Drawing : Venice Biennale 2019 Part three

Some of the work I came across in the Biennale made me think of drawing as a very physical process. For instance Shilpa Gupta's banging gate was an excellent illustration of how a drawing idea can become very physically real. A large gate is hinged on a pivot and motorised so that it swings back and forth. As it does so it bangs into the wall, bringing down layers of plaster and cement as it gradually eats its way through the wall it makes a heavy contact with. This seemed to be a powerful metaphor for ideological boundaries and their repressive functions. (Can art break down walls?) Her practice draws on the interstitial zones between nation states, ethno-religious divides and structures of surveillance. In Gupta's work everyday situations, such as the opening and shutting of a gate are distilled into allegorical gestures, and as I have struggled for many years with a self imposed task of trying to do a very similar thing, I was pleasantly surprised at how powerful an impact her work was having on the people experiencing her clanging gate.

Shilpa Gupta

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s installations solicit tension from spectators because of their apparent threat. The staging of what can be quite intimidating spectacles lies at the core of their working process. However it was the historical associations with drawing machines that initially interested me. I can still remember the first time I can across some of Tinguely's machines. They were big, intimidating creations that you were frightened of. They moved into your space and had a presence that made you feel that if you fell into their clutches you would be done for. Tinguely also made some spectacular drawing machines and often launched them with dramatic effect. His machines also link into that 3D drawing tradition of linearly linking one form with another, all engine parts being at one time an idea in the mind of an engineer, realised initially as a technical drawing, machines therefore have a particular set of associations with technical drawing codes.

Tinguely: Homage to New York 1960

A Tinguely machine

More on Tinguely

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s mechanical installations were targeted at more specific metaphorical concepts than Tinguely's. The painting machine below was built by reconfiguring a second hand robot arm, initially used in a manufacturing process. It 'paints' the floor by sweeping its 'brush' through a dark red blood like liquid, however as it makes its marks they soon disappear as the liquid gradually flows back over the sweeping gestural floor markings. The machine makes a strong impact because it is expending considerable energy on a series of tasks that are in the end pointless. (I wondered if this was also a comment on abstract painting). As an analogy it also pointed to the role of human beings in similar tasks, ones that have yet to be taken over by robots.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s other installation was perhaps more ambiguous in its allegorical intent, but it was undoubtedly powerful in its effect on the audience. A marble seat, carved to resemble the base of the one that supports the statue of President Lincoln, is kept behind a protective glass wall. Every now and again a powerful blast of compressed air forces a flexible tube to strike out in all directions and as you can see from the marks on the glass in the photograph, strike the sides of the glass walls with severe force like a demented whip.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu

Lincoln memorial

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu: 'Dear'

Was this a metaphor for the misuse of power? Was it about how slaves were treated and Lincoln's role in the abolition of the slave trade? Whatever it means, standing right next to the glass vitrine as the hose snaked about was a frightening experience, if only because of the sound made by the hose as it whipped around.

Zhanna Kadyrova was using tiles taken from a hotel in Venice to physically draw representations of clothing hanging out to dry. I took the photograph of her 'washing line' through a window in the central pavilion exhibition space, because the work was erected outside, in a similar way to all those washing lines you see strung between buildings as you walk Venice's streets.

Zhanna Kadyrova Second Hand (2014-ongoing)

As you walk around Venice as well as seeing actual washing lines, you will also find painted images of them as tourist mementos of the city. Zhanna Kadyrova in appropriating this image and connecting it with tiles from a refurbished tourist hotel, creates a particularly complex work that operates on several levels. On the one hand representing an actual clothes line, with identifiable specific types of socks and briefs, it is a form of still-life and on the other by making a solid representation of what is normally made of soft fabrics, it is a monument to something very un-monumental. Historically, only things that were of great importance used to be the subject of the sculptural monument and we are in a historically very important city when it comes to looking at the history of art.

Venice souvenir painting

Zhanna Kadyrova is also commenting on Venice as an art capital, both as something appropriated by tourists and as a place for the high art cognoscenti. Both images of washing lines now belong to the art canon, one read as 'low-art' and the other 'fine-art'; Kadyrova asking us questions as to which one if either, will in the long run survive?

Njideka Akunyili Crosby interested me technically, both as a printmaker and as someone looking at how drawing is used. In particular it was her sophisticated use of collage techniques that drew my attention to her work.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

You need to look carefully at the surface of her images because she has a powerful grasp of form, which means that the texture can be secondary to the colour/form and you don't notice that the surface is composed of collaged imagery. She uses a variety of image transfer techniques, as well as stencilling, so that when you get close up to the surface of her work it is a visually exciting and intriguing experience. (The work was behind glass, so my photographs don't do justice to the experience of looking at them)

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

People that live between cultures have a rich complex of imagery to process and Crosby makes the most out of her Nigerian/USA experiences. If you read Homi K Bhabba's classic text, 'The Location of Culture' you can get a better understanding of how this process works.

Kaari Upson

Finally for this post I'll leave you with the work of Kaari Upson. Upson layers her drawings with observations, thoughts about what she has seen, memories and anything else that can be used as a commentary on the things she is interested in. I was intrigued by the fact that these drawings often evolve over several years. They hang around the studio, and she returns to them over and over again, until their surface becomes overlaid with the complexity of making drawings over time. The great thing about Kaari Upson's drawings is that they are just that. DRAWING. She doesn't need to do anything else. Yes there is text and a lot of it, but the text is drawn into the surface, it performs a dance around the evolving imagery and at times also anchors the composition. Her work is a welcome reminder that you can still do interesting work just with a pencil and a felt tip pen, it as always depends on what you have to say and how you say it. The work in Venice was behind glass and like Njideka Akunyili Crosby's work, I did find the glass obtrusive.

Kaari Upson

You can get a much better idea of Upson's work by looking at a video of an exhibition presentation where she does not have the work framed, simply attaching her drawings directly to the walls. She made her reputation with the Larry Project. This was a long running project that centred on her chance finding of documents belonging to someone who used to live in an abandoned house near where she lived. Her imaginative investigation of an imagined life is a powerful model for how a project can grow and evolve the more you invest time and energy into its possibilities.

Kaari Upson

I did take quite a few photographs of the way artists were using framing and will at some point put up another post on this constantly re-occurring subject. It is an important issue and in Upson's case I really think the way it was framed made it much harder to appreciate what her work was about. By putting it behind glass you were distanced from it and her work was about direct responses to the intimate but raw connections she was making with her subject matter.

Venice Biennale 2019 Part one

Venice Biennale 2019 Part two

Venice Biennale 2019 Part four

Reflections on other Venice Biennales