Venice is a very quiet city. We went to sleep last night to the murmur of a dozen Venetian neighbors’ conversations, their living rooms all letting onto the same small alley that our apartment is on, and awoke this morning to the bells of San Cassiano, the local parish church. These are sounds that visitors have heard for centuries here in The Most Serene Republic, and without automobile traffic, they are about as loud as it gets.
I mentioned in our last posting that several nations were newly represented at this year’s Venice Biennale. Today we witnessed the first appearance of the Romani: the Gypsies. Housed in a 15th century palazzo, the range of works was quite varied, as the exhibition includes works by Romani artists from England, Finland, Romania and Hungary, among others. Many of the works focused on the outsider status of gypsies in most European countries, and the discrimination they endure. One of the best was by Daniel Baker, a Roma living in Great Britain who draws faces on commercial maps of Europe in an effort to “claim” living space for the gypsies.
Mexico, too, has long been absent from the Biennale, and their reappearance is marked by some incredibly high-tech works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Using closed circuit video surveillance cameras, radio-electric scanners and multichannel mixers, he creates installations that are truly interactive with the visitors. “Frequency and Volume” (2003) charts the location of the participant in the room, and uses the person's position to scan the electromagnetic spectrum. In essence, you become the tuning knob on a room-sized radio. As you move about, different radio signals are locked on, and the volume of the transmission is determined by the size of your shadow on the wall! Anyone still holding on to a stereotype of Mexico as a land of low-skilled labor needs to spend five minutes in one of Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks.
Okay, I shouldn’t be playing favorites here, and art is as much a matter of taste as substantive analysis, but I’ll stick out my neck and say it: The absolute highlight of the 52nd Venice Biennial International Art Exhibition is the work of a Brazilian artist, Waltercio Caldas. This is the diametric opposite of Lozano-Hemmer’s computerized wizardry. Using minimal materials -- a single room containing a few sheets of plate glass, string, a couple of rocks, and painted circles and squares on the wall -- Caldas realigns the visitor’s sense of how we view the world. He taught me to recognize anew that edges define objects in space. In his work, "Half Mirror Sharp," the end of a sheet of glass is made visually identical to a piece of yarn suspended from the ceiling, and to the edge of a wall. A black square painted on the wall collapses the space between it and the shadow of a doorway. This is less an intervention in the space of the gallery and more an act of creating visual equivalents between disparate objects. It is very, very affecting to learn something new about the way you see, using such simple means.
Pigeons again. We mentioned the aggravation the birds give to Venetians and visitors alike, but Lithuania is actually doing something about it. Sort of. They are making pigeons political. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia refused to give Lithuania back their Embassy villa in Rome. Wwhich is understandable, it being prime property in a world capital -- would you give up a villa in Rome if you had one? The Lithuanian government considers the villa the last occupied territory of the Cold War, and so two artists from Vilnius organized an international pigeon race, releasing dozens of homing pigeons from the Venice quay the other day. The birds will fly back to their roosts all over Europe, and help publicize the Lithuanian’s real estate problems. Plans are afoot to raise more pigeons in roosts near the villa, and release them from points across the continent. The return to the villa of dozens of these “doves of peace” will make an avian protest against the taking of the Embassy. And you thought pigeons were boring. Hah!
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