La Biennale di Venezia
50th International Art Exhibition
"Dreams and Conflict. The Dictatorship of the Viewer"
by Francesco Bonami
June 15th - November 2nd, 2003
Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann,
Institute of Media Research,
Braunschweig School of Art,
Germany
spielmann@medien-peb.uni-siegen.de
The 2003 Venice Biennale focuses on a
variety of themes which are loudly presented as headlines, as
if an art exhibition would present competing labels in a contemporary
fashion show. While director Francesco Bonami subsumes his view
of the state of art under the banal polarity of "Dreams and
Conflict" and - with the gesture of provocation implies an antagonism
that sounds interesting but does not realize in the shows. Basically,
Bonami assumes that through this Biennale the spectators will
feel released from any dominating and restricting 'curatorship'
of the past. Bonami obviously believes that viewers must have
experienced curators' concepts as nagging so that now he wants
to liberate us from any conceptual intervention into the, of
course, idealized view of an 'unmediated' relationship between
works of arts and any viewer. Not only is this an extreme narrow
perspective on curatorial practices, but it certainly can not
be the case in any show that there would be no guidance, selection,
and positioning at this year's Venice Biennale.
The expressed resolution sounds highly pretentious not to 'dictate'
the viewers' mind and let them sort out 'dreams' and 'conflicts'
by themselves through perceiving a 'polyphony of voices and
thoughts' (as the director describes his project). To say the
least, the statment is utmost banal, in particular when we consider
that curators are interpretators who necessarily always need
to make propositions which hopefully will demonstrate interventions,
reflect on the issue of mediation and communication in order
to address the viewer and challenge his/her understanding and
preconception of what is art. Needless to say, this is no 'dictatorship
of the viewer'. In fact the viewer is asked to critically react
and interact with an exhibition concept, and s/he will be very
critical in particular where the 'interpretations' of so many
different curators fail to bridge the distance between the themes
and topics announced by curators and the actual presented works
at Venice Biennale (for convenience I use 'work' as short term).
Moreover, the topic of intermingling dreams and conflicts does
not work out as overriding theme. It is hard to figure out the
major interst, motif, or leading question of this exhibition
series that is subdivided in multiple sections under differing
curatorship/dictatorship that hardly interact, merge or point
out a common focus. The diversity and multiplicity of shows
could produce interesting connections and reflect a variety
of facets, views and approaches towards 'urging topics' and
eventually provoke discussions on 'urging' topics such as the
West and the East, borders, space/territory and the new colonialism
that is replacing postcolonialism through recent wars fought
by US empire on the military, economic, and cultural fronts.
Too bad, none of this is happening in Venice where the refusal
to develop conceptual direction maneuvers the exhibitions into
boring aestheticism and sometimes kitsch à l'art pour
l'art - this larger tendency that is highlighted by Mathew Barney
and his successful strategy of self-referential product placement.
Plus, the individual shows are not even interrelated, but rather
manifest each curator's struggle for attention through trying
to supersede one another in placing allusive, politically and
cultural pretentious labels instead of naming concepts that
in one way or another would be worked through and acted out
in the actual presentations. So, the initial impression of this
show that aims to abandon what curators and directors are usually
supposed to do and instead praises an unspecific openness of
anything and fosters the directive of no interference with free
spirits of the viewer gets more and more confirmed when we walk
through the sections. Together the individual shows and the
fancy titles form a very ambitious attempt of the Biennale to
act politically super correct, but the parts are not strong
enough to stand for themselves and never build one piece or
a vision, they simply fall apart.
On the whole, Venice Biennale manifests a complete misunderstanding
of Joseph Beuys' struggle to intersect art and politics and
to provoke critical awareness and discussion of the state of
art through taking position in the field of arts. Curiously
enough, director Bonami heavily refers to Beuys, but it is hard
to see where this Venice Biennale would inherit the legacy of
art as democratic practices, which, of course, involves standpoints,
discourse and controversy. So what is different from previous
Biennale exhibitions is the stress on diversity of curators
who, not unlike Bonami himself, enter the arena with fashionable
headlines that appear as slogans that must sell well: they are
short, easy to understand, and use cutting edge language. The
poor level of naming reveals where the titles simply soak up
issues and terms which are currently at stake in the media,
the cultural, and the political debates: "The Zone" (Massimiliano
Gioni), "Clandestine" (again Bonami), "Fault Lines" (Gilane
Tawadros), "Individual Systems" (Igor Zabel), "Zone of Urgency"
(Hou Hanru), "The Structure of Survival" (Carlos Basualdo),
"Contemporary Arab Representations" (Catherine David), "The
Everyday Altered" (Gabriel Orozco), and finally "Utopia Station"
(Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija).
All of these art labels in their exhibitionist tone superficiality
remind one of strategies of aggressive advertisement that result
in setting up assumptions and promises which are never meant
to represent any real product. Similarly, curators who refer
to African, Asian, and Arabic cultures raise high expectations
and create interest in for example how digital and global processes
are manifest in different parts of the world, but the aestheticized
photographs, video and film installations that are squeezed
into the spaces of the Arsenale are rather shinning surfaces
or endless storytelling (the 6 screen interactive video installation
by Danish Eva Koch lines up many layers of epic narratives of
family life during Spanish War but fails to bring the materials
into a form that would transgress the level of a one to one
account). In particular, media/video/laptop installations lack
an appropriate form of expression to transmit deeper understanding
of the reality they deal with, and on the whole there is no
satisfying re-presentation of non-Western cultural-aesthetic
standpoints to counter-balance some mannerism and repetition.
Rather, emphasis lies on how the individual curator expresses
fascination towards these new, multifaceted and often tenuous
phenomena, regardless of any link to the discourse on content
and context where the works come from. Political correctness
is an important internal leitmotif of the series of shows and
means that once we address non-Western aesthetic practices we
can now comfort ourselves because we are dealing with the issue.
But how, in the three screen video installation "Ruptures" by
Salem Mekuria the violent colonial history of Ethiopia and the
actual HIV infection rates are intermingled in a portrait of
the country that is poorly projected on the screen and where
viewers have no place to sit and settle in the room. The presentation
rather is a 'walk through', squeeze yourself in the midst of
the screen installation, not necessarily inviting the viewer
to stay and watch the whole 'story' - would too much comfort
evoke suspicion of dictatorship on the viewer, one is left asking
oneself. However, this is just one example of how badly works
are presented that one would like to see under better conditions.
But the majority of presented works do not unfold a deeper,
conceptual level that would explain why specific works were
selected. "Utopia Station" presents itself in a post arte povera
manner where sheets of papers are glued on walls, writings,
projected in wooden cabinets are assembled in a well ordered
messiness that, in its ambitious avoidance of dictating, does
not express anything else of interest. This is so partly, because
works overlap, are not set up in adequate viewing conditions
and curators like Catherine David seem to think that the more
that is in one room the better. Her show is an Arabic dark chamber,
simply a black box with free standing screens onto which films/video
on DVD are projected that deal with Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine
and related issues that reflect today's fashionable concern
with Arab cultures. The problem is that here the 'dictatorship'
of the curator favours a mix of all such images and sounds in
one room - no place to sit nowhere - so that we get a colourful
audio-visual kaleidoscope of surface impressions where everything
appears equally important, banal, and not at all commented.
But why are seeing this, for what purpose and what is the relation
- I assume those question would disturb the aestheticization
of politics. This is in particular problematic as the Atlas
Group (already shown at Documenta Kassel last year) presented
alleged authentically statistic material on car bombs, first-hand
narrative of hostages, but all this supposedly 'archival material'
is deliberately made up - a fact one should be aware of. Again,
some explanation on the materials presented would be very useful
to the viewer. In the adjacent room photocopies of book pages
that describe a project directed by Catherine David were precisely
glued on large tables and resembled the allusive gesture of
conceptualism of several decades ago, but this attitude carried
on in 2003 does not fill the gap of missing conception.
Aside from the 'real' world of art, the concept of "Dreams and
Conflicts" was much better presented in the hands of the Italian
coffee company "Illy" that ran a coffee for free shop at the
Arsenale where 'viewers' could test by themselves a new type
of espresso machine, make their own espresso, drink it and not
pay for it. The company had literally transformed the motto
of the Biennale into its advertisement policy, "Dreams" and
"Conflicts" turned into writing on coffee cups and no viewer
was 'dictated' to but everyone could experience the multiplicity
of individual coffee making. There was no pressure on interpretation,
except the uniform water pressure in the machines. This was
an excellent strategy to connect the arts to the market.
Apart from this exception, Bonami's Venice
Biennale nowhere reaches a level of self-reflection, but the
obvious meaninglessness of the effort can get even worse where
Bonami himself in the show entitled "Delays and Revolutions"
at Giardini in a strange reference to Pop Art presents a kind
of art supermarket without price tags in an internationally
acclaimed mix of accepted, well-known and famous artists, a
voluntarily incoherent neighbouring of names and pieces, even
historical masterpieces are not missing. We all like to see
the film, but there is not even the attempt to reason why Andy
Warhol's film video installation "Inner and Outer Space" of
1965 is screened. And in this particular case framing by information
would probably have been a revelation to many viewers, since
Warhol used video in summer 1965 for recording Edi Sedgwick
and then played the video back while recording her a second
time with a film camera. This double-portrait is presented in
double projection, a self-reflection on the mirroring effect,
of course, and it is precious as one of the first, probably
'the' first video recording that was done 'before' Paik later
the same year. But not many people know the story, and the Venice
Biennale does not help to spread the word. It seems, information
and concept are 'out', but escapism and l'art pour l'art are
'in': a prominent and large space is dedicated to Richard Prince's
photographs exclusively of cowboy life in the American West.
In the viewer's mind this after-Marlboro 'campaign' clearly
represents the counterpart to Illy's: here brand name and advertisement
is transformed into art, while reversely Illy's mechanism of
'show' is to transform marketing into aesthetics. But as the
obscurity of director Bonami's 'dreams' and 'conflicts' is not
suggesting conceptual associations, the mind keeps wandering
to avoid compulsive meaning.
It would be unfair not to describe contributions that successfully
manage to transgress the limitations of the poor exhibition
concept and articulate standpoints relevant to contemporary
aesthetics, cultures, media, and politics. Surprisingly, we
find these strong positions mostly under the 'dictatorship'
of the national pavilions, maybe because the traditional idea
of the Venice Biennale to present works according to nations
provokes response and critical reflection in the age of global
flow. But the artists here were more interested to point out
borders and zones of conflict. The Spanish pavilion was completely
blocked: its entrance was closed with a brick wall. Santiago
Sierra's intention was to keep out non-Spanish citizens and
only allow people with a valid Spanish ID to enter the (empty)
pavilion through the backdoor. This excellent comment on the
issue of passing borders (which, as the piece underlines, is
a question of having the right passport) unfortunately could
not be carried out by real Spanish customs officers. Obviously,
it was not possible to have Spanish officers control passports
on Italian territory, so that Italian officers were standing
at the backdoor of the pavilion and asked for your Spanish passport.
However the conceptual statement became clear and the paradoxes
of guarding and controlling borders were further explored in
the installation of life size passports throughout the Giardini
gardens.
Sandi Hilal (Palestine) and Alessandro Petti (Italy) reflected
on the possibility that viewers usually wander freely in the
garden from 'nation' to 'nation' and juxtaposed this neighbourhood
in the realm of art with symbolic settings of passports that
serve sometimes as door-opens and other times as barriers in
the real world of political-cultural relations. The enlarged
passports from different nations brought important insights
to evidence that we may not know, because we have never seen
these passports. For example, in most Arabian passports the
wife was included in the man's passport meaning she has no travel
documents of her own. And the Palestinian refugee passports
were all issued by different countries (Lebanon, Sryria, Egypt)
so that the official documents through their visual exhibition
explained to everyone that there is no Palestine nation. A more
subtle critique could be seen on the level of languages, because
most Arabian passports were in French or English - the colonial
language - , whereas for example the Italian passport (before
EU) read Italian and French, but not English. And the People's
Democratic Republic of Yemen seems to have no interest in having
their citizens travelling outside Arabian nations, the passport
is monolingual and again the wife is included in her husband's
document.
Such "lessons" about identity, national affiliation and cultural
differences are not all disconcerting in an art exhibition,
because Hilal/Petti and Sierra were smart enough to incorporate
the political message into the existing structure of the art
spaces at Giardini. Similarly, the Netherlands (curator: Rein
Wolfs) present artists who create inner spaces and zones that
deal with borders and transformations in the social-cultural
arena. The renown architect/artists Bart and Eric van Lieshout
had built a wooden cinema structure in front of the Dutch pavilion
where they screened a video portraying drug traffic, racial
and sexual identity within youth groups inhabiting the streets
of Rotterdam. The title "Respect" referred to what was needed
to avoid violence and racial 'wars' and the underlying social-ethnic
tension was also highlighted in the lyrics of hip hop music
that accompanied the video. Moreover, the effect of roaring
hip-hop sounds from a hut gave another impressive example of
the interrelatedness of art, culture, and politics. Another
installation by Atelier van Lieshout outside the Arsenale spaces
consists of dysfunctional mobile toilet systems that associate
digestion and excretion, suggesting biting criticism of the
Arsenale shows in particular because the toilets were placed
outside the section "Utopia Station" that was so hard to swallow.
Inside the Dutch pavillion the topic of identity was further
pursued in the tension between art and fashion by Alicia Framis'
collection "Anti-Dog", a videofilm staging models who perform
fashion show in the streets and contrast the make-up of woman's
beauty with the real dangers of dark street corners and domestic
violence. The presentation was not at all didactic: Framis had
built a temporary interior tent in the pavillion, a shelter,
viewing and fitting room in one, where the dresses were displayed
and the models could be seen on screen to enjoy the fashion
while at the same time contrasting a crowed of males leaving
a football stadium or bearing embroidered ribbons bearing the
inscription "beauty beats violence". Another facet of cultural
criticism from a woman's point of view was presented in the
Bellgian pavillion by Valérie Mannaerts and Sylvie Eyberg.
Their mulitmedia installations including DVD projection and
photographs in subtle ways caused disturbance in viewing images
of everyday cultural practices. Sylvie Eyberg enlarged clippings
so that the presented photographs focused on spaces between,
for example a man and woman on a table, and other not very noticeable
details which through enlargement and subtitles led the viewer's
attention to space as territority that one person occupies and
the other not, in short, power relations were revealed in apparently
inconspicuous images. In the same way Valérie Mannaerts
refers to public images and through cut outs and layers reveals
'dark' zones in fashionable girl's culture where tattoos, diets
and eventually plastic surgery are considered possible tools
to transform oneself.
There was also a work of conceptual art highlighting cultural
transformation based on international economics. Simon Starling
had driven a red Fiat 126 (built in 1974 in Italy) from Turin
to Cieszyn, where Fiat 126 is still produced, but in white not
red, and there he replaced red parts of car with white ones
and drove the car back to Italy. Thus the car exhibited at Venice
not only symbolised the fusion of old and new EU countries,
but also subtly imports the colours of the Polish flag into
Italian car industry- an inversion of exporting Italian car
industries into Poland. So here, the state of art and the so-called
the real world merge into one piece, the suture remains visible.