The Venice Biennale is generally considered the world's most important international exhibition of contemporary art. Since its official inauguration in 1895, the Biennale has continued to expand, and this year's show — the 50th — was enormous. Entitled Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, the display included works by 380 artists from 63 different nations. The most recent Biennale occupied three main sites in Venice, with associated events and performances held in public spaces throughout the city. The Museo Correr hosted Painting from Rauschenberg to Murakami, an installation of paintings from 1964 to the present day. The large, military spaces of the Arsenale housed a wide range of works, including video projections, posters, sculptures and digital art. Further down the Grand Canal, the best-known location, the Giardini della Biennale (Gardens of the Biennale) featured about 33 national pavilions. Built on site by individual nations, each pavilion highlighted an established artist selected to represent his or her country.
Jana Sterbak, a Czech-born artist who moved with her family to Toronto in 1968, created a video installation for the Canadian pavilion. Called From Here to There, the video was made by strapping a lightweight camera onto the back of an energetic Jack Russell terrier. Unsteady images convey a dog's-eye view of charging through domestic spaces, riding in a vaporetto in Venice, and encountering a porcupine along the snowy banks of the St. Lawrence River. This video marks something of a departure for Sterbak, internationally famous for work inspired by the human body. For example, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987), a dress sewn together from raw flank steak, was a metaphor for the culturally inscribed body. The work's meaty form refused to make a clear distinction between the categories of the natural and the cultural by conflating flesh with clothing. Though quite different, Sterbak's latest work continues to blur the boundaries between nature and culture, given that a high-tech dog participated in the production of aesthetically appealing images.
Another striking installation inspired by contemporary technology appeared in the Australian pavilion. Artist Patricia Piccinini drew on medical science to explore the potential of genetic engineering. Her hyper-real sculptures represent hybrid creatures and cloned children, complete with shiny silicone flesh and real human hair. Still Life with Stem Cells (2002) portrays a life-size young girl absorbed in play with corporeal lumps adorned with veins that appear to throb, as well as scars and mouth-like openings. Although viewers may find the “stem cells” repulsive, the girl responds to them affectionately. Another work, The Young Family (2002-2003), depicts a strangely human “sow” nursing her human/pig babies. One “child” with a human face and long ears lies on its back, gazing up at the face of its tired mother. Like Still Life with Stem Cells, the scene is at once domestic and disturbing, familiar and startling.
Piccinini's productions are timely. They resonate with current fears and fantasies about gene splicing, cloning and reproductive technologies. Her fabrications resemble the creatures found in both recent films and novels, such as Lord of the Rings and Margaret Atwood's latest book, Oryx and Crake (2003). The futuristic life forms described by Atwood include the rakunk, a raccoon/skunk splice meant to create an attentive pet, and the pigoon, a transgenic pig designed to grow human-tissue organs for transplant. Both animals eventually escape into the wild, threatening humankind rather than serving it.
Unlike Atwood's rather bleak vision of genetic experimentation, however, Piccinini's creations remain domesticated (at least for now). She portrays the science-fiction future of genetic modification in a manner that is neither dystopian nor utopian. Her optimistic yet cautious pondering of genetic technologies is a welcome alternative to the extremes of technophilia and technophobia often highlighted in the media. The work of this Australian artist is nevertheless challenging. Like Sterbak's video, Piccinini's tactile sculptures ask us to imagine a fantastic future, one that may well force us to rethink the distinctions between humans and animals.
Though the Australian and Canadian pavilions were high points at this year's Biennale, they were by no means representative of the exhibition as a whole. Instead, the sheer diversity of contemporary art became visible in Venice, making it difficult to generalize about the future of art making.
Lianne McTavish Ms. McTavish is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at the University of New Brunswick, specializing in early modern medical imagery and contemporary art.
Footnotes
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The Venice Biennale opened to the public on June 15, and will run until Nov. 2, 2003.