Reports    Published 15/06/11

The 54th Venice Biennale

Venice
4 June–27 November 2011

by DOROTHY FEAVER

Bice Curiger’s exhibition in the international pavilion, ILLUMInazione, opens with three paintings by Tintoretto, also known as “Il Furioso”. These are sprawling compositions: sea beasts leap out of the water and there is a cameo from a camel. Outside of the Biennale, Venice is awash with Tintorettos, and entry to the international pavilion, with its installation of fake pigeons in the rafters, has the feel of stumbling into one of the city’s churches. Curiger’s courtesy to context sets the tone.

Sweden’s pavilion is a challenge for exhibition organisers, being all glass on two of four sides. Representing artist, Andreas Eriksson’s studio is of a similar build, and he follows the limitations of context. Casts of birds that have died crashing into his studio windows are installed around the tree that grows through the centre of the pavilion – these work out as tiny black slivers on the floor. Eriksson’s effort is complemented by a screaming from through the western windows, like a flock of birds taking fright: the screech comes from the gurning treads of an upended tank, positioned outside the US pavilion.¹ Perched on top of the tank is a hulk of an athlete, whose superthighs pound away on a treadmill, as if powering the tank. Inside gymnasts move their bodies over and around business-class airline seats-cum-gym horses.² Entitled Gloria, the US show, by duo Jennifer Allora and Guilermo Calzadilla, noted for their Cuban-American background, is about flex rather than muscle.³

I’ve opened this selected tour of the Biennale with two of the more literal, introspective exhibits, to define by contrast what were for me the highlights. This year, the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification, was a point for widespread reflection on national identity, intimately linked to the new digital age – and the overall theme, ILLUMInazione, had resonance. If Walter Benjamin’s mechanical age was about the fragmentary, then the digital age is being visualised as something fluid and ultra-sensitive.⁴

Deep inside the international pavilion is a film about Predator Drones by Omer Fast, born in Jerusalem and based in Berlin. Drones are the unmanned planes, controlled remotely by pilots on consoles thousands of miles away in the US, that fly the same routes over Afghanistan every day, edgy for irregularity, lest they are detected by heat sensors.⁵ In Five Thousand Feet is the Best (2010), an actor voices the words of an RL Drone pilot, droning on in a hotel room interview, until he takes a break in the corridor, where each time something happens to stimulate an anecdote to tell when he returns to the interview.⁶ So the three anecdotes that comprise the spokes of the film, as it rolls on and on in a loop, are chosen seemingly at random. One is about a hotel scam where a couple repeatedly steal wallets, thanks to keeping multiple pairs of trousers in the bathroom.

Further into the international pavilion is another timely piece, both interactive and international-minded, and set to decay from the onset of its production, 30 May 2011.⁷ Norma Jeane, an alias (this is the artist responsible for the one-man smoking capsules in Frieze Art Fair, 2008) has created a work about the recent technologically-enabled uprisings, using that most primary of schoolroom materials, Plasticine. There is a block in the middle of the room, composed of three layers of Plasticine in black, red and white (the colours of flags of the Arab world). Its title, #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17…) refers to the list of some of the most popular hashtags on Twitter as the revolutions were going on across the Arab world. Visitors are allowed to touch the piece and within days, the top layer had been picked away and the room smeared with names, messages and love hearts.

On the further side of the Giardini, across the bridge, Egypt presents a memorial to its chosen artist, 33-year old Ahmed Basiony, the father of two who was shot dead by snipers in the protests in Tahrir Square, Cairo, on 28 January. In the pavilion a wall of videos align footage of the protests with videos of the project the artist had been working on for the Biennale.⁹ For 30 Days of Running in the Place, Basiony had been filmed in a kind of space-suit, equipped with heat sensors, running on the spot, while sensors track his movement and feed the information through to a coloured screen. Adjacent, footage from the artist’s phone camera, shot over the four days of protests in January, shows the crowd breaking the curfew in Tahrir Square – and Basiony running on a real hot spot. This exhibition is a testimony to technology: the hand-held phone-camera, wobbly and pixellated, brings the hand of the artist terribly close.

In the Japan pavilion the animator Tabaimo has created an all-enveloping experience, Teleco-soup. At its centre is a mirrored well (“A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean, but it knows the height of the sky”, goes the Japanese proverb). All around there is a multi-channel animation projection on the walls, which slope to the floor with a smooth concave lip, while the corners of the pavilion are made infinite by mirrored panels. The images feature typical Japanese motifs: a finger pulls away a cute black and white urban scene in the wood block print style; underwater bubbles rise in a riff on the Hokusai seas; there are brains and clouds, bugs, roses and Enoki mushrooms. The animation moves up and down between the floor and ceiling in a slurp worthy of a Ramen-aficionado. It is virtual reality made tangible, with visitors tiptoeing up the slopes – into water or sky – as far as they can. And the wave of pictures, rolling up the slope, is of course redolent of the recent tsunami. Tabaimo’s simple conceit casts Japan as a soup: an island nation in the face of globalisation, all the more self-contained by its technological sophistication. When I was there the general response was to wave a salute with a smart-phone: Teleco-soup was being leaked out and uploaded through a sea of little screens.¹⁰

The Israel exhibit, One man’s floor is another man’s feelings, also frames Israel as an island state.¹¹ Sigalit Landau is interested in the transitional states between basic elements: salt, water, soil. Enter through a courtyard that is normally enclosed and in its centre there is a circle of office shoes cast in bronze, with the laces tied together between each pair. Inside the pavilion the shoes link up to an unmanned circle of laptops around a negotiating table, each showing a child tying the loops.¹² Elsewhere a set of letters from officials reply with polite enthusiasm to the artist’s enquiry as to the possibility of building a salt bridge between Israel and Jordan across the Dead Sea. A film shows a pair of shoes encrusted with Dead Sea salt, that have been left in the snow by a frozen lake in Gdansk, to melt away holes in the ice¹³ (“tread softly because you tread on my dreams”).¹⁴ Major pipe work has been put into the pavilion, entering on the side nearest the Giardini waterway, through a hole in the wall that is left unfinished and earthy. The pipe is meant to pump water from Venice into Israeli space. (It is not clear if the plumbing actually functions).

“It’s trying to be Thomas Hirschorn, but it isn’t,” someone was overheard sniping outside Switzerland, where none other than Thomas Hirschorn had created a crazed, tin foil catacomb, Crystals of Resistance. “I want to work in over-haste,” he says. “I want to work in headlessness and I want to work in panic. I want to work with the precarious and in the precarious. This is to be understood as the political. The political is, to understand the precarious not as a concept but to understand it as a condition.”¹⁵ Here there is precariousness by means of gems Sellotaped to mobile phones (quartz is instrumental to the workings of a clock), bundles of which are taped to plastic chairs. Silver forms hang precariously from the ceiling.¹⁶ It’s a handmade Tardis, luring the visitor into a lo-fi vision of the future, obsessive and fragile – a B-movie film set, unclear as to what it is meant to be, what it is, what it isn’t. It’s panic worthy of Il Furioso himself. It is rather perfect in the cranky fantasy-continuum of Venice.

Which takes us to the Arsenale, a 32-hectare naval complex, in which Swiss artist Urs Fischer has turned a chamber into a spooky candelabra. He presents a set of candles on a gargantuan scale. A wax model of a man (he happens to be Rudolf Stingel, a friend of the artist) looks up, albeit with a half-melted head, at a wax reproduction of Giovanni Bologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Women (1583), which, unlike the original in Florence, has its subject’s arm dripping onto a rapist’s shoulder and eating away at the plinth. A wax version of the artist’s studio chair quietly sinks into the corner. This is an experience specific to the time of viewing. So too, further on in the Arsenale, is Christian Marclay’s epic film, The Clock (2010).¹⁷ Marclay has edited together scores of film clips that show the time according to the 24 hour clock, accurate to the time of screening. It is an ode to the film buff, to story-telling, to the passing of time; clocking up B-movies, cult films, blockbusters, melodrama, film noir, screwballs, romcoms, you name it, Marclay has you glued to your seat, lost in fiction but stuck in the moment. The feats of engineering displayed by Fischer and Marclaytake on the magnitude of the Arsenale, which at the height of its powers could kit out a galleon in less time than it would take to screen The Clock in its entirety.

Up in the Cannaregio neighbourhood, Karla Black’s exhibition for Scotland drifts between what is and what isn’t – evoking Hirschorn’s Crystals of Resistance, minus the panic.¹⁸ Clouds of cellophane, blushing with paint, drift in mid-air, precariously attached to skeins of Sellotape; scraps of pastelled sugar paper are suspended, like smells made visible. A whiff of soap intensifies as you follow Black’s trail through rooms (candles sit squat in patches of soil) leading to a finale that is heady with the sickly-sweet smell of teen-girl: the Lush Bathbomb.¹⁹ The imminence of decay²⁰ and the dust and crumbliness of Black’s textures are particularly sensitive to the palazzo setting. In fact there is something suspiciously matchy-matchy between the installation and the ice-cream parlour shades of Palazzo Pisani Santa Marina’s walls (pistachio, limone, fragola); I am assured that this colour scheme was already in place, and Black’s choice of colours was not site-specific but a smashing coincidence.

A tidier palazzo near St Mark’s Square is the setting for the quiet coup of the 54th Venice Biennale: the first appearance of the Zimbabwe pavilion. The group show, Seeing Ourselves, features painting, video, sculpture and photography that sets itself apart from the country’s reputation for “Shona sculpture”. At the opening, Doreen Sibanda, Director of Zimbabwe’s National Gallery (its only gallery) recalled that from Harare the Biennale project, six years in the making, had seemed like “a pie in the sky”.²¹ One of the selected artists, Calvin Dondo, is showing a series of photographs of adopted children with their new German families. These draw on conventional portrait photography, and include an arresting image of a little girl in an orange outfit, holding hands with her blonde mum and suited dad; all three are facing a forest of pines, but turn back to smile for the camera. It’s a fitting backdrop for the opening speech by Ambassador Aldo Dell’Ariccia, Head of the European Union Delegation to the Republic of Zimbabwe. In front of a copse of cameras, she thanked Britain, France and Monaco for their hands in the project, and concluded, “we cannot see ourselves if no one sees us”.

If there is a lasting note in this international exhibition, it must be that participants are not just here to see or be seen, but to contribute to a group conversation. From Karla Black’s delicate puffs to the Japanese clouds and brains, to Plasticine squiggles and Israeli salt shoes: all these things are, in different ways, visualising the invisible flow of digital communication that has been leading in recent times to tangible political effect.²² If we were to try and finish on a higher perspective – let’s say from an Omer Fast kind of height – it might seem that these international exhibits, temporary as puffs and clouds themselves, are, at their best, the manifestations of truly collaborative, if invisible, Realpolitik.

Footnotes

1. For more tweeting, see Norma Jeane and Japan

2. See Omer Fast

Just over the way, Denmark’s group show includes big-butted women and upper case obscenities by way of Robert Crumb:  ‘OH I’M TELLING YOU, THERE’S GONNA BE HELL TO PAY… WHEN THE NIGGERS TAKE OVER AMERICA!’

4. See Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (1969)

5. See US and Egypt

6. See Israel and Christian Marclay

7. See Urs Fischer

8. See Egypt

9. See Japan

10. See Norma Jeane, Egypt and Israel

11. See Japan

12. See Omer Fast

13. See Urs Fischer

14. See Zimbabwe

15. Thomas Hirschorn speaking in Aubervilliers, 2011

16. See Scotland

17. Christian Marclay is the winner of this year’s Golden Lion for best artist.

18. See Switzerland

19. The Bathbomb is a powdery ball that explodes and foams as it is dropped into bathwater, dissolving into nothing.

20. See Norma Jeane

21. The Congo pavilion was on the official Biennale programme but didn’t make it to Venice.

22. Anish Kapoor’s piece ‘Ascension’, in the grand church of San Giorgio Maggiore, was meant to be a vortex of smoke rising between transept and nave; instead, despite the huge suction tube sticking into the roof and fans blowing in air from all sides, there was just a waft.