La Biennale di Venezia

51th International Art Exhibition
"The Experience of Art" curated by Maria de Corral and
"Always a Little Further" curated by Rosa Martinez
June 12-November 6 2005
Venice, Giardini and Arsenale and other venues

Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann
Institute of Media Research
Braunschweig University of Art, Germany.

spielmann@medien-peb.uni-siegen.de

For the first time the Venice Biennale exhibitions are directed by two curators, Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez——both from Spain, who complement each other in their emphasis on site specific and media-based works (a large number of videos and installations) that for the most part reflect issues of space. Undoubtly, space is a timely metaphor for thinking geopolitical distances and cultural diversity in the global art world as well as a means of expressing the state of art in our age of mediation, interactivity, and immersion. However, there is not much innovation and novelty to be seen on the horizon, but rather a reflection, rethinking and reworking of existing aesthetic concepts for example of performance, conceptual art works, projection pieces and political statements. Strikingly, a large number of the national participations at Giardini showed well-established and internationally respected artists with works that were rather timeless, if not boring.

Annette Messager in the French pavilion assembled associations around the topic of "casino" and invited the audience into one of her dream worlds made up of uncommon puppets, sudden pneumatic movements of toys, cushions and a red curtain that in waveforms covers an entire room from ceiling to floor. The audience is overwhelmed by the aesthetics of the machinery that steers this mechanical theater of illusion and animated toys and thus produces a visual spectactle to be gazed at in amazement. Messager won the Golden Lion for the best national participation, but it looked more like an award given for lifetime achievement, and not so much for her "casino". However, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was awarded to Barbara Kruger from the US. In sharp contrast to Kruger's work, the US pavilion at Giardini clearly went apolitcal and pretentiously presented a small, but selected number of paintings by Ed Ruscha as if art were the nation's sancturay to be worshipped in a sterile temple. The critique of this representation that astonishingly is not at all affected by the time and space we live in was best summarized by audience comments that the US would do better to present Iraq and Afghanistan, as they have adopted theses countries anyway. The German pavilion appeared as a late comment to tendencies of aestheticization that root in the conceptual art approaches of the late fifites and sixties. While Thomas Scheiblitz positioned a spatial sculpture in the middle of the main room to be walked around that looked like an attribute to Frank Stella's after having looked at Moholy-Nagy's mobile sculptures of the twenties, the same room served also as 'platform' for an anti-performance piece by Tino Seghal, who had hired exhibition guards to dance around in the room (reminding the dance around the golden calf in the Bible) and shout in intervals remarkable sentences such as "we are so contemporary". There must be a deeper philosophical reason for this avoidance of artwork, materiality and performance, as the artist explains in a lengthy interview with Germany philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in the German weekly "Die Zeit". These afterthoughts were not accessible to the general (English-speaking) public and the art which is not a work not telling by itself. But it is/was a symptomatic piece in demonstrating a shift of concern from the art to the artist, from the artist to the curator, and finally from the curator to the gesture of curating that is now done by the artist who is paying employees. In this sense the piece is radical, unfortunately the radical impetus of criticizing the art market is not successfully mediated.

Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij in the Dutch pavilion in a video film with actors examined media representation as it affects one'e own perception of the self and the other. In a number of situations of a supposedly casual private conversation we watch partners, friends and mother and daughter talking to each other as if each person was not real but simply delivers a set sterotyped, pre-casted sentences that are responded by other stereotypes. The work is self-reflexive and would benefit from a cinema/movie theater format of presentation, although the artists claim the work communicates with the formal qualities of the white cub pavilion built by Gerrit Rietvield in the 1950's. Even more explicitly, Hans Schabus deals with the history and design of the Austrian pavilion built in 1935 at Giardini. The monumental style of the pavilion is buried under a new 'building' that has the shape and color of a rocky mountain and thereby respresents a typical Austrian landscape. The pavilion can be accessed only from behind, and inside a labyrinthic system of ladders leads to the roof top from where the visitor has a 360° panoramic view over the pavilions and the city of Venice. The work presents a conceptual space that derives from redimensions of the original architecture and takes natural Austrian landscapes as its parameter. Reworking in a provacative mix of media, fashion and politics is the central theme in the large scale photographic collages by the British performance and mixed media artists Gilbert & George. The pictures that resemble pieces of a mosaic contain grafffiti, religious symbols, oriental ornaments, hieroglyphs and particles of subcultural language codes that express a shift in perception. Gilbert & George develop a visual language that develops from the experience of living in East London, where the reality on the street is determined by graffiti and young people from different ethnic origin wearing hoods, the latter practice has right now been declared criminal by Tony Blair. With regard to the politics of the real the mosaic pictures by Gilbert & George make the transition between on the one hand secret codes and specific languages and meanings that are shared by those who can read the signs and on the other hand an overtly provocation of normative systems in religion, politics, and aesthetics. Because the artists themselves —like always — appear as figures that like immigrants easily seem to assimilate into different culturall spaces and semiotically hybrid environments therefore manage to entertain and disturb at the same time.

With respect to the fact that the large number of 70 countries were registered with exhibitions the focus of attention is shifting away from the pavilions in the Giardini toward other venues in the city that had to be added to the traditional sites of the exhibition. One of the most interesting shows that fitted nicely into a Venetian 'palazzo' was the Latin American show curated by Irma Arestizabal that modestly arranged painting, photography and video works next to each other creating a multi-perspectival kaleidoscipe with no need of demonstrating interference or any painfull overlay. Humorous and put up to the point Donna Conlon's (Panama) video "Coexistence" shows ants carrying green leaves and also leaf-shaped little flags of different countries (which the artist had 'smuggled' amoung the real leaves for the ants to take away). A telling comment on the geopolitical question of what flags and the nations they represent stand for when we move, travel, migrate and even emigrate. A completely different notion of space from an art-historical perspective is the basis for Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist who uses the original ceiling space of the Venetian church San Stae for a seamlessly put together four channel projection. The viewers have to lie down on divans in order to experience the unusual view of large scale naked and voluptuously shaped female figures that in the tradition of fresco painters like Tiepolo and Tintoretto and in the place of their ceiling frescos seem to fly and sometimes swim into/from the ceiling/heaven without concern of the laws of gravity. This type of site specific video projection onto the church ceiling in a sense replaces religously defined heaven with today's virtual reality imagery and is contrasted by another large scale video work by fashion designer Hussein Chalayan in the Turkish show. Here, the original space of the 'palazzo' is rather veiled (the window shutters closed, the rooms dispappear into darkness). A series of horizontally set up video screens unfold a fictional narrative about identity and space in an antiseptical clean nowhere between office and hospital or whatsoever space with lack of focus except for the highly aestheticized imagery. The point of interest is not the weird story, but the beauty of the actress Tilda Swinton and eventually some of the clothes.

Viewed together, especially in Giardini and Arsenale the general question of how to integrate and properly present video projections in appropriate screening rooms still needs some consideration. Although some black boxes were installed at the Giardini and Arsenale where feaeture length video films were continuously running there was hardly information on the timetable. Interestingly, here a difference emerges between multiple or single screen video projections that are presented in open spaces or squeezed into tiny white cubes with no benches for the audience to sit. On top, some have audio channels that——like in the past——are overlaying other works. Sadly enough, a poorly presented piece in the open doorway is Bruce Nauman's important videowork "Shit in your Hart——Head on a Chair" from 1990 where a mime artist excises spoken language in silence thereby self-reflexively addressing contemporary topics of translation and transition through travel, migration and the experience of English as the dominant one world language. In contrast to many video presentations in unsuitable spaces, narrative if not to say conventional forms of movies for example by Stan Douglas or Candice Breitz are presented in built-in cinemas where the viewer is asked to find his/her seat in complete darkness and eventually must sit for hours. Also, the hour long stop motion animation films by Robin Rhode (South Africa) that playfully show children riding a bicycle or in freezed movement when they lie down and supplement chalk drawings on the ground are presentations in a format that in the context of an art exhibtion are misplaced and here would do better in the format of a short film or series of stills. Therefore, the question of projection and screening remains crucial when art exhibitions extend into media and implement film formats in their non-cinematic settings. Apart from having a few points of criticism from a media perspective, what works really well are spatial installations, such as the four wall projection room designed by South African artist William Kentridge who deliberately refers to film pioneer Georges Méliès (who invented stop motion) and uses early film techniques as a lively and entertaining means to converge and intersect different media and materials such as drawing, film, and performance. The artist thereby appears and disappears on multiple screens at different sizes where he creates, arranges and re-arranges objects and images that surround the viewer as if s/he were immersed into a multimedia perceptional environment. In a different approach that is concerned with politics of borders, Northern Ireland artist Willie Doherty in his video installation scrutinizes the effects that real borders and the politics of separation have on the individual who is trapped in visions and reflections of split-reality, disturbed by unsettling questions of identity and self-assurance that occur and increase when one is confronted with the enviornmental situation of restlessness. Everything is ambivalent in Doherty's work: the visuals and the narrative together produce a sense of the uncanny.

As said before, in general there was not much art that would point to new horizons, either technologically or aesthetically. Although there was a larger number of Asian participants in the two exhibitions curated by Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez and also in the additional exhibition venues outside Giardini, nevertheless most pieces worked with highly conventional mise-en-scene in the film and video format. Interestingly, Xu Zhen from China in the multiple video projection "Shout" randomly depicts street scenes where people suddenly react to an invisible scream (which is produced by the camera team). The short scenes of shouting are randomly projected onto surfaces of oil tanks. This installation in the last room of the Aresenale reminds that for the past hundred years there was no China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Concurrently, the Japanese Pavilion at Giardini has history and memory as its theme, but in the form of personal, intimate reminder of a person departed. Miyako Ishiucchi's exhibiton in memory of her mother presents large scale photographs of used objects that belogned to her mother such as broken lipstick, shoes, and different pieces of see-through and embroidered underwear that through the fixitiy of the photograph reflect death as the state of standstill, motionlessness, and immobility. Nothing changes any more in these sensitve pictures, time is frozen forever, the traces of former usage are fixed and maintained for eternity. Ishiucchi's work with traces of her mother departed clearly can be seen as a one-person reminder and at the same time read as a way of how to use media properties in accordance with aesthetic meaning. Needless to say that the Japanese participation is the most impressive.

The major prizes were awarded to Annette Messager (best national participation), to Regina José Galindo (young artist under 35) for video documentation of street performances where the artist from Guatemala shaves her body naked and covers her feet with red paint like blood and walks in the streets to protest totalitarian and abusive politcal systems, and to Thomas Schütte (Golden Lion to an artist) for human figure sculptures.