Venice Expo Opening Doors
The Age
Tuesday June 12, 2007
The mood is up among Australian artists and dealers, Megan Backhouse reports from the Venice Biennale.
AFTER three days of feverish queuing and previewing, the Venice Biennale - all 76 exhibitions plus 34 collateral events plus a 100-artist group show - is now open to every tourist in town.Thousands of international curators, collectors and journalists have already descended on the place in what, in its 52nd time and in an increasingly crowded biennale circuit, remains the most high-profile of art events.Given the slew of Australian artists - an unprecedented six - showing this year, spirits were high at the Australian camp even before the preview opened last Thursday, but by the time the preview was officially over at 8pm on Saturday night, the mood was buoyant.No one was talking concrete sales to the press in relation to the Australia Council-selected trio, but numerous overseas curators and collectors expressed strong interest in showing the works of Daniel von Sturmer, Callum Morton and Susan Norrie, who each showed a large installation. Melbourne art dealer Anna Schwartz, who represents both von Sturmer and Morton, said "significant sales" for both artists were under discussion.When it came to the other three artists selected by Venice Biennale director Robert Storr, however, Tolarno Galleries director Jan Minchin sold three of Rosemary Laing's large-scale photographs of the Woomera detention centre (to one American and two Australians) and Shaun Gladwell's deftly spinning skateboarder before a stormy sky and sea lured much praise and big crowds.About 15,000 people visited the three Australia Council-presented exhibitions during the vernissage (the same number visited Australia's Ricky Swallow show in the biennale preview two years ago). Among them were Portuguese curator Isabel Carlos, curator of the Sydney Biennale in 2004, and a selector for the Artes Mundi Wales art prize next year, who said she thought this year was Australia's best-ever presentation.Moreover, she told senior Australian curatorial adviser Juliana Engberg that Susan Norrie's 15-screen video work - looking at the devastation wrought in east Java by an unstoppable flow of hot mud - was the best project in the biennale.Christina Ruiz, editor of The Art Newspaper, said she thought Morton's bombed-out childhood family home - complete with pristine, white marble interior and the sound of screaming - was one of the best three to four pieces in the biennale with Tate Modern director, Vicente Todoli, describing it as "great, exceptional, fantastic". A London Times journalist reported that he simply "enjoyed the house sculpture".Numerous curators (including Lance Fung, who is putting together next year's SITE Santa Fe Biennale) spoke highly of Daniel von Sturmer's installation, which was widely considered to have perfectly resolved the difficulties presented by Australia's split-level pavilion. His plywood platform elegantly snakes from the upper to lower storey, topped with minimalist video screens and objects.It was outside the von Sturmer show that the Australia Council showbag was handed out. The giveaway wouldn't usually rate a mention except that the safety-first-looking yellow and black number was the bag of the biennale and you couldn't move in town without spotting several. By the end of the second preview day, the Australia Council had none left, with all 5000 walking the streets of Venice. Well, that's not quite true because at least one was for sale on eBay and German artist Isa Genzken had slotted one alongside all the other paraphernalia (suitcases, posters, astronauts, skulls, a self-awarded Oscar trophy) in her installation reflecting on tourism (as being both personally edifying and environmentally destructive).If you can judge an exhibition by its queue, hers was the hit of the preview with people waiting an hour outside the German pavilion - which she has wrapped with scaffolding and orange plastic webbing - to see it.After such a lengthy build-up, it is inevitably hard to please, but at least the wait made you determined to linger longer and lingering is essential with a Genzken show, with details only gradually emerging somewhere up in the ceiling or in half-closed cases or atop tall metal plinths.The seriously established Sophie Calle at the French pavilion also attracted a queue, but never as long and that's despite the most draw-you-in of relationship-woe texts in the entrance - "I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to answer. It was as if it wasn't meant for me. It ended with the words: 'Take care of yourself'. I took this recommendation literally".Calle proceeds to show us a dense array of eavesdropping-like videos and photographs of people reading and discussing and otherwise dissecting letters.Intimate in a more abstracted vein is Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the US pavilion, who generated a flurry of activity with his stacks of poster giveaways alongside an endless supply of cellophane-wrapped pieces of liquorice, strings of light bulbs and other works. (One of Gonzalez-Torres' liquorice works Untitled (Public Opinion) (1991) will be seen at the forthcoming show Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now at the National Gallery of Victoria later this month.) Both Gonzalez-Torres and Calle were also slotted into Storr's curated show, spread over two venues and taking in 100 artists. While the bigger names (Bruce Nauman, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Bourgeois for starters) are in the Italian pavilion in the Giardini, the more political and confronting works are in the Arsenale.There you can watch a boy kicking a rubber skull before the bombed-out former Serbian army headquarters in Belgrade in a video by Italian artist Paolo Canevari. The boy kicks endlessly, aimlessly, expertly in a desolate, vacant lot. Or a five-screen video by Columbian artist Oscar Munoz, which has the features of five faces (collected from newspaper obituaries) brushed in water on a grey surface (concrete, perhaps) so that they evaporate no sooner than they appear.Bulgaria's Nedko Solakov has managed to make a beguiling, even funny piece about AK-47 assault rifles, while in the same curated show, US artist Margaret Salmon skips death and war in her evocative films shot on a hand-held camera. In one she gives us three women cradling, feeding and frantically tending their babies to the sound of an Italian lullaby, while the other depicts a middle-aged couple arguing. The tense tone is clear, but you only get the vaguest gist of what they are saying.And that is just the barest snippet of what you can see in Venice, where several countries are taking part for the first time in a biennale that has attracted a record number of exhibitions.The Venice Biennale runs until November 21.
© 2007 The Age