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Notes from the Venice Biennale and "This World & Nearer Ones" on Governor's Island

Bill Adair, HPP Director:

In October I traveled to the Venice Biennale, the big international art fair in Italy. It’s an amazing and inspiring place to see contemporary art in historic places – some of the most spectacular historic sites one could see anywhere, in fact. The fair is stretched throughout the city – in beautiful palazzi, industrial ruins, and faded commercial buildings. It’s a visual feast in every way.

A delicious Venetian palace.

Artists are invited to represent their nation in Pavilions, many of which are concentrated in a park on the east side of the city. Other countries choose to find evocative old buildings to house their artist’s projects. A large, curated international survey of contemporary art is installed in the old Arsenale, an 18th century former military complex. It’s a haunting place.

The Arsenale.

Like with any other range of such projects, some of the artists use the historic spaces in Venice to much greater effect than others. Some integrate gorgeous interior details into the work; others utilize rich site-specific stories. To my mind, these three were some of the most successful:

1. Video projections on a scarred Arsenale wall by the American multimedia artist Paul Chan (b. 1973). These poignant figures are animated and move by the viewer slowly, melting into the patina of the wall and conjuring up (for me) painful moments of colonial oppression, illuminating the backbone of European economic power in the 18th-19th centuries.

2. Artist Moshekwa Langa (b. 1975) was born in South African and lives in the Netherlands. His work explores the poetics of expatriation and diaspora. He installed these totemic spools of thread in a hall of columns, evoking cross-cultural pillars of industry and creative expression.

3. This installation by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles is one of the most effective and affecting contemporary artist’s projects in a historic space that I have ever witnessed. Margolles’ practice involves traveling to the scenes of violent murder in northern Mexico (there have been about 5000 incidents in the last few years) where she soaks up the blood of victims on large sheets of cloth. In Venice, she installed these large bloody “tapestries” on the walls of an eerie and breathtaking 16^th century palazzo, and hung one outside as a flag. The work is both a beautiful and nauseating illustration of the history of human violence.

Laura Koloski, HPP Senior Program Specialist:

Governor’s Island, New York.

Before I visited last fall, when Bill and I went to see “This World & Nearer Ones” I didn’t even know this place existed. The project was organized by Creative Time, a New York-based organization that “strives to commission, produce and present the most important, ground-breaking, challenging and exceptional art of our times; art that infiltrates the public realm and engages millions of people in New York City and across the globe.” “This World & Nearer Ones” included the work of artists in variety of media installed in historic buildings and other locations all over the island.

The history of Governor’s Island is pretty interesting, though too long to detail here. Some of the highlights include:

--settlement by the Lenape, who called it Pagganck (“Nut Island”)

--occupation by George Washington’s troops in 1776

--use as the Army’s central recruiting station for the Eastern seaboard during the Civil War, and as a major supply base during the first World War

--birthplace of comedians Dick and Tommy Smothers (1937) and starting point for Wilbur Wright’s first flight over U.S. waters (1909)

--site of diplomatic meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev (1988)

Given the long and varied history and fascinating landscape of the island, opportunities for compelling intervention by contemporary artists are clearly present. There were many pieces that spoke to me in some way, like La Tierra de los Libres/The Land of the Free, a video installation by Judi Werthein, who filmed itinerant musicians—refugees from Columbia—performing their interpretation of the Star Spangled Banner. Overall, though, the work didn’t have the degree of site specificity, or reference the specific history of the island and its sites as much as I had hoped. I left with a sense that there was rich and largely unfulfilled potential for this—the illumination of the island’s many stories through a deep engagement with contemporary artists.