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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?
Another video work I found very engaging was an animation installation entitled La Figlia di Isacco by Valerio Berruti. Here's a page from his website that shows some stills of his process. When I first came into the large room that held this among many other works, I was captivated by the music I heard and wanted to know which piece it "belonged" to. When I walked around the box, which was about ten or twelve feet high//wide, I enjoyed the drawings and knowing that the music was related to them, but when I turned the last corner and saw the animation going on inside, I stopped. I was simply mesmerized watching this little girl turn in her highchair, and couldn't help but identify with her, feel it was me turning in the chair. The experience immediately recalled memories of being a child and feeling a fear of being alone, as well as feelings of helplessness and dependence--what it felt like to be put somewhere and not be able to get down or move from it until someone comes to help you. I was struck by the feeling of smallness and vulnerability. I didn't understand the title when I was there, but it translates as The Daughter of Isaac. Because I have never known the bible very well, so when I came home I looked up the story of Isaac, who it turns out did not have a daughter. The fictional nature of this adds another layer to the piece because the girl becomes the one who was forgotten, who was never spoken of, not written about or remembered and this adds to her loneliness and sense of abandonment.
Formally, Berruti took a simple idea and carried it out with only a red crayon, white gesso, and the brown paper in just a few spare contours and painted white background to make what turns out to be a quite-complex animation of a little girl's movements. I found myself thinking of how many hundreds of drawings it must have taken to make this, which is even clearer from the stills on his website. The small shifts between his drawn frames contributes to the child-like quality, and the limited materials speak to many children's books (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Swimmy, or books by Eric Carl, for example). If this had just been a video of a girl moving around in a chair with the same music it would not have had the same effect. The translation into drawings is essential here because it focuses our attention on her movement, which Berruti captured with a lot of truth--they are the movements of any curious child who is sitting in one place for a while, generalizing her as "a girl" rather than being so specific as belonging only to the girl who he watched to do them. The animation would have also not been the same without the music behind it. The music is nostalgic, repetative, meditative, quiet, slow, and never quite feels complete, which brings on a sense that we must stay here until there is more resolution. The simplicity//complexity of the animation coupled with the repetitive, leading music just held me. Standing there, I realized that I didn't mind feeling small, that Berruti had made it okay to feel small and vulnerable. This is an amazing thing these days; very few artists seem to want to help their audiences be okay with their insecurities and smallness, but Berruti has done just that here. I could have stayed and watched forever, and I noticed that almost everyone who came around the corner had a similar reaction--we were simply captivated.
A few buildings over from Miquel Barcelò's work, I found an exhibition of videos entitled disorient by Fiona Tan, which I found very thoughtful and engaging. In the large room in the back was a video installation with one video of many fine traded goods from all over the world on shelves in a storeroom on one wall and on the opposite wall was a video of contemporary lives of people from the various countries being described by a narrator. It turns out the narration were of a man reading Marco Polo's writings from his journals while traveling. He speaks about all these luxurious goods and how wonderful they are, yet is very demeaning towards the people who make them, treating them as sub-human. The video of these people show the bad conditions in which they live and work, a lot of hardship, and through this juxtaposition of past and present, we understand that not much has changed since Marco Polo sailed the world in the 1200's. This piece deals a lot with natural history and exploration in terms of how we document societies and cultures, and plays on both objective and subjective realities. While this video was very socially oriented and related strongly to Venice's history (through Marco Polo), there were much more personal works of Tan's in the front spaces of the building.
There was a series of videos taken in a vertical format and in black and white (or limited color so it was nearly black and white), that had very slow motions of people, and with slow pans so that they looked more like photographs. I thought this created an interesting dialogue between the photographic and video in terms of what a motion-picture means and how motion in an image affects our understanding and later memory of a subject. That they were in black and white made further references to photography, and also changed my sense of time, though because they are videos, it is almost like they are stories of past and present. Old photographs are in black and white, yet so are newspapers, and these videos felt like they existed in black and white in order to be in that ambiguous space where we don't know whether we are in a time that has long passed or this present one.
There was one other work, which was projected onto two large vertical screens that were hanging next to one another. On the left screen came images of an elderly woman, and on the right screen came correspondant images of her younger self in similar situations. Sometimes the screens would both come to the same place and time, such as the old woman lying in bed, or a waterfall, and sometimes they would be aligned, but often they were temporally displaced by just a second or two. That there were two screens that showed different parts and that they were aligned vertically made the videos feel like fragements, which further emphasized that they were about memory and the act of remembering. The work was very quiet and contemplative, exploring how we come to know ourselves through time. I found the metaphors that she drew out between the women and movements of water--over a waterfall, the fall of rain, in the bath and shower--very compelling, and very much related to the idea of Tao. For a little while, we were awash with this woman in her thoughts and memories, growing and dying with her, falling right over the edge of rock and not knowing what we have forgotten. We were on her river, moving with her.
After a week's rest and distance, it's time to write a bit about our trip to Venice last week.
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 (I'll return to this topic later after I talk about some specific works that really resonated for me).
The first thing I saw here were paintings and sculptures by Miquel Barceló. I liked his paintings a lot--very large, nearly abstract canvases that were depictions of ocean waves and tides, a few of gorillas, and then some of seashells. They all had a certain physicality of the material, and in some the canvas was actually hairy, like fur, which was painted in layers to resemble waves. Barceló is clearly interested in having a conversation with the abstract expressionists regarding abstraction, representation, and flatness, and is making paintings that are very provocative in that sense because he's seeming to be of that tradition, but in fact is denying it. Yet while it seemed like he was really denying abstract expressionist values in terms of actual abstraction and flatness of the picture plane, I felt his relationship with the physical work and towards the feminine was very much of that era. There were a few sculptures shaped like very large clay pots in the first room of women's curved bodies but lacking any suggestion of their heads, being cut off at the shoulders and they were essentially menstruating as he painted dark stains coming from their crotches. They were beautiful forms, and many people didn't realize that they were depictions of women's bodies because they were so abstract. There were also pots that were simply ovular, but then were painted on, depicting women and donkeys//mules//asses, both of which shared nearly the same form. This was not okay with me--an essential equation of the woman being the mule as well as the headless muse who's only delight is the shape of her body. The seashell paintings definately shared formal characteristics with the vagina, which is something that is valid--the forms are very similar--but given the context of the sculptures present, I was a little revolted at the use of a vagina-seashell as a way to delight in the feminine form without acknowledgement of women as people who are more than just their mere bodies. We have minds and hearts and come in more shapes and sizes and have different interests, Barceló. We are humans, thank you, and far more complex than the image that you have given in your work. What disturbed me most was the video that he showed of himself and another man making a clay wall work--essentially tearing at it with their hands, gouging out holes with big shovel-like instruments, throwing mud at it. It looked a lot like the videos of men carving up and disemboweling whales in the early 1900's. The act was so violent and disrespectful, I felt sorry that the clay had to put up with that, and knowing about the violence of this process made me feel wary of the other clay pots, etc. in the exhibition just due to the material being the same. Moreso, his pots depict women, and if this is what he feels towards women's flesh, I'd like to get as far away from it as possible. This is sort of sad because these aspects of the work in a way prevent me from enjoying the conversation he's having with abstract expressionism on a formal level.
