Arrival

I know it’s a tired story, but New Zealand’s geographic distance from Europe was emphasized for me once more on my flight to Venice. I had traveled for approximately 35 hours, eaten dry sandwiches at many airport transit lounges, been subjected to the Hannah Montana movie twice on a 11 hour Lufthansa flight, and been in an air conditioned environment for so long I felt like a human prune.

Nonetheless, my arrival to a sweltering Venice night was quite exciting and dramatic. As the plane descended, the sky was lit up by a spectacular electric storm. Gratefully, I met Veronica Green at the airport, and we scampered to the vaporetto as a much needed deluge of rain fell from the sky. Chugging down the Grand Canal in the rain, I thought this was an appropriately auspicious entry to Venezia, the city of history, love and death.

I spent a pleasant day after my arrival pottering around the Giardini. It is a very pleasant place to view art because you can take a break under the trees or on the grass when you are experiencing an overload of visual stimuli.

My view of Elmgren and Dragset’s work for the Danish and Nordic Pavilions was, similar to Julia Holderness’s experience, tempered by some contemporary art maintenance:

A wander around Daniel Birnbaum’s labyrinthine curated show revealed some delights. It’s good to see Yoko Ono and the Venetian City Council are on the same wavelength:

Once through the Biennale’s bookstore (trying not to spend too many Euros) I came across Aleksandra Mir’s humorous work. Arranged on racks are hundreds of postcards free for the taking, each emblazoned with the work ‘Venezia’. However, on closer inspection, the images on these postcards are evidently not of Venice; no one windsurfs here, and I haven’t as yet come across any thunderous waterfalls whilst lost in the Venetian streets.

The conflation of this city’s proper noun and another place’s marketable conception of itself highlights the vacuous production and consumption of images inherent in late capitalist tourism. Aleksandra Mir’s sly subversion of the conventional purpose of postcards – to promulgate a picturesque or sublime image of a site – is particularly pertinent in Venice, a city which has been captured and disseminated in the tourist photos of hundreds of millions of visitors from all over the world. Mir asks questions of the efficacy of the image and its supposed potential to convey what it is like to inhabit a place.

"air"

Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, by João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva (JMG+PP), and curated by Natxo Checa, is the Portuguese Pavilion for the 53^rd La Biennale di Venezia. The venue sits on the edge of the Grand Canal and is one of the only national pavilions I have seen outside the Giardini that has completely re-fitted the exhibition space, transforming it into a series of almost entirely blacked-out, museum-like projection rooms.

 
About Gravity, Photo, color, 95 x 135 cm, 2009. Image courtesy of the Portuguese Pavilion website.

The exhibition title itself proclaims a particular kind of process, or, more accurately, two processes: to experiment and to observe. With an explicit relationship to the discipline of science, these two processes for me indicate from the outset not just a way of looking at and deciphering the world, but also a particular visual realm of aesthetic objectivity. The legitimisation of this visual realm would rely on the employment of means with the most clarity, capable of producing and demonstrating the most convincing proof. But the title referrers to "different kinds" of the same substance, and must also necessitate an interest in the transitory, in watching a substance as it moves and changes from one state to another. 

 
Meteoritics, 2008. 16mm film, color, no sound. Image courtesy of the Portuguese Pavilion website.

To push something into a state of movement, with the hope to observe change, JMG+PP have chosen a series of sixteen 16mm projections to come together for Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. With no sound, a slow pace, and the warmth, texture and soft focus of 16mm film, the projections present an eclectic and enigmatic collection of short scenarios; from the apes and stockpot of The Soup, to the urn turned fountain and classical statue of Ventriloquism, and the ambiguous forms and movements of Meteoritics. These works seems to me, from the outset, to present quite a simple contradiction: how can we speak about a selection being eclectic and enigmatic when what connects their presentation is a desire to observe a pervasive substance such as air? At the same time, as the mode of recording and projecting these films places a particular mediality in the way of any contemporary idea of objective process, it became quite clear (?!) that the substance being chased here was much more accurately “air.”

 
Ventriloquism, 2009. 16mm film, color, no sound. Image courtesy of the Portuguese Pavilion website.

The title Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air draws on the work of British chemist, physicist and theologian Joseph Priestly (1733-1804), and it is his phlogistic theory, or more precisely, the fictitious possibilities offered by a historically obsolete idea of movement, that JMG+PP draw on here. Sitting in a series of dark rooms watching, for example, a pot of water being ignored, negotiated or sized-up by a group of apes (or perhaps it is the other way around?) turned my watching into a poetic kind of looking. When I realised that I was not waiting for any filmic event to happen as such, I was left to look for what was not visibly happening, to try and construct a narrative of absurd events, proven hypothesis, or developing phenomena.

3 Suns, 2009. 16mm film, color, no sound. Image courtesy of the Portuguese Pavilion website.

The situations recorded and presented by JMG+PP are unexplained and unjustified, but are nevertheless documents of actual, factual occurrences—or at least occurrences of fact as such within the space of the pavilion. It reminds me of the possibilities offered by the processes of cryptozoology—in which, surely, the desire to prove the existence of an unknown animal is really a need to nurture and protect mystery, and to challenge both our faith in what we think we see and the promise of an absolute, all encompassing knowledge system? 

Union of Comoros ‘djahazi’ update:

About six weeks ago I blogged about a work by Paolo W Tamburella and various (as far as I know un-named) Comorian Islanders – a djahazi (hewn-log boat) barely seeming to support the weight of a shipping container moored between four posts in the water outside the Giardini. Briefly the djahazi, outlawed in the Comoros Island uncannily around about the time of substantial foreign investment into the capital’s port Moroni and luxury tourist accommodation, was brought to the Venice Biennale as an Italian/Comorian project, but representing the Comoros Islands for the first time. A collaborative work under the direction of Tamburella with ‘Capital forwarding solutions’ stamped on the side of the container, it makes clear statements about the transnational movement of goods and capital and the generally proscriptive direction in which wealth flows.

 

The djahazi which had fallen into a state of disrepair prior to the Biennale, is again in a similar condition. Out walking one evening I noticed that the container had disappeared and the djahazi was partially submerged. A gesture was made to cordon it off and small sections of the boat were floating inside it. I contacted Paolo and we discussed the work, what had happened and what lay in store. It turns out that the very motion of ‘its own kind’, but especially the larger, faster moving mechanised boats, combined with the rocking motion of the heavy container had caused it to submerge a little. The container was apparently completely sunk and lay off to one side. Initial plans to rescue the components were to take place the next day.

 

Partially submerged djahazi

 

The crane-on-a-boat was visible from some distance and for the relatively modest appearance of the work there was definitely nothing cheap about this rescue mission. In a beautifully ironic, albeit unintentional state of affairs the container had clearly toppled over, landing upside down on the lagoon bed. As it emerged from the water, and in a gesture that tends towards underscoring the aforementioned trajectory, the ‘Capital forwarding solutions’ logo was also upside down.

 

 

Boat crane

 

 

Container with Paolo on right

 

 

'All go’

 

There were some tense moments when the djahazi was being hauled up, but despite its precarious appearance it was remarkably intact. The whole endeavour took about an hour. Paolo sailed off uncertain as to the future manifestation of the work, although the idea of assembling the components in their current form on a floating platform in the same place was under discussion.

 

 

Preparing to raise

 

 

Lifting up gently

 

 

In terms of elements alone – crane suspending boat – this reminded me of James Oram’s work in SCAPE, Christchurch 2008.

 

The work is interesting for the issues it raises regarding the (deliberate or otherwise) changing nature of works, and in turn how these changes impact on the nature of collaborative projects, especially those between so-called ‘first’ and ‘third’ world countries (Comoros has been designated a Heavily Indebted Poor Country). Paolo documented the rescue mission with a standard point and shoot digital camera and so this aspect, this act of transition will exist at least in the form of still photography. As for the next stage, this remains to be seen. In any regard, these actions have been carried out by Paolo in isolation which changes significantly the original collaborative effort that characterised the project. Given the distance and economic/ease-of-communication disparity (of the Comorians as a whole, at least) it is uncertain as to whether practical considerations have also impacted on Paolo’s decisions to act alone. During our discussion he said he didn’t want them to be upset by the situation, but the agency, visibility and voice of the Comorians, and to what extent dominant power relations have been re-inscribed remains in question.

 

Pleasure craft with ample personal security and guards.

Venetian Weave

The apartment for the attendants of the Aotearoa, New Zealand Pavilion is located in the San Marco quarter of Venice. A hop, skip and jump from Piazza San Marco, we are very much located in the thick of the tourist traffic that flows through the city in, apparently, ever increasing numbers.

 
Looking West in San Marco

Our morning walk to Judy and Francis’ venues takes us through some of the busiest thoroughfares of the city, past the glass, mask and gelato shops that Robyn has written about recently. I realised pretty quickly after I arrived here that there were some special tactics to master if I wanted to reach my place of work in time for our 10am daily opening. In the spirit of sharing lessons learned, I thought you might be interested in some of my findings.

Firstly, some astute observation of the average tourist was needed. As a general rule, tourists travel in groups, will often stop for no clear reason, tend to follow the photo-a-minute rule, and will most likely be caught in the lethally disorientating trap of being hungry, overheated and lost. In a city with incredibly narrow streets that follow the European pedestrian rule of staying right (as apposed to our left), an entire street flow can be brought to a standstill if a particularly hungry, hot and lost group of tourists get momentarily transfixed by a window full of well-lit Venetian glass chandeliers.

 
View South from Ponte di Rialto 

I am defiantly not in favor of the technique employed in the tube stations in London during rush hour (where a city employee is strategically stationed to remind travelers to “keep moving”), as I believe that collectively, we are much more infinitely flexible, sympathetic and adaptable than that. So, following the example set by local Venetians, I have adopted some navigational tactics that allow for an efficient negotiation of my route to and from home and La Maddalena, and the Fondazione Buziol.

 
Looking South in San Marco

It is best to locate your path of travel in between the two directions of pedestrians, as the most unpredictable moments happen in the direction of the shops and window displays lining the narrow streets. Once you have your path, keep looking ahead, planning your next move quickly—you may need to swerve and dive without warning, so keep focused. Some excellent accessories that seem to increase speed and maneuverability include: a mobile phone held up to your ear (talking occasionally helps facilitate a genuine look), a two-wheeled shopping trolley, a lit cigarette, or a small/large dog on a leash. Perhaps it is important to mention that although you should feel free to combine, say, the phone with dog/trolley/cigarette, or cigarette with phone/dog/trolley, the shopping trolley with dog combination (depending on how well behaved your dog/trolley is) could get difficult, and I would strongly advise against any attempt of the uninitiated to combine all four—the more imaginative readers among you can probably conjure an image of the carnage that could ensue.

 

 
Glass with ease in San Marco

With these helpful tips, and a few weeks of practice, you too can negotiate the mean streets with ease and confidence! There are, of course, less densely packed parts of Venice. To deviate from the main thoroughfares often leads to quiet wanderings through empty streets that open onto small campo. Searching for the many national pavilions, collateral events, and recommended eateries scattered around the city, you can sometimes feel as if Venice is a self-contained universe that occasionally deposits you at the labyrinths end, looking out towards the surrounding islands.

The vegetable island

Warning: no references to art made in this blog.

Venice was starting to stink. It hadn’t rained for about five weeks maybe and the streets and canals were beginning to register the unrelenting high humidity, hot sun and however many thousand thousand extra tourist bodies. That combined with the narrowness of the streets and corresponding tourist scrum meant it was time to get out, see something green and wander freely. Going to Sant’Erasmo, or the vegetable island as I have been calling it, for a couple of days was a natural course of action.

You catch the number 13 vaporetto from Fondamente Nove and travel for about half an hour before reaching the island, which is located in the northern Venetian lagoon and is larger than Venice itself. I just read it was once a key holiday destination for the Roman nobility in the region, but now it is predominantly agricultural and supplies Venice with a lot of its fruit and vegetable produce, hence its nickname as ‘il orto di Venezia’ (Venice’s garden). If you shop at the Rialto markets a ‘San Rasmo’ or ‘nostranno’ sign indicates that the produce originated in Sant’Erasmo.

 

Capsicum

 

The contrast between Venice and Sant’Erasmo couldn’t be more different. There are no, or hardly any tourists, only a handful of canals and so much green that it almost seems lurid after Venice’s built up architecture and tree shortage. Plus there is a feeling of space, openness and to top it off you can even hire a bike from the only B & B – Il Lato Azzurro (free if you’re staying there). Paradise. I got on a bike pretty much straight away because I was starving and needed to find something to eat. There really are not many amenities, or they keep ‘siesta’ hours, so I headed to the nearby on-the-beach café/fale type place. Then it was on the bike again, stopping briefly at the Torre Massimiliana (Maximillian’s Fort) which was established in the Napoleonic reign in the nineteenth century and finished off by the Austrians.

Torre Massimiliana

 

It took longer to bike around the island because I became a tourist, stopping to take photos along the only narrow asphalt road that goes right around the island, surrounded on both sides by small farms that are closer to market gardens than heavy duty agriculture. The main vehicles on the island are tiny little three-wheeled trucks called ‘Ape’ (a-pe) which means ‘bee’, which sound like a scooter and were (both) fairly plentiful. Aside from taking the produce to the wharf in the Ape though, most people got around on bikes. (For the cyclists among you it takes about half an hour to go right around the island at a good ‘clip’ on one of those European bikes and when the heat has abated a bit).

 

 

Along the main road

 

An Ape

 

Apart from reading and one visit to the small beach – which is more muddy, hot-water lagoon than refreshing sea water – I seemed to spend a lot of time biking around the island, exploring the gravel side roads and the only key sites: a ‘dairy’, church and cemetery. Aside from the beach café and a restaurant located between the market gardens, that was the extent of ‘things to do or visit’, which was more than fine.

 

 

Beach and partial view of café

 

The church

 

Sant’Erasmo is kind of dinky, rustic and a little bit ‘unkempt’, but somehow follows Italian design principles. In the same sense that some rubbish collectors in Venice wear stylely framed glasses and look like they could don Armani in a heartbeat. Yes there were a couple of decaying cars there which reminded me of a news item I saw years ago on dodgy salt-bitten cars on the Chathams, but they too were somehow in their rightful place.

 

All boarded/bricked-up

 

The picturesque in its full glory

 

Unfortunately I missed the artichoke festival which takes place on the 1^st of June.

 

White-heat gravel

A response to the troubling cat in Liam Gillick’s work for the German pavilion

Whether it was the result of chancing upon a real live cat in the streets, or memories rekindled as a result of Marnie’s blog on Liam Gillick in the German pavilion I’m not sure, but whatever the reason Gillick’s cat continues to slink uncannily in and out of my mind. The idea of the only talking cat in the world serving as a blog entry became more compelling whilst reading a chapter on cinema in Jacques Rancière’s The Future of the Image where another cat surfaces. More on that later.

 

The cat with exhibition brochure in its mouth

After negotiating between the awe of the visuals and the fraught ideologies of the mind, that the exterior of the German pavilion prompts, and flicking through the rainbow plastic fly strips on the door, the visitor’s feeling of standing in a near anesthetised über white cavern with lengths of sculptural kitchen units in pristine pine is oddly shattered by something curvilinear, furry, animate, and seemingly (if clunkily) alive. It makes for an unsettling disjuncture this cat, it feels wholly out of place, as if it had escaped the clutches of a taxidermist. In its oddness, with this oddness the cat assumes an all important role. It functions as a type of lynchpin shuffling between the domestic and the public as Gillick attempts to grapple with not only the weighty history of the oft-cited Nazi origins of the pavilion (stripped of functional amenities), but also with his selection as a British (UK) artist for the German pavilion.

 

Gillick of course makes this at least partially evident in the work’s title: How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks. When faced with the task of representing another country (despite the supposed dissolution of (globalised) borders), and especially a country with a high international profile generally, and in terms of art, the pressure runs high; how do you behave, what do you do? When this question of behaviour is compounded by the highly visible and publicised problematic history of the German pavilion, it becomes more pressing. Do you dig up the floor, alter the façade, or obscure it as in the case of the 2009 Japanese pavilion.

 

Gillick decided to work from the inside out and with a type of domestic signification that acts as an enabler of speech and reframing. The work exists as a co-production between applied modernist design inspired by the late Austrian Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky’s industrial designs (in the Frankfurt Kitchen at the Museum of Applied Art in Vienna) and with personal anecdotes and stand-ins of life in the Gillick family kitchen. Well known for his non-studio based practice, the accompanying exhibition brochure informs the reader that Gillick spent months working on the Biennale project in his kitchen while his son’s cat interrupting the flow. His quoted anecdotes of domestic origins and content – which given the artist’s predisposition towards writing as practice and not just supplement would engender dedicated readership – carry weight and have the effect of overlaying this personalisation, or ‘domesticisation’ onto the pavilion. Whilst he is at (obvious) pains to avoid providing a simplistic functionality to the sterile interior, domestic signifiers conjure the space, metaphorically at least as a site of production and consumption.

 

An emblem par excellence of domesticity, at least in Western conceptualisation is the cat, so even if jarring or wacky at first sight, a certain logic at its presence atop the kitchen-coded sculpture can be prised. Worked up around the narrative of the only talking cat in the world, Gillick has displaced his own voice onto the cat. The authority of speech that he ruminated on when observing his son’s cat (Who speaks? To whom and with what authority?”) could be seen to be given therefore to the cat. And with this authority the cat is given some hefty subjects to speak on ranging from ideological architecture, to veiled talk of warfare:  

 

“But now all people will want to know is its position on the history of totalitarian architecture of the restriction of credit within the context of failed models of globalisation”.

“Nightmares that will wake them up and make them think of machines in deserts doing terrible things”.

The townsfolk on the back of the exhibition brochure

According to Rancière in the context of Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873), the cat is a “fetish animal”, “the animal that converts one idiocy into another, consigning triumphant reasons to stupid superstitions or the enigma of a smile”. (The Future of the Image, p. 50). It is included here more as a reference than a direct linkage to the above, although the parallel of transference exists between the two (between Gillick and the cat, and the attributes of cats Rancière notes).

The main sponsor of the German pavilion is Hugo Boss.

Other kitchens of note include The Kitchen, New York, the highly regarded non-profit interdisciplinary organisation that started out as an incubator of the new medium of video in the early 1970’s.

More about The Kitchen

 

Modernist kitchen designs, whilst snazzy and all, simply aestheticised the regulation of labour for women in 1950’s domestic bliss.

Looking For Bruce Nauman

Note: This post describes one of the rare places in Venice where no photography is allowed—I hesitate to take a guess at how many images are made in this city in one day: 120,009, 500,341, 1,657,023?—so, after some thoughts about how to compensate for this, I have decided to let the words do the talking…

I am slowly learning my lessons the hard way in Venice. Firstly, regardless of how good, large, comprehensive or colour-coded your map appears, you will always get lost in this city. Secondly, always check what days venues are open! After a morning of both getting lost, and trying to see pavilions and exhibitions that were closed, I found one of Bruce Nauman’s venues for this years Biennale.

Along with occupying the United States of America Pavilion in the Giardini, Nauman’s work has been curated across two additional venues in the city: Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and Universita Ca’ Foscari. All three venues include works and installations that span from 1967, to new projects being seen for the first time in Venice. The works have been gathered around the three, slightly innocuous, threads of “Heads and Hands,” “Sounds and Space,” and “Fountains and Neons,” and, just in case you were wondering, there is a free brochure that marks exactly which works fit which thread/s.

After passing though the entrance to the Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini designed by Italian designer Carlo Scarpa—one of the rare modern architectural interventions into the façade of Venice—I walked through a dark, brick corridor filled with the thumps and bumps of Nauman’s Jumping. As one of the sound works from his Studio Aids II (1967-68) that includes Rolling on the Studio Floor, and Violin Tuned D.E.A.D, the sonic impact of Jumping took on a particularly ominous tone here—abstracted from the literal action its title describes, the sound became both tied to the surroundings, and made me aware of the potential vulnerability of my private experiences.

This corridor opened onto an interior, open courtyard, around which, spanning the entire length of one side, Pink and Yellow Light Corridor (Variable Lights) (1972) had been installed. The natural light of the courtyard dulled the incandescent glow of the alternate lengths of pink and yellow neon tubes, and after the rumbling of Jumping this choice of site was slightly underwhelming for me. I would love to experience the work at night, but the venue closes at 6pm. Following the lines of tubes overhead led me to the stairway, and up to the interior component of the exhibition.

What? Think, you say, think, think, think, think. Like an irritating two-year old who has just learned a new word, Nauman’s doubled, bouncing heads of Think (1993) were there as I turned up the stairs. I would really love to have this work in my studio, helping me to charge the often-confusing expectation to manifest thinking and doing, doing and thinking simultaneously. In the adjoining room,Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of My Room (1968) was a threatening partner to Think. In this work, the technical mechanisms are hidden, with only a bare light bulb and a whispered paranoiac voice that seemed to come from everywhere, animating the psychotropic potentials of the architectural surroundings.

The largest interior space of this venue resonated with a muffled chorus of voices emanating from rows of white surfaces, suspended from the ceiling and tethered to the floor. Walking between the rows, each muffled voice turned into an audible chant of partial lists days of the week; some, for example, would chant Thursday through Sunday, while others Saturday through Tuesday. Days (2009) is installed in the universities lecture hall, formerly the refectory (communal dining room) of the convent of the Tolentini, and I could not quell the sensation of a palimpsestic echo from the former uses of the space. Nauman’s  Days  conjured the haunting, repetitious, and embodied measuring of time that is present in the rooms (studios, homes, offices, hospitals, schools) that we regularly inhabit.

Seeing these works together was a really significant experience for me, but, although “opening” its presence out-side of the Giardini is perhaps (as the catalogue suggests) a critical move, I felt like the choices of works and their placement could have been more sympathetic to the building, letting the site and the works do something significant together that would not happen otherwise. It will be interesting to see how the two other shows work with their respective sites. I will keep you posted!