I am smiling all the time, here. Venice surprises me anew, every day. Even postcard-worn San Marco, past which I must walk each morning and each evening, hits me like a ton of marble every time, with its majesty and the sheer fact that something so extraordinary could exist in the world. It's hard to imagine anyone going to so much trouble, these days. I don't really care about the tourists. I'm a tourist, too. And it's good to see so many people in thrall and delight in one place at the same time.
But yesterday, coming upon it as I did from the far opposite end of the Piazza (because my sense of direction, while good, seems still vague enough to deliver me along a new channel each time) I resolved to come very early one morning and draw it, when the piazza is quiet.
The Biennale is extraordinary. I am approaching it without pre-conceived biases, and this is very helpful. I am taking it in the way I am absorbing the city itself: with wide-eyed wonder, sensitivity to everything, and gratitude for whatever stimulation is offered. Sometimes it is amusement, sometimes disturbance, sometimes just fun or bafflement or curiosity. So far nothing has moved me deeply, which is what I mostly ask of art, but the vast variety of endeavour displayed at the event gives a wonderful overview of the possibilities of artmaking, and it is really nice to find myself free of my tired old straitjacket standards for artistic worth.
Part of what makes this possible is the sheer scale of each offering. There is enough money behind each exhibit that ideas seem to have free rein, and can be realised to their fullest extent. Take, for example, Mike Nelson's exhibit, which takes up all of the Great Britain Pavilion. It is a meticulously recreated abandoned building, heavy with dust and memory and sadness, strange suggestions of place and story in the discarded objects found in the rooms. I can't picture how the pavilion must be in its clean-slate state: presumably it is an open, barn-like space like the others, but this year there are dank corridors and creaky flights of stairs leading to attic rooms and disused showers. Nothing betrays its actual location in a cheerful and affluent art fair. Parts of it even look dangerous - but there are no signs warning visitors not to climb that ladder, or not to touch that... The dust settles thickly in one's nostrils and there is a powerful sense of being somewhere one shouldn't be, of trespassing, disturbing a dormant possibility of malevolence or ill-fortune... and yet, it is precisely there for people to explore. Eerily, (for the other rooms were brown with dust and weak daylight) one room, deep in a building too warrenous for a quick retreat, was lit red with a dark-room bulb, and the low ceiling was strung with hundreds of black-and white photographs on pegs. The shock of this sign of life and recent activity after all those desolate rooms sent a chill through my spine.
I think it is my favourite exhibit so far.
But yesterday, coming upon it as I did from the far opposite end of the Piazza (because my sense of direction, while good, seems still vague enough to deliver me along a new channel each time) I resolved to come very early one morning and draw it, when the piazza is quiet.
The Biennale is extraordinary. I am approaching it without pre-conceived biases, and this is very helpful. I am taking it in the way I am absorbing the city itself: with wide-eyed wonder, sensitivity to everything, and gratitude for whatever stimulation is offered. Sometimes it is amusement, sometimes disturbance, sometimes just fun or bafflement or curiosity. So far nothing has moved me deeply, which is what I mostly ask of art, but the vast variety of endeavour displayed at the event gives a wonderful overview of the possibilities of artmaking, and it is really nice to find myself free of my tired old straitjacket standards for artistic worth.
Part of what makes this possible is the sheer scale of each offering. There is enough money behind each exhibit that ideas seem to have free rein, and can be realised to their fullest extent. Take, for example, Mike Nelson's exhibit, which takes up all of the Great Britain Pavilion. It is a meticulously recreated abandoned building, heavy with dust and memory and sadness, strange suggestions of place and story in the discarded objects found in the rooms. I can't picture how the pavilion must be in its clean-slate state: presumably it is an open, barn-like space like the others, but this year there are dank corridors and creaky flights of stairs leading to attic rooms and disused showers. Nothing betrays its actual location in a cheerful and affluent art fair. Parts of it even look dangerous - but there are no signs warning visitors not to climb that ladder, or not to touch that... The dust settles thickly in one's nostrils and there is a powerful sense of being somewhere one shouldn't be, of trespassing, disturbing a dormant possibility of malevolence or ill-fortune... and yet, it is precisely there for people to explore. Eerily, (for the other rooms were brown with dust and weak daylight) one room, deep in a building too warrenous for a quick retreat, was lit red with a dark-room bulb, and the low ceiling was strung with hundreds of black-and white photographs on pegs. The shock of this sign of life and recent activity after all those desolate rooms sent a chill through my spine.
I think it is my favourite exhibit so far.
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