In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni sealed 90 small metal cans claiming they contained his own excrement and sold them as a work of art under the name “Merda d’artista”. Decades later, some of those cans would reach hundreds of thousands of euros at auctions and would become one of the most famous examples of how contemporary art can transform the eschatological into an object of worship.
Venice and its strangest attraction. The Venice Biennale It is often sold as the great showcase of world contemporary art: national pavilions, monumental installations, political debates and artists trying to capture the attention of hundreds of thousands of visitors. However, this year the city has ended up finding its great phenomenon in something very more absurd and eschatological.
As hundreds of thousands of tourists walk through the canals and exhibitions, the longest lines are not in front of the United States, Russia or Israel pavilions, but in front two portable toilets blue ones installed in the Austrian pavilion. There, visitors are literally invited to urinate to keep a human performance alive. The idea, developed by the artist and choreographer Florentina Holzingerhas turned something as mundane as a chemical bath into one of the most talked about, uncomfortable and viral experiences in all of Venice.
A surreal system. The “Seaworld Venice” installationpresented by Austria, functions as a kind closed circuit between tourists, waste and human bodies. The urine collected in the bathrooms goes through a complex filtering system before being pumped into a huge transparent tank where a naked woman remains submerged for hours breathing through a diving mask.
A few meters away, another room exhibits deposits of faeces and pipes filling with brown sewage while visitors, artists and the curious observe the process with a mixture of fascination and repulsion. Not only that. The entire pavilion has been partially flooded and completed with deliberately excessive scenes: there are naked women spinning on jet skisperformers climbing rotating metal structures and almost apocalyptic musical shows in the middle of the Venetian lagoon. All this under an (il)logic that mixes ecology, bodily decay and extreme visual provocation.
Art and virality. The great irony of this edition of the Biennial is that many of the political and cultural controversies that seemed destined to monopolize the conversation ended up eclipsed by some simple chemical baths. The death of the main curator of the event, the tensions due to the presence of Russia and Israel or the criticism of the American pavilions have taken a backseat to the endless queues to participate in this kind of “urinal orgy” of the Austrian work.
Even artists historically associated with scandal, as Maurizio Cattelan (famous for installing a solid gold toilet at the Guggenheim), appeared orbiting around an installation that literally turned tourists’ pee in central part of the artistic experience. If you like, the situation sums up perfectly. an uncomfortable reality of contemporary art today: in an era dominated by social networks, virality and mass tourism, the ability of a work to generate conversation and selfies can end up being as important as its conceptual content, or something like that.
Provocation as language. As for the artist, Holzinger has spent years building her career precisely on that border between grotesque spectacle and artistic reflection. His previous works included nuns skatingperformers suspended through hooks embedded in the skin or scenes of simulated incontinence related to aging. In Venice he once again uses bodily fluids, nudity and uncomfortable situations as a mechanism to break taboos and force the public to react.
His defenders maintain that under the scandal there is a serious discourse about the human relationship with waste, pollution, the environmental fragility of Venice and the contemporary obsession with purity. own partial flooding The Austrian pavilion aims to function as a reference to the rise in sea level and the vulnerability of a city built on water. To achieve this, the team even had to collaborate with environmental engineers and technical specialists to design a filtration system capable of operating without damaging the historic building from 1934.
When to go to the bathroom is the news. The final scene perfectly sums up the surreal tone of this Biennial. While some national pavilions remained practically empty and others were consumed by political protests or diplomatic debates, hundreds of visitors they were still waiting their turn to enter some portable toilets that have accidentally become the great attraction of Venice these days.
in a city saturated with tourismlines and experiences designed to be photographed, the Austrian facility ended up functioning almost like a perfect caricature of the Biennale itself: masses of people moving to voluntarily participate in an eschatological performance become a global cultural phenomenon. Venice, a city accustomed for centuries to living off spectacle and foreign fascination, has just discovered that even something as basic as going to the bathroom can be transformed into an artistic experience capable of eclipsing half the art world.
Image | Wolfgang
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