Venice: The Edge of the World
Robert Storr’s Biennale was characterized by conscientiousness and fairness rather than provocation
A questionnaire from an eminent art historian doing the rounds at the moment asks why there has been a marked shortage of critical responses from the art world to the catastrophe of the war in Iraq, in contrast to the ways artists mobilized themselves against Vietnam some 40 years ago. He has a point, but his timing is poor; after three years of relative silence critical engagement with Iraq by artists abounds. Two of this year’s major biennials have made the Iraq War the centrepiece of examinations of present-day conflicts in different parts of the world: first, Okwui Enwezor’s Seville Biennial and now, less emphatically, Robert Storr’s Venice. As I write this, the ICA in London has ‘Memorial to the Iraq War’ on view, Mark Wallinger has filled the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain with State Britain, a life-size replica of Brian Haw’s recently illegalized anti-war protest in Parliament Square, while back in Venice, coinciding with the Biennale, Thomas Demand is showing ‘Yellowcake’, a body of work referencing the US and UK governments’ false assertions that Saddam Hussein was importing uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons.
Beginning with the space of the Arsenale, once past Dan Perjovschi’s typically sharp satirical graffiti on the ethical contradictions of art’s global vanity fair (I’m struggling to recall a recent biennial he wasn’t in) and a rather baggy, post-Utopian revisit of Futurism by Luca Buvoli (a curatorial compliment to the host nation), visitors to Storr’s exhibition ‘Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind; Art in the Present Tense’ find themselves in the linear expanse of the Corderie proper, whence a parade of works concerned with recent wars and state terror unfolds: Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, the Balkans, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua. Bullet-etched shells of buildings, fighter jets and AK-47s, memorials to the disappeared, detention camps, portraits of dead American combatants and a skull kicked about like a football line the walls with depressing familiarity. Although 9/11 and Iraq are alluded to by only two artists at this stage of the exhibition, they are inevitably evoked by the representations of other conflicts around them.
Storr’s knowledge of, and engagement with, current affairs and political history are confirmed in his lengthy essay and many entries on artists in the exhibition catalogue (around 40 of the 96 artists’ entries in the catalogue, a task normally farmed out to assistants). All the same, this section of the Biennale had an over-illustrative feel, even though only some of the works were in a documentary idiom: as though conflicts, not art practices, were being collected. With just one, sometimes two artists, dealing with any one situation, the specific causes and consequences of each were subsumed within what became a generalist picture of war whose treatment rarely felt more than thematic. This contrasted with the sure sense one had that a series of arguments was being assembled through the sequence of works in Enwezor’s biennial, whose theoretical horizons were ambitiously developed in the ten interrogative catalogue essays, each by a different writer (there are no essays in Storr’s catalogue apart from his own). In Venice there was little to argue with: the overall effect was not dissimilar to reading the international section of a quality left-of-centre newspaper from beginning to end, and for all the tragedy and brutality on display there was little with which to disagree for anyone with a left-of-centre world-view. It was left to Isa Genzken, whose German Pavilion was simply entitled Oil, to invoke the causal link between rapacious (American) capitalism and the ongoing horror in Iraq.
Alex Farquharson
Alex Farquharson is Director of CCAN (Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham), which opens late 2008, and a Research Fellow in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London, UK.
