Category Archives: contemporary art

Highlights of a lightening-speed tour of the Venice Biennale’s Central Pavilion

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I gave up on a concise analysis of this year’s Venice Biennial, which being enormous as always, seemed more and more untenable, and so here are some brief highlights of my short visit there. This 55th exhibition, called “The Encyclopedic Palace,” was curated by Massimiliano Gioni (of the New Museum in NYC), and very successfully to this Venice biennial newbie. Overall the central pavilion at Giardini was really good, cohesive, and interesting; there was an intuitive, almost mystic or transcendent theme, in many of the works, keying off an initial display of pages of Jung’s Red Book. Gioni mixed in outsider and/or older artists to rich effect, so it was a little less predictable. In the long halls of the Arsenale (which opened with a model of Auturi’s 1950s Encyclopedic Palace) I thought the exhibition worked less well, with a contemporary Salon-style, throw-everything-on-the-walls-and-impress-via-multiplicity, that was just too much. Also, a glut of video works with competing audio made it difficult to focus.

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Ongoing performance by Tino Seghal

Tino Sehgal, who won the Golden Lion for Best Artist, had a trio of performers chant and sing in a kind of mind-meld harmony, in one of the opening rooms of the central pavilion; I loved it. (As a corollary note, another performance, by Ragnar Kjartansson, was perhaps not the most meaningful but thoroughly enjoyable: the Icelandic artist  arranged for a boat, the S.S. Hangover, to glide around the Arsenale with a brass band.)

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Model houses by Oliver Croy; behind, 9-11-01 by Jack Whitten.

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Drawings by Jose Antonio Suarez Londono

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Installation by Cathy Wilkes

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My real question is if it’s not all too much: literally, just too much art? While this cornucopia is in keeping with the spirit of the Encyclopedic Palace, my philosophy is that there could be less. But I feel that way every time I visit an art fair.

Viviane Sassen’s Lexicon Series

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med_01_-belladonna-viviane-sassen-jpgPieter Hugo’s work reminds me of Viviane Sassen‘s photography series “Lexicon” (which I saw recently at the Venice Biennial-more about that to come). I find it especially striking how in both cases the people are posed in traditional art historical styles. The photograph above, Belladonna (2010), is perhaps less a portrait and more a traditional composition, except that traditional art historical narratives are upturned by the black model and contemporary dress.

“Pieter Hugo:This must be the place” at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest

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The show at the Ludwig Museum of South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s large, color photographs opens a window onto a side of Africa that few Western museum-goers are likely to have experienced, and it does so with an unflinching, documentary gaze that remains honest. His portraits emphasize the individual’s humanity. Through gaze, the viewer is connected to him or her, often people who they might be separated from by sociopolitical or economic factors.

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Next to the portrait Ashleigh McLean, left, is Hugo himself, a young and successful white man in South Africa. His subjects are often not either of those things, and there is a tension there. More on that in this interview with the artist. Maybe that tension fed into this most recent portrait series, There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends, where he alters his own and his friends’ skin pigmentation, subtly playing with our perception of them through their skin tones.

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The two portraits above, from the “Permanent Error” series, are called Al Hasan Abukari and Aissah Salifu, named after their subjects. In this way, Hugo doesn’t allow the subject to be de-personalized, while posing them in traditional, statuesque ways and with a direct gaze. The two men are among many people who search through an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana for scraps of precious metal. Overall, the exhibition at the Ludwig offers a documentary-esque yet aesthetic experience, which on one could be critiqued as exoticising the other, but I think Hugo escapes that with the personal connection and dignity he treats his subject with, even if never negating the voyeurism of portraiture.

More on the artist’s website.