The Venice Biennale, Part II: You Lookin' at Me?
by Aemilia Scott

Aemilia Scott has attended the Venice Biennale for numerous years. In this multipart series, she explores the festival's 51st incarnation.

The liberal American experience today is something akin to being a person with a terrible or hilarious deformity who is totally willing to mention it themselves, but who bristles when anyone else brings it up. This person may crack jokes about his one big foot or his lazy eye, but if another party gets anywhere near it, the gloves come off. Such is the life of an American who wants to live an enlightened life but also maintain some cultural dignity. We can laugh about it here. But seriously, it's not funny.

The job is even harder for American artists than it is for law-abiding American citizens. Artists have the incredible task of speaking truth to power, crashing idols and subverting dominant paradigms, while also epitomizing a time and place in their culture with the clarity and ease of a roadmap. The problem is that it is almost impossible to do both at the same time.

	Flak Interactive For photographs of Ed Ruscha's "Course of Empire" click here.

The American artists who are both building up and breaking down are visual satirists — they use the formal elements of art and popular culture to undo those things from within. Jeff Koons did it with his "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" sculptures in brass. Jasper Johns famously did it with his "White Flag" painting on newsprint. Bruce Nauman did it with his "Partial Truth" sculpture written in stone. American artists are uniquely gifted at showing Americans what they most hate to see in a form sexy enough so that they love seeing it. Art lovers and satire lovers both fetishize this closet-skeleton parade. We love being shown our cultural dirties and having them hoisted on the flagpole of truth. At least we think we do.

This year's American pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale reveals a new and darker side of American art-viewing. The artist Ed Ruscha represents America with a series of paintings entitled "Course of Empire." Often artists coming to the Biennale choose to do site-specific work about Italy, Venice or a broader European cultural trend. Always interesting for Europeans, and always interesting for Americans visiting Europe.

Two years ago Fred Wilson noticed that Venice is overrun with statues of exotic butlers with inky skin, turbans, pointy shoes and puffy pants, and holding trays upon which you can put business cards or hard candies or any other item appropriate for a foyer. These are Italian cigar-store Indians, except they are black. It is enough to make any American cringe. In his piece for the 50th Biennale, Fred Wilson used these statues to unpack the European ideas of the Moor, of colonialism at the height of the Venetian empire and of the exotic in the domestic sphere.

Wilson's criticism from the outside-in can be as pleasing for Americans as criticism from the inside out, given that the inside-out criticism is on American soil. But when the dirties are brought across the water to the Biennale, things smell a bit rotten. For the 51st Biennale, Ruscha shows the rot, and does so with a simplicity and humor that is like being beaten with a Nerf bat made of wood.

Ruscha is one of the smoothest, roughest, slickest, grossest, most subtle and most outrageous American artists of the late 20th century. His work has used photography, paint, airbrush and his own bodily secretions. He has documented "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" and has asked, "Will 100 Artists Draw a 1950 Ford From Memory?" These are slick and conceptual compared to his work "Stains," in which he simply made stains of his own secretions on sheets of archival paper and presented them in the form of a book.

Ruscha's most recognizable works are his huge airbrushed paintings, both totally anesthetic and totally sexy, that use text in absurd ways. He creates skyscapes of rich and ominous colors that include text, either prominently or almost totally obscured, of banal and funny phrases.

The series "Course of Empire" is in this style, but includes paintings less known to Ruscha's fans. The paintings are large, very simple architectural images of commercial buildings in Los Angeles. The installation has two parts. The first group of paintings is a black and white series Ruscha made in 1992; the second is a group of color paintings made by revisiting the sites of the older series and re-depicting them in the present.

Ruscha intended for the two groups to work in harmony with the Jeffersonian architecture of the American pavilion. Like Monticello, the pavilion has an elegant symmetry built off a central rotunda, and Ruscha divides the earlier and later paintings into the left and right half of the building. The effect of walking through the older black-and-white paintings and then crossing over to the newer color paintings is like reading two chapters of an epic that surely ends terribly for the hero.

The older black-and-white paintings evoke the nostalgia of a family photograph. That is, if your mom and dad are the industrial "Tool and Die" building and the "Trade School" in the sprawling industrial landscape of Los Angeles. And yet these giants are family in a way because they represent a kind of heavy industry and labor that grew in America after World War II. Mass production required the building of huge, faceless factories in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and those buildings still change the face of urban landscape.

And yet as industry shrinks, weakens and moves overseas, these buildings are becoming dinosaurs, sitting lifeless on our major streets like huge industrial fossils. And this is the other half of Ruscha's exhibition. From a distance the paintings look like exact replicas of the older ones in color. Gray skies become red and black; text goes from black to color. No more old family photos, these represent the present. The color paintings leave little room for nostalgia. They are less like that photo of your grandparents that your aunt took, and more like a disposable shot you snapped yourself a few weeks ago. This is L.A. last week; this is your life.

These paintings present more than they represent. If the viewer reads the entire installation as a story — starting with the proud Jeffersonian architecture representing the founding fathers' vision for America's empire, and moving to the black-and-white paintings that represent America's transition into the quiet sprawl of an economic empire — the color paintings show the present and likely future of American empire. They present to the international public an America of slow decay. They present an America of abandoned buildings, failed businesses and forgotten landscape.

Ruscha is a Los Angeles painter, and theorists (without any irony) say that Ruscha is Los Angeles. His most famous works are in and about Los Angeles, including "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" and "Royal Road Test," a site-specific installation where he took a Royal typewriter for a literal road test by throwing it out of a moving car window and collecting data on it. Cars, sprawl, poverty — these are themes in his work, and these are things that any Angeleno will describe as pillars of their beloved city.

Yet Ruscha's paintings have a way of acting not as representations of Los Angeles specifically, but as placeholders for any American city. In "Course of Empire" as well as his other paintings, the paint on the canvas is airbrushed rather than painted, the lines of the buildings are sleek and spare, and the elements of the landscape are distilled to their bare essentials — walls, sky, text — that make the work seem like abstraction, or like an instructional illustration.

Two surfaces and three words make up both of the "Tool and Die Building" paintings, which is the absolute minimum amount of representation necessary for communicating the subject. Yet the airbrushed paint and the slickly rendered perspectives make the paintings sexier and more tactilely appealing than might be expected. They seem as much like art landscapes as images on the side of a customized van. The skies are rendered airy from the airbrush texture and claustrophobically dense from the color palate. The lines of the architecture and the text are made grand by the wide perspective taken.

If only the world were this simple. But Ruscha's geture in simplifying his landscapes allows the viewer to map her own city, her own urban experience, onto these paintings. Los Angeles' industrial sprawl becomes Chicago's, which becomes Gary's, which becomes Newark's. Thus Los Angeles' slow decay becomes America's.

In America, Ruscha's paintings create an environment of rock 'n' roll, humor and dissent. A room full of Ruscha at the Met would be greeted like Iggy Pop at the Whiskey a Go-Go. But the air inside the American pavilion was as thick and silent as a wake. Americans milled around to get a look at the paintings, nodding and shaking their heads, and standing awkwardly as they stared at the images of the country they left to look at art. Europeans stared in disbelief and amusement. We are broadcasting our own fears. Good for us.

Most Europeans figured it out, but some didn't. There were Swiss citizens protesting outside of the American pavilion, declaring that they would not enter the building until the war in Iraq ended. If only anyone at all had listened to them. Not because this temporarily ex-patriot American public was for the war or in favor of current American politics. These were the farthest of far-left Americans you'll find outside of an I.W.W. meeting. But it was great to see them protesting anyway.

With no Europeans in the Pavillion, we visiting Americans could privately imagine America. We weren't there to imagine our country in its political and economic prime, because that image is only the sad shadow of Ruscha's work. Seeing the course of our own empire through international eyes, we needed to imagine a time and place when Ruscha's vision was ours alone to laugh at.

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