The 50^th Venice Biennale, 2003

Reviewed by "Elaine W. Ng"

elaineng@earthlink.net

It was the fiftieth staging of the Venice Biennale, the first of the post-911 era, the first in which China, the world's most populous nation, was supposed to take part (SARS in fact saw to it that, at the last moment, it didn't). The stakes were thus very high and the expectations were considerable. In the weeks before the mid-June vernissages with which the festival opens, the anticipation was palpable, but from the moment the wraps came off the sprawling series of exhibitions in the Giardini, the Arsenale and in the various studios and garrets scattered about the city, the verdict seemed to be both loud and unanimous: this Biennale this year underwhelmed its audience, totally, and turned out to be a disappointment like few others of the modern era.

This year's festival director, the Chicago-based Francesco Bonami, may take a long while to live down the poor reception of his show - if, that is, post-mortem discussions place all blame for the event  squarely with him. They may not: perhaps the artistic creativity of these times is going through some kind of inexplicable dry spell, and Bonami simply chose the best that was available to him. To discern such a subtle trend as this, however, will take a long while; for now the overwhelming belief seems to be that Bonami has managed to let down the audiences who flocked in this year, to take their vaporetti to what has hitherto been regarded as the greatest art exposition of the planet. The 2003 Venice Biennale is likely to be remembered, if at all, as one of the least successful of recent times.

Bonami must take his share of the blame however since there was a very considered logic behind what he set out to do. In curating Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, Bonami declared that he wanted to offer a radical change in direction for this Venice show, a change he hoped might live on long after his own festival had ended.  It was his considered view that each previous Biennale had been curated by a strong and supposedly visionary director who had firmly (and in Bonami's view, wrongly) stamped his own artistic bias on the show. The kind of top-down authoritative curatorial style of Harald Szeemann, who ran the 1999 and 2001 exhibitions, was cited as an example of just what it was that Bonami (who, it will be remembered, was chosen over the notoriously belligerent Robert Hughes, whom many wanted as 2003 director) now pointedly refused to do. Bonami's view was that the world had changed, profoundly, since the beginning of the millennium and the ?artistic geography' had changed with it. Acceptance of the realities of globalisation and the worldwide resistance to it meant that it was now entirely inappropriate, in his opinion, for one senior figure to impose his views and his style on the 2003 show: instead, he and a corps d'elite of international co-curators (from China, Argentina, Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland, Mexico, Egypt and Slovenia) would choose the bulk of the art, thereby making for a more democratic and polyphonous representation of whatever was being created around the world.

However, many would argue that, as is so often the case with the creations of committees, Bonami succeeded in making not so much a polyphony as a cacophony. So, we were offered among other mediocrities, a video of an elderly man with Parkinson's disease (Jaan Toomik, Peeta and Mat, 2001); a large and very smelly model of an Egyptian village square with video billboards depicting scenes of rural life (Wael Shawky, Untitled, 1999); a series of memorably wonderful quiet photographs - a rare piece of excellence - showing a series of ephemeral grey-white scenes slowly appearing through the slats of a pure white Venetian blind (Louisa Lambri, Untitled, 2002); a couple of Thai nurses administering piped oxygen to willing passers-by (Surasi Kusolwong, Announcement for Oxygen Room - Breathing Beauty, 2003); a dismantled Volkswagen bug, its parts suspended from gantries by nylon twine (Dami? Ortega, Cosmic Thing, 2001); and a chaotic collection of more than sixty pieces of pretentious juvenilia under the title Utopia Station, and curated by the hitherto well-regarded trio of Hans Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Visitors were invited to stamp the word Peace on a world map, or assemble four-letter words from a giant letter game on the floor of a glass cage, and other such banal ideas, most worthy of the schoolyard, but not of a grand international exposition des artes.

 

Mercifully the national exhibitions, most of which were in their usual grand pavilions in the Giardini, did manage to offer up a more traditional (and enjoyable) Biennale vision. Fred Wilson's critique of how African men and women have been portrayed in various Venetian representations - from paintings to jewelry - at the US (Guggenheim-owned) pavilion, and large and colorful multi-media paintings of African situations by Chris Ofili at the British, presented latest works which, while not finding universal favour, were at least were technically competent and heavy with moment. Canada's Jana Sterbak cleverly placed a video camera on top of her dog's head, and sent it racing through a historically- and politically-charged St. Lawrence mountain pass, offering a fascinating canine viewpoint on a place hitherto only known to humans. The Danish choice, Olafur Eliasson, performed memorable magic with kaleidoscopic glass, yellow dayglo galleries and steel tubing through which viewers were invited to travel. Australia's Patricia Piccinini made dreadfully unforgettable and hauntingly lifelike humanoid-animaloid sculptures, reminding us of the impending problems of the world of cloning and designer babies. The crisply clean photographs of important academic libraries and archives by Germany's Candida H?fer and the elegant metal-framed waterfall sound-and-photograph installations of the modishly-mononamed Icelandic artist R?i received wide approval.

Despite the growing presence of technology in our 21^st century lives, new media-based art made only a limited appearance in this Biennale. This was the first time that Iran exhibited: part of the Axis of Evil it may be, but it produces a good deal of digital art, and this year showed it, off-site, to a fascinated few. Romania made the very bold choice of showing works that were only net- and CD Rom-based. Ukraine's clever Viktor Sydorenko made a captivating video work - based very much on the dystopian vision of a kind of post-Soviet Fritz Lang - called Millstones of Time, an extended essay on pointlessness, which culminated, on the floor above (in a site some miles from the Giardini) in an equally captivating hologram display of the same theme. The Taiwanese photographer Yuan Goang-ming, used a curious and clever technique to remove all portrayals of human life from immense photographs of normally bustling Taipei street corners. Venezuela's show was closed as a political protest on the part of the artists, who pasted a sign on the front door pointing out their artwork could only be found on the website <www.orinokia.com>. And the Luxembourg artist  Tse Su-Mei won the Golden Lion award for a peaceful video, sound and multimedia installation of, basically, a solo cellist performing before an immense and dispassionate Alpine mountainscape.

 

There was, in summary, considerable merit on view in the Giardini; and a sadly equal lack of it in the Arsenale. Francesco Bonami liked to tell interviewers that in these chaotic times, he was offering us all a  vision of 'creative irrelevance to attack the absurdity of war, violence and discrimination?. Irrelevant and lacking in discrimination, quite possibly; but creative - by and large, this year, no.