back issue

Spanning the newly named Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini, and much of the Arsenale, Daniel Birnbaum's exhibition for this year's Venice Biennale, 'Making Worlds', considered works that reflect upon the ways in which we conceive, construct and model a world. Continuing a trend that has been in force at recent biennales, the curator included a number of historical pieces in the exhibition, including work by the Gutai group from Japan, Oyvind Fahlstrom and John Baldessari. The inclusion of these figures - considered by Birnbaum to be continuing, vital influences on the art of today - served as a point of departure for rethinking the present rather than a history lesson. In combination, they represent conceptual performance works, architectural interventions and an interest in avant-garde subversion.

Birnbuam states, art is 'a vehicle not only for sensual experience but also for critical &uot;thinking&uot; '. He believes that this is 'the only notion of &uot;politics&uot; that really matters in art'. In this vein, a number of works that could be said to elude or transcend market forces were created especially for the exhibition. Xu Tan presented a makeshift school made from the red, blue and white bags commonly used to transport goods. The Moscow Poetry Club held daily performances, while Rirkrit Tiravanija located an underwhelming reading library in the building that formerly housed the biennale bookshop. Tobias Rehberger (who inexplicably received the Golden Lion for Best Artist) created a cafe that was optically so dense it was impossible to inhabit. Roberto Cuoghi's very engaging sound piece Mei gui, 2006 (awarded a Special Mention), was a remake of a Shanghai pop song from the 1930s located in a Carlo Scarpa orientalist garden ...

For a show entitled 'Making Worlds', there was a curious lack of desire, whimsy or fantasy. With the eccentric exception of H´ctor Zamora's videos of floating airships over Venice and Nathalie Djurberg's wondrous walk-in sculpture garden with video animations of plasticine figures engaging in various levels of sexual power play (Djuberg was awarded the Silver Lion for Promising Young Artist), there were few fictional worlds, avatars, virtual spaces or interactive environments.

An exception was provided by artists Miltos Manetas and Rafael Rozendaal, who presented an internet pavilion for the first time in Venice. As well as displaying a dynamic online presence (http://www.padiglioneinternet.com/), there was also a physical experience, where projects were viewable on screens, around which various 'unofficial' internet groups gathered. One such group, PirateBay.org and their project 'Embassy of Piracy', not only tried to raid several exclusive biennale parties with a 'pirate' boat - distributing their now 'illegal' software for internet piracy - but also presented a video performance night to a massive mainly Generation Y crowd. Is this art? Maybe not, but it certainly felt very vital and connected to the world at large. At the other end of the spectrum, septuagenarian Lucas Samaras, who represented Greece, engaged with emerging technologies in Ecdysiast and viewers, 2006, an amusing installation showing a group of spectators on a bank of twenty-four screens watching a digitally enhanced video of the artist stripping.

Birnbaum's reading of the present direction in contemporary art is also one where the documentary relation to the present is no longer in force. By comparison, Kristina Norman in the Estonian pavilion presented several videos centred around the removal of a Soviet monument in Tallinn, documenting ethnic Russian and Estonian perspectives in a post-Independence period. The imagery ranged across memorial, protest, public action and rioting in a way that was both intimate yet non-partisan. There were no talking heads in 'Making Worlds' ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.