Islands, Origins, and Originalities or Making Worlds Aquatic A commentary on the 2009 Venice Biennale - “Making Worlds” Isabel Löfgren – August 2009 Embarkments By morning, we reached the edge of the Adriatic and crossed a pontoon onto the islands of Venice. The industrial sound of the speeding bus from the Alps is still vibrating in my body as I ride through the canals in a smooth and slow vaporetto at the crack of dawn; a shock of surfaces, smooth and striated waters wade beneath my feet. As we glide past the magnificent Venetian houses perched on the water, I anxiously await for a sensation of terra firma, if only to stretch my body and prepare my mind to a day where I know I will be navigating artificial worlds through the different pavilions encapsulated in an exhibition that spans the limits of the island-city. Near San Marco, from the window of the bus-boat comes the first of many sightings: a banner on a building that says “I will not make any more boring art”. I immediately recognize John Baldessari’s sentence from his video of the same name from 1971, where, like a schoolboy grounded by his teacher, he writes and rewrites this sentence on a piece of paper in a continuous loop as a critique to the overly conceptual and text-based “boring” art of his day. The sentence, taken out of its recursiveness and critical space, is, in its presentation, a world undone. It is rendered meaningless without the action, event, and medium that signifies it and renders it a work of art - it has become ‘sloganomics,’ Is this what awaits me through the day?

It is not my first time in Venice, but it is my first time seeing the Biennale. I had only seen Venice’s little sister, the Bienal de São Paulo, safely housed under a modernist single roof located in a park in the heart of a city known as a ‘concrete jungle’ extending indefinitely into the horizon. Venice, by contrast, is a delicate and fragile little archipelago, a man-made construction by the latest technology of its heyday with clearly defined borders surrounded by an emerald lagoon where I now glide in direction of the Giardini. The city itself constitutes a singular water-bound artificial world, incapable of expansion except through more artifice. Perhaps today, the factor that most extends Venice is its spectacle value as I see the swarms of tourists and art-goers gathering slowly in the distance to check out the art-fare of the day. Plotted Realities Seconds later, as I see Piazza San Marco emerging in the distance, I remember that every wall of this island-city contains, in a similar display of Baldessari’s sentence onto a façade, citations and excerpts of other worlds in the form of objects looted from Venice’s conquered territories. The now upcoming magnificent latticed façade of the Ducal Palace is like a collage canvas of such ‘mercantile souvenirs’, a striated space of signifiers of naval dominance over many centuries. In fact, the island’s morphogenesis already encompasses its own historicity, a museum in plein-air (like most of Italy, by the way). Likewise, the Biennale offers a wide sampling of artworks and “national representations” that are but fragments of ‘other’ worlds, equally deterritorialized from their original conditions of production and intentionality, and reframed into a world of display where original meanings become obscured and decontextualized. As we glide forward towards the Giardini not too far ahead, I notice, upon closer inspection, that the Ducal Palace has been converted into a gigantic billboard, veiled by a smooth digitally plotted advertisement by one of the Biennale’s sponsors, a high luxury brand of wrist-watches. In the mind of an advertiser, any surface can and will be used as a locus of communication depending on its degree of visibility in order to achieve the projected revenue stream. Pure territorial opportunism, business as usual. It is not even 9 a.m., I have already seen a misapplication of a piece and have been sold wristwatches, but still no art, only faint hints of it here and there along the canals. For the first time today, I think about how “Making Worlds” is such an apt title for this year’s propositions despite its intentional curatorial vagueness. The fact that I am seeing Venice’s artificiality from afar with history overlayed by advertising, prompts me to think of islands as constructions of artificial worlds and as worlds of artifice. Bravo, Curator Birnbaum (but a little obvious).

Islands In his essay “Desert Islands”, Deleuze differentiates between two kinds of islands: islands that are a) pieces of land which have been detached from the continental mass by surface erosion and violent separation (i.e. earthquake), and b) islands which have surfaced to the oceans as willed by submarine natural forces by erupting underwater volcanoes. This corresponds to the difference between isolation by erosion and isolation by creative emergence.1 The islands of Venice are more akin to a construction of the latter - an artificial world that has been creatively emerged. Yet Venice surpasses Deleuze’s distinction as its creative emergence has not been prompted by a natural phenomenon nor is it made of actual land. Venice literally stands on its legs, precariously sustained by logs extracted from its former possessions on the Dalmatian coast and contains no flora or fauna of its own. Its “nature” is one of pure technique, pure commerce, landscaping and architecture, a fantasy island of sorts, a totalizing and self-referential time-capsule. Its fragility increases as we know the island-city is fated to submersion and disappearance like a contemporary Atlantis. What will be left of it? Its own image.

Aleksandra Mir, “Venice (all places contain all others)”, postcard, 2009 Aleksandra Mir, a Russian artist questions the island-nature of Venice in her piece “Venice (all places contain all others)”. It is an island-wide intervention in an ideological circuit2. Mir printed one million postcards distributed for free in Venetian news and souvenir stands. With this piece, she subverts the notion of place and image where the “100 [selected] motifs depict a variety of waterscapes from

1 Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts. Semiotext(e), p.9 2 The term ‘ideological circuit’ is borrowed from Brazilian artist Cildo Meirelles and his 1970 piece called “Interventions in a ideological circuit” in which he printed anti-yankee messages on empty Coca-Cola bottles which were then put back into circulation. It is a pure form of what is called ‘viral marketing’ today.

around the world, overlaid with a graphic that spells out ‘Venezia’ in a variety of typical postcard styles.” In fact, it is the estrangement caused by these images and how we accidentally meet them that subvert the notion of Venice’s crystallized and timeless image-engineering. While postal art is nothing new, by appropriating a banal form of communication and inserting it within the flows of the current experience of the island-city, we begin to be confronted with the artificiality of this place-that-contains-all-others. The national pavilions that I am about to see follow a similar artificial geo-morphosis of the island and the subversion of its form, creatively emerged from the underwater forces of curatorial whim, stilted by the legitimation of art institutions, and willed by the demands of the international art market. Artificialities After disembarking, we are finally unleashed into the Giardini. I quickly study the map of the grounds to tread for the next few hours, and I cannot see any logic in the placement of each national pavilion - there is no recognizable vicinity, or any such planned footprint according to the real regions of the world, making geography obviously irrelevant. An unreliable Internet source on CNN claims that the pavilions were placed according to their importance in the late 19th century, but I cannot imagine that Czechoslovakia, one of the pavilions in the Giardini, had any geopolitical existence at that time. Walking into the gardens (also planned, designed and pruned accordingly to Napoleon’s initial proposal during his short reign over Venice), I notice that the dispersed pavilions feel like a sort of fictional archipelago…an archipelago on top of the archipelago on which I now stand. Experientially, I navigate from one ‘country’ to another in a sort of ‘connected isolation’3, with little time to tune out and tune in to the next, inevitably causing my mind to draw both linear and contiguous relationships between one experience and the next. What if Austria and Holland were actually neighbors? What would happen if Egypt and Poland were to suddenly share a border? Bernardin de Saint-Pierre defines islands as “miniatures of small continents,” and as such, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk interprets them as examples of worlds in which are gathered a selection of unities that compose these singular worlds, with a unique flora and fauna, a specific human population, and an “autonomous ensemble of modes and manners.”4 As in Sloterdijk’s description, these country pavilions are island-monads of sorts, detached or creatively emerged defined universes of art that are ‘in-the-world’ and stand as singularities of their own accord instead of being ‘of-the-world’ as mere representations of these faraway lands.

3 Sloterdijk, Peter, Sphären III: Schäume, p. 289 4 Ibid, p.275

Or so I hope. If we extend the island metaphor into art, we can say that works of art follow much of the same morphogenetic process described by Deleuze. Each work of art becomes a singularity either detached or emerged by creative forces contained within the bounds of its frame, which isolates it from other works of art, and also from the world. Singularity emerges from the immanence of each work, how well a piece can transport us into its own universe and its capacity to suspend our disbelief. Or, as American critic Dave Hickey would say, about a work of art’s capacity to “draw a crowd around itself”. With ‘national’ presence, this singularity is no longer solely contained by its intrinsic qualities - it reinforces the arbitrary representational aspect of a national expression and puts the importance of the ‘origin’ of the work of art to the forefront. In Venice, all art pieces have a passport. Entering any pavilion feels like a passport check needed to legitimate works of art as both art and national ‘representation.’ For instance, I can’t help but to bring all my a priori clichés and stereotypes about Egypt in reading the sculptures made of papyrus reeds that perfume the whole environment of its delightful pavilion. Papyrus reeds are indeed a signifier of Egyptian history, as much as cats are the keepers of grain silos and the underworld. Check! Or to retract myself into the deep outback while watching the extraordinary video-environment in the Australian pavilion. Got kangaroo? Got desert? Got MadMax? Check! Where is the Aborigine? Oh, not part of the landscape. I see.(no check). Australia is also an island and continent – its pavilion stands as an island-representing-itself-as-an-island-in-an-island-pavilion-set-on-an-island – maximum geographical self-referentiality. My metaphor still holds. Le Grand Tour Navigating from one pavilion to the next, stopping for the occasional water break by the concession stand and standing in line to see the attractions as if in an amusement park. The entire parcours of the Giardini seems to be paved more like a touristic procession as in a global art theme park within the larger constellation of tourism in which Venice finds itself trapped. The 21st century hybridity of media and ‘relational aesthetics’ clashes here with an outdated 19th century World Fair model of still discrete national categorizations. In a time when distance travel was long and costly and a privilege of the wealthy few, the world fairs in London or Paris and their lavish temporary pavilions served the purpose of bringing the distant world for the people to see. The intent was to make exotic and faraway lands visible by displaying them as a gesamtkunstwerk within carefully designed pavilions according to vernacular pastiche architecture. Often the world fairs also displayed miniatures of famous

monuments in order to approximate the viewer’s experience to the country itself as much as possible. Its most radical displays even purported to recreate entire worlds with native people hired for the exhibition as authentic props, animals and music: pure theatrics. The infamous “La Rue du Caire” in the 1889 Paris World Fair was a French creation intended to ‘resemble the old aspect of Cairo’ in a re-enacted Egyptian street so carefully done that ‘even the paint on the buildings was made dirty’5 and even donkeys were imported to give the spectator a similar-to-original simulation. These words are taken from the horrified reaction of an Egyptian delegation’s travel account to the exhibition that was irked and estranged by such a crude representation of themselves in a foreign land as oriental ‘primitives’. Moreover, these world fairs were also displays of high technology, where each country not only showed off their culture, artifacts, foods, and native animals, but also secured their status at the forefront of technological invention. The Crystal Palace in London’s 1851 World Fair (the first structural iron-frame and glass structure in the world) and the Eiffel Tower of 1899 come to mind. Soon, World Fairs became a calendar event in most countries, eventually competing with each other in terms of what each had to offer as ‘national spectacle’ while the hosting cities also prospered with the invention of modern tourism. The Venice Biennale was born out of this spirit, and its form remains relatively unchanged today. But how does this model adapt to a 21st century exhibitionary order? Representation, marketing or empowerment? Must-haves Art biennales are to the 21st century what contemporary art museums were to the 1980s and 90s: every city must have one. Since the first Venice biennale in 1895, more than 70 biennales are now active. We still await an African nation to have theirs appear on the piligrimage routes of the art world. Wait, they have started already. In a world where one lives the concept of ‘otherness’ through Flickr, Lonely Planet guides and low-budget travel, these national representations seem obsolete in their proposal - what is there to reveal about the world? What is there to be experienced that has not already been seen? The very persistence of this exhibition mode is curious. Perhaps this debate falls into notions of cultural representations, but here I don’t see how national pavilions are making accurate worlds of themselves. The sobriety of the Biennale seems to actually reinforce shared illusions and stereotypes about a nation. Egyptians use papyrus reeds, Greeks use classical proportions, Scandinavians show suicide, Austrians use child-like finger painting (what does this say about Austrians?) Everyone seems to confirm the tedious

5 Mitchell, Timothy. Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order, in “The Visual Culture Reader” ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 1997. p. 496.

expectation of an encapsulated and already proven identity and the typicality of stereotypes. Of course, an exhibition of this scale is designed as a space of legitimation more than accurate representation. In a world of constant migration of bodies and of information, can we say that the term ‘national representation’ is still valid? Does nationality precede identity? Does nationality precede art? Does nationality determine culture or simply packages it?

Origins Of course art cannot only be about self-expression, but it is also not a national expression a priori. We are not in Maoist China where any form of expression is by default a part of the political propaganda apparatus. On the contrary, in today’s emancipated world of individuals it seems like there is a fine balance between the individual who creates the art, the work of art, and the context where both the artist and the work of art operate in. In questioning what the essence of a work of art could be, Heidegger offers a solution. As a force that uses the creator for its own purposes, the artwork, the ‘thing’ resulting from creation must be considered in the context in which it exists and not that of its creator alone. Only then can we regard the work of art as more than expressing an element of truth in a culture, by means of addressing its very creation and allowing us for “that which is” to reveal itself. Heidegger asserts that an artwork is not solely a representation of something ‘out there’, but rather produces a community’s common understanding about something or about itself. Consequently, the artwork’s ‘being-in-the-world’ inherently changes the meaning of any culture. But for Nietszche, art is higher than truth, and if we are to claim that in the Venice Biennale context, identity and origin equals ‘truth’ and legitimation of a work of art acting as a country’s representative, then I wonder how we can detect what the ‘art’ actually is. Nevertheless, both Heidegger and Nietszche (regardless of whichever disparate world views each seems to defend), seem to agree, at least superficially, that it is art that fabricates truths, and not vice-versa. So what is the inner identity/being (or the multitudes of inner identities/beings) of a nation’s production of ‘that which is’? To which point does this is-ness resignify a nation, rather than the nation resignifying its inner, and supposedly true, identity through art? Each pavilion seemed to display art made by its dominant voices, giving visibility to that which is already demographically or politically obviated, showing an is-ness of what already “is”. Instead of a German pavilion, I would like to have seen a Turco-german pavilion, where the enormous immigrant population becomes a legitimate voice within the German nation and changes what it means to produce

German art today, or what being-German is now. Similarly, it would have been interesting to see an African-American artist such as Kara Walker representing the United States, since it is a country so deeply concerned with racial issues, particularly under the new paradigm shift under the Obama presidency. (I remind myself that these curatorial process is also the result of an extensive negotiation between different groups over a long period of time, and Bruce Nauman must have been chosen before Obama got elected. In a biennial event, perhaps timeliness informs the reading of the artwork by an ordinary spectator unaware of the backstage of the curatorial process.) Is the art world ready to recognize the world’s real flows of becoming, or is it frightened to recognize the fluidity of what it means ‘to belong’, ‘to be’ and ‘to become’? It seems that an event of this type would put this into question, precisely. Instead, the national pavilions fail to transcend self-referential territorializations, like self-contained islands so distanced from the continent and from each other, musing on their imprisonments and enjoying captivity with no sense of the horizon. One must always remember that an island is usually surrounded by water. It is the flowing water that has either caused the continental separation from the island, or that islands emerge by piercing through the water surface. In the island ontology, water has the capacity of transformation of the land that forms the islands. It is time to change of model. Or to jump into another island. Visibility From a more positive perspective, these national island-pavilions serve to increase the visibility of younger countries such as Russia, Slovakia, Serbia or Georgia which have creatively emerged from the breakdown of previous political constellations and where the concept of ‘origin’ is a novelty, a mystery, a remediation, not a trap; a ‘becoming’, not a stagnant fixity. Origin is not where you came from but who (and where) you will be tomorrow. We should now throw traditions and crystallized identities out the window and watch them splatter on the pavement below. Out with the old, in with the “creatively emerged” new. The idea of ‘explicitation’, which Sloterdijk refers to (what Merleau-Ponty would call ‘visibility’) describes emergent processes in which the latent becomes manifest through a process of intensification of forces that render the latent not only visible but explicit, unveiled. The ex-Soviet Republics and ex-communist states are slowly shedding away the phantom of their ‘fathers’, deleting the ‘ex-’ from their name, like islands separated by erosion. As such, they have been able to detach themselves from the mainland and create a singularity, a being-in-the-world (and not being-in-someone-else’s-world) while still maintaining a referential connection

with the original continental ‘fauna and flora’, but oedipally killing it off, yet stopping short of poking their eyes out. In fact, as these new countries become ‘micro-continents’ by the process of detachment, they become new spaces of oneiric imagination dealing with emergent concerns and relational political matters, such as immigration patterns. As I visit “Poland”, after Egypt (only a few meters apart), I see Kryzstof Wodicko’s “Guests”, a video installation and immersive environment about contemporary labour relations. It resembles a shadow-play of people interacting on a streetscape with the juxtaposed dialogue of Polish immigrants’ difficult visa and contract negotiations overseas. Poetic imagery juxtaposed with real dialogues and interviews, art as document, but not as neutral documentary. The piece seems to be reclaiming its citizens back to itself after a diaspora, and the claim of nationalism doesn’t feel like propaganda but is tinted with nostalgia that wishes to be reversed into a liveable reality. ‘Why don’t you come back and give us a chance to make our own worlds on our own terms?’ it asks.

Wodicko’s cinematic environment resembles a cathedral with its arched windows through which we see projections of blurred silhouettes working and negotiating their destinies as if behind a transluscent window. There is a calming sacredness about the whole space as the arched windows remind me of an arcade, yet we are on the outside. As I look up to the ceiling, there is a projection of a window cleaner cleaning the glass – perhaps a representation of the kinds of jobs the

Polish are relegated to abroad as second class citizens, or perhaps ‘cleaning’ the window so that we can see them better? In any case, the intention here seems to be a search for clarity, visibility, a way out of the obscurity of the Iron Curtain whose phantasm is slowly being shed away, out of their social and political invisibility.

The Romanians pose a similar question – come and see what a paradise you have created, you communist bastards, here is your techno-communist dream come true! “The Seductiveness of the Intervals” is an installation made up of a precariously built labyrinth of nooks and crannies contained within the pavilion, filled with situations such as precarious home-brewing contraptions, a blind man’s conversation with his equally blind dog, scenes from a bus in an everyday commute in Bucarest, a bureaucrat stamping useless documents - an in and out of everyday situations, images, voices, objects and spaces. The separation between each environment is not seamless, however. Rather, the artists provided a blank or empty room between each ‘environment’ which serve to ‘cleanse the palette’ after each scene and before the next. In a cinematic way, each of these intervals feels like a jump-cut time-lag into the next situation. The experience is disorienting as I immerse myself in it and deeper into the labyrinth, I lose a sense of self and give in to the sense of space and stop to hear the stories. Low-budget rough aesthetics (good art does not need to be high-tech) transported me into Romania for an instant. Feet in Venice, eyes in Bucarest. At the end of the labyrinth, a stairwell takes me up to the roof. On this roof is a garden, a simple one. I cannot be in this garden, I can only see it from a distance; there is nowhere else to go. Paradise is not here, it’s over there, somewhere, right over our heads (or inside our heads). The entire pavilion seen from above could very well be seen as a creatively emerged island, to continue in Deleuze’s ontological differentiation. Yet this installation, as much as it can be considered an island onto itself, can also contain another notion pertaining to the ‘desert island’ in the form of the garden-paradise that you can never inhabit. Deleuze’s definition of the desert island as a space of distant and vague geography but as a holder of a man’s imagination (like a faraway

blurred exotic paradise) holds true. A vague destination, but a destination, nonetheless. Senile Dominance The spent discourses of dominant art countries like the United States or France or Switzerland seem to be pleasurably crushed by the Eastern European pavilions which have risen from the murky underwaters of dictatorship with extraordinary creative power. They are less alienated, more daring, and more able to emancipate a national expression as a space ‘in-the-world’, elbow-nudging the old farts and their critics and their beloved traditions out of the way. These ‘fringe’, ‘marginal’, ‘up-and-coming’ or ‘peripheral’ countries, have now been able to rise above the surface and to shift the centers of thought and production away from the hegemony of the invincible West, watching them crumble from their newly acquired VIP seats. I use ‘peripheral’ here on purpose, for periphery implies that there is a center, and this term is usually used by the first-worlders to designate ‘those-who-are-not-yet-as-good-as-we-are-but-are-trying-hard-even-though-they-have-lower-budgets’. Little do they know that peripheries know much more about them and their “modes and manners” than they can imagine. Such is the price of visibility and over-exposure – the rogue enemy is watching you and already knows your next move. Besides the Baltic, Balkan and Black Sea states’ creative emancipation, most of the pavilions showed themselves to be somewhat alienated from the current economic reality of depression and retrenchment. They are certainly critical of their political situation in most instances, but do not always show an aspect related to the reality of art-making, an explicitation of production or of the creative process in response to the current moment of financial slowdown. If “context-responsive” is the new “site-specific”, then they are still somewhat stuck in site-specificity, or better, in their country-specificity. The context now is no longer the site, it is the environment, as in McLuhan’s definition that certain media create environments with defined logic and praxis dependent on the medium and its functioning in the world. What kind of environment does the financial crisis create for the work of art? Great prices at Art Basel. No - What kind of environment does the financial crisis create for art and artists? A period of reflection, reaction and critique. It is a fact that most installations in the biennale have been selected long in advance, and in this case, long before the crisis hit the world in late 2008. As Baudrillard would say, those works are already in disappearance as they were stillborn at the moment of inauguration. It is ironic that in a time of such economic retraction, an exhibition of this scale and importance completely bypasses this issue. The big ‘souk’ of the art world is indeed led by philistine market forces who now regard politics as a pebble in their shoes…at curator luncheons they must say: ”let us

show people beautiful things. God forbid that we should make people think. Give them cake!”

The Irish pavillion (coincidentally another island-country on the fringes of the great European continent-conglomerate) was divided into multiple stories in this rather common Venetian building - nothing fancy for a change. At the bottom floor, a dull video about the conflict between Protestant and Catholics (still!), and another video of an Irish-American girl recounting the story of her family by showing photographs of her grandmother, and more cliché post-modernisms and the usual need to show something ‘Irish’ – the same self-indulgence I saw elsewhere. Not impressed. However, on the top floor: a surprise. Only a few months before the opening of the event when the world was already deeply plunged in the current financial crisis, artists Sarah Browne and Gareth Kennedy created a third persona Kennedy Browne and made new pieces specifically for the event at very short notice. Both artists are individually interested in social or economic spaces, in the tensions of public and private spaces, with experiments that are both people- and place-specific – and maybe also context-responsive. Like the fringe European pavilions, their preoccupation was an immediate social situation but with a more global grip, and especially focused on the crisis. Shock Therapy “Pencil”, is deceivingly simple at first. The point of departure is a Milton Friedman speech about globalization aired on PBS in 1980., ‘Free to Choose', in which the American economist talks about the pencil as a product of world economy:

Friedman shows the origin of the materials and countries that are involved in making the components of the pencil and defends the free market's ability "to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world’ as a result of this global cooperation. Does it really? The transcript of the video is translated into 24 languages, printed on white A4 sheets and pinned to the wall. The multiple languages reflect the number of languages currently spoken in Dublin and is also mindful of the array of nationalities that visit the Biennale thus relaying Mr. Friedman’s message to as wide an audience as possible. “Although Kennedy Browne does see language in relation to the flows of people and capital, the two works seem to be based on the social space from the perspective of communication, rather than that of nationality and economy,” says critic Johanna Jürgens. Bingo. The curator, whom I meet during my visit, explains to me that due to economic constraints, the pieces for the pavilion had been decided only a few months prior. Coincidentally, it had only been a few months since I read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” in which Klein analyses free-market economics à la Chicago School, Milton Friedman’s brainchild, as a series of shock economic measures inspired by the concept of shock therapy in psychiatry, which have been later applied to torture tactics by using electroshock, a practice widely used from Latin American dictatorships up to Abu Ghraib. Since the 70s, such economic practices have commanded a series of ‘jolt’ economic rescues in several countries with the down side that such measures have led to enormous social discontent. Wodicko’s Poland was one such victim of such an economical shock therapy in the 90’s that led to the mass diaspora of cheap labour from Poland across Europe. Similarly, Ireland must have had a similar injection in the nineties, which backfired when the 2008 financial crisis hit. These measures are a sort of macchiavelian free-market economics imposed from the top down, where the so-called ‘economic shock therapy’ has led to economic stability at the expense of the exile, assassination, kidnapping and torture of dissident voices (a pre-Bush ‘you are with us or you are against us’ kind of philosophy). I ask the curator if the artists had read that book because their piece seems like a very accurate and ironic reading of the failure of free-market economics as postulated by the so-called ‘Chicago boys’ as felt in the everyday Irish reality. The video produced by Borwne and Kennedy was of Irish citizens, people like you and me, describing their current economic situation while sharpening a pencil like the one Friedman used to laud free market economics – as if wanting to undo free-market economics. A sort of visual metaphor of deconstructing these free-market economics from a personal standpoint, some of them quite ironic. I notice the pressure and speed at which these people sharpen their pencils, one of them even brandishing it as a weapon against free-market economics. Cool. Yes, where has this market taken us? A disclaimer to the neo-liberal economists out there: I am aware that the current financial crisis is not directly

Friedman’s fault. Friedman’s words here are used as a trigger to shed light on a very local Dublin context as a low-tax outpost for corporations like Google and expose similar situations that may very well be happening around the globe. The point here is that of historical as well as contemporary engagement and making it explicit by raising a critical voice. While Wodicko’s is lyrical, oneiric and poetic while treating a real situation, Kennedy Browne’s piece presents a more raw documental aesthetic rooted in presenting an array of textual and visual signifiers and a “détournement” of existing texts, language and visual styles that serve to highlight the irony found in Friedman’s words set against the backdrop of a society which is still at the fringe of the European economy and will probably remain there for a while. While the immediate spectacular appeal may be low in this installation, unlike Poland’s or Romania’s, it reflects a concentrated effort to use the opportunity of exhibiting at a national pavilion in the largest art event in the world as a space where current situations can be critiqued, exposed and connected to a larger world. Even though Ireland is also an island, exhibiting on an island, it gave me a glimpse of what worlds can be made if we take the privilege and the opportunities of explicitation so that we can all, curators, artists, artworks and spectators participate in a larger sphere where Heidegger’s “that which is” actually changes the meaning of the culture and context it operates within.

Other Worlds The day ends with the Pinault Collection, not included in the biennale ticket. It is not a national representation of any sort, but a 15 euro ticket into another made world at the tip of this island, an expensive collection of over-sized art housed in a magnificent pavilion. All the usual suspects are there, Sherman, Twombly, McCarthy…Exhausted, with aching feet and head spinning from so many worlds entered, we hop onto the bus-boat by night and return to terra firma again. Terra firma…what an illusion! No certainty to be found on the quicksand beneath our feet. We are all isolated within our frames, bound by our bodies, detached from or clinging too tightly to our origins in connected isolation to other island-selves. Or so I hope. Not. Singapore, August 2009