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September 22, 2003
biennale
My recent visit to the Venice Biennale was my first - and if you have even a passing interest in contemporary art, go. Move earth and mountains to see it. It's the best thing I've seen all year. The setting, the variety, the crazy city and generally the standard of the art all combine to create a truly breathtaking, headspinning experience.
The Biennale this year was held in three main venues: the Giardini della Biennale, the Arsenale, and the Museo Correr. I only managed the first two, plus ten or so other exhibitions dotted around Venice.
The Biennale has two sections, a large group curated show, and shows created by individual countries, mainly focussing on one artist each.
Many countries have their own little art galleries in the Biennale garden (and planning permission has been rumoured for some more). These have a variety of styles, and on a sunny day it's great to just wander round - and most of the year that's all you can do. These buildings are only open for a few exhibitions.
The best overall experience was probably Denmark, with Olafur Eliasson creating a set of visual experiences, including taking a pretty boring pavilion and building round it to create a more natural free-flowing space on many levels. Is it art? Who knows - it's playful and engaging.
Three other countries really amazed me: Israel's thoughtful take on human existence, ending in a room of tiny people walking around you, Egypt's insane installations of, well, thousands of moulded birds, mirrors, almost total blackout, computers, whirring fans, and one eyed robots, and Iceland, in a tiny pavilion, with a playful matching of technology and nature.
Mopping up a few special mentions - one piece (Peripatetic Sitting On by Roxana Chereches) in the otherwise disappointing Romanian digital art exhibition, producing a photo record of the Paris Metro, the dice room of Poland, Greece for having the most deadly installation, wonderful films by Lilsa Lounila in the clever Nordic Countries pavilion, empty manmade landscape photos by Candida Höfer for Germany, and Hungary, if just for the pavilion.
The British pavilion was good, and I'm always a fan of Chris Ofili, but I felt the presentation, whilst emphasising some aspects of the art, overtook the pieces.
Lowlights: the Australian Chapmanesque display, the frankly boring Serra pavilion for Spain (the mean would say the real piece was the bored Spanish border guard paid to check passports), and on a more political level, the closed censored Venezuelan pavilion.
The large Italian pavilion marks the start of the curated shows. This was a general ragbag of generally engaging works.
We've only just begun! A shortish walk from the gardens to the old Arsenale dockyard (past the Communist party headquarters), continuing the Venizian passion for signing for a few blocks and then leaving you completely lost in some backstreet.
The Arsenale is a set of converted buildings, starting with the Corderie, used previously to show work by young artists. Now 17 thousand square metres have been renovated (the Tate Modern has 14 thousand sq m of display space) and divided into 8 separately curated exhibitions.
By now my head was full of all kinds of strange art - and on entering the first two areas, I was worried that such group shows couldn't hold their own against the bold work of the countries. The third space, Individual Systems, started to reignite my passion.
This was just a warm up act for my favourite display, Z.O.U. Zone of Urgency, curated by Hou Hanru, based on urbanisation, expansion and transformation. Crazy, loud, computers, videos, a mini Japanese capsule hotel, banners, aircraft in filing cabinets, free oxygen and general visceral stimulation left me reeling with the biggest smile on my face.
Again, the displays lulled slightly, and yet again, my interest was piqued by some work in the slightly formal The Everyday Altered, only for all order to be dismantled in the excellent Utopia Station. More idea based than finished formal work, this part was responsible for many of the wonderful flyposters around Venice, and spilt out into the garden, creating an atmosphere of hippy enclave mixed with village fete.
Sure, my favourite areas tend towards curator-as-artist rather than analysing the pieces by themselves, but I can go to any art museum in the world for that. And with the sheer quantity of art to see, in such a limited time, you are naturally going to focus on the loud brash experiences over the quiet detailed shy thoughts. If I had a week, I would go back every day, as it's obvious I've missed the subtleties of much of the work.
But time was pressing - half a day left in Venice, much of which was trying to find the damned venues of the other exhibitions. The Absolut exhibition was quite impressive, some interesting work from Singapore, Luxembourg and Ukraine, a crazy classroom and lecture theatre taken over by Ireland for a summer of presentations and publications, and the Zenomap exhibition from Scotland.
In general: Amazing. Heavy (the catalogue weighs an impressive half a stone, even when giving the countries just a few pages each, plus a kilo or two of all the pick ups from the countries and even artists). Mindboggling. I'm going to try to get to next years' architecture exhibition, and you can be sure I'll be back in 2005 for the 51st Biennale.
All 250+ photos here.
Strange Biennale blog here.
A good long review, with lots of pictures, here.
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