“Wheel waa aaa yew doo eng eer?”
Two days ago I made my first trip to the Giardini. I think, like most first-timers, I was really struck by the architecture of each, discrete national pavilion, with everything from neo-classical seriousness, graceful modernist walls of glass, domestically scaled spaces, and buildings that would have looked at home along the coastlines of the Coromandel or Golden Bay in the 1990s. The commissions for each pavilion are as diverse as the architectures that house them and I really got a sense that while some artists chose to ignore the building, there are others who either explicitly addressed the physical and ideological spaces of the architecture and the surrounding gardens, or attempted to create a conversation with the city of Venice. The German Pavilion Liam Gillick’s project for the German Pavilion, How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks, was a work I was looking forward to, partly because I have just read the recently published reader Meaning Liam Gillick (ed. Monika Szewczyk et al.), and I was interested to see how an artist who seems to continually problematise, and mobilise the relationship between the built and the ideological, would respond to the setting of the Giardini. Well, firstly, on the face of the towering, neo-classical building Gillick has fitted a curtain of coloured strips of plastic over the entrance door. Described as “like” the blinds used to keep insects out of a room, this curtain immediately called to my mind the similar rainbows that often separate the shop floor from the domestic spaces of corner dairies up and down New Zealand. Entering through a mundane swoop of soft plastic, I expected something at odds with the authority of the building, perhaps somewhere I could sit, have a cup of tea and put my feet up? The Blinds
Inside, the building is comprised of one main room, with four interconnected rooms attached, all with incredibly high ceilings. There are no storage spaces, toilets or kitchen, and the only concession the building makes to the necessities of use is the occasional fire extinguisher and two emergency exits – also covered in plastic strips by Gillick. Humming, echoing and reverberating through the space (as if a formal speech is happening in one of the adjoining rooms) was a man’s voice, only occasionally audible, that is trying to tell a story. Running adjacent to the interior walls are a series of connected, double sided kitchen units arranged so they cut across and through the rooms of the pavilion. Although they are identifiable as kitchen units, they are devoid of any appliances, running water or fittings, bar three LED spotlights set into the timber above the bench space of each “kitchen.”
The Units
These kitchen structures appeared carefully made to me, but in the style of the mass-produced, pine kit-set packaged interiors that populate apartments all over The Kitchen Cat
Like much of Gillick’s work, any sense of meaning (if we can still talk of such things) involves chasing threads between what you find in the visual, and what is articulated in the written, spoken and performed. The echoed voice in the pavilion is incredibly hard to discern amidst the cavernous building and (I’m guessing) some added echo effects, so, turning to the transcription provided by the venue attendants, a story of the only talking cat in the world is told. This cat, presumably the one looking at me as I read, lives in an unnamed town and is cast by the community as prophet, ghost and wise feline, while cultivating depression, anxiety, boredom and snobbish ambivalence. In parts of the narrative, the cat is torn between the desires of its cat-ness, its all-knowing wisdom, and its need to be fed knowledge in order to fulfill the wishes of its visitors.
The Blinds
Within the narrative, the continuous demands on the cat to speak (despite its obvious talents in this area) are often uncomfortable, wrought with suspicion and misunderstandings, and the eventual story that is told by the cat to the children is only made possible through the stealing of the listeners breath – literally removing their ability to speak. For me, the figure of the speaking cat, the spoken narrative, and the kitchen unit forms are constructions that enable political, aesthetic and social questions to become at least fleetingly manifest. “Well, what are you doing here?”
To those who made it through my first – and, I promise, longest – post (like Liam Gillick, I have issues with ending things), there is more to come on the animal invasion of the 2009 Venice Biennale …
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