Seven Days in the Art World (27 page)

After swimming
several more lengths, I take another break. I’ve been sharing the pool with a fifty-year-old businessman with a well-studied backstroke. A Roman who collects contemporary Italian art, he has many complaints about the Biennale. First he laments the fact that the most important international art event takes place in a country with little public support for contemporary art. “We have no British Council or Goethe Institute. We have few
kunsthalles,
and most cities have no museum of contemporary or even modern art.” The Biennale, he implies, lets the
gerontocrazia
(the aged government) off the hook. Second, the Venice Biennale isn’t Italian enough! “Until this year we didn’t even have a properly Italian pavilion, because the Padiglione Italia was given over to the international show,” he says. “There are so few opportunities for artists that they have to move to New York or Berlin. Italy’s best-known contemporary artists—Maurizio Cattelan, Vanessa Beecroft, Francesco Vezzoli—they all live abroad.” The collector tells me that he buys most of his art in Milan, where there are some very good dealers, but few succeed in exporting their artists. “The problem with Milano…and even Torino…and particularly Roma,” he says, “is that any statement an artist makes there stays there!”

The new Italian pavilion (the
Padiglione italiano,
showcasing Italian art) is located ten minutes’ walk away from the Giardini, in the Arsenale. These old naval yards are given over to what feels like a kilometer of exhibition space during the Biennale. Booths staffed by Biennale workers who give out free cups of cold water and the availability of a handful of chauffeur-driven golf carts tacitly acknowledge its marathon quality. Although the Arsenale is mostly filled with art of Rob Storr’s choosing (an extension of his international exhibition), this year it also hosts one regional (Africa) and three national (China, Turkey, and Italy) pavilions. The
Padiglione italiano
features two artists: Giuseppe Penone, an older artist associated with the Arte Povera movement, and a young star named Francesco Vezzoli. When I arrived at the far end of the Arsenale, where the Italian pavilion is situated, the handsome Vezzoli, sweaty and bedraggled, was in the midst of an interview with Charlotte Higgins from the
Guardian
. The international press loved Vezzoli’s
Democrazy;
reports were appearing not just in the arts sections of national newspapers but in their political pages.

Certainly
Democrazy
made a good story. The artist had enlisted the collaboration of two of Washington, D.C.’s most important political spin doctors, Mark McKinnon and Bill Knapp, to write hypothetical scripts for the advertising campaigns of two U.S. presidential candidates. Vezzoli then recruited the Hollywood actress Sharon Stone to “run” for one party and the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy to represent the other. Once the videos were complete, Vezzoli installed them in a circular room with red carpet and navy walls in such a way that the candidates seemed to shout at each other. Vezzoli had opted for what Blazwick might have called a “dystopian proposition.” In his words, “The notion of choosing somebody to represent your country for art is not so dissimilar from choosing someone who represents your country for politics.” Moreover, he saturated the “Italian” pavilion with overtly American content. “We’ve been governed for years by Silvio Berlusconi—a man who grew his business selling American soap operas to the Italian audience,” Vezzoli told me. “In this way, my installation is actually more Italian than what is stereotypically Italian. It’s ‘glocal.’”

Italian
Vanity Fair
(the nation’s best-selling weekly) ran a ten-page cover story. “To have the message ‘Sharon for President’ on all the newsstands in Italy—not only was it hilarious, for me it was the complete short-circuit,” said Vezzoli. “It was an aggressive advertising campaign that I almost consider to be part of the work.” Vezzoli’s art often addresses the dynamics of celebrity and manipulation. “If I had had the funds,” he added, “I would have covered the whole of Italy with posters and bought ads on television saying ‘Sharon for President.’” The attention was fantastic, but the highlight for Vezzoli came from elsewhere. “The most surreal, sublime moment came when Italy’s vice president and minister of culture, Francesco Rutelli, came to visit the pavilion,” said Vezzoli. “He is known as
er piacione
, ‘the hunk’ of Italian politics. He’s incredibly handsome, and he is married to a famous Italian journalist. He is the real living instance of what I had just created as a fiction.”

Vezzoli thinks that the Venice Biennale is like the Cannes Film Festival. “The thin boundary between art and entertainment is slowly vanishing,” he explained. “The two fields are probably proceeding more and more with the same strategies. Maybe artists are greedy for more attention or more funding for our projects. Perhaps if I fail as an artist I’ll end up as a second-rate media mogul.” While many artists are most comfortable making work for the initiated, Vezzoli admits, “I have one weakness. I am obsessed by the audience—not in a stupid, commercial sense, but I am hypersensitive to my works’ wider readability.” At the Venice Biennale in 2001 Vezzoli presented the performance
Verushka Was Here,
and in 2005 his film
Caligula
was one of the most talked-about works of the festival, so Vezzoli understands the Venetian viewing context well. “The challenge when you’re invited to a Biennale is dealing with people’s short attention span,” he explained. “For the type of art education some of us have received, it’s absurd, because we have been taught to build projects for long, slow analysis.”

Although Vezzoli still goes back to visit his parents in the province of Brescia, he is one of an increasing number of itinerant artists. “I gave up my house and my studio. I’m using all the money I have to travel. It is stressful, but it is the only way for me to be in all the places I need to be for my chain reaction of projects.” I ventured that living in foreign countries enhances an artist’s education. Not only does it help them think beyond their native cultural horizons, but they can gain a more intimate understanding of the foreign reception of their work. Vezzoli nodded and added, “The really serious judges travel all the time—they see all the biennales and gallery shows. So, I’m sorry, in order to make a work that is up to their expectations, I have to keep myself updated by seeing all the same things. It’s horrible, but it’s true. I think artists do this unconsciously to survive—we do it for the survival of our ideas.”

From the
deep end of the Cipriani pool, one can see the steeple and dome of San Giorgio Maggiore, the subject of one of J.M.W. Turner’s most celebrated watercolors. Despite his prolific output depicting the city, Turner made only three short visits, spending a total of less than three weeks in Venice. Even with a superb visual memory, he needed to be efficient with his sketchbook, making nimble pencil drawings to document the shapes of the architecture and quick watercolors to evoke the pigmentation of the sky and sea.

The swiftest conversation I had in Venice was with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. A Swiss-born curator who travels constantly, he cocurated “Utopia Station,” a controversial section of the 2003 Venice Biennale; some thought the exhibition was a benchmark in innovative curatorship, others thought it was a mess. He is now codirector of the Serpentine Gallery in London and, as one colleague put it, “official freelance curator to the world.” The first time I met Obrist, I thought he was a manic visitor from another planet, but now I relish his creative common sense. Full of energy and generous to a fault, he occasionally sees exhibitions that make him “so agitated” that he “can’t sleep for a week.” Although Obrist believes that the national pavilions are old-fashioned, he wouldn’t abolish them, because he likes their constraints. “I always thought it would be so fantastic if England and France or perhaps Germany and Switzerland swapped buildings one year,” he told me. “That would be my suggestion.”

We met for cappuccino one morning in an open-air café in a quiet
campo,
disturbed only by the distant sound of church bells. I switched on my digital recorder and off he went. Obrist believes in interviewing others, not just as a research tool but as a written format. He has published some two hundred and fifty interviews and conducted public twenty-four-hour interview marathons (and mini-marathons of eight to twelve hours) in various cities around the world.

Obrist had recently visited Eric Hobsbawn, the ninety-year-old British historian. “Hobsbawn said that he would summarize his life as a ‘protest against forgetting.’ I think that might be the best definition for what curating could be—‘a protest against forgetting.’” Obrist smiled. “The criterion for the success of an exhibition is about what it produces in the long term.” A good Biennale is remembered. “It defines a decade,” he said. “There have been so many biennials, but at the end of the day, the ones that really matter are not so numerous. One of the best remains—even if none of us saw it because we were all too young, but looking at the catalogue and listening to older artists—the legendary 1976 Biennale of Germano Celant. His Biennale hasn’t been forgotten, because he had an interesting rule of the game—he restaged entire installed exhibitions rather than individual works.”

When Obrist attends a biennial, he looks for its “rules of the game.” He sees themes as boring, because “you simply illustrate them.” There has to be “some tie or link, almost like a musical score.” Otherwise, he said, “We just say there were five or seven great pieces in the show.” Obrist started reading his BlackBerry, but his speech decelerated only slightly. “We remember exhibitions that invent a new form of display. It’s a new rule or it’s a display feature or it’s some form of invention.” He looked up intently. “Georges Perec wrote a novel without the letter
e,
” he added. “I think we can learn from that.

“A good Biennale crystallizes heterogeneity,” continued Obrist. “I think Deleuze said, ‘To be in the middle of things, but to be in the center of nothing.’ Part of curatorial effort has to be to contribute to the polyphony of centers, to make a more diverse and richer art world.” Obrist wrote an e-mail as he spoke; his ability to multitask was impressive. If it were anyone else, you’d think he was rude, but he pulled it off with endearing obliviousness.

“Venice is about a sudden moment of synthesis,” he continued. “China, the Middle East, Latin America—we start to discover their different modernities, their different pasts, which is something the art world has ignored until recently. I think Francesco Bonami, director of the 2003 Biennale, took into account this new condition.”
*
Rather than filling the spaces himself, Bonami enlisted the support of eleven associate curators, including Obrist, to put together his show, entitled “Dreams and Conflicts.” Bonami’s Biennale had the misfortune of opening during an extreme heat wave, and this, combined with the inclusion of more than four hundred artists, contributed to scathing criticism in
Artforum
and many other art magazines about Bonami’s abnegation of curatorial responsibilities and the disorder and excess of his exhibition. However, since then, many have reevaluated his Venetian extravaganza; they look back on it with admiration and nostalgia. “How can a single curator still grasp everything?” continued Obrist. “When you win territory, you lose concentration. For over ten years I have been going back and forth to China, and during the past eighteen months I have started doing intensive research into the Middle East, making many trips to the emirates, Cairo, and Beirut. It is not something you can do all over the world.”

That night
I met Amy Cappellazzo of Christie’s at the U.S. pavilion party on the grand first floor of the Palazzo Pisani Moretti. The façade of the palazzo is fifteenth-century Gothic, but the inside was sumptuously redecorated in the eighteenth century. Its painted rococo ceilings, huge chandeliers, and terrazzo floors witnessed many masked balls during the hedonistic height of the Venetian Repubblica Serenissima. On this night, however, the guest of honor, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, was dead, so the party was subdued. Cappellazzo was standing near a large open window looking out onto the blackened evening waters of the Grand Canal. I asked her, as someone who feels like she is “holding up the sky” in this ever-escalating art market, how a pavilion influences an artist’s market. “It is less clear-cut than you would think,” she said. “With Felix, for example, it reinforces his greatness and the scarcity of his work, but it doesn’t affect his status per se. With younger, living artists, however, it can have a huge impact. It gives a local hero an international platform.” Cappellazzo waved her hand out into the night air. “Look at this place. There are no cars, no fire hydrants. Every building is surrounded by a moat. It is about how location colors experience. Art in a well-staged show in an exotic setting—what could be more persuasive?” According to Cappellazzo, the Biennale is about unfulfilled fantasies. “It’s not just that people hope that they’ll have a moving experience with an artwork or a chance meeting with their favorite artist in a hotel bar…Everyone is secretly expecting that something beautiful will happen to them.”

Back at
the Cipriani, I have finished my quota of lengths. Scott Fitzgerald described writing as “swimming underwater and holding your breath.” Lawrence Alloway portrayed the Venice Biennale as “the avant-garde in a goldfish bowl.” I lie down on the side of the pool and enjoy the colliding currents of the two thoughts. While staring up into the blue void, I recall one more encounter.

When I was in the Giardini, I ran into the artist Anish Kapoor. He represented the United Kingdom in 1990, so I asked him, What do you recollect most vividly from your year? “Hmm. I felt as if they were taking a risk with me,” he said. “I wasn’t British. I held an Indian passport, although I’d lived in the U.K. for however many years. I must have been among the youngest artists ever given the pavilion. It was a time when the obsession with youth was in its infancy. Of course, now it’s the way things are done, but it wasn’t then.” Kapoor looked pensive, then smiled. “I remember…It might have been the first day of the previews that year. There were thousands of people, as there always are.” He paused. “At lunchtime I went into one of the nicer restaurants near the Giardini and…everybody in the restaurant got up and started clapping.” Kapoor looked at me with genuine amazement. “It was completely spontaneous,” he said. “I was just a young guy. It was bizarre. It was wonderful.”