Seance for a Sunday morning. An absolutely riveting exhibition of the work of Paulina Peavy, at Beyond Baroque in Venice is a must for anyone in the region. No catalog is available, alas, so drawing from dense wall texts, I have distilled a few salient points.
Peavy grew up out west, but had significant stays in New York. She went to Oregon State and Chouinard (precursor to Cal Arts) as well as the Art Students League. She cycled through a number of different disciplines but ultimately became an adherent of Spiritualism and Theosophy via Agnes Pelton and others in San Pedro, and in particular channeled an entity called Lacamo who identified as an interplanetary and interdimensional visitor. Like Hilma af Klint, she sought to give form to her spiritual connections. She painted, wrote poetry, and began to centralize her thinking around astro culture and UFOs. Also influenced by Orozco, the Surrealists, and the Bible she seemed to have absorbed so many artistic cultures that her talent spilled over in multiple directions.
She made and wore elaborate masks and costumes when she channeled Lacamo. She worked in textiles, architecture, graphic and product design, string Art and with enchanting wood marionettes, but the films featuring translucent biomorphic forms showing alongside her work are worth the visit alone. With sound tracks straight out of Hollywood and the Twilight Zone, and voice over narration describing the female God they are mesmerizing. She believed females were the highest level of reincarnation (natch!)
I am being reductive here, and she deserves like Pelton and Af Klint a catalog and another larger show. Yet in the space at Beyond Baroque with its esoteric library and Persian carpets and unfettered access to the works, one feels she might appear at any moment to take us to a higher realm. Next weekend, during Felix and Gallery Weekend LA, there is a reception and performance on Saturday. Do not let our new mask rules keep you away from this out of time delight.
Pietro Consagra's spectacular theater in Gibellina Sicily at risk
This week would have been the opening of the Architecture Biennale in Venice, now postponed until this time 2021. In 2018, a project about the extraordinary 1972 theater of Pietro Consagra was center stage in the Italian pavilion. When I got to Gibellina and saw it, even with the debris in front and the disrepair, it was still one of the most beautiful structures, an example of this visionary sculptor's who envisaged each inhabitant would be transformed – in a “The Frontal City”, so they could "experience art...to keep oneself suspicious, susceptible, nervous, intolerant, evasive, enthusiastic, balanced, unbalanced, attentive, aggressive, lazy, imaginative, libidinous, free, ungraspable.” Consagra continued, “We no longer wish to live in cubes, nor in spheres or tubes. We do not want to end up in conventional dimensions dictated by the standards of mass production. We do not want to live within any concept of normalization...Whatever space we happen to use must be mobile, temporary, transparent, paradoxical and amenable to fluctuating ideas. It must evade the eternal structures of Power”. Today an effort is still ongoing to bring this utopian structure back to life.
Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943
The Prada Foundation in Venice, always a sumptuous experience has now become even more spectacular with the latest addition of Rem Koolhaas’s Torre, a multi story tower with installations that culminates in a restaurant modeled after the Four Seasons. It was closed when I was there so I cannot report on that, only that the spicy tuna sandwich at the original cafe was delicious and fast.
You need to be fast because there is much to see, especially now Post Zang Tumb Tuuum, a show that would not have been possible just a few years ago on the art of Italy pre and post WW2. It begins with the great Futurists (I can never have enough Boccocconi or Severni, though there are not the best examples here) and carries on through the Fascistic era. Now, buildings and paintings we once thought were edifici non grata are being newly rediscovered as examples of a certain style. Much of this art would have passed as Flea Market Art about a decade ago and it is still not the strongest period, but the curators have added vintage books, posters and ephemera and so we have an understanding of the motivations.
I am a bit of a sucker for this stuff, even in its middlebrow incarnations, because in the aggregate there is an elegance that defies the often repressive or anti Semitic period during which it was made. Artists such as de Chirico had already been fingered, but there are many society painters and designers who must have been working with one eye closed.
It’s a very large show which takes up many pavilions and I recommend it both as an artifact and a welcome addition to scholarship of the period which many of us having been avoiding.
A local very knowledgeable friend who accompanied me on my visit said, “Who knows how long this all can last? “ By that she meant that retail luxury business is down worldwide and that Prada too had been affected. Though many luxury houses have contributed mightily to the arts, I would have to say that the scholarship at Prada is always top drawer and introduces me to work with an excellent historical perspective.
Venice Architecture Biennale
My second visit to Venice for the Architecture Biennale was a one-Day extravaganza of thoughts about the world, and our human place in it.
The curators-- Irish women (hooray) Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara --made every attempt to encourage the national pavilion curators to hew to the theme of Freespace e.g., the role of walls/migration/identity/generosity and exchange and they did. It's a feast of thought experiments
My visit was timed with Trump sulking off from the G7 and meeting up with his bullying Korean counterpart in Singapore, a place where enforced cleanliness and comportment is the norm. No migrants landing there. The Singapore Pavilion defined free space "as a result of careful considerations in planning," and the celebration of "Place making through openness...and he creative freedom of the mind". I’m not sure the curators of this pavilion had the summit in mind
Architects therefore take up this challenge at their peril when governments themselves are rejecting the concept. And again, my constant complaint: architectural jargon is so off putting. Plain language is anathema to architects.
Still, they are optimists. They want to bring back abandoned spaces, repair the ones extant, take care, nurture. In no particular order some impressions:
The Swiss pavilion is white and empty, unfurnished --a house tour--and I'm afraid the pure intellectualism of this one passed me by. (They won the prize)
The British pavilion is also empty "an island" with exterior scaffolding, we are meant to construct our own environment, where the absence is the presence. Hmmm....
By contrast the V and A brought and reconstructed an entire section of the recently destroyed Robin Hood Gardens, the Smithson’s brutalist housing project which has already been partially torn down. This incited controversy--both in the tearing down and in the putting up on display--but as someone who has recently been softened by brutalist architecture I found it less a story of the type of architecture than the problem of low income housing in general.
By contrast the French filled theirs up with the detritus of ten abandoned places and asked about reawakening inspiration, community and the stories of people who live in these places and what they would wish for. (It reminded me of Alejandro Innaritu's LACMA exhibition)
In the same vein, the Italians took up their abandoned villages and towns and suggested interventions. They also had a genius install of routes one might follow --more huts!-- to experience a strong local sense of place.
(In Italy, where just yesterday they turned away a boat of 600 plus --received by Spain though not after a day or two of drifting with no food or water--migrants you can understand that they feel it should not just be their problem. Yet like Syria, it's all of our problems.)
The Australians focused on grasslands and environmental repair. The Czech pavilion explored the absence of life in downtowns and livable cities, free housing, homelessness and Problems of tourism. The Hungarians on building a bridge. The Koreans on the relation of modernity to the state run projects since the sixties, the Germans again on their Wall (this icon of their history is the ultimate resource for freeing space), the Greeks on academic spaces, the Canadians on indigenous cultures, the Spaniards on 'becoming" or the future, the Danes on their newly opened architecture hub in Copenhagen.
Repressive governments were just as eager to put best foot forward as if ignoring their own un free space: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and an exhibit of 100 towers by 100 architects outside the Arsenale venue were in direct contravention to the themes within the walls.
The Vatican has commissioned ten architects to build chapels on San Giorgio and wandering through these is uplifting, as the church has always counted on its architecture to be. Religions are probably the largest patron of projects since time began.
The US pavilion was a bit of a hodgepodge of projects about good citizenship by some famous and not so famous architects, I felt keenly that its discursiveness worked against the themes that some of the other pavilions took up with more single mindedness. Sometimes our democracy can be too much of a good thing.
Small towns, town squares, better housing, back to the future, these themes are not new. What is new is the fact that governments are veering away from inclusiveness, and are responding to fear, and keeping people out, not welcoming them in.
Architects are not expected to have all the solutions. They are rarely given enough money to see their visions through and are utopian by definition. One leaves the Biennial venues with equal measures of hope and despair.
Prada Foundation in Venice
At the Prada Foundation in Venice, an exhibition Machines À Penser has a title which is precisely the opposite of what one expects.
Inside the always impeccably curated space is a show about philosophers and their hideaway huts. It is a testament to the value of escaping to do one's work, to the perennial Virginia Woolf wish for a Room of One's Own or as Dieter Roelstraete, the curator put it, "the enduring infatuation with fantasies of flight and the architecture of retreat"
Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno the focus of the show had 'huts' that are still vaguely extant.
Do not think of Easthampton or Santa Barbara. Instead think of remote Norway or Germany or even the Pacific Palisades as the biggest surprise for me was a huge blow up of the Villa Aurora at the entry which is right near me in Los Angeles and which was the getaway of Lionel Feuchtwanger and the nearby 'hut's of Salka Viertel, Hans Eisner, Thomas Mann (now saved by the German government), Arnold Schoenberg, Brecht, Alma Mahler
The Palisades can be a good if isolating place with precious little spontaneity but that's probably what the philosophers were seeking. Refuge. Thinking about the relationship of thought to environment is omnipresent in my life and often confused with happiness. No, the exhibition is not about contentment but rather the mental space to do one's work.
Again I was sorry that few women were included as surely women have longed to escape to think even perhaps more than men.
Rachel Cusk's new book, Kudos, which I've just begun, has a scathing section on an Italian contessa's writers retreat only thinly disguised as is most of her work. Here the writer's are hardly able to work and instead sit staring at the beautiful walls or tapestries in a kind of mad desperation. One packs up his bag and leaves on the second day, another wishes she could but her suitcases are too heavy.
The intellectuals in this exhibit are more bonded with their private retreats which depend on barebones cooking (women seem to be present for that part).
Contemporary artists were asked to contribute to this theme. (Again: very few women) Alexander Kluge's film Cold is the Chain of God was far and away the most charming, an animation which included Napoleon's armies suffering in the cold, lots of beautiful snow and great wit.
The Peggy Guggenheim Museum
The Peggy Guggenheim Museum is irresistible to me. I've seen the paintings many times, yet they are some of my favorites. The many Max Ernsts (she helped him get his green card by marrying him so he could escape the war), the sexy Leonor Fini, the roomful of Pollocks (she was a great champion of his), the good Picassos, Brancusis et al. Unlike many collections, this one is so personal, and the homelike setting is so congenial to the art. Like Dominique de Menil she had a strong personal relationship to her artists and it comes through in the idiosyncratic collection.
Also there is the Albers in Mexico show, which I missed in NY and is small but pithy. The Albers fell in love with Mexico and New Mexico and returned time and again to the Mayan and Inca ruins for inspiration. Contact sheets of their travels show the intense level of engagement and the reflection in so much of the work. Missing are Annie's weavings. Why? This was the only thing that rankled.
The Palazzo Cini
The Palazzo Cini is right next door to the Peggy Guggenheim but it is largely skipped by tourists and so they are giving discount passes at the Peggy.
The Cini family also founded the San Giorgio Island install. This is merely an earlier iteration of the Prada/Pinault concept. Cini was a rich industrialist collector who also had a religious bent. Two Palazzi were converted by his daughter for a pot pourri of paintings sculptures and porcelains.
There are some nice things (a della Francesca Madonna and child and a great Pontormo portrait of Two Friends) but the discovery for me is the superior circular staircase by Tomaso Buzzi which was added in the fifties. An Imaginary Architecture show of drawings is up to coincide with the Biennale.
Carlo Scarpa room at the Ca Foscari public university in Venice
After three tries, I finally was able to get into the famous Carlo Scarpa room at the Ca Foscari public university in Venice.
This university seems a wonderful environment with this once in a lifetime situated campus and I was told it has excellent faculty and courses which can be had for a quarter the price of American universities.
In addition, it holds a rare Scarpa room which he designed for lectures including the chairs, the dais with its removable tile floor,, the folding window screens and wood fretted ceiling. Having done the Scarpa route outside Venice on one of my last trips, this was the excellent dessert. There is a tour which is given and I recommend it as my way of getting upstairs was entirely too random and complicated.