent Presence
(2005) stretches across five screens with a sci-fi-inflected narrative
about an experiment in DNA mapping that, like Gilbert & George's photos,
capitalizes on the global character of London. The more important presence,
though, is that of Tilda Swinton, whom Chalayan has cast as the severe
technician, either to rekindle some of that old Derek Jarman magic or
because the actress starred in Orlando, an earlier meditation on chromosomal
destiny. Swinton is shown extracting DNA from three used garments and
then laboring over basins of genetic soup in an effort to generate simulacra
of the young women who wore the clothing. She produces only bonsai-size,
T-shirt-clad distortions, unholy sculptural spawn of Henry Moore and Umberto
Boccioni. The monstrous props/sculptures that appear in the video are
on display, Matthew Barney fashion, in the next room.
From a genetic
dystopia, one can travel to a tropical paradise, thanks to eipilotti Rist's
Homo sapiens sapiens (2005), which is projected on the curvy ceiling of
the late Baroque church of San Stae. One of the artists representing Switzerland,
Rist evidently subscribes to the belief (recalling Vega's tongue-in-cheek
Arsenale installation) that Eden can be found in Brazil, which is where
she shot most of the dreamy footage of blooming flowers, leafy canopies
and two red-haired sister "innocents" who inhabit the charmed
landscape. Visitors surrender to the kaleidoscopic vision by lying on
large fabric-covered mattresses, like lily pads or the rubbery leaves
of a tropical plant, which cover the church floor. Rist's iconography
is not new, but it is refreshed by the site, as are the figural and ornamental
pieces of Kiki Smith and Karen Kilimnik, which are installed in the once-domestic
rooms of, respectively, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Palazzetto
Tito.
Grace Ndiritu's
three videos animate a former religious environment, the tiny Oratorio
di San Ludovico, which is as modest as Rist's is expansive. Not a pavilion,
the show is co-sponsored by Nuova Icona, the Venice not-for-profit that
oversees many of the collateral shows, and the [kon Gallery of Birmingham.
The U.K.-born artist combines African music, ritual gesture and her own
dark body in short works that address otherness and exploitation. If she
can veer toward the heavy-handed (inserting a crawl with the names of
the world's violent trouble-spots beneath the image of a writhing, veiled
woman), Ndiritu can also choreograph the most eloquently minimal actions.
In The Nightingale (2003), projected above the altar, the artist's strong
bare arms repeatedly wrap a patterned cloth around her face and head in
a succession of configurations that evoke a masked terrorist, a Muslim
woman, a blindfolded captive, a defiant bandit and--perhaps only in this
setting--one of Michelangelo's turbaned sybils from the Sistine ceiling.
The mood runs the gamut from threat to seduction, while the jumpy, rhythmic
editing introduces a possibility of humor that is sharply at odds with
the fixed expression in Ndiritu's unblinking eyes.
Parting
Thoughts
In 1948,
when the Venice Biennale resumed operations after World War II, the organizers
dedicated the event to educating the public and artists alike about the
march of vanguard art--a progress that had been interrupted and perverted
by 20 years of fascism and war--and to laying the groundwork for the resumption
of modernism's great course. The worthy project recapitulated the genealogy
of the "-isms" and toasted the abiding authority of Picasso,
Matisse, Moore, Beckmann and other European masters--just in time for
contemporary art's center of gravity to shift to New York. The show of
Peggy Guggenheim's private collection at the Biennale featured six works
by Jackson Pollock in the company of canvases by continental Surrealists.
The great restoration of 1948, as it turned out, was really the beginning
of art's next act.
As the present
administration in Venice articulates its own criteria of curatorial restraint
and responsible management, it's worth recalling that earlier campaign
of avant-garde advocacy and historical engineering, which took place following
a two-decade cultural vacuum. With today's mobile audience, the Internet
providing illustrated information about exhibitions, artists showing works
in galleries on multiple coasts and continents, and a global imperium
of international biennials and triennials on which the sun never sets,
does the most venerable biennial really wish to preside as the place where
contemporary art is summarized every two years? Worse, is Venice content
to become, as it was characterized by more than a few visitors during
the preview, an appetizer for those on the road to the real business of
Art Basel?
No sane
person would prefer a return to chaos and glut. But there are alternatives.
It is, after all, the promise of encountering the unexpected, the under-known
or the not-before-exhibited (as are the works by Schabus, Gilbert &
George, Raidpere, Ndiritu, Araujo, Luna, Tahimik, Abdul, Kicsiny, Chung-li
Kao, Hadjimichalis) that makes one even consider another expedition in
two years, and not the prospect of revisiting hits from the intervening
seasons. As Robert Storr embarks on his planning for 2007, it's consoling
to think that 2005, inadvertently to be sure, could turn out to be, like
1948, the beginning of art's next act.
The 51st
Venice Biennale remains on view through Nov. 6, 2005 (some collateral
exhibitions have earlier closing dates). The show is accompanied by a
three-volume catalogue. Detailed information can be found at www.labiennale.org.
Also in Venice, "Lucian Freud," curated by William Feaver, is
on view at the Museo Correr through Oct. 30. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection
is presenting "No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on
Paper," curated by Susan Davidson, through Sept. 18.
Copyright
2005 Gale Group, Inc.
ASAP
Copyright 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
Art in America
September 1, 2005
No. 8, Vol. 93; Pg. 108; ISSN: 0004-3214
|