Giacometti; Venice Biennale 2017

Giacometti at Tate Modern; Venice Biennale 2017

Giacometti

One can understand why the existentialists liked Giacometti. His schtick is stick people; and what art could be more eloquent about the fragility, almost Nothingness of Being (Le Neant in Sartre’s phrase), yet still suggesting movement and thereby human potential? Survivors of concentration camp and gulag, but striding rather than staggering.

But one can only take so much stick. Unappreciative, in the end, of the finer distinctions between, and the individual merits of, the multitudinous stick sculptures, my preference went to Giacometti’s heads. The exhibitions curator may share this view, for the first gallery is mostly given over to a regiment of them, in ordered deep lines. These heads are reasonably approximate to life-size, but, reflecting Giacometti’s different artistic preoccupations at different eras, vary greatly from naturalistic likenesses to abstracts, some reminiscent of Easter Island statues. Ironically it is the existentialist Simone de Beauvoir whose bust is among the most naturalistic. One especially notices her thick hair.

The second set of heads is rather different. They are disconcertingly shrunken, some to barely more than matchstick size. They mostly date from the WW2 years. Why such miniaturisation? Perhaps, prosaically, wartime rationing of materials. Giacometti himself said that he wanted to reproduce the effect of someone seen at as distance, as a tiny figure. (But this doesn’t quite work when the viewer and the figures are a few inches apart. One is in the presence of the very, very small, not the ordinary-sized at a distance.)

Perhaps a pat existentialist take would be: just as Giacometti’s elongated figures reduce humans to structures barely sufficient for movement, so the little busts celebrate, or rather note, diminished human condition in wartime, diminished for many millions to a vanishing point of non-existence.

However, as with the more life-sized busts, Simone de Beauvoir is recognisable, and her hair still luxuriant in miniature.

Venice in July; Biennale 2017

There is a big ongoing debate/furore about the colossal numbers of tourists converging on Venice, and the alleged damage caused to the delicate underwater infrastructure by the colossal cruise ships (not to mention the temporary surges contributing to the jammed bridges, piazzas and lanes when the ships disgorge their passengers. (See also my Venice blogs August 2015 and July 2016.)

(I am, of course, a regular and respectful visitor – a “tourist”? Moi? Non! (written with selfie-irony..).)

This July, we avoided the selfie frenzy feeding near the Rialto and St Mark’s. (Queuing for tickets for entrance to the Biennale, one noticed signs forbidding entrance to selfie sticks.)

But I noticed a new phenomenon about the independent visitors (ie those not part of the shuffling tourist groups), or perhaps I newly noticed an established phenomenon. Often, on the vaparettos to the islands, the overwhelming majority of passengers were Japanese, Chinese or Korean. Many were young women travelling in twos or threes, well dressed and fingering expensive smartphones – Chinese trustafarians?

I didn’t enjoy the Biennale as much as previous ones. Perhaps it was the sombre artistic mood that generally prevailed – there wasn’t much wit or playfulness.

My favourites: the US pavilion, the theme of which is destruction and decay (Why? One wonders..); little Goya-like etchings of a desolate Mother Courage in the Romanian pavilion; the perhaps meta-irony (if accusations are true) of a vision of a new circle of Dante’s Hell, for cyber criminals – in the Russian pavilion.

Disappointingly, the wonderful medieval industrial site that is the Arsenale did not have any water-borne jeux d’esprit.

But it did have one or two things of wit – and perhaps the most sinister figures of the Biennale. Mannequins to haunt one’s dreams, or to crawl out of the camera’s memory card one dark night, as in a Japanese horror film.

The British Pavilion contains oversized and shapeless mache structures.

It is entitled “Folly”. The official notes highlight two meanings: a “solely decorative architectural feature” (for example, a ruined tower built as a ruined tower) and a “jovial foolishness” ( a new one on me).

Missing from the notes is another meaning, combining architectural overtones and a less than “jovial” stupidity: a monumental folly. So a good alternative title for the British exhibition would be Brexit.

July 2017