Entry tags:

art, travel, venice biennale

Letter from Venice: Part I: Mise-en-Scene
Our plane arcs over the Alps, passing over Geneva and Mount Blanc (still heavily shrouded in snow), and slowly descends over the Dolomites, where rocky peaks emerge jagged and bare from patches of white snow. From the sky, I can trace the old trade routes, the valleys and canals that led upwards to the Brenner Pass, that singular weakness in the Eastern Alps that allowed trade and culture to flow freely between the North and the South. A traveler with a sharp eye can still catch sight of the mountain passes where goods from Venice (spices, silks, glass, antiques and jewels from the Silk Road) traveled beside valuables from the North (timber, silver, gold, leather, pelts).

Ideas, as well as things, traveled over the Brenner. In the sixteenth century, the painter Albrecht Durer recorded his journey from Nuremburg, in Southern Germany, to Venice and then South. Durer returned to his hometown fortified with new knowledge of Renaissance perspective.

We float slowly over the Veneto, following the Piave until the river meets the lagoon, and then we begin our descent, slowly circling over islands and marshes. Here, at the confluence of land and water, Europe met the Orient. Venice, ever exotic, carries all the romance and uncertainty of a border region. Even in the twenty-first century, Venice continues to trigger a certain Orientalism. Though the city lost its position as the gateway to the East in the late sixteenth century, Venice remains the city of Marco Polo, the point where Byzantine splendor encounters Renaissance classicism.

From the air, one begins to understand Venice as a landscape defined by water. The city barely rises above the waterline. A narrow spit of land connects Venice to the Veneto. To one used to a different sense of space, Venice seems too delicate and precious to be real. From the air, the city resembles a jeweled fantasy, a city carved out of shimmering gold.

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I have come to Venice for the 52nd Venice Biennale, officially known as the “The Venice Biennale: the 52nd International Art Exhibition (La Biennale di Venezia: 52 Exposizione Internationale d’Arte).” Since 1895, Venice has hosted an international contemporary art exposition. Every two years, the city transforms itself into a playground for contemporary art enthusiasts. Conceived as a tourist attraction, the Biennale slowly grew into a major venue for contemporary art.

Today, the Venice Biennale has expanded beyond its original site in the Giardini (the public gardens in Castello) to include the Arsenale (where Venice used to build her warships), as well as a host of smaller venues (mostly deconsecrated churches and private palazzi) across the city. The event has grown large enough to warrant multiple maps and guides. And because Venice remains a medieval city without a rational system of streets and addresses, one must expect to sacrifice a portion of each day to aimless wandering. Even with a good map, Venice is difficult to navigate. Turn a corner, and the city shifts.

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This year, the Biennale runs from June 10 to November 21, 2007. It is a massive, sprawling event with no clear center. Although one can name a host of theoretical reasons for a decentralized international exhibition, I suspect that the Biennale resists the compulsion to build around a clear center or focus for political reasons. In the end, it is politically expedient to encourage sprawl over focus.

Directed by Robert Storr, the 52nd Biennale carries the theme “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense.” For many years, Storr was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his museum background comes through. The show is quiet, more contemplative than active. Michael Kimmelman, an art critic for the New York Times, described the show as “subtle and sober…[and] maybe just a little boring."

Storr’s group show (housed in the Arsenale and in the Italian pavilion) displays a tighter structure than previous editions, and he draws extensively upon older artists, as well as older works. Storr strongly believes that the past forms the present. He hopes the juxtaposition of old and new works will allow viewers to gain an understanding of the various relationships between different eras.

In an interview with Artforum, Storr described his focus upon sensuality as a reaction to the anti-aesthetic current in contemporary art. (Perhaps Storr has been reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment?) Defending his position, Storr comments, “The sensual world is not necessarily a beautiful world, and pleasuring the public has never been a requirement of modern art. Sensing doesn’t always mean enjoying.”

 

Storr’s group show has been described as quite “political” in tone, and as a show with a “postcolonial” thesis. The group show certainly includes a number of works documenting contemporary geopolitical conflict. While setting up the show, Storr notes that he became particularly interested in “the way artists respond to violence, cultural violence, physical violence” as well as “the way they respond to…these questions of nationality and the fact that nationality doesn't say very much about most people.” For Storr, the question of “nationhood” and “nationality” seem particularly trenchant today, when so many nations have buckled beneath civil war and ethnic strife. Storr notes, “We have a nationality that is imposed as a political structure…but…[it] is not written in the land.”

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Biennial exhibitions have become something of a fad on the contemporary art scene. There are Biennials in Taipei, Shanghai, Kwangju, Istanbul, Athens, and Sao Paolo. There are also major exhibitions on three- and five-year cycles (e.g., the Yokohoma Triennial in Japan, and Documenta in Kassel, Germany). The vast majority of these exhibitions carry some degree of government sponsorship, and the politics behind such an event are delicate and complicated. In Shanghai, I watched government censors carefully survey each item in the Biennale before the event’s official opening. The exhibition could open only after the censors had approved the show.

Like art fairs (the Biennial’s commercial cousin), these enormous international exhibitions allow visitors to consume a vast quantity of art in a very short period. And like trade shows or conferences, Biennials give art professionals (collectors, artists, gallerists, curators, and their ilk) a chance to network and make new connections. During the first week of the Venice Biennale, Venice resembled a summer camp for the art world. No matter where I went, I ran into curators, artists, and art dealers from every corner of the world, many carrying plastic totes emblazoned with the 52nd Biennale’s signature chartreuse-and-orange logo.

The Venetian climate, already sultry in early June, discouraged the curator’s traditional all-black outfit. Visitors, often used to a more Northern climate, dealt with the heat in various ways. Some resorted to shorts. Others, more prepared, trotted out white linen suits or smartly tailored tropical-weight blazers. The colors were more Palm Beach than Manhattan, and I have never seen so many women dressed in billowing white gowns.

This year, the social scene was exceptionally intense, as many planned to complete the “Grand Tour,” proceeding to Basel, Switzerland for the annual Basel Art Fair, and then to Kassel for Documenta 12, and finally landing in Muenster for the 2007 edition of the Sculpture Project.

Once every ten years, these events all fall in the same year. In a bit of savvy marketing, the organizers decided to promote these four events as a package. Someone with (or perhaps without) a biting sense of irony decided to name the Venice-Basel-Kassel-Muenster circuit the “Grand Tour 2007,” after “the appealing itineraries of eighteenth-century European travelers.”

Those eighteenth-century travelers, of course, were no ordinary travelers. The Grand Tour has traditionally only been accessible to the select. The concept of the Grand Tour figures prominently in nineteenth-century American literature as an essential component of a well-rounded education. The Continent (then, as now) functioned as a kind of finishing school, supplying cultural polish and an illusion of depth. The “Grand Tour” has acquired a certain negative resonance, a paragon, not of cultural erudition, but of misguided pretension. One need only think back to Henry James and Edith Wharton, both writers (themselves living in European exile) who archly described Americans in Europe as shallow consumers with a tenuous grasp upon history. In many ways, the “Grand Tour” label is a more than apt description of the frenzied circus that travels the festival circuit.

The Biennale and its brethren have become stage-sets for a floating world of artists, curators, dealers, and other “scenesters.” The art world, too, produces groupies and wannabes, people located on the periphery who desperately wish to ascend to the center. The art critic Jerry Saltz complained, in a recent article for New York magazine, that the “first week,” with its endless rounds of parties, dinners, and other social engagements, has now superseded the art. No one, Saltz notes, truly comes for the art. Everyone travels together in a bubble. New York’s entire population of art professionals decamps to Venice, or Kassel, and everyone catches glimpses of the art under artificially crowded conditions. And the “glimpse” is the operative word, for during the first week of the Biennale, there were lines out the door at the most popular pavilions. Until I saw Venice, I had no idea that the global economy could support so many “art professionals.”

The “scene” itself has become a powerful draw. The media helps perpetuate this glamorous image by publishing photographs of celebrities taking in the sights. The New York Times reported sightings of Elton John and Kim Cattrall. François Pinault, the French financier, was on-hand to discuss his foundation’s transformation of the old custom-house, the Punta della Dogana, into a major center for contemporary art. Pinault’s future daughter-in-law, Salma Hayek, was most likely also in attendance. And for those who care as deeply for New York (or Berlin) as People cares for Hollywood, there was an endless parade of curators, art dealers, and artists to provide amusement. For a week, the Biennale takes over the city, and Venice becomes a stage-set for a series of carnivalesque events.

As in Hollywood, the most important moments take place offstage. While bit players (like myself) were following the Biennale’s movable feast, collectors, curators and dealers sealed million-dollar deals. Although the glamour adds to the fun, and certainly attracts media attention, it is the networking, the potential for hustling and deal-making, that matters most. The first week, I should add, is closed to the public. By June 10, the Biennale’s official opening date, most of the players have already fled, having moved onto Basel, Switzerland, for Art Basel, or to Kassel, Germany, for Documenta 12’s opening.

Like Saltz, I have conflicted feelings towards the Biennial format. But unlike Saltz, who is an old hand in a constricted world, I found the Biennale alternately frustrating and refreshing. For someone with a limited travel budget, the Biennale represented a convenient method of “one-stop shopping,” giving me the opportunity to quickly view large quantities of artwork from a variety of locations. I could never travel to Uruguay, or Peru, to take in the current art scene. But through the Biennale I could at least wrangle an international snapshot of contemporary art. The event is parochial in many ways, but as a major international exhibition, it took me out of America, and away from our provincialism.

For more information about the 52nd Venice Biennale, visit the Biennale’s official website

The Grand Tour 2007 website offers information about Documenta 12 and the Muenster Sculpture Project

Jerry Saltz offers a cantankerous overview of the Biennial phenomenon.

Saltz’s review of the Venice Biennale is equally garrulous and amusing.

For more mainstream coverage of the Biennale, visit the New York Times’s special section on Venice. Michael Kimmelman’s review can be found in this section.