When did this year’s Biennale actually begin? The official press preview was on Thursday. VIPs had access on Wednesday, and those with particularly good connections managed to sneak in on Tuesday. Sometimes, however, one’s “Biennial experience” starts before one even arrives. At the last edition of the outsized exhibition, mine got under way at Heathrow Airport, when I spotted the artists Gilbert and George sitting across from each other in the lounge at the British Airways gate. With rosy cheeks and identical gray suits, the artistic duo sat perfectly still, stared into space, didn’t exchange a word. They gained notoriety in the 1960s for performances called “living sculpture,” so it felt as if I’d walked into the middle of a show. The Biennale, set in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, often feels strange and stagy.
Just arriving in Venice and bumping into people one knows can inaugurate the event. A few years ago I shared a water taxi from Marco Polo Airport with artists Grayson Perry and Peter Doig. The lagoon superstrada offers a rare encounter with speed—forty-five miles an hour if you don’t hit a red light or have to give way to the polizia locale—so it was an exhilarating initiation to the aquatic theme park that is Venice. Throughout the ride, Doig, who often uses photographs as source material and whose most famous series of paintings features a canoe, snapped pictures with his digital camera, while Perry made wisecracks about the weather and his wardrobe. Of course, “Heat is the enemy of drag.”
Many say that the business of the Biennale really only gets rolling with a Bellini, the Prosecco-and-peach-puree cocktail with which one anoints one’s arrival in the Veneto region. After checking into my humble hotel, full of low-budget curators and critics (my swim at the Cipriani was made possible by a friend who can afford the exorbitant room rates), I met an acquaintance for this ritual drink at a hotel bar with a large terrace on the Grand Canal. Scattered among the outdoor tables were many familiar faces from the New York, L.A., London, and Berlin art worlds. “He’s C list. She’s B list,” he said as he fingered people out of the crowd. “Nick Serota is A list,” he added for clarification. “I used to stay at the Gritti Palace, but then I wondered, where does François Pinault stay?” He then delivered a treatise on the unrivaled discretion of Bauer Il Palazzo, an eighteenth-century boutique hotel, not to be confused with the lesser but still deluxe five-star modern Bauer. With 34,000 VIP and press passes issued for the four-day event, the Biennale is the world’s largest single assembly of art world insiders and their observers. As a result, the gatherings oscillate between the idiosyncratically inclusive and the callously exclusive.
Across the terrace I caught sight of David Teiger, the collector whom I’d shadowed at Art Basel. I wandered over and, when he insisted on pouring me a glass of champagne, sat down on a wrought iron chair. Teiger explained his strategy for the next four days. “I plan it out very carefully, then disregard the plan and go with the moment,” he said. “The Biennale is like a high school reunion where everyone turned out to be a success. It’s not the real world.” In the past Teiger has bought major artworks at the Biennale, and on this occasion he was looking “seriously, discreetly, respectfully.” At the Biennale, he explained, “you’re on a marathon hunt for a new masterpiece. You want to see a new face and fall in love. It’s like speed dating.” Teiger gazed through the white balustrade at the row of gondolas docked out front, then cautioned, “In Venice, you can fall in love with a lamppost.”
A couple of tables away, amid a scruffier entourage, sat John Baldessari. The sage L.A. artist was drinking a no-nonsense vodka on the rocks with his long legs stretched out in front of him. This year he was staying at the five-star Danieli, but he told me that the first time he came to the Biennale, back in 1972, he slept on the roof of a Volkswagen bus parked in the Giardini, a park characterized by a perpendicular axis of tree-lined avenues dotted with small, ornamental buildings owned and designed by different nations. The bus was accommodating a group video show that included his half-hour black-and-white video Folding Hat (1970–71). “My then wife and I climbed up with a couple of blankets. It was warm. It was okay,” he said matter-of-factly. In those days Baldessari wasn’t invited to the plush parties. “Now I receive a lot of invitations, but I usually say no,” he said with some satisfaction. “In Venice, you can judge artists’ stock prices based on how many parties they get invited to.” Although he despairs of the social hierarchies and the “visual overload,” Baldessari has come to like Venice, in part because he has a bad sense of direction. “I’ll turn the wrong way coming out of the elevator every morning,” he said. “In Venice, everybody is always lost, so you don’t feel bad when you pass someone you know sitting at a café for the third time in ten minutes.”
The Grand Canal was congested with early evening traffic; vaporetti (water buses) and sixty-euro-a-throw water taxis chugged and swished past silent black gondolas. The Romantic poet Lord Byron used to swim naked in the canals, but now there’s a strict ban on swimming, whether you’re nude or not.
Ten lengths of front crawl and the pool is still gloriously empty. At the last Biennale, I came here for a swim and saw Peter Brant, a major collector, and Alberto Mugrabi, a secondary-market dealer, lying on chaise longues smoking cigars. A New York property developer and another dealer, both with tanned bellies bursting out of white bathrobes, joined them. Larry Gagosian arrived, exchanged a few words, and left. It was as if those in the prime aisle seats of the Christie’s salesroom had been collectively beamed over to Europe and lost their clothes in the process. Apparently, during the Biennale this gang of art world players refers to the Cipriani poolside as “the office.”
A biennial is not just a show that takes place every two years; it is a goliath exhibition that is meant to capture the global artistic moment. Although institutions like the Whitney and the Tate hold national surveys that they call biennials and triennials, a true biennial is international in outlook and hosted by a city rather than a museum. La Biennale di Venezia, which was first held in 1895, has its roots in world fairs and academic salons. Its internationalism, for many years more accurately described as pan-Europeanism, grew out of the decaying city’s desire to encourage its only industry, tourism. São Paulo, Brazil, founded a biennial modeled on Venice’s in 1951, while Kassel, Germany, initiated Documenta, a more intellectual, less object-driven exhibition that takes place every five years, in 1955. A few new biennials were established in the seventies and eighties (notably, Sydney in 1973, Havana in 1984, and Istanbul in 1987), but the genre really went into overdrive in the nineties: Sharjah (1993), Santa Fe (1995), Lyon (1995), Gwangju (1995), Berlin (1996), Shanghai (2000), and Moscow (2005), to cite just a few. Unlike an art fair, where the displays are organized by the participating galleries, the underlying structures of biennials are determined by national identity and other curatorial themes.
The Venice Biennale is like a three-ring—or three-hundred- ring—circus. In the center spotlight is the master of ceremonies, the director of the Biennale, a rotating position occupied by a senior curator who oversees two international exhibitions where the artists are meant to represent themselves rather than a country. One is located in the largest pavilion in the Giardini, a Beaux-Arts building that was once called the Palazzo dell’Esposizione, until Mussolini’s aesthetic propagandists gave it a Fascist façade and renamed it the Padiglione Italia, a label that has stuck despite its non-Italian contents. (People are always confused by the name. In English there is no linguistic distinction between this international pavilion and the new one showcasing Italian art; they are both called Italian pavilions. But the Italians refer to the latter as the Padiglione italiano.) The other, even bigger international show is held in the Arsenale, a sprawling shipyard that is a vestige of Venice’s millennium as a naval power. This year, the director of the Biennale is Robert Storr, the first American-born curator to secure the challenging, high-profile position.
Battling for recognition in the second ring of the circus are seventy-six national pavilions that flaunt t
he work of the artists of their countries, usually in the form of solo shows. When contemporary art was a predominantly Western, first-world activity, these national representations were contained in the Giardini. Nowadays, however, with so many countries wanting to participate, the Biennale has spread out as government agencies (and occasionally private foundations) rent churches, warehouses, and palazzi all over Venice to showcase their artists. Finally, in the outer rings of the Biennale, upwards of a hundred official and unofficial sideshows—displays of private collections, special performances, and other ancillary events—vie for attention.
On VIP Wednesday, I walked briskly through the Giardini and straight into the Padiglione Italia for the first part of Robert Storr’s international exhibition, “Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense.” In the lobby was a large, recently made mobile by the underexposed eighty-one-year-old artist Nancy Spero, titled Maypole/Take No Prisoners. It featured two hundred drawings of severed heads with their tongues hanging out. In the next room on this central axis was a series of bright, hard-edged acrylic abstractions by the Nigerian-born American resident Odili Donald Odita. Then, in a grand room with a pitched roof, a series of six large paintings and a giant triptych by Sigmar Polke. The German artist had made his mark not only with paint but with pure violet pigment that turned gold when applied to the translucent polyester canvas. Collectors were oohing and ahhing. Artists and their dealers were inspecting how the works were made. Eagle-eyed curators and critics were expressing immediate reactions. “Sublime!” said one. “Ho-hum,” said another.*
I wandered through orderly sky-lit rooms devoted to the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, Cheri Samba, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Ryman. It would have been a contemplative experience had it not been for the lavish air-kissing and nonstop chatter. Then I sat through an eighteen-minute 35-millimeter film titled Graves-end, which was partly shot in a coltan mine in the Congo, by the British Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, and stood through an eleven-minute shadow-puppet video installation about sex and slavery by American Kara Walker. Her lengthy title, a quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, included the line calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea. After that I watched a black-and-white slide show by CalArts graduate Mario Garcia Torres. The thirty-two-year-old artist was a student in Michael Asher’s Post-Studio crit on the day I was there. Ironically, the Garcia Torres work, titled What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (In 36 Slides), documented the reunion of three students who’d participated in 1969 in a legendary seminar at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
As I was leaving an installation, Material for a Film, by the twenty-seven-year-old Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, I happened upon Storr himself. The tall, fair, bespectacled curator was meandering alone in a Panama hat and beige jacket, as if he were on safari in his own show. On leave from Yale University, where he is the dean of the School of Art, Storr looked exhausted and a little forlorn. “The vicissitudes of this particular Biennale, the backstage politics and so on, have been extreme,” he told me. “I cannot exaggerate how difficult it has been to just get to this day.”
A few months ago I interviewed Storr when he was less weary, over dinner at Le Caprice in London. An accomplished painter and persuasive writer, he patiently fielded all sorts of basic questions, including What does a curator do? “Curators bring things to your attention that would not have otherwise come to your attention. Moreover, they bring works to you in a way that makes some kind of vivid sense.” Until the Biennale, Storr was best known for his fluidly written monographs and for the elegant solo shows that he curated when he worked at MoMA in New York, so I asked him, What makes a good group show? “It’s not about masterpiece displays; it’s not about choosing the top forty,” he said. “It’s about creating some kind of texture out of the variety of art—against which individual works can mean more.”
When I asked, Are biennials supposed to capture the zeitgeist? Storr frowned. “I’m a hardworking, fifty-seven-year-old, straight, Anglo-Saxon, American guy. I’m not temperamentally inclined to try to second-guess the times,” he said. “I’m not trying to prove that I’m ‘with it.’ I’m just trying to keep moving and to deal with artists who are working at the top of their powers—who are in the heat of their own artistic moment—whether they’re having their peak moment of reception or not.”
Storr is more interested in what he calls “the present tense,” and he evoked the longtime Venetian resident and modernist Ezra Pound, who said, “A classic is news that stays news.” Then he added, “Great art is essentially work that has proven inexhaustible in terms of the value it gives to those who pay attention to it. It says, ‘I am in the present tense despite the fact that I was made five or fifty years ago.’”
Not entirely comfortable with the high profile bestowed on the “author” of the Biennale, Storr told me he thought that the curator’s status was generally overinflated. “If you do it well and do it right, being a curator is an honorable and necessary profession,” he explained. “But I think the curator as star, entrepreneur, or impresario is not a good thing for anybody.” He paused, then added, “My job is to keep people focused on the work of the hundred and one artists that are in my show.” However, he wasn’t overly optimistic. “I figure I’m due for a good bruising. It has to do with objective factors that determine how the art world works, and one of them is the need people periodically feel to bring others down a peg or ten.”
The directorship of the Venice Biennale is a particularly poisoned chalice. It’s the top job on offer to curators who haven’t abandoned the hands-on organization of shows by becoming museum directors, and the chosen one is often criticized brutally before, during, and after the opening of the Biennale. Curators often wax lyrical about collaboration, but although they cooperate on shows and curate together, they aren’t any less competitive than, say, collectors bidding against each other in an auction room. In fact, some curatorial alliances can appear to be very aggressive cabals.
For Storr, the best thing about curating the Biennale was doing the research. “I traveled a lot. I saw a lot of places and a lot of art that I would never have seen otherwise, and for that I’m really grateful. Professionally, I am beholden to the Biennale because I will make shows out of what I’ve seen for some time to come.” His conclusion after visiting five continents: “The dire predictions of global homogenization are just not true. There’s a lot of shared information, but people do wildly different things with it.”
Later that evening of VIP Wednesday, Sir Nicholas Serota and the Tate International Council held a cocktail party at the Palazzo Grassi, which was featuring an independent show of more than eighty works from the collection of François Pinault. The owner of Christie’s had bought and renovated the three-story palace—the last to be built before the fall of the Venetian Republic—so that its ornate painted ceilings, grand balustrades, and swirling pink-and-beige marble peeked out from behind twenty-foot-high white chipboard walls. The press release said that the white partitions engaged in an “understated, respectful dialogue with the building while establishing ideal conditions for displaying art.” The press pack also contained a separate slip that said, “Takashi Murakami was commissioned to make a special monumental painting cycle entitled 727-272 Plus…The presentation of this work will take place at a later date.”
Serota arrived by boat ten minutes after the appointed time, some twenty minutes late by the Swiss Railway watch that he sets ten minutes fast. He disappeared into the building to see the exhibition, then reappeared downstairs in the atrium, where champagne and canapés were being served. “We have a lot of supporters from around the world, many of whom come to Venice,” he told me. “It was very kind of François Pinault to let us have the space. He has been very supportive of the Tate.”
What do you look for when you come to the Biennale? I asked. “A few unexpected discoveries in the national pavilions, together with an intelligent view on the part
of the Biennale director,” said the Tate director. “Rob Storr was given almost three years to research his Biennale, so he has had the opportunity to set out, not just a piece of reportage, but a distinct point of view about what is significant about contemporary art now. There have been times when the Biennale has been undigested news—this is what struck me last week in Johannesburg or wherever.” Serota stood with one hand on his hip, the other poised on his chin, and added, “I do wonder whether a single person can any longer curate a show meant to be globally inclusive.”
The cocktail party was filling up. Over Serota’s shoulder, I noticed a gathering of Turner Prize alumni. Tomma Abts and Mark Titchner were talking to a curator from Tate Britain. Across its four locations, the Tate employs a total of sixty-five curators. “Good curators attend very closely to artists and their concerns but are not bound by them,” said Serota. “Good curators do not simply show the artists they like the most. They have an obligation to try to uncover the nerve endings of contemporary art. That means attending to where artists are looking, what they’re making, even if you’re not personally so engaged with it.”
I asked Serota if he had ever wanted to curate a biennial. “There was a moment in the late 1980s when I thought I might like to do Documenta. If I’d not come to the Tate and been hanging around looking as though I needed proper employment…but that moment has passed,” he said, as he expertly and almost imperceptibly surveyed the crowd. “I’m not sure anybody would be very interested in my view now. To some extent my view has a venue.” Serota noticed someone he needed to greet and by way of conclusion said, “At the end of the day, the Biennale shouldn’t be taken too seriously as a barometer of what’s important.”
Seven Days in the Art World Page 21