Oh yeah, one more Berlin thing. CS and I saw a piece in Berlin by a Polish artist we’d never heard of, Katarzyna Kozyra, and it was terrific. It was a group of videos of retired folks, naked, except they all wore opposite sexual prostheses (men with merkins, women with penises) doing, via stop-motion animation, moves from Nijinski’s choreography for Rite Of Spring — naturally. It was both disturbing and funny.
Spent a little over 2 days here in Venice. One mostly allotted to viewing the Arsenale, the ¼ mile long former ship facility, now a massive exhibition space, and one day mostly at the Giardini, a park with national pavilions, each mostly featuring an artist from that country. An American, Robert Storr, curated the Arsenale and the Italian pavilion, which is always given over to being a group show. There’s always grumbling about these things, but there are always some wonderful surprises too.
The first half of the slog through the Arsenale featured a lot of fairly didactic political art. Some of this was pretty good, but it also seemed out of context. Not that we just want to be entertained, but some of it seemed educational, journalistic. Large-scale photos of crumbling Beirut buildings and a moving and elaborate memory piece about a Palestinian intellectual living in Rome assassinated by Israel both deserve to be photo essays in a glossy magazine or in a newspaper’s Sunday supplement. Sadly, there aren’t many magazine formats dedicated to this kind of work. For a while Doubletake tried to do this — to mix arty journalistic photos with writing — but it’s a tough sell, I guess. Online versions of quite a few magazines offer expanded versions of the photos they run.
Here is one from a series by Brendan Corr that was in Foreign Policy magazine (of all places!)
And one by Brian Ulrich that is in Mother Jones — online.
What is odd is that these often adhere a little too tightly to the photojournalism/Magnum model to be thrown into the rarefied arty context of this show. The memory piece on Wael Zwaiter, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Ed Burtynsky’s Chinese photos and another artist’s drawings of U.S. war dead could all be combined with writing, and not necessarily didactic writing, to tell us about ourselves in ways that include history and current events and that go beyond aesthetics. They don’t have to be relegated to the weird insular art world — in fact they may have more power outside of that world.
What they collectively do, maybe what makes them seem odd here, is they point to something else — they ask us to look through the work at something else — a situation, a person, a place. It’s a fuzzy line, and maybe who am I to try and draw it? Even Andreas Gursky’s stuff sometimes (moreso in the past) could almost be viewed as journalism — but now it’s so heavily photoshopped that it represents a mental impression of a place more than the actual place.
(The tiny drawings on one wall of U.S. war dead, are, in my opinion, in poor taste. The Iraqi war dead — most of them civilians — so vastly outnumber the American casualties that in an international art forum this commemoration of only the U.S. deaths seems symptomatic of the current U.S. xenophobia)
Anyway, for a while it felt like we were being lectured at a bit, but there were lots of other pieces that, while not merely existing in a imaginary dreamworld unrelated to our harsh reality, were much less obvious in their intent. While some of the more didactic pieces would be lovely and poetic in another context here they seemed swamped and overpowered by the poetic ambiguity surrounding them.
And then there is encroachment from the other side. Journalistic snaps these days are looking more and more like performance art or elaborately staged film stills — how can an artist compete with this image below? All matching outfits — with the occasional Disney touches!
Photo — John Raoux/AP
About 1,000 people from 75 countries took their oaths together under the turrets of Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., as Gloria Estefan sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Or this one by James A. Rodriguez (via BoingBoing) of a demonstration in Guatemala. These simple sheets with faces of the disappeared — they don’t need text to speak volumes.
In another section Joshua Mosley did these odd claymation films of famous philosophers mouthing off as they stroll through a forest — eventually one of them gets viciously attacked by a huge (clay) dog.
A Chinese artist/filmmaker Yang Fudong had a whole series of boxes spaced throughout the Arsenale: each featured another chapter of his film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest. The title sounds like a classic story, and it is, but the film was of young hipsters full of ennui and intellectual angst wandering aimlessly, sometimes among rivers and streams, sometimes by modern apartments. It was shot in 35mm (!) and made to look like it was made in the 30s with scratches, flicker and all. Nice to see such high production value in an art context. Why this film had to be shown fragmented into 5 separate booths wasn’t clear — this extravagant presentation did however encourage one to spend a little time in each room, watching for 5 minutes or so. If one were expected to stand or sit on a bench (as is the art installation style) for 25 minutes one might balk — but in smaller doses, little by little we got a substantial taste.
I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing on DVD, but I imagine if he’s showing it as an art piece and not as a film then only collectors get the DVDs.
In the Russian pavilion crowds lingered over a 3-screen video by AES+F, "Last Riot", that inserted young models having a ritualized battle into a super elaborate computer-game-like landscape, all set to Wagner. It struck a nerve — shirtless models, swords, missiles and explosions — pretty apocalyptic shit. The Wagner didn’t hurt either.
Another Russian artist, Alex Ponomarev, made a shower stall that rained TV feeds — here it was raining news programs, but apparently if you turned the nozzle you got porn, sports or financial news. It was an homage to Nam Jun Paik, but seemed equally informed by the Matrix.
In the Korean pavilion Hyungkoo Lee had made a fake natural history museum exhibit of bones and skeletons — which, when you looked closely, turned out to be super realistic bones of cartoon characters! Here are the fossilized remains of Tom and Jerry.
In the Spanish pavilion two artists called Los Torreznos made hilarious videos of themselves. For some reason their stuff reminded me of conceptual comedy — Andy Kaufman or others whose comedy borders on weird theater.
In a separate building Francesco Vezzoli made two short fake political ads that were completely believable. The style was dead on and the sound bites and graphics were perfect. Of course, the fact that one featured the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy as a U.S. presidential candidate and the other Sharon Stone sort of gave it away. Stone's campaign ad was produced by Mark McKinnon, Bush's top advertising strategist in 2004, who is senior adviser to Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the "BHL" ad was managed and directed by Bill Clinton's advertising gurus from 1996.
Francis Alÿs did a lovely little animated film of a shoe being shined. The way it works with the song is perfect. I guess someone thought that wasn’t enough, for the adjoining room was filled with the animation cells, which seemed completely unnecessary.
A Belgian artist, Sophie Whettnall, made a video ("Shadowboxing") of a professional boxer coming really really close to hitting her.
