Shahryar Nashat in the Swiss Pavilion
James Wescott
Confronted with Rubens’ The Life of Marie de Medici in the Louvre, an epic sequence full of pale, voluptuous and muscular bodies engaged in mythological dramas, a young man sits on a bench and contemplates for a while. Then, almost with the calm, defiant expression of a breakdancer about to execute a hitherto impossible move, he gets up slowly and does a one-handed hand-stand on the gallery floor. It’s the perfect response to a work of such epic scope: a silent, pseudo heroic physical gesture. This is Shahryar Nashat’s video installation, The Regulating Line, in the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale: a strange acting out of the pure abstract desire, the super-human strength, and the humble devotion that art–the really good stuff–provokes all at once. It just makes you want to do something. And since we postmoderns can’t match the ambition and craft of the renaissance, what we’re left with is a beautiful gymnastics move, or making art about the response to art–but here, that’s OK.
