Sorcha Dallas

Selective Memory Venice Biennale

The 51st Venice Biennale opened to the public this week, after what’s known as the Vernissage – the official press days, when the festival is open only to art-world professionals, journalists and whoever else can blag their way in. In the central festival venue, the Giardini, a park on the edge of the city, frantic artists and curators were still installing exhibitions, as builders with buckets of cement and decorators with wet paint brushes took extended cigarette breaks.

This summer’s Biennale will display the art of more countries than ever before. In all, 73 nations have signed up, and among the countries exhibiting for the first time are Morocco, Albania, Afganistan, China and Northen Irland. The Ulster show will complete, for the first time, a full UK representation with separate national shows, with the British pavilion acting as effectively the English exhibition.

The frenzied last moment preparations of the Giardini where not replicated in the Scottish exhibition, where organised calm resigned. The Scottish artists this year have moved from the fading baroque splendour of a plazzo on the grand canal to a former art school, the Scoletta, on Campo San Rocco, tucked away behind possibly Venice’s greatest church, Santa Maria dei Frari, a brick-built, cathedral-sized chapel famed for its Bellini altarpiece and Canova sculptures. Across form the exhibition venue is a vast collection of Tintorettos.

The exhibition, entitled Selective Memory, follows the Zenomap show in 2003, the first presentation of contemporary art from Scotland undertaken by the Scottish Arts Council and British council and which featured Jim Lambie and Simon Starling – both nominated for the Turner Prize – and Clare Barclay.

Selective Memory has a similarly enticing line-up, with works from Alex Pollard, Cathy Wilkes, and – working together – Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan. All Glasgow- based, the four already have an enviable national and international track record of exhibitions to their names and, at this show, curators Jason E Bowman and Rachel Bradley are seeking to encourage viewers to explore the notion of artistic labour itself, and the processes the artist goes through in the making of their art.

Pollard’s work focuses on system s of communication and develops his recent productions using cut up antique rulers, transforming them into structures that find a meaning for the viewer. Each time is no antique, though: they are beautifully cast from plaster then treated to look authentic. In the centre of the room are two well-used school desks with two animal like sculptures constructed from the fake rulers. The juxtaposition of the desks and the rulers sends you back to schooldays and conjures up the imagination of a child who can construct a dinosaur out of virtually nothing.

On two of the gallery walls sit arms with hands also fashioned from the rulers, plus casts of two HB pencils and rubbers. Some of the hands draw a curved line, others gently rub it out. You can take it in one of two ways : a three-dimensional representation of how an artist works, or the growth, through trail and error, of childhood intellect, but there’s something authoritarian about the use of rulers, when you remember that a ruler can be an instrument of school punishment as well as a drawing tool.

Cathy Wilkes produces sculptures, and paints and writes, but has become celebrated for her installations. Her work – my least favourite when I went into the show but the most memorable after I left – resonates and comes back, if not to haunt you then to make you think. Here, a work entitled She’s Pregnant Again – ( a reworked version of the show Wilkes installed in an abandoned hairdresser’s in Glasgow’s east end last December) fills the L-shaped gallery space with items including two unplugged televisions back to back – one with a discarded towel, the other an open jam jar - a sink, an empty pram, shredded clothes, the sole of a child’s gym shoe and dirty plastic food bowls.

Around the walls are five small canvas paintings, some with saucers imbedded in the paint. There’s little love in this room – possibly it’s the experience of a pregnant single parent, stuck on society’s bleak margins. But it is also a series of snapshots of an exposed early childhood; the fragmented recollections of life as a toddler.

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan fill two rooms with massive, black, wedge-shaped sculptures. Like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, they hover menacingly and mockingly, cramming and dominating the space. Each black wedge has a stern face painted on it, scolding passers-by, but there is also a sense of playfulness and theatricality here. Tatham and O’Sullivan like to use recurring motifs in their work, one such image is a stickman with a square head and top hat. A small bronze statue of this stick man, on all fours, is on display.

It is, in fact, a model for a seven meter high version, found at the back of the British pavilion, which has a mystical almost pagan quality to it.

The Selective Memory of this show’s title could be the editing process an artist goes through in making and rejecting work for an exhibition. But it is also something else: the selective memory of early childhood, the crumbs and fragments of which remain in adults, and it is this, rather than nationality; though they all work in Scotland, none of the four are from here, which links together Wilkes, Pollard, and Tatham and O’Sullivan.