…. So, Venice: Amazing. Am getting a taste for wet vodka martinis. Best drunk by the Grand Canal in apricot sunshine, the colour of early evening here, facing the Iglesia de Maria de la Salute, across a gently lapping, surprisingly turquoise looking portion of the lagoon.
Except this martini is in Edinburgh – a couple of weeks later. Grey skies, intermittent sunshine, only water is occasional rain. Strange counterbalance: Venice vs Edinburgh. What holds them together in my regard is the art, of course. The former potently visual; the latter, mainly theatrical, largely comedic. Both stimulating, both inspiring. More of Edinburgh later….
So, for now: Venice (as I said), amazing. Following the evening at Harry’s, the next day was spent making best use of the day-ticket issued for the official Biennale in the Giardini and the Arsenale. For those of you who are not aficionados, the Arsenale is where the Venetians built their ships and the Giardini are the public gardens where the national pavilions are housed, each built according to their inimitable, national whims.
Therefore, the USA’s pavilion mirrors the Thomas Jefferson era and the North Portico of the Whitehouse (just seen here as the background to Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's extraordinary 'Track and Field'). Dullio Torres’ 1932 imposing façade of the Italian Pavilion (the biggest) exudes the extreme, linear plainness dictated by Mussolini’s facist rule. The British Pavilion is red-brick, looking ex-colonial and neo-classical, with grand stone steps up to the door. The German pavilion, the concrete floor of which was most memorably jackhammered-up in 1993 by Hans Haacke, is this year bursting at the seams with a show by the late Christoph Maria Schlingensief, an artistic provocateur, both revered and maligned for his radical commentaries on Germany’s past. The pavilion itself, the Ger of Germania being scrubbed out and replaced, in graffiti-like scrawl with EGO, won this year’s Golden Lion award. The building is suitably re-entitled because inside is a smorgasbord of sensual overload, got up to look like the inside of a church – altar, pews, incense, music, the works - blasphemously glorifying the personification and fictionalisation of a nation and focusing on inexplicable idiosyncracies.
Sharing a(nother) martini with Michael de Feo (www.mdefeo.com) later, I discovered that I had missed a key component of the show; the main event had sucked the stamina out of me and I hadn’t had the energy to explore the film tacked on to the side, showing smeared nudity. This made him laugh, which made other visitors show their disdain at his lack of respect for art. At this he laughed again.....
The French pavilion happened to be showing ‘Chance’, by an artist I’ve long admired, Christian Boltanski. When I was making art myself, portraits were one of my chosen subjects and Boltanski homes-in on the human face too. His signature grainy, black and white photos of heads of people long since dead (as a result of war and/or incarceration) are here again. This time, they are weighed against hundreds of images of new-borns, their photos on a seamless reel that ricochets around a scaffold filling the pavilion space. Or, on a screen nearby, their features can be mixed – at the whim of the visitor – with those of the features of the dead to create infinite possibilities of facial constructs. It’s a noisy, mesmerizing mess and strangely haunting too. The just alive and the long dead – all treated much the same.
Back to Blighty’s representation by Mike Nelson, who is currently also showing at Tate Britain with ‘Coral Reef’. Here, in the British Pavilion he has created ‘I, Impostor’, a true to form, disorientating, claustrophobic labyrinth that differs from his other installations by virtue of a seemingly clearer sense of narrative and based on the interior spaces inspired by Istanbul. Hans Haacke may have hacked-up the floor in 1993, but now Nelson hacks through the hallowed pavilion roof to create skylights and open courtyards. Again, I find myself thinking back to being a critic and how awful seeing this work on one of the press days would have been. Crowds are no good for experiencing such a piece as this. Being, (at the beginning of my visit to the pavilion at least), a lone observer, I could savour the quality of the isolation, the eeriness, the disorientation, the cramped spaces and the fantasies that accompany being alone in such a creation - all heightened by the exciting but threatening noise of distant footsteps, the shadows and voices coming from somewhere else close by.
Am kicking myself that for 10 euros, I did not buy the hardback published to accompany the installation, as I notice that it’s for sale now at Tate UK for £15. Curse easyjet for their ‘only one piece of hand luggage’ policy! I couldn't possibly have squeezed even the smallest olive, let alone another book, in to my bag. Then again, I’d be damned if I was going to struggle with and pay to have luggage in the hold, so I’ve only myself to blame....
Bo
Next instalment: Into the Shipyard
