Biennale twice the size

2 questions to the 2 organisers of a unique, 2-yearly event: the Venice Biennale.

What’s art’s role in building up awareness on such major issues as the environment, human rights, social development?
Maria de Corral: Today’s artists do not share a style, but an attempt to build personal aesthetic worlds, to establish their own formal needs, to shape a new reality for themselves, by accepting the challenge to produce an art that makes sense in the new context that has been delineated by the events of the past four years.

In the art of the past ten years it is extremely difficult to detect a dominating artistic doctrine or formal style, in blatant contrast with the constant anxiety about the effects of globalization or multiculturalism.

Artists establish the meaning and usefulness of their own raison d’être and the survival of the artistic gesture in a world dominated by the media, in which reality does not appear to manifest itself beyond representation.

By entitling this exhibition The Experience of Art, I wanted to share with the visitors some of the issues that artists address in their works every day: nostalgia as the feeling that the past is lost forever, expressed in a metaphorical language; the body and its redefinition, the introduction of fragmentation, dissolution and even death; power, domination and violence in the everyday life of each individual; the socio-political critique of current events by means of irony; the use of images, films and narration of the past as an immense archives thanks to which one can produce multiple operations of redefinition and appropriation.

Rosa Martinez: I believe that contemporary art has always sought points of contact between art and life, and has attempted to give form to our most profound feelings. Art is a fight in the symbolic order – the most relevant creators are those who open new perspectives for linguistic, social and ideological transformation. Today, questioning the autonomy of art and taking aesthetics into everyday life is part of an unstoppable widening of frontiers, of an extension of horizons that goes beyond established models. The adventurer, the philosopher, the scientist, the artist or the exhibition organiser, try constantly to discover new lands and to create new possibilities of thought.

This exercise is difficult in a context where new ideas, people and products circulate at high velocity, where the artists often mimic each other, where institutions franchise culture and in which marketing is the principal methodology of action.

One of the main functions of the curator is to reduce the background noise, to assign value and to organise syntax and discourses, which introduce sense into the unending traffic of messages.

In this context, the exhibition Always a Little Further is an essay presenting artists and aesthetic trends relevant at the beginning of the third millennium. A visit to the Arsenale proposes a fragmentary trip, a subjective and passionate dramatisation to discover the zones of light and dark in our convulsed world.

The Biennale’s always been an important “meeting of the waters”, where art practitioners and art consumers (visitors and public opinion in general) converge. It’s a venue, an opportunity for those who are even overproficient on the subject of art to meet those who are just starting out and finding it difficult to get their bearings. Have you ever tackled this issue during your direction of the event, and if so, how?
MdC: The Exhibition that will be held in the Italian Pavilion should not be understood as a self-serving discussion on the art of our times, but as a field open to distinct practices within which one can fulfill the desire to exchange experiences, ideas, thoughts, or even to provoke them. I would be pleased if the labyrinthian itinerary of art could be experienced not as a finished story but as a process defined in terms of the relationships between different subjects, forms, ideas and spaces, that would be more “similar to a center for experimentation than a stack of certainties”.

In that sense I would like the exhibition to deal with intensity, not categories. I would also be pleased if it were not historical or linear, but demonstrated the relationship that exists between artists of different generations who debate and work on specific ideas about art and the life of our times, creating a nexus between approaches that are similar in intensity and obsessive quality. My idea is for an exhibition that does not simply strive for a concept or a gratifying visualization, but is rich in thought and pleasure. I seek to address the themes that trouble and concern today’s society, and that artists know how to express in such a real, poetic and in many cases visionary, manner.

In approaching these issues implicit in the creative act, that do not belong strictly to the field of art, my intention is to show what is common in diversity, so that the viewer may admit the quality of what is unexpected and exceptional, and abandon his own reluctance at the idea of Pleasure in contemporary art.

RM: Throughout its long history, the Venice Biennale has become the epicentre, the privileged context for the confluence of artists coming from different geopolitical and cultural contexts. Offering a chance to analyse the concept of internationality and to redraw the contemporary topographies of alterity, the Biennale is a unique opportunity to invent new forms of neighbourhoods between artists, disciplines and audiences. This journey intends to draw the most significant lines in contemporary artistic production and to show that art still holds a promise for those who want to embark on the sort of voyage that made Deleuze take Proust’s motto: the real dreamer is the one who goes out to try to verify something.