Exhibition of exhibitions
No. 10, July—August 2003
In response to the question of what the theme of the current Venice Biennale-50 “Dreams and Conflicts. The Dictatorship of the Viewer” means, curator Francesco Bonami answered: “Anything at all”.
Like the theme of Biennale-49 – “The Plateau of Humanity” (curator Harald Szeemann), it gives absolute freedom for content. Today, when the crisis of curatorial activity at the level of large international projects is clearly felt, as a reaction,
a softer form arises – “zero” curatorship, which implies a policy of minimal restriction.
Dreams and Conflicts
The global and generalized theme increases the degree of freedom – both for the curator and for the artists. The title and concept are chosen so that under a bright figurative expression there are no specific boundaries or settings. Therefore, under the common umbrella “Dreams and Conflicts,” individual exhibitions of the general project easily coexist: “Utopia Station,” “Urgency Zone,” “Contemporary Arab Representation,” “The Secret,” “Survival Structure,” “Fault Lines,” “Individual Systems,” and others.
This was the main difference of the current Venice Biennale. According to the curator, Biennale-50 is an “exhibition of exhibitions.” The exhibition space was distributed among a group of well-known curators from around the world quite politically correctly. They were given the right to choose the theme, authors, their works, and placement in a specific space. This division of labor, unlike the previous monopoly of Harald Szeemann, yielded results. Each project in the Giardini, the Arsenal, and around the city had a distinct style, reflecting individual aesthetic preferences and – often – national affiliation. Walking through the endless halls of the Arsenal, a medieval fortress that has hosted contemporary art for more than one Biennale, visitors sequentially entered various semantic and energetic zones, which sharpened attention and facilitated the perception of individual works.
The exhibition “Delays and Revolutions” by Francesco Bonami had nothing to do with social revolutions. According to the curatorial concept, the entire history of art is not a linear movement but rather a series of breakthroughs, delays, and repetitions. Inviting artists of different generations and placing works of various genres in the Italian pavilion in Giardini di Castello – the traditional territory of the Biennale – he vividly demonstrated the, in principle, obvious diversity of the art world. Here one can see historical videos by Andy Warhol and sculptures by David Hammons; rows of various-sized pills on shelves of a mirrored stand (Damien Hirst, UK); neatly folded stacks of blue and green military blankets on the floor (Helen Mirra, USA); a naturalistic naked aluminum girl (Charles Ray, USA); black-and-white photographs of the Palestinian cabinet (Efrat Shvily, Israel); wall paintings with huge letters spelling “ANN!” and “OHH!” (Lucy McKenzie, UK). Or enter a huge room completely covered with blocks of aluminum foil on which one can and should write or draw something (Rudolf Stingel, Italy). Or step onto a podium and find oneself among running lights and many mirror reflections, like in the spotlight beams (Tobias Rehberger, Germany). The video installation by Peter Fischli and David Weiss presented absurd questions appearing and disappearing on the walls. This Swiss duo was awarded the “Golden Lion” as the best artists of the Biennale.
The exhibition “Zone” (curator Massimiliano Gioni, one of the curators of the next biennale “Manifesta-5”) is also located in the Giardini and is dedicated exclusively to Italian art. The exhibition space was specially created by the group of architects A12 as an alternative to official pavilions. Gioni provokes the very model of national presentation established since the 19th century. As a result of the creation of the European Union, the end of the Cold War, and other factors, the very concept of national identity has radically changed today. The curator managed to create a state of tension and dissatisfaction with reality. Indicative in this sense is the installation by Mykola Asael (Rome): a separate room resembling a technical room with simple metal furniture and a sink, where a crazed extractor fan works, and blue sparks fly where the furniture touches the floor. Anna de Manincor asserts from a video screen that “she will never give a child to this country.” Diego Perrone’s video demonstrates the prolonged agony of a monstrously virtually created dog.
In the Arsenal, the international project by curator Hou Hanru with a similar title “Urgency Zone,” dedicated to the expansion of urbanism and globalization, sounded more optimistic. According to the curator, contemporary artists should seek forms of reconciliation with reality. It is time to redefine what contemporary art, culture, and knowledge are and to open new spaces of imagination and experimentation. The exhibition demonstrated interactive trends in contemporary art and represented an incredibly rich space, chaotically filled with various works. Sounds of individual video works overlapped, covering everything with Strauss’s waltz. It was here that many interesting works by Chinese and Japanese artists could be noted. Chen Xiaosong (China) proposed his version of a chess game where black pieces are airplanes, and white ones are famous skyscrapers from around the world. In the computer version of his game, it is impossible to damage skyscrapers since they can dodge, stop, and absorb the black planes. In a short video by Adeli Abdessamed (Algeria), four young couples (three of them heterosexual) have sex in front of the audience, who applaud them at the end of the performance. Sora Kim and Jimhongsok (Korea) suggest not stopping at mixing only audio and video materials. They present a sculptural mix – an absurd monument where parts of characters’ bodies from different times and countries, made of corresponding materials, are combined, thus tracing the history of sculpture.
The exhibition “Fault Lines” curated by Jilan Tavardos was also very energetic and sensual in its own way. He uses this geological term as a metaphor not only for tectonic shifts and natural disasters but also for the creation of new landscapes. The exhibition features artists from Africa and the African diaspora. Like Francesco Bonami, Tavardos consciously expands the temporal and geographical ranges of his project: participating artists represent three generations from four continents, and the works cover the last 50 years. His task is to break existing stereotypes about Black culture. The huge installation “Asphalt City” by Wael Shawky (Egypt) is a black city with many houses with balconies and windows. The city simultaneously resembles a metropolis and a rural settlement, thus the artist ironically comments on the contradictory process of modernization in contemporary Egypt. In staged color photographs by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the focus is on semi-naked or naked men adorned with sacred and decorative attributes. The body allows him to explore the connection between erotic fantasies and the eternal values of ancestors.
In the Carrer Museum, a painting exhibition “From Rauschenberg to Murakami (1964-2003)” was organized. Its curator Francesco Bonami selected about 50 paintings by leading representatives of contemporary art. In a certain sense, he presented the newly created Museum of the Venice Biennale since all the authors were previously participants. The only video work included in the exposition is an animated film by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, where he, as in his painting, combines Japanese cultural traditions with modern popular iconography. The style “manga,” light electronic music, logos of the “Louis Vuitton” brand, with which Murakami works as a designer, a Pokemon-like super-being, and much more are present: a modern Japanese fairy tale about Alice in the land of simulacra, where she searches for a lost mobile phone.
The well-known artist Gabriel Orozco also acted as a curator in the Arsenal. The idea of his exhibition is also quite generalized – he deliberately limited himself to sculptural works only. Although overall Orozco’s project “Altered Everyday Life” looks like a set of random objects, this exposition contains one of the undeniable hits of the Arsenal. It is Damian Ortega’s work “Cosmic Thing,” where all parts of a real car disassembled into pieces are symmetrically suspended in the air, imitating a graphic assembly scheme.
Parade of national presentations
The Israeli pavilion was the most popular among the professional public at the Giardini, where a queue gathered all days of the Biennale vernissage. The project titled “Time is Up” presented several video installations by artist Michal Rovner. In one of the halls, on all four walls from ceiling to floor, many black horizontal lines were projected, actually human silhouettes walking one after another. Despite the endless movement of little figures on a closed line, the overall picture, resembling animated Egyptian hieroglyphs, does not change. Paradoxically, the artist combines the concepts of movement and immobility. The depersonalization and generalization of the figures free them from belonging to any place or time. A continuation of the crowd theme is her other video installation: in a dark room, Petri dishes (flat round vessels for growing bacteria) are chaotically scattered on tables. Skillfully disguised video projectors create the impression that many tiny little people have multiplied in each glass container, demonstrating various forms of movement.
Not only the commissioner of the Israeli project found minimalist forms and the organization of three-dimensional space relevant today. An example of the same direction, though less successful, is Stanislav Drozd’s project “Dice” in the Polish pavilion. In the center of the hall stood a gaming table with several scattered dice. But the intention was to impress the viewer not with simple symbolism of the riskiness of the game but with the fact that all walls of the huge hall (250 sq. m) were covered with similar dice cubes. The perception of this work took no more than a minute; associations arose more with meditation and extraordinary diligence than with ease and randomness of choice.
Continuing the theme of minimalism and conceptualism, it is necessary to mention the Portuguese presentation. The works of artist Pedro Cabrita Reis are spatial sculptures created using very simple materials and technologies. His works imply strangeness, mysticism, and ambiguity. At Biennale-50, he presented a huge construction, a kind of frame of a two-story building without walls and floors, where the main structural element is a door leaf. The sculpture resembles an absurd opposite of a labyrinth, where the continuous density of walls has disappeared, and in the resulting void, many meaningless doors have appeared. Inside the construction, one can wander among many uprights and doors that move on hinges and reveal nothing.
But the most non-spectacular (non-showy) of all minimalistic was, surprisingly, the Spanish pavilion. Artist Santiago Sierra from Madrid often dedicates his works to social inequality issues. He embodies ideas of political criticism in the form of various interventions and provocations, and he also likes to use living people as sculptural material. This time, visitors entering the pavilion immediately encounter a freshly built solid wall of large gray bricks. After receiving information that the entrance is on the other side of the building, they go there. At the doors, two guards check everyone’s passports. If the visitor confirms Spanish citizenship, he can enter, as it turned out, an empty room and see a lonely man, an ordinary one.
If the Spaniards only slightly shocked the democratically educated public, the Australian pavilion, where artist Patricia Piccinini’s project “We Are Family,” dedicated to bioengineering issues, left no one indifferent. Art that shocks can be liked or disliked, but it is hard to ignore. This is exactly what artists who aim to scare the viewer count on. According to the author, medical intervention in human life has gone too far. Fantasizing about possible consequences of the biotech era, the artist creates incredible synthetic organisms and forms. The sculptures are very realistic, and together they could well be used as a ready-made visual series for a new fantastic film about the horrors of genetic technology. The characters are very diverse; some look like products of crossing humans with pigs. They carefully feed their strange big-eared babies. Two clone boys with gray hair and wrinkles are engrossed in a computer game. An old-lady-like girl gently plays with some embryo-like pieces of flesh. The Austrian pavilion artist Bruno Gironcoli also surprises the viewer with the quality of his absurd sculptures, but in his huge “machines,” elements of mechanisms are mixed with anthropomorphic details, which implicitly, very restrainedly, refer to themes of sexuality, violence, and suffering.
In our technogenic age, turning to nature as a life-giving source seems quite logical. It is in nature that the true essence of the characters of the feature film “Angel Parking” by three Swiss artists (Emanuella Antille, George Lenslinger, Gerda Steiner), shot in the Dogma style, awakens and manifests. Members of a large family, tired of constant adaptation to reality and fragmented in a cruel world, try to find freedom in nature and restore relationships but constantly break down into unmotivated aggressive gestures. The dog undoubtedly is present as part of nature and as a family member. Despite all optimistic intentions, the film sounds hopeless, incredibly long, and at +35°C holds the viewer with great difficulty.
The natural perception of reality is, in a sense, also dedicated to the multi-screen video installation by Canadian artist Yana Stenbak “From Here to There.” Here, too, there is a dog, but already as the main, though invisible, hero. The nervous movement of the video camera, characteristic of experimental films of the 60s-70s, is not a conscious choice of the author but rather the result of the entire material being shot through the eyes of a dog. A young terrier named Stanley runs back and forth with a micro-video camera attached and films everything that falls into the lens. Mostly, these are snowy plains and roads, as well as streets of two historically important cities. The peculiarity of this shooting is that, first, the dog ignores any historical and aesthetic values, and second, the viewer has the opportunity to look at the world from a dog’s point of view – approximately 35 centimeters from the ground. But for those who did not read the press release, all these explanations are not obvious – the viewer sees on screens arranged in the form of a screen just chaotic movement over Canadian snows and is slightly puzzled.
Some works in the Japanese pavilion are also connected with nature. Yutaka Sone creates a sculpture 4 meters in diameter – the nonexistent “Island of the Double River,” on which all kinds of earthly landscapes are present: beaches, fjords, snowy mountain peaks, deserts, jungles, rivers, and caves. In the middle of the island are two waterfalls that intersect but do not merge, symbolizing the impossibility of union neither between individual people nor between Man and Nature. The naive pessimism of this work is only partially compensated by the possibility for those wishing to crawl over the imaginary island along a narrow bridge.
A completely different type of thinking was demonstrated by two artists representing Hungary this year – Andras Galik and Balint Havas. In their projects, they try to unexpectedly combine isolated worlds, institutions, political and cultural spheres. To create the project “Nefertiti,” they contacted Egyptologists from the Berlin Museum. After several months of negotiations, they managed to agree that for a few hours their created sculpture – a headless naked body – would be joined with the original bust of Nefertiti. The action resonated in the European press – the Egyptian archaeological community protested against the fact that the queen’s body was publicly presented naked. According to the authors, the representation of the body in contemporary art is one of the fundamental questions of human dignity and cultural traditions.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia presented a joint project “SuperStart” (Czech group “Camera Skura” and Slovak “Kunst-Fu”). The artists provoked the dominant sacred symbol of European civilization: in the middle of the pavilion, a huge figure of a gymnast hung on rings in the pose of the crucified Christ. On both sides, two video projections showed stadium stands where the audience expressed their emotions.
The German pavilion exhibited classic photographs by Candida Höfer from the series “Interiors,” color shots of deserted cultural spaces usually filled with people: theater stages, offices, restaurants, libraries. The classically cold concept and impeccable quality of the photo project were enlivened by Martin Kippenberger’s installation. Germany presented an artist who is no longer alive for the first time. “Ventilation Shaft” is part of his global project “World Metro,” where he previously built metro exits in different parts of the planet. For visitors standing on the ventilation grate, from which the sound of a passing train and wind blowing skirts and hair came, a complete illusion was created that a train passes every two minutes below the pavilion. In Venice, this absurd project sounded especially witty.
England was represented by the well-known Afro-English artist Chris Ofili, whose national affiliation was emphasized already in the title of each three-meter canvas: “Afro Ghost,” “Afro Love and Jealousy,” “Afro Sunrise.” The painting is done in red, black, and green tones – the official colors of the Pan-African flag adopted in 1920. Red means blood shed for freedom, black – nobility and belonging to the race, green – prosperity of the homeland. From a certain point, the artist made an aesthetic decision to use only these three colors. But the artist’s focus is not politics and ideology but the love story of a man and a woman among a lush primeval landscape resembling a sentimental kitschy paradise. To create a special atmosphere for perceiving the symbolic colors of this romantic painting, colored lighting was installed in the halls. In addition, the British pavilion underwent architectural changes for the first time: a monumental glass ceiling “Afro Kaleidoscope” was specially created, of course, in the same colors.
The USA also chose a Black artist to present the country this year. A surprising and even suspicious coincidence. Obviously, these countries now more than others need public demonstration of political correctness. But unlike Britain, whose project looked like a salon kitschy Afro-hymn, the American pavilion was full of meaning and energy, although kitsch dominated there too. Fred Wilson is a very famous and truly unique artist. It’s not that his work, like most African-American artists, is inseparable from ethnic and racial themes and issues of marginality. Wilson is best known for his complex installations whose meaning lies in interpreting diverse museum collections. He combines sculpture, painting, texts, ready-made objects, photography, audio, and video and creates a dialogue between objects. His projects are born from interest in a particular topic, fascinating and very serious research, usually inseparably linked to the place where they are realized. The impulse for the project “Black Venice” was the artist’s interest in the historical fate of Black Europeans. Venice, founded as a trade and cultural gateway between East and West, between the Muslim and Christian worlds, naturally stood out for ethnic diversity. Africans of Venice became the subject of specific research. His exhibition includes already finished works and objects – paintings by Venetian masters depicting Africans, lamps, door handles, and Murano glass in the form of Black figures. An opera aria from Otello plays as video. At the same time, he creates new objects. Large drops of black tears made of glass “flow” down the wall and lie on the floor. A huge box is tiled inside and outside with black and white tiles in a checkerboard pattern, over which black round mirrors are hung.
Unofficially, many experts recognized the national presentations of Israel and America as the best this year, but the winner was unexpectedly Luxembourg. National presentations and their evaluation are more a political than an aesthetic issue, both inside the country and for the international jury. Therefore, probably, the choice fell on a quiet tiny state with average, diluted Western art. The Luxembourg exhibition “Conditioned” presented works by artist Xu Mei Ce, for whom, as a former professional cellist, musical analogies are important. The project is elegantly absurd, competently cold, a concentrate of a distanced statement, easily perceived art that does not overload with information and does not require great intellectual and emotional effort.
The video projection “Desert Sweepers” resembles a moving bright advertising poster. Male figures in green uniforms of Paris street sweepers are digitally placed across the panoramic view of the desert, methodically sweeping it, gathering sand into small hills. According to the artist’s concept, the sound should not match what is happening on the screen. Therefore, the video is accompanied by the sound of plastic brooms rubbing against asphalt, recorded early in the morning on empty streets of Paris. The second video – “Echo” – is in the same vein: a small female figure with a cello against the backdrop of an idyllic landscape in the Swiss mountains periodically comes to life and freezes; first, a simple melody sounds, then an alpine echo responds. The installation room, where walls and ceiling are completely covered with many foam blocks of pyramidal shape (a contradiction between the softness of the material and aggressively pointed forms). In the next hall, three pairs of hourglasses mounted on the wall automatically turn over, counting “Personal Time.”
The author expresses gratitude to the International Renaissance Foundation and the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems of the Academy of Arts of Ukraine for the opportunity to work at the vernissage of the 50th Venice Biennale.
Read about Ukrainians – participants of the 50th Venice Biennale in the next issue of “PolitikHALL”.Link
