Search Results (4)

‘Venice excels in blackness and whiteness; water makes commerce between them’. So writes Adrian Stokes, in his 1947 study of the city, its architectures, and its art. This very sentence performs a problem of Venice that has vexed those who have made art, literature, and other writing of the city, in the city, from the city: Venice asks us to take its measure, its shadows and light, its water and stones—but this is even more complex than a chiaroscuro, ‘commerce’, aesthetic and economic, plays with what is clear and what is not, tipping us between registers we fail to fully comprehend. And thus we are brought too often to perform and replicate such confusion and inability to ‘account for’ the polytropic, polymaterial, and polytemporal registers the city simultaneously operates upon, or ‘makes commerce between’. And yet there is an artistic method that can account for the strange and often highly problematic spoliate economies of Venice, a method which also bridges walking practice as political performance art, and situated performance as art historical practice. This is a poetic-performance method that is provided by the artist Tim Brennan’s Vedute Manoeuvre, first performed in the Venice Biennale 2011, and re-performed as part of the research work documented here. Vedute Manoeuvre, I claim, is a method whose polyvocalic polyvisual modes, whose art-act as common experience and experience of the complexity of the artistic and architectural commons and commerce of Venice, is perhaps the only way of ‘giving voice to’ the polytropic, polymaterial, and polytemporal problems we encounter when we encounter Venice, its water, and its stones. We thus re-orientate the multiple other ways that spoliate, colonial, archipelagic Venice has been found difficult in previous attempts to perform an accounting of (and, indeed, of artistic commerce with) this vexed and vexing city, with Vedute Manoeuvre as invitation toward a performance ‘redux’, as crux and as solution. The work presented here—an essay in the truest sense—is also a mode of performance which demonstrates in its own attitudes to the question of the manoeuvre the act and art of manoeuvre itself. Full article

Temporary exhibitions have not only been the oldest, but also the most successful model of art mediation (e.g., the Venice Biennale). In this research work, we are interested in the subject of preserving periodic exhibitions in the form of an interactive virtual memory to be revisited in the future. Although popular forms for doing so include photography, video coverage, and catalogs, we are interested in the implementation of a digital “timestamp” that could provide a digital place of memory and recall. To do so, we are preserving the physical space of an exhibition through 3D digitization technologies, and at the same time, we are digitally encoding the curatorial rationale in the form of digitized exhibits, and their documentation in a semantic metamodel. The result is the synthesis of a pure digital exhibition that acts as a digital twin of its original version, preserved and experienced online as a catalog and virtual tour, and at the same time, available to become immersed in through VR technologies, thus expanding the time and space of its digital existence. Full article

It seems inherent in the nature of contemporary artist’s book production to continue to question the context for the genre in contemporary art practice, notwithstanding the medium’s potential for dissemination via mass production and an unquestionable advantage of portability for distribution. Artists, curators and editors operating in this sector look to create contexts for books in a variety of imaginative ways, through exhibition, commission, installations, performance and, of course as documentation. Broadening the discussion of the idea of the book within contemporary art practice, this paper examines the presence and role of book works within the context of the art biennale, in particular the Venice Art Biennale of which the 58th iteration (2019) is entitled ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’ and curated by Ralph Rugoff, with an overview of the independent International cultural offerings and the function of the ‘Book Pavilion’. Venetian museums and institutions continue to present vibrant diverse works within the arena of large-scale exhibitions, recognising the position that the book occupies in the history of the city. This year, the appearance for the first time, of ‘Book Biennale’, opens up a new and interesting dialogue, taking the measure of how the book is being promoted and its particular function for visual communication within the arts in Venice and beyond. Full article

During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the area dubbed the “Pavilion of the Shamans” opened with A Sacred Place, an immersive environmental work created by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in collaboration with the Huni Kuin, a native people of the Amazon rainforest. Despite the co-authorship of the installation, the artwork was dismissed by art critics as engaging in primitivism and colonialism. Borrowing anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of equivocation, this article examines the incorporation of both indigenous and contemporary art practices in A Sacred Place. The text ultimately argues that a more equivocal, open interpretation of the work could lead to a better understanding of the work and a more self-reflexive global art history that can look at and learn from at its own comparative limitations. Full article