2003, "The Venice Biennale: The German Pavilion (or 'Your Place in History')," EGS

Venice is like a beauty pageant or the Olympics. Countries serve forth their best in an excessive showcase. Being featured at the Biennale will often leverage an artist into new fame and secure his or her place in history.

This year's German Pavilion is curated by a theme of topographies, essentially: more art about the urban landscape. But what is interesting about the German Pavillion is that their featured artist, the artist chosen to be the artist of the moment in Germany, is Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997. He was a controversial conceptual artist who had long desired to represent Germany in Venice but was never selected. Kippenberger had even photographed himself as a tourist at the pavilion. The current exhibition is overdetmined by the death of the artist, it implies an end but thrives on the aftermath that becomes legacy. It is only after his death, with his post mortum aura and influence on the younger generation, that he gets the key position in the pavilion. To feature Kippenberger is really an all to characteristic -public German apology- after the victim is gone, he is honored. This provoked me to think about death, not as an agonizing end to it all but a new start when your great place in history can really begin. The Kippenberger work represented is a subway grate on the floor of an otherwise empty room. The occassional sound of a passing train is heard coming from this grate along with a gust of wind. This is a nice little trick that contributes to the theme park atmosphere already going on in Venice.

The other rooms of the pavilion have been filled with photographs by Candida Hofer. Hofer like Gursky is another one of the German photographers part of the Bechers legacy. Her pastel images of vacant public space are nothing new, BUT the particular set on display are incredibly decadent -libraries and waiting rooms (part of her "architecture of absence"). In the age of digital information, walls of books are like museums. The library is decaying. To collect books is to be decadent, to amass something not really essential to life. Hofer shows us these places where decadence is excessive, where thousands of books have been collected and sit in silence, unused. The waiting room is also a site of decadence. It compares to the waiting of life, the passage of time, that time itself must be wasted, with time there is always more excess of it, despite the fact it is in continual decay. In many ways, the work at the German Pavilion is the link between death and decadence - Kippenberger being dead and instantly historicized and Hofer showing places where old fashioned history is kept on shelves and eventually forgotten.