53rd Art Biennale Venice

This picture of embracing the world by and through art has been comprised by present Biennale director Daniel Birnbaum in the decision to avoid thematic foci at all. This year’s Venice Art Biennale rather emphasizes the potential of ‚creative practices’ in past and present under the heading of „Making Worlds“. In effect, the openness as paradigmatically expressed in Birnbaum’s curatorship of the show at the central Exhibition Palazzo at Giardini does not necessarily provoke overlappings, mergers, tension or controversary between the works displayed adjacent to each other, but for the most part the individual pieces rest peacefully in the white cube without much communication with each other or toward us, the audience. This impression of art disposed like objects on the shelves of a store is also highlighted by the fact that the presentation of hardly or even first time to be seen historical works, such as the Japanese Gutai group of mid fifties to sixties, is difficult to understand and validate in their impact upon contemporary arts without contextual information. Furthermore, because of no mentioning of the artistic development early conceptual pieces that are brought to Venice with support from the Japan Foundation, for example by Atsuko Tanaka, are likely to be overlooked and not necessarily seen as precursor to Tanaka’s well-known light bulb performance costume that made a strong impression at the previous Documenta of Kassel.

In this case, the Gutai approaches to break up coherent work (they also refused to give titles and simply named what they produce ‘work’ (‘Sakuhin’) and focus on ephemeral and performance presentation – in the streets of Tokyo and in natural environments – can neither be connected to the Japanese tradition of art embedded into nature nor related to the Western peformance, Happening and Fluxus movements. While the latter could be easily made by poviding information on the meetings of John Cage and Gutai (no note of that), both aspects, nature and performativity, are also influential in Miwa Yanagi’s photo-film installation at the Japanese Pavilion. Almost needless to say that the Gutai group with one exception were all male, and with respect to this ‚tradition’ of Japanese modern-contemporary arts we can read the the provocation in the over-live sized photographic black and white portraits of Miwa Yanagi’s wild dancing long-haired tribal woman. They have oversized and dangerously shaking artificial breasts and not only remind of witchcraft, magic and fairy tales but at the same time juxtapose and subvert the Japanese ‚canon’ of artistic creativity. Yanagi is definitely making another world with her „Windswept Women“ that inhabit deserted spaces on the photographs and in the film that is running in a small black tent that the artist has placed on the floor to force viewers to kneel down and peak into through a small opening in the fabric. By posing the large scale photographs inside decorated wooden frames like paintings and also with the film installation’s keyhole perspective on the windswept women, Yanagi is playfully adapting and ripping off Western ideas of perception.

In stark contrast to the precise and thorough employment of different media in the Japanese Pavilion, in Birnbaum’s Gutai room, we find low resolution monitors placed without any elevation right on the floor and also on top of each other, where the presented precious film documents of Gutai performances and also Shozo Shimanoto’s „Gutai Film“ of 1958 are impossible to view. The sound is just pouring into the room which has no place to sit for viewing. But this is only one example out of many neglects to properly present media. With extremely rare exceptions nowhere at the whole Biennale do we find chairs, stools or benches to sit. It is almost a metaphor of self-irony that viewers who are refused possibilities to rest and focus on works that by nature deal with duration will not have much reason to complain about the neglect because most of the presented work is of such mediocre quality that rushing through is all we need. Even in the additional spaces of the Arsenale where the sheer numbers of works and special contributions by countries (repeatedly China and for the first time United Arabian Emirates) have been reduced in comparision to former years, viewing conditions for Jumana Emil Abboud’s film on Palestine are poor, because it would need a cinematic viewing situation and not a standing screen in semi-dark space.

More suitable to the exhibition environment and at the same critical to the contemporary demand of energy are the dysfunctional electric and electronical devices that Chinese artist Chu Yun has set to stand-by mode or otherwise reduced to emergency and power lights. The completely darkened room full of machines is now only defined by small red and green LED pulses. More energetic and extremely noisy is the African media village by Pascale Marthine Tayou who has built an arbitrary assemble of wooden huts that serve as projector booth and screen surface for films about handicraft, machine workers and scenes from rural live in the middle of tons of shredded papers, conglomerations of cables and other traces of tools that connect places and communicate contexts. Differently from the Asian and African comments to our technological world, American artist Joan Jonas who is one of the pioneers of video art still producing new installation pieces, is showing her latest “Reading Dante II” on 2 screens opposite to each other. Viewers are sitting in the middle facing one or the other screen, not both at the same time. This is one of the strongest and best presented multimedia works underlining the conceptual rigour of Jonas who is always combining staged scenes with elements of performance and layers of textual, historical references.

But, in the Polish Pavilion it is a real pity that we are forced to stand or sit right on the floor in a completely black room to view the blurred and shadowy images of window cleaners on the multi-screen video projections by artist Krysztoff Wodiczko which also cover the ceiling of the pavilion. Wodiczko over many decades has been preoccupied working with projected images in public spaces and has used buildings as screens for addressing political issues of homeless people, censorship and borders. This year at Venice, the artist deliberately blurs experiences of being inside and outside: the voice-over of the video installation entitled “Guests” tells individual stories of immigrant workers who have become permanent guests. We watch them from inner territory cleaning “windows” that cannot be seen through from inside. It is rather them watching us (and talking to us directly) – as if screens were permeable windows.

On the whole, this year’s Biennale shows far less media works than previous ones. The best contribution of the biennale and not only in this category is to be seen in the Dutch Pavilion where Indonesian born artist Fiona Tan gives another convincing example of her artistic endeavor to interplay Eastern and Western concepts of the ‘world’ and highlight the use of techniques and technologies accordingly. In the three part exhibition, the main work “Disorient” confronts the traveller narrations by Marco Polo, who from Venice in thirteenth explored the ‘new worlds’ of Asia with actual imagery of the countries that Polo had described with regard to the social, economic and religious structure, trading and daily lives. What is of interest is the discrepancy between the beginnings of colonialism (reflected in the ways in which Polo highlights the values of the places he visits to the Western perspective) and the present post-colonial heritage of wars, migration and poverty in these countries (reflected in film footage by the artist and from other sources). In contrast to the living history of Polo that is brought back to the city of Venice as the origin of exploring the new world in the old days, a second screen projection shows the memorable part of such a journey: collected items, cultural and religious objects that Fiona Tan assembles on the shelves of an imaginary museum which also contains historical films shown on tv monitors. Here, the simultaneity of present and the past, the living and the preserved cultures, creates a mosaic-like perceptual environment that places us the audience right at the center of questioning the position of how to interrelate cultural diversity. In a potentially less obvious way, Fiona Tan is exploring the same question regarding conventions of painterly and filmic images that were conceived within the frame of western cultures.

The work group “Provenance” consists of six framed video films that can be seen as portraits of present individuals living in Amsterdam. A closer look, however, reveals that the light, position, gestures and body expression of the portrayed and also the selection of camera angles and shots (mainly travelling shots in close-up, near and totale) are closely reworking formal techniques of Dutch paintings of seventeenth century. The contrast between the two media forms, painting and film, bring the conceptual uses of techniques and technology to evidence which evolve within larger cultural determinations of representing the self and others. Finally, with the double screen installation “Rise and Fall”, Tan develops a double ‘portrait’ of a younger and an older woman connected through the flow of time and the passing of water that are encapsulated in the representational memory of the filmic images. And most favorably, in the Dutch Pavilion the audience can rest on carpets, pillows and benches to watch the different lengths of the film loops by Fiona Tan in full length.

Among the national pavilions at Giardini, other highlights include drawings by Silvia Bächli in the Swiss Pavilion that give an outstanding example of how to present diversity in a well-balanced arrangement of forms and formats that rather meditatively communicate scenes of stillness. In their second exhibtion venue, the church San Stae at Canale Grande, Fabirce Gygi has placed iron structures of shelves that divide and restructure the empty interior space of the church and dismantle the brutality of ordering and erecting borders, be the powers governmental, administrative or religious. In a more subtle, but comparatively referential manner, Roman Ondák inside the Czech and Slovak Pavilion turns outside inside when he actually transfers the location of the venue, “Giardini”, into the pavilion which has become an interior garden of trees and plants. Thus the inside does not differ much from the outside, because the pavilion like the surrounding grounds now has a pathway in the middle to walk through and supposedly walk by the artworks that have been replaced with a botanical landscape.

Finally, another garden is referenced by Bruce Nauman. His work complex bears the title “Topolgical Gardens” which needs to be understand as sheer metaphor for splitting the exhibition of his work to three different locations. In the national pavilion itself, the US representation is playing it safe and showcasing older, world-known works, mostly installation and neon works that come from museum and big private collections and do not provide any novel insights. But outside the Giardini, at the University of Architecture and at the University Ca’ Foscari, other works by Nauman which are rarely to be seen and heard are presented in appropriate locations and spaces that highlight the controverial and radical nature of the pieces. While the Univerity of Architecture focusses on Nauman’s audio works and houses the stereo audio pieces “Get out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room” of 1968 and “Studio Aids II” (1967-1968) that stretch the aural capacity of listeners to limits, the other university shows “Double Steel Cage Piece” of 1974 which has a narrow corridor that can be entered by the visitors.

Among the plentitude of further related and so-called collateral exhibition across Venice, I find it worth to stress Mona Hatoum’s solo show at the Fondazione Scientifica Querini. The artist of Palestinian origin uses different media spaces and materials, like wire, rugs, postcards, glass maps to construct and deconstruct mobile homes and to highlight the unstable living conditions of and in Palestine up to the extent that viewers and visitors can share the experience that there is no fixed space to make their own world.