and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Until recently, the German author’s photographic habits and motivations have mostly been gleaned from interviews—he died in 2001—and from the books themselves, in which images of characters, landscapes, architecture, and historical disaster may or may not match the “real” thing. So many ways of saying: They are not illustrations, you know. What, then?
Adriano Pedrosa organizes the 60th Venice Biennale around two broad identity rubrics: “Queer”—a metacategory that includes anyone “who has moved within different sexualities and genders,” along with outsider, folk, and Indigenous artists—and “Foreigner.” In a departure from the Biennale’s usual emphasis on contemporary makers, more than half of the featured artists are deceased. Folkloric, salt-of-the-earth vibes dominate: the mood is wholly at odds with the bland cosmopolitanism at play in terms of who shows up and how the work gets presented.
None of the artworks in “Chasing the Sun” are as innocent or whimsical as they appear. Paintings such as Sun, Moon(s), Strawberry, and Cotton Candy are made of pigments and molten beeswax plunged into layers of grout cased in aluminum. The objects include a silk paper kite (Mozi Kite) and a black inner tube (Chambre à Air), but also a Molotov cocktail, a slingshot, a handmade rifle, and sandboxes for stacking rocks and throwing knives.
Po Po conceived of these works in the 1980s, when Myanmar was under military rule and isolated from the wider world, but became disilllusioned with artmaking after the bloody student protests of 1988 and only recently returned to the idea. So despite the works’ outward resemblance to “contentless” abstraction in the Western tradition, they are better understood as part of the artist’s longstanding investigation into signs, symbols, and codes in a censored society.
Mediatized murder is a good way to get attention. Here, the line between celebrity and monster is gossamer, mixed up in a culture of antiheroes and gunslingers, fuzzed out by the noir tradition of cinematic murder—in which both Taxi Driver and ***** (and Jafa’s 2016 breakthrough, Love is the Message the Message is Death) indulge.
This exhibition foregrounds aesthetic and thematic deviations from traditional depictions of Indigenous life. Its title, which translates as “Leaks of our own. Indigenous visualities from south to north,” promises escape from the obligation to explore ancestral themes within the supposed conventions of a tradition preserved in aspic, unchanged since pre-Hispanic times.
Francesca Woodman’s images of her solitary, nude silhouette, backlit against large over-bright windows, hang with Justine Kurland’s photographs of entwined lovers and Carla Williams’s three-quarter length self-portraits, her hand clutching at her chin, her hair, the collar of her white striped robe. There is desperation in these images; the violence of need, and the existential shadow of insatiability.
To quote the organizers, the overarching idea of the biennial is to spur “the paradigm shift toward a livable and sustainable future on our planet. The key tools to achieve this objective are, without doubt, participation, collaboration, and awareness.” [It] tries to set an example for making and visiting exhibitions by minimizing shipping, and commissioning projects that are locally informed and realized; where one installation was marred by wrinkled vinyl, the images were not reprinted to save materials, for example. Yet I found myself questioning what role artists have in the whole endeavor.
Since the highly contested survey “Magiciens de la terre” at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 1989, reflections on globalization, and efforts to shift this paradigm, have been a feature of the biennial circuit. “Ten Thousand Suns” seems to tack away from the global as an organizing principle and to search for other ways of describing space, at once more fragmentary and more pluralistic.
Unlike literature or art, music appears to be nonrepresentational, at least at first. “But music also is a place of sorts,” says musicologist Holly Watkins, “replete with its own metaphorical locations, types of motion, departures, arrivals, and returns.” Songs articulate distance, texture, and intent. They respond to the acoustics of landscapes and social structures; they are amplified in some spaces and dampened in others. By listening to sounds—and the way they have been transcribed, adapted, and memorialized—we can trace otherwise invisible political interventions into landscapes and soundscapes and, in return, understand these interventions as documents, instructions, or scores.