Trans-Europe Express

Early June saw the opening of the 52nd Venice Biennale, documenta 12 and Sculpture Projects Muenster 07

‘How did I get here? Can you hear me outside? I cannot escape.’
Sonia Abián Rose, Das Konzentrationslager der Liebe, (The Concentration Camp of Love, 2007)

‘YES NO. Both of them are equally frightened of each other. That’s why the smart people say ‘maybe’.
Nedko Solakov, Fears, 2007

OK, so it’s a cheap shot to wrench epigrams from two arbitrarily chosen works among the thousands encountered on the long march from the 52nd Venice Biennale to documenta 12 to the fourth Sculpture Projects Muenster, in order to ventriloquize the sense of bewildering overload, spiced by the fear of premature judgement, that was a predictable result of ‘doing’ this summer’s ‘grand tour’. All three events opened within a ten-day period in early June and, despite their considerable differences, comparisons were unavoidable between these major exercises in stocktaking, which traditionally take place at two-, five-, and ten-year intervals respectively. Of course, rushing around on a tight schedule is no way to see, much less judiciously assess, such sprawling extravaganzas. Yet no amount of pious hand-wringing will alter the fact that this is precisely what a significant proportion of contemporary art’s most committed stakeholders will have done. This is a structural problem tackled in different ways by this year’s Biennale Director, Robert Storr, documenta curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, and Muenster impresarios Kasper König, Brigitte Franzen and Carina Plath. Crudely put, Storr’s sombre, understated Biennale gambled on the intelligence of an underestimated general public, a constituency he chooses to believe ‘would ultimately prefer to be engaged rather than enthralled’. Buergel and Noack’s determinedly anti-canonical, frequently exasperating but quietly rewarding documenta set even higher store on the patience and goodwill of viewers willing to suspend judgement until they had traversed their presentation in its entirety and considered the revisionist tale it had to tell. Muenster alone deigned to seduce, delight and entertain, while cleaving to its 30-year commitment to furthering the debate on art in public spaces.

The flagship exhibition in Venice, spread as usual over the capacious Italian Pavilion in the Giardini and the vast medieval Arsenale, was entitled ‘Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense’. While the banners under which such shows routinely set sail are rarely illuminating, the argument for the compatibility of aesthetic delectation with critical perspicacity was clearly aimed at an old bugbear of Storr’s; the neo-Puritan pleasure police of critical academe. A roomful of recent canvases in the Italian Pavilion, in which painting predominated, incidentally registered his ongoing tussle with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh for the soul of Gerhard Richter (played out over the years in various monographs, exhibitions, interviews and reviews). Close by were self-contained suites of paintings by fellow eminences Robert Ryman and Ellsworth Kelly, as well as rooms devoted to Elizabeth Murray and Susan Rothenburg. Pride of place, however, went to an array of giant Sigmar Polkes, which brooded darkly on the walls of the pavilion’s large central gallery. The pairing of two minor masters from different generations and sides of the Atlantic – Raoul de Keyser and Thomas Nozkowski – must have looked great on paper, but their adjacent rooms suffered from an unfortunate overhang and nagging intimations of pseudomorphism. The prevailing US–northern European inflection was tempered by the inclusion of the Mumbai-based Nalini Malani’s obliquely allegorical suite of ‘reverse paintings’ titled ‘Splitting the Other’ (2007) and by the more stridently global Agit-Pop of Congolese painter Chéri Samba. Even Jenny Holzer’s coruscating, large-scale text-works derived from declassified documents relating to the interrogation of detainees in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, were paintings, rendered in oil on linen. The pavilion’s roughly spiralling circuit, which opened with Nancy Spero’s fearsome maypole bedecked with screaming heads (Maypole/Take No Prisoners, 2007), came to an abrupt end in its strangest room, which housed a small selection of works by Chen Zhen, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Martin Kippenberger, José Leonilson, Fred Sandback and Philippe Thomas, all of whom are deceased. Sadly, the only other thing the occupants of this mezzanine mausoleum seemed to have in common was the even-handed inelegance with which their work had been installed.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic and curator who teaches at University College Dublin, Ireland.