Okay, So What of the Art?
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Okay, so what of the art? It has to be said, again, that the structure of the Venice Biennale is extremely weird and highly distorted if taken as a reflection of the world. And the awards given out on June 6 only reinforced the fiction. Bruce Nauman, again? Tobias Rehberger for kitting out a cafeteria? However much one respects Nauman’s work, these are bland, insular and rather establishment art-world choices. After seeing so much more that challenged rather than pleased (and ignored the unstated imperatives to float the Venetian economy by renting out vast amounts of real estate – Nauman’s three-venue display – or beautifying the biennale’s retail assets) I hoped for more daring selections, and, no problem, I’ll say it, more political positions.
For me, the best national pavilion by far was Mexico’s “What Else Could We Talk About?” Featuring a chilling series of works by Teresa Margolles and curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, the exhibition trounced all the mild-mannered anxiety about national representation and the self-conscious hand-wringing about putting on a good face that was elsewhere in evidence, particularly in shows associated with peripheral locations and/or third world situations. Margolles brought the blood and filth of Mexico’s surging crime wave and literally mopped the floor with it, smearing a dilapidated Venetian palazzo with the residue of execution-style murders. The stench was unmistakable. The somber installation, which pulled visitors through a series of seemingly bare but critically contaminated rooms, was highly effective and haunting.
An assistant mopping the floor of the Palazzo Rota Ivancich in Castello, part of Teresa Margolles’s What Else Could We Talk About? for the Mexico pavilion, curated by Cuauhtemoc Medina.
Margolles’ work offers a damning critique of a situation specific to Mexico (where the level of violence related to drug trafficking has now surpassed that of numerous war zones). But it also articulates a condition that is becoming increasingly common in the world (where globalization substitutes access to consumer goods for social justice and in the process perpetuates criminality, violence and low-grade wars without end). According to Medina, “We needed to look squarely at the intimate relations that actually exist between the universal triumph of capitalism-cum-electoral democracy, and the laissez-faire of violence.” Rather than presenting an idealized image of a state or showing off the unabashed sophistication of an art scene, Margolles and Medina used the space and time of the pavilion to take a position. It was a ballsy move. It took substantial risks (it could, of course, be interpreted as emotionally manipulative). But for me, it worked, and it gave rise to tougher, more trenchant thoughts and ideas than any other exhibition in the biennale sprawl.
A detail from Ahmet Ogut’s Exploded City, exhibited in a temporary structure for the Turkish pavilion, curated by Basak Senova.
Other works of note? The Turkish pavilion, featuring Banu Cennetoglu’s Catalog and Ahmet Ögüt’s Exploded City, also used the fact of the biennale to formulate fresh ideas about violence, memory, history, narrative and urban experience. I wanted to hate Fiona Tan’s split-screen video installation, Disorient, in the Dutch pavilion, but I found myself quite seriously enchanted by her audio-visual reworking of Marco Polo’s The Travels, known skeptically as il milione (the million) to suggest that his adventures were so numerous that much of them must be lies. Both the Turkish and Dutch pavilions took some initial inspiration from Italo Calvino’s masterful novel Invisible Cities and ran surprisingly far with it.
In “Palestine c/o Venice,” special mention goes to Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti for their remarkable sound installation Ramallah Syndrome. Rarely do sound installations make any sense of their spatial dimensions but this work demands that you enter a small, dark room, so that once you close the door, your eyes adjust and you feel the sense of enclosure, being surrounded by grey walls and overwhelmed by the voices and sounds that are expertly mixed into a complex and uncompromising soundtrack of occupation. The piece shifts with great linguistic dexterity between notions of normal, normality, normalcy and normalization, and mulls over the political implications of them all.
Shezad Dawood’s neon sculpture Triple Negation Chandelier (White), from 2008, on view in East-West Divan, curated by Jemima Montagu for Turquoise Mountain.
A still from Jumana Emil Abboud’s 4-minute video animation The Diver, from 2004, on view in Daniel Birnbaum’s exhibition “Making Worlds.”
Other highlights: Turquoise Mountain’s “East-West Divan,” a show of contemporary art from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan; Paul Chan’s horrific shadow-projection Sade for Sade’s Sake (in Daniel Birnbaum’s “Making Worlds,” check the catalogue description: “sex enmeshed with freedom, violence wrapped up with reason, art entangled in it all”); Jumana Emil Abboud’s gorgeously collaged and unflinchingly emotive animation The Diver; and Tomas Saraceno’s lusciously formalist room-size sculpture, Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web.
A rendering of what Emily Jacir’s stazione would have looked like had it gone ahead.
Disappointments: Why was Emily Jacir’s project stazione – a terrific study of how Arabic language, literature, culture, craftsmanship and scientific thinking filtered through and enriched the history of Venice, which was conceived as a city-wide intervention that would merely affix Arabic names to vaporetti stations – cancelled at the last minute and reduced to a mere booklet? Why did the Lebanese pavilion fail to rematerialize after its inauguration is 2007? Why is the Syrian pavilion simply a showcase for a bunch of bad Italian painters? Why is the Morocco pavilion always so terrible? What’s up with the real-estate ads in the ADACH exhibition? So many questions and no time yet for answers.
The Interns Are Revolting
By Tom Morton
Stepping out of a private viewing of the Francesco Bonami-curated show ‘Mapping the Studio’ at Francois Pinault’s new stately pleasure dome at the Punta della Dogana (a collection of slickly impressive big ticket items by the usual Pinault suspects, plus some great recent work by young American Matthew Day Jackson), I chanced upon what could only be described as a boarding party. Roaring off a flotilla of small boats, a group of black-clad, pirate flag-waving, Mexican wrestler-mask-wearing twenty-somethings leapt on to the Dogana’s quayside, and attempted to storm the (hastily locked) gallery spaces, around which a posse of Pinault’s security guards put up an ad hoc fence. Cue much banner waving, shouted imprecations, and finally an almighty push from the excitable youth, breaking through the barricade, and sending a couple of the hired goons sprawling. These fresh-faced demonstrators described themselves in the pamphlets (charmingly headlined ‘THIS IS NOT A PERFORMANCE!’) they handed out to the VIPs and press outside the venue as: ‘Precarious workers, trainees, students [...] cultural mediators at Punta della Dogana, that is students working for free in the didactics [...] workers of the cooperatives at the Civic Musuems, with no certainty about the stability of our wage [...] temporary workers at the Biennale, forced to a non-remunerated training of two weeks with no guarantee of being employed’. As I watched them gambol in front of the Dogana’s locked doors, dodging the enthusiastic swipes of the security guards, and the half-hearted tickings-off of the Carabinieri, I realised I had just witnessed my first ever intern riot.
A demonstration by interns is not, of course, without its comic potential (’What do we want?’ ‘The right to unremunerated labour, and the vague hope of a low-paid job in the contemporary arts sector at some indeterminate point in the future’ ‘When do we want it?’ ‘Now!’), but the Dogana pirates succeeded in pointing, in their ramshackle way, to something many of us know but choose to ignore: events like the Venice Biennale are built on foundations every bit as precarious as those of the city of Venice itself.
EITHER I PARTY OR I BLOG OR I SEE SOME ART. SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE
By Shumon Basar
I’ve been chastised - quite rightly - by my Bidouny bosses for not posting, well, anything at all, while I was out in Venice. In the relative comfort - and non-woosiness - of my London home I can try and rectify this, retrospectively. Before I spew out some pithy one-liners (and there WILL be some one-liners, about one-liners, conveniently) about what I saw, I have to expand (and thus justify!) on the lack of blagging, I mean, blogging.
Anyone who has been to the Vernissage days at Venice will know that, to put it in brutal-truth terms, trying to see “the art” actually gets in the way of all the other things you’re really there to do: reunite with friends youve not seen for anywhere between a day to a year, forumulate small-talk with strangers, wonder which parties you’ll try and gatecrash that evening, and squirm about all the art you’ve missed seeing so far.
Anotnia Carver tweets Bidoun
If you add to that the necessity to ‘blog’ what you’re seeing (or more accurately, not seeing), everything gets even more woosy than a woosy ride on a choppy vaperetto. Many pointed out that this was perhaps the “first Twitter Biennale” - and certainly friends of mine were feverishly twittering away with graceful one-line insights and put-downs that in my opinion maybe make the ‘blog’ somewhat redundant in this context.
Suddenly there is something even shorter, terser, more direct than the blog - which used to be the polar opposite to the studied, slow print review that will come out a month or three after the event itself (of course I’m excluding newspaper reports - they are the blogs of the print-world).
The blog is thus rendered neither short enough to be short (Twitter’s stolen that accolade) nor long enough to be in-depth (cue Artforum et al just as the sheen in the Arsenale has totally worn off and the Steve McQueen-esque dereliction of Venice sets in, ferile greyhounds included).
All this probably sounds like lame-oh excuse making for not doing what I had been charged to do while out there between the straw hats, Ray Bans and prosecco.
Speaking of which. I’d better write my first proper blog now …
Castles Made of Sand
By Xerxes Cook
Seeing as the medieval city of Venice suffers from a serious lack of Wi-Fi, I’ve taken advantage of the British Council’s generous offer to blog from the basement of the British Pavilion today in lieu of the sweltering Rialto internet cafe.
Leaving the heaving tourist trap, I headed across the Grand Canal yesterday afternoon to visit the Ukraine Pavilion. In keeping with the last installment’s proposition to collaborate with artists from outside of the country, this year’s exhibition, titled ‘Steppes of Dreams,’ brings together an artist that was once a fashion designer, Ilya Chichkan, and the Japanese fashion designer Mihara Yasuhiro. But why stop there? This year’s guest curator is none other than Wladimir Klitschko, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world! With such a motley crew assembled, the hope, said the organizers, was to create a film set without a camera – or an “atmosphere in which we are all characters in our own movie,” as Yasuhiro put it. The windows of Palazzo Papadopoli’s ornate gold-covered ballrooms have been blacked out, and in place, illumination emerges from Chichkan’s dimmed multicolored electric candles on the chandeliers. Two mechanized sculptures by Yasuhiro – one of a paintbrush levered to attack a dress, the other of a wooden robot riding a unicycle – are placed in the smaller, dimmed rooms and every so often a model roller-skates past serenely, her shadow recalling a dream sequence of Kubrickesque proportions. It’s an impressive display, one that would have been even more surreal if Chichkan’s original idea of having Klitschko on rollerskates delivering punches took place – and only the second time a fashion designer has represented a country in the biennale’s history (see Hussein Chalayan last year for Turkey).
Later on in the afternoon in the Giardini, tables of salami and sandwiches attracted a sizeable crowd to the Russian Pavilion, where visitors could see ‘Victory over the Sun,’ an exhibition taking its title from a 1913 opera in which Malevich conjured up the notion of Suprematism while preparing the set design. The opera, written in Zaum, a “transrational language” created by Alexei Khrushcenykh, provides the platform for Andrei Molodkin’s “Wings of Thrace” sculptures fashioned from Chechen oil and blood drawn from that province’s war. Still, the highlight is undoubtedly Pavel Pepperstein’s illustrations of landscapes of the future – “The Arch of Buddha in Jerusalem, 2904,” “Artificial Clouds 3451,” and “The Period of Eternal Dome 6556 – 7006,” – set to a soundtrack of the stoned artist rapping in English about contemporary art over Stravinsky.
Nearby is Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi’s twenty-foot tall black and white photographs titled Windswept Old Women, featuring screaming banshees with huge, sagging breasts swinging over their shoulders. Also nearby is the infamous joint Danish and Nordic Pavilion, entitled ‘The Collectors,’ by Elmsgreen and Dragset. With work from twenty-one predominantly gay artists evoking the feel of the kind of modernist home Hollywood anti-heroes usually inhabit, the couple’s sculpture of a middle age male face down in a swimming pool outside the pavilion tells the story of a suicide, and sits alongside contributions by the likes of Terence Koh, Wolfgang Tillmans, and William E. Jones.
A huge cheer inaugurated the opening of Steve McQueen’s British Pavilion – the comradery typical of the affection with which the country’s art press regard the Cannes award winner. I got around to seeing his thirty minute film Giardini (about the public gardens in the Castello district of Venice that have housed the biennale since 1895) at about 6pm, a perfect time to take off the now packed biennale bag and rest my feet and my shoulders. In honor of this biennale being the first event of its kind to have been covered by Twitter – perhaps the perfect medium for gossip, I present some thoughts that came to me while watching McQueen’s ethereal and characteristically visually stunning short film:
Clichés of painting with light have never rung more true.
The best bag of the biennale has to be Yoko Ono’s nipples, celebrating her Anton’s World exhibition at the Palazzetto Tito.
If only hitting the return bar didn’t take away your allotted characters, “tweeting” in haiku would be uber cool.
The art world is lagging behind the fashion world in terms of waste. No matter how discerning your hands, it’s impossible not to finish the day with a bag full of leaflets, free newspapers, press releases that will never see the light of day ever again. USB sticks next time please, or even better, a magnetic swiping thing that they use on public transport for your iPhones.
The fauna of Giardini is quite unsettling – packs of black hounds roam the pavilions at night, camouflaged spiders stalk the steps – and the pavilions take on a spooky, melancholic tone.
The high tide does strange things to the toilets of Venice.
I know a bursting British socialite that only narrowly missed pissing on a Gavin Turk sculpture last night upstairs at the Distortion exhibition.
Video art of this ilk - static camera shots focusing on detail, and slow, rhythmic editing – really allows the mind to wander. It’s all very therapeutic.
Heading back into town, the sun set over Bidoun’s elegant soirée as the water of the Grand Canal lapped at the feet of partygoers nibbling on California rolls. I headed to the Palazzo Papadopoli for the Ukrainian party, where to everyone’s delight and surprise, Verka Serduchka, the mirrored transvestite disco troupe that represented Ukraine at the Eurovision song contest in 2007, performed the classic “Eins, Zwei…seiben sieben tanzen!” and other marvels of her twisted imagination. I hitched a lift with Jay Jopling and company, heading to the disused Art Deco airport on the Lido for Elmsgreen & Dragset’s party. Artist Matthew Stone and The Lovely Jonjo from London spun swishy Italo Disco and electro to a crowd who had hit their second wind and were dancing with force – it was a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in the outdoor arenas of Rimini. It could have, and probably did go on all evening, but no night in Venice is complete without a visit to the Bauer’s courtyard for a nightcap, so I share a taxi with a smiley blonde Venetian princess for a one last glass of prosecco before getting to bed at 5 am. To paraphrase Albert Camus: nothing’s going to get better beyond then but sleep and sunrise.
Hangover: 8/10
Hours of Sleep: 6
Adachflachcach
By Antonia Carver
Opening of UAE National Pavilion
Who’d have thought it? Last night belonged to the UAE in the grand Venice party stakes but it was Abu Dhabi that rocked out, while the UAE, led by Dubai and Sharjah-based artists, gallerists and collectors, went all classy on us with a dinner at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. In the world of international socialites, it’s Dubai that’s usually the hot news from the UAE — with its leopard-print-adorned Roberto Cavalli clubs at home, and extravaganzas abroad such as filling a street in Toronto with camels and belly dancers for a party for the Dubai Film Fest; here, the UAE defied expectation by delivering a power dinner on the beautiful roof terrace and in the garden of the chichiest venue in Venice. I suspect the ever-poised academic Dr. Lamees Hamdan, commissioner of the pavilion, had a hand in this. Her soothing narration of the knowing audio guide to the UAE National Pavilion, scripted by Shumon Basar, has been giving the toughest critics hot flushes.
Boats then shipped off the guests across the canale di san marco to the garden of the Arsenale for the ADACH bash. Abu Dhabi had splashed its cash wisely in the direction of Mourad Mazouz, owner of Momo and Sketch, Bidoun pal, and party organizer extraordinaire. He’d decked out this corner of Old Europe in his trademark Oriental-chic, screening 1970s Egyptian movies up against the boat building yards and entertaining the masses in Bedu tents. Prosecco? No, prego. Solo champagne. DJs were imported from London and New York but it was Beiruti and Scrambled Eggs frontman Charbel’s homespun playing-of-records that had the Dubai crowd, Palestine Pavilion pals, and international amigos bouncing on the dancefloor. Abu Dhabi provides the champagne, but Dubai and Sharjah can dance.
Show me the love
By Antonia Carver
Situated slapbang between Britain, France and Germany, the grandes dames of the giardini, lies the Iraq pavilion. Milan-based artist Kadhum sits beneath an ash tree with a sign declaring his need for love. Refreshingly, this appears to have little to do with his birthplace’s rather urgent need for love and a whole lot more, but “the deafening cry … For love, love, love” upon which “were born religions, novels were written and billions of words wasted.” Visitors can choose to donate from a prescribed list, which includes hugs, kisses, sex, money or your life, and also hand over additional objects if they choose. The results of this survey of giving will be on www.artnow.it as of next week. Bidoun donated a copy of Issue 17, one of the ones perfumed by Shigenobu, no less, plus a prudish handshake.
Paul McCarthy — Bear and Rabbit in a Rock
By Xerxes Cook
Paul McCarthy - Bear and Rabbit in a Rock
Battle of the Totes
By Antonia Carver
Pavilion Olympics are also played out via the Battle of the Totes. While some countries attempt to go non-canvas — China is presenting a Carrefour-style plastic number — the tote bag remains resolutely standard at all art events with global pretensions. Even the most biennale-weary appear to gather them in; arthackpack homes presumably contain vast stockpiles of the things and surely a tote bag installation (succinctly commenting on nationalism, consumerism, market etc) is due. So let’s play tote bag bingo, shall we? So far, in the lead is Yoko Ono’s bag for ‘Making Worlds,’ and the black number with white scrawly artist’s capitals from the Dane-Nord combo pavilion which says ‘f*ck’ on it somewhere so it must be cool. Winner of the Audience Award may be the UAE National Pavilion bag, sported by everyone and their dog and their baby. Apparently, tote bags are the last remaining corner of the art world where swear-words, nudity and maybe even Arabic are kinda risque. Nil points for Vienna’s red plastic bag.
UAE groupies auditioning for the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ boyband
Three words: shoulder, interesting, burn.
Sheikhly Scrums
By Antonia Carver
Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan arrives at the ADACH platform for Venice
Photo: Alia Al Shamsi
Venice is of course a battle of national showcasing. Germany (wants to say that it) is now so at ease with itself that it doesn’t even need to show a homegrown artist. The country has selected New York-based Brit Liam Gillick. The British Pavilion, part of the European triumvirate of got-here-first, glory-days-of-the-1900s (the others are Germany and France) that head up the Giardini, is showing a new film by Steve McQueen, but only fifty people are admitted each hour, meaning the exhibition is fully booked by 10 am each morning.
The UAE, the first Gulf state to show in the Biennale, has arrived with aplomb, and with two representations: the national pavilion, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr, and a separate Abu Dhabi-run ‘ADACH platform for Venice’ exhibition, curated by Catherine David. A more considered review of these exhibitions will be posted here in the next few days, but both seem to have attracted a good deal of attention, although many Biennale visitors appear to be somewhat confused by the double-header. (Overheard in the ADACH show: “Well, I guess Spain has its national pavilion and something separate from Catalonia.” “Is Abu Dhabi fighting for its independence?” Err, not exactly.)
Lamya Gargash’s Familial at UAE National Pavilion
While the national pavilion is funded by the Emirates Foundation and endorsed by the federal minister, the featured artist is the Dubai-based Lamya Gargash, leading some critics well-versed in and attempting to play Gulf politics to snipe that this is the Dubai pavilion, even though the pavilion also includes Sharjah-based artists Tarek Al Ghoussein and Ebtisam Abdul Aziz, plus a video by Huda Saeed Saif, and work by veteran conceptualist Hassan Sharif. Many closely associated with Abu Dhabi, such as the twinkly-eyed, genial and brilliant Abu Dhabian Zaki Nusseibeh are involved as interviewees in Hannah Hurtzig’s kiosk talks, while the ADACH platform show, incidentally, is dominated by artists from Dubai, Sharjah and Fujeirah. Phew. Zolghadr has taken a boldly introspective approach, proposing an analysis of the curious tradition of world fairs alongside an introspective look at the UAE’s place in the practice of national showcasing.
The two UAE bashes were opened yesterday by Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, with the entourage – and the European press can outdo the UAE when it comes to a Sheikhly scrum – boarding little boats to cross the water from the UAE to Abu Dhabi. Lamya Gargash’s impressive photos of one-star hotels in the national pavilion are printed mat on large format and grouped in sets of collages. Hassan Sharif’s documentations of performances and actions, lent by the Qatar Museum of Modern Arab Art, in addition to his brilliant room of bundled collections of found objects (at the ADACH show) prove that he is so long overdue a properly-curated retrospective in the UAE. Abdullah Al Saadi’s delicate drawings that document his relationship with the mountains of Khor Fakkan suffered from overly bright Venice sun pouring in through skylights, but held their own.
Amid the usual gravy-trainers hoping that Gulf (or, rather, Abu Dhabi) petrodollars will save the crunched art world were a good deal of critics and curators genuinely interested in what kind of art is being produced in the UAE and the myriad ways of interpreting and packaging the latest arrival on the global stage. Plus of course a huge contingent of UAE supporters.
Three adjectives: bold, interesting, confounding
Will artists ever tire of playing with scale?
By Antonia Carver
Photo by Sunny Rabhar
Not when it makes you smile. ‘Making Worlds’ includes two examples: a beautiful projection of a giant Bonsai tree, courtesy of British artist Ceal Floyer, near a flock of tiny Zeppelins, hanging from the ceiling.
Three adjectives: charming, interesting, droll.
