My focus when visiting Venice Biennales has usually been on drawing, but this year there are a lot of exhibitions devoted to the ethnic traditions of the artists involved, and drawing is not always central to those cultures. I have therefore decided to simply show more of what I felt moved me or gave me pause for thought, especially as the biennale selection process does redress a Eurocentric balance and I would like to support the work in attempting to do that by the sadly dead before it opened curator Koyo Kouoh. The 61st Venice Biennale is entitled 'In Minor Keys' and it focuses on quiet, overlooked, and non-centralised voices. It was fascinating to watch videos of artists talking about their obsessions and so many of them saw art as central to their lives, without it, one artist from Kenya stated, they would have no need to carry on living. It was a relief to see so many alternative voices, even if I questioned one of the premises of the biennale which was to show that the world of the art market was not the only art world. There are many curators, buyers and art gallery owners who would I thought be going to see this Biennale and who I'm sure would be thinking about contacting those artists still alive and who were showcased in Venice, who they felt were 'under represented'. The careers of these artists might then take a step onto another level as they are shown on the world art market stage. Something that I realise is nothing new, on the plane over to Venice I was reading Martin Gayford's Venice: City of Pictures and he writes about artists such as Bellini having to balance two worlds. The desires of the church to have meaningful images made of significant Biblical moments and the needs of a new rising class of rich art cognoscenti, who wanted the best money could buy, for their own private collections. They wanted to be able to show off to others that they had the purchasing power to have paintings made just for them. Going into one church, I saw this what I think the church literature said was a painting by Tintoretto, but which doesn't look like his style, that for me summed up the tension between the need to re-create a religious moment in paint and the need to satisfy a patron.
Tintoretto, perhaps not
In this painting by Tintoretto or someone who was painting in Venice around the 16th century, you can see the tension between two needs.The painting was obviously completed as an image that was to visualise a moment from a religious text and then the donor must have insisted his portrait was put into the image, causing an awkward disjointed picture to be produced, in which the two figures in the painting bear no relationship between each other, except that they both stare out at whoever is looking at it.
This time in Venice I felt far closer to many of the artists showing at this Biennale, than I do to the art stars of galleries such as Gagosian, even if some of those art stars are ex students of mine. I could look at some of the work this year and think, oh yes that is achievable with the resources I have available; in fact there were times when I looked at certain work and thought, "I've dealt with that idea myself and my work could sit in the company of these other artworks without shame". I'm already harping on about myself I'm afraid and this is very much a reflection of the fact I no longer teach. My earlier reports on biennales were to help students who undertook the drawing strand of fine art, find a way through the mass of work they would be confronted with, but I no longer have that responsibility, so have the luxury of simply reflecting on things that helped me organise my thoughts in one way or another but teachers never stop teaching, so there will always be some reflections on how work seen can help generally with art practice. The two main exhibition spaces are the Arsenale and the Giardini but there are also collateral events that you bump into all over the city and I will begin with one of those, simply because of a sticker I saw on a lamppost right next to the place we were staying.
The sticker suggested that "cultural wars numb and disarm us" as Capital gets on with reality. So was I just fooling myself going round these exhibitions and thinking that art could effect some sort of social change or believing that it could raise awareness of the difficult issues that confront us all, at a very difficult moment in the world's history.
The Venice Biennale doesn't happen in isolation, there are ongoing wars, famine, civil upheaval, global warming and many other issues going on at the same time. Therefore
I find it difficult to separate out the art from an underlying awareness of the world's general 'unease' with itself. There are small flyers pasted up all over the city and several of these ask direct questions as to whether or not I should be there, as the biennale was a conflicted vehicle, many pavilions representing governments that had poor track records in human rights, or who were engaging in war or were being accused of genocide. So perhaps my first post on this year's biennale ought to be one reflecting on a chance encounter in a repurposed church of the work curated by a PussyRiot member, an exhibition devoted to giving a voice to those people in Russia who have been often rendered invisible to the many us who live in Western Europe.
The Pavilion of (DIS)SENSE was held in the ex-church of San Leonardo. A place that at first I thought was a comment on the status of art's greatest star, Leonardo da Vinci, but my brain was racing ahead of itself. In the entrance to the pavilion was a poster depicting Putin riding the Venetian winged lion
In the foyer was a copy of an exhibition catalogue of a Pussy Riot curated show dedicated to political prisoners, illegally detained in Russia, 'Resistance Imprisoned'.
Resistance Imprisoned was an exhibition bringing together drawings, texts, embroideries, photographs, and objects, all of which had been created by political prisoners. Among them being Nadya Tolokonnikova, co-founder of the feminist collective Pussy Riot, who is now an international figure of resistance to authoritarianism, imprisoned in Russia in 2012 for daring to sing against Putin in a Moscow cathedral, since her release, she has continuously transformed her experience of incarceration into an artistic weapon.
I have posted before on the uses of paper in prisons. At the time I wrote, 'In jail, the everyday things we take for granted have their values changed. Paper, in the form of books, magazines, letters, toilet paper or simply rubbish becomes valued not only for what it is, but for what it can become.' Pinned to the exhibition wall were a series of small images made by Russian political prisoners and these images brought me to tears, not necessarily because of their artistic power, but by demonstrating to myself how art can be made about the human condition in almost any circumstances and that as a form of communication it can thrive under the most harsh conditions. These small drawings were made on torn off sections of prison sheets, information flyers, envelopes, notebook pages and other scraps of material. As the curator, Nadya Tolokonnikova, states, the cell becomes the studio.
The text becomes the cell of imprisonment out of which someone needs to escape
The text above is about toiletries and is issued by Correctional institution FKU T-2 of the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) for the Lipetsk Region. It identifies a standardised issue pack for women entering or held within the Russian prison system. The identification numver ТУ 15.12.12-001-08828158-2020 is a Russian technical specification number, similar to a manufacturing standard and it relates to a particular toiletries kit that contains:
Toothpaste, 30 g – 1
Sanitary pads – 10
Toilet soap, 100 g – 1
Toilet paper, 25 m – 1
All of these images were simply pinned to black paper and below each image the text was set out as below:
Name:
Born:Sentence:
Crime:
Some more of the images from the exhibition:
I am not going to critique them as individual works of art, these are works of resistance, but they are still artworks and as such deserve being looked at and reflected upon just as much as the images that would have been on the walls of this church before it was deconsecrated, or the many images that I will be showing of other contemporary art work I saw when I was in Venice.
Where the alter would have been in the church, on the floor was a photo-collage entitled 'Victoria' by Katia Margolis, an image that pays tribute to a Ukrainian cultural figure killed by Russian aggression, the late writer and researcher Victoria Amelina.
Katia Margolis: Victoria: 2022
A 'T' shirt available in the exhibition stated the obvious but it still worked.
Death in Venice
So my first report on Venice this year is a political one, but one that hopefully puts the rest of the work I will be talking about in a proper perspective. It also is a reminder of the fact that drawing is the most democratic of the visual arts and that in times of crisis, it can be used as a powerful tool for the communication of individual trauma within political repression.
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