Visionaries: instotutionalilsed, but untamed
Author: Billy (Guillermo) @isbn.billy
Untamed Visionaries
The eighteenth of April was quiet on the canals – by quiet I mean the usual hum and chatter and scuffle that occurs in Venice. The cramped streets and paths were filled with people. They always are. The vascular network of walkways dominated one's memory of the city. The squares and lagoon and vaporettos lie back and watch from afar as the stressed-out tourists stretch bend necks to see little blue dots on their phones. Google maps. A miracle of technology. It mostly served as a means to ensure that the walkways never followed a perfect dual carriageway, always finding one man with his cap over his brow who can hardly walk straight, running into labyrinth paths and falling lost in deep dead-ends. Data roaming spares no one in the streets of San Marco.
The nineteenth of April was the day before the Biennale — before the preview. The day things began to change on the time-swept cobblestone alleys. The usual hustle and bustle of tourism falls under the shadow of bob cuts and bulky Balenciaga sneakers. Big bomber jackets are replaced by long coats and noir drapery as the creatures of art began their strut down the streets. Bejewelled caps with ‘Venice’ and ‘Italy’ are ushered into darkness as collectors, press, gallerists and other “VIP’s” land into Marco Polo airport, ready to party…and look at that art festival thing. They came out in their Sunday best, that's for sure. They even wore oversized glasses to hide their eyes and their happy faces, or glares to meet your contemptment. All that mattered before the opening was one thing: not doubling up.
‘oh god I hope I don’t show up in the same outfit as someone else’.
The 59th International Venice Art Biennale rose up and out of dormancy on April 23. Three years had passed since its last iteration, and a protean three years that was. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the International Art Exhibition opened its doors for the pre-opening on April 20th-22, and will be open to the public until November 27 this year. ‘The Milk of Dreams’ features 58 countries and 213 artists, 180 of which participated for the first time in the show. The exhibition’s title references Leonora Carrington’s book ‘The Milk of Dreams’ which involved a surrealist description of a world contingent on the imagination and its ability to re-envision reality. The book involved considerably more than that, but you would have to have read it to tell me off on that description. Sorry…
The ideas behind Carrington’s transformative figures and creatures are transposed and bolted onto the floors of the Giardini’s pavilions, and screwed onto the walls of the vast Arsenale labyrinth. Questions of the interrelationship between our bodies and the earth, humanity, metamorphoses and technology are summoned to mind when entering the cacophony of art.
Adina Pintilie (Romania) portrays a level of intimacy through a variance in artistic language shown in ‘You Are Another Me — A Cathedral of the Body’. Her visual conversation contextualizes the political and cultural anxieties surrounding systematic normativity and the repression of the body and gender. The moving image was, well, moving. Images expand and contract across the pavilion screens. The video involves an underground club scene, where sweat-ridden bodies are bound together in the dark, their skin and faces shimmering with interlaced footage of the scene booming deep-house and malachite green flares of light disorienting the audience in a nightmarish fuzz of vision. On a different, more delayed screen, two pale nude bodies are seen from above, wrapped around each other in a stripped bed as they overlap, recumbent then interlocked.
^Adina Pintilie, You Are Another Me - A cathedral of the Body^
Evolution and its relationship with technology was acutely and diagrammatically represented by Agnes Denes, an American artist who reimagined the human-earth relationship through illustrations of knowledge and its intersecting systems of attainment and production. Denes pioneered what is now called environmental art during the 1960s and previously exhibited at the Biennale in 1978. Her current works exhibited, Introspection I—Evolution (1968–1971) and Introspection II—Machines, Tools & Weapons (1969–1972), display her conceptual practice by means of environmental dialogue in the evolutionary development from ape to man and early tools to advanced machinery. This work reminded me of her previous series’ and her persistent commentary on ecological awareness in different modes and mediums. These modes and mediums were showcased in her recent retrospective exhibition at New York’s ‘The Shed’ in 2019-20 ‘Absolutes and Intermediates’ featuring over 150 artworks spanning her 50-year career. Good show.
The neat, never-dull light from the April sun blanketed the newly furbished grass of the gardens. The pavilions spurted out from the grass in all directions, protruding like brutalist concrete. The lines to enter the British, French and US pavilions always ran far. It always happens. The famous countries will always be the most visited in the exhibition. It always happens.
Attention traditionally follows the Giardini and Arsenale, each requiring an entire day to effectively view the works spaces… and possibly have an outfit change if you are self-conscious about your Issey Miyake ‘pleats please’ pants. However, the Biennale features numerous collateral events and exhibits throughout Venice. Ignasi Aballí’s (Spain) work ‘Venecia’ involves a collection of six guide books which are scattered across the Italian city. This work has two approaches: first, it pushes visitors to venture outside the Giardini walls to find the booklets, providing the audience with an opportunity to operate alongside with, and contribute to the expression of the artwork; and second, allowing the audience to discover a hidden Venice, a Venice discovered by searching for the books in a path through the city which diverges from the touristic vision commonly remembered.
^Ignasi Abili, Venecia^
‘The Milk of Dreams’ was born out of chaos and instability. Then again, when is the world not undergoing a level of that? Symbols and references to Carrington’s work varied vastly, and ultimately, one may be left doodling in an attempt to link the dots of conceptual reference, or simply surrendering to the analogies in favor of just appreciating the art for what it is. One may also take a third path. As many did as they watched the Met Gala from their homes, one could also be observant of the works and upon leaving each exhibition space, say to themselves,
‘It was really good, but was it on theme?...’
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