Sorcha Dallas

Philip Long, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and curator of this year’s Scottish presentation at the Venice Biennale, relates Scotland’s involvement with the Venice Biennale and introduces this years artists.

Art and Venice are inextricably intertwined. One has depended on the other throughout the city’s history; for artists Venice has been a source of inspiration and a centre of patronage and production for many hundreds of years; for Venice, art has formed its image and drawn countless people to it. Against this background, the Venice Biennale was conceived and from its outset intended as a forum for international art which would contribute to the redevelopment of the city both economically and culturally. The Biennale continues to adapt, expand and shift according to countries, political events, personalities and controversies which shape it each year, and is partly because of the consequent debates these matters generate that it continues to be recognised as the foremost contemporary art event in the world.

During its first years the Venice Biennale comprised of one exhibition, where artists from different countries exhibited together under one roof and under the patronage of an international committee. From the earliest days this included representation from throughout the British Isles. In 1897 (the Biennale’s second staging), thirty-three artists were distinctly classified as of Scottish (alongside nineteen other English contemporaries), establishing a pattern of large group exhibitions which continued up until the Second World War. Numerous Scots participated throughout these years, including James Guthrie in 1897, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his close group in 1899 (in a section devoted to Scottish decorative art) and E.A. Walton in 1903.

Individual countries were soon encouraged to construct their own pavilions in the surrounding Giardini (Venice’s public gardens in the Castello area), allowing them to promote their own artists more directly and giving them a vested interest in the promotion of the Biennale overall. Britain’s first Pavilion was opened in 1909, with interior designs by Scots D.Y. Cameron, J.D. Fergusson, George Henry, William McTaggart, S.J Peploe and others. By the 1930s this large group approach had become stagnant and in 1948 (the first Biennale to be held after the Second World War), the British Pavilion was entirely given over to Turner and Henry Moore. Further shows followed of perhaps two or three artists (in 1954, for example, the memorable grouping of Bacon, Freud and Nicholson) and in recent years the Pavilion has been devoted to one contemporary artist. Of Scots, this included William Turnbull and Eduardo Paolozzi in 1952, Paolozzi again in 1960, and in 1978 Mark Boyle.

In the same period new opportunities have presented themselves to artists beyond their national pavilions and Scottish artists have featured prominantly in this way. Of note was an exhibition devoted to the three sculptors David Mach, Arthur Watson and Kate Whiteford in 1990. An exciting, comparatively recent development has been the Biennale’s colonisation of the Arsenale, the former Venetian military dockyard, whose vast buildings have been host to internationally curated (as opposed to nationally selected exhibitions), bringing together contemporary artists from across the continents. Scottish artists, such as Christine Borland, Douglas Gordon and Roderick Buchanan, have been regularly included.

Since 2003, constituent parts of Britain (Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland) have developed separate exhibitions as a compliment to the British Pavilion, broadening the range of the UK’s representation at the Bienale. In that year, Scotland presented Zenomap, an exhibition of the work of Claire Barclay, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling, aswell as other artists associated with Scotland. In 2005 the work of Alex Pollard, Cathy Wilkes and Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan was exhibited under the title Selective Memory. Both these exhibitions set a trend for Scotland’s participation where, at the point of being chosen, the artists were recognised as being at a particular moment reasonably early on in their careers when exposure at the Biennale would bring the wider international attention they deserved.

For the 52nd Biennale, Scotland will occupy part of the grand baroque Palazzo Zenobio, home to the Armenian Cultural Institute in Venice, where exhibitions from several other countries (including Australia, Latin America and Armenia itself) will provide an appropriate international context for the six artists chosen to represent Scotland this year. They are Charles Avery, Henry Coombes, Louise Hopkins, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lucy Skaer and Tony Swain. Their work is of the most vital and stimulating kind, art made by highly gifted individuals who, happily for Scotland, can count their involvement with that country as a formative part of their careers. Each maintains an interest in Scotland, although their developing careers have already taken them from beyond Britain. The organisers – the Scottish Arts Council, British Council Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland – hope that the event encourages the selected artists and others to think of Scotland as a place which can provide great artistic opportunities, not only at home but also abroad.

For Venice, each artist is producing new work. Charles Avery, from Oban (whose 2002 drawing in The Fleming Collection features on this magazine’s cover), is based in London and has recently exhibited there, in Edinburgh and in Italy. For the Biennale he has developed his ongoing Islanders project, in which for over ten years now he has described in drawing, painting and sculpture the topology, population and cosmology of an imaginary island inspired by his childhood living in the west coat of Scotland. Henry Coombes, the youngest of this group, came dramatically to our attention in 2006 with his extraordinary film, Laddy and the Lady. For Venice he is developing an installation comprising of sculpture, paintings and a film-work, which together mark the beginnings of his investigation into nineteenth-century painter Landseer, whose life was darker and more remarkable than his art might immediately suggest.

Louise Hopkins, from Hertfordshire, has remained based in Glasgow since studying there, producing painting and graphic work, both profound and international in concern. The latter is particularly the case in her map pieces, where her modification of boundaries and landscapes changes our world perspective. Tony Swain, from Northern Ireland, also came to Glasgow to study and also remains based there. A sheet or cut section of newsprint provides the basis for his meticulously executed paintings, which provide a glimpse into a complex and surreal private world.

Observation of group interaction and social rituals are the starting point for Rosalind Nashashibi, who uses primarily 16mm film. In Venice she will show her mesmerising new film, Bachelor Machines Part 1, made on a cargo ship travelling between Italy and Scandinavia. Lucy Skaer has a base in Scotland, but also works internationally. Different locations, such as New York and Amsterdam, have inspired her to make surprising and beautiful work using sometimes traditional, sometimes very surprising means indeed.

Scottish art is at one of its most progressive moments and these artists represent this position in the form of six very considerable talents. As with the heterogeneous character of the Biennale, the work of Avery, Coombes, Hopkins, Nashashibi, Skaer and Swain is diverse, exciting and unpredictable. Each artist, however, could be said to share as part of their concern an interest in cultural similarities and differences, and the issues such differences present. Some on occasion have invented worlds to investigate their concerns; others make use of comparisons, real situations or look back into history. What is clear is that each artist works with such ability and often with such surprising and new means that they have the power to alter perceptions. Their work goes on show this summer in Venice from 10 June, at what remains one of the world’s most unmissable art events.