A Dearth in Venice

Despite what you may have heard, there’s some very good news from the 49th International Art Exhibition, which opened last month (and continues to Nov. 4) in this perennially pixilated city-in-the-sea. The good news is that the rising exhibition fad for gallery-size video projections is over. The Venice Biennale has delivered a fatal blow to the visitor-unfriendly format.

It’s not that curator Harald Szeeman has ignored the currently flourishing genre, whose roots lie in the history of single-channel video art since the 1970s and in more recent commercial applications like MTV. On the contrary, the Biennale is overflowing with the stuff. There seem to be more DVDs and video projectors than any other material.

Some are in the individual national pavilions clustered in the Giardini di Castello, the cool gardens at the city’s southeast end, where the Bienniale was launched in 1898. Most are in “Plateau of Humankind,” the huge special exhibition Szeeman has organized for the Italian pavilion and at the Arsenale, the immense shipyards where seafaring 16th century Venetians could build a fully equipped warship from scratch in 12 hours flat.

A few acknowledged masters of the video genre, such as Seattle’s Gary Hill and Long Beach’s Bill Viola, are represented by strong works. France’s Pierre Huyghe has turned his country’s pavilion into an icy environment of human isolation, where exquisite technology lures the imagination while fostering melancholic isolation. (Huyghe appropriately won a major Biennale prize.) Gifted younger European exemplars like Pipilotti Rist and Steve McQueen are absent. And a couple of nice surprises can be found: the addled animation of Sweden’s Magnus Wallin, who transforms the aesthetics of survival found in video games into something tragic yet strangely hopeful; and the witty video riffs on Color-field painting by Austria’s Heimo Zobernig, who tangles up his body in constantly rearranging sheets of colored cloth.

Finally, though, video projection has been killed with kindness. Most of what’s on view is--well, not exactly forgettable, because it’s virtually unwatchable in the first instance.

Picture this: The Corderie, a narrow vaulted building in the Arsenale where rope was once woven in an awesome space the length of several football fields, is lined with an alternating series of white-walled exhibition bays and video projection rooms. Each video room is dark, with an image projected on the white wall (or sometimes the floor) and a single parson’s bench for seating. Almost every room is devoid of people.

Visitors stroll the length of the Corderie, sticking their heads into the flickering booths and then moving on. Like something out of a Surrealist dreamscape, projectors in room after room play endless loops to an audience of nobody.

It’s doubtful any aspiring curator will adopt this as a model for future exhibitions (hooray!). Better a program of shorts in an ordinary theater than this torturous attempt at exhibiting film and video as if they’re painting or sculpture.

Perhaps this explains the otherwise inexplicable awarding of a special prize to the wife-and-husband team of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who abandoned the typical gallery exhibition space for the display of their short narrative video about a patient, a nurse and an ominous stalker. Instead they constructed a mock movie theater, complete with balcony and drapes, inside Canada’s national pavilion. (It looks sort of like the old set for “Siskel and Ebert.”) A viewer wearing headphones watches the film and hears a soundtrack that includes snippets of paranoid conversation among other, fictional audience members (“Did I leave the oven on at home?”). Clever if unadventurous, the work is nominally about the confusions of experience common to a media-saturated world.

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Also, it seats just 17 people, who constitute a captive audience for the 13-minute show. Queues lined up outside the Canadian pavilion match those next door waiting their turn to enter the German pavilion, notoriously designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer, where prizewinner Gregor Schneider has built the latest version of an ongoing project most recently featured at 1999’s Carnegie International and last year’s “Apocalypse” at London’s Royal Academy: a grimy labyrinth of dilapidated rooms, hallways and creaky stairs. An obvious metaphor for inner psychology--the apartment-like maze is filled with dead ends, foul associations and unexpected encounters with strangers--Schneider’s hokey fun house is accessible by just 10 visitors at a time.

Apparently, the Biennale’s five-member international prize jury had a soft spot for hammy entertainments, not to mention for the aesthetics of control and manipulation.

The best of the 31 national pavilions are those by painter Luc Tuymans (Belgium) and sculptor Robert Gober (the U.S.). Both are exceedingly quiet, low-key and contemplative. They represent what is actually cutting-edge in international art right now--not video projections in a gallery context but a renewed confidence in painting and sculpture.

Tuymans’ muffled, mothball colors and gently worked surfaces in oil and watercolor offer seductions without flash, quiet temptations whose unexpected payoff lies in the banality of his subjects. (Think bleached-out Edward Hopper, whose influence Tuymans has acknowledged.) Thematically, this group of 27 paintings concerns malevolent episodes of Belgian colonialism in Africa. In spare, almost disembodied images as disparate as a sleeping baby, a drum set, a uniformed soldier and a glimpse of leg protruding from beneath a skirt, the artist emerges as an intimist for whom memory is a bewitching, aching phantom. Tuymans is managing to build on the achievement of German painter Gerhard Richter in a deeply moving, wholly unironic way.

Gober’s spare but complex installation in the American pavilion, which is composed of eight sculptures, several prints, one photograph and an artist’s book, is likewise obsessed with memory and anxiety. It doesn’t hit the high mark set by his pivotal 1997 installation in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it does surpass most other contributions to the Biennale.

Galleries in the faux-Georgian building are laid out symmetrically on either side of a small central rotunda. Here, Gober has installed a handmade sculpture of a toilet plunger, its wooden handle broken as if from frantic use, which is placed on top of a “pedestal” made from a slab of Styrofoam cast in bronze and given a dull, tin-colored patina.

It’s an eccentric image, this tool for unclogging drains set atop a piece of flotsam made durable and artistically exalted by bronze. Part of Gober’s importance as an artist lies in this insistence on making everything by hand--right down to intaglio prints that reproduce newspaper and magazine articles. He acknowledges, like countless other artists, Marcel Duchamp’s take on sculpture as a ready-made object hemmed in by the modern age of mass production: Duchamp’s famous 1917 urinal, bought at a plumbing supply store, is glancingly invoked by the plumber’s helper at the center of the installation. Yet, rather than shop for his sculptural goods, Gober makes them from scratch. Making has meaning.

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As he did at MOCA, his installation for the Biennale also conflates secular imagery with a specifically Catholic iconography of transubstantiation. Light glows mysteriously behind the wooden door of a storm cellar dug into the floor of one room (the door handle is a braid of human hair). Gober’s sculpture mixes such movie imagery as Judy Garland’s tornado trip to Oz with classic painting, such as Tintoretto’s depiction of Christ’s tomb in the famous murals at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco across town. The storm-cellar sculpture is part liberating shelter, part morbid grave.

The works by the two American artists awarded Golden Lion prizes as “masters of contemporary art” likewise resonate against their specific Venetian setting. Richard Serra’s huge abstract sculptures of rolled steel, made with postindustrial ship-building technology, echo within the vast pre-industrial spaces of the Arsenale. Cy Twombly’s suite of 12 paintings, “Lepanto,” is titled after a famous 16th century sea battle, but the canvases pointedly recall Monet and Turner besotted by Venice--all watery turquoise blues, splashed with sunset flickers of magenta, orange and gold.

Despite these and other isolated moments in this enormous show (112 artists from 69 countries), the 49th Venice Biennale is not a memorable event overall. Nobody can quite say what the airy title, “Plateau of Humanity,” is supposed to mean. Everybody is willing to cut the curator considerable slack. Ever since he organized Germany’s Documenta 5 in 1972--perhaps the last great international survey of its kind--Szeeman has been arguably Europe’s most important curator.

The show’s title, though, is a veritable description of an enchanting sculpture by South Korea’s Do-Ho Suh, in which a wide glass bridge between two galleries is held aloft by a surging mass of thousands of tiny figurines. But the show itself is less a high platform offering a magnificent view than a dull plane that simply drones on. While it privileges new European art (72 artists) and gives short shrift to American work (13 artists), its most disappointing feature is that art from Los Angeles is almost entirely ignored.

Oddly, Szeeman cites as his inspiration for “The Plateau of Humanity” Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man,” a 1955 photography exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. An exercise in sentimentality that traveled the globe extolling a treacly image of international brotherhood at the height of the Cold War, “The Family of Man” was its own bad example of flat-lining numbness. Maybe all those empty rooms of DVD loops at the Arsenale are indeed its equivalent for our confusing new era of globalization.

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Venice Biennale, Giardini di Castello/Arsenale, 011-39-02-54914, https://www.labiennale.org, through Nov. 4. Closed Mondays.