Venice Biennale, talk by Griselda Pollock

Notes on Griselda's talk about the Venice Biennale, which I visited part of this summer.

- Green New Deal- 1929, Roosevelt came up with a new deal after the financial crash, ensuring lots of artists had jobs so they didn’t go to the war.

- Completely ‘green’ way of doing things.

- Righteous Austerity- Thinking about imposing on ourselves.

- What would happen if there were youth movements- changing people’s consciousness? What does art do in this scenario?

- The idea that the way we discover what art is now is through a certain kind of exhibition. Started in 1895 in Venice.

- Venice- tourist, art, medieval.

- Biennale- every 2 years. Venice had to reinvent itself in 1895, republic ends, with a conquest in 1798, reinvents itself as a romantic place of decay, sight of the first major survey of contemporary art.

- How do you discover what is happening in other parts of the world? Biennale helps this, they commission certain people to do the opening exhibition, which goes side by side to the international pavilions.

- Okwui Enwezor first African to curate the Biennale, themed around “All The Worlds Futures”

- Christine Macel Viva Art.

- Rosa Martinez  brought the Guerrila Girls to the Biennale.

- Art Olympics? High culture Disneyland? Who goes there and why? Apply to British Council to go to Venice for a month, interning with the Biennale.

- Director of the Hayward Gallery, ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’

- ‘ Highlight art that exists in between catergories of intellect and attention, to criticize the rationales behind our categorical thinking.’

- Highlight a general approach to making art, and a view of art’s social function.

- Bringing it back to the basics about how art is about form, and the position of art within society.

- Engagement, and understanding the times within which we live. What are curators doing?

- Idea of interesting art raises questions, and the notion of intellect.

- Not going to have a theme, art cannot stem the tide of all these things.

- End of the island, cleared by Napoleon, made into gardens; ‘Giardini’, national pavilions got built.

- Lithuanian pavilion; artificial beach, characters singing about climate change, while being on the beach. 30/40 minute long performance.

- Opera being used in contemporary art more and more.

- Israeli pavilion; future hospital, cubbys which are sound proofed, encouraging participants to scream.

- Seeing the idea, what happens when you make a work with a real body which is stylized, acting as art. Affect that comes with music and sound and space. Intrested in the set.

- Sound being produced to fill spaces just out of bodies. Often don’t have microphones, interesting artform.

- Performance with other bodies, you don’t know if you can carry it off until it happens. Can you sustain emotionally charged work without preventing the structure of the work being presented?

- Martin Puryear; 77-year-old African American artist. Combining geometric and organic forms. ‘Fullness of being within limit.’

- Sunburst, at the front of the American pavilion, beautifully constructed huge wooden frame, with a dark tail.

- Theme inside was ‘Liberty’, number of very large objects. Foragers cap, Union and Confederate army both wore similar caps throughout the civil war.

- Take the fact they both wore the same cap, hollow sculpture, can see part of a machine gun and part of a mirror reflecting.

- All of them have material and historical presence.

- Clothing or objects associated with the statue of Liberty. The American pavilion was built in the 1930s, to look like a plantation house, belonging to Thomas Jefferson, who had an African American person enslaved in his household, called Sally Hemmings, who he had 3 children with, as well as a long affair.

- Column which tapers, struck into it is an iron pillar with a link on it, to which enslaved people were chained. The whole classical structure of the South, which is there in the building, which exclusively represented White people, is the extraordinary opposite to the Lithuanian pavilion. The USA pavilion is very explicit. Everything is in the materials, the making and the planning.

- Carol Bowler; artificial materials, with very bright colors, reminding us that sculpture and making objects can still be incredibly powerful.