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The 56th Venice Biennale 2015

Marco Marcon
Eyeline 84
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Like most other art reviewers, I visited the Venice Biennale during the professional preview, aka ‘vernissage’, a three-day sweaty walkathon reserved for artists, curators, critics and miscellaneous hangers-on of all shapes and sizes. While the venues, restaurants and toilets are immeasurably more crowded than after the show opens to the general public, the preview is also the occasion on which the true essence of the biennale is shamelessly laid bare. It can be described as a convergence of two types of cognitive collapse: the first affects the exhibition, which, with the exception of the show curated by the artistic director du jour, is an event without rhyme or reason. Every two years participating nations spew forth their champion artists, who are chosen not only for legitimate professional reasons but also, at least in some cases, to satisfy political, commercial or even nepotistic interests. The result is a totality that is much less than the sum of its parts; it is what the people who know about these things call a ‘paratactic’ structure—individual components mindlessly added to each other, like ice-cream scoops on a cone, without ever forming a meaningful, unified system. How very Italian.

The second intellectual downfall affects the hapless visitors, be they ‘professional’ or simply stowaways—the latter provide the majority of bodies that pack the countless queues and obstruct the many narrow doorways and corridors. It is hard to underestimate the level of synaptic detumescence experienced by professional previewers and reviewers affected by jetlag, dehydration, inappropriate footwear, overexposure to visual stimuli—the Stendhal syndrome is a serious professional hazard in these circumstances—and over-eagerness to impress one’s peers.

As is to be expected, such uninhibited displays of institutional and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time. Installation view, Australian Pavilion. 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia. Photograph Alessandra Chemollo. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.

Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time. Installation view, Australian Pavilion. 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia. Photograph Alessandra Chemollo. Courtesy la Biennale di Venezia.

AES+F, Inverso Mundus, 2015. Still from 7-channel HD video installation. Courtesy the artists.

AES+F, Inverso Mundus, 2015. Still from 7-channel HD video installation. Courtesy the artists.