Venice Biennale – Making Worlds

Tomas Saraceno, Galaxy forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider´s web, 2008, Elastic rope, Dimensions variables, Place: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

By Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds, the 53rd Venice Biennale presents an extensive arsenal of works from over ninety international artists. The Biennale also heralds a record number of 44 Collateral Events proposed by international groups. Curated by Daniel Birnbaum, the main exhibition’s multiple themes converge into an overarching gestalt exploring many creational forces. In the opening of his curatorial statement, Birnbaum states that:

“The title of the exhibition (…) expresses my wish to emphasize the process of creation. A work of art represents a vision of the world and if taken seriously it can be seen as a way of making a world (…) Fare Mondi // Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead. It is about possible new beginnings…”

These constructive and evolutionary processes manifest in various ways throughout the renewed Palazzo della Esposizioni in the Giardini and the Arsenale. From the softly spiritual and sexually sublime to the overtly political and boldly national, each world exists independently, while still relating and responding to one other in the vacuous terminals of the Arsenale and cloistered quarters of the Giardini. 

These worlds of creationary momentum immediately confront the viewer upon entering the Arsenale area with the work of, Brazilian artist, Lygia Pape’s  TTÉIA 1, C (2002, 2005) series of gold threads arranged in over a dozen square formations, descending from ceiling to floor like beams of ethereal celestial light at the onset of some cataclysmic creation event.

The sublime continues within other worlds like Chu Yun’s Constellation No.2 (2006), where a darkened room filled with everyday appliances such as a water cooler, DVD player, fans, and computers, transforms into an amazing artificial L.E.D. stellar display. Galactic environs also seem to subtly appear within Grazia Toderi’s stereoscopic Red Orbits (2009) Martian red fields. Toderi’s nearly abstract video piece is truly mesmerizing in its binocular screens, giving the viewer a real feeling of watching a surreal and unidentifiable astronomical event.

From the grandiose to the minimal, these universal themes extend to the even most basic constructs of matter. In Tomas Saraceno’s Galaxy forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider´s web (2008), molecular modular webs of dark elastic rope envelop a large room in the Giardini’s main exhibition hall. The strands themselves and their crystalline structural arrangement accumulate in complexity and density; the seeming weightlessness of the forms still hangs precariously close to the floor and the viewer’s path.

Another powerfully primeval piece is Huang Yong Ping’s Buddha’s Hands (2006). A pair of monolithic fiberglass and resin hand-like forms rest on the gallery floor. They do not appear to be entirely human and seem to be in state of metamorphic flux; an enormous strand of prayer beads extends outward. 

Other equally epic works encompass more political worlds as in Goshka Macuga’s (Polish) Plus Ultra (2009) enormous tapestry or Pascale Marthine Tayou’s large-scale installation Human Being (2007). Both works take full advantage of the space they are in with Macuga’s capitalist commentary piece carefully hoisted between and curving around two large columns like a patriotic banner. Tayou’s sprawling shanty-town environment incorporates all the basic elements of human survival, especially focusing on the idea of shelter through fragile architectural environs.

Another work calling into question the nature of humanity is Paul Chan’s intensely provocative Sade for Sade’s Sake (2008-2009). Chan utilizes familiar silhouetted figures, while intensifying previous subject matter with figures in extreme states of sensual activity. Like the figures within Chan’s work, viewers are forced into this world of extremes, with their own shadows becoming part of the drama unfolding before them.

Many other disturbing yet arrestingly alluring worlds exist throughout the Biennale, each calling into question societal values as well as other art world issues. The Russian pavilion’s utopian Victory Over the Future exhibition is an impressive tour de force of installation works, including Andrei Molodkin’s dual Nike statues, each pulsating with an exchange of blood and oil. Pavel Pepperstein’s imaginative and futuristic drawings are a clever addition within the Giardini exhibition, but prove to be even more exciting within a completely personally fashioned world inside the Russian pavilion. The Kunsthaus Bregenz showcase of Jan Fabre’s From the Feet to the Brain morbid, yet poetic sculptural tableaux is phenomenal. The Dutch pavilion is also a favorite with engaging and even satirical narratives at play, in pieces like Elmgreen & Dragset’s Death of a Collector (2009). Each of these exhibitions highlights not only an intensely interesting personal world of the artist, but touches on more universal realms of power, society, humanity and the myriad of relationships therein.

Many of the artists within the expansive scope of the exhibition demonstrated a truly innovative approach to their work. Winning the Golden Lion award for best national participation was probably one of the most innovative of these artists – the 67 year old American artist, Bruce Nauman. Nauman’s Topological Gardens spread out over Venice in three separate locations: the United States pavilion, the Universitá lUAV di Venezie at Tolentini, and the Exhibition Spaces at Universitá Ca’ Foscari. For over forty decades, Nauman’s work has continually explored our often challenging postmodern relationship to art. Considered to be one of the most avant-garde sculptors of his generation, he presents a focused retrospective look at some exemplary works like the playfully disturbing Fifteen Pairs of Hands (1996), Three Heads Fountain (Juliet, Andrew, Rinde) (2005), and Five Pink Heads in the Corner (1992). Void of any descriptive identity, the imagery becomes more iconic than individual. One neon work centrally located within the pavilion that becomes the literal and figural heart of Nauman’s overture is The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), (1967), its blinking motion reflective of urgency and vitality. Works like The True Artist… and Pink and Yellow Light Corridor (Variable Lights) (1972) exemplify the artist’s use of neon lighting, highlighting exciting experimentations from Nauman’s early repertoire. In fact, most of Nauman’s career points towards the artist’s ability to perpetually exist on the edge of the avant-garde with his use of materials, subject matter and performance. The series of works highlighted within the Biennale exhibition are stationed according to three themes: “Fountains and Neons,” “Heads and Hands,” and “Sounds and Space.” The topological theme captures the artist’s often dichotomous and elusive subject matter (apparently also a nod to his mathematics college career path that switched to art). Nauman’s Gardens offer the viewer tantalizing insights into the perennial questions of what constitutes art. Subversive, humorous and completely unorthodox, Nauman’s style continues to have tremendous impact on many artists – generating multiple worlds within worlds and truly representing all the creative potential of the word artist.

Nauman’s seminal exhibition is certainly a microcosm of its own within the Making Worlds biennale. The artist and his work represent the perfect marriage between concept and aesthetics, as the artist truly fashions his own personal world that challenges traditional expectations of art. Nauman often invents idiosyncratic elements in his work that all revolve around the direct creative production of the artist himself. Nauman is forever making worlds that seem to remain in their own exclusive orbit yet speak to greater universal questions, while representing a lineage of influences both historical and reciprocal - from Duchamp and Fluxus to Barney and Harrison.

Each of the artists in this year’s Biennale also brilliantly reflects this reflexive paradigm of influential art. Included in the arsenal of artists are not only rising stars in the art world like Chan or Pepperstein, but a strong set of source artists like Nauman, Ono and Baldessari, who continue to wield their influence on the upcoming generation of artists and their own worlds. Making Worlds provides a steady stream of international artists, each presenting not only an important cultural sensibility, but a greater individual vision that guides all artists as they continue to make their own fascinating, peculiar, epic and many layered worlds. Birnbaum brings us the very monumental reduction of creative potential that resides within each artist and his audience.

Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart is an artist and writer living and working in her hometown of New Orleans. She has had works published in the New Orleans Art Review, ArtForum online, and Art Voices magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans.