It felt like this year we all needed an excuse to go to the Biennale. Mine was meeting my PhD supervisor, whom I hadn't seen for two years. "We could even meet in Venice, if you’re going to this bizarre opening," Prof. Cohen wrote to me a few weeks before the event. The truth is, it is always a bit bizarre, and strangely this year seemed somehow more normal than before. It was as if the city had more air to breath, as if time was moving slower. It was unusual for there were nearly no tourists, the Biennale crowd was smaller, and we all seemed to be just so happy to be there, travel for the first time in a year, meet people, see shows, breathe the breeze from the sea, and be in Venice.
Thinking back to past architecture biennales and their openings (that I have attended since 2014), it appears that the things that have had the greatest impact on me are not quite related to the architecture on display, but rather to all the buzz and the bubbles at the opening where the people of the industry – journalists, curators and the cooler (but not necessarily better) architects – momentarily take the center stage, merging with the shows. Many great ideas, projects and encounters have been born here. In fact, it was at the 2014 Biennale opening where I first met my supervisor-to-be (he was then the curator of the French pavilion and I was working for the Russian one). Now, again thinking of what to do after my thesis, I thought that it was time to go to Venice, to find the next thing. This is what Venice can do.
No-one quite knew what to expect this year. Was I doing something wrong? Would anyone else come? Were we even allowed to be there? How could it all work when the gist of the opening was having crowds of people mixing in a hot pit? What could the pandemic version of this hell be like? Strangely enough, it all turned out to be for the better. Under the restrictions that prevented the parties that normally play a big part of the opening week, dinners limited to terraces with only four people around a table, and almost no offerings of free drinks at openings, the mixing and mingling was different. For some reason, I liked it more. There was no hunting for the invitation or stressing about getting on the guest list of this or that party, there was less running from one opening to the other, from one person to the next, less stress, less hurry, less business cards. Instead, there seemed to be more meaningful encounters, more actual conversations, more time, and more empathy. The feeling of constantly having someone’s eyes on your back, of being evaluated, having to perform, was replaced by a shy curiosity – were we really here? This went for the city too. Never have I been greeted with such a look at a Cannaregio bar when ordering my morning coffee with my few words of (rough Roman) Italian, one of slight surprise followed by a genuine joy and welcome, as if asking "is it really you?" It was not directed to me personally, but more to the fact that the Biennale was on, and that people, after a long and difficult year, had finally arrived. There was a genuine feeling in the city that the world prevails, Venice prevails, people prevail and art prevails. There was one exhibition that managed to convey and channel a similar kind of empathy arising from a crisis – it was not the biennale, but Stop Painting at the Fondazione Prada.
Crises on Display
What then is the problem of the architecture biennale? It is not so much a question of the wealth of ideas on display – the title "How will we live together?" and the accompanying manifesto are full of empathetic and ambitious ideas – but more of a question of the show itself. It is a question of what literally is on show and how. If art can just be, take the space, make an impact, architecture (almost) always struggles: how do you display the building, the idea, the project? Many symposia and books have been dedicated to this topic over the past few years, but theory seems not to translate into practice and professionalism easily. Here, I think, is a lesson to be learned from the show Stop Painting. Curated by Peter Fischli, one half of the Swiss art world shaker duo Fischli/Weiss famed for their conceptual and boundary breaking works over the past five decades. In a therapeutic and self-reflective manner, but without showing any unnecessary doubt or lack confidence (a sentiment with echoes all around the architecture biennale) this exhibition takes doubt itself as its subject, asking what is painting and showing how you can seek an answer through an exhibition. It presents a meticulous selection and an eccentric collection of works from some of the household weirdos of the 20th century art world – from Kurt Schwitters to Asger Jörn – mixed with iconic works by other stars such as Michelangelo Pistoletto or Alberto Burri, circling around the joys and sorrows, the possibilities and limits of a practice, format and medium that seem outdated, and yet are fundamental.
The show opens on the ground floor with a 3 x 4 meters model of the upstairs galleries showing a mock-up of each of the rooms annotated with their themes and wall text that present five ruptures in painting. The presence of the model itself already sets the tone: is this how you stop painting? Is this the moment when you have no more images to paint and you move to mocking up others images on your walls, spatially riffing with ideas, rearranging the furniture? It is part of the story for sure, the presence of the mock-up not only presents an index to the otherwise free flowing show, but also hints of a process behind the meticulously effortless and endlessly clever hang upstairs. The materiality of the mock-up makes it clear that it is not an object of art on display, but rather a footnote, a final sketch before the project, not the actual thing, but a key to it all and the process behind it.
This exhibition makes the works on display shine, but also manages to spatially translate the artworld behind them. It presents a formalist approach to curating, one that makes riffs, rhymes and rhythms in its brilliantly composed stanzas, and through them digs to the very formative question of why a painting, how a painting, and beyond that why an exhibition and how an exhibition? Remarkably, it manages not only to display, but simultaneously explain and question, lay bare the process and ideas behind the paintings and behind their constellations. Here the mock-up offers a guide, but the show also does it itself all the time with careful and clever cross-references and visual links.
The crises of painting on display – from the invention of photography, the readymade and the expanding fields of art to the death of the author and the crisis of the avant-garde caused by neoliberal Capitalism and painting as its metaphor. These are the “ruptures” Fischli outlines in the catalogue, but the themes in the gallery are less descriptive, and convey these crises more elegantly and powerfully. One room, titled “Die Hard, Stirb Langsam, Duri a Morire” takes its cue from a 19th century humoristic lithograph by Honoré Daumier showing a pile of “refusé” paintings being carried away from “l’exposition universelle”. Displayed with Marcel Broodthaers’ stacked paintings in the middle of the room and encircled by an fantastically eccentric selection of paintings by Asger Jörn, Kurt Schwitters and Michael Krebber, it not only show the limits of the format, but also its possibilities with a celebration of both. This is a crisis on display that can in itself be seen as creative power.
From Crisis to Chaos
There is something in this formalism that seems to be akin to the real life formalism of the opening week itself. It doesn't really give many answers but offers a mix of ideas on display and brought together in a way in which they bring out the best (and sometimes the worst) in their neighbours. It shows how constellations of paintings and sculptures can make a difference, can shake and move, bring joy and amazement, but also question and lay bare ruptures in themselves and around them, the limits of their format. This fits Venice. This is what Venice does all the time, and has done for centuries. But unlike Venice that with all its elitism still always welcomes a stranger, the exhibition, perhaps unwittingly, also lays bare a more narrow truth about painting. If only its presentation was not so middle-aged male and so European, it would be even easier to celebrate with it. Acknowledging, it is also only from this privileged point of view that such a show could have emerged. Nevertheless quirky, it opens the centre of the art world with eccentric and lesser known works of great 20th century masters and mostly loans from private collections on display. Perhaps for these reasons, the exhibition at the Foundazione Prada resonated even more powerfully with the opening week. It is an unapologetic exhibition of privileged friendship in that it is the perfect portrait and mirror of the opening week. Somehow Venice allows this too, perpetuating the similar feeling of hope visible in Stop Painting. By presenting and laying bare the historic crises of painting, it reinstates the belief in painting, in art, even despite all its middle-aged, male whiteness.
The questions remain? How could this ease and flair of mixing and showing be done to architecture and how could the empathy and hope of the bizarre opening be translated to the Biennale? Actually, I think the biennale tries much harder than Fischli to think of hope beyond one's own circle, and many of the exhibits in this year's main exhibition as well as some of the national pavilions even take it as their main subject – Lebanon's powerful exhibition on hope and destruction and Chile's installation that narrates lives on a housing estate through dozens of small oil paintings displayed inside a cubical room come to mind. But, most of the time, the absolute loss of ease and flair overshadow and rip away any feelings of hope from the exhibition goer. Walking through the Arsenale after seeing the show at the Foundazione Prada made me literally feel so dizzy that I had to go out to take a breath.
"In place of whims, riffs, joy and love towards the art on display, there was disregard, belittling and misunderstandings resulting in incoherent noise, and not the kind that makes you think and see anew, but the kind that migraines are made of."
How could one curate an architecture exhibition that would work better? One would think that the skillset of an architect to work with spatial configurations would be the right one to do it. It does seem that when not thinking of an exhibition, but a pavilion or a building, the success rates are higher and it is often the case that the interventions, even exhibitions, that take place outside the Biennale proper, outside the halls of the Arsenale, or the pavilions of the Giardini, – when architecture is put into use as architecture – it does leave stronger impressions, even manage to make a change. Examples here are many and start from the very first legendary architecture shows at the Biennale in 1980 with Aldo Rossi’s floating theatre and the Strada Novissima where Paolo Portoghesi invited architects to design a "building" on a street that ran through the long hall of the corderia of the Arsenale. Here it was not merely a question of "showing" a project, but there was a strong inherent "architecture" to it. This year, such examples include the Majlis exhibition that actually builds a beautiful garden in a cloistered abbey on San Giorgio Maggiore. Here, a new productive garden acts as a framework for the actual “majlis” pavilion. Brought together with an exhibition of photographs, objects and video works displaying a long lasting project to document the nomadic “majlis” structures across continents that spreads inside the surrounding abbey, they form a whole, where architecture in its many forms leads the idea of exhibiting putting into use its very nature to build and creating a physical as well as conceptual framework for display. Moreover, the garden and the majlis in it make the perfect setting for the biennale as an event where not only projects, but also people come together.
How can we learn to learn from all this?
I think that the ambitions and declarations on inclusivity, social and environmental justice that set the tone for the Biennale through its manifesto are all in the right place. The problem is the showing and the mediating. Here, there is a lesson to be learned from the bizarre opening of this year, from Peter Fischli and from Venice itself, all of which show us that sometimes trying less hard and slowing down the pace can lead to unexpected and positive results, and that sometimes it is the dead-ends, ruptures and crises that can become the very seed for a meaningful inquiry, and, indeed, exhibition. This is the city, some of whose most beautiful buildings were built because of plagues of various kinds, to fight them, to prevent them, as a thanks for their passing. This year, even if the biennale couldn't convince us, the fact that we made it to Venice and the magic of the city itself could, with all the joy of encounters, empathy and strange familiarities. Could the world be built again as a more beautiful and welcoming place after this disruption? The challenge for the next architecture biennale will be to understand and utilize this, and, most of all, to put into use all the architects' tools of design and planning to translate and mediate it in and through space so that it can be felt and understood; to take seriously the question of exhibiting.
Perhaps here there is one more que to be taken from the Prada show Stop Painting that asks the fundamental question on the limits of the art itself, lays it bare, is not afraid of it, but makes it part of the show. Now, Fischli's mock-up displayed as a key to his brilliant show underlines this, and doing so, it unwillingly mocks the architecture shows. After all, the mock-up and the scale model are the tools of the trade for architects, yet, in Arsenale, none of the dozens of models on display have the same effect as Fischli’s that manages to show that this is how you use it in an exhibition meaningfully. It is a simple gesture of explanation, a catalogue in real space, a key, a hint, a roadmap, a moment of estrangement, mediation and meditation. Providing even one of these for the Biennale in a meaningful and inventive way would be a beginning.
After this year’s biennale I ask myself: Is there a reason that the main exhibition of the biennale wouldn't be thought of as an exhibition rather than a trade-show-like gathering where a curator invites practitioners to fill in a space by way of their choosing? It is clear that the national pavilions do what they consider best. Their incoherence between one another is less disturbing than the chaos of the main show. Each of them is a thing in their own right, but applying the same approach to the main exhibition does not work. The usual reply I guess is the hurry: from announcing the theme to the invitations to the installation is a question of months. But, in this edition, one would have hoped that the extra year could have been used to turn the list of exhibitors into an exhibition. Moreover, why is the model of the list of exhibitors the standard? Does the Biennale as the single most important exhibition and cultural event of architecture not offer the perfect platform for rethinking what an architecture exhibition could be, how the wealth of ideas and breadth of the field could be presented? Is this not what designers do anyways, to think of how to spatially organize sequences of spaces, movements through them, and the information, ideas and feelings they evoke? Why does all this seem to have been abandoned at the Biennale? Instead of a list of exhibitors and dedicated “booths” for each of them, could there not be a rigorous framework that not only works conceptually, but also spatially? The first step would be as simple as to admit and identify the problem and go back to the basic questions any curator and exhibition designer must ask themselves: how do you make an exhibition out of a list of exhibitors? What could be the physical and spatial framework that could achieve this? This is the very question that architects are best equipped to answer, if only they would remember to keep on asking it when making exhibitions.
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