Venice Biennale: "every idea but one": the ur-biennial of contemporary art, currently under way in Italy's Most Serene City, is a gargantuan affair whose sheer bulk obscures the few strong works on view. The menu is huge, but there's not much nourishment - Critical Essay

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

So just how big is the 50th Venice Biennale? Although the Italian pleas has tried to quantify this really, really big show, a reliable census is elusive. There are collaboratives and teams to be factored in, individuals appearing in more than one constituent exhibition, and online projects and poster projects that engage dozens of artists. A decade ago, there were 40 national pavilions. Tiffs year's catalogue lists 52 compared to the previous Biennale's 48, plus 19 official "satellite" shows and events, collectively called "Extra 50," compared to 13 in 2001. The sharpest spike, however, is in the international group show, which has tripled in size from nearly 130 artists to roughly 380 in two years. Bieanale venues now infiltrate nearly every corner of Venice, and an additional 13 artists and teams have been invited to distribute works, called "Interludes," on the exhibition's grounds and throughout the city. Simply stated, most visitors don't stand a chance of taking in the entire show: hence, perhaps, the strange sense of kinship elicited by Paola PM's "Inte," a billboard showing a compliant if bewildered-looking ass adrift to a low boat.

A glance at the world map goes a long way toward explaining the mounting number of nations represented. While the post-Cold War Biennale dropped one Germany from its roster in the early '90s, it acquired several new republics with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The U.K., while still intact, this year fielded separate representations from England, Scotland and Wales. Moreover, a global 'art world has come to mirror the global market economy. Little "tigers" like Singapore and Hang Kong, which debuted in 2001, no less than the People's Republic of China, forced by the SARS epidemic to cancel its own coming out at the Biennale this year, all look to make the world scene in Venice. True, it goes both ways: after first showing in 2001, Jamaica has not returned.

If the pumped-up national participation is attributable to the new world order, the expanding girth of the international group show has everything to do with the new curatorial order. Notwithstanding the disingenuous title devised by visual-arts director Francesco Bonami, "Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer," the 2003 Biennale is all about the hegemony of the global curator class. The group exhibition has been divided into 11 autonomous shows curated singly and/or collaboratively by Bonami, Carlos Basualdo, Daniel Birnbaum, Catherine David, Massimiliano Gioni, Hou Hanru, Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Gabriel Orozco, Gilane Tawadros, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Igor Zabel. Heavyweights all, most of them have worked before with Bonami and/or one another, and have organized other biennials, triennials, Manifestas, Documentas and assorted international shows. In Venice there is no dictatorship of the viewer, any more than cable television, whose many channels are owned by a few corporations, submits to the dictatorship of the consumer.

Characterizing this Biennale as an "antbology," an "archipelago" and a "show of shows," Bonami suggests that the multiple viewpoints signify the obsolescence of the individual authoritarian curator, a 20th-century figure exemplified by his predecessor, Harald Szeemann, the visual-arts director in 1999 and 2001. Never mind that the practice of subcontracting curatorial duties actually was introduced at the 1993 Biennale by Achille Bonito Oliva (who invited Bonami to be on that year's team). That Szeemann could become the poster child for authoritarianism is tinged with more than a little irony. In the late 1960s and early '70s, he virtually invented the role of the independent curator, a peripatetic free agent without binding institutional affiliations. And in 1980 it was Szeemann, with Bonito Oliva, who launched the Biennale's first "Aperto," the rambling show of emerging artists aimed at countering the exclusivity of the national pavilions.

Szecmann's descendants on Bonami's team are neither freer nor more open-minded, simply more numerous. It may be that Venice has become just another curatorial gig--big time, to be sure--on the world tour schedule. Among the anthologized shows, both "Utopia Station" (curated by Nesbit, Obrist and Tiravanija) and "Contemporary Arab Representations" (curated by David) are long-term projects that originated elsewhere in seminars and colloquia, and will assume various configurations as they continue on complex travel schedules. Among the satellite shows, the exhibition by Ilya and Emiha Kabakov at the Fandasione Querini Stampalla is slated for the Mort Art Museum, Tokyo, and Rome's National Museum of 21st Century Arts, while the art and architecture exhibition "The Snow Show," some of whose projects were previewed last March in Finnish Lapland [see "Front Page, May '03], will be realized fully only in 2004.

Cognizant that a good deal of the Biennale's art has been shown before, and that more of it will dot the exhibition schedules of commercial galleries and museums over the next two years, most visitors to Venice will look in vain for that "here and only here" installation or show that will make them feel fortunate to have come. This is not to say that good art cannot be found. But there are no heirs to Hans Haacke's polysemous and altogether unforgettable smashed-floor installation in the pavilion of the Federal Republic of Germany (1993), or to Serge Spitzer's breathtaking installation of thousands of drinking glasses in one of the raw and remote spaces of the Arsenale (1999).