Sign O' The Times:
A Stroll Through the 52nd Biennale
in Venice
"Think with the senses, feel with the
mind" is the motto of the 52nd Biennale in Venice, which is presenting
current themes and trends of contemporary art until November. But what
does the motto actually mean? And can new currents and tendencies actually
be discovered in the face of the confusing plethora of international
contributions? Tim Ackermann and Oliver Koerner von Gustorf
had a look around.
Isa
Genzken, OIL (detail),
German
Pavilon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
Photo:
Jens Ziehe, Courtesy German Pavilon 2007
Isa
Genzken's installation
Oil is tough and unsentimental. At a time when globally organized
concerts attempt to promote awareness of coming climate catastrophes, when
a market economy and a modern slave trade is booming in threshold
countries like China, when the Middle East is like a powder keg, she
creates a shimmering silver ambience in which global disasters are
condensed into formal issues.
Isa
Genzken, OIL (detail),
German
Pavilon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
Photo:
Jan Bitter, Courtesy German Pavilon 2007
While
the real world is getting hotter and hotter, Genzken's art is becoming
cooler and cooler. Inside the German
Pavilion, which at this year's Venice Biennale is draped with
orange-colored building plans, visitors expect an apocalyptic scenario.
Via a mirrored sluice, you enter an exhibition room lined with gray PVC
foil and come upon groups of sculptures in which Genzken has combined all
kinds of trash and luxury materials: abandoned trolleys and suitcases with
pictures of animals stuck on them; Venetian masks covering metallic
skulls; astronaut dolls dangling from the ceiling next to gallows loops or
stranded on the ground; silver-sprayed monsters and baby mutations hanging
like space travelers in designer chairs. In the face of this ambience, Sign
O' The Times comes to mind, the song in which Prince
sang about the madness of our civilization back in the 80s: "When a rocket
ship explodes/ And everybody still wants 2 fly/ Some say a man ain’t
happy/ Unless a man truly dies..."
German
Pavilon, Biennale in Venedig 2007
Photo:
Uwe Walter
|
Nevertheless, Genzken's contribution is hardly a simple
allegory about the current state of the world. Although the title, Oil
, can easily be associated with ideological and economic battles over oil,
it primarily addresses a raw material which most of the surfaces of the
modern world are made of. Genzken combines these surfaces into something
like a matrix, a visual construct which triggers diverse reflexes from
viewers. The orange meshed nets at the entrance to the scaffolded pavilion
produce a shimmering grid of light and shadow which makes the details of
the construction disappear or emerge depending on the perspective. Inside
the pavilion, too, Genzken precisely adjusts the interplay between
reflective, matte, and light-absorbing surfaces. The sensations triggered
by the work are a result of the interchange between light, color, and
space. The things that are combined, glued or screwed together function as
sculptural form without a specified meaning. At the same time they "speak"
through the associations of the artist or viewers. The result is
ultra-modern cinema, where inner pictures are triggered by outer stimuli.
AES+F
(Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky + Vladimir Fridkes),
Last Riot, 2007, videostill
Courtesy
of the Multimedia Art Centre, Triumph Gallery
Genzken
captures the essence of our age. And global phenomena such as fear of
terror, migration, and virtual reality play a role not only in the
national pavilions at the Biennale, but also at the Arsenale
show put together by star U.S. curator Robert
Storr. Many of the works on display in the exhibition– at least in the
Giardini – attempt to reach viewers by means of visual or sensory stimuli
rather than documentation or theoretical discourse. For example, the
Moscow artist group AES + F
depicts the final days of humankind like a computer game in their video
triptych The Last Riot on view in the Russian Pavilion. To music
from Wagner’s Walkürenritt, visitors sees teenagers with
all kinds of skin colors killing one another on snowy mountain peaks, a
devastating war in which everyone fights everyone. Nothing seems real any
more, not even violence. The landscape is a 3D animation in which elements
from popular games fuse or overlay one another: there are Asian-looking
cities, fairytale castles, carousels, tanks rolling up the mountains,
cruising missiles rising, trains derailing, aircraft falling from the sky.
The artists seem to be saying that the virtual world that was created like
a test-tube organism in the 20th century has gotten out of control and now
is overstepping its boundaries, absorbing its human creators and mutating
into something entirely new. But the fact that AES+F's vision is like a
Hollywood version of Samuel
Huntington's "clash of civilizations" and Caravaggio's
aesthetics coupled with heroic poses of Stalinism fuels old fears. With
these images in the back of your mind, you could view the group’s most
recent work as a neoconservative concoction combining the threat of the
downfall of western civilization with a provocative demand for new heroes.
Aernout
Mik, Mock Up, 2007,
4-channel
video installation, image from the set
Photo:
Florian Braun, courtesy carlier | gebauer, Berlin
In
comparison with this polemical tightrope walk, the video installation Citizens
and Subjects: The Netherlands for example by Aernout Mik in the Dutch
Pavilion is much more profound. Embedded in a lounge-like
architecture, Mik shows film scenes reminiscent of shooting exercises for
emergency situations, police training, and raids. Taking the idea of
training as a point of departure, he explores all kinds of "threats" we
believe we have to actively come to grips with to counter fears in
society. In the footage, staged scenes with actors and extras are
interspersed with real documentary material. When in one sequence
demonstrators, refugees, and security forces are shown, and you notice
that it is actually a surreal portrayal, you are confronted with your own
projections. It is not clear what kind of crisis it is. In spite of the
chaos and the unforseeability of the different situations, the police,
security forces, refugees, and victims seem to deal with them with
astonishing routine – as though they are saying that this state of
emergency is our new "normality."
[1]
[2]
[3]
|
