GIRL POWER
Romping on the Rialto

Venice Biennale. Jun 2nd 2005 | Venice | http://www.economist.com

ROSA MARTINEZ and María de Corral, the directors of this year’s Venice Biennale which opens on June 12th, are like stars from a Pedro Almodóvar film. Clever, stylish, funny and well-connected, the duo is juggling to complete the job at hand in record time, on a reduced budget and amidst a Byzantine bureaucracy. If they are not yet on the verge, it is only because this is business as usual at the Biennale.
After the 2003 event—dubbed death in Venice because of the crippling heat and chaotic artists’ installations—the 110-year-old art funfair has decided to restructure. Its new president, Davide Croff, a former banker, is trying to rationalise the event both financially (by encouraging private finance to supplement a dwindling public subsidy) and curatorially by creating a three-year plan in which the two Spanish women will be followed by a New Yorker, Robert Storr, in 2007.

Ms de Corral, a former director of the Reina Sofía museum and of the Fundación La Caixa collection in Barcelona, Spain’s most important contemporary art collection, likes to take the long view. Her exhibition in the labyrinthine Italian pavilion will present a series of “constellations” of contemporary artists, rather than a single dominant view of how art is now. “I am interested in highlighting the relation between artists of different generations, in ideas that emerge like fragments and sketches.” On entering, viewers will see a massive cast staircase by Rachel Whiteread, a British sculptor, and then a series of galleries showing emerging artists such as Jorge Macchi, an Argentine, mixed with works by Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Antoni Tapies.

Ms Martínez, on the other hand, is the baroness of biennali, having made her name as a peripatetic curator of international contemporary art expos in her native Barcelona, Istanbul, Busan (South Korea) and, most recently, Moscow. A biennial exhibition has an obligation to test the present, to challenge it, she says. “It provides a temporary global agora, a place for encounters between people…a chance to create new kinds of neighbourhoods between artists and audiences.”
Ms Martínez’s domain is the Arsenale, the monumental Renaissance armoury that once supplied the Venetian navy and is now open only for the Biennale. Traditionally this is the space for the most avant-garde art, and Ms Martínez is like an inmate who has taken over the asylum. She believes in art’s power to transform the status quo. “It can subvert established systems, rather than reinforce them.”
Since the two were appointed last August, much has been made of the fact that they are the first women to have done the job and they have chosen a record number of female artists—more than a third of the 92 names whose work is appearing in their respective exhibitions. But the curators differ on whether this Biennale is a feminist event. Ms de Corral says it is not. “I do not have a deliberate agenda to include more women.” But she has devoted space to Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. Although they are best known for the radical feminist works they made in the 1970s, Ms de Corral has chosen to emphasise their prophetic qualities by selecting some of their word-based works that criticise the abuse of power in the media. “In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist artists used their bodies to express ideas, but these two were the first to use their minds. Their work has been incredibly influential.”

Ms Martínez believes this Biennale is none other than a feminist statement. She has invited the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist artist’s collective, to perform, and is trying to include as many female artists as possible. “I believe in positive discrimination”, she says. “I wanted half of the artists to be female. But I couldn’t find enough because women artists have children, relationships, break-ups that slow down their careers. These things happen to male artists too but somehow their careers continue. Women cannot afford to relax.”

Ms Martínez titled her show “Always a Little Further”, inspired by her favourite Corto Maltese comic strip, in which the hero is always pushing the envelope and making one more journey. She has no qualms about injecting the pop culture of comics into an exhibition that also includes a Samuel Beckett play, Rem Koolhaas’s architecture and installations by esteemed contemporary artists like the nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois. “I like to mix art forms, generations, media, genders,” Ms Martínez says. Among the more radical works here is Joana Vasconcelos’s chandelier made of tampons, which, from a distance, look like shiny white glass. “It is pop and ironic, beautiful and rich in metaphor—and it uses industrial materials in new ways,” she says with a grin.

According to Ms Martínez, curators are more necessary than ever. Art and commerce have always been interdependent. But, she sees herself as a mediator who strikes a balance between the economic necessities of the market and the utopian dreams of artists. “Like a therapist or an editor, a curator is someone who finds meaning in the chaos of messages that surround us. My motto comes from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze—we have to think, create, resist.” His words are a good banner for the Venice Biennale.

La entrada The Economist, Londres, Reino Unido, Junio, 2005 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Cutaror: Rosa Martínez

Venice June 15 – November 2 , 2003

Santiago Sierra’s work belongs to a set of critical operations which call into question the belief that art is an autonomous, sublime and unselfish activity. Reviewing his works over the last twelve years, what stands out is the persistence of certain subjects – recurring lines of action which end up pointing to a basic obsession: that of deconstructing minimalism as the hegemonic language, associating it with the dictatorship of production and profit.
In his actions, people become ‘performative ready-mades’ that shape ‘situated stories’, extending the classical idea of site specificity. Connecting the semantic charges personified by his actors to socio-economic and geopolitical conditions is an effective way of linking the personal to the political, the local to the global. Some fundamental lines of his poetics converge in his projects at the Spanish Pavilion in Venice – obstruction, linguistic provocation and the reflection on work as punishment.

Wall enclosing a space points to the technologies of mediation and restricted access posed by borders and by limits, whether visible or invisible, which place people in different geographical, social or ideological territories. The wall polarises the Biennial spectators on either side of a hypothetical stage and formalises physical and political tensions evocative of that strange territory of sealed cities and countries defined by contemporary exclusions. Unlike Beckett’s absurd existentialist ‘wall of nothing’, Sierra builds walls that show how frontiers have not been abolished but reinforced. Inside the Pavilion, by staging the remains of construction work on the wall, disorder and abandonment, he proposes an exercise in denuding reality and refers to other remains and other twilight zones.

Covered word is a simple sculpture made of poor materials. Here, Sierra acts by omission. By covering the word ‘España’, he momentarily truncates its multiple historical and symbolic connotations, thus prefiguring a controversial emergence of sentimental reactions, ideological interpretations and aesthetic assessments.

The action, Hooded woman seated facing the wall took place in the physical location of the Spanish Pavilion interior, with no audience, on 1 May 2003. For an hour, a woman wearing a black hood remained seated, still and in silence. This work, which the artist documented in photographs and on video, dwelt on the idea of labour as a technology of domination and punishment, bearing witness to the violence of disciplinary processes and the objectualising power of money. The iconographic connections with Goya’s works, and with torture by the Inquisition, link up with many other contemporary iconological references.

Rosa Martínez Curator of The Spanish Pavilion / Venice Biennale 2003

Excerpts from the essay Merchandise and Death, in Santiago Sierra catalogue. Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2003. Publishers: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores. Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas / Turner. 2003.

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