1. VI–24. XI 2013
Venice, Giardini, Arsenale
Open: 10.00–18.00
Closed on Mondays
Tickets: http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/
Bearing the general title “The Encyclopaedic Palace”, the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice, this year under Massimiliano Gioni’s firm but characteristic curatorship, had already been declared a great success by the inner circle that sanctions the trends of the international art world before it had even opened to the wider public.
In Estonia, art writers have from time to time attempted to rebel against the importance, representativeness and proportions of the Venice Biennale. Declared the vanity fair of the art world, the format, however, has only gained in glitter and patina; indeed this year, a new record was set in terms of breadth with 88 countries participating. There is no less than ten newcomers, the most piquant among them perhaps the Vatican, using the Holy See as its trademark. If we have in fact reached an era where phenomena that are rich, big and steeped in tradition (this holds for stars, formats, (art) magazines, but also countries etc.) are becoming increasingly important (it is obvious enough at whose expense), then the biennale as a format is becoming part of the routine for the art world. If a city/region has no biennale, it at least has an art fair – the combination of these formats has been observed for some time now.
Prize-winning pavilions are no pavilions
In Venice, on the other hand, where ever new miracles are performed to involve new exhibition spaces (it has been well known for some time that exhibitions are held in historical churches and chapels as well as the palazzi), Angola (a newcomer to the Biennale) this year drifted all the way to winning the prize for the best national pavilion. Standing out with its unusual context, where piles of colourful printed posters of the urban environment of Luanda by Edson Chagase, showing minimalist, finely tuned art povera textures photographed in the style of 1970s Hyperrealism and the logic of the “shot”, had been set up on the floor of the tight little museum in the squatted Palazzo Cini with its historical paintings on show. And where the visitors did not pass up the chance to carry the exhibition off around the world – the whole show was in fact meant to be taken away (!), down to the very last poster. As subtenants, Lithuania and Cyprus (both of whom received special mentions) found a place for their joint pavilion deep inside a city block near the Arsenale, in a school building with a huge gymnasium from the 1980s, which had been effortlessly, as if in passing, redefined as a relational aesthetics kind of environment and workshop with a diffuse programme of performance art. While the displays of the Architecture Biennale year by year increasingly lean towards the Art Biennale (with the proportion of real, built architecture constantly decreasing), the contextual, spatial and transformation games of the Art Biennale; for example, the 54th Biennale, where Mike Nelson reconstructed a Hyperrealist piece of historic Istanbul in the British Pavilion, or this time around, as Germany and France realised an old play of thought by exchanging pavilions, with Germany also showing the country’s logo on the Neoclassical (not to mention National Socialist) facade of the building, reflect the conviction and desire on the part of contemporary art to relate to society on a platform equally credible to that of contemporary architecture. The Biennale institution has, of course, done a huge amount of work to prepare the exhibition spaces. On the far side of the dock inside the Arsenale complex, so much square footage has been developed over the last decade that it has definitely outgrown (at least in area) the oldest part of the Exhibition in the historical city park of Giardini.
The Arsenale exhibition begins with a gigantic, 136-storey model skyscraper composed of concentric circular elements by the self-taught Italian-born American artist Marino Auriti. In 1955, he patented it with the US Patent Office under the name “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico”. An encyclopaedia as a universal collection of all human knowledge, practices and experience – this is why the exhibition looks like a study in (cultural) anthropology, which, however, is made special by the curator’s heightened trust in the image as such. According to the curator’s conception, an image does not necessarily have to be created by a professional artist; the least suitable person for this, however, would be a contemporary artist working in the field of modern art, conscious of the market, trends and context, and skilfully exploiting the mechanisms of the art world. We see (without the knowledge of the author) tantric pattern paintings, archetypical embroidery and elaborate appliqués (not exclusively from the Third World), but also collections of natural stones and so on. What is displayed at the exhibition and now offered as art has often been created at the “wrong” time and in the “wrong” place; the exhibition in the central pavilion of the Giardini is also full of surprises, and even if there are names widely acknowledged in the art world, they do not dominate. Or alternatively, the context accentuates and magnifies altogether new connections (e.g. the work of the body-oriented classic painter Maria Lassing, which comes across as freak art in this context, or the textile-like, flowing “sculptural turds” in bronze by Sarah Lucas, who has been associated with the somewhat blandly scandal-oriented Young British Artists). The exhibition is dominated by art made by people who have lived and died in the shadows, but also the mentally disturbed, whose inner belief (in themselves, theory, the Almighty etc.) and unshakeable will now radiates back at us from the works. It sounds banal and esoteric enough, but being energetic and transcendental is a prerequisite for being selected by the curator of this exhibition. Not bad as a rough guide for identifying objects and situations at a time when everything an artist claims to be art is art. What follows from this is not so much “when and where”, but rather “who said so”. Consequently, we cannot escape the imperative of power even with the art of outsiders. Those who have seen exhibitions compiled from the Prinzhorn collections will notice a difference between works by diagnosed patients and this exhibition. Although several of the authors shown in Venice are or have in fact been lifelong patients at psychiatric hospitals, relapsers with “bad energy” do not dominate here; rather, the exhibition speaks of a quest for a New Age third way. Indeed, intensity and devotion, living in a world of one’s own, these things are shared by the mentally disturbed, the outsider and the great artist alike. Hilma af Klint, the Swedish woman who used her work as an esoteric medium, became world famous and was bestowed the honour of being a pioneer of abstract art only half a century after her death.
The curatorial part of the grand exhibition in the Giardini is still on display in the former Italian Pavilion, with facsimile pages from Carl Gustav Jung’s “Red Book” (or “Liber Novus”) chosen as the opening chord. Adding support to the psychoanalytic cryptograms, shown in the next hall are gigantic enlargements of coloured chalk drawings by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian esotericist and founder of anthroposophy, best known in Estonia for his educational reformism. The Giardini main pavilion with its Wunderkammer-style selection of para/art objects seems to take time out from the Biennale – we are in a museum where it would be somehow unfair to speak about a vanity fair or marketing of trends. Critics have already mentioned a similarity with the “Intense Proximity” triennial at the Paris Palais de Tokyo (where after a decade, reconstruction work shows no sign of finishing – which is in fact good), curated by Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor, who currently resides in Munich. Enwezor adds a multicultural dimension necessary for the contemporary (art) world (expelling Eurocentrism from a major exhibition at the heart of Europe in Paris (!)) and the concept of ethnography as such, at the same time melting away the time that separates different decades of the 20th century because in the virtual era everyone has the chance to be immortal (or at least omnipresent) in any corner of the world and at any time. Massimiliano Gioni, in contrast, prefers to geographic and ethnographic representedness, para-science and natural science, predominantly from the Enlightenment onwards, relating various thinkers-collectors-encyclopaedists to the exhibition, and so old European thought is – politically incorrectly – overrepresented in the exhibition.
Painting?
The absolute top painters of the world – Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, Cy Twombly, Neo Rauch, Alex Katz, Miquel Barceló, Luc Tuymans etc. – have to a greater or lesser extent always been represented in Venice, if not in the main exhibition, then in the national pavilions or satellite projects. It is a known fact that paintings continue to account for approximately 60 to 80 per cent of art market turnover (depending on how you calculate), which is why I would prefer not to read, even in Estonian, any more hoary jokes about it going out of favour or coming back. Men of the above calibre are not to be seen this year, although I did not once miss them once, as the display is so absorbing and free of a bellicose making-a-clean-sweep. Painting in a wider (“deconstructed”) sense could anyway be seen in every little stone, piece of wallpaper, collage (Albert Ohlen) or book of collage. As the curator puts it, the leitmotif of the exhibition is the archetypical image, whether in an individual or collective form; the absence of elitist painting in this context does not imply that it is underestimated or no longer valid. “Blindly” (2010), a terrific video piece by the rising Polish video artist Artur Žmijewski (displayed right next to the main hall), documents blind amateur artists working on large-scale abstract expressionist paintings – some of them sublime and tragic, some exploring the spiritual life of the artist/painter. (Possibly, even those whose hearts do not belong to painting became painters for 18 minutes and 41 seconds while watching the video.) Žmijewski’s video is a thought-provoking reality documentary about people for whom art (or painting) is therapy.
I already mentioned the Wunderkammer; alongside a collection of copper globes and minerals in the Giardini main pavilion you find a genre so despised today – realist seascapes, technique: oil on canvas. The roomful of large-format marines using a black and blue palette, bourgeois frames and finely tuned Gothic flavour is by the Belgian poet, painter and artist of who-knows-what-else, Thierry de Cordier. The show is archetypal, releases repressed emotions and strikes one as extremely intense and ghostly.
From the shadow of professional art, or painting, the exhibition reveals a subcultural world of images that have existed throughout all periods, and now, as if having blossomed and grown rhizomes, feels at home within “contemporary art” – for example, the pornographic drawings made by Yevgeni Kozlov as a teenager in the 1960s and 1970s. As a curio, a library of picturesque collages by Shinro Ohtake fills an entire large room; Augustin Lesage’s pattern paintings from the 1920s depicting a spiritual world suggest Tõnis Vint in Estonia. To continue the homespun play of thought, many of our artists (the first to come to mind is Tõnis Vint, then the core of Non Grata, and why not Einar Vene and many others) would have blended in particularly well in the main exhibition of the Biennale. In Estonian art, especially among the middle-aged and older artists, there are many artists independent of trends, unblemished by the market and audience reception, but as a rule we ourselves have grown tired of the images in their works.
This year, too, several national pavilions attempted to build their own, complementary encyclopaedic palaces. To venture in an even more personal direction, Lembit Sarapuu’s paintings, for example, would have made a suitable entry for the Estonian Pavilion, and there could have been room for Vilen Künnapu’s stupas. Dénes Farkas’ minimalism, with the shades of grey veiled in profundity as a result of texts by the Washington based curator Adam Budak, was aesthetically so finely tuned that we did not stand out in a bad sense; we were not in tune with the curator project of the Biennale – whether one should is another matter. The Estonian exposition was, however, a strong step towards becoming more international; in terms of public relations, it will open many doors at least for Farkas.
Jaan Elken is a painter and Professor of Painting at the Institute of Cultural Research and Fine Arts, University of Tartu. He was President of the Estonian Artists’ Association from 1999 to 2013.
Quote corner:
“I have always had this hope, characteristic of a small nation, that one day the sprout of Estonian culture will become bright and visible enough to stand out in this flower bed of more than a hundred countries. Yet, each time I have been disappointed to a greater or lesser degree. In a way, this also happened at the 55th art biennale “The Encyclopaedic Palace”, opened this weekend. /…/ Who can relate to the exhibit “Evident In Advance” set up in the third storey of a typical Venetian house? Is it the home of an anonymous Anglo-American linguist who has left notes on the walls only he can understand, before taking off to an unknown destination? Or did this mystical person know that people, having lost their habit of reading, need to be left with shelves full of books carrying various irritating titles, while their content consists of uniform-looking photographs of some desolate interior? /…/ While the Brits, the Germans and the French present the works of their most awarded artists, Estonia has chosen a different path.”
Mark Soosaar, Külas Veeneitsil. – Postimees 3. VI 2013
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“As we know, Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, representing Dénes Farkas last year at the Artissima international fair of contemporary art in Milan, even received the Guido Carbone Award for new entries for their display, which means that this artist has already proved his competence in addressing international art audiences. In Estonia too, Farkas is not left without recognition by the art community: in 2010 he received the annual prize from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia for his solo exhibition at Hobusepea Gallery managed by the Estonian Artists’ Association; he has been the “cover boy” of the cultural newspaper Sirp and was nominated for the Köler Prize, a contemporary art prize awarded since 2011. In short: he is part of the art world. In this year’s summer issue of KUNST.EE quarterly magazine, you can read how the curator of the Estonian exhibition, Polish-born Washington-based Adam Budak contextualises the work of Farkas, weaving a wider culturological “safety net” around the artist’s melancholic models of society. The background to the entire exhibit is formed by the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.”
Andreas Trossek, Uhke Eesti üle: Veneetsia biennaalil osalemine ei ole siseringi asi. – Postimees 11. VI 2013
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“Art exhibitions at the beginning of the previous century were much more strongly connected to contemporary displays of the achievements of the national economy than the structure of the current Biennale, which mostly tries to make more naïve visitors believe it has not got much to do with market values. In reality, however, it belongs to the present-day Grand Tour, forming a part of the rhythm of the jet-setting international players in the art market. The Venice Biennale is followed by Art Basel, the world’s most important art fair, usually opening a week after the Biennale. Hence, what is seen in the “previous stop of the tour” is directly reflected in the sales figures at Basel. To many artists, the displays in Venice help open doors to the international art market. /…/ Every two years, hundreds of articles all over the world ask the question: what the hell is it with Venice? /…/ Albeit unnecessarily. The Biennale spreads like a tumour, each time increasing the number of participating countries and breaking visitor records. The point is that multiculturalism has come to stay, dominating the lives of art audiences as well as artists. At the moment I cannot see any changes here: the voice of art language is becoming more and more polyphonic. Diversity is increasing. So is confusion.”
Hanno Soans, Meie kunstielu globaliseerumine – Veneetsia biennaalist ilma seda külastamata. – Eesti Ekspress 18. VII 2013.