Seven Days in the Art World (25 page)

Not entirely comfortable with the high profile bestowed on the “author” of the Biennale, Storr told me he thought that the curator’s status was generally overinflated. “If you do it well and do it right, being a curator is an honorable and necessary profession,” he explained. “But I think the curator as star, entrepreneur, or impresario is not a good thing for anybody.” He paused, then added, “My job is to keep people focused on the work of the hundred and one artists that are in my show.” However, he wasn’t overly optimistic. “I figure I’m due for a good bruising. It has to do with objective factors that determine how the art world works, and one of them is the need people periodically feel to bring others down a peg or ten.”

The directorship of the Venice Biennale is a particularly poisoned chalice. It’s the top job on offer to curators who haven’t abandoned the hands-on organization of shows by becoming museum directors, and the chosen one is often criticized brutally before, during, and after the opening of the Biennale. Curators often wax lyrical about collaboration, but although they cooperate on shows and curate together, they aren’t any less competitive than, say, collectors bidding against each other in an auction room. In fact, some curatorial alliances can appear to be very aggressive cabals.

For Storr, the best thing about curating the Biennale was doing the research. “I traveled a lot. I saw a lot of places and a lot of art that I would never have seen otherwise, and for that I’m really grateful. Professionally, I am beholden to the Biennale because I will make shows out of what I’ve seen for some time to come.” His conclusion after visiting five continents: “The dire predictions of global homogenization are just not true. There’s a lot of shared information, but people do wildly different things with it.”

Later that
evening of VIP Wednesday, Sir Nicholas Serota and the Tate International Council held a cocktail party at the Palazzo Grassi, which was featuring an independent show of more than eighty works from the collection of François Pinault. The owner of Christie’s had bought and renovated the three-story palace—the last to be built before the fall of the Venetian Republic—so that its ornate painted ceilings, grand balustrades, and swirling pink-and-beige marble peeked out from behind twenty-foot-high white chipboard walls. The press release said that the white partitions engaged in an “understated, respectful dialogue with the building while establishing ideal conditions for displaying art.” The press pack also contained a separate slip that said, “Takashi Murakami was commissioned to make a special monumental painting cycle entitled
727-272 Plus
…The presentation of this work will take place at a later date.”

Serota arrived by boat ten minutes after the appointed time, some twenty minutes late by the Swiss Railway watch that he sets ten minutes fast. He disappeared into the building to see the exhibition, then reappeared downstairs in the atrium, where champagne and canapés were being served. “We have a lot of supporters from around the world, many of whom come to Venice,” he told me. “It was very kind of François Pinault to let us have the space. He has been very supportive of the Tate.”

What do you look for when you come to the Biennale? I asked. “A few unexpected discoveries in the national pavilions, together with an intelligent view on the part of the Biennale director,” said the Tate director. “Rob Storr was given almost three years to research his Biennale, so he has had the opportunity to set out, not just a piece of reportage, but a distinct point of view about what is significant about contemporary art now. There have been times when the Biennale has been undigested news—this is what struck me last week in Johannesburg or wherever.” Serota stood with one hand on his hip, the other poised on his chin, and added, “I do wonder whether a single person can any longer curate a show meant to be globally inclusive.”

The cocktail party was filling up. Over Serota’s shoulder, I noticed a gathering of Turner Prize alumni. Tomma Abts and Mark Titchner were talking to a curator from Tate Britain. Across its four locations, the Tate employs a total of sixty-five curators. “Good curators attend very closely to artists and their concerns but are not bound by them,” said Serota. “Good curators do not simply show the artists they like the most. They have an obligation to try to uncover the nerve endings of contemporary art. That means attending to where artists are looking, what they’re making, even if you’re not personally so engaged with it.”

I asked Serota if he had ever wanted to curate a biennial. “There was a moment in the late 1980s when I thought I might like to do Documenta. If I’d not come to the Tate and been hanging around looking as though I needed proper employment…but that moment has passed,” he said, as he expertly and almost imperceptibly surveyed the crowd. “I’m not sure anybody would be very interested in my view now. To some extent my view has a venue.” Serota noticed someone he needed to greet and by way of conclusion said, “At the end of the day, the Biennale shouldn’t be taken too seriously as a barometer of what’s important.”

Standing next to me was a well-fed six-foot-three Mexican curator named Cuauhtémoc Medina. An associate curator who works on the Latin American collection at Tate Modern and a scholar at the Aesthetic Research Institute of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, he’d been deep in conversation with an older man with an unusual gray bob and a cane, who turned out to be the radical Argentinean artist León Ferrari, whose sculpture of Christ crucified on a U.S. Air Force plane was commanding respectful attention in the Arsenale.

Medina had been commissioned to write a review of the Biennale for the prestigious Mexican newspaper
Reforma
. He hadn’t seen many pavilions yet, but he already had strong views about Storr’s international show. With a few important exceptions, such as the rooms that housed works by Ferrari, Francis Alÿs, Marine Hugonier, and Mario Garcia Torres, he was disappointed by its conservatism. “It is two things a biennial should never be—correct and boring,” Medina declared. “It’s a museum installation in which museum artists have been given the best spaces. It doesn’t challenge the canon. It fails to develop an argument about contemporary art. Storr’s taste still seems tied to MoMA.”

According to Medina, the distinctions between museums and biennials were blurring for the worse. “A biennial is supposed to move things forward. It’s supposed to bring some instability into the system, not replicate the consensus. It’s supposed to be adventurous, not risk-adverse.” Medina invoked the memory of the late Harald Szeemann, the globe-trotting curator who initiated the first exhibition of young artists in the Arsenale in 1980. Szeemann, who famously declared that “globalization is the great enemy of art,” died in 2005 at the age of seventy-one. Specializing in large-scale exhibitions full of freshly executed site-specific work, Szeemann is generally considered the first freelance curator to become an art star. “Venice has been a major force of inclusion,” explained Medina. “That is why Szeemann called the exhibition in the Arsenale the Aperto.
Aperto
means ‘open.’ Storr’s show closes rather than opens the field.”

While Medina spoke, I noticed that his hair was damp and his sneakers were sodden. “I was in a tall service boat being used by a chap employed by the Mexican pavilion,” he explained sheepishly. “He couldn’t drive under an inland bridge, so he pulled up close to the edge and asked me to jump off.” Medina, who is not light on his feet, missed his target and fell into the canal. “It was a little bit disgusting. I had to swim about eighty meters to access the steps. Venetian water has a reputation for being toxic sludge. People imagine that they might die instantly from infection. I swallowed a bit. It was salty. Nothing special.”

Medina told me that he has a history of falling. One of his stumbles, done in front of the Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs during a stroll through Hyde Park, inspired a series of paintings, dozens of drawings, and various video works, including a minute-long animation entitled
The Last Clown
. Alÿs’s film depicts a man in a suit walking until he catches his leg in the tail of a dog and falls. Backed by a soundtrack of lighthearted jazz and punctuated with canned laughter, the Alÿs work is usually interpreted as a comment on the general public’s view of artists as jesters or absurd characters. So it’s revealing to note that the model for the work was in fact a curator.

Sometime after
8
P.M
. I left the reception, got on the Number 1
vaporetto
at the stop outside the Palazzo Grassi, and immediately encountered an assortment of
Artforum
people, including Tim Griffin and Charles Guarino. Griffin suggested that the Biennale and
Artforum
face the similar task of resisting “the cult of the latest,” while Guarino informed me: “In Venice, a good curator is the one who survives. The Biennale is a paradigm of Italy—disorganized, incomplete, rife with rumors of high jinks. Italian directors seem to have an easier time, since they’re in familiar territory. Germano Celant can put a Biennale together like a mechanic who owns his own Fiat. But sometimes you get a curator without a manual or a clue.” As the boat lumbered to its next stop, Guarino continued, “Either way, you can be sure that the international show subscribes to some vague curatorial thesis that’s impossible to confirm or deny and includes more artists than anyone can possibly appreciate.” Guarino hadn’t missed a Biennale in twenty-six years. What do you look for when you’re here? I asked. “Everybody has an agenda to brag about,” he replied. “Usually, if I’m looking for anything, it’s the people I’ve invited to dinner.”

The word
vaporetto
means “steamer,” but this boat ride was perfumed with wafts of diesel. We slowly zigzagged across the canal, passing the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, an odd, ground-floor-only half-palazzo with a spectacular roof terrace, and then the Hotel Gritti Palace, whose water-level
terrazza ristorante
is lined with copious red geraniums. As I was getting off the Number 1 at the San Zaccaria stop, I saw Nicholas Logsdail waiting for the Number 82. He and his Lisson Gallery staff were on their way to Harry’s Dolci for an al-fresco dinner, and he invited me to join them. “At every Biennale,” he explained, “there is a realignment of the clans.” With regard to the organization of the art, Logsdail quipped, “Museums are kinds of zoos, whereas biennials are more like being on safari. You drive for a whole day and see dozens of elephants when what you’re really looking for is a lion.”

Not far from where we stood was the gothic Palazzo Ducale, home of the doge and the seat of the Venetian government until its Napoleonic defeat but now one of the most visited tourist sites in Venice. Inside it, and remarkably off the beaten track for the Biennale crowd, were works by Venetian artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese and the sinister Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

Why are we so interested in the new? I asked Logsdail.

“It is very possibly a great commercial conspiracy,” he said wryly. “The nowness of now, which is quite obsessive, is actually a reflection of the consumerism that you see in the whole culture.” The gallerist was in a buoyant mood. “It can be a lot of fun if it is to your taste.”

Over the years Logsdail’s Lisson Gallery has had many artists exhibit in the Biennale. “If you put all your energy into something, amid all the confusion, you have a fifty percent chance of making a big splash,” he explained. “And if you don’t make a big splash, there isn’t even a ripple.”

Back at
the Cipriani, a British collecting couple are having a dip. He floats; she performs a regal head-up breaststroke. She tells me, in the nicest way, that she finds it irritating when “sporty” Americans insist on pounding up and down the pool. I tell her that I’m Canadian and she quickly commends this year’s Canadian pavilion as “the best since 2001.” At the Biennale, everyone is vividly aware of national identities. According to Philip Rylands, the long-standing director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (which often acts as an ad hoc American consulate in Venice), “Nationalism is one of the things that gives the Biennale tension and longevity. Without the national pavilions and the dozens of countries that apply for participation, the Biennale would surely have floundered in the way that public things can do in Italy. It would have become a triennial or a quintennial or died out altogether.”

Thursday started out drizzly. At 10
A.M
. the Biennale staff guarding the gates of the Giardini admitted those with press passes. No stampede, just a steady flow of cotton and linen in comfortable shoes. The Giardini offers a Disneyesque anthology of architectural styles. The folkloric Hungarian pavilion sits across from the geometric Dutch structure. The airy glass volume constructed by the Scandinavians looks blankly at the mini-Kremlin that houses the Russian contribution. I strode up the gentle incline to a small plateau where a triumvirate of West European powers meet in a face-off: the French pavilion (a mini-Versailles), the U.K. pavilion (originally built as a tearoom), and the German pavilion, a Nazi wonder, renovated by Ernst Haiger in the official Fascist style. On this occasion, the structure had been cloaked in orange-netted scaffolding in a symbolic rejection of its architectural identity by artist Isa Genzken.

The geopolitical axes of the Giardini are very 1948. Two thirds of the pavilions are held by European countries; they tend to have the larger structures in the prime locations. Five are owned by North and South American nations (the United States, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, and Uruguay). Two are claimed by the Far East (Japan and South Korea). Then there’s Australia, in a location that might well be described as “down under” Israel, in a tight spot next to the American pavilion; and Egypt, the only African and only Islamic nation, which is at the very back of the Giardini, in an area often missed by those who make insufficient use of their map.
*

Beckoned by my adopted homeland, I marched up the steps of the neo-Palladian villa labeled
GRAN BRETAGNA
. The six-room exhibition space was full of new paintings, drawings, wooden stick sculptures, and neon poems by Tracey Emin as well as some previously unexhibited watercolors from a 1990 series about her abortion. The show included a smattering of her signature spread-legged self-portraits. The artist was holding court in a wide-leg white trouser suit and black bra. “Feminism happened thirty years ago,” she said to a Swiss TV crew. “Thanks to the Guerrilla Girls, I can stand here in Yves St. Laurent and Alexander McQueen with my tits hanging out.” About representing the U.K., Emin said it was “nationalism on a sweet, lovely level.” Contrary to stereotypical British pride about “keeping oneself to oneself,” Emin acknowledged, “my problem is that I can’t keep a secret.”