Visual Fest (Part Five)

Further south in the Dorsoduro section is the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, a pair of buildings around a nice garden. By most accounts Peggy Guggenheim was a silly woman. One thing visitors to her museum may notice are the two gravestones among the ivy, marking the site where Guggenheim’s own ashes are interred alongside those of her 12 dogs. That silliness served her well in the art world, and the Guggenheim is following faithfully in her footsteps with its current exhibition pairing Matthew Barney with the late Joseph Beuys, an artist who is admittedly one of Barney’s inspirations.
A gravestone in the garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
The elegant gallery rooms are filled with the sort of junk you might find in an abandoned warehouse, accompanied by videos of the artists in fervid performance. Long narrative captions serve to clue in bewildered visitors to the significance of it all. Beuys pumped honey through museum galleries to spread enlightenment through the world, for instance, and Barney smeared Vaseline in his navel in order to show the potential for metamorphosis.

The show makes strikingly clear that first Beuys and now Barney are engaged in attempts to devise new cosmologies that are both literal-minded and ridiculous. Beuys’ pursuit of utopian politics via a poetry of objects and actions, as charming as it is, hardly has any practical meaning today. As for Barney’s elaborate theatricals, they seem to be barely sublimated sexual fantasies of a peculiarly neurotic sort. What was it Freud said about "desiring machines"?

Up in Venice’s Cannaregio district on the north side of the island, in the hard-to-find Palazzo Papolavo, Damien Hirst has installed a rather extensive selection of works that take Christianity as their theme. I had gone expecting to see the ￡50-million diamond-encrusted skull with new teeth (but no gold grill?) -- but of course that’s on view in London. What we had here were skulls made of silver, along with lots of other product.
Damien Hirst 'skulls in New Religion'
One piece shows the holy trinity as a pie chart, with god the father, god the Holy Spirit and god the son each taking up 33 percent of the whole. Other items include large photos of pharmaceutical pills matched with names of the apostles (Judas Iscariot is a Tiazac 360 capsule -- is that significant?) and a giant crucifix formed of six medical-style photographs of wounds on hands and feet, and a shot of open-heart surgery. A wooden cross with grooves filled with pills sits on an altar below a photograph of a taxidermied dove with spread wings.

Hirst has wit and a certain poetry, to be sure -- who wouldn’t prefer a dove to a man nailed to the cross -- but does he have any faith? Or does it even matter? Certainly not to the art market, who sees in Hirst’s work the perfect creed of Capital. (Editor:Xie Mu)