Venice Bienale

Ciao amici! Sono stanca!

The trip to Venice was a whirlwind. We were marched around at top speed (something almost impossible in narrow, cobble-stone streets and tourist-filled vaporetti) fueled by icky croissants, soggy sandwiches and at night, mega-expensive experimental Italian cuisine. Oh, and Bellini's of course!

Our hotel could not be further away from the Biennale without going off the main islands. So it took us about an hour each way to get there and back to hotel. Ugh! Wet, cold weather! The always positive Brazilian here actually packed a bikini! Yes, got some laughs from that one. You never, know, right?

We figured out that they bought us a ticket from Stanstead Airport (45 mins from London by train) to Treviso airport (1 hour from Venice by bus) as a team-building exercise! But it was a good trip overall. We got to see the main pavilions as well as the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and the Palazzo Grassi , which is the property of Christie’s owner, François Pernault, yes he of Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Samsonite, etc… Apparently there’s an internship to be awarded to a Christie’s student at the end of each year at the palazzo. We were all excited hoping that maybe as an intern we might get some Gucci shoes and lovely handbags. Yeah right!

Anyway, I have my essay to write, so I’ll just post a few pics with commentaries here. Nobody has the patience for all the art we saw anyway!

Ashton (tall guy on left, US), Surya (S. Korea), Ming (Singapore) and Conor (Canada-by-way-of-Ireland), following their Italian-speaking guide... me!

Yes we actually had a few hours of clear sky. Just had to take apicture of this beautiful house. If i get the internship, this is where I'll live with my Gucci shoes and LV hand-bags.

Now for some art: This was by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska. Difficult to see in the pic, but she forced the pre-fabricated metal frame of a typical communist, 70's-style building into Poland's (somewhat) classical pavillion. The metal is all bent and twisted so that it could fit in the pavillion. Cool statement on the changes in architectual tastes and the destruction needed to transform old fashions and trends into new ones.
The thing looks like the skeleton for Cindarella's carriage and i found myself singing, "Bibbledee-bobbledee-doo...."

Off to have a nice dinner after days of eating horrible croissants and soggy sandwhiches. Me, Conor (Canadian) and Margret (Norwegian). Conor is hilarious and Margret has one of the most original laughs I've ever heard. Conor has his rich-playboy look on. We were in a water taxi to go to the restaurant because we got dressed up. They charged the nine of us 10 Euros each to go about 10 minutes down the canal. It was like a limousine, though. Fun.

Also in Limo: Ricardo (Mexico), Paula (Puerto Rico), Mehgan (US). The dinner came out to about 100 euros per person! And I ended up trying out a venice menu which served... get this: veal gristle in onions and garlic. Gristle. know what Gristle is? You know the tendons and stuff between the bones and the joints and muscles that we usually spit out? That's gristle. Uck. Second course: spaghetti with anchovie sauce - half a packet of salt in it. Next! At least the wine and the tiramissu were good.

Nicole (Left, US) and Anna (Greece). Esta aí da direita é a esticadona. Ela é toda fake. A Nicole é filha de um dono de galeria em New York e fica totalmente bêbada com super facilidade. Meio irritante.

More Art: French Pavillion, artist Sophie Calle. She received a (real) letter from her boyfriend telling her it was over... same existential crap as always. At the end of the letter, he writes, "Take Care of Yourself." - the title of the piece. What does she do to take care of herself? She sends the letter to over 100 women asking them to interpret, translate, understand, use the letter as they see fit.. doing whatever they like to it. She sent it to all sorts of different professionals as well as her mother, a tarot-reader, etc... So you have literature teachers deconstructing it and correcting its grammar, you have a clown making jokes of the words, you have a historian analysing it in terms of history, you have a musician play it and so on, and so on... It's hilarious! Very well done and I for one identified with it instantly. Very cool. First piece of installation art I can really understand.

Projeto Morrinho. Um grupo de meninos das favelas cariocas que recriam as favelas nos mínimos detalhes em miniatura, feito de tijolos pintados, garrafinhas e tampas. tem até campo de futebol, olha! Isto tem mais ou menos uns 2 metros de altura, para ter uma idea. Apareceu também na Bienal de São Paulo no ano passado.. aliás muitas coisas brasileiras foram repetidas.

Ricardo and me over a canal. Ricardo is such a figura. He belongs on Gay eye for the straight guy or something.

Last one: Iran do Espirito Santo, Brasil. There quite a few Brazilians in the Biennale and much better pieces than this one, but I didn't take pics. This was OK. Somewhat cool to see the disappearing wall reflected in granite that looked as if it had crashed.

Awwww, just like students!! We sit on the floor waiting for the Ryanair plane in Treviso airport. I think we spent more on the trains, buses and checked baggage fee (yes we had to pay to check luggage) than Christie's did for the whole trip.

Boozy Brits and Night Buses

I like to tell people that I feel very safe here. It's like a weight has been lifted and I have relaxed. It didn't happen at once. Seeing people fall asleep with their bags open on the underground would astound me at first. But, slowly and cautiously, I seem to have let my guard down and at some time in the past few weeks I relaxed completely about security. My bag hangs down open. I will walk an empty street at night. I don't double-lock my doors at night anymore.

Several things have helped me get that relaxed. The first of course is that every inch of the centre of London is monitored by CCTV. There are signs everywhere warning us that we're on candid camera. And when there is crime (usually outside the city centre), there is footage of it and people get caught.
But other, not so obvious, things may even have a greater hand in it. The most surprising of these to me, is that London is a 24 X 7 party capital!

When I say I'm Brazilian people always look at me with envy and awe in their faces and ask about all the partying Brazilians do. Since this appears to be something to boast about, I'm not going to contradict them but the amount of late-night action going on in the Soho, Covent Garden, Oxford Street triangle, is on par with Carnaval on any day. And we're talking about every night here! Well, maybe not Mondays.

It's incredible! No matter how late, there are always people wandering, stumbling or not making their way home. Lots of people. I can walk the 15 or so minutes from Soho feeling like its mid-afternoon, except of course that the crowds tend to weave a little and may sometimes be a wee bit louder too.

Buses are the same way. There are the infamous night buses here in London, which run the regular main routes after midnight. There have been night bus survival guides published in the newspapers, love stories have sprung from night buses and several regulars have Night-bus buddies, which always seem to be going home with them at 5 am every Thursday, Friday, Saturday... But the buses are packed. They might be gross -- you have a lot of people still learning to drink, and all the problems that rise with that, -- but they are safe. And if any guy comes up to bother you, they're usually so drunk, they're quite harmless.

And of course the main reason all this happens is because Holy Crap these people drink! I can't keep up and I've stopped trying, at the risk of committing a huge faux pas.

Sometime in the not-so-distant past, some idiot created "rounds". Rounds are pure evil disguised as being friendly. It works like this: A group of about 5 of us go to a pub. One person will offer to pay and get everyone's drinks. Then as soon as one of the five has finished, he or she will do the same for the rest, and so on... until everyone has paid a round for all five ... and then you start again.
So, you're always drinking at the pace of the fastest drinkers AND you always accept a drink, because that way, everyone pays the same.. more or less. If you refuse a drink, it makes you look cheap, because then people will think you're trying to get out of paying their drink. UGH!!!

No wonder there are all these completely shit-faced people everywhere. The larger the group, the more you drink! Everyone has to pay their round. If you go out in 7 people, you're going to drink 7 drinks! On top of it all, drinks are relatively cheap. A pint of beer is notoriously expensive at the equivalent of 5 dollars. But a gin and tonic is just about the same price! So is a coke. Doesn't make sense, right? So, if the intent is to party, young people are going to spend their 3 pounds on scotch and gin, rather than a larger or wine. More bang for your buck.

The BBC is going to air a series, along the lines of Super-size Me (the fast-food documentary), following a 30-something drinking as much as her 20-something friends, every night for a month. Apparently that equals an average of (each girl, per night!) 5 glasses of wine, 3 Smirnoff Ice-type drinks, 4 shots of tequila, 2-3 pints of larger followed by 2 or 3 mixed drinks like gin and tonics or rum and coke. She says she aged 10 years during those 30 days.

So... at the risk of seeming cheap and rude, I declined an offer for someone to pay a round last Saturday. I did, however, offer to buy them something later on... which they declined. Ooops. Just blame the Brazilian... she has no idea what she's doing. But at least she looks good!!!

School

Oooh, I haven't been good about this. So sorry everyone!

Anyway, school.

The course is incredibly exciting. I am constantly amazed at the connections going on in my head and quite proud, actually, of how much I already know. The fact that I have a little experience in the practice of painting helps a lot. I'm always the one to know which technique was used and even how the artist started or constructed his work. Also, being here makes things so much easier because of the number of museums and exhibits going on. Its impossible to go to all of them. Books are easy to find too, so if I'm suddenly interested in a subject, I can quickly read up on it.


There are 24 of us in the Diploma course and there are another 20 or so Masters students who share morning lectures with us. I'd say about half the class is made up of British, Americans or Canadians. There are quite a few people from Russia and France (you'd think Paris would have a better program than Christies, but apparently not) and the rest from places like Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Greece, Switzerland and Italy. And of course, me, the Brazilian. There is another Brazilian somewhere in another course, Fine and Decorative Arts, I think, but I haven't been able to find her yet.

The course director, Lizzie is absolutely awesome. She has curated and worked at the National Gallery in London and Tate Modern. She is the type of person who captures your attention from the start and keeps you completely focused and interested during a 2-hour lecture. She's very passionate about everything she says and provides great feedback on points you make.

The other two main lecturers are... mmm, so-so. One seems to have never taken a public speaking class and Ummms and Ahhhhhs through-out the whole lecture taking forever to make his point and leaves off the end of sentences so you never really know where he's going. The people who don't speak English that well have a really hard time understanding him.

The guest teacher, an American, has another type of problem. He talks around his point, never making it completely clear, using long words and difficult terms when he could be more concise. He also goes into philosophy a lot but fails to define terms so one of the first things he says is that human nature is constantly changing. Of course half the class loudly disagreed with him. The point was completely lost, while everyone debated this and it didn't even really contribute with what he was trying to convey anyway. And all through this some students are furiously scribbling in their notebooks, trying to keep up, while others are looking around, waiting for the goal of this discussion to make itself clear.

If there's one thing we are learning from these last two, is how NOT to talk about art! But, it's still all good. And so far Lizzie is the one who has been giving us the majority of lectures.

In the afternoons, we usually have visits to galleries, museums and guest lecturers like Christies employees, specialists, artists and gallery owners. These are usually really interesting and always touch both on academic history of art points and the direction of the art market.

Today we went to the pre-sale viewings for two of Christie's sales. One of the people who took us around was a collector and Christie's alumni. There is always a focus on market, prices and the different types of investors, collectors and what the market is doing. Speculation seems to be a dirty word for most, but there have been one or two more realist speakers who have taken it for what it is. Art is being consumed. There is also a lot of talk about the bubble bursting but we've been told that the warnings have been going on for years. The collector we chatted to this afternoon said that from his conversations with gallery owners, the market does not seem to be slowing down that much.

Anyway, my first project is something called an Object Analysis. We have to chose a work of art, from 1860 to 1905 and describe it in a very particular way. There is a series of questions that have to be answered and to answer them, we have to research the artist, the subject, the time, the medium, the art-dealer, the museum... everything very deeply. I'm loving it. I chose a Degas... mostly because it was in an odd place: the V&A.

This one:

The ballet scene from Meyerbeer's opera 'Robert le Diable', 1876
Presently in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Bequethed by Constantine Ionides in 1901.







I'll post my essay when it's done, but, for now... it's so interesting to do this! I have to discover why it was painted, who it was sold to, for how much, how was it sold, who bought it afterwards, how did it get to where it is now, its path through history. I also have to imagine who saw it at the time, what were they thinking, who is in it, why was it important, who looks at it now, what was written about it at several times through history, etc....


To research all this, I use several libraries and look at old gallery and museum catalogues, newspaper articles, art critic essays, monographs, all sorts of stuff. The final product will be a 2000 word essay with end-notes and bibliography.


It's odd that the Robert Le Diable is in the V&A, because the V&A museum is basically a student's museum, which houses examples of design for objects and home furnishings. It was a museum originally intended for the instruction of trade and artisinal craft. You can't learn how to paint a Degas just by looking at it, so it's strange that a painting should be there. All this goes into my essay too because there is a whole story of why the painting is in the V&A and why it has stayed there for over a century. Which you shall learn later on. * cue discovery-channel/twilight zone music*


Next Wednesday I'm off to Venice! I'll try to borrow a camera to take pics and tell you all about that. Tomorrow I spend the afternoon at the Frieze Art fair, which is this mammoth of an event for contemporary art. The same collector we met today will be leading us through it showing us what he thinks are good investments and why certain pieces are there. As my friend Connor said, we better make some money between today and tomorrow so we can out-bid him!