This year's Venice Art Biennale is entitled 'Foreigners Everywhere' and is a response to the global refugee crisis and the fact that immigration has become a difficult topic for the western world. Many countries now seek to put up boundaries to prevent those in the global south who are facing war and the consequences of climate change, from looking for safe havens in their more 'stable' regions. The fact that many of the western nations have at one time or another used their superior military powers to conquer the areas of the globe that now face climate change at its worst, or are politically unstable as a direct result of western colonial occupation and the arbitrary establishment of boundaries, doesn't seem to matter to many people. I have been told to 'get over it', when raising the issue and that these things are all in the past. But they are still live. Our experience here in Chapeltown, is that there are still consequences linked to post-colonial situations, such as what sorts of jobs people can get, how people think about race, how culture is shaped and who's culture is regarded as the norm.
The works I have selected to ruminate upon are mainly dealing with a drawing led agenda, but due to the multi faceted nature of current art practices; video, photography, soundscapes, mixed media and installation art forms were also very strongly represented within the current biennale exhibitions, I will naturally spread my thoughts out beyond drawing's territory. In particular John Akomfrah's 'Listening all night to the rain', which is this year's British pavilion exhibition, was an extremely moving and powerful work, that used a combination of audio and video projection, to develop a complex narrative of contemporary life in Britain. To experience this, whilst hearing news about far right led riots in English cities, was particularly sobering and I would hope that his exhibition goes on to be shown in UK venues, just as Sonia Boyce's biennale presentation 'Feeling her way', eventually found its way to Leeds.
The first body of work to capture my drawing led attention was that of Evelyn Taocheng Wang, who was channelling the work of Agnus Martin.
Evelyn Taocheng Wang: I Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time (2022–2023)
Wang’s series of paintings 'I Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time', set up a dialogue that represents how culture morphs and changes over time. Martin was an abstractionist influenced by eastern philosophy and religion. Her work is part of the established canon of western non figurative painting and is often introduced to fine art students as a model of refined sensibility and the need to focus on the nuances of aesthetic difference. However as Wang copies Agnes Martin's work she is herself conflicted and her commentary reflects both the difference in aesthetic attitudes between western and eastern traditions, and her own personal feelings as she tries to reconcile these differences. The refined abstract sensibility of Martin, in now conjoined with the delicate questioning of Wang, the new synthesis echoing the fact that nothing is pure, we are all a mix of influences and hopefully by being aware of this, we can accept difference much more easily and move beyond binary oppositions in our thinking.
The need to become much more accepting of other cultures and ways of thinking is I believe going to become central to our future survival, if not we face a period of war and terrible destruction, that will eventually expand to include all those areas of the world that at the moment see themselves as safe havens.
Strangely after deciding that the work I would be most interested in would be centred on dissolving the boundaries between cultures, the next body of images to capture my attention were those made by Romany Eveleigh. These were works on paper glued to canvas, made in the 1970s and they used the materials, and techniques of writing rather than drawing. She basically repeats the letter “o”, which fills her square support to create irregular bands of faint marks so that from a distance they appear as written texts. This is writing that does not communicate a message and I have reflected on this several times before because of my interest in aesmic writing. It is interesting to compare these images with those of Irma Blank, Eveleigh's images are though more a reminder of the gesture of the writer’s hand. Eveleigh has stated that these images are “not a sought-after end but a sought-for beginning.” Aesmic writing, it is argued, fuses text and image into a unity, thus setting them both free to an audience's subjective interpretations, but perhaps because also on exhibition in the Giardini was the work of an artist who wanted to show how drawing ability had been used in the past to discriminate and separate out foreign elements from society, I was reminded of the false claims of graphologists, who argued that they could tell a person's character and moral disposition from the shape of their handwriting.
Romany Eveleigh
Joyce Joumaa's work, 'Memory contours' reflects on the eugenics movement's influence on past immigration policy and practice in the United States of America. She has investigated the drawing led intelligence tests designed to identify mental deficiency; tests that often led to the detention and deportation of people who failed them. One test that was often given to people landing in Ellis Island New York, was to draw shapes from memory. The test demonstrates how drawing can be both gestural expression and instrumentalised as a sign of intelligence and mental health. The Nazi party in Germany were very quick to pick up on the implications of these types of tests and used examples of expressionist painting, which was itself an attempt to portray emotion, as illustrations of mental depravity.
Joyce Joumaa
Joumaa has made videos of people trying to replicate the four drawings shown in the upper image, thus heightening the tension. How well will the person drawing be able to replicate what they have seen? The installation reminds us that observational drawing ability is a product of training and is not an innate skill. Training is also culturally specific and a well trained artist in one tradition, will find their skills not valued in another. It was interesting to see that a collective of Māori artists won the Golden Lion prize for 'Takapau', a large-scale installation inspired by traditional woven mats. An intricate canopy had been woven from reflective trucking straps, echoing the shape of traditional takapau; the finely woven mats made for special events.
Māori artists collective: Takapau
Māori artists are trained in takapau mat construction, the particular abstract forms signifying various aspects of Māori culture. This training is as important to a Māori artist as life drawing was to a French academy painter from the 19th century. One society's culture will always be foreign to another's; imagine a situation whereby a Māori set test was given to Europeans, whereby they had to make designs using traditional Māori forms, after having just a quick glance of a takapau mat.
It is at this point that an idea of releasing images from their past context begin to become more and more important to me, and I presume this is what led Lina Bo Bardi to design her alternative presentation method. She is another person I have looked at before in connection with my posts looking at framing work. The clear glass system does help us to see what lies behind the images that we normally only look at the front of. The old fading stuck on notes about past exhibitions, or sales are always fascinating, as well as the various ways that the images' supports have been made. There was though an issue and that was how poorly sighted people were managing to negotiate these glass panels. perhaps the same effect could have been achieved by sinking the images into a thin wall, so that you could see both sides without having to negotiate the 'invisible' glass holding structure. The glass panel presentation systems were designed by Bo Bardi and first exhibited at the opening of the Sao Paulo museum of Art in 1968. They were designed to ‘resurface’ art objects dating from classical history up to the present by “floating” them in glass panels anchored by a concrete block. She stated, “My intention has been to destroy the aura surrounding museums.” She wanted to disrupt the contemplation of works hanging on white walls, and destroy the hierarchies set up between artists and artistic periods, undoing the sacralisation of the museum experience. Of course her glass easels were now exhibited with all the aura of the art and artists that she wanted to get past. This valorisation is something that is part and parcel of contemporary western art culture; the art gallery is used as a frame to give value to the work, even if it is meant as a statement about art not having monetary value; a paradox that I don't think will be overcome until art is returned to its function as a day to day reality, as opposed to something special and therefore metaphorically protected by the walls of the Venice Arsenale.
Lina Bo Bardi 'floating' presentation system
The exhibition as a whole did though raise questions about western aesthetic values and what role an artist has in a world that is both global and constructed from a fantastic mix of cultures; some with traditions going back thousands of years and others with newly minted traditions, that have come about as fusions between the many disparate peoples that now inhabit dense city environments. Whether or not an art exhibition, no matter how big, can have any impact on what is actually going on in our towns and cities is debatable, but it is hard to track down consequences of experience, and someone with or without power and influence, might just see something here that will trigger them to make a decision, and that decision may set off something, like that butterfly in the Amazon jungle that flaps its wings one day, and as a consequence eventually a storm blows over New York.
I shall, as I have in other years in response to earlier visits, reflect on my visit over the next few weeks, there is so much to see that it takes me time to digest it all.
See also:
More Biennale posts
2024
2022
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