The international assemblage of the art world in Venice for the Biennale di Venezia, converged under the banner of 'the plateau of humankind.' Much vaunted as a forum on contemporary art, the event made plain that diversity is not much related to difference, that 'contemporary' is a wildly relative term, and that art - and especially mainstream art - is mired in the coy alliance between economics and social relevance.
Divided between the main-event (the fair of state pavilions), the Arsenale (the hotbed of young artists work), and a number of satellite events throughout Venice, the Biennale hosted a wild array of possibilities. A number of official pavilions exhibited what can be termed media art (notably Austria, Canada, France …) and the Arsenale and satellite events (Slovenia's intervention stands out) extended this into installations and interactive works largely limited in the primary exhibition. The Austrian, French and Canadian exhibitions of Granular Synthesis & Gelatin, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff presented the most significant provocations to the otherwise mostly dull works (including pompously vacuous video installations) in an international art mall absorbed more by cell phones, the dulling exchange of party invitations, and the long lines than by the art itself!
Without doubt the Austrian Pavilion's linking of Granular Synthesis and Gelatin was one of the most challenging exhibitions, as much for its incongruity and for its oddly persuasive installation. While other pavilions staked out finely-stylized installations, no doubt well conceptualized for the jurors, the Austrian pavilion was either a decisive contradiction or a dismal juxtaposition.
Gelatin's Die total Osmose surely transformed the entrance to the pavilion into what they called 'almost invisible glibbery slime' ('eine geradezu unsichtbare glibbrige Masse'), a marsh of primeval mud. The problem was that it was neither 'invisible' nor, to use their words, a 'membrane.' Instead, the installation posited a chaotic space whose visibility was overwhelming not subtle, whose presence oozed but whose radicality was lost because it seemed without a cause. Wary art world types, weaned on elegantly packaged earth-art, were not to be enamored by walking planks across mud. As such it was a pathetic entrée into the tuned space of the work of Granular Synthesis.
Their new work filled the space with dramatic sensation. Now abandoning the harsh figuration of earlier works, the luminescent abstraction of the projection and the incessant subtlety of the sound forced one out of the 'slime' and into a tightly conceived environment in which the 'realm of the senses' is induced to fight for and against recognition, representation. Visibility, in this sense, has its benefits!
In an art-world compulsively interested in grandiose visuality, Granular Synthesis ought to come as triumphant. Instead, the marketeers of art consumables reveal that their interests lie in fantastic illusions, in full-motion video, in real-time, in unsophisticated availability, in omnivorous accumulation, in flimsily constructed narratives.
With great acumen, with the persuasiveness of a reconceptualized abstraction, however, Granular Synthesis, poses a conundrum: abstraction (which the art-world cannot shirk) against sensational abstraction. In this small dark space, the realization comes in a form not legitimated by the established historians of the non-objectivists, of the theorists of the psychology of abstract expressionism, of the apologists for video installation. Rather, the new work of Granular Synthesis exposes the unwillingness of the mainstream art world to think inside the box, to allow sensation to outdistance observation.
Unter dem Motto 'Plateau der Menschheit' steht die diesjährige Biennale di Venezia. Gerühmt als Forum zeitgenössischer Kunst, macht dieses Event einmal mehr deutlich, dass Diversität nicht so sehr mit Differenz zu tun hat, dass 'zeitgenössisch' ein sehr relativ Begriff ist und dass Kunst – vor allem die Mainstream-Kunst – in der verschämten Allianz zwischen Ökonomie und sozialer Relevanz gefangen ist.
