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50th Venice Biennale: Who's afraid
Graham Parker on the reasoning behind Manchester’s presence at this year’s biennale.
A curious biennale this year – the usual images of packs of fellow countryfolk urgently conferring on the best pavilions or party ticket availability, were dulled somewhat by the stifling heat and the absence of any universal talking points beyond the continuing relevance of the biennale in its current sprawling form and the grandiloquent pretensions of its official themes. Oh yes, the themes. It might be an easy target, but the challenge to produce an all-encompassing and ultimately meaningless parenthetic frame for non-contentious worldwide survey, has been met this year by: 'The Dictatorship of the Viewer', which only marginally beats 2001's triumphantly meaningless 'Plateau of Humanity'. New biennale director Francesco Bonami cannot be faulted for his choice of collaborators in producing the keynote collection of works in the Arsenale (Gilane Tawdros, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gabrielle Orozco may be among the more familiar to UK audiences), consisting of ten independently curated sections given over to geographical and thematic sweeps, with the presentational aesthetics running from shanty town to museum to industrial cyber café and back again. But the overall effect...
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