In further news: documenta artists protest ‘profit-above-everything’ motive; Monir Museum opens in Tehran; Beijing artist on the run over eviction footage
From Hans Haacke’s 1993 exhibition ‘Germania’ through the works of the Palestinian writers Mahmoud Darwish and Wael Zuaiter to the films of Francesco Rosi and Jim Jarmusch – the evolution of Emily Jacir’s artistic imagination
If exit polls are to be believed (and the recent UK elections have sadly shown they should be) the main show of this year's 56th Venice Biennale is a flop. ‘Dreadful’, 'dire’, 'depressing’ are some of the more printable adjectives I’ve heard to describe it. ‘Venice is Bad' was the insightful email header from a supposedly serious art news source.
On Saturday, after the crowds of journalists had thinned out and the international press delivered their judgements, it was time for the official jury (Jessica Morgan; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy; Francesco Manacorda; Bisi Silva and Ali Subotnick) to present theirs, feline-formed and much coveted.
The Biennale exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, has turned out to be something of a coup. He has compellingly followed through his basic idea of submerging him and us – via surrealism, spiritualist abstraction, ‘outsider art’, popular culture – into the phantasmagorical unconscious and the primordial of 20th century art (and its digital counterpart of the 21st).
If old attitudes could become form again, what would they look like? Organized by the Fondazione Prada, the exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013’ at Ca’ Corner della Regina ambitiously sets out to reconstruct Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition ‘Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information’, originally staged at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland in 1969.
The title for Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale – an exhibition which is mostly wonderful, often magisterial and elegantly provocative – comes from a work by Marino Auriti, Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo (c.1950s). A model of this skyscraper is installed in the first room of the Arsenale. The Italian-American artist’s quixotic aim was for the building to house all the knowledge in the world; he estimated that it would cost about $2.5 billion to realize. Unsurprisingly, Auriti never found a backer, though he wrote plenty of letters, and even patented his design. For decades it languished in his garage. In 2003, 23 years after Auriti died, his granddaughters donated the model to the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
A sense of magic pervades the main exhibition of this year's Venice Biennale. In the Central Pavilion, curator Massimiliano Gioni has chosen to present a number of artists whose working methodology comes through esoteric influences, spirituality, private mysticism and personal fetishism. So the title of Jeremy Deller’s British Pavilion, 'English Magic', was fitting. If Gioni’s dextrous presentation often looks to historical inspiration, Deller’s anthropological take on all things English is rooted firmly in the present.
Um die Sache abzukürzen: Einiges, was man auf einem ersten Rundgang durch die Länderpavillons der Giardini auf der diesjährigen 55. Biennale di Venezia zu sehen bekommt, wirkt ein wenig misslungen. Der deutsche Pavillon gehört leider auch dazu. Die Idee der Kuratorin Susanne Gaensheimer, aus Anlass des 50-jährigen Jubiläums der Unterzeichnung des Élysée-Vertrags zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich mit dem französischen Pavillon Gebäude zu tauschen, ist an sich ja keine schlechte Sache. Steht man aber erst einmal in der Ausstellung mit den Beiträgen von Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar, Santu Mofokeng und Dayanita Singh wirkt es aber fast so, als wöge die Beschäftigung mit dem Prinzip „nationaler Repräsentation in der Gegenwart“ unter den Prämissen dieses bewussten Displacements nur noch schwerer.
