One for all: Steven Henry Madoff on the Venice Biennale - Preview

THOSE WHO RECALL THE WAR between Vittorio Sgarbi, former undersecretary of the Italian culture ministry, and Francesco Bonami, director of visual arts for the 50th Venice Biennale [see Artforum, May 2002], may wonder what became of the clangor over Bonami's appointment: It ended with a whimper when Sgarbi was summarily booted from office last summer. Even at its most heated, this was nothing more than a local skirmish compared with the real war and terrorism under the pall of which this Biennale, opening next month, has been planned and largely realized.

It is hard to believe that only two years have passed between Harald Szeemann's immensely hopeful "Plateau of Humankind," the central exhibition of the last Biennale, and Bonami's "Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer." The world, splintered by September II and the calamity in Iraq, is changed, and the Biennale--at 108 years, the world's oldest international art exposition, unfolding in the peaceful precincts of the Giardini and its environs--faces the pressures of a thunderous geopolitical climate. Which, it turns out, will be much its point.

Bonami's structure for the exhibition reflects these straitened, fractured times: He chose to cede unity and dominance to fragments and chance, in effect revoking his single voice of curatorial authority and replacing it with many independent voices, come what may.

"One person with one vision isn't a logical way to do this kind of exhibition any longer," Bonami explains. "That's too monotonous for a show that's so big, and with so little time to prepare. And especially with bombs dropping, the world is telling us every day that there is no unifying subject. So I wanted to present a fragmentary set of identities in art--even if people say there is not enough of a connection and I get fried for it."

But of course he will not be fried, or celebrated, alone. Bonami invited a dozen prominent and professionally intertwined curators--Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Catherine David, Daniel Birnbaum, Carlos Basualdo, and Gilane Tawadros among them--to organize exhibitions beside him. There will be eleven shows, which Bonami likens, in a passing moment of geekiness, to the nonlinear narrative of hypertext. From the works of some 265 artists in about 79,000 square feet of exhibition space, viewers will be invited to construct a "Dreams and Conflicts" all their own, "out of the relationships they discover for themselves," as the director puts it.

This is where the second part of the title, "The Dictatorship of the Viewer," comes in. Bonami, whose day job is Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, remarks that "the viewer has become the dictator in museums today, demanding explanations of what they see. And museums are terrified to lose even one customer. So the level of culture is lowered with blockbusters. On the other side, viewers are abused by work--videos especially--that demand the kind of time only a retired person has. The viewer, in this sense, is dictated to. So I want to address these things by making a more challenging experience for viewers but also by limiting works that will not allow them to make their way through the art in a reasonable time."

For the twenty-first century, Bonami proposes that the behemoth Biennale and its many elephantine clones be broken down to make the art--and the world that the art represents--easier to approach and its exhibition more nimble. Bonami speaks of his shows as "live cells interacting in unpredictable ways." The monolith, he suggests, must be taken apart, made modular, and that is what he'll do. (Not that this hasn't been tried before in Venice, if on a smaller scale. Ten years ago, Achille Bonito Oliva handed out sections of the "Aperto" exhibition to different curators, including, tellingly enough, Bonami.)

Yet despite the talk of autonomous shows, the aggregate may still amount to a monolith. Call it zeitgeist, curatorial preoccupation, or fashion--the thrust of these exhibitions is art mapped onto social and political frameworks. Just consider the shows' titles: Catherine David's "Contemporary Arab Presentations"; Hou Hanru's "Z.O.U. (Zone of Urgency)"; Basualdo's "The Structure of Survival"; "Utopia Station," curated by Obrist, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija; "Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes" by Tawadros; and "The Zone" by Massimiliano Gioni, who writes of his show with regard to migratory movements and of his exhibition space as a metaphor for Italy's role in European history. The terms and subjects that crop up repeatedly in the shows' summaries telegraph this Biennale's concerns: postcolonialism; disenfranchisement; "art itself as a social institution"; local versus global; "theater of resistance"; social transformation; social crises; nationalist struggles; race and power.

A year ago, Bonami said pugnaciously that he wasn't interested in art that's like an essay on anthropology or sociology." When reminded of this recently, he laughed and said, "But for the shows I'm doing, this is not the case. For the rest, there is freedom to do what they want. And the range is broader than you think, from David's show, which is supersociological, to 'Utopia Station,' which includes every aspect of the creative mind, including science."