You better believe it!

In Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition, ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ visitors are invited to experience two museums worth of coral-clad sculpture, objects, photography and video that aims to push our understanding of how history and myths are formed, questioning the mortality of materials and their makers. We are told that the beasts, idols, artefacts and objects on show were once lost in a legendary shipwreck and have been raised from the Indian Ocean to be presented here at the Francois Pinault Foundation’s Punta Della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi galleries in Venice. Relics of a bygone civilisation they are presented as such, in vast glass vitrines or vast spaces; many still encrusted in the limpets, barnacles and coral accumulated from their time underwater.



‘Demon with a bowl’ (Exhibition Enlargement) Painted resin. 1822 x 789 x 1144 cm

On Monday 12^th June 2017 armed with nothing but a camera and a pen I chose to wade into the depths and shallows of these art-infested waters...

 

‘Calendar Stone’ Bronze. 422.5 x 475.8 x 172.3 cm

Opening in the heart of the Biennale contemporary art calendar, the venue set over two museums along the Grand Canal has the makings for the perfect rock n’ roll style location for an artist whose calf slicing, diamond skull encrusting, butterfly pinning works about mortality have become amongst the most iconic, satirised, notorious, discussed and the most highly selling of any living artist in the contemporary art world. This new exhibition of work from the Bristol born artist, now in his 50s is his most ambitious to date and sees a sum 190 pieces in marble, gold and bronze, crystal, jade and malachite, at over a decade in the making and at a whopping cost reportedly of 50 million to make it is as an extravaganza to behold as it is ambitiously risky. But what else would one expect from the artist made famous as one of the YBAs for pickling a shark and calling it art!

‘Huehueteotl and Olmec Dragon’ Silver, Paint. 29.7 x 28 x 21 cm

In the Punta Della Dogana a replica of a Mayan Calendar welcomes visitors to the exhibition, its surface completely clad in the coral and underwater fauna of its supposed 2,000 years lost at sea. Behind it, a larger-than-life statue of a warrior atop a snarling bear on its hind legs, its surface also at first glance appearing to be covered in a living surface.  Smaller relics such as coins and assorted precious stones alongside photographs placed throughout the exhibition create a museum-like narrative that depicts the breadth of what was ‘discovered’ as well as the salvaging process of divers excavating these treasures. If you believe that any of it is real, from the impressive looking albeit actually fake coral, to the whole fabricated tale itself then you’ll believe anything! It soon becomes apparent that this is all a little too farfetched; the comic nature completely exposed when pop culture figures such as Mickey Mouse, Goofy, a transformer, Kate Moss as a sphinx appear and later a depiction of the artist himself. They are modern cultural references that begin to make the whole thing begin to feel like the satire of Banksy’s Dismaland. It does however raise the interesting question of whether these are remnants from a fabricated past or visions of a dystopian future?

‘The Warrior and the Bear’ Bronze. 713 x 260 x 203 cm

This is merely the tip of the iceberg in an exhibition that in its vast yarn-spinning complexity becomes more a lesson in 21^st Century marketing and publicity. This isn’t a criticism; Hirst manipulates the power of the institution of the gallery as a place for authority and truth and turns it on its head. The result is that the ‘joke’ ends up more often than not to appear rather kitsch, befitting of the attention they receive in their crowd-pleasing photographable appeal alone. For these reasons early reviews for this exhibition were almost ravenous in criticising it but I feel that they were searching too hard for a depth that they sought when in fact what makes this show so appealing and so extraordinary is in its shallowness. Unabashed conviction in its commitment to the lie it is trying to tell is commendable as at times its relentlessness of puns and popular icons grows tedious. It is popular, maybe for the wrong reasons; though it is also fun and regardless of the jokes or whether it’s real or not it is still a spectacle to behold.

Artists have long been blurring the distinctions between truth and lies, fact and fiction, history and its documentation versus myth and its own immortality in their art. Whilst these are ideas that have been explored before, particularly in Hirst’s work, they have not been explored as lavishly previously by the artist as they have here. There is something Hollywood blockbuster-like or theme park sized extravagance to the ambition of the ‘lie’ that is being presented that sort of allows us to forgive it and immerse ourselves into the experience. Are we part of the joke or in on the joke I am still unsure? For me, the best work in the exhibition is the video documentation, regardless of the ‘lie’, the reality is that all of these monstrously-sized objects had actually been put out at sea and salvaged (albeit in a staged manner) but the filming of this process is mysteriously compelling, well shot and edited as a piece of film-making and becomes visually far more believable! As for the sculptures themselves, I think it would be good if much of this work was buried back at sea; not because I believe they are awful (some though truly are) but because I would like to have seen them with real algae and age to them rather than being fabricated. In 2,000 years or more they could become something that really could be discovered? I would love to know either way what the legacy of this work will be. 

‘Hydra and Kali’ Bronze. 539 x 612 x 244 cm

In this era of fake news this exhibition feels timelier than what critics give it credit for and the lasting impression it has had for me is that there is still much creativity involved in creating a story, those stories then sometimes becoming myths of the future. This exhibition is certainly very memorable! It is therefore highly appropriate that I end this tale with one of my own. Make of it what you will. Upon finishing seeing the show at the Palazzo Grassi, I descended the stairs and spotted at the feet of the gargantuan 18 metre resin statue ‘Demon with a Bowl’, the artist, Damien Hirst, himself! It was the ultimate irony and much to my surprise that no one else in the relatively busy exhibition had noticed that its creator was just walking amongst them as they so enthusiastically photographed and viewed his work, perhaps it was humbling? Myself, I could not resist the opportunity to say ‘hi’ and shake his hand. “I suppose you’re to blame for all this then?” I asked him. “I suppose I am,” he said.

That really is unbelievable!

 

Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ is on at Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana until 3^rd December 2017. http://www.palazzograssi.it/en/exhibitions/current/

On a magic carpet ride

Rudolf Stingel at Palazzo Grassi

Picture the scene. You've been in Venice for three days, seen hundreds of art works as part of the Biennale ranging everything from flayed rats sewn together to mountains of rubble and perhaps more shockingly of all, even the occasional painting; you've walked miles through floods, over bridges, under bridges, over and under again, eaten olives (even though you know you don't like them) and cheese and bread and ham for breakfast, noon and dinner, drunk profuse amounts of prosecco willingly (it was hardly a chore) and all the while wandering with purpose in search of your next art fix.

Then you arrive at the Palazzo Grassi...  

If life were a movie (in my head it could well be) then about now there'd be some kind of musical cue, something classical or brassy, and there'd be an arial shot of the protagonist (you) as you stepped unknowingly onto the Prussian/Oriental red carpeted floor inside the central atrium of the Palazzo Grassi only to look up, cue panning shot, as your eyes follow upwards three layers of balconies, that same red carpet wrapped floor to wall all the way up and up til you reached the ceiling. Dramatic pause for sense of awe.

... 



Ahem, but surely something as mundane as a wall-to-floor carpeted interior of a seventeenth century building couldn't possibly fail to be exciting no matter how you analyse it afterwards....? It was such a strange sight to come across, that when you were actually stood there amongst it all none of it felt like it was actually real, hence my need to provide the prior background context to what was already a heightened, magical experience of just being in Venice itself. There was a sort-of breathtaking absurdity to having this entire space given to the work of one artist when relatively each floor was pretty much the same as the one that proceeded it, the same red carpet (approx. 5,000 square metres of it!) covering floor/walls with a single silver monochromatic painting by the artist in each room (more on that later). Normally Palazzo Grassi is a contemporary gallery filled with hundreds of singular artworks at one time; you now had the entire space dedicated solely to the work of one artist. That artist is, Rudolf Stingel somewhat of a local, originally from Merano, Italy (but works mostly from New York) and whose work explores how art can intervene with ‘the exhibition space’/context it is shown in by displaying his paintings in environments that respond to/unsettle that space. In turn it attempts to answer how we view or perceive paintings based on their context and how an environment, its materials, textures, colours, patterns, climate and how does that alter how a painting is created/act of creation.

The literal definition of the Persian word for carpet means, ‘to spread’ which has a wonderful irony in this installation due to the sheer amount of carpet it uses and as a result it certainly makes you more aware of the building itself, the architecture (the geometry in the carpet pattern echoing shapes within the building's design), its height, layout, scale, period features (the ceiling has been left untouched) and amplifies the gallery's sense of grandeur with its new found luxurious, red carpet coating that both protects the building from its inhabitants and vice versa. Carpeting naturally also acts as a way of slowing you down, in the way that carpeted surfaces generate more friction and both literally slow us down as well as creating a softer, more homely sense of ease.  The smell of it and texture that envelops you as you walk around the rooms and acts as both an insulator and sort-of ‘suffocator’ at the same time, I wasn’t sure whether I felt comforted or trapped by being surrounded in so much carpet! The acoustics, or lack of, were interesting too and everything became quite soundless and muffled. It all made me increasingly aware of the archetypal gallery as a context for viewing art and how we are distracted by the noise of our feet, the coldness of the rooms, the familiarity of the whiteness of the walls and how it can sometimes mean you don’t really ‘see’ the art work on the walls properly at all. On saying that, the paintings that we were now in a supposedly more slow and aware state-of-mind to view, were in fact pretty average. On the first floor were large abstracts whose surfaces were silver monochrome textured with prints and traces of the pattern present in the red carpet. I thought these were actually more successful than the paintings on the upper floors and had some subtly intriguing surfaces. On the other floors they were, on the whole, smaller (see bottom picture) depicting silver monochrome photorealistic portraits of the artist’s friend, Franz West and portraits of sculptures (yes, you read that correctly, portraits of sculptures like a cherub or saints). These paintings are often hung solely in a massive room on their own and you couldn’t help to notice their silvery glow standing out against the redness of the carpeted walls but I just couldn’t really figure out why they were there, why the things depicted in them were chosen, it seemed a little too random for my liking. One possible solution may lie in the curating of these works which does, however, suggest a journey from abstraction to the figurative but also the inner journey that the viewer undergoes as they unknowingly at first become part of the installation as well as viewing it. There is some theoretic rationale too that accompanies this idea (in a pamphlet on the work you’re handed at the start) referring to Freud’s study in Vienna with its oriental carpets on walls and floors as, I think, a rather tenuous link to ‘the feeling of containment and the sensory experience that we discover when entering this labyrinth guide us into the Ego, with its representations and illusions...’ Maybe (raises one eyebrow).

Perhaps the Freudian reference was taking affect and I was becoming increasingly paranoid and sceptical about this whole installation/work of art by simply not really and wholly trusting the intended interpretation that this was an artwork about the redefinition of the meaning of a painting and its perceptions because the crucial thing, the crucial part in that concept, ‘the paintings themselves’ was the one thing that was a bit cold, unimportant and fighting against its’ surroundings. If this was anything to go by then the artist is surely saying that 'redefining the meaning of a painting and its perceptions' lies within the context in which it is hung-in and not with the actual painting itself (am I repeating myself?). So why bother to paint at all or perhaps why bother to paint unless one paints for a particular space? Point indeed. I am beginning to be convinced that Stingel is an artist who is interested more in how we perceive the art we are looking at than the painting of the actual work itself, although often I thought the two went together?  I did admire how this whole installation quietly forced me to ponder and ‘got into my head’ with its befuddling of the senses, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ meets ‘Arabian nights’ style, where, up was no longer up and down was no longer down, smells, sounds and textures generated a contradictory magical and disturbing intimacy.  To some extent that sense of displacement and unfamiliarity is exactly the right mind-set to perceive a painting, as you are much more unaware of what to expect and more open to interpretation. Either that of course or this whole time I had actually accidently walked into a branch of Carpet World in the middle of Venice...!?