The Venice Biennial, Swedish Style.

It is a well-known fact that biennials have become media circuses and a mere excuse for so-called cultural tourism, but, in our naivety, we always expect each new curator to take advantage of the stage, particularly the one offered by Venice, to present some kind of idea. This has not been the case here. The Swedish curator Daniel Birnbaum has deliberately adopted a position of extraordinary ideological lukewarmness, “Swedish style”. Given the global meltdown we are currently experiencing, it would have been desirable for him to have made some kind of conceptual effort, to have conducted some kind of analysis of the situation, and to have selected a series of artists whose production gives rise to some kind of debate. But this has not happened. In his brief text he mentions three central elements which we cannot help but find surprising; firstly, the idea of “DIY”; secondly, the notion of painting as an expanded language, and, lastly, his defence of the value of poetry as a manifestation of a symbolic plurality in the face of a single globalising way of thinking. All of which is summarised in the sentence Making Worlds, a deliberately deceiving title, as it makes promises but does not deliver, given that there is little that can be built out of these raw materials.

Instead, he has chosen to establish the individuality of artistic languages, which leads the works to be presented following no common thread. Birnbaum himself resorted to the idea of the messy desk in order to describe the direction he has taken. It is not a question of asking him to put it to rights, but he should at least have attempted to establish some sort of structure, however tenuous. Given the above, it is unsurprising to find that he is interested in a certain return to the object and to sensory values; according to this logic, the most political and documenting elements of reality are assigned a secondary role. In his favour, he has avoided the most commercial proposals, which were shockingly central to the last Venice Biennial.

As for the works which he has selected, it is worth noting that Birnbaum has recycled pieces from the 1960s and 70s, whose value is undeniable, but whose presence in the Biennial he fails to justify. The national pavilions, as always, are in a category of their own. The United States, reluctant to take any risks, brings Bruce Nauman’s Topological Gardens, an almost retrospective proposal which has now extended to two spaces, offering an extraordinary journey through old and recent works.

As for Spain’s pavilion, it is hard to find the words to express the image we are offering, yet again, in Venice. It must be hard for outsiders to understand our country: on the one hand, we have Barceló as our official representative, and on the other a series of collateral events including a Catalonian Pavilion (with a very interesting proposal by Daniel García Andújar, Pedro G. Romero and the team formed by Joan Vila-Puig and Elvira Pujol), a Murcia Pavilion (with uneven proposals, of which it is worth noting the video by Alfredo Jaar, which deals with the figure of Pasolini), as well as a large individual exhibition by Bernardi Roig, the inclusion in Birnbaum’s selection of the Barcelona artists Bestué and Vives, and Sara Ramo, who was born in Madrid but lives in Belo Horizonte, as well as a Spanish curator, Fernando Francés, at the head of the Gabon Pavilion, with the artist Owanto. It would seem that we are the perfect example of that sum of individualities and disconnected discourses proposed by Daniel Birnbaum in his Fare Mondi.

Oh, and don’t miss the magnificent exhibition by the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Finally, if you wish to witness the most obscene luxury, make sure to have a look at the new space of the Pinault Collection, in Punta della Dogana, where Tadao Ando has created an impressive exhibition space, and where you might have a chance to see the most spectacular yachts imaginable, docked just outside. The collection itself has been created on the same scale; even Mike Kelly presents his most strategically seductive work here.

Alicia Murría

*Translator’s note: the author plays with the Spanish expression “Swedish style”—which means “to act the fool”— and the curator’s nationality.