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Reviewer biography
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The 50th Venice Biennale, 2003 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 21st
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.
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copyright © 2003 ISAST