The 2011 Venice Biennale might seem somewhat anachronistic to those who travel to Venice every two years in order to be informed about the newest artists and tendencies of the global arts scene. For this year we were confronted by a number of “retrograde” artworks and theories at the Biennale’s various curated shows and national pavilions alike.
In fact, Bice Curiger, the director of the Biennale, unequivocally relates to the past with the title: the wordplay (ILLUMInazioni – ILLUMInations) is at once a reference to globalisation and the disappearance of frontiers between nations, and an invitation to notice the values of ages past. Curiger’s title implies a close connection with illuminated medieval scriptures, as well as Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry volume Illuminations and Walter Benjamin’s collection of essays edited by Hannah Arendt.
In addition to these theoretical connections, the presence of retrospection is also widely observable in practice at this year’s Biennale: Curiger has made manifest use of 16th century Venetian traditions by incorporating Tintoretto’s paintings among contemporary works (further emphasising her opinion that the roots of the globalisation of art and the establishment of the modern art market are to be sought in 16th century Venice), as well as the leading international artists of the 1970s-80s.
However, the presentation of the works of Goldstein, Cattelan, Polke, Sherman, Turrell and Wool, conceived at different points in time, demonstrates a not quite clear curatorial concept: are we dealing with retrospection or re-canonisation? The mere presentation of the past, or its contemporising? What did Curiger want to call attention to: the value of a specific piece, the entire oeuvre of a given artist, simply their past activity, or only their present work?
Curiger selected Jack Goldstein’s 1978 piece The Jump into the Biennale’s main exhibition. Goldstein was an important member of the 1980s Picture-Generation; however, he has been completely forgotten since then. Exhibiting his more than thirty years old light work in Venice in 2011 is a delightful correspondence with Tintoretto’s art.
The repeated exhibition of two works that have already been on show here, one from Sigmar Polke and one from Maurizo Cattelan, indicates a similarly retrospective attitude. Polke’s mural Polizeischwein painted on the façade of the German Pavilion at the 1986 Biennale is an analogous antecedent of works dealing with the ever so current question of national frontiers, while Cattelan’s installation Turisti (1997) comprising stuffed pigeons can (also) be interpreted as the recurrence of certain questions from the past. The works of Sherman, Turrell and Wool at the exhibition are all from this or last year, so in their case, we can clearly speak of re-canonisation.
Curiger gave special attention to time in her curatorial theme, as well as the closely related corresponding notions of visible-invisible. The chief curator’s retrospection, her endeavour to show and transfer past values into the present, are fully understandable, as hers is the last generation that has not yet been socialised in mass culture, and she is perhaps right to feel that this is the last moment when these questions can still be asked: what represents value today? Do we know and value the past and its accomplishments enough? And all in all: do past works have significance today?
Shifting our attention from the curated show to the works presented at the national pavilions, it soon becomes obvious that this year it was not just Curiger who felt like looking into the past instead of the present/future. To mention only the most conspicuous of the national pavilions that have organized historical shows: the Russian, Brazilian, Romanian, Croatian and Serbian pavilions presented works of highly influential conceptual artists from the seventies – true, occasionally accompanied by some present-day works of the same artists, or complemented by works from the young generation, so a similar hesitation between retrospection and re-canonisation was observable in the national pavilions as well.
The height of the art of Andrei Monastyrski, Artur Barrio, Ion Grigorescu, Tomislav Gotovac and Dragoljub Rasa Todosijevic can be dated around the 1960s-70s in Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Bucharest, Zagreb and Belgrade. One might say they have arrived a little late to the city of lagoons, but we know very well that in the case of Monastyrski, Grigorescu, Gotovac és Todosijevic, there are political reasons for this delay: during socialist times, they could not even exhibit in their own countries, let alone Venice.
In order to make this year’s retrospection-fever in Venice seem less extraordinary, let us have a short recap of certain periods in the 116 years of the Biennale’s history. It will instantly become obvious that this phenomenon is far from unprecedented.
Looking into the past is by no means alien to the approach of the Venice Biennale’s institution. This conservatism is not surprising, as all nations have always endeavoured to present their best and already “made”, internationally renowned artists in their own national pavilions, for the whole world to see. Experimentation and radical innovation were rarely accommodated, and therefore the institution of the Biennale has generally been considered conservative and retrospective by artists, art historians and critics.
In my opinion, there are two forms of retrospection, and they need to be clearly distinguished. The posterior, retrospective, summarizing presentation of an artist, artist group or tendency that was considered very timely in its age, is not to be mixed up with a hidebound attitude, when the works of an artist who was active in an earlier, transcended style are presented as current and valid in a later period. The latter case deserves no special attention, while the first brings up various interesting questions.
Actually, the full truth is that in fact the exhibitions of the Venice Biennale have been alternating only between these two solutions for more than a hundred years – with a few exceptions when a leading artist and/or tendency was indeed presented in its own time. Such was, for instance, the Gustav Klimt show in 1910, which was his first solo exhibition in the history of the Biennale.
With its modernist approach, rejecting the salon-like character of the space and transforming the hall into a real museum-like exhibition space (white cube), this can be considered one of the most revolutionary and most discussed exhibitions in the history of the Biennale. Similar shows that perfectly tapped into the trendsetting tendencies of the given period were the 1920 show of Alexander Archipenko along with Larionov’s and Goncharova’s works at the Russian Pavilion, or the 1922 show of German expressionists at the German Pavilion, featuring Max Beckmann and Otto Dix.
In this context, the 1964 Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the U.S. pavilion is also of special significance, for it also meant the successful and timely break-in of pop art into Europe. Of course, here we need to mention the exhibitions of the Aperto Series, introduced by Harald Szeemann in 1980, which can be considered the first attempt of the Biennale at the introduction of young and so far unknown artists.
My analysis in the following shall be reduced to the exhibitions (national representations) organised in that much debated and criticised system of national pavilions, considered retrograde in its approach. I will compare those two eras in the history of the Biennale when an artist or an artistic tendency could not be presented in its own time at the Giardini on account of various political and/or professional reasons, but posterity made reparation for this failure.
I find two longer periods in the history of the Biennale when this compulsion to make reparations seems to be outlined: the first is in the 1950s, the second is the present day. Observing both periods, a fundamental question arises: are such retrospective shows successful, can they be successful, can they reach their goal among an audience hungry for fresh things, while a plethora of contemporary exhibitions is available at the same time and place?
It is common knowledge that by 1930 the Biennale had become completely single-minded, as the institution had been almost completely taken over by the fascist Italian state, and so it was debased into being the representative event of a totalitarian regime until the end of World War 2. The Venice Biennale found its new voice after 1948, giving rise to a succession of great retrospective shows to compensate for the stagnant years, aiming to fill the gaps in art history and re-establishing continuity.
The first in the series was a large-scale show of impressionists with works by Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Seurat, Sisly and Toulouse-Lautrec, to be followed by big retrospective exhibitions interpreting and analysing one tendency after another. The grand prize winners also speak for themselves: 1948: Georges Braque; 1950: Henri Matisse; 1952: Raoul Dufy; 1954: Max Ernst; 1956: Jacques Villon.
Besides all these retrospective exhibitions, the early fifties brought about an intensified presence of current European informel art and American abstract expressionism in Venice: the art of Mark Tobey, Robert Motherwell, Antoni Trpies, Giacomo Manzu, Ossip Zadkine, Eduardo Chillida and Hans Hartung was presented concurrently with Chagall’s and Mirň’s classical modern paintings. The post-World War II retrospection-fever lasted more than fifteen years, and as Peter J. Schneemann put it, the Venice Biennale finally put an end to this “perpetual repetition of referring back to the pre-war moderns” with the aforementioned Rauschenberg exhibition of 1964. (1)
However, the retrospective shows occupying the entire Biennale between 1948 and 1964, never brought the highly expected professional and public success. Beyond obligatorily filling the gaps, the finally-we-have-presented-the-great-avant-gardes-in-Venice-feeling could not overwrite the disinterest that had set in on account of the delay.
Unfortunately, this year we could witness something similar. The Venice shows of Andrei Monastyrski, Artur Barrio, Ion Grigorescu, Tomislav Gotovac and Dragoljub Rasa Todosijevic have so far elicited almost entirely no reaction (2), although all were undoubtedly exceptional artists in their own time and environment. In fact, Romania – being the first of the post-socialist bloc – already attempted to present seventies avant-garde art in Venice in 1997, and now once again, they have brought Grigorescu, but it is not more of a breakthrough now than it had been then.
Retroactivity apparently does not work in Venice. But what would we expect from it? Connection, interlacing, relation. However, there is immanence between formation, temporal transformation and recollection, “a difference in a constant state of formation”. (3)
Retroactivity is “what makes something visible in a world that is hardly accessible from the level of objects and language, doing it relatively independently from objectual experience and beyond the devices of language, merely by its approach”. (4) The time that passes between creation and presentation can be interpreted as a kind of “passive, unconscious, self-less sphere”, as a “conceptual opposite”, and thus we can only have a “conjecture, a speculative idea” about the period prior to the vacuum. (5)
By way of retroactivity we endeavour to raise the past into the present, thus making a segment of the past a present feeling. We wish to be part of the past and at once insert it into our present. However, there are two ways for retroactivity: reinterpreting the past from a contemporary perspective, or transferring the past as a whole into the present. Works reinterpreting the past from a contemporary perspective and reflecting on certain undiscussed issues of the past with a contemporary attitude had already appeared in Venice before (cf. for instance Andreas Fogarasi’s video installation Kultur und Freizeit at the Hungarian Pavilion in 2007), and now it seems that the time has come for an actual, massive interpretation of the past. So far, however, with much less stir and success.
Therefore, in my opinion, the fundamental question for the Venice Biennale regarding its future is where it will position itself in the line of countless international and truly contemporary events? Will it continue to retrospect, organising historical exhibitions, or will it focus on the actual present? In any case, at this year’s Biennale, the classical art historical approach dominated strongly over contemporary curatorial practice.
Translated by Daniel Sipos
(1) Peter J. Schneemann: Die Biennale von Venedig. Nationale Präsentation und internationaler Anspruch. Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 53 (1996), 313-321.
(2) Eltekintve néhány, kizárólag az említett pavilonokra fókuszáló cikktől (például: Rasa Todosijevic in Conversation with Dietmar Unterkofler. ARTMargins 28 June 2011; Claudia Barbieri: A Russian Guru at Work in Venice. New York Times, 13 June 2011), and an award (this year’s UniCredit Venice Award was granted to Todosijevic).
(3) Tamás Ullmann: A változás tapasztalata [The Experience of Change] Aspecto 1 (2008), 86.
(4) Ullmann 2008, 97.
(5) Ullmann 2008, 87.