the last post did not do justice to the impressiveness of the venice biennale. the scale and organization of the main show for one, but the "narrative," as i called it before, is not as bland as i made it out to be. the shared experience, archival tendencies of human beings are placed in an interesting dialogue across time. the show presents a sort of naive "primordial" shared unconscious in conjunction with a more bleak one of the contemporary era.
if the giardini show presents more of this collective unconscious through images and dreams that surface across people and times, the arsenale introduces a more explicit relationship between the observation of our natural surroundings and science / technology.
auriti's "absurd" dream of an encyclopedic palace of the world becomes a nightmare, a source of our own fall from paradise. the limits of science and rationality emerge more prominently here. our desire to know reveals itself as detrimental to us and nature, to which we have long ceased to belong.
camille henrot's film, grosse fatigue (2013) tells the story of our "beginning," where yahweh decided to rest when he saw the human race had brought sufficient amount of violence and moral pestilence into the world. the narrator lists the animals and lives there were in the beginning while the film shows images of dead birds (all carefully labeled) pulled out from drawers and he speaks of the creation of earth and mountains while a map identifies percentages of people with bipolar disorders and schizophrenia around the world.
at a few galleries farther down, millet mounds (2012), a video installation by xuan kan exhibits the futility of our attempts to collect, classify, and salvage history, despite our technological advancements and number of record-keeping devices at our disposal. a long stretch of small monitors flicker through thousands of images like a choppy film, yet they cannot retrieve the aura or meaning of these historic locations.
harun farocki's video ubertranung [transmission] (2007) shows the ways in which people interact with the historic monuments that do remain--a strong tendency for touch, a desperate desire to shorten the irreparable gap between the holy past and decrepit present.
later on, one passes through the ryan trecartin "hell" room, as holland cotter put it in his new york times review. the "human circumstance" is rendered more depressing as the issue of human agency (in collective memory, identity, etc.) seems an irrelevant question. passing by wade guyton's printer-made paintings and albert oehlin's collages from pages of magazines, books, and supermarket ads, i wondered what this may really mean for art. a complete destruction of the romantic notion of artistic genius? or an extreme exaggeration of it?
the ominous but fascinating film, da vinci (2012) by yuri ancarani warns us about the machines threatening to take over and eliminate us from the world of our own construction. in the second to last room, there is dieter roth's solo szenen [solo scenes] (1997-1998), a video installation of 131 monitors displaying cctv footage of men in their offices. watching the men file papers at their desks, drinking coffee, and pacing around the rooms, i was left without a doubt that i was to regret (on the behalf of humanity) indulging in the obsession to know everything.
but is there some sort of hope? walter de maria's golden rods at the end of this journey seemed to lead somewhere less bleak. i walked out to the open air, toward the boat docks of the arsenale. smelling the salty sea, i felt relieved that it was over.
it's already been 11 days since i returned from venice, and today i decided to pay a second visit to a show i did not have time to see in its entirety the first time. the international center of photography contributes to the discussion (lesson?) raised by the later part of the venice biennale's arsenale show. the title of the icp's triennial, a different order of things, suggests a convergence in their subjects of interest, on the role of art, images, and photography now.
some works included take similar positions as the venice biennale. roy arden's the world as will and representation--archive 2007 (2007) is a 96-minute rapid slideshow of 28,144 images of "things." it evokes the flashing speed of xuan kan's installation, but arden's gives the impression of going through "everything." i did not stand to watch for the whole duration of the piece, but when i paused to watch multiple times, it went through images of guitars, portraits of families, dildos, boats, you name it.
this archival tendency appears more humorously absurd in another work, michael schmelling's images of hoarder's dens. they are a part of his series the plan (2005-2009), in which he documented raids into homes of people who cannot throw anything out. collecting as societal disease. i could not help but smile in remembrance of the "cosmic" section of the venice biennale when seeing one photo which showed a box of books titled numbers: rational and irrational, the telescope, and earth, moon, and planets.
much of the work are concerned specifically with the role of the camera in documentation, memory, and cultural production. jim goldberg's small portraits and sometimes written stories of migrants fill one wall. titled proof (2013), they testify to the artist's encounter with his subjects. markings on each (a check mark, an x, question mark, outlines and borders) by his hand attempt to recreate the contact he had with them--human gestures of intimacy through the alterations of the documenting medium.
like goldberg, others display a consideration of their own presence (intrusion?) during the process of photographing or filming. gideon mendel's portraits of flood victims around the world are not simply ethnographic documentations; the eyes and expressions on the faces betray a well of feelings (some accusatory, others more resigned but still resentful) toward the photographer and, by extension, the viewer as their bodies stand half submerged in water. the title of each portrait begins with the name(s) of each subject, sparing them from becoming another number in statistical data.
the formally abstract work, such as trevor paglen's drone images, takeda shimpei's nuclear imprints, and lisa oppenheim's smoke prints, have elaborately political back stories that implicate the viewer in the consequences of their viewing. the impeccably manicured hand in thomas hirschhorn's video, touching reality (2012), nonchalantly flips through gruesome war photographs on an ipad, occasionally zooming in to take a closer look at spilled guts or a cellphone still clutched by stiff fingers of corpses,
oliver laric's video installation of two works, versions (2010) and versions (2012), presents example after example of appropriation (deliberate or not) and recurring images throughout visual mediums in history. there exists no such thing as originality and we always take from history, laric seems to say. the "archive" is made of the same repeating images. is there such a thing as discovery and human agency?
i like the show at icp for its complexity, and perhaps, greater optimism than the biennale's take on some of the issues. human beings, art, images, have more power. photography and seeing are actions which have consequences in the real world. sometimes they do violence and destruction, sometimes they bestow power and create potential for changing the world.
this post may be very scattered and grammatically incorrect. but i wanted to get some notes down before my desire to write about this show went away completely.
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