Letter from London: To The Manner Born
Bronzino: Random!
It’s good, useless fun to pre-emptively define the times you live in. Nicholas Bourriaud’s confusingly limned term “Altermodern,” used to define works in last year’s Tate Triennial and, by extension, contemporary society as a whole, dropped out of parlance as soon as we got used to its pronunciation. Charles Saatchi’s 1999 show, New Neurotic Realism – a compendium of mainly loose-limbed realist painting, including Cecily Brown, Martin Moloney, and Dexter Dalwood – was an unsuccessful attempt at drawing the line under the YBAs. Even Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s “Neo-Dada” back in the late-50s had a lame-duck ring about it. It’s not only our era that has found its unique identity nigh-impossible to define, although the teeth-grinding muddling over “aughts” and “aughties,” “naughts” and “naughties” is perhaps the one thing that is definitively of our time: an anxiety over what our era is actually defined by. (Imagine a “naughts” or “naughties” theme party – well, you won’t have to for long – and you get the picture). Art writers suffer from pre-emptive epochal-definition disorder almost as much as music writers do (remember the New Wave of New Wave? No?), but something particular has entered the argument recently — an attempt to define today’s art in reference to the art of the past, in particular, to the art of Mannerism.
Mannerism is the only pre-Impressionist “movement” that’s meant as an insult. Loosely defined as the stretch of time between the summit of the High Renaissance and the beginnings of the Baroque in the late 1500s, it describes an art of high style (“maniera,” in Italian) and convoluted reference best exemplified in the paintings of Pontormo, Bronzino, and Parmigianino, the sculptures of Giambologna and Cellini, and the buildings of Michaelangelo and Giulio Romano. Its origins as a term are contested, but it seems to have first been used in the modern sense by 17th century theorist Gianpietro Bellori. As John Shearman summarizes it, for Bellori, mannerism “was an ideal born in the artist’s fantasy and based not upon reality but upon pratica: stylistic convention and technical expertise.” A Mannerist audience might bust a gut at Romano’s wonky architraves at the Palazzo del Te, or titter and blush at Bronzino’s filthy Venus and Cupid, or fawn admiringly over Cellini’s camp-as-Christmas salt cellar. It’s an art aimed squarely at Renaissance cognoscenti, full of winking allusion and pictorial trickery. Picture a cross between Raphael and David Copperfield and you’ve more or less got it.
Weekly Roundup
Walton Ford, "The Island", 2009. Watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper. Panel 1: 95 1/2 x 36 in. Panel 2: 95 1/2 x 60 in. Panel 3: 95 1/2 x 36 in. © 2009 Walton Ford. Photo: Christopher Burke Studio. via Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Tasmanian wolves, patented patterns, cartoon anthropomorphism, ancient mythology, portico projections, and a big gift:
- Bestiarium, a large-scale survey exhibition of watercolor paintings by Season 2 artist Walton Ford, is on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. His new large-scale painting The Island, recently acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Betonville, Arkansas, is included in the exhibition. In this composition Ford presents, via the press release, “a writhing pyramidal mass of Tasmanian wolves (thylacines) grappling with each other and a few doomed lambs. The violent extermination of the thylacines, which were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, calls into question who is hunter and hunted in this savage tableau.” Bestiarium is on view in Berlin through May 24. In June, the show will travel to Vienna’s Albertina Museum. This is Ford’s first show in Europe.
- Through March 21, Vancouver Art Gallery will project works from the exhibition CUE: Artists’ Videos onto the portico of their Robson Street facade. The show consists of more than 80 titles by artists from countries across the globe, such as Art21’s William Kentridge (Season 5). Cinematic language in video, and the unfolding of world events are some of the subjects covered in CUE. The videos have been arranged into seven thematic programs. Each program runs continuously on selected days between 5am – 2am.
- Works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in the group exhibition Shudder at The Drawing Room in London. The artists in Shudder use animation to develop characters and investigate personal states of mind and relationships. Their works tap into, among other things, the cartoon tradition of anthropomorphism. Shudder will include a brand new piece by Pettibon titled Zephyr; the artist describes it as a baby playing with the wind and traveling in the sky. Zephyr continues the themes explored in Pettibon’s The Place, Where We Were created in 2008. Shudder continues through March 14.
- On January 27, London’s contemporary art gallery Sadie Coles HQ will open an exhibition of works by Season 2 artist Matthew Barney. Barney will present a new group of drawings related to his performance and film project Ancient Evenings, based on Norman Mailer’s bestselling novel by the same title. Mailer’s 1983 text reimagined ancient Egyptian mythology and ritual. Barney’s operatic performance (a collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler) occurs in seven acts symbolizing the seven stages the soul passes through after death in ancient Egyptian belief: Ren, Khu, Sekhem, Ba, Ka, Khaibit and Sekhu. The exhibition closes on March 6.
- Get a closer look at a new installation by Season 1 artist Barry McGee on the blog Arrested Motion. According to SLAMXHYPE, this installation — part of SF MoMA’s year-long Anniversary Show — is made up of many individual works created over the years including drawings, personal photos, and McGee’s iconic (and patented) patterns. The installation is on view through January 2011.
- Kelowna.com reports that Toronto art collector and philanthropist Ydessa Hendeles has offered to donate 32 Canadian and international works to the Art Gallery of Ontario. This would be the biggest single gift of contemporary art in the museum’s history. The donation includes works by artists Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3), James Coleman, Gary Hill, Thomas Schutte, Kim Adams, Ian Carr-Harris, Max Dean, Betty Goodwin, and Liz Magor. Plans are underway to exhibit the Hendeles donation within the next 18 months.
- Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) will participate in the panel discussion “Participatory Art: Creative Approaches to the Concept of Community“ organized by LaRete Art Projects and the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia Romagna Region in Italy. The event is part of Arte Fiera Art First 2010, Bologna, a yearly international art fair for modern and contemporary art. The event takes place Saturday, January 30 at 2pm.
The Ethics of Dust: A Conversation with Jorge Otero-Pailos
In my previous columns in this monthly series, I’ve spoken with a number of practicing conservators to illustrate some of the ways in which we care for contemporary art. But I’ve never engaged directly into a discussion around the ethics of our work. What does it mean to preserve, clean, represent, or repair an artwork, building, monument, or cultural heritage site in the 21st century? What guides our decision-making process and how do we translate this process across different time periods and cultures? These aren’t easy questions.
As a way to consider ethical issues related to conservation, I’ve invited Jorge Otero-Pailos here for a conversation. In addition to being an architect and professor in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Mr. Otero-Pailos is an artist who installed an artwork in the Doge’s Palace for this year’s Venice Bienale. His project for Venice, The Ethics of Dust, was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Another installation of this project was exhibited at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano:
Richard McCoy: First of all, I really like your work and the complex issues it raises. But because last month I spoke with Glenn Wharton about interviewing living artists, I’d like to start by turning the tables a bit on you. Will you talk about your future plans for this work, and what kinds of parameters have been set into place for its long-term preservation? Or is this work itself ephemeral?
Jorge Otero-Pailos: As conservators know all too well, no work of art lasts forever. The Ethics of Dust is a project to preserve the world’s pollution, a material that I see as emblematic of modernity, but which we know only obliquely through its effects on other objects.
Paradoxically, even though conservation was formed in the effort to deal with the advent of pollution, we really don’t know very much about it politically, culturally, historically, and aesthetically. We also know very little about its own long-term behavior, or how to preserve it. But without it, a major part of our cultural history will be lost.
I’ve attempted to open up this conversation and to focus attention on pollution with this series of installations, in which I save pollution from major monuments. I’m using latex as a way to transfer the pollution from the buildings. Apart from standard directives, I have not set special parameters for its preservation. In what concerns the latex, we benefit from the work that has already been done on the conservation of Eva Hesse’s work. More importantly, regarding the pollution, I hope this work will open up the possibility to take “dust” more seriously and begin experimenting with how to conserve it.
Weekly Roundup
Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Lightning Fields 145", 2009. Gelatin-silver print, 22.9 x 18.4 inches. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery.
- New photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) are on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through October 31. Sugimoto’s latest body of work titled Lightning Fields depicts electricity. To create each image, the artist uses a Van De Graaff 400,000-volt generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto film. The result in each case is a unique, instantaneous image of an electrical current, sometimes resembling a meteor shower, or a “treeing effect” on the film.
- On October 21, Season 2 artist Walton Ford will sign copies of the popular edition of Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra at the TASCHEN Store in New York (107 Greene Street). Only 100 copies of the book will be available. The ticketed event begins at 7pm; reservations are accepted via telephone. New work by Ford will be displayed at Paul Kasmin Gallery beginning November 12.
- October 27 – December 23, two sculptures by Richard Serra (Season 1) — Blind Spot (2002-2003) and Open Ended (2007-2008) — will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. These similar concentric structures each consist of six weatherproof steel plates. Open Ended was exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in London last year. The New York exhibition brings both sculptures together for the first time.
- On November 7, a new stage performance by Season 5 artist Cao Fei will premiere at Teatro Astra/Artissima 16 Theatre Project in Turin. RMB City Opera (part of Fei’s ongoing RMB City project in Second Life) is based on the “model dramas” (Yang Ban Xi) of the Cultural Revolution period. Yang Ban Xi were the only politically-approved types of performance at the time, as traditional opera was banned by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing. Read more about RMB City Opera here.
- Art Review has released their 2009 Power 100 list, a look at “who’s who in contemporary art,” and a “guide to general trends and forces that shape the artworld.” Bruce Nauman (Season 1) comes in at #10; Jeff Koons (Season 5) holds the #13 spot; Mike Kelley (Season 1) is #20; and John Baldessari (Season 5) ranks #37. View the complete list.
- Paul Laster of ArtKrush has reviewed the “massive, energetic show,” New York Minute: 60 Artists on the New York Scene, which includes work by Barry McGee (Season 1). “Exploring street punk, wild figuration, and new abstraction, the artists in this colorful show represent a new generation of creative minds, responding to the world around them in rapid and unpredictable ways,” writes Laster. Read the entire piece on Flavorwire.
- Two concurrent exhibitions by Season 2 artist Maya Lin at Pace Wildenstein and Salon 94 have been reviewed by Justin Wolf (also on Flavorwire). He writes: “While not unimpressive, [Recycled Landscapes, at Salon 94] pales next to its Chelsea counterpart, but maybe that’s the point. Here the utterly polished gallery space has been transformed into an obsessive-compulsive’s playroom; refinement infused with touches of juvenility.” Read more…
- The new issue of Parkett (no. 86) features artists Josiah McElheny (Season 3), John Baldessari (Season 5), Carol Bove and Philippe Parreno. See excerpts and images from the publication here.
Letter from London: Doublecrossed
Hiroshi Sugimoto, "U.A. Walker," New York, 1978.
News of artists famous in one field crossing over into another is very often met with public derision. Bruce Willis, one of the most talented pub-rockers of the late 1980s (Return of Bruno), fell foul of the critics when he tried to branch out into acting (The Whole Nine Yards), as did indie songstrel Scarlett Johansson (Match Point) and rap supremo Joaquin Phoenix (Signs). De Kooning-esque abstractionist Paul McCartney’s forays into popular music have similarly met with the critical thumbs-down, and latterday expressionist Bob Dylan’s adenoidal folk-rock has received little more than shrugging indifference on the international music circuit.
The message seems to be that there’s a kind of selfishness to cultural versatility and a public unwillingness to square fictionalized and “real” identities. (Perhaps the critics might have been kinder to Willis’s Under the Boardwalk if it had been released under the name of John McClane…well, there’s no point in wishing your life away). In any case, contemporary artists – operating as they do on the fringes of mainstream culture – are in the best position to facilitate an effective crossover into the mainstream, Schnabel’s professional volte-face being its axiom. Cultural crossover is, in other words, invariably outside-in, never effectively the other way around. Just ask Russell Crowe (wear a helmet, though).
Steve McQueen’s disheartening pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale was conducted very much as mainstream cinematic spectacle. You queued up in time-honored British fashion (imagine that at the French pavilion!) to be informed of your slot, waited around, got ushered in, and were told that you “weren’t allowed to leave for the duration of the film” (I paraphrase, but that’s pretty much what we were told). Naturally, this ruffled feathers in Venice, for a crowd accustomed to a 10-second whip-around in search of free tote bags, and ran counter to conventional experiences of art, directly proportional as it usually is to the duration of the audioguide, tour guide’s explanation, or syntactic adroitness of wall text. (Picture enforced viewing times for a Robert Ryman show, for instance, and you get the idea). For contemporary artists, cinema offers an opportunity to condition the duration of the viewer’s experience; after all, you’ve paid ten quid to get in anyway, and you might as well stay til the end to see who the dolly grip is. Little surprise, then, that Matthew Barney chose to screen some of his arduous-at-best Cremaster films at arthouse cinemas as well as galleries, or that Douglas Gordon’s lugubrious Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait was released “as” a mainstream film. And the forthcoming theatrical release of Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy, a biopic of John Lennon’s childhood, will provide the video artist with a captive audience her ponderous and often pompous video works are rarely granted.
This foray into the mainstream, soon to be followed by an as-yet untitled project by the Chapman Brothers which I’m hoping will be turn out to be Hostel IV, might be read as testament to the increased visibility of contemporary artists in mainstream culture, but there is a clear demarcation, certainly in McQueen’s work, between his cinematic and artistic’output – a demarcation seemingly ignored in his Venice installation, which really should have been submitted for the film festival later in the year. The language of cinema forces the artist’s hand as well as the audience’s presumed attention – after all, you can (and should) wander out of the majority of displays of video art whenever you like, whereas leaving a cinema, clambering over snogging couples while scattering popcorn into their laps, is awkward at best and, strangely, frowned-upon (in Britain, anyway). For someone of middling talent like Taylor-Wood, the narrative and durational demands of cinema might shear off some of her worst indulgences (e.g.); comparing McQueen’s film, Hunger, with his art video, Giardini, is evidence enough of the ameliorative effects of cinematic convention. Still, it’s hard not to somewhat begrudge, as anyone with any stake in marginal cultural activity must (and, let’s face it, contemporary art, regardless of its glamour quotient, economic symbolism or intermittent tabloid friendliness, is a marginal cultural activity, like scat or bodybuilding), contemporary culture’s mainstream magnetic pole.
What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index
Famished for some art? It’s Friday and we’re back with this week’s Index. Do you know what was sizzling here this past week? Put on your thinking caps — there’s no need for utensils. Ready set, go… !
- What is the U.S.A’s 18th largest city, the home of the first self-serve grocery store (the Piggly Wiggly,) has an ancient sister city in Egypt, and is also the home an interesting spaces to view art? Guest blogger Adrian Duran gives us the low-down on what to check out in the art world of Memphis, TN.
- What’s in the Yard with Josiah McElheny in downtown Manhattan and Queens? Click here for the answer and other Art21-related news.
- This curator keeps himself pretty busy as a Senior Program Specialist at the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, and he’s back in full force as resident writer for the Art21 Blog.
- What are the different ways art educators can consider avoiding art becoming (simply) wallpaper? Art should not deaden our ability to imagine! Joe Fusaro lends his advice…
- How does one go about making a film of that moment when teachers, students, artists, and the casual viewer are confronted with artists talking about their work, the ideas behind it, and then attempt to DO something with that experience? Jessica Hamlin introduces the Art21 Educator Video with Joe Fusaro in his classroom in Nyack.
- Louis XIV and a giant floral Puppy Dog? What was Jeff Koons thinking? Wes Miller teases us with a clip from Art21’s Season 5 Fantasy episode and an excerpt from Art21 Season 5 book.
- Where the heck is Daniel? Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio neighborhoods in Athens? Breeders Gallery? Francois Pinault’s Puntas della Dogana in Venice?
- For another helping of an Art21 Video Exclusive, see Arturo Herrara’s Assistant Jeff Bechtel describe the process in which he…
- And last, but certainly not least … it’s Part II of Jonathan Munar’s interview with writer and producer of Second Skin, Victor Pinero. (psssssstt…. hey New Yorkers, the film is premiering this weekend at The Tank.)
Summer Travelogue
Front door in Kerameikos
Upon arriving in Athens, several curious and helpful people gave me every warning to stay far away from the Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio neighborhoods, which was exactly where I was headed, for ReMap KM 2. Settled by new immigrants from Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and dubbed Little Bangladesh, these neighborhoods are defined by poverty, drugs, petty crime, and prostitution.
Just as I was about to head into the first gallery, Nice & Fit from Berlin, a teenager came barreling around the corner, ran out into the intersection, and was gone without a trace. Six of Athens’s finest gave chase for a couple blocks before giving up the pursuit. Perhaps the bad reputation is sadly deserved. But there was a tremendously festive spirit that night. Hundreds of brave art appreciators were following maps, strolling between abandoned buildings where the 21 international galleries and 16 independent projects had set up squats. It felt like we visitors had set up a block party on derelict pedestrian streets after the residents had agreed to disappear for the night.
Many of us ended our tours at Breeder Gallery’s elegant new space at the end of the nearly empty Iasonos Street. Co-owner George Vamvakidis explained to me that these seedy blocks were once part of Athens’s most affluent neighborhood, the grand homes creating a romantic passageway. As the city expanded, younger residents moved to further out suburbs, their parents died, and the crumbling facades were left to decay. I asked George if it had been a good idea to relocate his gallery to oblivion. He said he liked the action the street gets—all types of action—and that the foot traffic increased as the city grew darker each night. As it turns out, the vast majority of the seemingly abandoned-looking buildings were far from empty. Rather, they had been adapted into brothels, woven into the massive web of Greece’s legal sex trade.
Early the next morning, when I returned to the area to take a few photos in the light, I found myself walking behind the only other person who was out and about. He was dressed smartly, with a polo shirt tucked into his jeans and I assumed him to be a fellow tourist, perhaps a gallery-hopping collector, as we were both fumbling maps while walking. Suddenly he stopped, looked left, looked right, steadied himself, and then bolted through the front door of one of the brothels. I was left alone in the middle of the walkway completely surprised.
Perhaps it isn’t so shocking, the intertwining of ad-hoc galleries amongst prostitutes. Certainly, artists have long investigated the links between the two ancient professions. Marlene Dumas famously wrote, “lf a Prostitute is a person / who makes it a profession/ to gratify the lust of various persons / for economical reasons or gain, / where emotional involvement may / or may not be present— / Then it seems not so far removed / from my definition of an artist.” And six years ago, Andrea Fraser debuted her video, Untitled. She had sex with an unnamed collector who had paid her $20,000, then displayed the bird’s-eye-view footage in galleries around the world. (The $20,000 apparently did not cover the full girlfriend experience. They commenced with intercourse, engaged in a bit of talk, and then exited to opposite sides of the frame.)
With great pleasure, artistic provocateurs have explored every angle of the sex trade, but my recent European vacation made me wonder about the exploitative nature of the art viewer. See, in full confession, not long after I saw the john in Athens, I engaged in my own degrading activity — only mine took place at the entrance gate of an art museum in Venice.
Letter from London: Dearth in Venice
Charles Ray, "Boy with Frog" (2009). Photo: Ben Street
There’s a school of thought that claims that any large-scale survey of art conducted in any year in history will have its share of peaks and troughs, but holding the world’s largest contemporary art survey in Venice gives the lie to that idea, somewhat. Slipping into a church like San Zaccaria, which I did after the onslaught of the national pavilions and the Arsenale, provided a corrective to that idea in the form of Giovanni Bellini’s altarpiece, made about 500 years ago. No, it wouldn’t have been the same.
Herein lies the danger of showing contemporary art in Venice. The magisterial presence of literally hundreds of architectural and artistic masterpieces has a breathing-down-the-neck quality that sends otherwise sensible artists a bit loopy. The vast medieval hall of the Arsenale, which is longer than 5000 tennis courts laid end-to-end, either swamps smaller works or forces artists’ hands in creating huger artistic gambits than they’d do otherwise. Hence the almost total absence of painting in the Arsenale (curated by Daniel Birnbaum) and the preponderance of big film projections, sprawling messy installations, and theatrical light effects. As though second-guessing the inevitable fatigue of the visitor, the show peters out towards the end, sinking in the metaphorical mud in a series of plops and bubbles appropriate for the city sinking into the lagoon (too easy?).
Invariably and problematically (to use a favored Biennale word), the overabundance of stuff means that memorability becomes the litmus test. If it’s not still in your mind by the time you’re being doused in Perrier by a squadron of nude dwarves, or whatever it is they do at the openings (I think my invite got lost in the post, probably), then it hasn’t worked. This is unavoidable in a image-mad culture such as ours which privileges quantity over depth; it means that the Arsenale becomes an impatient channel surf through the last ten years of artmaking, rarely settling on one thing for long. That’s great for the opening, when a hasty whip-through is all the heat or paucity of cocktails will allow, but it makes for a thin viewing experience thereafter.
Having said that, there are a number of stand-out works, especially Paul Chan’s terrifying and hilarious Sade for Sade’s Sake, a projection of silhouetted figures conducting Sadean activities unmentionable on an educational website such as this one, which sees Chan step away from the wistful whimsy of Seven Lights and back to the jerky misanthropy that made his early work so compelling. Jorge Otero-Pailos hangs a huge latex imprint of a wall of the Ducal Palace, which has collected dust and pollution for years, creating both a palimpsest of time and motion and a frozen moment in a city in a state of perpetual entropy, like a skin sample preserved for future cloning. And venerable arte povera maestro Michelangelo Pistoletto has hung big gilt-framed mirrors around three walls of the second room and smashed them; some have big gaping fissures in them, others just a couple of spidery holes. While this is almost one of those you-had-to-be-there performance residuals beloved of art insiders, it makes sense as an after-the-fact installation, a memory of violent action relevant to the city itself (particularly in the Arsenale, its defunct naval factories) and a kind of furious self-portrait—Pistoletto taking a wrecking ball to the elegant mirrored surfaces of the works which made him. As Roger Moore would say, it’s simply smashing.
Wodiczko Perforates Polish Pavilion with “Guests”
Krzysztof Wodiczko, "Goście / Guests," 2008-2009, video projection, project visualization. Photos courtesy of the Artist and Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
Entitled Goście / Guests, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s exhibition greets visitors to the Venice Biennale’s Polish Pavilion with the words of political theorist Hannah Arendt: “Refugees driven from country to country represent the avant-garde of their people.” Obviously, Arendt is not referring to “avant-garde” in the artspeak sense that you and I may be accustomed to. Rather, she suggests that the state of displacement is one that will be experienced by entire populations, rather than small persecuted groups. The proclamation comes from Arendt’s 1943 article, “We Refugees,” which calls for a resistance to assimilation and predicts the gradual dissolving of European borders and segregated nation-states. In the context of the Biennale, whose very structure upholds the model of the nation-state, the invocation of Arendt is bold, if not contentious.
Stepping inside of the Polish Pavilion, we can see Arendt’s views embodied, as the solid stone building is suddenly rendered porous and thin by Wodiczko’s trompe l’oeil installation. Projections create the illusion of frosted glass floor-to-ceiling windows on every wall. At first, it seems that you can observe goings-on outside the pavilion through these translucent windows. Within each arched “pane” you can see silhouettes of bodies engaged in various activities—speaking on cell phones, vacuuming, resting on suitcases. Voices, which reveal casual conversations that are all related to issues of immigration (i.e. unemployment, legalization documents, etc.), stir your analytical mind and the sensory illusion dissolves—but not completely. Your mind remains unsettled by mirage of surrounding humans.
While it would be easy to say that the characters in these tableaus—clearly immigrants—are guests, your own status as such is also underscored. As the viewer, you are most likely a guest of Venice, and certainly a guest of this space. In Wodiczo’s Art:21 segment, he describes engaging with memorials as “a vehicle through which the past and the future converge.” Though the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale functions much differently than a memorial, I believe that in quoting Hannah Arendt, Wodiczko ties the perpetual flux of today’s “stateless” immigrants to the mass displacement of Jews and other Europeans in WWII, and ultimately implicates the viewer in this ongoing lineage.
Biennale Breaks New Ground: Inaugurating the Internet Pavilion
AIDS-3D and Helga Wretman, "Spread Love," performance still from June 3 2009. Courtesy AIDS-3D.
There is no question that the Internet is transforming the way we experience art. A few weeks ago, Art21 tweeted that data released by the NEA indicates that visits to museums and galleries are declining, while more and more people are experiencing art through electronic media. Though the World Wide Web has the potential to bring art to larger and broader audiences, encountering an artwork virtually is significantly different than viewing the “original” in person. But what about work that is made specifically for the Internet?
This year marked the birth of the first Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Conceived by Greek-born artist Miltos Manetas, it is the only pavilion in the 53rd International Art Exhibition that can be directly experienced by any reader of this blog, or almost any individual with online access. Generally classified as “Internet art,” the artworks featured in the Internet Pavilion engage with the World Wide Web in various ways, approaching it as a medium, an exhibition space, and a subject.
Oliver Laric, "Versions," still from digital video, 2009. Courtesy the Artist.
Although the Internet Pavilion has a “physical outlet” in Venice, this real world exhibition space seems to function for the Pavilion in the same way that a portfolio website might function for an artist working in more traditional media. During the Biennale’s opening week, the space (located at S.A.L.E, Magazzini del Sale, Zattere) housed a powerful performance by AIDS-3D and Helga Wretman, as well as various subversive happenings by filesharing pioneers/outlaws/activists The Pirate Bay. However, the works that are still on display—a new work by Aleksandra Domanović, a sculpture by architect Christian Wassman, and projected videos from the New Wave online exhibition–feel like shadows of their online selves. Rather than an autonomous exhibition, the embodiment of the Internet Pavilion in Venice serves as a signpost, directing attendees of the Biennale to…well, the Internet part of the Internet Pavilion.
Moreover, national pavilions in the Biennale do not simply exhibit works of art. Rather, each artist also serves a symbolic function, with the goal of embodying, in some way, his or her respective country as a whole. Likewise, Manetas chose the components of the Internet Pavilion as a vehicle to represent the Internet as an entity, a space, a reality. He expanded on this idea, and his overall vision for the Internet Pavilion, in an interview following the Biennale’s opening events in Venice.
Lily Simonson: In its present incarnation, the Internet Pavilion has many participants/ingredients: New Wave show, the Pirate Bay, AIDS-3D, Wikipedia Art Embassy, and more. How did you select the participating artists?
Miltos Manetas: I was thinking of the Chorus in the Greek Tragedy, the power of Chorus, the dynamics of its eventual complaints or its approval. Finally, I choose to let on stage—as the only actor—the Internet itself. In this sense, the Internet Pavilion is a monologue in front of a Chorus, the fragmented talk of the Internets while the artists, the architect, the composers, the designers, and the activists I invited are making noise in the background.
LS: Some of the rhetoric surrounding the Internet Pavilion likens the Internet to a country. Also in your essay, “Websites Are the Art of Our Times,” you write that the Internet is “a ’space,’ similar to the American Continent immediately after it was discovered…” Now in 2009, are we still just explorers of the Internet, or do you think that it is possible to be from the Internet, the way you can be from Greece or from the United States?
MM: Yes, now we can be “from the Internets”—that’s the point of the project. It was President Bush who coined that term: in his…imagination, the Internet multiplied exactly like the bread and the wine produced by Jesus in the desert. President Bush gave us a hint: we know now that the “Internets” are what these people fear. Sooner or later, their Cyclopic hate will break upon us; there will be laws and tech that will aim to censure the Net.
