Nathalie Djurberg and Paul Chan: Making Weird Worlds at Birnbaum’s Biennale
Paul Chan, "Sade for Sade’s Sake," 2009. Three channel shadow projection. Courtesy VVORK (www.vvork.com)
Daniel Birnbaum’s poetic theme of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Making Worlds, is, in some sense, an anti-theme, emphasizing the plurality of art today. Birnbaum’s explanation that “we now live in a multi-centric art world” does not provide much of a compass to viewers who are trying to navigate through a maze of 77-plus pavilions containing hundreds of artworks. In fact, not only does the title fail to orient viewers, but it is also actively disorienting. In a way, there is something paradoxical about the phrase “making worlds”: “making” implies putting things together, cohering, structuring, while “worlds” implies a multiplicity of discrete parts, diffusion, discontinuity.
Come to think of it, my two favorite pieces from the shows that Birnbaum curated (at the Arsenale and the Giardini’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni) explore this notion of simultaneous cohesion and dispersion, using the destructive power of sexuality as a conceit. Paul Chan’s shadow figures in Sade for Sade’s Sake and Nathalie Djurberg’s plasticine puppets in Experimentet show bodies simultaneously merging together in various orgiastic formations while literally breaking apart and dismembering. While the violence of eroticism and the eroticism of violence are age-old themes, I believe that both artists are using this idea to explore larger issues of human struggle.
Paul Chan’s shadow projections interpret Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in 45-second scenes, which he refers to as “stanzas.” The violent whippings, assaults, and gangbangs literally invoke Sade, while the rhythm of the piece reflects what Gilles Deleuze described, in Coldness and Cruelty, as Sade’s “mechanistic approach [to language] imbued with the mathematical spirit.” This mathematical spirit is also reflected in the video’s interposing of geometric shapes, which Chan describes as a means to establish distance. The shadows themselves seem to be more like geometric forms than human beings, as they are reduced to the simplest contours possible. Chan describes coming to the use of shadow projections as a means to “impoverish” his work. I believe that it is this act of impoverishing that allows Sade for Sade’s Sake to function on the level of the symbolic, as opposed to simply illustrating acts of sex and violence.
Still from Nathalie Djurberg's "Experimentet," 2009. Courtesy ArtObserved (www.artobserved.com)
But if Chan’s shadow plays are the ultimate impoverishment of animated videos, Djurberg’s installation is as rich and lush as any moving projection can be (watch her accept the Biennale’s Silver Lion award for the most promising young artist here). While Chan’s shadow projections are created digitally, Djurberg’s hand is evident in every part of her work: in the dozens of carefully sculpted plasticine figures animated by the painstaking process of stop motion claymation, in the painterly sets of each video, and in the installation of human-sized, grotesque flower sculptures that surround the three projections. Described in the Biennale catalogue as a “surrealist Garden of Eden,” Djurberg’s set reflects the lushness of the surrounding Giardini, just as the violent austerity of Chan’s video echoes the industrial harshness of the pointedly unmodified Arsenale. One video in Experimentet shows a woman attempting to evade the advances of an older lecher, and in turn both struggle to escape the forest that begins to attack them. Another film displays a group of Catholic priests detachedly observing a parade of nude women as they erotically clamber over each other’s bodies, melting together and then clawing one other apart until only tattered bits of flesh remain. In a third video, a nude female reclines on a Victorian couch (a la psychoanalysis) in a cave of fecal stalactites, while bits of her body break off one by one and attack her. It seems that this video’s reference to the process of psychoanalysis, like Chan’s invocation of mathemeatics and vague shadows, subtly instructs the viewer to interpret these bizarre violent orgies as symbolic of broader struggles. Sure, the worlds that Djurberg and Chan are making may be horrifying and quite peculiar, but ultimately they address ideas that are profoundly universal. And isn’t that kind of beautiful?
Weekly Roundup
- Krzysztof Wodiczko is the sole artist representing Poland at this summer’s Venice Biennale. The striking video installation of milky windows depicts the shadows of immigrant workers as they take on the daily tasks and routines of life, conversing in various languages. Above is a ScribeMedia video interview with the Season 3 artist.
- Elements of Photography opened this past weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibition focuses on two fundamental elements of nature inherent to the medium: light and water. The “naturalists” in the show include artists Luisa Lambri, Walead Beshty, Adam Ekberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), and others. Through October 4.
- The Stenersen Museum in Oslo opens an intriguing show this week that explores the many dimensions of gender-based violence. Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art is curated by Randy Rosenberg of Art Works For Change. Several of the 17 participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Laylah Ali (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Icelandic Love Corporation, and Lucy Orta. Through August 9.
- Ongoing at LACMA is Classical Frieze, an exhibit of recent films and photographs by Eleanor Antin (Season 2). The works on display mimic the ancient world by way of 19th-century neo-classical paintings. Through September 14th.
- White Noise opens this week at James Cohan Gallery. The group show features works that exist at the intersection of visual art, music and sound, exploring “how sound can obliterate as well as elevate; how silence can involve both absence and presence.” Some of the artists include Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Joseph Beuys, Martha Colburn, Rodney Graham, Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, Christian Marclay, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). June 18-August 12.
No Expectations
Dan Colen, "Untitled" (2008). Chewing gum and chewing gum residue on canvas in artist's frame. 19.1 x 15.1 inches. Courtesy David Nolan New York.
In his New York Times article on the opening of the Venice Biennale, Michael Kimmelman laments that the look of the exhibition “suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus.”
Without reading too much into it, the critique that contemporary art has been “professionalized to a fault” feels analogous to the sentiment expressed by the anonymous graffito I mentioned in my previous post: “The only true artists are amateurs.”
Of course, the word “amateur” cuts both ways. In most contexts it connotes a lack of training, sophistication, or seriousness, but its derivation from the Latin amator implies that its foremost meaning is “lover.” Simply put, the amateur is someone who, motivated only by the love of the game, engages in an activity without expecting anything to come of it.
Two exhibitions that I encountered yesterday, Slough at David Nolan New York and Alice Neel: Selected Works at David Zwirner, brought this concept into focus in very different ways. Slough, astutely curated by the artist Steve DiBenedetto, is a group show with a complicated backstory based on the title word’s multiple meanings. As explained in the press release, the range includes “bog-like” and “primordial,” “moral degradation or spiritual dejection,” “cast aside or shed off,” and “the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.”
The show includes striking works by Dieter Roth, Jon Kessler, Robert Bordo, and Michael Scott, who represent quite a heterogeneity of aesthetic objectives and studio practice, but who are nonetheless united by a sense of improvisation, accident, and play: a what-if approach akin to kicking over a can of paint to see what happens next (which, in fact, is what Hermann Nitsch’s untitled canvas seems to be). Philip Taaffe’s swirls of pigment, titled Slough I and Slough IV (both 2003), and Andy Warhol’s invariably lovely Piss Paintings from 1978 adopt pure serendipity as their method and meaning; densely laden works by Larry Poons and the late Eugène Leroy revel in their raw materiality; Carroll Dunham’s surprisingly aggressive Untitled (1984-85), in graphite, ink and paint on wood veneer, bespeaks a jittery call-and-response that, like most of the strongest works in the show, seems to spring from an ethos of risk-taking oblivious to the ultimate salvageability of the results. Nothing is calculated, preconceived, strategized, theorized, or prejudged. The object comes into existence solely to delight its maker or, as it seems with Dan Colen’s chewing gum pictures, for the sheer giddy hell of it.
Pride: Golden Lion Awarded to Bruce Nauman’s “Topological Gardens”
Installation shot of Bruce Nauman, "Pink and Yellow Light Corridor (Variable Lights)," 1972. Pink and yellow fluorescent lights. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Panza Collection, 1991. 91.3828 © 2009 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Michele Lamanna, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I have never thought of myself as susceptible to patriotism, but for the second time this year, I’ve felt proud to be an American. The first incident of pride stemmed from the victory of a certain groundbreaker whose name begins with a “B” and ends with “arack Obama.” Incident number two occurred this weekend, when the United States Pavilion received the Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale, honoring a certain artist who was featured in the inaugural season of Art:21 (2001). Ahem! Given my previous post’s shameless rhapsodizing on the bewitching beauty of Venice, you will probably not be surprised when I say that my favorite works in the Biennale are those that engage in some way with the magical surrounding city. Perhaps the committee that selected Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens for this exciting award shared my sentiment, since the very structure of the exhibition is rooted in a rich and exciting interplay with the history, geography, architecture, and people of Venice.
Biennalers (as I have taken to calling them) have been lining up since last week outside the American Pavilion in the Giardini. Sometimes they chatted with each other, sometimes they scanned the surrounding area, but mostly they just stared straight ahead, their eyes fixed on the spiraling neon text piece that is visible through the doorway. You know the one, it’s titled The True Artist Helps the World By Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign). In this case, it is a window sign rather than a wall sign, hung in front of the arched glass on the far side of the Pavilion’s foyer, facing outward. This orientation means that viewers entering the pavilion read the words backwards, and only those walking outside the rear of the pavilion can read the text the “right” way. Thus the glowing pink and blue work draws viewers into the pavilion, only to suggest that they go outside of it again.
Bruce Nauman, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)," 1967. Neon, edition a/p, 59 x 55 x 2 inches, SW 99073. Private Collection. Courtesy Sperone Westwater.
Indeed, brochures, posters, banners, and even t-shirts worn by the exhibition’s security guards explicitly direct viewers to continue their experience of Bruce Nauman’s four-decade oeuvre at two additional sites outside of the official American Pavilion. In case you consider skipping these excursions outside the Giardini, you are sure to be dissuaded from your laziness when you learn that the only new pieces of the 30-odd works in the sprawling exhibition are found in these off-site…sites. The new works, entitled Giorni and Days, are installed at the Universita Ca’Foscari, and the Universita Iuay di Venezia, respectively. Each piece is comprised of seven white panels facing each other, extending across a long corridor. The pairs of panels emanate different voices reading out days of the week, in order, over and over. As you might guess, the disembodied voices of Giordini recite the days in Italian, while Days is, yep, in English.
I have to admit, when I first learned that the American pavilion had spread Nauman’s works across three separate locations–a Biennale “first”—I was concerned that it might be an art-world version of American imperialism. Upon experiencing the diasporal exhibition, however, it became clear that these installations were, in fact, functioning in a way that destabalizes the very notion of borders, segregation, and hierarchy. Moreover, the works strive to fully integrate Nauman’s work into the exquisite context of Venice, in a way that enhances both the work and its surroundings. This is especially true for the new works, which were created specifically for this context, in collaboration with the students at the universities that house them. Not only do the rows of white rectangles visually mirror the glowing windows that line the corridor around Giorni, but the voices themselves are those of the students, and were recorded in Venice. The repetitition of the names of days not only conjures repetition in Nauman’s blinking signs and looping videos, but also the repetition of meditation. Given that the building was originally a convent, I feel that Nauman intends to reference Venice’s broader history of transition from private palaces and religious institutions to public buildings for visitors and learners. In turn, this seems to echo his own process of expanding private studio revelations to public installations.
Installation shot of Bruce Nauman, "Days," 2009. Audio (fourteen channels); continuous play; one audio source consisting of seven stereo audio files with fourteen speakers. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York © 2009 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Michele Lamanna, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In his Art:21 segment, Nauman reveals, “I don’t generally think about large audiences. I think about, ‘who would I like to show this to?’ Who that came over to visit would I say, ‘Let me show you this…’” Whether it becomes a sign, or a projection, or a loud voice in a large space, Nauman’s work always gives the feeling that you are experiencing, in a very public way, something that is terribly intimate. In the context of the very grand Venice Biennale, this tension becomes even more exaggerated, and the work is that much more striking.
Weekly Roundup
Bruce Nauman, "One Hundred Live and Die," 1984. Neon tubing mounted on four metal monoliths. Collection of Fukake Publishing Co., Ltd., Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York, © Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
- Bruce Nauman (Season 1) has won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Visit the Daily Best Media Gallery to see images of his installation.
- Nauman is the first Art21 artist to appear on the Times list of the top 200 artists from the 20th century through today. He comes in at #24.
- Songs of Ascension, the multimedia work by Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton and composer Meredith Monk, will be included in this year’s Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
- BAM has also commissioned a new piece by the Dessner Brothers. The musical duo will collaborate with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie, as well as vocalists from The Breeders for this project.
- Videos by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe (working in collaboration with Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Liam Gillick and Melik Ohanian) are on view in VRAOUM!, an exhibition of comic strips and contemporary art, at La Maison Rouge in Paris.
- A major mid-career survey of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) will open at the Brooklyn Museum on June 26, 2009.
Rome on a Roman Holiday
In the depths of a seemingly endless New York winter, my mind is already thinking toward late spring days on the Adriatic and the 53rd International Art Exhibition at la grande dame of all international art fairs, La Biennale de Venezia. There will be sultry nights, hobnobbing amongst the cognoscenti and, most importantly, a three-gelati-per-day minimum for all art lovers.
This year’s director, Daniel Birnbaum, has eschewed sections in favor of a thematically tight mega-exhibition. Organized around mostly “process” and “painting,” 53 seems poised to steer way clear of the epic knock-down-drag-out mainly between Okwui Enwezor and Rob Storr (with several punches landed by Francesco Bonami and Jessica Morgan) over the African Pavilion at the last Biennale. Though the debate quickly descended into sheer mudslinging, primarily at issue was Storr’s over-reliance on the holdings of a morally suspect Congolese collector. This time around, no African “big men” are rearing their heads, the unglamorous but stable and relatively prosperous west African nation of Gabon is participating for the first time and Mother Africa is present in Venice in a wonderful display of peace and inclusivity.
As it happens, I am re-reading Miwon Kwon’s book on site-specificity, One Place After Another, and like any good student of critical theory, I believe context gives meaning. I am having a hard time thinking about Italy outside the context of Africa, or more specifically, the increasingly precarious situation of African immigrants.
In the past few years, tens of thousands of Africans have illegally landed on southern Italian shores. While this is clearly many more than the southern towns and islands can legally process, police and support, the angst over the rapidly arriving clandestini has fueled xenophobic legislation, attacks against and murders of eastern Europeans, Roma and Africans—not to mention the number of immigrants who die either in boat crossings or are killed once they land ashore. I don’t mean to make too light of the situation, but you know something’s going slightly awry in Italy when there’s a serious move afoot that could possibly ban Sicilian cuisine in the north of the country.
The Biennale bears no responsibility for any of these racist developments, clearly, but there’s no point in burying well-coiffed heads in the Giardini’s gravel about it. And if the news is too depressing for any dear readers, I’d like to suggest two fantastic art projects that have deftly and poetically presented the movement of immigrant bodies through the Italian landscape.
Moroccan-born French artist, Bouchra Khalili, recently made a series of videos called Mapping Journey that trace the routes of several African immigrants through Italy to France where they have ultimately joined the French Foreign Legion.
Bouchra Khalili, "Mapping Journey #1," 2008
Very short and shot from a single vantage point in a documentary style, the videos leave the viewer almost confused while watching the matter-of-fact way the anonymous subjects dryly narrate their dangerous (and often multiple) attempts to cross the Mediterranean, slip past borders and only to find a safe haven in a military hangover from imperial France.
Isaac Julien’s high-calorie films and videos are as lush and beautiful as Khalili’s are straightforward and his WESTERN UNION: Small Boats (2007) is no exception.
Isaac Julien, "WESTERN UNION Series No. 8 (Sculpture for a New Millenium)," 2007
In a project encompassing multi-channel video, photography, installation and a collaboration with choreographer Russell Maliphant, Julien moves his viewers wordlessly through a sweeping visual tale of vulnerable bodies in sublime southern Italian landscapes. In interior scenes, Julien situates his protagonists in a baroque ballroom that Luchino Visconti fans (count me among the faithful) will recognize from The Leopard and, like Visconti’s epic film about an Italy in cultural crisis, WESTERN UNION is downright decadent in its beauty.
Letter from London: Altermodern Love
Nathaniel Mellor, "Giantbum" (2008)
I have to confess to a fear that strikes me whenever I go into a gallery of contemporary art and see the entrance to a video installation. Does anyone else get this? I get this sinking realization that if I walk down that darkening corridor towards the sound of that whirring projector or muffled dialogue, I’m going to have to be there for at least 20 seconds. I’ll have to crunch myself up against the wall. That might hurt. And what if I don’t like it? When is it ok to slowly walk back out of the room, as though lost in contemplation of the muzzily out-of-focus shots of deserted parking lots with subtitled dialogue? Is five seconds enough? I might smile knowingly to myself as though I have reached a level of understanding beyond most of the other visitors, while secretly thinking to myself that I’d far rather be watching the last 20 minutes of Liar Liar. Again.
I had this feeling a couple of times while visiting the new triennial of contemporary art at Tate Britain. The triennial has, over the years, showcased contemporary British art, but, perhaps in order to better illustrate the guiding thesis of its curator, Nicholas Bourriaud, this iteration takes in a range of artists working all over the world but within a fairly established artistic strategy, i.e. one well-versed in the writings of N. Bourriaud. The triennial’s title, Altermodern, needs a bit of explaining. Unfortunately, and despite the good intentions both of Bourriaud and the Tate publicity and interpretation department (the Tate really does have a department called “Interpretation and Education”; I think Stalin had one of those, too), explaining this intentionally open-ended term has proved something of a headache. The Tate website has a video interview with Bourriaud and a (slightly tongue-in-cheek, I hope) manifesto that aims to pinpoint the times in which we live with pithy phrases like “our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.” Having taken the Tube to the gallery that day, I totally got that bit.
I think Bourriaud realizes he’s in deep water trying to define art being made now, as anyone would (no one confidently used the term ‘Renaissance’ until the nineteenth century, after all, and even now no one can quite agree when that got going), but for all the obfuscation and slippery language of the manifesto, the exhibition itself makes thoughtful and often compelling links across a range of artistic approaches. Credit is due to Bourriaud for allowing the art to take precedence over the curatorial conceit and not the other way around. Although when the conceit is this vague it’s hard to know what wouldn’t be considered “altermodern.” A hint at the broadness of Bourriaud’s brief is given in the inclusion of veteran art maverick Gustav Metzger, whose past as lighting designer for sixties bands like Cream and The Who is evident in his 2006 piece shown here: five liquid crystal color projections of an exceptionally trippy nature that brought me right back to the last time I watched a documentary on “the swinging Sixties.” Those were the days.
Video projections dominate Bourriaud’s exhibition, although happily the majority of them feel like real extensions of the language of video. Marcus Coates’s The Plover’s Wing, a 30-minute interview between the artist, dressed in an old-school Adidas tracksuit with a dead badger on his head and a dead rabbit poking out of his top (no, wait! Come back!), and an Israeli mayor concerned about the impact of the region’s violence on the young generation, is a strange, deadpan, hilarious and ultimately heartening work that has a warmth about it I don’t remember seeing in previous triennials. Honestly, it’s truly touching to watch the patient seriousness of the mayor and his translator as they observe Coates performing various animal sounds while acting as a mediator between the human and animal worlds. Lindsay Seers’s film Extramission 6 (Black Maria)—projected inside a wooden mock-up of Thomas Edison’s 1893 film production studio Black Maria—is a kind of patchwork documentary of Seers’s childhood. Suffering from memory loss as a young child, Seers retreated into an obsession with film that led her to using her mouth as a camera. It’s all filmed and staged in a way that steers clear of sentimentality while packing a significant emotional punch. Both films—connected, I suppose, by an interest in translation and the slippages it succumbs to—are both witty and unashamedly emotive. It’s also maybe the first time I’ve sat through an entire video installation without itching to leave. That’s that fear conquered.
Altermodern does sometimes slip into neutral. Simon Starling out-banals his own impressive record of drearily quixotic projects with a piece involving camera phones and Francis Bacon furniture that I’d rather not go into (the brevity of life suddenly being particularly apparent); Rachel Harrison, darling of the New Museum’s Unmonumental show, looks lazily hip and studiedly noncommittal with her stack of painted buckets wired up to a tiny video of some people in Florida smashing up a car. There’s a smattering of post-Matthew Barney D&D style mythologizing in the work of Charles Avery and Nathaniel Mellors, whose palatability is directly proportional to your resistance to whimsy and interest in made-up maps. Andrea Zittel’s influence continues to proliferate, as seen in the nudge-nudge utopianism of Olivia Plender, whose handmade costumes and knowingly obscure reference points can be a bit wearisome. And the seemingly omnipresent Subodh Gupta fills one of the central halls with a vast mushroom cloud of reflective kitchen utensils, a hangover from the brash days of the YBAs, like a big silver fart.
There are, though, many more hits than misses, especially Tacita Dean’s suite of photogravures entitled The Russian Ending, a reference to the doctored sad endings of Danish films released in Russia (they reserved the happy endings for the American market). The photos, culled from flea market postcards, show beached whales, collapsed bridges, and open-casket wakes, each etched with Dean’s storyboard-style notes (”zoom in,” “pan out,” and so on). As with Dean’s best work, it’s a contemplative experience that never sacrifices a kind of melancholy beauty to its conceptual rigor, and epitomizes the best bits of Altermodern: uncertain, searching, witty, serious and—this is the really radical bit—generous.
Letter from London: Revealing Mystic Truths
Bruce Nauman, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)," 1967. Neon, edition a/p, 59 x 55 x 2 inches. Courtesy Sperone Westwater.
At the risk of sounding like the opening voiceover in Sex and the City, all this talk of the Vatican’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale has got me thinking: can men and women ever really be friends? No, sorry, I mean: can contemporary art express spirituality?
Cut the jaunty samba.
Conventional art-historical ideas about the onset of modernism in the late nineteenth century claim that it rejected the bigger-is-better attitude of hoary old history painting in favor of messy little pictures of beaches and boulevards. Abstract Expressionist painting claimed back some of the spiritual ground lost in the pipesmoke of Old Europe, but its spirituality looks both muscular and empty now, talking loud and saying nothing. Spirituality became even more of a dirty word in the halcyon days of post-modernism. But apparently that’s over now, according to French curator Nicholas Bourriaud, the brains behind Tate Britain’s Triennial this year.
Bourriaud, who looks like somebody dressed up as a French curator for a costume party (how’s that for suspension of disbelief?), chaired a roundtable discussion I recently attended at Tate Britain to launch his vision of art now, which he gives the label “Altermodern” (maybe “alt.modern” is better). (I did bring a pen and notebook with me, but must have zoned out mid-discussion, because when I looked down when the lights went up it was all skulls and bleeding daggers. Weird.) “Altermodern,” the subtitle of the Triennial, comes from the man who brought you the wildly popular “Relational Aesthetics” and is just as impossible to explain to your mum. Having spent a good 45 minutes with the Tate press release and an intravenous espresso drip, I can just about work out what it’s all about. Artists travel more these days; artists use the internet; artists like texting; artists live abroad (read: “in Berlin”). All of this means that the nature of art now—cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, multifarious and polymorphously perverse—can encompass not only more ways of making and understanding art but may be able to reclaim ground lost during the modernist (and post-modernist) mountain-climb.
It’s easy to be glib about the Vatican’s attempts to gatecrash the party (there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be there, or that their pavilion will necessarily be worse than anyone else’s) but it brings up some uncomfortable questions about what was lost as avant-garde territory was gained. What Renaissance art at its best provides is common ground between visual pleasure and spiritual sincerity—or at least, philosophical seriousness. The permissive beauty of works by someone like Raphael seemed embarrassingly seductive to the puritanical early modern mindset (Dave Hickey’s essay on Cezanne and Fragonard in Air Guitar makes this point approx. 76 million times better than I could). I’m not advocating a return to the style of that time—we did that already with the Pre-Raphaelites, for which I am truly, truly sorry—but a reconsideration of the relationship between the visually ravishing and the intellectually or spiritually inquisitive (and that’s what the greatest Renaissance paintings are, like this one) is something worth reclaiming, isn’t it?
The State of the Art of the Church
I for one, am extremely excited by the Vatican’s participation in the upcoming Venice Biennale, as Ben Street mentions in Yes We (Vati) Can! After watching Rick Warren deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration, I am reminded of the burning picket fence separating church, state, and art, perhaps something to be contended with more thoroughly in the next Flash Points feature, Art + Politics.
A slave to good ‘ol fashioned controversy, here is an inkling of what I hope to see by way of the Holy See come the year of hugs and kisses, e.g. OX:
- Damien Hirst’s crucified, bi-sected Christ and Virgin Mary in formaldehyde
- Maurizio Cattelan’s pope and meteorite (The Ninth Hour, 1999) swallowed up by a black hole created by the Hadron collider
- Kara Walker (Season 2) silhouettes of confessional indiscretions
- It’s Venice, so all Vatican reps should be walking on water if possible—a show within a show. If the Chinese can do it…
But, with all levity aside, this is the most interesting addition to an exhibition of this magnitude in a long, long time. I might also expect the Vatican to next take out a booth at Art Basel Miami and sell off some of those ungodly works currently in the permanent collection.
It’s almost compelling as Rudy Giuliani curating the next Whitney Biennial (as yet unconfirmed from a very unreliable source).
Change comes to art too… Happy Inauguration Day!
Letter from London: Yes We (Vati) Can!
Holy neo-conceptualism! The Vatican has issued a press statement announcing that it will be participating in the Venice Biennale this summer, which will make this year’s event one of the most refreshingly strange ones in its 114-year history (British artist Liam Gillick will be representing Germany, while the Welsh pavilion will show work by national genius and founding Velvet Underground member John Cale). The Vatican claims to have been “inundated” with ideas from both artists and senior church figures in a move apparently designed to counter perceived artistic assaults on Catholicism. From the furore around Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary during the Brooklyn iteration of the Sensation show in 1999, to last year’s kerfuffle over Martin Kippenberger’s crucified frog, displayed in Bolzano, Italy—in protest at which an Italian politician, Franz Pahl, went on hunger strike, describing the sculpture as “a grave offence to our Catholic population”—the Catholic church has taken more than its share of body blows in recent years. Nonetheless, there’s something undoubtedly amusing about the ease with which the Church takes offense at what are often cheap shots designed for maximum exposure, a sort of comic replaying of the tragic consequences of the controversy around the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons of 2005.
Christianity is an easy target for artistic outrage because it is so inextricably bound to the representational image. Throughout its history, the Church has had an uneasy time with representation, and for its first few hundred years artistic developments came hesitantly, haltingly. It’s worth noting that one of the first recorded representations of Christ’s crucifixion is itself a parody; scratched into a wall on Rome’s Palatine Hill, it shows a donkey-headed character on a cross being worshiped by a man, with the sarcastic inscription, “Alexamenos worships his god.” Even during the Renaissance, the high-water mark of Christian representation, controversy was commonplace. Criticism of his Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel in the 1530s led Michelangelo to depict his most outspoken critic, Biagio da Cesena, as the donkey-eared Minos, judge of the underworld, fat-bellied and engirdled by a python with its jaws clamped around his genitals. And while Caravaggio’s apparent use of a drowned prostitute as his model for the pre-Assumption Virgin Mary was (not surprisingly) rejected, almost all of his confrontational and unsettling works were not only accepted but embraced by the embattled Church of the Counter-Reformation. It remains startling to see his disturbing painting of the crucifixion of St Peter on the wall of the chapel for which it was commissioned, a frank image of a big man’s final indignity. The interpretative flexibility of the Bible is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness; its persistence as iconographic resource for contemporary artists will continue as long as art is made, as will ever more literal and divisive interpretations of its texts.
While the Vatican will have no national pavilion, it seems likely that the exhibition would occupy one of the city’s hundreds of churches in line with previous years (the baroque San Stae is used annually as an exhibition space). The question is: what kind of work will it show? While Christian imagery has its own significant presence within contemporary art (from Damien Hirst’s retellings of the lives of the saints in formaldehyde and livestock to Mark Wallinger’s channelling of Christian mysticism in his video and sculpture), it is rarely without provocation. The Vatican has always had a somewhat troubled relationship with modern art, tending to plump for a conservative abstracted realism, as seen in most modern Catholic churches; its last major commission for the basilica of St Peter’s were the bronze panels of the Door of Death by Giacomo Manzu in the late 1950s. The most obvious contender (mentioned in the press release alongside Anish Kapoor and Jannis Kounellis) is perhaps Bill Viola, whose portentous and relentlessly tasteful videos are very much in line with Catholic conservatism (and whose 2007 Venice show took place in the church of San Gallo). The press release, in its only specific description of the Vatican’s chosen works, enthuses about an “amazing” holographic projection of Pope Benedict XVI by French artist Yannig Guillevic. That whirring sound you hear is Michelangelo reaching escape velocity, somewhere far below.
