It doesn’t make so much sense to write this as a chronological diary so I am instead culling from my notes which now bring us to the theme of the national pavilions. Venice started holding the biennale at the end of the 19th century and it shows. While the art has kept apace, the national pavilion system, a sort of Olympics for art, is an anachronism that generations of artists and curators have had to wrestle with. There is considerable awareness of this and the publications that are thrust into your hands as you make your way around often contain interviews with curators and commentators who discuss strategies for subverting and reframing nationalistic agendas.
These national pavilions can create the effect that when you encounter them the work inside is not first of all the work of an artist, group of artists or even a curator, but is instead the expression of a people. The Greek pavilion, for example, reflects upon alternative economies and in this sense does not fail to meet the expectations that the Greeks would talk about the economic crisis. It works the other way too: if a pavilion plays contrary to expectations then that too can be read as a choice. There is no escaping the flag until you get to the curated exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) where the flag is replaced by the marketplace.
The British pavilion, or should I say the English pavilion (Scotland and Wales have their own as ‘their’ artists don’t get a look in these days), hosts the ‘English Magic’ exhibition by Jeremy Deller. I was aware of this title well before finding the exhibition as the free bags, mobile adverts bearing the British Council’s logo, were given out on the 1st day of the preview and acted as mobile adverts on the shoulders of visitors for the remainder of the preview days.
There is plenty of coverage of this exhibition elsewhere so I won’t repeat what the rooms consist of. It was all very familiar stuff for me dealing with the hybrid nature of the British class structure. It did include a large map of the UK to show Bowie’s 1972 tour, a map that curiously included Scotland and Wales, absent from the exhibition’s title, and this map went some way to further reinforce the national frame. Indeed the exhibition looked as if it was attempting to represent the country to the outside world and present a nuanced view of the UK in much the same way as Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony did. Like Boyle, this approach played well to the home crowd but read as highly nationalistic to outsiders. Gompertz on the BBC tried to suggest the exhibition was ‘controversial’ yet upon the intercession of the British authorities it held back from genuine internal controversy by removing the banner that read “Prince Harry kills me”.
This attitude to political art on the part of the British establishment can be summed up, “you can go this far and no further” and that really was my general feeling about the exhibition as a whole. By being placed within the frame of the Venice Biennale any political force it might have had when presented elsewhere was over-coded with the ‘Cool Britania’ message. Of all the national pavilions I saw in the three days, the British one was quite probably the most nationalistic of the lot.
The Serbian pavilion, by way of contrast, placed the work of the two artists Miloš Tomić and Vladimir Perić’ at the forefront and through the oblique dialogue their works constructed, avoided playing to nationalistic expectations. That they still had to play their part as a “minor art world’ power, as the exhibition’s commissioner Maja Cirić puts it, is clear but the focus was very deliberately drawn outside of the nation state. Vladimir Perić’s Museum of Childhood while in a sense political in its look backwards to a Yugoslav era childhood, was also highly individual and humble in approach while Miloš Tomić’s stylish and amusing videos of amateur music were similarly personal in their framing.
