VIEW FROM VENICE
The forty-ninth Venice Biennale, the first in this millennium, gathered the greatest number of participating countries throughout the history of this grand international exhibition of arts. The Biennale is held in the Giardini di Castello Gardens, remotely resembling the Kyiv Exhibitions and Fairs Center, with a good deal of rather architecturally eclectic pavilions, including the Russian one built, incidentally, in the early twentieth century on the donations of our industrialist Tereshchenko. The pavilions hosted official presentations of the participating countries whose expositions were formed at the discretion of presentation curators. One could see here all that can be conditionally referred to as art fashion: installations, video, paintings, sculptures, etc.
A large group of art researchers and critics should offer thanks to the International Renaissance Foundation for their visit. And perhaps each of them, like each of all those who have ever been here, has his/her own vision of Venice. This self-sufficient city, which looks like nothing else on earth, surpasses all expectations and makes one fall in love with it at once and forever. The city, itself a piece of art, boast architecture built between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, never to be spoilt or refurbished by man since then. Looking at the city, you can study the history of architecture and arts without any special efforts. You see here the mixture of all — Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque — styles. You can get accidentally into a church and stand in awe before the works of great Veronese: he happened to be a local parishioner; and here is the famous La Fenice theater, where Verdi’s La Traviata and Rigoletto were put on for the first time — and thus street by street.
Simultaneously Venice is totally devoid of the sensation of theatricality, a stage scenery for tourists. Even gondolas, looking like Venetian-style kitsch rather than romantic memorabilia, cannot mar the city. It is lively, multilingual, cheerful, and modern. It is no accident that precisely this place hosts the famous Biennale, including a film festival and exhibitions of books, architecture, and modern art. This is why it is a very good idea to look at the art of today from precisely this ancient city which does not have to prove anything to anybody. You will get a very instructive view.
Continuing the Biennale theme, I asked two well-known Kyiv-based art researchers to answer three questions: 1. To what extent does the Biennale represent the overall picture of modern art? 2. What are the main trends in the latter? and 3. How does Ukraine look against the general background?
Oleksiy TYTARENKO:
“Thanks to the Renaissance Foundation, I spent at the Biennale four days of special presentations for the press, etc., and another four days, looking around. Three plus kilometers of the international exhibition at Arsenale, the former shipyard of the queen of the seas, and about fifty national exhibitions in the old city garden Giardini di Castello and other venues. Exotic audiences of all skin colors coming in droves, girls on stilts handing out booklets, yachts rolling by the wharves. What a festival!
“If you arrange an exhibition here, you will barely see a couple of spectators in addition to other strange artists like me and some relations. Over there, they flood in as if for a match against Moscow Spartak at our central stadium, in spite of the exhibits being very subtle. For example, the Swiss set up a host of loudspeakers around a baroque church on the Canale Grande at an additional exposition outside their pavilion in Giardini. You walk around and hear the waxing and waning singsong of mysterious noises. It’s interactive audio installation: you provoke music and these noises with your own walk. For baroque is nothing but these noises, space, and perpetual motion. To my mind, this showpiece of modern art adds no new garbage to the already littered world, but it clearly shifts your consciousness a bit.
“So the Biennale audiences roll in droves to see these highly refined shifts, for there is very little puffed-up, stupid, and inertial art over there. 80% of what I saw was quite interesting indeed. What stirred by far the greatest interest were the Biennale’s neophytes: such very pivotal and powerful countries as Taiwan, Singapore, Jamaica, and New Zealand. Their exoticism and authenticity, filtered through ultramodern forms, sounds in such a genuine voice that you feel it down your spine. Taiwan, for instance, having no pavilion of its own, leased an old Venetian jail, a structure next to the Palace of Doges. You enter a dark hall, and the pressure of your feet brings to life the floor squares which begin to flash the faces of men, women, and children. In the room next door you find what looks like a ritual wooden cannibalistic contraption: you must enter there barefooted and feel the touch and smell of Taiwan. Add to this the ten meter high advertising posters you can see from any vaporetto, a motorboat, and presentations with ethnic music and cuisine!
“But we did not have all this: as you all must have heard, we were there for the first time. The endless squabbles and scandals over who will participate resulted in an army style tent a hundred or so meters away from the main entrance, behind the fence of an all-out feast at Giardini. The First Presentation,’ etc., was written in small type on the tent, but, naturally, nobody sees this from the main entrance and nobody goes to the tent. And what is inside the tent? A diorama: grain fields of our dear Motherland painted in a stern down-to-earth style. Since it is a diorama, sunflowers in the foreground are stuck in other beautiful items. In the artistic sense, this is Kabakov’s style pure and simple. But Kabakov put up his shared kitchens at international exhibitions about fifteen years ago, during perestroika, when such things looked exotic. And now?
“My sensation is that of a complete failure to fit in with the context and the stupid organization of our participation. Even the Italian waiters, invited to attend to our more than modest stand-up dinner and supposed to be standing by the laid tables at 2 p.m., calmly sipped wine behind the tent: the lackey always scorns a spineless master.
“Conclusions? The only conclusion is that, while it is important and extremely prestigious to participate, we need an open democratic contest and, accordingly, a well thought out organization for this participation. For want of this, the current curator Rayevsky just raped us all, so we got nothing but the results I mentioned. All he did was beat up a colleague of mine, a well-known culture critic, right at the opening ceremony. We barely managed to pull him away. A Ukrainian landing party in Venice.”
Oleh SYDOR-HIBELYNDA:
“First, the Biennale can be regarded not only as a mirror of certain trends in modern art but also, in a way, as the catalyst thereof. Secondly, our knowledge of these trends is very vague and obtained from texts. So for me and my colleagues, visiting the forty-ninth Venice Biennale was, first of all, sort of a belated instance of sentimental education rather than an inspection tour of contemporary art. (This was in fact the first large-scale visit of Ukrainian journalists to such a prestigious cultural function, for which I take this opportunity to thank the Renaissance Foundation.) However, even judging by what we saw cursorily, we can note that opportunism also reigns supreme here, which allows ignoring the really strong African and Asian pavilions (Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and partially Russia) and extolling the expositions marked with the longest lines of spectators but hardly with the most convincing artistic solution and speculating on interactive gimmicks (Germany and Canada). The jury noted and praised a run-of-the- mill French video but remained indifferent to the innovations offered by Estonia. And, in general, the atmosphere of the Venice Biennale is filled with the unavoidable spirit of carnival which is impossible — and undesirable — to rip off from art proper. I mean the dressed-up suits, the people on stilts, handing out festival guidebooks in the shape of a picturesque palette (where, incidentally, it is no use looking for the pavilion of Ukraine), and a surly looking fellow with a cobblestone chained to his neck (this character had to hold the stone with both hands in order not to fall down). And Fabrizio Plessi’s video installation, Water-Fire, right on St. Mark’s Square? Where is the end of art and the beginning of life?
“2. The impression is the world is moving toward simplicity, but not the primitive. Appeals to ‘the sources’ (also known as the authentic), as well as the onslaught of indiscriminate ‘new technologies,’ no longer work. However, if necessary, a contemporary artist will resort to both, taking a not so cheerful and sober view of the simplicity of the former and the unlimited possibilities of the latter. The main thing is to create a suggestive, bright image almost as powerful as a drug. This is why the forty-ninth Biennale displayed so much video and so little painting; however, the latter did not evaporate completely from the horizons of art and in some cases even managed to ‘floor’ the ‘new fads...’ within the limits of one isolated project (Denmark). Out of the recurrent motifs, I remember something inflated, udder-shaped, and sometimes even ill-smelling (Peter Robinson in the pavilion of New Zealand, Vic Muniz in the pavilion of Brazil, Ernesto Neto in Arsenale; Robert Gober’s so- called collective teat in the US pavilion). Does the artist try to milk reality as it were a hornless cow? This a possible answer. Or, maybe, there is no answer at all...
“3. I feel so sad, dull, and desperate. A grim crowd that was soon forgotten. In general, our proverbial tent is the same story as Mazepa now being filmed, i.e., a thirst for things lofty without knowing how to achieve them. But what looks natural or excusable in the movies looks quite sinister in fine arts. I mean that a marriage between art (unofficial in our case!) and the state can be nothing in essence but a shameful misalliance. We are not living in the 1920s: there is no hope for the repeated implementation of an avant-garde project. On the other hand, we become insured against all that has grown on its yeast. Besides, today’s creators are too cynical compared to their counterparts eighty years ago. As to ideas, the world is likely to be soon overwhelmed by our ceaseless bitching, which, naturally, has nothing to do with art and arouses nobody’s interest. Nevertheless, neither Viktor Marushchenko (photo) nor Oleksandr Reutburd (video) still fit in with the world context (at the exposition of Szeemann). You will not believe me, but I once happened to hear this phrase amid the Biennale Babel, ‘How fate has scattered us, Ukrainians, across the world...’ I look back and see Kyiv-born Mr. Kulyk speaking to his lady friend. Incidentally, his works at the Yugoslav pavilion is also our victory, to some extent.”
