Worlds Enough, and Time: Daniel Birnbaum's Biennale

By Marcia E. Vetrocq 9/18/09

Venice

View Slideshow View of Lygia Pape’s installation Ttéia I, C, 2002, gold thread in square forms. Photo Laurent Lecat.; View of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s performance/installation Twenty-two Less Two, 2009, mirrors, wood.;

When the second Triennale di Torino, organized by Daniel Birnbaum and called “50 Moons of Saturn,” opened last November, it triggered intense speculation that the Stockholm-born, Frankfurt-based curator would be offering a sneak preview of his intentions for the 2009 Venice Biennale, then seven months away. As it turned out, the overlap in the shows’ rosters (14 of the 50 artists who exhibited and two who contributed to the Turin catalogue number among the nearly 90 artists and collectives in Venice) proved sizable but unremarkable, as many of those individuals—Paul Chan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tobias Rehberger, Wolfgang Tillmans among them—had already figured (as have others in the current Biennale, like Thomas Bayrle, Ceal Floyer, Carsten Höller and Philippe Parreno) in Birnbaum’s previous exhibitions and writings.

More intriguing is the volte-face in Birnbaum’s construction of the nature of artistic practice. The Turin show centered on the melancholic humor historically associated with creative genius. Birnbaum’s title for the 53rd Biennale, “Fare Mondi” or “Making Worlds,” likewise stays aloft in the metaphoric heavens, but this show abjures the temperamental determinism of the dark side for an endorsement of art as an arena of free and enlightened invention. It’s a congenial and utterly elastic big-tent principle. If the Venice exhibition lacks a sense of urgency or revelation, it almost compensates with the sheer clarity and grace of its presentation. Birnbaum intends to validate the creative individual, but the exhibition succeeds largely on the refinement and wit of his selection and positioning of works. It is very much the curator who is making worlds here.

Birnbaum’s gentlemanly disinclination to engage in generational pandering and identity politics is declared in his choice of the epigraph that heads his catalogue essay, a definition of art by the late Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström: “Consider art as a way of expressing a fusion of ‘pleasure’ and ‘insight.’ Reach this by impurity, or multiplicity of levels, rather than by reduction.” Multiplicity—not a grand, zeitgeisty overview or a hot new art-world wedge issue—is on Birnbaum’s mind. Accordingly, “Making Worlds” proffers any number of themes—community, domesticity, global trade, consumerism, the scale of nature, monochrome color, cosmic dreaming—sometimes by gathering kindred works in the same area, sometimes by dispersing works associated with a given image or concept so that an idea arrives at critical mass through recurrence rather than concentration.

While adjacency, sequencing and recurrence articulate the themes, it’s the canny alternation of bright and crepuscular spaces that knits the exhibition together, almost seamlessly in the Arsenale, more spottily in the main pavilion in the Giardini, which has been grandly rechristened the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (henceforth the PdE) but remains a warren of rooms that defies smooth navigation. In the Arsenale, “Making Worlds” opens with Lygia Pape’s hushed Ttéia I, C (2002). Golden threads, precisely illuminated in the gloom, stretch from ceiling to floor like squared beams of divine light. (Bernini would have approved.) Making for an assaultive contrast, the next space accommodates Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Twenty-two Less Two (2009), 22 gold-framed mirrors that nearly simmer against bright white walls. The gilded frames, as heavy as Pape’s threads are ethereal, fleetingly evoked the Galérie des Glaces at Versailles and an ensemble of Francis Bacon paintings: fleetingly because 20 of the mirrors were smashed by the mallet-wielding artist in a pair of actions during the vernissage. The residue of the performance—shattered surfaces, mounded shards, two “survivors”—makes for a rather inert installation for the run of the show.

Throughout the Arsenale, “Making Worlds” toggles between conventionally illuminated works and shadowy, theatrical ones; the latter are almost always more memorable. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Human Being (2009), an elaborately constructed African village, appears to be slipping into twilight. The resilience of life is represented by fancifully assembled figures and videos of daily labor, while the specters of drugs and death—and the hint of a remote world of fashionable and indifferent consumption—are summoned by bright-hued sacks of white powder labeled “Cocaine Couleur 09,” “Cocaine Couleur 067,” etc. Benetton, anyone?

A powerful sequence of umbral rooms starts with Joan Jonas’s Reading Dante II (2009), a mixed-medium piece centered on footage from performances with the artist’s friends reading aloud from The Divine Comedy. From there you segue into the silence of Grazia Toderi’s Orbite Rosse (2009), a two-channel video whose red-hued and light-dotted nocturnal panoramas, marked by round-edged frames that evoke a stereoscopic device, lie somewhere between a bird’s-eye view of urban sprawl and a star-strewn astronomical chart. Right behind Toderi’s projection lies the inkiest chamber of all. It is easily taken for her tech room, but the winking little lights, which seem to grow more numerous and importunate as you linger, belong to scores of ordinary electronic appliances collected by Chu Yun for his Constellation No. 3 (2009). Not far from here, at the end of the Arsenale, is Spencer Finch’s Moonlight (Venice, March 10, 2009), a quilt of tinted gels that cover a series of handsome arched windows and cast glowing, shifting colored grids on the floor: natural light is rendered as miraculous-seeming as Pape’s illusionistic beams.