Venice, the best part

After all the active and often political installations around the city, we found some calm relief on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Several years ago, the occupants of the monastery there decided to host exhibitions of contemporary art, including an installation in the center of the church crossing. This year the artist was Sean Scully. First I was surprised at the bright colors of the huge structure in the center of the church.

Looking up from inside the Scully

Then I was increasingly touched by his works in groups in various rooms of the monastery, by his stained glass windows, and by the monochrome boxy structures in various open spaces. Perhaps the juxtaposition of these abstract works with the Renaissance sculptures and paintings gave them added gravitas; I can't say; I'm not sure what it was. 

Walking around the monastery became surprisingly moving, just via paintings in blocks of richly muted colors. Even now, looking at some of my images and the details showing his brush strokes, I feel a tightening in my chest.

Next we visited the exhibition at Le Stanze del Vetro, the museum of glass on the island, of works by the important but not well-known French glass master, Maurice Marinot. Marinot's techniques evolved and developed over a career from 1911 to 1934. He lived from 1882 to 1960, but stopped making glass in 1934, when the glassworks he used closed down. He worked a lot with bubbles, carved glass, and thick, dense vessels, constantly exploring new techniques, always in the form of vessels.

Finally, toward the end of the island we saw the exhibition of works by Alberto Burri. I particularly wanted to see this exhibition because we have visited his masterpiece, the Cretto, in the earthquake-destroyed village of Gibellina in Sicily, and found it impressive.

Alberto Burri, Gibellina, Cretto, 1985-2015

Alberto Burri, Grande Sacco, 1952, with details

Earlier works make use of found objects and are abstract compositions, but as he progressed, his work became increasingly minimal and somehow also increasingly powerful, so that by the last room filled with textured black paintings, I was extremely touched. 

The guard confirmed my sense that these works are very moving, but I can't articulate exactly why. I suspect that their simplicity after all the wild and often aggressive works in the Biennale gave me some comfort. Some of the paintings made use of crackle in a way that suggested the Gibellina project, and they preceded it.

Alberto Burri, Grande Cretto Nero, 1977

There's a lovely cafe/restaurant between Le Stanze del Vetro and San Giorgio and we ended out visit with a light lunch and an Aperol Spritz there.

Venice Biennale Day 4, The Giardini

Posting about Venice has been interrupted, and reviewing my images and notes from the Giardini national pavilions and the second part of May You Live in Interesting Times really provides some clarity on what made a lasting impression, We made a point of going to the Laure Prouvost video and installation at the French Pavilion. The video was lively and the installation suggested the degradation of the sea.
Of the many engaging works in  the second stage of May You Live in Interesting Times, I single out two that reverberated for me. Teresa Margolles's Muro Ciudad Juarez, 2010, a wall transported from that city, with its razor wiring, graffiti and bullet holes, spoke to the drug violence in Mexico more emphatically than any video I can recall.

And again I was taken by Jimmie Durham. This time his work is a slab of Black Serpentine, 2019, accompanied by a panel that puts the work in the context of global commerce.

I thought the Russian Pavilion's installation based on Rembrandt's Prodigal Son was overblown and so dark I was afraid I would fall. It made me feel sorry for the painting.

The videos of indigenous people in the Canada Pavilion addressed issues of land and cultural appropriation.


The German Pavilion again was reconstructed in a way that made little impact.

We had some discussions with the guides in the Great Britain installation, who told us the artist, Cathy Wilkes, didn't want them to explain the work, that we should understand it in our own way. Honestly, I tried and I didn't.

I enjoyed exploring the reconceived tomb that was the Egyptian Pavilion, "khnum across times witness."

I also found the inside-out airplane in the Polish Pavilion fascinating. 

The Belgian Pavilion "Mondo Cane" by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, was a sort of diorama of puppets portraying craftspeople in the center area and zombies and misfits behind bars on the periphery.

I very much liked the United States Pavilion this time. In the midst of video, performance, and drastic modifications of the pavilions, Martin Puryear's sculptures seemed calming and disturbing at the same time. I've always found his sculptures fascinating for their ungainly shapes and I've never been able to figure out if they had specific meanings. Peter Plagens' Wall Street Journal article on the pavilion interpreted his work in this exhibition in some detail and I wonder if all the sculptures I have seen by him over the years are also as specifically connected to the African American experience and racism. Probably so.

I wonder about the interpretation of the monumental façade that sits in front of the building, a sort of flat light-colored trellis supported by a heavy black twisting form. The light part, a circle with rays curving away from it suggests classical architectural designs, and the twisting black support is in strong contrast to it, so the idea that this is elegant white America supported by black labor makes sense, especially after reading the NY Times's 1619 Project essays. (Incidentally, my Spalding ancestor arrived in Jamestown in April 1619, just a few months before those first slaves. I believe my ancestor was an indentured servant and I would be surprised if he could have afforded slaves. By 1627 he had completed his indentureship and in 1634 he moved to Braintree, Massachusetts. Regardless, he must have witnessed the beginning of slavery in America.

The Wall Street Journal did not discuss at least  one work, the large red curved shape that I thought looked sort of like a cap. It's titled Big Phrygian and dates from 2010-14, painted red cedar. In the seventeenth century Phrygian caps were a symbol of liberty and an article on this work says that Puryear saw a print of an African American wearing a Phrygian cap, the source for this sculpture. I had no idea of that background in the exhibition, just thought the sculpture was an interesting minimal shape. And I wonder how many visitors to the exhibition would have known this story.

Most impressive to me is the central sculpture, a tribute to Sally Hemmings, positioned under the dome of the pavilion entrance, the most Jeffersonian part of the very neoclassical pavilion. It's a tall white pedestal topped by a metal form that suggests a cross and a shackle.

Venice Biennale, Day 3 Afternoon National Pavilions at the Arsenale

The Biennale catalogue lists 26 national pavilions in the Arsenale. Those are in addition to the 29 official ones at the Giardini and the scores of them in apartments, shops, palaces, warehouses, and other venues hidden across the city. I’ve selected only a few that particularly caught my attention.

Because I made a couple of trips Amazon Peru in the ‘90s, starting in Iquitos, I was quite taken by Christian Bendayán’s rather complex installation in the Peruvian pavilion, “Indios Antropofágos”. A Butterfly Garden in the Jungle. Based on “exoticized images of jungle natives,” his Spanish tile compositions depicted transgender and transvestite characters enacting exaggerated versions of early 20^th-century postcards of native people of Peru. Versions of the postcards, showing native Peruvians dancing or posing in groups are also included in this richly conceived installation.  The backgrounds of the tile compositions copied watercolors of Iquitos – on view in the exhibition - by the lepidopterist Otto Michael, who published books on Amazon butterflies after three multi-year expeditions to Peru between 1885 and 1921. Michael’s books are also on display, titled “Butterfly Hunter of the Amazon,” and Bendayán has included collages of Amazonian women with butterfly wings. This is a rich and dense installation, full of history, anthropology, socology and biology, very rewarding if one takes the time to look carefully. And the tiles, azulejos, are brightly colored and cheerful.

 

The Luxembourg Pavilion included a vast installation by Marco Godinho, Written by Water, of blank books that have been washed the water of various oceans. It is accompanied by a video documenting the books being washed by waves. The array of blank books, each a slightly different color of white and each with differently curled pages, was both peaceful and disturbing. Blank books, the ocean as a factor, and the whiteness of the pages call to mind bleaching coral and the power of the earth’s elements.

Kosovo’s Family Album is a video installation by Alban Muja that captured my attention for many minutes, as adults describe the meaning and memories they derive from photographs of themselves as children displaced by the Kosovo War of 1998-99. Their straightforward descriptions of the events they survived and their calm demeanor made the stories chilling.

The Ukraine Pavilion was somewhat ephemeral, but engaging, especially to Tom. As their entry to the Biennale, Ukraine sent the worlds largest cargo plane the Antonov AN-225 MRIYA on a flight over Venice on May 9, 2019, casting its shadow over the Giardini del Biennale.  In the cargo hold was a digital directory of all living Ukrainian artists.

brochure cover about the Antonov 224 cargo plane

The installation that touched me the most was another of multiple similar objects, this one from Saudi Arabia:  Zahrah Al Ghamdi’s After Illusion. It refers to a line from an ancient Arabic poem by Zuhayr bin Abi Sulma (520-609) referring to his attempt to recognize his home after having been away for 20 years. The installation is made up of thousands or round, sea-form like sculptures made from leather, attached to translucent lighted white shims and clustered on the floor. It was pleasant to walk through, evoking a world of peace and artistic creativity.

Layers of suspended black paper made up the installation by Joël Andrianomearisoa for the Madagascar Pavilion, that country’s first representation at Venice. It is beautifully simple, dark but not completely negative in feeling.

Latvian artist Daiga Grantina presented an installation of brightly colored forms suspended from the ceiling, leaning on the walls and resting on the floor, titled Saules Suns. They seemed playful, organic, cheerful, and a little menacing.

Ghana also had its first representation at Venice and chose to make a substantial pavilion, designed by Sir David Adjaye, the Ghanian-British architect. Among several artists included there were Lynette Yiadom-Bonkye, a very good painter, Felicia Abban, a photographer, and the famous ubiquitour El Anatsui, with several enormous wall pieces made as usual, from bottle caps and the like. They were so big I couldn't capture them in photographs.

Felicia Abban, Untitled Self-Portraits, ca. 1060s-70s

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, The Mighty, Mighty Lines, 2019, oil on linen

El Anazui, Yaw Berko, 2019, aluminum printing plates, bottle tops, and copper wires.

Walking toward the end of the Arsenale, outdoors, we came upon a very old decrepit-looking boat, suspended near the water, obviously salvaged. We did not know at the time that this was the boat named Barca Nostra, which had sunk off the coast of Libya in 2015, drowning about 900 immigrants. The Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Bűchel had brought the boat to Venice. There are online images of it being transported to the lagoon.

Among the several large pavilions at the end of the Arsenale building, we were most interested in India. The installation, Our Time for aFuture Caring, is based on the memory of Mahatma Gandhi. It opens with images of Gandhi and a quotation from him, “I am not a seer, rishi or philosopher of non-violence; I am only an artist on non-violence and desire to develop the art of non-violence in the realm of resistance,” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The works of several younger artists and senior artists like Nandalal Bose, all refer to Gandhi’ s teachings and impact on India. I’ve chosen to focus on just two. The first installation, by GR Iranna, We Together, 2012, two walls full of single Indian sandals of the type worn by Gandhi, is another example of repeating the same element, in this instance peasant sandals, to larger effect than just a few sandals, a photograph or a painting would have. To me it spoke of all the kinds of people who wear this footwear, and all the walking Gandhi and his followers, and Indians, do.  Of Bodies, Armour, and Cages by Shakuntala Kulkarne, includes several cane dresses, headdresses and other forms, as well as photographs of women wearing the dresses. While being beautifully and artfully constructed, the works speak profoundly of women’s real and imagined constrictions.

GR Iranna, We Together, 2012

Shakuntala Kulkarni, Of Bodies, Armour, and Cages, 2010-2012

If you wonder where the Italy and China pavilions are, I did not photograph any of the works in these two very large venues. I did make a point of seeing the installation by Tomás Saraceno, an artist whose work has fascinated me since I first saw it at an earlier Biennale. On the Disappearance of Clouds, in one of my favorite parts of the Arsenale complex, relates conceptually to the effects of global warming, apparently moving with the motion of the tides, and accompanied by scores for music compositions on the same subject, these clouds were not as evocative as the webs we have seen by Saraceno in Venice and other venues. And I discovered, this installation was part of the curated exhibition. Some things were not very clear as we wandered through the spaces.