Passage to the Orient (1993): Re-assessing the Role of the ‘Orient’ as ‘Avant-garde’ during the Rise of Globalisation

Abstract

Of the several exhibitions that composed the 1993 Venice Biennale, Passage to the Orient has received the most commentary. Its fame is doubtless linked to its display of works by fourteen Chinese painters, exhibited for the first time in Venice. However, the exhibition was not devoted solely to Chinese art. It was rather intended as the manifesto for a new, international approach by the Biennale, significantly announcing its commitment to East–West dialogue, with East intended as both geographical and symbolic. From the curator’s perspective, the concept of the Orient evoked the unknown and the new; in Said’s terms it was ‘Orientalist’. Moreover, the symbolic figure of Marco Polo, who inspired the exhibition’s title, recalled the idea of ‘trespassing’, of moving beyond personal, geographic, political, and historical boundaries. Through an investigation around the use of the concept of ‘Marco Polo Syndrome’, the layered meaning of the term avant-garde in Bonito Oliva’s jargon and his broader scope in rejuvenating the Biennale’s international vocation, this essay aims to redefine how the term Orient was used during the rise of globalisation at the beginning of the 1990s. Finally, such analysis proves helpful in framing continuity between the concepts of historical avant-garde and contemporaneity during the transitional period of the 1990s.

Keywords:

• Passage to the Orient
• Venice Biennale
• globalisation
• avant-garde
• Orient
• contemporary art
• Achille Bonito Oliva
• Chinese contemporary art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This text was presented at the 2021 Association for Art History’s Annual Conference, (Birmingham, 14–17 April 2021) at the panel Challenging Orientalism: new questions of perception and reception chaired by Emily Christensen and Erica Payet. I am grateful for their advice and help in enabling my argument to come through. I also wanted to thank Chiara Bertola, Francesca Dal Lago, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Mario Gorni, Chris Heppell, Lucy Steeds, and Carla Subrizi among others. All of these people have guided me in different ways through the long process of editing and sorting image copyright.

2 About the biennalisation (see Lim 2007; Ferguson, Greenberg, and Nairne 2006; Sassatelli 2016; Green and Gardner 2016).

3 See (Smith 2005; Smith 2007; Pastor Roces 2005; Jiehong 2018).

4 Three different translations appear in the Archival documentation: Passage to the Orient, Passage to Orient and Passage to East. Here the author decided upon the most used translation in the final volume of the catalogue which contained essays translated in English.

5 China Avantgarde, curated by Jochen Noth, Andreas Schmid, and Hans van Dijk (Pohlmann et. al, 1993), is considered a seminal exhibition that significantly transformed Western knowledge of Chinese contemporary art. After Berlin, the exhibition travelled to Rotterdam (May 29–July 15, 1993), to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oxford, England (July 31–October 17, 1993) and to the Brandts Klaedefabrik in Odense, Denmark (November 13, 1993–February 6, 1994). Its last venue was the Roemer-and Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, Germany as part of the local China Festival. See Koch (2011) and also Asia Art Archive https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/china-avantgarde-exhibition-archive

6 China’s New Art, Post-1989 opened in Hong Kong and then travelled to Australia, England, and the USA. For further information on the Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/chinas-new-art-post-1989-47542

7 The establishment of each new pavilion requires the approval of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; therefore, the presence of a country with a pavilion at the Venice Biennale depends mostly on satisfying political interests.

8 The group was founded in 1987 in the Furmany Lane squat (Moscow) and lasted until 2001. Participating artists included Pavel Pepperstein, Sergei Anufriev, Yuri Leiderman, and Vladimir Fedorov. 

9 The movement, established in 1946 in France by Isidore Isou and Gabriel Pomerand, had its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism and had a great influence on other movements such as Situationism.

10 Li Xianting, together with Gao Minglu, was among the enthusiastic critics and artists who organised Zhongguo Xiandai Yishuzhan (China/Avant-Garde), in Beijing in 1989. See Koch (2011, 76–77).

11 Francesca Dal Lago, interview with the author, 8 February 2021.

12 Gerardo Mosquera (2010) further developed his 1992 text into “The Havana Biennial: A Concrete Utopia.”

13 The international symposium “The Marco Polo Syndrome. Problems of intercultural communication in art theory and curatorial practice” (April 11–12, 1995) was curated by Gerhard Haupt, in collaboration with Bernd M. Schere and took place at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. See http://universes-in-universe.de/magazin/marco-polo/english.htm.

14 Renato Poggioli, who moved to the United States during the Second World War, received little attention in Italy because of his clashes with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). His ideas were nevertheless picked up by Italian schools (see De Micheli 1970).

15 Each map in Magiciens de la Terre catalogue was designed by Etudes et cartographie, Lille.

16 The full title of the biennial was ORIENT/ATION–The Vision of Art in a Paradoxical World. For the full list of the participating artists visit the online Istanbul biennial archive: https://bienal.iksv.org/en/biennial-archive/4th-international-istanbul-biennial, accessed November 20, 2021.

17 The poem (translated by Laurie Schwatrz) was quoted by Block in the catalogue (34) was composed by Johannes Wolfgang Goethe. It belongs to the collection of lyrics West-östlicher Divan (West Eastern Divan) inspired by the Persian poet Hafiz.

18 Piotr Piotrowski (2009) summarises the Orientalisation process of the 1990s in relation to Eastern Europe and Asia in “Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde” (see also Wolff 1994; Clark 1998; Pejić and Eliott 1999).

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Clarissa Ricci

Clarissa Ricci is adjunct professor at the University of Bologna and founder and co-editor of OBOE Journal (On Biennials and Other Exhibitions). Her research focuses on the history and networks of exhibitions, biennials, fairs, markets, and contemporaneity. She was a recipient of the Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art (2019–2020) and previously entrusted by Iuav University in Venice (2017–2019) with researching the foundation of Arte Fiera. She was also a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York City and was awarded a Library Research Grant by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She is author of numerous essays and has edited various volumes, including Double Trouble: Exhibitions facing fairs in Contemporary Art (2020) and Art, Market and Agency at the Venice Biennale, 1895–1993 (co-edited with Marie Tavinor, 2021) for Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Her latest book is devoted to a reconsideration of the exhibition of young artists at the Venice Biennale Aperto 1980–1993: La mostra dei giovani artisti della Biennale di Venezia (2022).