Maine State Library Maine State Documents Academic Research and Dissertations Special Collections 10-3-2013 Venice Biennale: Staging Nations Emily Lauren Putnam IDSVA Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalmaine.com/academic Recommended Citation Putnam, Emily Lauren, "Venice Biennale: Staging Nations" (2013). Academic Research and Dissertations. Book 3. http://digitalmaine.com/academic/3 This Text is brought to you for free and open access by the Special Collections at Maine State Documents. It has been accepted for inclusion in Academic Research and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Maine State Documents. For more information, please contact [email protected]. VENICE BIENNALE: STAGING NATIONS Emily Lauren Putnam Submitted to the faculty of The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy October, 2013 i Accepted by the faculty of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ Shannon Rose Riley, MFA, Ph.D. Doctoral Committee ______________________________ George Smith, Ph.D. ______________________________ Simonetta Moro, Ph.D. October 3, 2013 ii © 2013 Emily Lauren Putnam ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii Every day, for hundreds of years, Venice had woken up and put on this guise of being a real place even though everyone knew it existed only for tourists. The difference, the novelty, of Venice was that the gondoliers and fruit-sellers and bakers were all tourists too, enjoying an infinitely extended city-break. The gondoliers enjoyed the fruit-sellers, the fruit-sellers enjoyed the gondoliers and bakers, and all of them together enjoyed the real residents: the hordes of camera- toting Japanese, the honeymooning Americans, the euro-pinching backpackers and hungover Biennale-goers.⁠ Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi Whenever art happens—that is, whenever there is a beginning—a thrust enters history; history either begins or starts over again. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people I would like to thank for their support of this project. Special thanks to Laura Graveline, librarian at IDSVA, for her kind assistance; Sigrid Hackenberg, Director of Dissertation Committees, and Simonetta Moro, for their help in preparing the document. I want to thank MaryAnne Davis, Jessica Doyle, and Kate Farrington for sharing their photographs and thoughts of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Crystal of Resistance, as well as Amy Cook and Heather Dunn for providing me with materials from the 2007 Venice Biennale. I also want to thank Lisa Freiman and David Hunt for taking the time to discuss Gloria by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, and Craig Freeman for sharing the “secrets” of augmented reality and Manifest.AR. I want to acknowledge my primary advisor, Shannon Rose Riley, who helped me work harder and more rigorously than I ever thought possible. She went above and beyond her duties to keep me on my toes, endowing a respect for the writing process—a gift that I hope to share with other artists. In addition, I am grateful for George Smith, Amy Curtis, and the rest of the faculty and administration of IDSVA who have helped guide my journey along this long and exciting path. I am indebted to my IDSVA friends and colleagues, including Tamara Fox, Kathy Desmond, and Michael Smith, who provided me with vital support and criticism as we worked together inside and outside the classroom. I also want to thank the women of the Beverly Philosophical Society—Leonie Bradbury, MaryAnne Davis, Joni Doherty, Kate Farrington, Kathryn McFadden, and the hostesses with the most-ess, Jennifer Hall and Blyth Hazen—for their feedback and insights on Chapter 4. I am also grateful for Margaret Bellafiore, Joanne Rice, Bob Raymond, Jed Speare and the other artists of Mobius who helped me foster my creative process, both in terms of scholarship and artistic practice, over the past four years. Sections from Chapter 1 have been presented at the American Society for Aesthetics Rocky Mountain Division 2012 annual conference. Sections from Chapter 3 were presented at “Women Who Write,” an event sponsored by Margaret Bellafiore at the Mobius Art Gallery in August 2012. I would also like to thank my parents, Patricia and David Putnam, whose incessant love and encouragement gave me the strength to follow my dreams. Finally, I am grateful for Kate Amory and David Stalling who helped me maintain some semblance of sanity during this whole process. v ABSTRACT Emily Lauren Putnam VENICE BIENNALE: STAGING NATIONS During the Biennale, Venice, with its unique urban topography and waterscape, functions as a staging ground for nations and other political and cultural groups. Unlike the crop of biennials that have recently exploded on the art scene, the Venice Biennale is the world’s longest running festival of its kind. Its origins coincide with both the crystallization of capitalism in the nineteenth century, the creation of a unified Italian nation, and major challenges to European colonialism. A distinctive characteristic of the Venice Biennale is its reliance on an exhibition setup modeled on the cultural display of modern, sovereign nations, which has persisted over time. In recent decades, neoliberalism has impacted the geopolitical layout and the inclusion of nations at the Venice Biennale as a site where gestures—artistic, curatorial, institutional, political, tourist, and urban—are involved in the production and exhibition of contemporary art. These gestures are some of the means by which nations are presented, enacted, modeled, behaved, revealed, contained, erased, and experienced. In this dissertation, I read such gestures within the context of select national pavilion exhibitions and what the Biennale calls “collateral events” from 1993 to the present through the lens of critical theory, visual studies, and performance studies in order to examine how such gestures enable and reveal material relations and the structuring of power in neoliberalism, where freedom is placed under erasure. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments....................................................................................................v Abstract...................................................................................................................vi Contents.................................................................................................................vii Introduction..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 THE UGLY AMERICANS Gestures and Social Practice in the Work of Allora and Calzadilla......................62 Chapter 2 CARTOGRAPHY DEFERRED The Venice Biennale as Heterotopic Spielraum..................................................111 Chapter 3 BECAUSE IT IS THERE... National Performatives and International Uptake at the Venice Biennale..........159 Chapter 4 LOST IN PLACE The Experience of the Tourist/Spectator and the Theatricality of Venice...........217 Chapter 5 AUGMENTED BIENNALE The Impact of Digital Navigational Technology on the Venice Biennale...........282 Notes....................................................................................................................323 Bibliography........................................................................................................357 vii Introduction “The power of art to change life is indirect. But so is (or ought to be) the power of political sovereignty.” —Susan Buck-Morss1 As Susan Buck-Morss describes in the above quote, both art and politics influence the destiny of a nation and its inhabitants, though this relationship is complex, ambiguous, and at times contradictory. While there tends to be an emphasis on the role of political sovereignty in international relations, the role of art cannot be underestimated. In the past several decades, the rise of neoliberalism has changed art, politics, and economics, which are mediated at the international art event, the Venice Biennale. Unlike the recent crop of biennials that have exploded on the art scene, the Venice Biennale is the world’s longest running festival of its kind, dating back to the late days of European colonialism and the rise of the modern nation-state in the nineteenth century. Since 1907, the Venice Biennale has relied on a national pavilion system as its exhibition model. As time progressed, the geopolitics of the Biennale has shifted in conjunction with the changing tides of transnational politics and economics, but the national pavilion system remains the backbone of the event. Subsequently, the increasing influence of neoliberalism has impacted the geographic placement and inclusion of pavilions and what the Biennale refers to as “collateral events.” David Harvey defines neoliberalism as: A theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional 1 framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.2 The emphasis on market freedom means that some national governments are expected to have limited roles in the neoliberal model, with the defined purpose of creating and preserving the infrastructure that will allow these market conditions to flourish. Moreover, according to this model, the nation is not rendered useless,