Venice sees a flood of creativity, at the Biennale and beyond
VENICE - America's official contribution to this year's Venice Biennale, a career overview of the work of Bruce Nauman, was at once the best exhibition in town and a cruel gob of spit in the face.
Venice during the Biennale is a city absolutely glittering with what Saul Bellow called "event glamour." The world's wealthiest collectors descend on the lagoon, journalists and museum folk prowl the city avidly, and every other building, from refurbished palazzos on the Grand Canal to derelict rooms off forgotten alleys, seems to be hosting an exhibition.
But to the prevailing mood of the Biennale, Nauman, who is 65, has his bucket of water ready. In its disciplined, nerve-racking way, his work mocks the dream of desire and requital, meaning and epiphany that both the Biennale and Venice itself seem designed to arouse. "You may think you felt something," he writes in a passage of text that is part of a 1973 piece called "Flayed Earth/Flayed Self (Skin/Sink)," "but that's not it that's not anything you're only here in the room."
Nauman's work at the American pavilion in the Giardini, home to the national pavilions, was complemented by two other Nauman shows at nearby art schools. Far from being optional extras, the off-site shows were superior to the pavilion's. They included two new sound installations: "Days," a long room with pairs of speakers on either side emitting voice recordings of the days of the week in English, and "Giorni," doing the same in Italian. Both established shifting rhythms and tones, making what could have been an insultingly mindless experience utterly beguiling.
And yet still somehow insulting. That is just Nauman's way. But don't take it personally. It's not you he's insulting: It's the whole human dream of transcendence.
Other signature pieces at the Biennale included "Think," a dual-channel video of the artist's head bobbing up and down; the sound and light installation "Get out of My Mind, Get out of This Room"; and the famous spiraling neon sign that spells out, with more pathos than sarcasm, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths."
Nauman was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation this year, the first time since 1990 that an American has won the award. It's a coup for the Philadelphia Art Museum, which organized this survey, and deserved recognition for Nauman, who has been a massive influence on younger artists.
But he makes art that does more than just "explore" or "interrogate" or "probe" ideas, in the manner of so many of his conceptually oriented followers. He skewers them. And the manner of the skewering is so crisp, so economical, so zipped-up, that the experience of his work stops being about ideas and takes on a quality of dread.
Of course, dread can descend on anyone attempting to traverse the Biennale. There are hundreds of artists showing every kind of art.
The director of this year's show - taking over from America's Robert Storr in 2007 - is the Frankfurt-based curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum. Birnbaum's displays - one in the Arsenale, the other at the former Italian pavilion, now called the Palazzo delle Esposizione, in the Giardini - are relatively lacking in big-name firepower. And yet my feeling was that he has outdone Storr and produced one of the best Biennales of the last decade.
At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a scintillating Robert Rauschenberg show called "Gluts." Coming a year after the artist's death, it's a survey of 40 little-known sculptural works made in the '80s and '90s from recycled metal.
He called them "gluts" because a glut in the oil market had depressed the economy and made more of this detritus available. There's an air of insouciance but also formal precision about the show. Rauschenberg at his best.
The Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, meanwhile, has a fine exhibition devoted to the enigmatic American James Lee Byars called "James Lee Byars Lived Here" (he did, for many years). And at the Fondazione Girgio Cini on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Los Angeles-born John Wesley is the subject of a massive career retrospective organized by the Prada Foundation.
Wesley is usually identified with his erotic images in a flat, economical idiom using a limited pink and black palette. Well, the flatness never varies, but the range of Wesley's subject matter, his graphic inventiveness, and the limberness of his cool and pleasure-loving wit were a revelation to me.
But the really great show in Venice this year is at the Palazzo Fortuny. Called "In-finitum," it's the third in a trilogy of shows conceived by the Belgian dealer Axel Vervoordt. It's a cornucopia of more than 300 works displayed over four floors, ranging from ancient archeological objects to Old Masters, Asian art, modern masters, and a wide array of contemporary artists.
A substantial section is devoted to unfinished works by Cezanne, Bonnard, George Romney, and Marlene Dumas, among others. Just as other parts of the display make us question the afterlife of artworks, this extraordinary section prompts all sorts of speculations on the genesis of artworks and the whole questionable idea of "finish." Works by Picasso, Rothko, and Miro, meanwhile, are boldly relegated to the attic.
"In-finitum," like its predecessor, "Artempo" at the last Biennale, is so unusual and of such high quality that it would be worth the trip to Venice alone.
Birnbaum's show, called "Making Worlds," was inspired by a book by philosopher Nelson Goodman, who taught Noam Chomsky at the University of Pennsylvania. Goodman was born in Somerville, educated at Harvard University (where he was also later a professor), and died 10 years ago in Needham.
He worked for a time as an art dealer and turned toward aesthetic philosophy later in his career. In "Ways of Worldmaking," he wrote: "Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking."
Hence, perhaps, the many installations in Birnbaum's show that draw on ideas already established in fields outside art, such as choreography, film, and especially architecture.
From the very first work in the Arsenale - a tremendous installation of bunched and spotlit diagonal golden threads resembling shafts of light in a cathedral, by the late Lygia Pape - Birnbaum confronts us with spaces transformed. Many of these architectural interventions, like Pape's, are dramatic. But they are also light, provisional, delicate, as if acknowledging a need to tread lightly or make use of what already exists.
Tomas Saraceno, for instance, inspired by the webs of the black widow spider, filled the main gallery of the Palazzo delle Esposizione with a galaxy of interconnected elastic rope. Saraceno shares with several other artists here, such as Marjetica Potrè and Yona Friedman, an interest in improvised housing, often suspended above existing structures.
Not all of these improvisations on architecture made for great work. But I liked the hanging forest of gymnasts' rings by the American dancer and choreographer William Forsythe (balancing on them was devilishly hard), the area of lawn turned into a swamp by Lara Favaretto, and also the series of box-shaped rooms, each a different color, by Brazil's Cildo Meireles.
Birnbaum paced his exhibition beautifully, but he gave special prominence to some artists who didn't deserve it. Wolfgang Tillmans, for instance, has never been more than a mildly interesting practitioner of grungy, snapshot-style photography. But here he has the best part of a large gallery to himself, and most of the photographs Birnbaum has chosen are abstract monochromes. What could possibly be more boring?
Still, there were many memorable highlights by artists we are sure to see more of in years to come. America's Paul Chan has a shadow projection of orgiastic goings-on called "Sade for Sade's Sake." It's raw, provocative, and like most of Chan's work, magical. In a similar vein, Hans-Peter Feldman sets up toys and bric-a-brac on revolving turntables with a series of lights casting bewitching shadows on the walls.
I was fascinated by a black-and-white film by Ulla von Brandenburg set in Le Corbusier's famous Villa Savoye. To the sound of a dainty German lullaby, we watch a family (loosely based on the real, dysfunctional family who actually lived in this landmark modernist house) sitting down at table. At one point they all seem to be mouthing the words to the lullaby, even as their gestures continue much as before. Later, they wander individually through the house before congregating in the garden. The work combines aspects of cinema, architecture, theater, and performance, and it's riveting.
Other highlights include a film about a company of metal fabricators by Simon Starling - not an artist I have always admired - projected by means of a natty kinetic sculpture. The piece is self-referential (part of the film shows the projector being made) but also historically aware (the metal company was associated with the Bauhaus, the Third Reich, and now with Berlin's contemporary art scene). Both the film and the projector are marvelous to look at, and the whole thing bristles with ironies.
Strong, too, was an installation of giant flowers drenched in lurid paint by Nathalie Djurberg. In among these botanical forms are several screens showing Djurberg's obscene yet compelling stop-motion animation films.
Tony Conrad's paintings made from light-sensitive paper back in the early '70s combine minimalist art with cinema in a captivating way. And I responded, too, to Sunil Gawde's screen with moving mechanical wheels on one side producing shifting eclipses on the other.
In a darkened space, Wodiczko projects eight blurred films in the shape of arched windows against the walls and one in the shape of a rectangular "skylight" onto the ceiling. The films show blurred silhouettes of workers welding, drilling, and washing the windows. Through headphones, we hear the voices of these "aliens" discussing their often heartbreaking predicaments. The whole thing was neither didactic nor overcomplicated. It was very simple, very moving.
There was a lot of buzz around the Danish and Nordic pavilions, which had joined forces for a show called "The Collectors" curated by Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen. Both pavilions were given over to re-creations of two wealthy art collectors' homes. It all looked fascinating from the outside, where we gaped at a man - presumably one collector, a fictional author of erotic novels - face down in a swimming pool and, through the window, a naked young male model lounging on an Arne Jacobsen OX chair.
But when you enrolled in the official tour, conducted by a woman pretending to be a real estate agent, the whole experience turned into pure ham. What a disappointment.
Steve McQueen's film in the British pavilion was the next best thing after Nauman's. It showed the Giardini in winter, out of Biennale season, in a series of long, lonely, hauntingly beautiful shots. If not quite a rebuke, it was certainly a perfect antidote to the hectic hedonism of the Biennale's opening week.
Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com. 