Chinese Art at and near the Venice Biennale I

China and Chinese artists seemed everywhere in Venice, and we did not see anywhere near all the Chinese exhibitions, most particularly the huge installation titled Voice of the Unseen: Chinese Independent Art 1979/Today, which apparently included 200 artists in a section of the Arsenale that was oddly inaccessible the day we were there. Here's an interesting link to the New Republic 'take' on it and the preponderance of Chinese art in Venice. Interestingly, I don't find many images at all from this supposedly important exhibition on the web. I'm wondering why the sign did not intrigue me more.

I had read that Ai Wei Wei had an installation work that was in a hard-to-find place near Piazza San Marco. On our first evening in Venice, we went out for a walk, looking for a restaurant, and walked right into the church with Ai's project, the six large metal boxes with dioramas of his time in prison that you could peek at through small openings on their top and/or side. We saw him sitting handcuffed to a chair, eating, walking, sleeping, showering, and on the toilet, all with two uniformed guards standing close by. I was glad to have this as the first Chinese display on our Venice trip. The Chinese seem to have imprisoned Ai in a slightly less draconian process than the Russians use for their wealthy opposition members.

Subsequently we were interested to see Ai's installation of three-legged stools that filled the main hall of the German Pavilion (the erstwhile French Pavilion) in the Giardini. The information that the stools had been essential elements of every Chinese home until they were replaced by plastic and the homes were replaced by towering apartment buildings imbued the dramatic huge construction with the sense of the loss of history in the midst of enormous economic development and modernization that Ai's work often raises.

We missed the Ai installation at the Zitelle on the Giudecca, but did see one of his works also in the Cini Foundation's exhibition of contemporary artists who incorporate glass in their work. His glass jar containing the powdered remains of a crushed Han vessel also referred to aspects of Chinese economic development and forced modernization.

At the official Chinese Pavilion in the Arsenale, protest was not evident. Tom loved that the introductory label touted computer-generated art as the art of the future and he really enjoyed the computer enhanced videos. I was significantly less entranced, thinking both of the hacking made possible by sophisticated computer knowledge and the rather bland content of the sometimes visually lively videos. The first video was a dystopian visual narrative of the destruction, rebuilding, and re-destruction of a city or a civilization, full of skeletons and insects doing the destruction, its architecture more suggestive of the western world than the eastern. The nearby label is what actually set me off against most of the digital work in the pavilion, even though some of it was engaging. Certainly focusing on a contemporary medium can seem forward-looking, but it also turns away from any significant content or even form to celebrate the technology:

I was very taken by a group of large-scale photographs by Wang Qingsong, which are much better photographed and described on Design Boom, a great source for Biennale images and information.
I particularly loved that photograph of the artist almost hidden in a huge study, Follow Him, 2010, surrounded by all kinds of books, reproduced in sharp detail, suggesting the impossibility of knowing and the absurdity of trying to know.  You need to click on the nest picture to see the whole thing:

Another photograph shows what looks like an enormous classroom, and Wang is the only person awake in it, aided by an intravenous fluids stand.

Finally, there's a video , also by Wang, of large groups of nude or nearly nude (they wear boots or socks) Chinese participants, posing as classical paintings in what appears to be a pretty cold studio, since as soon as the photograph is taken, they rush off the set in very businesslike style.

More videos and images drew my attention because the artist, Miao Xiaochen, made a copy of Michelangelo's Last Judgement with all 400 figures depicted himself, an interesting feat that pretty much robs the original of any meaning and doesn't give the new version much interest except in the making of it. There's also a huge wall projection of various images (I caught the Pieta image), paintings of digital constructs, and a cube onto which images are projected so you appear to see them from all sides. The label suggests that the cube has something to do with cubism, but that's a quite different from Picasso and anything he attempted.

The problem with video is that you can't capture the evolution of the images without copying them in video. These were engagingly diverse although they did not have any particular emotional impact on me.

Outdoors were some more interesting installations, at least for me. Shu Yong had taken Chinese words and phrases, Google translated them into English, put them on 1500 transparent bricks the size of the bricks of the Great Wall, and made a wall in the Garden. The phrases were as strange as one might imagine and the wall quite lovely it its way.

Next to it I rather liked the pavilion apparently reconstructing a building that was part of the refuse created by Chinese modernization, recalling the construction Ai Wei Wei made of old doors at the 2007 Documenta and the construction of stools in the German pavilion here. But the label defines this as something else. Hu Yaolin seems to be the artist, but is not mentioned further (and didn't turn up in a Google search) by the curator, who describes this as a structure of Hui-style architecture, an important and revered Chinese style that in modernization "is disappearing and has become more scarce and precious." He continues, "We have taken the saved structure of a residence to the Venice Biennale in order to demonstrate to the world that during the dynamic developing process, we are endeavouring to protect our cultural heritage." I found this disingenuous and can't believe the curator actually believes that by placing an example of the architecture in the form of an open pavilion in the humid, hot garden in Venice, it is being preserved. There is no indication of what will become of the structure after the Biennale ends, or, actually, what Hu Yaolin had to do with it, whoever that is. It's called Thing-In-Itself, an installation, 2013.

By the time I saw He Yungchang's Biennale project his 2013 glass bottles had been replaced by mostly plastic ones, all filled presumably, with sea water, as he instructed. All kinds of issues regarding Venice's relationship to the sea, water purification, water issues in general, were raised in my mind, but also the pile of bottles glistened wiith light and the color of the bluish bottles and colored bottle caps.

Chinese art at or near the Venice Biennale, II

Chinese artists turned up in several other sites, often unexpectedly, as in the Pavilion of Kenya, where the curators were Italian - Sandro Orlandi and Paola Poponi - and the artists from Kenya, Italy, and, mostly, China. The title of the show was "Reflective Nature, A New Primary Enchanting Sensitivity." The centerpiece was Feng Zhengjiu's Garden, 2009, but other works were perhaps more engaging.

I was taken by a group of photographs of people seeming to fly above landscapes, for example, Flying Over Venice, by Li Wei.

A painting by He Weiming, In the Deep Mountains, No. 4, 2012, was almost lost behind an arch and seemed deeply thoughtful and evocative, perhaps just because it was large, hidden, detailed, and monotone.

There was another rather traditional painter in this pavilion whose work attracted me. Fan Bo's painting of an old man standing, titled The Flowers Blow and Fade. Born in 1957, Fan Bo is somewhat older than many of the hippest new artists, and his work is far more reflective than most.

 We weren't always tuned in to the diverse sources of Chinese artists. Only later did we realize that the collateral exhibition, "Rhapsody in Green," was sponsored by the National Taiwan University of Arts, not from mainland China. The brochure talks about the various meanings of the "Chinese color word 'ch'ing,'" which could refer to green, blue or black, but green was the theme color of this display.  First we saw Green Box, 2004 by Kao Tsan-Hsing (b. 1945), one of several organic-looking sculptures made from painted iron and steel wool.

Huang Ming-Chang (b. 1952),  produced exhaustively detailed oil paintings of rice fields.

Finally, Chou Yu-Cheng (b. 1976) is a much more conceptual artist, who had two graduate students make a 2/3 copy of a highly regarded painting of the colonial period by Kuo Hsueh-Ha titled Near Mount Yuan-Shan, 1928 lauded for its use of 10 shades of green gouache.

At the conservatory of music there was a display of the Shanghai artist Simon Ma, some works in collaboration with Julian Lennon. I found them rather graceful, but also a bit facile. You need only go to his website to get a sense of his accomplishments and aspirations. The building, the Palazzo Pisani, dates from the 17th century and is decorated with gorgeous mouldings and eighteenth-century painting.

And in a church in Dorsoduro there was a huge kind of wacky display of the work of Zhong Biao, installed sort of in .imitation of Maurizio Cattelan's show at the Guggenheim, with all the slickly detailed and commercially surreal paintings hung randomly from the ceiling. There was a large label of unanswerable and not very interesting questions on the church wall. Zhang is an associate professor at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Nonetheless, I wondered where this came from and what the curator, Gary Xu, from the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was thinking. 

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.