Overwhelmed by Contemporary Art in Venice

I visited the prestigious contemporary art salon Venice Biennale during two cold days in the beginning of November (and thus contirbuted to the record attendance or more than 370000 visitors). I have to admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of contemporary art and I often lack the motivation of even trying to understand it. However, my first experience of Venice Biennale was an inspiring opportunity to discover the amazing variety of contemporary art. Well, I’m not saying that I didn’t sigh in exasperation every now and then or that I didn’t fail to understand a few times which items were actually part of the show and which ones just belonged to the exhibition place.

The setting itself is of course magnificent as the exhibitions take place in the beautiful Giardini and in the Arsenal where you only have a limited access outside the Biennale. Moreover, some individual countries have their exhibitions scattered around the city in old palazzi and if the art is not worth the search and walk through the tiny streets, the view or the exhibition place itself can be awarding. It is also a great way to get to know the city’s less visited areas better.

This exhibiton by Marialuisa Tadei was in a church.

View from a palazzo.

All in all, Biennale feels like an attraction park designed for adults. Instead of hotdogs you drink overprized prosecco and instead of getting all dizzy in a rollercoaster you get the same feeling after hours and hours of light installations, video projections, wax models, manipulated photographs and even some traditional paintings. After two years of admiring Italian Renaissance art in Florence it can be difficult to understand the beauty or message of an abstract 3-dimensional (art) piece therefore I certainly needed to change my criteria for evaluation. But normally the first impression was the most important one – the immediate beauty or cleverness of the piece.

This complex geometrical work is by Tomas Saraceno. I immedately loved it. Just for the amazing form.

Again, without any deeper thoughts, I thougt this photo collase in Belgium's pavilion was somehow inventive, combining flowers collected in urban areas with photos of the place where the plant was picked.

The exhibition guide’s explanations on the works almost ruined these instant experiences as the curator’s far-fetched interpretations imposed a deeper societal meaning for each work. This obscured the simple idea that a normal viewer achieved by obviously doing the error of thinking that art could also be just art and abstract sculpture is not necessarily a form of anti-capitalist revolution or illustration of the precariousness of social networks.

This was instead something I'm not interested at all. Wasn't this invented in the 1960's...

This, however, was funny and so suitable for the ruined house where the exhibition took place.

Even though art doesn't need to be a political statement or artist's interpretation of social problems, I think that Nordic pavilion was an excellent combination of message and aesthetic form. The pavilion was also hugely covered in media as it focused on the current economic crisis with a little bit of humour, creativity and courage. The whole pavilion was transformed into a glamorous house of an art dealer now drowned in the swimming pool in front of the pavilion. Fantastic!

Inside the art dealer's house.

Tom of Finland's interpretation of David. Decadence and economic crisis!

In order to see how the Biennale has changed during its more 110 years, the British Council's website is a great source of information displaying timeline and images of all the British pavilions. The first salon in 1895 doesn't seem very shocking...