Eamon, Christopher

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148 PlJBLIC 40marble tomb with the words "I Love You" carved inArmenian, words she was reported to have spoken.There are many ways to engage with politicalissues, For instance, Osvaldo Romberg's maze-likeinstallation at Sabanci University's Kasa Galleryaddresses what he calls the macro-political. InBuilding Footprints (2009) Romberg mixed transparentelements from classical and modern architecture toexpress layers of time, and to ask us what is rememberedand what is being forgotten.I came away from Istanbul feeling that it was thework outside the biennial that was "political," yetvery subtle and effective.The 53rdVenice Biennale,like many ofits predecessors,seems doomed to displease, the result perhaps of asyndrome of aiming to please everyone. It is revealingthat after continuous expansion born fi'om its aspirationsfor inclusion, more could be learned about the stateof global contemporary art at Art Basel than at thegrueling and difficult-to-maneuver Venice Biennale.What most visitors tend to expect from biennials isthe ability to grasp an overview of contemporary artpresented by a specialist in the field. Anything elselike conceptualizing the works selected in a waythat enlightens or, better, changes, one's view orunderstanding of the works, is an added bonus. Inrecent history at the Biennale, neither has been the case.If Documenta is the Olympics of contemporaryart, then the Venice Biennale is its Academy Awards.It was the first of its kind in 1895. It maintains thestatus of "mother of all biennials" even now that ithas been followed by greater numbers and ever-more-specialized biennials and triennials taking placeall over the globe. But the birthplace of the modernbiennial may be in the long run also the place ofits end, if this has not already happened at leastsymbolically. Born in the golden era of WorldExpositions so famous for leaving behind theirlandmarks-London's Crystal Palace, the EiffelTower, Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building at the1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago,among others-the Venice Biennale first exhibiteddecorative and applied arts at its inception. Thelandmarks of its history can be found in the Giardini,where the pavilions are trenchant reminders of thecolonialist context of the fair's birth and subsequentgrowth as a mainly Eurocentric yet internationalvenue for contemporary art. Over the decades it hasworked to rectify the situation of not adequatelyrepresenting non-Western nations by adding newnational representations in off-site pavilions andexpanding the main exhibition greatly with theaddition of the enormous Arsenale exhibition spacein 1980.This year, the broader Biennale boasted seventy-seven national pavilions, including representativeartists from the Republic of Gabon and the Union ofComoros, and forty-four collateral exhibitions,exhibitions not organized by the Biennale organization,but which are welcomed under its umbrella. Even theArsenale had been greatly expanded. The mainexhibition pavilion formerly called the ItalianPavilion has also been enlarged and renamed thePalazzo delle Esposizioni della Biennale. Collateralevents included interesting digital works by JohnGerrard at the Island of Cortoza, as well as a context-sensitive exhibition of recent works by Mona-Hatoum at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Thebiggest collateral event of all is not included in theBiennale: the massive renovation of the Baroque-eraCustoms Hall, the Punta della Dogana (itself a symbolof globalization from a former time), by luxury goodsmagnate Francois Pinault, and the reinstallation of hismuseum at the Palazzo Grassi, both of which drewmany thousands of visitors.Apart from repeatedly seeing the massive yachtsof Pinault, Roman Abramavich and Larry Ellismoored outside the Dogana (because all mega yachtmoorings in the Canal Grande were already taken),the pleasures of traveling around Venice to visit overninety or so offsite pavilions wears painfully thin,especially since the rewards for doing so are mostlynot forthcoming. Individual national representationswere simply not worth the trek. But this is, in a sense,the legacy of a post-colonial aspiration that inexpecting to represent the world, the map for thatworld has become almost as large. A painfully evidentproblem is the inconsistency with respect to themechanisms through which individual nations selectrepresentative projects for their pavilions, most evidentat the United Arab Emirates pavilion and newly createdItalian section at the Arsenale. Both are probably theresult ofState requirements and, in the case of the latter,internal bureaucracy.The continuous expansion of sites and venuesexasperates viewers at the Arsenale, which is really aendless line of mega installations from one end to thenext. It culminates with the weak Instituto Italo-LatinoAmericano pavilion, consisting of works by twentyartists crammed into one room with no real curatorialvision, the Chinese pavilion and aforementionedU.A.E. and Italian Pavilions. This is before you evenget to the newly opened Giardino delleVergini, ifyouaren't already too blitzed to notice, a site that this year'sDirector Daniel Birnbaum calls "a uniquely poeticbackdrop for artistic interventions." Indeed, elevenartists installed work in the park, one artfully creatingan artificial swamp, another, famed choreographerWilliam Forsythe, stringing stirrups in a tree so thatChristopher Eamon 149you could "interact with" or become part of themovement of the work. That the press release andDirectors' statement makes so much out of a fewworks placed outside speaks to perhaps the completeoutmodedness of large-scale biennials, especially thisone. Large-scale exhibitions like this are simply notable to react to truly innovative or multidisciplinarywork with any real depth or seriousness.Biennials have always been about art tourism,and in effect about garnering tourist dollars anddemonstrating national power. Indeed that's whyWorld's Fairs and Venice Biennale were created. Thatone can already indulge in art tourism from theTirana to Dakar and Havana, and have been able todo so for many years, is perhaps the main reasonVenice is failing. It is intent on competing with thesemuch more focused and at times more enlighteningexhibitions. While art tourism can be a way to learnabout others, it also never really quite gets the touringsubject into any position of knowledge vis a vis theother, a fact that has hardly been ameliorated intoday's much-lauded "global" art world.All of this is not to say that the main exhibition,save for certain inclusions and barring one's ownpredilections, is a relatively handsome exhibition withcombinations of newer works brought into contactwith historical antecedents such as OyvindFahlstrom, the Gutai artists, Lygia Pape, GordonMatta-Clark, Andre Cadere and Blinky Palermo.Much of this work, especially of Gutai, is rarely seenand enlightening especially in relation to the currentresurgence of audience participation and performancepractices in art. Many artists in the vein of the latterseem happy to embrace their roles as technicians ofthe conceptual, where rules and activities can bedreamed up in perpetuity as a kind infinitely generativegrammar with no need to infer from history, look atcurrent conditions, or make something other thatbasically does not self-generate.Still Birnbaum falls into the classic curatorial trapof explaining the inclusion of historical antecedentsas due to their "influence" on the younger artists with150 PUBLIC 40which they are coupled. This is usually apocryphal.Indeed, the reason it is so important to see works likesthese included in a contemporary context is that theseworks and these artists for one reason or another did nothave the influence they should have had. In the caseof FaWstrom and Gutai, they suffered respectively fromAnglo-American and Western Eurocentrism, whichis not to say that their contemporaries were notinterested in, and aware of them, rather that their legacyhas been so diminished that they need to be included,remembered and reinserted into the contemporaryart dialogue today.Still the timeliness of the inclusion of some of theother historical works, such as Pape and Cadereseems belated in this context. And of course YokoOno's Fluxus works jotted down during two years insixties seem to have been repeated in exhibitionseverywhere for the past decade. You can't get awayfrom them, but whether she or Fluxus has influenceda younger generation is another question.In any case, Birnbaum's main exhibition at theformer Italian pavilion is fine, in fact, refreshing, in anera of the Euro-curator-as-brand. By that model, thebrand oftentimes writes of major paradigm shiftsin Western epistemology every time it makes anexhibition. Think of Nicholas Bourriaud's TateTriennial, which is somehow meant to support histhesis that a major rupture in Western consciousnessis about to occur on the occasion of his exhibition. 1If we return to the curatorial goal of changingour understanding of works on display, Birnbaumseems to find it a valuable concern. In Birnbaum'sconceptualization for the Biennale, he is not guilty ofintellectual overreaching. Indeed, his almost banalconcept of"MakingWorlds" is either a tease about hisphilosophical underpinnings, or a complete accident.Given his background as art historian and philosopherhis conception is most likely based on an unmentionedintertext kept a secret so as not to alienate. The title"Making Worlds" is a contraction of a key idea in thephilosophy of aesthetics developed in the late fiftiesand sixties by Anglo-American philosopher NelsonGoodman.The key tenets ofwhat can be considered hisconstructivist philosophy is that human consciousnessconstructs the world through interpretation and thecreation of symbols.Art in creating a relatively dense situation createsa world rich in symbols just as the real world isconstructed through symbolization, and as such canbe considered at no less a level. Goodman's ideas, whichare conceived basically within the relatively obscureand already bankrupt discipline of the philosophy ofaesthetics, parallels an attempt in the same time periodto view everything in human experience as knowableonly through the structure of language. InGoodman's case, symbols and symbolization, ratherthan language proper, create worlds, which thereforecan be considered made. The context is significantbecause within the fields of analytical and Anglo-American philosophy this sort of constructivism wasrather a leap. Only Richard Rorty made more of theidea of the knowability of the world outside oflanguagefrom within the Anglo-American tradition. However,as is common in the field, Goodman could not keepfrom engaging in the creation of shopping list ofmore or less dense types of symbolization, better orless good attempts at world making, and which of thearts fits which bill of goods, all as a way to compensatefor the fact that the idea that art builds worlds-literallydifferent worlds-was already grossly out of touch'with what contemporary art had become by the earlysixties. For better or worse, these attempts from withinthe philosophy ofaesthetics, no matter how progressiveor maverick they may seem in hindsight, were late indescribing how art was contemporaneously beingmade and conceived by artists.In evoking, at least in his title, the philosophy ofart as world making, Birnbaum's subliminal choicefor an exhibition on the current state of contemporaryart worldwide seems out of step, and yet as a title, andtitle alone, it is as sufficiently inoffensive to at least letmuch of the work and the curatorial choice fordisplay, combination, and pacing speak for itself. Forthis, Birnbaum should be applauded.If the end of the Venice Biennale comes aboutfrom an exhaustion of its own aspirations, it is alsobecause the impetus for its existence, art tourism anda predilection to "discover," like Columbus, newworlds and new artists has outrun its usefulness. Worldart tourism is more available and more adequatelyattempted elsewhere. Contemporary art as we knowit, colonizes more and more of the globe. It's nowonder that the term "global" in art began to be usedaround the same time as the term globalization infinance and the birth of many of the new biennials inthe early-to-mid nineties. Colonizing the contemporaryas "the Same" has been expanding for twenty yearsand now the showcasing of sameness and differenceis done better at the regional level, for reasons ofself-discovery or otherwise. This is the nature of theexhibition form known as the biennial. For all thetexts criticizing Venice, few have taken a look at thebiennial and its replication as useful at times and incertain contexts, and vastly inadequate at others.NOTE1 As the press release states, Bourriaud's Triennial "arguesthat the historical period defined by post-modernism iscoming to an end, and a new art form for the twenty-firstcentury is emerging...." He explains that "while the [1970s]economy was severing its ties with concrete geography,culture was becoming divorced from history as a coherentscenario. Postmodernism was the story of this disconnection,leading to a reified conception of 'origins.' What I call'altermodern' is the narrative of our reconnection withboth, through a new set of parameters linked to globalization:instantaneity, availability, displacements ... " (Bourriaud 2009).That historicism is part and parcel of Modernity and whatwe call Post-modernism is meant to be outside historicalperiodization in the first place is lost in this type of brand-consolidating statement.REFERENCESNicholas Bourriaud, "Tate Triennial 2009," interview withTom Morton, Freize, #120 Ganuary/February 2009),http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tate_triennial_2009/.Tate Modern, press release for" Altermodern: Tate Triennial2009" Ganuary 2,2009), http://www.tate.org.uk/about/pres-soffice/pressreleases!2009/17523 .htm.On August 14th, 1947 a sovereign Pakistan wascreated, and the following day saw the creation of asovereign India, and event known as Parition. BhaskarSarkar's lVIourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in theWake of Partition adds a much-needed addition to thequickly expanding catalogue of scholarly work onIndian cinema. In his book, Sarkar considers theeffects of Partition on the world's largest film industrythrough an examination of Bollywood, Bengali, andother regional cinemas, as well as Indian television.Sarkar's analysis both addresses and moves past anunderstanding of Indian film merely as part of India'snation-building project. Rather, Sarkar suggests thatthe relationship between Indian cinema and nationhas, since Indian sovereignty, been fluid and complex.In his introduction, he cautions that rather than viewPartition as India's originary trauma, one which hascaused all of India's present "woes," Partition shouldbe understood within a matrix of discourse thatcontinues to change. For instance, in the book's lastchapter, Sarkar asserts that in recent years Partitionhas been consciously mobilized by contemporarycultural and political trends. This mobilizationdemonstrates the self-awareness that, according toSarkar, the media has of its own role in memory andarchiving history.The book's seven chapters and coda are dividedinto two sections. The first section of the book focuseson the relative silence of representation of Partitionin the thirty years immediately following the event.The second section examines how and why thissilence was broken through textual analysis of specificcases of the representation of Partition within Indianfilm and television-what the author calls "the returnof repressed." As far as the increased rise in Partition

53rd Venice Biennale

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53rd Venice Biennale

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