THE PHENOMENON OF THE "PAVILION-LESS"

by Giuliana Carbi

Taking the Venice Biennale as the starting point to discuss these topics was “owed” to the Venetian festival, a very special event in which, more than elsewhere, are felt the frictions, that pervade also the arts, between cultural appurtenance (and the resulting proper and improper ways of representing a common identity) and global internationalism (with the price that operating its system entails). The Venetian formula of art “competition” between nations, unchanged for over a century, becomes powerfully topical when one thinks that it sets out to make the “separate” unity of the pavilion and the “opening to dialogue” of the international debate walk - or rather, limp - together. If it is true that the thematic character of this event is what determines, although possibly not with the same power and consensus of other international showcases, the topicality of the Biennale, it is equally true that this all comes down to little more than a grand mundane event. The stream of world-wide specialists that besiege the Giardini on the pre-opening days still converges there mainly to take part in the grand circus of qualitative comparisons between pavilions, all standing in a queue under the blistering sun and asking each other, for instance, “Have you been to Germany yet?” not “have you seen the work of Gregor Schneider?” To be present at the Venice Biennale, even if simply as one of the artists of the national pavilion, seems to be worth several points for one’s collection to win a “place” in the international system. The superfluity on the waiting-list made up of the countries which still don’t have an official pavilion (crowded over the past decade by the countries of eastern Europe and recently bloated by the Asian ones) has led the “excluded” to force the situation, expanding the showcase to the whole of the lagoon city, in the most unexpected places given the prices prevailing in Venice, and going so far as to occupy the foundations of palaces and consecrated churches as well as private houses and even the over-dilated virtual space of a small monitor. Never has the Venetian event registered such record attendance as this year. The frenetic self-organisation of the nations without a pavilion has somehow taken the Biennale out of the hands of the institution which governs it. Today, the overly vital and original Venetian initiative, recognised by the operators themselves as the “plateau of mankind (sic)” in the true sense of the term, has become the showcase of the pavilionless, the focal point being the desire of these countries for international visibility.

Can the reason for this be traced to a past which has seen the coexistence, in the eastern countries especially, of an exasperated representativeness of state art and an equally exasperated and sacrosanct dissident underground experimental ferment? Some have pointed out that the fall in tension, once necessary to get one’s message across in those regimes, bypassing the obstacle of censorship, has led to a loss in creativity. It is equally true, however, that the younger generations have jumped in one bound the sense of aporia between preservation of traditional identity and internationalism that still divides the older generation, swiftly taking up new technologies and adapting to the new systems of visibility, ignorant of the euphoria of discovering on the other side of the curtain new methods with which they were already acquainted … It is also true that, maybe as a result of the very different point of view or simply because the change took place too rapidly, these new artists, while working on the new within a shared international milieu, are able to express what they want to say with greater, and possibly more authentic, strength than their equally young and more expert colleagues. The fascinating wealth of this multifarious and contradictory cultural community, which is now becoming aware, for good or ill, of the growing interest it is finally attracting in the international arena, deserves to be studied in greater depth. This because the topical point is that their new quest for visibility is already subjected to the pressure of the international system according to precise parameters. However, the closeness of the comparison with the as yet “embryonic” situation of these countries, which for instance still express an alternative curatorial notion of the territory of art, is a comforting signal that we are still in time to discuss the criteria that inform these parameters: it is a matter of huge importance and urgency for us all.

The Forum brought out, maybe for the first time clearly, why this is so. The dossier is therefore arranged in the form of questions, as yet open.