Biennale Archives - Nicholas Hedges

Re-count

September 22, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

I have been reminded by Monika that I really liked an Australian piece shown elsewhere in the city. By Healy and Cordeiro, it comprised thousands of used video cassettes (195,774 according to documentation) arranged in a large block like a kind of tomb on the outside of which a number of the labels (some printed, some handwritten) were visible.

The vast block, displayed in an ecclesiastic setting became a kind of sepulchre in which the recent past was buried. The titles on the outside became like names revealing only a little of what was hidden inside, information which would take – again according to documentation – over 66 years to view. So, Australia was in this respect, excellent.

53rd Venice Biennale

September 22, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

Without wishing to reduce the Venice Biennale down to the level of the Eurovision Song Contest (difficult as that is when walking around the Pavilions of the Giardini) my winners as regards the participating countries are, in no particular order, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Estonia, Portugal and Luxembourg. Out of these Hungary and Poland exhibited at the Giardini while the others showed in various locations throughout the city. An awful lot in the Biennale’s other main venue, the Arsenale, was instantly forgettable (or mind-numbingly unforgettable as in the case of the United Arab Emirates). But of course there were exceptions: Lygia Pape, Ceal Floyer, Bernar Venet and Miranda July (who, in the gardens, injected some much needed humour) were all interesting. But then, across the water, in a series of new exhibition spaces, came Jan Fabre of whom the less said the better. At least the architecture was interesting. Venet’s massive sculptures worked well within the great brick voids and I must also mention AES+F’s The Feast of Trimalchio which was both weird and weirdly compelling, like a rather kitsch song one can’t help sing along with.

In terms of individual participants showing at the Biennale, I was taken with quite a number of works including Nathalie Djurberg’s disturbing video/sculpture installation described in the catalogue as a surrealistic Garden of Eden, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s beautiful Schattenspiel (Shadow Play), Simon Starling’s Willhelm Noack oHG and Chu Yun’s Constellation. There were numerous others too, including, perhaps most notably Mona Hatoum who showed at a so-called ‘collateral event’ in the Querini Stampalia.

But just as there are a small number of winners so there’s an inverse number of losers – crap to you and me. The winner of the wooden spoon however has to be Switzerland’s entry (I’m fighting against the desire to write Bang-a-Bang-a-Bang or such like silly song title and have in a sense already failed). The work explained – or rather the blurb did – that ‘drawing is a movement of sight, of the nuanced shifts and deviations that attract undirected attention to objects and dream figments that are never really concretized’ and from that codswallop you might agree the curators or whosoever wrote the guff for each piece should also claim a piece of the booby-prize. Other notable rubbish included Australia (who were also rubbish two years ago) and Germany (who were my wooden spoon winners at the last Biennale and who for this year’s effort drew on the talents of British Artist Liam Gillick (?) who managed to make a trip to IKEA look interesting – by the way I read that Gillick travelled for more than a year, ‘researching and developing his project for the German pavilion in a continuous dialogue with curator Nicolaus Schafhausen’ – quite how he arrived at making some dull cupboards escapes me). Israel’s entry was terrible and Norway’s too (definitely nil point). There were other notable wastes of space but I can’t be bothered to waste any space upon them.

One of the biggest disappointments for me however was the British entry from Steve McQueen, whose film Giardini was, well, boring. Certainly it contained some beautiful shots and was an interesting idea, but at 30 minutes it was just too long. There was also the fact that one had to view it at a certain time, that viewers were asked to arrive 10 minutes before the show which built up expectations to such a level the film almost had to fail. After a few minutes we were already shuffling in our seats, a few more minutes – when the dogs came again and sniffed around in a manner straight from a Peter Greenway film (no slight on that director intended) – and we were checking our watches. As a piece one could view at leisure, walking in and out at whatever time suited, it probably would have worked, but treating it like a film turned it I’m afraid into a very dull affair. As I don’t have any pictures of these less-than-inspiring works here is a picture of very-inspiring Venice.

What I really loathe are those pieces where the artist assembles tons of stuff in a room or space with which the viewer is asked to ‘create a narrative’ or not as the case may be. There are a few exceptions where this type of work is successful, but by and large it irritates the hell out of me. So Haegue Yang and Pascale Marthine Tayou, pack it in now.

But what about the winners..?

For me, Peter Forgacs’ Col Tempo was exceptional, giving history a human face. Taking archive footage from the Wastl project, he showed how people in the past, who lived in times of trauma were just like people today. It sounds a pretty obvious thing to say but often when we think about the past we tend not to see individuals as such, but rather numbers and tropes. Ironically, the footage Forgacs used was originally concerned with anything but the individual, rather Dr Josef Wastl, head of the Department of Anthropology at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, put on an exhibition which attempted to present to the public ‘the characteristic physical features’ and ‘mental traits’ of the Jews. What we see when looking at the images however are individuals just like us today.

Poland’s Krzysztof Wodiczko examined the issue of immigration. The Guests of the title were shown as shadow-figures outside the space in which we as onlookers (or out-lookers) were standing. We saw them without faces, without distinguishable characteristics, save for their voices which accompanied the work Nevertheless, in their outlines we could recognise the people we see all around us, the way they move, the way they stand and taken together with Forgacs’ work, it was indeed a powerful piece (by the way Poland won it for me two years ago).

Another powerful pieces came via Teresa Margolles who showed her work in the Mexican ‘Pavilion’. Her installation (and action) What Else Could We Talk About? took the country’s endemic violence and brought it into the Palazzo Rota-Ivancich. The Palazzo is a decaying structure which is nonetheless quite beautiful. The original (or at least very old) decor is still visible – faded wallpaper with patches where paintings (perhaps portraits given their shape) once hung. It was almost enough just to be in the building. Each room contained an incongruous mop and plastic bucket in which we learned blood collected from sites of killings in Mexico was mixed with water and used to wash down floors over which we were walking. In every room therefore one could sense quite palpably the echoes of missing people – those who’d lived and died in the city over the course of the Palazzo’s existence and those who lived and died in the present albeit thousands of miles away. There was a sense of the past and distance in the present being synonymous. There were also paintings again made from blood collected at the sites of executions in Mexico. Each painting, hanging like a blanket, resembled a modern-day Turin Shroud and I found myself being asked to believe, not in a life that could be known only through death, but individual deaths (and many of them) happening in the midst of life today.

Estonia’s entry examined in part the power of symbols and in particular the replica of a statue which had once stood in the capital Talinn. The statue (the replica of which looked quite kitsch in the gallery) marked the grave of Red Army soldiers from 1947 until its removal in a post-communist Estonia. For most Estonians the statue was a symbol of Soviet oppression, for many ethnic Russians it symbolised victory over Nazism. The artist, Kristina Norman placed the replica where the original statue had stood and documented the furore that followed with the police taking both her and the statue away.

The Portuguese artists Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paivia showed a series of video projections in a piece entitled Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. Each piece appeared to have been shot with a high speed camera, revealing in slow motion clear details of fire, water etc. But the appearance of each projection was that of a 1970s snapshot. The texture and quality of the projections reminded me of my own holiday photographs and in particular some work I’ve been doing on their hidden details.

And finally Luxembourg. Another video installation tucked away in a backstreet in which the artists Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert reflected on the divide between Africa and Europe, evoking according to the catalogue issues of difference and immigration. What I liked about the piece was the dialogue created between the various projections as seen through open doorways between the rooms. The image of a fly struggling in a spider’s web and that of a man standing still in a street but clearly lost in an alien world was particularly striking – one could sense via the other image his internal struggle.

All in all the Biennale served up the usual mix of both the sublime and the ridiculous. Much of it – especially in the Arsenale (now a much bigger site) was pretty lame, but then any work would struggle in such a massive space, vying for attention like an antique thimble in a flea-market. Certainly the use of spaces outside the sites of the Giardini and Arsenale tended to make for more interesting work, but one could argue that when in a place like Venice every space and every part of every space is interesting, whether home to art or not.

Venice – The Biennale

September 17, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

For some time I have wanted to visit the Biennale, and, finally this year, I went. To be honest, I had little idea what to expect, or what – from a ‘professional’ perspective – I would gain, but my hopes were raised when, having left our hotel, we saw the following poster:

Admittedly this was a fringe event, but it promised much. I last saw Bill Viola’s work in May this year, in Warsaw, and was blown away by it. He’s an artist who interests me a great deal, not just through his exhibited works, but also through his writing. So, on a hot and glorious day, we made our way to the Chiesa di San Gallo, a small and somewhat unassuming fifteenth century church, a stone’s throw from St. Mark’s Square.

Inside it was dark. On three altars, three large, flat screens were placed, one in front and two either side of those who stood or sat watching near the entrance. There was a stillness inside, emphasised by the sonic aspect of the work as well as by the coolness of the interior, a quietude augmented by the contrast with the heat and the light outside.

At first I thought there was something wrong with two of the screens, as the pictures shown on both of them were monochrome, blurred and rather grainy, much like an image one might see through an infrared camera. The screen directly in front however, showed a figure, beautifully lit and filmed as one would expect from Viola. Of course the point soon became clear.

Before the monochrome figures was a wall of water which one could not quite discern except for the occasional highlights at the bottom of the screen where the water caught the lights. Slowly, again in Viola’s inimitable style, the figures behind the water (always shown in isolation) walked toward us, towards the mysterious screen of water. Then at last they broke through, their limbs shrouded in a halo-like light as the water became visible around them.

The figures (of which there were several) then stood for a moment, before – after varying periods of time – they walked back through the screen of water to become monochrome, fuliginous shadows; versions of what they had just that second been.

This was a work, whose meaning was emphasised and expounded by its location. It could quite easily work in isolation, in a gallery (as was the case in Warsaw) for example, but here, in the church, it became a different piece altogether; the church was as much a part of the piece as the images played on the screens; indeed, the work’s meaning came as much through it’s ancient interior, (through which countless generations have passed in consideration of life and death and life after death and who are now themselves memories held by the church) its stones and its statues, as through the power of technology. As one looked at the ghosts behind the invisible walls of water, one could imagine the ghosts of all those who’d once sat where we were sitting. And when the figures emerged and returned to the depths, thoughts of one’s own mortality could not be ignored. More can be seen at the official website, www.oceanwithoutashore.com.

The next day we made our way to the Giardini to see the pavillions of the various participating countries and to see what, along with Bill Viola, was on offer. It says something about the art that we soon had a leaderboard (as if this was a Eurovision event) and even more, that for much of the trawl through the Giardini we had only a first and second place. Nothing warranted a third, although the battle for the wooden spoon was intense (won jointly in the end by Canada and the quite appalling German contingent).

For me, the best piece by some way was to be found in the Polish Pavillion, represented by Monika Sosnowska.

This was one of the few pieces in the whole exhibition which (like Viola’s fringe work) considered the space in which it was displayed. The architectural form, a sort of prefabricated structure had been bent and twisted so as to fit into the space in which it was shown. It had it seemed been brought to its knees and brought to mind an exhibition we had seen in Poland a few months back concerning the housing developments of the communist era, in which it wasn’t so much the structures themselves which were crushed and forced to fit a space, but humans themselves. The structure also reminded me of my own work as regards my drawings, and so I saw this almost as a physical, three dimensional drawing.
Spain came second and Russia third with the USA in fourth. I know it cheapens the whole event to reduce art to winners and losers, but then, such was the overall standard of the work it was hard not to see it that way. As for the British Pavillion… the less said the better.

Later that afternoon we took in the Arsenale, the quarter mile interior beneath which, art is reduced even further by casual and indifferent glances, to side shows and decoration. Admittedly the space is very impressive (how often is that phrase used as a means of justifying an otherwise mediocre exhinition) and there were moments when one felt glad to be there.

Oscar Munoz’s Memorial was particularly poignant, and Yang Fudong’s series of films (parts 1 to 5 of ‘Seven Intellectuals on the Yellow Mountain’) especially beautiful.

But aside from these there was little else to get excited about. The question, fundamentally, is this: how should art be seen? Or to put it another way, how best is it viewed? With Viola, the work was in its own space and its power was enhanced by the content within the church and the light and life outside. With the Biennale, in the Pavillions and the interminable Arsenale, art became like any word repeated over and over again; in the end (actually some time before the end) it lost its meaning completely.