By Frank Selby
Special to the Post
Everyone’s been to the Biennale but me. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t always do the things people are supposed to do. I lived in southern California for years and years and never went to Disneyland. I went to Las Vegas and didn’t gamble, and so on. But every serious artist is supposed to go to the Venice Biennale; it’s the most important point of reference to contemporary practitioners. So this year my new wife, Jenn, and I decided to go (she’s been before). I should warn that we were on our honeymoon, so this ‘critique’ will probably lack some of the claws it might have had if the circumstances hadn’t been so joyful.
It was pretty hard for me to be steely-eyed after nine dreamy days in Paris followed by nine more days in Venice, eating marvelous meals, walking around the city, seeing art everywhere and generally having such a great time that I almost felt guilty. I figured that when we got to the Biennale, it would be such a tour-de-force of intimidating ideas and bewildering new strategies that we would be brought back down to earth with a thud.
Oddly enough, nothing like that happened. The show was, for the most part, just really interesting and fun, and there was a nice, easygoing gestalt to the overall (huge) project.
The “c” in “curation” has grown to very much a capital “C” in recent years, and there is little practical distinction, at least in the big leagues, between a curator and an artist. Curators are artists, and that’s fine with me.
But as a result, there’s now as much bad, ego-driven curation as there is bad, ego-driven art, which is an awful lot. I’ve noticed an annoying trend over the past decade of famous curators seeming so determined to bend each piece in their care to the idea of their project that I often feel, viewing a large-scale exhibition, as if I were watching some tyrannical theatre instructor screaming commands to terrified kindergarten actors in a school play. I resent the curator’s role as clich -maker: one way or another he or she identifies some perceived art-world trend and orchestrates a big, flashy, globe-trotting exhibition devoted to it, getting so much media exposure that by the time it’s over the young movement is rendered a yawning banality. So it’s become fun for artists like me to crucify curators, and the entire art world always watches with interest when the Biennale’s curator is chosen. Robert Storr curated 2007’s exhibition, and his efforts were pilloried so mercilessly in all of the art press that I almost felt sorry for him.
Daniel Birnbaum, a young Swedish curator, was responsible for this year’s show, and he had the right approach. He had a theme (Fare Mondi/Making Worlds) that was somehow both ambiguous and imaginative, and it was plain that his aspiration in this case was to bring a lot of amazing artists together and see what happened. The Venice Biennale is a mammoth undertaking consisting of the Giardini and the Arsenale, the main sites where most of the national pavilions are housed, and scores of offsite locations where various nations host the artist or artists they’ve chosen to represent them at the event. The entire city of Venice has important installations scattered across it, and anybody who’s spent time there understands just getting around to a few in a day can be daunting. It’s impossible not to get lost. To impose a strict ethos onto a project of this magnitude in conjunction with other external factors brought to bear on viewers’ experience is too much of a burden for the artwork, so Birnbaum’s light touch was welcome.
If there was one theme that seemed to recur throughout the Biennale, it was the idea that an important contemporary show had to acknowledge the influences of what ostensibly is contemporary. So the artists on display were not just the twenty- and thirty-something hip set that is generally so dominant in these environments.
Instead, those artists were placed lovingly alongside their forefathers in art practice, and this pairing made the show no less current. My all-time favorite artist, Mr. Bruce Nauman, represented America and won the Golden Lion for best national participation, presenting works dating back to the late ’60s alongside brand new pieces. John Baldessari, Yoko Ono, Joan Jonas, Michelangelo Pistoletto and other “late career” artists made up a viable part of the exhibition, neck and neck with younger artists in terms of relevance at the same time their ideas were manifested in the young artists’ work.
In fact, my favorite piece in the entire exhibition was “tteia, I, C” by Lygia Pape, a Brazilian artist who died in 2004 at 77. This down-to-earth, mature approach to contemporary curation, instead of an assembly line of gleaming new products straight from hotshot studios, gave the Biennale dimension and character and demonstrated art as a continuous, reflexive, growing practice rather than just a series of blockbusting fads on display.
I’ve already confessed that my state of mind may have colored my experience of the exhibition in an uncharacteristically positive way. (I’m still experiencing that phenomenon, as a matter of fact). Certainly if I’d wanted to, I could have made less complimentary observations. Always at these events, politics play a huge part. It’s apparent that Daniel Birnbaum is a popular figure in the art world, and it’s now even more popular that he’s popular.
But I don’t resent these workplace hierarchies because it is part of what made the exhibition successful. The impression is that the artists were probably happy to work with him. Furthermore, most people I observed seemed genuinely excited about the show. Everybody was giddy at the awards ceremony and cheered themselves hoarse for the winners; I even saw a lot of awkwardly enthusiastic dancing at some of the parties.
The good vibes could have been due to some brand of recession-mindedness: people tend to unify during times of strife, only to fragment when money starts flowing again.
Whatever the cause, and it may have been just been the fact that the show was so great, it was rewarding and a lot of fun to be present. I can’t wait to go back.