Some people refused to visit the American Pavilion at Venice, I believe because the government had specified that the artist could not have any relationship to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), thereby excluding work that includes or refers to races other than white, to women’s issues, to LGBTQ people, and to a variety of lifestyles, which resulted in most curators and artists declining to participate. The artist exhibited was the relatively unknown sculptor, Alma Allen.
I was unfamiliar with Alma Allen’s work and had read several reviews. What struck me in the reviews was the tendency to anthropomorphize sculptures that seemed to me to be essentially abstract. One apparently suggested a cat, one a seated person, another looked like a pair of pants. Such interpretations, similar to seeing figures in clouds, a rather amateur approach to essentially abstract art. The works are untitled. Except for the pair of pants, I did not see things represented. Allen carves various stones and also creates bronzes, using traditional methods, but also robotic sculpting. The large bronzes often appear to be squeezed from a mold like toothpaste or frozen yogurt. The carved stone objects are very simple shapes. Tom and I did not find them particularly engaging, but they were professionally constructed. Perhaps if they had been lauded by many curators and featured in major museums, I would have received them differently. Tom would not.
I did rather like this one, but I'm a sucker for glitter:
Like a great many museum labels, the curator's text alleges in evocative and somewhat arcane language that the work has complex, theoretical, philosophical, and spiritual content, manifested by the artist’s amazing ability. The curator, Jeffrey Uslip, uses words in his descriptions that I had to look up and really couldn’t connect with the objects. Here are his last sentences: "Allen’s sculpture, like all allocentric art, is decidedly present and a cipher for the future. The artist’s signature visual vocabulary provides the ground for the “Allocene” – a proposal for art that embodies a state of alterity, weightlessness, and freedom of thought: matter, time and landscape are coauthors of meaning."
In contrast was the Canada Pavilion. It’s a smaller facility with a tree growing through the center and quite a lot of glass on the front. This year the artist Abbas Akhavan built a pool inside, designed as a Wardian case, a facility invented by a 19th century English botanist, Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791-1868) to transport plants around the British Empire. The pool is planted with Victoria cruziania waterlilies, named after Queen Victoria and featured at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition. Native to South America, these were grown from seeds from the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew that had been germinated at the Orto Botanico in Padua and planted in the pavilion while the Waterlily House at Kew is closed for renovation.
Abbas Akhavan was born in Tehran in 1977 and has lived in
Canada for thirty years. The label says this makes “a meditative space in which
to revisit a pivotal moment in world history and to consider how we position
ourselves today in relation to our natural and built environments.” I thought the
huge lily pads were stunning, a relief from the heat, and that building the
water tank in the pavilion was impressive if somehow inappropriate for an art venue.
So while the lilies are cool to look at, the display suggests the absurdity of exhibiting
things away from their natural environments and maybe evokes larger issues of displacement.
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