The art fair season of the decade has returned. Collectors and curators, artists and dealers have flocked to Europe to gauge the new state of art from the openings of the 52nd Venice Biennale, Documenta Kassel 12, and Sculpture Project Münster 07. 

These international art shows have become a meaningful focal point of the contemporary world. Engaging in a process of understanding the tastes in contemporary art and their underlying intentions is a must for viewers while participating in the exhibitions. Especially when we live in the current world at extreme ends and wars, it requires even more. Here, art INASIA presents sharp guide of how to gaze these very different three art festivals. 

Art Excursion to 52nd Venice Biennale: Jin Sang Yoo

The Vague Politics of Potentiality: Young Cheol Lee

The Archaeological Site: Ji Yoon Moon

The 52nd Venice Biennale will set out on its 5 month marathon beginning with a spectacular opening on June 10 and end on November 12. Robert Storr, The executive director has prepared a time to think about the dichotomous consideration from philosophers that came after Plato. Great works of art make the audience think and stimulate their senses. With the inter-relation of thought and feeling in mind, He has chosen the harmonic collision between intellect and intuition as the topic of this Biennale. Let’s concretize the expectations we’ve had about the Biennale which may feel as if gradually fading these days and observe what hot and healthy debates this year’s Venice Biennale is about to bring.

Sharp Contrast in Western and Non-Western

Robert Storr, the artistic director of the Venice Biennale and the former senior curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, declared the theme of the exhibition “Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind.” The point of the theme is revealing the moments of aesthetic solutions, within the Biennale structure where diverse artistic worlds intertwine and intersect, which is beyond a hierarchy in dichotomous categories from philosophers that came after Plato. In his preface for the main exhibition, Robert Storr starts with a word, ‘epiphany.’ The term ‘epiphany’ refers to a moment of sudden insight when an ideal world is revealed. But how can we interpret this conceptual theme, one of the most important Modernist Project in the 20th century, in the thread of the contemporary world that we live in?

As if paradoxically referring to Franscesco Bonami’s theme in the 50th Venice Biennale, ‘The Viewer’s Dictatorship’, which is presented as a subconscious force from the inside of the art domain, Storr is asking for viewers to grasp their own understanding of contradiction between past and present and conflicts between ideal and reality in the context of their contemporary world. However, his request to viewers necessitates their recognition of complicated surroundings. This is because the Biennale should be aligned in contemporariness. Our current world is overflowed with capitalistic optimism and political defeatism. Storr’s aesthetic context around the exhibition, therefore, was needed to meet compromises on various tangled conditions.

Robert Storr attempts to bring some balance in the exhibition by giving a sub-theme “Art in the Present Tense.” As a matter of fact, the exhibition introduces a number of artists whose works are related to the subject of death and war, societal ideal and its downfall. Over a half of 102 artists, selected by Robert Storr among the particular exhibitions at the Arsenale which start from ‘Aperto’ and the main exhibition in the Italian Pavilion, are dealing with these kind of subjects. To name a few, starting from the Arsenale, León Ferrari who is also invited in the Kassel Documenta, creates apocalyptic visions of war and totalitarian society. Argentine Guillermo Kuitca who was introduced in the San Paulo Biennale, delineates the history of war and political bankruptcy. Yang Fudong’s massive video works present the current memory about the Chinese modern history in four booths. Ilya and Emila Kabakov represent individual’s lost utopian visions into a somewhat monumental project. Francis Alÿs presents her implicit perspective on the paradox of contemporary art through drawings and a lyrical animation, ‘a shoe being shined by a cloth.’

Yang Chen Jong, Jan Christan Braun, and Sophie Calle who are introduced simultaneously for both the Arsenale and the French Pavilion, focus explicitly on the subject of death. Sophie Calle has gained great publicity in the Biennale again, where she presents her stunning work of recomposing records and random thoughts about her mother’s death using objects like photos, texts, and oil paintings. This work was based on her true story about how Ms. Calle received the news that she had been accepted to the Venice Biennale on the same day she learned that her mother was dying in a month. The Italian Pavilion at the Giardini where the exhibitions extend to the Arsenale introduced a number of American artist’s works in 60’s and 70’s. This was well predicted as Robert Storr became the director of the Biennale who was the former chief critic at MOMA in New York. The pavilion is filled with artworks by Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Nancy Spero, Robert Ryman, Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, Jason Rhoades, and Louise Bourgeois. Also, it was an appealing remark that the artwork of Cuban-born Felix Gonzales-Torres, who recently left us presented for both the main exhibition and the U.S. Pavilion simultaneously as to showing deference to himself.

There have been various opinions about this year’s Biennale. The general opinion around the 52nd Venice Biennale was about its failure to define the contemporary issues and its original point of view. This can be explained as follows: The Biennale requests the director’s explicit perspectives more and more. When a number of Biennales are jumbled up around the world, where similar artists are repeatedly introduced, it seems to be more difficult to propose a new format of the Biennale when it introduces hundreds of artists at the same time. Like the previous Biennales, this year’s exhibition has met the same problem that it started with, selecting the artists and ended to only arraying their art pieces. To sum up, the Venice Biennale 2007 is dichotomized into two categories; young and emerging non-western artists representing ‘Art in the Present Tense’ and historical artists centered in the U.S. representing the other theme, ‘Sense and Mind.’ Two flows of the exhibition are so obvious that viewers can recognize them immediately. They are embedded throughout the exhibitions in a sense. Although Robert Storr dissents Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ that viewers shouldn’t interpret an art exhibition as a spectacle which can manipulate viewers, he seems to take this problem somewhat lightly. In the other words, the exhibition is a huge text and viewers read this text together with authors. Viewers cannot simply ignore that the director’s standpoint in the exhibition, especially, with the facts that he is the first American curator in the history of the Venice Biennale and the former chief curator at the world’s most cultural hegemony, the Museum of Modern Art.

In this prospective, the dismissive feedback about the exhibition’s conservativeness comes in the thread that the director should have obviously guessed how the viewers would interpret the exhibition who live in the world where the U.S. leads into neo-liberalism and wars. Although the exhibition introduces a large number of outstanding works with interesting subjects, it is unavoidable that the overall feedback of the Venice Biennale itself overpowered the exhibition. Thinking of this point, it gives a few thoughts about the road next to the National Hall in Swiss was named after Herald Szeemann as to pay tribute to him.

Biennale, The Only Art Expo Helds National Pavilions

Inspite of all this, no one can deny that the Venice Biennale is the largest and the most influential art show in the world. At this year, the Turkish and the African Pavilions are newly opened. Two exhibitions are held in the Arsenale due to the Giardini having met its full capacity and they attract much attention because they represent their regional political issues. Vasif Kortun directs the Turkish Pavilion, who has led the Istanbul Biennale and in recognition of his great performance, it has become a major international event. This reflects Turkey’s fervent desire to become a member of E.U. by showing their interests in cultural diplomacy.

Heyin Alptekin’s huge installation which occupies the central exhibition space in the Arsenale, includes video works which allow viewers to survey the modern look of Turkey throughout the multiple exhibition booths. No less than that, the pavilion was filled with enthusiasm by a huge number of Turkish crowds. Right next to the Turkish Pavilion, the African Pavilion invited 30 artists who widely ranged from South Africa to North Africa. The distinct point of the African exhibition was that it included non-African artists, such as a Dutch artist, Marlene Dumas and Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist who worked with Andy Warhol. Yinka Shonib who has been widely introduced in Kassel Documenta 2002, Ghada Amer, a Egyptian born and well-known artist to Asian artsy, Oladélé Bamgboyé who was invited the 1st Yokohama Triennale, and some other important artists participated in the African Pavilion.