Pinault's Venice Plans; Istanbul Artist in Danger?; Documenta 12 Scores Record Visitor Numbers; Lyon Reviews; Art Cologne Palma Debut
PINAULT UNVEILS VENICE PLANS FOR 2009—AND BEYOND
François Pinault plans to transform Venice's Dogana into a museum by the next Venice Biennale, in 2009. As Le Monde's Grégoire Allix reports, Pinault—the private collector, the owner of Christie's auction house and Haunch of Venison gallery, and a shareholder in Le Monde—revealed the architectural model at a press conference last week in Venice. Accompanied by Venice mayor Massimo Cacciari and the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, Pinault lauded the "efficiency of the Italian administration," which last April chose his project for the Dogana over the Guggenheim's competing plan.
What can visitors expect in 2009? Allix claims that the ambitious completion date makes project administrator and engineer Eugenio Tranquilli "break into a cold sweat." With good reason: The Dogana, a seventeenth-century triangular brick building located at the tip of the Grand Canal and across from San Marco square, is in a terrible state after thirty years of disuse. In addition to restoration and modernization, the project calls for protection against floods. In Ando's minimalist design, the principal addition is a square hall in the middle of the building. The future contemporary-art center—4,300 square meters (46,285 square feet), with 3,000 square meters (32,292 square feet) for exhibition space and an initial investment of €20–30 million ($28.1–42.2 million)—will make Venice the Italian capital of contemporary art, at least according to Cacciari. For Pinault, expanding his laguna holdings from the Palazzo Grassi to the Dogana will allow him to show up to 20 percent of his private collection, which holds twenty-five hundred works. Four hundred have already been selected for exhibition at the Dogana.
But the expansion is not enough for Pinault. According to Allix, the collector-auctioneer-gallerist is already negotiating with the church to gain more exhibition space from a neighboring seminary. Other possible expansion plans include adding a basement to the Dogana, although the supports for the building have not yet been strengthened.
ISTANBUL BIENNIAL ARTIST ENDANGERED BY TURKISH PRESS?
Speculations in the Turkish press about damage done to Hamra Abbas's contribution to the Istanbul Biennial could endanger the Pakistan-based artist. As Die Tageszeitung's Claudia Richter reports, Abbas responded to the biennial's lead question, "Which Way Is East?," with a Kama Sutra–inspired sculpture titled Lessons in Love, which shows lovers in various positions and also holding a weapon. While designed to evoke the destructive potential of relationships, the work has been damaged by children due to the lack of security guards at the event. The Istanbul newspaper Sabah incited a round of speculation throughout the Turkish press that the damage was actually done by radicals as a protest against its sexual content.
As Richter reports, Sabah misquoted Abbas to transform the children's misdeed into an act of vandalism, if not iconoclasm, from religious extremists. Abbas—who studied and taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and will take up a teaching position at the academy in Islamabad, Pakistan—attempted to correct the error, but the Turkish headlines made an explosive connection between "erotics" and "radicalism" in relation to her work. Even an intervention from the press office of the Istanbul Biennial could not undo the error, which has now spread throughout the Turkish press.
Richter suggests that Abbas is being used by the Turkish media as an example of the antidemocratic tendencies of religious powers in the state, which threatens to step away from secularism. The newspaper's misquote—however useful for supporting the separation between religion and state—could cause problems for Abbas in Pakistan. "While the Turkish media are instrumentalizing the case to damage the image of religious powers in their own country," writes Richter, "the campaign threatens to backfire for the artist in her home country, where such powers are in fact at work."
RECORD VISITOR NUMBERS FOR DOCUMENTA 12
The controversial Documenta 12, curated by Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, came to a close last weekend. While unpopular with the critics—in both the German and the international press—the "one-hundred-day" museum proved a success with the public. According to a D12 press release, a record 754,301 saw the event. That's a hundred thousand more visitors than Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11, held in 2002—a 16 percent increase. In addition to these paying guests, 4,390 professionals and 15,537 journalists visited from fifty-two countries.
Among the paying guests, one-third traveled to Kassel from outside Germany, mainly from the Netherlands, the US, France, Belgium, and Austria. Increases came both locally and internationally. Twice as many Kassel citizens visited the event, while more visitors came from eastern-European and Asian states. For the first time, China made the visitor ranking, landing in sixth place.
LYON FACES THE CRITICS
"A biennial with neither faith nor choice." That's how Le Monde's Harry Bellet and Philippe Dagen sum up the Lyon Biennial, which opened just last week. Curators Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans-Ulrich Obrist came up with a novel selection principle: invite forty-nine other curators and fourteen artists to pick "the work or the artist that holds an essential place for you in this decade" for the show.
"Moisdon and Obrist's decision to delegate the choice of artists to others would be explained by the globalization of the art world and the increase in exhibitions, which prevents any global perspective," write Bellet and Dagen. "But who would be naive enough to hope for from a biennial, except Venice, a global perspective? That's not the goal of these events." Despite the curators' hope for more international views, the novel invitation seems to have increased national tendencies. "The English exhibit English artists, the Greeks, a Greek artist, the Lithuanian, a Lithuanian artist, and so on."
With neither a theme nor an aesthetic, the exhibition has one over-riding tendency: déjà-vu. "Recycled provocations from Dada—now ageless—are all over the place," in works from Urs Fischer, Erick Beltrán, Ohad Meromi, Tino Sehgal, and Apertet & Vigier, among others. Some of the fourteen artists invited to curate came up with novel solutions of their own. Pierre Joseph invited fourteen other artists to comment on his own work, while Saâdane Afif gathered nearly fifty artists who have exhibited at the Zoo Galerie in Nantes.
DEBUT FOR ART COLOGNE PALMA
The Süddeutsche Zeitung's Dorothea Baumer sends a positive report back from the first edition of Art Cologne Palma de Mallorca, which occurs at terminal A in the Palma Airport on Mallorca. "The newest autumnal destination for contemporary art collectors on the Germans' favorite island" featured fifty-five international galleries exhibiting their wares over 8,000 square meters (86,111 square feet) in two spaces within the former terminal. New as it is, the fair already has a satellite spin-off fair, Jam Art, which features works by younger artists. While Baumer was happy to see a "high artistic level" throughout the wares, she missed the quality at the fair's "Open Space" event back home in Cologne. "Art Cologne Palma is still somewhat too small to attract enough Spaniards from the mainland or even collectors in the know from South America," writes Baumer. "But the beginning tallies up optimistically."