VENICE VIGNETTES 2022
Honestly, I never enjoy entering the Irish Pavilion, & I have been doing this since 2009 (except for John Gerrard’s “collateral” event that same virgin year). There’s something subjective already brewing inside that obscures one’s POV in terms of one’s own National Pavillion. An inadequate objectivity, like not seeing the wood for the trees in a familial relationship. Pure subjectivity. Those Irish writers that do write on the aforementioned take a travel-writer approach, which induces the fantasy of distance & ends up like Lonely Planet promo, with no real effort to break through their intimate & complicated relationship to the Irish artist’s work. Perhaps it’s public expectation, or the unsaid or empty “amazings” that come with such reputational economies. O’Malley’s metal, glass & video works work on the level of “through a glass darkly”. They do that mid-century modern & minimalist thing of utilising space, poetic space, to pause, to think, to speculate, to imagine beyond their holey architecture. You have to bring yourself to O’Malleys work, to be solicited by it. The artist is not speaking here in tongues or testaments, she is mouthing meaning, serifs without font. Her sculptures attune to the nature of negative space & positive movements — air blows through a filmic vent, a crow bobs its head in water: elemental. Atomised up close, soldered at a distance, & vice versa, intimacy & distance tag team in this controlled affair with silhouettes of the elemental. Following what is always a hysterically installed Arsenale compared to the gallery structure of the main-space Giardini & most of its Pavilions, O’Malley’s installation reads as a Giardini show within the Arsenale. No spectacle; the spectacle, like subjectivity, resides in the uncanny gap between perception & the essence of a thing, a thought, a pathological bobbing crow, the soft shuttering of a vent. But is composure a good thing in Venice? Should we go full-Eurovision? I don’t know. I like O’Malley’s work here. It verges on the transparent & self-shielding but leaves itself open to be invisible or bruised. It shows & conceals without being erotic. An earthly accident that may go unnoticed.
Located outside the main-space Arsenale, Peru’s Pavilion is a true outlier in temperament, tone & time. The artist’s name is Herbert Rodríguez. Remember him. His work comes out of the socio-political instability in Peru in the mid-1980s, situated in the crossfire between successive militant state governments & the communist party Shining Path. Rodríguez’s critical subjectivity is not bourgeois reflexivity — the luxury of time is not on his side. There’s a punk urgency to his social manifesto, collaged & conjoined to resist the politically oppressive agenda via a subterranean ideal, the punk underground. Though the underground is an ideology born of the very thing it tries to rally against, institutions & authoritarianism, a rebellion that ends up being recycled by the same institutions — like here in Venice, there’s something about the chewing & spitting of mass-media imagery against the backdrop of political propaganda that retains a DIY spirit. Compared to Barbara Kruger, who takes centre stage in the Arsenale, & who we laugh & love along with as bourgeois consumers in a knowing meta-institutional critique, the “zombie argument” still stands: Kruger’s work exists in & because of the very institutions it critiques. Rodríguez’s craft is less FUTURA-fast, truncated or on the nose. The curators of this retroactive retrospective spanning just 5 years (1985-1990) try unsuccessfully to connect what drove Rodríguez to what drives the overriding earth-mother craftiness of the 59th Biennale. The curators plainly state in the cheap takeaway newspaper catalogue the artist was against one thing that undergirds every Biennale: bourgeois culture backed by big institutions, countries, galleries, money, power. The whole punk DIY mood is retained in how the curators display work on MDF partitions & under glass in chipboard display cases, strikingly unlike the civilised vitrines protecting Marlene Dumas’ drawings in the Palazzo Grassi. Herbert Rodríguez did then what today’s *content as culture* youth do today: recycle the image so it loses itself. But his agenda seems different somehow. There’s no vision of a better world here, just the world as it was, is, will be.
Why is Francis Alÿs’ work the most moving work in Venice this year? It’s difficult to express in words, because there’s no words. No rhetorical or metaphorical justifications. No identity politics. No vaunted inclusiveness. No irony, or disguised cynicism as irony. No minimal absences or maximal excesses. No critical posturing or medium competitiveness. No egos or individualism. No theory thumping, feminist or climate-change oratory. No meta-reflections or regressions on art about art. No context or closed esoteric framing. No archive or legacy touting. No marvelous excavations in history or the artist’s warped mind. No “familiar” or familiarising. No cheap empathetic tactics or political, social or cultural bandwagoning, waving or saluting. What there is, is children. Children at play. That’s it. That’s all. Sure, there’s that rarest type of painting, paintings that have a consistent mood (not style) in a painter’s repertoire, that dot the entrance rooms to the Belgium Pavilion like snapshots from an orphaned traveller’s family album. But that’s not what makes Alÿs work special. It’s his video installation of children playing games on the sand, soot, snow, desert, concrete, everywhere, with the merest of means. That’s it. No clever conceit or aha moment, just that — children playing games & captured in the present moment playing them, for fun, for friendship. Overall, it’s a quiet Biennale this year. Here it’s crowded. No queues, just an unadulterated hoard of adults with eyes open & lips upturned. The smile is contagious. Alÿs manages to indirectly express what other artist’s try to express through themselves via an entity divorced from every adult artist, an entity whose sense of play & subjectivity the artist wants back: the child. And it’s nothing to do with innocence. Children are more Macivillian in their desires than adults can ever remember. Children’s play is for its own sake. It's a nihilistic play. Play that is born to be destroyed so it can be born again. Like the Phoenix, it’s golden. If there is a message to be gleaned here, it’s one pragmatist Richard Rorty said time & again, the world can only be saved with our children’s future in mind.
The architectural determinism of the Palazzo Ducale Venice deterministically prevents any detours or by-passes through the labyrinthine stone stairways & grand rooms of marbel, panelling & painting. In other words - you are corralled where to go. So you go & go & go. A long time ago I appreciated this type of painting in books, when it was compressed down to a page, a photograph, cropped by the art historian who must have kitted out this place in scaffolding to blot out the rest, in order to find some recondite gesture or secret pentimenti to make a name for himself among his monocle-wearing peers. Or he just saw it in books like me. Here, taking it all in, in one breath, it reads as craft, as tradition, as toil, as rule-bound, as silly, as patronage, as deterministic. It’s fine, fine art even, but art is definitely a different thing today. Anyway, we are here for Anselm Kiefer, the big German man-artist of metaphysical painting who rolls around in the phenomenological dirt, toil, guilt & alchemy of history, which is all myth through his eyes. Fuck, they are big. After the Disneyland courtrooms of god signalling, here is a painter as god & without god. Whereas the renaissance that leads to here tries to render the metaphysical, Kiefer digs it up. These are dirty paintings, drenched in metal rain, treacherous gold & silver. But let’s take the monocle off for a second, they are dumb too. (Sorry for all the following repeated “actuals”.) There’s an actual metal coffin flung open in one; there’s a line of actual bicycles ET-style ranging across the top of another; & down low, a school of actual metal toy submarines. But, fuck me they are big. Everyone is a Sunday painter in comparison, or Thursday painter (Luc Tuymans paints on Thursdays. True story!). With the monocle back on, what Kiefer does really well is landscape. The scale helps, but looking from afar, or adrift, he transcends landscape painting into actual landscape; landscape embroiled in the dawn & dusk of civilisation, when there was no civilisation, no renaissance, no rebirth, no middle, just twilight burning on both ends. And there were tingles! Dare I say it, a religious experience (without a god).