Art and Truth on Canale Scomenzera

The first time I noticed the life-size tank and giant pair of hands on the side of Canale Scomenzera, on the busy fondamenta at the western end of the Santa Marta section of Venice, I was disappointed not to have a camera with me and was sure it would be loaded onto a barge and hauled off any day. From what I could see it didn't appear to be an especially interesting piece of art, really, but the novelty of seeing it in the middle of a dock usually given over to construction materials and gravel and garbage barges endowed it with a certain interest.

That was over a year ago.

Soon after I first saw it, I'd periodically think that I really should make a point of going to take a photo of it before it disappeared--but I never did. And when I happened past it on a vaporetto, on the way to Piazzale Roma, say, I either never had a camera with me or, if I did, the tank and giant hands were entirely hidden by a load of grocery crates or something.

And the longer it remained in the same place, amid all the practical or industrial and non-aesthetic stuff of the fondamenta, the more my interest in it faded.

Only last week, as we returned home on a vaporetto from a trip to the Dolomites, did I finally happen to get a photo. And only today did I finally find out what the work is--or was.

It's by the artist Lorenzo Quinn (son of the actor Anthony), and was featured in the 2011 Biennale in two places: first, floating upon a raft moored off the island of San Servolo and, then, on the dry land within the Italian Pavillion.

There were originally five life-sized toy army figurines that went with it, but they appear to be MIA from the work's present site on the fondamenta of Canale Scomenzera. You can read all about the work, and see it in its original and complete form, here:

http://www.halcyongallery.com/news/lorenzo-quinn-54th-international-art-exhibition-venice-biennale

The illustration of the article above shows that the giant hands used to have the coloring of caucasian skin, but that pigmentation seems to have been washed away over the course of the work's extended exposure to the elements.

I wonder what the story is behind the work's apparent abandonment on the docks of Santa Marta. It couldn't have been cheap to fabricate it, and contemporary art of that size generally has a pretty hefty price tag. 

And what about that green garbage barge with the provocative name of Veritas (in the photo at top) that happened to be moored near the work on the day I took the photo? 

What kind of irreverent philosopher, or iconoclast, or perhaps even misanthrope, gives the name of Truth to the waste management department for the Veneto?

If one of the defining aims of much contemporary art after Marcel Duchamp was to show that in the context of a gallery or museum even the most ordinary objects can become aesthetic objects of contemplation or "art", perhaps the inverse is also obviously true.

That outside of the curated venues of the Biennale, abandoned to the elements of the workaday world, the Truth is that even the most technologically-advanced of fabricated aesthetic objects becomes merely--well, becomes merely garbage. Just another thing taking up space on a dock with too little of it anyway. Of interest, finally, only in its minimal usefulness as a surface to lean the broken rudder of a boat against.

Venice Biennale: The Future of a Promise, Pan-Arab Exhibition

At a certain point in the 20th Century it seems it became fashionable for certain cognoscenti to announce: Painting Is Dead. Then in the 1980s it was "miraculously reborn" as an obscenely lucrative medium, complete with its own latter-day de Koonings and Pollocks self-consciously mimicking the heroic days of those masters, and it was no longer so important--or even advisable--to assert its passing. Some people still do, of course, but as long as there's an international market for it it's not imperative to do so.

I was never qualified to make such a pronouncement and no one, not even myself, cared what I thought about Painting's viability. And, besides, as I have a sister who's a painter how could I take pleasure in the thought of its passing? But I must confess that recently during one or two of my grumpier days as I walked through this or that Biennale pavilion I was surprised to find myself sympathizing--and completely!--with those who talked of its demise. In our media-saturated age how could ancient old toothless Painting, depending entirely on so many now-familiar motifs and strategies, possibly still reach us?

Then I saw the work Al Maw3oud by the Lebanese painter Ayman Baalbaki and was reminded how.

Painting could still be monumental and striking, complex and suggestive of any number of contradictory ideas all at once. Instead of seeming like the oldest medium on display it could seem like the freshest and most immediate. At least to me.

detail of Al Maw3oud

But, then, there are a number of striking pieces, in different media, on display in The Future of a Promise. Another, by the Saudi artist Ahmed Mater, struck me as having far more to suggest about one of the defining myths of America--and its reality--than any of the momentarily eye-catching and costly pieces in the American pavilion which, finally, I can only describe as high concept, low impact.

At first sight, I thought Mater's The Cowboy Code was nothing more than a homey American needlepoint sampler recreated on an absurdly massive scale.

But then I stepped up close to the piece and discovered the entire thing was composed of the plastic ammunition discs for a toy cap gun, as you can see below.

It's a dark witty piece that, unlike a number of other works in the Biennale, does not stop at wit, at a knowing punch line. I find myself thinking of the piece still, days later.

Venice Biennale: Ukraine Pavilion Part 2 (San Fantin)

 

A dark rainy day like today was the perfect time to see Oksana Mas's work in the beautiful (and usually closed) church of San Fantin.

You can read about and see images of other parts of Mas's massive work (including close-ups of the 1,000s of wood eggs that make up the works), as displayed at San Stae, here: http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2011/06/venice-biennale-ukraine-pavilion.html

Venice Biennale: Arsenale Fuel Tanks

There's no end of competition for the contemporary artist in Venice. As good as the works are in the Chinese Pavilion, I couldn't help becoming obsessed with the huge old fuel tanks lining the walls of the massive warehouse.

A little like the work of some contemporary of the young Rauschenberg & Jasper Johns

Time's incidental beauty

Yang Maoyuan's piece, All Things Are Visible, is visible on the floor

Venice Biennale: Italy Pavilion: Garibaldirama

 

A thicket of Garibaldis: detail of the work Innocente Italia by Lello Esposito (acrylic on canvas, bronze and iron).

Venice Biennale: Anish Kapoor at S. Giorgio Maggiore

I should say right off that I like the work of Anish Kapoor. His "Cloud Gate" in Chicago (which he hates to be called what everyone naturally calls it: "The Bean") seems to me like the most successfully integrated and engaging public sculpture I've seen. And I liked his deeply pigmented works before he went all reflective on us. So I was excited to hear that he would have an auxilary work in this Biennale.

Having finally seen "Ascension", though, I've realized that the sound of eight towering stacks of powerful fans beneath a dome of one of Palladio's masterpieces is every bit as annoying as the canned music that certain other great Venetian churches--such as San Francesco della Vigna--insist on ruining their spaces with.

This explicitly-labeled spiritual work also reminded me once again that while the poor may still possibly be able to find relatively low-cost consolation in Religion, when it comes to Spirituality these days huge amounts of money are required. In place of the more traditional distinctions between these two terms I'd like to suggest what I think is now a more relevant formula:

Madonna, Sting and Oprah are all extremely spiritual.

Someone like Mother Teresa, having taken a vow of poverty, could only have been religious.

In America at least, anything that pitches itself as spiritual typically requires a platinum American Express card. 

In the case of the mystical almost immaterial experience promised us by Anish Kapoor in "Ascension", it requires all those fans burning through unimaginable quantities of kilowatt hours and major corporate funding. (Like the work? Buy the commemorative espresso service!)

It's an extremely strange work of art in that it requires nothing so quaint as a "willing suspension of disbelief" but, instead, an extremely determined kind of tunnel vision. Having seen the posters for the piece around town, which showed the most ethereal of works--nothing more than moody smoke--I was shocked to walk into the church and encounter not just the fans and their din, but a huge circular nearly-six-foot-tall base (whose form and material suggested the reception desk of a contemporary medical center), and a massive curved ventilation pipe extending out into the space below the center of the dome--its size and shape like something out of Dr. Seuss. Comical in the context, a little wacky.

As the photo illustrating this post shows, I was determined to have the pure experience promised by the publicity material. There's no sign of the huge Seussian ventilation pipe drawing the funnel of smoke upward, and the stack of fans are relegated to the edges of the frame.

Only after leaving the church did I realize how completely insane this was. I willfully ignored 90% of the experience of the work in order to capture the more picturesque and completely unrepresentative 10%.

This is the kind of willful self-deception required by politics--and advertising--not good art.

"Ascension" was originally created for a specific site in a very poor street in Brazil. In such a busy setting I imagine the noise of the fans and all the rest of the very material construction required to create the immaterial effects of this work seemed far less intrusive--and, thus, far less absurd. I'm surprised that an artist who has been very outspoken about his belief that most public art is bad precisely because it has no relation to its site (see Charles Ray's "Boy with Frog") would allow it to be installed in a space in which it fits so poorly.

For in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore it seems like a work of unintentional self-parody.  Reminiscent of those traveling spiritualistic charlatans of the 19th and early 20th-century and their elaborate stagecraft, but presented in the grotesquely bloated terms of our own day. Or like some satirical Rube Goldberg-ian contraption whose enormous expenditures of energy, money and materials produces only a little smoke for the viewer--and its own self-perpetuation.

Venice Biennale: Unofficial Venice Pavilion: "Nude Outside Bath"

I don't mean to slight the official Venice Pavilion in the Biennale but the installation I saw (and posted about) Sunday in the Brazil Pavilion by Artur Barrio reminded me of another, well, exhibition I recently saw on the edges of the Giardini Pubblici.

One of the focal points in Barrio's site specific installation is a scaffold which, with its dirty sheets and two sacks of grain for pillows, its variety of empty bottles and glasses, scraps of building materials and other waste, attests to the process of the work's creation and the former presence of the artist. Messy life, or at least traces of it--some of them still rotting (the fish in the crates of salt near the make-shift cot), some of them just the usual plastic waste of our society--defy and disrupt the pristine order we might expect in an exhibition space.

Does it surprise us and pull us up short? Well, no, in this context it's kind of what one expects.

Unlike the work pictured below. Another site-specific installation, on the edge of the Riva dei Partigiani, right next to Carlo Scarpa's once-floating/now stationary Monument to the Women Partisans.

Like Artur Barrio's most famous works, his "situations", the above installation is constructed of the most modest materials and yet has a disorienting impact upon its surroundings. But the above work is not by Barrio. Nor is it, as far as I can tell, intended as art. 

A man really does seem to live here, at least part of the time. Like most residences, the decor changes periodically. For a time there were two chairs (a visitor was expected?). Before the tricolore appeared last week, there had been a large umbrella. One afternoon I saw the older man whose place it is sitting in a chair beneath the umbrella reading. For a while I thought that perhaps it was just his terrace away from home. It's a great location, with a great view, unmatched even by those with an apartment on the Riva (in Manhattan it would rent as a one bedroom for $2,000 per month). When some people get tired of being indoors they have a favorite park bench they like to sit on. I thought this might be something like that, only expanded and more intensely domesticated.

But I now think this is his only, or at least primary residence. I say this because while I have never passed by in the evening and seen him sleeping there, I did pass by a few weeks ago and see him at his morning bath. He was standing in the middle of his living area--that is, the slightly lower level with the chair--completely naked except for a blue towel draped over one shoulder. A white haired man, probably in his 60s, with a round belly. He had a hand mirror and was shaving, facing in the direction of the Partisan sculpture.

It was about 9:30 in the morning and he seemed entirely at ease, perfectly natural. Nothing insane or squalid or threatening about him. Just another naked guy shaving in what seemed to be the privacy of his own bathroom. As if the walls and roof of what had once been his own little house had suddenly vanished, but he hadn't noticed.

Others did notice. While I stood watching him a crowded vaporetto passed by less than 50 yards away. But while I could see the vaporetto passengers watching him with amusement, he seemed completely unaware of them.

Vaporetto traffic is just one of the facts of life in such a location; live there long enough and I'm sure you reach a point where you don't even notice it anymore.

This is the kind of display that would get you in trouble in the United States--and perhaps in any other Italian city in which homelessness is more visibly a problem than Venice. But the man and his residence remain, undisturbed by the authorities as far as I can tell. I should probably try to find out more about him, what his situation is. But for now I simply hope that his run extends beyond that of the Biennale.  

Venice Biennale: Brazil Pavilion

It's a hard thing to be an artist these days. Especially in something like the Venice Biennale.

At one time I'm sure it was supposed to be a great honor to be selected to represent your country--but that phrase alone, to "represent your country," involves the contemporary artist in all kinds of problems involving nationalism and politics and representation of any and all sorts.

A walk through the Biennale can sometimes seem to me like a walk through an ingenious system of exquisite torture, in which artists find themselves in the most impossible of positions, struggling mightily to maintain their credibility as subversives in the most institutional of settings.

It's a losing proposition. Back when the Biennale began an artist could simply exhibit his (mostly) or her (sometimes) work. But many contemporary artists feel the need to call into question the whole notion of "exhibition" and "national pavilion" and a lot of other once seemingly straightforward terms that can only be handled safely within quotation marks now, lest the artist become infected by them.

 The Brazilian installation artist Artur Barrio bravely does without the quotation marks in his work, but the setting of the Biennale seems to present particular challenges for him. Barrio specializes in subverting the ordinary contexts of the everyday by preparing odd unidentifiable sacks of things--for example, a raggedy bloody bag about the size of a human torso, filled with bones and entrails and other unappetizing things--and leaving them anonymously behind on a sidewalk in Rio, for example, then recording the reactions of passers-by. One of the two rooms in the Brazil Pavilion documents two such works from the early 1970s.

At at time when "para-police forces" in Brazil were "cleansing" the streets of delinquents and poor children--that is, murdering them and dumping their bodies outside the city--Barrio's "placement of five hundred plastic bags containing blood, nails, dung, waste, and other debris in downtown Rio during the peak of the dictatorship’s repression” (Ramirez, Mari Carman and Olea, Hector, Inverted Utopias: Avant-garde Art in Latin America, Yale University Press) was a way of marking these disappearances, of trying to engage Brazilians personally in what their government was trying to keep out of sight.

These were brilliant works by an important artist--but how much can he possibly do within the Brazil Pavilion at the Venice Biennale? He has created a site specific installation but the setting of the Biennale works against him. No one is really surprised to find dried fish heads in crates of salt or an ersatz bed and refuse, empty bottles of wine, writing on the wall, scraped-off plaster, ropes and so forth; we're used to seeing a bunch of junk scattered around in contemporary art. There are so many other pavilions to see, viewers don't even slow to take it all in, much less react in any way.

He knows what he likes

Except for one viewer, that is. A pigeon happened to walk in while I was looking at the installation and he became very engaged with the piece. Specifically with a plastic sack of dried corn kernals hanging on the frame of the cot.

He watched the corn and I watched him. Then he leaped onto the plastic bag and, wings flapping, tried to break into it. He tried this a number of times with no luck.

He spent far more time with the piece than any human who passed through while I was there. Then, finally giving up, he walked out of the pavilion through the same door he came in.

It was the most intense interaction with any of the Biennale art that I've witnessed in my half dozen visits to the pavilions and, no surprise, it was by a creature whose appetites remained undimmed by the aesthetical institutional setting. If I were the artist it might not have been all that I'd hoped for but, considering the context, I'd be pretty happy with it.

Venice Biennale: Finland Pavilion

I went to the Venice Biennale late Sunday afternoon. I'd been writing, looking at words for over 5 hours, and the last thing I wanted to do was have to look at more of them. In such a frame of mind one is struck by just how many damn words there are to take in at the Biennale as part of the works themselves (not just as catalog copy). So much text to read, and even to hear--both spoken and sung.

But not everywhere. Below are images from Vesa-Pekka Rannikko's work in the Finland Pavilion. In fact, the below images represent only the video portion of the work, as the work as a whole also involves obscuring the outside of the original building designed by Alvar Aalto with "construction elements" (panels, 2x4s, etc).

So, in truth, the below images, presenting just part of the work, should be considered "details" of the whole, which when seen in its entirety plays with 2-dimensionality and 3-dimensionality, architecture, painting (as object and act), and exhibition space. But enough with the words already!

Venice Biennale: Haiti Pavilion Part 2

Five works by Jean Hérard Celeur (close-ups of front 2 pieces are on my first post about this Pavilion)

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse

 

Bawon Samedi by the artist André Eugène

The first of 3 crucifixion pieces by André Eugène

by André Eugene

Conceived specifically for this site on the Riva, Haiti's wealthier neighbors in the Caribbean are represented by the yachts regularly docked nearby, making this area of Venice something like a changing map of the Caribbean Sea. Above, a yacht from George Town, Cayman Islands beside the shipping containers of the Haiti Pavilion.

Today, July 28, was the last day for the exhibition. Tomorrow it is to be removed to make way for a massive cruise ship to dock there--where absolutely positively no one wants it. But the Haiti exhibition may, I hear, possibly travel to a museum in the Netherlands.

See the pavilion's website at www.deathandfertility.org 

My earlier post on the Haiti Pavilion can be found at: 

http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2011/06/venice-biennale-haiti-pavilion.html

Venice Biennale: United States Pavilion

A work by American artists Allora & Calzadilla

As the old song says:

Running on, running on empty,
Running on, running blind,
Running on, running into the sun,
But I'm running behind.

Venice Biennale: Ukraine Pavilion Part 1 (San Stae)

Passing in a vaporetto by the Ukraine Pavilion in front of San Stae you could swear you were looking at a detail of a painting depicted on an outdated Jumbotron--that is, one of the massive video screens used in American sports stadiums. An experience that didn't exactly thrill me, until I got off the vaporetto and walked close enough to the three-sided piece by the artist Oksana Mas to discover that what I had taken for some kind of lo-fi electronic video screen was actually a vast wall of hand-painted wood eggs.

Each of the three sides of the pavilion at San Stae, as well as the Ukrainian pavilion near La Fenice, are details, in painted eggs, of the Van Eyck brothers' large Ghent altarpiece. Some of the eggs are covered in decorative motifs, many others with figures, symbols or brand names. According to one source I found online (http://www.fundgp.com/en/media/news/190/) different people were asked to paint their idea of sin on the eggs. One egg per person? I don't know. But I suppose that might explain some (but only some) of the images you may find in the more detailed pics below if you click on them and look closely enough. Though if this is the case I'm dismayed by how many people still seem to equate the nude female figure with "sin". Perhaps just wishful thinking on their part?

In any case, this would explain only partly who painted some of the eggs, and with what in mind. Another panel, the one which depicts a detail of Mary's face, is composed of eggs painted in floral motifs and has nothing to do with any notions of sin so far as I can tell. Botanists or gardeners or disciples of John Ruskin may correct me on this.

 There's more to find out about this, and no doubt more that could be written, but better to show you some images--and here is the artist's website: http://www.mas-art.com/home

Detail of Mary's mouth

Detail of the detail of the crown of the Ghent altarpiece

 

You can see images of the central part of Mas's massive work, as displayed in the Church of San Fantin, here:

http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2011/10/venice-biennale-ukraine-pavilion-part-2.html 

Venice Biennale: Haiti Pavilion Part 1

Among all the various Biennale sites spread out around Venice and its various islands, I can't decide whether the Haitian Pavilion is the hardest or the easiest exhibition space to miss. On the one hand it's not far from the main exhibition area in the Giardini and situated all alone in the middle of Riva dei Sette Martiri. And yet people walk right past it, completely unaware that it's there. Or, more to the point, that it's a Biennale pavilion at all, as it consists (as you can see below) of two large freight containers, arranged in the shape of a Tau cross, in the red and blue of the Haitian flag.

The Haiti Pavilion

I've only seen a little of the Biennale so far, but among so many expensive spectacles and international art stars (gee whiz, there's Cindy Sherman in costume again, but in a bigger scale than ever!) the Haiti Pavilion acts as something like a counterweight. Entitled "Death and Fertility" it features the work of three artists (Jean Hérard Celeur, André Eugène, Jean Claude Saintilus) from Port-au-Prince who have reinvented Haitian Vodou figures in particularly suggestive contemporary materials: "engine manifolds, computer entrails, TV sets, medical debris, skulls and discarded lumber [which] transform the detritus of a failing economy into deranged post-apocalyptic totems." (Leah Gordon, adjunct curator of the exhibition)

For more information on the exhibition, more images of the work, and an excellent documentary on the artists, check out the Pavilion's website at http://deathandfertility.org

Below are two works by Jean Hérard Celeur that in a city filled with countless figures of saints atop buildings, within niches, and upon altars--figures of ceremonial, religious, historical and political import--I found especially striking. In them the history of international commerce, in which Venice played so major a role, is brought up to the present, depicted from the other side of that looking glass in which Westerners have traditionally seen only their own reflection.

A madonna and child unlike any of the many others in Venice
 

You can see more photos of the Haiti Pavilion at: 

http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2011/07/venice-biennale-haiti-pavilion-part-2.html

Back Doors to the Biennale

The 54th Venice Biennale opens on June 4 and preparations now seem to be going on almost around the clock--at least in some pavillions. Below are photos (taken this evening) of the back doors of a large pavillion officially considered part of the "Giardini" venue, though it is located not in the public gardens themselves but across a little bridge on the island of Sant' Elena.

In a strange way the old graffiti I walk past nearly every day (& that you see below) seems to have suddenly become, even before the Biennale has opened, an integral part of the exhibition.

Every inch of this large exhibition space is as purple as its back door.

The glow of a painter's lamp seems to promise all the significance of a video installation.

A graffiti plant thrives among real ones; a real shirt hangs among paintings.