At Venice’s enormous, city-filling Biennale art exhibition, there are about 90 national pavilions, in which each country selects one or more artists to exhibit their work. In addition to these, there were more gypsy shows than could be counted. I did not see everything: I was at this art Woodstock for four days, but paid my own way, which meant no expensive water taxis to take me way the hell out to some island show in the lagoon. So while I’m sure I “missed the one thing that should have been seen in Venice” (which is what everyone at the airport kept saying as I prepared to board the plane home), I did see some riveting things, some revolting ones, and everything in between. Here are my five personal favorite pavilions and my three least favorite.
Excellent International Debut: Adrian Villar Rojas (Argentina)
A surprising turn. This young artist created a series of giant archeological columns that seem to come from 10 million years in the future — or might be the last sculptures on earth. His spatial dwarfing, mudlike construction techniques, imagination, scale, and notions of history unfolding, out of control, all made me look forward to seeing more from this 31-year-old.
Walkthrough Wonderland: Karla Black (Scotland)
An installation of pastel-colored shapes made of soap, paper, and clay mixed with Vaseline and Venetian marble dust. Dirt on the floor creates paths; one comes away with the feeling of an artist in sweet control of a sensitive touch and on her own.
As Real As It Gets … for Now: Mike Nelson (Great Britain)
An enormous, labyrinthine, multi-roomed installation that conjures working-class Istanbul and a mad photographer’s darkroom. Nelson’s brand of hyper-realism isn’t to my taste — to me, it’s a series of stage sets gone bananas — but he wowed crowds and took people on some sort of journey to an inner Orientalism of the Mind. So I will bow in this case, without resentment, to the crowd.
Engulfing Glut, Guts, and Good Art: Thomas Hirschhorn (Switzerland)
Hirschhorn’s full-on, all-out building-filling installation involves mannequins, aluminum foil, gruesome war pictures, and broken bottles. It’s a true overload, a fabulist fortress of shame, solitude, fury, resolve, and artistic/political ambition. My personal favorite, even when it veers toward the didactic and goes over-the-top.
A New Window Into the Mind: Yael Bartana (Poland)
The three videos in this pavilion take the premise that the Jews of the world have right of return to Poland, where they may build settlements. They’re too HBO-slick and overlong by half, but the gripping idea behind them sticks in the mind — even if it would start another world war.
Bad But Loved by the Pros, As Usual: Christian Boltanski (France)
Christian Boltanski’s overblown printing-press contraption whirs at breakneck speed, producing black-and-white baby pictures: It’s Festivalism — art made for events like this, and nothing more — at its most bloated, bland, and pointless. I’m continually baffled by how beloved Boltanski is by the Curatorati. Indeed, I ran into two megacurators in Venice (a former documenta curator and a major London museum director) who said to me, “Boltanski is good, right?” I replied, “You two have been trying to tell me Boltanski is great for twenty years.” He’s not.
Vengeance Will Be the Bad Curator’s: Vittorio Sgarbi (Italy)
Far worse than Boltanski’s merely bad art is Vittorio Sgarbi’s malevolent bad-faith, art-hating arrogance in the ugliest contemporary-art exhibition that I have ever seen. ArtInfo identifies Mr. Sgarbi, a politician, writer, and collector, as “the Glenn Beck of the Italian art world,” and indeed there is a kind of paranoid madness present here. His pavilion is an unmitigated visual onslaught installed on walls and curving shelving units. It’s almost all academic kitsch, bad figure painting, or anything the curator imagines as anti-avant-garde. Being reactionary is nothing new, but this is extraordinarily bad. The New YorkTimes (in a review that, full disclosure, was by my wife) called the show “unredeemable” and a “national scandal.” Is there anything good about this cattle call? Perhaps only that it won’t be surpassed anytime soon.
Tanks for the Memories, But That’s All: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (America)
I’ve already written about this super-hip artistic duo’s gargantuan encapsulation of the Ugly American via tank and treadmill. Had I been the curator, however, I would have tried to stop them there, because everything else they’ve done inside their pavilion is obvious, redundant, or silly. The first work you see inside the door is a black-painted, seven-and-a-half-foot replica of the Statue of Freedom (also known as Armed Freedom), the bronze sculpture that has stood atop the U.S. Capitol dome since 1863 — but here it rests prone on a tanning bed. Perhaps meant to evoke a president lying in state, it is so visually dead, pedantic, and simplistic that I think it may not even be art. Further along, actual Olympic athletes perform on a set of wooden replicas of business-class airline seats, and in the end it’s just pointless and ugly. The ginormous racket-producing tank spectacle outside is more than enough. It may be drop-dead obvious and may be the most expensive thing one could imagine lugging to Venice, but as one of the more obnoxious national acts ever executed at a Biennale — making American art spill over, dominate, and colonize the space outside the building — it serves as an enticingly odious metaphor for our recent wars and “freedom agenda.” The only thing that could be more poignantly odious (in my Jewish mind) would be to have artists from the Israeli Pavilion located two feet away build a settlement here. Then they could have refused to remove it, citing some ancient literary text.
The selection above is so DEAD that we are definitely in the bottom part of a wave of decadent art, and have probably some more to go before rising. Similar to the music where musical talent has been removed and replaced by barbie dolls from reality music pop shows. I hope to see paint, drawing and sculpture come back to base camp !
It could takes years maybe even decades. The Dark Ages even lasted a few centuries.
It seems that Installations that make a statement are all that is needed. The art itself is secondary. Can anyone explain what you do with these piles of junk? where do you put them? in some curators living room? No. In the DumpBin yes !
Art seems to be more about the artists nowadays than the art they produce.
A personality cult which glamourises the mundane and the boring.
And for my next trick I will create a lifesize replica of the Statue of Liberty out of 1 million Barbie Dolls.
It’s refreshing to see someone standing up to what they feel is bad art, and while art may be subjective, it’s nice to see a few people actually sharing their honest opinions, even if I don’t always agree with them. If art is social commentary, it truly feels that commentary on the commentary is very one-sided most of the time, with most reviewers simply praising everything using frilly adjective infused language that suspiciously resembles the artist or curator’s own statement.
I definitely agree about Adrian Villar Rojas – he’s an artist to watch. His installation, Mi Familia Muerta (My Dead Family) at the Biennial of the End of the World in Argentina in 2009 is worth looking up too.
Very entertaining idea Jerry..your comment on the jewish settlemts….now that would have ben art!!
The ‘ art ‘ shown here is that of people all in with the idea but forgeting about esthetic value of the art .
Isn’t art meant to take us out of the morgue? Or the concentration camp crematorium?
We all know we are going to die someday , yes we know thanks . How about a bit of beautiful or even interesting. Iam not talking about ‘chocolate box art’ no , just something with a bit of soul and love attached to it.
You know like Rembrandt did in his time , or de Kooning in the 50′s -80′s.
What has happened to the following ?
1/ Art .
2/ Music.
3:Films ie hollywood.
4/ Politics.
5/ Food.
6/ The freedom of traveling ie today more visas etc then ever before.
7/ Education.
Lastly TV. It’s all gone in the toilet. Today is insipid , moronic a very dark period in history , and you curators , gallery owners like Charles Saatchi who buy art per ton and sell it off destroying artists like Chilida among others. You record companies have destroyed music today . Turn on MTV and you get the same girls or boys band puking out some garbage with a lifespan of a month at best.
Your making these last two decades come three decades a very poor epoque in what will be called the ‘ cultural dark ages ‘. I hope it doesn’t degenerate anymore.
Amen.
I can only agree with Mr Saltz comments on the work of messers Allora Calzadilla. I think that this kind of arrogant art was best summed in a quote from Brian Sewell, who, in 1994, which obiously still holds true today. He wrote:
“So many contemporary painters and sculptors have withdrawn from any communication with the public, and critics have developed a highfalutin jargon designed to exclude the public from debate and the formation of truly held opinion and to convince them that not only have they no business to want to understand art, but it is their duty to believe in it in much the same way as peasants believed in Christianity and Voodoo.”
Jerry’s tone certainly departs dramatically from his derision of the 2009 Biennale’s “eight generation conceptualism”…. none of that this year? Really? Why did you change your mind?
It’s quite easy and very popular to criticize the Italian pavilion this year. One has all the big names behind you. Sgarbi has certainly destroyed the aesthetic value of some great work (and presented some terrible work) with his reactionary political stance, but we would be remiss if we projected that onto all the artists themselves. The flee-market presentation was horrendous, but there certainly was some work worth looking at, especially one who’s brilliant work suffered un-justly from such a terrible presentation: Roberto Ferri.
But, hey, it’s easy to just slap on a stereo-type and call it a day, instead of actually looking at the work with an unbiased eye. And characterizing him as “anti-avant-garde” is an easy slight of hand. Sgarbi is a lunatic but the avant-garde has become dominant in all the institutions – which rather negates itself – doesn’t it? But that’s another issue.
Of course, I do love to read Jerry’s witty, acerbic comments, peppered with counter-culture verbiage. It is, indeed, very entertaining. (I’m actually being sincere, here). But I have to say, he always seems so very calculated and PC about who he praises and who he attacks. In 2009 Bruce Nauman was the great Godhead…. really? Mildly witty phrases written in neon is new? “Exploring the nature of communication and languages inherent problems”? Isn’t that what every artist does? Could it have had something to do with the fact that Nauman had recently risen on the infamous “Top 200 artists of the 20th century” list to be the most influential living American artist? In 2010 Nauman became the most influential living artist according to Artfacts.net. No, couldn’t be that.
Why are Allora and Calzadilla not art, why is Boltanski derivative, but Karla Black is “an artist in sweet control of a sensitive touch”? I’ve seen that kind of work time and again in university art schools across the U.S and Europe. He didn’t like Nelson, but it had an aesthetic power that you can’t deny and was conceptually quite profound. I’d love to hear some clear criteria other than “it’s all subjective, but trust me because I’m a critic”.
It sounds to me more like arguing for the relevance of his job, rather than substantially discussing the work. Frankly, being an art critic pays jack, and he’s obviously a much better writer than the likes of Dan Brown, so I wonder why he does it if he’s not going to actually give us a substantial critique.
Maybe Sgarbi is not a loony but just trying to undermine modern art.
If art ha sno limits and at the same time everything is art because the artist or gallery that exhibits something says it is art.
Then these people are taking us for a bunch of idiots.
The viewer chooses what to them is art. Not the gallery, not the critic, not the hype in the papers and not the artist.
An “artist” might display a lot of mirrors in the Tat Modern and say the people looking at themselves in the mirrors are reflections of themselves as art because the artist says so. When the viewer sees a mirror in a room.
An artist might get a dog to make a big turd on the floor of the tate Modern or other gallery and say it is the turdificationismal being of energy forming matter dissolving reality of science.
A viewer will see a pile of dog shit.
So the public are not fools and the artists promotoers and investors involved in this cartel of controlling the art world can all go and find more big quick gimicks to keep the con going.
Ploppi,
Perhaps, but Sgarbi is doing a terrible job. Tactically speaking, he’s having the opposite effect, and actually making himself look like nothing more than a bitter, jealous kid who wasn’t let into the party.
The fact is that there are some things revealed by modernism and post-modernism that are valuable. Duchamp’s urinal in 1917 was not art, his idea was the art. But, that was the point… it was a modern reliquary. And at that time most of the visual art simply embodied the shallow vestiges of a visual language, devoid of any significant meaning. So, the act of posing a urinal as art was an ironic gesture meant to point out how “Art” had come to replace religion, the gallery the temple, and yet the art of that time was lacking the substance that religion had. Duchamp wasn’t speaking to the public, or especially the public of today, he was directly criticizing the art institutions at that exact time….. all of which was largely mis-understood by the artworld and then subsequently commodified.
Take for example “An Oak Tree” by Michael Craig-Martin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Oak_Tree
The glass of water is a glass of water, but the text is actually quite an entertaining example of sophist rhetoric. The glass of water is just a visual aide and isn’t really necessary.
It’s true that after one does this kind of thing once, (especially within the bounds of the avant-garde emphasis on the “new” and “original”) it rather looses it’s novelty. It’s really something you can only do once and it have any significant meaning to anyone because it’s time specific. That’s why the greatest works of art tend to be more about universal human experience that apply to every time, rather than the fashion or politics of the day. These things cease to be relevant once we move on to the next 24 hour news cycle.
But, it’s important for me to point out that conceptual art is a kind of psuedo-philosophy. It’s a hybridization of art forms and philosophy – which is nothing inherently new, but has simply become the dominant form.
The problem comes when the state funded institutions begin to enforce this as the only acceptable or relevant art form…. when critics, historians, and curators attempt to apply this form of verbal linguistic analytic philosophy to visual art (as Foucault did). They simply ignore the fact that a large part of the content in a painting is conveyed through the visual language of the paint- the technical narrative – which is composed of value, color, line, light, shadow, brush strokes, skillful compositional relationships between these elements, and finally both the theme and the object depicted. A post-modern analysis of visual art completely misses this language and only focuses on the relationship between the object and materials as a direct symbol for something, and the context around the object. And this is why they simply don’t find relevance in someone like Odd Nerdrum. They not only don’t know the language, but they’re confused by looking for a language that isn’t there in the way that they’ve been trained to read it. And so they disregard it and marginalize it either out of ignorance, or an interest to protect their careers and investments in conceptual art. The Red Lantern is a great work of Chinese literature. Just because I don’t know Chinese doesn’t make it worthless. It’s just inaccessible to me. On the other side of the coin, the greatest art throughout history has always tried to speak in a way that transcends these linguistic barriers, and that is what is missing from a lot of art today, whether it be technically skilled, or conceptually driven.
But there’s another option. Contemporary Art doesn’t have to be only piles of shit and starving dogs. There was an iconoclasm in the 20th century, but now we’re now in a period where pluralism is possible. We don’t have to be at war with the contemporary institutionalized elite, we can simply make our own market and our own communities…. and the internet and social media is an incredibly powerful tool for doing that.
I see from another post of yours that you’re familiar with Rober tHughes. You might also be interested to check out Roger Scuton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKEdA-b-O6o&feature=related
I think he’s missing a few key components in his view, but overall, he makes some good points.
Ultimately, we get much further by making the work that we think is great and making it visible to people. A positive affirmation of what we do value is much more effective than complaining about things that we really can’t control.
By the way, this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you like Roger Scruton and Robert Hughes, you might be interested in reading an objectivist or empiric theory of aesthetics.
Judging Art Almost Objectively
http://artbabel.blogspot.com/2010/04/judging-art-almost-objectively.html
not having attended the Venice Biennale I can only comment on comments and images, copies of works via the flat panel screen. Yet how the mind wonders as it wanders through these images about like minds passing precious moments in pursuit of something more meaningful, authentic and relevant in this life, as mist before the dawn dissipates in full sun light. I hear the siren song and dance the compulsive jig to the black promise of an endless starlit alchemy of mind perpetrated by Banshee’s. I may never find my way into the light still I dance…
In all honesty I had not heard of any of the artists mentioned untill reading this article by Jerry Saltz.
Using art to promote a political agenda has been a tradition since Roman times.
The art shown here all looks a little desperate, as if the artists have to make a statement in order to give it some kind of pseudo credibility.
I like Dali’s attitude to art in that he created his images and then let people find their own meaning in them.
most in Venice was boring