Venice Biennale I The Encyclopedic Palace The Arsenale

I took a lot of pictures at the Venice Biennale, as usual, but there were so many little objects and so many artists that my images can only give a vague suggestion of the work in the curated exhibition. As is widely known, this large display, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, is titled The Encyclopedic Palace. When I first heard the title, I thought it sounded like most of the previous titles of curated exhibitions: something that can justify anything you want to include; after all, it's encyclopedic. But in fact, he does appear to have had a stronger focus than any of the previous curators, for which I nonetheless have mixed feelings.

The Encyclopedic Palace was a concept of an Italian immigrant to the United States named Marino Auriti. Living in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, he operated an auto body shop and a frame shop. But after he retired, he devoted himself to building the model for an Encyclopedic Palace, which he imagined would house "the entire range of humanity's achievements - from the wheel to the satellite, and from ancient artifacts to the most vanguard art." He expected that it would be built in Washington, DC and would be the tallest building in the world. The model, down to its hair comb balustrades, opens the Arsenale section of Gioni's show, which is where we started.




detail of model with hair-comb balustrade

 Gioni takes this as his departing place and one expects the exhibition to focus on artists who "pursued the impossible dream of universal knowledge," as he indicates in the introduction to the exhibition, continuing "Today, as we grapple with a constant flood of information, such attempts to fabricate all-inclusive systems seem even more necessary and even more desperate." I'm not sure about the truth of this position; I'm not sure most of us don't have pretty effective "all-inclusive systems" that are also fairly straightforward, like the Rotary motto "Service Above Self." But the Encyclopedic Palace immediately reminds me of other projects by obsessive men who did not work as professional artists, for example Sam Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles or, more near to me, S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas. More than an encyclopedic system, these constructions share the obsessiveness of their creators, who labored for years to build their monuments.

Obsessiveness seems a more reliable filter to use to connect the works in Gioni's two huge exhibitions, not to mention the character of the curator, who fills room after room with dozens, even hundreds of examples of artists' and non-artists' work. There's even a show within the show, of odd things gathered by Cindy Sherman for exhibition. What is not featured in the exhibition is contemporary art, although there are some works by living artists, often made many years ago. It occurred to me that it would be vitually impossible to mount an exhibition of this size in any normal museum (perhaps Mass MOCA could handle the size), and that not many directors or curators would want to sponsor something this huge. But it's possible at Venice and if Gioni had the idea, he may well have seen this as the only opportunity to do the project. And he got away with ignoring the expectation that the exhibition would feature contemporary art, at least with the critics I've read. Since one reason I like to go to the Venice Biennale is to see what's happening in contemporary art from around the world, I think I found this show disappointing. But after all, it was stuff to look at, so I looked as much as I could in the two days we allotted. This means I missed a lot, never had time to read most of the labels, whose style seem to be copied from Documenta last year - too much text in tiny print, with the added feature that many labels were in the dark, so no more than one person could read them at a time. The labels also referred frequently to works by the artist or maker that were not on view, confusing me and wasting my energy, since if I didn't know who the artist was, I would certainly not be familiar with her other work. Don't these people ever take museum training, or read the label-writing guidelines?

Surrounding The Palace model are photographs by J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, a Nigerian photographer who documented the multifarious hairstyles of women in Africa. I've seen these before, or similar photographs, and always thought the hair had been made up especially for the photographer, but apparently he is documenting, not creating the hairstyles. Oddly, I chose to photograph the one that's in the Short Guide and there's a bit of blue from a reflection that distorts her ear:

A confession: before starting the exhibition, Tom and I decided that we should go to the end first, remembering that the last slog around the end of the Arsenale in mid-afternoon is really hot and tiring. The result is that we probably enjoyed the Chinese, Italian, Bahamas and Latin American pavilions more than in previous years and that we saved being tired for the curated exhibition. It is certainly exhausting.



Going backward, we started with Walter de Maria's 1990 Apollo's Ecstasy, which looks nice in the Arsenale room, I'm not sure if they suggest the delicate balance of "the pure, defined forms of the brass rods counterposed against the boundlessness of an infinite mathematical sequence." There are just 20 nice shiny rods in a big, rough room.

There are works by Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and other artists who may not fit my understanding of the exhibition's theme, although I kind of think most artists are obsessive. I wondered about Duane Hanson, but of course he obsessively made his figures realistic, as did John di Andrea and, in a way, Charles Ray, all represented in the Arsenale.

I was very taken by Dieter Roth's Solo Scenes, 1997-98, 131 videos of himself in his everyday life during the last years of his life. The detail of his daily routine, the quiet of his life, seemed mesmerizing, even when I watched only a few for a very short time.

A woman, Prabhavatha Meppayil, born 1965 in Bangalore, India, does extremely subtle drawings with copper wire on gesso that are reminiscent of Agnes Martin in their subtlety. The work is invisible in my photographs. The photos on the

web aren't much better.

Another woman, Channa Horwitz (1932-2013) made meticulous geometric drawings that seem to be related to dance and music, but also are very similar to works in the Central Pavilion half of this huge exhibition. Here's one, with a detail:

Cindy Sherman's show within a show included some outsiders, like James Castle, and several people whose work often involved erotic fantasies. Carol Rama's watercolor of someone having sex with an animal and Pierre Molinier's fetishistic photographs, often amusingly bizarre:





Steve McQueen in a way came closest to the idea of encyclopedic knowledge with his 116 images from Carl Sagan's Golden Record, which was sent into space in 1977 with Voyagers 1 and 2 (I can't see that name without thinking of Star Trek and Vyger), juxtaposed with indecipherable sounds - glossalalia. Looking at the images, I wondered how anyone not from earth could make any sense of them whatsoever.

One of the most puzzling inclusions was the work of Drossos P. Skyllas (1912-73), who apparently labored very diligently to create his hackneyed and commercial-looking images that never received art world recognition. Until now, I assume. It reminded me of seeing a Thomas Kinkade painting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts last fall. I only photographed one:

with a detail:

Perhaps another contribution to the encyclopedic idea; you can include all kinds of work that has been called art.

Before we got to the Arsenale, we stopped at a small building that this year housed the Ivory Coast pavilion. I rather liked the small works on cardboard by Frederic Bruly Bouabre, depicting the alphabet of a nearly extinct African language, or all the presidents of African countries, or other series of concepts or objects. There were dozens of these on view at the Arsenale as well, a good year for him. They reminded me of the Argentine artist Xul Solar, some of whose work is on view in the former bookshop, now Biennale library, in the Giardini.



Trying to think of an exciting, challenging installation in the Arsenale is problematic because most of the installations were just rooms full of multiple works, like the Dieter Roth series of 131 videos, each with its own screen. Another good example of this is R. Crumb's graphic version of the Book of Genesis, which filled one room. Adequate attention would have meant reading the whole thing, which was not possible, so I picked a few frames.

There were a few bigger projects: Danh Vo's frame of a Catholic church from Vietnam and hanging cloth works, Ryan Trecartin's loud videos of outlandish performers, Pavel Althamer's room full of grey skeletons with portrait heads of Venetian people all formed from draped with sheets of plastic from his father's factory, Almech.

In a corner behind some other works, I was fascinated by a video, Transmission, 2007, by Harun Farocki of people interacting with memorials and holy objects, from a statue of Saint Peter and the Bocca di Verita in Rome to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington and a spot where Christ rested his hand along the road to Calvary. Just hands touching places worn away from centuries of homage. Another aspect of obsession.

Among the outsiders at the Arsenale, the autistic Shinishi Sawada from Japan made a strange menagerie of terracotta sculptures covered with spikes, one of which reminded me of Grayson Perry's childhood teddy bear and inspiration Alan Measles:

Back at the beginning of the show, we found lovely nature photographs by Eliot Porter (1901-90, the brother of painter Fairfield Porter and another artist largely ignored by professional critics, who made beautiful images), very dramatic early aerial photographs by Edward Spelterini (1852-1931), and amazingly detailed Drawings of Old Trees, by Patrick von Caeckenbergh.

One last thing - I was pleased to see the monumental abstract works of Phillida Barlow hanging near the beginning of the exhibition. She is an artist who is gaining international recognition after many years of making sculpture.

I'm exhausted, and that's only a tiny selection from half the exhibition.

Manet: Return to Venice

Of all the exhibitions we visited in our six days looking at art in Venice, the most stunning was the Manet show at the Palazzo Ducale. When we visited on a Monday morning in July, it was sparsely attended, and we walked in between huge long lines for San Marco and substantial lines for the Palazzo itself. I had missed the reviews of the exhibition before we went, although I had made a note of it. Only when I read in Un Ospite in Venezia that Manet’s Olympia was there with Titian’s Venus of Urbino did I realize that this was not just a little show of a few minor paintings, but a significant and serious exploration of Manet's time in Italy and the influence of the Renaissance on his painting. The introductory label, and booklet state: “The exhibition studies, highlights and demonstrates the importance of the Italian Renaissance masters in the formation of his poetics: Manet studied, quoted, interpreted and distorted works by artists such as Titian, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and Tintoretto.” Other suggested influences in the exhibition are Carpaccio, Antonello da Messina and Lorenzo Lotto.

Manet made two trips to Venice. Having been in Venice for several days, we identified much more strongly with Manet's experience there than we could have if we’d seen the exhibition anywhere else. The exhibition opens with a very helpful triple timeline of events in Manet’s life, other contemporary arts events, and historical happenings. In the same space are some documents of the Venice Manet would have visited. A newspaper of 1853 notes Mr. Manet’s arrival and the hotel where he would stay for a month, lucky guy. While the exhibition only alluded to political events, many of the objects, and Manet's own activities, confirm his commitment to liberation movements in Europe and the elsewhere during his lifetime.

The next room displays a relatively small group selected from about 140 drawings and paintings after Italian Renaissance paintings that Manet made on that first trip to Italy, including a Tintoretto self-portrait, Sarto’s frescoes in Santissima Annunziata in Florence, Luca della Robbia’s Cantoria from Florence Cathedral. Here an oil sketch version of his Déjeuner sur l’Herbe appropriately makes the familiar comparisons with Giorgione/Titian’s Fête Champêtre and the Marcantonio Raimondi print of the Judgment of Paris that is an even more specific source for the composition. Sarto's frescoes seem to have provided sources for compositions throughout Manet's lifetime, which I found very satisfying, having been an admirer of that cycle of frescoes for decades. Here are a couple of the frescoes from Wikipedia.

So I’m going along thinking this is a pretty interesting scholarly demonstration of Manet’s engagement with Italy when I enter the next room and am blasted back by the two large paintings of nudes, almost exactly the same size, hanging side by side on one gallery wall. At the same time the power and beauty of both paintings almost brought me to tears, I thought of how the National Gallery in London had not allowed us to see the two paintings of the Madonna of the Rocks attributed to Leonardo side by side in that historic exhibition a year or so ago. You can easily do the art historical comparison of the two works from photographs, although the startled black cat in Manet’s Olympia almost disappears in the darkness, while Venus’s faithful little dog is quite visible. But the lush beauty of the flesh of Titian’s Venus, the shimmering light and luminous Venetian color, the sense of calm, safe and happy everyday warmth are tactile, personal, enveloping in person.  Manet converts the Renaissance Venus, turning warmth into coldness, curves into angles, invitation into challenge, and hominess into business, at the same time he paints the shawl under Olympia with gorgeous texture and color that make his work equally impossible to leave.  The mere size of the works in a relatively small room is stunning. It occurred to me that both works must be in good state of conservation and that the lighting was particularly effective for them against the dark wall color.

A touching portrait of Manet’s parents, with a sensitive description of how Manet underplayed his father’s dementia, is an indication of the sensitivity of the labels, despite the fact that in several instances the titles of works intended for comparison are omitted in the Engligh translations. Subsequent galleries demonstrate other aspects of the Italian influence, not always completely convincingly, but the objects are wonderful to see. A wonderful still life of a lemon may or may not have anything to do with Italian baroque still life. Later galleries reiterate the Spanish influences on images of Spanish dancers, the Fifer, and The Balcony, which is also suggested to be conceptually related to the fragment by Carpaccio of Two Venetian Ladies in that the figures all look into the distance in different directions.

A hugely significant part of this exhibition consists of loans from the Musee d’Orsay, and I suspect that some of the exhibition is devised to take advantage of them, so the later sections have somewhat less specific connections to the Italian Renaissance. It was wonderful to see the fantastic portrait of Emile Zola and the somewhat more fluid portrait of Stephane Mallarmé, calling attention to the wealth of associations that enriched Manet's environment.  

I did not find the comparison of the Zola portrait to a Lorenzo Lotto as convincing as I might have, but remain assured that Manet was infused with Renaissance compositions and concepts. Mallarmé's translation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, which Manet illustrated, was a fascinating diversion.

The later paintings by Manet, still wonderfully executed, seem somewhat lighter in content, although the labels suggested his continued political commitments. The one image of Venice, The Grand Canal, of 1874, from a private collection, captures the light, the water, and the surroundings in a way that reminded me of Sargent.

The exhibition has intelligent and inspiring labels in Italian and English. It is accompanied by a significant scholarly catalogue and a very helpful Short Guide with enough photographs and texts to provide a memory jogger for non-specialists. I also loved that the exhibition is in the rooms of the Palazzo Ducale, with bits of pastel stucco work and ducal portrait paintings and sculptures peeking out above the temporary walls.

San Pellegrino label

We returned from a 17-day trip to Italy last on July 12 and I’ll be posting various items about that in the next few days or weeks. It always takes a while to digest the Venice Biennale; I always wonder how art critics can produce their reviews virtually the same day they see the exhibitions.

We drink aqua minerale con gas with most meals. San Pellegrino is sometimes the mineral water and this year I was puzzled that the bottle label had conjoined Italian and American flags on it. I know Italy and the US are friendly, but I couldn’t figure out why the mineral water bottles would privilege the American flag above others. Underneath was the inscription in Italian, “The year of Italian culture.” No one could explain it to me, although some of the waiters had good ideas, for example “Americans really like San Pellegrino, and they buy a lot of it.” It was only when I returned and was reading other arts blogs  that I learned that this is the year of Italian culture in the United States, not in Italy.  It doesn’t seem to have been very widely publicized here and from what I’m reading in web articles, it’s an idea that comes from Italy, not here. Well, it’s July and I’m finally tuned into it. Now I'll be seeing evidence of this celebration everywhere, as I did this week when I saw the ancient red marble statue of a faun, the Fauno Rosso that the Italians have lent to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.

Cats again, and cherries

Cats

Of course, I remembered last night, the cats are essentially feral. They are two of a litter of six found as tiny kittens in an abandoned trailer at a nearby farm market. Without knowing the cat family was inside, someone closed the trialer door, leaving the kittens alone inside, with the remains of a rabbit. I'm imagining Puff and Shadow remembering their happy childhood as they devoured their rabbit catch. It also occurred to us that they may have brought the rabbit inside to keep it away from the dogs, who like to eat rabbit, but just don't seem to be able to catch them.

One of their litter mates was a calico and three were spotted. They others were adopted as farm cats and live outside all the time. They remained pretty small, unlike ours, who now weigh about 13 pounds each. We initially thought both cats were female. A couple of days after we got them I checked again and found that Puff was a boy. They acclimated quickly to domestic life and crawl on laps and purr readily. Shadow was the brave kitten - standing up to Thunder the husky and venturing into new places - and Puff is the scaredy cat, hiding whenever anyone comes to the house and running at every noise, but Puff is definitely the hunter, efficiently dispatching mice, birds, and now a rabbit. They like to cuddle on a blue chair, but they also fight with each other lately.

Brother and sister

Cherries

This week we've been working pretty hard to keep the orchard and vineyard in shape, mowing and weed whacking everything.  The apples look really great, growing rapidly and enjoying the frequent rains. We also harvested our one sour cherry tree. Last year it had nothing; this year we picked about 30 pounds of cherries and left a bunch for the birds as well. I've pitted almost all of them, we made several batches of jam and froze many bags of them for future use in cobblers. Our new sweet cherry tree produced only 7 cherries, but they are good.

Two birds and a Rabbit

Going down the stairs this morning, we encountered Puff, stretched our luxuriously on the staircase. Seeing a cat in this state might not sound odd, but he always runs down ahead of us, looking for his morning kitty food treat. At the foot of the stairs Tom stopped and on the floor I noticed what appeared to be extensive mouse remains, but Tom looked at me in amazement. When I looked closer I shared his surprise, because the remains were clearly a rabbit. All that was left was the head and some guts and fur. As we wondered how a rabbit had come into the house, I noticed that the front door was slightly ajar. Carrying a whole bunch of stuff in last evening I had left the storm door open and apparently hadn't closed the front door tightly. Some time during the night, Puff and Shadow slipped out, caught the rabbit, brought it in, and ate it.
I went out and called Shadow, who sauntered in from the garage. Then I went out the back door to check the deck and patio. We try to keep the cats inside because of the bird feeders. Before I made that decision I found remains of a cardinal, a titmouse, a male downy woodpecker, and a nuthatch (the last straw) on and under the deck. The last one Puff got within 20 minutes of going out. Today I found a whole female downy woodpecker at the bottom of the stairs and the head of a female house finch on the patio.
Tom is wondering why the dogs don't get rabbits as efficiently as the cats do. I'm happy the dogs seem to just chase the rabbits and can't catch them. We'll keep the cats indoors as much as possible.

Puff and Shadow, murderous cats

Who knows what else they killed in their murderous morning spree!? They certainly weren't interested in breakfast.

Barred Owl?

This afternoon, about 3:30 I was at my house in town and looked out the window to see a large owl on a chair on the patio. He/she flew up to a tree and sat there for a while, then dropped down to catch something, stayed there for a while, looking around. I waited for about a half hour, hoping to see if the owl had caught anything, but it flew back to the tree with nothing in its claws, and I took more pictures. Although it looked like the pictures of the Spotted Owl in my bird book, I think it is probably a Barred Owl, since they are more common around here. After a while I went upstairs and from the window there I could see the three small children next door playing in their yard, maybe 30 feet from the owl, but separated by the fence my neighbors put in when they moved. And across the way you can see the other neighbors' house, with their manicured lawn and garden.

Barred Owl

Lin Tianmiao, Bound Unbound, Asia Society

Several reviewers seem to think the work of Chinese artist Lin Tianmiao is derivative and it got me to wondering exactly how much that matters. To be derivative seems to me to mean that an artist blindly and without thought copies the medium, style, or subject of other artists, or imitates an entire artistic style, perhaps adding  changes that make the work more accessible. When an artist's work seems to show the influence of another artist, it can mean many things. Some of Lin Tianmiao's creations in the exhibition at Asia Society did not inspire much interest from me, but others were beautiful, beautifully crafted, and made me think about what it means to be human and to be a woman, in quite different ways than the artists who influenced her - Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, and Ann Hamilton - do. That's a lot more than I got from the Richard Artschwager show at the Whitney, an artist I had always understood to be wildly creative and original, but whose work seems to be primarily about art.

Coming off the Asia Society elevator, I was charmed by All the Same, 2011, a row of bones considerably above eye level, each completely wound in a different rainbow color of silk thread, each bone's strand dropping down to puddle on the floor. The wall curved, and the colored, covered bones made a rainbow around it. Only from the label did I learn that these are replicas of all the bones in the human body. The colors are beautiful and I walked around it trying to identify which bones were which, engaging with my own substructure while I looked. Now that I write this, I imagine that I'm responding to a Bourgeois, Smith, or Hamilton "lite," colorful and ordered images of body parts that those artists would make more disturbing and less accessible. But I was transfixed and delighted, and it made me think and feel. No images I can find do this work justice.

In another installation Lin combined bones with tools and again wound them in silk thread, this time all grey, so the wrapped objects became neither bone nor tool, or both. There were more than 75 of these; the largest included a human scull or a pickaxe. I started thinking there's something of a miniature Christo in this work. The idea was reinforced by the larger installation, Bound and Unbound, 1997, in which she wound white thread around 548 everyday household objects, making an installation at a time when installations were often prohibited in post-Tianamen Beijing. By gathering this huge nuuber of objects used by women in their daily lives and carefully winding them in white, she gives dignity to the objects, calls attention to the daily work of a Chinese household, and perhaps makes some reference to just how many objects the Chinese economy makes it possible to have. It's a lot of stuff.

One installation is made up of a group of plump women, who seem to be partly made of patchwork white silk with balls of thread and bits of cloth hanging from them, and whose heads are audio speakers. The speakers play the sounds of laughter and perhaps talking, as if the women are telling jokes. I watched it for quite a while and could only sense the camaraderie of women. A nearby installation had three old men facing each other, covered similarly in pink silk skin. They were anatomically right for old men and their poses and anatomy suggested hardships suffered and past. It was around here in the installation I felt how strongly the connection to the artist's life and the life experience of women infuses all this work. It's derivative in the same way my life is derivative of yours.

I spent a long time in Here? or there? a large video and costume installation Lin made with her husband Wang Gongxin, where the six oval videos showed a woman wearing each of the nine odd costumes intercut with images of landscape, a teahouse, a Chinese garden, and old and new buildings and ruins, sometimes broken up by a rushing image and a sound like a train zooming by. It's impossible to 'get a hold' of what's going on, with the erratic changes of scene, perhaps like the changes in China today. or just  the changes and rush of life. The costumes are fascinating, oddly revealing, constrictive, strange, impossible.

In several works the artist uses her own body as the model, hanging threads from it, connecting two images with threads, or partially obscured by clustered threads. The label, which explains that in the 1960s and 70s only portraits of Mao Zedong were allowed in China and families could not have personal portraits at all, gives these images a poignancy that they could hardly have in a Western context.

Doing research on contemporary art in China a couple of years ago I came upon Lin Tianmiao's The Proliferation of Thread Winding, 1995, consisting of a bed with 20,000 needles in its center, a video monitor on the pillow, and hundreds of silk threads unwound out from the bed and in balls on the floor. For some reason Asian Society's installation had a table rather than a bed, which seemed to negate the concept. Regardless, the object in person is far more intriguing than the black-and-white illustration I knew from the past.

The most recent work in the show hangs in the front stairway, prominent, but also a bit difficult to see. It's a gold silk picture, kind of like a Julian Schnabel plate painting, except far more elegant and thought-provoking, with gold-wound human bones and scissors and thread attached to the surface instead of plates. Sculls and bones are woven or embroidered into the abstract rectangles of various shades of gold and a few bright blue embroidered flowers touch the embroidered bones. It's elegant and eerie, sewing luxury and mortality. Knowing a bit of the history of 20th-century China, I'm almost afraid to think of what it represents.