Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  Standing next to me was a well-fed six-foot-three Mexican curator named Cuauhtémoc Medina. An associate curator who works on the Latin American collection at Tate Modern and a scholar at the Aesthetic Research Institute of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, he’d been deep in conversation with an older man with an unusual gray bob and a cane, who turned out to be the radical Argentinean artist León Ferrari, whose sculpture of Christ crucified on a U.S. Air Force plane was commanding respectful attention in the Arsenale.

  Medina had been commissioned to write a review of the Biennale for the prestigious Mexican newspaper Reforma. He hadn’t seen many pavilions yet, but he already had strong views about Storr’s international show. With a few important exceptions, such as the rooms that housed works by Ferrari, Francis Alÿs, Marine Hugonier, and Mario Garcia Torres, he was disappointed by its conservatism. “It is two things a biennial should never be—correct and boring,” Medina declared. “It’s a museum installation in which museum artists have been given the best spaces. It doesn’t challenge the canon. It fails to develop an argument about contemporary art. Storr’s taste still seems tied to MoMA.”

  According to Medina, the distinctions between museums and biennials were blurring for the worse. “A biennial is supposed to move things forward. It’s supposed to bring some instability into the system, not replicate the consensus. It’s supposed to be adventurous, not risk-adverse.” Medina invoked the memory of the late Harald Szeemann, the globe-trotting curator who initiated the first exhibition of young artists in the Arsenale in 1980. Szeemann, who famously declared that “globalization is the great enemy of art,” died in 2005 at the age of seventy-one. Specializing in large-scale exhibitions full of freshly executed site-specific work, Szeemann is generally considered the first freelance curator to become an art star. “Venice has been a major force of inclusion,” explained Medina. “That is why Szeemann called the exhibition in the Arsenale the Aperto. Aperto means ‘open.’ Storr’s show closes rather than opens the field.”

  While Medina spoke, I noticed that his hair was damp and his sneakers were sodden. “I was in a tall service boat being used by a chap employed by the Mexican pavilion,” he explained sheepishly. “He couldn’t drive under an inland bridge, so he pulled up close to the edge and asked me to jump off.” Medina, who is not light on his feet, missed his target and fell into the canal. “It was a little bit disgusting. I had to swim about eighty meters to access the steps. Venetian water has a reputation for being toxic sludge. People imagine that they might die instantly from infection. I swallowed a bit. It was salty. Nothing special.”

  Medina told me that he has a history of falling. One of his stumbles, done in front of the Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs during a stroll through Hyde Park, inspired a series of paintings, dozens of drawings, and various video works, including a minute-long animation entitled The Last Clown. Alÿs’s film depicts a man in a suit walking until he catches his leg in the tail of a dog and falls. Backed by a soundtrack of lighthearted jazz and punctuated with canned laughter, the Alÿs work is usually interpreted as a comment on the general public’s view of artists as jesters or absurd characters. So it’s revealing to note that the model for the work was in fact a curator.

  Sometime after 8 P.M. I left the reception, got on the Number 1 vaporetto at the stop outside the Palazzo Grassi, and immediately encountered an assortment of Artforum people, including Tim Griffin and Charles Guarino. Griffin suggested that the Biennale and Artforum face the similar task of resisting “the cult of the latest,” while Guarino informed me: “In Venice, a good curator is the one who survives. The Biennale is a paradigm of Italy—disorganized, incomplete, rife with rumors of high jinks. Italian directors seem to have an easier time, since they’re in familiar territory. Germano Celant can put a Biennale together like a mechanic who owns his own Fiat. But sometimes you get a curator without a manual or a clue.” As the boat lumbered to its next stop, Guarino continued, “Either way, you can be sure that the international show subscribes to some vague curatorial thesis that’s impossible to confirm or deny and includes more artists than anyone can possibly appreciate.” Guarino hadn’t missed a Biennale in twenty-six years. What do you look for when you’re here? I asked. “Everybody has an agenda to brag about,” he replied. “Usually, if I’m looking for anything, it’s the people I’ve invited to dinner.”

  The word vaporetto means “steamer,” but this boat ride was perfumed with wafts of diesel. We slowly zigzagged across the canal, passing the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, an odd, ground-floor-only half-palazzo with a spectacular roof terrace, and then the Hotel Gritti Palace, whose water-level terrazza ristorante is lined with copious red geraniums. As I was getting off the Number 1 at the San Zaccaria stop, I saw Nicholas Logsdail waiting for the Number 82. He and his Lisson Gallery staff were on their way to Harry’s Dolci for an al-fresco dinner, and he invited me to join them. “At every Biennale,” he explained, “there is a realignment of the clans.” With regard to the organization of the art, Logsdail quipped, “Museums are kinds of zoos, whereas biennials are more like being on safari. You drive for a whole day and see dozens of elephants when what you’re really looking for is a lion.”

  Not far from where we stood was the gothic Palazzo Ducale, home of the doge and the seat of the Venetian government until its Napoleonic defeat but now one of the most visited tourist sites in Venice. Inside it, and remarkably off the beaten track for the Biennale crowd, were works by Venetian artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese and the sinister Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

  Why are we so interested in the new? I asked Logsdail.

  “It is very possibly a great commercial conspiracy,” he said wryly. “The nowness of now, which is quite obsessive, is actually a reflection of the consumerism that you see in the whole culture.” The gallerist was in a buoyant mood. “It can be a lot of fun if it is to your taste.”

  Over the years Logsdail’s Lisson Gallery has had many artists exhibit in the Biennale. “If you put all your energy into something, amid all the confusion, you have a fifty percent chance of making a big splash,” he explained. “And if you don’t make a big splash, there isn’t even a ripple.”

  Back at the Cipriani, a British collecting couple are having a dip. He floats; she performs a regal head-up breaststroke. She tells me, in the nicest way, that she finds it irritating when “sporty” Americans insist on pounding up and down the pool. I tell her that I’m Canadian and she quickly commends this year’s Canadian pavilion as “the best since 2001.” At the Biennale, everyone is vividly aware of national identities. According to Philip Rylands, the long-standing director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (which often acts as an ad hoc American consulate in Venice), “Nationalism is one of the things that gives the Biennale tension and longevity. Without the national pavilions and the dozens of countries that apply for participation, the Biennale would surely have floundered in the way that public things can do in Italy. It would have become a triennial or a quintennial or died out altogether.”

  Thursday started out drizzly. At 10 A.M. the Biennale staff guarding the gates of the Giardini admitted those with press passes. No stampede, just a steady flow of cotton and linen in comfortable shoes. The Giardini offers a Disneyesque anthology of architectural styles. The folkloric Hungarian pavilion sits across from the geometric Dutch structure. The airy glass volume constructed by the Scandinavians looks blankly at the mini-Kremlin that houses the Russian contribution. I strode up the gentle incline to a small plateau where a triumvirate of West European powers meet in a face-off: the French pavilion (a mini-Versailles), the U.K. pavilion (originally built as a tearoom), and the German pavilion, a Nazi wonder, renovated by Ernst Haiger in the official Fascist style. On this occasion, the structure had been cloaked in orange-netted scaffolding in a symbolic rejection of its architectural identity by artist Isa Genzken.

  The geopolitical axes of the Giardini are very 1948. Two thirds of the pavilions are held by
European countries; they tend to have the larger structures in the prime locations. Five are owned by North and South American nations (the United States, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, and Uruguay). Two are claimed by the Far East (Japan and South Korea). Then there’s Australia, in a location that might well be described as “down under” Israel, in a tight spot next to the American pavilion; and Egypt, the only African and only Islamic nation, which is at the very back of the Giardini, in an area often missed by those who make insufficient use of their map.*

  Beckoned by my adopted homeland, I marched up the steps of the neo-Palladian villa labeled GRAN BRETAGNA. The six-room exhibition space was full of new paintings, drawings, wooden stick sculptures, and neon poems by Tracey Emin as well as some previously unexhibited watercolors from a 1990 series about her abortion. The show included a smattering of her signature spread-legged self-portraits. The artist was holding court in a wide-leg white trouser suit and black bra. “Feminism happened thirty years ago,” she said to a Swiss TV crew. “Thanks to the Guerrilla Girls, I can stand here in Yves St. Laurent and Alexander McQueen with my tits hanging out.” About representing the U.K., Emin said it was “nationalism on a sweet, lovely level.” Contrary to stereotypical British pride about “keeping oneself to oneself,” Emin acknowledged, “my problem is that I can’t keep a secret.”

  Stationed in almost every national pavilion are the dealers who represent the exhibiting artist. With some countries, selling is not officially supposed to happen. With others, the government body that owns the pavilion is supposed to receive a percentage of sales. Having found that dealers subvert the system by claiming that the art was sold after the Biennale closed, a third arrangement seems to have become most common. The dealers underwrite the fabrication, shipping, and celebratory party; in return, they can sell as freely as they would out of their own gallery space. Nonetheless, it’s not something anyone likes to discuss openly with the press.

  Tim Marlow, one of the directors of Emin’s London gallery, White Cube, was hanging around in the front room of her pavilion, looking like he’d just walked off a page of GQ. Avoiding what would no doubt be an unpopular question about sales, I asked him, What is British about British art? “The dominant cultural paradigm is pluralism,” he responded smoothly. “British art is amazingly diverse, but I guess British artists often deal with the dominance of the literary in our culture. Tracey is a wonderful storyteller. In her own words, she is a ‘raving expressionist.’” He paused. “I suppose there is also a wry humor in a lot of British art—Damien, Tracey, Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos [aka the Chapman brothers]. It contrasts with the dry quality of a lot of German and American conceptual art.”

  When asked how Emin came to be chosen to represent the U.K., Marlow pointed to Andrea Rose, a woman with short brown hair wearing a more businesslike white suit than Emin’s on the other side of the room. As the head of visual arts at the British Council, Andrea Rose has the job of promoting British art around the world. “I hate to employ the word using, but our job is to use art to serve Britain’s foreign policy objectives overseas,” she told me. “At the moment our priorities are China, Russia, the Islamic world, Africa. Western Europe comes very low down on the list, North America not at all. We’re not pushing a political line, other than to say that the freedom to engage in debate is a very important freedom.” The British Council is an organization of more than seven thousand employees working in over a hundred countries worldwide. Although visual arts are a small part of the organization, Rose is nevertheless in a position to say, “You name me a biennial—Istanbul, São Paulo, Shanghai, Moscow—and we are probably there.” According to Rose, these biennials offer an opportunity for people away from the hubs of the art world to see what others see: “They plug people into the great international dialogue and connect people to ideas that are current elsewhere.”

  Venice, however, is the only place in the world where the British Council and most other governments’ cultural departments have their own building. About nine months before every Biennale, Rose convenes a committee of eight experts with a particular interest in contemporary art to choose an artist to represent the U.K. “Venice is a form of circus, and you’ve got to be able to choose the right person to perform at any particular time,” she explained. “The Biennale is a very temporal thing. It doesn’t suit all artists. You put a finger in the air and choose the best artist for Venice, which is not necessarily the best artist in Britain but hopefully someone who reflects what is going on in Britain. The conflict in Venice is, do you choose somebody to make history or do you confirm history?”

  Different countries have different bureaucratic mechanisms by which they award the pavilion to an artist. The Germans, rather like the British, have a national agency for culture, the Goethe Institute, which presides over the pavilion. The Guggenheim owns the American pavilion, but it does not determine its contents. The Department of State invites proposals and the National Endowment for the Arts convenes a selection panel. Occasionally a country that doesn’t have the interest or finances to promote contemporary art refuses an invitation from the Biennale to host a pavilion. In 2005, for instance, a private dealer underwrote a semiofficial Indian pavilion, but this year, as in previous years, India has no pavilion at all. This year, “members of the Lebanese community” funded the first-ever Lebanese pavilion, an exhibition of five artists living in Beirut, which enjoyed the official but not the financial support of the Lebanese government.

  I left the British pavilion with its giveaway goods—a tote bag, a catalogue, some temporary tattoos, and a white hat embroidered in pink with the words ALWAYS WANTING YOU…LOVE TRACE X—and headed over to the American pavilion, which looks like a little state capitol building. Nancy Spector, the pavilion’s curator, was standing in the lobby, basking in the warm glow of a luminous sculpture called “Untitled” (America) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Cuban-born Gonzalez-Torres died of complications due to AIDS in 1996. Some people were lamenting the fact that the pavilion show had taken so long to come; others complained that the pavilion should celebrate the work of a living artist. One irate curator even exclaimed, “Maybe next time the U.S. will decide to show Whistler!” The consensus seemed to be that the timing was wrong; the pavilion was beautiful but funereal.

  Certainly the reception was not as overwhelmingly upbeat as that accorded to Ed Ruscha’s 2005 pavilion, in which five black-and-white paintings from his 1992 Blue Collar series were hung with five new color canvases depicting the same Los Angeles locations. On show shortly after the invasion of Iraq and entitled “Course of Empire,” the exhibition had a freshness and a sense of history that satisfied many people’s expectations. Ruscha had the benefit of having shown in the pavilion once before; he had made hundreds of chocolate-on-paper silkscreens and then hung them on four walls to create a strong-smelling installation called Chocolate Room as part of a group show in 1970. When the artist was awarded the pavilion for a solo show in 2005, he had a vivid sense of the connotations and dynamics of the space. He also had an intelligent rapport with curators Linda Norden and Donna De Salvo, who had applied for the pavilion on his behalf. “I’m terrible at hanging works,” Ruscha told me in his midwestern drawl. “I might walk in and take the one painting that I consider to be the best and put it on the quickest, easiest wall. Among other things, those smart ladies helped me out by hanging those works right.” Ruscha didn’t pretend to understand the process that singled him out to represent the United States that year. “It involves some politics,” he said. “It certainly entails factors that are beyond the talent of the artists that they’re considering. Functionaries from the federal government turned up at the receptions. Nice guys, but kinda gray suits, you know.”

  Upon exiting from the American pavilion, I receive a warm greeting from Paul Schimmel. The curator was taking a short European break from working on his Murakami retrospective. About the American pavilion’s awarding process, he sighed and said, “My MOCA colleague Ann Goldstein put for
th Felix Gonzalez-Torres with his cooperation in 1995. I put in Chris Burden that year. Then I applied for Charley Ray and Jeff Koons. When it comes down to it, it’s not a question of (a) the quality of artist or (b) the ability to pull it off. It’s ultimately about the perception of how the show will fit into the greater theme and who is politically useful at the moment. With these kinds of competitions, I’m always a bridesmaid.”

  The drizzle turned into a downpour and we dispersed. I scurried to a café and stood in a soggy line for a panino, my white trousers splattered with mud. When the rain subsided, I realized that I’d missed the Canadian pavilion, which is tucked behind the British pavilion “like a gardener’s shack or outhouse to the mother country,” as one curator put it. Built in 1954, the pavilion is a delicate wigwamlike space with slanting walls that often defeat the artists who exhibit there. I entered the building with low expectations and was completely taken aback by the strange, mirror-clad installation created by artist David Altmejd. The thirty-two-year-old Québécois had mastered the space by creating a total environment that was half northern woodland, half glittering boutique. I lost my bearings in a positive sense until I encountered Andrea Rosen, Altmejd’s New York dealer, then Stuart Shave, his London dealer, then Dakis Jouannou, the Greek supercollector, who was evidently trying to acquire the work.* I looped back, to recapture the experience of being in something rather than looking at something, taking refuge in a mirrored closet with ledges upon which sat taxidermied birds and phallic fungi.

  On the way out I met Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, who was ticking the Canadian pavilion off her map of the Giardini. With long blond hair and a bright smile, Blazwick challenges the easy assumption that curators are the dowdiest players in the art world. What did you think? I asked her. “Extraordinary!” she said intensely. “Altmejd transformed the pavilion into a wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities.” Blazwick tucked her map in her bag and continued: “I love stepping out of the everyday into the space of art. I love to be immersed in an idea or an aesthetic or something phenomenological. Frankly, I get enough of everyday life.”