Global Modernism.

52ND VENICE BIENNALE

VENICE

JUNE 10-NOVEMBER 21, 2007

The Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia) is a complex affair. For the first time in its long history, an American, Robert Storr, is the director. Storr, an independent curator, artist, writer, and Dean of Yale University, also curated two significant exhibitions of the Biennale. One takes place in the Arsenale, a former boat building facility, and the other in the Italian Pavilion, part of the Garden District (Giardini) of Venice. The Giardini is filled with various national pavilions that are independently curated. In addition, there are off-site installations in palazzos, galleries, and alternative spaces all over the winding paths and canals of Venice.

My focus concerns Storr's Biennale in terms of Global Modernism--by which I mean the contemporary art scene in light of countries beyond the nineteenth-century hotbeds of the Industrial Revolution: England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. What does a Biennale look like that includes work by artists originally from, for example, China, Colombia, Ghana, and Japan? And, in turn, can anything be noted about the impact or role of less economically powerful countries in relation to the bigger muscled states or States?

Not to toe a die-hard Marxian line, but the sheer magnitude of the spaces, the frightening quantity of money needed to mount the exhibitions, the necessary economic underpinning for any artist included, and the massive pilgrimage of dealers, collectors, curators, and critics for the first few days of the event reinforce the overwhelming commodity aspect of the entire enterprise. It is a cultural phenomenon, and it is big business even if the curator is officially in the nonprofit sector and aims to keep our sights on loftier concerns.

The word "globalization" is associated with international conglomerations. An artist included in the Biennale automatically becomes part of international art commerce. The commodity status of his or her work goes up. I do not mention this in a disparaging way, and it is not my intention to reduce any work to a mere commodity, but a raw reality of the Biennale, as elsewhere, may be that meaning is inseparable from the consumer vortex aspect of contemporary culture.

What distinguishes work by individuals from countries beyond Western Europe and the U.S.? In some cases, absolutely nothing. One extensive video installation included ten simultaneous projections of individuals, often tightly cropped, saying, "I will die." Five screens were on one wall separated from the other six by a room that showed less compelling photographs of cemeteries. In the videos, the younger the subject, the more gleeful the statement. The artist Yang Zhenzhong is Chinese yet the cultural lines in the work are seamless; there is no indicator of one particular national affiliation or identity. We are citizens of the world. We will all die.

On the other hand, some works seemed more particular to the cultures from which they emerged. For example, materials were sometimes gleaned from the consumer products of a specific place. In Ghanian El Anatsui's Dusasa I (2007) and II (2007), the two massive--two stories high, wide as a small city block--shrouds are made of wired bottle caps and wrappings. In the current environment, where fortunes are made in a dematerialized world, in cyberspace, or with high-end financial leveraging, labor and materiality are oddly anachronistic, even romantic, in the manner of a decaying building. The beauty, dare I use the word, is in the odd longing for the values no longer celebrated. The two giant, intricate, decorative curtains, akin to grand Renaissance tapestries, are gently draped, allowing the recycled consumer products (mere metallic wrappers and bottle collars) to reflect the spotlights. Anatsui uses the detritus of modern societies. There is a morality here as well as an aesthetic.

Colombian artist Oscar Munoz drew faces in water on cement and filmed the gray-on-gray drawing as well as the water evaporating. The image of the faces being created and disappearing were projected simultaneously so one face emerges as another fades away. In a Janus-like interpretation, the piece looks to the myth surrounding the origin of art itself and equally, as noted by Michael Kimmelman, brings to mind the mysterious disappearances that occurred under some South American dictatorships. A "the end is near" theme also showed up in Italian artist Paolo Canevari's film Bouncing Skull (2007), which shows a boy in front of a bombed out building kicking a ball in the shape of a skull--or is it a skull? The overall effect is doom and "gloomish."

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Japanese artist Hiroharu Mori added a note of levity. In the center of the Arsenale hallway, he suspended a large helium balloon sporting a question mark. In the gallery nook next to it was a video of the balloon in a park environment, and there was also a bin of small question mark balloons for the taking in the spirit of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who happened to represent the United States at the Biennale this year.

A bit further down the very long Arsenale from Mori's work is a Dionysian installation of neon lights, Mexican tourist items, and a banged-up mattress, among other things. This piece by the late U.S. artist Jason Rhoades struck me the hardest in light of my questions about Global Modernism. The reason the project had such an impact was somewhat personal. The week before leaving for the Venice Biennale, I had been in San Miguel, Mexico, where I had just seen many of Rhoades's "props"--for example, margarita glasses or mugs in the shape of female body parts--in the shops of the dusty, colorful mountain town. In addition, I had noticed the raw, struggling element of the Mexican city that supported extensive American tourism. And here in Venice, I was seeing aspects of the tourist economy of Mexico, co-opted by an American artist and alchemically inserted into another seriously high-end, tourist economy. It was the only piece in the Arsenale that was not allowed to be photographed. "Copyrighted," a guard said to me as I was reprimanded for using my camera. The co-opting had to stop somewhere. At the most unexpected, chaotic moment, one economy appeared to be consumed wholesale by another.

This led to a more complete picture of Global Modernism. Sometimes in an international art scene nationality is irrelevant. At other intervals, a more personal narrative may be detected, something particular to a given circumscribed culture. And then, despite playfulness and open borders, a piece strikes an unexpected note of imperialism.

LUCY BOWDITCH is associate professor of art history at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.