The crowd at this year's Venice Biennale is as brash and showy as ever, but the work itself is more subtle, reports Aidan Dunne
Day one of the previews of the Venice Biennale and La Serenissima made the substantial contingent of Irish visitors feel right at home with a series of prolonged downpours. People who'd expected to ward off the sun scrambled for umbrellas and splashed through puddles. But the rain did nothing to deter the substantial crowd who made it to the lunchtime launch of the show by Northern Ireland's representative, Willie Doherty. Fuelled by bellinis, the chatter easily drowned out the doleful tones of Stephen Rea's voiceover for Doherty's starkly downbeat video, Ghost Story. By the time Ireland's show, by Gerard Byrne, opened that evening, the clouds had dispersed.
On hand was Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue, a first for him, and he seemed genuinely impressed by the professionalism of the Irish exhibition (curated by Limerick City Gallery director Mike Fitzpatrick), and the sheer scale and vitality of the biennale in general. It is, by its nature, a huge, sprawling event, but this year it is more tightly organised and somehow more manageable than usual. Perhaps it's a reflection of the excited state of the contemporary art market, but this year also brought a record number of big, showy private yachts to Venice. They were there moored close to the main venue, the Giardini, as well as further afield, and served as venues for some of the perpetual succession of parties that led colourfully attired arty types a merry dance all over the city, like so many pied pipers.
Listen to the word on the street and it would be easy to get the impression that the biennale is in a state of perpetual decline since some mythical golden age in its 100 years-plus history. But, in truth, there is a tired feeling to at least some of what the exhibition's director, Robert Storr, decided to do, and not just because, reasonably, he opted to mark the passing of a significant number of artists, including such major figures as Sol LeWitt and Jason Rhoades, who barely got beyond 40.
Rhoades, whose middle name could have been Excess, could be relied upon to generate the impression, at least, of bling and liveliness at any exhibition, so most international curators probably had his number on speed dial. His frenetic, expensive installations enact and delight in a culture of rampant consumerist commodification. Here, the central element of his work is a mass of suspended neon signs spelling out some of the several thousand slang or pet words for female genitalia he had amassed via years of research. It's all tacky and hysterical, but that's what he was about, and you can see he will be missed, even with Chinese and Russian artists queuing up to demonstrate that, hey, they can do excess too, and then some.
The biennale's title, Think With the Senses - Feel with the Mind, is as vapid as any advertising slogan, and Storr's subtitle, Art in the Present Tense, with the emphasis on that multi-purpose Tense, is closer to the mark and actually does mean something. Artists face particular difficulties, Storr suggests, in working in a complicated and troubled time, and he doesn't aim to map out future models or trends as much as reflect an uneasy here and now. In fact, the show he's chosen for the Italian Pavilion has a significant retrospective aspect to it, which is no bad thing in itself.
It is bad that many big names disappoint. Here I'd include Sigmar Polke, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Ryman. Elizabeth Murray is a capable artist who never seemed to really hit her stride and doesn't here either. Gerhard Richter though, shows a superb set of paintings and Bruce Nauman is caustically good. His Venice Fountains have a brutal, functional quality. Our viewpoint is from the inside of body casts. Water feeds in through the mouths, drains into sinks and is re-circulated. It's about life as physical process, but one also thinks of other, brutalising, contexts.
Storr also makes a clever pairing in Raoul De Keyser and Thomas Nozkowski. The latter's paintings defy the odds in being quietly, slowly absorbing and make up one of the highlights of the biennale. The rules of each work evolve with the painting. Underlining the fact that quiet work can withstand big-budget bling, Merlin James's paintings also look good in the Welsh show on Giudecca. Other high points of the Italian Pavilion include the Pakistani artist, Nalini Malani, and the late Martin Kippenberger.
There were three preview days and you would be hard put just to see everything in the three days, never mind watch every video and read every piece of text. Yang Fudong's film in five episodes, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, its format inspired by Chinese scroll landscape paintings, would in itself have used up the best part of a day, but it is instantly engrossing and looks to be a remarkable achievement.
AS REGARDS THE tense aspect of the Present Tense, Storr incorporates a great deal of work that deals with conflict, its aftermath and its consequences. In Paolo Canevari's video, a boy kicks a football around in the shadow of a ruined building. But the football is a human skull and the building was once the headquarters of Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian army. A striking image, but there is a slickness to the work that is off-putting, perhaps because it has the conceptual neatness of a television advertisement.
American artist Emily Prince has been documenting American service people who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in a series of small pencil drawings, with biographical information. So far, she has made about 3,800 drawings. What of the Iraqi and Afghan casualties? As Prince says, she is not trying to deny their losses, but her work is all the more effective in not opting for a piece of routine Bush-bashing. The gentleness and consideration of her project make it stand out.
Relatively indirect but compelling, Tomoko Yoneda's beautiful photographs of Balkan and Middle Eastern sites chart former conflict - she'll adopt the viewpoint of a sniper looking on Sarajevo, for example. By comparison, Gabriele Basilico's documentary photographs of ruined sections of Beirut take a more direct approach.
Of the national pavilions in the Giardini, people warmed to Belgium's Eric Duychaert's live and video performances as a non-specific intellectual explaining grammar and other subjects. Of course his lectures are shaggy-dog stories.
Also popular is Sophie Calle, representing France with a typically autobiographical piece in which she invited various individuals to comment on the e-mail by means of which her lover dumped her.
The American commissioner, Nancy Spector, was diplomatically astute in choosing Félix González-Torres to represent the United States. Cuban-born, he moved to the US in 1968. His pioneering works used everyday materials to symbolise ideas of social and sexual communities. He died of Aids in 1996. The networks of lightbulbs, images of the sea printed poster-size and available to be taken away, and carpets of wrapped sweets - all were enthusiastically received by the preview crowds.
Pretty much everyone remarked on the taste and decorum of the British pavilion. Not what you expect from bad girl Tracey Emin, but it was a case of curator Andrea Rose playing Henry Higgins to Emin's Eliza Doolittle, attempting to make her paint proper. This may have been a mistake. The paintings look like poor imitations of Cy Twombly and are not in the same league as, say, Cecily Brown - and there are too many tiny monoprints. Emin is a celebrity, and she is liked and respected for the emotional candour of her confessional, autobiographical works, but there is something forced and off-the-peg about the angst in this body of work.
There are several inventive pieces centring on the human body, from Korean Lee Hyungkoo's extraordinary mock-scientific exploration of racial variation to Irena Juzova's commodified view and a beautifully designed installation in the Czech and Slovak pavilion.
Canada's David Altmejd's bird- headed human hybrids, as well as other mutant variations, are ghastly in a graphic horror-movie way.
Venezuela's Antonio Briceno presented photographs of indigenous peoples in several South American locations: straightforward, but worthwhile.
VENTURE OFF-SITE AND there are many riches to be discovered. Thomas Demand's Processo Grottesco, over on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore is a substantial, two-part exhibition in itself, following the creation of his work, Grotto, and also featuring a new series of photographs. Featuring several artists, the New Forest Pavilion is impressive and includes the outstanding Anne Hardy.
What is the verdict on the 52nd biennale likely to be? In a way, it doesn't matter. For all its disappointments, there is a huge amount of work that is well worth seeing.
The 52nd Venice Biennale is at the Biennale Giardini, the Arsenale and other Venice venues until Nov 21. Full-price admissiois 15. The exhibitions from Ireland and Northern Ireland are at the Instituto Provinciale Per L'Infanzia, Santa Maria della Pieta, until Nov 21
Floating ideas: the Irish at bay
In recent years, Irish artist Gerard Byrne has built up a significant international reputation with a series of works based on pre-existing printed texts. The pattern that is emerging in his work is an interest in representing historical documents, snapshots of aspects of their time, in our own time. The latest magazine interview he uses, in 1984 and Beyond (below), is an imaginary re-enactment of a discussion about potential future developments by four sci-fi writers, printed in Playboy magazine in 1963.
Byrne's re-enactments are elaborate (they are professionally acted and shot, for example) but unnaturalistic in that they are deliberately distanced from plausibility. As one might expect, this heavily considered, text-driven approach is popular with those who like their art laced with generous helpings of theory. But photography has also been central to his work and may well become so again in the future.
Willie Doherty is one of Northern Ireland's most respected artists, with a long track record in making works that critically engage with the politics of representation, especially in relation to the Troubles. His recent projects have been concerned with the aftermath of conflict and could be interpreted, if not exclusively, as allegorical accounts of the province's current predicament. He has viewed it as a derelict, disused office block and, now, as the site of a Ghost Story (above). An unseen narrator follows a road through a dark forestry plantation and has a vision of an atrocity that is unspecified but certainly resembles Bloody Sunday. We are left with a jumble of memories and pain and confusion. Nothing is really explained or assimilated or agreed.