Reports    Published 29/06/11

Encore Biennale

54th Venice Biennale, Venice
4 June–27 November 2011

by CELIA WHITE

Venice’s labyrinthine walkways and tilting palazzos have long seemed an unlikely setting for the vast showcase of contemporary art that fills the city every two years. A site of beautiful decay, but hardly of progress, it is curious that Venice has remained central to one of the art world’s most important international expositions.

Yet when speeding along the canal on the vaporetto, or feeling the endless rise and fall of the body over the city's myriad bridges, or reliving a personal version of Don't Look Now in a dark corridor (a scene that even the hot Venetian sun cannot counteract), the reason becomes clear: Venice is a place that prioritises aesthetic and sensory experience over logical structure. Navigating it relies as much on visual stimuli and mental checkpoints as it does on maps, and as a result it is an arena of exploration, of trial and error. Bound up on a tiny island, it is a self-reflexive space, a treatise on space's subjectivity and the multiple ways to experience it where a rational arrangement is lacking.

This quality of Venice’s physical complexity has never been more pertinent to developments in art than it is now. The notion that the moving, feeling, hearing and seeing body can be central to art is hardly radical, nor is the concept that artworks can consist of the immersive, explorative environments that Venice itself so exemplifies. Yet these ideas have inserted themselves into several national pavilions in the 2011 Venice Biennale with a distinctive contemporaneity.

Mike Nelson's project for the UK pavilion, entitled I, Impostor, has totally transformed the late-19th-century neo-classical domed structure into a 17th-century Turkish caravanserai, a complex of rooms that once functioned as an inn and workshop for travellers. Yet Nelson’s caravanserai is based not on a real building, but on a remake of that building that he constructed for the 8th Istanbul Biennale in 2003. For the Istanbul version, entitled Magazin: Büyük Valide Han, Nelson created a visual maze filled with red light and black and white photographs of the space itself hanging from the ceiling, such that visitors continuously encountered the space alongside representations of it. In I, Impostor, he has transported that maze of rooms and the photographic installation into an entirely separate environment, hundreds of miles away, and allowed it to spread and infect this new site while constantly referring to the old.

Nelson’s radical yet low-budget transformation of the gallery – which has involved stripping back the white walls and removing the roof – leaves behind an altered state, or a place in disguise. The effect for the viewer is a sense of entering a personal space, one of dwelling, working, eating, yet a space rife with an eerie sense of abandonment, as if the inhabitants had very recently walked out of the door without intention of returning. This is a narrative cut short before it has begun; if it continues, it is unclear who is responsible for its unfolding. The bare walls, the tools, the low-lit stairways and shattered chandelier belong to no one. As we peer nervously around each wooden doorframe we are implicated, we, impostor, dictated to by the unrecognisable power of this new type of gallery space.

Equally transformative is Thomas Hirschhorn’s Crystal of Resistance for the Swiss pavilion; here twisting pathways filled with tin-foil-clad objects – magazines, Barbie dolls, mobile phones, cinema seats – provide a glittering, far brasher pilgrimage. The cumulative effect of the foil, the garish objects, the mirrored walls and crystals splintering the visual continuity is one of starkness and oppression; a heat seems to radiate from the many reflective surfaces, or from each viewer’s body as he or she tries to negotiate the sparkling walkways. On first encounter Crystal of Resistance seems an obvious attempt to immerse the viewer in the detritus of existence: the shallow and sickly pursuit of material possessions in which we are visually implicated through the reflection of our faces in the mirrors and foil. Yet reading Hirschhorn’s statement of purpose reveals the opposite: he intended to create a “cave”, an “indestructible and earthly dwelling of the gods” that can represent or conjure “a truth that resists facts, opinions and commentaries”, an experience of art that is universal and autonomous of everything that is not “resistance as such”. This cave of universal truth and the idea of autonomous art are undoubtedly unrealisable fantasies, not to mention a highly presumptuous grounding for an artistic project (“Can my work create a new term of art?”). Hirschhorn’s immersive space is simply a superficial mass of things, of stuff, that is only universal in the sense that everyone – and therefore no one in particular – can recognise and relate to it.

Seen together, Nelson and Hirschhorn’s pavilions exemplify a trend, perhaps already reaching its peak, for epically transformed spaces that viewers can explore and weave into their own narrative pattern. Yet unlike Nelson’s, Hirschhorn’s transformation, though grand, remains utterly uncompelling. Seeping from every pore is a shallowness that does not connect with the overabundance of meaning that Hirschhorn’s accompanying essay lays out for it. By contrast, Nelson’s pavilion succeeds by leaving more to the viewer. Where Hirschhorn has manufactured our response to his environment, Nelson’s careful, far more understated manipulation of the space is a catalyst for our imagination: he allows us to scare ourselves. A residual sense of unease lingers in the pavilion in much that same way that a horror film’s atmosphere resounds in the mind days after being watched.

The nearby German pavilion further exemplifies this tendency toward the transformed, explorative and emotionally charged exhibition space. Unlike Nelson and Hirschhorn's spaces, which both at least partly declare their falsity, Christoph Schlingenseif's display is a site of real tragedy; the objects and films within are the remains of a truly devastating event. Having received the commission for the pavilion while in treatment for lung cancer, Schlingenseif died in late summer 2010. As a result, the pavilion that would have shown his latest (still unfinished) project has instead been transformed into a shrine to Schlingenseif's work and illness. The pavilion’s interior appears as the inside of a church, replete with pews, altar and candles - a reconstruction of the stage set of Schlingenseif's play A Church of Fear vs the Alien Within. Around the church are projected Schlingenseif's beautiful Fluxus-inspired films, home videos, and sequences showing the artist in hospital following the removal of one of his lungs. These are accompanied by X-ray images, miniature coffins and the artist's personal objects. 

The visual crowding of the space with the detritus of Schlingenseif’s memory lends it a crushing frankness that makes viewing almost unbearable. Where Hirschhorn's space seeks the depersonalised, universal viewer, the German pavilion's homage to Schlingenseif proffers a distinctly personal story and a specific event that encases the viewer in its particularity to this place, this person, these objects. As in Nelson’s I, Impostor, and unlike in the traditional gallery space, the subject of our emotional engagement is dispersed such that we formulate our own narrative for Schlingenseif’s life, interleaving it with our own and relishing the power that the space gives us to do so.

Schlingenseif’s show was the recipient of this year’s prestigious Golden Lion for the best national pavilion. Aside from the emotional power lent to it by the tragic series of events in the months preceding the Biennale, the German pavilion was able to elicit such emotional or inquisitive responses in its audience through an awareness of the many sensory possibilities of an artwork that occupies more than three dimensions. The interior of the Greek pavilion falls short of this awareness, consisting as it does simply of a walkway at ground level surrounded by very shallow, largely stagnant water stretching as far as the walls. Though understated to the point of being uninteresting, the Greek pavilion’s serenity produces an infinitely more favourable response than that of the Canadian pavilion, which inspires only disappointment. The promise of intrigue and scandal implied by the specially-erected wooden facade, with its awkwardly-small doorway and its super-scale concrete poem, white on black, that speaks of the “fluorescent discharge of sloppy viviseconds” and the “endless bleeding journey shivering whore of light”, is swiftly curtailed by the banality of the pavilion’s innards. No wooden structure plastered with further obscenities, but rather a sedate gallery space in which colourful, Fauvesque portraits hang. The paintings supposedly explore the anguish of modern identity using fragments of culture, new and old, yet their very presence implies an identity crisis housed within the pavilion itself, where, ironically, the anguished persona that is turned outward is not matched by what dwells within.

Despite their relatively extreme modifications of the existing buildings, the Greek and Canadian pavilions fail in creating fully compelling immersive environments because they lack consideration of what such modifications can reveal about space and our relationship to it. Like Nelson’s I, Impostor, Markus Schinwald’s Austrian pavilion places spatial transformation and exploration at the centre of the project, and the result for the viewer is an evolving dialogue concerning the body’s interaction with space. Schinwald has filled the Austrian pavilion with white partitions that hang from the ceiling down to hip-level. Among these partitions are corridors and dead-ends, and among these corridors and dead-ends paintings hang and sculptures protrude from gaps at unlikely heights. Though the display feels far from chaotic, it bears little relation to the viewing eye or the moving body; ergonomics and the ease of viewing that so dictate our gallery experience and our daily actions are absent, and their absence points to the impact that minor shifts in spatial arrangement could have on our correspondence with our environment. 

Though two-dimensional, Schinwald’s paintings, when they can be found, contribute to this analysis of space in a subtle way. The paintings are reworkings of traditional portraits but with the application of startling alterations. A prosthetic chin is attached to a face with little attempt to blend it into the face’s structure; chains hooked over the ears force a man’s mouth into a permanent smile; a cotton container houses a pair of lips. The notion that prostheses can conceal flaws is turned on its head: the flaws are declared, made grotesque, and incorporated into painstakingly executed portrait paintings – an art form which has long been used to conceal the imperfections of its sitters. Though the paintings possess a haunting quality of their own, they create a focal point for Schinwald’s broader exploration of the hazed boundary between the animate and inanimate, between the body and the spatial and material surroundings that it relies upon. Their grimly muted portrayal of the place where body ends and world begins is in turn mirrored by the disembodied legs of wandering visitors, glimpsed under the truncating canopy of Schinwald’s inverted gallery space.

No single artwork in the Biennale brings these considerations to the fore better than that of Erwin Wurm, another Austrian artist, with his installation Narrow House. Situated in the midst of the city in the grounds of the Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, Narrow House is a reconstruction of Wurm’s childhood home. In one dimension – lengthways – it appears entirely normal, but the view from the front reveals that it is only one metre wide. The interior of the house has been resized accordingly, with an astonishing eye for detail: photographs hung along the house’s length look normal, while those hung along the breadth of the house are squashed in exact scalar relation to its contracted width. Likewise, a chair running lengthways is just a normal chair; yet its companion, at the head of the table, like the toilet, the beds and the hall telephone, takes on the reduced dimensions of the house’s width in a way that is both surreal and farcical.