Biennale Giardini:

Walked through San Marco Square on a Sunday. Packed with tourists! We had the notion of going to the Ducale but after seeing the thick line thought better of it. We scuttled off to the vaporetto and sailed our way to the Giardini. Its really awe-inspiring watching the centuries flow past. We docked and escaped the lurching 52 with a bunch of really anxious tourists tottering on wobbly sea legs. At the entrance of the Giardini there is a giant missle with a video flow down the middle of it. Could be the promise of something exciting! The 15 Euro entrance is reasonable. It covers both the Giardini and the Arsenale and allows you to take the biennale over a couple of days. There’s just too much to take in - Arsenale domani, se voi per favore! As for today, the pavilions demand my attention.

Quick Aside - One cool giveaway at the Biennale was the free espresso from illy. When you buy your ticket you get a little packet that has an individually wrapped café bag. Once inside you have to cue at the special illy booths to use an espresso machine that makes a perfect shot (con crema.) Half way through the pavilions and I was drag-assing. A jolt later I’m ready to go for the next round. Thanks illy! (It really doesn't take much to make me happy.)
Ok, to start with, EVERYONE has had their say about this biennale. So here I am with two cents in hand. The hard part is trying to say something new about the show. It’s bloody impossible so I’ll just give a few observations.

I agree that it is a very, very conservative show - at least in the Giardini. By that I mean I think I've seen most of this stuff somewhere else and/or by someone else. It's strange to me that no matter where these artists come from there is very little difference in the style of work being made. I guess it shows how interconnected, insecure and unimaginative we all are. The art world is a very small place, tiny in fact. The media both print and electronic have made it even more so. And the art business has made it virtually microscopic. I guess that might explain some of the conformity that goes on. The little surprise was that there were paintings from famous dead guys Bacon and Guston. There were also paintings from Dumas, some German thick paint realist guy and “brush magic” abstractions from Frise and Usle. Paintings!!!! Who knew? I guess Saatchi’s ad campaign and major public push is working it’s magic. Still nothing ground breaking, just work-a-day professional academic paint. Ho hum to look at, but at least it ain’t video!

The American pavilion was a bore. Ruscha. (Crickey mate have we lost our mojo!) It's just a thought but if we have to use the tried and true can we at least find some mid career artist that could really spice it up a bit, please! Say a Mike Kelly or a Tony Oursler. If it can’t be groundbreaking can it be at the very least exciting? I know the critics talked this one up, but I can hardly remember one painting in the exhibit and I'm really trying. The critics liked the take of the 60's paintings of LA buildings updated with graffiti, the influx of immigrant business and the general ravages of junk space sprawl. To me they were file paintings with an added clever historical twist. To be fair I admit that I'm not a Ruscha fan, so draw your own conclusions. The day I was there I saw people practically gallop through the US pavilion. One tourist said to his friend, "yeah, yeah…so what…" as he scanned the paintings and ran for the exit. Sounded like another New Yorker to me. I just hope that wasn't the normal reaction. Americans really are treading light in Europe these days.

The Brits showed Gilbert and George. Would someone PLEASE flush… and light a match? Thanks.

Vellozi’s fake movie commercial for a remake of Penthouse’s Caligula is like a Saturday Night Live segment for Art World Insiders. We were stacked into a tiny standing room only theater recreation complete with red carpets and people jockeying for seating. The looped film bit was packed tight and high with gay icons and b-listers. It’s campy fun to watch Courtney Love try to emote and Gore Vidal pretend to be arch while raising his eyebrows. Vellozi must be seriously connected. Even the Renaissance sycophant Vasari couldn’t link up so many faded stars, and he was the art world connector of all time. I give it thumbs up for chutzpah. Cute.

The rest of the art I came across amounted to –
• Same old political statements.
• Lots of navel gazing videos.
• Consumer objects placed on plinths.
• Ham fisted itchy scratchy heartfelt scrawled drawings.
• Cibachromes! - ‘nuff said.
• The classist tendency to use huge amounts of empty space to make a statement. This usually consists of one object (probably a "consumer object") placed awkwardly askew in a room or teetering next to doorways. (This practice requires a minimum of 3000 square feet of empty gallery space.) These open spaces between walls are symbolic of the power classes using nothing to assert their cultural/political dominance. It is similar to the ascension of the "loft space." Christ, I read an article the other day where the author detailed a sprawl sub-division in Vegas that features "loft homes" for the upwardly mobile casino service industry wannabes. My distaste for this power space is further honed by the fact that many of my colleagues are still fascinated by this limp play for authority– corporate toadies all. In the 21st Century the use of space in this fashion is an anachronism and has ceased to resonate aesthetically. Trite, lazy and thoughtless art fueled by money and a severe dearth of originality.
• Way over priced food and drink exploiting the tired, thirsty and hungry art crowds. They were charging Giant Stadium food prices. Ouch! Art capitalism sucks!

Admittedly it's fun to see contemporary art in a touristy kind of fashion. It really takes all the threat out of it. Just think how quickly the French 19th Century avant-garde would have been accepted if they were presented in this fashion. Instant stardom and huge prices would have followed. It’s art without the burnishing of life experience. In this world any new radical visual idea would be co-opted by market speculators, lost in the sponsorship booths or quickly codified in the expensively egalitarian bookshop. Art becomes a diverting entertainment. In the beautiful Giardini the last thing anyone wants to do is really think about art! It's a theme park for the fashionable outsider, Euro Disney for culture vultures.

There were a lot of pavilions that I gave little notice. It was a physical day and it sometimes is a bit hard to wade through the stuff of culture. Besides I still have Tintoretto in my head from the day before. The problem with most of the work I’ve just seen is a visual one as defined by McLuhan. Painting is a hot medium; it is made strictly for seeing and by seeing, discovering meaning. Today our cultural experiences rely heavily on text and non-sequential interactivity. There is always a voice running underneath, a running commentary being made about what you’re supposed to be experiencing. Music is mediated by the MC-Rapper, TV has the talking heads blathering about whatever is being presented, and art has the audio guide gently persuading you what you’re seeing. The main problem is that we experience art works mostly outside of the thing in itself. We know what it is before we get to see it or we have an explanation on the wall next to the work. The art on view is for the most part an artifact of some larger participation. I find it difficult to come across anything as visually explosive and compelling as the paintings I saw yesterday at the Accademia. I want my contemporaries' work to be as thrilling as the paintings that exist here in Venice. That's a hard rub, I know.

Painters have been behind the eight ball since the failure of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. After that horrible sell off/out painting ran screaming to Pop art because painters could hope for a visual element, something to paint! However it wouldn't be the same old tired painting. Warhol and Lichtenstein understood the visual shift being fueled by new medias. Television, the proliferation of fast media and the speed of contemporary living, were evident to those who looked. How would a painting work in this changing media environment? Warhol chose magazine layout. Lichtenstein chose comics. Fast media presents signs of general experience and allows the viewer to fill in the depth through their own interiority. By conforming to signs it frees us to explore our own feelings of what we see. Warhol’s insistence on repetition, celebrity and death ties us to our own mortality, our need to impress and our need to remember or be remembered. This is slickly presented like the magazines that were beginning to proliferate our cultural experience. Lichtenstein codified our fantasies of love, heroism and ego through the stilted visual structures of Romance and War comics. Like all fast media this visual info is condensed and compressed. Fast media changed the painting game from ABEX materialism to media ephemera and we began to experience different visual ideas. Media became the subject of painting. Postmodernism began to flourish in this aesthetic environment. It co-opted all the "isms" of the 20th Century and created a fragrant stew of reactionary painting that aped the media experience. This style quickly fit in with the newly profitable art academies in the education factories and became the style preferred by most American Cultural Instituions.

Revivalism
Today, painting's new permutation is as a commodity. Damien Hirst’s last show at Gagosian was yet another checkmate in the painting endgame. He used his business star power to force us to regard the oil paint drivel he was hawking as a radical gesture. There was the usual flurry of publicity before the exhibit with glossy pictures and star turn interviews. The discussion of content was rampant. The paintings were all “realist” based on “found” photos published in newspapers and magazines. The surprising thing about the coverage of the show was that Hirst was never taken to task for his visual laziness, both aesthetic and practical, by the art press. The event overshadowed the work, and the paintings were merely artifacts. Who will spend time looking at these paintings and discussing the ideas presented in them? Who will spend time looking at the “skill,” “intelligence,” and “talent” that created the work? The short answer is no one. These works were made by committee, “Hirst Inc.,” and that seems to be the case with most artists these days. The paintings were simply stock certificates bought and sold to maintain an investment like you would Microsoft or IBM stocks. Hirst was not involved in coming up with new visions. If he had he would have used his own photos. Even in the face of the Postmodernist torrent of optical information he would have photographed his own faces, his own moments describing his emotions or ideas. He would not have stood for anything less. Or to put it squarely in the common vernacular - it's the difference between finding cool stuff and making cool stuff. One makes you a designer; the other makes you an artist.

I can't help wondering if life was the similar for Tintoretto or Titian. They were concerned about their careers and were ambitious to boot. Tintoretto was quite a cad when it came to business. Both of those artists had mouths to feed after all. But they never stopped pushing the boundaries of their work. They continued to find ways to express their concerns about painting. They reacted to their times and understood that they HAD to find new ways to express visual ideas. They radicalized content and used their practice to make that radical nature apparent in the work. This fight is still obvious in their paintings and still a revelation to us today. Not because they painted figures or that they made a buttload of money but because they expressed something unique. That is what’s missing in the Giardini and my painting generation, originality and guts.

Back on the Vaporetto I am exhausted from the show. I watch the city flow past on my way to the Ca’ Rezzonico stop. Art is not easy, it never has been. It demands a great deal of attention and a great deal of thought. I get excited, genuinely enthusiastic about it, and when I'm disappointed I examine it to find out why it disappoints. I want it to be great! Today the work I saw was overshadowed by yesterday's visual encounter with another century and the aesthetic connections I was able to make through time. Today's art felt light and uneventful. Thankfully the vaporetto floats into the Grand Canal and makes it all fantastic once again.