Modern Art in Villas

Felix Salmon submits:

After the magical experience of the Villa Panza, I went on to any number of locations elsewhere in Europe which either by choice or by necessity were showing contemporary art in decidedly non-contemporary locations. It seems there's basically three ways of doing this.

First is the Villa Panza solution: to place contemporary art sensitively in a baroque setting. The contrast, when this is done well, serves to heighten the experience of both the art and the architecture.

Second is the Palazzo Grassi solution: get a modern architect, in this case Tadao Ando, to keep the exterior and the gorgeous the ceilings untouched, but make the exhibition spaces as close as possible to the classic white cube all the same, by covering the floors in grey linoleum and the walls in white marmorino. That way when you're looking at art on the walls, you might as well be in a Chelsea gallery rather than a gorgeous palazzo on the Grand Canal.

I can understand why François Pinault chose to go this route. He's not installing a permanent exhibition; rather, the palazzo is showing a series of temporary shows, and trying to install each one perfectly in an idiosyncratic Venetian space would be all but impossible. Nevertheless, the Pinault/Ando solution does seem a bit sub-optimal.

Finally, there's the genuinely site-specific solution, as evidenced by avant-garde Singaporean ceramicist Jason Lim in the stunning Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, the location of the Singapore Pavilion for the purposes of this Biennale.

The one thing you can be sure of in any Venetian palazzo is that it will be full of gorgeous Murano chandeliers (unless it's the Palazzo Grassi, of course, in which case the chandeliers will have been perfunctorily removed by Tadao Ando). Lim found a room with one such chandelier at each end, and then built his own to hang from the fixture in the middle. He then video-recorded his chandelier crashing onto the floor, and exhibited the smashed remains for the duration of the Biennale, in a gorgeous and unique installation.

This is a step beyond the 1970s site-specificity that one finds at Villa Panza, where James Turrell and Dan Flavin did the kinds of work they were doing anyway, but just customized it for their patron's home. At the same time, of course, it is inherently uncommercial: no collector without a Venetian palazzo of his own could really buy the piece.

The Singapore pavilion was probably my favorite of all the exhibition spaces in Venice, because not only Jason Lim but all of the exhibiting artists really worked with the palazzo in an imaginative and innovative way. The art world is generally confined to a series of white cubes with precious little personality; when it rotates into the world's most beautiful city once every two years, the least it can do is make the most of the opportunity.

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