Bill Viola: Ocean Without a Shore
Chiesa di San Gallo
If you are going to see only one thing at the Venice Biennale, go and see the
work of Bill Viola. Step out of a tourist-littered courtyard into a little
16th-century church. There in the darkness you contact something that feels
sacred. This American’s talent is not for ground-breaking novelty. Rather,
through up-to-date technology, he finds a visual language to express things
that we all recognise but only rarely experience with such eloquent clarity.
Viola’s intensely humanitarian vision is underpinned by an experience he had
as a child when he fell into a swimming pool and nearly drowned. When
someone dived in and rescued him, he felt almost angry. There at the bottom
he had crossed over into an entranced other space. Ever since he has been
testing the threshold. The sensual and the spiritual, the material and the
transcendental, touch in his work.
In Ocean Without a Shore he presents three video-panel altarpieces. On
each, a grainy figures hovers like some mirage amid a ghostly place. Your
mind reverberates to a far-off muffled roar. And you wait. Then one of the
figures moves slowly forward, stepping through a curtain of streaming,
sunlit water; flooding suddenly with colour, to become part of our world.
They stand there: bewildered, perplexed, sometimes almost frightened,
supplicating or yearning, trembling on the verge of speech. Then, one by
one, each turns and goes back, brushing his or her way through the watery
boundary to dissolve back into the shadows. Anyone who has ever stared at a
photograph of some dead loved-one will recognise the feeling that this work
so movingly conjures. Anyone who has wrestled with inner conflict will
understand what Viola is talking about.
The theme of this year’s Biennale is: “Think with the senses; feel with the
mind”. This is an artist who can make us do just that.
Tracey Emin: Borrowed Light
British Pavilion
Tracey Emin is queen, but she has taken a counter-intuitive decision. This
year’s biennale — from the last-minute resignation of its director to
ethical rows over an African art exhibition — has not been exempt from
controversy. But if you were hoping that Emin might stir up a bit of a
scandal you will be disappointed. She has taken a wilfully understated
approach. Borrowed Light looks quietly traditional. Rows of scratchy
little drawings and blotty watercolours line the walls. A pile of splintery
sticks is built up into tottering structures. A baby-pink neon fills a room
with its fading afterglow. And there are a couple of patchy embroidered
blankets and a handful of paintings.
Together they parade the now all-too-familiar persona of the artist: wounded
and weeping; spreadeagled and open; or desperate, all-hopes-dashed;
spatchcocked for sex or crawling for cover; abandoned, bedraggled, fierce
and frightened, sodomised, victimised, broken and smashed.
Emin has blurted her heart out into blotted scrapbooks. We stare at her
suffering with the eyes of the psychologist, the psychopath, the
pornographer, the gynaecologist. But where is the lover? Emin fills that
role herself. And that is the problem. Though she begs us to understand her
in semi-literate scrawls, her self-obsession starts to feel like a prison.
This show is supposed to feel intimate. And there is something undeniably
evocative about the images that seem less composed than drifting apart. But
her unassailable sense of victimhood fends you off. It begins to feel
self-indulgently simplistic — and not least when you compare it with the
complex work of Sophie Calle in the French Pavilion next door. As the French
artist subjects the text of a “dumping” letter to intense theoretical
scrutiny, she exposes multifaceted emotional depths.
Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in a Chinese Forest
Arsenale
This is a multipartite piece by the video artist Yang Fudong. As you stroll
down the main aisle of the huge aesthetic cathedral that the former
munitions store has now become, you can progress from screening chamber to
screening chamber. Each of Yang Fudong’s five “chapters” lasts for around
half an hour. But it doesn’t take long to realise that you are watching
something extraordinary.
This meandering story of seven young urban intellectuals wandering off into
the country (wearing improbably stylish clothing and the occasional Burberry
scarf) to philosophise indolently, is curiously entrancing. Progressing
unhurriedly in black and white, it crosses cultural boundaries, bringing
together the lyrical traditions of Chinese brush and ink painting and the
stark period aesthetic of Nouvelle Vague cinema.
Adapting a classical tale of seven sages in a bamboo forest to a baffled
modern-day China still struggling to reconcile its past with a fast-paced
present, this video series has an unsettling, anachronistic feel. It is
mysterious, maddening, inscrutable, intriguing. Sometimes it records with
cruel detachment but at the same time there is tenderness in its minute
precision. Even when it feels at its most restrainedly distant, a sense of
confused passions wrestles under the surface. Yang Fudong is an artist who
knows how to transform the prosaic into something alluringly and often also
disturbing. Shown in an Arsenale display full of often simplistic or
hamfisted approaches to the subject of war, this video broaches the legacy
of cultural conflict with a beauty and subtlety that makes it stand out.
Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art
Palazzo Fortuny
“Irredeemably naff” was a much-touted opinion of Artempo. And maybe that’s the
appeal. It’s very refreshing to find one wilful rebel amid so much
self-consciously fashionable taste. Besides, non-artworld visitors all
seemed to love it.
Artempo feels delightfully hammy. It takes the former home of the Spanish
artist Mariano Fortuny as its venue. This makes a melodramatic setting.
Fortuny’s rich fabrics and exotic paintings still drape the walls. And it
would be worth making a detour to see this palazzo alone, to lounge about on
dusty sofas in the cavernous cool of the sombre, heavy-beamed rooms.
This is not the sort of exhibition you would want to get locked into alone at
night. The sinister tastes of the Antwerp collector Axel Vervoordt preside
over an exhibition that, taking his collection as its focus, expands over
three storeys. It disregards those traditional divisions between periods and
cultures. This is a mêlée in which ancient Hindu lingams can encounter
priapic Louise Bourgeois sculptures, ancient classical fragments can meet
Bellmer’s surreal butcheries and medical mannequins with unfolding stomachs
are reflected in Berlinde De Bruyckere’s waxen contortions. Here are
extravagant tribal artefacts and gruesome natural history museum exhibits,
but here too are the pared-down visions of such modern and contemporary
masters as Lucio Fontana, whose slashed canvases reach for the emptiness of
the infinite, or James Turrell, whose glowing Red Shift captures a sense of
intangible space.
As the spectator moves through this cabinet of curiosities he sees the body
deform and melt. He watches time slip away and space expand. Cultural
distinctions ripple and warp like reflections in the Anish Kapoor mirror
that sends its distortions dancing about the crumbling brickwork of the
basement. This show feels like a cultural fairground — and it’s fun.
Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Dorsoduro
Watch a pair of magical imaginations slowly forming amid a primordial slime of
fat and Vaseline. This is a clearly focused, confidently cerebral exhibition
and, surrounded by the competitive melee of a biennale, it comes as a relief
to discover a show with such unabashedly academic credentials.
All in the Present Must Be Transformed examines the aesthetic
affinities between Beuys, the charismatic and controversial German who has
polarised subsequent generations, and Barney, the current superstar of
American postmodernism. Displaying their work side and by side, it compares
the pencil sketches that play an important catalytic role in their
conceptual visions, explores the similarities between their actions and
performances, and presents the vitrines of paraphernalia that each artist
collects.
But don’t expect to see much of the extravagant and visually sumptuous
Cremaster Cycle for which Barney has been so deservedly fêted. This show
tends to go back to beginnings, to the earliest video pieces of a former
athlete who presents himself in Field Dressing struggling, muscular
and naked amid a tangled complexity of ropes, to raise and lower himself
from a greasy mess of petroleum jelly. This formative vision was lubricated
by that of Beuys, the remnants of whose Honeypump (an artwork which
involved pumping two tons of honey for the 1977 Kassel Documenta) lie about
like a dismantled machine in an adjoining gallery. This is the machine that
first drove one of the most extraordinary imaginations of our contemporary
era — that of Matthew Barney.
And yet a generation divides these two artists. Metaphors that held stable for
Beuys metamorphose into something less secure in the mind of his admirer.
Even as this show exposes fundamental similarities, postmodernism is
sprouting and sprawling from modernism’s primordial slime.
BEST OF THE REST
Don’t miss the immaculately curated Italian Pavilion with its amazing Gerhardt
Richter work, its dancing Ellsworth Kelly abstracts and a superlative series
of Sigmar Polke paintings.
The Cuban-born Félix Gonzalez Torres turns the American Pavilion into a
thought-provoking focus.
Russia rushes away into a hallucinogenic field of love in installations that
mingle a Soviet past with pop culture.
Become one the specimens in David Altmejd’s fantastical hall of mirrors aviary
in the Canadian Pavilion.
If you feel like something quirky, pop into the Korean Pavilion where fiction
becomes fact as comic-book creatures come to archaeological life.
The Tempest: Paul Fryer and Matt Collishaw in the Via Garibaldi. Step into a
space hardly bigger than a cupboard for a tiny show which packs the punch of
an espresso shot.
DISAPPOINTMENTS
The Arsenale: there is curiously muted, low-tech atmosphere to this year’s
biennale and this is nowhere felt more strongly than in the Arsenale. Almost
nothing leaps out at you.
The German Pavilion in the Giardini: why choose (yet again) an installation
that only a handful of people can get into at any one time. You won’t get to
see Isa Genzken unless you are prepared to queue for hours.
Wales on the Giudecca: Wales reached for the stars with its last contribution.
And with Richard Deacon representing the nation this year, there was plenty
of promise. But his wavy ceramic contributions are understatedly dull.
Sargant and Venice at the Correr Museum: though you may long for those days
when watery streets were haunted by only a few shadowy figures, this
evocative American Impressionist’s watercolours of Venice feel leached of
their power when displayed in the city itself.
— The Venice Biennale runs until November 21 (go after the summer to avoid the
heat and the crowds).
