Noticing the Giardini

Two art projects in the Giardini at this year's Venice Biennale particularly thrilled me because they drew attention to the garden location of the pavilions; and they did so in unpretentious and understated ways. What made the exprience even more emphatic for me was the unanticipated serrendipity of encountering one immediately after the other.

First there was Steve McQueen's poetic two-screen film in the British Pavilion of a damp, rubbish-stren, decaying and desolate winter Giardini. McQueen juxtaposed carefuly framed close-ups alongside mysterious wide shots and enigmatic out-of-focus details to reveal the erstwhile hub of the art world crawling with slow-moving insects and snails; dripping with mist; drenched in rain; and haunted by scavenging long-legged stray dogs and men smoking cigarettes in the shadows seeking secret assignations.

With these images still swirling around my head, I descended the steps of the British Pavilion and I made my way down hill to the next exhibition, that of the Czech and Sovak Republic. Here, I did a double-take and checked my bearings, as the wide open doors of the pavilion revealed an inside exactly like the outside. Here Roman Ondak had landscaped the whole inside of pavilion into an exact copy, or actually an exact extension, of the Giardini's gravel paths, trees and shrubbery. This simple gesture, coupled with breaking a door through the back wall of the building so that people could walk right through un-impeded, had turned the pavilion inside out. It was in fact quite funny to find myself walking directly behind a group of four people who seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that they had walked through a building, let alone an artist's installation! They seemed so engrossed in their conversation that they unconsiously followed the path in front of them without pause, as if Ondak's exhibit had made the pavilion invisible.

What, when, where: Steve McQueen, "Giardini" 2009, British Pavilion; and Roman Ondak "Loop" 2009, Pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Rebublics; Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art 2009, Venice, Italy. Photos of "Giardini" courtesy the artist; photos of "Loop" by Rob Garrett.

Rushing but not rushed

The Mexican Pavilion was the last on my “list” of must-see exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and I had left it and a few others to my final afternoon. But sandwiching a half-day trip to Verona into my final day and missing my preferred train back to Venice, meant I was literally rushing to get to the exhibition before it closed for the day. It also meant I was too late to catch the daily performance at the venue. Having gone to Verona and at the redhead’s suggestion having sought out a divine but brusque restaurant for lunch to enjoy the local specialties of donkey mince with noodles and horse casserole with polenta, I was now both delightfully sated and rushing to catch one last Venice exhibition before moving on to Berlin.

Certainly these were not the best circumstances to be seeing one the gritty and ethically potent presentation by Therese Margolles. Yet here I was, with about 20 minutes, and camera in hand, determined to see it and to at least make a quick record for later reflection. I was ushered up to a row of first floor rooms. One after the other, cool, shaded, slightly damp, the rooms were empty of “art” except for a single mop and bucket standing against a wall in each. With my poor timing, I had not been there to see the daily mid-afternoon ritual in which the attendants wet-mopped these floors as the artist had instructed.

Moving fairly quickly I was still waiting, or looking for something, but not sure what. The last of these upstairs rooms didn’t care whether I was ready, waiting, or distracted: it packed an unmitigated punch which assaulted all my senses as soon as I crossed the threshold. The room stank. It was warmer and slightly fetid. It was darker: crimson dark. The walls of this room were hung with blood-soaked shrouds. It was a sweet, cloying, humid and claustrophobic chamber which stopped me in my tracks and I wanted to hold my breath, turn away, seek the calm coolness of the previous two rooms, but I was at least momentarily transfixed and found myself breathing the room in.

But then I did keep moving; on down the stairs to the final room where there was more water, but this time it was somehow being filtered or further cleansed through a wall of earth. Or was the earth being cleansed? I wasn’t sure; and then I was suddenly out in the calle again, and into the cool peachy light of an early autumn evening. What I did know, and had come prepared to see in some form or other, was Margolles presentation of mud and human blood from the sites of narcotic executions in the Sinaloa area of Mexico where she is based.

I was rushing, but surprisingly I found that the impact of this work was undiluted by my distracted state. Its visceral power and by association its ethical impact hit home sharply as if everything that I could, or would have lingered over, reflected on, in situ, was collapsed into that one brief moment when my nostrils and skin took in the blood-soaked room. Rushing but not rushed.

What, when, where: Teresa Margolles, “¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?” (What Else Could We Talk About?); 7 June - 22 November 2009; Palazzo Rota-Ivancich, Castello 4421, Venice.

The restaurant: Osteria del Duca, Via Arche Scaligere 2, Verona

Is it possible to get it without seeing it?!

Probably best that the redhead was thousands of miles away from this one given her scepticism of much conceptual art... Paul Pfeiffer's video art work "Empire" at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is literally three months long... That's right, the video runs for three months, not looped and repeating for three months; the piece is a single three-month-long take... No, I didn't take my sleeping bag and a food hamper (or several food hampers) to the gallery find out... So what do you do with an art work you never actually get to see completely, or in its entirety? Surely this should be one of the most frustrating, one of the silliest, ideas around. But this is not what I experienced. In fact, when visitng Berlin recently, this was one of the best things I saw. OK, I know you know I didn't really see it: watching 5 minutes of a three month video doesn't really count does it?!

Why one of the best things I saw? It appealed to my sense of humour: the improbability of it. It also appealed to me because it was quite humble and straightforward. The impossibility of viewing the work as a whole did not come across as some sort of arrogant snub. Because the artist has simply set up a surveillance quality video camera where he can capture a queen wasp building her nest and growing her colony of wasps over 3 summer months, from start to finish, any one 3 minute segment you watch is going to be pretty similar to any other 3 minute segment. Similar except for the sorts of differences that ae quite predicable: the nest will be bigger and there'll be more wasps! That's all it is... a simple idea; one camera angle; a single take; but potentially teeming with poetic, philosophical, scarey, everyday feelings and ideas, that can literaly buzz around inside your head long after having glimpsed a fraction of the whole art work. One idea, picture, one action; one long lingering memory...

What, where, when: Paul Pfeiffer, "Empire" 2004, showing in the exhibition "Paul Pfeiffer: The Saints", 10 October 2009 - 28 March 2010, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (photos by Rob Garrett)

Art that made us laugh

The redhead doesn’t always get contemporary art. She bristles with umbrage whenever she feels she’s being condescended to. Refreshing then when we walked into Tatzu Nishi’s installation in Sydney and she laughed out loud. Good naturedly; with understanding. “I get it!” is not always possible with contemporary art, and sometimes I don’t mind being puzzled, mystified or confounded. But other times there are art works where I think I ought to get it – but feel pushed away and then annoyed by the fact that I haven’t been given enough information to “get it.” Not here. Nishi’s installation is profoundly gettable, simple, direct and straightforward. It made me think; and laugh out loud.

Nishi is getting pretty well known for working with public monuments and statues. What he does is build a scaffold around an existing statue’s plinth and then makes a small building on top so that the statue is entirely enclosed by a small room decorated in the manner of an apartment or hotel. In Liverpool he enclosed a statue of Queen Victoria within a grand hotel bedroom room; in Christchurch he enclosed a statue of Captain James Cook within motel bathroom. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales he enclosed the two equestrian monuments that stand either side of the Gallery’s main entrance, giving each a room of their own. In one room Nishi had organised the room, decor and furnishings so that the huge bronze horse and rider looked as if they were standing on a pair of disheveled double beds. In the other room Nishi had turned the allegorical figure of “Peace” riding on a rearing horse into a divided duo: “Peace” was now a head-and-shoulders bust sitting on a coffee table, while the horse’s head was enclosed by (stuffed into) a set of cupboards.

There’s another coffee table arrangement that I’d seen photos of, and wish I’d got to see in person. It was in Cologne. There Nishi managed, after quite a process, to get permission to build a scaffold right to the top of the Cathedral's roofline where he built a viewing room around the gilded cross that sat on top of the roof’s apex. Imagine that: climbing all those stairs up the outside of the Cathedral and entering into the temporary room to find the cross sitting on a coffee table like an ordinary, but over-sized piece of objet d’art.

Where, what, when: Tatzu Nishi, "War and peace and inbetween" 2 October 2009 - 14 February 2010, Sydney, Australia (photos by Rob Garrett)