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Thoughts for the 52. International Art Exhibition Výberové konanie na projekt výtvarného riešenia česko – slovenského výstavného pavilónu v Benátkach It seems we must constantly relearn old truths by casting them in new light, constantly reenact old arguments by phrasing them in new terms. Of these arguments, most hinge on dichotomies to which our consciousness turns in moments of confusion, a matrix of paired opposites, where, in times of crisis, we are tempted to take refuge from the far greater complexity of our fundamentally metamorphic nature and ever conflicted circumstances. Classically these binaries issue from a basic division between mind and body, thought and feeling. But such oppositions are devices rather than axioms, tools rather than verities. At best they help focus experience in a given phase of its unfolding. At worst - and the worst is more common than the best - they artificially cut off one experience from another. Under such conditions, an impression or thought that comes to us spontaneously is logically pitted against the next that crowds in upon it. The implicit assumption in so doing is that this discomforting competition for our attention could be definitively resolved if only we chose one over the other, declared one right and the other wrong, named one reality and the other an illusion. Thus, on the one hand, "beauty" has traditionally been aligned with an idealized version of nature, of the art of the past or of the future perfection of pure abstract form and held up as intrinsically superior to the "ugliness" of harsh or impure visions. In the 1990s "beauty" became the rallying cry of many who lamented the ascendancy of work in new media - primarily video, installation, photo and text work – much of which directly addressed issues clearly intended to disturb the spectator’s peace of mind. The same constituency often made invidious comparisons between the "beauty" and "quality" of historical modern art – Kandinsky, Matisse, Miro, Malevich, Mondrian, Picasso – and the supposed lack of these virtues in most types of contemporary art all the while forgetting the iconoclasm of these and other modernist forerunners. On the other hand, reliance upon and cultivation of perception has in some quarters been stigmatized as the antithesis of conceptual seriousness. And so painting, which the apostate painter Duchamp wrote off as "retinal art," nearly a century ago, is now routinely treated by Dada-inspired groups as a negation of the intellect, while "the poetic" is correspondingly dismissed as a diversion from "the political." In the 1980s many avowedly critical artistic currents were identified with the catch phrase "anti-aesthetic," a label that, in the way of vanguards, effectively accused all the rest of mere aestheticism. However, in time it has become obvious that the formal achievements and eventual embrace of these radical tendencies (starting with Duchamp’s), owes much to the counter- as distinct from anti-aesthetic they brought into being - that is to say with the fresh ways of seeing as well as thinking they represented. Despite such tell tale ironies, the idea that absolutes ultimately govern our lives and understanding has proven hard to shake. Pick your side in a battle between contraries and everything that follows, including all the friends and enemies one will make and all the sensations and insights one will have as well as all those one has tacitly foresworn are predictable. Yet try as we may to reduce existence to either/or choices consciousness remains inherently multifaceted and contradictory. While ideology tends to insist that meaning finally hinges on a few basic alternatives, art, whatever its stated goals, demonstrates by its vital diversity that being never comes down to one or two factors but grows and variegates to match the demands and capacities of the imagination. There sensation, intuition, reflection and emotion are inherently complementary and coincident. With these considerations in the background the 52. International Art Exhibition will take as its working premise that art in its very essence is plural and that the best in one form of expression is not exclusive of the best in another. Moreover, this Biennale has been predicated on the belief that we have reached the point where the positive clarification of terms and the formal or technical advances resulting from the theoretical antagonisms that we have inherited now come at an increasingly prohibitive price when calculated in the restrictions they place on individual involvement with art and in the fragmentation of cultural discourse they foster. For too long the custom of supposing that any given practice can thrive only at the expense of the alternatives, has meant that the vastly expanded set of choices that confront both the artist and the public – a second stage of the modern Renaissance – has been reconfigured as an all-or-nothing struggle for primacy. The pursuit of novelty for its own sake is instrumental in the process. So too are the cycles of commerce. And so too is the quest for institutional hegemony in universities and museums. In this setting, each innovation brought about by a genuine change in perspective is likely to be eclipsed by the one that follows it before the potential of the first has been fully realized or acknowledged. Whether it is a matter of images, objects or ideas invention is reduced to style and style is reduced to fashion. But scan the field of possibility that competing vanguards opened up and you will see that nobody "won," almost nobody "lost" and many formed alliances. As a consequence we are presently confronted with an artistic horizon only as narrow was we make it by habit of taste or by dogma. Neither chronology nor geography provide simple grounds for discrimination as they once seemed to do. Simultaneity of activity within history and across boundaries stretches the scope of contemporary art regardless of the desire of some to shut it down. Previously "new" forms are learning to assume the weight of their recent past and recognize the degree to which they have engendered their own traditions. Old forms are showing that in the good hands they still produce surprises. Most important of all, our collective outlook has at long last widened to encompass the actual breadth of international creativity. It is worldwide and flush with hybridities rather than homogenously global. It reaches from Brooklyn to Moscow, Bamako to Cologne, Buenos Aires to Shanghai. In sum, the 52. International Art Exhibition will show many things but make no single argument from the aggregate they compose. Rather than invoking previous cultural imperatives or conjuring new curatorial ones, the 52. International Art Exhibition seeks first and foremost to recognize art’s manifold qualities, methods and purposes. It also wishes to accent the simultaneity of their claims on an audience alert to its own variousness as well as to the multi-dimensional character of each of its members. It takes for granted that everyone possesses the ability to rise to the exigencies of the unfamiliar. Likewise, it has faith that inasmuch as the apparently familiar frequently harbors untapped nuance and unanticipated content, such discreet revelations will not be lost on anyone inclined to pay close attention. Of course no one Biennale can presume to report in full on an artistic scene of such magnitude and complexity. Not even the combined coverage of the more than one hundred such exhibitions that have grown out of the model first established in Venice in 1895 can accomplish this feat. Nor is a Biennale just an account of things that have happened in the interval since the last, a cyclical omnium gatherum of works bracketed by predetermined dates. Rather each Biennale represents a view of the present from a position in time and from selected vantage points within the range of relevant production. Naturally, the word relevant begs the question of relevant to what? Those are the criteria that the each Director of Visual Arts must decide upon. And each must do so with the explicit understanding that their choices are partial, and that the distortions or oversights they may create from of the perspective of other observers are open to correction by future exhibitions and will most certainly be open to debate during the duration of the show they make. Debate is good. Setting the stage for it and doing all that can be done to insure that it takes place on the highest level is an essential purpose of the Biennale. Making sure that that debate engages not only art professionals but the general public is a principal preoccupation of the organizers. Some of the criteria for the 52. International Art Exhibition are as follows. Exhibitions are a means of communication. To successfully reach and hold their audiences and to responsibly present individual works of art they must have a form, and form results from self-imposed limitations. Nowadays many exhibitions have become so large and sprawling that it is impossible for the specialist much less the average viewer to absorb more than a fraction of what they have to offer in a single visit. Of necessity then, the Biennale will require multiple visits. Knowing that, every effort will be made within the constraints dictated by space and resources to "phrase" the sequence and installation of works so that each of these visits will be the equivalent of reading a chapter in a longer text or of reconnoitring a mappable section of a vast landscape that is to be explored at the viewer’s own pace over a period of days. Likewise the relative harmony or dissonance of adjacent works will be designed to thread a number of unifying ideas through the exhibition as a whole. The ideas issue directly from the work itself; only the specific correlations will be the affair of the organizer. Among the considerations raised by the work will be the fragility of culture in violent times. Another will be the role of art in the face of death. For reasons alluded to above the 52. International Art Exhibition will take the present as its point of departure and its point of arrival. However, the contents will not be confined to art made within the past two years or even the past five. Where art made previously bears significantly on our current situation, it will be incorporated into the ensemble. That said none of the art will be "historical" except insofar as that term applies to our actuality. But for a handful of artists, all of those who have been invited are living. The few who are not represent a much larger number who, were it not for AIDS and other causes of premature death, would still be active. These representative of greater losses remain our contemporaries by virtue of the immediacy and abiding importance of their contribution. The decision to omit an explicitly historical component of a kind common in exhibitions of this genre was not taken out of any disregard for the past, but out of a greater interest in how the past already always inhabits the present. It also expresses a reluctance to assign artists a posthumous place in an aesthetic family tree such that they become father and mother figures to their juniors who, by the same method, may also be deprived of choice in the matter of their heritage. In art genealogy is never simple, and pedigrees are invariably suspect. The work of older generations is thus included alongside that of younger generations as being equally contemporary with the moment of the exhibition and the circumstances in which it takes place and within which a likewise multigenerational public encounters it. In gathering material for the 52. International Art Exhibition the Director of Visual Arts has traveled to counties in Latin America, Africa and across Europe as well as visiting Australia, Canada China, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. Needless to say there are many more places that he would have liked to go had time and money permitted. Nevertheless research and the international flow of art and information have built bridges to art worlds he could not see first hand, and the result of all of these forms of outreach will be evident in the selection. At this juncture, it should be noted that the Venice Biennale is the only exhibition of its kind to maintain permanent national pavilions, the Sao Paulo Biennial having given up national sections just this year. Rather than attempt a proportional survey of current art around the world, the thematic exhibitions in the Italia Pavilion at the Giardini and the Arsenale will leave the task of representation to those pavilions and concentrate on work that articulates some of the problems and evinces some of the themes sketched above. The important factor is that work embodying those problems and themes has been widely sought out and will be given its proper place regardless of where it originates. In recognition of the fact that many parts of the world have no regular presence in Venice, and wary of the neo-colonial overtones of presuming to summarize the achievements of other cultures from a distance, the Director of Visual Arts has recommended to the Board of the Biennale that spaces in the Artiglierie formerly occupied by the international exhibition be turned over to curators from two countries and one continent heretofore not granted a fixed location within the framework of the Biennale. The countries are India and Turkey, the continent is Africa. This recommendation has been endorsed by the Board and is the first step toward establishing a permanent pavilion for the two countries named, and individual pavilions for some of the many nations that make up Africa. It is the beginning of a process of greater self-determination within the unique site of encounter that has evolved in Venice around the Biennale. And, it is a sign that ten years into its second century that institution identifies its future with greater dialogue with and among the new nations and old cultures that are changing the face of the planet and the look and substance of art. Robert Storr hore | |
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