The Venice Biennale

As I usually do this time of the year, I have been booking an apartment to go and spend some time over at the Venice Biennale. Each time I go I try and filter out some artists or exhibitions that seem to have a direct relevance to students working within the drawing strand at the college of art. See these examples from the last biennale. 

Biennale report part 1 

Biennale report part 2 

Biennale report part 3 

Biennale report part 4 

However when I think back to 2015 perhaps it was no one piece of art work that affected me, it was instead a Huffington Post newspaper story about an incident that happened at the beginning of the festival. A floating bridge bringing a dozen VIP guests to the event broke, throwing all of them, Miuccia Prada included, into the lagoon. I tried to collect all the images of the ‘disaster’ I could find and sequence them to make a mini storyboard, I have yet to finish the rough animation I was making of the event, but if I have time I shall. I think the images have the making of an epic, think ‘Titanic’ and major film stars playing the roles of Ms Prada and the other art socialites. The accident didn’t kill anyone, but the sudden intrusion of reality makes everyone more human, they share in that moment responses and reactions that are outside of the normally contrived looks and trained body postures. Sadly, much of the art they were going to see, which purported to be a response to the political realities of the time, was not of a similar level. The the entire Biennale was centred around a continuous reading of Marx, which itself was moving, but as I went from pavilion to pavilion and from gallery to gallery, it was hard to find any artists that could make you stand back and think with the same degree of sharpness that this event had.  This year I have some work over in Venice in one of the fringe events, work done in response to the ongoing migrant crisis. Looking back at my own work, I could criticise it for the same inadequacies that I saw in others on my last visit. When art does reflect on real life traumatic events it sometimes has to go into territories few of us would venture into, Goya for example eventually descends into his own despair. Perhaps what interested me in this event was that it was also funny and laughter can help us all face despair. 

Images sourced from various news articles of the collapse of a floating bridge during the 2015 Venice Biennale

See also:

Bringing the inanimate to life A reflection on how we forget that it was the bridge that was the real agency in this event.