How many worlds are there? And to whom do they belong? Wondering around the Giardini at the 53rd Venice Biennale, it appears that there are, rather depressingly, fewer worlds out there than one might imagine. Perhaps, in the end, there is only one giant one, the art world, which purports to incorporate and speak on behalf of every aspect of human life that in another age might have had its own voice: politics, literature, love. The retro-Expo effect of the pavilions, each belonging to a well-defined nation-state (with the exception of the anachronistic Czechoslovakian pavilion, now housing Czechs and Slovaks in the edifice of their former country), seems better suited to the display of native herbs and animals than to the cutting-edge of artistic practice in each particular place (besides, so many of the artists live in Berlin it makes little sense to make any link between the artistic representative and the country). Some of the best shows play on this historical ambiguity: the Belgian Jef Geys, perhaps acknowledging the Expo-element, puts on a kind of botanical show, compiling a kind of updated herbal remedy manual from plants found in urban streets. Spain’s Miquel Barceló presents us with a couple of his recent gorillas, heavily worked-over canvases of beasts gazing stoically in the midst of the art-show as zoological curiosity.
The Director of the 53rd Biennale, Daniel Birnbaum, states in his introduction that “Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead” and whilst many of the entries in the Biennale do indeed seek to address this question of “worlds” – the overlapping universes that comprise a globalised yet profoundly divided planet , as well as images of worlds beyond the limited phenomenological borders of terra firma – the entries of some countries turn inwards, preferring to indulge the question of what it means to be an artist from and of a particular nation by way of irony and self-parody. Thus the Australian entry includes a Mad Max-esque video of car-surfing, and a motorcyclist cradling a dead kangaroo; the Nordic pavilion contains a kind of sexualized commemoration/celebration of the clichéd Scandinavian Ikea-image of indoor décor (a bed, a fireplace, sofas and knick-knacks) accompanied by tomes of queer theory; the Canadian entry features footage of people ice-skating. The better entries break with this curious combination of self-parody and perversely proud self-presentation – a kind of ironic nationalism that pervades many of the entries. Perhaps the most striking single-piece entry, that of the Comoros Islands, lies on the outskirts of the Giardini. A traditional boat (a Djahazi), lies moored on a platform, tilted away from the water and towards the pathway. Inside, lies a single modern container, the kind more often found in ports on the outskirts of town, in giant piles on the back of flat boats or hidden inside lorries. The artist, Paolo W Tamburella, gives the following back story on his website:
In 2006, following the modernization of the port, the use of the Djahazi was prohibited, thus interrupting a longstanding tradition of Comorian dockers on the islands and placing the Comoros in a new chapter of global economy. In 2008 Paolo W Tamburella traveled to Comoros to investigate what happened to the dockers and to their boats. The Djahazis had been abandoned in the port of the capital Moroni and were sinking in the water, while most of the dockers were unemployed. In a month long effort the artist and 5 dockers worked on fixing one Djahazi with the goal to ship it and present it in Venice as first national participation of the Union of the Comoros at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Perhaps the two most profoundly affecting works of the Biennale as a whole, after the Comoros entry – Steve McQueen’s film and Teresa Margolles‘ Mexican entry, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, What Else Could We Talk About? – are both comments on the Biennale itself. Margolles’s work is also about the country she comes from, yet her vision is so far removed from the whimsy that characterises many of the other entries that she single-handedly invalidates the self-referential ironical approach, hopefully for all time. Down a tricky-to-find alley near San Marco, in an elegant building that must have belonged to the Venetian nobility, the Mexican pavilion has the usual set-up: a smart-looking woman behind a desk with a couple of catalogues in front of her. The first indication that this is an entry unlike the others comes with the first wall-description, which indicates that the concrete of the table behind which the woman is sitting is “mixed with blood.” The blood, it notes, was recovered from recent victims of gang wars in Mexico. Suddenly the question of complicity fills the room. The beautiful walls of the grotesque building become really, literally grotesque in the other sense: an art show… at a time like this? The title of the show is both a provocation and a real question: what else can Mexico talk about? More than that, what else should we all be talking about? Although Margolles’ work flirts with moralism, it has the very great strength of presenting the situation – albeit in its absence or distance – rather than simply being judgemental. Even if the blood contained in the exhibits isn’t really the blood of murder victims, though there’s no reason to think that it’s not, it wouldn’t matter – it doesn’t need to be true to be true. It simply works. More importantly, perhaps, there is no celebration of the “local” nature of this violence, no sentimentality about the fatalism of Catholic violence, no folkloric dimension, just a stark record of events.
Another Margolles piece, Cleaning, consists of a bucket and mop with a mixture of water and blood, used to clean the entire building at 4pm every day – another exercise in profound disquiet. The floors themselves are tainted with the brutal realities of a world that in other ways couldn’t be further away from the genteel glory of Venice’s canals and cafes. Margolles is incredibly skilled at mining this particular combination of emotions: a brutal sense of the violence of the world combined with an uncertainty about what it is we are supposed to be looking at in the context of an art gallery, or even whether it is possible to go on being in an art gallery in quite the same way. The first room upstairs is perhaps the most cutting in precisely this way: the perfectly ragged but aristocratic walls are unadorned, but for a single card reading “canvas with blood”. But where is the canvas? The walls are bare. It somehow becomes apparent that the canvas is outside the window. Between an EU and a Venice flag there flies a dirty, graying, bloodied cloth, as if “representing” Mexico. The complicity she deals in cannot simply be swept aside as a problem happening “over there”. Like the “cleaning” blood on the gallery floors that instantaneously makes the soles of your shoes feel as they do when stepping over graves in a cemetery, the thousand cards for cutting cocaine she handed out in the first week of the Biennale, each depicting a recent Mexican murder victim, make it clear that whichever “world” it would be nice to pretend to live in, the distance between a hedonistic junket in Western Europe and death on the streets in Mexico is an awful lot smaller than we like to pretend it is. Margolles does not so much “make a world” as make clearer the one that we’re in: it seems to me that this may well be the most important function of contemporary art.
In a smaller, gentler, and extraordinarily beautiful way, Steve McQueen’s film Giardini, shown on two screens placed side by side in the British pavilion, also exposes the limits and echo-chamber effect of most contemporary art and of the Biennale itself. His subject is the gardens of the Biennale when the art and its many visitors are out of sight. The art-less “world” of the Giardini is revealed to be a very different place: teeming with beetles and a silence broken only by the ringing of nearby church bells, its visitors are altogether distinct from the hip and well-heeled crowds clutching their €18 tickets as they crowd into the decked-out pavilions. Off-season, the garden is home to gangs of dogs that look like deer sniffing menacingly around a pile of rubbish while an old lady drags her wheelie-bag slowly across the uneven ground; a man smokes in the dark, waiting infinitely for an assignation of one kind or another; another pair of men embrace each other under cover of darkness, their hair illuminated by awkward park lamps, a low hum in the background. McQueen’s observational constructions, as idiosyncratic as they are moving, pitch the noise of nature against the noise of art and the stillness of the gardens against the freneticism of the crowds. Beyond the art world, then, there is the natural world, the world of desire and the world of real, and frequently brutal, sensations. As Margolles and McQueen show, it might – perversely – just take the contemporary art to remind us of that.
Nina Power is the creator of the consistently excellent Infinite Thought and a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. Her first book, One-Dimensional Woman, published by Zer0 Books, will be out in November.
More images from Venice:
