The artist’s extreme use of the body has caused viewers to puke, faint, and leave her shows. At the Venice Biennale, though, her vision has made her a star.
By Lauren Oyler
It was the day before the press preview for the Venice Biennale, and the toilets at the Austrian pavilion were broken. In Venice, plumbing problems are routine; the city doesn’t have a modern sewage system, so it relies on its canals and the tides to flush out wastewater treated in thousands of septic tanks. A heavy rain can flood the streets, and private bathrooms. But the two bright-blue porta-potties were not here for convenience. They were part of an installation opening the next day.
Between the toilets, Florentina Holzinger was naked, in a decent-sized tank of water, maintaining a defiant, full-frontal pose, wearing a diving mask and breathing through a scuba. A steady stream of bubbles was making chunks of her long hair float straight up. Occasionally, her left pinkie twitched. Otherwise, she barely moved. The water contained urine from the porta-potties that had been filtered through a system visible beneath the tank. “It is maintained by the pee of the people,” Giulia Messia, Holzinger’s publicity manager, explained. “But no shitting.”
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