Mirrors

When trying to write about such a big event it is inevitable that everything starts to run together especially since everything is so fresh on my mind. But I'll do my best to give you an idea of some of the things that struck me as particularly worth while.

Sigmar Polke paintings - It was actually the first thing I saw. Well, actually not the first thing. We managed to see a big chunk of the arsenale because we were searching for our press passes and then it was off to lunch. So after lunch and a beer I went into the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini and had a look around. Right smack in the middle were these works by Polke. Dark works that were monumental and sublime in their darkness. They left me speachless and with a strong feeling in my stomach. But I couldn't hang around too long because the artSEEN team was supposed to meet shortly for drinks in front of Hungary. But it all turned out to be too crowded so we went on our way...

I heard Robert Storr speak in Florence about a month ago in a talk called 'Between the Factory and the Garden'. In the speach he spoke of the viewer and the event and about doing something with an event that was planned over one hundred years ago and about the difficulties of dealing with such a space for contemporary art which is never so easily put into such spaces. He was very clear about what he was going to present and what I saw seemed to jive with what he was saying in his talk. Lots of paintings beacause after all that's what he deals with on a regular basis both as a painter and a curator. I thought his choices were good ones and the Italian pavilion overall worked very well. My progression from Polke, to Ellsworth Kelly, to Gerhard Richter, and then to Robert Ryman made perfect and logical sense. Here was an idea and one worth exploring. One could easily say that such big names are a shoe in but I feel it is also an opportunity to see the greatness of an artist. After all painters especially tend to get really good late in life.

I passed saturday morning entirely at the Arsenale. I spent a good deal of time with the Francis Alys installation. I've written about his work in the past and I think he's really on to something. It has to do with really getting to the point. Many people attempt to deal with the political or the poetic and fail. Alys does not. At times it's difficult to say why he pulls it off but he does and for now I'll stick to just that... that he consistently deals with the poetic and the political on a level that his contemporaries could really learn from...

There was much more and of course by the end I was too tired to look at anything with fresh eyes. Which may have influenced my reaction to the pavilions this year as being very average. I didn't feel that it was bad but nothing that stopped me in my tracks. And I couldn't get over the sinking feeling that French art looks and feels really French and British art is really British and Germans very German and The Americans very American. It seemed a bit absurd and a gallerist at a certain point even started bashing Americans which was funny because she thought I was British or Italian or something and it gets me wondering about the tolerance of people in the Art World. Are we all just supporting our own?

Overall I'm happy I went. I like seeing what people are doing and I enjoy discovering that all the big people are not so big anyway. Just people sweating their brains out in Venice on a hot day. It's a great place to get rid of all the smoke and mirrors even if there were a lot of mirrors everywhere!