Venice waters down its Biennale

Its title promised illumination, but despite a few highlights much of this year’s Venice Biennale is fairly dull in places. But Irish artists Corban Walker and Gerard Byrne do stand-out

THERE’S AN end-of-season feeling in Venice, largely down to the lowering sky, the heavy showers that drench the city and a high tide lapping threateningly at the banks of the Grand Canal. Despite which, La Serenissima is still thronged with visitors, and a significant proportion of them are making their way to the 54th Venice Biennale as it enters its final month. They queue at the entrances of the two main venues, the Giardini and the Arsenale, then make their way through the seemingly endless maze of contemporary art. Attendants dispense plastic bags designed to hold dripping umbrellas at the door of the Italian pavilion in the Giardini, a wise precaution that saves many an artwork from a drenching.

Two Irish artists participate in this year’s Venice Biennale. Corban Walker is the national representative in the Irish Pavilion, and Gerard Byrne is in the group exhibition at the huge Arsenale, as an invited artist. The Biennale follows exactly the same dual format. It consists of national pavilions, occupied by a record 89 countries this year, and a large group exhibition put together by a guest director. Titled ILLUMInations this year, the group show has grown alarmingly over time. Both strands of the Biennale spill out from the central location, the Giardini, to encompass not only the cavernous Arsenale but also myriad venues throughout the city.

This year's director was Bice Curiger, a Swiss art-historian, writer and curator at the Zurich Kunsthaus. She is also a co-founder and editor-in-chief of Parkett, an influential contemporary art magazine that has championed an interestingly diverse group of artists since it began publishing in the 1980s. Curiger is a quiet, thoughtful curator and editor, not at all flashy or flamboyant. Despite her promising credentials, however, ILLUMInations fails to live up to its optimistic title.

“I want to concentrate on the art,” she said in an interview with the online journal Artinfo, “instead of trying to create a theory about the world and then select artworks accordingly.” If only that were so – a large proportion of what’s on view comes across as being illustrative of theory in one form or another. For the most part, one concludes, artists aren’t exceptionally capable of theoretical analysis.

One of Curiger’s boldest strokes was the inclusion of three paintings by that great 16th-century Venetian artist Tintoretto. “Biennales are always about the now,” she acknowledged. But at the same time: “History is incredibly present in Venice, and it would be strange to only look at contemporary art.” Tintoretto was radical in his time, but with some honourable exceptions there is surprisingly little in the Biennale to match the energy, cogency and technical proficiency of his paintings, and not just because there is very little painting in Curiger’s selection (Corinne Wasmuth is one of very few interesting paintings who come to mind).

Some of the artists featured over the years in Parkett are included, but they fail to sparkle and there is a curious feeling of anti-climax throughout the exhibition, a lack of an authoritative vision. About one-third of the artists are under 35, which didn’t stop one or two commentators bemoaning the lack of younger artists, perhaps because there is no sense of the kind of energy and ambition one would expect of youth. As it is, what the show really needs to anchor it are some substantial bodies of work by a few senior figures in the art world.

Not that everything disappoints. Christian Marclay's The Clockdeservedly won the main award, the Golden Lion. Some people have been sniffy about this, describing the work as populist in a slightly disparaging way. It's certainly popular. As with every venue where it's shown, the gallery it occupies is permanently packed. There's so much to see in the Biennale that viewers tend to quickly check things out and move on. With The Clockthey arrive, sit down for a moment and are still there an hour later.

A real-time splicing together of clips from thousands of films, it lasts 24 hours and is absolutely engrossing. Marclay is a Swiss-American who studied art in Boston and New York in the 1970s. Equally active in music and visual art, he is recognised as a pioneer of turntablism, and a cut-and-paste approach seems integral to everything he does. The more pretentious echelons of the contemporary art world may be disconcerted that he has managed to make an epic work that is immediately accessible and understandable, hugely enjoyable, put together with great skill and is also conceptually rich and intellectually satisfying – making him a worthy artistic heir of Tintoretto.

Among the national pavilions, a few stand out. Mike Nelson’s brilliant installation takes over the British pavilion in toto. He reworks an earlier piece from Istanbul. You enter and find yourself negotiating a labyrinthine sequence of cramped, dusty rooms, corridors and courtyards, never quite at ease, never quite able to situate yourself geographically of culturally. He has in mind the pivotal position of both Istanbul and Venice as mercantile centres between east and west.

Christian Boltanski’s noisy installation in the French pavilion explores the chance of human identity. An industrial apparatus churns out composite individuals, overseeing them from cradle to grave, unwitting components of structures that shape and define them. In a broadly comparable vein, the Dutch pavilion, a collaboration by eight artists, is a bravura mock-opera set incorporating critiques of institutional cultural structures.

The Irish pavilion is one of those located outside the hallowed grounds of the Giardini and the Arsenale, but the building it occupies and its relatively central location, in the Calle della Pietá, are very good, and so too is Walker’s tactful, tasteful use of the space, bounded by a peaceful walled courtyard on one side and a narrow canal on the other. Walker, now based in New York, is the son of the architect Robin Walker and the art critic Dorothy Walker.

His own height, four feet, determines the scale of his work, which recurrently explores our perceptions of and engagement with the built environment and each other. His main piece for Venice, Please Adjust, is a towering jumble of "160 interlocking stainless steel cube frames". It is elegantly poised but distinctly precarious-looking, too, and its interwoven patterns can be seen as evoking the way we negotiate the tangle of urban spaces. It's also a fractured reworking of the modernist grid.

His other two pieces are vinyl drawings made on the windows at opposite sides of the room. Transparent Wallbegins with a 60mm opaque black square and progressively halves its dimensions as it spreads across the glass, becoming transparent.

Modulartakes his height as a given unit of scale in a sequence of blue patterns. Walker's work is thoughtful and allows for layers of interpretation. It also holds you in the space, promising a respite from the hyperactive jumble of contemporary art that awaits you outside.

It's something of an honour for an Irish artist to be invited into the body of the main show. In the Arsenale, Gerard Byrne, as he tends to do, presents an expanded episode from one of his series of works, this one to do with the legend of the Loch Ness monster. Case Study: Loch Ness (Some possibilities and problems)marshals groups of photographs and some film footage. We find ourselves examining the grainy images for evidence of unorthodox zoological goings-on.

What we’re likely to conclude is not that Nessie exists but that black-and-white photographic images of swathes of complicated terrain are inherently ambiguous. Byrne plays on this ambiguity in many of his photographs, in which tree stumps and other innocuous details offer momentary possibilities of being something more. It was only in the mid-1990s that the classic photograph of the monster, originally produced and published in the 1930s, an image that engendered a frenzy of interest in the fabled beast, was revealed to have been a hoax.

Byrne turns out to be addressing not the existence or non-existence of Nessie but the power of the popular imagination allied with a powerful new technology – in this case the portable snapshot camera. And something else as well: to borrow a phrase from another artist, Martin Healy, who has dealt with comparable subject matter, and titled one of his exhibitions I Want to Believe.We do.

The 54th Venice Biennale, ILLUMInations, curated by Bice Curiger, continues until November 27th