Identica Insight 08 Venice Biennale

IDENTICA
INSIGHT
Guest Edition Issue 8
THE VENICE BIENNALE 2013
Sam Stone, Creative Director

Issue 8
VENICE BIENNALE
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art
exhibition that takes place once every two years
in Venice, Italy. The Biennale happens across the
city but its two main sites are at the Giardini
and the old shipyard at Arsenale.
This year’s Biennale brings together over one
hundred and fifty artists from more than eighty
countries, with each country staging competing
exhibitions in their national pavilions.
The worlds of art and design so often overlap
that this year, instead of going to my usual
design haunts, I decided to visit the Venice
Biennale to see the work of some of the worlds
leading and upcoming artists.
Blurring the line between professional artists
and amateurs, the exhibition aims to bring the
many infinite worlds of contemporary art to life
in a single place. It was a weird and wonderful
experience, full of surprises and intense moments,
from the imagined to the real, the individual to
the collective, the modern to the historic.
02
150
Contemporary artists
80
Participating countries

Issue 8
VENICE BIENNALE
For me personally I was just as interested in the
artist’s back-stories as I was the work itself, with
many artists dedicating their life to the pursuit
of one ideal. This passion and spirit to capture
and focus on a single ambition seems all the
more relevant in a world where a constant flood
of information and technology is available to
distract us.
The centrepiece of the Biennale is an exhibition
called the The Encyclopedic Palace curated this
year by a young director from the New Museum
of Contemporary Art in New York called
Massimiliano Gioni.
On November 16th, 1955, self taught Italian-
American artist Marino Auriti filed a design with
the U.S Patent office depicting his Encyclopedic
Palace, an imaginary museum that was meant to
house all worldy knowledge.
Unfortunately for Auriti his dream of such a
place never came to fruition but Gioni used this
theme as a way of constructing an exhibition that
brings together many examples of artwork and
creative expressions generated to visualise our
obsessive attempts at capturing and collecting
knowledge in order to try and make sense of the
world and our role within it.
03
1
1. Auriti standing next
to his model built in
wood and plastic and
cellulose of the
Encyclopedic Palace,
the museum that he
patented in 1955. Once
built it would have
occupied 16 blocks in
Washington DC with
its 700 metres in
height and 136 floors
containing all past,
present and future
knowledge.

Issue 8
COLLECTIONS
04
1. American artist
Sarah Sze takes
everyday objects and
turns them into finely
balanced complex
installations.
2. Fischli and Weiss
collection of over two
hundred clay
sculptures which
represent the world
through events,
objects and phrases.
Appropriately enough then the exhibition seems
to contain many artworks devoted to the idea of
collections, consisting of made objects, found
objects and captured experiences to reveal the
artist’s understanding of the world, both past
and present.
I was particularly in awe of the work of Sarah
Sve in the national pavilion of the United
States. Sve’s installation was a collection of
normal everyday objects like paint cans,
toothpicks, paper, light bulbs and rocks that she
has constructed into complex installations that
all seem to balance precariously like fragile
architectural eco systems, challenging us to
consider what objects in our life have value.
Elsewhere, in their first large-scale
collaboration, Fischli and Weiss display a
collection of over 200 small clay sculptures on
white plinths that aim to celebrate our
idiosyncratic world through a series of playfully
depicted events, objects, phrases and stories that
provide a thought-provoking survey of our times.
1
2

Issue 8
COLLECTIONS
05
1. A symmetrical
pattern of Mickey
Mouse rubber toys
collected over two
decades as a
monument to a
generation that
disappeared in the
civil war in Serbia.
2. Having experienced
the March 11th
earthquake and
tsunami, a disaster on
an unprecedented
scale, Koki Tanaka’s
films and videos
capture collective acts
of the event.
Many of the collective displays struck very
strong emotional chords, such as in the national
pavilion of Serbia, where artist Vladimir Peric
has created a three dimensional geometric
wallpaper covering one full wall of the pavilion
with hundreds of vintage Mickey Mouse rubber
toys he has collected at flea markets over the
course of two decades. I found this wall
installation initially quite lively and uplifting
but on reading further soon found out that a
whole generation of children who played with
these toys disappeared in the civil war. The
display then took on a rather chilling dimension
with the multiple rows of the toys bringing to
mind rows of tombstones at war graves.
In the Japanese pavilion exhibiting artist Koki
Tanaka’s work was equally unsettling. Tanaka
has visualised through films and videos what he
calls ‘collective acts’ that capture the multiple
emotions exhibited by people after the
earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. These
images show groups of people talking about
themselves whilst eating emergency rations,
walking in large groups through the streets at
night with flashlights and going down a fire
escape whilst evacuating a building.
1
2

Issue 8
SELF
06
1. Matt Mullican
transcribes his
thoughts on paper and
bed sheets whilst in a
hypnotic trance.
2. Robert Cuoghi’s
multi-layered large
scale sculpture
produced using a state
of the art 3D printer.
Another common theme I experienced at the
exhibition was the concept of ‘self’ with many
artists creating work by initiating experiments
with themselves and others to unearth the
hidden depths of the human psyche. Take the
work from Matt Mullican for example who
transcribes his subconscious thoughts on paper
and bed sheets whilst in a hypnotic trance to
create a fantastic labyrinth of signs, symbols
and words. These spontaneous diagrams and
writings appear to offer free access to Mullican’s
mind with one left feeling weirdly acquainted
with the artist long after viewing his work.
Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi took the concept of
self to extreme ends with the idea of human
metamorphosis. Cuoghi transformed himself
into his father, piling on pounds of weight onto
his slight frame, growing a beard, wearing his
father’s clothes and adopting his mannerisms in
a process that took seven years to complete. This
constant transformation and change of hybrid
forms and identity is a recurrent theme in his
work with his submission for the biennale being
a large scale sculpture with multiple layers of
micro organisms, rather impressively produced
using a state of the art 3D printer.
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2

Issue 8
SELF
07
1/2. In 1997, with
knowledge of his
impending death,
Roth started to
videotape nearly every
aspect of his life. Each
of the 131 screens
shows a different
video, in which Roth
is the sole protagonist.
Turning his own life into art, Dieter Roth
entered a video installation wall consisting of
131 monitors that capture his obsession with
recording the fluctuations of his everyday life in
what were to be his last years. In a rather
intriguing twist on the idea of a self portrait, the
films show a solitary Roth in his apartment
going about his business, eating, washing,
reading and drawing while he gets progressively
more fragile and ill. The frenetic display
becomes a depressingly stark metaphor for the
transience of human lives and our sense of self.
1
2

Issue 8
NATURE
08
1/2. The work Forest
Square involved
cutting down an area
(10 m x 10 m) of forest,
and sorting out the
trees, undergrowth
and surface soil.
Nature appeared to be firmly on the agenda also
this year with many artists using the natural
world as their raw material and media. Perhaps
this is an ongoing rejection of the man-made in
our increasingly mechanised and remote
computerised society. Maybe it is a reflection of
the power, scale and unpredictability of recent
environmental disasters. Either way it seemed to
convey a nostalgic longing for a simpler, more
basic, rural existence with nature personifying
truth and authenticity.
On centre stage at the Finnish pavilion was a
photographic triptych called Forest Square.
Artist Antti Laitinen, whose work is
characterised by his relationship to nature,
spent months cutting down 10 square metres of
forest in Finland. After felling the forest and
manually striping the surface of soil, Antti
stored the wood, soil, roots and branches in a
‘forest assorting centre’ where he devised many
ingenious ways of sorting and separating the
forest material into their constituent parts. Soil,
moss, wood, needles, leaves and cones were all
separated into 400 baskets containing different
types of undergrowth. The final composition
takes exactly 10 square metres of space, just like
the original forest.
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2

Issue 8
NATURE
09
1. Conceived after
extensive excursions
in the mountains, Lin
Xue’s works explore
the structures of
plants and animal life.
2. A fallen tree made
entirely out of wax
that resembles a
disfigured human body
by Belgian artist
Berlinde De Bruyckere.
Hong Kong based artist Lin Xue creates
infinitely intricate ink works using a sharpened
shard of bamboo capturing the complex patterns
and energy he believes flows through the natural
world. His work explores the structure of plants
and animal life with natural scenes and
vegetation developing into a web of mystical
reproductions, half familiar, half imaginary.
Interestingly the bamboo shard that he uses does
not retain ink so Lin Xue is forced to draw
quickly which adds a further intriguing
dimension to his work.
And finally on the subject of nature, Belgian
artist Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Cripplewood
shows the metamorphosis of a fallen tree into a
vulnerable and disfigured human body. The tree
is enormous, a gnarled and knotted uprooted
elm, merging into a mass of trunks and limbs
with an almost disturbing resemblance to the
muscles, tendons and bones of the human form.
It was only on close inspection that I realised
that the tree was entirely made out of wax.
1
2

Issue 8
DEDICATION
10
1. Robert Crumb’s
graphic novel of all
fifty chapters of the
book of Genesis took 5
years to complete.
2. In Poledna’s film,
the donkey does a few
dance steps while
singing along to the
soundtrack in a forest
full of surprises:
singing birds and
chubby bunnies are
the main characters.
Beyond the main themes I saw I was taken
aback by the sheer passion and dedication that
the artists commit to the creation of their work. I
am not sure why I found it so surprising, if you
truly believe in what you are creating for the
world it is only right that you explore every
detail and edifice of the concept you are trying to
communicate. Perhaps it is because as designers
we occupy the commercial side of the art world
where deadlines and numbers are increasingly
the success criteria and where the luxury of time
is something we constantly yearn for.
For pure and unadulterated dedication take a
look at the work of Robert Crumb. Crumb
gained notoriety for creating autobiographical
comics with alternative, often bizarre,
characters. In 2009, Crumb published his most
ambitious work to date, a graphic novel of all
fifty chapters of the book of Genesis that took
him five years to complete. Or the work of
Austrian artist Mathias Poledna who, with the
collaboration of film studios in California,
created a three minute hand-drawn film, called
Imitation of Life, using more than 5,000
drawings and sketches, just like in the glory
days of Disney.
1
2

Issue 8
DEDICATION
11
1. Arthur Bispo do
Rosário. His complex
universe created in a
psychiatric hospital
near Rio, which today
houses his artwork.
2. Emma Kunz creates
elaborate geometric
drawings in pencil on
graph paper guided by
a pendulum.
For further examples of dedication take a look at
the work of Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo do
Rosario who produced over eight hundred
tapestries in preparation for Judgement Day
during five decades of internment in a
psychiatric hospital and artist Emma Kunz who
produced elaborate geometric drawings guided
by a pendulum, sometimes working continuously
for more than 24 hours.
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2

Issue 8
IN SUMMARY
So I guess if I was going to try and
summarise my lasting impression of the
Biennale I would say that I left feeling a
renewed sense of passion and dedication
for creating work I really believe in, even
if the circumstances can sometimes feel
challenging and the goals out of reach.
I found the single- minded pursuit of
perfection and depth of narratives within
the art works truly inspiring, sometimes
overwhelming.
So if you ever get a chance to go to the
Biennale do not let the opportunity pass you
by. I can guarantee you will be astounded
by the artistic endeavours of the human
race to create objects of lasting value and
memory long after the event has finished.
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1. ‘The body is only a
vehicle for the soul’
Haunting sculptures
by Pawel Althamer.
2. It rained gold coins
at the Russian
pavilion, symbolic of
our lust and greed.
1
2

THANK YOU
Issue 8
TO FIND OUT MORE: Call +44 (0)20 3451 9700,
or email Leah Williams leah.williams@identica.com

Identica Insight 08 Venice Biennale

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