Venice Biennale II The Giardini

Traditionally, the main site for the Venice Biennale is the Biennale Gardens, which are near the end of the Riva degli Schiavoni. Walking along the Riva one often passes huge yachts and we imagine they are moored there for the art exhibition.

Each of about 27 countries has its own designated pavilion in the gardens. The Italian Pavilion is by far the largest, but for years it has been one of the two sites for the curated exhibition, not for Italian art. This year the Italians finally got their own exhibition space again, in the Arsenale, the other large site for the curated show. It's a very large space, with very large art, but that's for a later discussion.

This year we began the Giardini national pavilions with Spain and I was surprised that I liked the paintings of Miguel Barcelo there so much. They are large, dramatically textured abstractions or images of gorillas, generally with limited color. Normally I would scoff at them as very traditional but they were fascinating.

Barcelo used his space to show the work of another painter, whose work he had discovered in Africa, Francois Augieres, from Perigueux, in one small gallery. I didn't think much of the rather primitive painting then, but the two I photographed look quite provocative now.

In the Belgium Pavilion, Jef Geys had a multilingual installation that took a while to understand. I have no pictures, probably because they didn't permit it. He showed maps of several cities and drawings and photographs of weeds that are found growing in those cities. Then he provided information about the medicinal or nutritional qualities of the weeds, suggesting that the weeds are actually very useful plants, that might make a difference, especially  in areas of poverty. The combination of botanical illustration, maps, long texts, and sociological/medicinal uses made this installation surpisingly touching. For an excellent detailed description, see http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/6761/jef-geys-belgian-pavilion-at-venice-art-biennale-09.html

Usually we finish what I think of as the "major" pavilions, then cross a small canal to a second group of pavilions that always have seemed less interesting. But this could be because we're pretty hot and tired by the time we get there, so we started with those. And we found several very good displays. There's a Venice pavilion, which this year finally did a show of glass objects, including a Dale Chihuly garden that I found really not his best but Tom liked more than most. Other international glass artists who have worked at Murano were on view there as well.

Zoran Todorovic and Katarina Zdjelar at the Serbian Pavilian presented very different works. Todorovic collected two tons of hair from salons and army barbers and made it into felt pads/blankets that were available for sale, in an installation he titled "Warmth." They had an unpleasant distinct odor and we couldn't stay long in the pavilion, but I stayed long enough to be fascinated with Zdjelar's videos of people saying whatever words of Russian they could remember from their time of occupation.

The Egyptian Pavilian included Ahmad Askalany's woven straw figures, some of them romantically elongated and gracefully posed in iconic groupings and others making the space feel a bit like a comfortable bazaar. The combination of the two types and a kind of freedom to use traditional materials and styles made the experience refreshing.

Poland's Krzysztof Wodiczko made a very innovative and powerful video that gave me the sense that I was evesdropping on people who were expressing their feelings about being immigrants in an unfamiliar, or growing familiar, place. Creating arches that seemed to be covered with frosted glass, he presented people moving in everyday situations who could only dimly be seen, but they could be heard through earphones available on the wall.

Of three artists in the Romanian Pavilion, I remember Stefan Constantinescu, whose video of a man talking on his cell phone on a bus, repeatedly and increasingly violently threatening to kill his girl friend, while the other passengers ignore him. It was very upsetting.

Luis Braga offered photographs and Delson Uchoa showed paintings from Northeastern Brazil that were similarly intensely colored. The paintings are abstract, almost like weavings, but very heavily painted with wonderful viscous textures, which turns out to be the result of fusing acrylic sheets to the surface.  I couldn't figure out the photographs, but one of people's hanging clothing seen through the windows of a boat, was quite beautiful. I see now that his photographs all depict scenes on the Amazon.

Lucas Samaras represented Greece and the reprisal of some of his earlier self images redone with his present self was interesting if you remember Samaras. Tom was bored. Also, the substantial video section was out of order in July.

Back in the main gardens, I loved that Roman Ondak had landscaped the Czech and Slovak Pavilion, just walls and a facade and a skylight and a garden inside them. When you walk into the pavilion, you think you're still outside in the Giardini and it takes a minute to realize that the artist has continued the outside experience into and through the space.

Despite the previews we had read that this Biennale wasn't as exciting as usual - something I think they say every year about every biennial exhibition - we were very interested in seeing the Nordic and Denmark Pavilions, where Elmgreen & Dragset had supposedly created fictive collectors' homes, complete with "for sale" sign and body floating the the swimming pool outside. I was never sure from the press information if the art works on view in the "houses" were really by actual artists or constructions of the kind of stuff collectors buy. And I still couldn't tell in the pavilions themselves. For something I had anticipated to be a take off on collecting, it was neither pungent nor inspiring nor funny. I recalled with nostalgia the 2007 installation at the Nordic Pavilion, Adel Abidin's "Welcome to Baghdad," a painfully wicked parody of a travel agency promotion for a war zone. (One of the things that happens when you attend the Biennale many times is that you remember the best things or the worst things you've seen in most of the pavilions.) Anyway, the Elmgreen & Dragset congolmeration left me puzzled, except for a particularly painful installation in the dining room of the Danish Pavilion house. On the wall were expensively framed signs collected from homeless and hungry people asking for food or help, "found art" that seemed a complete indictment of contemporary collecting and conceptual art making.

The sign to the right says, "55 years / house, work and pension / I don't have any of these / Please help me to live/Thank you /Rome"

  At the Finland Pavilion Jussi Kivi apparently decided to exhibit his extensive collection of Fire and Rescue materials, perhaps of interest to those engaged in that field of work or collecting, but puzzling to us. The German Pavilion had the much-discussed work of Liam Gillick, a British artist who decided to replicate, in a non-functional way, the cabinet work in his kitchen, with an anamatronic cat sitting on one of the shelves. We didn't know about the kitchen part and found the blonde non-functional cabinets stretching through the pavilion doors completely boring. Later, when made our annual pilgrimage to St. Stae to see what the Swiss had done to it this year, we found metal shelving reminiscent of the German cabinets. After this the metal cells with glittering walls by Claude Leveque in the French Pavilion were far more engaging and, of course evoked Guantanamo, prisons, and torture, even with no statements about it. We weren't engaged by Japan, Korea, Austria, or Israel this year, all of which evoke memories of challenging, outrageous, or touching displays in the past. Nothing wrong with them, just not to write home about.

The Russians showed a number of artists, to  varying response. I was particularly taken by Pavel Pepperstein, who filled a gallery with watercolors of historic sites of the future, drawn in a style that calls to mind Saul Steinberg and perhaps some of the delicacy of Paul Klee. Fanciful, ironic, amusing,  and I hope not prescient, they have a light touch that contrasted to the darker and heavier works in most of the rest of the space, and evidenced an abundant imagination. They also fit most appropriately to the title of the whole pavilion, "Victory over the Future," a play on the title of the 1913 Futurist opera, "Victory over the Sun."

At the Canadian Pavilion we were vaguely interested in the videos by Mark Lewis, one of men getting into a fight and another that I remember primarily as a charming image of a pigeon keeping warm on a sidewalk subway grate.

We have grown to expect to be offended by the Australian Pavilion and didn't really stay to see much of Shaun Gladwell's videos of men, cars, and kangaroos in the outback or somewhere. I read later and should have realized from the title "Maddestmaximus," that it's all derived from "Mad Max," but I couldn't watch that whole movie, so I would have been lost in it anyway. The sculpture of a motorcycle bursting into the pavilion walls was amusing,especially since the Venezuela Pavilion had one bursting out of the wall.

It has taken a long time to recreate the Giardini national pavilions, so I'll save the first half of the thematic, curated exhibition, titled "Making Worlds," for another post.

Coyote

Sunday morning a coyote ran across the back yard, along the fence/woods line. It was large and grey and rangy, not a pretty animal, but striking. I don't think I've ever seen one before, but one of the things I love about the country house is hearing the coyotes howl and yip just after sunset. It's such a wild sound.

Venice Biennale I

The Venice Biennale is so huge that it’s difficult to figure out where to start writing about it. This explains why nothing has appeared on this site for the past two weeks or so. That, the apple crop, and various Rotary activities involving grants for international service projects. Anyway, I figured that the best way is just to start with something and see what happens.

So, we always go to the Venice Biennale, but we try never to go to the opening. One year we were there during the opening by mistake and we never got to eat at our favorite restaurants or see any of our favorite sites because we kept running into people we knew. At the same time, not being in the “in” group, we didn’t go to any of the events, so I felt both deprived of my favorite places and left out at the same time. Plus, it was the hottest June anyone could remember. So I always try to go at least a week after it opens, especially since the prices go down in Venice after July 1.

If you don’t go to the opening, you see the exhibition that everyone else sees. For example, the entire Dutch Pavilion was closed because there were malfunctions for the Fiona Tan videos. Half the Greek Pavilion was closed, again for technical reasons, so we only saw Lucas Samaras’s wall pieces. It was peaceful, there was space in the cafes and restaurants, we didn’t have to line up for anything. Interestingly, the two places I'm mentioning here were not in the official Biennale sites, but were national pavilions in offsite locations, part of the fascination with the Biennale, where finding national exhibitions involves discovering some of the nooks and crannies of historical Venice.

At the Icelandic Pavilion, one of my favorites because it’s on the ground floor of a building with a dock on the Grand Canal, we could see the progress Ragnar Kjartansson was making in his daily paintings. His exhibition is to paint each day a picture of a the same model, who I think is also a friend of his. By the time we got there, he had finished about 30 paintings.

I didn’t think he was making much progress in improving his painting style or technique, but it was very pleasant to walk into a working studio, with Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely playing on the record player and dozens of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts littering various surfaces. Nothing fancy and no hype, just an artist and his model, working and not talking much to each other or anybody. Plus you could go out on the dock and enjoy the Grand Canal.

At the opening you would have learned what the project was, but there would have been only a couple of paintings. By the time we were there, the model was growing a beard and we could see that Kjartansson was painting him in a variety of poses. I’d love to see it now, after they’ve been together for more than three months, still at it.

When people ask us how the 2009 Biennale was, Tom says it was boring. I can’t give it that quick an adjective, but a lot was totally puzzling to me and I don’t think anything intrigued and engaged me the way Sophie Calle did in the 2007 French pavilion. But I can’t get the Mexican pavilion out of my mind: “What else could we talk about?” The artist is Teresa Margolles. We had a hell of a time finding the palace where it was and I was about to give up, except that we had been so impressed in 2007 with their display in another palace.

Finally we found it.

We went to the piano nobile of the palazzo Rota-Ivancich. There was almost nothing there. But she displayed large cloths that the label said were soaked in the blood of people killed in the Mexico drug wars.

A young man was washing the floors, something he does at least once a day, with water mixed with the blood of the dead.

A wall made from mud mixed with the blood of the dead greeted us as we were leaving.
And at the entrance we saw an image of the United States Pavilion hung with the blood soaked cloths of her exhibition. There was a German couple there, asking the attendants why she should have wanted the United States Pavilion to have such an upsetting display. The attendant, who was Italian, seemed confused, so I said “Because they get the guns from us and we buy the drugs.” And we left.

Tomato Worm and honeybees

I took a picture of the gorgeous caterpillar that had eaten half of one of our tomato plants. Then I picked off the leaf and took it to the woods about 50 yards away and left him/her on a branch. I haven’t seen any more, or any other damage so far. Here it is:

For four years we’ve been feeding hummingbirds and orioles. This week suddenly our feeders are inundated with honeybees. The openings in the oriole feeder were large enough that the bees could get inside, get trapped and die, not before drinking all the nectar. Now we’re replaced the feeders so they can’t get in anymore. They just swarm around one or two holes. For the most part, the hummingbirds seem to be able to share with the bees. I figure if you’re small, you can squeeze in without making them angry. The bees seem to tilt the feeder so the nectar goes to one hole, then they drink it. They finish it in one day. We figure they’re wild and have a hive nearby, but there’s not much chance we’ll find it in the woods. They should be good for the apple blossoms next spring.

Farm report – fauna

Last week was the first week of apple picking and we picked, processed and delivered just over a ton of Gala apples, most of a relatively small crop. We used our washer/sorter for the first time and it saved a lot of time and hassle. But we still do all the picking and I do most of the weighing and bagging by myself, in the kitchen. We also gave about 120 pounds of apples to a food pantry. This week we took about 160 more pounds to another pantry. Fortunately, there are plenty of people happy to have not-perfect apples and we’re delighted to be able to put them to good use.

We also had a range of animal experiences last week:

Mammal. First, Tom was having trouble getting the pickup to start. He finally opened the hood and found a large nest inside, and the animal had chewed through three wires. On Tuesday we had seen the beginning of a nest in the garage, so we finally went and bought two traps, a live trap and an oversize snap mousetrap on Wednesday. Thursday morning the live trap was sprung and empty and there was a dead packrat in the killer trap. We reset both traps and I’ve caught two adorable mice in the live trap – released them in a distant field. The packrat seems to have been working alone.

Amphibian. I like to have a little baby pool for Rosie to use when she’s hot from chasing Frisbees or balls. We discovered four baby frogs living in the pool. They go away when it rains and come back when it’s hot. Also the Beisecker Farms tree frog finally made his/her return to the back door, where the inside lights attract bugs for him.

Bird. The eggs hatched and the babies have grown. The mourning doves fledged and the baby goldfinches are almost ready to go. Last week they had little fuzzy heads; this week they look like goldfinches. I’ve seen two Baltimore Orioles, one male on the deck on Sunday and the other a dead female who got caught in the last grape nets.
Baby mourning dove

Pair of mourning doves. They disappeared, along with their nest, a few days later.

You can see how big the babies are, pushing mama dove out.

Goldfinches, just fuzz balls.

A few days later; we’ve counted at least four babies.

Insect. Suddenly the hummingbird feeders are swarming with bees. The Oriole feeder has bigger holes and the bees would go inside and end up in the main container, where they couldn’t escape and just piled up. We had to wait till dark to get them out. One of the hummingbird feeders had one plastic flower knocked off by an oriole last spring and they were getting into that one too. So we’ve taken those feeders down and only have feeders with hummingbird-sized holes. The bees are still there, but not in swarms. It was interesting to watch the hummingbirds try to get to the feeders around the bees, and to see bees chasing hummingbirds away from their feeders.

Yesterday I saw this beautiful huge caterpillar on a tomato plant. Tom says it’s a tomato worm and will destroy the plants. I’m afraid it probably is, but if there’s only one, maybe we can leave it. I don’t have a picture yet.

Finally, I’ve had a request for a picture of Thunder, the other dog. Here he is:

Blue eyes.

Richard Long, finally

Most of the exhibitions we liked best in London were serendipitous: Medals of Dishonor, which we found much more interesting than the lovely Indian paintings we intended to see, or the J.W. Waterhouse show at the Royal Academy that we decided to see because of its intriguing review in the Financial Times, or the Classified exhibition at the Tate Britain, which we’re still talking about. The idea of Classification as an exhibition concept has more “legs” than the other “concept” exhibitions that were all over London and Venice this summer, and some of the objects in that show were definitely memorable.

But Richard Long was one exhibition I was determined to see. In 1996, the first time I visited Japan, there was a Richard Long exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. I visited it on the next to last day of my trip, which had started with a visit to Ryoan-ji and had included a huge number of temples and important artistic sites, always guided by a knowledgeable graduate student, professor, or curator. I was there at the behest of my friend and host Fukushima Keido, the head abbot of the Tofuku-ji Zen sect. I hadn’t thought much of Ryoan-ji and had puzzled over why a gathering of dry rocks and raked gravel could be so important. The Richard Long exhibition included several of his circles of rocks, which looked like they must have been influenced by Zen gardens, although I didn’t really think he really was involved in Zen. The circles both fit in and had extra meaning in Kyoto and whenever I see his circles now I think of Japanese Buddhism.

Then I came upon a print, just text as I recall: “An eleven day walk through the hills north of Kyoto, starting and ending looking at the same rock at Ryoan-ji,” or something like that. My trip lasted about eleven days and, influenced by Long’s print, I decided to return to Ryoan-ji on the last day. It was overwhelming, profound, beautiful, evocative of everything Zen Buddhism was about. Somehow after being in the culture for ten days and after being nudged by Richard Long, I found that I was able to experience a Zen garden completely differently from the way I had seen it on my first visit.* So I owe Richard Long a huge art debt.

The exhibition at the Tate, Richard Long: Heaven and Earth is very large and really focuses on Long’s walks, all kinds of walks, from the first one documented with a photograph of a line trampled through tall grass to extended complicated multiple walks and sea-to-sea treks. Each was documented in some way: by a photograph of an intervention in the landscape (a row of stones, a trail, some cairns), a map marked with the journey, or just a poetic description of the walk or the things observed on the walk. Some of the descriptions were printed on paper and some were directly stenciled on the walls. Primed by that Kyoto image, I kept imagining the artist moving through the landscape, perhaps modifying it or just documenting his experience, and I was vicariously moving with him and at the same time marveling at his stamina and ability to make variations on the theme of walking. The idea of him moving through space, occupying space in a transitional way, was very exciting: walking and travel making conceptual sculpture.

The next day I took Tom to the Tate Britain to see the exhibition and discovered that there is another way to see Long’s work. “So I could go out on my tractor and mow the farm and call it art?” he asked. I tried to explain that yes he could, if he called it art and did it repeatedly, consistently, and with variations that might have meaning, but he would have none of it. Walking was no different than mowing the farm and it did not reverberate with anything in his experience.

Granted, after a while the descriptions began to be tiring and the longer, larger ones began to resemble poetry rather than sculpture, so that some of the work became possibly self-indulgent, although the videos of Long himself show someone who appears to be totally abstemious.

One large gallery of the exhibition included a few of Long’s stone circles and other geometric forms and Tom did like those. He was the one who noticed the outlines on the floor that must have guided the artist in laying out the circles (He always finds the distracting details.) He was not impressed with Long’s mud drawings, which were much more engaging to me when I learned that Long digs the mud at low tide from the river near where he lives and considers the wall images to be sculpture rather than drawing or painting. Again the images trace the movements of a person, an action painting concept, but considered from the point of view of a sculptor.

Finally, we watched the video of Long, self effacing, committed, doing what he does because it makes sense to him, and having committed himself for decades to making and documenting walks as sculpture and as art. We’re the same age. And he’s from Bristol, where our art journey this summer began.

The Tate Britain has an excellent web site for this exhibition, showing many of the works, with their labels as explanations by Long of his work and his interests.

*When I returned from Japan, I inquired about purchasing the Kyoto text piece and was stunned that it cost $20,000. It was not in the Tate exhibition, but it is on his web site.

Orchard report

Yesterday we harvested the grapes. It was a poor harvest, about half what we got last year. We think the freeze last spring might have gotten some of the grapes, and we also had quite a bit of bird damage.

It's a big year for birds; they're pecking at the apples more than usual. Of course, we feed lots of hummingbirds and seed-eating birds, but they're not the ones eating the fruit - mostly robins and mockingbirds and bluebirds, we think. We don't want to kill the birds. In fact, a couple of days ago we very carefully cut a baby mockingbird out of the grape nets. She was really caught and squawking, but while Tom went to get the scissors, I put my hand over her head and she quieted down, just like a parrot. Her mother was circling and looking like she might attack us. When we got her free, we set her on the branch of a tree and hoped for the best.

The fourth row of Rome trees seems to be particularly hospitable. We have three nests in that row and today I got pictures of all three mothers, two mourning doves and a goldfinch. They were very courageous, holding their ground while I took the pictures. Here they are:

Mourning dove holding her ground.

Female goldfinch above and her eggs. It's a really tight nest.

Second mourning dove

Rosie enjoying a Rome.