Art review: Martin Boyce

Published on Friday 5 June 2009 16:10

MARTIN Boyce's exhibition No Reflections is one of the few places in Venice you can get away from the water. Cross the stone bridge over a shimmering canal, climb up the whitewashed stairs of Palazzo Pisani, step across the threshold and you've entered a room that feels more like an abandoned and long-dried up swimming pool than a grand drawing room.

You walk across 16 vast stepping stones, their surfaces scuffed and tired. Wax paper leaves drift across the terrazzo floor. Through an open door you glimpse the wooden slats of what might be a screen but turns out to be a sculpture of an overturned bench. Up here you feel high and dry.

Boyce, who lives in Glasgow, is representing Scotland in just one of the vast network of activities that make up the Venice Biennale, a curious hybrid between a curated exhibition and a cultural Olympiad based around nation states. It's an institution that is now more than a century old. This year there are 77 national presentations across the city and this is the fourth time in recent years that Scotland has had a presence alongside the British Pavilion which sits in neoclassical splendour in the Giardini, the park that is home to much of the Biennale activity.

Curated by the team at Dundee Contemporary Arts, this show is the first time that Scotland has supported a solo presentation and it has paid off handsomely: giving Boyce seven rooms and a unique chance to stretch his wings. Each room is spare and simple, containing just a handful of very striking sculptures, but the sequence adds up to a substantial body of work, a kind of faded dreamscape that resembles in turn a drained pool, an abandoned garden or park, and an empty aviary.

There are vast rusting tables, overturned litter bins, each carefully crafted to slick modernist designs by the artist. But these forms, once both glamorous and utilitarian, are now unnerving. You're tempted to think of the late JG Ballard, whose bleak work was filled with emptied pools and failed utopias, but it doesn't have quite that amplified sense of apocalypse, more an end-of-season melancholy, a sense of a place or moment that has lost its moorings.

Even on the opening night, as the art crowd descended on the Palazzo in hordes, the evening sun through the windows struck the rooms with a sorrowful rather than celebratory air.

Within the show, Boyce, whose art often quotes from the history of design, has taken a single motif and worked it up into a whole family of forms. A stylised concrete tree made for a decorative art fair in Paris in the 1920s has been transformed into a cluster of black and white metal chandeliers hung from the ceilings. The tree's linear rhythms are echoed in typography, and on the patterned surface of an abandoned bed with a sinister bolster of rolled chain link fencing. In the final room there is an overturned, heavily rusted bin. On top sits a makeshift bird box which resembles a face or a mask. This wooden effigy is the only overt reference to human presence, but the box is empty. The birds have flown.

It's hard in Venice not to be seduced by the sheer beauty of the place and hard not to compete with its riches, the ornate damask and gilt. It's a classic mistake for exhibitors, who can never outdo their setting. Boyce's show is muscular and supremely confident, its heavy and rusting materials hard-edged and brutal. It's a classic example of restraint being a form of strength.

No Reflections is oddly timeless, befitting a setting where an old palazzo finds the modern world nipping at its heels. Nestled next to its leaded glass and crumbling brick exterior, you'll find a shop selling ultra-modern industrial catering equipment, round the corner a cobbler's that seems as ancient as the stones of Venice. Among these complex layers of history, the bustle of the Venice Biennale this year seems both ominous and exciting.

At Palazzo Pisani, the breeze through an open window makes Boyce's leaves rustle and shift. As the Biennale opens, the cold wind of the recession is big in everyone's minds, though there is still no shortage of the rich and the glamorous and a strong Russian presence among the travelling VIPs and glitterati. Interestingly the chill might just be what makes Venice hold its own. In an art world that had been increasingly dominated by commercial art fairs, the curious model of Venice seems more sustainable and more credible than the collectors' merry-go-round of exclusively commercial enterprises, such as the Basel art fair which will open at the weekend.

There is a powerful sense that the art world wants to embrace strong serious work this year, and a palpable darkness to much of the subject matter. Some of this, of course, is a matter of sheer coincidence. If the 2007 Biennale was dominated by strong women, such as Annette Messager in the French Pavilion, this is a year again of big tough boys such as Bruce Nauman representing America.

If there's a melancholy air in Boyce's show, it's echoed elsewhere in a series of presentations that have themes of decay, conflict or confrontation. The Russians have an exhibition that includes blood and oil. At the British Pavilion the artist Steve McQueen, fresh from the success of his first feature Hunger, about the final months of Bobby Sands, has made a lush, beautiful film entitled Giardini and set in the Giardini in winter.

The park, which this week is packed with designer-clad collectors and air-kissing curators, is spooky at other times of year. In McQueen's film the pavilions are boarded up and the gardens filled with rubbish. A mysterious pack of greyhounds move through the site and, in a sequence set at night, there are men lurking in the shadows: perhaps with malevolent intent, perhaps seeking sexual solace. A worm slithers through a puddle, a beetle alights on a flower. It may be a metaphor for identity in this most nationalistic of settings, but despite its virtuoso imagery it is a strangely empty and ultimately dissatisfying film.

In a fierce satire, Danish/Norwegian duo Elmgreen and Dragset have recast the Danish and Nordic pavilions, as a pair of houses belonging to rich collectors. The first belongs to a dysfunctional family, the second a wealthy gay man who has studded his home with fine furniture, great art and good-looking boys. You get taken round by an actor on the premise that he is an estate agent trying to make a sale. Outside, though, the owner lies face down in a pool.

One of the more anticipated of the British shows this year was that of John Cale for Wales. Founder member of the legendary rock group the Velvet Underground, Cale has a troubled and complex relationship with his homeland, which he fled for New York. Cale has made the kind of exhibition an ageing rock star might, by turns stretched, overindulgent, and yet curiously moving. In a sequence of related short films and sound works he explores a bleak landscape of slate mines and abandoned farms, and punishes himself with a stiff walk up a mountain. The camera lingers in a empty house that by implication might be his own unhappy home. In a short final sequence we see him strapped to a plank and ducked in water in a practice somewhere between a medieval ducking stool and modern waterboarding. It's ridiculous, of course, but also genuinely shocking and unexpected in its anger.

Much of Venice this year seems angry or sad. Yet perhaps through its very emphasis on melancholy and obsolescence, it has proved once more that it is not yet obsolete.

• The Venice Biennale runs from today until 22 November. Martin Boyce No Reflections is at Palazzo Pisani, Calle delle Erbe, Cannaregio www.scotlandandvenice.com