2,967℉ in the Shade

And you think it's hot where you are this summer!

The artisan in the image above is one of Maestro Giorgio Giuman's three sons at Fornace Linea Arianna on Murano, and his work station is just a short distance from the factory's main glass oven, which burns at a temperature of 1,147℃ (or 2,967℉). To keep hydrated in such conditions he and his brothers each drink 6 liters of water (just over 1.5 gallons) per workday.

A slightly different version of this image was originally posted in late July of 2013, in connection with a post on the artist Judy Harvest's collaboration with Fornace Linea Arianna on her work Denatured.

Sunday in the Park with Tong, Today

Actually, it's within the walled garden of the Querini Stampalia Museum where the Chinese artist Tong Yanrunan is painting an open air portrait. An exhibition of Yanrunan's portraits entitled Face to Face serves as the compelling centerpiece of a broader exhibition of contemporary Chinese art (Splendors of the Sun and Moon) which is running at the Querini until 20 July. Today was the last day that the artist was scheduled to be there painting portraits (something, alas, that I only found out about today), but the portraits themselves, built up from thick graceful brushstrokes, are definitely worth a look whether the artist is around or not.

Of course the Querini Stampalia is always worth a look (though I think it's still the rare tourist who actually makes his or her way there, though it's located just a short distance from Piazza San Marco). And until 1 July you can still catch the fine exhibition of two twinned paintings by Giovanni Bellini and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna--an image or two of which I'll put into the next post.

A wall of portraits by the Chinese artist Tong Yanrunan (exhibited on the Querini Stampalia's Carlo-Scarpa-designed garden level)

Tong Yanrunan at work today

The 57th Venice Biennale Prepares for Launch

I must admit that my first sight of the ongoing installation alongside the Grand Canal in Campo San Vio of what I've since learned is a 66-foot-tall gold tower created by the artist James Lee Byars (1932-1997) made me think not of art at all, but of my first visit to Europe (and Venice) as a teenager in 1982, as then President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev tussled over the deployment of nuclear missiles located in, or directed at, Europe.

I couldn't help but think that if the economic and sexual Predator-in-Chief currently occupying the White House reached an agreement with Venice's similarly self-promoting non-resident mayor to deploy an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile or two in the historic center they'd both be inclined for them to have the kind of bling factor evident in the image above.

Once the scaffolding has been removed, however, I trust that Byar's The Golden Tower will come into its own as art, installed in a public space (as per the artist's original hopes) for the first time since its creation in 1990. It's one of the many official "Collateral Events" of this edition of the Venice Biennale.

The 57th Biennale itself opens to the public on 13 May (with previews beginning on the 10th) and runs through 26 November 2017.

My Favorite Work of Art at the 56th Venice Biennale

At times one or both of "Work Songs" co-creators also performed: in the above image, Jason Moran, on piano, with Jamet Pittman and Roosevelt André Credit

My favorite work of art in the current Venice Biennale, Jason Moran and Alica Hall Moran's "Work Songs", strikes me as the fullest realization of the two qualities that the Biennale's General Director Okwui Enwezor said he had in mind when he decided to create a performance space in the very center of the Central Pavilion: "liveness" and "epic duration."

Of course, the piece I've been participating in since the exhibition's opening in early May, an ongoing public reading of the whole of Das Kapital in English, also embodies these qualities. Marx's huge work itself is both epic and epochal, and reading a little more of it each session--typically 3 times every day--is an exercise in endurance as well as duration. But as "live" as we readers may be, we don't stray from the text, whereas the various singers (solo or in pairs) who have performed "Work Songs" can, and do, make the project into something new with each performance.

So if you're lucky (as I've been) to see a lot of the performances, you can't help but be struck by the infinite variety of approaches and moods evident in each 40 minute performance. This is "liveness" in the fullest sense of the word, and each performance is both a reiteration and a furthering of the whole project--which itself starts to seem like a nearly 7-month-long epic song, progressing as a song does, through repetition and variation.

The basis of "Work Songs"--which is performed Thursday through Sunday at 4:40 pm--is a recorded 40-minute series of tracks created with a variety of instruments, electronic beats, samples, and/or field recordings. The singers are given a track list with each track's running time and the lyrics of each song that should "go" with each track, but the tracks almost never have any obvious melodic relation to the song. This ain't karaoke; there aren't the expected, recognizable tunes to sing along with.  Instead, for example, the first song on the list, "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore", is accompanied by a rhythmic sound of chains, which returns this well-known song to its documented origins among slaves living on an island off the coast of South Carolina.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs (at left) and Lisa E. Harris performed both as a pair and solo during their weeks in the piece

But the singers themselves are in no way bound to approaching the track list in a certain way. Which isn't at all surprising given the musical versatility, inventiveness, and just plain fearlessness of the project's co-creators who, three years ago, were given an entire floor of New York City's Whitney Museum of Art to do as they liked with for five days as part of that institution's own biennial (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/arts/music/alicia-hall-moran-and-jason-moran-in-bleed-at-whitney.html).

One afternoon last summer, Alicia Hall Moran mentioned (almost in passing) in regards to "Work Songs" that they had aimed to create something that the singers could perform in front of a predominantly white audience without embarrassment--the embarrassment, I took it, of being little more than the rote representatives of a stereotypical "Black experience," doing traditional songs in crowd-pleasing ways.

As she talked a little about creating the piece I got the impression that even in the middle of doing so they had a sense of the singers they knew who would be perfect for it. But this wasn't a just job they were putting together for those singers (though singers are always happy when those come along), this was the kind of project that would, ideally, draw some of their best work out of them.

Jason Moran told me that when Okwui first contacted them about creating a live piece he warned them it would be staged in an arena area that people would pass through on their way to see other galleries. Perhaps they'd sit for a few minutes, but then they'd move on. And the piece would be, probably, 20 minutes long. Jason agreed. Then Okwui contacted him again and asked "How about making it 40 minutes long?"

"No problem," Jason replied. But then, Jason said, he set to work on it and he realized it wasn't so easy to occupy 40 minutes of empty stage time. "That's work," he said, "filling up that time. There were times I wished we'd just stuck to 20 minutes."

Indeed, filling up 40 minutes of stage time can be hard on the singers as well, regardless of the fact that almost all of them are not only classically-trained opera singers, but adept and gifted in an astonishing array of styles, with extensive and impressive resumes.

In fact, one singer told me that the classically-trained part of herself was about ready to freak out when she was first given the skeletal set list and told to have at it. She showed me the few pages inside the slim hardback book each singer brings to the podium with her or him and said, "Really, where is the rest of the material? I was like: This is it?!"

In addition to performing with Steven Herring (at left), Anthony Mills is now performing the piece solo

"Work Songs," in other words, is not only all about work, but it is itself work, and the experience of this work for the singer, the process, is foregrounded. Paradoxically, the unchanging nature of the recorded accompaniment puts more rather than less pressure upon the performer to be present for each session, to explore each piece anew each time--taking it apart or embroidering it, or both--and risking that it might just fall flat, instead of simply presenting a tidy, rehearsed, predictable performance.

I asked another singer one day if, given the challenges of the piece, there were ever sessions when she was tempted to "take it easy"? Just deliver the songs as the crowd-pleasers that someone with her voice and training and experience and charisma could make them, simply overwhelming whatever complexity or discordance the recorded tracks might present?

"No," she answered without hesitation, "that would be hard, not easy. There's work and then there's work. That would be drudgery."

In other words, among the many things going on in "Work Songs" (and I'm just scratching the surface here), one of them has to do with the dignity of work (just as Marx concerns himself with the same issue in Das Kapital, and the British artist Jeremy Deller does in his small piece not far away in the Central Pavilion displaying the electronic monitor each Amazon warehouse worker must wear on his or her wrist that constantly monitors their efficiency). The list of songs begins with purposeful, hopeful effort (even if originally sung by slaves), continues with the energy of "Rock Island Line" (originating with railway workers, then prisoners) and the mythic impulse of "John Henry," before gradually giving way to something that can be as crushing in its own way as hard labor: joblessness.

In this collection of work songs and spirituals the refrain of a panhandler on a city street--a field recording--is given its own place. "I'm looking for work," he repeats in the recording, "I'd rather work. Please help me if you can," in rhythms that are reminiscent of the songs we've heard earlier. As in them, the rhythm of these repeated lines seems to function as a defense against despair, a way to keep going, to mark time, and to assert one's humanity in the midst of conditions that would otherwise strip it away.

There's no way you can tap your foot to this, and it's often one of the most charged moments of each performance when the singers on stage take up this refrain themselves. Here, too, different singers (or the same singer on different days) handle this material in radically different ways. I've seen these lines sung with defiance and energy. I've seen them stripped of emotion and made strange like the found lyrics of some contemporary art song. I've seen them handled like lines of poetry, whose significance can only hope to be gleaned in the act of singing them: each word weighed in the uttering, each phrasing investigated for heft. I've seen them turned into the most heartbreaking or most anguished appeal you're ever likely to hear. I've seen them almost completely passed over.

Much of the time many people in the audience have no idea what to make of this part, and in certain performances the discomfort is palpable, and people simply walk out. In certain sessions it's been impossible to figure out if the singer really is asking for money--whether it's performance, in other words, or an actual request. Is it art or life we're dealing with here?

In fact, I've seen members of the audience give money to a singer--whose intention wasn't to actually receive donations, but who couldn't refuse them without destroying the performance.

I guess the question is at such times: is the singer working as an artist or working as a person in actual need? Or more generally: What kind of performance is this? Is it a performance at all?

Which, now that I think about it, are the same questions most of us ask ourselves when confronted by people in need outside the Biennale. As if the hard work that all of us find ourselves having to do involves at its most basic level simply seeing each other, recognizing what others need, and figuring out how (or if) to respond. 

In any case, where "Work Songs" goes from this point, how it moves toward its conclusion--its mood and its method--varies (like the rest of the piece) each day, even when performed by the same singer. There are performances which are pretty lighthearted, performances involving audience participation, others that are of operatic intensity, still others that are more like poetry. Some performances dive into the bleakest depths, others seem to reach some spiritual transcendence, and some few that I've seen from each performer, whether solo or in a duet, that simply blow apart the given form and take you on a ride you could never have predicted--and that can't be repeated.

It's this unpredictability, the inspired interplay between form and freedom encouraged (demanded?) by the piece, and the sheer talent of the various singers that has kept me going back to the piece throughout the summer (with the exception of its first weeks, when anxiety about doing my own job for Das Kapital Oratorio left me no room to take in anything else). I'd guess I've seen at least a third of all the performances; maybe closer to almost half.  

Those planning to attend the closing days of the Biennale still have the chance to catch one of the last three performances of "Work Songs" on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday (the 19th, 20th, or 21st of November) at 4:40, starring the immensely talented Anthony Mills.

UPDATE: 25 November: to listen to a full live performance of "Work Songs" by Anthony Mills visit: https://soundcloud.com/ghettotrance/work-songs-live-from-56-la-biennale-di-venezia

***

For those interested in checking out the just-released new album by Alicia Hall Moran, Heavy Blue, visit: https://aliciahallmoran.bandcamp.com/releases.

For those who might want to catch Jason Moran perform live (something I'd recommend), here's a link to  his upcoming shows (both in the US and Europe): http://www.jasonmoran.com/shows.html. Elsewhere on the same site you can listen to his recordings, etc. 

How I Came To Be in The Venice Biennale (or, Of Capital Importance?, Part 2)

Two readers of Das Kapital Oratorio rehearse in the unfinished Arena performance area of the Central Pavilion in May

Paradoxically, the fact that I've been at the Biennale so frequently since its opening is precisely what has prevented me from having anything to say about it. Or at least, any inclination to write it down.

When I first got the job of reading Das Kapital in English, I believed the entrance pass that came along with it would give me the chance to repeatedly take in pieces in a way most other people could not. I did one post on the Vernissage back in early May, but otherwise I was so entirely absorbed by preparing for what I was supposed to do on stage that I couldn't really think about anything else at the Biennale.

And how does one get such a gig? you may wonder. In my case, I was contacted by a member of the Biennale staff with the unenviable job of rounding up as many fluent speakers of English as possible who might not only be interested in reading Marx in public but also be available for a seven month stretch. Initially, they had only trained actors in mind, but in order to get a large enough pool of applicants they were willing to take video auditions from anyone.

Over 400 people sent in such auditions; the majority of them polyglot actors in their 20s from all around Italy. But being fluent in a language--no matter how fluent you are--doesn't necessarily equip you to deal with Marx in English. Native English speakers struggle with it--and especially with reading it out loud--so imagine how extraordinary are the language skills of those who can manage it whose mother tongue is not English (and who, in most cases, seem to speak at least a couple of other languages besides English).

Based upon the video auditions, the directors of the piece, Isaac Julien and Mark Nash, invited more than two dozen people to audition live in the Teatro Piccolo located within the Arsenale.

I hadn't dared or even thought of auditioning for anything since the fourth grade, when, after my bumbling attempt to secure a very minor role in some small classroom production, the teacher had decided the role could be better filled by a straight-back chair.

More recently, I had done more than 25 public readings after my novel was published in America. But before each and every one of those I'd taken one half of a little pill intended to ease back spasms, which served to blot out the upper register of panic I felt standing in front of even a small audience.

Those pills, however, were long gone, and, moreover, it didn't seem either practical or wise to depend upon them when I might have to read nearly every day--and more than once a day--for seven months. 

I've long loved empty theaters and empty stages, and that's what I reminded myself of when it was time to stand alone on an empty stage in front of an actual professional director--rather than a 4th grade teaching nun--two of whose films I'd seen and liked years ago (http://FRANTZ-FANON, https:///Looking_for_Langston). Even as my heart threw itself around my thoracic cage like a lunatic against the padded walls of a cell, I told myself what a marvelous place to be, up on that stage, beneath the peaked, wood-beamed ceiling of the old Arsenale. There was no place I'd rather be, I told myself. And, besides, I had nothing to lose.

There were three rounds of auditions on that stage--though the directors were so kind about the process that it seemed like you'd already been accepted as part of the project, even as you were still trying out. I was called back a second time, then a third, kind of thinking I'd already gotten the job. This was actually a helpful delusion.

I also benefited from not only being a Native English speaker, but from having some graduate school experience with Marx, and texts even more complicated than Marx. Though the energy we were asked to bring to the reading of the text was different than anything I'd ever had to do with such writings in grad school, and different, in fact, from the way I'd read my own fiction in public.

One day, after I'd finished reading and waited onstage for comments, Mark Nash said, "Well, you clearly seem to understand what you're reading, and that's good. But you give the impression that the prospect of all those pages lying ahead still to be read weighs very heavily upon you."

I thought I'd been reading with an entirely unaccustomed and almost indecorous amount of vigor!

I went home and, though I hate hearing my own voice, recorded myself reading and forced myself to listen. He was right! I became drowsy listening to myself.

By this time in April I'd made the final cut of a dozen readers--four of us Native English speakers. The directors had to return to London and we had a week off before resuming rehearsals. Every day during that break I forced myself to read--basically shout--Marx out loud in the closed bedroom of our apartment into an audio recorder, then played it back for myself. 

My six-year-old son, Sandro, began to mimic me. "AND THE COMMODITY...!" he would bellow. "...USE VALUE AND EXCHANGE VALUE...! LABOR POWER...! THAT IS TO SAY...!"

When I went to his first grade classroom for a meeting with his teachers, at a certain point one of them leaned toward me and asked, dubiously, if it was really true that I was going to be reading Das Kapital by Karl Marx at the Biennale.

It seems Sandro had told them all about it, and, I suspect, had been entertaining his friends with the Marxian phrases he'd picked up through the bedroom wall, delivering them in full comical windbag mode.

I could imagine how a six-year-old spouting Marx might have struck most first grade teachers in America, where the word "socialist" alarms people (and to be merely accused of being one is considered more damning than to be both a proven thief and pathological liar). Child Protective Services would have been summoned. Here, where the Communist party still has public demonstrations--even in the center of conservative Campo Santo Stefano--they seemed more amused than worried.

I thus fulfilled what I suspect is one of the essential duties of a father: providing one's son with a comic subject. But the practice really did help. Any time panic threatened during those opening days of the Biennale (before the general public could enter), when the gulf between the economic equality Marx espoused and extraordinary privilege of the audience (made up of art world insiders: collectors and gallerists and curators and artists and journalists: owners of yachts and palazzi and those who'd been their guests) was at its most extreme and absurd, I'd remind myself of the time I'd spent shouting alone at home, struggling to make sense of and enunciate the text. It always came back to this one-on-one struggle. Yes, I had to look up at times, make some effort to connect with the audience (or at least acknowledge their presence), but it wasn't like I was speaking extemporaneously. I had a path to follow, and had already put in far more time making sense of it than the 30-minutes my co-reader and I would be spending on stage.

But what was the point of it all? some people in the audience would ask after readings. It's a question I never thought I could actually answer for them, on their behalf, as it were. And though I have my own ideas about the piece, I'm not sure, after all, that they're worth going into. At least not here, not now.

NOTE: Part One on the subject of the Das Kapital Oratorio is here: http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2015/10/of-capital-importance-marx-at-56th.html

Of Capital Importance? Marx at the 56th Venice Biennale

An image of the Das Kapital Oratorio taken during the Vernissage

One of the works in this latest edition of the Venice Biennale that has gotten the most attention from critics was created by Karl Marx long ago. It's the Das Kapital Oratorio, conceived by the current Biennale's General Director Okwui Enwezor and directed by Turner Prize-nominated installation artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien. It's a live 30-minute ongoing reading (in English) of the entirety of Marx's magnum opus, staged three times (as of 15 September, two times) every day in the Arena performance area of the Central Pavilion for the entirety of the Biennale's nearly seven month run.

In his introduction to this Biennale (http://www.labiennale.org/en/enwezor/), Enwezor singled it out as "a core part" of the extensive schedule of live performances running in the large theater space at the very center of the exhibition (beautifully designed by the architect David Adjaye), and critics of all political bents haven't hesitated to take their swings at the piece, which in this day and age, and in such a context, hovers piñata-like at the heart of the show--just as Enwezor intended.

Some have praised it, others have derided it as an open contradiction at the heart of this international art trade show of the wheeling and dealing 1%, their mega-yachts hitched up along the nearby Riva. "What a yawn," some of them say--with an agitation that belies those very words.

As Aurora Fonda put it in Artribune: "Can you imagine a reading of Marx's Das Kapital at the first Biennale of 1895? Impossible! That it is conceivable today signifies that all revolutionary potential in the text is exhausted. To read Das Kapital at the 2015 Biennale shows that its contents are by now innocuous, and this is the only reason it can be loudly declaimed in I Giardini (dei Biennale)" (my translation from the Italian). 

Why not read Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century (published to international acclaim in 2013), another critic asked?

And yet another one, during an afternoon session of the Das Kapital Oratorio in August, actually threatened to disrupt it.

He approached one of the Biennnale technicians at the fringe of the stage and asked what he, the tech, would do if someone walked up onto the stage and interrupted the readers.

The tech--actually the supervisor of all the live performances in the Arena--said he would physically remove that person from the Central Pavilion.

This answer gave the would-be disrupter pause. He decided to clarify his position: the reading was not active enough, he said. What did a reading alone ever accomplish? There had to be physical confrontation, drama. This was the real stuff of revolution.

At least this was as much sense as the Biennale supervisor could make of what the man said. He repeated simply that if the man--an artist himself, it seemed (as his itch to seize the spotlight for himself might have already indicated)--tried to disrupt the performance he would be hauled out of the pavilion.

This extended exchange was taking place between the two seated figures about 8 yards away from me, in the first row of seats just off to my right. It was quite audible, if not comprehensible, and I was surprised that Giovanni the technician, of all people, would be carrying on a conversation at this time.

You see, I was on the stage reading Das Kapital while this talk unfolded--approaching the end of the allotted pages for that particular session--with no idea that my co-reader and I were in any danger of having company.

As it turned out, we finished our reading before the young artist could make up his mind to interfere.

Generally, however, in the more than four months my fellow readers and I have read Das Kapital, (having finished all three volumes once, and now well into our second go-round), nothing so dramatic is even threatened. People pass through as we read on their way to other galleries. Some stop and sit down for a few minutes. Some stay longer. Some few stay for the entire 30 minutes. As a reader, those are the ones you wonder about. Especially if you find one or two persevering as you read through what might be called the less scintillating parts of Marx's work such as:

"The commodities in which the 2,000c is embodied can be broken down, as far as their value goes, into:

1. 1,333 1/3c + 333 1/3v + 83 1/3s = 2,000c; similarly the 500v into..."

And so on: formulas of this kind for pages.

The challenge presented to us readers by the director of the piece is to dramatize even passages like this. Not in the sense of "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?", but in the sense of maintaining a kind of vigorous, animating, engagement with the text even when we can't help but know that to almost every listener who wanders in mid-argument such figures add up to nothing very meaningful.

After all, it's not a lecture that's been constructed to be understood as spoken, but a text intended for the page, whose reading may, moreover, start and/or end abruptly mid-chapter.

But there have been a couple of pleasant surprises when listeners have known exactly what we were reading--and far more about it than we readers do. For example, a pair of professors from the University of California, Berkeley--one of whom had himself read all of Das Kapital four times through and lead discussion groups on it as a graduate student at Yale--who were quite pleased by the project. Though even the 4-time reader of it admitted that he'd had doubts it could be read out loud at all: fearing that there were long passages of the work, especially in Volumes 2 and 3, that would basically refuse to be resurrected from the page and become a viable spoken presence. 

Other listeners have simply asked what's the point of the piece. One, an earnest student from the University of Heidelberg who was writing a piece on the Biennale for a newspaper, just asked me straight out if I thought art could change the world.

And that really is the impossible question--which few art world pros would express or countenance in such a direct fashion--that haunts this Biennale (and obviously rankles some critics). Is it really possible that Enwezor believes that such a reading in such a place can have any effect on anyone or anything? Or does not even he himself actually believe it? And if he does not, then is it, instead, simply an empty or cynical or naïve or fashionable--or insert whatever derogatory adjective your own personal politics provide you with--gesture?

I told the student I honestly had no answer to her question. It was beyond me to even begin to imagine addressing it.

But one thing I've noticed since she asked and I didn't answer is that the thing about a piñata such as this Marx reading is that a person's reaction to it and (in the case of critics) their manner of attack, reveals more about them and their assumptions and ideals than it does about the piñata. 

After more than four months of doing the readings I've come up with certain ideas about some of the things it might be doing, even if I still have no idea about its (or art's in general) ultimate effect. But if I'm going to go into any of those ideas I'll have to do so in another post, as this one's long enough already.   

NOTE: To read more about the Das Kapital Oratorio, and how I came to be in it, visit:  http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2015/10/how-i-came-to-be-in-venice-biennale.html

 

Looking at Bill Viola's Artwork, Thinking of Giovanni Bellini

An image of Bill Viola's plasma screen video Water Martyr

This is the last weekend to catch an exhibition of 15 contemporary artworks on the riva of the Giudecca beside the church of the Zitelle called, Heartbreak Hotel. Among the artists represented by a single work are Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman, and Joana Vasconcelos, whom visitors to the 2013 Venice Biennale will no doubt remember as the creator of Portugal's "floating pavilion" (http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/portugal-pavilion.html).

It's an interesting show that allows each work enough space to be pondered on its own terms; it's admirably restrained, you might say. Well, except for the show's handout on the works which has the unfortunate tendency to collapse each work into a tidily packaged message we can easily deposit in our shopping cart of experiences. A tendency perhaps in keeping with what the show's brochure describes as the "entrepreneurial spirit" of the artworks' collector and curator: one definition of entrepreneur being, I suppose, one inclined to impose a definite value on everything. 

In any case, one of the most captivating of the pieces on display is video artist Bill Viola's Earth Martyr, Air Martyr, Fire Martyr, Water Martyr (2104), which consists of four tall narrow high-definition plasma screens: one on each of the four walls surrounding a central seating area in its own darkened room, and each one showing a different solitary figure undergoing an ordeal with one of the four elements (though it might be argued that the "air" is actually more "high wind").

Each figure begins (simultaneously) in a subdued state, then is subjected to an encounter with his or her designated element that gradually builds to a peak of intensity. The water martryr, for example, lies curled up sleeping in the bottom of the small screen, before being hauled up by his feet in a deluge. The fire martyr dozes in his chair before the first flames drop quite beautifully from above like burning wax and little by little start to accumulate around his chair. The air martyr, a woman in white, is suspended with thick rope by her wrists mid-screen, her ankles bound by the same kind of rope and tethered to the floor. The earth martyr is huddled at the bottom of the screen among a mound of dirt.

The action in each case is tumultuous, dramatic, yet unfolds in complete silence and somehow, paradoxically, maintains a persistent sense of precisely-rendered tranquility. It was the persistent tranquility rendered with a preternatural clarity that, in spite, of all the movement probably made me think of two of Giovanni Bellini's altarpieces here in Venice: the large one in the church of San Zaccaria and smaller one in the side chapel of I Frari.

Though working in a radically different medium and 500 years later, Viola manages, like Bellini, to create a work that is both beautiful, "a feast for the eyes" as they say, and yet otherworldly, transcendent. Viola may, at least in the fire video, be using a "palette" more evocative of Caravaggio than Bellini, but he manages to distance his figures from the physical, bodily world in a way in which Caravaggio had no interest.

In his great San Zaccaria altarpiece, Bellini is careful to situate his "sacred conversation" between the enthroned Mary and the saints in what appears to be an extension of the church itself: the columns and their gilded capitals in the painting famously reproduce the columns that frame the painting in the church itself. The picture space, in other words, pretends to be an actual side chapel of San Zaccaria.

Yet this illusion of immediacy is broken by how Bellini portrays the figures themselves, whose arrangement, expressions, postures, all serve to remove them from any human world we know. For all the beauty of their brocade and silks, their sphere of existence--unlike that of, say, Veronese's religious figures--is not one we dare think of sullying with our human touch. The richness of Veronese's colors and surfaces is alluring: even his religious paintings are filled with objects of desire.

There's a hieratic quality to Bellini's altarpiece. It may possess a softly glowing precision, like an eerily-clear early morning in Venice after a night of gale-force storminess--but it has little to do with any world we can experience. Its tranquility is transcendent, otherworldly, airless--or at least filled with an atmosphere too refined for human survival.

And that is what I was reminded of while looking at Viola's videos. His four martyrs' apotheoses are highly aestheticized and occur, I'm almost tempted to say, at that contemporary point (common in marketing today) at which the aesthetic becomes conflated with the ascetic.

Viola may have been looking to allude to the religious iconography of Old Masters such as Bellini, but the look of the piece also evokes, at least for me, our own age's high-end commercial class-porn cult of transcendence and spirituality.

It's shiny, to use the title of a piece by Douglas Coupland published this summer as part of e-flux journal's Venice Biennale "Super Community" project (http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/douglas-coupland/), very shiny. Coupland writes (channeling Andy Warhol via David Lynch): "I love shiny, because the moment you see something shiny, you know there's going to be something rotten or scary nearby..."

But if this has any general validity--and I kind of doubt that it does--it has little to do with Viola's piece in which the "scary" part of martyrdom, the human part, is mostly left out. Just as it is entirely left out of any high-end advertisements for, say, organic cotton yoga clothing or exclusive spiritual retreat travel packages.

Of course martyrdom by fire was certainly not unknown in Venice. Indeed, during Giovanni Bellini's own lifetime he would have possibly seen or certainly heard of those "sodomites" burned alive between the twin columns of the Piazzetta "so that if the body is burned up by fire the flight of their souls is not damned" (from the Archivio Stato di Venezia, quoted in Guido Ruggiero's excellent book, The Boundaries of Eros). And the American Viola himself would probably have had a hard time not hearing of the CIA's extensive program of waterboarding--a kind of water martyrdom, in which death is approached but never achieved, over and over again--during George W. Bush's presidency.

These thoughts, too, occurred to me while watching Viola's piece--though I suspect they aren't "supposed to." They aren't Viola's intention (not that an artist's intention should matter to a viewer), nor are they--I've just found out by doing a web search on the work--the response of most reviewers to the piece. Indeed, thanks to the web search, I've just learned that this particular piece was created specifically for St Paul's Cathedral in London, where it was permanently installed last year. And in at least one other case, I've just discovered, a critic also found himself thinking of torture and advertising (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art//Bill-Viola-St-Pauls-Cathedral.html)--then feeling bad for doing so.

It is not Viola's fault. We are all of us drowning under a deluge of images more overwhelming than the torrent that batters his water martyr.

Bellini depicted the Virgin Mary and saints; Viola is depicting human beings. I guess part of me wonders if the tranquil air that was appropriate in 1500 for the former may, by 2014, be ill-suited and ineluctably corrupted.

In any case, if you are in Venice this weekend--or London at any time--it's worth a look, to see how it strikes you. 

An image of Bill Viola's plasma-screen video Fire Martyr

Diane by Joana Vasconcelos, foreground, with Katharina Frisch's Händler (Dealer) in background

Nick van Woert's Damnatio memoriae

Detail of Damnatio memoriae

One Last Look at Danza Biennale 2015: Campo San Maurizio, Yesterday

Dancers perform Islands Revisited by the choreographer Salva Sanchis in front of an appreciative audience--and, behind it, the palazzo where Italy's greatest novelist, Alessandro Manzoni, lived for a time.

The Dignity--and Thrill--of Gesture: The Biennale Danza This Weekend

Annamaria Ajmone turns the San Trovaso squero into her own stage

There are many reasons not to come to Venice right now--the immense herds of day-tripping tour groups seem more numerous and denser than ever--but one excellent reason to brave whatever frustrations you might encounter is the Biennale Danza, continuing through tomorrow, July 28.

Entitled La dignità del gesto (The Dignity of the Gesture), this edition of the Biennale Danza continues the tradition of transforming public spaces with extraordinary dance performances. Or, I should say, mostly public spaces, as one of the most electrifying of the three performances I saw yesterday took place in the suitably theatrical space of the famous squero (or boat yard) of San Trovaso: a solo dance piece entitled Buan by Annamaria Ajmone. We spectators crowded the fondamenta across the little canal that runs in front of the yard, while a few of the craftsmen who work in the yard watched from the rear of what Ajmone turned into a stage.

Other locations were the nearby Campo of San Trovaso--where six dancers performed a piece by choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb of tango-like passion and intensity (Nous serons tous des étrangers)--and Campo San't Agnese, where a troupe of ten dancers worked through the more restrained but no less compelling variations of Claudia Castelluci's Esercitazioni ritmiche (Rhythmic Exercises).

The complete program of events can be found here: http://www.labiennale.org/en/dance/biennale-dance/program.html

If you happen to be in Venice this weekend, I'd recommend adding some of the above events to your must-do list. 

Such public performances as those captured in this post's images, and free to all, are just a part of the whole program of events going on during the Biennale Danza, and evidence of the quality of work throughout. Though the various editions of Biennale Danza run for just a small fraction of the time that the Venice Biennales of Art or of Architecture occupy the city (typically just four days as compared to six or seven months), they're no less worthy of planning a visit to the city around. And they may even change the way one looks at those other much larger troupes of (tourist) bodies engaged in their own implicit and mysterious choreography within the city's venerable spaces.

There was no shortage of drama in Radhouane El Meddeb's Nous serons tous des  étrangers

The restricted movements and patterns of Claudia Castellucci's Esercitazioni ritmiche created another kind of drama

At a certain point of the performance a water taxi driver (bottom left) pulled his boat with his fares into the canal between the dancer and the audience (a perfect view!)--but, after an immediate outcry from the audience on the fondamenta, wisely retreated

While oblivious to such action as above, a man in a linen suit, entirely absorbed in texting, began to cross the stage of Campo San Trovaso during the middle of the performance. Quickly redirected by security, the man continued to furiously text, never once looking up as he went on his way--to the amusement of the dance's audience.

The Union of Fire and Water--and of Venice and Baku, Azerbaijan--at Ca' Barbaro

The entrance hall of Ca' Barbaro, with video by Almagul Menlibayeva on right wall

The exhibition entitled The Union of Fire and Water by the two Azerbaijani artists Almagul Menlibayeva and Rashad Alakbarov, which now fills most of Ca' Barbaro's piano nobile (and continues until November 22), manages to tell a story with the far-ranging sweep and drama and pathos of the best of historical novels.

Taking as their starting point the fact that the Venetian ambassador Giosafat Barbaro (1413-1494) "traveled to and wrote extensively on Azerbaijani cities and the court of Shah Uzun Hassan" (from exhibition's press release), the artists position Venice and the city of Baku as the two poles of an extensive series of cross-cultural exchanges, and conflicts, stretching from the 15th century to the 20th, when the oil magnate Murtuza Mukhtarov built a grand Venetian Gothic style palace in Baku for his beloved wife.

Having served various functions since its construction in 1912, the palace now houses the main marriage registry office in Baku, according to the press release, and is known as the "Palace of Happiness". Though the romantic tale of Mukhtarov and his wife did not itself have a happy ending. Just eight years after the palace's completion, Mukhtarov commited suicide after fighting against (and killing some of) the invading Bolshevik forces.

The Union of Fire and Water is an ambitious and interesting exhibition that manages to more than hold its own within storied rooms once frequented by Henry James, Robert Browning, Monet, Whistler, and John Singer Sargent. 

Much more information on the exhibition and artists can be found here: http://www.bakuvenice2015.com/

For those interested in an intimate (and pocket-sized but very nicely produced) introduction to Ca' Barbaro itself during the years when Henry James stayed there, I'd recommend Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro (Pushkin Press), which includes not only letters written by James himself, but is rounded out with letters from members of the Curtis family that provide interesting glimpses of their celebrated guest.

A previous post on a prior visit to Ca' Barbaro--when the palace's rooms were filled not with new art, but with the furniture of the present owners, and which includes images of the palace's courtyard made famous by its appearance in the BBC Brideshead Revisited--can be found here: http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/03/a-visit-to-ca-barbaro_27.html

A final note: The famous high-ceilinged salone depicted by John Singer Sargent in his portrait of the Curtises (an image of which is included in the earlier post above) is, unfortunately, not open to the public during the present exhibition. Though there is a link in the post above to a website with images of the salone.

The grand central hall or portego with a weathered metal house of cards sculpture by Rashad Alakbarov, Precariousness of History, that introduces a central theme of the exhibition. (Also of note, a large ceramic stove near rear windows: a heating source that WD Howells, writing in the 1860s, describes as being generally unheard of in Venice palaces.)

Stucco work above a door of the portego with satyr-cherubs

Rashad Alakbarov's stairway maze, Untitled (Omnes Viae Ducunt Venetias)

Alakbarov's installation Do Not Fear

A detail of a stucco ceiling

Stucco work above a door

A detail of a stucco ceiling

An Alakbarov installation with mirrors (with "I WAS HERE" reflected on wall at rear) in the palazzo's dining room

A detail from the dining room ceiling

An Almagul Menlibayeva video installation in which a sea appears to surge just outside the palazzo's windows (in another room, another pair of "video windows" create the illusion that the city of Baku itself lies outside the palazzo)

A detail of Menlibayeva's and Alakbarov's melancholy installation Conclusion

Monochromes in a Palazzo with a Colorful Past: Dansaekhwa at Palazzo Contarini Polignac

A large stucco ceiling in one of the palazzo's stairwells

Sometimes it seems that one of the biggest challenges for art works displayed in what are called the "official Collateral Events" of the Venice Biennale is not to be dwarfed by their grand surroundings--palazzi and the like--and their long history. And I'll admit that what draws me to certain exhibitions are, in fact, the places (and palaces) that host them--otherwise closed to the public--rather than the art itself.  

One such official Collateral Event worth a visit for both the art and the site is Dansaekhwa at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac (also know as the Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo) in Dorsoduro, just a short distance from the Accademia Bridge. Dansaekhwa, an important movement in post-war Korea, is the term applied to a school of abstract painting with a limited color palette and, in many cases, a strong relationship with traditional Taoist and Buddhist ideas. The exhibition is notable for the accessible way in which it situates the art in both Eastern and Western cultural contexts with an interesting documentary that loops in one salon off the largest of the exhibition rooms.

A good overview of the exhibition, its artists, and their works on display can be found here: http://www.arte.it/art-calendar/venice/exhibition-dansaekhwa-15217

Because of much of the art's subtlety of color and the importance of texture and scale to it, I saw little point in trying to photograph it for this blog. As far as pictures went, I focused on the palazzo itself, which, as it turns out, happens to feature some monochromatic pieces of its own on its ceilings, dating from a good two hundred or more years before the works it hosts.

The palazzo is now most famous as the former home of Winnaretta Singer (who became known as the Princess de Polignac), an heiress of the Singer sewing machine fortune, and the host (usually in her celebrated Paris salon) and patron of some of the most important composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Poulenc, Satie, and Stravinsky among them. A short distance down the Grand Canal, another heiress and patron of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim, would later set up shop in her own palazzo and become known as a major patron of 20th-century visual arts, but I can imagine some people arguing that Singer's influence in the field of music was in fact even more extensive--if less generally known these days.

And Singer's unconventional life itself (as something of a sexual outlaw) was hardly less interesting than her taste in music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnaretta_Singer#Patron_of_arts).

A view out of this palazzo's ornate wrought iron water gate onto the Grand Canal was the subject of a previous post, here: http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2015/05/looking-out-front-door-of-palazzo.html

Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, aka Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo, with its pretty loggia overlooking a private garden

One of the palazzo's ceilings featuring a monochromatic mythological scene

A detail of the same scene

A second of the palazzo's mythological monochromatic ceiling scenes

A detail of the same scene

A detail of a large monochromatic grid painting by Chung Sang-Hwa: Untitled 75-8-12, 1975

A portrait of Richard Wagner in pastel (and behind glass) in a dark corner of the entry to the piano nobile serves as evidence of the famous musical patron who once lived in the palazzo (and used to frequent Bayreuth)

This bust standing sentry in a niche beside the palazzo's elevator (perhaps a young Contarini?) attests to more distant inhabitants

This small exterior courtyard is the closest one can come to either the loggia (visible at top) or the private garden lying behind the green door at right

Looking Out the Front Door of Palazzo Contarini Polignac, This Afternoon

Both Ca' Barbaro and--almost directly across the Grand Canal from it--Palazzo Contarini-Polignac are hosting Biennale exhibitions from now into November, which means not only do you have a chance to see some interesting contemporary art gratis, but also to see the interiors of two of the most beautiful and celebrated palazzi in the city. Having visited both palazzi today, I can tell you that both places and both exhibitions merit a visit, and I'll post some images from each in the next few days. But, lacking time at the moment, I hope this view out from the water gate of Palazzo Contarini-Polignac will suffice for now.

7 Glimpses of the Opening Days (and a Night) of the 56th Biennale

The exhibition pieces start before you even enter the Giardini proper: this one (which I had no time to find out anything about) seeming to raise questions with its emergency service colors and material about what happens when a particular culture's very mode of dress starts to be interpreted as a hazard

My involvement in a Biennale project has left me with almost no time to do anything else but I wanted to post a few images from yesterday and today's opening days, even if I must do so with almost none of the explanation that the works merit.

At present I can only refer you to the Biennale's official website: http://www.labiennale.org/en/calendar/art.html?back=true

The Biennale opens to the public on May 9.

Oscar Murillo's heavy black drapes and Glenn Ligon's neon "blues blood bruise" adorn the front of the Central Pavilion

David Adjaye's beautifully-designed ARENA space within the Central Pavilion is the setting for a continuous series of live performances

If you look closely at the above photo you'll see a blond woman speaking into a microphone just beneath the "N" of FINLANDIA. But, like most people actually at the Biennale, your attention was probably entirely taken up by the table in the foreground laden with champagne bottles and the pourers handing out free glasses of it.

Isaac Julien's new installation Stones Against Diamonds received a very brief 1-day showing at Palazzo Malipiero-Barnabò. Its premiere will actually occur at the forthcoming Art Basel. Julien is the director, however, of the Biennale's Das Kapital Oratorio, shown in an image above on the ARENA stage.

One of the countless parties that punctuate the end (or beginning) of each of the Biennale's opening days--for a fuller depiction of which I refer you to Geoff Dyer's comic novella Jeff in Venice, in which a very contemporary English version of Thomas Mann's Gustav Von Aschenbach learns that even the consummation of one's desire for a younger beloved can leave a whole lot to be desired.