That's how we ride, that's how we smoke
"The Dictatorship of the Viewer" is the motto Francesco Bonami has chosen to
curate Venice's 50th Art Biennial: in an age of information, no work of
art should lay claim to more than three to five minutes of attention. 650
participating artists have sketched out the problem zones in the broad
field of globalization, but nobody wanted to do without utopias entirely.
Harald Fricke took a look around the Venice Bienniale and is introducing
recent works by artists in the Deutsche Bank Collection.
Art in every port
Over the years, the Venice
Biennale has grown into an exhibition monster. One week prior to the
beginning of Art
Basel, the opening not only serves as a get together for the
establishment, but also as an ample platform for the market's various
quirks. This year, everyone was banking on a painting boom in Venice;
suddenly, however, the focus is on mixed-media arrangements – and already
the collectors are reading this as a cue to reorganize.
The number
of nations taking part in the
Biennale has doubled since 1993 alone. This is an expression of a world
undergoing an increasing cultural differentiation – in the age of
globalization, the periphery and the center are everywhere the same. This
new, large-scale cartography also, of course, exerts its effects on local
peculiarities: art now proliferates far beyond the traditional pavilions
of the giardini and into every conceivable
corner, pretty much taking over all of Venice's
islands. In view of this,
Francesco Bonami has selected a catchy motto for the 50th Biennale,
dedicating it to "The Dictatorship of the Viewer." The individual works
should, as he says, be experienceable in "three to five minutes"; in the
final analysis, he's concerned with concrete communication in an age of
channel zapping and the ubiquity of information technology.
The Italian Pavillon
The Italian exhibition
organizer, who is currently living in Chicago, is firmly convinced that
the only way art can find its way back to its content is through a
limitation of this nature coupled with visual intensification.
Nevertheless, every involvement with society occurs via "dreams and
conflicts"; both provide the material for cultural exchange. An
uncertainty exists following September 11, but also a hope to end the
conflict in the Middle East. There is a desire to finally learn more about
contemporary life in Asia (unfortunately, China was unable to take part in
the Biennale due to the SARS epidemic); there is also, however, a fear of
returning to the political and social crisis that has been reigning in
South America and Africa from the nineteen seventies on.
Francesco Bonami, Catherine David, Gabriel Orozc
This degree of attention and commitment has its price: around a dozen
curators worked with Bonami on realizing the Biennale; over 650 artists
were invited. In the end, the dictatorship can easily turn against the
viewer. Throughout the parcours, I found myself occasionally
yearning for an oasis of meaninglessness – one half-hour later, after a
heavy trudge in the 95 degree-heat, I finally found it in the espresso
lounge run by the coffee company "illy." After that, the tour continued
through
Catherine David's section
"Contemporary Arab Representations," which included, a
documentation of urban destruction in Beirut (more
here),
"The Everyday Altered," an investigation of everyday Mexican
life by
Gabriel Orozco, and a
"Utopia Station," for which
Molly Nesbitt,
Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and
Rirkrit Tiravanija picked out almost a hundred artists.
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Contemporary Arab Representations
"Utopia Station" is a fascinating
conglomeration, something between a commune, a laboratory, and an artists'
republic. This is where the path ends, with an installation by
Tobias Rehberger. The sculptor, who lives in Frankfurt, installed a
Fountain in the middle of a cube made of bright pieces of cloth. A
tangle of garden hoses continuously sprinkles water from a height of eight
feet, picking up on two different motifs in the process: on the one hand,
an otherwise private act such as showering is made public, and on the
other, Rehberger's functional design is a dynamically changing sculpture
coupling the natural resource of water with textile design and an
aesthetics derived from the home improvement store.
Here, his
Fountain comes across somewhat like a late heir of Russian
revolutionary art à la
Rodchenko, for whom design was meant to be a symbol of the working masses.
In this sense, Rehberger's shower installation represents an investigation
of utopia – as a location of collective, but also of a highly banal
everyday experience.
Ilya Kabakov, Levlvovich's "Coincedences", 1998
©Deutsche Bank
Collection
For
Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, utopia is something that's been lost,
particularly in their memories of the Soviet Union. The Russian artist
couple, who live in New York, have installed their Gesamtkunstwerk
Where is our place? in the elegant rooms of the Fondazione Querini
Stampalia, where, according to the
concept, people can get together with giants and dwarves (
images). Here, the museum setting is transformed into "total theater"
(Kabakov), a melancholic journey in time: as an homage to the 19th
century, larger-than-life pants legs are standing before oversized picture
fragments jutting out of a crack in the ceiling, gold-framed quotes from
bourgeois salon painting: the overwhelming past that continues to force
itself into the present's gaze. In contrast, tiny landscapes with
abandoned villages are let into the floor as a model of "a world we can
know nothing about because it withdraws from our perception, like the
future." At eye level, on the other hand, the viewer is confronted with
photographs from the eighties –everyday Socialist life, idyllic military
scenes, culture, and technology in the early phase of Perestroika. For
Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, this series of images is nothing more than proof
of time's ephemerality, already as long forgotten as the Czarist Russia of
the oil paintings. Thus, although all three layers overlap like a
historical puzzle, the corresponding worlds nonetheless remain separate
from one another. In a gentle and slightly sentimental way, Where is
our place? tells us that even our own personal standpoint is not
spared from transience in the memory's general "allover."
Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Untitled (Questions), 1981-2003
courtesy David
Weiss, Peter Fischli and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York;
Galerie
Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber, Zürich;
Monika Sprüth
Galerie, Cologne
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