Nations Better Than Illuminations
Attending the Venice Biennale preview contains a healthy dose of masochism. How else can one explain the desire to push one’s way through dense art-crowd queues just to make it to the central exhibitions at the Arsenale and Giardini where 83 artists are exhibiting their works, while waiting in line in front of 89 national pavilions or attempting to find 37 collateral events scattered all over Venice!?
However, masochism aside, this year’s central exhibition undersigned by the Swiss curator Bice Curiger hasn’t justified the great expectations preceding her curator reputation.
Let’s start from the title: ILLUMInations. An apt name for an exhibition that wants to depict questioning ideas of national identities, the process of lighting or a purposeful metaphor for producing new meanings – all of which contemporary art production refers to on a regular basis. However, upon entering the central pavilion in the Giardini, Curiger’s idea rapidly fades as, in effect, there’s no meaningful theory that connects the allegedly “satirical” work of Maurizio Cattelan entitled “Tourists” (where 2.000 stuffed pigeons are placed on the pavilion’s roof posts), for example, with Tinttoreto’s work, situated in the central premises of the pavilion or even with the separated architectural structure by Monika Sosnowska.
*Maurizio Cattelan – Turisti
Still, with this curator concept that situated three masterpieces of a mannerist maestro of light and color, Bice Curiger nevertheless stirred up professional interest. In the lines fronting the exhibition pavilions and at resting-places, there was much talk about the meaning of Tintoretto’s masterpieces standing together with contemporary art productions. Are Tintoretto’s works attempting to erase the borders between contemporary and historic art production, does the re-contextualization of Tintoretto indicate a need to delve into historical topics, can Tintoretto’s master use of light technique be linked with the Biennale works that literally illuminate, such as the light works of Jamesa Turell or those that adopt historical works such as the “remake” of Giambologna’s “The Abduction of the Sabine Women” by the young Swiss Urs Fischer?
Be that as it may, sifting through the exhibition premises of the central Giardini pavilion or the exhibition situated in the Arsenals, the idea of illumination via art, or erasing national identity borders is fading away. Unfortunately, viewing the aforementioned Curiger’s exhibitions, it seems little more than as a passageway through an ambitiously envisioned fair of contemporary art. The exception in the curator concept is the intelligent idea of setting up a para-pavilion that actually justifies the notion of erasing the importance of nationality-based presentations. Thus the curator engaged the aforementioned Pole Monika Sosnowska, Austrian Franza Westa, China native Song Dong and American Oscar Tuazon to create architectural structures that are fast becoming a gathering place for a wide variety of artistic voices.
*Song Dong – ParaPavilion
It’s a rare occurrence at the Venice Biennale that the national pavilions overshadow the central curator exhibition. However, the 54th Venice Biennale brought on this very upheaval. The well-deserved award, the Golden Lion, for the best national participation has been awarded to the German Pavilion and the recently deceased artist Christoph Schlingensiefthat is, the curator Susanne Gaensheimer for the daring transformation of oppressive Nazi architecture in the German Pavilion into a theater set-up. Schlingensief was a popular provocateur and enfant terrible of the German theater and film scene, while a segment of his varied productions has been revived in the transformation of the national pavilion into an obscure church choir where the author’s films are shown while a parallel story of his disease is running.
*The German Pavillion – Christoph Schlingensief
The complete transformation of pavilion architecture is the work of Brit Mike Nelson. Upon entering his space/ambient entitled “I, Imposter”, you forget that you’re in the Venice Giardinis and are under the impression that you’ve just walked through a kind of star-gate portal carrying you into a caravan-saraj right out of the Turkish outskirts from the first half of the 20th century. You breathe in dust, stumble alongside shabby furniture, bend down so as to avoid the low roof beams of an ancient photo-laboratory. You become disgusted by the unusually cheap ugliness of the courtyard in this particular Turkish shelter (namely, the artist had the ceiling of the British pavilion removed so as to reconstruct the courtyard). Shocked by the intentional ugliness of the ambient, “a sculpture through which one can pass through” – as Nelson pointed out, you emerge happy to still be in Venice, concluding that this Biennale’s hit is the absolute transformation of the otherwise set pavilion architecture.
The otherwise annoying Thomas Hirschhorn with his work “Crystal of Resistance” used precisely this procedure at the Swiss pavilion. Renowned for his politically engaged installations and slightly predictable criticism of the late capitalist society and its associated economy, Hirschhorn outdid himself this time and presented a post-apocalyptic vision of something that sci-fi fans would call the crystal palace of Superman’s dad Jor-El following the atomic holocaust. Countless lines of cell phones have been carelessly taped together to plastic chair posts, while the whole pavilion, smothered in a horror-vacuum, has been lined with aluminum foil from which glass and crystal debris are hanging around, not caring about the visitors’ safety. Mutilated dolls and photos of cripples shot at recent battlefields can also be seen. The crystals, which in this case Hirschhorn uses as a metaphor for objects that “illuminate everything,” serve as the focal point of the whole ambient. Hirschhorn, as he states in his text for the Biennale catalogue, due to “loving their exquisite beauty” opens up in their universality. In a word – a frenzied and impressive pavilion.
The complete opposite, but equally interesting, is the cool and rational Danish presentation with the topic of freedom of speech. Thus the Danish present an exhibition in miniature form entitled “Speech Matters” which represents 18 international artists: from Jan Švankmajer’s animations to excellent photos of the young American photographer Taryn Simon. In addition to the exhibition at the national pavilion, the Danish project includes a series of public projects in Venice, along with numerous performances and events. The curator of the Danish national pavilion, Greek native Katerina Gregos decided to change the set appearance of the pavilion with the help of architect Tim Wendland. Dealing with extremely modest spatial (and financial) interventions he still managed to create intimate spaces where art works can be observed, emphasizing the great speakers corner on the roof of the pavilion.
As was the case with the last few editions of the Venice Biennale, it was important to stress the notion of the international, non-national significance of contemporary art. A strong critique of the nationality-based presentation was probably best conveyed by the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra at the 2003 Biennale when entrance to his exhibition at the Spanish pavilion was granted solely by showing a Spanish passport to the uniformed doormen. The Spaniards are no better this year, with the presentation of Dora Garcia’s project entitled “The Unsuitables”. Garcia organized a string of performances, lectures, monologues and discussions, actually a think-tank platform where she included the protagonists of the Italian art scene, all experts from marginalized or neglected fields with the following slogan: “It’s inappropriate for an artist to represent a nation, a nation is inappropriate for representing an artist.”
The paradigm shift in the notion of a national pavilion was also reinforced by the Polish commissioner Hanna Wroblewska who for the first time ever selected an artist who isn’t a Pole for the national Biennale presentation. Her selected artist is an Israeli/Dutch artist named Yael Bartana and her video trilogy is entitled “And Europe Will Be Stunned”, speaking out about the activities of the Jewish renaissance movement in Poland, that is, about contemporary xenophobia, anti-semitism as well collective national myths.
National mythology is also the theme of the USA’s pavilion with a visual attraction in front of the Pavilion entrance. A tank is set there, which instead of a dome carries a racing band where American racers are rotated, run by the tank’s tracks. But the paradox laying in the fact that: the tank stands still. While this idea is interesting while waiting to enter the pavilion, upon entrance the interior itself, where the works of the duo Allora-Calzadilla are presented, is somewhat disappointing.
*In front of the American pavilion *Allora-Calzadilla – Organs-ATM Machine
The Egyptian pavilion is also politically charged, presenting the work of the young artist Ahmed Basiony, who died in the Egyptian mutiny this January. The politics involved, although imbued with marketing inspiration, were glaringly obvious at every turn, especially the countless red canvas bags from which the face of the locked-up Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei stared back at us with the mandatory slogan “Free Ai Weiwei”, along with discussions on the possibility of not inviting China to the Venice Biennale or just simply deciding to boycott the Chinese pavilion. Even though it was presented under the notion of “creative experience”, the Italian pavilion presentation was also politically inclined, by the reactionary right-winger and Berlusconi’s art historian Vittorio Sgarbi, who jampacked the exhibition space with works from some two hundred Italian artists ranging from expressionist art to figurative sculptures – in any case, this nationality-based presenting mode can be avoided.
In lieu of a conclusion and without any trace of local patriotism, WHW’s project “Responsibility for Witnessed Events: Stories from a Negative Area” are a prime example of a high-quality project which, even though isn’t prone to excite “at first sight”, but tends to grow on one gradually, after having spent a certain amount of time in some eighty square meters, one becomes pulled in the story of the performance collective BADco where on small monitors, one’s recent history dovetails with the present time alongside works of the radical maverick Tomo Gotovac. Precisely this clash between the collective and individual creates a field of tension that in turn opens up an area for new observation experiences. Thus it seems that the decision of UniCredit Group’s Central and Eastern Europe Award for the best national presentation, in the amount of 150.00 Euro, has been misallocated. Namely, the award has been granted to the Serbian pavilion Dragoljub Raša Todosijevi* for the same old, same old take on various ideology symbolism with a return to creatively somewhat better past times with photos from his excellent early video “Was ist kunst.”
*Croatian Pavillion
*Serbian Pavillion
photographs: Tomislav Šmider
Leila Topić
