The Biennale and its Discontents

The 50th Venice Biennale, June 15 through November 2, 2003.

The international art press has weighed in and its verdict is clear: the 50th Venice Biennale was weak, weak, weak! Even under the best of circumstances, the Biennale is a difficult, marathon event, with exhibitions spread among sixty-four national pavilions, half in the Giardini (Venice's city park), the other half distributed around the city; the endless-seeming Arsenale; and numerous other locations, this time including the Museo Correr in St. Mark's Square, home to a survey of painting from 1963 to the present. During the vernissage in mid-June, temperatures in Venice consistently reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with the result that the throngs of art lovers often felt as if they had to choose between seeing more art or doing something—anything!—to ward off heat prostration.

The weather, which was reported on as much as the art, was not conducive to a patient assessment of what many critics found to be a badly curated exhibition, and the critical responses were frequently intemperate. Although previous directors of the Biennale had undertaken to curate both the Arsenale and the Italian pavilion themselves, Francesco Bonami, director of the 50th, delegated the curation of most of the Arsenale to others, each of whom was allocated a "zone" within the massive space. Laura Cumming's fulminations in the London Observer are fairly typical of the critical response: "No art deserves to be presented thus, and no viewer could make anything of it in such conditions." ¹

To be frank, I have no argument with the essentially negative cast of most of the criticism generated by the Biennale. Much as I enjoyed the experience of seeing so much art and so much of the art world gathered in one place at one time, the whole affair felt dispirited, as if no one really knew what to say or do about art at this particular moment in geo-political time, an uncertainty reflected in the titles of both the Turkish and Taiwanese exhibitions: In Limbo and Limbo Zone, respectively. Good intentions abounded: the curatorial conceits that animated each zone of the Arsenale were worthy, but they simply did not generate very good exhibitions. Hou Hanru's ZOU/Zone of Urgency, a collection of highly politicized work by Asian Pacific artists, was a clangorous environment that felt like a city under siege, yet communicated nothing beyond that. The Utopia Station zone at the far end of the Arsenale, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, presented the work of a multitude of artists in a low-key plywood environment that was meant to de-emphasize art world glam and celebrity but ended up seeming only like a particularly pretentious alternative space.

Much of the work in the national pavilions was not so much bad as disappointingly predictable. Fred Wilson's installation in the American pavilion, Speak of Me As I Am, for example, made a clear point about continuities between depictions of Moors in Venetian art and more contemporary representations of blackness. It wasn't bad but it also wasn't particularly fresh; it felt like the entirely foreseeable result of applying a formula: FW + Venice = X. That said, I must disagree with Cumming, who criticized Wilson for employing a Senegalese handbag vendor like those one sees on the streets of major cities worldwide to sit outside the pavilion with an array of bags apparently on offer. Whereas she contends that Wilson unethically treated the bag seller "as an object. . . and not as a human being," I would argue that Wilson's gesture pointed directly to the pertinent question of who these people are and how they got where they are. It was the only truly edgy and provocative part of the installation.

In spite of the Biennale's shortcomings (and the heat), there were pleasures to be had. It was wonderful to see a whole room...