venice biennale and icp triennial

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.

back from dreams to nyc

i just returned from a ten-day dream trip from italy. it took me more than a month of laborious planning. i went through three cities: rome, florence, and venice. with approximately three days in each, i had to set up the most perfect itinerary to take advantage of my brief stay. venice, however, i did not plan as thoroughly as the other cities. i imagined i will probably bust my ass trying to see as much biennial related art as possible.

which is what happened. during the full days i had, i arrived earlier than the 10am opening time to wait in line at the arsenale and giardini. i spent the whole day there until closing time at 6pm, only occasionally leaving for food, gelato, a sit near the canal, or a visit to a satellite event close by. after the main venues closed, i hurried to see other events that stayed open for a little bit longer. i spent the other two half days getting lost and searching for national pavilions and satellite events not included at the central biennale locations. thankfully, some were clustered around the same areas, but others were more difficult to find. this difficulty heightened my annoyance when i finally found them and i did not like what i took the trouble to see. 

i truly felt the politics of spatial distribution in venice. to get my money's worth on the hefty entrance fee to the arsenale and giardini, i visited every pavilion there. but the pavilions around other parts of town did not require a ticket, nor were they conveniently located at single, easy accessible destinations as the main exhibits. given these difficulties and time restraints, i could not see as many national pavilions or collateral events as i would have liked. if this happened despite the immense effort i made to squeeze in as much as possible, i imagine it may have been even more so for those who were not there to write about it. seeking out the pavilions of iraq or thailand become very conscious choices, whereas one can do quick glances at spain or japan since they are right inside the arsenale or giardini.

this must be the case every year--how can one include "everything" and "everyone" "equally"?--but it appears sillier in relation to this year's theme: the shamelessly utopian dream of marino auriti's encyclopedic palace. its curator, massimiliano gioni, admits to the absurdity of such an idea--the existence of a space containing all human knowledge. the exhibit seems more of a meta-approach to investigate and complicate the reasons why and what we collect, classify, keep tabs on. but the central pavilion at the giardini location especially suggests the existence of a universal, collective knowledge--a jungian shared unconscious existing across borders and times. a good portion of the show there arranges the work formally: the gaping ellipses of anonymous tantric paintings in one room echo forms created by the circling gestures of the blind painters in artur zmijewski's film, blindly (2010) and even the globe and mandalas in camille henrot's video installation, grosse fatigue (2013) at the arsenale venue. but seeing the same recurring forms and subjects under the same curatorial argument of the archival, encyclopedic tendencies of our "human condition" can be exhausting. what of the show's including the "severely autistic" sawada shinichi's sculptures, for example, as evocative of "the arts of tribal societies in africa"? or lynette yiadom-boakye's imaginary portraits of dark skinned people?

extremely exhausted from my journey from florence and getting lost, i trudged back toward my hotel on the first day of my arrival in venice. it had begun to rain, and as i approached the san marco piazza i decided to duck into an exhibit, this is not a taiwan pavilion, which happened to be there at the right time. it was like taking a long gulp from a cold pint of dark ale after an entire afternoon of flowery tea. the show was directly concerned with relative nature of subjectivity, notions of "national representation" and identity, more explicit consideration of who the audience was. also by chance, i was on time for the last of four performances, a live bianshi narration of artist bernd behr's film, chronotopia by huang ying-hsuing. bianshi narrators are silent film narrators from back in the day--a perpetual reminder that one is seeing a film, and that the images are being interpreted by one as well as the person speaking for (with?) it. the guy spoke entirely in taiwanese without subtitles during the 16:38-minute projection which already had an english narration. most people present did not seem to speak taiwanese and appeared bored after the first few minutes. i, too, found myself straining at first to hear the muted english from the film and looking for subtitles. failing at both, i became fascinated by the whole act: for those 16 plus minutes, english was NOT the assumed language of the audience. huang's enthusiastic speech was not only lost on most of the audience members, but also became a noisy obstruction for those trying to hear a language they understood. when the performance ended and the projection resumed its english narration, i listened, wondering what the correlations were between huang's words and the english narration of the film. i will never know, but after standing near the speakers for a while, i realized that the center speakers also had been playing a taiwanese narration in a very low volume the entire time, barely audible under the booming english.

relevant to this show is also the history of the "taiwan" pavilion at the biennale. sort of there at some point, then gone in 2001, not granted an official "national" pavilion but listed as a collateral event. i know very little about international political drama, and i may be reading what i would like (from an ignorant american perspective) from behr's film as well as the work of other artists, hsu chia-wei and katerina seda + batezo mikilu. the show at least appeared to be adding a different and important perspective to the one(s?) given by the main biennale show, which, overall, i thought relatively safe and too neat.

i will probably write more about the main exhibit and some other shows. i saw a lot and it's been difficult to sort through and process all of them. 

more to come.