Published 20/08/09

Venice Biennale 2009

53rd International Art Exhibition
7 June–22 November 2009

by RICHARD DEMARCO

In late August the Edinburgh Festival will end, and this high summer weather will be over and with it my memories of perfect summer weather at the 53rd Venice Biennale. In the first week of August, these memories should be coinciding with my experience of the beginning of the 63rd Edinburgh Festival. I find it hard to believe that I have experienced every single Edinburgh Festival and all the Venice Biennales since 1968. Forty-one years have passed since that year of revolution when the Biennale was besieged by angry student protesters. There have been thirty-nine Edinburgh Festivals since 1968 and there have been eighteen Biennales. The combined weight of the statistics of art programmes in Edinburgh and Venice cause me to consider the enviable, or rather unenviable, position in which I am now placed to make sense of how the Edinburgh Festival and the Venice Biennale have changed as I have personally experienced them.

They have both grown considerably over the years – uncontrollably so, under forces they have found hard to resist.

They have started to resemble each other because, under the direction of Jonathan Mills, the Edinburgh Festival has begun to take seriously the international contemporary visual art world and the Venice Biennale, over the past decade and now under the direction of Daniel Birnbaum, is paying more and more attention to the world of the performing arts. Both have official programmes and venues challenged by unofficial equivalents.

The Edinburgh Festival’s unofficial section, known the world over as The Fringe, is now seriously rivalling the Official programme, arguably becoming highly significant because of its success in attracting a youthful international audience. The Venice Biennale has, in recent years, seen its ‘fringe’ grow more powerful in terms of its economic and cultural impact on Venice.

Both have youthful directors in their mid-forties; both show deep respect for the ways in which their predecessors have left them legacies defining the highest levels of achievement.  To maintain and honour such legacies, they have to face a global financial crisis. Despite this, both have managed to keep their 2009 programmes resolutely international, despite the dismal economic future facing the Venetian and Edinburgh civic authorities. They have made good use of the fact that they are directing unique cultural events that are on a scale challenged only by the Olympic Games. They certainly can provide an international spotlight under which national achievements can be compared and judged.  Perhaps more importantly, they both can provide a covetable imprimatur upon artistic endeavours.

The Venice Biennale was born in the aftermath of Giuseppi Garibaldi’s ‘Risorgimento’. In 1895, Venice was fortunate to have a mayor, Riccardo Sevvatico, who was a much-respected poet and playwright with a wide circle of friends who shared his belief that Venice needed to acquire a new image within the new political reality of the Kingdom of Italy. No longer an independent republic, it needed to assert itself as a city committed to the future through the spirit of internationalism in the visual arts.

For the fourth year in succession, the Scottish Arts Council and The British Council have contributed the bulk of the funding necessary to present a Scottish presence in a Scottish Pavilion, usually far removed from the Venetian Gardens, “I Giardini”, where the long-standing official pavilions can be found, clustered together with the British Pavilion dominating, built on a mound with a commanding view of the Biennale’s main thoroughfare close to the main entrance and the official vaparetto stops linking the Giardini with both the Lido and the Grand Canal.

In 1990, Scotland had a powerful presence in the Giardini within sight of the British Pavilion. Three Scottish artists, Kate Whiteford, David Mach and Arthur Watson, were honoured by the then Director, Giovanni Carandente, by being allotted the enviable and expansive garden-space between the main gate leading to the intersection of the two main thoroughfares.

It was the result of long drawn-out negotiations between the Biennale officials and the representatives of The Scottish Sculpture Trust, The Demarco Gallery and Gabriella Cardazzo and her friends as Venetians well versed in Biennale politics.

How I wish the Scottish contribution to the 2009 Biennale was so well sited.  Unfortunately, it could hardly be more distant and difficult to find, far from the nearest vaparetto stop – in a small palace, on a top floor suite of seven rooms accessible by a stairway of sixty-one steps. Martin Boyce, the artist chosen to represent Scotland, chose this location after he had visited Venice for the first time. I respect the complex rational behind his decision to entitle his sculptural installation ‘No Reflections’. It was a risk-taking exercise with a distinct level of perversity. He created a built environment which will probably be better appreciated when it comes to Dundee Contemporary Arts when the Biennale ends in November. Martyn Boyce’s exhibition is in contrast to the exhibitions in the British, Irish and Welsh pavilions for the simple reason that they all make exclusive use of the medium of film.

The Venice Biennale has improved its physical appearance thanks to the French multi-millionaire art collector, Francoise Pinault, who, three years ago, took responsibility of maintaining and operating the Palazzo Grazi containing the most impressive exhibition facilities on the Grand Canal. The Biennale has thus benefited from a prize selection of outstanding treasures in the Pinault Collection. He has not only arranged to present a programme of temporary exhibitions from his Collection; he has also fulfilled his dream of converting the Dogana, the eye-catching Custom House of Venice that marks the entrance to the Grand Canal.

The Guggenheim had entertained high hopes of taking it over but it is doubtful if they could have achieved the level of loving restoration of its fabric under the inspired direction of the Japanese architect, Tadao Ando. Artists such as Cy Twombly, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman and even the Chapman Brothers are exhibited in well-nigh perfect harmony with the distinctive architectural features that are quintessentially ‘Venetian’.

The Dogana can now be seen as complementary to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in its neighbouring and equally impressive Grand Canal location.

There is an unmissable exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg sculptures constructed of scrap metal in almost violent contrast to the refinement and intricacy of Wim Delvoye’s Gothic spire-shaped sculptures made from laser-cut corten steel.

The Arsenale is once again a daunting experience because of the very immensity of its scale. Thankfully, Daniel Birnbaum, the Biennale Director, has exercised his authority to simplify the arrangement of the exhibition spaces, so that they can be negotiated more easily and with less physical effort than in recent years. cLygia Pape, the Brazilian artist, defines this new arrangement with an ethereal sulpture made of thin metal bands stretching from floor to ceiling at various angles catching and reflecting light and obliging the viewer to take into consideration the vast scale of the interior of a building whose purpose was to make ropes for the Venetian Navy. It certainly competes for the attention of Biennale-goers who normally focus their attention on the national pavilions in the Giardini, including the most life enhancing and thought provoking, such as those of Belgium, Poland and Australia.

The world of Islam has entered in most convincingly and I feel morally obliged to see an exhibition-making manifest the work of artists from Afghanistan within the context of Edinburgh’s art world.

Unfortunately, my time in Venice ran out and I missed it. However, thanks to the guidance of a Venetian friend, Sonia Rolak, the Polish artist who has lived and worked in Venice for 27 years, I was able to visit the most extraordinary private collection housed in the Palazzo Dona in the Campo San Polo. The Collection is an expression of the very best in contemporary Polish art, designed to be in harmony with the domestic interior. Art appears even in the kitchen and bedrooms. Without Sonia Rolak’s good advice and the willingness of her Venetian husband, Sergio Cardazzo, I would not have enjoyed the experience of sailing to the Island of San Erasmo, which faces the entrance to the Lagoon and is dominated by a magnificent Martello-like fortress. It is now converted successfully into an art gallery.