1st Athens BienniAl 2007:
Destroy Athens
10 Septem ber – 18 Novem ber
WhY ThE RElATIVElY MUTED DISPlAYS ThIS YEAR AT DOCUMENTA AND ThE VENICE BIENNAlE?
ONE REASON MIGhT BE ThAT ThE CURATORS RESPONSIBlE FOR ThEM hAVE INTERNAlISED
ThE WARINESS WITh WhICh MANY IN ThE ARTWORlD INCREASINGlY VIEW ThE PERIODIC
MEGAShOW. BUT ThE ESOTERIC, ANTI-CANONICAl DISPlAYS AT DOCUMENTA AND ThE SOBER
BUT ThOROUGhlY CANON-ENTRENChING ShOWS AT ThE BIENNAlE DID lITTlE TO WIN OVER
ThE DOUBTERS. ThE FIRST AThENS BIENNIAl COUlD hARDlY BE MORE DIFFERENT. CONCEIVED
ON A SMAllER SCAlE AND ClEARlY REAlISED ON A MUCh SMAllER BUDGET, IT NEVERThElESS
OFFERS A POTENT CURATORIAl VISION AND PURSUES IT SINGlEMINDEDlY FROM START TO FINISh.
True, it doesn’t really do what it says on the tin. According to the Using the scattered buildings of a restored gasworks, they take
catalogue essays, the biennial’s curators set out to organise a show that would the visitor along a circuit that begins and ends with moments of explosive
work to explode stereotypes, including in the first place the stereotypical destruction: Julian Rosefeldt and Piero Steinle’s multiscreen video
view of Athens as the birthplace of Western civilisation. That was the installation of buildings detonated in Germany after the Second World
rationale for the title, Destroy Athens, which apparently did little, initially, War and Elodie Pong’s video of an avalanche. In between, the visitor passes
to endear the project to the mayor. As the curators, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, through a number of spaces that are connected by temporary passages.
Poka-Yio and Augustine Zenakos, commissioned many of the works on An open courtyard littered with posters and graffiti serves as a kind of
display, some clearly take aim at reductive views of place and identity. latter-day agora; it is followed by a hall that houses pieces in which various
Others approach their brief more obliquely and many more hardly address histories – official, revisionist and mythical — jostle and collide. Then, as
it at all. Actually, some works, far from shattering stereotypes, vigorously one exhibition space follows another, the focus narrows, shifting from
rehearse them. In his hilarious, cheek-burningly embarrassing video Home public to private space, from disputed history and dystopian community
2 (2007), Olaf Breuning paints a satirical portrait of a young American to dysfunctional home and personal neurosis. The final hall, which sketches
who has a yen to travel and expects faraway places and peoples to match various endings, is a bitter and well-judged anti-climax, filled as it is with
his inane, media-derived fantasies. But while mocking his protagonist’s work that describes moments of stasis, of incarceration and of terminal
preconceptions, the artist cheerfully endorses the popular European repetition.
image of the adenoidal American tourist. Meanwhile, Stelios Faitakis has The bleakness of the show is moderated, up to a point, by constant
created a large mural in which Socrates, drinking his cup of hemlock, is shifts in the spacing and tempo of the exhibits, and by eddies of relative
presented as the spiritual father of contemporary Greek demonstrators in calm, such as the building given over to Mark Manders’s sleek and
their struggles against a repressive establishment, personified here by riot menacing Machine Constructed to Provide Persistent Absence (Reduced to
police and priests. Political allegory, as Faitakis well knows, cannot operate 88%) (2002), one of the biennial’s highlights. Elsewhere the grimness of the
without turning individuals into emblematic figures – without, in other curators’ vision is married to a taste for carnivalesque excess (John Bock,
words, invoking stereotypes. assume vivid astro focus) and gothic theatricality (Folkert de Jong, Aidas
That said, it would be churlish to reproach the curators for putting Bareikis). The curators also show a penchant for drama in their mise en
together a show that departs from their original agenda. It is senseless to scène, and that makes for some particularly effective passages, such as the
expect a megashow to make a tightly argued case for this or that intellectual sequence of works by Christian Marclay, Derek Jarman and Eleni Mylonas,
position; at best it may offer various, possibly discordant perspectives on a but it also painfully exposes the weakness of pieces like Thanassis Totsikas’s
constellation of related issues, its thematic focus serving as a catalyst, not a video of a vomiting man, which is given an absurdly prominent place.
prescription. What the curators in Athens have created is in any case more In fact, there are unconvincing pieces scattered throughout, pieces
compelling than another essay on the evils of stereotyping: they have put you would never have seen in Robert Storr’s far more consistent Venice
together a show in which disparate pieces work cumulatively to form a Biennale, for instance, but Destroy Athens as a whole carries a sense of
gripping – and caustically pessimistic – narrative. urgency that easily survives the occasional lapse (two ‘appendix’ shows,
curated by UK-based curators – Tom Morton’s intriguing How to Endure,
featuring work that imagines or revisits various occult practices, and Neil
Mulholland’s survey of young Edinburgh-based artists Young Athenians
– supplemented the main show without quite maintaining its energy). The
facing page, from top:
talk of dismantling stereotypes may be a red herring, but this biennial is
Stelios Faitakis, Socrates Drinks the Conium,
a well-conceived venture all the same. It communicates a dark picture of
2007, latex, acrylic, spray, metallic paint.
photo: vassilis polychronakis. Courtesy the
today’s world and it does so with wit and conviction, showing in the process
breeder, Athens
more faith in the format of the megashow than either the Biennale or
Folkert de Jong, Secht, der Mensch;
Documenta. Marcus Verhagen
The Shooting Lesson, 2007, styrofoam,
polyurethane foam, pigment, 800 x 800 x 450 cm.
photo: vassilis polychronakis. Courtesy James
Cohan Gallery, New York
191 Artreview
November_REVIEWS.indd 191 26/9/07 13:28:54
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