Seven Days in the Art World (24 page)

I stroll over to Strick, who is looking pensive, and ask him what he is thinking. “What’s the members’ opening going to be like? And the gala? What will be the conversation among artists? How will this change what people think about Murakami?” replies the museum director. “Every sector of the audience is in communication. Reactions are reinforced. At a certain point a consensus is formed. Sometimes it takes a while, but a work like this, which is so powerful and unexpected—it will make an impression very quickly. People will be surprised and talk about it.”

Yoshitake looks baffled. “I don’t know. Is it sacrilegious?” she wonders aloud. Certainly this bipolar character couldn’t be further away from Zen. “The Buddha is a transcendent being whose serenity is meant to reassure us that everything will be okay in our next lives, but this creature is disturbing.” The PhD student stares at the work, grappling with its connotations. “I think it’s the only truly post-atomic Buddha I’ve seen,” she adds. “Takashi is not an overtly political artist…but it’s interesting that he is making work like this for an American audience at this time.”

Poe looks satisfied. “We’re gonna make an edition of ten on a domestic scale. That’s the next project. Love that!” he says. “People should be able to live with
Oval
. The references and meanings are still there.” Blum walks over. The partners stand, feet planted on the ground, arms across their chests, as if they are staking out territory in a tough schoolyard. “It’s as entertaining as fuck. So entertaining that it may get backlash,” says Poe. “I just hope it fits on the plane when it’s crated. At the moment we’ve only got two inches of clearance.”

The fabricator opens a box of platinum leaf to show the Toyama reporter. It costs three dollars for a 10-centimeter-square sheet. Thinner than flaking skin, it blows into an unusable crinkle in the wind. “The true unveiling will be in L.A. at MOCA,” declares Blum. “The platinum will create a significant change in impact. We’ve never done platinum leafing of this complexity. That’s a big unknown.”

Murakami walks over and adopts his dealers’ posture. They talk. Afterward the artist makes the rounds, having a word with everyone. When he gets to me, I compliment him on the work’s sublime sense of humor. “I love this tension,” he says as he looks at the group circling around his work. “Not nervous, because I saw it two weeks ago. Already in satisfaction that quality is good. Each part has many stories.”

In ten years’ time, what will you remember most about today? I ask.

“Head of factory. Old guy was very quiet. Just watching to our job. But finally he’s smiling,” says Murakami. “Also old fabricator tell me, ‘Thank you so much. You gave us a really good experience.’ And then the young fabricator, Mr. Iijima, the director of the sculpture—for first time, his face has confidence.”

Murakami looks at his work like a loving parent regarding a child who didn’t come in first. “But for me,” he continues, “my feeling is, ‘Oh my god, it’s so small!’ I say to each fabricator, ‘Hey, next time, scale is double or triple, please.’” Murakami curves his lips, self-consciously mimicking the expression of
Oval
’s front face. “Do you know the Kamakura Buddha?” he asks. The Great Buddha of Kamakura is a forty-four-foot-high bronze sculpture cast in 1252. Buddhist statues tend to be housed in temples, but the Kamakura’s buildings were washed away by a tsunami in 1495 and since then the Buddha has stood in the open air. “This sculpture is in the mentality of Japanese people,” says the artist. “I’m happy with
Oval Buddha
but thinking to next change. Not ambition. Really pure feeling. Instinct. Next work must be much bigger. Much complicated. That is my brain.”

N
oon on Saturday the ninth of June. The Venice Biennale doesn’t open to the public until tomorrow, but it’s already over for the art world. A few guests lounge under white umbrellas while a waiter walks past with a tray of freshly squeezed blood-orange juice. The Cipri ani is one of the most luxurious hotels in the world; a short boat ride from the Piazza San Marco, it offers an escape from the swarms that descend on the city. I’ve just plunged into the hotel’s deserted hundred-foot filtered saltwater pool. After a week of too much art and too many conversations, punctuated by intermittent rain, I relish the prospect of a meditative swim under a cloudless sky. Hindsight is essential to making sense of the contemporary.

When did this year’s Biennale actually begin? The official press preview was on Thursday. VIPs had access on Wednesday, and those with particularly good connections managed to sneak in on Tuesday. Sometimes, however, one’s “Biennial experience” starts before one even arrives. At the last edition of the outsized exhibition, mine got under way at Heathrow Airport, when I spotted the artists Gilbert and George sitting across from each other in the lounge at the British Airways gate. With rosy cheeks and identical gray suits, the artistic duo sat perfectly still, stared into space, didn’t exchange a word. They gained notoriety in the 1960s for performances called “living sculpture,” so it felt as if I’d walked into the middle of a show. The Biennale, set in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, often feels strange and stagy.

Just arriving in Venice and bumping into people one knows can inaugurate the event. A few years ago I shared a water taxi from Marco Polo Airport with artists Grayson Perry and Peter Doig. The lagoon
superstrada
offers a rare encounter with speed—forty-five miles an hour if you don’t hit a red light or have to give way to the
polizia locale
—so it was an exhilarating initiation to the aquatic theme park that is Venice. Throughout the ride, Doig, who often uses photographs as source material and whose most famous series of paintings features a canoe, snapped pictures with his digital camera, while Perry made wisecracks about the weather and his wardrobe. Of course, “Heat is the enemy of drag.”

Many say that the business of the Biennale really only gets rolling with a Bellini, the Prosecco-and-peach-puree cocktail with which one anoints one’s arrival in the Veneto region. After checking into my humble hotel, full of low-budget curators and critics (my swim at the Cipriani was made possible by a friend who can afford the exorbitant room rates), I met an acquaintance for this ritual drink at a hotel bar with a large terrace on the Grand Canal. Scattered among the outdoor tables were many familiar faces from the New York, L.A., London, and Berlin art worlds. “He’s C list. She’s B list,” he said as he fingered people out of the crowd. “Nick Serota is A list,” he added for clarification. “I used to stay at the Gritti Palace, but then I wondered, where does François Pinault stay?” He then delivered a treatise on the unrivaled discretion of Bauer Il Palazzo, an eighteenth-century boutique hotel, not to be confused with the lesser but still deluxe five-star modern Bauer. With 34,000 VIP and press passes issued for the four-day event, the Biennale is the world’s largest single assembly of art world insiders and their observers. As a result, the gatherings oscillate between the idiosyncratically inclusive and the callously exclusive.

Across the terrace I caught sight of David Teiger, the collector whom I’d shadowed at Art Basel. I wandered over and, when he insisted on pouring me a glass of champagne, sat down on a wrought iron chair. Teiger explained his strategy for the next four days. “I plan it out very carefully, then disregard the plan and go with the moment,” he said. “The Biennale is like a high school reunion where everyone turned out to be a success. It’s not the real world.” In the past Teiger has bought major artworks at the Biennale, and on this occasion he was looking “seriously, discreetly, respectfully.” At the Biennale, he explained, “you’re on a marathon hunt for a new masterpiece. You want to see a new face and fall in love. It’s like speed dating.” Teiger gazed through the white balustrade at the row of gondolas docked out front, then cautioned, “In Venice, you can fall in love with a lamppost.”

A couple of tables away, amid a scruffier entourage, sat John Baldessari. The sage L.A. artist was drinking a no-nonsense vodka on the rocks with his long legs stretched out in front of him. This year he was staying at the five-star Danieli, but he told me that the first time he came to the Biennale, back in 1972, he slept on the roof of a Volkswagen bus parked in the Giardini, a park characterized by a perpendicular axis of tree-lined avenues dotted with small, ornamental buildings owned and designed by different nations. The bus was accommodating a group video show that included his half-hour black-and-white video
Folding Hat
(1970–71). “My then wife and I climbed up with a couple of blankets. It was warm. It was okay,” he said matter-of-factly. In those days Baldessari wasn’t invited to the plush parties. “Now I receive a lot of invitations, but I usually say no,” he said with some satisfaction. “In Venice, you can judge artists’ stock prices based on how many parties they get invited to.” Although he despairs of the social hierarchies and the “visual overload,” Baldessari has come to like Venice, in part because he has a bad sense of direction. “I’ll turn the wrong way coming out of the elevator every morning,” he said. “In Venice, everybody is always lost, so you don’t feel bad when you pass someone you know sitting at a café for the third time in ten minutes.”

The Grand Canal was congested with early evening traffic;
vaporetti
(water buses) and sixty-euro-a-throw water taxis chugged and swished past silent black gondolas. The Romantic poet Lord Byron used to swim naked in the canals, but now there’s a strict ban on swimming, whether you’re nude or not.

Ten lengths
of front crawl and the pool is still gloriously empty. At the last Biennale, I came here for a swim and saw Peter Brant, a major collector, and Alberto Mugrabi, a secondary-market dealer, lying on chaise longues smoking cigars. A New York property developer and another dealer, both with tanned bellies bursting out of white bathrobes, joined them. Larry Gagosian arrived, exchanged a few words, and left. It was as if those in the prime aisle seats of the Christie’s salesroom had been collectively beamed over to Europe and lost their clothes in the process. Apparently, during the Biennale this gang of art world players refers to the Cipriani poolside as “the office.”

A biennial is not just a show that takes place every two years; it is a goliath exhibition that is meant to capture the global artistic moment. Although institutions like the Whitney and the Tate hold national surveys that they call biennials and triennials, a true biennial is international in outlook and hosted by a city rather than a museum. La Biennale di Venezia, which was first held in 1895, has its roots in world fairs and academic salons. Its internationalism, for many years more accurately described as pan-Europeanism, grew out of the decaying city’s desire to encourage its only industry, tourism. São Paulo, Brazil, founded a biennial modeled on Venice’s in 1951, while Kassel, Germany, initiated Documenta, a more intellectual, less object-driven exhibition that takes place every five years, in 1955. A few new biennials were established in the seventies and eighties (notably, Sydney in 1973, Havana in 1984, and Istanbul in 1987), but the genre really went into overdrive in the nineties: Sharjah (1993), Santa Fe (1995), Lyon (1995), Gwangju (1995), Berlin (1996), Shanghai (2000), and Moscow (2005), to cite just a few. Unlike an art fair, where the displays are organized by the participating galleries, the underlying structures of biennials are determined by national identity and other curatorial themes.

The Venice Biennale is like a three-ring—or three-
hundred-
ring—circus. In the center spotlight is the master of ceremonies, the director of the Biennale, a rotating position occupied by a senior curator who oversees two international exhibitions where the artists are meant to represent themselves rather than a country. One is located in the largest pavilion in the Giardini, a Beaux-Arts building that was once called the Palazzo dell’Esposizione, until Mussolini’s aesthetic propagandists gave it a Fascist façade and renamed it the Padiglione Italia, a label that has stuck despite its non-Italian contents. (People are always confused by the name. In English there is no linguistic distinction between this international pavilion and the new one showcasing Italian art; they are both called Italian pavilions. But the Italians refer to the latter as the
Padiglione italiano.
) The other, even bigger international show is held in the Arsenale, a sprawling shipyard that is a vestige of Venice’s millennium as a naval power. This year, the director of the Biennale is Robert Storr, the first American-born curator to secure the challenging, high-profile position.

Battling for recognition in the second ring of the circus are seventy-six national pavilions that flaunt the work of the artists of their countries, usually in the form of solo shows. When contemporary art was a predominantly Western, first-world activity, these national representations were contained in the Giardini. Nowadays, however, with so many countries wanting to participate, the Biennale has spread out as government agencies (and occasionally private foundations) rent churches, warehouses, and palazzi all over Venice to showcase their artists. Finally, in the outer rings of the Biennale, upwards of a hundred official and unofficial sideshows—displays of private collections, special performances, and other ancillary events—vie for attention.

On VIP Wednesday, I walked briskly through the Giardini and straight into the Padiglione Italia for the first part of Robert Storr’s international exhibition, “Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense.” In the lobby was a large, recently made mobile by the underexposed eighty-one-year-old artist Nancy Spero, titled
Maypole/Take No Prisoners
. It featured two hundred drawings of severed heads with their tongues hanging out. In the next room on this central axis was a series of bright, hard-edged acrylic abstractions by the Nigerian-born American resident Odili Donald Odita. Then, in a grand room with a pitched roof, a series of six large paintings and a giant triptych by Sigmar Polke. The German artist had made his mark not only with paint but with pure violet pigment that turned gold when applied to the translucent polyester canvas. Collectors were oohing and ahhing. Artists and their dealers were inspecting how the works were made. Eagle-eyed curators and critics were expressing immediate reactions. “Sublime!” said one. “Ho-hum,” said another.
*

I wandered through orderly sky-lit rooms devoted to the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, Cheri Samba, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Ryman. It would have been a contemplative experience had it not been for the lavish air-kissing and nonstop chatter. Then I sat through an eighteen-minute 35-millimeter film titled
Graves-end,
which was partly shot in a coltan mine in the Congo, by the British Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, and stood through an eleven-minute shadow-puppet video installation about sex and slavery by American Kara Walker. Her lengthy title, a quote from Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
, included the line
calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea
. After that I watched a black-and-white slide show by CalArts graduate Mario Garcia Torres. The thirty-two-year-old artist was a student in Michael Asher’s Post-Studio crit on the day I was there. Ironically, the Garcia Torres work, titled
What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (In 36 Slides),
documented the reunion of three students who’d participated in 1969 in a legendary seminar at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

As I was leaving an installation,
Material for a Film,
by the twenty-seven-year-old Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, I happened upon Storr himself. The tall, fair, bespectacled curator was meandering alone in a Panama hat and beige jacket, as if he were on safari in his own show. On leave from Yale University, where he is the dean of the School of Art, Storr looked exhausted and a little forlorn. “The vicissitudes of this particular Biennale, the backstage politics and so on, have been extreme,” he told me. “I cannot exaggerate how difficult it has been to just get to this day.”

A few months ago I interviewed Storr when he was less weary, over dinner at Le Caprice in London. An accomplished painter and persuasive writer, he patiently fielded all sorts of basic questions, including What does a curator do? “Curators bring things to your attention that would not have otherwise come to your attention. Moreover, they bring works to you in a way that makes some kind of vivid sense.” Until the Biennale, Storr was best known for his fluidly written monographs and for the elegant solo shows that he curated when he worked at MoMA in New York, so I asked him, What makes a good group show? “It’s not about masterpiece displays; it’s not about choosing the top forty,” he said. “It’s about creating some kind of texture out of the variety of art—against which individual works can mean more.”

When I asked, Are biennials supposed to capture the zeitgeist? Storr frowned. “I’m a hardworking, fifty-seven-year-old, straight, Anglo-Saxon, American guy. I’m not temperamentally inclined to try to second-guess the times,” he said. “I’m not trying to prove that I’m ‘with it.’ I’m just trying to keep moving and to deal with artists who are working at the top of their powers—who are in the heat of their own artistic moment—whether they’re having their peak moment of reception or not.”

Storr is more interested in what he calls “the present tense,” and he evoked the longtime Venetian resident and modernist Ezra Pound, who said, “A classic is news that stays news.” Then he added, “Great art is essentially work that has proven inexhaustible in terms of the value it gives to those who pay attention to it. It says, ‘I am in the present tense despite the fact that I was made five or fifty years ago.’”