Into the Shipyard

So. Long time, no blog.

Well, I was waiting until one can finally wave goodbye to the Venice Biennale, finishing as it did last weekend, to complete the current train of thought on the matter as a fitting end to the episode. And how time and art have moved on in the interim.

We now have Bloomberg New Contemporaries featuring at the ICA. As the Biennale faded out, a day of 'Intercourse' (of the intellectual, rather than biblical variety) made the art news, including as it did an auction with Christopher Biggins (!) and a re-enactment of the Odessa steps scene from Eisensteins's 'Battleship Potemkin'  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec

The ICA version starred Norman Rosenthal, Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger, Andrew Logan and Louisa Buck et al. The artworld's finest donned fancydress and plastic swords to trample over those members of the public daft enough to volunteer to pretend to die and drape themselves theatrically on the cold, stone steps at the bottom of Waterloo Place, just off The Mall.

Why, why, why?  You may well ask. But then, as Jane and Louise Wilson were directing, it makes sense. Still, more lark than art, methinks.

Anyway, one cannot close comment on the Biennale without a foray in to the Arsenale: the old ship building area of Venice. The Corderie at the Arsenale, the vast, industrial warehouse spaces that were the old rope factories, traditionally feature a curated mix of work by international artists in a more open, or 'aperto' exhibition. The lack of painting was compensated by only one of four works I can now remember. The key one surely being Christan Marclay's, The Clock (2010).

 

Not surprisingly, Marclay won the Golden Lion for the best artist at the Biennale's ILLUMInations exhibition for this. It's an utterly compelling piece of extraordinary research, editing and montage compilation. By now, you will probably know the premise: a film 24 hours in length, comprises film clips from contemporary and vintage footage, all featuring the time at which you are watching the film, whenever you happen to be watching it, in actual time. Yes, actually. I had thought that Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993) had the monopoly on such a genre:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1jkoMfPa40 

However, Marclay's piece is such a tour de force, it's almost as impossible to fault as it was to get up off one of the large comfortable sofas provided and go back out into the Venetian sunshine.  

Ok, so before we leave Venice for a quick nip to Edinburgh (I did promise) I know you are dying to learn what the other three pieces were that caught my attention - no, dammit! - that were the only other artworks I can recall - as I said (memory's going).

Beyond Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas's extraordinary mosaics created out of hand-painted eggs (see above), Swiss artist Urs Fischer's essentially giant, burning wax candles made an impact. By the time I witnessed the work, I was confronted by a series of sad lumps, barely anthropomorphic. Once monumental copies of neo-classical sculptures, were dribbling and fizzling out in sad, solidifying pools of cloudy grey and cream on the floor. The most latterly magnificent of these was a full-scale cast of Giovanni Bologna’s 16th-century The Rape of the Sabine Women. 

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/15021/urs-fisher-at-venice-art-biennale-2011.html

The other piece was Chinese artists Song Dong's Para-Pavillion, evocative in spatial and olfactory terms:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMoyYKvJkUM  The maze of knitted-together wardrobe fascias, ending with what looked like a decaying skeleton of a chinese pavillion, gave rise to feelings similar to those experienced in the presence of the 'ghost' works by Rachel Whiteread. It's the sense of past lives, of clothes worn, loves expressed, rows and tears lost, imbuing the fabric of the installation that give the work its power....

A final thought from Venice that greets visitors to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection:

Next stop: Edinburgh

Ciao,

Bo