La Biennale di Venezia (review)

In 2007, La Biennale di Venezia was the first of a series of high-caliber Euro-pean art events, to continue with Art 38 Basel (Switzerland) and documenta 12 in Kassel and the Sculpture Projects Münster, both in Germany. While the latter happens once every 10 years and documenta takes place every four years, the art biennale at Venice, because of its shorter intervals, is supposed to reflect the pulse of the present time every two years. Under its first Ameri-can director, Robert Storr, the exhibition aims to open up to previously barely acknowledged and widely under-represented cultures and countries and presents special showcases of Africa and Turkey. Because the Venice site of the Giardini includes the national pavilions that were built in a different spirit and witness a historical past of thinking nations, these roots in modern art today need to be complemented and broadened in the spirit of internationally and interculturally interconnected art scenes.

Because of the special situation in Venice, Storr, at the press conference, emphasized the international dialogue and the mutual communication with the competitors at Basel, Kassel and Münster, which he finds important to presenting a more appropriate perspective as curator that aims to overcome the national foci in the country art shows. However, Storr was also very clear that, although we have a large and growing number of artists from Asian and African countries, it would be shortsighted to think that culture has become international. In addition, one has also to reflect that artists do not necessarily work in the countries where they come from. Therefore, the Bien-nale exhibitions that Storr curated himself at the Arsenale were intended to look at spaces between cultures and to explore places where we can sense the genealogy of styles and positions.

Apparently, this rather broad conception spreads out into many—too many—areas and thus is in danger of encompassing a plentitude of cultures and genres like a show-reel. Evidently, this Biennale did not pull together a stringent topic. The ambitiously driven centrifugal approach to widening the spectrum between thinking and feeling manifests in rather blurred forms of staged and documentary performances, photographs, films and video installations. This mix is not always comprehensive. Although the idea of a single focus or center is voluntarily abandoned, we nevertheless find that a larger number of exhibited works in a rather straightforward manner depict war scenes, effects of devastation and bordered, abandoned or ruined spaces. Most of these depicted or constructed scenes show traces or leftovers of formerly inhabited spaces (the difference between document and fiction is not important here) and are now emptied of humans and/or animals. Another effect of the warfare is visible in photographs of borders. Surprisingly, however, such conceptual approaches to the connection of war and art seem arbitrary and are not aesthetically convincing. The same tendency, however, is one, maybe the only, thematic connection between some of the national pavilions at Giardini, which otherwise are centripetally concerned with the individual national art scenes the pavilions promote.

Here, in the nationally curated art exhibitions at Giardini, the larger number of country shows seem by and large unaffected by challenges to the idea of national art shows and prefer to play it safe. In particular, the pavilions of the U.S.A., Great Britain, Germany and France showcase well-established artists successful in the art market with works that more or less emotionally touch upon the personal and more or less naively (or not at all) address issues of national identity. Like a memorial show, the U.S.A. pavilion stages photographs and floor pieces by Felix Gonzales-Torres that stand in a conceptual tradition and address almost universal issues of citizenship, community, society and democracy in a plain, almost positivist manner. The “educational attitude” of the work relates back to 1970s and 1980s aesthetics. Also, because the show presents the oeuvre of the deceased...