By Jörg Heiser
Martin Kippenberger in Venice 1996, photograph by Elfie Semotan
Ha, what a strange, and rewarding, experience to be in Venice in-between Biennales. No rush to that off-site pavilion I still need to see, no ‘what party tonight?’ small talk fatigue; just the usual ebb and flow of Europe-in-ten-days tourists and school trip kids. And, of course, that absurdly majestic outdoor museum of a city. I have to think of Elfie Semotan’s photographs of Martin Kippenberger from 1996, on their Venice honeymoon, also in-between Biennales: Martin with pigeons on San Marco, Martin proudly posing in front of the German Pavilion (the latter image he soon turned into a poster, tragically-ironically faking, a year before his death, the representational triumph that didn’t happen during his lifetime).
Not that between Biennales there was no modern and contemporary art on display, in fact I was here to see three newly opened exhibitions: an Irving Penn survey and the group show ‘Illusion of Light’ at Palazzo Grassi, and Wade Guyton at Punta della Dogana. Plus a Haris Epaminonda show that had already opened in March at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Sounded manageable, so I also intended to spend an extra day to follow up on a recent pet subject, if not slight obsession: the work of Lorenzo Lotto, the 16th century Venetian painter who, during his lifetime, was not remotely as successful as his contemporary Titian.
I’ll return to Lotto later, but first, the Grassi and Dogana shows. The Irving Penn retrospective, curated by Pierre Apraxine and Matthieu Humery, brings together 130 photographs taken between the 1940s and ‘80s. A typical case of you-thought-you-knew-it-but-you-don’t: it’s pretty hard not to have seen many of Penn’s iconic portraits in reproduction, whether it’s Truman Capote pressing his index finger against his temple thus sporting his precious cufflinks (1965) or Barnett Newman’s frivolous monocle and cigarette pose (1966); but these well-known images gain new quality, literally, with large print-size diapositives that are publically exhibited here for the first time, lit from behind light-box style in an otherwise unlit room.
Penn worked from these diapositives using the platinum-palladium print process, which produces the broadest possible tonal range in black and white photography. The peculiar thing about these huge ‘slides’ is that they are tonally neutral in this regard, with a rich palette of greys not yet pushed towards the starker contrasts Penn created in the darkroom to induce compositional drama and focus. In the print version of the famous portrait of Picasso with a hat (1957), for example, shown several rooms after the diapositives, the viewer’s attention is much more steered towards the left eye at the centre of the image. But that the diapositive version is lit from behind suddenly lends the image another, maybe even more striking quality: an uncanny ghostly presence, glowing and revealing every possible light angle and perspective at once, a kind of hologram effect without hologram: whether it’s the Californian hippie family with the dude holding the baby and the woman in the front looking straight at the camera; or cartoonist Saul Steinberg wearing a mask, a rectangular piece of cardboard with two dots for eyes covering everything but his nose.
These images of course were initially shot for reproduction in print magazines – mainly Vogue– and between art director Alexander Liberman and Penn, they were pushed gently towards marketable qualities of glamour and sophistication the magazine was highlighting in the post-war era (and that, by the way, still feel at home in a city where even the water taxis have a graceful 1960s design): whether hippie hair or monocle, both were modernist shorthand for fashionability. But in the exhibition it also becomes apparent how much Penn – unhappy with the cost-induced decline of print quality in the early 1960s – was using the medium as a vehicle to then produce prints the tonal brilliance of which would make them even more arresting. In the vintage Vogue copies on display, you see how one image might be used as a double page spread, while another would end up as a thumb-nail in a round-up. All the more Penn seemed to be keen to produce these high-quality prints as markers of his artistry, and therefore typically in limited edition; thus also the curious two straight, diagonal scratches he marked the diapositives with, to prevent more than twelve prints being made from them.
Strangely, put on display in this light-box way – which one might see as frivolous given that Penn, who died in 2009, probably never intended them to be used in this manner – these diapositives feel even more effective because of the two parallel scratches. At points they look as if string lines had been spanned across his studio. They become a signature, always placed in the lower third of the rectangular in a from-left-to-right-downward diagonal – like a compositional device to accentuate space and character, like the parapets used in Renaissance portraits. Sometimes they directly correspond to the composition, as in the case of a suit-wearing Marc Chagall reclining like a classical nude (1947), the lines doubling up his androgynous pose.
Maybe it’s against the background of these curious and smart effects of studio portrait photography that some of the more virtuoso kitsch elements of Penn’s work are thrown into relief; something the curators didn’t necessarily attempt to hide. His food still lives look yummy, and one doesn’t mind them being motivated by the requirements of a mid-20th-century highstreet magazine in the run-up to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Yet what makes them slightly pretentious is their appeals to art-historic aura courtesy of Dutch Golden Age. His 1950–51 portraits of a plumber, a motorcycle policeman or a news-vender have an air of egalitarian bonhomie to them, but invited to step in front of the grey studio backdrop otherwise reserved for the famous and beautiful, some of these ordinary blue-collar citizens strike a proud pose. The geared-up sewer cleaner, deep-sea diver and tree pruner look like warriors, and the train coach waiter flashes a winning smile – it’s as if they were all auditioning for a role. August Sander in a US, glamour shot casting mode. While these protagonists nevertheless radiate a spontaneous, come-on-step-in-and-show-off attitude, other work, both earlier and much later, treats protagonists as objects in a still life. In one room the constellation, purposefully hung that way, makes this almost achingly apparent: a 1992 ripe camembert colour photo; and across from it, a 1947 New York Ballet Theatre group arranged statically, next to a 1947 bucolic still life of tableware with grapes and eggs and ham leg, next to Three Rissani Women with Bread, a 1971 Morocco shot with the women’s faces hidden under layers of dark cloth. Whether you’re a cheese, or a bottle of wine, or a dancer, or in fact an ‘ethnic’ protagonist: for better or crypto-colonialist worse, Penn treated you ‘equally’ as objects to be arranged in the studio – unless, of course, you were Marlene Dietrich (1948) or Marcel Duchamp (1948) and insisted on your own expression and pose.
With a head brim-full of vibrant and problematic images like these, it’s hard to switch register to a show entitled ‘The Illusion of Light’ many of the works in which are austere exercises in minimalist or optical reduction. Doug Wheeler – a veteran of the Californian 1960s ‘light and space’ movement along with the likes of Larry Bell or Robert Irwin – dramatically transformed the square-shaped atrium of Palazzo Grassi: while two of the column-lined sides remained fully visible, the other two sides had been transformed, with carefully trimmed white boards and even more careful lighting technology, into a kind of horizonless whiteout zone, as if there was a gap in your vision, or as if you’re in a mute and calm snowstorm (D-N SF 12 PG VI, 2012).
Walking upstairs, one saw the backside of this vision machine, a simple modular system built to form a spherical structure. The Wheeler piece seemed like an almost too literal illustration of the show’s title, suggesting that one-type-fits-all-exhibitions are what a place like Venice demands, where outside the Biennale masses of tourists and a few locals are the only potential audience. But ultimately in a city where vistas of labyrinthic alleys, 15th century-design gondolas, and pink sunset skies reflected in murky waters are abound, it’s a bit of a non-starter to play on easy expectations raised by words like ‘illusion’ and ‘light’.
That said, much of what follows, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, could have just as well been in a show entitled ‘The Reality of Death’ rather than ‘The Illusion of Light’; as if she had consciously chosen to muffle the grim reaper with nice gift wrap. In other words, some of the best works in the show – and that’s probably not a bad thing in this case – seemed chosen with only the loosest connection to its supposed concern. Marcel Broodthaers conceived the installation Le Salon Noir in 1966, as an homage to his friend the late surrealist poet Marcel Lecomte who had died that year; a table and chair covered with black cloth, a coffin-shaped shelf leaning against the wall, lined with jars of white cotton and variations of black silhouettes of Lecomte’s face in profile. But amidst this Magrittean surrealist scenario (Lecomte and Magritte were close), Broodthaers added the decisive poetico-conceptual element: a white visiting card placed on the table, one of its corners dog-eared – a most gentle and understated way to promise to never forget the lost friend.
Amongst decent works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Troy Brauntuch, Latifah Echakch, or David Claerbout, each of whom had a room to themselves, Danh Vo’s Autoerotic Asphyxiation of 2010 (and first conceived for Artist Space in New York), was maybe the strongest: it transforms the Venetian parlour facing Canale Grande, replacing the museum wall panelling with a white ceiling-to-floor curtain embroidered with a flower pattern. That flower pattern is the cypher of a referential web connecting botanist and missionary Jean-André Soulié, who was killed in Tibet in 1905, with images and letters hung behind the curtains that, in short, circle around the idea of postcolonial trauma and death offset with glimpses of love and affection. The climax of this juxtaposition is the combination of a State of Delaware clinical instruction how to efficiently execute by hanging with an image of a gently smiling four-year old Danh Vo, put in a girl’s dress because nothing else was at hand when photographed as a member of his refugee family that had arrived in Denmark from Vietnam. Not much illusion here, and at least as much darkness as light.
In that sense there was a spiritual kinship here between Vo’s installation and an older work by General Idea, the series of paintings ‘White AIDS’ (1993) – white Robert-Indiana-style letters spelling out ‘AIDS’ three different combinations of green, blue and red hues so pale it’s almost white on white ground, hence charging the monastic Ad Reinhardt routine of the black monochrome-not-strictly-speaking-a-monochrome resulting in photographic irreproducibility with a white hint to the social irreplaceability of those who died of a big disease with a little name. And, I should mention that having dinner sitting with General Idea’s AA Bronson and his partner was surely one of the highlights of my trip; as good as a chat can get, which went from the wonders of Canadian wilderness to the banalities of Berlin life to the exchange of corresponding grim facts about my mother and grandma losing their home three times during theWWII bombings of Mainz, Germany, while AA’s father had been serving in the Canadian air force and bombed German cities. Finding common ground today despite still sometimes feels like a wonder, as is the fact that I learned that AA Bronson’s brother was in Canadian spandex rock veterans Loverboy– two major talents, if radically different, in one family!
Wade Guyton at Punta della Dogana now had to compete with all of these observations and ideas floating around my head, which is a little unfair given his consciously austere style. But then again playing a Don Judd version of Warhol in the 21st century is maybe the kind of approach that will always make you look unassailable and outside of your time but also a bit solipsistic and entrepreneurial precisely by way of that. In any case here in Venice it wasn’t the custom- made-to-wall-measure canvases that Guyton had installed at Petzel in New York and Capitain in Cologne, but the variation of a show Guyton had first done in 2011 at Vienna’s Secession entitled Zeichnungen für ein kleines Zimmer (Drawings For A Small Room). The space is dominated by white-framed vitrines lined with red panels (which in size and format and the way they dominate the space owe a lot to Hanne Darboven’s vitrines of Rutherford / Nils Bohr Arbeit, from 1988–93), featuring forensic evidence of the visual vocabulary Guyton employs for his large scale works; pages from vintage catalogues and magazines overprinted with printer stripes.
This is not the place to go more thoroughly into the pros (for example, the parallels to electronic music in the way monotony and glitches are turned into virtues) and cons (the sheer calculatedness of that very monotony-glitch-scenario as an artist signature) of Guyton’s work, but let’s say it was a good contrast of pudicitia to the voluptas of going to Accademia the next day, to see Carpaccio’s St. Ursula Cycle (1490-95), and not least, Lorenzo Lotto’s Young Man In His Study (c. 1530); Caroline Bourgeois rightly pointed out in conversation that ultimately, the unflinching soberness of Giorgione’s Old Woman (1509) is stronger than Lotto’s romantic view of the man with rose pedals and a lizard in his studiolo. Nevertheless going on a tiny pilgrimage across Venice to visit three churches that house works by Lotto over the course of a long afternoon was worth it.
But before, on the way to my first Lotto church, I stopped by Haris Epaminonda’s show at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Her ‘Chapters IV’ (2014) may well be one of the most congenial responses so far to the late Carlo Scarpa’s dazzling architecture inserted into the historic palazzo in 1961–63. Scarpa combined a semipermeable late-modernist Zen aesthetics between salon and garden with the practical function of allowing water in rather than warding it off through an intricate system of small water channels. Epaminonda basically vamped up the already idiosyncratic angles and details that Scarpa had introduced by adding a minimalist black freestanding frame here, or a small metal bowl there, or an aquarium with two fish, thus creating a sort of Mondrianesque walk-in arrangement. My description may make it sound a bit too redundantly decorative, but that was not what it was, it rather had a sense of precious precision.
But back to Lorenzo Lotto. Some of Lotto’s most remarkable works are actually outside of Italy: Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum houses a number of his enigmatic, psychologically charged portraits, some of which are landscape format (quite unusual during their day), and there is a strange picture in London’s National Gallery, A Lady with a Drawing of Lucretia. That painting had puzzled me as it has been on three covers of books about Lotto alone; neither of these books offers a satisfying interpretation of its seemingly coded meaning. In any case the subject of Lucretia – the Roman lady who according to legend in 510 BC committed suicide after being raped by the Etruscan prince, an incident that sparked the overthrow of monarchy and the founding of the Roman republic – was normally taken as symbolic of a wife’s chastity. But the London portrait seems contradictory in this regard, and maybe the story is more complicated, if thinking of 16th century republican Venice as a place where a courtesan such as Veronica Franco became a celebrated poet meeting with royalties, and where since the 1520s the first clandestine Lutheran communities had formed before the Roman Inquisition struck back from 1542 on.
I still need to read and learn more about all these things, but I have to admit to a fascination that with these kinds of enigmatic Renaissance works there is no press release or artist statement channelling me all the sophisticated references; I like that I have to do the legwork of sourcing and reading often obscure but relevant scholarly work before I can entertain my own speculations. What, for example, does the seeming smirk in the face of an alms-giving secretary of Saint Antonino mean, as his colleague accepts a request letter while warding off another, reaching across a richly ornate carpet, with fat bags of money behind him, in the painting housed at Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo (Alms of St Antoninus, c. 1540–42)? Were the Dominicans who had commissioned Lotto happy with this seeming subtext of criticizing the church’s out-of-touch approach to wealth, its complementary policies of trickle-down charity and moneyed letters of indulgence, or am I reading too much into it?
While at Santi Giovanni special lighting illuminated the painting at intervals, the Madonna with Child and Saints (1546) at San Giacomo dell’Orio was, badly lit, hidden at the backend of the rope-cordoned altar – which in itself was flabbergasting: that a Renaissance master’s work would be housed so negligently (or nonchalantly?) as if the city was just too full of old masters to really bother.
Finally, at Santa Maria dei Carmini, the positively gaudy piousness of Saint Nicolas in Glory, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Lucia (1527-29) was to be beheld after throwing a one-Euro coin into a little box that would start a lighting interval. Which led me to ask four people for the fitting change before I found someone. Will one day someone spend a bitcoin to illuminate a Guyton? Or will some artist be commissioned by an oligarch – like Lotto was by the Dominicans (though probably not thereafter) – to do work about that oligarch’s ethics of finance? Returning to Venice during Biennales for years to come, we will see.