Report From Venice: The Arsenale
James Westcott
There’s only a very short curatorial introduction to the exhibition at the Arsenale in Venice for the 51st edition of the Biennale. Rosa Martinez quotes Beckett only to defy him: while he spoke of an art that was "weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road," Martinez insists that we must go "Always a little further" in our creative explorations, and that if we do so in good heart, we "cannot fail." Given the immensity of the Arsenale, this is a necessarily general theme, but it touches on platitude: what curator wouldn’t like to say that the work in their exhibition pushes creative boundaries?
It’s a pleasant jolt to find the Guerilla Girls in the first chamber of the Arsenale’s endless corridor. "Where are the women artists of Venice? Underneath the men," says one enormous poster with an image of a man riding a woman like a horse. While sexism, conscious or otherwise, still pervades the art world–P.S.1’s "Greater New York" exhibition has only 34 per cent female artists–and the posters are funny and sharp, they seemed to turn the chamber into something of an introductory lobby, which is a tad demeaning. And, in another lobby-like touch, there is a large chandelier in the room–but one made by Joana Vasconcelo out of unused tampons tied together.
This idea of light and fecundity seems to connect with Adrian Paci’s video Turn On in the next room. A group of rugged peasant men–who could be characters in a Hemingway novel, with their leathery faces and hard, empty stares–sit on some concrete steps, maybe in a marketplace or at a port, at dusk. Each man has a little motor next to him, and one by one they pull the cord and start their engines. This illuminates a light bulb, which each man holds in front of him like a piece of fruit or like disembodied genitalia. There’s no particular expression on their rough faces, but it’s possible to discern–or project–a smudge of rather meek self-satisfaction.
It’s also an intense pleasure just to watch a simple, unguarded human face in the enormous video projection Be the first to see what you see as you see it, by Runa Islam. A woman trots around a gallery staring at some crockery placed on plinths. Eventually she starts prodding it until it falls to the ground. There’s childlike defiance but no petulance, curiosity but no American Beauty-style sentimental beguilement at mundane objects. The woman is more like an alien seeing the objects for the first time, examining them thoroughly but dispassionately. Since these objects are crockery, one might say the piece is about gender, like other works in the first two rooms, but a phenomenological reading is richer: it’s a plain and pure encounter with the implacable objecthood of objects, a testing of their limits, and an attempt to see what they are with no associations or expectations.
A new theme of cultural specificity and underlying universality–that most familiar of globalization debates–starts to emerge in several of the apparently endless large video projections (painting is nearly absent from the first half of the Arsenale’s big, un-intimate hallways). The topic is approached with varying degrees of grace and intelligence. Gregor Schneider shows a video proposal for an unrealized work called CUBE VENICE 2005, which would have been a giant black cube plonked in the middle of St. Mark’s Place. It looks incredible in the mock-up–I wish it could have been made. Schneider’s text explains that his cube, which would have been as tall as the buildings that describe the square of St. Mark’s, was inspired by the Kaaba in Mecca. But Schneider says he was trying to explore the spatial alchemy that makes a cube such a powerful and revered physical presence across different cultures. At least, that’s the sugary story he spun (unsuccessfully) for the proposal to the authorities, who were worried the cube would offend Muslims. But Schneider probably just wanted the irrational joy of dropping this ridiculous, illegible alien object in St. Mark’s and watching people approach it like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Cristina Garcia Rodero’s photojournalism-ish black and white pictures literalize the pursuit of the universal. They show people in similar postures in drastically different countries and scenarios: a shrouded body in a mental institute in Georgia formally resembles a shrouded body in the cult of Maria Lionza. Stephen Dean’s three films of ecstatic crowds in different places across the world continue the theme more promisingly, but in Kimsooja’s long hall of video projections, the mantra starts to take on all the gravity of a Benetton ad: the artist stands mysteriously with her back to the camera while people in the street–oh, the citizens of the world–rush past her, almost oblivious.
The artists in the second half of the Arsenale must really suffer because you’re exhausted by the time you reach half way, and in my case, I was also nudging up against closing time. There was just time to get to Rem Koolhaas’s installation, which consisted of huge banners slung over the rafters. They outlined his plans and speculations for his renovation of the Hermitage in St. Petersberg. He clearly sees this as a monstrous and almost regrettable task, and doesn’t want to do a slick job like Yoshio Taniguchi did on MoMA. So Koolhaas asks, in scratchy handwriting on the banners: Is a minimal intervention possible? Can we hang dozens of paintings in one room, cramming the walls? Must we modernize? He may as well ask: Do I really have to do this? He likes the decay as it is.
Almost out of time now, I turned back towards the entrance and encountered Sergio Vega’s sculpture of a man with a bag on his head sitting on a bench. This wasn’t so interesting as the black curtain behind him with sunlight leaking through. I pulled it back and found a long desolate alleyway, and got the shivers in a way no piece of art had stimulated. The exquisite geometry of the alley somehow invited one to tiptoe down it, to literally go "always a little further." But then I was disappointed to find that even this apparently accidental, surplus space, which was the most beautiful and provocative of all, had been subtly colonized by art: Laura Belem had made a sound installation of squawking birds called Escutura. It was good enough, but gratuitous. It would have been better to leave the space alone and let the art from elsewhere sink in.
