(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The artist must deal with the world, but his or her point of departure must be that, not knowing the world, not knowing the truth. You don't lie with the truth. You approach the task humbly in order to explore it. You don't use the artwork to either confirm or deny what we already know. What we already know or think we know about forced migrants, about refugees, about the oppression of indigenous peoples, about the exclusion of women, queers and other vulnerable people. The result will then be an art that ends up as a social marker, as a political statement, a confirmation of our own knowledge, our own goodness, and then we can hand out the prizes.
Being held hostage by a political agenda.
At this year's Art Biennale in Venice, I often had the experience of being taken hostage by a political agenda. The Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa has clearly wanted to use the biennale as an occasion to speak for the indigenous peoples (Mexicans, Peruvians, Congolese, etc.), marginalized homosexuals, outsiders, the many displaced refugees and migrants worldwide.
An admittedly noble matter. But the political gesture of art is not directly about values, but about representation, about form, about aesthetics, about ways of making visible and showing the world and things. It is possible for a work of art to have a political meaning, but it must be as a derived indirect effect.
On the window leading to the Israeli pavilion hung a note stating that the pavilion would only open with an agreed ceasefire. Only a small video of moving puppets could be seen through the window to the exhibition room, but the note on the window itself was a big draw, probably the most photographed pavilion!
Possibly we find ourselves in a form of shock over the state of the world – we no longer know what to do with ourselves – but that too can be turned into an artistic matter. And fortunately there were also quite a few artists who tried to do that. One of the problems with the biennale is that there is almost too much different art set up next to each other. More than you can handle. You have to take it in smaller pieces over several days to be present.
The foreignness
To be outside, marginalized in society – as the outsider artist, often self-taught close to folk art (popular artist), or as the queer artist, looked down upon or alienated in his own country – are modes of existence and temperaments that speak directly into the biennale's title Foreigners everywhere – foreigners everywhere ('Foreignness everywhere'].
The seemingly obvious message has two sides: wherever you are and wherever you go, you meet a stranger – they are everywhere, but also, wherever you are, you are always deep down a stranger. Not only a stranger to the other, but also a stranger to yourself. Even the familiar and familiar can suddenly appear strange and strange.
The political gesture of art is not directly about values, but about representation, about form, about aesthetics, about ways of making visible and showing the world and things.
Strangeness plays here on Freud'sThe scary', the uncanny. Like, for example, the video artist Charmane Poh's small film about queer people's home life, which shows a peculiar floating intimacy and the home as a wonderful sacred zone where they can be 'themselves'. The meaning of the English word 'queer' is precisely 'strange'. Not so much a play with sexuality, but the strangeness of living and working conditions. It was exciting to follow Grenada's pavilion No Man Is An Island , where a number of artists explore the poet Èdouard Glissant's relational poetics and philosophy through special theatrical underwater images from the Caribbean archipelago. Where what we share is our own abyss, our own strangeness. Communities arise in relation to the way we direct our attention to things and relationships. We experience our shared strangeness.
Outsider and diaspora art
It is in this outsider and diaspora art that you will find the interesting contributions at this year's biennale. The central building of the Giardini, a large white classical architectural western structure with columns and an imposing expression, now painted in a psychedelic colorful scale of pang colors by the Brazilian group MAHKU. And with this entrance, one moves in a more fluid and bordering bodily consciousness, which now pushes the gaze and the direction. As if the folkloric art is not only directly political, but also a reminder to break down structures and challenge the senses in new ways in colors and shapes. Like Palestinian Dana Awartanis suspended pieces of silk with small patches over tiny bullet holes that are barely visible. A healing process that reminds us of the tragic and vulnerable situation in Gaza.
Let's add outside the biennale: Within diaspora art, there have been many lesser-known artists who in their own way connected with either surrealism, landscape painting or abstract compositional art such as Japanese Tomie Ohtake (1912–2015) who lived and worked in Brazil. Or the South African outsider artist Maggie Laubser (1886–1973), who in a series of portraits shows a tenderness and a loneliness in the harsh country life. The still-living Austrian landscape painter and self-taught Leopold Strobl (1960-), in his series of small paintings from the rural mountainous region of northern Austria, has created a series of landscapes of an almost ghostly, mysterious character. The people are barely visible, while the dark mountains placed like alien sculptures between trees and sky create a dark and secretive poetry. Trees, forests, houses, mountains, buildings exist in a profound silence. A world of something both familiar and foreign. A strange glow of spiritual energy hovers over these works. Stroebl is a psychiatric patient and has been associated with the center for Gugging Art Brut for 16 years. A strong example of outsider art.
Eliseu Visconti (1866–1944) was also an Italian immigrant between two continents, between South America (Brazil) and Europe (Italy). In his art, he combined Renaissance tones with the modern in a post-impressionist series of intense self-portraits. Evelyn Taocheng Wang has created a series of strange Buddhist minimalist tableaus that function both as a commentary on the American painter Agnes Martin's art of silence and as a painting whose fluid elements water and light break with Confucius's patriarchal Buddhism.
Between old tales and an uncertain future
Of the many national pavilions, the contribution to the Romanian pavilion in particular made a big impression.
Here, the artist Serban Savu has created an entire panel of small and large paintings on one large wall, a so-called polyptic arrangement. Like Greece, Romania has a long history with icon art, the Orthodox Church and the Byzantine tradition. In his art, Savu draws on both icon painting and the social realism of mosaics, here, however, with a self-reflexive examination of the intermediate state and emptiness that characterizes life today. Romania is affected by economic poverty, high unemployment, abandoned rural regions and an uncertain future.
Like Greece, Romania has a long history with icon art, the Orthodox Church and the Byzantine tradition.
The question that occupies Savu is: What does it mean to create and work in the void between the old religious narratives that no longer speak to us – and an uncertain future? Where we stare into an all-too-bright comprehensible world and yet it's as if we understand less and less of the life around us. The paintings depict this void both in work and in so-called free time. Both alone or together, people are seen standing in a state of daydreaming and waiting. A kind of post-utopian anxiety in everyday scenes and pastel colors. The old socialism has been replaced here by a fragmented state of perplexity and glimpses of longing and mystery.
Beyond the Biennale: William Kentridge
Inspiring and encouraging just a stone's throw from the biennale, was the South African William Kentridge (1951-) said so well: Self-portrait as a coffee-pot. His ten small films that have come to be corona lockdown, shows something about what art is and its relationship to politics – but here in a different way than at the biennale. Not as a statement, but to pursue the meaning that arises in the creation process itself.
Kentridge is a mixture of artist, storyteller, photographer and performer.
Kentridge is a mixture of artist, storyteller, photographer and performer. In this collage, we see charcoal drawings, and films that film him drawing and narrating himself – including the meeting with his own doppelganger with whom he talks – and musicians and singers who take turns entering his studio and becoming part of the work. He depicts the entire messy process of artistic creation. Each film is composed around a theme: Finding one's destiny; The memory as a vanishing point; Oh, to believe in another world, etc.
It is art brought forth by the music of chance, wonder and play. But also seriousness and pain. Kentridge works cartographically and explores connections between, for example, the local area and the gold miners, not as a political statement, but he shows the torture of the landscape and the destruction of the imagination. I saw this tenfold self-portrait in philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe's Institute for Artistic Representation in Venice. Here, an entire apartment has been converted into a working studio with collage, drawings, models of the espresso pot, photos, books – a living studio – what Kentridge himself calls a living extension of my own brain.
Se https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXmzLpAOKjs
