The 50th Venice Biennale, 2003
The subtitle of this Venice Biennale is ‘The Dictatorship of the Viewer’, a phrase referring to the Marxist concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. But in any revolution the outcome is uncertain, and this is the case in the post-Readymade condition. In the wake of the revolution instigated by Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, the definition of art in the 2000s is: ‘that which is exhibited’. This places the curator in an extremely important position as the first judge of what is and is not art. But what happens if, as on the historic occasion of the fiftieth Venice Biennale, the curator throws up his hands and farms out his job to a collection of sub-curators? Especially when the part he did bring together, ‘Delays and Revolutions’, in the Italian pavilion, was by far the best section of the entire show in terms of its curatorial focus and quality.
Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum’s ‘Delays and Revolutions’ was prefaced by a text on the wall of the entrance to the Italian Pavilion that might explain why Bonami wanted to concentrate on a much smaller task. I will quote just the first of the three paragraphs:
Art survives as its caricature. Its charm lies in its irrelevance. Everything concerning it is a justification of its gratuitousness. Its arbitrary values confirm the fact that they are vacuous. Art is a circensian mode of expression.1
With this anomie in mind, and noting that even Delays and Revolutions was a nonsensical title, it occurred to me that if there was any theme it was the abyss-like self-questioning of the self-questioning of ‘art’ in the wake of Duchamp’s historic pissoir... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline