By Laura McLean-Ferris

There was a buoyant mood in Turin on Wednesday 5 November 2008 as the city awoke to the news of Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency. The 2nd Turin Triennial and the 15th Artissima Art Fair were both opening in the north Italian town in the same week, and the place was full of artists and arts professionals in high spirits. A sunny disposition like this is extremely rare in an artworld forever clad in mourning black.

A peculiar day, then, for Daniel Birnbaum’s melancholy triennial to open. 50 Moons of Saturn focuses on the melancholic spirit, a subject that Birnbaum has studied to great literary effect elsewhere. A mood killer of sorts. Because, lest we forget, there is always plenty to be melancholy about. The triennial is held across three venues in Turin. The Palazzina della Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and the stunning Castello di Rivoli in nearby Rivoli. The curator awards two major artist commissions and curates a group exhibition, the stated aim being to bring a selection of new work into dialogue with art stars at the top of their game (in 2005 these two commissions were given to Doris Salcedo and Takashi Murakami). The artists with solo shows this year are Paul Chan and Olafur Eliasson, though all three venues are peppered with a selection of 50 artists’ works seen under the cosmic influence of Saturn, the ‘star of melancholy’.

The Promotrice delle Belle Arti is the only venue with no major commission – and perhaps as a result, with the strongest and most interesting set of works. A grand foyer entrance space with a high ceiling is hung with Spencer Finch’s coloured light tubes, which attempt to project cosmic light conditions, while on the walls hang subdued Wilhelm Sasnal paintings, providing a summation of recurring themes here: cosmic planetary movements, muted drama and teenage introspection. A standout piece is Untitled False Document (2008), from young New Yorker Jordan Wolfson, in which a 16mm film projection shows an image of a plasma-screen TV in a soulless house. On the television screen is a video of a beautiful girl letting large pictures of fruit fly into the wind. We are drawn in and out of this image through changes in focus and a robotic voiceover that describes what we see before us. There’s touching kitchen-sink drama in Jennifer Bornstein’s 16mm film Celestial Spectacular (2002), in which the artist enacts dramatic natural phenomena (meteors, eclipses) using tiny homemade sets of cardboard and cotton wool, and early cinematic techniques.


Wolfgang Tilmans, Stadium (2008)


Ragnar Kjartansson, God (Dio) (2007)

The one problem here is so much grey. This whole building is grey: grey walls, grey ceiling, grey paintings, grey sculptures, grey photographs. Even the black-and-white floors come across as grey. Occasional colour acts like a bright beacon, drawing you towards Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs, Matthew Brannon’s letterpress works and a grand finale room hung with shining purple curtains by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. In a film within, the artist, dressed as a romantic 1950s heartthrob and accompanied by a band, sings the phrase “sorrow conquers happiness” over and over in a muffled tone for an hour. This nod to the theatricality of holding a melancholy mood for so long is a welcome acknowledgement from the weighty spirit of many of the works here.

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is less successful, heavily weighed upon by several pieces from Paul Chan. It's rare that I so aggressively dislike something. Hand-drawn computer animations depict a world in which bovine girls wear their dresses hitched up high so they can chew grass on all fours and then easily roll over and shit while masturbating. Oh, what a happy land! Then businessmen with mobile phones and guns come and rape everyone and set everything on fire, and the land is destroyed, though this keeps on happening in cycles forever. The films are ugly, the sentiment is ugly and banal, and the more I think about it, the more I hate it. There is another charmless video like this, and then a somewhat less offensive film made using a vintage pornographic illustration, which explores themes of masturbation, pornography and language in a kind of Marquis de Sade/Lacan remix.

Paul Chan, Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier) (2000–3) / Luca Trevisani, Per Pettinare lo Sazio (To Comb Space) (2008)

Certain themes from Chan’s films pervade here, including the imagining of apocalyptic futures. This is most successful in Rosa Barba’s excellent film They Shine (2007), shot in the Mojave Desert. A giant set of solar panels move in unison in a sun-bleached atmosphere, as a flat-voiced narrator describes a future community cloaked by giant mirrors that create an invisibility cloak. There is also a minimal and lyrical sculpture installation from Luca Trevisani called To Comb Space (2008), which involves an image of a leg printed across several open books, alongside other elements that seem to want to break out of the confines of their own objecthood.

Lastly to Castello di Rivoli, a spectacular castle overlooking the Alps. The grandeur of the architecture and the environment here lends itself to more elegiac work. Olafur Eliasson’s installation The Sun Has No Money (2008) is a deceptively simple, celestial installation of light projected through varying sizes of clear spinning rings. Inside and onto these tall castle walls, the colours thrown by the refraction of pure white light gives one the impression of being able to see the universe from afar. Life, from here, looks like an unlikely miracle of light that is somehow spoiled by the minutiae of human existence. In the rest of the exhibition here there are several pieces which explore disappointments and limitations. Ulla von Brandenburg’s curtains lead you down a theatrical path to nothing. Guido van der Werve’s deadpan video about the history of Steinway & Sons takes an operatic turn when he somehow arranges to play Chopin on their most reified model, the Model D Concert Grand, while accompanied by an entire orchestra – and all in his tiny apartment.

Olafur Eliasson, The Sun Has No Money (2008) / Ulla von Brandenburg, 5 Folded Curtains (2008)

Overall there are more than a few outstanding works in 50 Moons of Saturn, but the prevailing feeling is that this is Birnbaum’s exhibition, his strength of vision sustaining more than many of the artists’ works themselves seem capable of in this context. His comment in a recent ArtReview interview that he had tried ‘to push it quite far in the direction of a thematic exhibition’ certainly rings true. Melancholy, a subject dear to his heart (or should that be spleen?), is lyrically explored here in every possible spectrum, and there is a strong selection of specific works. Some pieces, however, fade to grey. Ultimately, wider judgement will depend on whether you believe that triennials are primarily for artists’ visions or those of their curators.