By Jenn Selby
Special to the PostFor many, the Venice Biennale is a spectacle unseen, a tradition that is unknown unless happened upon during a summer outing.
For those in the art world, as artists, curators, critics, historians or even collectors, the international Biennale is the most revered exhibition in the world. Dating back to the 1800s, every two years the Venice Biennale offers glimpses of the avant garde, reflections on the old and critiques of the global contemporary art topography.
As two artists, newlywed and professionally still emerging, in June of 2009 we had the opportunity to experience the spectacle that is known as the opening week of the Venice Biennale.
In the midst of frantic buyers, oversized yachts, nerdy scholars, aggressive journalists and plenty of hangers-on we found ourselves surrounded by an over-stimulating saturation of art.
We found the expected ó the shocking, the boring, the minimalist, the neo-feminist, and the peripheral artists invited in by way of politics and a shifting hierarchical structure. However, there was one thing we found that was unexpected, fresh, and somehow new: we found film.
In stark contrast to the previous Biennale, which was riddled with video at every turn, this year’s presentation was quite different. Throughout our exploration of the Giardini and the Arsenale we would hear it before our eyes caught glimpse ó the soft, warm and methodical rapping of a film projector. The film works appeared neither nostalgic nor geriatric and frail, as artists unapologetically harnessed film as a viable, contemporary and very adequate (if not superior) means of creating.
One piece that most struck us was Simon Starling’s “Wilhelm Noack oHG.” It was a purpose-built 35mm film loop projector showing black and white 35mm imagery (2006).
The apparatus itself was beautiful and demanded to be viewed, admired and respected. It was a large, helix-shaped mechanism that substituted the function of a traditional reel used by a 35mm film projector.
Physically massive and structurally sophisticated, the contraption relied on a system of rods and spinning wheels to aid the film’s motion through the projector. At all times the entirety of the film was vulnerably exposed ó to the admiration of viewers, to vandalism or touch, and to dust and particles free-floating through space.
It permitted one to see the inner workings, the romance of machines, the physicality of the image being projected on the wall. It was nothing less than a glorification of the thing, of matter, of physicality.
The content of the film perfectly completed the piece ó images of factories, of industry, of the materials and products of mechanical production.
It was nothing short of a romanticisation of the physicality of creating, and sensory experience of physicality, viewing, and seeing.
Of course immediate references came to mind: Vladimir Tatlin and his “Monument to the Third International,” Walter Benjamin and his writings, Marxist Revolution and the implied glamour of hard work, touch and quality machines.
The undeniable link with slick, minimalist design and cheap Ikea furniture; of function, form and beauty. Although the work was not specifically made for the Biennale, dark ironies laced the viewing of the piece by two American artists as the United States was sinking with dying automotive industries, frail banking systems and lack of the tangible.
But the most sensual part of the experience for me was the smell ó the particular smell of dust particles burning on the lamp, of the film slowly breaking down with each viewing cycle.
It was this, and only this, aspect of these projected works that nodded to the past, which challenged the possibility of “new” technological innovation cohabitating with actual sensory experience.
As an artist working with any and all types of lens-based media (as the academics and gallerists so coldly categorize them), the thoughtless proposal of the forced extinction of film, in any form, is beyond my understanding, my acceptance, my approval.
To those easily led by hypercapitalist demands, film seems antiquated, underpowered and just out of fashion. However I urge those individuals to carefully study the trends of the 2009 Venice Biennale, and reconsider their assumption that one (digital) replaces the other (film).
In fact, the media are so different that even some quantum physicists do not agree on their relationship to light, physicality and subsequently reality … let alone to an agreement by practitioners in the field on such simple properties as clarity, resolution, and true color.
Compare this to the hundreds of tourists at Paris’ Orsay Museum and the seemingly impulsive need to digitally photograph each painting, sometimes standing right in front of the thing and never even viewing it with the naked eye, only through the LCD screen.
Perhaps the contemporary public has no need for the tangible, for the thing, for the sensations of touch or smell.
When one travels to Paris, patiently waits in a line, pays admission and clears security only to use a point-and-shoot digital camera through which to view a Van Gogh or Manet, we must force re-evaluation not only upon ourselves but upon society as a whole, and on the distinctions between our tactile and virtual desires.
There is something to be said of the thing, of physicality, of the indexical sign and its relationship to the world around us.
The 53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition “Fare Mondi/Making Worlds” will run through Nov. 22. For more information, go to www.labiennale.org.