The 52nd Venice Biennale
This year, a record number of countries--77--are taking part in the Venice Biennale, and the International Art Exhibition features about 100 artists. Thirty-four collateral events round out this gigantic art fest, which exhausts its visitors with an excess of presentations spread out over the island. Much of it will be only glanced at or won't be seen at all by the average visitor, who will spend, two or three days in Venice. Has the Biennale reached a point where the massive accumulation of art begins to demonstrate its own irrelevance ?Many of the artworks are socially conscious projects, but they are generally low-key, self-reflective and even self-effacing. The exhibition is bloated, but the art is not. Rather than claiming the power to "subvert," the participating artists appear to question their own efficacy in a world plagued by baffling calamities.
From the maelstrom of images, there are two that, in my mind, epitomize the organizational and commercial drive behind mammoth art events and the self-doubt and helplessness that is expressed by many of the artists. The first is not an artwork, but a disclaimer by this year's director, the American curator Robert Storr. Printed on a banner near the entrance of the Giardini, the elegant park that houses many of the international pavilions, are the words, "The Biennale has no position on conflict and no part in it. RS" An important international exhibition does not take a political stance, no matter how politically explicit some of its artists may be.
The second is a performance/photo installation by the Norwegian duo Toril Goksoyr and Camilla Martens. A long glass wall at the Nordic pavilion is covered by a large, quasi-commercial poster that can be seen only from the outside. It displays an image of the artists posing as models, languorously eyeing the viewer. In the middle, their bored conversation appears in speech balloons: "it would be nice to do something important" is answered by, "something political?" Two window cleaners are constantly washing the windows, using lots of water and pulling squeegees back and forth over the text and the faces of the artists. The labourers are black and were hired by the artists for the duration of the exhibition.
Goksoyr and Martens portray themselves as trapped in their roles as models, artists turned agents for a consumer society. They admit to being unable to do anything political, anything to eradicate the exploitive structures of society that their work so pointedly demonstrates. The Biennale itself is like this storefront window, showcasing the conflicts of the world, attempting to keep them encased behind the glass of a world art exhibition.
Storr, to his credit, has produced a show that coheres remarkably well, despite its open theme, Think with the Senses--Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense. The International Exhibition presents mostly unknown and young artists in the Arsenale, while the Italian pavilion features more famous names, such as Nancy Spero, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Susan Rothenberg and Jenny Holzer. The show is a marvel of inclusiveness: works by artists of different genders, ages and geographical origins meet and contrast productively with one another.
Many, but not all of these conversations between works address political concerns. A looped video by Paolo Canevari, Bouncing Skull (2007), shows a young boy kicking a skull-shaped ball in front of a bombed-out building somewhere in the Balkans region. A cynical reflection on the pervasive ordinariness of horror and destruction, the video relates as easily to the Serbo-Croatian war of the 90s as it does to the present Middle East catastrophe, which forms the subject of many of the works on view. Holzer, in her customary laconic style, reproduces and enlarges declassified US war documents to present devastating evidence of the brutality committed by US soldiers. In a continuing project, a young American artist, Emily Prince, presents wallet-size drawings of every American soldier killed in the Iraq war. Thousands of these images, using different colours of paper to represent different races, are pinned on a wall in the Arsenale, arranged to form a map of the US. The labour-intensity of the work provokes a feeling of helplessness in the face of overwhelming irrationality in world politics. What can artists do, other than mirror the great sadness and sense of injustice that the Iraq war now provokes in most US citizens?
Faith in the academic ability to analyze, activate and disseminate artworks is brought under visual scrutiny by Rainer Ganahl, who has installed a wallfull of framed photographs of academic seminars and lectures dating back to 1995. Ganahl has recorded the presentations of many famous art theorists, such as Linda Nochlin (Glory and Misery of Pornography, 1996) and Michael Fried (Wall and Wittgenstein, Photography and the Everyday, 2005). Passionate lecturers, intensely listening audiences: the work forms a fascinating visual document of the reciprocal influences of academic theory and contemporary art. The relevance of art to politics and education in relation to a larger social discourse, however, is questioned in an enlarged display of the results of a Google search for the term "Politics and Education" Here, the word "art" is absent.
In the Belgian pavilion, contemporary art's link with theory is humorously parodied by Eric Duyckaerts. An elaborate labyrinth of glass and mirrors (Palais des glaces et de la decouverte, 2007) is interspersed with videoscreens on which the artist-as-professor elaborates specific links between art and a range of academic disciplines. A master rhetorician, Duyckaerts ridicules contemporary art's preoccupation with theory by cleverly steering his well-researched arguments to absurd conclusions. His lectures are punctuated by an occasional loud knock whenever a visitor inadvertently bumps into a glass wall, despite the warning labels.
David Altmejd's installation at the Canadian pavilion is one of the few spectacles that truly amazes among the predominantly sober installations elsewhere. Altmejd makes brilliant use of the venue, a curvilinear, glassy building that has a tree growing right through the roof. He fills one room with strange growths and artificial trees, hundreds of stuffed birds and a male, bird-headed mannequin. In an adjoining space sits an enormous figure, The Giant 2 (2007), a marvellous mix of decay and glamour that has birds nesting in its decomposing body. All of this is reflected in glass and shards of mirrors, making the space unreadable and disorienting. The work has the look of a store display, sleekness turned inside out by a window dresser gone berserk.
Read as a store display, Altmejd's work resonates with the Czech and Slovak pavilion, which the artist Irena Juzova has transformed into a luxury boutique with white sculpted paper. A vitrine containing a cast of the artist's own body in lukopren (a white, waxy material) is the focal point of the show. Irena Juzova's Collection Series (2007) features the name of the artist on walls and boxes. A play on the use of a celebrity's identity to brand and sell merchandise, the work also reflects art's victimization by the game of the luxury market.
In general, the presentations in the national pavilions have in common with the works in Storr's International Exhibition a sense of social conscience. This ensures a coherence to the whole of the Biennale, against which only the modernist works by Robert Ryman and Elsworth Kelly and new abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter awkwardly stand out. Sigmar Polke, a painter who continues to surprise, contributes a series of stunning translucent paintings that look different whenever the light changes in the skylit room. The works suggest an ephemerality and sense of uncertainty seldom seen in painting.
Despite a focus on political conflict, visitors are also able to recognize many human commonalities, death being the most pervasive one. Sophie Calle shows a touching video of the last minutes of her mother's life (Pas Pu Saisir la Mort, 2007), Jan Christiaan Braun presents a series of photographs of American burial plots adorned with messages and gifts by loving relatives (Still in this world, 2007) and Yang Zhenzhong shows people of different ages and from different parts of the world pronouncing the words "I will die" in their own languages. In the Italian pavilion, Sol LeWitt's large work, Wall Drawing #1167: Dark to Light (Scribbles) (2005), executed in pencil marks according to his instructions, is a fitting memorial to the artist, who died just months before the exhibition opened.
Besides death, it may just be art itself that fosters a sense of universality at the Biennale. To see artists from so many different parts of the world create art using whatever media are at hand demonstrates a pervasive human need to make marks, to play, to decorate, to express feelings and through it all, make sense of human existence. The Morrinho Project, a group of artists from Rio de Janeiro, illustrates this need, but also shows the gap between rich and poor artists, between expensive and found materials. The Morrinho Model (2007), part of the International Exhibition, is a sprawling "model" of favela communities, made of innumerable bricks and other materials that are piled up against an artificial hill created in the Giardini. The bricks are found in other places in the park as well; near some temporary toilets, the artwork cozies up to a collection of garbage bins. It is a rich and playful work that invites children to manipulate toy cars on the roads and watch an outdoor puppet show. The puppets, small painted blocks, are moved about by very visible hands. The show itself is in sharp contrast to its presentation on DVD. The high-tech apparatus is protected from the elements by a ratty metal "puppet theatre"--all this technology to simulate one of the oldest and simplest art forms, the outdoor puppet theatre.
With the presence of works of surprising beauty, art's ability to endure asserts itself. El Anatsui has stitched together bottle caps and the metallic coverings of wine corks with thin wire to create two amazing wall hangings. More than three meters high and almost six meters wide, their impact is reinforced by their placement behind the centuries-old brick pillars of the Arsenale. From the excesses of garbage, of drinking, poverty and drudgery, beauty is created that does indeed, to paraphrase Storr, make one aware of one's whole being.
But such epiphanies diminish the more art there is to see. At the end of a long day, yet another sign proclaiming, "the exhibition continues" takes on a nightmarish quality. In the end, the impossibility of taking in so many works, mentally and physically, left me feeling guilty for not being able to pay more attention to the presentations, which obviously had been lavished with so much care and passion. The Romanian pavilion, with its exhibition Low-Budget Monuments, is a case in point. Reaching the pavilion exhausted, all I could muster was a cursory glance at the displays before picking up a copy of a compilation of essays on monuments called Memosphere. Rethinking Monuments. Most of the 150,000 copies of the paper were piled up outside the pavilion, covered in plastic, a monument in their own right.
At least these thoughtful essays helped me to recreate the Romanian exhibition in my mind once I was rested and at home on my couch. There, I realized that one small work from the Romanian pavilion resonated through the whole of the Biennale. Christoph Buchel, of Mass MoCA infamy, together with Giovanni Carmine, compiled approximately 300 paintings and graphic images of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu for a book that is displayed at the pavilion. As curator Mihnea Mircan remarks about the work, "the multiplying apparitions annihilate each other, the sublime body tries to be as big as the projection of dominance on which it relies, yet deflates into an amputated comparison" It may be that Buchel and Carmine are not only alluding to the self-destruction of Ceausescu's propaganda, but also to that of contemporary art through its excessiveness.
As monumental and ineffectively political as the Biennale is, the art it presents promises to reach audiences in far corners of the world. The pile of broadsheets at the Romanian pavilion suggests one method of dissemination and, of course, the Internet is another. On the Web, where socially engaged artworks compete with opposing views in mainstream newscasts, artists enter into discussions and regain some of their political efficacy. It is true, as critics have pointed out, that works such as Fouad Elkoury's diary texts and photographs, created during the war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006, form a valuable counterpoint to television news, but how many visitors actually reached the off-site pavilion and, once there, took the time to take the work in? It is more likely to be read and absorbed by many people on Elkoury's website: www.fouadelkoury.com/exhibition.php?id=20&limit=32.
For the next Venice Biennale, why not acknowledge the limitations of viewers' stamina on site, and provide each visitor with a list of artists' websites? Limiting the Biennale to, say, one continent at a time would also be a relief.
Petra Halkes works as an independent painter, art critic and curator. She is the author of Aspiring to the Landscape (2006) a book on contemporary landscape painting.
Halkes, Petra