Venice Biennale: In every pavilion, a parallel universe - Telegraph
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There are always new artists to discover at the Venice Biennale, but usually you find them in the group show at the Arsenale or in some godforsaken palazzo way off the beaten track. This year, the work that impressed me most was shown in the national pavilions of Great Britain, Germany and Japan – in each of which the artist created a world-within-a-world, immersing visitors in a parallel universe and sweeping them up in the intensity of the artist’s imaginative vision. Last week, the artists who showed in those pavilions were almost unknown outside their own countries; by the time the awards were announced on Saturday word of mouth had made three of them famous. Germany won the Golden Lion, but for my money all three were worthy of the big award.
Mike Nelson’s show – which I reviewed last week – transformed the delightful interior of the British Pavilion into a place where nothing good could ever happen. Using architectural fragments and found objects he salvaged from skips and junkyards in Istanbul and Venice, he rebuilt the interior, turning it into a place of dispossession and dangerous alienation. Harsh neon lighting, dirty mattresses and filthy blankets, rags covering television sets that are never turned off; empty petrol tins, broken furniture and rusty tools scattered on wooden tables: everywhere you looked, there was dirt and despair.
When the artist, filmmaker and theatre director Christoph Schlingensief created the installation being shown in the German pavilion in 2008, he already knew he was dying from lung cancer. A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within is a life-size replica of the Catholic church where he been an altar boy during his childhood. In effect, what we see is a theatre set against which Schlingensief stages a “performance” of his life and approaching death.
We sit in pews facing the altar watching excerpts from home movies showing the artist in childhood juxtaposed with X-rays of the lungs that would kill him. A monstrance, where in a real church, the eucharist would be displayed, contains a photo of a cancer cell. Films projected on both side walls of the “church” chronicle a journey from innocence to experience and from health to physical deterioration.
After snatches of Wagner and the Ave Maria, we hear the artist speaking of his terror of death, before breaking down in tears. Some may find this operatic theatricality excessive. It moved me as few works of art ever have.
Whatever his belief (or lack of it) as an adult, Schlingensief is looking back on his life and facing his death in the only way he knows how – by filtering both through a religious imagination he internalised as a child. The piece acknowledges the complexity of faith as both alienating and oppressive but also a gift that he connects with art and music and his visionary work in education and public health in Africa.
Many colleagues told me that their favourite pavilion was Japan’s, where the young artist Tabaimo showed hand-drawn animations on mirrored walls in a small enclosed space. Drawing on an aesthetic somewhere between Hokusai and Walt Disney, she was like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, waving a magic wand to fill the gallery with breaking waves and blooming flowers as infinite space opened up beneath our feet or over our heads.
If that sounds confusing, it was. Because it was impossible for the mind to understand what the eye was seeing, I found myself fixed to one spot, unable to determine except through touch where the real walls and floor stopped and the animated and mirrored ones began. Lord knows what it all meant – but who cares, it was great.
The rest of the biennale wasn’t bad, either. Turning the interior of the French Pavilion into a sort of clanking conveyer belt made out of scaffolding, Christian Boltanski processed pictures of newborn infants through a projector in such a way that a part of each baby’s face appeared for a few split seconds on a far wall juxtaposed with the eyes, nose or mouth of an adult. His point was simple but profound: that the genes we are born with by sheer chance determine not only our appearance and intelligence, but everything else about our lives, including our capacity for happiness.
After seeing it, I sat in a café watching biennale-goers pass by. What struck me was how unaware we all are that beauty, brains, prosperity and good fortune are not of our own doing. The gift or curse that God or nature bestows at random is lifetime membership of or exclusion from the lucky sperm club.
At the pavilion of the United States, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Track and Field consisted of an overturned Centurion MK3 tank on which an athlete dressed in red, white and blue was jogging on a running machine attached to the tank’s massive caterpillar tracks, making them move and creating a din you could hear all over the public gardens. Inside the pavilion, Olympic gymnasts performed specially commissioned routines on scale model replicas of business class airline seats, contrasting the vibrancy and beauty of the human body in movement with the immobility and inertia of corporate and military thinking.
Also terrific was the Israeli Pavilion, with its film of three young man men armed with knives playing a game in which each drew a line in the sand which was instantly erased and then redrawn by each of the others in turn – a neat summing up of that hopeless, chronic and unsolvable political situation. Poland showed a film by an Israeli artist which called for the three million Polish Jews who were exterminated with the enthusiastic co-operation of their fellow countrymen in the Holocaust to be replaced with a new wave of Jewish settlers. I found its language and its ideas dodgy in the extreme.
By tradition the group show in the former Italian Pavilion is curated by the director of the visual arts section. This year it was a mistake to open the show with three of Tintoretto’s most cherished paintings, including the sublime Stealing of the Body of St Mark from the Academia. There are certainly contemporary artists who can bear comparison with the greatest Old Masters, but none of them turned up in the show that followed – a point I thought rather neatly made by the Italian Maurizio Cattelan who placed flocks of highly realistic stuffed pigeons in the rafters and piles of fake pigeon poo on the floors as a comment on the proceedings.
At the group show in the former rope factory, or Cordiere, at the Arsenale, the stand-out exhibit was Christian Marclay’s The Clock – the 24- hour time piece in which every minute of every hour is either seen or mentioned in a film clip or clips that flash on the screen for that minute, which was better than ever when watched from a comfortable couch.
I arrived at 11.45am and so spent 15 of the happiest minutes of the whole biennale waiting to see which film would appear when the clock struck noon – and sure enough, there he was, Gary Cooper doing what a man has to do as the little hand moved to High Noon. Marclay was presented with the Golden Lion for the best artist in the exhibition.
Also outstanding was Nick Relph’s technically complex three-channel film about the art of Ellsworth Kelly, in which he used collage, colour filters and drawings to do on film what Kelly did with paper, scissors and paint. I’m a big fan of Nurse Jackie and so grabbed the chance to watch the second instalment of Nathaniel Mellors’s Ourhouse, a hilarious parody of a television soap opera about a dysfunctional (but arty) family.
In the Scottish Pavilion (outside the official exhibition spaces), Karla Black staged an ambitious show of work made of paper and string and stuck together with glue and Sellotape. Black, who has been nominated for the Turner Prize this year, tries to paint on air and sculpt with materials that look as if they could float away at any minute.
The jury gave a Silver Lion for the most promising young artist to the British sculptor Haroon Mirza, who showed a menacing black triangular box in which the viewer stood to watch a circle of white LED lights illuminate for a moment, then click off, leaving us with an after image of white loops dancing before our eyes.
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Venice Biennale: In every pavilion, a parallel universe - Telegraph
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