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Return to
the Far Pavilions
Daniel Jewesbury
Something is always missing in a translation. However perspicacious the
translator, some nuance will always be neglected, some particularity left
unconveyed. The verb 'to traduce', originally meaning to transport,
convey or translate (and related to the modern French verb traduire, to
translate) now means to slander or calumniate - to misrepresent. The
desire to render all knowledge into a commonly-accessible code leads,
conversely, to a canon of decontextualised signs, which float or drift,
reverberating dully in new contexts. The modernists' utopia, enabled
and epitomised by perfect communication, never arrives, because they failed
to account for the fragmentary character of language itself.
Does all this sound like a lesson in things we already know, that we hardly
need to be reminded of? Then consider the rationale and ambitions of the
48th Venice Biennale (which has the catchy title "dAPERTutto / APERTO
overALL / APERTO partTOUT / APERTO überALL"). This year's
event, the biggest so far, attempts to represent everything in late twentieth-century
art, before the Three Zeros finally arrive, and to fabricate from it (and
for it) a uniform narrative of 'international art now'. It is
one which, predictably, privileges the slight and the banal. New terminologies
have been found to articulate and perpetuate the old yearning for a True
Story of Art: the dual rhetoric of 'globalism', both as a nostalgic
recollection of the ideal of Socialist Internationalism and as a metonym
for the 'real' internationalism of global capital, is invoked
repeatedly, often almost mystically, by the various organisers and national
commissioners of the Biennale. Overall curator Harald Szeemann writes
in his press release that in this year's Biennale the "national
ghettos will be abolished"; yet the idiosyncratic logic of the Biennale
depends on those ghettos, on the seemingly random cluster of pavilions
gathered in the Giardini, empty for eighteen months until the circus once
again rolls into town.
As the dismantling and re-organisation of Modern sciences of classification
continues, institutions are attempting to align with the spirit of the
supposed 'new democracy' under spurious banners like 'respecting
difference' or 'celebrating diversity'. It's easy
to 'celebrate diversity' when that simply means devising a few
new sub-divisions of the existing categories: the 2001 census in the UK,
for example, will attempt to include definitive categories for all people
of mixed race. Similarly, the supposedly benign rhetoric of 'multiculturalism'
is now widely denounced as a ruse, a barely-disguised reiteration of the
status quo. Rather than seeking tangible shifts in power, such strategies
attempt to assimilate 'difference' into the existing structure,
even when that structure has no place for difference, or rather can only
offer subordinate places, as fragmentary traductions of the monolithic
centre.
The number of national pavilions establishing themselves outside the main
Giardini site has certainly grown, but if you try to find any of them
you'll have trouble; the Biennale organisers, somewhat churlishly,
refuse to print full addresses for them on publicity material. Wander
the labyrinthine alleyways of Venice looking for one of them and you'll
quickly see through the rhetoric of openness and equality clinging to
this year's event. The Irish pavilion has been in the Nuova Icona
gallery for several years, down one of those inauspicious-looking alleyways
on the island of Giudecca. This year's representative, Anne Tallentire,
presents a body of work that resists traduction into the globalist miasma
of Szeemann's überBiennale by insisting on its own specific
contexts. The show, Instances, pulls together three curiously jarring
elements (a series of short performance videos, a backlit transparency
and a half-hour video projection) and with them addresses the concerns
that have occupied Tallentire for several years: translation, communication
and authorship. In the first room a small colour monitor rests on a flight
case and shows a series of hand-held single-edit sequences that fade up
from black. In them, the artist is engaged in various activities, pulling
up a floorboard, arranging small pieces of wood, spreading broken glass
on the floor until it fills the monitor screen. The way the camera frames
the performances, concentrating solely on the act and cutting off even
the performer's body, prevents any external contexts from becoming
visible, except that it's clearly the same room in all the shots.
Every so often, the normally-silent video breaks into sound, just for
a second or two: the sound of glass scraped across wood, of a floorboard
banged back into place. In the back room of the gallery a wall is taken
up with a video projection. Walking into the space at the beginning of
the loop one finds it almost completely black, save for one pinpoint of
light. Gradually the space gets lighter, but it's not just your eyes
that are getting used to the darkness; the half-hour video shows dawn
breaking somewhere over the nondescript inner city. The process of elucidation
(literally) that the video records is ultimately pointless: there is no
landscape for us to survey, since all that can be discerned of this 'grand
vista' is a steel fence that occupies the whole of the foreground,
and an unremarkable tower block. Taking the shedding of light as a metaphor
for the explanation of intrinsic meaning, both these video pieces are
about narrative, about our desire to make stories of ostensibly unconnected
events, and yet each refuses to be narrativised. The third element of
the piece, which sits between the two video rooms, is a large colour transparency
of a woman's ear pressed up against concrete, listening where there
is no hearing to be done. Writing in his catalogue essay, Brian Hand suggests
that a translation is not simply a corruption of an original text, but
that the original is itself always infected with omission, that the communicative
act is always partial, approximate. Tallentire's deftness lies in
drawing this out, making out of it a body of work that is insistent, but
which clings to its own partiality. Leaving the gallery and the contemplative
space that has been constructed in it (in contrast to the rest of the
Biennale), I was put in mind of the right to silence and its gradual removal
from British law. Silence itself, the absence of information, can now
be an implication of guilt.
Tallentire's work draws out considerations of space as well, by figuring
the construction of narrative in four dimensions. Several artists in the
Biennale explored our contemporary relationship with urban space and built
landscapes, most notably Doug Aitken. His video installation Electric
Earth is divided into three consecutive 'rooms', with images
and sounds overflowing from one chamber into the next. In the first room
a young black man lies on a bed in a motel room or apartment, endlessly
changing the channels on his TV, which we then see is showing only noise.
His glazed expression contrasts with the voice-over: "A lot of times
I dance so fast I will come... It's like food for me". In the
second room two mirror-image projections are shown at right angles to
one another; in the third another three screens form three sides of a
square. In these two spaces the same young man dances in the deserted
streets at night. The familiar signs of the city - barbed wire fences,
abandoned shopping trolleys, empty parking lots - litter Aitken's
beautifully filmed environment, while the soundtrack mixes shadowy hip-hop
beats with the character's narration: "It's the only now
I get". His peculiar autism, his alienation from the city which surrounds
him, recall Frantz Fanon's disturbed subject of European colonialism,
fragmented and re-inscribed by intangible processes of power located far
away.
In the Italian pavilion, three artists collaborate to explore the spatialisation
of narrative, with an elaborately-constructed series of three interwoven
films. In the first, Jump-Cut, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe
and Philippe Parreno present us with a clip from a French film of the
early 1970s. A moustachioed character mutters urgently down the phone,
agreeing to come over straight away. He leaves his apartment block, and
emerges from the building 25 years older, the same actor in the Paris
streets of today. He salutes the camera and begins to walk across town...
The piece concentrates on a single break in continuity in the original
film, in which the character was shown standing in a building in one part
of town and emerging, miraculously, in a completely separate area as he
leaves that building. In this 'remake', the same actor has been
engaged to walk the distance between the two shots, re-uniting a space
that had been fragmented, but at the expense of the 'linearity'
of time, of narrative. As he reaches his destination, the film reverts
to the original, the break 'sutured'. Watching the video, one
gradually becomes aware of another layer: the projection is itself a re-presentation
of another projection, the film having been projected in the same room
some time previously and re-filmed with a hand-held camera. The people
walking in front of the projector are themselves part of the film. As
the loop comes to an end, the camera leaves the room, walking out into
the night-time desertion of the off-season Giardini; just as we think
that we've returned to a simple projection, that the re-filming has
stopped, the camera pulls back once more to reveal the picture framed,
re-filmed, on the wall that we are watching now...
More literal approaches to space are found in the large-scale black and
white aerial photographs of Balthasar Burckhard and in Frank Thiel's
colour photos of the enormous reconstructions underway in Berlin. Both
concentrate on the 'given-ness' of the urban realm, on its seemingly
random (but actually tightly controlled) development and growth.
The Biennale features a large number of Asian artists, particularly young
Chinese artists. Speaking at a discussion organised by Audio Arts magazine
in the British pavilion, Charles Esche suggested that it may be more than
coincidence that at a time when China is the only Other superpower in
the world, when its international relations are continuously headline
news, European and American curators have decided to discover Chinese
'culture'. Many works concentrate on re-articulating the myths
of Socialist Realism, most notably Cai Guo-Qiang's Venice Rent-Collecting
Courtyard. The piece is a slightly-altered replica of a series of sculptures
originally commissioned by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. However
bad things are now, the sculptures tell us, look how bad they were before:
peasants toil, their backs bent under their loads, while the landlords
extort their rent and the bosses stand by ready to beat anyone found shirking.
The lifesize sculptures were toured around China in the '70s and
copies made for various eastern European cities. Harald Szeemann wanted
to exhibit them in Documenta in 1976. Figures were added whenever politically
expedient: heroic soldiers when the army were needed to maintain 'order',
virtous workers when there were shortages. The piece re-emerges now as
Guo-Qiang's personal remembrance of recent history. A straw panama
is added to one landlord, a wooden sword placed in the hand of another,
in an attempt to re-locate (or dislocate) the figures. However, the piece
sits uneasily between irony and poignancy in the surroundings of the Biennale.
Nearly all the Chinese political art shown (there are several exponents
here) suffers from its translocation, from a situation where contexts
(history and politics) are immediately available, to the glib neo-Orientalism
of the international art show.
Some of the work seems to comment wryly on precisely this condition, particularly
Zhou Tiehai's painting The relations in the art world are the same
as the relations between states in the post Cold War era. Or as Szeemann
puts it, "The large number of Asian artists this year will facilitate
an encounter with a history that is very different from that of Europe
or North America".
To return finally to that claim of non-territoriality, let's end
with an anecdote, one which, obviously, proves nothing. A friend from
Dublin, another freelance writer, asks for a copy of the Gary Hume catalogue
at the British pavilion, showing her press accreditation. She's told
she needs a union card to get any press information. When she says that
she's a freelance, that art writers in Dublin don't need press
cards, the new internationalism is explained to her immediately: "You're
not in Dublin now. You're in Great Britain." Roll on the abolition
of national ghettos.
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