19 September 2013
1. What I Saw
It is the Biennale of sunken treasures and Mr. Gioni as a diver plunges into the abyss of time and of the art, bringing to light artists who are hidden by wave of the time. What emerges, is catalogued in the Palazzo Enciclopedico. It is a name that holds as a manifest the direction taken by Mr. Gioni. This was the name given to the project by Marino Auriti when he deposited in the Office Patents of New York the Utopian dream of a place that in 1955 would have to accommodate all the human knowledge, from the wheel to the satellite. It is mirror of a need of the times which must reckon with an increasingly
impressive human heritage.
It is not a question of being passive spectators, but scholars, both for the arrangement of works both for their content and provenance. Nothing is proposed to us as it is but rather in its inner workings or analog ones. One example is the way in which Mr. Gioni positions and treats the technology: not directly but by calling instead that artists investigate processes without using it spectacularly. Some of these are:
Mark Leckey: this artist has earned a reputation as a cultural anthropologist. His analysis on the digital media and on consumerism speak of how technology alters our relationship with the world. At the Biennale he is present with a series of videos filmed inside the exhibition “The Universal Address-ability of Dumb Things”. He speaks to all about a
upcoming technological animism where technology will have turned down our relationship with objects.
Simon Denny: his works are inspired by various strategies of presentation of goods and products, virtual and real ones, probing the consequences of the rapid technological progress. The work in the Biennale is a kind of monument to obsolete technology, Demonstrating how technological innovations from the high taxes they force us to adapt and evolve to keep pace with a world of ever-expanding information.
James Richards: his movies, from various sources including youtube, explore often the most visceral aspects of the popular imagination.
Laurent Montaron: the two videos Will There Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow? and Readings present a characteristic theme of his works: the impulse towards rationality and progress, incarnated by technological developments, is countered by the irrational and mysterious processes of machines, that instead of helping us clarify, are sometimes used to hide,
obscure and complicate our understanding of the world. Stan Van der Beek: pioneering researcher in experimental animation and in digital art, Designed the Movie-Drome (1965) that was carried out not ever. The Movie-Drome should
have been a centre of dissemination of knowledge through the image so that it is like a kind of prototype of the internet. At the Biennale it is exposed a scaled-down model, that he called Portable Electric Assemblages.
Neil Beloufa: the mediation as experience and communication: the creation of an alien world where concepts of future and present, truth and lie, truth and sarcasm meet each others. In the video “Kempinski” it is constructed a fiction landscape set in Mali. The future is made with a linguistic games because they describe interstellar travel speaking at present tense.
2. What I observed:
In China Pavilion, high density technology, the exhibition theme is that of “Transfiguration”, referring to the contamination between art and everyday life, the transformation of everyday ordinariness to exceptionality of media; innovative changes of performances, thanks to the evolution of technology, offer a conceptual look hyper-volatile spirit of our
current era.
In English Pavilion, Jeremy Deller with the languages of the video, installation and painting recreates a story tracks quite fantastic in “English Magic.”
In the German Pavilion, Ai Weiwei presents “Bang” a chaotic and monumentally made 886 forest wood stools. Also the suggestive national pavilions of Spain, with Lara Almarcegui installations on natural regeneration and decay of human civilization urbanized; Argentina offers four locations that offer a look back on the emblematic figure of interpretation of Eva Peròn connection. It is Funny the new movie “Imitation of Life” by Mathias Poledna in the Austrian Pavilion. Playful performative action on lust and seduction of gold staged in Russian Pavilion with an incessant rain of precious coins. At The Corderie, Roberto Cuoghi exposes the large sculpture “Belinda”, dedicated to the ideas of hybridity and metamorphosis, evident in the bizarre totem tribute to micro macrocosm of life; the improbable unusual enlargement microbial forms seem carved in stone and instead is made using modern technology 3D printer.
To admire the storybooks from the collection of Cindy Sherman, still at Arsenal, where are exposed even photographic images with disturbing and bizarre portraits by Laurie Simmons and Allen McCollum.
The Holy See participates this year for the first time at the Venice Biennale, proposing an exhibition inspired by the biblical account of Genesis. Titled “In the beginning”, is articulated in a reflection on three thematic units, entrusted to many artists. On opening, the Hall exhibited a trilogy of paintings of Tano Festa, Roman artist who has long worked on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo, then the three themes run with “the creation”, by Studio Azzurro (an interactive installation that sees man in central position and stimulates the Viewer to a physical-sensory movement-mental space and in collective
and individual memory), “De-creation” (panoramic photographs in black and white of the Czech artist Josef Koudelka), the “re-creation” by Lawrence Carroll (interventions with recycled materials).
