At this year's Venice biennale, which opens on 10th June, the British, French and German pavilions will each be occupied by each country's leading female artist—Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle and Isa Genzken respectively. There will be much talk of the three beauty queens—or more likely divas—of the biennale. Art critics and journalists will no doubt fall back on national stereotypes and gender clichés, and for once they will have a point. The combination of these artists—perhaps a brilliant coincidence, perhaps the result of devious design—is a reminder that even though we live in a globalised art world full of liberated female artists, national and sexual differences still count.
To give you a quick idea, I approached all three artists for interviews, and they each responded in a distinctive but equally infuriating way. Tracey Emin, I was informed, liked to get paid. Isa Genzken, I was told, never did interviews because she was too depressed. Sophie Calle said yes, but her trick is always to give exactly the same interview as she gave to Le Monde in 1983, as if the interview itself were one of her conceptual art works. So there you have it: the cocky Brit, the angst-ridden German and the cunning Frenchwoman.
Pithy comparisons don't stop there. Take their public images: Emin is the enfant terrible (excuse the French) who swears and drinks; Calle the femme fatale who has had many lovers; and Genzken the recluse with a philosophical vision. Next, there's their modes of conversation: Emin is rude; Calle flirtatious; Genzken analytical. Calle dresses elegantly, Emin tends to look a bit frumpy, and the elusive Genzken, in the few photos I have seen, looks as if she's on her way to a 1980s feminist convention. Even the famous ex-boyfriends of these artists speak volumes about their differences. Calle was once the partner of the late French intellectual Jean Baudrillard, who famously announced that the real no longer existed. Genzken is the ex-wife of Germany's most important postwar painter Gerhard Richter, whose best paintings capture the qualities of a photograph, complete with motion blur, grain and out-of-focus effects. Emin, meanwhile, went out with Billy Childish, a poet who fronted the legendary 1980s rockabilly band the Milkshakes, but who is today best known for his disgruntled opposition to the Turner prize and Britart. So there you have it again: French post-structuralism, German phenomenology and British punk.
We don't know exactly what Emin is making for Venice, but her work, though as autobiographical and emotional as Calle's, is also its intellectual antithesis. Her unmade bed, the sewn-pieces that quote arguments with boyfriends, her scrawled handwriting turned into neon signs: all monumentalise her love life as art. But this is not a world of disappointment, tragedy and melancholy, like that of Calle, but one of sexual adventure, drunkenness and petulance. While the Frenchwoman's culture is that of the left bank, Emin's aesthetic is that of binge-drinking British teenagers in provincial towns.
Isa Genzken, aged 59, is the oldest of the three, yet her art is not well known to a British audience. She began by making feminine versions of abstract minimalist sculptures, often beautiful tapering thin ellipses that stretched across the gallery floor: an organic European take on the big American aesthetic of Richard Serra and Carl Andre. But her work nowadays cannot be so easily defined by gender or geography. In the last decade, she has been applying the techniques and aesthetic of collage to sculpture. Contemporary found objects, such as designer furniture, cheap wrapping paper and plastic flowers, as well as her signature materials of holographic-patterned cardboard, tiled mirror paper and perspex, come together in complicated, formally brilliant arrangements. Colourful and theatrical, Genzken's sculptures evoke a Riddley Walker-esque post-apocalyptic near future in which children shoot their own horror movies, and plastic flowers and bundles of tinsel are arranged in totemic columns. For the biennale, she is making an installation called Oil, which she claims will not be a critique of the Iraq war.
The odds are that one of these women will win the Golden Lion award. Given all the chatter, it seems unlikely that the judges will bypass them. I would put my money on Isa Genzken becoming Miss Venice biennale 2007. She is a fabulously original artist, for whom, the whole art world agrees, recognition is long overdue. Also, I always did prefer German girls.
