Rec | UNDERHATED: THE VENICE BIENNALE

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Rec'd on 😠 forget overrated...what is UNDER HATED?

To start, I’m not discrediting the artists who are selected to participate. But there is something so odd and so twisted about the art world descending upon a small city that doesn’t really have the infrastructure to support a massive international exhibition while it is actively sinking. The jets that transport the art, materials, curators, visitors, artists, the massive amount of waste the fair produces. It just boggles my mind that climate change is happening at an accelerated rate and the oceans are heating / rising, but still we are putting on a big art fair amongst the storied canals. There’s simply gotta be another way to give artists their flowers and recognition without having such an environmental impact. And don’t get me started on the geopolitical / racialized nature of how artists are picked and dropped from representing their countries… I don’t have sour grapes about never going (it’s a big deal to attend in my field). I just have no interest in being part of the spectacle and contributing to the messiness of descending upon Venice en masse.

@salad_valet

3d ago

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@eatgraeps

Anyway the most impactful thing I remember were films by Manauara Clandestina called “Migranta” and “Building” and I cannot for the life of me find them online, but if you ever get the chance you should check her out! Along w paintings by Louis Frantino and Evelyn Teochang Wang. And the Australian pavilion about aboriginal genocide.

2d ago

@eatgraeps

@EATGRAEPS *Fratino excuse me

2d ago

@salad_valet

@EATGRAEPS ahhhh i SO appreciate you chiming in with your experience. It filled in some of the blanks for me. I have the gut feeling that this big project isn‘t it. Or maybe it was a great thing at one time, but it’s outlived its need. Will definitely check out your recs!!

2d ago

@eatgraeps

I’m by no means an art scholar or expert but I ended up spending a day in the Giardini kind of by accident last summer (the bit with the central exhibition and national pavilions) and while it was certainly compelling to witness such a massive international event, I was kind of sad at how much fell flat. The theme was ”Strangers Everywhere” and the nations that were actually dealing with the effects of war and immigration and seeking refuge (like Egypt and some Eastern European countries) had super striking exhibits whereas most of the selections felt very tone deaf and out of touch? Like, the US one was almost disgustingly garish and extremely dismissive of the Native American community it was supposedly representing? Not to mention the fact that there were either IDF or Italian soldiers guarding the Israeli exhibit that was closed in protest, also the lack of representation from the global south, also the lack of black and brown representation (there was a exhibit with archival portraits of black and brown europeans but it was hidden wayyyy in the back of the main pavilion and i almost missed it). In comparison to a well selected exhibition or museum, I would say it is more spectacle than anything- plus there was such soooo much to take it it seemed impossible. I would go again if I was somehow visiting my friends in Venice but yea, I agree that it is unnecessarily wasteful and probably more about the enrichment of a few people than for the good of the artists and the city.

2d ago

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👎🏽international art english👎🏽

”Rule and Levine attribute the pervasive use of IAE to an insistence on authority and power in a field as subjective and exclusive as art. “Whatever the content,” they write, “the aim is to sound to the art world like someone worth listening to, by adopting the approximation of its elite language.” More than their Triple Canopy essay itself, I much prefer the blunt two-fold observations both Levine and Rule provide in a related interview in The Guardian. “You can’t speak in simple sentences as a museum and be taken seriously,” says Levine. Likewise, Rule asserts, “IAE has made art harder for non-professionals.””

@mitra

Jan 27, 2024

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Buying in

There's a thing that I notice at art museums sometimes. Someone wearing a slightly annoyed expression will be speeding through the exhibit like they are going down a long to do list. Or I'll be playing a board game with a group and there will be some guy with a strained face looking like they'd rather be anywhere else. Maybe another time we're leaving a movie and they start to complain about how it 'wasn't realistic', you get the picture. I swear to God it makes me want to pulpify their face. I'm not saying that you need to like every piece of art or that you should feel bad for not liking a movie, but, goddamn, at least give it a fucking second. Closing yourself off to The New, being automatically opposed to earnestness when it appears, is one of the most damaging defense mechanisms I can think of. It is, in turn, also one of the best ways to maximize your misery. The defense mechanism that is cynicism, turns its users into parasites of the Social; they are sold the idea (a lie) that damaging and denigrating <<something>> allows one to become independent of its power structure. On the contrary, just as a leech is the most dependent on its host, cynics are those that are most dependent on the power structures in our culture. I really want to emphasize the difference between criticism and cynicism, because I am in no way saying that we should not criticize bad or damaging art, but to successfully criticize something means to first buy in, to really allow yourself to be taken by a piece, to examine it as it comes. Buying in as a term (even one so bathed in capitalist sebum) is the right one in this case because to buy in requires one to make a sacrifice. You cannot experience art without opening yourself to the possibility that it will do damage to you. To fully allow yourself to be moved by a piece of art is to allow yourself to be cut. But inside that cut is what it means to be human. I think the single best way to combat cynicism is an unceasing curiosity of the world and the people in it. The normal and common of this world is absolutely fantasmatic if you take a moment to examine it; we see the world through have fluid filled orbs made of meat for fucks sake. The fact that there is anything at all, the fact that you and I exist for even a second is an absolutely unbelievable mind fuck, and to be unimpressed by any and everything doesn’t make you special or better than anyone, it just leaves you on a road to the pit of despair and leaves me really bummed out for the rest of the night.

@green_thumb_in_my_bum

Sep 20, 2024

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Spend time with art you dont like / understand

I understand the stop-at-whatever-catches-your-eye style of visiting museums and galleries but it makes me sad to see people rush through. The real joy of art is the breakthrough that occurs after engaging with a made thing. Some helpful questions to ask: -What is the title of the piece and how does it relate it what I see? -Why did I stop/hurry past? -Why is it here? Does it belong to the space or to a theme? -What does it allow me to do/see/think/play with?

@florinegrassenhopper

May 19, 2024

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