"Dreams and Conflicts
The Dictatorship of the Viewer"

Or the dictatorship of the curator

Contemporary reality
Art market and overproduction
"Art died not because there was not any, but because there was too much", Jean Baudrillard.

For me, the general image
of the 50th edition of the Venice Biennial was pathetically hard to stand.
Staled stuff and un-felt despairs. (The national pavilions had a major and ill-fated contribution to this state of things)
Generally, the good works, which were few, were suffocated by a show of bidonville.
The theoretical texts in the Biennial's catalogue (if one was so imprudent to read it before visiting the exhibition) create an expectance horizon that is not fulfilled.

My cut from 550 artists
Giardini, international selection "Delays and Revolutions"
Curators Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum in this order, although I'm feeling tempted to read the other way around.
"Too early, too late. The temporality of art is never linear, it's characterized by repetition and syncopation, detours and delays"

* Andy Warhol, video with Marcel Duchamp repeated in the state before the interview when he doesn't say anything. He prepares himself but he delays…
* Peter Fischli and David Weiss with waves of words (projected on the walls), lost, replaced, repeated…
* Rirkrit Tiravanija - the painting "Less Oil More Courage"
* the "de-pressurized" room, covered in tinfoil, in which were studded all kind of words, worthless objects in an accidental letting go (I don't remember the name of the author and the catalogue and the guide doesn't help me as it doesn't show the works in situ)
* The model of a highway (in cardboard), Thomas Bayrle
* Dan Graham with his room watched by the surveillance camera, (parallel pieces of time), in which you can see the others and not yourself as you're delayed and you will be seen (or not) by the next one
* Richard Prince, posters with cowboy from Marlboro Country

Arsenale "Zone of Urgency"
Curator Hou Hanru

* Chen Shaoxiong - digital animation, skyscrapers that attract planes like a fly-paper.

*Alfredo and Maria Aquililan, the Philippine jeep of those with an obvious killing instinct

"Clandestine" Curator Francesco Bonami

The corridor of Monika Sosnowska, long, with a strip of green paint, with a tempting opened and bright door, at the other end, a corridor where you can enter till close to the middle and then you stuck and you're in a difficult situation, the walls became narrower and don't let you pass, what do you do? do you return? do you crawl till the end of it? …

www. labiennale.org
(15.06 - 2.11.2003
10- 18h
Giardini closed on Monday
Arsenale closed on Tuesday)

Lia Perjovschi