u n t i l n e x t t i m e

Before getting into the madness of attempting to recap on another incredible experience of the Venice Biennale, we got some images back from the exhibition in a bin! A new and fun premise with some bizarre documentation. 

Venice Biennale was, as always, absolutely saturated with amazing work from all over the world. Some knowing art history references form Cody Choi, including a sculpture that has the shape of Rodin’s “The Thinker” but is made with pink liquid Pepto-Bismol and toilet paper, the two objects that represent his early cultural indigestion and are very much in line with his exploration into clashes between the Eastern and the Western worlds. 

Mika Taanila’s project ‘Film Reader’ contains a series of prepared cinema books but instead of text editing, the artist has created a process parallel to traditional film editing, i.e. splicing. These books are works of moving image, quite literally: images are moved and taken out, erased, cut-out, transformed and discarded. Immaterial ideas of cinematic writing/reading transform into eerie cinematic collages. 

Anne Imhof’s work in the German pavilion was a favourite of ours. A glass floor has been installed across the span of the pavilion, and for the first few minutes one is overcome by an unnerving feeling of vertigo. Underneath the glass, a series of objects are arranged in clusters: a leather mattress, cuffs, spoons, chains, and bottles of liquids of dubious nature. Imhof’s loyal crew of performers wear tattered sport clothes and dirty jeans, and can be found scattered across the space. The entire time, the performers move about. They stand on plinths, sing, dance, and then move into the claustrophobic spaces below the glass floor, where they engage in activities which range from looking sulky to checking their mobile phones. Then just as you’ve got used to them wondering through the space an industrial soundtrack explodes on the speakers, filling the room with metallic beats. The performers all come together in formation and walk across the room slowly, like an impossibly cool army of zombies. They reach the front end of the pavilion, where instead of a door, a glass window has been installed. Audience members that didn’t make it inside are piling up and squinting to see. Then, the group turns and walks back to the center of room, looking deadpan towards the viewers, who are photographing and videoing their every move, fascinated, despite the mildly threatening feeling these characters provoke. A truly chilling but enchanting experience.

Next up was Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen who produced a hilarious film installation re-imagining Finnish society through the eyes of two messianic outsider figures, who offer a cosmic-comic perspective on Finnish creation mythology, contemporary Finnish society, and its possible futures.

Søren Engsted had a funny and intelligent film of a performance where he uses the technology seen in street magic to make the appearance of levitation. He then delivers a lecture on all types of levitation whilst in this position.

Taus Makhacheva’s film tightrope is another example of a beautifully presented metaphor only this time one involving balancing on a tightrope. It’s about the basic doubts an artist might have in making their own work, and the difficulty of trying to balance real-life responsibilities with an artistic practice.

As always, great to see Charles Atlas film featuring Lady Bunny. In ‘The Tyranny of Consciousness’ Lady Bunny reveals how she finally found a voice and managed to speak about politics only after growing up, and then talks about peace, life, our planet, greed and the confusing and complex times we are living in, all to a backdrop of 44 sunsets.

Another top moment was seeing Guan Xiao film titled ‘David’. We had never seen one of her films before so it was great to witness. Named for Michelangelo’s sculpture, it’s an absurdist commentary on the contemporary commercialisation of a centuries-old sculpture, including some amazing Chinese karaoke.

‘Living Dog Among Dead Lions’ was an installation by Vajiko Chachkhiani in the form of a small abandoned wooden hut, found in the Georgian countryside and reassembled on-site. Furniture, pictures, lights and other household items are the only occupants of the cabin. Then they simulated a never-ending rainstorm inside it by puncturing the ceiling with hundreds of holes and installing an irrigation system above. Water puddles on the floor and furniture, and trickles through cracks in the wood. The intention was that visitors can watch the interior decay and rot over the course of the biennale, while the exterior of the house will remain untouched, but this would have been more prominent if all the interior hadn’t been covered in plastic sheeting.

We had been looking forward to Rachel Maclean’s ‘Spite Your Face’ for quite some time and it did not fail to impress. The film takes in part of the narrative of Pinocchio and follows Pinocchio-like characters who encounter situations where a normal sense of what is true and what is false is confused, and so the viewer’s sense of what are lies and what are truths becomes confused as well. It’s clear that it’s a direct commentary on recent events, but there’s no Trump, or Theresa May, front and center beside the wooden boy. It’s more allusive; you can pick up on certain things or certain tropes in political characters. It’s much more thoughtful to have characters to feel a little bit more like an amalgam of different characters and different ideas, get the audience thinking.

Evan Penny’s ‘Ask Your Body’ exhibition was an amazing display of technical skill. However, we didn’t think the actual hyper-real sculptures were necessary, it felt a little gimmicky. However, the photography of them was amazing and felt more connected to how viewers might perceive their relationship with themselves and others.

‘The Imitation of Christ’ is a large scale project by Roberto Cuoghi in which Jesus after Jesus is cast by assistants working the moulds and kilns, before getting laid out on their backs by twos in little plastic bubbles. Then they are left to disintegrate until they have fallen apart, the body shattered into different parts – thus resembling the shrivelled-up relics that the crusaders set off after so long ago. It was quite a spectacle, and its byproducts quite gorgeous. Creating work about religion, and more specifically Christianity, is always a tricky one; so much has been done to investigate of the historical figure of the Christ. Yet Cuoghi has tapped into this very unexceptional fact that no one knows what he looked like, and that’s why you have 200 years of art history trying to depict him. The work is then showing the multiplication of his body as a man, and then nature comes in and alters it.

Another highlight was Andy Holden’s ‘Laws of Motion in the Cartoon Landscape’, something we’ve been looking forward to seeing for sometime and have soured the Internet for to no avail. The work comes in the form of a two channel film presenting a theory that the world is now a cartoon, and explores how an artist might operate in a landscape in which everything has been done, everything is equally possible, yet certain things endlessly reoccur. Taking ‘cartoon physics’ as its starting point, this dual-screen work, with artist appearing as narrator, via green-screen and as animated avatar, in the Cartoon Landscape, tells the history of the golden era of cartoons; interweaving quantum mechanics, philosophy, art history, and politics, to construct a set of Laws. The presentation mixes critical theory and conspiracy theory, oscillating between historical fact and bombastic speculation, each idea flowing into the next with the logic of a cartoon. Animated sequences sit alongside extracts from Stephen Hawkins, Greek philosophy, speculations on the 2008 financial crisis, Donald Trump, musings on the potentially animate nature of all matter, and the role of the artist in this post-human landscape. Even in the baking Summer heat we stuck it out till the end and we were rewarded.

Last but certainly not least was Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the WRECK of the Unbelievable’. A site of total over indulgent excessive activity, which was incredibly entertaining and enjoyable. As you can probably tell it’s a complicated triumph. The labels for the works on display, dozens of objects, many enormous, depicting mythological beings – monsters, ancient royalty, maiden warriors, three-headed dogs, and suchlike – refer to them in a slightly puzzled or distant way as if only so much can be known. In other words, they’re like the labels in places at the British Museum, and the objects are like the antiquities you’d expect to find there. We are told that these ancient artworks were found lying at the bottom of the ocean after a ship carrying them, called the Unbelievable, sank, 2,000 years ago. This is untrue but it is true that works were sunk into the sea and then dragged up again and the operation recorded, just for the sake of the photos. This is only made more insane by the option of having a tour guide where the guide acts as if this is in fact true. As mentioned before the success is complicated; the objects remain aesthetically worthless but they’re needed for the concepts – after that they needn’t be looked at again. The true artwork was in the whole astonishing vision, the spectacle of a lifetime – his wondrous invented museum.

Well Venice Biennale, until next time…