The Venice Biennale’s organization is a little like a constitutional monarchy: the president of the organization appoints a curator, who is responsible for the overall direction of the main exhibition areas and the event’s theme. Then each country elects their own representative through means that range from complex selection procedures to unilateral appointments by a cultural ministry. Those national curators, along with a few entrepreneurial types who mount “collateral events” (such as the two major shows Anish Kapoor mounted) do their own thing, often in contradiction to the main line. Thus, comes together the creative chaos of the Venice Biennale.
That diversity is on display this year in the efforts of at least three major national pavilions by Spain, Germany, and the host country, Italy. Unlike the main exhibit, which I discussed in my last post, these efforts are not about bodies or blobs, but about buildings and raise the question, which has been an issue at least since the Biennale I organized in 2008, of what belongs in an art biennale and what in an architecture edition—and thus what the definitions of these two fields might be.
Walk into the Spanish Pavilion, given over to an installation by the artist Ignasi Aballi, and architecture cognoscenti with a longish memory might have a sense of déjà vu: With a complete pavilion erected within the existing structure at a 10-degree angle shift, both new and old walls painted a dazzling white that stand under skylights that have been stripped and opened (a rarity here as in most art display spaces these days, as curators and artists don’t allow natural light), and standing on an equally barren concrete floor, you might feel yourself transported to a Peter Eisenman-designed project from the 1970s through 1990s. Eisenman might have used a slightly more subtle shift—he favored six degrees, as I recall from measuring those distortions as a student—but the overall effect is the same. The vistas and distortions of space have the effect of turning the structure itself into the object of display and, by implication, make you realize the charged nature of an empty space that does not do its job by fading into its job of framing and defining people or objects.
Aballi’s justification for this work of art, which he calls Correction, is that the mistake is actually the original pavilion’s: Because of vagaries of the site and planning, or because the designer or builder made a mistake (the real reasons are lost in the mists of time), the structure is placed ten degrees off axis from its neighbors, the Belgian and Dutch pavilions. The artist thus presents his work as one of correction and alignment, which brings the Spanish nation in tune with its European Union neighbors, while making the viewer aware of the historical otherness, or at least quirkiness, of this Spanish site. Apparently, the installation is accompanied by six pamphlets that find and discuss similar spatial anomalies around Venice, so that the exhibition becomes a way to heighten our perception of spaces and places that do not conform. However, neither I nor anybody I talked to could locate those writings, so I suspect they were part of the myth-making effort—as neither I nor other architects on site could find the original supposed shift either.
If the Spanish Pavilion used a slight conceit to create a fun palace effect (although I still think Eisenman and some of his followers did it better), the German effort is a grander one, both conceptually and physically. The story artist Maria Eichhorn tells is that she wanted to temporarily remove the German structure altogether and relocate it elsewhere in Venice. By thus removing a legacy of the Bavarian state that had originally commissioned the building, as well as memories of the German state that took it over in 1912 (and later stripped it down in 1938 to reflect Nazi tastes), she proposed to make us aware of how the building represents state power and in particular the wrought history of the German nation.
In preparation for the move, she authorized the uncovering of large parts of the foundation and the structure behind the walls. When the move proved to be too expensive (a source inside the Biennale organization told me the action was actually never seriously considered), Eichhorn left the unfinished exploratory work behind, kept the building empty and, like Aballi, wrote tour pamphlets of the city that would highlight other cases of displacement (these tours do seem to have operated, though I did not have a chance to take one).
The effect is like that of the Spanish operation, but without the abstraction. You get to admire the foundations and the rough brick walls, as well as the emptiness of the space. The fragments of structure become the objects on display, and they are quite beautiful as compositions framed by white walls and concrete floors, again basking under skylights. Here Eichhorn is working in the tradition of artists such as Hans Haacke and Chris Burden, who performed such digs at the same time as Eisenman was shifting and twisting. Though the display (for that is still what it is) thus has more legitimate art-world roots, it recalls nothing so much as the kind of strip-and-reveal renovations that have been popularized by architects going back to early-stage Frank Gehry (whose Temporary Contemporary exhibition space at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art hosted Burden’s archaeological dig in 1986) and including current practices such as de Vylder Vinck Taillieu.
A different tactic is on view in the Italian Pavilion. Usually the site for rather rote displays by the Biennale’s host country, this set of warehouse spaces in what used to be the city’s navy yards now is an elegy to Italy’s industrial heyday composed by a single artist, Gian Maria Tossati. Instead of stripping and revealing structure, Tossati has left the warehouses as found, and then added elements that elaborate on their industrial nature to evoke abandoned factories and workshops.
The exhibit’s first section, "History of the Night," leads you through three such spaces, as well as up through the offices and an incongruous bedroom that overlooks the ersatz production areas. Each of those scenes is more elaborate than the next: Starting with what appears to be an abandoned machine room, you enter into a room where ducts dangle in the space as sculptures while still providing air. The last gallery is an ersatz sewing workshop that appears to have been just abandoned, with some of the worker’s personal items and many unfinished garments left in place. The story is one of glamorous industry becoming formulaic and mundane.
In the second part of the show, "Destiny of Comets," you find yourself in what are now the largest industrial sites in Italy and elsewhere, which is a warehouse, although it is empty. From there, you look out into a dark space where a pool of water shimmers in obscurity, while lights flicker at the far end, evoking either fireflies or a view of a distant city.
Meant as a comment on the glory days of the Italian economy after the Second World War—when Italy briefly become an industrial powerhouse before shifting to “softer” trades like textile and then focusing on branding and specialized crafts— Tossati’s exhibition is not just Italian. It reminds us of the emergence and passing of the last phase of production capitalism before consumer-oriented, just-in-time production in smaller batches all around the world, and the emergence of an experience-based economy—which this display also is a good example of—transformed our society’s logistical basis into the search not for ever newer, bigger, and better objects, but for cheaper, faster, and more original experiences.
The Tossati pavilion is the opera version of the minimalist creations on display in the Spanish and German offerings, as is perhaps fitting for an Italian exhibition. The three together certainly are as strong in their architectural commentary on existing conditions, power structures, memory, and other grand issues as any building I have seen in recent years. They are architecture or art as storytelling, which is especially remarkable given their abstraction. What is implied, which is both the conceit of the mistakes, the removal never carried out, or the spaces that once housed work, is mirrored by empty space and its containment by an expressive structure. For architecture to tell stories or lies, perversely, it has to be empty, so that it becomes the story. Being an art installation offers it that opportunity.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
