Visual Fest (Part Four)

After 45 minutes of searching through the bewildering maze of Venice’s pedestrian byways, we finally found our goal. "Caccia al tesoro!" -- "A treasure hunt!" -- exclaimed Mariacristina Parravicini, the Italian-born New York dealer. Treasures indeed were to be found at the Palazzo Fortuny, a splendidly dilapidated, four-story gothic building just off the Grand Canal, midway between the Rialto and Accademia bridges.

There, the Belgian designer and collector Axel Vervoordt has installed a contemporary kunstkabinett, mixing together over 300 objects from the prehistoric to the contemporary, much of it from his own holdings. The trove does inspire fantasies of collecting, that’s for sure. Why would anyone save Alighiero Boetti’s sculpture, a figure made in 1969 of hand-formed clay lumps arranged on the floor with a yellow butterfly positioned on the chest? To collect!

One highlight is a huge s-shaped freestanding funhouse mirror by Anish Kapoor, installed in a gallery devoted to the human figure and also containing a rather exotic pair of artist’s posing mannequins, a 1st century Roman torso of a youth, and figurative works by Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Yves Klein, Berlinde De Bruyckere and Kimsooja. Upstairs, a large elephant’s ear is positioned next to a cabinet-sized "piss painting" by Andy Warhol, and five pale paintings from 1965 by Roman Opalka -- who was then somewhere mid-stride in the project of counting from one to infinity via dense skeins of hand-painted numbers -- hang near a serene Sung Buddha from 1,000 years ago.
"It’s the best thing in all of Venice," exclaimed Parravicini.

An impressive show of works by the Antwerp-based artist Jan Fabre (b. 1958) is located right around the corner at the Palazzo Benzon, organized by the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo. Fabre is his own best subject, and the show features life-sized imagoes of the Flemish artist spitting on a field of toppled black marble gravestones, banging his head against an Old Master painting (with blood dripping from his nose and pooling on the floor) and hanged by the neck in a closet (this last made of gold tacks).

Several smaller sculptures depict the artist’s brain, horror-movie style, in the throes of various difficulties -- emitting smoke from a tin chimney, for instance, or with a small figure of the artist riding it like a bucking bronco. Still more sculptures show taxidermied cats hung by hooks and otherwise harrowed, and a pair of snow-white mannequins, pierced by knives, holding clear glass objects.

All this has "meaning" that is perhaps too literal, and in the end Fabre’s sculptures are more impressive as acts of fabrication than philosophy. I do like the bronze tableau of the artist sitting in a suit in a tub, attempting to write on the surface of the water with his finger. "A gesture of impossibility, but a metaphor for the metamorphosis of creating," as it says in the catalogue.

Across the Grand Canal in Venice’s San Polo district is the beautiful Palazzo Popodopoli, a fantastic ruin with frescoed ceilings and baroque decorations, site of the Ukrainian pavilion. Something of a punch line, the pavilion largely included works by non-Ukrainian artists, though presumably their works address questions about the Ukraine and its relation to the world. It was organized by Peter Doroshenko, an American who now is director of the Baltic Center in England (and, truth be told, also president of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev).

Works by a few actual Ukrainians were on hand, notably color photos by the Berlin-based "critical realist" photographer Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938), who focuses on images of his fellow citizens on grimy Ukrainian streets in an effort to "communicate with low things on a close distance." He provides as well a more optimistic image, a mural-sized triptych of a young girl in her underwear, wearing very contemporary pink flip-flops, looking out onto a lush green landscape as towards a hopeful future. The girl’s pose is a quotation of Salvador Dalí’s famous image, Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of her Own Chastity (1954), once in the collection of Playboy magazine .

More tangentially Ukrainian is the slo-mo vid by London YBAer Sam Taylor-Wood that shows a Ukrainian dancer with the London Royal Ballet holding his position while suspended motionless in the air (by invisible wires, presumably), as if frozen mid-leap, for more than four minutes, while another figure lies back on a sofa, resting her head on her hand. The nonchalance in the face of the miraculous -- I identify the reclining figure with the artist -- is the essence of avant-garde cool, no?

Also included in the pavilion is the London "billboard" artist Mark Titchner, who has installed an oversized roto-relief visible from the Grand Canal, designed to draw attention while remaining fairly cryptic (and cheesy), and the Chicago graffiti artist Dzine, who contributes a gussied-up "low rider" tricycle attached to a boat trailer, painted and upholstered in the colors of the Ukrainian flag and placed in the landing dock. These artists, where do they get their ideas?

Upstairs is a whole suite of voguish photographs by the high-fashion photographer Juergen Teller, perhaps using Ukrainian models -- now there’s a comic thought. The photos are typical of their type, and look even stupider than usual in this context. But there are some sexy nudes. At last, just what has been lacking in these stately Venetian precincts, a touch of trashy contemporary porn!