Blisters on the road to Oblivion: the Venice Biennale

Anyone who considers him or herself a contemporary culture producer must make the pilgrimage to Venice for the Biennale, at least once. For it is there and there alone that you will be fully saturated with contemporary art. It is the ultimate art orgy. Not all the art on display is necessarily good or even the best the world has to offer but there is a lot of it. And that is of fundamental importance.

I was recently privileged enough to be sent on a research trip to Venice by the University of Cape Town’s Masters programme. Publicity plugs aside, I mention this because to view art with your contemporaries is also an important ingredient to the pilgrimage. In line with Heraclitus’s observation that we never enter the same river twice, we will never view an artwork the same twice. In this case it is not the artwork that changes but us: our mental health, recent resonant experiences and relative sobriety all attribute to our responses to works. Discussing the day’s differing experiences over a bottle of Italian wine by the side of a canal with peers was just as fruitful as viewing the work itself. What follows are some of my observations as informed, at the very least, by the quantities of olives consumed in compliment to the conversations among friends.

Our first port of call was the Arsenale. This impressive ancient fortress that housed a ship yard boasting a battle ship a day production rate during Venice heyday in the 15th century is now home to an expanding number of exhibition spaces. The considered choices of the curator were housed in the main exhibition space with a first class entrance piece by Lygia Pape. Simple in execution his lyrical installation of gold thread in square forms set the tone for a selection of works that were theatrical in their presentation as befits an international art show.

The drama, however, reached points of hilarity in the Italian Pavilion with an onslaught of paintings and flashy lightbox tricks that left the viewer with the distinct aftertaste of too much candy floss at the fun fair. The Ferris wheel reached its zenith with Jan Fabre’s work. After a short ride across the harbour, one was ushered through three enormous installations that were revealed to be hyperbolic one-liners. The scale of the joke was jaw dropping. Each space was bigger then most national pavilions. Who was this guy? Clearly he had a tap into some billionaire’s resources. If you can’t make yachts, make art.

However, even if big budget has a hit and miss ratio, I was willing to forgive all after experiencing the truly mesmerizing, three chaptered panoramic film The Feast of Trimalcho produced by AES+F in the Unconditional Love exhibition. Layered, apocalyptic, decadent and with highly charged sexual ambiguity, this was high budget intelligent mastery at its very best.

Where the newer pavilions were reverting to the flashy, the more established pavilions at the Giardini were riding a more moderate carriage, peopled with weighty names of import (the Bruce Nauman ‘retrospective’ at the American pavilion being a case in point). One such weighty name in particular delivered with aplomb: the Steve McQueen dual-screen film Giardini at the British Pavilion was a poignant antonym to the gluttonous spectacle of other pavilions. Meditating on the empty months in the Giardini between Biennales, McQueen’s film reflected on the banal beauty of the space out of its seasonal use, weaving a subtle narrative shaped by the movements of street dogs and clandescene nightly meetings.

The spectacle of glamour versus the understated was forming a sharp critical divide as I continued to explore the Biennale. A day at the Pinault Collection inspired a highly critical response from peers over a fabulous risotto that evening. The collection is housed in an incredibly renovated building that stands in bold competition with St Mark’s square for the craning necks of tourists at the mouth of the Grand Canal. Entering the immaculate space felt a bit like bird watching in a zoo. If I’d had a little book of all the top contemporary artists selling for too many pounds, I could have ticked them off as I proceeded through the cavernous halls. Dazzling, yes, but emotionally numbing, this was a collection of brand name snapshots. A wealthy collector’s private hallway artworks with me, the exhibition visitor, as the sucker who just paid 10 Euro towards his return on investment. Poor Gonzalez-Torres, he would have been horrified at the honoring in such a capitalist venture.

‘You know what they say about big works? Big works …
Deep pockets and custom designed exhibition spaces.’

Overall, the deepest impressions were left not by the blinding flash, but by the whispers. Yoko Ono’s exhibition Anton’s Memory was truly engaging. The viewer was asked to partake in touching, playful performances, the memory of which makes me smile whenever I find the ‘piece of sky’ (puzzle piece with imprint of sky) we were invited to take with us. Was it irony that saw both her and Bruce Nauman awarded life time achievement golden lions this year? I call it hope that two artists with such an overt distain for the Art Market should be so duly honoured.

Every pilgrim has a highlight and mine was definitely the In-Finitum exhibition housed in the Fortuny Museum. Conceived as the third of three exhibitions based around a visual collaboration with artifacts in the museum, the surprising juxtapositions of a Bill Viola video with a daguerreotype of the Taj Mahal was transporting. The curators inspired a fascination with unfinished works by Renaissance masters that was truly lyrical. A refreshingly cool breeze over the hot egos elsewhere inspired notebook musings such as, ‘Make old mirrors that reveal other worlds,’ or, ‘Start collections of unfinished paintings,’ and ‘Admire beautiful things in the half-gloom for hours.’

Let us rise and prepare to accept destiny:

…the true dimension of art – is condemned to an eternal and unrelenting search for the secret traces of a work that will provoke, as soon as sensed, the necessity, or rather the urgency, of another search.
- Guilo Paolini 2009

After that, there is little more for me to add other than the advice to listen to the bells when in Venice. They chime upon a tempo of their own choosing, of times past and times to come.