LIVE FROM THE 55TH VENICE BIENNALE

Each iteration of the Venice Biennale has a curator or curators select a theme, and assemble artworks in a large exhibition that is the centerpiece of the event. Other participants – the artists and curators of the many national pavilions and “collateral events” – can decide to ride with that theme, or ignore it. In recent years, the themes (“Making Worlds,” “Always a Little Further”) have been sufficiently vague that people could say they were following it without actually having to do much about it.

This year, curator Massimiliano Gioni’s theme of “The Encyclopedic Palace” has been taken to heart by many artists. In an earlier post, we described how the main exhibition has a strong museum feel to it, accentuated by the relentless use of multiples – dozens of these, hundreds of those. The limitations of depending on the multiple that we see in the Encyclopedic Palace extends to those national pavilions that respond to the siren call of enumeration. Hungarian Zsolt Asztalos presented a collection of unexploded bombs with the heartwarming idea that these tools of death are really gifts -- “manifestations of a state of grace” because they did not explode, did not take lives. But we don’t need 30 of them to make the point.

As if in response to this over-emphasis on multiples, Czech Republic artist Petra Feriancova presents groupings of things in ways that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to interact with them. Large photocopies are curled up under a glass table; objects are placed on shelves reaching to the ceiling, far beyond the visitor’s gaze; and a set of framed photographs lined up on the floor tempt but ultimately thwart the viewer’s desire to flip through them -- all reminders that encyclopedic depth does not guarantee useful communication.

Collecting and organizing -- crucial elements of the ordering function of the encyclopedia – were embraced as design principles by several artists. The Finland pavilion showed the work of Antti Laitinen, who stripped the trees, undergrowth and soil from a section of woods, then spent 5 months sorting the constituent materials (bark, earth, roots). It seemed as though the trees were being punished for having one of their brethren fall on the Pavilion in 2011.

American artist Sarah Sze filled the U. S. Pavilion with materials both hand- and machine-made. These were brought together using tools from the local hardware store acting as both literal means of binding – lots of clamps of various types -- and as an analogy to the process of accumulation. Like the “outsider” artists in Gioni’s Encyclopedic Palace, Sze hopes the elaboration of minutiae builds to a greater whole. But lacking hierarchy, focus, or compelling structure, her assemblages do not transcend the materials of which they are made. They seem to be models for a larger work – you want to walk through these constructions, but instead you are looking down at them.

The presumed seriousness of all this cataloguing is nicely overturned by the humor of Serbian artist Vladimir Peric, whose long line of camera-case “animals” are the funniest works in the entire Biennale.

A second theme across several pavilions is the Biennale itself. Art about the Biennale, or about Venice, is a longstanding trope, and gets quite a workout this year. Romania’s “An immaterial retrospective of the Venice Biennale” has actors re-enacting themes from previous Biennales, including reciting documents from the Biennale archives (we heard Sophie Calle’s “Dear Jane” letter from the 2007 French pavilion); Lara Almarcegui (filling the Spanish pavilion with glass, earth, and bricks in proportion that these materials comprised the buildings’ construction); and Chilean Alfredo Jaar’s Venezia, Venezia (a scale model of all the pavilions in the Giardini, that rises from and sinks back into a pool of water). Are we to read these as critiques of the national pavilion system? This issue is dead. It has been undercut in so many ways and by so many countries (think Germany and France swapping their pavilions this year) that an artist who comes to the Biennale and only comments on the venue is wasting an opportunity to address more important issues.

Far better to engage the dynamic of the Biennale, or the city, as a locus of international attention. Lawrence Weiner’s phrase “The Grace of a Gesture” reproduced in multiple languages on the Grand Canal vaporetti; or the Maldives offering several artists’ take on climate change – comparing Venice’s sinking to their island nation’s threatened disappearance from rising sea levels -- in a thoughtful and varied installation that marks the country’s first appearance at the Biennale.

The strongest installations are the official representation of Greece and the collateral event by Catalonia; their responsiveness to current economic crises ensures a focused treatment.

Francesc Torres’s 25% documents the lives of eight unemployed Catalans (25% of the province is out of work). Each was invited to select a personal item from home, and a work of art from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Their visits to the museum, and discussion of why they chose the work they did, were filmed by Mercedes Alvarez. The installation consisted of large photographs of each of the eight, with their chosen objects and the film, and a brief biography. Together these create strong multi-dimensional portraits of contemporary Europeans in distress, and offer an interesting lesson in the potential poetics of contemporary art – how works by such luminaries as Hans Haacke, Perejaume, and Esther Ferrer can become tools for coming to grips with disheartening circumstances, even by those untrained in the language of art appreciation.

History Zero by Stefanos Tsivopoulos (Greece) combines didactic panels describing a variety of non-traditional economic tools (alternative currencies from beer cans to bitcoins; barter systems; time banks) with a three-part video narrative that celebrates non-monetary approaches to value. Here, an immigrant scrap metal collector, a young artist seeking inspiration from walks in the city, and an elderly art collector who, suffering from dementia, makes origami flowers from 500 Euro banknotes (and throws them away when they begin to look tired) are linked when the immigrant finds the discarded money and abandons his cart of detritus, which the artist takes home as the kernel of his next project – perhaps one he will offer to the elderly collector as a new work of art. The story shares with the homegrown exchange systems an optimism about human interaction that transcends formal capital structures.

That desire to interact with others also underpins Kata Mijatovic’s Between the Sky and Earth. The Croatian artist is constructing an Archive of Dreams, and you are invited to participate by submitting a dream online (at arhivsnova.hr). The project depends on telling others our dreams as a kind of currency, one that facilitates the exchange of interiorized values.

Lastly, Russia’s Vadim Zakharov’s Danaë presents a literal Deus ex Machina: the myth of Danaë is reduced to the mechanical as a conveyor belt lifts the golden coins to a machine that showers them down onto umbrella-shielded visitors. One watches this while kneeling on prie-dieux and looking over a railing, conflating di sotto in sù Baroque ceiling painting with worshipping at the altar of mammon. File this one under heavy irony.

As different as these four works are, they share a refreshing re-engagement with story telling. Narrative too, we are reminded, is a means of exchange that depends upon and celebrates shared experience.


Reporting from the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale diVenezia, Preston Thayer and Marjorie Och.