Roundtable Discussion of the 2015 Venice Biennale (original) (raw)
Related papers
2003
The vernissage days at Venice in 2003 opened in torrid heat, and a very large crowd of art people, about 50% of whom would appear to have been dependencies of curators and art press, and not, mainly, people interested in contemporary art save as an obscure spectacular ritual or tourist event. It was all a bit like the Louvre on summer Saturday afternoon, without the Mona Lisa, without bullet-proof glass. These were less than ideal conditions for viewing art let alone engaging in the 'collaboration' curatorially envisaged in two sub-exhibitions Zones of Urgency and Utopia Station. One could barely do even mild art historical anthropology on some of the plethora of visiting international curators, to meet and to observe which was my main purpose in going this year.
2013
The article reviews the 55th Venice Biennale art exhibition, which featured works by various contemporary artists including Walter De Maria, Jose Antonio Suarez Londono and Marino Auriti, held at locations throughout Venice, Italy, through November 24, 2013.
Art and Capital, Venice Biennale 2007
The thing that I found interesting about doing some work on capital in Venice was that the Biennale and a Venetian financial history presented the literal and material connections we can make between art and capital. Given this, what I want to draw out today is how although many recent art practices as well as the Biennale itself has aimed to emphasise the literal and material nature of art, that grounds art in experience, this has paradoxically seemed to aid and abet the logic of financial capital giving it a privileged status as a ubiquitous and formless power. So, it was Venetian financiers who dominated and controlled a huge international bubble of currency speculation from 1275 to 1350. These financiers led the banking families of Florence and were under license of and also controlled major revenues to the Papacy and international royalty. For Venetians, these unregulated far reaching economies was a trade not in goods but in value itself, Venice was seen as " the greatest commercial success – a city without industry, which came to bestride the Mediterranean world and to control an Empire through mere trading enterprise " (Braudel). This financial oligarchy of small companies in fact were megaspeculators, thriving on the instability of nation states and the value of value itself. A trade in abstractions, in fiction and free trade mythology that resisted and deformalised physical borders and ideological boundaries. This description of the effect of capital can and has been levelled at today's economy driven politics. This is globalisation as 'the integration of trade, finance and information that is creating a single global market and culture' 1 The description of the field of capital often then, appears like this: it is material and ideological; it appears as an open territory where routine and stability is rejected, all bets are on and speculation and risk are paramount. The key problems then are that Global Financial capital is groundless and abstract whilst also being seamless and total. And, secondly, if we want to position a critical relationship to capital, we have to acknowledge somehow that a love of deregulated freedoms is paramount to a liberalism that has been fostered by not only capital but stands for the ethics of a critical art practice. This is not so much that art is assimilated or commoditised by capital but a deeper philosophical point that they operate with the same principles. I find this particularly relevant to the Biennale in both the aims of the business of the art project as a whole, as well as its curation and the artworks that make it up. So if art and capital share this liberalist credo, what this means then is that our descriptions of the power of capital are now central to what we understand as critique-and vice versa. Just to rehearse this then, this is especially so when we can identify capital as the most pervasive substantive force written through our lives and yet we understand that our predisposition to a faith in individuality, and free agency, does not guarantee any opposition to capital but rather seems to substantiate the freedoms of capital. These questions and problems seem to ask for resistance, but here I want to argue that resistance limits agency. What I want to go through now, is how discourses on experience, temporality and the evental nature of art have extended rather than negotiated these problems. And I think this is worth dealing with not only because of the Venice Biennale, but through what is now a comprehensive shift in curation and art making to discourses on experience and exchange. The interest in experience that I want to address is not the anti-aesthetic of Hal Foster, nor is it the 1 (Thomas Freidman, 'Roll Over Hawks and Doves', the New York Times 2 Feb, I: 15)
Venetian Biennale East meets West
Article covering the 2017 Venice Bienniale for the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (Fall 2017 Newsletter) https://www.idsva.edu/newsletter-fall-2017/2017/11/16/venice-biennale-review-east-meets-west
Historiography of Venice Biennale
MODERN ART IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION: SCIENCE, EDUCATION, ART MARKET, 2018
Historiography of the Venice Biennale. One of the latest trends is to represent the history of 20th century art as a process of artistic events. Interest on the problem of biennalisation of culture among researchers appeared almost simultaneously with the comprehension of the processes of globalization and of formation of nations - in the middle of the twentieth century. By the 2000s, interest in these problems had not abated, and now we have the opportunity to be acquainted with the extensive literary heritage, especially for the Venice Biennale. The authors of the monographs on the history of the exhibition Enzo di Martino and Lawrence Alloway unanimously declared in both 1969 and 2005 that "the history of the Biennale does not exist" [4, p.10], and that the studies devoted to this international exhibition "are almost completely absent "[1, p.180]. Nevertheless, the authors offer readers two point of views on the exhibition. In the first case the point of view of the organizers of the event, (Enzo di Martino presents the history of Biennale as a series of director’s projects). And a point of view of curator of a national pavilion (Lawrence Alloway, curator of the American pavilion, speaks about “a vivid set of national identities "[1, p.17]). The exhibition is thus viewed like a nation’s competition, or an upcoming display system. Later, Oleg Sidor-Gibelinda used the principle of Lawrence Alloway in a monograph dedicated to the presence of Ukraine at the Venice Biennale. In the introductory article, the author notes, "with the advent of national pavilions, the principles of a" high feast "are formed." The gourmet spectator does not wander the labyrinth from now on, but selectively inspects national artifacts "[9, p. 100]. Finally, the Russian composers of the monograph "Russian Artists at the Venice Biennale, 1895-2013" do the same. We see the personal stories of the curators of the Soviet pavilions and the history of the approval of the USSR and beyond the post-Soviet Russia on the territory of Venice. "For Russian artists, in turn, reading their art through the prism of national stereotypes ensured success" [8, p.35]. National pavilions of the Venice Biennale, as an object of research, appear for the first time in dissertational scientific works. Pascal Budillon Puma in 1989 examined the international influence of the Venice Biennale on Italian art criticism in 1948-1968. Describing Soviet participation, the author often referred to his "sluggishness" and "piling up" [2, p.88]. Marilène Malbert agreed with her in 2006 in her thesis "International artistic relations at the Venice Biennale, 1948-1968", a historical essay based on the materials of the Archives of the Venice Biennale ASAC. The researcher noted the "retrograde" nature of Soviet exhibitions and the "inflexible" exhibition policy [6, p.150]. Finally, Maria Vittoria Martini, writing about the structural changes in the Biennale, said, "the Soviet Union alone did not take the innovation of the leadership of the Biennale" [5, p.95], about the events of the 1970s, when the Biennale turned from a conservative structure into a "modern art laboratory ". In the works of these authors, the Biennale is analyzed as a simple sequence of events without an actual analysis of the production and perception processes of the public of various national pavilions. Eastern Europe at the Venice Biennale, including the newly formed states, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is perceived by researchers as "unchanging", "devoid of evolution" [6, p.171], the case of "resistance to progress" and "stagnation" [5, p.101]. The conferences of recent years are devoted to the study of the Venice Biennale. The collection of scientific articles "Where Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and The Global Salon: la Biennale di Venezia International Symposium", which is attended by such important figures in the international art arena as Carolyn Jones, theorist of "Biennial Culture" or Robert Storr, critic, art historian and curator of the Venice Biennale of 2007; is a reflection of heated debates in curatorial circles, on painful issues for the Venice exhibition. Among other things, the commercialization of the venue and its academic character. Later in 2007, the conference "Starting from Venice: studies on the Biennale" offers various approaches to the study of the venue. Therefore, the Swiss researcher Beat Wiss offers an interesting method. The author emphasizes that the artistic biennale can be regarded as a place of continuous formation of modernity: national participation in the structure of the Venice Biennale can be regarded as a modernized cultural identity of the country [7, p.120]. Concluding the review of the literature, it can be stated that a full theoretical study of the definition of the role and the place of the Biennale in modern art practice was not conducted. The analysis of the art of individual states has generally not enough attention, the understanding of the role of Eastern Europe in the context of the exhibition is debatable, and finally the question of the artistic and political aspects of the presence of the former Soviet republics at the Venice Biennale and the problem of designing their identity is not analyzed. Literature 1. ALLOWAY, Lawrence the Venice Biennale, 1895-1968: from salon to goldfish bowl. London: Faber Physical Description, 1969 2. BUDILLON PUMA, Pascale L’analyse d'art italienne devant les apports étrangers à la Biennale de Venise des arts figuratifs (1948-1968). Paris: Université Paris VIII, 1989. 3. BIENNALE di Venezia International Symposium, Where art worlds meet: multiple modernities and the global salon: la Biennale di Venezia International Symposium. Venezia: Marsilio, 2005. 4. DI MARTINO, Enzo, The history of the Venice Biennale: 1895-2005. Venezia: Papiro Arte, 2005. 5. MARTINI, Maria Vittoria La Biennale di Venezia 1968-1978: la rivoluzione incompiuta. Venezia: Università Ca 'Foscari, 2011. 6. MALBERT, Marylène Les relations artistiques internationales à la Biennale de Venise 1948-1968. Paris: Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2006. 7. RICCI, Clarissa (dir.) Starting from Venice: studies on the Biennale. Milano: ET. Al., 2010 8. MOLOK N. ed. Russian artists at the Venice Biennale, 1895-2013. Moscow: Stella Art Foundation, 2013 9. Sidor-Gibelinda, O. Українці на венеційськііі бієнале: сто років присутності. - Kiev: Our Hour, 2008
n ncyclopedic Art Biennale in Venice
This article ofers an anthropological view of the last, 2013 edition of the Biennale Internazionale d'arte di Venezia. Taking advantage of the simultaneous presence of exhibitions from many countries, independently run by local curators, the viewer is invited to try to catch the inspiration of the artists in their own culture. And this, in turn, reflects the general theme of that edition, the utopia of an all-encompassing approach to art collection.