Notes From Nowhere

While it announces its location (the Biennale gardens) in its title, Steve McQueen’s 40 minute film work, ‘Giardini,’ is disconcertingly filmed in Winter to none of the sun and honey-bush, and to none of the crowds, of the Summer gardens which greet us now. McQueen has banked on our disquiet, and it works. There are images (here), which recur, of doberman dogs trawling the scent of something on the ground, like blood hounds. They could be wild but for their sleek coats and refined bodies. We could be in London, dreary with rain, urban refuse and old columns. The desolation is sinister and McQueen pairs it with the roaring sound of crowds, as of a football match. But the only sign of people here, apart from two liminal figures whose seeming confrontation resolves into an embrace, is the luxury cruise ship that parades past once on the lagoon, as they do daily by the dozen.

But there is also hush as we cut to film versions of ‘still life,’ sometimes paired as diptychs on a split screen: multi-coloured confetti in wet pebbles, a wood-spider on moss, a red insect on a yellow flower. So is borne out McQueen’s stated interest in really looking, and there is an object lesson in what we are here to do in the name of art.

Un piccolo cono di gelato al limone per favore?

Venice begins to change its aspect when described, by a dinner companion, as a Thirteenth Century Disney Land.

We spend an afternoon in the consummately curated, under Axel Vervoordt’s direction, ‘In-finitum,’ one in a series of exhibitions at the Palazzo Fortuny. Spanning four floors, it moves upwards from Lucio Fontana’s primordial clay stones in a darkened basement, to the high white perfection of Ettore Spalletti’s (new to me) sculptures—like square, translucent Brancusi. In the middle floors, pieces are intimately laid out in cabinets and on tables: Egyptian earthenware, unfinished Renaissance paintings, all in a setting of wall tapestries and Venezian cloth, frayed with age. Memorable was James Turrell’s installation, like falling into a Rothko painting made of light. (Indeed it eclipsed, for me, an actual Rothko hung in an interior space on the fourth floor, a seeming apotheosis of the show). For the first time, in these surrounds, I understood Ad Reinhardt’s monochromatic paintings, this one, ‘Abstract Painting’ (1956-1960), so many vibrating black panels.