VENICE BIENNALE 2003 REPORT

Interviews
Maurizio Cattelan
Kevin Hanley
Rirkrit Tiravanija

Photo Essays
Darren Almond photo essay
Valerie Stahl von Stromberg photo essay

Venice 2003 Links
Francesco Bonami interview
Superchannel interviews
Artforum diary
Artforum article
David Rimanelli article
Sally O'Reilly article
Adrian Searle article
Guardian article
Flash Art article



The Dictatorship of the Flasher
Sherman Sam

Venice is a magical place, a city like a dream if you don't sniff the canals too closely. And outside of the great meals, for 4 months every 2 years it transforms into Disneyland for art lovers. Now unlike art fairs, commerce is purportedly held at bay; dealers after all have to sell to survive and fairs are trade shows that demonstrate financial conditions rather than gauge culture; whereas the Biennales purportedly provide opportunities for more ambitious and creative agendas. In addition, with its nationalistic and transnational overviews, it can create new contexts for artworks as well as showcase undiscovered or lesser-known talents. Finally, more than anything, Venice is an event!

Francesco Bonami, this year's curator, wanted to empower the viewer in allowing them to determine (he)r own particular journey; hence, it seems entirely appropriate for KF to bring you Flasher's our own particular Venice. On its closure (05/11) with 380 artists in the main exhibition (excluding the numerous special participants), 10 guest curators, 62 official nations with 19 others in the Extra 50 events, 260,103 tickets sold (i.e. 1,806 visitors per day), running at a total cost of 8,200,000 euros, this 50th anniversary edition -- titled Dreams and Conflicts and subtitled The Dictatorship of the Viewer -- is certainly the biggest Biennale ever. The opening is a frenzy of freebies and parties to put even Oscar nominees in a tizzy, and now it'd take a week to work your way through every single artwork -- at the usual leisurely Flasher's pace, of course. Add to that the full participation of all the British Isles, we small islanders should be proud that Scotland produced one of the more atmospheric pavilions, while Wales sent out strong signals (and we're not talking 'bout Mark Hughes). All this makes Venice special, and for the non-art participant a guarantee that a Venetian holiday is not just beefing up with Titian, or Prada for that matter.



The Venice Biennale -- 2003
Barry Schwabsky

There was speculation in the English press that the grand pubahs of the Venice Biennale denied Chris Ofili the prize for best pavilion for political reasons -- resentment over British collaboration with the American invasion of Iraq. In fact, art world insiders had never given Ofili the edge, preferring Olafur Eliasson in the Danish pavilion, but were blindsided when the award went to the little-known Su-Mei Tse of Luxembourg. Best intellectual pedigree was shown by Belgium, who had entrusted the curatorship of its pavilion to Thiery de Duve, probably the subtlest theorist of contemporary art. De Duve selected Sylvie Eyberg and Valerie Mannaerts, young women dealing in contrasting ways with photomontage, and accompanied their work with a characteristically elegant, impressively risky essay on what he called "the feminine and masculine shares in the genesis of the image." The most telling gesture was undoubtedly Santiago Sierra's one-two punch at the Spanish pavilion, the front of which had been bricked shut. Not that old routine, one thought -- until someone whispered the suggestion of trying around back. There indeed one saw an open door, but a guard on duty refused entry to all but those bearing a Spanish passport.

No matter. Prizes are vulgar. But if prizes there must be, why not just say Ofili gave one to Venice? Rarely does an artist push himself as hard as Ofili clearly did with his new series "within reach." His paintings took up where the series Freedom One Day (shown last year at London's Victoria Miro Gallery) left off. But where those earlier meditations on the dalliances of a pair of lovers in a tropical paradise (conjured with only the red, black, and green of Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist flag) seemed a triumph of technique over ostensible subject, the further adventures of the same couple in the same colours finds Ofili getting the balance just right. He is now in complete control of a palette that could easily have become monotonous but instead builds an astonishing intensity; the imagery has become more free-flowing, with a rhythmic sweep that brings feeling to the fore. It's a brilliant suite of paintings, and a visit to the new Saatchi Gallery, where a number of Ofili's paintings from 1996 can be seen, will show just how far Ofili has developed in only seven years. The older paintings still look good, but their charm is inseparable from a youthful naivete and awkwardness that have no further place in an oeuvre whose apparent lightness and bounce conceal a ruthless concentration.

Yet the British pavilion provoked considerable scepticism among art-world notables. It was felt, apparently, that Ofili had miscalculated in the setting he had designed for his paintings in collaboration with the architect David Adjaye, who had previously worked with him on the presentation of another series shown last year in London, The Upper Room. I'd interviewed Ofili in April and had asked him whether he'd planned some similar architectural intervention in Venice; he'd led me to think that if there were something of the kind in the offing, it would be much more understated. "I'm going to try to adjust the space to create a more intimate atmosphere," was how he put it. When I saw Ofili in Venice and reminded him of this, he just smiled and said, "I lied." And boy how he lied! Fitting the pavilion out with carpeting, coloured walls and lighting, and what I can't resist calling the over-the-top final touch of a coloured glass ceiling that he calls "Afro Kaleidoscope," Ofili could easily have smothered his paintings in so much disco-dark atmosphere that they'd become invisible. But this artist knows what he's doing. Without losing the richness of the paintings' colour, the setting he and Adjaye created for them actually brought out their inner glow along with the sparkle and glitter that is part and parcel of their surface. The real problem lay, I think, with the expectations of many of the viewers: painting is one thing, installation another, and never the twain should meet, they think. The James McNeil Whistler of the Peacock Room might have told them otherwise, as could the Howard Hodgkin who last year at the Royal Academy presented his new paintings against electric blue walls. The painter is always, sooner or later, the maker of his paintings' context -- Ofili has simply reached that point sooner than most.

Ofili said a funny thing in the course of Thelma Golden's interview with him in the accompanying catalogue: "I decided back in 1992, just before leaving art school, that if I was going to continue to make paintings, I was only going to make paintings about things I was interested in, and to make paintings I liked, because if nobody was going to buy them, I should like them enough to hang on my walls." Now, this may sound like a self-evident thought. But much of the rest of the Biennale proved that it was not. Of course people make art about what concerns them, and the Biennale is filled to the brim with work made by people who, clearly, are terribly interested in their subject matter. What separates Ofili from many of the others is that he has considered the possibility that there might be no public for what concerns him. By contrast, a good deal of the work on view seemed to begin with the assumption that it is the public's duty to be interested. The ne plus ultra of this attitude can be found in the Biennale's Utopia Station section, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rikrit Tiravanija, all intelligent and knowledgeable people who should have known better. Utopia Station reminded me of nothing so much as the Earth Day fair my daughter's school in New York used to have every spring, with its hastily constructed booths, its posters and flyers, and its slightly embarrassing opportunities for interaction with the exhibits -- and above all with its implication that just being there one has already shown one's good will and begun to do right. Should artists really count on the existence of this well-meaning public? A different view is suggested by one of the wittiest artists working today, Maurizio Cattelan, whose sculpture Charlie is a little tricycle-riding robot boy who peddled around through the Italian pavilion where Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum curated a show called Delays and Revolutions. Charlie rode up to any given object or viewer, stoped at a respectful distance, cocked his head in bemusement, and then rode away to the next thing. Presumably he saw as much as anybody else. He bore a strong family resemblance to Maurizio Cattelan.

I realize I should have said something much earlier on about how the Biennale is organized -- its various parts and subsections, the national pavilions whose contents are chosen by committees in their home countries and the curated programs, under the control of the Biennale's Director -- this year it was Bonami, an Italian based at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago -- that are somehow above that cultural Olympiad. But how can I? Trying to come to grips with the Biennale is like trying to waltz with an octopus: it's too squirmy, and then how do you know which arm to lead with? It's not so much an exhibition as an exhibition of exhibitions. And it keeps getting bigger and more spread out each time. More and more countries want to participate, but since the Giardini where the pavilions are sited has long since been filled up, the newly arrived nations have to make do with random palazzi around the city. That would be manageable, and only fair, but then the curated sections keep expanding too -- this time ballooning beyond the control of a single person, they had to be subcontracted. But in the vast Arsenale and adjacent areas where most of the thematic shows were housed it became impossible to tell where one ended and another began -- with the exception of the one called Z.O.U./Zone of Urgency, which Hou Hanru seemed to have organized with a view toward distinguishing it from the rest by ensuring that it would be louder and more overbearing. And yet one roamed these corridors full of hope -- one might always turn up a good work of art.

One could, if assiduous enough, find good work at the Arsenale, mainly in Clandestine, the section that Bonami himself curated. There's not enough space to do more than name them, but Flavio Favelli, Ghazel, Paulina Olowska, Aida Ruilova, and Cheyney Thompson, among others, made the effort worth it. Bonami has taste. But perhaps he lacks conviction. It's tempting to play the wit and add that the curators to whom he entrusted so much sheer floor space have conviction but lack taste. Unfortunately that's not quite right. Again, something Ofili says throws everything else into relief: "That is what painting can be about. That through making paintings you get to a better place; you get to be a better painter." Ofili understands that the utopian content of his work resides in how it is made. His "Afromantic" imagery, his red, black, and green palette in homage to Marcus Garvey, all the signifiers that indicate his work's subject matter -- these exist to clarify and give a public face to aspirations that are essentially artistic. Elsewhere, too often, the work's form, or rather its forming, can seem to be little more than a shortcut to the representation of some extraneous meaning.



Gooooooaaaaaallllll!
Sherman Sam

With probably the most videocentric, interactive and artist-intensive Biennale ever, the work that stood out here -- almost by default -- tended to be the more hand-crafted, lo-tech objects. From the Arte Povera interventions of Kristina Braein at the Nordic Pavilion to Gabriel Orozco's poetic yet forlorn, wooden recreation of Carlo Scarpa's crumbling roof (the actual one to be viewed just out side by Orozco's homage) to Pedro Cebrita Reis' air-conditioned, neon-lit shanty in the Giardini. It is Beatriz Milhaze's (bn. 1960) -- one half of the Brazilian pavilion -- contribution that we'd certainly call Flashtastic. Having extended the visual space of the paintings into the gallery by painting the walls a bright yellow, Milhaze's actual paintings straddle that soft, uncomfortable border between abstraction, design and decoration. Inspired by both modernism and Brazilian popular culture, it is her combination of a functional dead-line drawing and filled-in colour with her sensibility towards design that puts the verve in her work. The floral shapes, spirals, stripes provide the structure, while colour and pattern explodes and transgress structure to create the psychedelic, polychromatic experience. Unlike Chris Ofili's intervention where the pavilion becomes absorbed into the paintings, the Rio-based artist's yellow walls merely set the stage for her paintings. Milhaze often creates by painting unto sheets of plastic, then transfers the pieces of paint onto canvas. This collagist-attitude fits perfectly with Milhaze's interest in pop culture and the content of her paintings. Now, yellow is entirely appropriate given the green and yellow of the national flag, but also yellow being the colours of samba and their football team's national strip; thus a colour inextricably associated with a certain free-flowing, effervescent spirit. Where winning is not necessarily as important as winning with style.


Image © Valerie Stahl von Stromberg

© 2003 KultureFlash Limited