i just returned from a ten-day dream trip from italy. it took me more than a month of laborious planning. i went through three cities: rome, florence, and venice. with approximately three days in each, i had to set up the most perfect itinerary to take advantage of my brief stay. venice, however, i did not plan as thoroughly as the other cities. i imagined i will probably bust my ass trying to see as much biennial related art as possible.
which is what happened. during the full days i had, i arrived earlier than the 10am opening time to wait in line at the arsenale and giardini. i spent the whole day there until closing time at 6pm, only occasionally leaving for food, gelato, a sit near the canal, or a visit to a satellite event close by. after the main venues closed, i hurried to see other events that stayed open for a little bit longer. i spent the other two half days getting lost and searching for national pavilions and satellite events not included at the central biennale locations. thankfully, some were clustered around the same areas, but others were more difficult to find. this difficulty heightened my annoyance when i finally found them and i did not like what i took the trouble to see.
i truly felt the politics of spatial distribution in venice. to get my money's worth on the hefty entrance fee to the arsenale and giardini, i visited every pavilion there. but the pavilions around other parts of town did not require a ticket, nor were they conveniently located at single, easy accessible destinations as the main exhibits. given these difficulties and time restraints, i could not see as many national pavilions or collateral events as i would have liked. if this happened despite the immense effort i made to squeeze in as much as possible, i imagine it may have been even more so for those who were not there to write about it. seeking out the pavilions of iraq or thailand become very conscious choices, whereas one can do quick glances at spain or japan since they are right inside the arsenale or giardini.
this must be the case every year--how can one include "everything" and "everyone" "equally"?--but it appears sillier in relation to this year's theme: the shamelessly utopian dream of marino auriti's encyclopedic palace. its curator, massimiliano gioni, admits to the absurdity of such an idea--the existence of a space containing all human knowledge. the exhibit seems more of a meta-approach to investigate and complicate the reasons why and what we collect, classify, keep tabs on. but the central pavilion at the giardini location especially suggests the existence of a universal, collective knowledge--a jungian shared unconscious existing across borders and times. a good portion of the show there arranges the work formally: the gaping ellipses of anonymous tantric paintings in one room echo forms created by the circling gestures of the blind painters in artur zmijewski's film, blindly (2010) and even the globe and mandalas in camille henrot's video installation, grosse fatigue (2013) at the arsenale venue. but seeing the same recurring forms and subjects under the same curatorial argument of the archival, encyclopedic tendencies of our "human condition" can be exhausting. what of the show's including the "severely autistic" sawada shinichi's sculptures, for example, as evocative of "the arts of tribal societies in africa"? or lynette yiadom-boakye's imaginary portraits of dark skinned people?
extremely exhausted from my journey from florence and getting lost, i trudged back toward my hotel on the first day of my arrival in venice. it had begun to rain, and as i approached the san marco piazza i decided to duck into an exhibit, this is not a taiwan pavilion, which happened to be there at the right time. it was like taking a long gulp from a cold pint of dark ale after an entire afternoon of flowery tea. the show was directly concerned with relative nature of subjectivity, notions of "national representation" and identity, more explicit consideration of who the audience was. also by chance, i was on time for the last of four performances, a live bianshi narration of artist bernd behr's film, chronotopia by huang ying-hsuing. bianshi narrators are silent film narrators from back in the day--a perpetual reminder that one is seeing a film, and that the images are being interpreted by one as well as the person speaking for (with?) it. the guy spoke entirely in taiwanese without subtitles during the 16:38-minute projection which already had an english narration. most people present did not seem to speak taiwanese and appeared bored after the first few minutes. i, too, found myself straining at first to hear the muted english from the film and looking for subtitles. failing at both, i became fascinated by the whole act: for those 16 plus minutes, english was NOT the assumed language of the audience. huang's enthusiastic speech was not only lost on most of the audience members, but also became a noisy obstruction for those trying to hear a language they understood. when the performance ended and the projection resumed its english narration, i listened, wondering what the correlations were between huang's words and the english narration of the film. i will never know, but after standing near the speakers for a while, i realized that the center speakers also had been playing a taiwanese narration in a very low volume the entire time, barely audible under the booming english.
relevant to this show is also the history of the "taiwan" pavilion at the biennale. sort of there at some point, then gone in 2001, not granted an official "national" pavilion but listed as a collateral event. i know very little about international political drama, and i may be reading what i would like (from an ignorant american perspective) from behr's film as well as the work of other artists, hsu chia-wei and katerina seda + batezo mikilu. the show at least appeared to be adding a different and important perspective to the one(s?) given by the main biennale show, which, overall, i thought relatively safe and too neat.
i will probably write more about the main exhibit and some other shows. i saw a lot and it's been difficult to sort through and process all of them.
more to come.
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