Seven Days in the Art World (26 page)

Stationed in almost every national pavilion are the dealers who represent the exhibiting artist. With some countries, selling is not officially supposed to happen. With others, the government body that owns the pavilion is supposed to receive a percentage of sales. Having found that dealers subvert the system by claiming that the art was sold after the Biennale closed, a third arrangement seems to have become most common. The dealers underwrite the fabrication, shipping, and celebratory party; in return, they can sell as freely as they would out of their own gallery space. Nonetheless, it’s not something anyone likes to discuss openly with the press.

Tim Marlow, one of the directors of Emin’s London gallery, White Cube, was hanging around in the front room of her pavilion, looking like he’d just walked off a page of
GQ
. Avoiding what would no doubt be an unpopular question about sales, I asked him, What is British about British art? “The dominant cultural paradigm is pluralism,” he responded smoothly. “British art is amazingly diverse, but I guess British artists often deal with the dominance of the literary in our culture. Tracey is a wonderful storyteller. In her own words, she is a ‘raving expressionist.’” He paused. “I suppose there is also a wry humor in a lot of British art—Damien, Tracey, Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos [aka the Chapman brothers]. It contrasts with the dry quality of a lot of German and American conceptual art.”

When asked how Emin came to be chosen to represent the U.K., Marlow pointed to Andrea Rose, a woman with short brown hair wearing a more businesslike white suit than Emin’s on the other side of the room. As the head of visual arts at the British Council, Andrea Rose has the job of promoting British art around the world. “I hate to employ the word
using,
but our job is to use art to serve Britain’s foreign policy objectives overseas,” she told me. “At the moment our priorities are China, Russia, the Islamic world, Africa. Western Europe comes very low down on the list, North America not at all. We’re not pushing a political line, other than to say that the freedom to engage in debate is a very important freedom.” The British Council is an organization of more than seven thousand employees working in over a hundred countries worldwide. Although visual arts are a small part of the organization, Rose is nevertheless in a position to say, “You name me a biennial—Istanbul, São Paulo, Shanghai, Moscow—and we are probably there.” According to Rose, these biennials offer an opportunity for people away from the hubs of the art world to see what others see: “They plug people into the great international dialogue and connect people to ideas that are current elsewhere.”

Venice, however, is the only place in the world where the British Council and most other governments’ cultural departments have their own building. About nine months before every Biennale, Rose convenes a committee of eight experts with a particular interest in contemporary art to choose an artist to represent the U.K. “Venice is a form of circus, and you’ve got to be able to choose the right person to perform at any particular time,” she explained. “The Biennale is a very temporal thing. It doesn’t suit all artists. You put a finger in the air and choose the best artist for Venice, which is not necessarily the best artist in Britain but hopefully someone who reflects what is going on in Britain. The conflict in Venice is, do you choose somebody to make history or do you confirm history?”

Different countries have different bureaucratic mechanisms by which they award the pavilion to an artist. The Germans, rather like the British, have a national agency for culture, the Goethe Institute, which presides over the pavilion. The Guggenheim owns the American pavilion, but it does not determine its contents. The Department of State invites proposals and the National Endowment for the Arts convenes a selection panel. Occasionally a country that doesn’t have the interest or finances to promote contemporary art refuses an invitation from the Biennale to host a pavilion. In 2005, for instance, a private dealer underwrote a semiofficial Indian pavilion, but this year, as in previous years, India has no pavilion at all. This year, “members of the Lebanese community” funded the first-ever Lebanese pavilion, an exhibition of five artists living in Beirut, which enjoyed the official but not the financial support of the Lebanese government.

I left the British pavilion with its giveaway goods—a tote bag, a catalogue, some temporary tattoos, and a white hat embroidered in pink with the words
ALWAYS WANTING YOU
…
LOVE TRACE X
—and headed over to the American pavilion, which looks like a little state capitol building. Nancy Spector, the pavilion’s curator, was standing in the lobby, basking in the warm glow of a luminous sculpture called
“Untitled” (America)
by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Cuban-born Gonzalez-Torres died of complications due to AIDS in 1996. Some people were lamenting the fact that the pavilion show had taken so long to come; others complained that the pavilion should celebrate the work of a living artist. One irate curator even exclaimed, “Maybe next time the U.S. will decide to show Whistler!” The consensus seemed to be that the timing was wrong; the pavilion was beautiful but funereal.

Certainly the reception was not as overwhelmingly upbeat as that accorded to Ed Ruscha’s 2005 pavilion, in which five black-and-white paintings from his 1992 Blue Collar series were hung with five new color canvases depicting the same Los Angeles locations. On show shortly after the invasion of Iraq and entitled “Course of Empire,” the exhibition had a freshness and a sense of history that satisfied many people’s expectations. Ruscha had the benefit of having shown in the pavilion once before; he had made hundreds of chocolate-on-paper silkscreens and then hung them on four walls to create a strong-smelling installation called
Chocolate Room
as part of a group show in 1970. When the artist was awarded the pavilion for a solo show in 2005, he had a vivid sense of the connotations and dynamics of the space. He also had an intelligent rapport with curators Linda Norden and Donna De Salvo, who had applied for the pavilion on his behalf. “I’m terrible at hanging works,” Ruscha told me in his midwestern drawl. “I might walk in and take the one painting that I consider to be the best and put it on the quickest, easiest wall. Among other things, those smart ladies helped me out by hanging those works right.” Ruscha didn’t pretend to understand the process that singled him out to represent the United States that year. “It involves some politics,” he said. “It certainly entails factors that are beyond the talent of the artists that they’re considering. Functionaries from the federal government turned up at the receptions. Nice guys, but kinda gray suits, you know.”

Upon exiting from the American pavilion, I receive a warm greeting from Paul Schimmel. The curator was taking a short European break from working on his Murakami retrospective. About the American pavilion’s awarding process, he sighed and said, “My MOCA colleague Ann Goldstein put forth Felix Gonzalez-Torres with his cooperation in 1995. I put in Chris Burden that year. Then I applied for Charley Ray and Jeff Koons. When it comes down to it, it’s not a question of (a) the quality of artist or (b) the ability to pull it off. It’s ultimately about the perception of how the show will fit into the greater theme and who is politically useful at the moment. With these kinds of competitions, I’m always a bridesmaid.”

The drizzle turned into a downpour and we dispersed. I scurried to a café and stood in a soggy line for a
panino
, my white trousers splattered with mud. When the rain subsided, I realized that I’d missed the Canadian pavilion, which is tucked behind the British pavilion “like a gardener’s shack or outhouse to the mother country,” as one curator put it. Built in 1954, the pavilion is a delicate wigwamlike space with slanting walls that often defeat the artists who exhibit there. I entered the building with low expectations and was completely taken aback by the strange, mirror-clad installation created by artist David Altmejd. The thirty-two-year-old Québécois had mastered the space by creating a total environment that was half northern woodland, half glittering boutique. I lost my bearings in a positive sense until I encountered Andrea Rosen, Altmejd’s New York dealer, then Stuart Shave, his London dealer, then Dakis Jouannou, the Greek supercollector, who was evidently trying to acquire the work.
*
I looped back, to recapture the experience of being
in
something rather than looking
at
something, taking refuge in a mirrored closet with ledges upon which sat taxidermied birds and phallic fungi.

On the way out I met Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, who was ticking the Canadian pavilion off her map of the Giardini. With long blond hair and a bright smile, Blazwick challenges the easy assumption that curators are the dowdiest players in the art world. What did you think? I asked her. “Extraordinary!” she said intensely. “Altmejd transformed the pavilion into a
wunderkammer
, a cabinet of curiosities.” Blazwick tucked her map in her bag and continued: “I love stepping out of the everyday into the space of art. I love to be immersed in an idea or an aesthetic or something phenomenological. Frankly, I get enough of everyday life.”

Many see the pavilions as anachronistic; they posit quaint ideas of nationhood that are collapsing under the weight of globalization. While Blazwick admits that the notion of national schools or styles is meaningless, she adores the pavilions because they have the potential to be “utopian propositions.” The pavilions stand alone. “They have no function,” she explained, “which means artists are free to create something that has autonomy.” Blazwick nodded at acquaintances as they traipsed into the pavilion. “Shows that should be called ‘Here’s my latest year of work’ are often disappointing,” she continued. “But when artists take on the pavilion and make a propositional statement, when they use its dynamics, architecture, and history, then you can get something really interesting.”

Blazwick tendered a list of legendary pavilions. In 1993, Hans Haacke chopped up the floor of the German pavilion. “It was the first time an artist took on the whole pavilion as an ideological, symbolic structure,” she explained. In 2001 in the Belgian pavilion, Luc Tuymans premiered a series of acclaimed paintings about the Congo to make a statement about colonial history. In 2003, Chris Ofili transformed his U.K. pavilion into “an oasis of Africanness, a lost paradise of his imagination.” In 2005, Annette Messager covered up
FRANCIA
, the Italian word for France that is inscribed on the front of the French pavilion, with a sign saying
CASINO
, recasting the nation as a lawless territory of risk and pleasure. “These pavilions were unforgettable because they were immersive,” concluded Blazwick. “They weren’t windows on the world. They were worlds in their own right.”

Seduced by Blazwick’s enthusiasm, I wondered how, as a professional, she managed to give the art her full attention. “Venice is a big party, and the preview is a networking experience,” she confessed. “You skim across the art and you really run, but you prepare. You get a lot of prenotice in the form of press releases. I take notes about things I want to follow up on later.” Still, the volume of art means that one will probably fail to pay attention to something that could have changed one’s life. “I walked into the Hungarian pavilion and walked straight out again,” admitted Blazwick. “I thought, ‘Six black boxes. I can’t be bothered. I haven’t got the time.’” Thankfully, she returned to the pavilion, by thirty-year-old Andreas Fogarasi, and discovered that each black box contained a video that was “a very quiet, complex, poetic, and funny meditation on the failure of utopia.”

Having had my fill of representations from relatively stable democratic countries, I left the Giardini. Just outside the gates and beyond the kiosk selling postcards and carnival masks, a white-faced mime stood on a box and adopted a series of saintly poses associated with Baroque sculptures. Next to him, a local was selling T-shirts emblazoned with the faces of different artist stars, like Paul McCarthy and Richard Prince. I managed to jump into a water taxi that had just dropped others off and sped across the lagoon toward the Ukrainian pavilion. Although the art world seemed to have overtaken Venice, some regular sightseers were still to be found. As we drove up the Grand Canal, we whizzed past a flotilla of five gondolas full of Japanese tourists with parasols and cameras. Their gondoliers, wearing traditional black-and-white-striped shirts, were talking animatedly among themselves as they absentmindedly poled their boats forward. No one here for the Biennale has time for such leisurely rides.

The Ukrainian pavilion, whose exhibition was titled “a poem about an inland sea,” was housed in the rotting grandeur of the Palazzo Papadopoli and privately funded by the art world newcomer and billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Its curator, Peter Doroshenko (American-born of Ukrainian descent), faced with the problem of drawing attention to the artists of a country better known for exporting vodka, steel, and fashion models, decided on a mix of four Ukrainian and four relatively well-known Western artists, including British-born and-based Mark Titchner. I tried for a glimpse of the works but was thwarted by officious guards, who ushered me in the canal-side front entrance only to escort me out the back door, as the pavilion was closing. I found Titchner in the grassy garden out back, standing under one of his works, a billboard that shouted,
WE ARE UKRAINIANS
,
WHAT ELSE MATTERS
? He had been fielding questions from the press for seven hours and all he could muster was “I’m all talked out.” Pinchuk, who had been busy ordering a photographer to take pictures of him and his family, dragged Titchner into one of the shots. The artist brandished a smile for the camera, then returned to my side. With a pen poised on my little blue notebook, I looked at him expectantly. He stood, shuffled his feet, shrugged. “The problems of representing another country,” he offered, “are as numerous as representing your own.”