Art in America
September 2005 Issue
Venice Biennale: Be Careful What You Wish For.
By Marcia E. Vetrocq
Despite the unprecedented appointment of two women as visual-arts
directors, the 2005 Biennale is a cautious affair, marked by close
administrative oversight and curatorial temperance. More garden party
than free-for-all, the event just might leave some visitors nostalgic
for the undisciplined–and occasionally spectacular–displays of years
past.
After the satanic heat and Babylonian excess of the last Venice Biennale
preview, the survivors of 2003 sounded downright catechistic when
reciting their common hopes for this year’s edition: greater thematic
coherence, a more restrained roster of artists, shorter entry lines,
fewer on-your-feet screening marathons and–admittedly beyond
bureaucratic determination–less punishing temperatures in which to
tackle a citywide event that has become a test of time management and
physical endurance. Meteorological prayers were answered in full, but,
as if by the malign volition of a devil who corrupts each wish even as
he grants it, the desired clarity and numerical abstemiousness (91
artists in the international group shows compared to 380 in 2003) became
the attributes of an exhibition that is all but purged of risk and
surprise. Well-groomed, responsible and as eager to please as a new
suitor, the 2005 Venice Biennale serves up contemporary art (and some
less-than-contemporary art) that is market wise, celebrity conscious and
chary of offending. That the exhibition comes wrapped in a
self-satisfied mantle of better-late-than-never feminism is cause for
some dismay.
It’s necessary, of course, to distinguish between the presentations in
the national pavilions, which are determined by each participating
country, and the large international group shows, which are curated by
visual-arts directors appointed by the administrative board that
oversees the event. Yet throughout all the sections this year, there
prevails a reassuring air, attributable in part to the sheer familiarity
and even seniority of many of the participants. For example, four of the
national pavilions that claim a hefty share of the limelight are
showcasing high-profile artists age 60 or older, with Prance, Great
Britain, Spain and the U.S. presenting, respectively, works by Annette
Messager, Gilbert & George, Antoni Muntadas and Ed Ruscha that are
unlikely to arouse any controversy. An almost deferential atmosphere
permeates the two international shows as well, thanks to the relatively
high number of well-known (and some deceased) artists, and to the
inclusion of a fair number of works that have already garnered critical
attention.
For this outing, the visual-arts directorship saw its first joint
appointment, that of Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez, whose
nationality (Spanish) and gender (female) are likewise unprecedented in
the organization’s history. Installed in and outside the mazelike
Italian pavilion in the Giardini, de Corral’s show of 42 artists, “The
Experience of Art,” is dedicated to mapping the terra firma of art
today. The presence of Marlene Dumas, Gabriel Orozco, Rachel Whiteread,
Cildo Meireles, Dan Graham and other landmark figures is reasonable if
not stirring, while the inclusion of Francis Bacon, Philip Guston, Agnes
Martin and Juan Munoz arguably carries the enterprise too far into
retrospection. Martinez’s “Always a Little Further,” a presentation of
works by 49 individuals and teams that is intended to be the more
forward-looking of the two shows, occupies the expansive spaces of the
Arsenale, the past home of “Aperto,” “Utopia Station” and other edgy or
youthful manifestations. Yet Martinez’s roster inexplicably includes
Samuel Beckett and Louise Bourgeois–inspirational, yes,
up-to-the-minute, no–along with Jimmie Durham, Olafur Eliasson, Mona
Hatoum and others who might have easily been at home in de Corral’s
overview of contemporary art’s establishment.
Both group exhibitions include good works, but the overwhelming
impression is of a project of confirmation spiced with a bit of novelty,
rather like the audience-survey-driven programming of summer repertory
theater. Some of the responsibility for this pervasive caution, perhaps
the lion’s share, rests with Davide Croff, the current president of the
Biennale’s board [see “Front Page,” Oct. ’04]. Croft took the
step–previously the prerogative of the visual-arts director–of
articulating the Biennale’s prudent theme, which he then entrusted to de
Corral and Martinez. Moreover, for the first time the board named the
directors of two successive biennali, with Robert Storr’s appointment
for 2007 preempting a second outing by de Corral and Martinez. The board
further determined that Storr would be enlightened by the collected
wisdom of veteran biennial and Documenta curators and other high-profile
art professionals, a group of whom have been invited to Venice for a
summit in December.
One recalls past editions directed by Achille Bonito Oliva, Jean Clair
and Harald Szeemann as expressions of strong and compelling, though
certainly not infallible, curatorial vision. Francesco Bonami’s 2003
extravaganza, engorged and unfocused, seems to have been the last straw,
the Heaven’s Gate of biennali. The potential consequences of the
administration’s clipping the director’s wings and casting a net of
circumspection over all operations were nearly ignored in last summer’s
stir over the superficially radical step of appointing de Corral and
Martinez. But in truth, the designation of a woman or women to direct
the Biennale was so belated, the curators’ resumes are so long and
distinguished, and the outcome, after all, is so mainstream, that this
appointment really has caused no more of a ripple than, say, last year’s
casting of Denzel Washington in the wan remake of The Manchurian
Candidate: the public, as they say, was ready for it.
Grrrrrrl Power and (A Few) Bad Boys
De Corral and Martinez open each section of the international show with
an assertive graphic display: a digitally printed vinyl mural (called a
“wall tattoo” in the catalogue) by Barbara Kruger on the facade of the
Italian pavilion, and enormous posters by the Guerrilla Girls in the
Arsenale. Thus we enter, lashed by the irony of one (“YOU MAKE HISTORY
WHEN YOU DO BUSINESS”; “ADMIT NOTHING. BLAME EVERYONE”) and prodded by
the sarcasm of the others (“Where are the women artists of Venice?
Underneath the men”). Two ceiling-hung pieces by younger women follow
the works of the veteran feminists. Above the entrance foyer of the
Italian pavilion is suspended Monica Bonvicini’s Blind Shot (2004), a
menacing-looking but ultimately pointless jack hammer that cycles on
like a thunderous automatic weapon every two minutes or so. In the
Arsenale is Joana Vasconcelos’s The Bride (2001), an enormous teardrop
of a chandelier that proves, upon inspection, to be made of tampons
(14,000 of them) on a steel armature.
Contributing to the Biennale’s current of feminist triumphalism–the
title of Pilar Albarracin’s flamenco video, I Will Dance On Your Grave,
may say it best–are the unprecedented numerical strength of women
artists in both shows (less remarked upon is the equally dramatic spike
in the representation of artists from Iberia and Latin America) and the
awarding of three of the Biennale’s four Golden Lions to women artists.
Kruger received the award for lifetime achievement, and Annette
Messager, the first woman to represent France in Venice, was cited for
the outstanding national pavilion. The Golden Lions reserved for the
international show were apportioned between the two sections. Germany’s
Thomas Schutte, in de Corral’s survey, was recognized for his supremely
accomplished ensemble of framed engraved heads and pedestal-borne
metamorphic figures, the latter acquiring supplemental gravitas from the
adjacent hanging of Francis Bacon’s tortured anatomies. Regina Jose
Galindo, a Guatemalan artist from Martinez’s roster, was declared the
best participant under 35 for her viscerally political performance
videos.
As a feminist declaration, however, much of this feels more wishful and
nostalgic than pungent and present. Posters by the Guerrilla Girls, a
20-year-old collective (“fighting discrimination with facts, humor and
fake fur since 1985”) tick off a series of distressing statistics (fewer
than 40 of the roughly 1,240 artworks on view in six major museums of
Venice are by women; only 9 percent of the artists in the 1995 Biennale
were women). But it all seems like so much crabby shop talk when, far
from the spotlight, in the little pavilion of the Republic of Armenia in
Palazzo Zenobio, Diana Hakobian’s three-channel video, Logic of Power
(2005), offers an altogether more sobering and consequential-seeming set
of numbers about deaths resulting from illegal abortions, the depressed
level of women’s wages and the denial of higher education to women in
much of the world. While the Guerrilla Girls have updated their
iconography to include bimbo-of-the-moment Pamela Anderson and the
terror-alert color code system remade into an index of the Bush
administration’s hostility to women, their construction of the gender
problem nevertheless feels dated, and the humor has grown slack.
Is there something in the nature of triumph delayed that makes a bit of
slackness inevitable? Is it possible to match the initial jolt delivered
by Kruger, or by her sister text-messager Jenny Holzer, represented in
the Italian pavilion by a dramatic, Flavinesque corner piece? The punch
line of Vasconcelos’s feminine hygiene fixture seems like a small
“gotcha!” when one thinks of the shocking absorbent armory arrayed by
Judy Chicago in her 1972 Menstruation Bathroom for Womanhouse in L.A.
The videos of Galindo–whom we see shaving her body hair and striding
nude through town, walking through basins of blood and in close-up
footage of her hymenoplasty–strike one as too serf-consciously beholden
to Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta and Orlan. Meanwhile, in Runa Islam’s
film Be The First To See What You See As You See It (2004), the
affectless young woman who tentatively coaxes pieces of period china
(tired emblems of women’s domestic entrapment and presumed fragility)
off their platforms to a crash landing is a mere Stepford vandal
compared to the delirious slugger Pipilotti Rist, who demolished the
windows of parked cars with a long-stemmed red flower in an
unforgettable video in the 1997 Biennale. Even Eija-Liisa Ahtila, the
author of tart, tough minidramas probing the psychological and sexual
pressures that bear down on women and families, is represented in the
Italian pavilion by a cloying work, The Hour of Prayer (2005), a
four-screen projection in which a blonde Nordic beauty, grieving over
the death of her fluffy dog Luca, escapes to dusty, crowded Benin, where
the church bell-triggered barking of the lean local mutts becomes a
healing canine ritual.
With the curators showcasing women artists, you can’t resist searching
for constructions of gender in the works of the men they selected. For
example, William Kentridge’s installation in the Italian pavilion’s
elevated gallery is an affecting visualization of two realms of
enchantment–the intimate space of the studio and the vast reaches of
the Milky Way–that pays tribute to the early days of film-making.
Still, the presence in these projections of an elusive nude model/muse
and Kentridge’s imagining of the galaxy as great coiling spermlike
streams invoke the hoary erotic tradition of Courbet, Rodin and Matisse.
More overtly testosterone-fueled is Willie Doherty’s Non-Specific Threat
(2004), a looped game of chicken in which the camera circles an utterly
impassive yet stereotypically tough-looking man. It’s not clear whether
man or camera is the more predatory, since the menacing voiceover–“I
have contaminated you”; “You create me”–could be speaking for either.
Robin Rhode (who may owe something to fellow South African Kentridge for
his halting, low-tech method and incorporation of hand-drawn elements)
is perhaps the most evolved male in de Corral’s show, with his
PBS-friendy videos of children at play. Bruce Nauman remains the baddest
boy on the block with Shit in Your Hat–Head on a Chair, which offers a
thoroughly gratifying lesson in mime abuse. (Did de Corral reach back to
that work from 1990 merely because it’s in the collection of the
Fundacion “la Caixa,” which she directed from 1981 to ’91?)
Some highly caffeinated guy art can be found over at the Arsenale, too,
with John Bock’s obsessive-expulsive installation (the site of a preview
performance on the durable topos of taming a feral child) incorporating
athletic equipment, projectors and battered teddy bears, and the videos
of Blue Noses, a Moscow-based group whose unapologetically sexist antics
with naked girls, baguette phalluses and a mechanical alligator are
displayed on 12 monitors arranged face-up in a circle of cardboard
boxes. For a sharp behavioral alternative, C-prints, videos and garments
on mannequins capture the gender-bending outrageousness of performance
artist and super-size model Leigh Bowery. During the Biennale, Bowery
can be seen as painted by Lucian Freud in a retrospective at the Museo
Correr.
Fundamentally more tame and far too satisfied with its own leering
naughtiness is Francesco Vezzoli’s Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s
Caligula (2005), which is playing to packed houses in the Italian
pavilion. A steamy come-on for a fictional remake of the legendary smut
chestnut of 1979, the video features Helen Mirren and Adriana Asti (who
appeared in the original) hamming it up with Courtney Love, Karen Black,
Milla Jovovich, Benicio Del Toro, Barbara Bouchet and Vidal himself.
Notwithstanding long-term support received from the Fondazione Prada
(which organized the concurrent collateral show of Vezzoli’s work on
view at the Fondazione Cini), the artist turned to Donatella Versace for
costumes that are the last word in imperial glare. During the preview
days, only Candice Breitz’s videos, Mother and Father (both 2005), came
close to Vezzoli’s in audience draw, and they, too, feature Hollywood
actors and actresses, though the stars are not co-conspirators but
rather the digital raw material of highly edited sequences that mock the
cliches of family life.
Some Politics, Some Installations, Lots of Video
Compared to biennali past, you have to look hard in the Arsenale to
avoid concluding that the world is in pretty good shape, AIDS has been
cured and stability has been achieved in the world’s trouble spots. The
Guantanamo Initiative of Christoph Buchel and Gianni Motti (the latter
also one of four artists representing Switzerland) requires a small
detour to a shipping container parked outside the building. Launched
last year, the documentation-rich project calls upon the Castro
government–which does not recognize U.S. rights to Guantanamo and has
not cashed checks paid on the lease since 1959–to seize the base, with
its controversial military-run prison, and convert it into a cultural
center. For Palabras/Words (2005), within the Arsenale, the Cuban-born
Diango Hernandez arranges a tangle of wires and fallen electrical poles,
a symbol of failed planning and broken promises, through which we view a
projection of vintage news images and a scroll of the names of former
Communist-bloc nations and their leaders. Fidel Castro is the last
intransigent survivor of the lot.
If the Buchel-Motti initiative is quixotic, Emily Jacir’s Ramallah/New
York (2004-05), which juxtaposes footage of the ordinary activities of
small businesses in both cities, is, sad to say, altogether too
reasonable in its plea for mutual understanding. Meanwhile, Gregor
Schneider’s desire to construct a black cloth-draped, metal cubic
structure that resembles the Ka’ba, the centerpiece of Islam’s holiest
shrine in Mecca, is inexcusably naive. Wounded by the Biennale’s refusal
to back his plan (the administration not surprisingly concluded that the
piece, to be sited in the city’s congested tourist heartland, the Piazza
San Marco, could be offensive to Muslims), Schneider is showing a video
in the Arsenale with an animation of his proposal and an explication of
his soft-headed conviction that East and West can find common ground in
their shared preoccupation with simple formal elements (think Tony
Smith’s Die). Schneider seems rather more sulky than idealistic in the
Biennale catalogue, where his six alotted pages have been printed in
solid black.
Kidlat Tahimik, from the Philippines, and Sergio Vega, a Buenos
Aires-born and Gainesville-based artist, offer their own insights into
cultural difference. A favorite of film buffs, Tahimik’s The Perfumed
Nightmare (1977) follows the disillusionment of a young Filippino taxi
driver who dreams of traveling to the American paradise–Florida–to
become an astronaut. Transferred to video, the work is screened in the
Arsenale above an ad hoc installation that incorporates burned “relics”
from the artist’s fire-ravaged studio and some dubious artifacts–like
the statue of a “wind goddess” who faces a headless Marilyn Monroe
statuette with her skirt lifted by the draft from a subway grating–that
gently mock the equivalences people discern across cultures.
Referencing a different paradise, Vega’s hot-hued ensemble comprises a
number of individual objects, environments and photo-and-text-based
pieces that debunk–though not without affection–the centuries-old myth
of Brazil as a tropical paradise. Despite some discordant notes struck
by shantytown views with irate chickens and dogs, the installation is
wholly seductive, with inviting chairs, spongy floor cushions and bossa
nova grooves from vintage LPs. The environment is surely more relaxing
than the other participatory works by Brazil’s Rivane Neuenschwander,
who invites visitors to type wordless love letters on “modified”
typewriters; by the Centre of Attention, a London-based collective that
allows you to recline on a mortuary bier after you’ve scored your own
funeral with music downloaded from the Internet; and by Mariko Mori, who
has dusted off her brain wave interface pod for those in need of a quick
kip–by appointment only.