Burning Up: Art Sizzles at the Biennale

Everyone thinks that Venice is sinking. But they’re wrong.

It’s on fire.

Picture this: a steamy afternoon in Venice. You’ve already gotten lost twice, you’ve climbed over more smelly bridges than you care to count, and you just want to take a picture of the Basilica of San Marco to show your mother. You stumble into a square filled with squawking pigeons and camera-clad tourists and sigh with relief. But there’s something wrong. San Marco’s on fire.

After a few seconds, it becomes clear that San Marco will not, after all, burn down. The fire is a reflection from a Plessi video installation “WaterFire” on the windows in the Museo Correr. For approximately three minutes, the windows are engulfed in images of flames, and then the flames subside into soothing violet images of the sea. The square becomes peaceful again as the blue hues dance off the gold mosaics of the Basilica, only to be illuminated by the orange flames three minutes later.

“WaterFire” is one of over 75 exhibitions that make up the 49th International Exhibition of Art of the Venice Biennale. The Biennale is a rare event in the art world; an abstract, fabulous idea that has both come to fruition and remained successful for over a hundred years. In 1895, an International Art Exhibition was held in Venice under the auspices of Mayor Riccardo Selvatico. For the first ten years art was exhibited in a single building, while now there are 30-odd pavilions and numerous off-site exhibition spaces. Since the beginning, the Biennale has championed new, up-and-coming artists—Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were introduced to the European Art World at a Biennale in the 1940s—while acknowledging accomplished artists with the coveted Leone d’Oro award for lifetime achievement. While visual art remains the central focus of the exhibition, dance, poetry, music and performance art have steadily been gaining ground in the last decade.

Every other summer, hundreds of the world’s most prestigious artists, selected by a rigorous international jury, descend upon the lagoon to show their work—work that often makes Plessi’s flames seem positively tame. Sumo wrestlers fight amid a candy-colored geometric background in one room, while another man tries to walk on ice wearing spherical shoes and a human nipple is transformed into an evening bag. There are bronze garbage bags and terra-cotta plungers, photographs of rest-room graffiti and gorgeous formal painting. There’s even a flying steamroller.

Unfortunately, the theme of this year’s Biennale does little to tie all of these elements together into a coherent overall exhibition. Admittedly, connecting circus posters with photographs of execution cells is a daunting task, but Director Harald Szeemann’s title “Platea dell’umanita,” (Plateau of Humankind) proves too grandiose to be noble. It remains unclear what, exactly, is the on this plateau: Is it the exalted artists? Is it the ideas of (in)humanity that they express? Or is it the Biennale itself? The implication seems to be that visitors are free to take their pick, or to ignore the theme completely. Which may not be a bad option, as the best the Biennale has to offer often comes in the form of individual spots of genius amid the general clutter.

One such spot could be found in the canvases of Gerhard Richter, a German artist who lives and works in Cologne. Following a classical precedent, Richter was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the Cathedral of Padre Pio in Foggia, Italy. But Richter’s response was anything but classical: instead of presenting the piou with a limpid Christ hanging from a traditional crucifix, he painted a series of diamond-shaped canvases with a dense, rich red paint. Shades of yellow underpainting shine through the red pigments in spots, making his canvasses positively luminous. The Cathedral of Padre Pio rejected Richter’s works as being too abstract, but the Cathedral’s loss is Venice’s gain. When viewed in tandem with Titian’s Assunta—located in the nearby Friary—Richter’s Rhomba appears as the abstract embodiment of a truly divine light.

Nearby in the international pavilion is the work of Keith Tyson, a British artist who set himself the task of “understanding the unintelligible.” Tyson set a metal column in the center of the room, with a small sign explaining that computers rested inside the column. The exclusion of the viewer from the source of understanding—the computers —was supplemented by a series of 52 poster-sized drawings, representing a deck of tarot cards, suggesting the infinite combinations of understanding that are possible with a shuffled deck. Tyson’s engagement with the concept of understanding managed to be both whimsical and thoughtful, a balance that is increasingly hard to find.

Political statements are not rare at the Biennale, but one of the most powerful statements of this years’ Biennale is easily walked past. Do-Ho Suh, a Korean artists who splits his time between Seoul and New York, placed hundred of tiny plastic human figurines underneath a glass floor. Viewers enter his exhibition space and see only white walls and a rusty pipe; it’s often a few minutes before they see the struggling figurines that they are walking over. Such a delayed reaction calls into question the perceptions of passive violence in our society, and the gender-less figurines provided a clever comment on the status of the glass ceiling in the new century.

Other notables in the International Pavilion—which had the best percentage of interesting art per square foot by far—included a room full of 12 huge Cy Twombly paintings (Twombly, along with Richard Serra, won the Leone d’oro this year), Mimmo Rotella’s decollages of circus posters and Lucinda Devlin’s chilling photographs of American execution cells. Less impressive offerings included Paul Graham’s photographs of bathroom graffiti, Nedko Solakov’s repeated painting of walls white and black, repeatedly layering the hues over each other, and Tanja Ostojic’s “reinterpretation” of Malevich’s black square using her pubic hairs.

The most popular single-country pavilions remained the German pavilion, a house reconstructed by Gregor Schneider that caused either great claustrophobia or great praise, and the Canadian pavilion (George Bures Miller and Janet Cardiff), which took science fiction film making to the next level by using all five senses to play with the viewer’s sense of perception. The Polish pavilion (Leon Tarasewicz) won the cheap thrill award, by creating an easy optical illusion with their floor. (Ridges cut into the floor and painted orange on one side and blue on the other caused the floor to miraculously change colors depending on your position.) The Switzerland pavilion showed the work of Urs Luthi, Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang, providing inspirational messages on coffee mugs and mannequins on exercise equipment.

The exhibits at this year’s Biennale are not universially strong, but if you are willing to spend an afternoon among steamrollers and manequins, you just might find a gem. And who knows, maybe it’ll show up at the Whitney in a few years.

La Biennale di Venezia

in Venice, Italy

June 10–November 4, 2001

10am–6pm

Saturdays 10am–8pm

Closed Mondays