The Venice Biennale by Suzie Walshe

Going to the Venice bien­nale is like going shop­ping on Christ­mas Eve. You know it’s crazy, but it has to be done. The 52nd inter­na­tional Bien­nale “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind” invaded Venice this month occu­py­ing the Gia­r­dini Gar­dens, nearby Arse­nale and dozens of sites through out the city, and will con­tinue to do so until Novem­ber. The bien­nale is often described as the Olympics of the art world, so it is only nat­ural that, with so much to look at, there is some­thing for every­one. This year’s artis­tic direc­tor, Robert Storr, the for­mer senior cura­tor at the Museum of Mod­ern Art, made sure all of the bases were cov­ered.
The main site at the Gia­r­dini gar­dens was the Ital­ian pavil­ion. Ital­ian is a term that should be used loosely since the space was mainly filled with the likes of Nancy Spero, Sig­mar Polke, Louise Bour­geois, Bruce Nau­man and Ger­hard Richter.  Despite the un-Italian con­tent, the Ital­ian Pavil­ion show looked bet­ter than ever: it is a styl­ish, per­fectly con­structed exhi­bi­tion bring­ing new works by some of the best estab­lished artists together. Storr claims that, “It’s not about mas­ter­piece dis­plays. It’s about cre­at­ing tex­ture out of art, against which art can make more sense and mean more.”
After the Ital­ian pavil­ion, I check out the British, Ger­man and French pavil­ions, show­ing the Charlie’s Angels of the bien­ni­ale: Tracey Emin, Isa Gen­zken (whose work Oil gen­er­ated buzz by only allow­ing 25 peo­ple in at a time) and Sophie Calle.
Tracey Emin’s show was beau­ti­ful, pol­ished and ulti­mately inof­fen­sive, mak­ing it slightly dis­ap­point­ing. The Eng­lish artist, whose work is often skil­fully vul­gar, can­did and poignant all at the same time, has some of her grit. She deliv­ered her spread-legged draw­ings and con­fes­sional neons with a gloss and pol­ish that made the show seem more coher­ent than it actu­ally was. The title of the exhi­bi­tion, “Bor­rowed Light,” from an old Eng­lish paint color, was not the only thing bor­rowed in the exhi­bi­tion. Although beau­ti­ful, her attempts at expres­sion­ist fig­u­ra­tion looked as though they were done by an art stu­dent with an Abstract expres­sion­ist fix­a­tion. Cy Twombly, for instance, should remem­ber here that imi­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery.
Unfor­tu­nately for Emin, one of the best shows in the entire bien­nale was right next to hers. The French pavil­ion con­tained an amaz­ing sprawl­ing photo and text instal­la­tion called “Prenez Soin de Vous” (“Take Care of Your­self”) by Sophie Calle. Trans­form­ing the space into an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal per­for­mance piece, Calle asked 107 women to inter­pret a break-up let­ter she had received (and found incom­pre­hen­si­ble) from a man she had been involved with. The piece included videos by Feist, Peaches and Lau­rie Ander­son. One other woman trans­lated the let­ter into Latin while a psy­chol­o­gist took a hard look at it as well. As an actress acted the let­ter out, a singer also sang it, all while a crim­i­nol­o­gist ana­lyzed it. Each image and per­for­mance was grip­ping inde­pen­dently, but the scale of all of these together cre­ates a dynamism that could hold the view­ers’ atten­tion. With a sin­gle idea, Calle man­aged to make mul­ti­ple state­ments from a range of diverse peo­ple.
Jenny Holzer’s con­tri­bu­tion to the bien­nale, a room full of new paint­ings and blow-ups of cen­sored doc­u­ments, demon­strated a more suc­cess­ful redi­rec­tion in her work than Tracey Emin did. This work appears to marry her inter­est in text with a latter-day Neo-Expressionism, as she finally moves away from those tedious say­ings. The graphic gallery is full of evi­dence of the US military’s human rights vio­la­tions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The work is a defi­ant refu­ta­tion of the main­stream US media’s account of con­flict. Once again we are reminded, that wars are won and lost one vul­ner­a­ble and suf­fer­ing human body at a time. Many vis­i­tors to the bien­nale were struck also by a pow­er­ful wall of pen­cil por­traits based on pho­tographs of Amer­i­can vic­tims of the war in Iraq by the Amer­i­can artist Emily Prince. She began the project in 2004, rely­ing on the pho­tographs fam­ily mem­bers posted at a mil­i­tary web­site. Many peo­ple are already herald­ing this bien­nale as “the polit­i­cal one,” and this may def­i­nitely be true. With allu­sions to war, war and more war, it cer­tainly appears to be the dom­i­nant pre­oc­cu­pa­tion.
In the Arse­nale, this theme con­tin­ues with a raft of mostly younger artists exhibit­ing works of sim­i­lar polit­i­cal urgency and emo­tional res­o­nance. Among them is Ital­ian artist Paolo Canevari, who is show­ing an unset­tling pro­jec­tion of a scruffy youth kick­ing a rub­ber skull like a soc­cer ball around the rub­ble of the bombed-out ruins of Bel­grade.
The Arse­nale is usu­ally the liveli­est area of the bien­nale. This year the space felt leaden with war and the weight of artis­tic respon­si­bil­ity. One of the ironies of the bien­nale is that you walk from inside these gal­leries, where polit­i­cal and emo­tional trauma are so often the sub­ject of art, into the blaze of the Venet­ian after­noon, where priv­i­lege and indul­gence drips from every cor­ner and obliv­i­ous tourists eat over­priced pizza by the mouth­ful. Per­haps the polit­i­cal under­tone was inten­tional this year. Storr intended to give peo­ple “some­thing to think about other than the art world.” The mar­riage of pol­i­tics and art is noth­ing new of course, but this year reminders of death, war or forces beyond con­trol were every­where.
The Arse­nale is an aes­thetic marathon. Most of it becomes a blur, and only the fastest stand out. One of the high­lights at the Arse­nale was a four chan­nel video piece by Yang Zheny­hong in which a series of peo­ple of dif­fer­ent ages and from dif­fer­ent cul­tures and envi­ron­ments look at the cam­era and say the words “I will die.” The work was one of the more emo­tive pieces in the show. Halfway through the marathon is a major instal­la­tion by the Arte Povera stal­wart Giuseppe Penone that doesn’t dis­ap­point. Dubbed Scul­ture de Linfa, it includes two mas­sive tree trunks whose rough sur­faces have been method­i­cally cov­ered with leather, attached using tacks.
The biennale’s biggest dis­ap­point­ment was the African Pavil­ion. The African pavil­ion at the Arse­nale is sup­pos­edly the first show of African art at the bien­nale in its 112 years. But in the same way the Ital­ian Pavil­ion isn’t Ital­ian and the Ukrain­ian pavil­ion isn’t Ukrain­ian, the exhi­bi­tion hardly focused on black Africa. Most of the work comes from artists who are African-American (Jean-Michel Basquiat), white (Mar­lène Dumas), live in the Europe (Chris Ofili) or who are not by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion African at all (Andy Warhol).
The other national pavil­ions this year were also sig­nif­i­cant. In the US pavil­ion, Guggen­heim Museum cura­tor Nancy Spec­tor curated a dis­play of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS ten years ago. Sev­eral strings of 40-watt light bulbs hang in the entry­way, giv­ing off as much heat as light. The Korean pavil­ion was another pleas­ant sur­prise. Hyungkoo Lee’s fab­ri­cated fos­sil remains of Bugs Bunny, Tom, Jerry and oth­ers where som­brely pre­sented in glass con­tain­ers, as if on dis­play in a twisted nat­ural his­tory museum.
Once you have had enough of the Gia­r­dini and Arse­nale (this hap­pens sur­pris­ingly quickly) jump on a vaporetto and head up the canal to explore the pri­vately funded pavil­ions that are scat­tered across Venice, in all sorts of weird and won­der­ful sites. The main attrac­tions of the Bien­nale have become its venues, not its themes and ideas, as a result the most pop­u­lar venues are those usu­ally not suit­able for ‘Bien­nale art’. A must see is the Ukrain­ian pavil­ion, housed in the fad­ing grandeur of the Palazzo Papadopoli. The Ukraine may not be known for its art—more for rigged elec­tions and poi­soned presidents—but don’t let this put you off: the pavil­ion is one of the strongest in the Bien­nale.
The space and the work that occu­pies it, is with­out ques­tion the most thought­fully installed in the entire Bien­nale show; the con­trast of con­tem­po­rary video, instal­la­tion and pho­to­graphic work with the opu­lent and ornate sur­rounds was elec­tric. The show was an odd mix of four Ukrain­ian and four rel­a­tively high-profile West­ern artists all pre­sented work under the title “Poem of an Inland Sea.” Unex­pect­edly the artists from the Ukraine (Ser­hiy Bratkov, Alexan­der Hnil­it­sky and Lesia Zaiats and Boris Mikhailov) mixed well with the inter­na­tional artists that included Juer­gen Teller and Mark Titch­ner from the UK and Dzine Car­los­Rolon from the US. British artist Sam Taylor-Wood pre­sented 3 new films that seemed to get peo­ple talk­ing. ‘That White Rush’ the video that caused the most fuss shows is a young woman lying naked while a white swan decom­poses on top of her. But it was the fact that Taylor-Wood is even in the Ukrain­ian pavil­ion that raised the most eye­brows. She was cho­sen by Peter Doroshenko, who is in charge of the Baltic in Gateshead, Eng­land (where she had a major ret­ro­spec­tive last year) who has fam­ily links to Ukraine. He argues uncon­vinc­ingly that the Taylor-Woods work touches on Ukrain­ian iconog­ra­phy and sen­si­bil­i­ties.
Con­tin­u­ing the theme of Video (the hottest medium at the Bien­nale), Willie Doherty at the North­ern Ire­land Pavil­ion showed two older pieces, Clo­sure from 2005, Pas­sage from 2006, that com­pli­mented each other beau­ti­fully, and Ghost Story, com­mis­sioned for Venice. The new work is poetic and eerie as it moves between past and future, dis­parate mem­o­ries, dreams and pre­mo­ni­tions. Finally, if you have any patience, energy and time left Bill Vio­las ‘Ocean with­out a Shore’ at the 16th-century church in Campo San Gallo is a must. Ocean With­out a Shore presents a cycli­cal pro­gres­sion of images that describes a series of encoun­ters at the inter­sec­tion between life and death. Located near the Piazza San Marco the church of San Gallo was for­merly a pri­vate chapel, and Viola directly incor­po­rates its inter­nal archi­tec­ture into his piece, using the three exist­ing stone altars as video screens.
So, is it pos­si­ble to sum up the impres­sions of the mad­ness? –Prob­a­bly not. No mat­ter what the orga­niz­ers of the Bien­nale claim, it looks more like an immense fes­ti­val of con­tem­po­rary art, than a bien­nale orga­nized strictly accord­ing to the cura­tors’ plans. There is a cer­tain impres­sion that the Bien­nale still wants to intro­duce every per­son to con­tem­po­rary art. The Venice Bien­nale is still an event that always gal­va­nizes the art world; I’m just not sure how much it’s going to affect the rest of it.