There are moments in the history of art when we can feel the cultural balance of power shift irrevocably from one country or continent to another. It happened straight after the second world war, when abstract expressionism signalled to the world that the US was ready to consign tired, battle-scarred Europe to posterity. And it is, so the received wisdom has it, about to happen all over again; for there is a country that can - and does - boast 3,000 years of culture, dizzying rates of economic growth and a long-suppressed determination to engage the outside world in its inexorable rise as a global power. Little wonder that all eyes were on China at the opening of Venice’s Biennale of contemporary art, which opened to the public on Sunday.
It is the first time in the exhibition’s history that the Chinese have been granted their own pavilion at the Biennale. It is not as if they were dragged in by an art world anxious to see what it had to offer. Indeed, Davide Croff, the new Biennale president, says that the delegation that visited him from Beijing last year was insistent in its wish that China become involved in the world’s most important contemporary art gathering, sooner rather than later. It seems China was finally ready to enter the fold of culture’s most contentious arena; to join in with the tampon chandeliers, the screaming performance artists, the blood-curdling video pieces and the trompe l’oeil sculptures that every other summer turn Venice into a surreal backdrop for contemporary art’s frisky excesses.
In a bid, perhaps, to cover all its options, China has entered five works for this, the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale. One of them, “Farmer Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer” by Peng Yu and Sun Yuan, is something of a gift for those seeking an easy metaphor: the spacecraft in question is revved up in a garden inside the city’s old Arsenale by its inventor, a farmer from Anhui province, to try and achieve take-off.
Amid much clatter and noise, the tension becomes palpable: will he, and China, succeed? On its inaugural “flight”, one of the propeller blades suddenly sank, forcing the farmer-pilot to abandon his efforts. In truth, it never looked like he was going to achieve his aim. But this is precisely the point the artists are making, describing their work as a “dramatic experiment that parallels the unknowns in China’s open future”.
The pavilion curator, the charismatic Cai Guo-Qiang, used the launch’s press conference to reinforce the point: the flying saucer was a symbol, he said, of a country that was trying hard to take off but was unsure where it was going. Whether it took off at all, he said, was unimportant: “We are not in an astronautical exhibition.” Such frankness, perhaps surprising to western listeners, is replicated in two more works: Xu Zhen’s “Shout” is a video installation showing passers-by turning suddenly to see who has screamed at them (like the “smack of a zen master” to a recalcitrant pupil, said Cai); Liu Wei’s “Star” is a light installation among the old oil drums of the Arsenale, disorienting the viewer with violent flashes of white light, a symbol, said Cai, of the “chaos and numbness of urban cosmopolitan life”.
The remaining Chinese entries are decidedly less aggressive. Yung Ho Chang’s entry is a beautiful canopy made entirely of bamboo, a homage to agrarian artisanship, while Wang Qiheng’s “Fengshui Project for Venice Biennale” is a witty analysis of all the Biennale national pavilions based on the ancient topographical art, adding a flippant and self-referential note to the proceedings. Taken together, the five Chinese pieces form an impressive and eclectic range of work; nothing that hasn’t been seen before, but plenty of evidence that the society is publicly scrutinising itself with a disarming clarity.
A very different ethic pervades the pavilions of some of the more established nations in the Giardini, the Biennale’s more traditional venue. In both the British and US pavilions, housing works by Gilbert George and Ed Ruscha respectively, the emphasis is on slickness and competence. These artists are well established, their works already valued highly; but there is a whiff in the air of playing safe. There is little sense of the edgy experimentation that gives each Biennale its special flavour.
But that is always part of the Biennale’s charm: the mixture of highly polished art works, presented by the nations that bask in their status as cultural trend-setters, and those pieces from less recognised countries that draw attention more explicitly, and occasionally ham-fistedly, to social and political matters in their homeland.
These are most often found outside the Giardini-Arsenale complex, in some of the otherwise abandoned palazzi that nestle on or around the Grand Canal. In the Fondazione Levi, for example, another country is making its Biennale debut: Afghanistan. On the wall of one of the stripped-out rooms is a selection of rugs, in familiar brown-hued earth colours, but with bold modernist designs taking the place of traditional patterns. Beautiful craftsmanship; but where is the art? It lies, says their creator, Rahim Walizada, in the very manufacture of the work. The artist took his designs to the countryside, far from Kabul, where he employed more than 20 women who could not leave their homes, to make the carpets in their own houses. It takes a team of four women about eight months to make each one.
There is, therefore, a socio-political commentary in the creation of the rugs; and a financial aftermath too: Walizada, who lived in New York before returning to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, has already turned down approaches from leading department stores in London and New York to stock the highly desirable works, not wishing to tie into an exclusive deal with any single retailer. A nose for business has become at least as essential as a fertile imagination in today’s contemporary art world, whether you are based in a SoHo loft or the plains of an Axis of Evil countryside.
This being Italy, there was an inevitable flurry of polemica as the Biennale opened to the press last week. This came from the Italian culture minister Rocco Buttiglione, known to a wider international public after being forced to withdraw his candidacy for a job as a European Commissioner last year for his controversial views about women and homosexuality. Buttiglione was relatively restrained in his comments this time, but observed, after a brisk tour of the works on display in the Arsenale, that sexual permissiveness, like communism, was just another social movement from the past - “acqua passata” - and was no basis for stimulating art.
He may have been referring to the work of the Guerrilla Girls, who have festooned the entrance to the Arsenale with posters denouncing the unfair treatment of women and ethnic minorities in the Biennale itself; or perhaps to Joana Vasconcelos’ giant and rather beautiful chandelier, composed of 14,000 tampons; or more likely still, to the shocking video by Guatemala’s Regina Jose Galindo, who received the Golden Lion for best young artist.
Galindo’s live and filmed performances are intricately bound to the fate of her fellow countrywomen. The videos displayed here are all but unwatchable: in one, she shaves off all her body hair and walks naked down the street; in another, she undergoes a hymenoplasty - a common cosmetic practice in her homeland to “repair” the hymen - which we see in gruesome close-up. Little wonder that Buttiglione was whisked past the work during the tour. He later took the trouble to condemn the practice, adding however that its graphic depiction did not necessarily constitute great art. The Biennale judges took a different view, lauding Galindo’s “courage in confronting power” as they handed her the prize.
Another piece said to have upset the conservative culture minister is Francesco Vezzoli’s striking five-minute film in the Italian Pavilion, a mock trailer for a forthcoming film about Caligula, featuring real Hollywood stars such as Benicio del Toro, Courtney Love and Karen Black. During the brief glimpses of orgiastic sex, we also see the face of the new Pope for a split second, although some may feel that the work’s surrealistic humour disguises its potential for offensiveness.
France won the Golden Lion for best National Pavilion, where Annette Messager reinterpreted the Pinocchio myth in a dramatic and crowd-pleasing installation. The other pavilions varied in tone, from the meticulously crafted woodwork tableaux of Australia’s Ricky Swallow, to Miyako Ishiuchi’s melancholy photographs in the Japanese pavilion, in which she contrasts the intimate possessions of her dying mother with detailed pictures of her scarred skin, a moving juxtaposition of textures and meanings.
Humour and disorientation are big themes, and nowhere do they come together more obviously than in Germany’s pavilion, where Tino Sehgal’s installation is the talk of the Giardini. As you walk in, the security guards, sporting official Biennale uniforms and badges, suddenly start jumping up and down, singing in unison with slightly crazed expressions: “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!” If this were not dislocating enough, more guards are waiting in the next room to accost you, offering to refund half of your entrance fee if you will talk to them about the market economy.
I took up the offer and my interlocutor, Charles, asked me a series of questions on globalisation, rebutting my answers with further questions, until we came to a polite compromise. He gave me a code word - “Dodo 2” - that I was to present to the cashier at the entrance and he or she would complete the refund. I duly walked up to the cash desk and whispered the magic word - only to be told that the cashier had run out of money for the day, but would have some more the following morning. That, we conclude, is the pesky thing about the market economy: promises much, rarely delivers. One couldn’t help wondering if anyone had told the Chinese yet.
The Venice Biennale runs until November 6.
