on feeling vindicated and realizing the fragile shibboleth of my opinion

Filth, blasphemy and big, big stars

Adrian Searle picks his way through the world's largest, most prestigious art show: the Venice Biennale

Adrian Searle
Tuesday June 14, 2005

Guardian

The 51st Venice Biennale opened on Sunday and in the German pavilion the exhibition attendants have broken into a song about it. "Ohhh! This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary," they chant, waving their arms. Thomas Scheibitz's sculptures, which share the pavilion, stand mute, oddly geometric and somewhat recalcitrant in the face of this little performance. Orchestrated by Tino Sehgal, the work is joyful as much as ironic or insolent; it's art about art, about the art world, and about Sehgal himself. He's telling us - or getting his actors dressed as attendants to tell us - both how theatrical and how very now it all is. I wonder why visitors don't form a spontaneous conga, spilling out into the Giardini, the other national pavilions, and the medieval naval buildings and docks of the Arsenale, where the biennale continues, still chanting the litany of the moment.

It is always all so contemporary. Except when it is passe, like the vast, classically designed chandelier hung not with Murano glass baubles but with unused tampons at the entrance to the Arsenale. (How many student works, though not quite so well done, has one seen like this?) Or the wrecked and empty Romanian pavilion, a non-work that Daniel Knorr presents, I take it, as a kind of metaphor for the powerlessness of art and of the nation state in the new world order and the new Europe, but that reminds us only of other such non-happenings that have amused, baffled and annoyed visitors over the past decades.

Sehgal and Knorr are not the only artists to have chosen the biennale to examine what it means to show here. In his On Translation: I Giardini, in the Spanish pavilion, Antoni Muntadas questions the continuing relevance of the idea of national representation, and what participation signifies; in one work he lists those many nations, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, not represented. Even the astonishing 17.5m-high mountain of timber and roofing felt that has engulfed the Austrian pavilion, a work by Hans Schabus, is in part a comment on the history and site of the pavilion itself, and what showing here represents for the individual artist, the spectator, and for Austria and Italy, which share the same mountain border. Climbing through the work's Piranesian interior to the mountain's peak - where one can open a little hatch to gaze over the Giardini and, on a clear day, to the distant Alps - one comes to a pinnacle that is Romantic, absurd, all-encompassing and empty. Which is exactly the point.

The Venice Biennale is filled with nullities and profundities, the silly and the serious. Always, there is too much to see, things to forget and things that surprise and confuse. Confusion is good, but there's too much of it, even though this is a smaller, better biennale than the previous two editions. Over and above the national pavilions, with their artists chosen by individual curators and committees, the biennale always appoints an overall director, or on this occasion two: Spanish curators María de Corral and Rosa Martínez, who have organised the biennale's keynote exhibitions in the Italian pavilion and in the Arsenale.

Taking over the Italian pavilion (which some Italians have complained they would quite like back) and several outdoor sites in the Giardini, is De Corral's The Experience of Art. She lists nostalgia, the body, "power, domination and violence", "sociopolitical critique of current events by means of irony", and "the use of images and film and narration of the past as an immense archive" among her preoccupations. She lets the works do the work, which is saying a lot these days, in a show whose installation is respectful and sometimes startling. The interconnecting galleries devoted to Thomas Schütte, Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Marlene Dumas may seem a tad predictable but at least allow the artists to speak for themselves and to one another. What the conversation entails, in the juxtaposition of a Rachel Whiteread staircase and some blown-up, pixilated photographs by Thomas Ruff, I can't exactly fathom: mediation of reality through the casting process and the electronic manipulation of the image, I'd guess. Schütte's room of his recent iron female figures on their huge tables are coupled with a large suite of etched portraits, and rightly won a Golden Lion. His show might even be seen as an old-fashioned demonstration of sculptural mass, volume and line, but being old-fashioned and conservative it is a sort of disguise for Schütte.

The later works by Bacon nearby look weary and mannered by comparison, though what Bacon inevitably came up against, apart from the trap of his own style, was the fact that figurative sculpture and painting has to deal with mannerism, against which a self-conscious and self-effacing realism can provide no alternative, because it too is a manner, a stance taken in the light of history as well as the things in the world it seeks to depict. This is also evident in the Lucian Freud retrospective at the Museo Correr. A group of the last works of Juan Muñoz, in which 13 figures sit laughing and falling perilously from their raised rows of iron benches, can be taken as a kind of joke about what a sculpted figure can represent and what its presence means - as a form, as a surrogate person, as a mirror of the real. They are laughing at the impossibility of their own existence, and at the expectations we might have of them.

So it is with Bruce Nauman's funny and horrible Shit in Your Hat - Head on a Chair, in which a projected, white-faced mime artist tries to follow Nauman's impossible authoritarian commands, and in Willie Doherty's Non-Specific Threat, in which the camera constantly circles the shaved, magnificently malevolent head of a man. This is accompanied by a lengthy spoken text about how this guy is your worst nightmare. "I am the face of evil," the voice says. "I am beyond reason ... your death is my salvation ... I am your desire." This is done in such a deadpan way as to be convincing while serial-killer-movie implausible. Then again, Barbara Kruger's invocation of George Bush and American hubris on the exterior of the Italian pavilion reminds us that nothing is implausible.

At least we can lighten up with Francesco Vezzoli's hilarious trailer for a remake of the notorious 1979 movie Caligula. Installed with cinema seating and booming acoustics, it leaves the audience open-mouthed as Helen Mirren leads two frisky, bare-bottomed, collared slaves about, and Karen Black, the most promiscuous woman in Rome, dabs her nose with freshly ejaculated spunk. Gore Vidal, who wrote the screenplay for the original, hams it up gloriously, announcing: "Coming soon ... to a theatre near you." With alarming out-takes from the dildo-fellating, bum-lickingly orgiastic 54 minutes censored from the 1979 film, and with appearances by Courtney Love, Glenn Shadix and Benicio del Toro, this is almost the best five minutes in the biennale. It's got the lot: filth, blasphemy, erudite allusions and big, big stars. As the deep-throated film-trailer hyperbole has it: "You can literally feel it coating you in the taboo!" Vezzoli's Caligula puts to shame some of the more respectful, movie-quoting, "from art-house to art installation" film work in Venice, of which there is a very great deal.

In many ways, The Experience of Art is a more satisfying, and at times troubling and moving, show than most of the efforts by the national representations in the Giardini. If Mark Wallinger had been in a position to exhibit the work he has in De Corral's show, when he represented Britain in the 47th biennale, he'd have won best pavilion. This two-hour video record of the 10 days the artist spent wearing a fancy-dress bear suit and living in the empty, glass-walled Mies van der Rohe Nationalgalerie in Berlin, shuffling about, sleeping, gazing at the severities of human architecture, being a bored bear, is genuinely tragic.

There are few killer individual pavilions this time around. Gilbert and George deserve to represent Britain, but there are too many of their new, computer-assisted Gingko Pictures. There's more than a hint of overripe decay and railing against age in there. But G&G are a wonderfully sinister national treasure. And that's what their work, in the end, seems to be about. Age seems to be the subject of Ed Ruscha's 1990s paintings, in the US pavilion, of hard-edged, anonymous industrial buildings in LA, too. He has now repainted these as a second accompanying series. The buildings are still there, but the companies that occupied them have been bought out. The logos have changed and the sky has gone brittle and lurid. There's a sadness, and a nostalgia for what was already brooding and hideous. This is less about changing economics than an older artist watching the world change.

Ruscha, rumour had it, was set to win the Golden Lion for best pavilion. Instead, Annette Messager won. "Casino" reads the neon sign over the entrance to the French pavilion. A casino is both a gambling hall and a brothel, and this work is both a retelling of the Pinocchio story and a devious play on the life of Casanova. Inevitably, it is a Freudian nightmare. In the first room a little wooden Pinocchio endlessly turns on a cart between piles of bolsters, like a child imagining its cot as a play den, alive with furtive rubbery hands and knife-edged noses. In the second room is an ocean of red silk: it roils about, fills the space and retreats, floods and ebbs. Undersea life glows on and off beneath the silken, bloody sea, and sickbed apparitions ascend and descend from the ceiling. Pinocchio, like Jonah, has been eaten by the whale, or by God, or someone. Messager returns to us a convincing sense of childhood wonder and horror with a work that is difficult to resist.

It's all done with compressed air, and computer-assisted machinery that farts and hisses and, in the final room, throws things about with mad abandon. Soft-toy body parts and dice are hurled around with maniacal glee. I was astonished. But perhaps not quite so astonished as at a performance by John Bock in the Arsenale, where he and an accomplice attack one another with labour-saving kitchen devices and get covered in porridge oats. Unlike Messager's work, Bock's installation is a platform for performance, and without the performance to animate it the whole thing is just a mess.

This was part of Rosa Martinez's show Always a Little Further. It always feels that the further you walk through the cavernous interiors of the Arsenale, the worse the art gets. This year was no exception, although every piece was installed with a certain elegance. Perhaps the Arsenale should be a free-for-all, an antidote to the territorial claims of the national pavilions in the Giardini. The most contentious piece here was in the end censored from the show. Gregor Schneider intended to site a black cube, based on the proportions of the sacred Ka'ba in Mecca, in St Mark's Square. This object was, he said, "an independent body free of all mental associations". But nothing is free of mental associations, ever, not even the most dismal art work. All we are left with is a short video.

My favourite piece was Korean artist Kimsooja's video Needle Woman, in which, on several screens, a woman is seen standing in crowded streets around the world - in Chad, Yemen, Nepal, Havana - as people mill round her. You feel the immensity of the world, mutual incomprehension, curiosity, surprise. She is the still centre, the subject always turned away from us. No, not the subject, but an object; it is the others who are the subjects.

If the Arsenale is a bit of a zoo - replete with a hippopotamus sculpted in mud from the Venice canals, on whose back someone sits, reading a newspaper and blowing on a little whistle - it concludes beautifully in an empty little brick bastion, where we hear a multiple-tracked recording of Louise Bourgeois muttering to herself and singing the half-remembered songs of her childhood. Like Messager's work, this is much more than cute or silly. Bourgeois doesn't care whether she's good or bad, and I'd rather have bad than mediocre, of which there is always a lot at Venice.

One of the most argued-over works is Mandarin Ducks, by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, in the Dutch pavilion. This film is in many ways irredeemable, with its stilted acting, mannered staging and its cliches about relationships during a Sunday gathering of friends, whose convivial afternoon degenerates into a minefield of sexual tension, rancour, embitterment and jealousy. The mannerism, to be generous, is a deliberate element of the film, along with the lighting, the screening conditions and the references to art. The shock was that this pair of artists are best known for the cinematic distance, elegance and understatement of their often panoramic earlier works. This, instead, was a brave attempt to turn the camera away from an anonymous reality towards human intimacies and the mess of relationships. Its tensions were all internalised and artificial. But rather than feeling smug about how many arty in-jokes and references the viewer could chalk up, I ended up consumed by the soap-opera-bad acting of it all, which was itself either a hideous mistake, or a conscious reference.

The Mandarin ducks of the title are supposed to be a symbol of fidelity. Maybe what the artists were really talking about was fidelity to their own reputations, and how sometimes it is necessary to move in a new direction. This in itself is not so much contemporary, as Tino Sehgal would have it, as a creative necessity.

· Venice Biennale is at various venues in Venice until November 6. Details: 00 39 041 271 90 20, or www.labiennale.org

some pilfered photos of annette messager's "casino," which left me gaping and floored:


the clock, however, was the one strong false note i felt she struck in the exhibition. the room, with its flowing red fabric and circular time would have much improved without the overly literal reminder of the clock. time is there, one feels it in all its wearying circularity, without its direct representation.