The Venice Biennial is today a large, intermittent institution that organizes and manages film, art, architecture and dance exhibitions. The same pre-industrial spaces are used for different the events in different times, sometimes allowing for curious, interdisciplinary cross-references. The 53rd edition of the Art Biennial, directed by Daniel Birnbaum and visited by more than 375,000 people, was the latest edition of a series originally started in 1895. It curiously engaged in a postponed dialogue with the latest architecture Biennial, by virtue of the fact that the latter had taken place in the same spaces of the Venice Arsenale a few months before. Whilst the architecture show was dominated by a logic of temporariness and elasticity, the art exhibition boasted an attention to the scenarios we’re living in, looking at current political and environmental issues. Its main concern was to create space under the theme of “Making Worlds”. Some called this mission an escapist fantasy. Apparently, as architecture increasingly turns to an esoteric cult of the logarithm and to spectacular, photography-ready roof structures, artists are left freer to explore the actual material world and voice ideas and opinions through the manipulation of space.
This Biennial also continued a recent trend in providing representations of differences and of previously underrepresented parts of the world. Wales and Catalonia had their own pavilions on the island of Giudecca, while Scotland was represented by Martin Boyce, who created a set of seventeen installations under the title of “No Reflection” at Palazzo Pisani, near the Ponte di Rialto. Boyce had originally considered other spaces for his project, but eventually settled on this fifteenth-century construction because of its eerie atmosphere of decay, a mixture of past grandeur and an irregular, apparently irrational layout of spaces. Boyce used these spaces to create a collection of variations on the theme of man’s fear of not surviving himself. Brown leaves rustle along the rooms to unify the experience of visitors as they explore the spaces. But the leaves are blatantly artificial, made of paraffin-coated crepe paper and cut in angular, unnatural shapes. The rooms feature a number of metal works, which are shaped after familiar objects, but look abandoned or unusable. for instance, there is a metal bed with a metal pillow, in which only a metal person could sleep. All in all, one could imagine the installations as a vision of man-made environments after men have disappeared, as if after an environmental Armageddon.
The Palestinian pavilion was also located on the island of Giudecca, and it required, as the Welsh and Catalonian pavilions, a short vaporetto pilgrimage through the Venetian lagoon. It presented a mix of engagement and formalism, and artists successfully eschewed the easy aestheticisms and domestications of the West Bank Separation Wall seen often over the last few years. Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, the founders of the Decolonizing Architecture collective, based in Beit Sahour, Palestinian territories, presented their “Ramallah Syndrome”: an enclosed, darkened space, where one could listen to recorded oral testimonies from Palestine and physically perceive the oppression. Other artists included Emily Jacir, Khalil Rabah, Jawad Al Mahli, Shadi AbibHallah, and Taysir Batniji, who used used video and photography combined with installation to research concepts like construction/destruction, cultural erasure and marginalization. On the other hand, the debut of the African pavilion, supervised by curator Robert Storr, was very colourful, lively yet easily forgotten: the audience was given what they expected from “Africa”: myths of good savages, true colours, crude oil, human warmth, thongs, globalisation, animism, optimism, and so forth.
The national pavilions are located in the gardens of the Biennale. These spaces are also featured in their off-season blankness in a video by artist Steve McQueen (Giardini), who represented England at the event. Visiting the national pavilion, where each and every country tried to project an idealized image of itself, one was able to perceive the continuous, consistent retreat of many artists from the notion of art as the most appropriate medium to convey notions difficult or impossible to express otherwise, the sublime. This was especially true for the European artists. Figurativism and pseudorealism were the main codes used by artists who created work so involved with the contemporary world and its values, that this work is deemed to fade away with it. The transnational Danish-Nordic Pavilion was an interesting example. People diligently queued hours to enter and admire a flashy space designed as a catharsis for a culturally ambitious middle-class audience. The multi-installation, called “The Collectors”, featured works by artists of several background, including Italy’s Maurizio Cattelan.and imitated a posh house, destabilized by cute interventions such as an automaton-like chambermaid, a melted armchair, a dining table split in two and other neo-surrealist artefacts characterized by a wit that can well charm the occasional viewer, but that also, ultimately, disempowers art by presenting it as something unusual, flamboyant, or simply weird – as if leaving most space blank on a page could make any piece of prose into a poem.
Some works by Brazilian artists in the Arsenale building demonstrated a radically different approach. The language adopted by artists such as Sara Ramo or Renata Lucas was universal in its formalism and conceptualism, and successful in creating alternative times and spaces. Often, the terms used to describe their work include reduction and essence. However, cutting a board out of the wooden floor to expose the raw concrete underneath – as Renata Lucas did – is nothing essential or minimal: all the way round, it dramatically created a new space, polydimensional in its depth and bidimensional in the game of references to the very floor people set their feet on. These interventions in space and time were powerful dismissals of a geo/egocentrism still dwelling in our minds centuries after Copernicus. This was real world-making, this was baroque: a brutal reshuffling of planes that left the audience unsettled because they could feel stranded, castaway like a drifting planet brutally removed from its fixed spot at the centre of the universe. This baroque was even more convincing because it utilized the very tool that should eradicate it – the Cartesian grid – to its own advantage.
On the day of the opening a still sprightly Michelangelo Pistoletto hinted at some kind of beyond by methodically smashing several tall mirrors in his installation at the entrance of the Arsenale complex. However accustomed to similar acts, the audience’s enthusiasm was stirred by the desperate gesture. Someone noticed that the mirrors were placed in heavily decorated, golden-leaf wooden frames. This certainly was a hint at the intimidating taste of the petty bourgeoisie, which usually favours cumbersome testimonies of past grandeur. The broken mirrors, however, then stayed in the lovely frames for five months until the closing of the Biennial, providing a tragic metaphor of fate and place of much “controversial” art in society today.
Photos: © Gabriele Oropallo, 2009.