54th International Art Exhibition 2011
Despite being a century-old tradition, the Venice Biennale remains the most prominent symbol of the growth in popularity of large-scale exhibitions around the world, a proliferation which developed particularly after the turn of the 1980s. Over the years, many art writers have pointed out that the prominence of festival-size exhibitions has been detrimental to aspects of contemporary art because of their foregrounding of spectacle-driven aesthetics. However, such criticisms have often failed to mention just how important such events are, offering a form of cultural tourism that forces one to acknowledge the difficulty of extracting aesthetic experiences from a larger social setting.
Just as the sounds of water and motorboats draw you into the city’s ambience, Venice’s historical peculiarities penetrate one’s entire experience of the Biennale. This notion was taken up by Charles Ray in his public sculpture Boy with Frog (2009), an eight foot tall naked boy holding a frog as if it was just plucked out of the Grand Canal. Situated at the very end of the Punta della Dogana, the precisely scaled-up work renders tourists and locals alike to the size of children, particularly when viewed from the Giardini side. In the context of the Biennale it suggested that, overshadowed by a palpable sense of the city’s cultural history, the contemporary artworld resembles a bunch of kids comparing frogs. Rather than being a patronising stance, Ray’s sculpture captures what it is like to be on the trail of contemporary art in this imperturbable city.
Many reviews of the 2011 Venice Biennale have already noted the heightened political nature of this year’s national pavilions and the imperfectly curated Arsenale and Central Pavilion by the Swiss curator Bice Curiger. Titled ... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline