freud/bacon

lucian freud, francis bacon

francis bacon, lucien freud

cracked culture?

first published by a virtual biennale, line magazine
www.avirtualbiennale.tumblr.com

Cracked Culture? / The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art

Artists: Ma Liang, Ma Han, Shi Jindian, Jiao Xingtao, Han Zijian, Wang Xiaosong, Wang Chengyun, Resi Girardello, Ying Tianqi, Feng Feng, He Gong, Liu Guofu, Huang Gang, Ferruccio Gard

Curators: Wang Lin, Gloria Vallese

Venue: Liceo Artistico Statale di Venezia, Palazzo Giustinian Recanti & Convento dello Spirito Santo

Cracked Culture? The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art attempts to confront ideas about cultural and personal identity, nationality and tradition and the Western and Eastern world.  According to the curator, Wang Lin, contemporary Chinese artists are intensely conflicted between East and West, and tradition and modernity. Often, their artistic efforts reflect the choices of Western curators and investors, rather than their own authentic creativity. This exhibition claims to ‘look from a different perspective.’ In confrontation with typically Venetian locations, thirteen Chinese and two Italian artists attempt to reveal the genuine face of their contemporary art environments.

The exhibition is a combination of ‘traditional’ Chinese style, post-modern painting, ethereal film installations and gilded anatomical sculptures, with a persistent undercurrent of morbidity. The concentration upon death, disorder and disintegration is not necessarily consciously conceived in all the works, yet Gao Yang’s gaudy paintings hint at human irrationality in life, and fragmentation in death, while Wang Chengyun’s painterly representation of historic events are imbued with power and violence. 

Unfortunately, the exhibition feels confused, and the insistence on an authentic Eastern viewpoint becomes more of an obfuscation than a clarification. Despite the consistent permeation of melancholy throughout the works, they remain diverse in subject matter, materials, technique, attitude and presentation. The works are interesting in their variety, with certain stand out pieces such as Ying Tianqi’s Traces of the Vicissitudes and Shi Jindian’s White Forest. Furthermore, the curation of works at the Convento del Santo Spirito is extremely interesting, incorporating elements of the university building rather than attempting to overrule them. In particular, a video projected onto heaped chairs creates absorbing and amusing parallels between the importance of art and education. Occasionally there are arrows pointing to seemingly empty classrooms, forcing the viewer to search for artworks that may or may not exist.

However, while certain artists, such as Ólafur Ólafsson and Libia Castro, use the Venice Biennale in order to highlight the fiction of a ‘national identity’ within contemporary art, this exhibition is still naïvely presenting it as a reality. Ólafsson and Castro, who represent Iceland at the Biennale this year, presented three new iterations of their ongoing projectYour Country Doesn’t Exist, which explores political, socio-economic and personal forces that affect present day life. The work is an interpretation of the complex relationships which compose various cultures, calling attention to the difficulties in establishing a monoculture within any given society or country.

It seems redundant to press the point of an ‘artistic national identity’, when one doesn’t appear to be present, but Cracked Culture eagerly presses it. The Venice Biennale is an international, contemporary art festival, thus, arguably, inciting artists to represent their country; to create work which demonstrates its unique character. However, artists at the 2011 Biennale seem to have moved on, creating a diverse discourse which challenges this simplistic idea, leaving Cracked Culture trailing behind on its quest for identity.

Kathryn Lloyd

taryn simon

from a living man declared dead and other chapters

'A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen 'chapters' that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein's son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.'

www.tarynsimon.com

jonsi and alex

christian boltanski: chance

first published by a virtual biennale, line magazine
www.avirtualbiennale.tumblr.com

For Boltanski, who for over 40 years, has fixated upon the futility of life in the face of death, Chance, seems an optimistic premise for an exhibition. Boltanski’s presentation for the 2011 Biennale explores the luck and fate that exists at the very beginning of life, by fixating upon the expanse of possibilities facing newborn babies. Additionally, Boltanski includes an interactive element to his exploration, allowing the public to ‘play’ and ‘win’ with the artist.

The main room of the pavilion consists of a large, moving loop of paper, upon which Boltanski has printed photographs of hundreds of children. Weaving its way across a matrix of scaffolding, the photographic strip stops suddenly, an alarm bell sounds, and one child’s face is illuminated on an oversized screen. The process then begins again, until the next alarm bells and chance chooses another child.

In each of the two side rooms, a clock with luminous numbers counts up the world’s population. The panel on the left records, in real-time, the number of births and the panel on the right, the number of deaths. The number of births is always higher than the number of deaths. This marks an important stage in the evolution of Boltanski’s work, which has previously been dominated by disappearance and demise. Here, however, he  opens himself up to a broader examination and presents the consistent, daily victory of life over death.

The third and final room introduces Boltanski’s interactive feature to the exhibition. On the wall there is a large video screen on which various images of segments of humans faces are projected. These segments are on a continuous loop, which the visitor can pause by pressing a button. The faces consist of three arbitrary sections, creating strange, mutable identities. Functioning like a giant, facial, fruit-machine, the visitor can ‘win’ by matching up the three sections of face. This part of the exhibition can also be experienced online, by using a website which reads: ‘WIN by putting one of the portraits back together and Christian Boltanski will send you a gift!’ This virtual representation is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibition, contributing to Boltanski’s ‘global approach’ in an entirely novel way, and furthermore provoking interesting questions about the parallels between the internet and the art world - specifically the Biennale itself.

Since the late 60s, Christian Boltanski has exhibited a direct, unflinching presentation of death, creating his own minimalist aesthetic which parallels the inevitability of our ultimate demise. Chance delivers an uncharacteristically sanguine perspective on these existential questions, which undermines the majority of his previous work. Arguably, Boltanski has been progressing towards this “positive” outlook since his inauguration of the project Les Archives du Cœur (The Archives of the Heart.) Since 2005, Boltanski has been collecting recordings of heartbeats from all around the world, giving himself the impossible task of collecting ‘the heartbeat of everyone in the world.’ The recordings will be preserved on the Japanese island of Teshima on the Seto Inland Sea. While this concept demonstrates a naïve ambition to present the fundamental proof of life on an unsurpassable scale, it does so with a shrewdness that Chance lacks. Les Archives du Cœur is an extraordinary example of Boltanski’s merging of fact and fiction, of his satirical manipulation of the autobiographical, and his acknowledgement of the futile, in the face of optimism. 

Boltanski’s fixation upon chance did not have to be mirthless in order to be successful. However, it is too blatant, too contrived, and creeps over the boundary of the theatrical, into the realms of spectacle. This is something his work has previously managed to avoid - presenting stage-like homages to the dead in Les Suisses Morts (The Swiss Dead) and Detective, which have intelligently rested in the space between installation and theatre. Through its ‘game-show’ type presentation, Chance, stumbles out of this space, and exhibits itself devoid of satire or irony. Boltanski’s exhibition is an empty, minimalist shell, with methodological imprints of his previous works, but entirely lacking its profundity. 

wolfgang joop: eternal love

first published by a virtual biennale, line magazine

www.avirtualbiennale.tumblr.com

Wolfgang Joop is infamous as the German designer who founded the fashion and cosmetics company JOOP! In the context of the 54th Venice Biennale, he presents Eternal Love - an overview of his recent sculptural and textile works. 

Presenting a multitude of marble monkeys and screaming angels, Joop addresses our human existence through his juxtaposition of the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the earthly. Utilising his mastery of the aesthetic, Joop grasps his viewer’s attention with kitsch imagery, and gleaming surfaces. In Eternal Love, Joop conceives of an idealised world that is clearly flawed, but one which opposes his fast-paced fashion world, which he claims as ‘amoral’ and ‘not used to provoke deep thought.’

The work presented is essentially beautiful, classically informed and ethereal. However, this initial aestheticism is deceptive, obscuring an enigmatic series of works which address the duality of life and death, and the various manifestations of love. One exhibition room displays a sequence of drawings which depict the story of a fashion crazed monkey who falls in love with a human designer from Paris, for whom she subsequently breaks off her engagement to a male monkey, despite the fact her love is unrequited. For Joop, the monkey embodies pure, natural love - an antithesis to our humanistic, cognitive experiences. Joop’s idiosyncratic presentation of the human and the animal is a consistent thread throughout the exhibition - it is a well-known collocation, but Joop provides a slight twist of irritation; a mockery that evades over simplification. 

The ultimate difficulty with Eternal Love lies with Joop’s relationship to his precedents. It is inevitable that his artistic oeuvre will be compared to his career as a fashion designer, with all its implications. There is clearly an ingrained love of pure aestheticism within the artist/designer, which becomes dangerous when attempting to present artistic dialogue alongside artistic beauty. One can assume Joop’s use of kitsch is a purposeful tool rather than a simple stylistic choice, as, juxtaposed with brutal animalistic imagery, it clearly seeks to emphasise his interest in ‘the duality of life.’ However, one must attempt to distinguish whether the work truly manages to say anything over and above this duality, or whether it ultimately recedes into its own beauty. That is to say, whether it seeks to establish anything more than Joop’s own words: ‘cherry blossoms are very fleeting, while skulls can last thousands of years.’ 

gerard byrne

case study: loch ness (some possibilities and problems) 

poland: kostrzyn to krakow

berlin

andrea zittel

spruth magers

and based in berlin

mitte

doppelganger brief - trisickle

The term doppelganger is derived from the German words doppel (double) and ganger (walker) It was originally used to describe the double of a living person in fiction, folklore, and popular culture that typically represents evil. The concept of having a deviant alter ego has been explored in various works of fiction, art and film and even has a place within a social context such as identity theft. 

The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Someday you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oh my poor old Harry Jekyll, if I ever read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde