Speakers: Paul Ardenne, Davide Fornari, Alfredo Jaar, Robert Ireland, Federica Martini, Vittoria Martini, Antoni Muntadas, Beat Wyss; scientific coordination: Federica Martini

ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES:

 Paul Ardenne – Art Biennals and other Documentas: Tools for postdemocratic propaganda?

 Abstract

This conference questions the status of art biennials against the backdrop of twenty years of anarchic multiplication and gradual degradation of their symbolic reach. Initially a must-have of the cultural policies, the “GEAC” (Big Contemporary Art Event), has rapidly become the model of a suspicious operation, serving a cultural industry which quest for entertainment and power ended up in exploitation. In this context, the prevailing feeling is that freedom of creation is less and less emphasized and increasingly put under the authority of “post-democratic” politics, disguised by the use of the vocabulary and symbols of democracy and to the disadvantage of a fair valorisation of artistic creation.

Biography

Academic (Faculty of the Arts, Amiens) and collaborator of Artpress and Archistorm. Paul Ardenne has written several books about contemporary aesthetic: Art, l’âge contemporain (1997), L’Art dans son moment politique (2000), L’Image Corps (2001), Un Art contextuel (2002 et 2008), Portraiturés (2003) as well as monographies on architects and an essay about contemporary urbanity, Terre habitée (2005, NEW EDITION. 2011). He has curated several exhibitions : Micropolitiques, Expérimenter le réel, La Force de l’art 1, Working Men, Ailleurs, WANI… He collaborated with the film-maker Christophe Caubel on a movie dedicated to the street artist ZEVS (2008) and with Antoine Viviani for a documentary film INSITU (Providences/Arte France, 2011) focusing on street art.

Davide Fornari, reviewer

 Biography

Davide Fornari studied at University Iuav of Venice, ETSA of Barcelona and Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Rovereto – Trento School of Management. Honour degree in Architecture (2004), master of Art and Culture Management (2006), he holds a PhD in Product and Communication Design from University Iuav, with a thesis on humanoid interfaces (2010). Current positions Researcher at SUPSI, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, Lugano (Switzerland)
; Editor for design and architecture at et al./ edizioni, Milan (Italy)
; Consultant at lettera27 Foundation and executive director of the project Mobile A2K, curated by Iolanda Pensa and Roberto Casati, Milan (Italy). Affiliations: 2009 – junior fellow of AIAP, Associazione Italiana Progettazione per la Comunicazione Visiva
 2009- member of the editorial board of DoDo, the series of books by the School of Doctorate Studies, University Iuav of Venice (Italy) 

2008-2009 elected member of the board of the School of Doctorate Studies, University Iuav of Venice (Italy) 
2009 former member of LISaV, international laboratory of Semiotics in Venice (Italy).

Robert Ireland – Pavilions in a garden on an island…

Abstract

The Venitian topos of the « Giardini » concentrates 3 immemorial archetypes. Their validity seems to be rooted in our contemporary collective unconscious and preoccupations. The Island as utopia; the garden as a nostalgic Eden remote from the pressure of time; the pavilion, issued from the romantic gardening tradition (as the french « fabriques » for instance). All these topics re-enact the questionning of the sense of conservation of culture, national identity and immunity against the contemporary world and the course of time. Each case emphasizes the phenomena of scale reduction : the Island as a micro territory ; the Garden as a micro- natue ; the Pavilion as a micro-villa.

The pursuing of such lasting situations might give us a hint to the reason of our fascination of such « genius loci » : as we are always expecting picturesque encounters, peaceful disconnected and out of time places enabling us to forget the day-to-day turmoil, and, last but not least, our high demand that art should be consumed in an context immune from exterior disturbings.

Biography

Robert Ireland lives and works in Lausanne (CH), where he graduated at ECAL in 1987. Parallel to his artistic practice, Robert Ireland assistant professor at EPFL and at ENAC (Natural Architectural and Constructed Environnement Section) from 1991 to 2007. He was teacher and coordinator at Collège des Humanités in Human ans Social Sciences at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne for HEAD – Genève. Since 2007 he is professor in the Master Program MAPS – Arts in Public Spheres. Co-author of the book L‘évidence du paysage, Infolio, Gollion and of the essay « Espaces d’oubli», with Federica Martini, in Territoires – Bex & Arts, Art & Fiction, Lausanne. Has written several essays about the work and the artistic practice of artists and architects (Renate Buser, Ian Anüll, Ariane Epars, Pierre Bonnet…), as well as critical texts. His artistic practice includes regular exhibitions in museums and galleries (MCBA, Lausanne, Musée de Pully, Kunsthaus Aarau, Musée Rath, Genève, Galerie Skopia, Genève…) and interventions in public space (Gymnase de Burier, Ecole professionnelle de Fribourg, Lausanne et Genève).

Alfredo Jaar – It is difficult

Biography

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. He was born in Santiago de Chile in 1956. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta (1987, 2002) in Kassel. Important individual exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel, London; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. He has realized more than sixty public interventions around the world. He recently completed two important public commissions: The Geometry of Conscience, a memorial located next to the just opened Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago de Chile; and Park of the Laments, a memorial park within a park sited next to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. A major retrospective of his work opened in June 2012 at three institutions in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V. and the Alte Nationalgalerie. More than forty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In 2006 he received Spain’s Premio Extremadura a la Creación.

Federica Martini, symposium scientific coordinator

Biography

Federica Martini, PhD, is an art historian and curator. She was a member of the Curatorial Departments of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli-Turin, Musée Jenisch Vevey and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts/Lausanne, and curator of the visual art section of the Festival des Urbaines, Lausanne. Since 2009 she is head of the Master program MAPS – Arts in Public Spheres at ECAV, Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre. Recent projects include The Reading Sculpture (edition, 2009); Double Exposure (Conches – Musée d’ethnographie, Genève, 2010); Slipping Glimpser (Théatre Arsenic, atomic shelters, Lausanne, 2011); Incongruous (Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts/Lausanne, 2011); What is a Fact? (Musée historique, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2012); Vague Terrain – 0° latitude-longitude Gleisdreieck (Complices, Berlin, 2012). She is currently working with Didier Rittener on the project Royal Garden 4 – Rivières (Le Crédac – Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry). Recent publications: Just Another Exhibition: Stories and Politics of Biennials (Postmedia Books, Milano, 2011) and Marco Fedele di Catrano – Unbearable dissertation on a broken line (cura, Roma, 2011), and several articles on exhibiting national identities.

Vittoria Martini – The Space of the Exhibition: the ‘multi-cellular’ structure of the Venice Biennale

 Abstract

In 1807 Napoleon government accepted the plan proposed by the Venetian architect Gianantonio Selva for a park to situate in Venice western area. Selva’s project envisaged a series of recreational facilities for the green areas that were never realized due to lack of funds. Ever since, the Venetian Giardini have been looking for a function, which was found when the gardens were selected as a site for an exhibition of contemporary art, the Venice Biennale. The decision to use a space conceived for a purpose other than to serve as the headquarters for a contemporary art exhibition, marked the start of the Biennale’s unsteady trek through recurrent emergencies, artificial façades and contrived spaces.

Looking into the first symptoms of the structural disease that has been affecting the Venice Biennale since its opening in 1895, this lecture traces back institutional decisions and historical practices that has shaped the exhibition space of the Biennale. To date, the progressive atomisation of the exhibition space also influenced the perception of a notion of international, here meant as an “ensemble” of pavilions showing “autonomous participation of individual countries”. Starting from a crucial quote by art critic Lawrence Alloway, we will see how and when the Biennale get over the cellular structure in order to remain an “entity in time,” a institution able to adapt itself to political and social changes without losing the spirit of its identity. In other words, as Alloway puts it, with the birth of the pavilions the structure of the Biennale became “multi-cellular”.

Biography

Vittoria Martini is an art historian. In 2011 she completed her Ph.D. Her dissertation is entitled The Unattainable Revolution: The Venice Biennale 1968-1978 and focuses on the history of the Venice Biennale exhibitions in the 1970s. In 2005 she conducted historical research for Antoni Muntadas’ On Translation: I Giardini, (Spanish Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale). In 2009 she was the reviewer of the Historical panel at the Bergen Biennal Conference. Her recent publications on the topic include Just Another Exhibition: Histories and Politics of Biennials (co-authored with Federica Martini, Postmediabooks 2011); “The Era of the Histories of Biennials Has Begun” and “Questions of Authorship in Biennial Curating” (the latter co-authored with Federica Martini; in E. Filipovic, M. van Hal, S. Øvstebø, eds., The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, Hatje Cantz Verlag 2010); “A Brief History of I Giardini or a Brief History of the Venice Biennale seen from the Giardini” (updated version: 2010, http://www.artandeducation.net)

Antoni Muntadas – Politics, Nations, Pavilions

Biography

Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) began his artistic career as a painter. In the early seventies, however, he became interested in action art and moved to New York, where he currently works and lives. Besides an intense teaching activity which he keeps up to this day, his work is also represented in some of the world’s most important collections, including the Museum of Modern Art-MoMA (New York), the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Museo Reina Sofía, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona-MACBA (Barcelona) and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo. He has also taken part in some of the foremost international art festivals, such as Documenta VI and X, the 1976 Venice Biennale, the 1981 São Paulo Art Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (1991). In 2009, he was awarded the Velázquez Prize for the Plastic Arts.

Beat Wyss – The Giardini of Venice. Plea for an untimely Platform

Abstract

Art historiography of modernism has internalized the retrospective ideology of the “Avant-garde” by considering modern art to be an international movement that progresses against a backdrop of local cultural die-hards. The research project on the history of the Venice Biennale, launched by the Swiss Center of Art Research (SIK-ISEA), intends, instead, to analyse the way how different regions and nations act and react culturally within the constraints, caused by industrialisation, colonization, and (neo)liberalization. The aim is to gain a plural notion of modernities by specifying the process of modernization according to the conditions of political systems and cultural heritages. That does not mean to indulge in local “campanilismo”, but to develop a method of comparative art history by transcultural discourse analysis. With Liam Gillick, it is an English artist that was invited in the German Pavilion for the 2009 Venice Biennale, in order to demonstrate the antiquity of the nation in the context of art. But, to be honest: wasn’t this only to provide our television company with “event-patriotism”?  The Venice Biennale was founded in 1895, just a year before the first Olympic Games in Athens. Both spectacles live on the idea of ​​a peaceful competition among nations. Nonetheless, their rules were not fit for service, so the Olympic Games, World Fairs and Biennials were cancelled regularly during the World Wars. Biennial culture is a unifying international spectacle that can be disturbed when its political agents do not abide by the rules and, in the marketplace of cultures, human rights are written in small font. This intervention describes the research project of national participations in the Venice Biennale, with a focus on Eastern Europe, supported by the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich, and promotes a network for research on the Biennale.

Biography

Beat Wyss is Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design, and member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. He was spokesman of the Karlsruhe graduate college Image – Medium – Body, concerned with image theory and cultural studies. Committed for building up a doctoral school at the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK) in Zürich, he initiated a research program on the history of La Biennale di Venezia, focussed on the nations of East Central Europe and the USA, with the aim to enlarge the range of participating countries worldwide. His research interests include history of ideas and mentalities: Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity (1985/1999) and La voluntad de arte, sobra la mentalitad moderna (1996/2008); the orbit of Post-structuralism: Nach den grossen Erzählungen (2009); the historical expansion of the art system: Vom Bild zum Kunstsystem (2006); colonialism and globalization: Die Weltausstellung von Paris 1889 (2010).