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51st Venice Biennial - Day 1 - Giardini

text on the Italian pavilion (in English) reads "Admit Nothing Blame Everyone".

  Most of the news of the 51st Venice Biennial is dominated by the two main "juried" exhibitions.  The first was located in the Italian pavilion which advertised "Admit Nothing Blame Everyone".  It turned out to be truth in advertising as good portion of the juried exhibitions were tedious political messages that blamed: first men, then the US, and then Capitalism.  The curators admitted that they had selected the work of artists they already knew but with the intent to reach out to under represented countries.  Maybe so.  I preferred the national pavilions.  Still, there were a few gems in the curated shows.  A film piece called "Memoirias del subdesarrollo" (memories of undeveloped) by Stan Douglas was my favorite in the Italian pavilion.  It was a remake of a film about the life of a young Cuban man who stayed behind in Cuba even after all his friends had left for Miami.  It was very well done with as much left between the lines as stated outright.  The political messages were there but weren't so biased.  Just one man's very personal effort to salvage his own life in the face of a bad political situation.

Jeffersonian style interpretation of greek revival architecture of the 19th century (red bricks, white colonades, arched windows).
   That said, I should also admit that the US pavilion was equally disappointing.
black and white painting that frames the top half of a ubiquetous commercial building has a sign "Tool & Die".
 First this.
Color painting of same building except the writing is in Chinese characters. Grafitti is scrawled on one side of the building.
 Then this.    

Times five.

The show was called: "Course of Empire".  The accompanying text was all about Ed Ruscha's struggle to make his paintings understood.
An empty room except for a few people who are leaving. The walls are black, ceiling white, floor is unfinished concrete.
   The Romanian Pavilion was much more daring--albeit "ala Robert Irwin".  The presentation "European Influenza" was one of the "invisible" artworks by Daniel Knorr. 
  So here you have the country that gave us Brancussi but has since been first dominated by the USSR and then has fallen on hard times.  Yet they are lucky enough to retain one of the few permanent pavilions in the main "Giardini De La Biennale", which exposes them to the maximum number of international visitors.  They select their one representative to the world and in so doing give him a shot at stardom.  He chooses to present an entirely empty pavilion in a dilapidated state.  The walls have been hastily painted a flat black.  No one has written on the resulting chalkboard-like surface.  Only the building and the history that put it here remain. 
  An embarrassed young woman hastily explains (over and over) to a bewildered and impatient stream of smirking onlookers that there was supposed to be a small book to be handed out as part of the presentation but that they ran out.  If you would please sign the guest book the artist will send one as soon as more are printed. 
  It was great.  For me the exhibit was not so much about the work and fame of one person but about the situation of a whole country.  It was easily dismissed as "nothing there, lets move on" but the more I think about it the more I appreciate this solution of how to direct the attention of the viewer.  There were many pavilions from countries that struggled with a similar difficulty of how to address an international audience.  I don't think this piece could have worked for any of them.  Most had to overcome the oppressive overhead of the city of Venice, but Romania, with its existing pavilion can stand separate and distinct.  Once substantial, presently on hard times, a blank slate poised for the future.  It really was great.
A wall and door painted black. The door is open so that the color of the trees and buildings outside are visible.

  On top of all that was the slightly subversive aspect that the back door to the exhibit, which led to the streets of Venice, was left open and thus provided both an escape and a free entry into the guarded Giardini (admission was 15 euros). 

image of a projection screen showing four people dressed in red as they walk in a large field of snow.
   The Russian pavilion required a somewhat similar effort from the viewer.  The main entry of the pavilion led to an empty room with white walls but painted Communist-red ceiling and floor.  To one side was a darkened room with an image of these four people dressed in red, frozen in mid step.  Whenever a viewer entered the room there would be a loud click and the slide would change to a version of the same four people but a little closer to the viewer.  The sound emanated from near the doorway so that the entering viewer's attention was directed toward the causal effect of their having entered.  The light beam used to detect a new viewer was intermittent and would only trigger every few seconds. 
  One problem was that a lot of people stopped at the doorway before passing through the sensor.  One woman stood blocking the sensor for some time wondering what people were looking at before she said, in an American accent, "its like watching snow melt".  Finally, she moved and the process resumed.  It took about twelve viewers and perhaps two minutes to get to the point where the people in red were close enough to fill the screen.  At that point there was the sound of a cannon and the images changed to a series of the people falling back to the starting point.
  Most of the viewers just sort of came in, glanced around and left but some lingered to see the whole sequence.  Just outside the door to the darkened room there was a page that explained the thought behind the piece saying that the artist wanted to interact with the viewer.  Very few people read it. 
A large faceted model of a mountain nearly envelops the pavilian building. Only one corner of the original structure is visible.
   The Austrian exhibition offered something for both the impatient and the inquisitive.  The exhibit itself grew right out of their pavilion so you were rewarded without even having to enter.  Once inside the viewer was invited by a series of stairways to traverse through walls and skylights up inside a scale model of a mountain.
wooden truss structure with staircases ascends through the skylight of the old Austrian Pavilion.   This is a view looking down through the structure and staircases at the roof of the original pavilion building. 
view of one of the venice canals and jumbleof buildings beyond. The edge of the hatch shows graffitti.
   The crowed seemed to delighted with the clear goal of mounting to the highest point where there was a small hatch that allowed a view out.  Note that many of viewers responded to their successful navigation of the winding staircase and the isolation of being alone on top by leaving their own mark.  The graffiti was in every language but mostly said "was here". 
waferboard model of the "mountain" hangs upside down from the cieling.
  For the inquisitive, there were many other such hatches at lower levels on side routes but they were not so popular as the one at the top and didn't sport graffiti.  Hidden off to one side was a small room that contained a scale model of the exhibition (hanging from the ceiling), a PC showing aerial photographs, a topographic map of a mountain in Italy (I expected it to be in Austria) and some pictures of that area and illustrations of mountain climbers.  Perhaps there was an explanation of why this mountain Pontebba was so important but if so it was hidden even more cleverly because I never found it. 
furniture parts assembled into a tree.
   The Israeli pavilion presented the work of one artist, Guy Ben-Ner.  There was a sculpture made of furniture parts at one level and a video of the artist interacting with the sculpture on another. 
image of the video projection of Guy Ben-Ner interacting with his sculpture. He has just discovered a small drawer containing tools and hardware for assembling furniture out of the parts of his sculpture.
   Over a course of perhaps ten minutes, the video showed the artist (wearing underwear and a fake beard) first lying on a mattress at the base of the "tree" looking up at it then discovering that there are tools and hardware hidden in a small drawer in side the trunk of the tree (shown at left) then slowly reconstructing the furniture that was used to make the sculpture: a chair, an umbrella, a table, a rocking chair, and a bunk bed.  Sometimes, the same part would be used for more then one purpose.  Some of the manipulations of the component parts included hinges and special latches so that the process was more involved than simply taking the whole thing apart and putting it back together again.  The video was filmed in the pavilion.
  At each step the sculpture remained cohesive.  The video is presented in a series of short performances like the assembly of the chair or of the table.  The impatient viewer could stay for one piece of furniture and then leave feeling satisfied that the rest was more of the same.   I watched until he had disassembled the whole sculpture into furniture.  Perhaps he reassembled it.  I don't know.
  This piece was really well done and was the favorite of a couple of people who I spoke with. 
Glass front of the building reveals a figure wrapped in chains and tied to anchors. The figure is wearing a business suit and carries two suitcases. hanging on the wall on either side are straw behives that match the form of the chains wrapping the figure's head.
   The Hungarian pavilion presented the work of sculptor Balazs Kicsiny.  The installations narrated various frustrations of modern life such as this one showing a man packed to travel but anchored.  He is flanked by bee-hives.  I am noticing that the ex-soviet countries have artists that are quite adept at portraying the conflict between individualism and the collective. 
A room ful of gadgets, wires, tubing, video screens, and enegmatic projections.
  The Belgian pavilion was full of all kinds of crazy "machinery" connected by tubing and wires.  Each station projected an image. 
Floor covered in hundreds of inverted "Duvel" beer bottles. In the foreground the labels can be discerned but beyond the first row, only the bottoms of the bottles can be seen. In background is a person standing on the bottles and a projected image of a person standing.
   My favorite was the room paved with inverted beer bottles (but then I have a weakness for Belgian ale).  The  first few rows of bottles were glued together but the rest jangled as the viewer walked on them.
Handwritten note explains in two laguages that the dutch pavilion is closed due to technical difficulties. Graffitti, mostly in Dutch I think, complains bitterly. I suspect many countrymen came and were more than disapointed.
   Some of the pavilions were closed.  The crowd was not sympathetic.
Nestled in the trees is a building made up of a cylinder and a couple of cubes mostly painted in a subdued green-gray but the top is like a bright red oriental lantern.
   The Korean pavilion was hidden in the trees of the garden.
A sculpted piece of styrofoam is carved to look like two realistic human arms that are positioned to create the form of a swan: on arm is bent upward to form a neck with the hand becoming the head and beak while the other arm crosses the bicept of the first so that the hand and fingers look like the wing and feathers of the swan. Very nicely done.
   The Korean Pavilion had work from a number of artists.  This piece by Kim Beom was fun.  It is carved from styrofoam.  I have a soft spot for artists who can work materials so well and for images that present multiple forms.  To me the subject and presentation are intrinsically Eastern and immersed in their tradition but the material choice brings it into the present and offers an invitation for direct participation (as opposed to viewing someone else's culture from a safe distance).  The choice to use male arms changes this piece from what I would have expected.  All in all a very nice piece.
Hand drawn ink-on-building graffiti is made up of innumerable charcatures that one might expect to see on a highschool student's notebook line the walls, door and even outside the exit.   I have been paying attention to graffiti so was surprised to see it creeping into the Korean exhibit. 
A boat structure is balanced on the tips of two rows of oars over a pile of sand. One has the feeling of being underwater. in the background are a number of granite monoliths.
   The Egyptian exhibit was one of the few that was entirely sculptural.  My interest in sculpture caused me to pay more attention to the sculptures which were actually a small minority of the overall biennial.  Biased as I am, I felt that installations such as these by Nagi Farid and Salah Hammad allowed the viewer to immerse themselves in the presentations.
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   By far the most extravagant display of raw talent was the Australian pavilion full of wood carvings by Ricky Swallow.  The whole exhibit was about skill.  The choice of topics related somewhat to the artist but was mostly in the classical tradition.  To me, the work is this artist's effort to refute the claim that the old  masters cannot be beaten at their own game; that art has to go in some entirely new direction.  It was a refreshing change from the rest of the Biennial.
Highly acurate wood carving of a skeleton holding a wlaking stick and sitting in a chair.
   This piece would have been impressive enough for its accuracy if it had been carved of separate parts and assembled but it was hewn from one laminated block so most of the cutting is against the grain and required hollowing out many inaccessible cavities. 
close up of the skeletons lap and right arm which is holding a knife--all carved out of one large laminated block of light colored wood. The level of acuracy is excrutiating. Visible in the photo are indications of the direction of the grain in the original block.
   Note the line of the original block passing through the leg bones, wrist, knife blade, and chair below.  He is showing off.
  There were warning signs pleading to not touch the work because it was so fragile. 
A masterfully carved calssical piece of stonework full of saints grape leaves and other adornments in extreme high relief.
   Venice is covered with so much masterful artwork that it often blends into the structures that it adorns.  I was overwhelmed.  Sleep.

11 Octobre 2005

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