미래의 척도, 베니스 비엔날레
탐지에서 베니스 비엔날레에 대한 소개글을 썼습니다.
베니스 비엔날레를 세계사 속에서 미술 권력 이동 및 흐름 등에 대해 잘 정리해 놓았군요.
가고 싶다..
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article6436897.ece
For one week at the start of June every other year Venice is the place where the art world meets the art world — on water-buses and taxis, in bars and restaurants, openings, lunches, dinners and parties. The city on the lagoon becomes a huge networking venue: a unique opportunity to discover who’s in, who’s out, what’s new and what might be the coming thing.
The Venice Biennale, the 53rd edition of which opens to the public for six months from tomorrow, is the greatest contemporary art event in the world. This year it’s the biggest yet and shows no signs of being daunted by the financial downturn, with no fewer than 77 separate exhibitions in the national pavilions. At the previous Biennale, in 2007, at the height of the art boom, I looked at Welsh sculptures and paintings in an abandoned brewery on the island of La Giudecca, blue chip paintings by such patriarchs of the avant-garde as Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, a memorial to a youth made up of a bunch of flowers, a pair of Nike trainers and a handwritten note to “Keep it real” in a special pavilion of African art, and video from virtually every country in the United Nations.
Much was very good, but, as is inevitable in such huge mixed displays, an awful lot was not. There was a moment when I suddenly began to feel terrible. It was about a third of a mile into the old sail warehouses of the Venetian Arsenale. one moment I was making notes and forming judgments, the next I was struck by a searing headache, plus ominous sensations in my chest and abdomen. I recalled that Dante had found in this very spot some of the most vivid imagery in his Inferno — the bubbling pitch to be precise. For the critic, and the assiduously thorough visitor, there is a risk of severe art prostration (fortunately treatable with sparkling wine). If possible, sample the exhibitions slowly, pause from time to time and — as Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s Contemporary sagely advises — leave time for a nice lunch.
At times the Biennale experience can seem downright purgatorial. In the hot summer of 2003 the temperature climbed to 40C (100F) and it seemed possible that the milling assembly of dealers, curators, artists, critics, publicists, collectors and hangers-on might melt into the canals like gelati. But despite the danger of becoming arted-out, still we keep coming back. As Bill Viola, the American film and video artist, once put it to me: “It’s the nearest thing that the art world has to a trade conference. Plumbers and real estate agents have those, so why shouldn’t we?” You just can’t miss it.
양식의 맨 위
양식의 맨 아래
The founders of the Biennale in 1895 would be, no doubt, astonished to behold what they had brought about. The first was a small, staid affair organised — as it continued to be for many years — by the city council. News about new art travelled more slowly in those days, and the big excitement was the first appearance of Pre-Raphaelite paintings on Italian soil. The aged Millais and Holman Hunt — at that date scarcely the avant-garde — were invited to exhibit by the Mayor of Venice but their works disappointed local critics. Whistler, also by then a senior figure, won a prize for Symphony in White, No 2, a dreamy portrait of the artist’s lover Joanna Hiffernan standing at a fireplace, painted 31 years earlier in 1864 (it’s now in the Tate collection).
In its early days the Biennale was a target for Marinetti and the Futurists because of its stodgy indifference to new art. In 1910 it was included in a list of “Things and people deserving a kick” for its consistent exclusion of Modernism. But despite or because of that attitude the Biennale caught on in the years before the First World War, when the practice grew up of building national pavilions for the exhibiting countries — still essentially a small European club — in the Giardini di Castello. In 1909 the British installed themselves in a pretty classical structure, a converted café that by accident or design looks down on the premises of other countries from a small knoll.
The national pavilions, over the years, have developed into a delightful architectural theme park in themselves, with some very distinguished contributions (the Finnish Pavilion, for example, was designed by Alvar Aalto, the Austrian by Josef Hoffmann). In recent decades each country has tended to be represented by one or at most two artists to show new works, but to begin with the national displays were more like miniature versions of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. In 1899 Britain was represented by 70 painters and sculptors, in 1912 by more than 150.
Arrangements were a little haphazard. The British contingent was organised and paid for by volunteers, and it was not until the 1930s that financial responsibility was taken over by a deeply reluctant treasury.
Inevitably, like any such international event, the Biennale became a muffled echo of global politics. It was in abeyance during the First World War, and again for six years after 1942 — a very political Biennale, devoted to support for the war effort with Joseph Goebbels in official attendance as Nazi minister for propaganda.
The Fifties were the dawn of an era in which a single artist could dominate a Biennale, as happened with Giacometti, whose work occupied the French Pavilion in 1956 — with a series of his trademark attenuated figures entitled “Women of Venice”. The question of what the Biennale is for has hung over the event since 1964, when Robert Rauschenberg was given the Grand Prize for Painting, for his combinations of paint and collage elements, such as a stuffed bird, a light bulb or a chicken, and the assemblies of photographic imagery and dripping paint that followed them.
Rauschenberg’s victory, with this mixture of pre-pop art and messy abstraction caused consternation in French cultural circles and has gone down as the moment when New York replaced Paris as the world capital of the arts. It marked a turning-point of a different kind for Rauschenberg himself. on hearing of his win, he wired his studio in New York ordering the destruction of the silkscreens used to make the work. He had no wish, he explained, to repeat himself. on the other hand his art was arguably never as powerful again.
Should an appearance at the Biennale crown a career? Or should it be a showcase for younger, emerging artists? The national pavilions and the Biennale itself still oscillate between the two, while tending increasingly to the latter. The US Pavilion is still often occupied by a grand elder statesman of art: Ed Ruscha, with his bleak Course of Empire paintings, evoking declining American industry in 2005, Bruce Nauman with a sort of mini-career retrospective over three sites this time.
Britain has been more inclined to the trendy: Steve McQueen this year, with a quiet film work depicting dogs running loose in a deserted wintertime Giardini; in 2003 Chris Ofili, who had the entire pavilion recast into a hot-colour fantasy of greens and black, in one of the more memorable one-person shows in recent years, and in 2007 Tracey Emin. Her exhibition of drawings failed to set the Biennale alight, exposing, according to some critics, a slight talent in comparison with other exhibiting artists such as Sophie Calle in the French Pavilion, whose show Take Care of Yourself (Prenez soin de vous) was made up of 107 women’s analyses of the self-indulgent e-mail with which her boyfriend dumped her (the title was his sign-off).
The Biennale can be the pinnacle for an artist — or at least a high peak. once, filing into the British Council’s reception, an elderly artist remarked, wistfully, to me: “Thirty years ago this party was for me.” To be chosen to put an exhibition in the national pavilion — generally of new work — is an honour that few are grand enough to refuse. Damien Hirst is reported to have done so, but Gilbert & George always expressed huge enthusiasm. Would you say yes to Venice? “You bet we would!” they always replied. And they did in 2005, filling the pavilion, somewhat unexpectedly, with a series of works based on the ginkgo tree.
After a wobble during the political disarray of the late Sixties — the 1974 edition was devoted to protest against the Pinochet regime in Chile — in 1980, the Aperto, an additional exhibition of international contemporary art curated by the Biennale director, was introduced. This has become increasingly big, complemented by a host of ancillary displays.
Thus in recent Biennales it has been harder for an individual artist to steal the show, as Joseph Beuys did in 1976 when his Tram Stop was installed in the German Pavilion, a building dating from the Nazi era, with the words GERMANIA inscribed over the door. The piece took the form of a screaming head protruding from a cannon’s mouth — an unforgettable evocation of the horror and pity of war.
The Biennale continues to shadow global politics. The 1990s brought the conundrum of how to divide up the former Yugoslavia and USSR pavilions and the 21st century has brought devolution in Britain — so Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and, this year, Cumbrian participation. In recent years there has been more and more art from everywhere — Asia, Africa, the Middle East. That has been part of the fascination of the event, but also a problem. There is simply not enough space. National exhibitions stretch right back down the Grand Canal to the station. As for the parties, vernissages (openings), press breakfasts, congratulatory dinners — a whole lagoon of prosecco and Bellini cocktails would not be sufficient to supply them.
The Biennale bashes have developed into a sub-genre of performance art in themselves. one year the British Council ferried us all out to a deserted island in the lagoon, where the guests were presented with a sumptuous buffet and insect repellent. Nowhere else could you see, as happened in 1999, Sir Nicholas Serota, Chris Smith, Gary Hume and Jay Jopling among 500 guests bopping in a 17th- century palazzo to the sound of Pulp (the owner was reported to have complained that the Baroque fittings had been damaged by the revellers).
It’s a party, it’s a conference, it’s a vast media scrimmage, but most of all the Biennale is a manifestation of something that its founders might have hoped for but could scarcely have guessed at: that contemporary art is now a global phenomenon. Indeed — good, bad and indifferent — it is one of the few endeavours that truly bind the contemporary world together.
The 53rd Venice Biennale is open from tomorrow until Nov 22.