Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

“No Place” to Go
By Beth Elaine Wilson

I arrived in Venice* with equal parts anticipation and dread. Had I traveled all this way just to find myself immersed in a slightly different version of the New York art scene that’s both intrigued and frustrated me for so long?

Venice, it turns out, is a bit like Disneyworld. The streets are clogged with tourists, as the street vendors and other businesses cater to the city’s main industry with overpriced food and tacky souvenir knickknacks. According to Margaret Plant’s Venice: Fragile City, a recent encyclopedic tome on the history of the place, ever since Napoleon marched in to end Venice’s last real period of political independence in 1797, it’s never been entirely itself, but rather a constant hearkening back to the old glories of the Doges and the historic Venice of Giorgone, Titian, and Tintoretto. It’s quite true: Venice has become an image of itself, as it has turned primarily into a tourist destination, and its resident population has dwindled from a historic high of 200,000 to a paltry 65,000 today. The city has apparently embraced this transformation wholeheartedly—maintaining the historic facade of the buildings on the Grand Canal has such priority that when scaffolding is erected in order to perform inevitable repairs on the old buildings, they actually create an enormous theatrical scrim to stretch over it, printed with a life-size image of the original building underneath.

Venice seemed, at first blush, to be an inordinately appropriate setting for the mother of all contemporary art biennials. Just before I left New York, I’d caught the Matthew Barney “Cremaster Cycle” extravaganza at the Guggenheim before it closed, and wondered at the simultaneous visual richness of the films (less so the sculpture) and their ultimate vacuousness as meaningful cultural products. Barney’s work is visually interesting, but has absolutely no soul.

So I came prepared to endure a week of art that reiterated variations on this emptiness. In addition, the director of the Biennale, Francesco Bonami, had bestowed a flowery and somewhat off-putting title on the enterprise— “Dreams and Conflicts: the Dictatorship of the Viewer”— which didn’t help much. But then something else happened. Amidst all the hubbub and the hype, the swarming crowds of predictable artworld “types” schmoozing and jostling each other for freebies at the pavilions, a number of works began to jump out at me in the various exhibitions, creating here and there elements of an almost ideal Biennale for me.
I should note that there is an absolutely enormous amount of art to work one’s way through—in the Giardini, there are 32 individual country pavilions, each exhibiting their own artists, plus 20 or-so other informal pavilions organized by various countries in various locations all over the city, plus the string of 11 other thematic exhibitions organized by Bonami and almost a dozen other curators that appeared in the Italian Pavilion and the nearby Arsenale (the shipbuilding yards where the old Venetians built their sea-going empire). If there’s such a thing as an art marathon, this is it.

It started for me with the “non-pavilion” erected throughout the Giardini, a project called “Stateless Nation,” staged in lieu of a national pavilion by Sandi Hilal, a Palestinian born in Bethlehem, and her Italian husband, Alessandro Petti, both of whom are trained as architects. Hilal considered the fact that over half of all Palestinians live outside of Palestine, and thought, “Then what is Palestine now?” Add to this the day-to-day reality of restricted movement in the occupied territories, which makes an obsession with travel documents a necessity, and Hilal’s inspired idea makes complete sense: She and her husband created a series of 10 seven-foot-high “passports”, dispersed throughout the Giardini, each sporting the gold-embossed crest of various countries on one side (including an at this point imaginary Palestinian one) with an equally oversized portrait photo and ID information for a “Palestinian” on the inside.

This theme of displaced people and the increasingly blurred lines between nations and cultures became an intermittent motif throughout the Biennale for me, and each time I encountered another example of it—like Amit Goran’s “Map”, an installation of six plasma video screens encircling and simultaneously bombarding the viewer with home movies, breaking news stories, and poetic visuals, all images of life in Israel today, which impressed me with the frightful truth of how fragmented and displaced any single idea of the complex situation there (or anywhere) is forced to be—the questions of perspective and how meaning(s) happen became stronger and stronger for me.

Brilliantly picking up on this thread, the husband-and-wife team of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov were invited to create their own splinter exhibition of the Biennale at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia (which also houses a collection of Venetian art and furniture from the old glory days) called “Where is our place?” The galleries were lined with a series of mildly interesting but unremarkable mid-sized black and white photo/text pieces, each simply framed in black, with text in English but with imagery and cadences betraying the artists’ Russian origins. The first main gallery, however, presented the initial shock of seeing a gigantic pair of legs (the old fashioned brown plaid trousers and shoes of one, at least) emerging through the ceiling, belonging to a giant who in turn was apparently contemplating an equally huge painting, whose ornate, gilded, bottom frame extends just below the ceiling. In turn, embedded in the corners of the gallery floor are miniature landscapes (lakes, houses, trees) protected by a layer of clear Plexiglas, a world in which we would be the giants.

The radical relativity implied by the show—the fact that all meaning, and especially artistic/cultural meaning, is a product of who is doing the looking—is not a repudiation of the effort to make any meaning at all, but rather a challenge to forge on, recognizing all the difficulties presented by displacement, recontextualization, and the day-to-day politics of simply living alongside other people, which calls upon each of us to define a critical and ethical viewpoint every day, for ourselves. I was prompted by these Russians to think again about life and art back home in the Hudson Valley, with all our own competing interests and agendas for art, tourism, development, and the rest of it.

An apotheosis of this insight came for me as I passed through “Utopia Station,” a subversive, anarchic exhibition organized for the Biennale by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Vassar College professor Molly Nesbit. Admitting from the outset the literal impossibility of locating the “no place” of Utopia, they instead have created an improvised “station” along the way, or as they call it “a field of starting points, many starting points being brought and offered by many different people. Some will bring objects now, others later.”

In the final hall of the old Arsenale, they’ve built a plywood platform with various room-sized cubicles extending almost the length of the room, plastered with various utopian posters, containing a video installation here, an improvised work of art there (like John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s interactive Imagine Peace room, which invites the visitor to ink up a rubber stamp with that slogan and stamp it on one of the many world maps lining the room). Large plywood benches, “conversation circles” line up along one side of the platform, while the exhibition spills out the doors on the other side into a park-cum-festival featuring a poster forest, eco-friendly digesting port-o-potties, a guarana cola booth (seeking to empower third world farmers against beverage barons like Coca-Cola), and green spaces to take a rest from the stress and toil of the Biennale. Olafur Eliasson captures the ephemeral but nonetheless convincing quality of this improvisational utopia with Yourutopia, a simple, round, wall-mounted disk that invites the viewer to press a small button—at which point a powerful strobe light burns the word UTOPIA onto your retina, leaving a memorable, if evanescent mark of that perpetually unreachable, yet inevitable desire for harmony and completeness.

The irony, I suppose, is that the most “real” part of my Venice art adventure happened when I stumbled through "Utopia Station." Ultimately unsuccessful in locating it there, I suppose I’ll just have to keep looking for it here.

“DREAMS AND CONFLICTS: THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE VIEWER,” THE 50TH INTERNATIONAL VENICE BIENNALE, THROUGH NOVEMBER 2 IN THE GIARDINI PUBBLICI AND THE ARSENALE, VENICE, ITALY. WWW.LABIENNALE.ORG/EN/.

*This trip was supported in part with funds from the Special Opportunity Stipends Program through New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, admin-istered in Mid-Hudson by Garrison Art Center.