San Lazzaro

Today I visited the Armenian Pavilion on the island of San Lazzaro, 15 minutes southeast by water from Piazza San Marco. It was a fraught visit in many ways, and so moving in others. Despite my research, I hadn’t learnt that it opened at 1pm, not 10am like every other Biennale site. And so, I arrived to the island-come-monastery two hours early. A monk saw me sitting in the garden and came to me, offering me entry—a kind gesture for which I am thankful. This gesture gave me about an hour’s respite as I quietly made my way through the first part of the exhibition, around the bright cloister, and along a corridor in which I found a site-specific installation of five videos by filmmaker Nigal Bezjian, set among the monastery’s usual display of the parts of its antique print workshop. Through this line of print blocks, tools, machines, texts and maps I move slowly, like a bibliophile who has discovered that heaven is, in fact, a library./ Soon I face Bezjian’s first video, a reading by Marc Nichanian of Armenian poet Daniel Varoujan’s 'To the Cilician Ashes.' The intensity of this man as he reads his poet, was like the cast of a fine dialogical mesh and I found myself weeping with him, even though his emotion is only in his hand movements, his looks to camera, his voice, his words, while mine leaks profusely from the fleshy corners of eyes. He tells me that poetry is the medium of mourning and as I stand in that corridor, I am mourning and yet aware of my inability to mourn a mother who died before I came to Venice. ‘It will catch up with you’ someone said to me before I left New Zealand, because I said I hadn’t really had a good chance to cry. How do you do it? In this place, there is so much possibility, so much death, so many voices, and I am diving head first into the waters of it, and later, noting the details of apparatus and the precision and passion of texts in my notebook./100 years ago, the Armenian nation was subject to genocide, and can never recover from this—so I understand from the art of this exhibition. This catastrophic ‘event’ has neither central name, nor recognition: it has become nets within nets of people, and nets within nets of stories, and questions./ Here am I then, the daughter of a mother, in some ways, I felt I never really knew, a mother who left, who had to be sought out, who opened herself later in life, but only in certain ways. What is my sorrow? And what are the words for sorrow? Nichanian interprets Varoujan and poses a question: What is the song one inscribes on one’s own epitaph as the artist who dies to find the death of another--this notion of the poet writing for his lost land? That question is so heavy I carry the heft of it as I sit with another work elsewhere and am, unexpectedly, asked to leave the pavilion by a Biennale attendant. I should not have ‘snuck in early’, and this is totally fair enough (after all, I’m an attendant myself!)./ I move outside just as a boat pulls up to the island and a tour group of about 50 climbs aboard and I wait close to doors that finally open and humbly pay the entry fee I did not realise was owing and quickly make my way to the ‘main’ part of the exhibition. Too slow. There are the intrepid 'tourists', forming a human barricade in a tiny room between two others—the nexus point of the two upstairs rooms of the exhibition. The bodies of its throng hardly budge until a French couple barges through to the staccato of their accented mutterings, and I follow./ Away, I find a work on paper, on the floor, intriguing, an embossing of white text on white, perhaps Varoujan again. I bend to see, and, so soon, there comes the mass, too quick for me to move. And I am apparently in the way as one un-gentle-man decides to mark his passage, stomping right over the artwork in front of me. I am taken aback and I am angry: I yell at him ‘you’re walking on the artwork!’. He half turns, uncaring, unable to understand the language and lash of my tongue. I am exasperated. I am fuming like an art historian and curator branded with a red-hot iron and I tell the attendant what I think—the one who escorted me out over an hour ago: this is no good, this mass, this throng, this walking on the artwork. He bends and straightens the artwork and tells me ‘it is okay.’ But it’s not okay, and I snarl that I will return when there are not ‘too many people’, but I don’t. I go to the reading of Varoujan for a moment and then I go to meet the next commuter boat. And then I return, through yet another throng to San Marco to an apartment to write, not the poem that I had a vision of writing through tears, the one I would supposedly have written in the garden later, or unburdened in the cloister, but one entitled 'To the ashes, San Lazarro', which follows... There is a decision/ at the end/ of a block of type/ at its end/ it takes ink/ and weight and press/ for paper and handles turned tight/ laid out flat scythed and cut at corners/ sheared like board/ engraved, incised, creased and perforated/ with the promise/ of curlicues and reading backwards/ across the surface of maps and production and direction/ set on steady legs and ready for/ rollers with arm-width handles/ and tables for spreading a thick gloss/ of the alphabet—poetry is the medium/ of mourning he says with ashes/ and a question of the possibility of it still/ in cases labelled ‘E’, ‘M’, ‘S’, ‘K’, ‘Q’/ along the glass of the archive/ and golden spines that have taken the seal/ rolled against or punched straight in/ there are tools that make us/ xylographic, lithographic, megalithic/ on an island of books/ and switches, screws, pulleys, tapes, trays, springs/ bolts, pistons, wires, keepers, handles/ chains, cogs, molds, stands and boards/ I find a marble tomb I am still/ to inscribe/ for my mother.
Hear the sound work on Soundcloud.

The Fine Bones of a City

Is there a mapping that can occur when the human body synchs with the urban body? If that was to happen, wouldn’t it happen in Venice which runs and spreads corporeally like a fine web of bones, blood vessels and causeways? Venice has been metaphorically described along these lines as writers extol the labyrinth, in which it is perhaps best to be lost, to go with the flow. Tiziano Scarpa, for example, has written 'Venice is a Fish,' in which he describes the water city as a vast sole stretched out against the deep, tethered to the mainland by a fishing line. Aerially, it looks, at any time, like it might flick its tail and be off, except for the forests of inverted trees that hold it fast in its seabed slime, on its armature of millions of now-petrified piles. Overlaying this grid, and its rafts, are pockets of architecture, and collections of communes, all with their own fine detail, laid out almost secretly like a plated, yet still-boned, festa.
Here my thoughts swim around images and are grounded by a few, momentarily come to life and are held together: today I am pulling in the prose of Scarpa and his fish, a massive sixteenth century woodcut seen in Museo Correr, and a 1950s oil painting seen at Venice's Gallery of Modern Art, Ca' Pesaro.
Since the fifteenth century, Venice has been a centre for the artistic consideration of cartography and the 6-panel woodcut, ‘Aerial View Map,’ by Jacopo de’ Barbari (c.1470 – 1516) was a landmark work. Astounding at the time, and still poignant today, is its conceptualisation and materialisation of the aerial view, along with its exactitude in paving, tiles, facades, chimneys, roads, bell towers, small squares, and even, the pattern of the sea’s surface. With this map, the renaissance laid claim to a new creation--a synthetic vision of the city under the guidance of the laws of geometry and perspective.
More modern, but along similar lines, is the painting ‘Sojourn in Venice’ by Tancredi (Parmeggiani Tancredi, 1927-1964). It plays with abstraction to suggest the multiple and overlaid parts of the city, its many compartments and allusive links.
In Venice, the city’s body whispers to me ‘within, within, within’ and my body (especially my feet!) will fail before I think I’ve charted my way.

Cy Twombly at Ca' Pesaro

I love the Itailian word for writing, scrittura. It’s almost onomatopoeic as its meaning and etymology offer the very act of writing—the scribe, the clerk, of the scriptum. I’m not inspired by the religious connotations of ‘scriptum’, but the weight of the word seems right: it is a composition, a document, even a contract./ As you will notice from a previous post, the title of this blog was in part inspired by such a rumination. My interest is to provide myself with, and share, a space for scrittura as part of Immagine: some kind of total image that grows over time, with reference to ‘imagination’ in English./ This is in mind as I enter the International Gallery of Modern Art, Ca’ Pesaro, to see a Cy Twombly exhibition, 'Paradise.' I have long been interested in Twombly’s work for the way it plays the line, or merges and enriches the line, between drawing/painting and writing. Yes, there is text in his work, but what really captivates me is his overall sense of Scrittura, if I can expand that to include the image./ Yes, you can see the Abstract Expressionist idea of automatic writing in Twombly’s work, which is, these days, not particularly exciting. But Twombly goes much further and takes on fuller concerns. Of note is the hand of the mark, the gesture and intent of the writer—that looping he does, for example, and the way he includes text that becomes image, and vice versa. It’s not so much that he creates a narrative, but that there’s a rhythm that creates syntax, particularly as he works in series./ The exhibition's introductory wall text is ecclesiastical, and the somewhat unfortunate inevitability of this makes me smile. Of most relevance to me, and the least effusive, is the sentence ‘His innovative use of language and broad range of allusion and reference open his work to history, literature, and philosophy, blurring the boundaries between painting, drawing, and writing, while preserving a degree of abstraction.’ Although sometimes monumental and bold, Twombly’s works work more quietly on me, like an artist’s script that I walk into, follow, and come back to./ An exhibition in photo is different to an exhibition in person. Some images follow as excerpts, however. They seek to capture a little of Twombly’s syntax and rhythm, and his flirtation with the act of language: its jots, lines, marks and colours, and its continuance.

Terre Arti

At the Museo Correr you see a collection of art and objects donated to the city up to the 1800s. At one point, you enter a library lined with walnut bookcases and books and documents, originally from the Pisani Family palace at San Vidal, and (for me) featuring two large free standing globes, dating (I’m guessing) from the 17th century, or before. Maps show a lot of the way we, our cultures, view the world. The globes take my attention and I notice that one of them has the words ‘Terre Arti’ on one side, tipped down towards the floor. This immediately captures my attention. Is this an accidental conjunction fortuitously resulting from the fixed nature of the object in this setting? This is not ‘Terra Firma’ or ‘Terra Incognita,’ although, surely, 'Terre Arti' can be both of these. This is a location of lands for the arts, and where it is, I can’t quite tell. Ruminating on this, I decide that this ‘Terre Arti’ is a land of our own making, with its coastlines and nearby mountains. It’s a place where the arts make a landing, make themselves substantial while tucked into coves and crannies, bordered by ebbs and flows. Disillusionment comes easy in Venice. Going upstairs to the picture gallery I walk past icons and painted masterpieces looking worse for wear. A conservator would shake their head at the tape so obviously stuck over the unstable parts of numerous works. I guess in Venice, there is so much history, and so much decay, you just cannot conserve everything that might deserve it. Even the imperial rooms, through which you enter the museum ‘proper’ are, for an enthusiast, on the verge of unpresentable, and the word that comes to my mind is ‘boredom’ as I think of living in these rooms. And yet, you can’t write things off so quickly. Terre Arti always beckons.

'Arrival' is a Misnoma

'Arrival' is a misnoma. You may be in a new place but you aren’t there yet, you aren’t in it, you make no impact. As I arrived in Venice on a near-Summer’s afternoon on 1 June 2015, I felt the impetus of relief: so many weeks, no, months, to get here. But to where exactly? Walking streets, over the first two days, I think of entrances as points of arrival we hope to encounter. In Venice, they lie in paths, along the run of the ochre, yellow and pink crumble and peel of walls, they are secreted behind gates, they are cut off by water, they are linked and dropped by bridges. They have their own life, their own language paced out as poetic runes. Venice the island, the historic water city, entices the act of arrival--calle, vie, corte, campo, fondamenta, piazza. We walk, my husband and I, where we want to escape the crush for prescribed views and momentoes. If I stripped out all these bodies, would I be able to engage any more than this? So much grandeur, so little time. I wander more quietly with the phone as a camera because that’s all I have. I try to feel the invisible city. What is this way in which such cities draw us in, and push us away?