Report From Venice: The Pavilions
James Westcott
The Taiwan pavilion–actually called a Museum–is a few steps from St. Mark’s Place on the waterfront. An enormous sign declares "The Specter of Freedom," and when you slip inside the building and up the cool marble steps into a large dark chamber to see Chung-li Kao’s animations of a saintly man gazing at a crucifix-cum-fighter plane, you realize that this "freedom" refers to America’s current mission as well as to Taiwan’s ongoing struggle with China. Then suddenly another aircraft roars into view: a silhouetted projection of a jet plane, together with engine sound effects, passes overhead across the vaulted ceiling.
Aside from a clever but dense call for an artist’s strike by Hsin-I Eva Lin, the undoubted highlight in the museum is the series of performances by Kuang-yu Tsui. In one of his video documentations, he has a series of random–but usually heavy–objects thrown quite hard at the back of his head. The game is for him to guess what just hit him. Wine bottle. Chair. Wires. Usually though, he has no idea. Yes, that really was a TV just smacking his skull, and we cringe in imagined pain even though Kunag-yu hardly flinches. In another video, he?s out braining himself on street furniture and shop windows and train doors. After each headlong charge and harrowing crack on the head, he straightens out his distinctive red glasses and walks out of the frame with understated dignity, as if closer to solving a small problem, or perhaps just quelling it for the moment. If these films sound funny, they’re not–at least ultimately. They are very sympathetic, but it?s not the cheap pathos of the nerdy, weird anti-hero. More overtly and allowably funny is the situationist-type stunt he pulls in London: he stands by traffic lights, and, as they turn green, waves a Formula-1 checkered flag, thus granting the passing cars a part in a very small drama.
To save energy required for the inevitable art deluge, we take the ferry to the Giardini, even though Sislej Xhafa’s enormous ku klux klan-style white hood sculpture is in sight not far away. Up close, you can see the gentle sprinkle of water from the black eye holes that explain the title, "Ceremonial Crying System." This is Albania’s first pavilion, but somehow more appealing is the idea of Xhafa’s performances in previous years to protest the fact that there wasn’t one: he walked around the Giardini in a soccer kit, asking people if they wanted to play with him. He had a small Albania flag jutting from his backpack.
Entering the Giardini proper we hear a cacophony: blaring electronic music and someone shouting in Italian into a microphone. Naturally, we follow the excitement and arrive at the American pavilion to find a small squadron of riot police. I immediately suspect some kind of clever performance/prank, but no, they were real police, and they were closely watching–and in the process flattering–a man from the "Mars Pavilion" who was dressed in a Transformers robot outfit, together with his companion, the man with a mobile sound-system. I can only presume that it was some kind of anti-American protest–and it worked. The noise made it impossible to concentrate on the meditative Ed Ruscha paintings inside, which though beautiful seemed like a very worthy and boring choice of representative, much like Gilbert and George in Grande-Bretagne.
As the Mars Pavilion roamed off somewhere, peace finally began to descend on the sublime Nordic pavilion nearby, which was designed by the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn in 1958 and was this year shared by Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The participating artists simply removed the glass walls from the pavilion to create a marble Zen garden with no distinction between inside and out?trees literally grow through the roof. Even Miriam B�ckstr�m and Carsten H�ller’s gesture of the sound installation in the emptied pavilion–mildly amplified noises from the Giardini’s pathways–seemed gratuitous in this minimalist paradise.
It soon became clear that bold and–hate to say it–site-specific gestures like this one, and stunts, sculptures, performances and interactive mini artworlds would fare best in the competitive and A.D.D.-inducing atmosphere of the Giardini. No time to stand in front of a painting and let the work breathe. Even photography seemed a bit primitive in its reverential stasis. Give me complete sensory immersion, inject feelings directly into my brain!
Russia did this the best. Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov built a windtunnel with the sound of ghastly–or operatic–moaning piped in along with the relentless, somehow primal torrent of air. There was a warning on the door not to spend more than two minutes in the wind. Perhaps this was as much to avoid trauma and madness as airborne diseases and headaches. Standing in the jet stream, you instinctively close your eyes, and it’s terrifying. "This is the Russian soul," my East German companion informed me with relish. It wasn’t quite a decent into hell, perhaps more like spinning around uncontrollably in purgatory, or being battered by a Siberian snowstorm in the dead of night. Upon exiting this harrowing region of the psyche, the blissful Italian sunshine and carefree fun of the Giardini seemed totally alien, petty and naive.
But then we saw a familiar man standing alone on a pathway, fiddling with his camera. The red glasses confirmed that it was indeed Kuang-yu Tsui. We introduced ourselves, and, clearly rattled by the encounter and by our compliments, he offered his thanks and a limp hand for us to shake. We left him alone, thinking it better not to ask the dumb but unavoidable questions, "Doesn’t your head hurt?" or "What’s the idea behind your work?"
You have to feel sorry for Thomas Scheibitz, the painter and sculptor whose work is pretty interesting but totally overshadowed by Tino Sehgal’s brilliant performance piece in the Germany pavilion. As people enter, the security guards approach them, usually sneakily from behind, and then break out into an addictively silly song and dance: "Oooh! This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!" Then they repeat the same in a reverential whisper, and then one last time in a joyous and camp yelp, hips twisting and arms flailing. It perfectly mimics the response one might immediately (but silently) have upon seeing Scheibitz?s shabby and sugary geometric sculptures in the main hall–you’ve no idea what it’s about, but it looks reassuringly different and difficult and now-ish, and–cowardly relief!–a long way off from delivering any visceral impact.
Being accosted by the security guards–who are very cleverly cast because they look normal and not like smarmy art students pulling off a prank–is wonderfully disorientating. The few moments before you realize what’s happening, that this is being done for you, are strange and dream-like. You are not quite yourself. But to the other people inside the pavilion who are already in on the joke, you are absolutely yourself: caught off-guard. Some people are sourpusses about the whole thing and refuse to smile, or are incapable of it. One woman–apparently with complete conviction that it might work–actually held up a program to her face to try to hide from the attention. Most people were confused and then beguiled. I stayed for about an hour watching the unwitting performances and couldn?t stop smiling?not, I hope, through pleasure at their momentary humiliation, but because what was revealed was an enchanting and very human vulnerability, and then very quickly pure joy as the joke crystallizes.
Perhaps the more appropriate jingle though might have been "Oooh! This is not contemporary," since this knee-jerk arbitrary dismissal is a far easier response in the pavilions (I had it in Uruguay and Australia) than the kind of credulous in-crowd mantra that Sehgal was poking fun at. The sheer quantity of work in the Giardini forces one to be a little defensive and dismissive. Still, the sheer pleasure of watching the natural performativity of the visitors and the pitch-perfect performance of the security guards was far more interesting anyway than the work’s political connotations?or the discussion I was encouraged to have next door with other security guards about the market economy.
Switzerland contained a storyboard sequence of slick and boring corporate photographs by Marco Poloni: aeroplane interiors, business meetings, boardrooms. They had an IBM aesthetic. Actually, the photography in new IBM ads is more interesting. And here’s the danger of the pavilion system: one is tempted to think, Oh, this is so typically Swiss: clean and dull. But Shahryar Nashat’s video of a gymnast doing a one-handed hand stand in front of Rubens’ The Life of Marie de Medici at the Louvre was amazing: the only possible response to the skill and ambition of an old Master now lies outside of art, in a semi-heroic physical gesture, one which is simultaneously death-defying and despondent.
Barbara Kruger’s suitably depressing slogan on the front of the Italian pavilion, "Admit Nothing, Blame Everyone," again seemed targeted at Bush & Co. But having hardly any time left, we quickly gave up on the exhibition inside, "The Experience of Art." I couldn’t figure out the point of pixilated Thomas Ruff pictures in the same room as a Rachel Whiteread staircase, and then Francis Bacon in the next room. It’s all great stuff that we could see fairly easily any time in a museum or at an art fair–why did it need to be here, now, like this? A glance at the curator’s wall text on the way out confirmed the apparent lack of vision: it was apparently a (paranoid and P.C.) priority to "leave questions open," but in the process, it seemed like no questions were even asked.
When the clock struck six and the pavilions were about to close, we were left with the haunting image of an animated drummer boy by Carilina Raquel Antich in Egpyt. The boy had finished his militaristic drumming routine, tucked his sticks neatly under his arm, and swung his drum to the side. Where it seemed like the animation would stop and the loop would begin again, instead the boy just stood there staring blankly directly at us, blinking occasionally, with no expression on his face. The animation was raw and simple, but very human in this moment of calmness and emptiness. It was as if the boy was saying: "OK. I’ve banged my drum, now what do you want from me? I have nothing for you."
