Making Worlds: Sensitive in Venice
Takashi Murakami’s work at the Punta della Dogana / photo Richard Rhodes
The billionaire French collector François Pinault scooped the 53rd Venice Biennale last week when he opened his Punta della Dogana contemporary art museum site one day before the official press opening of the Biennale. Its first exhibition, “Mapping the Studio,” presented a who’s who of artists that included Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, Takashi Murakami, Rudolph Stingel, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Cady Noland. Divided between the Dogana and the Palazzo Grassi (Pinault’s first Venice site that put on a lacklustre display for the previous Biennale) this year’s show offered a blue-chip claim to the primacy of collecting over curating.
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François Pinault’s Punta della Dogana at night / photo Richard Rhodes |
Holding the tip of Dorsoduro, across the Grand Canal from San Marco, the 17th-century former Venetian Republic customs house is a city landmark that is now Pinault’s on a 30-year lease. Over the last 18 months it has seen a $28-million renovation by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and the end result is not just a swank personal art foundation but a credible museum of contemporary art that speaks in the loud, bold voice of mega-scale works—beginning, very publicly, with a giant-size naked-boy statue by California artist Charles Ray that dangles a wriggling frog in the direction of the Biennale’s Giardini across the water. Who would have guessed that the recession-battered voice of big-time money could recoup itself in time for the June opening of the Biennale? And now there is likely to be ongoing competition for the next 14.
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Maurizio Cattelan’s work and Rachel Whiteread’s work at the Punta della Dogana / photo Richard Rhodes |
This is good. It has been clear for a while that the Biennale formula is in need of its own renovation. The theme shows of its various artistic directors—Rosa Martinez, Maria De Corral, Robert Storr and now Daniel Birnbaum—no longer deliver convincing overviews of the contemporary scene. They seem too big, too general, too much like after-the-fact trend-capping. The loud political emphasis of Martinez and De Corral’s 2005 Biennale at times recouped a laudable history of feminist and activist art; but it also registered as a late and minor riposte to the woeful slide of humanist standards led by the Bush administration. Storr’s museum-world professionalism, while respectful of the elevated aura of art, came across in 2007 as an earnest, sadly dull chasing of evaporated authority (a diminished authority that perhaps haunts America more than art). And Birnbaum’s “Making Worlds” this year again shifts focus. It brings together an evasive globalist art fuelled by private subjectivities and offers an exhibition where delicate poetics are often undone and subsumed by a pervasive homogeneity. He has made a Sensitive Biennale that at times turns delicacy into a New Age drone.
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Lygia Pape’s work at the Arsenale / photo Richard Rhodes |
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