Mum, Ive Got An Art Headache
Monday, October 17th, 2005Wow, so much art. Yesterday I gave myself a nosebleed from looking at art just too hard out. That was at the second venue for the Venice Biennale, the Giardini, or Public Gardens. For some reason I was expecting this particular exhibition expedition to take a mere four hours or so. I was very wrong. Even though after learning my lesson from my first expedition and breezing through the whole area first to pick out the good stuff, I was there from opening time 10am til 5.30pm…. Its all those damn video installations. I start watching one and just have to see what happens. Actually the amount of video work was a little disapointing – seems like everyone was jumping on the band wagon instead of trying to bring back painting. Long live the painting. This exhibition was curated by a different person to the last one and was much bigger, with works that seemed cleaner and more refined than the last. The best work for me being a William Kentridge work which consisted of four video projections of animated black and white ink and graphite drawings combined with actions by the artist as he told a sort of fantastic story. The imagery was beautiful and so I forgave the video aspect. Its not actually the using of video that I dont enjoy, just the lack of painting and drawing – this work combined both. Francis Bacon and Marlene Dumas works were also great to see. Out in the giardini (garden) were exhibitions by all the individual participating countries.
The best of these was Australia’s Ricky Swallow, who had no video whatsoever, rather painstakingly carved sculptures of still life with references to time, existence, death – all those deep things. There was probably some other good stuff from other countries, but by this time, nose bleeding, feet stumbling, mind reeling, everything was one big foreign blur. But Im not racist, Im not.
I didnt actually find NZ’s contribution to the exibition til I was on my way back as it, plus Northeren Irelands plus Morroco’s and a few other countries were hidden away…probably because Italy doesnt need to stay on NZs good side… but the exhibition looked interesting, from what I could see through the haze of my art-induced insanity. Youve probably heard about the work, its the one with the portaloos. And the portaloos are supposed to move or speak or something but it was almost closed when I stopped by. There were also lots of signs and gates and words and other confusing things in it. As far as attempts to confuse the viewer go in contemporary art, I can assure you NZ is up there with the best of them.
Today I succumbed to the inevitable and went for the San Marco basilica experience. Seeing it again, it was still awe inspiring to think of the time and material value of the place, which was built as a monument to St Mark – or whoever it is who was smuggled into Venice from Egypt and whos bones are buried under the basilica. There is so much work evident in the huge number of mosaics, and so many precious gemstones and metals in all those stolen treasures, its hard not to be impressed. I wish I had the desire and patience to actually read all the educational plaques around the place and thus actually learn some stuff but I was too busy looking for impaled pigeons. Where are they? I think either the pigeons have learnt that sitting on spikes is not a good idea, or the religious authorities felt people should be spending more time reading educational plaques rather than looking at pigeon corpses and so have hired specially trained pigeon scoopers to quickly hide the evidence should an impaling occur.
Tomorrow, I’ll do a last minute dash of spending, then its off to Treviso airport to sit in a shed for two hours (for that is all it is) before flying to London and back to Dublin. Where Tonia will nurse me back to sanity and massage my aching smelly feet like every good sister should.
Ive read and heard it said that three days is plenty to see Venice, but Ive been here for five full days and there’s still plenty I would have liked to have seen. Guess it depends on your definition of seeing Venice. Though I will be glad to be back to Ireland where ‘please’ is only one syllable and has no tricky rolled rrrrs, where I dont have to practise buying a bus ticket, and where Im not faced with the eternal dilemma of deciding just what flavour of gelato to have today.
Em