53rd Venice Biennale Day 9
Nov 2 2009
Day 9 Sunday 9/27 Palazzo Grassi, Museo Fortuny, Latvian Pavillion
Sunday was the day to complete our visit to the Pinault collection, by going a few stops up the Grand Canal to the Palazzo Grassi, bought in 2006 by Pinault from the Agnelli (FIAT) family. FIAT had run the Grassi as a major exhibition venue, but for Pinault it is serves as a glorious box for his art collection. The centrepiece of the current exhibition, is, rather surprisingly Piotr Uklanski’s the Nazis, (Dancefloor) a piece I first saw at the old Photographers Gallery in Covent Garden 1998. Jazzed up with a disco floor, a conflation with one of his first exhibited pieces Untitled (Dance Floor), the piece dominated the entire atrium of the palazzo. Circulating up through the building, you run through a greatest hits of contemporary art, but, like any collection, with a few real surprises. It was good to see the Chapmans again with Like a Dog Returns to it’s own Vomit, as well as a sculptures by Yves Tanguly and Richard Prince but as a whole the spaces suffer in comparison with the Punta Della Dogana, being more enclosed and museum-like; a legacy of the FIAT ownership. I felt that as an exhibition, rather than a collection/museum, Mapping the Studio required more linking themes or artists. Part if this was provided by Rob Pruitt with 101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself, first shown at Gavin Brown in 1999. A selection of the ideas had been realised throughout the building, from No 51 'make mud, 2 parts dirt 1 part water, use as paint or clay' (Richard Long? ), No 46 'put googlie eyes on things’ (googly eyes affixed to the C19 statuary that adorn the grand staircase of the palazzo: a dig at the Chapmans, who do exactly that with their reworking of Goya prints?), No 85 'invent a new color by mixing paint and then name it' (Francois Pinot; a kind of sludgy purple), No 39 'buy something expensive, bring it home' (the whole building). Pruitt’s work revolves around the concept of, basically, being a dick about stuff (in a deliberate use of his own phraseology), and his deliberately adolescent critique of contemporary art was in a rather sickly contrast to the luxuriousness of the surroundings; which, while I’m sure was deliberate, only intensified the queasiness of the enterprise. Much of contemporary art (and art as whole to be honest) is a variety of shell game; intimately connected with money, class and status, the setting and context of the work provides for much of its impact. Attack that context and the whole structure disintegrates. This is easy to do, and since Pruitt’s work is already in the collection, and attack on that collection begins to look like internalized art work pretension…but perhaps that was the point… and so it goes...
Strolling out of the Palazzo, stopped into the church of San Samuele, for Into the Light – Paradise Papillon, new work by San Marino-based Mariluisa Tadei, a bonkers set of installations and sculptures that screamed self-published vanity work; an interesting accompaniment to the Grassi.
Final stop on this Sunday was the Museo Fortuny, for In-Fintium, an exhibition organized by the City of Venice, again seemingly as a opportunity to capitalize on the contemporary art audience in the city for the biennale. Another space only open for special projects, the C15th Palazzo had been equipped as a residence, museum and atelier by its owner, the wealthy Spanish designer and decadent Mariano Fortuny, before being given to the city by his widow in 195o. And what a wonderful refreshing change from the climate controlled box of the Palazzo Grassi! This was an completely engaging, almost naïf in it’s enthusiasm, mish-mash of work spread through all four floors of the Palazzo, encompassing the delightfully vague curatorial concept of the in-finite and the un-finished, with pieces ranging from Durer to Escher to ancient Egypt to Rothko to Kapoor and Turrell, to John Gerrard and Fischli and Weiss. Curated by Dutch designer, collector and art dealer Axel Vervoordt from his own collection, and the collection the City of Venice, In-Finitum formed the final exhibition of three, 2007 in Venice, and 2008 in Paris. This was a very old-fashioned, even eccentric vision of the transformative power of artistic endeavor, and thus a pleasing counter-point to the sickly internationalist distance of the work at Palazzo Grassi. The enthusiast approach has much to fault it, but to have such a homely set-up amongst the exquisite decay of the moldering Fortuny, with no climate control, windows thrown wide and breezes circulating through, work clustered in dingy cabinets, unlabelled, as if artfully discarded my some aesthete deity, was a welcome eccentricity. As such the show was a caprice, but at least an honest one, wearing its heart on its sleeve. And so wonderful to be able to breathe the fresh sea air of Venice, while strolling through 3000 years of collected art work.
Following from Elmgren and Dragset, masterful deconstruction at the Nordic Pavilions in the Giardini (see Day 4) perhaps a theme for me, this biennale was the collector. Certainly Fortuny and Grassi, Vervoordt and Pinault make a fascinating comparison. While, ostensively, Vervoordt is the ‘professional’, an art dealer and designer, with Pinault is the amateur collector, whose day job is billionaire businessman, it is Pinault who drapes his collection with the accoutrements of the museum, architect Tadao Ando, and his own team of curators, while Vervoordt engages with a decayed environment with fierce enthusiasm and distain for the conventions of contemporary art exhibition of a PBS home decoration show. While Vervoordt is obviously selling; his design business and art dealership, Pinault is also selling; PPR the luxury goods group of which he is the head; what better imprimatueur of the luxury good than contemporary art? Both own what they exhibit, and with their wealth can make their own decisions, but I think I prefer the loopy passion of In-Finitum over the measured distance of Mapping The Studio.
Invigourated we stopped for a cappuccino at campo Santa Maria Dei Miracoli, and then meandering back to the hotel, encountered the Latvian Pavilion, third of a strong showing from the Baltic States. Compared to the expansive sculptural experience of Lithuania (See Day 7), this felt a bit cramped, and the show would have benefited from a more circumspect curatorial eye.
No comments found for this entry