VENICE
Like so much of the art world, this year’s Venice Biennale is an example of the overblown spectacles, predictable politics and perverse performances that characterize cultural gatherings around the globe.
It seems artists no longer believe a canvas or a sculpture can make a sufficiently loud statement in a biennale. Instead they go for the grand gesture, creating massive theatrical environments whose scale and ambition cannot mask shallow content. New Yorker magazine critic Peter Schjeldahl dubs the phenomenon “festivalism.”
The biennale is a festival of sorts. It’s the most comprehensive survey of international contemporary art, a vast and prestigious exhibition that has taken place in this Italian city nearly every two years for more than a century. The 54th edition opened this month and remains on view through late fall.
The core of the show is the Giardini park where 29 national pavilions present official exhibitions sent from Europe and the Americas, with a few from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, relative latecomers to the international art circuit. Nations lacking permanent pavilions get space in the nearby Arsenale or around town. A record 89 nations are participating this year, up from 77 in 2009.
As if this weren’t enough, there is an 83-artist group show curated by this year’s director, the Swiss curator Bice Curiger, who titles her gathering “Illumi-nations” to suggest enlightenment and multinationalism.
What’s on view?
Here’s the scene in front of the U.S. pavilion: A sand-colored Army tank is flipped upside down with its turret on the ground. On top of its elevated undercarriage is a treadmill with an athlete dressed in red, white and blue and running in place, his action seeming to power the tank treads that roll with an ear-splitting clatter.
The contraption — conceived by the artist couple Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla — constitutes an unsubtle critique of American values.
The theme continues inside the Jeffersonian-style pavilion where a scale model of the “Freedom” sculpture from the Capitol dome lies in a sun-tanning bed, an ATM rigged with a pipe organ plays heavenly chords when visitors withdraw euros, and gymnasts perform muscular routines on painted-wooden replicas of business-class airline seats.
Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which commissioned the works, told me the exhibit is “an unabashed celebration of American commercial power around the world . . . richly dipped in irony.”
“Gloria,” as the conceptual installation is titled, may take issue with America’s devotion to militarism and mammon, but it also betokens our government’s respect for the First Amendment. How else to explain the State Department’s approval of an exhibit that satirizes ugly Americanism? (The selection was recommended by art professionals convened by the National Endowment for the Arts.) And if the overturned tank is “festivalism” writ large, it’s not alone at this year’s biennale.
Mike Nelson transformed the neoclassical British pavilion into a walk-through Istanbul caravansary with alleys and attic spaces strewn with tables, stoves and broken loom components. The dimly lit warren opens onto an internal courtyard for which he removed the pavilion’s roof. The down-the-rabbit-hole effect is transporting, and one can read into it something or other about the mutability of national identity, but the primary effect is astonishment at all the carpentry that went into its construction.
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