I arrived in Venice at sunrise, totally dazed. Under the influence of a miracle pill for jet lag that was recommended by a gallery friend from Miami. Besides getting paranoid the whole trip, I got dizziness, low blood pressure and nausea, caused not by pills but by slow digestion and the constant presence in the throat of a "chicken or pasta" flavor, the gummy pastiche featuring nowadays as the prison dinner option in crowded tourist classes on any flight that takes you from Buenos Aires to Europe.
Decomposed and stressed, on arrival I confirmed that they had lost the suitcase during the Barajas stop over and I had to face, in that state of emotional fragility, the harsh reality check that I do not understand nor can say absolutely anything in Italian. The Japanese who were in the same queue for baggage claims filled out the paperwork much more calmly and efficiently than me. I, who always thought I could understand that supposedly so familiar language.
I was born and raised in a village in the middle of the countryside, in the province of Santa Fe. An area known as "la pampa gringa" (“the white pampas”) a quadrilateral formed by joining the cities of Rafaela, Esperanza, Sunchales and San Francisco (which is right on the border between Santa Fe and Córdoba) with straight imaginary lines…all colonies of European immigrants. Half of my school classmates had Italian grandmothers who were constantly shouting, complaining, swearing, cursing the “porca madonna”, saying “vanffanculo”! , Inserting into every three words the odd one from the Piedmont and Tuscan dialect. They sounded the same. It was all Italian. That memory is present so far as the smell of ´Bagna cauda´. This would be why I thought I understood the language. I ended up speaking basic English, and though I have certified Level Three approved by my English School ´Cultural Inglesa de Rosario´, something I must have said wrongly because they sent the suitcase to a hotel with the same name but in another city, and I received the suitcase, with the clothes inside, four days later, almost when I was due to return.
I do not know why I'm talking about all this. It must be because I am having difficulty getting to the point: Venice, the contemporary art and the biennial. For I while I have been trying and unable to reach an opinion. I cannot focus. The mere fact of sitting and writing something about contemporary art paralyzes me. I like to paint, draw, take photos, do videos, objects, scenography in a continuous and compulsive way. But I could never finish reading a note, a preface, a review, or a book about art, not even those talking about my own work.
It makes me want to beat around the bush. Dodge the package. Get out of it. Eventually, I accepted that distraction may be a possible way to reach the goal: how to answer the question "What did you think of the Biennial?" When I felt forced to respond, I got out of it by repeating some phrases I heard from Eduardo Stupía in an interview that can be seen on YouTube.
The intricacies, the digressions, the stop-over may be more interesting than the place of arrival. I always preferred to have a beer with salami in pubs along the highway than have dinner at the best restaurant in my final destination.
As the poet said, walker, there is no path but footprints in the sea. While it rimes, anything goes. Go down the path of the obvious to get to the essence of the problem.
It is said that Andy Warhol, master of the masters in the art of making a character of oneself, provoking, playing with the commonplace and demystifying the art when the word is written in capital letters, in his first and only trip to Madrid, in 1983, was taken to the Prado Museum, in a procession led by Queen Sofia, with dozens of journalists and people from those circles around him. The visit lasted less than 15 minutes. He looked askance at the pictures, and only paused - theatrically exaggerating praise – in front of a few oil copies of masterpieces that were on sale for tourists at the door to the Museum.
Something similar happened to me in the Biennial. I've learned that today originality has no value in itself. It is understood that everything has been done already. I amused myself more watching the clothes worn by women strolling among the works talking nonstop with their iPhone 4, the men´s expensive pointy shoes, the billboards from Mario Testino that covered the St. Mark's Square building, the souvenirs...
As for the works, my feelings of appreciation work like those of someone from the province going to the big city for the first time. When I went to Times Square in New York last year, I spent half an hour looking paralyzed with my mouth open at 50 feet high digital billboards. This time in Venice the same thing happened to me on seeing a tank turned over where an athlete was running on a gym treadmill, and gave the impression that with his physical strength he would move all the machinery.
I fall into the trap of shock effects. The visual situation, with the addition of an amplified soundtrack was so captivating that it looked like a publicity show. It might have been in the Nations´ Fair in North Park or an event in Punta del Este at high season. Finally, the Biennial is a fair. At times, my memory, perhaps due to the spring sunshine that filtered through the Giardini trees, took me back to the agricultural livestock fairs in the towns from my childhood, where my father would take me to see the strong yellow wheat cutting machinery, bright green tractors, promoters with their red miniskirts and blond Barbie hairstyles, countrymen, food stalls... Total happiness.
I liked the war tank so much that I filmed it for 15 minutes without cutting the camera with the idea of putting a full shot in some video art experience. The work represented a part of the official dispatch of the United States, precisely the country that is involved in all the wars of the world, and supposedly the turned over tank was a plea for peace. Better not go into details. Change front and cross to the right side shot.
Further images of the Biennial come: the pictures / posters of Cindy Sherman which - with all due respect - I found more of the same old thing, the pavilion in France, where there was a great display of very well chromed ´Acrow´ pipes and endless acetate tapes with transparent faces of Christian Boltanski babies which worked very well, very rhythmic, but it did not move me one bit with regards provoking an emotional, poetic vibe. What I expect of art. There was a great Tintoretto, a version of the wonderful last supper that was so dark you could not see it, because all the walls were so white, and there were so many people, so much light coming through the windows, so many reflections on the black oil that it was better looking at it at night, calm, in the center double page of the catalog in the hotel room. And it is only fair (and I do not do so because of patriotic closeness, but poetic forcefulness), I have to cite the work of young Adrián Villar Rojas. A basement as designed by Gaudí ,abandoned brown sand castles on a beach at sunset off the coast of Paraná , and Dantesque dungeon scenography on the set of Alice in Wonderland made by a gang of Paraguayan bricklayers in an ´ayahuasca’ trance. Talent. ´Gaucho´ delirium. Creole circus. Perspiration . Work, work and work. Form and content.
The problem with the biennial is that when you arrive at the pavilions to see the works you are already exhausted by all you have to see on the way… the burden of the surroundings. You have to first pass through the cloud of tourists taking pictures and walking like a flock of sheep along every square inch of the center esplanade. This was already written and described wonderfully by Susan Sontag in her book on photography, and photographed as no other by Briton Martin Parr. But the issue of tourism and the reason why people take pictures is still totally gripping and revealing. It describe better than anything the modern world. For what purpose do they do it? For what reason do they it? How do they feel?
Someday, if you can, take the test of staying twenty minutes stood in the middle of the bridge that crosses the creek where the Puente de los Suspiros is, at rush hour, in summer, at high season, and look at the faces and body postures of the tourists. Nobody seems to know for what purpose or reason they are there. The faces of oppression … frowns ... sun hats ... red skin from the sun. The effort it involves being a tourist. Finally, almost in spite of myself, I ended up taking a photo of the photo of the photo…a copy of the copy.
Wanting to rest, I sat on the side of the bridge, on the pier, with my feet almost touching the water and I tried to get as close as possible to a group of gondoliers who were resting. It brought me back down to earth. The guys were talking like taxi drivers in La Boca on the corner of Caminito next to the Proa Foundation: as if the thousands of tourists who passed them five meters away did not exist. I heard their jokes and their concern for the football game the day before. I didn´t understand much at all, but I realized what they were talking about. We were joined by a cultural closeness, something earthly, which brought out in me the paranoia of not knowing where I stood in the middle of the crowd trying to make use of their time seeing "works of art".
But on balance in hindsight, what most impressed me, what caused me most visual pleasure, was looking at the boats - the tourist boats that seem like floating cities, five-story buildings with all the people looking out from the balconies. The ´vaporettos´, which look like boats in Tigre on a Sunday afternoon, the practicality the sailors and drivers have while parking, mooring, dodging the other ´vaporettos´. The police boats zigzagging at full speed with the siren blaring, the taxi boats ... But the thing that struck me most , of course , symbolically and powerfully, was the super yacht ´Luna´ owned by the Russian mega-millionaire Milan Abramovic parked in the very gateway to the Biennial. It is as long as a block and as high as a four story building. At the top, all types of super sophisticated radars. The emergency rafts are larger than any weekend yacht that can be seen in the San Fernando Port. It is really obscene.
The image of the ship, always with eight or ten guards and a wire fence around it, is complete with the visual, political and economic contrast of some African boys, alongside the same boat, who were selling fake Gucci handbags to passersby. Here such street vendors are called ´manteros´. Simply joining those two images with a look, looking at the boy's face, reading his eyes, imagining his past, his childhood, his cousins or distant relatives, kindred spirits who try to cross the Strait of Gibraltar up Ceuta and Melilla in little boats to reach Spain, perhaps sailing at the same time, along the same water and the same sea that Abramovic´s yacht cruising to Venice, with the crew at their posts and all perfectly controlled for arrival in time for cocktails at the opening of the Biennial.
Abramovic is 44 years old. His mother died when he was 18 months old and his father when he was four years old. He was raised by a few uncles in northern Russia. Life made him strong. Besides being the Chelsea club owner, he is dating a former model, Daria Zhukova, who just opened an art gallery in Moscow last December, where for the opening party Amy Winehouse was invited to sing at a private event for 300 people. The magazines say that Amy was divine…angelic. She sang with a yellow leopard skin dress, earned a million pounds and flew back to London a few minutes after finishing the show.
It is needless to comment how fragile it all is.
I don´t know where I got it from that it makes any sense to try to solve the heartbreaking equation between a more civilized sharing out of resources in the world and the role it plays in society of contemporary art, or if finally we, the artists, are a very similar entertainment to that of football, or fashion ... I get tired just trying to come up with an answer. I sit in a bar at sunset, drinking Fernet Branca. The idea occurs to me that for the next Biennial Argentina could come early to Milan Abramovic and rent that mooring area to the Venice port administration, and take the Fragata Libertad as if it were a show, a live performance. With Soledad, el Chaqueño Palavecino, Los Chalchaleros with craft stalls from all different provinces ...´Malambo´ music and ´boleadores´ shows...
It would be expensive, but it would be a stroke of assured international press, prestige for the country on a really undeniable worldwide scale. We best keep it a secret. I don’t want some Chinese curator to read the account and copy the idea, and tomorrow be processing permission to do something similar, yet with a bigger boat.
Marcos López