Selling our national pride up the Grand Canal

Published on Tuesday 14 June 2005 02:21

SELECTIVE MEMORY **

VENICE BIENNALE

IN ANY alphabetical list of countries, you would think Scotland should appear somewhere between Romania and Slovenia. Not at the Venice Biennale, however. Scotland has an official presence in Venice but, if it is in the listings at all, it is nowhere in the official three-volume catalogue, where it appears firmly under "G" for Great Britain. The same alphabetic injury is done to Wales and Northern Ireland. England does not appear at all, but that only makes this seem more patronising. It is still synonymous with Great Britain in some minds.

This petty centralism is, I suspect, the work of the British Council, which jealously guards its control over the British presence at the Biennale and is rigidly centralist. The main British manifestation is always a one-person show in the British Pavilion. The British Council chooses the artist. The only Scot ever to be chosen was Mark Boyle in 1978.

Scotland faces a challenge: how to become visible culturally in the wider world and how to bypass London to achieve this. The Scottish Arts Council (SAC) is right to take up this challenge. They have borne the cost of the Scottish presence at the Biennale, with assistance in kind from the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Council itself - though not enough to justify injuring the alphabet, I reckon.

The Scottish show is called Selective Memory. It is in the Scoletta, next door to the Scuola de San Rocco, home to Tintoretto's most ambitious work. It is an expensive project, but it ought to be worth it. The Biennale is the biggest shop window in the world for art, although rather than spending money hiring a gallery, perhaps the SAC should be challenging the British Council's monopoly of the British Pavilion. How about Christine Borland in two years time, for instance? This year the Pavilion is given to Gilbert and George. What a waste of space that is.

Sadly, however, this year's Scottish show could not replace even Gilbert and George. It would be an embarrassment. Four artists are included: Cathy Wilkes, Alex Pollard, Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan.

The latter two work together, so there are three individual shows in four rooms on the first floor of the Scoletta, with a single work by Tatham and O'Sullivan sited in a park beyond the main Giardini of the Biennale. The title seems quite meaningless and does not link the artists in any way.

When you climb the stairs, a large black triangular object crowded into the space greets you on the landing. It has a schematic face painted on it in white. This is by Tatham and O'Sullivan and is repeated in the room they occupy, accompanied by two framed photographs of standing stones, a framed painting in splotches of pink and grey and a picture of several schematic stick-figure sculptures. One of these also appears as a small bronze on a plinth and the pink and grey of the painting is picked up in the geometric decoration of a cube on a stand. Their outdoor piece is a large wooden version of the stick figure on the plinth. It is sited well off the beaten track. When I visited it, the only other person near was a man walking a little dog. He glanced at it and went on.

During the Biennale such things rarely earn a second glance. The little dog was more interested and appeared to wonder if the sculpture might not offer an opportunity for some self-expression of his own. Then even he moved on. The idea seems to be that, like the standing stones in the photographs, work like this will be enigmatic and arresting. It will confront and engage the spectator. It accosts you to say: "look at me! Am I not interesting?" The little dog had figured out the answer: no, not in the least.

It all seems dreadfully precious and self-absorbed. Talking to Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, they confirmed this feeling when they said together that they felt it was important to know something of their previous work to understand it. When I suggested that in Venice they could hardly expect that and their work would have to stand on its own, they seemed offended. Jane Tatham even suggested I was wrong, that people who knew their work would come. Well, if that tiny company is their intended audience, what are they doing among the crowds in Venice? Why on earth were they chosen to represent us?

You might ask the same questions of Cathy Wilkes. Her work is in the next room and is called Pregnant Again. She has a small child who was with her in Venice and so her work is plainly personal. It is an untidy scattering, mostly on the floor, of objects you might associate with motherhood and young children, among them a pram, a saucer, a child's shoe, a half empty pot of jam, and two television sets: all that either mother or child can hope to do is watch the telly, perhaps. One or two things have a more deliberate artiness about them, a piece of broken mirror upended in a bowl, saucers collaged into paintings on the wall, but they add nothing.

Motherhood is a touching and problematic business, today more than ever. At that superficial level perhaps this work is touching, too, but as art, it is simply an accumulation of coy trivia. It adds nothing to our understanding of pregnancy or motherhood. Wilkes makes the same nave assumption of the spectator's interest in her as a person that Tatham and O'Sullivan do. She does so because, like them, she confuses herself with her art. It is a mistake that arises from the false syllogism promoted by Duchamp and Beuys: "I am an artist. Art is important. Therefore I am important, and, it follows, anything I do is interesting."

Art is important, certainly, but not all art by any means; only if the art first claims our interest will the artist also do so. Even then we may know nothing about the artist. Some of the very greatest art we have is irretrievably anonymous, but that does not make it any less interesting. Above all, in Venice, where there is so much competition and such an international audience, art has to be free-standing, able to speak for itself and command our interest and respect without any given context. There is plenty of art in the Biennale this year that can do that, but nothing in the work of these artists here.

Alex Pollard is the one bright spark. He makes sculpture, reliefs and wall drawings from things that look like rulers - but which go round corners, and do things rulers shouldn't. This is not just a random choice. In a couple of elegant wall drawings, apparently carried out by hands themselves composed of rulers, he makes the connection between measurement, drawing and geometry, the way we use them to reach out and try to make sense of the world.

He also questions whether the sense we think we make really is sense at all. In the forms he uses he cites Duchamp and Picabia and the nonsense anti-machines they made to propose such questioning long ago. He also cites Duchamp directly in a reworking of his Nude Descending a Staircase - one of the last paintings Duchamp made before he took up attitudinising as an art form.Pollard seems to be revisiting this misleading hero of contemporary art in a thoughtful and genuinely questioning way.

To play football for Scotland, you have to at least have a Scottish granny. To represent Scotland at the Biennale you don't need to be Scottish at all. None of these artists is. But you do have to be connected with Glasgow, it seems. All four artists and both curators (it took two curators to choose four artists) have that qualification. Art tends to generate little tribal eddies of mutually supported self-importance. They are very local, and nobody who is not part of such a closed circle of self-congratulation believes in its validity. That is what happened in London a decade or so ago. And we see evidence of the same thing happening here, but how insignificant an eddy this is really is made painfully clear by its exposure in the huge vortex that is the Venice Biennale. This show will not make a ripple there. Scottish art deserves better than that.

• For Duncan Macmillan's full report from the Venice Biennale see Critique magazine this coming Saturday.

• Selective Memory is at the Biennale until 6 November, before moving to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, on 7 December.