Venice - Day Two - Far away places

On our second day we visited two exhibitions that are relatively distant from the center of Venice. First was the Golden-Lion-winning Lithuanian Pavilion, Sun and Sea (Marina) which is across the island from the Arsenal, probably not that far walking, but we chose to find the closest vaporetto stop, Celestia, only a couple of blocks from the site. We went on Wednesday, thinking there wouldn’t be too much of a crown, and indeed the line was not long, and we waited about 20 minutes. When we left, about noon, there was no line at all. The pavilion is in a military installation, with signs warning visitors to stay on the path. Inside, we heard ethereal singing and climbed out to a balcony surrounding the scene of people on a fictive beach, complete with balls, chairs toys, books, and everything one associates with a well populated seaside. As all the reviews say, the beach occupants sing arias and choruses about a variety of beach experiences, some pleasant, some terrible, and some both at once. I thought the work should be presented as a one-act opera, which is what it really is, and I would be happy to see it again in that context. It was dark. Although I could understand much of the singing, which was in English, I wanted to follow in the libretto, but it was not easy to see it and there weren’t enough chairs for everyone. So I read ahead and we left before it was over. Tom and I both liked it very much.

Our next stop was the installation by Edmund de Waal, Psalm, in the Jewish Museum in the Venice Ghetto. To get there we took the Number 2 vaporetto the rest of the way around the island, passing residential and industrial areas we had never seen before, plus the cruise ship docks and the bus terminal. Just outside the ghetto we stopped in a nondescript restaurant and had a wonderful lunch, surrounded by locals and Asian tourists.

The Ghetto was established in 1516, and the word ghetto comes from there. I had been in the ghetto before, but had not visited the museum, which is a fascinating  combination of memorials to former residents, objects associated with services, historical materials, and a the beautiful, richly appointed sixteenth-century Canton Scuola synagogue, which, not being Jewish or members,  we could only view from windows. De Waal installed his works in rooms and a corridor near the synagogue. They consist of various sizes of wall display cases, shelves or pedestals with white porcelain cylinders of various sizes and shapes, box forms that may also be porcelain, and gold leaf. No matter how one looks, it is impossible to see all the forms completely as they are set in front of each other with just glimpses visible. His work reminds me of the Zen garden at Ryoan-ji, where no matter where you sit you cannot see all the stones. I want to be profoundly moved by these installations, but it doesn’t happen. I loved The Hare with Amber Eyes and found it very moving. I wish his works of art had the same effect.

My photographs are inadequate; going to de Waal’s website provides better images.

De Waal also did an installation at the Ateneo Veneto, with shelves on which he put both his porcelains and almost 2000 books by exiled writers, mostly in translation, which visitors were encouraged to take down and read, as well as lists of lost and erased libraries in the world. We did not go to that part, which I regret because the concept is so powerful. At the same time, I’m very grateful that he led us to the ghetto and the museum there. In several locations in the ghetto there were posted copies of a Wall Street Journal article about the place and its synagogues, with information on tours.


We headed back toward our hotel, getting off the vaporetto at San Zaccaria and stopping at a few sites we’ve visited in the past: the church of Santa Maria della Pieta, with a collateral installation, Processional by California artist ToddWilliamson, and, in a nearby building, rooms holding the Andorra, Zimbabwe, and San Marino Pavilions. The Todd Williamson installation is in a side corridor, called a chapel in the information. It includes paintings, a recorded musical composition, Nocturne, by Greg Walter from the University of North Carolina, and five bronze panels with inspirational quotations by famous people in Latin, with casually placed translations on a chair in the corridor. The abstract paintings are rich and strong. I found the combination of music and paintings surprisingly moving, although I wondered about the inspirational quotations in that context. Maybe he’s trying to say that good things can be said by the strangest people. The church, of course, is known as Vivaldi’s home church.  Here are one of the paintings and two of the panels:

No dream is too big/ No challenge is too great

Nothing we want for our future is beyond our reach

You know you are on the road to success

 if you would do your job and not be paid for it.

Did they really say those things? Sounds a bit like Jenny Holzer.... 

There were five quotation panels in all. I liked Elan Musk’s especially: “It’s okay to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.” It sounded like him and it sounded like a reasonable idea. I’m hopeful that the Trump quotation will hold true for me in the 2020 election. And I thought Oprah was forgetting all the people who do what they love for nothing because they can’t get paid for it and those who don’t get paid adequately for what they do.

We enjoyed the Zimbabwe Pavilion. The attendant there was from Zimbabwe and when we suggested that Venice must be quite foreign to him, he said the biggest wild animal he had seen in Venice was a pigeon! The pavilion has the title Soko Risina Musoro, which I learned is the title of an epic poem written by Zimbabwean NationalistHerbert Chitepo, translated as The Tale Without a Head. I cannot find the date when the poem was written, but Chitepo was born in 1923 and assassinated in 1975. Four artists are shown there, two men and two women. I particularly liked Georgina Maxim’s fiber works, large, beautifully colored, and densely packed

Georgina Maxim, Mai Mugari I, textile mixed media, 2019

, and I was taken by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s large abstracted representational images derived from her own family and from Southern African life. 

Kudzanai Violet Hwami, Jovian Swirl, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2019

 Neville Starling’s photograph- based works made very effective reference to his father’s Alzheimer’s memory loss and to the idea of memory loss altogether. 

Neville Starling, White Lies, multimedia

Cosmas Shiridzinomwa’s large paintings, titled Fruitless Discussions and Violent Discussions express their ideas through twisted tables and chairs with hands. 

Cosmas Shiridzinomwa, Fruitless Discussions I, oil on canvas, 2013

We were disappointed with the Andorra Pavilion, which had been one of our favorites in 2017. (Sorry, I have to skip some things.) And we were puzzled that the San Marino Pavilion displayed Chinese artists, which I now understaSnd is a result of something they call a Friendship Project International. One of them was Xu De Qi, whose Beauty and the Beast series I found particularly unappealing. 

Xu De Qi, Beauty and the Beast

Another, Cheng Chengwei, displayed beautifully crafted hyperrealist images that somehow felt disturbing and politically charged by just depicting a man and a woman. 

Chen Chenwei, Series on the Republic of China, Shadows in the Moonlight, oil on canvas, 2014

And a San Marino artist, Martina Conti, apparently enlisted members of Parliament to pose for her photographs.

 This gives some sense of the diversity of experiences one has trying to see what's on view among the hundreds of offerings during the Biennale, and it's only the second day, before we actually attended the central two venues.

                     

Venice - Day One: Around the Biennale and Glasstress 2019

Abstract Composition, 1962, Mixed media on hardboard. Private collection

detail of Abstract Composition

We were in Venice for 7 nights, 6 days. In the past I've tried to group the exhibitions by what was most interesting, but this year I think it might work better to go chronologically, according to when we saw what. My goals were to see some of the Biennale pavilions that had the best reviews and to see selected ancillary exhibitions.  Because walking is a challenge for Tom these days, I tried to plan so as to require the least steps, not really of much worth in a city like Venice, where walking is just necessary.

We arrived the evening of July 1 nearing the end of a heat wave across southern Europe. On the way to the Arsenale, where we bought Biennale tickets, we stopped at the Cyprus Pavilion, showing work by Christoforos Savva (1924-1968) “one of the most groundbreaking Cypriot artists of the twentieth century,” according to the very useful brochure that accompanies the exhibition.  The brochure describes Savva’s use of found textiles to make abstract paintings he called Yfasmatography, his concrete works that were often incorporated in architecture, and his 1967-68 “pin paintings,” included in the inaugural Cypriot Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1968, just before Savva suddenly died.  It’s always a revelation to me to find that artists more than 50 years ago were recycling found objects and textiles in abstract compositions.

Cement relief with glass

Composition, 1967-68, Pins on canvas on styrofoam,
Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia

detail of Composition, 1967-68

After purchasing our Biennale tickets, we wandered into two booths next to the Arsenale entrance. The Hong Kong pavilion featured Shirley Tse, a Hong Kong born (1968) artist who is based in Los Angeles. What we saw was a tangle of turned wood poles connected by L-shaped joins that wandered across the entrance space. Walking into the next room, we found that the construction meandered into that room as well. The turned wood sections looked like balusters, beadsteads, table legs. A very helpful guard told us that the joins are 3D-printed plastic and that the artist changes the construction to fit whatever the exhibition space is. We found it fascinating and charming that she combined such a traditional technique as wood-turning with contemporary 3D printing, and I followed the pieces in and out of the two rooms. The turned wood pieces were diverse and often lovely.

Negotiated Differences, turned wood and CD printed plastic, 2019

Next door, the Macao Pavilion featured peculiar ceramic objects and installations by Heidi Lau, who grew up in Macao but lives and works in New York City after attending New York University. She described the work as an apparition of Macao. I frankly found the sculptures a bit surreal, like the "Apparition" of the exhibition title. I did not get the titles of the individual sculptures; they are all clay and quite fantastical. Tom did not take the stairs to see the ones inside, but he was quite taken with those in the garden, like the fountain, the first one below.

Next we took the vaporetto to Murano and headed straight for Glasstress. We were disappointed to find that the exhibition was only on Murano this year, supposedly because it was the 10th anniversary of the exhibition, which makes no sense, because it has always had a locatio near the Accademia Bridge - actually I only remember the first Glasstress at that location, and one on Murano. In any event, I was interested that the curators were two artists whose work I have liked for years: Vik Muniz and Koen Vanmechelen. The curators chose works from previous Glasstress shows as well as artists who hadn't shown there before.  We didn't learn till later that the black labels were for the return works and the white ones were for the new ones.  '

I liked the white Ai Wei Wei chandelier with its Twitter birds, security  cameras, hands with middle finger up, and handcuffs, a lovely tribute to surveillance, censorship, and incarceration.  He repeated the middle finger trope in two more works, one a row of 12 hands in different colors.

There was a lovely Reclining Nocturne No. 4 by Karen Lamonte, the artist who evokes female figures through cast glass. 

Juana Vasconcelos had a bright red chandelier, combining colored fibers with the glass. 

I also was moved by Antonio Riello's Ashes to Ashes, chalices with ashes of books, as if they were human remains, with publication date and burning date, as each book's life span. They are difficult to photograph.

And I was delighted to see work by Francisco Toledo, a Mexican artist who has fascinated me for decades. 

Francisco Toledo, Rinoceronet, 2019, glass, mica, detail

Last time Vik Muniz contributed enormous chalices to the show. This time he had a couple of portraits made from murrini, so they look photographic from a distance. These are actually glass, as opposed to photographs of glass compositions. 

Fred Wilson's Iago's Mirror, 2009,  marks a major change in his style that resulted from him representing the United States in the Venice Biennale. By pointing out the blackamoors in shops around Venice and choosing to work in black glass, he sensitized us to the international scope of racism. 

Koen Vanmechelen's installation, Collective Memory, 2019 -  Encyclopedia of Human Rights LABIOMISTA comparative DNA sequence analysis of the Mechelse Padovana CCP23 - was pretty obscure for me,  although it definitely called to mind many issues of contemporary life. 

We enjoyed seeing his black head topped by roosters.

Glasstress is an important exhibition in that it focuses on artists who may not normally work with glass, introducing them working in a different medium and showing viewers the surprising variety of form and expression possible in the medium.

On the way back to the hotel, I made my way to San Zaccaria, to spend a few minutes with the Bellini Sacra Conversazione altarpiece there. I always try to visit this painting in Venice and it always  captures me.This little photograph cannot show do it justice, the way the painted architecture melds with the church architecture, the warm Venetian light that makes the colors glow, the contemplation of the figures and the way they fit perfectly into their setting. This is the painting that taught me always to put the coin in the slot to light the painting you want to see.  

This time I also ventured into the sacristy and S. Tarasio chapel with Andrea del Castagno frescoes in the vaults and stunning sculpted and painted altarpieces by Venetian 14th and 15th century artists. 

This is the polyptych on the right wall of the chapel, by Giovanni and Antonion da Murano and dated 1443, the polyptych of the Body of Christ, with Saints. When we see altarpieces in museums and talk about Renaissance art, we tend to focus on painters, often because they have been carved out of their original settings. The altarpieces in this chapel retain the combination of painting, inlay and sculpture, with the gilding and detail of metalwork, which was a particular skill in early Renaissance Venice. 

Below the chapel is a crypt and I went down to see it. Even in July, the floor was covered with water. When I asked the sacristan about it, he showed me photographs with the water up to the bottom of the arches, a stark reminder of the fragility of Venice.