The Venice Biennale and Documenta, Part I
by Aemilia Scott

Aemilia Scott has attended the Venice Biennale for numerous years. In this two-part series, she explores the festival's 52nd incarnation, and also attends Documenta 12, a contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.

Once every ten years, a planetary alignment in the art world results in four major events, Venice Biennale, Documenta, Art Basel and Skulptur Project Munster, being held during the same season. The summer of 2007 brought just such a concurrence; of the four, the 52nd Venice Biennale (a combination of curated show and World's Fair) and Documenta 12 were the two centers of the art universe. What happens to the art community during this magical time? Ordinarily, you may expect to pay for one, two or even three plane tickets to see this much art. But if you act now, you can get all this art, plus a fabulous European vacation for the low, low price of a single ticket! If reviews of Documenta and the Biennale are any evidence, the art world was scrambling around Europe like contestants on Supermarket Sweep.

I do not make my career as an artist or an art insider, so I unfortunately could not take part in the "biennale culture" as envisioned by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine. His vision of the biennial art experience this summer, as the frenetic floor of a stock exchange rather than the hallowed rooms of a salon, made the thing seem more like a trans-continental circle-jerk than a powerful celestial convergence. All four exhibitions shared a feeling of sameness, he wrote.

This may have been true for those on the inside, but on the outside the air was very different. I visited the Venice Biennale and Documenta 12 in late June, after the opening week but with barely enough time for the dust to settle. From the perspective of a relatively savvy non-initiate, the two events reflected two very different definitions of art. The Biennale tried to make compromises between the formal and the conceptual in artmaking, and Documenta tried to toss out the formal altogether. For my art dollar, neither exhibition by itself quite hit the mark. And yet when seen together as a single cultural experience, when spoken about in the same breath as they inevitably will be this year, the two exhibitions actually deliver an experience that is greater than the sum of their art.

The 52nd Venice Biennale wins the unofficial Golden Lion for best exhibition name ever: "Pensi con i Sensi, Senti con la Mente." The beauty of the phrase is lost in the English: "Think With the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense." Head curator Robert Storr's intention with the phrase was to unify the heart and mind of artmaking — in other words, the aesthetic and the conceptual. This seemed to be an almost explicit reaction to the last Biennale's curator, Francesco Bonami, whose orgiastic vision of artmaking seemed to many like a sensory overload. Many thought it was a little too tasty, like being force-fed your favorite banquet food. Storr wants to give you a complete, sensible meal.

The problem is, when one's intention in an exhibition is a compromise, a compromise is what one gets. Art has forever struggled with its beauty and its brains, and there are always artists that fall on one side or another of that spectrum. Bruce Nauman made a piece for the Storr-curated Italian Pavilion called "Reverse Fountain," and his work often falls on the side of brains. Nauman's piece, like his other work, is conceptually disturbing and formally amateurish. In fact it is disturbing because Nauman's relationship to materials is perpetually amateurish — seeing it is like looking at the first painting your child makes and realizing that he is deeply disturbed, but disturbed in that un-self-conscious way that only a child can be.

Nauman used Home Depot buckets, rubber tubing, utility sinks simple plaster casts of men's faces to create this fountain. Its formal roughness is like a slap in the face, which startles the brain into accepting a something that is so conceptually tight it blinds the mind's eye. The cast faces are displayed inside-out, and the rubber tubing is forced into the faces' mouths. It is a fountain seen from inside the fountain. Also it is a fountain meant to run in reverse. The man's face you see from behind will be gorged with a continuous flow of water into its mouth. The fountain that you are theoretically inside will be gorged with water. The viewer is the man. The viewer will be gorged. The viewer is standing in the middle of a huge art exhibition with thousands of pieces. QED. Blindingly tight.

On the other side of the spectrum is Austrian poo-thrower Franz West, also included by Storr at the Biennale. He specializes in strange, ugly sculptures and monumental public anti-art works. These are so aesthetically tight that they make your teeth hurt. Featured in the Arsenale, which is the name given to the half of the Biennale that each year's curator gets to play with, were two types of sculptures by West. The first are these — sweet Jesus, they are almost impossible to describe — pieces of flotsam on a stick. They look like 20-foot tall colored chunks of debris, debris less like something you'd find in space and more like something you'd find inside your mouth. And they are displayed on a large iron skewer.

They are mesmerizing, and at times totally retarded, and therefore very funny. The second set of pieces are West's public sculptures, pieces made from welded metal and meant to be sat on. One looks like a giant vagina-doughnut. The others look like massive turds. They are crudely welded but expertly painted, and all look sort of deflated or malformed. They are childish and personal aesthetic gestures, and they are abstract in a way that would have made Clement Greenberg want to kill himself. Each piece is like a thumb up the butt of the proud German tradition of monumental public spaces. My teeth hurt just thinking about it.

These are two of the stand-outs. They stand out because they occupy specific places on the Think with the Senses / Feel with the Mind continuum. Nauman and West live in the brain and the gut respectively, and if the exhibition were made up of strong gestures like these all over the continuum, the Biennale would have been a Technical Knock Out. But again, a compromise was reached when a real fight should have ensued. These sorts of art arguments are better solved — curatorially at least — with an agree-to-disagree attitude. Let us taste the rainbow, don't find the works that are the mud brown of all the colors mixed.

Such mud-brown work included a piece called "Lists" by Spanish artist Ignasi Aballi. The piece consisted of an entire wall covered in framed lists of what seemed to be newspaper cutouts There were lists of things, of people, of places, of numbers — all presented with the intention of removing their meaning, but all bearing an obvious rhetorical relation to Iraq War statistics. The piece would have been interesting if the lists were semiotically divorced from their initial meaning, or if on the other hand the viewer were confronted with an entire wall of meticulously collected war facts, but between the two poles the piece fell apart. It's either too vague, or not vague enough.

American artist Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, made a film piece called New York is Now, which consists of appropriated, old-timey-looking footage of New York City mirrored against itself, and some trancy music. The film seemed more a testament to the power of Apple iMovie's Mirror Image filter than to the power of New York City. Like a disappointing date, the piece was not smart enough to make conversation, and certainly not handsome enough to look at.

Other action-packed artwork at the Biennale include "Save Manhattan 03" by Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi, Untitled (The Seven Deadly Sins) by Kendell Gears and a series of staged photos depicting different war zones of the modern era by British artist Neil Hamon. Each of these pieces grab you first by the gut with a strong aesthetic, and then deliver the conceptual poison once they have you in their grasp.

But a great many pieces at the Biennale existed in a sort of gray area between heart-poundingly aesthetic and head-poundingly conceptual. Imagine how placid it is to stand in a room full of people who are neither too smart nor too sexy to cause a stir. And all I wanted was to see what sorts of feuds or affairs that are started when you pack a room full of supermodels and politicians.

Speaking of politicians: What is the difference between a lawyer and a law? This is the simplest answer: a law is a thing, and a lawyer is someone who interprets a thing. What does this have to do with the art world? The true statement, "Things are politically unstable in Iraq," is a thing. It is, however, not art. Something must be done to it before it becomes art. It must be passed through the brain. It can be amplified, or abstracted, or refracted, or personified, or personalized, or fucking something — anything — but the point is, something must be done to it in order to take it out of the world of journalistic documentary and into the world of art. And disturbingly often, this is what Documenta 12 failed to do.

For a second, put down the everything-as-art concept as popularized by Dadaists, Situationists and Gilbert & George. Those movements presented urinals and public screams as art with the spirit of provocation and challenge, inviting the viewer herself to become part of the artwork. Within that context everything truly can be art.

But Ahlam Shibli's photo collection of the West Bank in Documenta's Neue Gallerie is not art. This kind of non-art is rampant at Documenta 12, but the problem is most clear with this work — additionally, this is the point in the exhibition where I snapped, and came closer to defacing a framed image than ever before. Here is a cemetery in the West Bank. And here are some displeased looking youths in the West Bank. And here are more graves! It looks like this artist had a great summer vacation. If all he wanted to do was make the case that things are unstable in the West Bank, then this artist needs to work for US News and World Report and not try to ride the Biennale circuit. If this message was meant for us, then there is really no need to preach to the choir of art-going Europeans.

Also not art was a prefab temporary building covered with pieces of cake and little screened prints of the Pope (most likely Benedict XVI) with his face blacked out. Although at my most magnanimous I might even find this to be a piece of art because there was a color added to an already existing photo of the Pope. Even at my most gracious, an unused, umodified Congolese voting ballot hanging on the wall of the Neue Gallery is not art.

It's not a matter of political specificity precluding artmaking. Kerry James Marshall's piece, "Single Invisible Man," is an arresting black-on-black painting, a political statement about race relations and — as a bonus — a literary reference! In all honesty I was so thrilled to look at a piece that wasn't desperately whining to be understood, I would have taken just about anything. If nothing else, the stupefying, ceaseless drone of all the non-art at Documenta 12 made pieces like Marshall's — pieces that present the politically concrete in a complicated way, or a morally ambiguous way or a beautiful way — particularly arresting.

Documenta is sort of famous for this problem. Its name means "document," so an emphasis on the documentarian ideal is understandable. But considering the best of Documenta's history, art can be brutally high concept and still be art. In 1972, Joseph Beuys inaugurated the idea of "100 days, 100 lectures," which is a series of lecture about film, urban planning, globalization and occasionally even art. This lecture series continues through Documenta 12. As part of the first series of lectures, Beuys created one of his most famous pieces, "The Honey Pump," which was literally a pump that pushed thousands of pounds of honey in a clear tube through all the lecture rooms. He wanted to show that information is nourishment, and it is pleasure, and it reminds us that we, like bees, need each other to survive. Simple, beautiful, super-high-concept.

So if the Biennale falls short by looking for too much compromise, Documenta falls short because at times it lacks anything to compromise between. And yet for all that is imperfect with the two exhibitions, returning to Jerry Saltz's initial argument, it is clear that the two exhibitions are not at all carbon copies. And this in itself is a victory for the art world, because even a pluralistic community that includes a few wrong voices, a few crazy voices and a few silent members, is always preferable to a single and unified voice, even if that voice is the best one. That is why, at least in this writer's experience of the Venice Biennale and Documenta 12, two somewhat-wrongs do make a right. This is because art is genuinely anti-authoritarian — not just as a slogan, but as an unavoidable reality. It is the only organism on the planet that exists most fully at its fringe, that is most powerful at its own frontier and is least solid at its core.

E-mail Aemilia Scott at aemilia at gmail dot com.