diversity//unity (making worlds, we're all making our own little worlds)

Coming back to this:

To be surrounded by so much contemporary art at the Venice Biennale was an amazing experience, but it was also incredibly overwhelming and exhausting to look at so much.

After going to MACVAL gallery in Paris, and in Venice: the Guggenheim, two huge Biennale sites, Academia Museum, and the two sites for the Mapping the Studio contemporary art exhibition, then the Lyon Biennale on the way home to Pont-Aven, we all said that we couldn't look at any more art. We were totally exhausted. We all hit this point (or wall) repeatedly each day after several hours of being at galleries, which is a pretty normal art-viewing phenomenon, but it started to strike me that this is a pretty strange thing.

What really made me start thinking about this was the difference between my experiences at all the contemporary sites compared to that of Academia. After the Biennale, it was honestly a relief to go to Academia and be able to walk through rooms and not have to enter and entirely new world every two minutes. At Academia, it was a relief to be able to sit and look at a work for longer than a few minutes and to draw it, to spend time with it and come to really understand how just one image is working. It was a relief to see how many artists had gone about communicating their own views of the same subject matters--Madonna and Child, the Annunciation, Adam and Eve--and yet they had come up with works that spoke about these same things in very different ways. I was tired physically from drawing after going to Academia, but not nearly so mentally strung out. I could find some overall reason and meaning from what I'd seen. Call me traditional, or whatever you want, but Adam and Eve by Jacopo Robusti detto Tintoretto (c. 1500's) was one of my favorite things I saw in Venice, and Academia might have been my favorite place we went.

It's not that I don't like or appreciate contemporary art, I really enjoy making work about the things I'm interested in and finding artists who I like and relating to their work, but that's sort of just it, too. Today, we're all just finding the things we like, what we want, creating our little niche that's great for each of us, and then telling people about that. If we're all telling people about our own little world, what we say starts to lose meaning amidst all the people chattering. What I say or you say becomes insignificant. This experience of going to see artwork and trying to listen to so many disparate voices is, honestly, getting a little old. I'm always expecting something new and different within a gallery and it's tiring to have to experience so much plurality, so much so that seeing more of the same thing actually sounds really really good. A little more cohesion would be so wonderful.

At the Biennale, the works within each country were different enough from each other, you would think that at least people from the same culture might be speaking about similar things. But it seems we've lost our local cultures in favor of individual interests in x or y. Venice was like reading all of these chapters out of a the same book, but they don't make sense as a whole, there's no theme, nothing to keep them together other than that each chapter is it's own little world. I just realized that this is starting to sound like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (I posted on it a few weeks ago), yet his book was held together by being actual descriptions of physical worlds and their laws of being. At Venice, the theme was Making Worlds, and while some artists took that more literally than others, the works were so vastly diverse that if there was an overall interweaving I certainly couldn't make sense of it.

Isn't that a little sad? Isn't there something we can all start to gather around once more other than how great it is to be able to have our own individual interests? Not that we all should start painting again or making work about the Madonna and Child--that's not relevant anymore. The thing is, I don't know what is relevant to us all. Is there anything we can start to share and build more of a community around? What happens when culture and art loose all sense of cohesion? With having such a globalized world, is that at all possible? And does anyone else want more cohesion, or is it just me? Am I just the crazy one?