MY BIENNALE ADVENTURE

I visited the Biennale last Friday, and it was awesome. VIU coordinates tours to various sights around Venezia each week, normally on Fridays, and a few of these tours are mandatory for our "Wonders of Venice" course. The Biennale was a surprise; to begin with, I had no clue what it was. Getting up to catch an 8:45 a.m. vaporetto to the main islands, and then over to the "Gardini: Biennale" boat stop, I had been indifferent to the excursion, not even sure where in Venice we were headed. Once I found out that La Biennale was a modern art museum, begun in the 1800's as a national arts fair that now holds biannual modern art displays created by artists not only from Italy but from around the world, I was excited.I like modern art, mostly because it is such a large and surprising category of creativity, one that defies definition like art has never done before. Really, I just like its weirdness, or its ability to "make things strange" to me (to use Professor Emily Allen's words). Even as a fan, though, I always find myself questioning its worth, and I'm sure many people who have seen modern art can relate to what I'm talking about. Before this trip to the Biennale, I had never really figured out what I think of the often effortless-looking constructions it encompasses: a tin can sitting in an empty room, to be cliche. It had been a while since I had seen any "modern art," so on Friday, once I learned that the Biennale was a modern exhibition, I decided to both enjoy and find meaning in every piece I saw that I might figure what I really think of it.

We walked off the vaporetto stop and through the entrance gardens to pick up our tickets before entering the museum grounds. Pebbles crunched under our feet as our guide led us to a lawn where we could listen to his account of La Biennale's history and plan our tour. VIU is full of international students, so our by-nation-pavilion part of the tour was influenced by what nationalities were in the group. The pavilions are literally 29 buildings built and decorated by different countries, some sharing space but most independent. There are also pavilions in the city, not on the main Biennale grounds, that accommodate for more countries (and they're free too, so when I see them now I go in to experience strange things, it's great).

Inside the main building, the one that says "La Biennale" in the picture at the top, we saw a load of weird, amazing pieces from paintings, like "The Revenge of the Old House" and "The Attack of the Old Houses" above, to entire little worlds, like the slightly gruesome flower forest below that filled a room with giant flowers, music, scary videos, and a really gross frog.
Here I am in the bungee-cord replica of a spider's web (below). Until the guide explained it, I had no clue what it was supposed to be; the way it looked, different sized balls of cord that seemed to float in the air, I thought they were planets, cells, or exploding suns. It was neat to realize how one very direct interpretation of something so specific as a spiderweb can make such a statement about our existence, lots of spheres.
Here was a room all about dreams, I believe, at least that's what it reminded me of. The objects on the left turned in front of lights creating moving shadows on the wall, something like when you begin to fall to sleep and shapes and images begin to blend in your mind. I felt like I was sharing that fleeting moment of falling to sleep with everyone in the room, seeing something of an ultimately personal experience in a physical, public reality.
As we left the main building, we walked through a cafeteria where you could "eat on art." This struck me funny because it seems to me we always eat on art, we even eat art, so the novel idea was not that novel... but then maybe that was the point, I did not read the artist's statement. Still, this was a great room, like a fancy restaurant in New York City.
Outside we began the pavilion tours. We saw the American pavilion, which was interesting, but not really the winner it was pronounced to be; some heads were hanging from the ceiling with water shooting out of holes in their sides and many neat pairs of hands that looked difficult to sculpt were enacting hand signals. I liked the Danish and Nordic Pavilions better. One was the house of man who lived alone but publicly alone, Mr. B, and the other was the house of his neighbors', A Family, a private yet troubled little gorup. This is Mr. B's house.
He didn't live there anymore.
But we could go inside his house and look around.
I would love to have this bathroom, to shower in the forest.
He had some nice pieces of art also, although the collections of explicit photography and drawings weren't for me. I didn't take a lot of photos in the neighbors' house, but they were definitely disturbed, in many ways, and there was a large "for sale" sign in their font yard.
Once the tour was over, we left without having seen most of the pavilions, but, because I was really enjoying it, I had to go back. I spent an extra two hours visiting many of the other exhibits. Here is a picture of France's pavilion. Inside, I walked into a large cage in the shape of a Greek cross that had a black flag blowing in wind at the end of each arm. I didn't like it; it felt empty and foreboding.
I also walked through the Russian pavilion, in which I saw this mechanical guy...
... drawing ovals,
... some glass balls hanging from the ceiling with famous peoples' pictures on them, and lots of other weird things, including visions of the distant future in a blacklit room with dance music and the Winged Victory gushing with red water, that made me think about... I don't know... I wish I had had time to read what everything meant.
The Venetian pavilion was pretty legit... Well, I shouldn't say that; I thought most of them were well done, but I liked this one because I could easily put meaning to it, Venetian glass. Plus, it was pretty.
And, Egypt's big, palm leaf Egyptians, including lots of large, mummy-like cats inside the building, was nice.All of the Biennale's exhibits were exciting, and some were a little frightening, especially when I had no clue what was being said. I have visited at least twenty of the pavilions so far, both on and off the main grounds; I enjoyed them all, even if I did not like what I saw. Of course, without a guide to explain most of the pieces, I had trouble grasping the concepts presented; I would have read their explanations had I had time to. Unlike most classical art forms, "modern" art is not restricted to a single medium and its meaning can be very unclear without interpretive input from the artists. I think people often consider art something that speaks without words, aside from performance arts, and this is an assumption that can get in the way of popularizing the "modern" form. Some of the art in the Biennale was almost worthless in my opinion without its description or back story, but once I learned a little more about the art than I could see, the art began to say more than could its explanation alone. A few works did speak for themselves, or perhaps those artists and I just happen to think alike, yet, even though I liked finding out that I had "gotten it right," I found many of the elusive pieces to be just as interesting as the obvious ones. Sometimes they said things to me that the artists had not intended; sometimes I learned to see things from new angles entirely.

Overall, what I liked about contemplating the Biennale's modern art was how it used relationships and various distances to convey distinct ideas about broad and abstract concepts. In classical art, for example, the subject is normally a physical thing or a widely known action or movement that can be contained within a frame or the stone for the purpose of viewing as a person here looking there. In "modern" art, the subject is most often abstract, especially when the viewer does not understand where the artist is coming from, which can add to the art. Objects, colors, or other mediums are used in modern art to make us see our own thoughts, to make us feel strange, to put us into new situations looking out, not in as with the classical portrait. Audio, visuals, touch, taste, smell, thought, nature, everything is used to question everything. It is a communication of thoughts through physical mediums and gestures. The strangeness seems to asks you to enter your mind and test out ideas or to find ideas to explain what the artist has presented to you. It is as if the art speaks to your unconscious and you come away knowing more than what was said; you continue to ponder and you learn. Ideas are made visually memorable. Art is very clearly used as a spoken language of thought. I told you, it's hard to describe, and I'm failing at it in this blog.

To sum things up as a student of Venice, though, the presence of modern art in Venice is fitting, despite Venice's fame as a city stuck in a now useless past. Since its beginning, Venice has been a place of change and challenge where cultures have clashed and expression in many forms has been important. Art of all kinds seems to have flourished in or, at least, have notably passed through Venice. Today, in modern Venice, I would be disappointed to find that Venice was not keeping up with its history as an artistically inspirational city. With the presence of modern art, Venice is not just a living city, but it is a city of the future, a place where people come to use the past to see and design the future by sharing thought through various mediums.



(the use of image and emotional impression to express logic has persisted to become more abstract.)


stone wings



turn in

to personal dynamics -speak
modern art

it's not easy


Song by Sufjan Stevens (all for the effect, as was the strange ending to this blog that I threw in as a bonus!)