On the Venice Biennale

On the Venice Biennale Alain Arias-Misson Venice Biennale 2005 June 12 - November 6, 2005 Venice, Italy The fifty-first Venice Biennale of 2005, arguably the largest and best attended ofthis increasingly popular venue for artists, art marketers, and the art public—and also thejust plain curious—is over. The gritty, pre-industrial Arsenale, often the most innovative , least "establishment" section of the Biennale, prompted the following jottings and reflections on the state of the arts. Entrance: the Guerilla Girls—giant chandelier made ofwhite mini-tampons. Worth a chuckle. Huge polemical posters on the walls chalking up the underrepresentation of women artists in past Biennales, in museums, in auctions, and so forth. This sets the tone for the entire Arsenale—artistically negligible in some ways (more below), but resonant in terms of gender politics, since women artists and quite often Hispanic artists are now prevalent in the Arsenale. Next, a giant screen shows a video by Runa Islam, a Bangladeshi artist, currently living and working in the UK. A young woman, presumably the artist, immaculately dressed, surveys an elegantly set tea table gleaming with precious, decorated, white china. Slowly, thoughtfully, she picks up pieces of the valuable china one by one, looks each one over carefully, and drops it quietly to the floor. In Islam's video one can see the stakes of Empire played out in something as mundane as unladylike table manners. Perhaps this speaks to Middle America's fundamentalist households as well? Walking through the dusty warehouse halls, an abundance of the wall-sized video projections. Fewer installations. Few drawings or paintings. Without question, the video has become the de rigueur medium. Not just one at a time, however, but two, three, and even six monitors, and we're talking 12' ? 10' screens. The gigantism ofthe medium, and the brevity and sometimes triviality of the content, is flagrant. Next, an entire wall ofgleaming, stainless steel, professional cookware by Gupta, an Indian woman artist. Same message as the video. It seems that everything in the Arsenale must be Very Big, as if the artist is afraid of being overlooked otherwise. One tenth of the size might have sufficed. All right—I do understand the significance of disproportionate size of presentation, but I wonder about these politically engaged demotic works that overwhelm the visitor through sheer mass. A single large video, one ofthe rare videos that this viewer found both truly fascinating and persuasive , by Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo. Title: "Skin." An unassuming, small Guatemalan woman (the artist) shaves every hair of her body. Nude and hairless and wholly unremarkable, she walks down a busy Guatemalan street seemingly invisibly, nobody turning to look at her, her smallness and unimportance and total lack of glamour somehow weighted with significance (unlike many of the women's videos , in which women appear improbably seductive and cosmetic). Another sequence, dedicated to the victims of Guatemalan goon squads (supported by US government funds): dressed plainly, barefoot, she prepares a basin ofblood. Soaking her feet in the blood, she walks down the street to the front steps of the Guatemalan parliament, leaving bloody footprints behind her, to face the armed military squad arrayed along the steps, preventing entry. Women and Hispanic artists areprevalent in theArsenale. More effective than most of the videos of the Biennale, this video yet illustrates traits fundamental to most ofthem: these are performance films in which the artist enacts her (or his) work, and they usually include crowds of people. This is not video art, in which an original use ofvideo as medium is the rule, and the video image as such is the artwork (e.g., the unparalleled Bill Viola). Here, an ostensibly neutral medium portrays the (often female) body and the human crowd. Performance art and body art have been absorbed—hence to a significant extent cancelled out—by this newly dominant medium, or approach to medium. The trend throughout the Arsenale consists, then, of this emphasis on the body, the organic, and the political, through the medium of video. As ifTV culture has swallowed the imagination. As the great screens stream by with their performing artists and crowd scenes, what becomes overwhelmingly apparent is the irruption of...