Stuart Morgan

Interview by William Furlong, recorded in Venice, June 1990

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 10, Number 4, 1990

Transcript

William Furlong: Stuart Morgan you’re one of the commissioners of the Aperto Section; what are the key issues that have been raised this year in the Aperto?

Stuart Morgan: The key issues for me are issues of the body and power. Two years ago the work in the Aperto section would have been neo-conceptual, it would have been mainly photographic. What we are seeing now is a resurgence of work to do with touch, to do with intimacy, to do with the relations of the body with the work. This means something and this is why perhaps the issue to do with AIDS is so important to us and to all the artists, because it encapsulates all this extremely well.

WF: You’re talking about a particular piece now?

SM: I’m talking about the Gran Fury piece. Gran Fury is the militant arm of art in America and when we invited them I suppose we knew that we were in for trouble. The work that they made was about women’s rights, it was to do with AIDS and sexuality, it was to do with religion and it was to do with the country that we’re in. It had a picture of the Pope and that alone caused us a great deal of trouble. Far more trouble than the Jeff Koons, which was also to do with sexuality, far more trouble in fact that any other single piece in the entire Aperto section.

WF: You say that the show has this common denominator to do with intimacy and with touch. It’s a very clearly presented show, so pieces like the Jeff Koons really do jump out; they’re so over-the-top, theatrical.

SM: There is a theatrical element too but I think that may be to do with the fact that artists from other countries come to the Biennale, but all they can do is make a visual statement. We had a Russian artist who wanted four live dogs in his section; he also wanted oranges that people could take away with them. There is a necessary amount of theatre, unfortunately, to do with the Biennale and that’s to do with the non-translatability of ideas.

WF: How do you think this show relates to the show in the Giardini, with the national pavilions; is there a dialogue between them and the Aperto?

SM: I’m only answering for myself but there can be no deliberate dialogue with the pavilions.

WF: So is there a thread then that arises out of the Pavilion shows?

SM: Probably not because to get into a pavilion you have to be a senior artist and you’re already a few years out of date. What you have to do is re-stage your old work in a bigger and more spectacular way. Luckily Anish Kapoor, for example, has made a set of new work. This is not the case with Jenny Holzer, who is simply giving us a medley of her hits, but put together extraordinarily beautifully.

WF: What were the concerns when you were asked to be a commissioner for the Aperto section this year?

SM: The same kind of criteria that you use to go about looking at art anyway. There are pressures of course in looking at the work from countries that don’t have a pavilion. If we don’t take one work by a country without a pavilion then that country is not represented in what purports to be an international show. The fact is that it can’t be truly international because no more pavilions can be built in Venice.

WF: Perhaps we could finish by returning to what I saw in the papers; the scandal, it made sort of headlines. Has the scandal been resolved, because the work is quite a challenge to Roman Catholic attitudes and the Pope, which I imagine are taboo subjects here in Italy?

SM: Yes, it reached the front page in one of the biggest papers in Italy. The difficult thing to account for in one’s mind is that the Pope is a religious leader and a political leader simultaneously. He is also an idol, he is something to be dreamed about and, even a photograph of him being used for something else, other than to relate to religion, is felt to be an affront and an abuse. The scandal really is to do with what the Biennale is about; the situation is very clear, you invite a group of artists whose business it is to make trouble, knowing that they’re going to make trouble and trouble is really rather good for the tourist aspect of the Biennale. This is fine until the head of the commission, Giovanni Carandente, breaks with the commissioners themselves, who want to put a work up which is a little too hot to handle. Carandente is a Christian Democrat and he has to be seen to be a Christian and to make statements about the fact that the Pope’s image is being misused. He made a long statement to the press, finally disengaging himself from the entire business, knowing that if the work was blasphemous according to Italian Law, the five commissioners that he’d been working with could go to jail for up to two years.

WF: Is Mr. Carandente the overall commissioner?

SM: He was my boss and he is the head of the Visual Arts section, answerable only to the Portuguese. The Portuguese, it seems, may secretly have over-ruled Carandente who was trying to hold proceedings up. Now we have a situation that involves the artists, who already have their work up, the Gran Fury people who are already over, who are holding press conferences saying that they must have their work up. They’re writing in their space that Carandente has withheld the work and the commissioners are trying to make peace between all of these factions. Finally, of course, when Carandente has made his statement he has justified himself as a Christian, he knows that he will not go to jail, the commissioners get what they want, the Biennale, in the shape of the Portuguese who intervened, has what it wants, which is a marketable scandal. Everyone has what he or she wants and we all go home happy.

WF: And the piece in fact is still up.

SM: The piece is still up and the only thing that could happen now is that it may be defaced by right wing groups or extreme religious groups. The issue of course is not the issue of AIDS, it’s not the issue of women getting AIDS, it is none of the issues that the work raises apart from the fact that it uses the picture of the Pope. It was cropped when it appeared in the Italian newspapers, so that it only showed a picture of the Pope. The quotation in it is not even a quotation from the Pope.

WF: What do you think you’ve learnt from your whole engagement with the Venice Biennale?

SM: I’ve learnt that I would never do it again. I think that it’s very difficult to be satisfied with anything that you do with five people. I picked artists that I wanted to see and works that I wanted to see. It has been very satisfying seeing the artists that I chose talking to each other and even planning to make works with each other. That’s the real satisfaction for me. I go away dissatisfied with the show and dissatisfied with the entire idea of the Biennale and large international shows. It’s not international, it’s not fair, it’s bad politics, it’s in the main bad art and utterly unnecessary, except for tourist reasons. It’s a sort of visual equivalent of the Eurovision Song Context.