2969 Calle Del Forno, Venice, 21st September 2009
Woke about 6.30 and sat by the window reading The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt while Nina slept. Footsteps, boats and voices outside – the Venetian dawn chorus.
After breakfast we took a vaporetto to Arsenale to see part of this year’s art Biennale, ‘Making Worlds’. The Director, Daniel Birnbaum, writes: ‘A work of art is more than an object, more than a commodity. It represents a vision of the world, and if taken seriously must be seen as a way of making a world.’ It was rather disappointing, few works as memorable as in past years. Perhaps it felt like this because aesthetics and visual pleasure seemed to be sacrificed to the theoretical and conceptual, to agendas and ideas. Our pleasure in the work seemed to be in inverse proportion to the opacity of the language describing it. Four pieces did stay with me though: Lygia Pape’s soaring, shimmering cascade of golden fibers; Michaelangelo Pistoletto’s fractured world of shattered mirrors; Paul Chan’s shadow images of interacting figures and objects (said to evoke the writings of the Marquise Sade); and Huang Yong Ping’s huge and threateningly elemental recreations of the fruit of the Hand of Buddha tree, used in traditional Chinese medicine.