THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN

I suppose why my heart sinks a bit at the prospect of the Biennale – the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice – is because it reminds me so much of old fashioned sales conferences – large budgets, the need to impress and a big venue.
In the Ca’ Pesaro there’s a work by John Baldessari, a canvas blank but for these words:
“Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work”.
In the Biennale it’s just the reverse…all ideas but I’m not sure about the art.

 

Thus the Spanish stand has as its entry just a huge heap of rubble – yes - a metaphor for their economy.

The United States has sculptures made from rubbish, old bags of cement and assorted debris with officious girls saying - “don’t get near, stand behind the line”. Finland has trees and a tribute to photosynthesis. Korea’s included a dark room in which there was no light and no sound for sixty seconds. In there I had an overbearing desire to say “will you take your hand off my bottom?” to see what happened, but I resisted the urge.

The Dutch stand with human faces crushed in printers’ presses, the Japanese reliving crises like their tsunami in a series of sections entitled “precarious tasks” and the British stand were all  successes amongst others.

Jeremy Deller, the installation artist, had done Britain proud in recognising the stand had to be engaging and vivid. The exhibit of portraits by prisoners (mostly ex-soldiers) of significant people involved in the Iraq war was amazing.  Elsewhere he declares ‘war on wealth’, as the Guardian eagerly described it. The counterpoint of William Morris and the rouble-drenched Abramovitch was good and angry as was section all about the Prince Harry who allegedly once shot a harrier hen at Sandringham.

They were even serving mugs of tea on the stand.

The scale of the event overall is theme-park vast and tiring which meant when I belatedly reached the British Tino Seghal performance art piece which was the gold award winner of the whole show my mind was so battered that it seemed incomprehensibly weird. But Alva Noé from Cosmos and Culture said - and this made sense as I reflected on the sheer presence of the piece:
“this work doesn't play the "attention" game that is so basic to the performing arts. It doesn't try to capture your attention, or direct it, or organize it. The work is just there, like a picture on the wall, and the actors might as well be battery-operated machines.”

In my head I hear a chorus of voices muttering “philistine” in my not lavishing more praise on the Biennale but this is a show and about as far from the Guggenheim, Academia or Pesaro as you can get. Until as you limp away from the Giardini you reach the biggest art show in the history of mankind which is in the Arsenale. By now the chorus of voices in my head are whimpering “enough, enough!”

Bur first an old friend – no surely that isn’t the right word – a display entitled “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” by Mark Leckey last seen by me at Bexhill on Sea at the De La Warre Pavilion. It seems out of place rather like seeing a London cab in the streets of Venice.
But then briefly two extraordinary moments for art anaesthetised eyes – the Peruvian exhibition of spices which touched the senses strongly and looked great and Pawel Althamer’s “Venetians” – a mass of skeletal sculptures of people with skinless bodies. Extraordinarily he’s produced these in association with his father’s plastics factory using extruded strips to form the surreal bodies. He says it’s to show “bodies are just vehicles for the soul”. It makes you stop, look and think. I thought it marvellous.

The Biennale is a huge success. It’s a hotch pot of “wow”, “yuk” and “what the hell is that?” Creativity, pretension and political raging co-exist but what it feels like is a big, important and inventive event.

If only the literature and marketing of the event were as good and clear as the best of the work is. At least Jeremy Deller shows the way how to do it in his brilliantly communicative work. Let’s see if they heed my words in 2015…it would make my life so much less tiring.