Venice Biennale 2019 Part one

I have just returned from my biannual visit to the Venice Biennale and as always have thoughts as to the role drawing is still playing within contemporary art practice. Perhaps this year drawing feels more something that lies under the surface and is less obvious as an art form, but the more I looked about me, I saw drawing as a framework through which many artists had stepped, even though by now they felt it had been left behind. This year's biennale entitled, 'May you live in interesting times' in particular being a fascinating one, because it asks the question, "what purpose can art play when there are so many environmental and political dangers facing the planet?" The lead curator, Ralph Runoff stated that the real purpose of art is that artworks are never reducible to being messages to decipher or comprehend. Art does not give us conclusions but gives us interesting points of departure. That old question, "What does it mean?" is shown to be meaningless, and the biennale sets out to "celebrate artists that work between customary categories". 

My own responses are as always driven by my present interests and therefore my reflections are not really a proper review, but are simply thoughts about things I encountered that made me think about what I am up to. 

The first issue to strike me was that the selected artists in the Arsenale were also shown in the Giardini central pavilion. The issue being that the type of work shown in the one was not necessarily like the work shown in the other venue. For instance, the work of Christian Marclay in the Arsenale was a video projection and in the Giardini large woodcut prints. The old idea of an artist being a painter or sculptor was gradually being let go of and being replaced by an idea of the artist as someone that used whatever was appropriate to get their ideas communicated. Personally I felt this reflected a position that I was very comfortable with and as someone that still uses drawing as a thinking tool, it also helped me to locate my ideas about drawing practice much more clearly. Drawing is something that does not have to be the end result, simply something that is part of a complex process of communication. Sometimes it will have a strong visual presence, but at others it may simply be the way that an artist visualised a future possibility in his or her head. 

Christian Marclay's '48 War Movies' was the first work to get me thinking as I walked around the Arsenale. There were several overlapping issues here for someone trying to think about the continuing relevance of drawing. The first thing that you become aware of is the old fashioned power of a single central point perspective. This is what in effect Marclay has made by inserting one movie inside another and then another and another, each time leaving a thin edge that still keeps running its footage, even though we can only see a tiny strip of what is going on. 

One point perspective

This reveals the tight connection between the idea of the camera and single point perspective. The compaction of 48 movies running at the same time together with the overlaid sound of them, added up to a pretty powerful effect. (If you google 'how to put one video inside another in Adobe Premiere' you will find out how to do this) I found it fascinating that you could work out all sorts of things about each movie from the small amount of information available to you, our perceptual apparatus is very sophisticated especially when it comes to reading images that we are very used to. As a genre 'War Movies' have much in common, but when seeing 48 at once, together with their overlaid soundtracks you can become disorientated, something that I'm sure Marclay wanted to happen, his projection reflecting on our continuing fascination with war and how it can never capture the reality of war's fragmentation of normality. The tiny images in the centre of the film, read as if they were trapped in the net of all the other films, your vision was drawn down into that tiny central world, a world too small to be clearly recognisable, but big enough to communicate its warlike nature. 

Detail

Christian Marclay

In the Giardini central pavilion you could see Marclay's other work, consisting of two large six foot high woodcuts which were images taken from Japanese Manga comics. I presumed the images had been transferred using CNC routing techniques, used to cut out what looked like large plywood sheets. The contrast between the cut out sections that made up the image and the way grain of the wood itself had picked up the printer's ink, was what I found most interesting, as it was the thing that highlighted the specific nature of printing off large plywood sheets. The figures in the prints were screaming but of course silently, this being the nature of the medium. No matter how big you make the prints, no matter how large the printed mouth becomes, it will never make a sound. This was of course the opposite to what was happening with his war movies, the sound in the projection room being at times almost unbearable. 

Ed Atkins was another artist that in being represented by two totally different sets of work demonstrated that he was more interested in getting an idea across than working towards a certain style or overall 'look'. In the Arsenale his computer animations and video installations were the focus and in the Giardini his drawings were spread out and mixed in with various other artists work.

Ed Atkins: Old Food. 2017 - 2019 Video installation

The focus of the various video and installation pieces was I thought very much about role playing. From large scale clothes hangers carrying what appeared to me to be various costumes, some of which looked as if they had been worn in his videos, to the videos themselves and animations that focused sometimes on how we respond in certain cliched ways in times of grief or loss and at others on how the atmosphere of the fairy tale can be used to loop or hold time frozen. 

Ed Atkins

His drawing work as shown in the Giardini was much more traditional, each image including a giant cross spider / human, the word BLOOM emblazoned across every drawing as if it was some sort of logo. The style of drawing was very comic book derivative, suffering from a certain thinness of line I felt, but nevertheless powerful enough to hold their own when seen against various other types of work when they were placed around and about the Giardini central pavilion. The images worked as if they were escaped experiments from some film like 'the Fly'. His moving image works operated to some extent like this too. They felt as if they were brief moments cut from a fairy tale or public information animation. One animation in particular consisted of the making of various sandwiches. The images in this case being of humans making up the various sandwich fillings. Collectively I found the work compelling and spent some time sitting looking at the various video pieces and thinking about how they linked with the spaces made by the large clothes racks. Siting these various video pieces in dark spaces made by these racks was an important part of the overall effect and highlighted the importance of this type of control over the presentation of your work. 

Suki Seokyeong Kang  was using a particular formal approach to 3D drawing, that I have referenced before in the work of Sarah Sze. You link one thing to another by a formal association, such as a line being made of a length of metal at one moment and then it can be extended or linked to another line that may be a decorative element on a surface or a drawing on the floor. However her work also introduced issues related to craft and the blurred line between 'modernism' and design and painting and the found object.

Suki Seokyeong Kang  



In the Arsenale installation, (above) Suki Seokyeong Kang was able to link craft based textiles, design components from manufactured objects, and engineered elements into a flowing series of related forms. The only issue I had was with the devices used to keep the audience from getting too close to the work. They were too formally similar to the aesthetic Kang uses and so interfered with the visual read.

Suki Seokyeong Kang  

In the Giardini she exhibited objects that were more 'stand alone' highlighting the sculptural elements of her practice. However these objects were still in essence 3D drawings. Lines in space made by objects that were sometimes designed and at other times made as craft. For instance in the piece above that uses two circular elements, the top one is woven from a natural material and the object that it sits on is manufactured. The square sections below are made from metal, but with a square of hand made textile sat in the middle of it. Formal symmetry being the device to lock everything into one and differences in manufacture and use being the secondary rhythm that runs through the piece. Kang's much more gentle formal associations were for myself a welcome visual relief, such a pity that the installations had to have those grey stands with wire between in there as well, they were too much of a visual distraction.

Gabriel Rico

It is interesting to compare Kang's work with the work of Gabriel Rico who's small wall drawings made of found materials and tiny neons were on the one hand very much an extension of Paul Klee's exhortation to take a line for a walk, and on the other a celebration of the textural complexity of the city street meets a rural retreat. 

Gabriel Rico

Rico's work was also presented in installation form and in these stripped down situations the connections made between things were as much poetic as they were formal. 

Cameron Jamie first came to attention with his film Kranky Klaus, following the village ritual of Krampus through small villages high in the Austrian Alps. The film was scored by noise artists Keiji Heino and the Melvins and was centred on what is regarded as a culturally sanctioned ritual of choreographed – though apparently real – violence. His work comments on our very thin veneer of sophistication that is so easily broken through and it reflects on how close we actually can be to a time of violence and the destruction of social norms.

Cameron Jamie

Jamie's installation in the Arsenale could have been something from an anthropological exhibition, its raw approach to image making reflecting both his earlier interest in Austrian Krampus rituals and his continuing interest in American folk rituals, many of which seek to tap into Native American Indian references. In the Giardini he was exhibiting ceramic masks

Cameron Jamie

I was particularly interested in how the masks were both made and presented. By working over an actual face the interior of the masks was refined and represented a ghost of what you could call a 'normal' person, but the exterior of the mask was rough and hardly formed, almost demon like. The use of ceramic was interesting and again the change between refined elements and rough unformed surfaces was particularly fascinating, especially because of the various ways I have been handling clay myself.

You might question what his work has to do with drawing, but the more I have found myself working with found materials in conjunction with clay, the more I feel that ways of drawing, such as collage and frottage, can very easily transposed into making.

All five artists were playful in the way they were using materials. In particular it felt as if we had now moved well beyond media specificity, and artists were now simply using whatever approach or materials they decided were fit for purpose. The old hierarchy between different approaches or artists seeing themselves as painters or sculptors seemed to feel redundant and artists were able to focus on ideas, without too many art axes to grind.

As this is a university holiday period and I have several exhibitions of my own to work on, I will be taking my time and making my reflections on this year's Venice Biennale over three or four posts. The Biennale goes on until November, so there is plenty of time to fit a visit in if you have the money and the inclination.

Venice Biennale 2019 Part two
Venice Biennale 2019 Part three
Venice Biennale 2109 Part four

Reflections on other Venice Biennales

2015

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

2017

Venice an allegory
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4