A concert of variety


Charles Baudelaire once told an anecdote about the novelist, Honoré de Balzac, whose attention was caught, whilst examining a painting of a winter landscape, by the sight of a humble cottage, with a thin trickle of smoke emerging from the roof: “How beautiful that is!” he is reported to have exclaimed, “But what are they doing in that shack? What are they thinking about? What are their concerns? Have they had a good harvest? Surely, they have to cover their bills?” For Baudelaire, this blithe disregard for the conventions of “taste” and “beauty” was worth more than any amount of theorizing and technical analysis. His quasi-anthropological approach offers a neat analogy to the way in which Harald Szeemann has set about assembling and ordering the largest-yet, forty-ninth edition of the Venice Biennale.

After his dAPERTutto of 1999, which affirmed the universal power of the imagination, Szeemann has contrived the complementary theme of The Plateau of Humankind, which reflects his belief (as he carefully phrases it) in “the timeless, grand narration of human existence in its time.” In fact, as this implies, he is less interested in constructing narratives than in deconstructing them and in establishing links and relationships, clusters of affinity and fields of tension.

It is tempting to suggest approaching the Biennale, as a whole, in the disengaged spirit of the Baudelairian flâneur, but this would be too glib. In reality, this edition, like others before it, is a carefully articulated assemblage of largely unrelated events—Szeemann’s own, the national pavilions, on and off-site, and independently organized shows—to which a catalogue, a coordinated publicity campaign, a catch-all title, and, above all, a shared experience of the city, provide at least the semblance of unity.…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 86, Summer 2001.




Henry Meyric Hughes