Groans Of Venice - Harald Szeemann's Venice Biennale

ArtForum, Sept, 2001 by Robert Storr, Daniel Birnbaum, Daniel Soutif, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Richard Flood, Katy Siegel

EVEN FOR A SUMMARIZING MEGASHOW, WHERE TOUCH NOTICES GO WITH THE TERRITORY, HARALD SZEEMANN'S 49TH VENICE BIENNALE HAS BEEN WIDELY CRITICIZED FOR AN UNFAVORABLE CHAFF-TO-WHEAT RATIO. ROBERT STORR'S MODEST PROPOSAL: VOTE WITH YOUR FEET. DANIEL SOUTIF, BENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH, RICHARD FLOOD, AND KATY SIEGEL JOIN HIM IN FLEEING THE FILLER AND FOCUSING LARGELY ON THE HIGHPOINTS. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DANIEL BIRNBAUM SURVEYS THE PLATEAU, SETTING THE STAGE WITH A COMPREHENSIVE REPORT.

More Is Less

DANIEL BIRNBAUM

Most people would go along with Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto's optimistic words in the catalogue to this year's Venice Biennale: "I hope in this millennium art will become something more important than just a spectacle. I hope that art will get closer to the people in general, not just something for specialists." Many would even support his statement "I hope art will become more spiritual. I hope it can fill the big emptiness of humanity today." But it's rare to find such ambitions spelled out so frankly. No doubt Harald Szeemann, organizer for the second consecutive installment of the Venice extravaganza, would agree with Neto. The Biennale is always, of course, a spectacle par excellence, but this renewal, titled "Plateau of Humankind," takes as its explicit point of departure the "positive, utopian spirituality of [Joseph] Beuys" and wants to continue the "work towards spiritual activity at the service of the possible visualization of a museum of obsessions" that Szeemann was pursuing long before most o f us learned how to spell Beuvs. So what is spirituality in the age of the spectacle?

At the center of the Italian pavilion, Szeemann arranged a "Platform of Thought," where profound ideas appear capable of passing directly from the gilded head of a 600-year-old Buddha to Erich Bodeker's sincere-looking wooden Saint Barbara, 1970, and onward to a dancing twelfth-century Siva and the superbly inane Adam and Eve, 1975, by the late German sculptor Hans Schmitt. This collection--which comprises thirty-odd family members, including a US Navy diving helmet--is vintage Szeemann: a completely eccentric set of artifacts that oddly enough makes perfect sense because it all looks great together and seems full of bizarre life. I wish the whole Biennale had been carried out in this ruthlessly egocentric spirit. As it is, my lingering impression is instead one of an enormous amassing of vaguely interesting work from all over the world with only a few real highlights--fewer in fact than the last time around, when Szeemann filled the Arsenale with pieces by, among others, Doug Aitken, Thomas Hirschhorn, Olafur Eliasson, and Shirin Neshat. Writing on Dieter Roth, Szeemann once distinguished two kinds of creative tendencies: the desire to subtract more and more until only the essential is left (e.g., Giacometti) and the will to constantly add new elements and produce an abundance (Roth). If one were to apply the same distinction to curating, there is no doubt into which category Szeemann would fall. While that impulse may have worked two years ago in Venice, this time it doesn't. To see one video installation after another adds up to little more than exhaustion and makes most of us unreceptive to the few truly interesting works. Indeed, a general sense of disappointment dominated the opening days. Where was this year's Aitken? Certainly not in Chris Cunningham's cool but ultimately tacky music videos. Where was the counterpoint to Roth's deeply touching video self portrait that so clearly formed the artistic hub of the last Biennale? Unfortunately not in Beuys's beautiful Olivestones, 1982: It may be difficult for many to accept, but there is simply no easy path from the social sculptor's spiritual geographies to what is most interesting in today's art (with the possible exception of Gregor Schneider).

This time around the advantage in the dialectic between national pavilions and the international show falls to the pavilions, where one finds some of the most ambitious and challenging contributions. There were years when the unofficial shows beyond the purview of the Biennale proper were the places to find interesting new art. Then Szeemann redefined the Aperto, the area traditionally given over to emerging artists, to include the whole program, thus more or less negating the national exhibitions and making the unofficial exhibitions of young art redundant. With this year's successful national contributions, it seems that, strangely enough, we've come full circle and the old Olympic model of art is what has the most to offer.

This is admittedly an oversimplification; there were, after all, some ambitious sideshows this year, such as "Authentic/Ex-centric: Africa in and out of Africa" in the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, which featured work by seven artists, including a fascinating installation by Yinka Shonibare. His Vacation, 2000, a family of astronauts (clad in space suits made from African wax-printed cotton textile) out for a leisurely extraterrestrial stroll, smartly conflates various forms of otherness in a way that leaves everybody confused. Another noteworthy side project is British artist Mike Nelson's mazelike The Deliverance and The Patience, 2001, on the Giudecca. The viewer is invited to choose between parallel tracks through the labyrinth, thus passing through one of two successions OT corridors and rooms. Perhaps this space is an old hotel where everything has started to disintegrate and rot away? There are spaces for meditation, for resting or drinking--but for whom? The moment you enter you're already part of a narr ative. No matter how simple the stage set, you cannot but try to make sense of the story. Nelson clarifies the logic of the architectural construction: "Two worlds run parallel to one another, sometimes alongside, sometimes leap-frogging, until they meet at the junction of the second and third sections. Here a third route is offered--a door to a staircase leading to the mezzanine, which offers an overview of the exterior of the construction thereby dismantling the original two fictions that cross, merge, and disintegrate within the physical structure." Getting a glimpse of the whole structure from above, you realize how surprisingly small the space is--and how primitive the machinery that brings about the split fiction.