Venice biennale 2017 part 3 Artist as visionary

Rachael Rose: Lake Valley

Drawing comes in many forms and I have several times pointed to the rise of animation as an established art practice. The Biennale was again a showcase for some of the most interesting contemporary work in this area. Rachel Rose had a short eight and a half minute animation that tapped into our collective childhood psyche.  It's simply about a woman and her dog. Each scene is made in such a way that the extraordinary beauty of everyday life is affirmed and moments of wonder are elicited from simple actions like sleeping or smelling, rich evocative moments, which make this film both memorable and significant, as it demonstrates how artists can make us aware of the rich substance of our lives. The animation is also a complex reference to the way illustration conventions shape our childhoods; scenes in the film often composed of collages taken from children's books and constructed in such a way that they both echo and yet re-create anew the idea of what it is like to be immersed in the world of our formative years again. 

Rachael Rose: Lake Valley

Grisha Bruskin's work in the Russian pavilion also struck a childhood chord. This time taking me back to the 1950s, a time of toy solders, cheap science fiction and the magic of shining torches in the night. As you walked into the first exhibition space you entered into darkness, the walls were moving animations consisting of simple white line drawings based on the sculptural objects that were set out on plinths around the room, each object was illuminated by moving spotlights designed to throw shadows onto the wall behind and thus mixing the moving shadow forms with the animations. 

Grisha Bruskin Russian pavilion

Bruskin's world is peopled with hybrids, as if from a nightmare passage from Toy Story, but it is also a world of archetypical myths and if you have followed his work you realise that the figures on view are part of a huge cast of characters that he uses to play out a personal mythology that is heavily indebted to his Jewish heritage. I saw his Alefbet tapestry project a few years ago and was soon engaged trying to unpick how his world was evolving, how his characters were growing out of both life experiences and mythic reflection. 

Bruskin: Silkscreen print

Bruskin grew up within two cultures that were driven by texts, the Old Testament and the Communist Manifesto. Marx of course was also a Jew and both texts look towards a future vision when God/Communism triumphs and being an artist in the middle of this is always going to be interesting. Within Communism, objects are commodities, the moment of monetary exchange sees abstraction becoming reality (the fetish) and in the Old Testament all things will only be revealed as they really are after the coming of the Messiah. 

The way these objects are lit is very important, on the one hand things being illuminated in the dark suggests some sort of religious experience, but the spotlit image also belongs to the world of the expensive shop. 

Some of Bruskin's sculptures feel as if they are forbidden graven images taken from a Biblical text, whilst others are from a more familiar world of state propaganda, such as military marches and massive building projects. Tales from the Bible, the echoes of Abyssinian history and culture that thread their way through it, state propaganda as seen through the eyes of a boy, all mesh within a private world that can only be given reality within the Capitalist world of the celebrated individual. It's no accident that Bruskin works between Moscow and New York. I have to admit a personal fascination with his work, and I'm sure the fact that my grandmother was of Polish Jewish heritage is partly to do with this. I also worry about the place of a personal mythology or allegorical practice within a society driven by much more prosaic needs. 

The Russian pavilion's curators were however not worried by these things and in the gallery beneath there was an exhibition of figures trapped in the geometric forms of a post-Schwitters cave, arms and legs protruding as they were frozen into their own Hell of digital transgression. You could only see their full bodies by using I-pads trigged to show images by the visual codes written on the walls. 

Recycle Group: Blocked content

The work was a reinterpretation of the 9th Circle of Hell from Dante's Divine Comedy and I didn't like it at all, finding it over complicated and too obvious. However it was interesting to see how new technology was now being used to reveal things that are hidden. 

I was more interested in the Latvian Pavilion, Miķelis Fišers uses the language of cheap science fiction comic book illustration, paradoxically presented and lit in such a way that we are meant to read it as something much more important than it really is. 

Miķelis Fišers: Multidimensional Entities Cut Up Their Avatars Before Evacuation from Planet Earth.

The drawings are cut out of a highly polished black surface laid down onto wooden boards, with something like a knife or scraper board tool. The polished black feels sophisticated, but the way the drawing is done is more evocative of amateur art. 

Ancient Aliens Execute Overqualified Rocket Scientists at Palenque, Mexico

Each drawing was set into a column with a niche and lit from above and below, as if we were in a very special exclusive shop or museum. 

Miķelis Fišers: Installation view

One area of the exhibition was taken up by a large white neon installation, whereby the idea was given a much more theatrical exposition and a soundtrack was also provided to enforce a weird science fiction feeling. 

Reptilian Immobilizes Hallucinating Darwinists, light and sound installation, extruded polystyrene, structured polypropylene sheets,
drawing cut in ORACAL® adhesive film, LED light tape. 600 x 600 x 600 cm. 
Sound by ERROR.

The image above is my own photograph when I hadn't adjusted exposure to take into account of the lighting, what it does though is reveal the building and how in reality the image sat. The weight and gravitas of the old arsenale building totally overpowering the light drawing, making it feel more like a kitch insert, which I felt was appropriate. With titles like "The Last Yeties Protest Against CO Emissions by the Great Wall of China" we are asked to bring all our myths together onto some sort of level playing field, whether these are totally fictional or not, doesn't seem to matter, everything, it is suggested is up for cheap thrills in this universe. I wondered if Fišers' tongue in cheek installation was some sort of commentary on the work in the Russian Pavilion and took some of its lessons to heart, in a time of post-mythology all perhaps we look for is entertainment. 

Luboš Plný

Luboš Plný's intense diagrammatic anatomical drawings are superimpositions of layers of private meanings into a space that superficially resembles that of a scientific diagram.  His 'skins' of collage trapped into skeins of line drawing being the creation of some sort of deranged Doctor Frankenstein. The difference is that Plný believes in this, it is no comment or struggle to realise a personal account of the complexity of a modern day allegory, this work simply is what it is. 

Luboš Plný

He works on stretched paper, the brown tape being cut through to release the images and at the same time make a border for them. There are often dates stacked up to a record of engagement, giving information as to his age, when drawings were started, when they stopped, when they started up again etc. Some areas are missed out, blanks related to old operations he might have had.  All of these things building up and making the work an intense autobiographical record. 

Luboš Plný: Detail of dates recorded during the image's making

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith’s large scale prints were the products of another personal world, but one informed by a much more aware theoretical position. Smith's work is very much a product of post-feminist discourse and you can see various influences such as Angela Carter in the background. Smith's father was the artist Tony Smith, so she would have had a very sophisticated upbringing with an awareness of what it is to be an international artist. Smith's practice is drawing and print led but she works in sculpture and sound and like so many contemporary practitioners follows her instinct as she moves from media to media. Some of these images were presented in metal frames, designed so that sections could be fitted together. Looking closely at the various components, it looked to me as if she had been printing off perspex sheets, then had realised that the sheets themselves had a powerful quality in their own right as the ink became embedded in the scratched out drawing. These sheets were I think then cut up and embedded in the frames. If you compare the prints you can get a sense of the process. 

These prints are about six or seven feet high and are printed onto several sheets of thin handmade paper that have been stuck together. The paper quality suggests a certain fragility and the print process is drypoint, i.e. the image is scratched out of a plastic sheet and ink is then rubbed into the scratch marks and wiped off the surface before being printed by putting the whole thing through a press. (You can also do this with the back of a wooden spoon by burnishing the image from the back). In this case the most difficult thing would have been getting hold of a press big enough, but an artist of Smith's stature would have no trouble with that. 

Detail of acrylic sheet trapped in metal frame

You can see from the detail above how the scratched acrylic looks and how Smith has then had this inserted into the metal frame. The frames themselves are mounted onto the walls by using brackets. I'm always interested in details lie this, as there is always a time when you are faced with a similar problem and you can use the idea yourself. 

Frame detail

Detail of mapping pin in paper

Close up of Smith's printed drypoint portrait

Finally, in relation to this reflection on personal visions, I would like to present the work of Kananginak Pootoogook, the Inuit artist. 

I put up a couple of posts some time ago about the 'Magicians of the Earth' exhibition, and how much it had affected me. Magicians of the Earth' part one,  Magicians of the Earth part two.  What I was particularly interested in was the flattening of artist reputations. Unknown artists from often very under represented cultures were being shown alongside Western 'art stars'.  Their work was often powerful and had an integrity that many of the Western artists seemed to have lost. Pootoogook had been making images since the late 50s and his work documented the issues and landscapes of Inuit life. Often his drawings were not particularly 'well drawn', but because they were drawings they could capture the world in the way only drawings can do. You can see inside the boat below, each item is portrayed clearly and from the point of view of someone who knows how they ought to be ordered in the boat. You could not get this sort of information from a photograph. 

Kananginak Pootoogook

It could be argued that by putting Pootoogook's work into the context of the Biennale his work is in some way being demeaned by being taken out of its original context. But for me it was a simple reminder of how what is for one person their everyday life, is for someone else a world of wonder. Kiki Smith's portraits of her friends remind us that everyone around us is equally interesting, you don't need to strive for the unusual or esoteric in order to make interesting work. Pootoogook's drawings were made with ordinary coloured pencils and of course framed for presentation, which gives them a certain 'honorific' value. His drawings are now 'protected' behind glass, which is another issue and one I am very aware of, so I was glad to see Kiki Smith showing prints by putting them up with mapping pins. As always I digress, but I have had several conversations with galleries lately about this. I prefer to pin my drawings directly to walls, but galleries like you to have work framed. They are worried people might damage the work, but if Smith can get away with it in Venice, I would hope other galleries would take note. 

There were other artists I could have picked out that I felt occupied this old tradition of image making but perhaps there is enough in this post to make the point. I shall put up one more post as a sort of rag bag of interests before they fade from memory; the main point being that it is worthwhile going to these large Biennales, as you will always find something of interest. The Venice Biennale is on until November, so if you do have enough money to take a break over in Italy, why not go and see what's on.