Just Add Water
The 1999 Venice Biennale
As creator of the Aperto back in the mists of Biennale history, Harald Szeemann clearly deserves the right to tinker around with it today: that’s the Frankenstein logic underwriting this year’s Biennale, a logic that Szeemann backs up with the usual hard-assed cadre of shiny-shoed Biennale officialdom.
In the same week as the Wimbledon first rounds, a lot of art world hepcats were waiting to see Szeemann and his wild, expansionist Aperto get smeared like Martina Hingis - so smeared, in fact, that you would need a squeegee to get their remains off the Giardini. The popular success and generally benign reception of this messy exhibition has caused some puzzlement courtside. Both Szeemann and Hingis are all-court players with a tendency to the deep power baseline game, and both turn out to have a fondness for the loose-lipped remark, but the Swiss man fared better because some things run deeper than a seeding system in the structure of Biennales.
Szeemann has hedged that the problem of the Aperto is the tension between making an inventory of the best global art and providing any sort of useful supplement to the pavilions. His Aperto has a wilfully inclusive and implausibly ambitious feel to it - so ambitious that men with Makitas and table saws were hanging around for days after the opening. It also, of course, reprises large parts of the 1997 Lyon Biennial, but that passed without comment, almost forgiven in advance.
In fact, this year’s Aperto - renamed the d’APERTutto, or ‘Aperto over all’ - broke into new areas of the dockyard, the existence of which many Venetians had only dimly suspected, and this territorial ambition gave agricultural grade space to monster installations such as Jason Rhoades and Paul McCarthy’s donut factory, Chen Zhen’s drumming room and Thomas Hirschhorn’s World-Airport (1999).
The donut plant is part of a larger proposition equating investment in the art business with factory gate donut shipments; a revenge fuck by the art world that the entertainment industry passed over. The work revives Rhoades’ Ferrari-as-a-Trojan-horse theme: ‘We use the Trojan horse, equipped with the plastic penis to enter the media - it’s a simple number - ten goes in, twenty goes out, ten dollars goes into media, ten goes into the plastic penis, ten goes through the Trojan, ten goes through the donut - twenty comes back’, drawls McCarthy in an accompanying fund-raising video. He speaks the language of crazed and drooling Internet start-ups. Uma Szeemann, Harald’s daughter, got her hands dirty early on mixing flour and olive oil in a cement mixer to the cell-phoned instructions of the artists. Later in the week, though, the testy guards were telling people to get the hell off the Laz-e-boy vinyl sofa while themselves enjoying the posterior comfort provided by that device. Otherwise you could have easily sat around being fed donuts by Uma Szeemann until they carried you off on a stretcher.
With this strip-mining of the entertainment mother lode going on next door to Chen Zhen’s Buddhist drums, you got some idea of what was going in the big picture - an unresolved and warmed-over fascination with the East; an appalled admiration for the money-splurging West.
The Aperto had a pinballish configuration: you could zip round, say, a slew of Wang Jin’s extraordinary plastic operatic costumes by sashaying through Doug Aitken’s syncopated four room video, or bypass Chris Burden’s Meccano bridges by swinging through Simone Aaberg Kaern’s almost taxonomic chronicle of WWII aviatrices. A lot of this, of course, may have been predetermined: Christian Jankowski called up some of the Veneto’s dodgy cable channel tarot card readers to ask, in dodgy Italian, if his artwork would be a success, and then used their spookily accurate responses as the work. After that you saw things a little differently.
Monica Bonvicini looked at the phenomenology of gendered architectural space in a beaten up dry wall room. John Bock pulled off a great performance in a potato-filled crawl space. Pipilotti Rist, who overwhelmed last time around with a car window smashing short that pretty much everyone rated high on their all time best video list, came back with a Blue Velvet/Texas Chainsaw Massacre hybrid of suburban angst and a silvery box in the lacustrine end of the Arsenale that blew big smoke-filled bubbles out of a doorway every four minutes or so.
At the furthest reaches, behind the Georgian exhibition area, was Shirin Neshat’s thrilling two-screen video Turbulent (1998). A white-shirted Iranian-Kurdish crooner sings a 13th century poem, and while he puffs up in the applause of his white-shirted all boy audience there’s a sort of serious sub-aural jet-engine-type rumbling from the other side of the room, where a woman emerges from the shadows in an empty theatre and begins her own wailing song for women - who are still prohibited from singing in public.
At the Dogana, the Guggenheim’s hoped-for site of expansion in Venice, Bill Fontana pulled off an acoustical installation linked to 13 microphones around the city, a work that is genuinely adoring of Venice in a way that Katharina Fritsch’s gnarrly and frankly recycled plague rats and James Lee Byars’ Spinning Oracle of Delphi (1986), both in the entrance of the Italian pavilion, could only posture about. There were more benevolent ghosts in Venice though. Grandmaster Flash’s concert at the Campo Santa Margarita was rained off on the night of the British party, so Grandmaster fans had to be content with his blessing on Renée Cox’s and Victor Matthews’ distilled and devout installation at the Oratorio San Ludovico.
For all the protests about its skewed Disneyland of national identities, the Giardini felt a lot like an agricultural fair, with different species tethered in every dusty stockade - a sort of high-end DNA parade. Some were tranquillised and fairly mellow, like Roman Signer at the Swiss pavilion, while other prize heifers hyperventilated and looked so distressed it seemed like they might inhale their own vomit, which called for calming noises from the visitors.
The national pavilions are now pretty much divided between those that care at all about challenging the space they’re in and those that treat them as annexed commercial gallery space. Ann Veronica Janssens filled the Belgian pavilion with a fog that evoked the apron of a European airport runway but with acoustical recollections of childish play that, when you worked out what was going on, hit you like a mallet blow.
Jason Rhoades and Peter Bonde chucked out any pretence of national identity at the Danish pavilion and crammed the place with Winnebagos full of stuff recalling their track racing event in half-size cars at Willow Springs circuit in California. Involving rather than interactive, the monitors showing slow-mos and driver-cam views felt like pit-lane telemetry equipment jammed into snap-on tool boxes.
Ann Hamilton took charge of the Jeffersonian American pavilion and with $1.5m of Tom Ford’s Gucci money tenderly sprinkled a vermilion pigment down the bright white walls into piles at the room’s edges. This daily performance needs to be vacuumed away every night by serious industrial contamination removal individuals with respirators, since the slack-jawed interns on site to answer questions would not touch the work with a ten-foot stick. The walls were mounted with a Braille account of transcribed war crimes tribunal hearings, so that if you attempted to read it you got dried, but apparently well-oxygenated, blood on your hands.
Hamilton was not the only one to bite clumsily into the cherry of Kosovo comment, however. The Austrian artists’ group WochenKlausur made a piece about the role of language teaching for the refugees, and Irene and Christine Hohenbüchler had what looked like a bijou refugee summerhouse in the back. If you wanted still more Kosovo comment, the end of the Corderie contained Soo-Ja Kim’s Bottari truck loaded with clothing bundles facing an overwhelming, worrying mirror; for this Biennale, it was the end of the road.
Andrew Gellatly
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