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Michelangelo Pistoletto’s work at the Arsenale / photo Richard Rhodes |
The installation of gold-thread beams by the late Brazilian artist Lygia Pape that opened the show in the Arsenale turned the inspirational clock back to the utopian 1960s. As a starting point for “Making Worlds,” the ghostly drama of her installation (like crossing beams of spotlights in a theatre) fashioned a time-tunnel entry onto works by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Aleksandra Mir, Jan Håfström, Amy Simon, Richard Wentworth, Sara Ramo, Jumana Emil Abboud and 80-odd others. These works often threaded childhood images and experiences with the regrets, anxieties and cautions of disenchanted adulthood. When, on the Friday press day, Pistolletto re-entered his installation of large, baroque gold-framed mirrors and broke the remaining intact ones, he tipped his hand to indicate an end of sparkle and glitter, and he adjusted the mood of Birnbaum’s beginning into something tougher, something that broached a concept of ruin and stood apart from the uninflected, concept-bound fragmentation and disarray that was a construction principle for much of the other work. By the end of the long stretch of gallery bays, the show had become a monotone epic in need of an edit: there was a mismatch between art geared to psychic hiding and quiet retreat and its entwinement with a delivery system predicated on historical aura and monumental scale. At the Dogana, there was no such gap; Pinault had gathered works tilted towards overstatement and showy bombast. At the Arsenale, Birnbaum embraced understatement, then let it drift.
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Jan Håfström’s work at the Arsenale / photo Richard Rhodes |
Only when the floor plan turned at right angles and a series of video installations by Joan Jonas, Grazia Toderi and Keren Cytter offered sit-down, extended engagement did the private voices of his show come into their own. Jonas’ Reading Dante II was a compendium of old and new video footage that skittered through time alongside readings of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The projected, improvisational drawings that filled and unfilled auxiliary walls carried the tentative beauty of changing thought around a comprehensive theme—not so much a making of worlds as a making of a mythic world view. Toderi’s Red Orbit had been pieced together out of urban nightscape footage shot near an airport. Flipped and flopped and magnified into a half-dozen blended image spaces, the overall effect was of a mysterious, circling night sky that stood as a world apart; it only intermittently reminded you of its mundane nearness. Behind that, the kitchen-sink, close-up drama of Cytter’s video was virtually the only work to wear emotion on its sleeve. It set the thermostat high to remind you of the other world shaped by anger, fear and tears—the everyday staples otherwise left out of Birnbaum’s show.
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Jorge Otero-Pailos’ work at the Arsenale / photo Richard Rhodes |
Over at the Giardini, the old Italian pavilion, now known as the Palace of Exhibitions, had the advantage of a more modestly tailored exhibition space. However, there was still an inappropriate gigantism that was out of sync with a number of the works. Nathalie Djurberg, for example, who has shown show-stopping videos in the Berlin Biennal and in last year’s “After Nature” show at the New Museum, filled a dark room with wonky, Smurf-style sculptures to set a mood for her new video. While one can imagine the attraction of sculpture for a Claymation-style filmmaker, the stage-set result only made an external ironic frame for the film, a film that on its own accord treads a finer discriminating line where irony loops into a kind of existential disrepair.
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Joan Jonas’ work at the Arsenale / photo Richard Rhodes |
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