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| My Hunt for Relics and the People I Met along the Way Alise Tīfentāle The 51st Venice Biennale: a difficult task, a mental exercise on an almost superhuman scale, a cabalistic stimulus to discover and establish my own position not just in relation to art, but to the world as a whole. For a person to take a delight in everything is undignified. To reject everything is even more undignified, since it's ultimately a rejection of oneself. The search for one's own kind is a search for oneself - not always a simple or enjoyable quest. To discover strangers, to finally perceive what it is that separates us, and why. Mediocrities and misunderstandings constitute an absolutely essential basis and background. My own kind: these are the ones who say what I wish to hear. Exaltation, slightly grotesque, pseudo-religious catharsis or a condition resembling it, something "larger than life" - this is precisely how I've always imagined the experience of art. It does not include wearying attempts to decipher some complex individual's private cuneiform or mountains of didactic A4 pages, behind which one may get a glimpse of a feeble video. This constitutes the background. And then there are the strangers. Those saying things I'd perhaps like to hear, but cannot comprehend. Amid flourishing globalisation and cosmopolitanism, one senses ever more forcefully the emptiness of the "cultural interaction" concept. Though we hold joint exhibitions and even partly inhabit the same cultural space, we'll never come to a mutual understanding unless our worlds come into contact at the basic, root, historical level that gives rise to common jokes, stories, systems of reference and common intentions. Possibly, this exhibition became such a complicated personal task because there was a great deal of personally-oriented art, with intimate experiences, inner dialogues and bodily sensations translated into the language of art. Almost every work demands that I engage with it and at the same time with myself. Of course, there's no avoiding social and political antics at any Biennale, but there is an impression that, this time, art has approached me in order to get acquainted, chat about the meaning of life and have a good time, instead of me meeting up with art in order attend a party congress or a gathering of cultural terrorists. Most valuable at this exhibition seemed to be the human factor: after all, contemporary art, too, may be appropriate for comprehension, perception and utilisation, just like, for instance, good architecture or good food. One might say that such art is childish, playful, old-fashioned or sentimental, but equally one may say that it serves to awaken that part of the soul of every individual which, ever since Adam, has been longing for religion, ritual and exaltation. |
| Name Versus Country Māra Traumane On the third day of the Venice Biennale I was telling an Armenian colleague about my new idea, influenced by the Italian pavilion, of the "thieving artist": a creator casually freezing into artistic stills the discoveries and works generated in other fields and by other people and, in serving up these remixes, gradually drifting in the direction of the international art establishment. He shares in return his theory about "speculation upon speculation": the artist pragmatically and casually playing with themes from science and critical theory. It is Rosa Martínez herself who unwittingly reveals in the Biennale catalogue the wider context behind the lukewarm exhibitions curated by her and María de Corral: "The major part of the game passes in this constant struggle, confronting and adapting to political, economic and administrative constraints, because an exhibition is also a 'product', launched into the market-place to compete with other similar products." Submitting to the laws of the "cultural sphere of production", the exhibitions have been devised as a compromise between art, the market (to a considerable degree) and standards of liberalism, at the expense of any challenge, any major statement or poetics. Post factum, we see in the Biennale catalogue the "ideal" version of the exhibitions, which appears clearer and more refined than what is actually shown in the exhibition rooms. |
