AN ARTFULLY DISJOINTED VENICE BIENNALE

In its 114 years, the Venice Biennale has grown from a small festival organised by a local city council into one of the most dense and most important agglomerations of contemporary art the world has ever seen. The 53rd Venice Biennale crams 77 national pavilions and 38 collateral shows into the traditional Giardini (gardens) and Arsenale (shipyards). Counter-festivals have sprung up beyond the official boundaries, and there is even an Internet Pavilion.

Containing this morass of art, culture and ego is a challenge. Robert Storr, dean of Yale's School of Art and a former senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art, oversaw the last Biennale. He raised hackles by presenting an overtly political main exhibition (which Michael Kimmelman described as "just a little boring"). There was also some controversy over his choice for the first-ever African pavilion, which featured works from the collection of an allegedly corrupt Congolese banking heir named Sindika Dokolo.

The critical gang-mugging of the 52nd Venice Biennale provoked an 8,000-word response from Storr in Artforum . He resolved to "take heart in knowing that shows as controversial as mine have proved to fade from memory less quickly than state-of-the-art culture-industry funfests, and that, in the best-case scenario, the work I did in Venice may yet be appreciated as a critique by example of art-world business-as-usual."

This year the onerous task of overseeing the festival fell to Daniel Birnbaum, at 46 its youngest-ever curator. "Fare Mondi" (Making Worlds) is this year’s theme and the name of the central exhibition. “I came upon [Fare Mondi] in a rather beautiful book called "Ways of Worldmaking", by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman,” Birnbaum explained in an interview with Sarah Douglas. “The title is there to communicate an atmosphere rather than be too strict. The idea of 'making' is about art in a studio, or a sort of laboratory environment—something very different from a museum.”

With this theme, Birnbaum is privileging the art and artists over some sort of cohesive (and binding) vision. This marks a welcome break from the spate of exhibitions that hew too closely to an over-arching idea, such as the Younger Than Jesus show at the New Museum. Such shows tend to sacrifice the motivations of the individual to the whims of the curator.

"Coherence is always illusionary," observes Adrian Searle in the Guardian. "What one looks for instead is verve, bite, a sense of drive and a desire to orchestrate dynamic conjunctions."

What Searle finds in Venice is that "[Birnbaum] seems to like dangly things, things using stretched string, things that cast looming shadows, things with a crisp, formal sense of composition and colour. It all comes together, intermittently."

So dispensing with the pretense of theme lends more attention to the art. But to New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz, the emperor was naked. "Making Worlds is earnest, professional and pretty thin. It has a lot of new names, but most of the art looks uniform and familiar. Meaning there’s a lot of late-late-late conceptualism, videos, photos, and other visually boring things".

So where does one go for a decent art fair? To Saltz the answer is Switzerland: “Basel, the world’s best art fair.”

The 53rd Venice Biennale runs from June 7th to November 22nd.

~ JAMES MCGIRK

Picture credit: stefano meneghetti (via Flickr)