We asked artists Bradley McCallum and Jackie Tarry to share with us their experience at the Venice Biennale - a look at Venice through they eyes of the artists. As impressed as they were with Golden Lion winning Bruce Nauman, they were more intrigued by the Mexican pavilions interaction with Nauman's pavilion.
For Jackie and I the 53rd International Art Exhibition, titled “Making Worlds” directed by Daniel Birnbaum was our third opportunity to participate in the Vernissage of this legendary exhibition. We arrived with high expectations. The two and half days that we had in Venice were not enough to see every pavilion or collateral exhibition, rather our experience became a unique blend of discovering the city, drawing connections between given art works and rubbing shoulders with other artists, curators, and patrons.
Our return flight was filled with our colleagues each beginning to articulate their own response. One friend, an established curator describe that she arrived with great expectations, to see curatorial responses to this moment, when the market is no longer in overdrive. In the end, only some of her expectations were met. This seemed to be a shared response by many of the individuals we spoke to. By the time our flight landed we learned that the United States of America Pavilion won the Golden Lion. Without question Bruce Nauman is an artist that has made enormous contributions to the art world and this specific selection of work held together very well.
But what engaged Jackie and I on a much deeper level was the intervention that took place at the American Pavilion two months earlier. During the quiet of the pre-biennale Mexican artists Teresa Margolles installed fabric saturated in the dried blood of victims killed in the recent surge of violence in the drug wars of Northern Mexico, to veil the windows and front door of the American Pavilion. The photograph that documents this intervention resides in the realm of the poetic, and sidesteps the didactic tendency of the political content that is at the core of the work. This image was not part of the installation but was included on the inside of the brochure, echoeing the profoundly moving experience of the installation of Margolles’ work in the Mexican Pavilion, titled ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?) curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina.
For us the discovery of the Mexican Pavilion came as we were trying to navigate the inner pathways of Venice with the official map of the 53rd Biennale (impressive graphics but no street names) and just as we were prepared to give up the search we found the entrance. From here we were directed upstairs through a series of estate rooms that long ago their glory and give evidence the slow age of generations who lost their wealth and power, in several of these rooms a quite performance took place, an individual solemnly mopped the floor. At first on thinks the action is about labor or service, but then a small wall text describes that the floors are being washed with a combination of water and blood from victims of the drug wars. In the final room a series of frescos are veiled with canvases that are saturated with dried blood, each hangs loosely over the paintings. While at any given time one canvas is removed as the artists embroiders this with a text that will unfold during exhibition, using a golden thread.
On the flight home I found myself thinking of the connections between Teresa Margolles intervention and Bruce Nauman’s installation. The image of the shuttered American Pavilion exists like a dream, there is a disturbing normalcy in the image, the blood-red curtains are symmetrical and tailored to the building, while the memory of the blood remains on the outside of the pavilion as on our national boarder. Inside we witness the body dissected and fragmented, in one room Naumans’ suspended heads are bound to each other as if freezing the emotional pain of the relationship that we have with the two sides of our self and this language is further explored in the hand gestures and Nauman’s seminal work, “Hand to Mouth.”
To exit the Mexican Pavilion we walked down the back stair case then through a long corridor to tapestry of evidence, fabric embedded with the dirt from the sites of executions, with an elaborate system spraying mist onto the back surface so that the earth remains damp and the water on the front surface slowly drips into a recapture system later used by the performers who are washing the floors. This fountain maintains a wall of scared earth ---while Nauman’s severed heads spray water streams into a reflecting pool - water serving as the threshold to these works as it does through out Venice.
As most viewers to the 53rd Venice Biennale will surely visit the American Pavilion I also encourage you to bear witness to the ongoing performance at the Mexican Pavilion and to give consideration to the unintended dialogue between these two artists work.
