The Venice Biennale

“Founded in 1895, this art event has been transformed from a primarily decorative arts show to a juggernaut of the contemporary scene.”

Venice kicks off the season when the 52nd International Art Exhibition, the Venice Biennale (Biennale di Venezia) opening on June 10th. Founded in 1895, this art event has been transformed from a primarily decorative arts show to a juggernaut of the contemporary scene. For five months, art overtakes the city as several venues are created. The heart of the exhibition is located at the Giardini, the gardens in the east of Venice where the Italian Pavilion and 29 other permanent national pavilions are located. Each country selects one or more artists to fill their space.

This year, the United States pavilion will showcase the late Cuban-American conceptual artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996). Gonzalez-Torres addresses ideas of loss, love and desire through everyday materials. His work includes slips of paper or pieces of candy piled across floors and in corners. Visitors can remove individual pieces, thus making the sculpture a fluid work as it decreases or sometimes increases in mass. The pavilion exhibition will include a work never made in the artist’s lifetime; this new work will be based on the artist’s surviving drawings.

“…the Bienniale … tends to spark events and shows throughout the city…the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni will host a special contemporary exhibition.”

The Giardini also hosts a large, thematic exhibition organized by the 2007 director, Robert Storr, an American curator and critic. Storr, formerly a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is now Dean of the Yale School of Art. The Arsenale, once the warehouses and shipyards to the Venetian Republic, works as a second venue which developed as a place for artists from countries without permanent pavilions, or for younger artists.

However, the Bienniale is not limited to these two spaces but tends to spark events and shows throughout the city. Home to an extraordinary twentieth-century art collection, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni will host a special contemporary exhibition, All in the Present Must Be Transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys from June 6 – September 2. For a few weeks, the well-respected 64th Venice International Film Festival will overlap the Biennale (Augst 29-Spetember 8). In 2005, the city reportedly drew in about 900,000 visitors to all the art events over the five months.

documenta 12

“…documenta 12 will again feature artists working in every conceivable media.... a multimedia artist … explores language and its sound through video … a culinary Salvador Dali … creates fantastic blends of ingredients from his restaurant.”

In the center of Germany, the 200,000 residents of Kassel hosted over 650,000 visitors at documenta 11 in 2002. The show was started in 1995 by art educator and artist, Arnold Bode as an attempt to reconcile post-war public life with international modernity. Staged every five years with a different artistic director, this “Hundred Day Museum” has emerged as a worthy competitor to the Venice Biennale and is one of the leading art exhibitions on the international art scene.

“…For the passionate observers of contemporary art … there is only a four-month window to experience this solar eclipse of contemporary art events.”

Led by artistic director, Roger M. Buergel, a renowned German curator, the 2007 documenta 12 will again feature artists working in every conceivable media. Some of the announced artists include Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, British artist Imogen Stidworthy and Spanish chef, Ferran Adrià. To give an idea of the range of media, Stidworthy is a multimedia artist who explores language and its sound through video. Called a culinary Salvador Dali by restaurant critics, Adrià creates fantastic blends of ingredients from his restaurant north of Barcelona. The artist list for the exhibition is anticipated to be around a hundred participants.

There are three leitmotifs driving the vision of the exhibition this year: Is modernity our antiquity? In other words, are the ideas that underlined much of the twentieth-century’s politics and culture alive or dead in this new world of globalization? What is bare life, or what constitutes life when everything is subtracted which is not essential? And, what is to be done to understand these things? The underlying theme will be how art relates to these questions and whether or not art helps us to better understand them.

documenta 12 opens on June 16, 2007, six days after the Venice Biennale. documenta, although international in scope, is also focused on making connections to its local art scene and to art education. Special tours have been organized including tours by students between thirteen and nineteen years of age who will guide adults through the exhibition and incorporate their own interests and focuses.

documenta 12 closes on September 23, 2007, about two months before the closing of the Venice Biennale on November 21st. For the passionate observers of contemporary art, this means there is only a four-month window to experience this solar eclipse of contemporary art events.