The first museum we saw was Punta Della Dogana - south-west of Piazza San Marco, and jutting out at the mouth of the Grand Canal - literally a point, as the name suggests.
The building, originally Venice's Customs House, has been beautifully customised to display Pinault's collection to the public. The collection is often confronting, but each work is given so much space of its own that I didn't feel assaulted by the content. The emphasis seemed to be on serious, mindful contemplation in the long, cool rooms, while Venice glimmered, blinding bright, through the windows. For instance, Maurizio Cattelan's sombre sculpture/installation of nine bodies covered with white sheets lying in the centre of the polished concrete floor of one large room. Though disturbing and sad, the piece didn't wrench at my conscience and make mincemeat of my sensibilities the way that some work can. Instead, unspecific, apolitical, it seemed to invite compassion and respectful vigil over the anonymous forms. I sat and drew them for a while.
*Maurizio Cattelan is also responsible for 'The Others' - the extraordinary installation of 2000 taxidermied pigeons on the facade and rafters of the Central Pavillion of the Biennale.
In the adjoining room - another barn-like space of gleaming concrete floor and beamed ceilings - was my favourite piece. Another installation, this one by a New York artist named Roni Horn, it comprised a series of wide, short, cylindrical blocks of glass (maybe more than a metre in circumference) set on the floor, with translucent matte sides and the tops so crystal-clear and smooth as to give the illusion of cups filled 'up to the brim, and even above the brim' with pure, cool water. They glowed like blue beacons across the space, and were so peaceful and lovely to watch.
The second museum was Palazzo Grassi, literally a palace - huge and ornate with fabulously decorative ceilings, marble pillars, the works. This collection - also late-modern and contemporary artwork, was even bigger, and much of it had an apocalyptic theme. There were really only two special moments in it for me: One was by a French artist, Loris Gréaud, who had made a forest of blackened - seemingly burnt - trees in a big, darkened room (even the big palace windows were tinted to block the light). It felt like being in some sort of fairytale - Hansel and Gretel comes to mind in particular - especially as one walked through the darkness to the huge, white, glowing ball of a moon.
The other was a slideshow of photographs taken by a Belgian photographer, David Claerbout, of a bunch of young men and boys in a bleak landscape in Algiers, on a fenced-in, asphalt soccer court. They have been momentarily captivated by a frenzy of gulls swooping above the court. One man reaches into the air with a piece of bread - almost everyone is smiling. The special part is that all the photographs, though they are taken from many different viewpoints - including above the birds - seem to have been taken at the exact same moment. The result is like a three-dimensional freeze-frame, meticulously examined, of one moment of joy in a hard town. The piece is actually called, "Sections of a Happy Moment", and it is just about as moving and uplifting as one could want. (especially after the dismembered corpses and brutalised animals and women of some of the other exhibits!)
No comments:
Post a Comment