#014. VENICE SUITCASE

Allard van Hoorn

#019
performance TITLE: VENICE SUITCASE
performance BY: RENATA LUCAS
Date: 2009, VENI CEBIENNAL
LEFTOVER: PHOTO , TEXT
PHOTO: EDUARDO ORTEGA

VENICE SUITCASE “A stretch of highway hidden
beneath hundreds of yards of wooden board,
uncovering only a few patches of shiny tar,
cunningly suggesting the whole exhibition is
built on a local interstate .”

As Venice sinks ever so slightly into it’s dreamlike channels, this might be partially due to the effect of the weight of over one hundred events that accompany the official program of the 53rd Biennial that kicked off early this June. These collateral events, self-organized shows, performances and interventions that star alongside massive presentations in the Giardini and Arsenale submerge the city in a colorful blanket of inspiration, albeit trying to see everything is to run the risk of visual paralysis and information poisoning.

So, one has to choose and stick with one’s choices. Again, my personal pick consisted of a simple piece, meditative, and in almost exactly the same spot as I encountered Mona Hatoum’s self-generating, self-erasing, round Japanese garden four years earlier.

Walking down the impressively long halls of the Arsenale, once a Venetian dockyard, an endless stream of art engulfs the visitor. One stands, looks up the walls, enters installations, stops to watch a video, turns around and contemplates.

Almost unnoticed by it’s clever position sunk five inches into the floor a freshly-laid piece of asphalt, complete with painted-on stripes, strikes not only as undermining the architecture of the Arsenale but also subversively deconstructing the idea of the exhibition itself. A stretch of highway hidden beneath hundreds of yards of wooden board, uncovering only a few patches of shiny tar, cunningly suggesting the whole exhibition is built on a local interstate.

Our universe is infinitely complex and we can use some guidance. Contemporary art faces the challenge to explain intricate matters in a simplified manner, not to transform straightforward concepts into intellectually demanding propositions. In a world already overwhelmed by visual and informational overdrive we might be helped by a bit of haiku and mantra.

Right after walking through the entrance of the Golden Lion Award winning American pavilion in the Giardini section of the exhibition, a round light-sculpture produced in 1967 by Bruce Nauman tells us ‘The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths’. This work made from neon tubes, which back in the sixties were strictly used for advertisement, applies a commercial medium within the language of art. It is a method of employing commonly known signs to help convey more densely packed messages.

These Mystic Truths Nauman speaks of are often revealed by artists using deceivingly simple works like Brazilian artist Renata Lucas’ undercover path of fresh laid freeway. Generally Lucas utilizes everyday symbols like displaced or transformed fences, walls, walkways and roads to de-mystify complex relationships to reality. She intervenes with subtle alterations that make us re-evaluate our surroundings and daily life so that we may understand more of it. It’s an attempt to simplify understanding by simplification of the world’s sensorial and visual signs so we might imagine new experiences, new ideas.

The presence of the visitor within the exhibition implies not only a physical process of being in and moving through a volume, but also an act of the mind. With the installation of this plain apparition of a freeway running down the centre of the building Lucas inventively inserts public space into the Arsenale, turning it inside out, forcing the viewer to reconsider his position. By bringing a ‘real life’ object, in this case a road, into the realm of art we are obliged to contemplate the outside world and the objects we find inside the building in connection to what they might signify or imply elsewhere.

The works by Lucas are residues of her performances as she breaks open the floors of the Arsenale to asphalt that what is uncovered or, as she did in a work in Rio de Janeiro, by covering a complete crossroads with wooden panels before giving it back to the daily passers-by to be reused in a slightly altered sensation of traversing that point in the city-grid. The creation of these urban interventions are the leftovers of actions that offer a form of contemporary archeology as if we are looking into the rearview mirror of the future discovering added layers of meaning in subtly manipulated patches of public space that document the intention to analyze our daily experiences of passing through the landscape of our all to well known built environment.

Lucas effectively tests our ability to imagine other possibilities, summoning new scenarios of realities, leaving us in charge of creating worlds or ‘Making Worlds’ as the title of this edition of the Venice Biennial proclaims.

© Allard van Hoorn