La Biennale

by Ruth Barker, 6 Oct 2009

Hello,

Back in Glasgow safe and sound from my little excursion to Venice. First of all, a little background: I’ve never been to the Biennale before, and so this trip was a surprise 30th birthday present (back in June, but it took a while to organise) from my husband, my family and my friends, who all chipped in to send me on my way. It was an extraordinary, wonderful, slightly overwhelming gift that I was completely unprepared for, and I honestly don’t know how to begin to thank everyone! I’ll do my best, I think, with a series of fine dinners.

So, as a first trip it was quite overwhelming I guess. The most incredible thing was the sheer amount of visual opulence in the city – a seemingly undifferentiated blur of art, architecture, religious splendour, low kitsch and high fashion. I’ve never seen a city so encased in embellishment. I doubt that there’s anything like it in the world.

And the Biennale itself? Endlessly fascinating, but not (I have to say) endlessly engaging. Some of the work was a LOT better than others – which is to say that some of it wasn’t all that great, in my humble opinion. Still, in a way that was kind of reassuring I suppose. My personal highlights were Scotland’s pavilion (maybe it’s just patriotism, but I thought Martin Boyce’s work was among the best things I saw); Mexico’s (artist: Teresa Margolles); The Netherlands’ (artist: Fiona Tan) and Central Asia’s pavilion, in which Kazakhstan was represented by Oksana Shatalova, Yelena Vorobyeva &Viktor Vorobyev; Kyrgyzstan was represented by Ermek Jaenisch; Tajikistan by Djamshed Kholikov, and Uzbekistan by Anzor Salidjanov. Oh and I also loved Pavel Pepperstein in the Russian pavillion. By far the best work I saw (or, to be more diplomatic, the work I liked best) in the Fare Mondi/Making Worlds surveys in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini and the Arsenale was Nathalie Djurberg’s.

Among the most disappointing from my point of view was the presentation by the Denmark and Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden). Titled The Collectors and much written about in the art press, this revolved around a single superfiction-like conceit that the pavilions were stage-set like homes of wealthy collectors, the work present being contextualised by its relationship to both an embedded fictional narrative (complete with ‘corpse’ floating in the outdoor pool) and the broader notion of an art market: the business of art business as Warhol might say. Personally I found the conceit limited and contrived, and also somewhat undermined by the physical positioning of the work within the Giardini site. There was something clumsy about it I felt, and almost old-fashioned in a YBA kind of way. Yes, art is part of a market, and it exists simultaneously in multiple, sometimes contradictory economies. But didn’t we establish that already?

Of course I didn’t see everything. In the time I had I think that would have been impossible, and I probably did miss some real gems. An interesting contrast was made however, by two of the off-site pavillions, which I happened to see consecutively. The first was Foreign Affairs the Taiwan pavilion showing work by Chien-Chi Chang, Chen Chieh-Jen, Hsieh Ying-Chun, and Cheng-Ta Yu. This was a disappointing show I felt, in which a serious topic (Taiwanese status, identity, and equality) was tackled in what felt like a very limited fashion. It made me think seriously about the role of the viewer in this kind of work. Much has been written about the multiple roles of artists within society, and the differing kinds of worth that these can inhabit and / or convey. The role of artist as social commentator, mirror, or window into a culture of community is established and inarguable. How though can we reconcile these roles with the experience of viewing the work that is produced when artists take on these roles in an unmediated or untranslated way? How are we to respond as viewers when a territory of inequality or injustice is placed before us? Is it beside the point to critique the size of a screen or the colour balance of a photograph? It seems wrong to do this somehow, and yet because we are encountering the work within an art context, we are primed to notice and respond to its visual codes and qualities. It’s a serious question, and one that I don’t raise facetiously. The aesthetic or ‘artistic’ content of the work in Foreign Affairs took second place to the political stance chosen. For the artists to choose to do this is inarguably their right. Likewise for the curator to choose to show the work. But the question remains, once the work is made and displayed, how and why is it disseminated to an art audience? Am I also expected to judge it in terms of its politics rather than its ‘art content’? And what does it mean if I do this? Where do I go from there, after I’ve decided to boycott Taiwanese goods, for example? The show left me flat, I’m afraid.

Leaving it, however, I made my way to another off-site space – the Mexican pavilion. Here I found another artist dealing with another social injustice. But here I also found real power in the work, and in the significance of a visual art approach and context for the work in What else could we talk about? For years, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles has investigated “the exploration of the artistic possibilities of human remains, the memory of the loss provoked by violent death and the institutions that manage human corpses.” Her work is lyrical but undeniable, full of a certain gestural poetry but unstinting in it’s ability to address this forlorn and mortal subject matter. There’s real weight to her practice, whether washing the floor of this 16th century Venetian palazzo in the blood of Mexican murder victims, or replacing the Mexican flag on the front of the building with a flag soaked in mud and the blood of the dead. Set against the statement that 2008 was the year when the most bullets have been fired in Mexico’s recent history, there’s a lot I could say about Margolles’ work, but this probably isn’t the right place. It’s important to say that her practice isn’t unproblematic – I’m sure that accusations of exploitation could be, and have been made – but partly it’s that complication, that tension, which appeals to me. Perhaps it’s that level of friction that makes it far more interesting as art, as well as that level of metamorphosis and gesture, which transforms her work from commentary into something ultimately, qualitatively, different.

More later,
R