the plankman’s blog

daniel’s flickr library.

The review of the biennale is going to follow… please bare with me: Im writing it in a wordprocessor – to identify spelling mistakes… hehehehe
UPDATE

The Arsenale:
On Monday 4 July (Happy Indy day, America) I went with David “The Journalist” Neustein to the Arsenale portion of the 2005 Venice Biennale. It was fantastic for a number of reasons that didn’t relate directly to the artwork – and so life goes ;-) For interests sake, here is the Official History.

The Arsenale portion is hosted in the most magnificent old shipyard warehouses. These buildings were originally used to construct the fleets of the Venetian Republic and have been restored and perfectly chosen for an event of this scale. It was my first time seeing these gorgeous spaces – and unfortunately enjoyed the architecture more than the work. There were a few pieces that are worth mentioning though…

Mariko Mori’s Wave Ufo – Gorgeous. Truly something out of a 70’s sci-fi movie which has been re-rendered by Pixar! People enter the bod structure 3-at-a-time and their brainwaves are associated with one of the visual effects inside the pod. I believe the whole experience takes no longer than 10 minutes… but the wait was 1.5 hours!

Rem Koolhaas’s installation outlining the plans for the Hermitage renovation. The most interesting showcase of museum related datasets I have seen. There are some beautiful visualizations of total floor space and comparisons to other large scale museums.

Cristina Garcia Rodero: Beautiful dangling amorphous aluminium masses. What else can I say? They look like they ought to come crashing down into a pile of liquefied metallic jelly. YUM.

Mona Hatoum’s + and –: A circular sand pit with a beam that rotates around the center. The one half of the beam is a toothed surface and the other is simply a flat edge. Constantly raking the surface and constantly being re-smoothed. Beautiful rhythmic experience.

George Pusenkoff Mona Lisa Goes Space: There is something interesting about the ubiquitous nature of this piece around Venice. The main piece can be found as you leave the Venice St. Lucia train station. It’s a massive metal enclosure with a series of bitmapped Mona Lisa’s framed in a Mac OS 9 style window. These images are aligned around the space in an order of increasing hue. Rather ugly. Then there are a series of large yellow replica’s of these images around Venice is select locations. One of these massive yellow mona lisa’s has had a mustache spray painted onto it and below it “this is not art”. I am totally sold on the piece if its intent is to promote public responses like this. Marcel Duchamp would be so proud!

Samuel Beckett’s video installation Breath: In one of the ship-building warehouses, this piece is made up of a perfectly aligned grid of projectors displaying a moving video image on the floor. I believe it may be images of a large trash head – or a close-up of a very colorful oil painting. Either way, its disturbing and thrilling to be standing on this moving floor – as you hear the breath escaping from the sound system.

At the outskirts of the Arsenale, we bumped into the China pavilion of the Giardini portion of the Biennale. There were two interesting works here:
Du Wenda’s Flying Saucers: Two strange looking flying machines sitting in the garden. They looked fairly functional in so far as their propellers might actually move… But they were truly something you’d expect to find in Leonardo Da Vinci’s basement.
Yung Ho Chang’s Bamboo Shoots: An incredible structure built entirely of long pieces of bamboo. Beautifully fluid… Inspiring a need to climb the delicate/strong looking structure. There is of course a warning to suggest that climbing would be an unfortunate idea…

Thus ends part one. One day I will attend the Giardini and perhaps post: PART 2 – Daniel wonders into Venetian Art Gardens!