4am. Good morning, Venice.
My confused body rolled out of bed in a state of utter timezone disarray, the sweet sweet delirium of jetlag setting in. Stumbling out of my lodging, I wound my way to the water, hoping to find serenity and existential reason. Venice in the wee hours exposes the lifeblood of the city. Barges move supplies in and waste back out again. Sweepers with whimsical bundled twig brooms make sure the city is spotless for the day’s affairs. I watched the obvious signs of Biennale preparations begin to get underway. The next week would see thousands of eyes on over a hundred artists chosen to represent their countries in what would wind up being a microcosm war of the larger landscape global scene.
The Highlights
“Do you want to learn animation?” A fucked up animated puppet with uncanny movement styles and smile too big for its face is teaching an animation class. In the process, it makes pasta, breaks all concept of space and dimensionality, addresses the fundamental absurdity of having a body, and manages to rickrolls the entire Biennale. I walked out of the palazzo feeling as though the secrets of personal liberation or destruction may live in that video’s endless absurdist loop. Probably both.
“Screen Melancholy”
I had anticipated Gabrielle Goliath’s work ever since following the controversy around her becoming the representative for South Africa and then being summarily removed from the position because of her refusal to omit a Palestinian woman from her performance piece. I celebrated with her when she decided to launch the piece anyway, believing fully that this kind of censorship in the art world is a mark of evil and a stain on the making of meaning within humanity itself. Entering through black curtains, I could already hear the haunting tone central to the piece. Inside the beautiful, vertically towering church were boxes containing screens and sound systems. Each screen showed a different part of the performance: women from respective cultures sustaining the same note for an hour.
The note struck me to my core. Knowing that it represented violence not just across South Africa and Palestine, but also against LGBTQIA people and women across the world. I sat down and felt overwhelming kinship with these women, each stepping onto the platform and joining the last in that single haunting tone. There is something beautiful in both mourning and pain, a common experience echoing across cultures, a message to one another of understanding and shared loss. The violence that one of us experiences belongs, in some way, to all of us.
As a producer of events that some might call extreme, I have a moral obligation to address Holzinger’s work. If you have been anywhere near Biennale content, you’ve seen Florentina hanging from the inside of a bell naked, or seen a jetski running in circles through barely purified piss, performers living in tanks of the same liquid. A weathervane covered in naked women.
Do I love it? Do I hate it?
I feel conflicted about it. Judging it as a Work of Art, it’s got some holes. It’s like a live-action femme Chuck Palahniuk novel. There are a lot of themes and motifs happening all at once and I’m not exactly sure how they hang together conceptually. It has an air of the same instagramability that Beeple’s “Regular Animals” did at Art Basel Miami. At the same time, keeping audiences engaged and interested in the art world provides an important gateway for the curious to learn more about this tiny but mighty ecosystem of ideas. Art must stay relevant and respond to the current zeitgeist. If this piece is what we are focusing on, it’s less about what Holzinger puts in a pavilion, and more a reflection of what society desires to dwell in at this time.
Piss, stunts, shock, time, immersion, duration. 2026? Kinda seems accurate to me.
If you’d like to read more about previous tours of the art world, fee free to turn to Andrew Berardini’s Artforum diary of both Miami and Los Angeles where I served as a photographer. Not only is his writing a perennial delight, but a faithful recounting of a journeys we shared.
Back to the studio
Before leaving for Venice, I had an errant curiosity about hide glue and looked up how to make it. As one of the earliest forms of adhesive used by humankind (now commonly used by luthiers), it seemed like fertile ground for a conceptual extension of my use of rawhide in previous bodies of work. What I was not quite expecting was the fussy versatility of the material as it collaborates and is extensively influenced in its form by the environment in which it dries. Realizing that the adhesive itself hardens into a transparent material, I have now crafted an entire line of research around the process of creating what I now refer to as “liquid skin” and have many hours of thought and ideation into what it truly means when the matter we host our consciousness within passes from our bodies. How do we experience transformation daily, let alone how our body passes into new forms upon our death?
“Hide glass” or the dried product of “liquid skin”
This summer promises to be a dense flurry of experimentation solidifying (pun intended) into new pieces that chase physical and conceptual limits. I will post updates on my instagram rapidly, and my next newsletter should contain some of the ideation process as I dig into the layers of meaning buried within this rich material language.
I will also be planning to show this work and beginning those conversations in late July/early August. If you’re interested in collaborating on or including pieces in a show, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Thank you again for following my practice and journey. My work continues with your support and I so throughly appreciate your care and the care of this thriving community.