Drawing : Venice Biennale 2017 part 1 Erwin Wurm

Erwin Wurm

I have been to Venice again to get some sort of sense of the current state of the international art scene, this years biennale is entitled Viva Arte Viva and is "dedicated to celebrating, and almost giving thanks for, the very existence of art and artists, whose worlds expand our perspective and the space of our existence.”. My filter is drawing, so what I pick out will of course be very biased, however when there is so much to see you need some way of cutting through, or you will just get lost.

There appeared to me to be more community based projects, drawing often being used to map out where things happened or to establish a point of view. There was a lot of model making, and drawing as animation, as well as a return to traditional craft skills, including textile materials and the obsessive image makers who just draw and draw and draw. But perhaps the most interesting issue was the relationship between drawing and performance.
The key artist in the middle of all these diverse and hard to categorise strands was for myself, Erwin Wurm. I felt he was able to both work on an intimate gently humorous level and in a publicly monumental arena, and at both ends of the spectrum produce work that was engaging and sensitive to its audience. Most importantly though was the fact it was funny.
Wurm is this year's Austrian representative and the first thing you see of his work is an upturned lorry right outside the pavilion.

Erwin Wurm

Wurm had had the interior of the lorry converted into a staircase that led to the top, you went inside the lorry, climbed up and then could look out over the whole biennale. A simple idea but very effective and one I know he would have communicated to the powers that be by showing them a very simple drawing. I see a lot of public art that I don't think works very well, but I could imagine this type of piece working in most city centres. It reimagines something very familiar and at the same time offers a platform for others to view their city from an unusual point of view.
I first came across Wurm when he was doing his 'one-minute sculptures', daft little ideas that seemed to cut right through the serious conceptual world of late 1990s contemporary art. What was always refreshing was that Wurm liked to show how you could perform his ideas by making small drawings, his version of Ikea 'how to' diagrams.

Erwin Wurm: One minute sculpture

On entering the Austrian pavilion I was soon joining in with his games, standing on things, putting my legs in holes and generally making a fool of myself, all the time looking for his signature drawings, which sort of gave you a licence to play.

On entering the caravan above, you could look for various tiny drawings suggesting what to do, such as lie on the bed and stick your legs out of the holes in the roof, or simply respond to the situation in whatever way you chose. Wurm invites you to become both a participant and a voyeur at the same time. As you see his tiny drawings, you become aware of your internal dialogue with yourself, "shall I or shan't I?", do I engage or not? You look around at others engaged in the same way, some take the plunge others do not. Some look closely at the little drawings, others stand back and regard the whole unfolding performance from a distance, whilst children just get on with the play aspect of this.

Wurm places drawing at the centre of all these decisions. This is drawing as information, it tells us how to operate in relation to the objects we encounter. But also drawing as choreography, a way of explaining how to do things with your body; drawing as sculpture, as well as drawing as a performative practice.

Instructions as to what to do when you get inside the caravan

The visual aesthetic that is developed by a combination of modern manufactured objects and small very individual informal 'sketches' drawn directly onto the object's surfaces is very 'humanising'. It's as if the objects have been personalised, in much the same way as when you have small children who draw on the furniture or on the wallpaper. They 'disrespect' the commodities they are surrounded with and see them simply for what they are, things to interact with. Everywhere else in the biennale guards were there to make sure you didn't touch the precious art, but here was one place you could stand on it, no mind touch it.

After Wurm I found most of the other work rather pompous or overblown, but he had given me an interesting lens through which to view the rest of the work, which I will begin to do over the next few posts.