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login register ADVERTISE BACK ISSUES CONTACT US SUBSCRIBE follow us search ARTGUIDE IN PRINT 500 WORDS PREVIEWS BOOKFORUM A & E 中文版 DIARY PICKS NEWS VIDEO FILM PASSAGES SLANT SCENE & HERD Tale of Two Cities links RECENT ARCHIVE VENICE 06.16.14 Agnieszka Gratza on “Solaris Chronicles” at the LUMA Foundation in Arles Kate Sutton at the opening of Manifesta 10 Andrew Berardini on the opening of Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles Linda Yablonsky on Jeff Koons’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum Linda Yablonsky on Juergen Teller, Rashid Johnson, and Paweł Althamer in Greece Gemma Tipton on Marina Left: Artist Christopher Williams and architect Rem Koolhaas, director of the 14th Venice Architectural Biennale. Right: Abramović and Ed Atkins Fashion designer and collector Muiccia Prada. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky) at the Serpentine WHILE IN VENICE, I didn’t hear a single joke about architects. This is a profession that appears to take itself very seriously—no bad behavior while away from home. At least, that’s how it seemed over three preview days at the Fourteenth Venice Biennale of architecture—my first. Experienced people predicted that there would be more artists involved than in any edition before, and probably the best one to break my virginity. The reason, they all said, was “Rem”—Rem Koolhaas, the exhibition’s curator and an architect so widely respected that even those who turn up their noses at his ideas pay them close attention. What kind of show would he make? Not the usual kind, to be sure. From the moment of my arrival on Wednesday, June 4, Venice did seem quieter than it is when the art world is in town. Not that it wasn’t around. A passel of artists, dealers, museum directors, and architects were lunching that afternoon at Ca’ Corner della Regina, the eighteenth­century palazzo where the Prada Foundation is in residence while its new museum complex in Milan (designed by Koolhaas) is under construction. The attraction was an exclusive preview of Germano Celant’s “Art or Sound?,” which features works dating from the fifteenth century to the present, from the Surrealist, Fluxus, and Arte Povera movements as well as the latest from Haroon Mirza and Tarek Atoui. It is not about sound art but objects that make or suggest sound and may or may not be art. “Museums have grown too quiet,” Celant said. “There are NEWS PICKS FILM SLANT rules. No fire. No animals. No bad smells. But now there is sound everywhere. So we did it our way, which is to look at the history.” Newest Headlines Major Collection Donated to Two Pennsylvania Museums 2014 Praemium Imperiale Award Winners Include Martial Raysse, Giuseppe Penone, and Steven Holl Marco Maggi to Represent Uruguay at 2015 Venice Biennale Martino Stierli Named Chief Curator of Architecture and Design At MoMA Tsang Kin­Wah to Represent Hong Kong at Venice Biennale Left: Prada Foundation curator Germano Celant. Right: Moderna Museet director Daniel Birnbaum and Charlotte Birnbaum. Herman De Vries to Spread over two floors were musical instruments that looked like sculpture (a nineteenth­century violin Represent Netherlands at with nails for strings, a military cornet shaped like a serpent); sound­emitting sculpture (Dennis 56th Venice Biennale Oppenheim’s tap­dancing marionette, Man Ray’s metronome, Robert Rauschenberg’s radio­transmitting Getty Acquires Robert junkyard, Oracle); and quiet sculpture (Christian Marclay’s soft guitar, Ed Kienholz’s furry blonde cello McElroy Archives grotesque, a ball of twine by Duchamp that supposedly rattles when shaken). “They borrowed the Lynne Cooke Appointed Duchamp from us,” said Moderna Museet director Daniel Birnbaum. “It’s the most boring object in the Senior Curator at National Gallery show but also the most important.” On Kawara (1933–2014) At least, I think that’s what he said. What with all the chiming clocks, working calliopes, birdcalls, ZieherSmith and Horton buzzing alarms, dog barks, drumbeats and electronic beeps to drown out the nattering nabobs, I couldn’t Gallery to Merge be sure. Serpentine Gallery cocurator Hans Ulrich Obrist— organizer of the biennial’s Swiss pavilion— was there from the jump with Tino Sehgal and Haus der Kunst director Okwui Enwezor, curator of the next Venice art biennial. On their heels came Carsten Höller, Thomas Demand, Peter Fischli, Koo Jeong­ A, Tate Modern director Chris Dercon, and Wolfgang Tillmans (the last, the only artist participating in “Fundamentals,” Koolhaas’s exposition for the biennial). Mrs. Prada made only a brief appearance during the lunch, which gave Metropolitan Museum president Dan Brodsky and the Met’s modern and contemporary chair Sheena Wagstaff a chance to show off the museum’s first architecture curator, Beatrice Galilee. “This is the first time ever that so many people from the art world have come to an architectural biennale,” said the Milanese dealer Giò Marconi. “It’s a big thing.” Actually, there didn’t seem so many overall. Absent were the dealers and collectors who turn the art biennale into a business transaction; Pin­Up magazine editor Felix Burrichter and I nearly had the Palazzo Grassi to ourselves. Possibly, that was an illusion, the effect of vertigo induced by the Doug Wheeler environment that introduces “The Illusion of Light,” in one of the more coherent shows I’ve seen there. It had standout works by Julio Le Parc, Bruce Conner, and Troy Brauntuch, as well as “Autoerotic Asphyxiation,” the peekaboo Danh Vo installation that debuted at Artists Space a few years ago. Left: Metropolitan Museum president Dan Brodsky with architect Carlos Brillembourg. Right: Haus der Kunst and 56th Venice Art Biennale director Okwui Enwezor with artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Tino Seghal. That evening brought rain and increasing overlap between architecture and art to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, where David Landau and Marie­Rose Kahane welcomed guests to Le Stanze del Vetro, the glassmaking museum they founded on the grounds of a magnificent Palladian cloister. There stood Hiroshi Sugimoto in traditional Japanese garb, the better to introduce his latest structure, Mondrian, a glass teahouse that appeared to float above a blue­tiled reflecting pool set within a fragrant garden. “It’s my art in three dimensions,” Sugimoto said of the sculpture—er, house—where tea ceremonies would take place all week. “We weren’t sure this dream could be realized,” said Kahane, “but we worked very hard for two years and now here it is—and it’s wonderful.” It was tranquil, all right. Hundreds of people spoke in hushed tones as they walked to a buffet dinner in the cloister’s glorious courtyard, where a pair of enormous cypress trees seemed to symbolize the towering ambitions of architects everywhere. By contrast, the Bauer terrace was almost deserted when I stopped in afterward with d.a.p. communications director Alex Galan. This would never happen during an art biennial, even in rain. Perhaps architects go to bed early. Next morning, skies were clear over the Giardini as I headed for the Swiss pavilion, where Obrist was holding one of his marathons of yak. Anri Sala was just finishing a conversation with his old friend Edi Rama, an artist who went on to become the current prime minister of Albania. (What are the odds?) The talks, unfortunately, put the exhibition, “Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price: A Stroll Through a Fun Palace,” on temporary hold. It didn’t have much to do with Switzerland, frankly, but it did involve choreography by Sehgal, an enormous archive on loan from the Canadian Center of Architecture, and a window shade by Philippe Parreno that went up and down. Koolhaas had imposed a single, historical theme on all of the national pavilions: “Absorbing Modernity: 1914­2014.” It brought the biennial a welcome unity but also turned the whole enterprise into a giant research project that sent architects out to excavate the architectural soul of their nations before the homogeneity of globalism set in. Blueprints and models were scarce, replaced so often by text and photos that the biennial began to feel like a Dan Graham show. An exception was the Austrian pavilion. It had no printed images, just the white architectural models of 160 national parliament buildings, made to scale and hung in a grid pattern on white walls. Seldom has a country’s estimation of its own sense of power been so visible. Left: Serpentine Gallery cocurator Hans Ulrich Obrist with artists Peter Fischli and Koo Jeong­A. Right: Dealer Gió Marconi. Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár tipped me off to that one over lunch with Alessandro Bava, Luis Ortega, and Octave Perrault, the three young architects who created an ad hoc “Airbnb Pavilion” near the Grassi. Together they had rented a Jacuzzi­equipped, €180­per­night apartment from Airbnb, and recruited dozens of other young architects and artists to install drawings and videos for a five­day exhibition. “There have been a lot of people,” Bava said. “Sometimes we have to turn them away, because we need to shower or something. But come by later. The jacuzzi’s great.” Instead, I stepped under the false ceiling that begins Koolhaas’s show, “The Elements of Architecture”— and was baffled. Conditioned by years of art biennials, I didn’t know what to make of a show that had almost nothing new in it. The exception was Tillmans’s contribution, A Book for Architects, which wasn’t a book but photographs of urban homes projected as if they were on the pages of a book. I liked it. There was text everywhere else. There were antique objects—toilets, doorknobs, fragments of walls, windows, elevators, or ramps—in displays that invoked either the ghost of Gordon Matta­Clark or early works by Haim Steinbach, and films that spliced together together scenes of toilets, windows, doors and so on, totally Christian Marclay style.

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