Curated by Danh Vo in collaboration with Caroline Bourgeois
Venice: home of Marco Polo; key entrepôt on the Silk Road; the heart of a great and glittering maritime and mercantile empire. For hundreds of years the Most Serene Republic reached out across the Adriatic and the Mediterranean to the Eastern Empire and beyond, trading and plundering; the famous lion of St Mark atop the right-hand column of the Piazzetta, next to the Doge’s Palace, is probably 4th century BC Persian-Hellenistic; the Byzantine water-marble facing of the basilica of San Marco was stripped from Hagia Sophia during the sack of Constantinople at the time of the Fourth Crusade.
Yet the city also has an intense historical and cultural specificity: an essentially Græco-Roman and Roman Catholic identity that underpins all its great artistic achievements. It is simply not possible fully to appreciate the glories of San Marco or the Accademia, of Titian or Tiepolo, of Monteverdi or Vivaldi, without at least a passing familiarity with the stories of Homer and Ovid, of the Bible and the Saints. Even so, many of the millions of international visitors who wander, lost, through the city’s commerce-clogged arteries, engrossed in their ‘must-see’ maps, remain blissfully ignorant of the iconography of Hercules and the Erymanthian Boar, or Europa and the Bull, of the symbolism of the four Evangelists, or of the difference between a Last Supper and a Feast in the House of Levi.
The Venice Biennale of Art is similarly an international hub, and in its 56th manifestation rather self-consciously so, under curator Okwui Enwezor’s rubric of ‘all the world’s futures.’ But in the contemporary, post-postmodern, global visual art environment, there is none of that anchoring historical consensus of meaning or of value, no Panofsky, no Bullfinch, little to counter the drift of aesthetic-touristical ignorance, to offer an objective, empirical alternative to the solipsistic phenomenology of a culture in terminal decline.
So it might be possible to consider Danh Vo’s Slip of the Tongue exhibition as nothing more than a fashionable and elegant Venetian capriccio. Here the artist’s own art of acquisition and arrangement is displayed alongside other much-dropped names and subjects and gestures, mostly selected from the house of one of the great and glittering collectors of the twenty-first century, François Pinault. To begin with, the inclusion of temporal outliers in mediæval miniaturists and Giovanni Bellini, in Rodin and Brâncusi and Picasso, suggests something of the transhistorical wunderkammer curatorial aesthetic pioneered in such exhibitions as Tra and Theatre of the World.[1] Then there are the revivalist heroes, sixties and seventies artists like Francesco Lo Savio, Carol Rama, Paul Thek, Nancy Spero and Lee Lozano, ‘since about 2006-2007 … considered as “the” rediscovery of the 21st century,’[2] as well as a range of usual biennalist suspects from Marcel Broodthaers to Hubert Duprat, Elmgreen a
