In the anecdotes and stories shared by artists relating to their participation in the Venice Biennial, their respective preparatory trips to Venice hold a special position. Typically, the preparatory trip usually takes place about eight to ten months prior to the Biennial – assuming that the nomination process in the respective country allows the artist(s) and the commissioner any such lead time. That said, this has long been the practice in Austria as it has in other countries with important national pavilions at the Biennial. Many of the 35 or so nations who showcase their own entries in Venice with their own pavilion do not nominate the artists or commissioners until much later in the day.

At the beginning of November last year we duly undertook this trip with Herbert Brandl, who had been nominated as early as October 12 for a solo show in the Austrian Pavilion at this year’s Biennial. What immediately strikes the eye is the truth of what has been narrated by many other artists who have made important Biennial pavilions in the past: It is extremely strange to be on the Biennial premises while the air is still cold and wintery. Even if you have visited the Biennial a dozen times as an art critic, it is always in June or August. Letting an exhibition act upon you in an unheated pavilion when the temperature is only ten degrees proves to be a special experience no matter how wonderful the Venetian light is. However incidentally, you instantly become aware of this fascinating Venetian light not to mention the Austrian Pavilion erected in 1934 according to the plans of Josef Hoffmann, one of the most beautiful buildings designed by the architect and on the Biennial premises. Such a trip is especially memorable because you stand alone on the premises with the selected artist and realize that in the hours that follow, together you will conceive an exhibition which means a lot for his career and for the position and degree of seriousness with which the artists of the particular country are taken in the international arena. It was also a very special travel experience to visit the Austrian Pavilion with Herbert Brandl. When you travel with artists who possess a clear line that they have constantly returned to and reinterpreted in countless works, it is indeed a special moment when you set foot in an exhibition space with them – a space for which they are supposed to devise an exhibition. This first visit after being nominated is often a decisive factor in how the exhibition will eventually turn out. As we stand for some time beside each other in one of the main pavilions I can hear Brandl saying, “this is much smaller than I remembered it being.” That was exactly my impression.

The preparatory trip to Venice in which the artist conceives his exhibition in the national pavilion – be it an exhibition of pictures which he prepares at home in his studio or an installation that reorganizes the pavilion on location – has only become the rule of late in the 112-year history of the Biennial. Until 1968, which in this respect represents a turning point, most artists simply sent their work to Venice (in those days it was exclusively painting and sculpture, the first photograph was exhibited at the Biennial in 1976). The precise staging of the exhibition was a duty incumbent upon the respective country’s commissioner and the organizers of the international exhibition sections. The artists only came to the opening, which was all the more important as the Venice Biennial – dreamed up by Italian and international artists in 1895 without any government influence as a platform to offer their works for sale to art collectors from various countries – was, until 1968, chiefly a place where art was sold. It was in fact comparable to today’s art fairs, albeit with a very restrictive selection of artists by state committees who considered it a very special honor to be represented in the Venice Biennial. Even when Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Oskar Kokoschka made their great presentations at the Biennial after 1945, they did not travel to Venice to prepare. Neither did they have a decisive influence on how their pictures and sculptures were then showcased. However, they were present at the opening as were their most important collectors who bought directly on site. In a number of international publications on the history of the Biennial you may come across the anecdote according to which Friedensreich Hundertwasser (who exhibited in 1962 in the Austrian Pavilion) quite literally stood at the pavilion entrance during the opening days and actually auctioned off the pictures to collectors. After the Biennial crisis in the summer of 1968 the statutes were altered. The exhibition and no longer the sales aspect was defined as the purpose. In 1970, the first three pavilions appeared in which artists worked on the pavilions themselves – after a preparatory trip. It was the United States Pavilion that, in 1970, became a workshop for prints that attracted Biennial visitors, the French Pavilion in which the architects Claude Parent and Paul Virilio (Virilio later became a philosopher and media theorist with a worldwide audience) installed the first experimental environment in 1970, and the West German Pavilion in which Dieter Honish, Director of the New National Gallery in Berlin together with Heinz Mack and Günter Uecker (Zero Group), Karl Georg Pfahler and Kaspar-Thomas Lenk (Op Art) established the tradition of intervening artistically to rearrange the building on the inside and outside. Dieter Honisch was also the very first commissioner to entrust the reconfiguration of an entire pavilion to a single artist. The artist was Gerhard Richter, whose international career commenced with “his” pavilion. That same year Hans Hollein and Oswald Oberhuber set an internationally acclaimed accent in the Austrian Pavilion (commissioner was Wilfried Skreiner) with two site-specific installations.

From this point on the preparatory trip for commissioner and artist has become a prevalent practice, with a view to designing the national pavilion for the next Biennial. In autumn 2006, the result was a beautiful image: Isa Genzken for the German Pavilion, Tracey Emin for the British, Sophie Calle for the French, Herbert Brandl for the Austrian Pavilion and almost thirty other artists were on the Biennial premises to carefully appraise the building each of them would be exhibiting in and the landscape architecture of Giardini. And then they all returned to their studios scattered around the world to continue with their work for the Biennial. The image is one of an imaginary worldwide studio where artists are now working for the Venice Biennial, which will open on June 10. The fact that predominantly new works will be on display at the Biennial is, incidentally, not as new as it seems. In 1948, Henri Matisse, when invited to exhibit at the French Pavilion during the first post-War Biennial, insisted that only his newest works be shown. He was right, because his later work (which at the time no museum other than the MOMA in New York wanted to display) triumphed and established his long-term fame.

The preparatory trip to Venice often influenced the overall design given a national pavilion. In 1995, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss screened more than 30 self-made videos from Switzerland, landing one of the major artistic successes of the Biennial among both visitors and the critics. They produced the piece after watching countless tourists on St. Mark’s Square, all of whom walked through the town with video cameras. Fischli and Weiss thereupon used precisely such a video camera to film their own country, and at the same time exhibited the films in the Pavilion. They had also observed something else. When the Biennial was not on, the “Giardini” gardens became a paradise for Venice’s cats, dozens of them playing in the park. Accordingly, they placed a bowl with fresh cat-food in their pavilion, something most people overlooked, but which the artistic tandem felt was important – for the sake of the cats.

Today, Hans Haacke still speaks with great emotion of his trip to Venice in the early days of January, 1993. He arrived there on January 6th, and as an artist with a Protestant background he was not prepared for the Italian celebrations of Epiphany. The German Foreign Office had suggested to the German Commissioner Klaus Bussmann, Director of Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster and co-founder with Kasper König of the “Skulptur Projekte“, that the German Pavilion house a contribution to the unification of East and West Germany. Klaus Bussmann invited two artists resident in New York to attend, namely Nam June Paik, who had spent almost his entire career in Germany, and Hans Haacke, who had lived abroad since 1960. Sitting alone in the German Pavilion, Hans Haacke had the idea of tackling its marble floor, which was the last physically intact testimony to the new shape given the German Pavilion by Adolf Hitler for the 1938 Biennial. Hans Haacke thus developed the idea of breaking up the marble floor and presenting it as a field of ruins – a surprise for the visitors who had not expected anything like this, let alone ever witnessed such a thing before. Haacke’s Pavilion won the Golden Lion for best pavilion for Germany and even found its way into history books on the topic of 20th century German history.

“We came to view the ‘gardens’ in which the old Biennial took place, 36 times since 1895, and lastly in 1972. We intended to decide in the German Pavilion whether we would be able to participate in the next Biennial and how the topic of “Physical Environment” could be addressed. There was a clear outcome to our visits and tours: the projects of Beuys, Gerz and Ruthenbeck reflect the joint visit. They are the product of discussions, measurements, corrections, memories and experiences, impressions and contradictions. They were created for and staged in Venice. They reflect the topic of the 1976 Biennial just as much as they do the impressions we had of the city for two days in November. The works refer to the building and its rooms, to the pathos of the architecture and to nature in the gardens, to the city of Venice and the cities of Düsseldorf and Paris.”

Klaus Gallwitz, Biennial Commissioner for Germany for the 1976, 1978 and 1980 Biennials, traveled to Venice in November 1975 with the three artists he had chosen. The 1974 Biennial had not taken place as the fierce political debate in Italy prevented the new statutes from being enacted. In its stead, an exhibition was held in protest against Augusto Pinochet’s coup. In 1976 a decision was taken which of the founding nations would participate once more in the Venice Biennial. Joseph Beuys’ “Tram Stop”, toured the world and established his international reputation – six months after he had joined Klaus Gallwitz for the trip it was realized in the German Pavilion, the walls of which were severely damaged by moisture from the lagoon.

Four years later, Georg Baselitz, again nominated by Klaus Gallwitz, decided at the very last moment not to display the painting he had created after returning from his trip to Venice, and instead his first sculpture, carved straight from wood and likewise made directly on returning from the preparatory trip. Several gallery owners who owned Baselitz paintings were indignant. However, by not exhibiting his paintings and instead relying on the impressive power of his wooden sculpture Baselitz won the day, and deep international respect.

Today, a preparatory trip to Venice has become something that most artists who exhibit in a national pavilion at the Biennial take as a given. This can be explained primarily by the fact that over about the last 30 years most artists (irrespective of the media or expressive direction they prefer) have grasped the idea of a solo show holistically, as a single entity in which the distribution and hanging of the images are as important to the painter as the specific spatial/artistic design is to an installation or media artist. Moreover, the national pavilions at the Venice Biennial are a special case: The national pavilions are unique instances of exhibition architecture. The comparatively small buildings exist solely for the purpose of exhibitions. The additional infrastructure that any art gallery or museum possesses, such as offices, toilets and a storeroom, are nowhere to be found in the Venetian national pavilions. An artist who agrees to participate thus tends to find himself confronted for the first time by a thoroughbred exhibition space, and if he refers the exhibits to the architectural space as a whole, then the oeuvre will be displayed in an especially consistent and ingenious framework.

This practice of devising the exhibition as a totality and treating the national pavilion as one single volume, was first deployed at the beginning of the 20th century not least by the art and exhibition strategies of the Viennese Secession. Their idea of the gesamtkunstwerk made the universalistic claim to expressing a harmonious concept of the world and the social domain, something in which art of today no longer believes so straightforwardly. However, the Austrian Pavilion, designed in January 1934 by Josef Hoffmann as a “second secession”, strongly supports the current notion of an exhibition building as a single spatial entity. Indeed, it is also the clearest “white cube” and most neutral exhibition space of the Venetian pavilions.

Herbert Brandl, for all his training in the media arts, has from the very outset focused on paintings mounted on stretcher frames as his medium and directly after his nomination resolved deliberately only to showcase painting in Venice. It was thus all the more interesting to see how, when visiting the Austrian Pavilion last November, he carefully studied the volume and architectural details of the building – not with a view to changing the rooms by installations, but instead with an eye to creating the best possible conditions for the visibility of the pictures, for the interaction between paintings and pavilion. From this vantage point, we then decided in favor of a series of temporary modifications to the pavilion; they will be very discreet but will nevertheless make certain that the visitor has the impression of never having seen the pavilion this way before.

Robert Fleck