Artistic vision: The Venice Biennale and Pinault’s new Punta della Dogana

It may be that any Biennial, having a Director whose job is like herding cats (the curators of the national pavillions), is by definition a mixed bag, structurally unable to express any coherent artistic vision. That’s what I came away with after visiting this year’s Venice Biennale, “Making Worlds”, directed by Daniel Birnbaum; in addition to the unpleasant feeling that most of it was looking backwards, instead of straight ahead into the future.

The following day, I visited François Pinault’s new contemporary art center at the Punta della Dogana (pictured), which hosts half of an exhibition titled “Mapping the Studio” (with the rest at Palazzo Grassi). It was everything that the Biennale wasn’t. Instead of the decaying infrastructure of the Giardini and the Arsenale, a freshly restored vast and luminous space, bearing the marks of Tadao Ando’s loving care (and, of course, ample funding by Monsieur Pinault). Instead of a cacophony of voices, a clear curatorial point of view: sure, a provocative, controversy-seeking one at times, but nevertheless an artistic vision, a show of teamwork between the collector and his curators, Gingeras and Bonami. A cross-section of what’s at the edge of artistic creation today, mediated by a discerning taste. Even the works from the 1970s and 1980s seemed fresh and contemporary.

Walking through the Biennale felt like work; visiting the (admittedly much smaller) Punta della Dogana was sheer pleasure.

And how was it for you?

Kunsthaus Zürich, lights and shadows

Upon becoming a member of the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft earlier this year, I was surprised to learn that it has over 20,000 members and it is the second largest museum membership program in Europe after that of the Tate in London. This, with a city population of about 380,000 – 1.1m including the suburbs. Which makes Zurich, on a per capita basis, the place with the highest density of paying museum supporters in Europe.

But tonight, leafing through the assoication’s annual report, I found out that in 2008 visitor numbers at the Kunsthaus Zürich dropped to the lowest level in 10 years: only 214,000 visitors (vs. 310,000 in 2007 and the all-time high of 364,000 in 2000, the year of a Cézanne blockbuster). On the one hand, the report says, a few of the 2008 exhibitions (particularly Europop and Rivoluzione! Italian Modernism from Segantini to Balla) fell short of expectations; on the other hand, Zurich and Switzerland hosted a number of Euro 2008 soccer games as well as other competing events supposedly hurting museum attendance. Also, they make they rather unconvincing argument that since the exhibition program stretches over a three-year time horizon, there can be holes that imapct a given year’s numbers disproportionately – if so, we should see a steep rebound in 2009. In the meantime, twenty teams of architects are competing to build an extension to the Kunsthaus, with the winners to be announced in June and construction to be completed by 2015 at a cost of CHF 150 million, half from private sources and the other half committed by the city and the canton.

I have not yet seen any other museum’s 2008 visitor numbers and I don’t know whether the recession has caused other places to lose 30% of their visitors year on year. I would tend to guess, though, that there are places where the media would get at least a good crisis story out of this. Switzerland is probably too distracted by other shock news (unemployment breaking the 5% threshold! UBS announcing layoffs!) to start a conversation about the health of its cultural offerings.

Or, most likely, everybody is waiting for Art Basel in June. Last year’s edition packed 60,000 visitors (myself included) in just five days;  it is the most important commercial thermometer of the art market in the Continent. But with fewer people with serious money to spend, I doubt that even Art Basel will come close to last year’s success.

From the train window: Fischli & Weiss

If you’ve ever looked outside during the short train ride, to your right shortly before Oerlikon if you’re going from Zurich to the airport, to your left in the other direction, you’ve seen this.

From the Channel 4 Big Art project site:

Fischli & Weiss, How to Work Better (1991)
Painted on the wall of an office building, the artists play with the motivational sayings and strategies of the huge corporations that rule our lives and work. The obvious irony and banal treatment here helps to make a break with the corporate and reclaim the language of ordinary common sense (courtesy Peter Fischli David Weiss and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich).

The building is apparently used by the Zurich University for the computer science and psychology departments.

The list is actually not bad advice, everything considered.

Brandeis and the Rose Art Museum: should a university not sell its collection?

The art world is loudly complaining about the decision of the trustees of Brandeis University to face the financial crisis by, among other measures, selling the modern and contemporary art collection housed in the university’s Rose Art Museum. Reactions so far call the decision “astonishing”, “a shame”, “unprincipled”, “a complete wrong message to donors“, and “bad economics” (because art, like other asset classes, is likely to fetch less now than it would have in the good times). The Association of Art Museum Directors said it is “shocked and dismayed” by plans to close the Rose.

It doesn’t end here. The Massachussetts Attorney General is to conduct a detailed review of the decision. A spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s office said: “They are saying that civilization doesn’t matter in the name of some kind of bottom line.”

Readers, you know how much I love modern and contemporary art. You know how passionate I am about it. Yet, I have to wonder: have all these people been living with their heads under the sand for the last year or so? I told you months ago that there was going to be less money for art. The writing was on the wall. It is not that civilization doesn’t matter – it matters enourmously, indeed. But in a crisis, you do what you gotta do.

So, let me come out and say it. I think the Brandeis trustees made the right decision. It is indeed a pity that the Rose has become a luxury that the university can no longer afford to keep, but if the alternatives are worse (freezing faculty hiring, cutting back on financial aid for students), then it is the right decision. If Stanford President John Hennessy wrote me another letter, saying this time that the trustees have decided to sell off the university’s art holdings, I would be saddened, but I would not complain. Let alone call the decision “unprincipled”.

The Attorney General’s spokeswoman also said: “It’s essential that students have access to real works of art [...] By subtracting the works of art from a college environment, you are betraying an enormous trust.” With all due respect, this is ridiculous. College fees are high, but do not include the permanent guarantee that you will have an art museum in your backyard, for your convenience. (Annual visitor numbers at the Rose were 13,000-15,000: a tiny number. The archeological digs at Venosa, near Potenza in Southern Italy, pull in more than that, according to 2007 data from the Italian Culture Ministry). For centuries, art students have been used to traveling, to go and study art where the art is. That’s how one becomes an artist (or a curator, or a critic, or whatever). Do we really want a generation of couch potato art students?

Collections are built and dispersed; at the end of February, the collection built up by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé will be auctioned off by Christie’s, in what is likely to be the largest sale of a private collection ever. Sure, those pieces were bought and not donated. But how many donor’s grants to the Rose stipulated that the works could never be sold under any circumstances, including a global financial crisis that shrinks the university endowment at unprecedented speeds? and what does “never” mean? until the donor’s last descendant has died? until the artist’s work has gone out of fashion – and lost value? until the end of the universe? And if you were a donor, would you make such a draconian stipulation? If you were a museum, would you accept it?

Sure, the university could have sought students’ opinions before the trustees had to decide. Yet the students’ protest sounds disingenuous, as they know perfectly well that they would have protested a lot more if the university had decided to save the Rose but cut back on, say, student dorms and have students sleep in tents out there in the snow. The decision-making process could, and probably should, have been more participative. But at the end of the day, students are there to study, and administrators are there to administer: somebody has to make decisions. And Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz and the trustees, in this case, made the right one.

Tag cloud, 1972

A curiously contemporary work from 1972 in the Italics exhibition curated by Francesco Bonami at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. It seems that designers of good-looking tag clouds such as Wordle haven’t really invented anything aesthetically new. The work, “Sì alla violenza operaia” (“Yes to workers’ violence”), is by artist Nanni Balestrini, 1972.

Antonio Canova and Francis Bacon in Milan

Last Thursday evening Palazzo Reale was open until 10:30pm. I saw two exhibitions. What two views of the world could be more antipodean to each other?

Joel Peter Witkin and Jan Saudek

For those of you with that morbid streak, if you are in Milan, don’t miss the dual exhibition of photographs by Joel Peter Witkin and Jan Saudek, at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea until April 27.

 

Left: Joel Peter Witkin, Man with Dog, Mexico, 1990.

Right: Jan Saudek, The Knife.

Louise Bourgeois at the Tate Modern

There may be many alternative universes out there. In some of them, there are planets that resemble ours, and in some of these, beings that we would recognize as humans behave almost like us. They have developed their own religions, and some of them worship strange idols, artifacts we would recognize as ancient but could not quite place in the history of any of our civilizations.

Louise Bourgeois has been there. She has brought back – and carved in marble or cast in bronze or in latex – the idols from this other universe. Some of them shapeless, many of them headless, all of them blind. They are blind, but they watch us in our dreams.

In the photo: Nature study, 1984-94, Private collection.

Coupon for two tickets for the price of one to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Tate Modern in London: here.

David Lynch at the Milan Triennale: The Air is on Fire

Congratulations to Triennale President Davide Rampello for bringing to Milan (until Jan. 13, 2008) this exhibition of David Lynch’s paintings, drawings, photographs and early experimental and animation shorts. Organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, curated and installed by Lynch himself, The Air is on Fire is the largest retrospective ever to focus on Lynch’s art outside cinema, digging among other things into two black folders containing a lifetime’s worth of sketches, doodles and notes.

Fans will recall that Lynch studied art in Washington and Boston; after a short interlude in Europe (he was meant to stay for three years, studying painting with Oskar Kokoschka, but returned to the United States after 15 days, apparently upset by the neatness and cleanliness he encountered in Salzburg), Lynch attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He then stumbled into the movies more or less by accident, and the rest is history (of cinema).

Walking through this exhibition is a bit like sitting through INLAND EMPIRE, but, at your choice, shorter. Lynch’s paintings look like they’ve been made by a terminally traumatized child of Anselm Kiefer and Louise Bourgeois, extensively trained in Art Brut technique and living in a dark attic where the main pastime is invoking Jean-Michel Basquiat’s comeback from his grave. Lynch’s photographs carry echoes of Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst. His sketches belie a fine draftsman. His presentation of the works is deliberately neither chronological nor thematic, following only his imperscrutable inner logic.

Enjoy.

Sandy Skoglund, Radioactive Cats and lighting fixtures

I’ve always been a fan of Sandy Skoglund’s photography, but I’m wondering why on earth lighting fixtures firm Fratelli Martini chose one of the artist’s more somber and disquieting works for the cover of its 2007 catalog.