ILLUMI nations: The Venice Biennale 2011

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Henry Matthews follows our July article on the Venice Biennale with his own observations

The Venice Biennale, more than any other international art exposition, opens up beyond the boundaries of its site to engage with the entire city. Originally confined to a group of national pavilions and a central building in the Giardini Pubblici, it expanded in 1999 into the rope factory of the Arsenale and spread out to widely dispersed locales.

As we move around Venice, perhaps lost in narrow streets, or riding on vaporetti, we see banners announcing shows in grand palazzi, and hole-in-the-wall buildings,in churches and abandoned industrial sites, even on a small island. They beckon to places where few tourists normally penetrate and often reward us with thought-provoking and visually exciting exhibits. This year, 89 countries are participating, some of them, including Cuba, new to the Biennale, or returning after a period of absence. In addition, many ‘collateral’ shows, sponsored by a variety of organizations, add to the offerings. While this year’s curator, Bice Curiger, is responsible for the official exhibition in the Arsenale and the central pavilion, the essence of the Biennale is found in the multiplicity of voices.

Curiger, an art historian and the editor of Parkett, an art magazine published in Switzerland, explains a play on words that links the theme of light with nations to produce the themeILLUMInations. She builds on the global nature of art. One of five questions she asks all the participating artists is: How many nations are inside you? Celebrating light in a Venetian context, she includes three major paintings by Tintoretto in the central pavilion. Borrowed from the Accademia gallery, which is now undergoing restoration, the dramatically luminous  Removal of the Body of St Mark (1562–6) and  The Last Supper  (1592–4), with its table set dynamically on a diagonal axis, present a challenge to the art that follows.

Some of the artists in the show deal with light in a literal way. An installation by James Turrell, like all his work, reveals the essence of pure light and its potential to overpower architectural space. The Iranian artist David Nuur defines and animates space with neon tubes. Others explore the theme in more metaphorical ways. Visitors navigating the vast array of art selectively will find works that resonate for them, but as a whole the show lacks the vitality we usually associate with the Biennale.

The powerful industrial architecture of the rope factory and the once-coherent interiors of the Central building have been divided into a maze of small, often crowded spaces to enclose exhibits and allow for many videos. It is therefore a relief to emerge into a large area, defined by massive brick arcades, where comfortable sofas invite weary patrons to sit and watch Christian Marclay’s film,  The Clock. Running for 24 hours, this assembles clips from over 1000 movies all of which include glimpses at clocks, watches or chimes showing the actual time wherever it is shown. Spliced together with an uncanny illusion of continuity, it exhibits cinematography that shows up the slow-paced banality of many of the videos in the exposition. Marclay (b. 1955) was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist at the Biennale.

Curiger has commissioned four artists to create ‘parapavilions’ which include the work of others. The most arresting of these, entitled Intelligence of the Poor  (Image 1 in the lightbox above) is the nostalgic recreation by Song Dong of his 100-year-old parental home in China. In line with his recent installation at MoMA in New York entitled Waste Not, he is dealing with continued use and adaptation of cultural and physical resources. Indeed, he surrounds it with dwellings made out of old wardrobes.

At the other end of the scale, two futuristic installations occupy a shipyard building beyond the Rope Factory with an interior like that of an ancient basilica. In the further aisle of this monumental space,  Outside Itself  (image 2 in the lightbox) by Federico Diaz involves robots that make art untouched by human hand. In the course of the Biennale, a German automotive robot will arrange half a million black plastic balls representing photons in a pattern determined by various stimuli, according to a mathematical program.

In the first aisle, the Russian artist Alexander Ponomarev refuses such a mechanistic approach. With sponsorship from London’s Courtauld Institure of Art, he invited three other artists to collaborate with him in  One of a Thousand Ways to defeat Entropy  (image 3). In a statement reminiscent of the 1914 Futurist Manifesto and reflecting the optimism of the Russian Avant-Garde after the revolution, he writes that while everything we need is shrinking, ‘Only one thing grows fatally – Entropy’. ‘Our project in Venice throws light on this tendency, emphasizing that resistance to the principle (declared to be the second beginning of thermodynamics) can only be carried out by a creative person! Only a creator gives birth to life energy…’. ‘The bearers of this energy – artists, engineers, poets – are a small army, the guides of evolution, warriors with cosmic noise…’.

Ponomarev has erected two vast transparent acrylic tubes each filled with twelve metric tons of lagoon water and containing a ‘Kinetic futuro-automobile,’ within which is a human-foetus-like form, slowly rising and falling within its cylinder. He uses water ‘as the symbol of the unending cycle of life in which entropic reduction oscillates with vital essence’.  The bluish green fluid in its smooth cylinder, illuminated by roof-lights and a window of ecclesiastical character, commands the space.

Near them, Hans Op de Beeck illustrates entropy in a model of a suburban home covered in volcanic ash.  Ryoichi Kurokawa contributes eight ICD screens arranged in an octagon to surround the viewer with sound and image. On these screens, waterfalls cascade in a threatening manner down rocky clefts. To one side stretches an 18-metre-long monochrome collage by Adrian Ghenie depicting Marcel Duchamp’s corpse lying in state.  Revolutionary zeal appears to be the connection between the four artists.  Inspired by Canto XXI of Dante’s Inferno, which refers to the Arsenale, Ponomorov insists that visitors can only reach his show in the Novissimo Arsenaleby boat: ‘Where else but in the Arsenale of Venice should one build an ark, a ship of associates, poets, dreamers and utopians to set out together on a fascinating adventure?’

Some of the most exciting work is found in national and independent pavilions, both in the Giardini and in remote sites. Given the state of the world today it is hardly surprising that many of the national exhibits are political in nature, or express angst or outrage. Those of Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Denmark, stand out among many examples. They are covered in detail in a separate review for Cassone by Susan Platt (see Featured reviews, July).

In the United States pavilion Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla have used ‘quasi-Surrealist  strategies of free association and unexpected juxtaposition in order to pose questions about the relationships among art, politics, and international identity in the 21st century’. In front of the neoclassical building stands an upside-down tank on which an athlete runs on a treadmill (image 4). Can this be a new interpretation of ‘swords to ploughshares?’

Christian Boltanski, the artist featured in the French Pavilion, deals with the issue of population, recording in huge, separate LED displays the number of births and deaths predicted throughout the world. The central element, supported on a scaffolding is a wide, continuously moving strip of film showing the faces of innumerable babies. When the movement suddenly stops, one face is displayed as a still. Chance alone singles out this infant, for what we do not know. The artist also involves viewers in a game allowing them to seek a complete face from the randomly matched upper and lower parts of faces of babies and elderly people. 

The Korean Pavilion stands out from the old, neoclassical ones; its steel frame and glass walls give it transparency. The artist Lee Yong-baek presents contradictions, camouflage and threats. Near the entrance, over-life-size robot-like figures fight, one pinning the other to the floor, and further back, against a bank of trees outside, they are seen again in a pieta pose. In one corner, a close look at a wall of colourful flowers behind glass reveals soldiers carrying guns moving behind them (image 6). In another room, we peer into mirrors only to be assailed by bullets smashing into them from behind.

For the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, in The Sleeping City Dominik Lang, recreates and transforms the studio of his father ‘manipulating already-finished material and composing new entities out of it’. The artist combines critique with personal engagement (image 7).

The precise and exquisite forms of  The Black Arch  by Raja and Shadia Alem in the Pavilion of Saudi Arabia (image 8), with their polished metal surfaces and projected mosaics, contrast with the rough, almost violent concrete-like structures by Adrián Villa Rojas in the Argentine exhibit (image 9). The first refers to experiences of Mecca and Venice; the second, perhaps to ‘alternative universes’.                                                                                                   

Several Venetian churches offer milieus for art. In the Palladian church of San Giorgio, Anish Kapoor has attempted to create a spiritual manifestation in a column of vapour rising from a cylinder at the crossing of nave and transepts. Unfortunately, the four tall banks of fans and a funnel projecting from the base of the dome above destroy the sense of immateriality.

The small church of San Lio in the Castello district hosts a recreation on film of the scene in The Road to Calvary by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1564). Actors who possess an amazing resemblance to the artist’s own characters enact the events leading up to the crucifixion, every frame looking like a Flemish painting (image 10). To one side of the nave, three screens show the landscape background of Bruegel’s painting filled with convincingly Bruegel-esque figures in motion. In the foreground of one of them the artist himself is sketching. This is the work of the Polish multi-disciplinary artist Lech Majewski, who spent three years ‘weaving an enormous digital tapestry composed of layer upon layer of perspective, atmospheric phenomena and people’. He collaborated on the text for the film with the art critic Michael Francis Gibson.