Steve McQueen's "Giardini" at the Venice Biennale

British artist Steve McQueen invites viewers to examine life in the Venetian muncipal gardens in his new film, Giardini. The Times Online writes, "With the Giardini as a subject he is on fertile historic ground. This leafy park, first laid out by the decree of a conquering Napoleon, has the feel of an upmarket housing estate. A host of nations — but first and most prominently the leading colonial powers — have been invited to build their own quirkily distinctive and often boastfully grandiose pavilions. It is as if the age of empire has arrived on Wisteria Lane. And colonialism is an area that McQueen, a deeply politicised artist of Afro-Caribbean ancestry, has repeatedly addressed.

But don’t expect a rant. If McQueen feels anger, he restrains it with an almost ferocious self-control. Occasionally you can imagine his white-knuckle grip on the camera. The easy catharsis of overspilling emotion is denied as he focuses on the formal elements of film-making — on framing and viewpoints, on lighting and speed — so that the spectator can start to do the feeling instead.

Giardini is a rigorously understated piece that shows us the gardens in winter. This strange hangover of a lost era of empire, currently heaving with excitable visitors, is abandoned to rubbish and builders’ detritus, to a pair of gay lovers and a pottering bag lady. The viewer gazes, sometimes in tight close-up, sometimes down long dripping vistas, at a desolate world of bare branches and burrowing beetles, boarded-up doorways and a pair of prowlers. A soundtrack of hammering raindrops and church bells, of birds singing and crowds chanting, builds up and then dies away periodically into a silence so thick that you almost suffocate. Black dogs scavenge, like a ghostly depression, around the scene.



Interview with Steve McQueen