Venice Biennale: critical diary

To wind up here are a few final observations.

Tied up on the waterfront next to Arsenale are a line of hyper-expensive boats. First among them is Sea Force One. It is first because it has the distinction of having its own security fence erected around it complete with a small loveless cabin in which sits a security guard who takes all visitors through a metal detector. Sea Force One sports airport style security. It flies under a British Merchant Navy flag and looks like the sort of Ocean going vessel the royals might get about in and if not them then the billionaire tycoons or over rich celebrities who want to both see Venice in style, and be seen in Venice in style. Sea Force One is not unique however, the other ships moored up in front and behind it are similarly ostentatious and together they mark this stretch of waterfront out as ‘tax evaders mile’.

While there were some new countries contributing pavilions for the first time some other countries, such as Singapore, have dropped out citing the considerable expense of putting on a pavilion against the limited exposure the work receives due to the saturation of the Venice Biennale. They may well have a point.

Although the whole scene surrounding the art can be quite interesting to observe in its own right the places where the art was most visible were the pavilions situated outside of the Giandini and Arsenale. When visiting these the pace is necessarily slowed and the eye has a greater chance to look freshly at the work as it is not on quite so relentless a conveyor belt of art.

Finally I should mention the most untypical of the national efforts, the Lithuanian pavilion. They used a school building and centred the exhibition around a large sports hall and set of stair wells. It was not particularly showy, it was simply well thought through, had sufficient space so that the work was neither squashed together nor reduced to a single statement and they found a good way to create a connection between the work and building.

An essential part of Biennale are the many receptions that the pavilions and assorted foundations and exhibitions host. These take place throughout the three days of the preview and create definite focal points that punctuate an otherwise endless schedule of art appreciation. They a offer a great opportunity to meet people, to see the full character of a pavilion and its team and, if you work them well, you need not pay for a single drink or meal while in Venice.

Here are some impressions of a few of them.

Turkish pavilion: took place in near darkness amongst a video installation with the food and drinks all served from one very crowded table. Joyful and with the character of a nighclub bar.

Luxembourg pavilion: well attended with solid catering. An art rock band, an offshoot of the exhibition, played inside to a crowded gallery. A rather random assortment of guests as it was in a part of the city where there were a cluster of pavilions all holding receptions that evening: people were drifting in from the Montenegrin pavilion and next stop was the foundation round the corner.

Hong Kong arts reception: this was a more private reception that was stumbled upon and they turned out to be providing high-class catering served by a team of hyper-active waiters. A well heeled crowd attended this event and the talk was about the West Kowloon Arts regeneration programme.

Estonian pavilion: a well attended reception and one put together with a fraction of the resources of most others. They made the right choice of quantity over quality serving simple wine and flavoured bread as the visitors understood (many were from Estonia and the other Baltic states) and the event was much more a networking ocassion that wanted to last a while.

Zhong Biao’s reception: this was the most lavish public reception I attended. The catering was conspicously good with one good quality Italian dish following another. It was attended by an unlikely mix of people: a very dressed up younger Chinese art crowd looking like it was more a society wedding than an art opening, a mixed Italian group with a few art professionals and some younger people to make up numbers and then a few strays like me. The art was not at all to Western tastes but sells well in China (and thus has investment status) and the converation was on how Sichuan curators are taking over.

Danish pavilion: quantities of Karlsberg flowing but not so many people. Relaxed and good for conversation.

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.

The Infr’action Venezia Festival presented quite different sorts of performances to those found within the national pavilions. It is a dedeicated performance art festival which ran parallel to the preview days of the Biennale for the second time. It mostly took place in the narrow park that connected Giardini and Arsenale with some performances spilling out onto the nearby streets and an early morning event on Piazza San Marco. There were over 40 participating artists from a great many countries and they formed an intergenerational mass with many styles and approaches to live performance.

It was quite striking to see the difference between these performances and those inside the national pavilions. As the Infr’action artists were generally dedicated performance artists they knew how to deal with people asking them questions during their performance, they were able to make effective use of public space, they knew how to vary their rhythm, were often improvising and finding something in the act of giving the performance. Another distinguishing feature was that it was the artists themselves who was almost always the performers of their work. There were one or two exceptions where more people (usually other festival artists) collaborated in order to realise a performance but the vast majority of the works were self-made solo performances. Most of the performances had been prepared to some degree before the festival began but there were also performances made on the spot in response to the local conditions. All of this gave the Infr’action performances a very different atmosphere: the work was more raw, personal and spontaneous, it not precious and usually made with simple materials.

The park space was the definite focus for the performances, which took place over several afternoons. There was no formal timetable but rather they unfolded in a more organic manner in response to the other works, the weather and so on. Often there were simultaneous performances providing multiple focal points. As they tended to have very different rhythms and durations this dispersed, polyrhythmic structure often helped both the slower and the more intensive pieces as there was contrast and a chance to return to actions over time and see how they had evolved.

My search for manifestos uncovered one that was written by Marilyn Arsem for Infr’action Venezia 2011. This is an excerpt:

Performance art is now.

Performance art is live.

Performance art reveals itself in the present.

The artist engages in the act of creation as s/he performs.

Performance art’s manifestation and outcome cannot be known in advance.

Re-enactment of historical work is theater, not performance art.

Performance art is real.

Performance art operates on a human scale.

It exists on the same plane as those who witness it.

The artist uses real materials and real actions.

The artist is no one other than her/himself.

There are no boundaries between art and life.

The time is only now.

The place is only here.

Full text:

http://www.infractionvenice.org/this-is-performanc…

While I would not say that every performance adhered completely to these points it does give a pretty good idea of the general tendency of the work. It does, for me, leave questions hanging such as what exactly are the things that performance art is, such as “real” and what are the things it is not, such as “theater”. I also find that being your self in a performance can be tricky as this self is somewhat fluid and dependent upon context. That said, the features that she identifies, however we might chose to interpret them, are to a great extent those which distinguished the performances of Infr’action from those of the Biennale. What’s more, it is perhaps the right of the manifesto to express itself without stopping to define terms; such academic niceties can be left for conventional academic texts.

In conclusion then it is ironic then that while performance does features in the more prestigious side of the Biennale, it is usually badly done as the systems which support the national pavilion model rarely has a use for performance. If performance art is your focus then look elsewhere, such as at Infr’action, as it operates on a model that is more accommodating of the form.

Performance does feature in the Biennale but it is usually rather safe and of secondary importance unless you step outside the official sites. Rather than a national pavilion presenting the work of a performance artist, live performance, when present at all, tends to be integrateintod into an exhibition the impetus for which comes from a curator and or visual artist whose primary medium is not performance. There are exceptions to this rule from time to time such as the Croatian Pavilion of 2005 but these are very much the exceptions that prove the rule. So, while performance does feature in the pavilions, as I will describe, it can often feel as if it is there more as a way of creating events that draw attention to the space, an alternative or better still, supplement, to a drinks reception.

The Italian Pavilion featured this sort of performance: a woman dressed in black (of course!) is takes off her clothes, lays them out and, once naked, puts them back on again. She does this slowly and seriously whilst turning 90 degrees at a time in a circle. She does not engage in eye contact with the crowd, mostly of men, who gather in front of her. The performance runs like clockwork and an absolute barrier between viewer and performer is maintained. The performance was not clearly credited and seemed to be taking place as some sort of sideshow, a bit of spice to liven up the space but nothing that need be taken too seriously.

The Romanian Pavilion also featured performance and here it played a more central role. A group of performers dressed in everyday clothing enacted artworks from previous editions of the Venice Biennale. They gave the title of the work and a short description of it (in English) whilst holding a bodily gesture derived from the artwork. The works they referenced ranged from 1930s sculptures to recent video art and it created a review of sorts. The performance made better use of space but had a lifelessness about it that made it suffer in the context of the Biennale where a pavilion within Giardini or Arsenale will typically get no more than 5-minutes to make its mark upon visitors. With such a low attention span and such a bustle of spectators crammed on the merry go round, performances within the pavilions take place in quite un-conducive conditions. While the Romanian Pavilion presented a work that responded to the history of the Biennale I felt it completely missed the present situation of the biennale relying upon a rather hermetic performance language.