Inventing Venice: A Director’s Roundtable

by Massimiliano Gioni

Rosa Martínez, ’05

How much time did you have to organize the Biennale? How did this impact your process and results?
We had only about nine months to start thinking and acting, even though I said yes as soon as I was asked by the president of the Biennale at that time, Davide Croff, since I was aware of the significance of being inscribed in the history of the event as the first woman director in its 110 years of existence. I was also thrilled at the possibility of creating a show in the amazing spaces of the Arsenale. So these challenges compensated for the short time—made more pressing by the slowness of the Italian bureaucracy—and all the other difficulties. When I learned that the president had also chosen another woman to curate the Central Pavilion, and that this woman was María de Corral, I was very happy to share this chance and yet to have different spaces. The fact that we were two women directors (instead of the classic one man) prompted Italian feminists in Milan to ask the president a funny question at the press conference: had he made this decision because in his male unconscious it took two women to equal one man?

What was your budget? How much did you raise?
The budget was a big mystery. I never knew what my total budget was, but I remember that it was cut by a big amount when I said no to a request made by a sponsor. Neither I nor the artists I invited would agree to convert the Arsenale into an advertisement space for coffee machines, with chairs bearing the sponsor logo all around. So I had to ask some galleries and artists to help me balance the cut, and they did.

In curating the show, did you aim to talk to your peers or to address a wider audience?
Harald Szeemann [director of the 1999 and 2001 Venice Biennales] told me that when you do a show you always have to keep your peers in mind. However, I think that in an international event as meaningful and important as this one you have to present la bella combinazione, addressing a wider audience. You must take the event a little bit further than your predecessors took it, but you also have to make it broad and comprehensible enough to reach the general public.

What did you want to do differently than your predecessors? Did you accomplish that goal?
Being a woman, I wanted to reflect on the exclusion that female artists have suffered historically, and the Guerrilla Girls helped me very much with their statistics. Through a series of ironic, large-scale posters, they showed how in 1895 only 2.4 percent of the artists who participated in the International Exhibition in Venice were female; but the shocking thing was that one century later, in 1995, the proportion was only 9 percent. I also wanted to reflect on other political inequalities, so the sound project by Santiago Sierra at the corridor entrance was very meaningful. Among many other things, he stated how in 2005 the countries that had a national pavilion inside the Giardini represented 24 percent of the world’s population and produced 83 percent of the Global National Product, while the countries having a national pavilion outside the Giardini represented 34 percent of world’s population, producing 9 percent of GNP.

What was the most complex project you were involved with?
The installation Cube by Gregor Schneider at the Piazza San Marco was so complex it became totally impossible to achieve, even though the artist had financial support to do it. We had to go through a hard process of obstacles and face political censorship, because the piece resembled the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam.

Which key project were you unable to pull off?
In addition to Cube, there was an ambitious project by Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba that could not be presented. Jun wanted to create a big performative installation to criticize the commercialization of domestic water by Coca-Cola in Vietnam. There was also a proposal by Gianni Motti and Christoph Büchel for which we did not get permission: they wanted to sink a container in the waters outside the Arsenale to simulate the isolated conditions of the prisoners in Guantánamo.

What was the harshest criticism you faced?
Believe it or not, the harshest criticism came from some Spanish magazine editors and art critics. The provincial envy was one of the worst things we had to face. Other power strategies could be observed in the critical reception of the event. For example some hegemonic critics dropped a line in major art magazines saying the show was not relevant, then spent four pages acclaiming their own national artists—even though those artists, while well established in the market, had very little to say about the present. But this is part of the game.

What did you risk?
I risked losing my patience, especially with the managing director of the Biennale at the time. But María de Corral was very wise in advising me to keep calm, and Robert Storr, who also suffered that manager’s dark intrigues, finally had the pleasure of seeing him resign prior to the opening of his Biennale in 2007.

What did you lose in the process of curating?What did you gain?
I did not have the chance to bring the show even further as I did not have time for deeper and wider artistic research, but I gained many pleasures: having wonderful projects by artists that I deeply believe in; becoming part of the history of an extraordinary international art event; working with a wonderful local administrative team; and, last but not least, learning to walk through the labyrinths of Venice without getting lost.

How do you think your Biennale is remembered? How do you think it impacted the history of the Biennale itself, or changed the format of what a biennial can be?
From the curatorial point of view, I intended to make the syntax of my exhibition clear and legible; I used the longitudinal walk of the Arsenale to play with similarities and oppositions between the works placed on either side. By creating conjunctions and disjunctions, contrasts and connections, I proposed an interpretation of what contemporary creation is all about. Many people understood and appreciated this, together with the political ambition, the humor or the beauty of some of the selected projects. But I was especially surprised by the sexist evaluation made by an important male dealer: he said he had never seen the Arsenale so neat and tidy, so it was obvious that a woman had taken care of it. Apart from that, my contribution to the history of biennials has to be appraised by others, taking into account other projects I’ve done, such as the 5th Istanbul Biennial in 1997, the 3rd SITE Santa Fe Biennial in 1999, the Biennial EVA 2000 in Limerick and several international exhibitions that I co-curated during the decade 2000-10. My desire and my curatorial actions have always been invested in what could be called the expanded field of contemporary art, bringing the exhibition beyond its walls, dissolving esthetic ideologies and interacting with local communities. So, in Venice, the Arsenale was beautiful and charged with meaning but still small.

2005 Prizes:

• Golden Lion for best artist of the international exhibition: Thomas Schütte
• Golden Lion for an artist under 35: Regina José Galindo
• Young Italian Art Prize: Lara Favaretto
• Golden Lion for lifetime achievement: Barbara Kruger
• Golden Lion for best national participation: France, represented by Annette Messager
  
  PHOTO: View of El Anatsui’s Fresh and Fading Memories, 2007, aluminum and cooper wire, 360 by 240 inches; installed on the exterior of the Palazzo Fortuny in the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. Photo Giovanni Pancino. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Rosa Martínez is an independent curator and art collections consultant. 

Full article: Art in America

La entrada Art In America, Nueva York, EEUU, Marzo, 2013 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.