- Venue
- la Biennale di Venezia
- Location
- Italy
Art+Politics: Venice Biennale 2009 – Making Worlds
He who knows himself and others
Here will also see,
That the East and West like brothers,
Parted ne’re shall be.
From Goethe’s West-Ostlicher Divan, 1819
The intention of the curator of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Daniel Birnbaum, was to create an exhibition that placed few if any limitations on the artist. Making Worlds was to be about “possible new beginnings”. The invited artists were to experiment and represent “a vision of the world”; “New worlds (would) emerge where worlds meet”. Venice was to be the place where worlds met but, with an unfortunate irony, Venice has emerged as an unintended focus, pulling together the plurality of artistic traditions, represented by the seventy seven countries on show, through the power of its history and through the unexpected approach to the Bienniale adopted by a significant minority of the 100 plus artists involved. They have come, some of them, obsequiously, as if as ambassadors to the court of a medieval Doge.
Historically Eurocentric with an imperial codicil, the biennial has for years endeavoured to represent a more global art scene, mainly through collateral events. [There is little room in the Giardini for more pavilions, though China, since 2005, has been accommodated amongst the oil tanks at the end of the Arsenale, the first African pavilion was introduced in 2007, and Turkey occupies an adjacent shed.] Collateral events are held throughout the city in churches, palazzi, on the streets and, in the case of Alexander Ponomarev’s SubTiziano, in the Grand Canal itself. Newcomers from the east, whether through deference or a need to justify there presence at the Biennale, have tended to filter their art through the prism of the historic role of Venice in the history of Europe’s dealings with the orient – meaning anywhere east of the Adriatic. This has had the effect of elevating Venice to a position where it is staring in its own show – less the proscenium arch if not quite the leading man. At its worst, this could have had the effect of distorting both the history of the city and the authenticity of the art and has, probably, done more harm to the latter than to the former.
Maybe Venice needed a boost. The eponymous Jeff Atman, in Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, does the city no favours. Touring the Biennale he comes away with “a cumulative hangover, liver damage…. and a notebook almost devoid of notes”, whilst the biennale Edition of Venezia News sees Venice as “a city made stupid by tourists”. The nostalgic recall of past Venetian glories could not have come more presciently. The 53rd Bienniale is a celebration of Venetian power; one-time trading and diplomatic colossus, now a cultural centre and bridge between east and west, custodian of the cultural traditions of the West, Byzantium and the Arab world – no matter that Venice sacked Constantinople in 1204, and helped establish the triumph of the West at the sea battle of Lepanto in 1571.
Palestine c/o Venice, one of the 44 collateral events at the Biennale, rather sums up the ambiguity of the relationship between Venice and the East. Whilst not a state, Palestine was somewhat controversially given a site, courtesy of the municipal council, in the former convent of Santi Cosma on the Giudecca, for seven Palestinian artists to exhibit their work. Much of the work is directly political, though mostly timid, careful not to give offence. The artist Emily Jacir, winner of the Golden Lion Award in 2007, chose to base her work on “Venice’s shared heritage with the Arab world”, pointing to future possible cultural exchanges. Her proposal was to have the names of vaporetto stations along the Grand Canal, where “centuries of cross-cultural exchange between Venice and the Arab world are clearly visible”, written in Arabic alongside the Italian. The proposal was never realised. The vaporetto company withdrew its support at the last minute. No reason has ever been given. In the convent you can pick up leaflets describing the work, Statione – IMAGE 1 -with mock-up photos of how it would have looked but the only physical presence is a label on a wall stating “Work cancelled”, a stark, forbidding reminder of the fragility of the cultural bridge that Venice represents.
The wonderfully restored Scuola Grande della Misericordia houses the joint pavilion of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. Curated by Turquoise Mountain, an organisation committed to the regeneration of historic Kabul, the exhibition – East-West Divan – embodies the idea of aesthetic fusion and acknowledges the historic role of Venice in this process. Here, the East is Persian and shi’ite, not Arab and mainstream Islam, a more comfortable and historically tenable liaison – Medieval Venice was often allied to Persia against the Turks. The work is gently subversive, an authentic embrace between “Pop art and Shi’ite shrine”, a promise of cultural co-existence, even if the Persian miniaturist figure – IMAGE 2 – Moderate Elightenment, is too cartoonish or reminiscent of the incongruity of the Chapman Brothers’ bastardised Goya prints, that can be seen in the Palazzo Grassi.
In keeping, perhaps, with Holland’s past colonial interest in the East Indies, Fiona Tan’s audiovisual installation in the Dutch pavilion in the Giardini, Disorient, also focusses on the critical place of Venice in providing a gateway to and from Asia. The idea of gateway Venice is further echoed in the Chinese contribution on Isola di San Servolo, A Gift to Marco Polo, in which nine Chinese artists pay a contemporary artistic tribute to the 13th century Venetian merchant adventurer.
Almost messianic and utterly unapologetic in its enthusiasm to promote the inherent artistic and cultural attributes of the host city, unashamedly referred to as La Serenissima, is the collateral event Port of Arts, sponsored by the Venice Port Authority and Il Sogno di Polifilo, an organisation with links to the Rosicrusians that might well have sprung from the pages of a Dan Brown novel. “Critical in this moment to the peaceable coexistence between nations”, eight italian artists have combined to “hoist the flag of culture” and highlight Venice as “an alive and vibrant cultural center(sic) rather than a stereotypical display window for the works of the International Artist”. The 80 works are displayed in and around a restored church, Santa Marta, where the building and the message are perhaps more interesting than the art.
As the Godfather of all the 200 plus biennials that now take place around the world, Venice will always attract those who wish to exploit her power and reputation, sometimes with and sometimes without the need to show obeisance. Not for the first time, Venice has become a soap box for a variety of causes, some more blatantly promoted than others. In 2007, the atmosphere in the Arsenale was grim, “dulled by war and the weight of artistic responsibility” as the Guardian art critic, Adrian Searle put it. Much of the weight, though, was as if by proxy, with western artists taking on the tribulations of others. This year the political art is more direct, more first person, less colonial. In 2007, the plight of Comoros Islanders and the banning of their traditional craft from their ports and harbours might well have been covered by an Australian video (the Australians, like the Russians, put themselves about at Venice). Not this year. In the lagoon, just off the Giardini vaporetto stop, floating on a pontoon, is one of the banned djahazi boats brought over from the Indian Ocean by the Comoros artist himself – IMAGE 3.
Apart from referencing the importance of Venice in the affairs of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arab world,the artists at Palestine c/o Venice speak more directly about their political grievances; for example, in Date Ticker the artist Taysir Batniji marks the number of days since he was able to go to his own home on the West Bank – IMAGE 4 – whilst Khalil Rabah’s A Geography: 50 Villages uses Venice to promote the 3rd Riwaq Biennial – small exhibitions in 50 Palestinian villages, curated as part of the movement to preserve Palestinian culture.
The National representative artists of Azerbaijan and Estonia, Mexico and Montenegro, Macao (an interesting imperial throwback, rather like the Hong Kong pavilion, provocatively hanging around outside the entrance to the Arsenale like a disaffected hoody), and Taiwan all plough political furrows, either deeply nationalistic or more broadly universal in their focus and intent.
Venezuelan artists in the Giardini have taken up the cause of the Yukpa Indians whose land was seized by the military and handed to wealthy ranchers. Their art is an indictment of President Chavez as much as of those responsible for the land confiscation. His government has failed to fulfill promises of restitution. IMAGE 5 shows a map drawn by the indians showing the boundaries of the lands they claim as their own – agitprop, perhaps, but a fulfillment, none-the-less, of Birnbaum’s vision of artists making worlds.
