This at last, thanks to the director/curator Robert Storr, who hails from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was an exceptional Biennale. He overcame the problem of congestion that can plague the Giardini, in a frame when the total visitor numbers were more, as were the total number of pavilions (77 in all). He achieved this on the basis of an intelligent humanism, rather than monetarism although, fortunately, both aspects worked together. The coffee and profiteroles were better than before and the parties, on the whole, were better and wilder too (and not just because Tracey Emin was hopping around). Also, it seemed to be a Biennale de Jeunesse. By that one means anyone under 55, the young at heart for all that.

It also seemed that there was a greater productivity between the exhibitions, more intelligently disposed (viz., the Ghanaian El Anatsui's massive screen/drape weaving together discarded labels and bottle foil entitled 'Dusasa I'). Robert Storr, as director, devised for his theme show a title more poetic in Italian than English, 'Pensa con i Sensi, Senti con la Mente' ('Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind'). There was a prevailing sense overall of experienced selectivity, which revealed a fatalism, a kind of discreet existentialism in his range of choice, so a fairly ruthless exclusivity drily disposed, dare one say, even academic in the Arsenale Corderie.

Looking around, the Africa Pavilion was partly a misnomer, with a collection containing non-African works (and whatever happened to the potent theme of 2007, the issue of the so-called abolition of the slave trade, which wasn't?) The angel of death seemed to flutter over the Arsenale too, replete with a detritus of skeletons by different artists. There is much 'mattress art' plus litter. But our Tracey was there first, long ago. Now in the British Pavilion, she is expressively graphic (as befits her codes), serene or hung-over, depending upon how that code comes to be broken. But it has to be said that in the French Pavilion, Sophie Calle came to excel in this process.

Robert Storr here reveals his own intellectual 'affair' with the work of Calle, which runs back a few years now. The narrative for the present exhibition at the Biennale reveals how Calle herself received an email from a resiling lover, sanctimoniously breaking off the relationship with the message, 'Prenez soin de vous' (Take care of yourself), the ultimate in hypocritical coding for male-female disengagement. This becomes a leitmotif for the whole show. Calle certainly does precisely this, by sending copies of the treacherous message to 107 of her female friends. The responses were then documented by her and they form the main content of her exhibition.

The journal Artpress inadvertently played an important part in the formation of a fresh creative sequence for both Storr and Calle. In his text for them of November 2003, in Artpress 292 in which he 'accidentally' substituted the words 'je me permis' (it allowed myself) for 'il me permit' (it allowed me), he inadvertently had created a new interpretation of the photograph entitled 'The Wedding Dress', which itself was important to the artist. He also created an entire collage of textual readings and mis-readings. However, the ultimate de-codification of this sequence is now fulfilled dramatically in the 2007 Biennale. Storr enlarges on this 2003 event in his April 2007 article in Artpress as follows:

The artist's simultaneously mercurial and assertive authorship functions by self displacements that are so charged with potential significance they can make almost anybody else's version, no matter how inadvertent, look or sound good. In short 'she'- the voice of Calle's texts who may or may not be Calle at all - is the perfect vessel for ambiguities and ambivalences that even weak misreaders learn from, and that strong misreaders sharpen according to their own experience or intention.¹

The breaking of Calle's codes is an enterprise worthy of the Bletchley wartime Enigma (German) code breakers. To assist her in the French Pavilion, Calle had cleverly enlisted (and entirely voluntarily on his part) the French superstar artist Daniel Buren, who also built a small Pavilion all his own in the grounds, entitled 'La Tonnelle'('The Bower')'. This elegant refuge must have been Buren's personal escape from the built archaisms of the French Pavilion, which he had himself previously known all too well as an exhibitor previously to Calle. Here also, Buren displaced himself 'à la mode de Sophie Calle'. Lest Buren felt himself marginalised, it is necessary here to place all due credit on him for the fact that the exhibition there actually works. Once Calle had 'appointed' him (a French practice here where the artist appoints the curator), following his personal reply to her advertisement as such, this fortuitous alchemy began to work. He had a profound effect on the existing ground plan of the Pavilion, and moved the spaces around creatively, achieving seven rooms where only four had existed before. This allowed the walls and screens to proliferate in providing for the display of the 107 responses, some of which were substantially sized items: text, photographic images and so on, revealing the professions of the senders of replies. Calle forensically photographed each of the women replying. The French Pavilion itself, so 'faux-renaissance', was transformed into a kind of casket containing these revealing letters back. Calle, the jilted lover, exacts true vengeance on the resiling partner, who literally has disappeared from existence, it seems. Maybe he will slip into Venice, but he certainly will not find Sophie Calle around, she is much too smart.

In fact, he might slip across into the British Pavilion. This is, as always, another story. Here Tracey Emin has found her own way of handling curatorial convention. In fact she claims she has spent 'nearly all of her budget' in getting the quaint little tearoom that is the British Pavilion, renovated. It was certainly fairly decaying before. She cleverly raised further money for this from English Heritage. The pillars in marble were refurbished, and the wall cladding spruced up. The finish is now in a faint pink. The trees and hedges around were also trimmed. In fact here we have a suitable stage set for a Somerset Maugham drawing room comedy (so beloved of Italians - I once saw a performance of one in Florence, finding myself the only person laughing.) Here, the exhibits are enhanced in visual impact by the soft glow of neon from a few such pieces, rather like drawing-room wall-lamps flickering. The exhibits include a fragile but potent range of small monoprints (in the point of arrival), where an unhappy female is persecuted by stick-like genitalia. It is best not to describe the wooden sculptures, which could represent a new direction for the future. Tracey definitely has what it takes and, despite her best efforts, the Pavilion does not. She deserves an award for just 'being there', and expressing the eternal female predicament. The building comes over as not so much a villino, maybe rather a suburban parody. And Sam Taylor-Wood has been banished to the Ukrainian Pavilion, on spurious linkage there. Tracey did have some paintings up, but not as many as British Council had hoped for. Elton John put a reserve on one (prices over £300,000). Visitors to the British Pavilion, such as Naomi Campbell and Prince Michael of Kent have been slightly fugitive, but definitely there. Emin's 'abortion watercolours' were skilful evocations of a tragically felt event. The curator for the British Council, Andrea Rose, described the exhibition overall as 'ladylike', in line with diverse interpretations of the female role as artist. In varying forms this all epitomised the enlightened balancing act of Robert Storr's Biennale, with the Czech Republic showing Irena Juzova, Isa Genken of Germany, Sophie Calle, Julia Milner in the Russian Pavilion, and Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin. But her exhibition at the English (oops - sorry!) British Pavilion is inherently English, which is all for the best. In the Scottish selection, selected by Philip Long of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, among the six artists selected whom he includes in this exhibition at the Palazzo Zenobio are three women artists: Lucy Skaer, Louise Hopkins, and Rosalind Nashashibi. No matter that only one of the six is actually Scottish.

If anything was to make this year's Venice Biennale challenging and pleasurable at the same time, it was the combination in adjacent pavilions (France and Britain) of Sophie Calle and Tracey Emin, the two sirens of the Venetian Lagoon. So, whatever happened to Sophie Calle's very ex-boyfriend? Maybe they teamed up and lured him to a fate worse than virtual death, in the blue lagoon. So they might well do fair vengeance to male chauvinism. 'Prenez soin de vous!'

Richard Demarco will add some comments on the Venice Biennale, and on Kassel's 'Documenta 12', for Studio International during July, following his own visits to each.

Michael Spens

Reference
1. Storr, R. Je me permis. Artpress 2007; 335: 4-7.