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Óscar Muñoz
Proyecto para un Memorial, 2003–2005, five channel video-projections, 7’ loop, without sound,
courtesy: Galería Alcuadrado, Bogotá, Colombia
Jenny Holzer
Left Handprint, 2007, oil on linen, courtesy: the artist
which are all names of the feminine genitalia. Lux, calme et volupté.
Which is not to say there are not also other kind of works in the biennial,
more subtle and profound, such as Jenny Holzer’s silkscreen
paintings which are based on classified military documents from the
Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay prison. It is not just the change of
perspective to the unofficial history that make these works thoughtful,
but the way of daring to show real death without turning it into
a metaphor. Death in the present tense (if we want to give to Storr
what’s his), such as is also the one depicted in Óscar Muñoz’ portraits
of people disappeared by the political regime in his country,
Columbia, but in so many other places around the world. Portraits
which are drawn with water on the concrete sidewalk, and drying up
in the sun before being finished.
In the end there was no escape, everybody fell into the meditationupon-death
mood, even Sophie Calle realized a new work about her
mother who found out she was to die soon just when the artist was
invited to participate in the biennial. Luckily, there were also the
national pavilions. Where the same Sophie Calle, representing
France, made a beautifully installed, painfully theatrical set up
around a letter of separation received from her ex-partner, and
which she gave for analysis and interpretation to 107 women with
different professions and hobbies. A clever way for public revenge,
presented with the help of Calle’s hired curator Daniel Buren, who
redesigned in an all too sophisticated way the pavilion and added to
it his own reinterpretation, a colorful miniature pavilion, La Tonnelle,
placed in a park in the Giardini.
To come back and conclude on Robert Storr’s exhibition, what was
probably most exasperating about it was the lack of any sense of
humour, or self-irony. Even Dan Perjovschi, whose work accustomed
us with spaces of passage between the real world and the art world,
who is used with making witty introductions for exhibitions or connections
between works, looked too institutional in the Italia pavilion,
in a little dark corridor, which was leading one from the
dramatic cut-out heads of Nancy Spero to the stones following a
magnetic needle, of Giovanni Anselmo. Whereas in the Arsenale Dan
Perjovschi looked outside of the biennial, which he literally was, as
he covered with drawings the walls in the free-access area at the
entrance. Maybe he should have put a warning in this work – don’t
go inside unless you’re really excited about life and want to chill
down a little bit... His presence in both the displays might have come
from Storr’s stressing of the idea of the artist in the present tense,
who can be at the same time established and emerging (i.e. contemporary).
Or dead and still in the present tense, like Félix Gonzalez-
Torrès, whose work was featured both in Storr’s Italia pavilion and
in the US pavilion, with very little to say in both contexts, deprived
of its intimacy and delicacy.
Robert Storr declared himself skeptical on the idea of national representation,
unless the artists take nationality as their subject of interest.
However, the number of requests for – more or less national –
pavilions increases with each edition, and I tend to interpret this as
a need for self-representation rather than a belief in national values.
The national pavilions might express a mirror image of society, if one
thinks only of the attention paid to the triumvirate of Germany,
Britain and France, or of the dependence of artists on the political
regimes or politicized institutions which commission them. But isn’t
it more interesting to find all these reflected games, narrowed down
to a scale which makes them more understandable and acceptable
(or not), than the didactic global scouting of an internationally
famous curator with a too heavy (Western) art historical baggage?
Of course, the national pavilions are each country’s business and
therefore the art presented there ranges from extremely fresh to
endless displays of Artists’ Union like paintings, watercolors or sculptures.
Sometimes, the stories behind the curtains are more interesting
than the final result presented to the public – as it happened this
year with Croatia’s de-commissioning David Maljkovic’ and replacing
him with a light-op artist, Ivana Franke. At every edition there is
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