“We All Live in the Opera:” Negotiating Resistance and Nationality at the Venice Biennale
I did not expect to like the Venice Biennale; but I did.
Much maligned as yet another tourist trap, the Biennale of my imagination revolved around nauseating crowds and sensationalist, market-driven art. Instead, the range of work on view, the plethora of questions this very range sparked, made for a fascinating, multi-facetted experience. And, of course, there is Venice itself—extravagant, morbid, and colorful, a tourist magnet that easily outstripped the lure of the Biennale in mid-July: The crowds thinned considerably whenever we left San Marco behind and approached the Arsenale or the Giardini, the two main exhibition venues of the Biennale. But tourist trap or not, occasionally, it pays to stop and ponder the sheer absurdity of the place: Who would build these marble palaces perched on wooden beams anchored in sandy soil covered in salty water? The insanity of the crumbling architectural excesses of the past is compelling.
Back to the Biennale. The directions any essay on the Biennale could take are endless at first and second glance: the notable interest in autobiographical traces and unreliable reconstructions of real-life events? (It seems we’re still hung up on authenticity). The gender, race, and cultural politics so many artists return to in their quest for critical relevance? The question of art–or English—as a lingua franca prone to fail at crucial moments? The fact that installation and video art abound? The curious religiosity emanating from predictable and unpredictable corners? The lingering infatuation with resistance, even if it is far from clear what exactly is being resisted or why?
N.F. Could you tell me how your revolution should look like?
J.S. No, because if I am honest, I do not care if a revolution happens. The current situation, the contemporary regime, allow for my revolt. A revolution would probably not allow for individual revolt. I can be against. If a real revolution came, I could not be against it. I would join the revolution. But a man like me does not join anything, he is a man in revolt. My standpoint is very egotistical. I want the world to stay as it is so I can afford to be against it.
N.F. Which revolution threatens your standpoint the most?
J.S. Based on all I know about it, the Chinese.
(Translated and excerpted from a dialog included in one of Rosemarie Trockel’s collages on view in the Arsenale.)
Flirting with resistance and revolution while hovering in an ill-defined state of “being-against” points to the irony of participating in an international art show dedicated to illuminating the concept of nation, nationality, and nationhood in the 21st century while trying to undo that very participation. (The spray-painted manifesto, designed to “reclaim” the space of the Romanian Pavilion, is a case in point). What will it be: proclaiming resistance–against the Biennale and its platform and hence to choose to remain outside, or entering into the fray, either half-heartedly, with gestures that superficially signify “resistance” while capitalizing on the exposure to an international audience—or embracing the Biennale for what it is, an art show in its third century, laden with history—and a forum like no other to stage aesthetic and political inquiries?
Before diving in, consider the carefully articulated curatorial and conceptual framework set up by Bice Curiger, the Swiss curator of this 54th Biennale:
ILLUMInations points to light, a classical theme in art that closely relates to Venice. Equally, by accentuating its spurious suffix “nations”, its semantic scope is not only broadened to embrace the real world and socio-political dimensions, but it also highlights the distinctive character of the Venice Biennale with its national pavilions. Far removed from culturally conservative constructs of “nation”, art offers the potential to explore new forms of “community” and negotiate differences and affinities that might serve as models for the future.
Curiger’s head-on approach to the question of what nationality means in a putatively global 21st-century world insists on problematizing, rather than taking for granted, the national pavilions of the Giardini, and makes their distinctive character, which could quickly turn into a quaint liability, into a point worth investigating critically, poetically, politically. But whether the art on view manages to transcend the culturally conservative construct of “nation” or indeed successfully suggests new forms of community—that warrants a resonating question mark rather than a full stop.
Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour video collage of footage gleaned from Hollywood films, old and new, featuring, predominantly, clocks, watches, and characters looking at them—with alarm, impatience, and all those intricate emotions that result from our being tethered to time—won the Golden Lion. Putatively, the piece transcends national allegiances and language barriers without apparent effort, and thus demonstrates how fluent ‘we’ are in the cross-cultural lingua franca of popular culture, re-conceptualized as video art. Without being told, the audience knows how to consume this piece: we sit back on couches in the semi-dark and stare at the glimmering screen, enjoy the moments of recognition—this film, that actor—and succumb to Marclay’s sneaky proposition to watch each minute unfold through clever cuts and montages—but in real time (that is, each minute that passes on screen passes in real time).
Utterly consumable, The Clock points to the ways we experience and measure time, how we create shared or exclusive reference points, and demonstrates how fun conceptual art can be and how easy it is to become a citizen of global popular culture rather than remain mired in modern assumptions of national identities.
But those national identities remain relevant elsewhere: Italy’s pavilion, curated by the Ministry for the Cultural Heritage and Activities, celebrates the Italian state of the art, while Poland’s curators, Sebastian Cichocki and Galit Eilat, invited a non-Pole to exhibit for the first time: Israeli artist Yael Bartana offers …and Europe will be stunned, a utopian tour de force on three screens. Bartana imagines a movement in Poland that invites three million Jews back to Poland: repatriation rather than expulsion and anti-Semitism. But such utopian fantasies clash with realities that unfold on the margins of the official Biennale venues: The Tibetan Pavilion, a project by Italian artist Ruggero Maggi, is not included in the official program. Despite its sentimental approach to visualizing Tibetan politics—a butterfly encased in mountains of quartz and snow—the project points to the unresolved issue of a people, a nation, without an autonomous state, in a region under Chinese control. Elsewhere, arrows point in multiple directions to the “anonymous stateless immigrant pavilion,” further complicating the politics of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and nomadic isolation.
The Italian Pavilion dominates the northern expanse of the Arsenale. Upon entering the space, I stop, overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of work assembled to celebrate Lo Stato dell’Arte nel 150° dell’Unità d’Italia: a democracy of taste unfolds in unruly action–a potpourri, smorgasbord, mish-mash of styles, mediums, concerns—my Italy-savvy friend calls it guazzabuglio.
Next door, the Chinese contribution offers a stark aesthetic contrast. The space, the Arsenale’s former cistern, is dominated by rusty barrels, used to store drinking water in times past. The huge barrels practically line the walls and create a challenging, dense space for the artists to work with. The challenge has been beautifully resolved, though: in the center, a tunnel provides an illuminated corridor, where English letters seem to fall, like snow, down curving walls activated by ink drawings. Similarly elegant, Yang Maoyung’s All Things Are Visible reiterates a mantra of Chinese medicine, while populating the floor underneath the cistern with hundreds of small ceramic vessels of varying sizes, each of them, I read, inscribed with medical prescriptions on the inside. Outside, in the Arsenale’s garden, Cai Zhisong’s bulbous white sculptures create “cloud tea.” Two celebrations, two models of modern nation states, two aesthetic experiences that could not be more different.
Each of the artists curator Peng Feng invited to participate in the Chinese exhibition engages with one (or more) of Chinese traditions, which, according to Peng, may seem conservative. In his mind, these traditions are still contemporary and alive, as they continue to be pervasively practiced today. Hence the joint title of the Chinese exhibit: Pervasion. Though I doubt Peng Feng would have intended the title to suggest a pervasive Chinese presence at the Biennale, the Chinese version of the modern republic kept appearing—mostly, in the shape of the eternally smiling, saluting party official.
At Puglia Arte Contemporanea, for instance, the photograph Goodbye Tiananmen (2007) by the Gao Brothers leaves little doubt about their political sympathies: a group of hard-hat wearing workers stands under a cloud of suspended bricks. Behind them, a scrawny young guard in uniform totes a gun. In the foreground, posing on top of the prostrate body of a young man, a party official in the nude salutes with a smile.
At the Future Generation Art Prize at Palazzo Papadopoli in Venice’s San Polo neighborhood, Cao Fei’s installation In the Night Garden (2010) not only conjures the melancholy beauty of a garden at night with its muted colors and the inevitable statue of a saluting Party chairman. But this night garden does not end with plastic greenery, a familiar statue, and inviting benches; it continues into the elaborate make-belief of Second Life, where each gesture, each pose, promises individuation while being utterly scripted and prefabricated; no re-ordering of the world, then, just narratives as old and as stylized as the Chinese opera.
Spatially, the installation requires us to turn our backs to the fake garden to indulge in Second Life’s dizzying architectural structures and unfolding plots. Thus the audience repeats the turning away from the unfulfilled promise of the garden at night to get immersed in Second Life’s virtual reality filled with superheroes of American provenance: Superman, Batman, Batgirl serve as stand-ins for the lingua franca so well suited for both wasting time and connecting across cultures, as Marclay’s The Clock insinuates. But here, pop culture’s global language becomes a flat-screen liability: finding no real alternatives, Cao Fei’s masked characters laconically conclude, “we all are in the panopticon; we all live in the opera.”
The politics of looking re-appear in the Croation Pavilion’s technological complexities: viewers are filmed while watching a wall-mounted flat screen, only to become the thing the next audience member stares at—a feedback loop that leaves little doubt about the point that viewing is never an innocent, uninvolved activity. At the Central Asian Pavilion, artists Alla Rumyantseva and Aleksey Rumyantsev present six suspended pairs of glasses, tinted red, green, and blue, in front of a video screen. A sign invites viewers to look at the screen through the varying glasses. Each color produces a different image, a different experience (RGB 2011): what may seem like a heavy-handed metaphor here is still a point worth making elsewhere.
The gestures of resistance continue elsewhere. Freedom of speech and freedom in general are questioned and extolled in turn (Denmark’s Pavilion, especially Johannes Af Tavsheden), spaces are ostensibly “reclaimed” from curatorial control (an unconvincing performance by Romania’s Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova), garbage cans from around the world await visitors exiting from the darkened movie theater of sorts that houses Marclay’s The Clock—an oddly compelling juxtaposition courtesy of Sweden’s Klara Liden—while Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn offers a monumental installation entitled Crystals of Resistance that, in the artist’s signature style, combines rhizomatic growth with crystalline structures in order to take on cell phones, television sets, plastic chairs, fashion mannequins, Barbies, consumerism in general… “resistance” becomes the ultimate fetish, amorphous, capable of containing multitudes. Nothing is resolved; everything is suggested.
Where does this particular path through the guazzabuglio of the Biennale leave me? Intrigued by the question of why “resistance” exerts such lingering allure; troubled by the keen opposition between democratic rabble-rousing unruliness—often at the expense of aesthetically calculated experience—and the tight exercise of aesthetic control on view in pavilions such as the Chinese one. Drawing a simple parallel between the authoritative aesthetic commanding of a space and real-life politics does not work. And rather than a simple clash between modernist and post-modernist sensibilities, what is at stake in this contrast is a different set of priorities and politics of the sensible. But exploring these priorities and politics of aesthetic experience—and adding into the mix the gravity-defying, chair-melting house of mirrors in Luxemburg’s pavilion, the dusty, stuffy maze Mike Kelley created in Great Britain’s space, or the imposing sculptures of New Zealand’s Michael Parekowhai—would be another attempt, a different essay, on grappling with the 54th Biennale of Venice.
Image List
1.) Official Biennale signage on view throughout the city.
2.) and 3.) Rosemarie Trockel’s collage, with detail of dialog, at the Arsenale
4.) Anonymous Stateless Immigrant Pavilion stencil on a bridge across a canal close to the Arsenale
5.)-7.) Ruggero Maggi, The Tibetan Pavilion, somewhere in Venice’s Cannareggio neighborhood
8.) and 9.) Views of the Italian Pavilion in the Arsenale
10.)–14.) Views of the Chinese Pavilion in the Arsenale
15.) Gao Brothers, Goodbye Tiananmen at Puglia Arte Contemperanea
16.) and 17.) Klara Liden’s garbage cans at the Arsenale
18.)–22.) Thomas Hirschhorn’s Crystals of Resistance at the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini
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