Sorcha Dallas

Now for the Italian job

From the sublime to the ridiculous…four Scottish artists have created a visually-powerful show, rich in the tapestry of modern life, at the prestigious Venice Biennale.

Vast international art shows are the norm these days, rather than exception. There are annuals, biennials, triennials, and the five-yearly spectacle that is the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany. The Venice Biannale is the mother of them all, however. The combination of a handful of huge curated international shows, around 60 autonomous presentations by participating nations and a host of projects across the city, with varying degrees of official support, is overwhelming. Founded in 1893, and, with the exception of war-time gaps, still going strong, Venice has history on its side. But, like the city itself, which is a floating – or rather slowly sinking – museum, the Biennale has to find ways to move from present to past to future.

New countries jostle for places in the Giardini, the park that is the heart of the official national presentations. Old countries, such as China, find themselves busy reviewing their place in the cultural world, conceding as the price of international reputation, freedom of speech for their artists that might be difficult otherwise. Small countries, like the developed nations of Britain, strike out on their own. This year, in a piece of charming whimsy, there is even a British exhibition, the New Forest Pavilion.

This is the third time there has been a Manchester Pavilion. It’s a bar run by a friendly family willing to put up with a bit of liveliness and a neon Manchester sign in their window in exchange for guaranteed business.

At the British Pavillion in the Giardini, London pair Gilbert and George have produced a sly riff on youth and age. In a market sometimes in thrall to the idea of novelty, they have been working together for 40 years. A series of digital prints shows the artists in provocative poses, decorated by their recurring image of the leaf of the ancient gingko tree, renowned for its life-giving properties. Some of these pictures would be bound to alarm John Prescott in his campaign against disreputable youngsters wearing hooded tops. These images are packed with such young men and the works have titles such as Hooded and Cowled.

In the American Pavilion, the painter Ed Ruscha, himself a couple of years short of 70, has produced a beautiful and bitter-sweet meditation on the passage of time. One set of paintings, made in 1992, shows a series of light industrial buildings. The second, made a dozen years later, shows the same sites as they have developed through time. The buildings are expanded or abandoned, the ownership changed, signage faded. We are all, Ruscha suggests, likely to be supplanted.

This year’s Scottish exhibition takes issues of history, personal and artistic, to its heart. It features four artists: Alex Pollard, the duo Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan and Cathy Wilkes. All four live and work in Glasgow. Entitled Scotland and Venice: Selective Memory, it is less interested in that typical Venice method of presentation, the instant visual showstopper, than in the ideas and motifs that recur or get worked through in the making of art. It also takes on vast swathes of art history through oblique reference or direct quotation.

The Scottish venue, the Scoletta di San Rocco, comes steeped in history. It is a stone’s throw from the Frari, one of Venice’s favourite churches, home to a spectacular alterpiece by Titian. It is adjacent to, and belongs to, the Scuola grande di San Rocco, one of the city’s most richly decorated interiors, with a mind-boggling series of sixteenth – century panels painted by Tintoretto. The Scuola was home to a grand confraternity, with charitable aims and an insatiable appetite for the best in artistic and architectural splendour. The small Scoletta was home to its educational wing.

Inside, the presentation is sober and smart. Emphasising the vaguely scholastic atmosphere of this former college and the claustrophobia that one always feels is possible in the city, it reminds you that, when visiting the splendour next door, Henry James later complained that while it was magnificent he found himself unable to breathe. The first Artwork greeting you is part of Tatham and O’Sullivan’s work, A Routine Sequence of External Actions - a vast wedge-shaped sculpture that threatens to push the viewer down the stairs they have just climbed. Its plain black surface is relieved only by an expressive outline of a white-painted face. Tatham and O’Sullivan bring together contradictory viewpoints to investigate how and why we give objects meaning.

Thus their sculptures combine implacable monumental sculpture with expressive decoration and a plain sense of the ridiculous. The rest of their work includes framed images of another kind of monument, mystical standing stones, as well as an abstract expressionist painting and a tiny bronze sculpture of a stick figure. Outdoors, in the Parco della Rimembranze, the Stick Man appears as a comical 6m-high sculpture.

Stick figures also appear in Alex Pollard’s work. He takes as a starting point the figure of a bureaucrat, an image created using wooden, metal-hinged Victorian rulers. This satire on the unbending nature of authority turns into something far more fun with his pair of tiny dinosaurs made from what at first looks like rulers but turns out to be plaster casts decorated to look like the real thing.

On the wall, two pairs of skeletal hands appears to have drawn lines. Only when you look closer does it become clear the pencils and rulers they hold are painted plaster.

The toughest and most rewarding work in the show is that of Cathy Wilkes. Wilkes has produced work that is harsh and moving, raw yet very carefully produced. She’s Pregnant Again is a room full of disparate elements that reflects on motherhood and the life - cycle. It is angry yet tender. A sequence of painting lines the walls, each showing different phases of the sun. Two metal trays on the floor hold a series of objects: charred wood, pens, discarded lace. All are soaked in pungent petrol, which reeks of danger.

There is an abandoned pram, two switched-off televisions sitting back to back, like people who can’t talk to each other. In a bowl on the floor is a shard of glass, lovely and lethal. The room may look chaotic at first but it contains a precise visual rhythm. It works. Within an hour of the exhibition opening its doors, I encountered two women holding back the tears. In a city weighed down with history, full of glitter and glamour, that is a rare thing indeed.