Art Fairs International
110th Venice Biennale: The Process of Pushing Further
By Darrell Hartman
May 2005, p. 18

The Venice Biennale is, in the words of event president Davide Croff, “the mother of all the other bienalli,” and this year the great progenitor turns 110.

Ever since the first Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia was launched in 1895, under the auspices of King Umberto I and Queen Margherita di Savoia, the Biennale has been one of the most compelling, not to mention consistent, cynosures of the art world. It drew over 200,000 visitors its first year. In 1910, Klimt and Renoir showed paintings, a work by Picasso was deemed too shocking for exhibition, and the futurist Filippo Marinetti peppered the Piazza San Marco with pamphlets denouncing the entire event. The Biennale began including avant-garde works in 1920, and ten years later expanded its program to include music, cinema and theater. In the years following World War II, the Biennale matured into a broad international forum, which recognized the achievements of well-known artists like Johns and Rauschenberg, and served western audiences fresh offerings—like traditional Japanese Nô theater, the films of Satyajit Ray, or the odd Stravinsky world premiere—from around the globe.

Should you get misty-eyed about the halcyon past of the Biennale, however, this year’s organizers will be quick to remind you that the centennial celebration was ten years ago. Conservative inclinations seem to have vaporized in the heady atmosphere of reinvention that surrounds preparations for the 2005 event—in particular, the 51st International Art Exhibition, which kicks off this year’s Biennale on June 12.

Rosa Martínez, who is co-curating the exhibition with fellow Spaniard and long-time colleague María de Corral, said she is proud to be directing such a high-profile event. “But,” she added, “I am even more proud of being able to change it.”

The Biennale has rarely stayed the same for long; nor, however, does it often get the kind of makeover the organizers have given it for 2005. This year’s International Art Exhibition is the first in Biennale history to be run by two women—and to adopt a bisected conceptual tableau in favor of a single unifying theme.

“The Experience of Art,” curated by de Corral, will feature the work of 42 artists from around the globe and trace the dominant currents in the art world of the present and recent past. It will be held at the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, with three pieces on display, al fresco, in the gardens themselves. Meanwhile, just north of the Giardini at the Arsenale di Venezia, Martinez's “Always A Little Further” will show work by 49 contemporary artists and offer a view of art’s future.

“The most relevant creators are those who open new perspectives for linguistic, social, and ideological transformation,” said Martínez, who tapped the talents of Mariko Mori, the Russian group Blue Noses, and thirty year-old Guatemalan artist Regina José de Galindo. Her exhibition’s title comes from a story of the dashing adventurer and comic book hero Corto Maltese. Martínez said she hoped the exhibition would evoke the idea of a romantic traveler who is “always independent, always open to chance and risk, and always crossing all kinds of frontiers.”

“Heroes like Maltese are hard to find in these days of materialism and over-organization of our lives,” said Martínez. What’s more, the current cultural traffic jam makes spaces for artistic originality few and far between. Martínez said she was looking for pioneering artists “in a context where new ideas, people and products circulate at high velocity, where the artists often mimic each other, where institutions franchise culture, and in which marketing is the principal methodology of action.”

Other artists participating in “Always A Little Further” are Pakistani-born Shahzia Sikander—who uses her training in Persian and Hindu miniature painting to create rich, surreal fusions of traditional and contemporary art that are both refined and expressive—and Gregor Schneider, the German artist with a talent for turning ordinary living spaces into stygian museums of trauma. Schneider’s unnerving “renovation” of the three-story house in which he grew up was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2001 Biennale.

Though the exhibition explores the cutting edge of contemporary art, it is not short on artists with more than well-established reputation—most notably Samuel Beckett (whose play Breathe is being adapted by Greek artist Nikos Navridis), architect Rem Koolhaas, the feminist group Guerrilla Girls, and Louise Bourgeois, who turned 93 last December. “She’s the youngest of the show,” said Martinez, noting the sculptor’s constant efforts to reinvent her art and test formal boundaries. “She’s the prototype of the relevant artist: the one who wants to do new things all the time.”

In cataloguing art trends since 1970 for “The Experience of Art,” María de Corral took care not to suggest that any work of art is ever inert—or holistic. “I am interested in ideas that appear as a mass of remains, fragments, rough drafts, and attempts,” she said, adding that she was also attracted to “works that allow the viewer to recreate his own aesthetic experience.”

Big-name artists whose work will be on show include Donald Judd, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Dan Graham, Gabriel Orozco, Bruce Nauman, Francis Bacon, and the late Agnes Martin.

Another contributor is Polish artist Miroslaw Balka, who makes thought-provoking sculptures out of leather, wood, and—because, one suspects, the undervaluation of this quotidian and essential mineral appeals to Balka’s own humble sensibility—salt. Tacita Dean, whose work will also be featured in the exhibition, uses film to coax meaning out of the abyss, whether it is the bottomless mystery of the ocean (as in her acclaimed Disappearance at Sea, 1996), or the symbolic depths of well-known relics.

Entitled “The Experience of Art,” the show makes no secret of its phenomenological bent. De Corral said she wants the “labyrinthine itinerary” of the exhibition, which is (unlike “Always A Little Further”) not arranged in a linear fashion, “to be experienced not as a finished story, but a process.”

According to de Corral, the show will explore five specific concerns facing contemporary artists: nostalgia, the body, the role of power, the use of irony in social and political critique, and the appropriation and redefinition of images, films, and other forms of historical narration.

De Corral does not want the theoretical framework to dominate the show, however. Refreshingly, she recognizes the old-fashioned appeal of “an exhibition that does not simply strive for a concept or a gratifying visualization, but is rich in thought and pleasure”—in other words, aesthetics.

This year marks an apogee of international participation at the Biennale. Seventy-nine countries will have national pavilions (which are separate from the main exhibition), and artists from Afghanistan, Morocco, Albania, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere will be showing work at the Biennale for the first time. Martínez stressed that “international conviviality is possible in Venice” even if borders around the world have been tightening in recent years, and this year’s Biennale represents, as clearly as ever, an attempt to make the city the crossroads for arts and ideas that it was for commerce in the first half of the 15th century.

The 51st Annual Art Exhibition will also feature ten peripheral installations and a 150-foot-tall “special project” of steel and aluminum. Created by Fabrizo Plessi, “Mare verticali” originally appeared at the 2000 International Exhibition in Hanover. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is co-sponsoring its installation at the Biennale, as the structure will tour China in 2006 as part of Italy’s “Year in China,” an officially-organized program of cultural exchange.

In addition to the overwhelming volume of art, Biennale visitors can take in “collateral events” like performances, conferences, seminars, and poetry readings. The prestigious Golden Lion will be awarded for four different categories, including lifetime achievement. Also to be given out is The Prize for Young Italian art 2004-2005.

The other arts festivals of the Venice Biennale will follow the 51st International Art Exhibition later in the year:

-3rd International Festival of Contemporary Dance, June 8 to July 2.

-62nd Venice International Film Festival, August 31 to September 10.

-37th International Theatre Festival: September 15 to 25.

-49th International Festival of Contemporary Music: September 29 to October 9.