2019 Venice, Antoine Catala

(link)

Proposition B begins differently, with breath, a soft exhaust, dispersed debris and then these words breathing slowly. Hey. Relax. Its intonation would appear friendly, coming in and out with its tide of breath. But do you trust it? Haven't we grown numb to this friendliness, that coercive calm of advertising, self-help, bait-and-switch sell. Because surely we recognize not everything is okay. Proposition A was certainly full of not-okay. And we've learned distrust. Being rightfully so doesn't make it easier. Torturing our connection with earnest pleas seems a theme of this Biennial.

Venice 2019, Neïl Beloufa

(link)

Are these not bondage devices for tourists?

"What the third-century Stylite sought in self-privation and proud stillness, [the jogger] is seeking through the muscular exhaustion of his body. He is the brother in mortification of those who conscientiously exhaust themselves in the body-building studios on complicated machines with chrome pulleys and on terrifying medical contraptions. There is a direct line that runs from the medieval instruments of torture, via the industrial movements of production-line work, to the techniques of schooling the body by using mechanical apparatuses. Like dieting, body-building, and so many other things, jogging is a new form of voluntary servitude." - Baudrillard

Art is the new form of penance. A form of entertainment as self-flagellation, "of repentance for having done wrong."
The doctor's table and the movie theater converge.

Venice 2019, George Condo Arsenale

(link)

This is the first thing you see. Proposition A. Surely opening - at least one half of - your travel destination exhibition with this prominent, large, painting is something. Surely something more should have been made of this? Ironic mirror to Warhol, to Elvis, to Condo, cartooning the world. Surely something.

Venice 2019, Arsenale Darren Bader

(link)

This used to be fun, these adbusters-like detournements in the world, ostensibly confusing comical estranging. But who has the energy to care about another wacky project teasing the signs of commerce we've grown so numb to.  It's all synonymous with silicon valley buzz words. Surrealist irruption becomes the tech-industry's mythical "disruption." That the language of these two movements (surrealism and big-tech) mirror each other is surrealist of all. Capital has forced surreal worlds in a way that art couldn't compete. Making this feel less comically extreme and more just like normal business, you can find these things just like this out there in the world, which may be Bader's - again hamfisted - point. The world is just the world, this is just the world.

Venice 2019, Kenneth Goldsmith

(link)

This is bad and art should not become propaganda even propaganda for our team.

Venice 2019, Arthur Jafa Central Pavilion

(link)

"The White Album" is probably best explained in reaction to reaction of "Love is the Message, The Message is Death".

"This was sad bc of where it was. I was uncomfortable bc of the ppl sat around me, the number of white ppl laughing at black people that went viral like Sweet Brown, like that beginning intro of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is rly fucked up, it’s not funny, the whole intro is a joke at the expense of the black body and the tropes of speech that white society has marked as laughable. They were laughing at these bits that weren’t for them to laugh at, without reflection on their position as an audience, the fact they were laughing felt grotesque like, it wasn’t there for it to be funny, it was there as part of the stuff, the stuff popping up with all the other,, it made me tense. it felt violent n i haven’t rly got words to explain it very well [i feel like Aria Dean explains the feeling and more better in Poor Meme, Rich Meme; but also this essay on Black Trauma & the viral video from Buzzfeed] it was like… ok so this happened; i was sat behind two like hype beast skate bros wearing busted vans and dead Supreme caps n like… there was a moment in the film when Earl Sweatshirt pops up n they like elbowed each other got all gassed that they recognised him;;; but there was no like irony for them that 2 minutes before there was a clip of Amandla Stenberg saying “what if white america loved black people as much as it loves consuming black culture”. It felt all at once, simultaneously too much;; like both irresponsible and immediately radical to dump this raw and vulnerable film, this footage, this black twitter as archive, all this in the film there in that setting with no cushion. At the top of a London building on the Strand that had been transformed into like a Lisson Gallery greatest hits album underneath us. No explanation, no address really. It felt violent that certain ppl could potentially walk away having had that laugh, n nothing else. No really emotional connect, not feeling like a freshly picked scab// like i did. Not to say, ‘i had the right reaction, lol at these white plebs’;;; but like… if u don’t get it, maybe it isn’t for u? isn’t it radical and irresponsible also to speak in specificities, to be both marginalised and not try and speak to a majority, how beautiful, to revel in that complexity! It made me sad bc the people around me didn’t get it. i know they didn’t get it, fuck me, white ppl never do. it made me sad bc this film made me feel so fucking much, but tbh i shouldn’t feel sad. I had a beautiful, specific reaction even though this film wasn’t actually really for me either." - The White Pube

'I’m not making any more Love Is the Messages,” [Jafa] said in a phone interview from his home base, Los Angeles.
“I started to feel like I was giving people this sort of microwave epiphany about blackness and I started [feeling] very suspect about it. After so many ‘I cried. I crieds’, well, is that the measure of having processed it in a constructive way? I’m not sure it is."

The White Album’s tonal and visual proximities begin with The Pure and the Damned, the music video from Oneohtrix Point Never featuring Iggy Pop’s eerie poesy, from the 2017 film Good Time. “To me, I look at that video, I was like: this shit is definitely about whiteness,” Jafa said of the clip, which he stumbled upon on YouTube. “A lot of really white shit that white people don’t think is about whiteness, they just think it’s about the world.” - The Guardian

Venice 2019, Danh Vo, & at kurimanzutto

(Arsenale, kurimanzutto)

"Vo has acquired objects from the estate of Robert McNamara [...] This first contact with the McNamara family led their son Craig McNamara to befriend Vo and later gift him with a walnut orchard*, its timber destined to make rifle stocks. Instead, the timber has been used by the artist to make replicas of designer furniture or to be used raw and unfinished"

Remember "process orientated abstraction", those set of instructions - a conceptual rubric - that was enacted to be left as traces surfaces the painting? Spraying of fire extinguishers, extracting dyes from flowers, silvering paintings, et al. Vo's is the conceptual art version of that. Vo allows legend to become perfume, an adornment mystifying its objects. Like an unironic Jason Rhoades, exhibitions become spaces for the process of mythification. Whereas for Rhoades it was a  comic process of figurative trash becoming some hokey possibility for art, for Vo the pre-christened becomes involved in the permutations of further embedding it in objects. I think somewhere here there is a conflation of terms or ideas. The aura of art, of objects, is somehow smeltable, is made able to be repoured into new objects through a form of storytelling. Vo is a factory for this witchcraft, for the production of belief in these ghosts. This is not to denigrate storytelling, or myth, but that somehow (through conceptual art) we've equated the aura of art with the mythologizing of objects with a narrative, a press release. Replaced something's raison d'être with any reason for being whatsoever. What exactly do the walnut tables actually contain?

*According the Guardian, Vo was gifted 10 hectares of lumber, not an actual orchard. (24.7 acres of Sierra Orchard's 450. Though some of this acreage is dedicated to olive oil and other things. However, according to Time Out London, this was all the wood from a recent clearing.)

Venice 2019, Laure Prouvost French Pavilion

(link)

Comparison to a Dental office because there is something so administered about Prouvost's, like being reclined slightly fetal as you are worked on, jaw agape, drilling, affects, smiling faces. A strange feeling of being digested. The same feeling as a very effective advertisement. Pressed and kneaded through tunnel again. Expelled out the end and feeling like it. A "4D film is a marketing term for an entertainment presentation system." The sensorsium, being awash in the seat of pure sensation. Like you are inside the movie. Like of course there's a queue. We require an industrial entertainment complex for the jetset. The special mention Golden lion went to the equivalent of Disney's It's a Small World boat ride, but its just Belgium.



See too: Laure Prouvost at Carlier Gebauer

Venice 2019, Belgium Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys Mondo Cane

(link)

Against Venetian statuary, against marble gods with triforks, JdGHT's is wantonly provincial, the unsophisticate, the stupid it is. Turns out, despite centuries of looking up at them, we don't actually resemble Greek Gods. Instead these sullen mannequins far more accurate to the people encircling it. Tourists or art-polloi are made electric by this awful mirror. We are the botched paintings of Christ. It is a cruel realization that more than the marble, we unfortunately echo these, you Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic. Turns out people are ugly. A Golden Lion to mockery as corrective.
Welcome to Belgium.


Read all posts about Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys
Read: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Kunsthal Aarhus, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at Gavin Brown, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at MoMA PS1

Venice 2019 Notes: Christoph Buchel

Something like a conversation, Venice:

"Something like 75 migrants died."
"No, I think it was 300, maybe more."
A third person through sipped coffee conjectured a third much higher number, which everyone, my eavesdropping included, agreed was absurd.

The United Nation's number is a Google away for you and had been for us as well, group shaded in Free WiFi. But nobody wants to google a deathtoll. And we, having heard it before, carried with us some approximation we felt accurate-ish. Accurate enough. We carry vague feelings of distinction between 75, 300 deaths, 800 deaths labeled migrant. It is the indistinction that matters, matters more than the actual number. Scales of death blurring as equivalent-ish. Say, one-third of a September 11th.

Interesting that an artist generally dealing with installation and artifice is now trafficking this.

Venice 2019

(link)

When Venice has finally sunk and the winter beaches have washed away and we jetset can no longer virtualize space by exhausting the earth and finally have to stay put and upload to cloud for our higher desires, when there is no earth and there is only net, then we'll be forced to come up with a way to better sort our image. The primitive mass of image against this is all going away in our best attempts at preservation.