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C105
Review
Venice Biennale:
Katie Holten
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| Katie Holten:
Laboratorio dell Vigna, 2003, installation
shot; photo Ros Kavanagh; courtesy Valerie Connor |
Laboratorio dell Vigna,
Katie Holten's project for the Venice Biennale,
is a nebulous entity. It exists at a physical site, as
a series of pamphlets, as a residency and through organised
public events. It is a network of ideas configured during
a fifty-day stay in the city and presented at Ireland's
off-Giardini pavilion, the Scuola di San Pasquale. This
venue has been as much a base of operations for the artist
as a temporary gallery for the project and this is indicated
by the presence of Holten's desk, a large working area
covered by her research materials, drawings and post-it
notes. This creative corner is situated upstairs in the
Scuola, while downstairs there is an assembly of much
smaller wooden desks, perfunctory stalls that have been
constructed to accommodate the key production of Holten's
residency, a series of pamphlets entitled Papers.
Each Paper
has a title (Love, Flying, Nothing,
Water) and is an intriguing collection of references,
sketches, articles and images with a glossary at the end.
The glossary is a cross between a thesaurus and the Devil's
Dictionary, so that the entry in the Flying paper
for altitude is the informative Height, esp.
above sea level, while ryanair is described
as The budget "I'm never flying with them again"
airline. The exception to this is Paper www,
a collection of website links arranged alphabetically
that would seem to be the artist's internet browser history
during her time in Venice. Given the low-tech, laid-back
format of the Papers, it is surprising that Holten
has established a distinctly didactic feel to the area
where we are offered the opportunity to study the booklets.
The contrast between the study-hall atmosphere on entry
to the Scuola and the energetic productivity upstairs
demarcates a curious line between artist and visitor.
For the dedicated art-goer that has actively sought out
the space or the ambling tourist that has happened upon
the Campo della Confraternitą, the environment of the
Laboratorio della Vigna isn't conducive to continuing
the conversations Holten has cultivated during her time
in Venice. It is as if we are locked out of the creative
loop, positioned firmly as an observer rather than participant
in the generation of information central to the work.
Fortunately,
the Papers can be taken away. The plurality of
thought tendered in the texts can be better absorbed elsewhere.
The diversity of material is in turns entertaining, informative,
stimulating, dull and frustrating. Pretty much a reflection
of the Biennale itself. The fragmented approach
adopted by Holten and Francesco Bonami, chief curator
at Venice, risks dissolution into a postmodern play of
meaning, and the challenge of taking on such a multiplicity
of statements is to channel the sum of disparate parts
into a compelling and significant whole.
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| Katie Holten:
Laboratorio dell Vigna, 2003, installation
shots; photos Ros Kavanagh; courtesy Valerie Connor |
The sprawl
of ideas on show in the Arsenale felt unwieldy and while
the title of the event, The dictatorship of the viewer,
suggests that this unformulated approach was a deliberate
tactic, i.e., the editorial decisions lie with the spectator,
it cannot disguise a serious abdication of curatorial
responsibility. In Holten's work, however, there is a
suggestion that her work is about this failure, about
the collapse of coherency in our information age. The
inclusion of Alan D. Sokal's notorious essay Transgressing
the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics
of quantum gravity, hints at this, as does the oft-quoted
line from Beckett: "Ever Tried? Ever Failed? No Matter.
Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." As with Santiago
Serra's brick wall in the Spanish pavilion, Laboratorio
della Vigna is a response to the impossible situation
of Venice itself, a biennale of nation-states in an era
of globalised identities. In comparison with the spectacular
instantaneous wham of Serra's installation, Holten's contribution
is a more subdued work, but both artists successfully
stage the important questions of who and what the Biennale
is for.
Fióna
Kearney Visual Arts Officer at University College,
Cork.
Katie
Holten: Laboratorio della Vigna, Venice
Biennale, June - November 2003; curated by Valerie Connor
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