Self-reflexivity forms a compelling backdrop to this year’s Biennale. This year’s dual winner of the 2009 Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award (along with Yoko Ono) John Baldessari boldly announce the main event with his laminated solvent print on vinyl that adheres to the façade of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni where the main curated show in the Giardini is situated. Announcing itself – La Biennale – in Hollywood-style lettering, the façade’s incongruous seascape proclaims the exhibition’s slightly kitsch, if iconic institutional status.
In the British Pavilion, Steve McQueen’s poignantly beautiful (though perhaps a little long) half-hour video installation, Giardini (2009), documents the slightly shabby afterlife of the vast public space in winter. The crowds of prosecco-wielding, free-tote-bag-grabbing critics, artists, dealers and curators are replaced by furtive figures (scoring love, scoring drugs) and attenuated greyhounds destined for euthanasia. Meanwhile, the historically-loaded German pavilion plays host to British artist Liam Gillick who recreates a minimalistic plywood kitchen at odds with the monumental space. His scene is completed by an animatronic cat who tells a story of misrepresentation and misunderstanding. The Czech and Slovak Pavilion features Roman Ondák´s Loop (2009), a devastatingly quotidian continuation of the Giardini’s gravel pathway and typical foliage through the art space and out the other side. Cut-and-pasted from reality into art, with no discernable difference, the work reveals the power of the exhibition format in defining and validating the work of art itself.
In a corner of the Arsenale, Russian artist Aleksandra Mir has placed several boxes, filled with one million free postcards for visitors to take and mail to friends. An image of water not located in, yet labeled as Venice dominates each card: the myth of Venice subsuming all others, spread around the world by unassuming Biennale disciples.
Most amusing, perhaps, is the debut pavilion of the United Arab Emirates, which ironically engages the Biennale’s history as an aesthetic arena for competing countries by showcasing architectural models for new museums (including branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim) being built on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island.
Pushing the envelope further is the new Internet Pavilion (www.PadiglioneInternet.com), started by Miltos Manetas and curated by Jan Aman. The Pavilion can be visited online for the duration of the Biennale (which runs until November), and is the platform for several other projects.
One of these is the 'Embassy of Piracy', which sprung from the notorious Swedish file-sharing site Pirate Bay (now also an increasingly popular grassroots political party). During the press preview of the Biennale, Pirate Bay organizers and affiliates took to the lagoon, disembarking and setting up an 'Embassy of Piracy' under the auspices of the Internet Pavilion (which has a physical site located at the collateral venue SALE), offering the public tutorials on internet piracy. This open challenge to Italian authorities was provoked by significant recent clashes over internet governance issues.
As part of the intervention, the 'Embassy of Piracy' sent out an appeal to people to download, print and decorate foldable paper pyramid models – representing embassies – from their website, in order to assert the freedom of the Internet from national borders or legislature. On the final day of the press preview, after a number of stunts at prime venues (such as at the opening of Francois Pinault’s contemporary collection at the Punta Della Dogana, which diverted significant attention – and several celebrities – from the Biennale) the 'Embassy of Piracy' at SALE was raided by the police. Not content to investigate the installation under progress (an assortment of paper pyramids, Biennale balloons, various textual materials and computers), they demanded to see the passports of all those involved. The Embassy of Piracy called this action of Berlusconi’s state “a severe trespassing of the diplomatic integrity of the internet”: certainly it highlighted real anxieties about the possibilities inherent in an intellectual and aesthetic domain without definable borders.
Besides the national pavilions and collateral events, both the Giardini and Arsenale host a central space – conceived of as a 'single articulated exhibition' – curated by Daniel Birnbaum. Here, 'making worlds' not only traverses nationalities, but also favours site-specific and large-scale installations, as well as a tactile materiality. Some works, like Tomás Saraceno’s Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider's Web (2008), a suspended astronomical arrangement of elastic ropes in the Giardini, and Lygia Pape’s Ttéia I, C (2002), an installation of gold threads in square forms in the Arsenale, have an immediate visual effect. Others require negotiation or interaction from the spectator: Lara Favoretto’s Momentary Monument (Swamp) sets a bog in the middle of the manicured Arsenale gardens, while Miranda July’s refreshingly light Eleven Heavy Things – a set of outdoor fiberglass sculptures – rely on the viewer’s participation (sticking faces and fingers in holes, standing on platforms and taking photographs) to contextualize their inscriptions. Everyday objects, actions and encounters become the stuff of which new worlds are created. Hans-Peter Feldman’s Schattenspiel (Shadow Play), for example, is a collection of the ordinary (toy figures, Lazy Susans, glass bottles and other household bric-a-brac), made extraordinary in the dancing shadows they cast onto a wall.
Self-reflexivity and an engagement with the everyday thus emerge as major strands running through the Biennale’s scattered offerings. Four artists from Africa stand out significantly in the curated exhibition even as nationhood is elided in favour of world-making. In the second part of this review, I look at their work and Wayne Barker’s undercover intervention which asks: Who’s worlds are they anyway?
Amy Halliday is a writer and educator based in Europe.
