Letter from Venice, October 2001

The Venice Biennale, conceived and directed by Harald Szeemann, opened in June this summer with the thought-provoking title ‘Platform of Humankind’. The theme allowed Harald Szeemann, who truly bestrides the contemporary art world, to travel far and wide to make sure that this, his second consecutive directorship of the world’s most famous and long-standing Biennale of Modern Art, should be noted for its capacity to share his vision of the contemporary art world as part of Marshall McLuhan’s concept of a global village. Studio International previously focused on the fact that the Venice Biennale had attracted the world’s art press in large numbers, and had significantly enlarged the physical reality of the Biennale to include many national pavilions never before present, bringing into play countries which had belonged to the Soviet Union and which now enjoy political independence, and countries from continents far removed from Europe.

When the tragic events of 11 September unfolded to a shocked world in the form of horrific television and press images of New York’s twin towers, memories came back into focus of countless visits to New York in the seventies and eighties, when the Soho district helped to define New York as the world capital for contemporary art – a district where the World Trade Centre’s towers loomed large on the skyline. Now, they are reduced to rubble. Joseph Beuys named these towers after the two surgeon saints, Cosmas and Damian, whose specialty was the grafting of black limbs onto white patients and vice versa. Beuys saw the towers as symbols of racial harmony. They now represent a possible lasting disharmony between the Christo-Judaic and Islamic worlds.

For the last two years, since the Ruskin and Turner exhibition at the Tate Britain, I have been concerned with the life and work of John Ruskin as a precursor of Joseph Beuys. For, like Beuys, Ruskin was concerned not only with art but also with social, economic and moral issues, and with the nature of Europe’s cultural identity. Both were inspired by Venice, the one European city whose very stones manifest the coming together of European and Byzantine cultural identities. Venice depended for its existence on trade with Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, and became a symbol par excellence of a place where East meets West and the areas of Christendom and Islam are conjoined.

On 1 October, I returned to Venice in the fifth month of the Venice Biennale in order to meet Harald Szeemann and to discuss with him his thoughts on the Venice Biennale in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. At the same time, this meeting coincided with the opening of an exhibition questioning the place of the artist in modern society. It was inspired by the life and work of John Ruskin, and was entitled ‘The Witnesses’. It was by Sonia Rolak, a Polish artist who has lived in Venice for many years and who was educated at Goldsmiths School of Art. The exhibition resulted from her investigation into the world of Ruskin and centred on his house at Brantwood in his beloved Lake District.

Sonia Rolak is the first artist in Venice in recent years to work with Ruskinian ideas, and the most telling image in her exhibition is a work entitled ‘Ruskin’s Eyes’. It is in the form of a composite wall painting in honour of Ruskin’s capacity to see the stones of Venice clearly, and, what is more, defend them with his life, and at the same time consider the importance of the various shades of blue which are revealed in the waters of Venice.

Sonia Rolak related these paintings to an installation of sculpture in the form of four white marble stones that are, in fact, boulders from the alpine rivers close to Venice. These stones are in conversation with each other, but they invite each visitor to be involved in their conversation and to consider their own human presence in relation to ‘Ruskin’s Eyes’ through the reflected images made by the mirrored surfaces sliced into the surface of each of the stones.

This exhibition is in a gallery that must be seen as a welcome addition to Venice’s exhibition spaces. It is on the island of the Guidecca, in an area given over to the repairing, building and housing of the many small boats used by the Venetians. This new gallery is appropriately named ‘Ex-Cantieri Navali’. The exhibition was presented under the aegis of the Commune de Venezia, as part of a programme that they presented in collaboration with the Venice Biennale and linked in particular to an exhibition that seems, with hindsight, to have addressed the problems expressed by the tragic events of September 11.

The exhibition, entitled ‘Markers’, brought more that 200 artists and poets together from all over the world to make banners, each measuring two metres by one metre, expressing the intentions of what is called the International Artists Museum. It is a worldwide channel of communication through a growing global network of autonomous art centres – interactive but independently funded. The International Artists Museum came into being during the 1990 exhibition in Lodz entitled ‘Construction in Process Number Three’. It is the only existing independent museum in the world run directly by artists.

The American poet and artist Emmett Williams, a founder member of Fluxus International, has been the Foundation’s President since that time. Every few years the museum organises ‘Construction in Process’ exhibitions. The first ‘Construction in Process’ exhibition took place in 1981 in Lodz before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The seventh expression of this took place in Bydgoszcz in Poland in an exhibition devised for the Millennium year 2000, and was subtitled ‘The Earth is a Flower’. From that, the idea of the Markers Exhibition for the Venice Biennale 2001 was born. It was devised as an outdoor project for Garibaldi Street near the Biennale’s main sites in ‘I Giardini’ and the Arsenale.

The exhibition was first designed to foster ‘Art without Boundaries’, an exhibition addressed to the general public at large. By means of the computer and internet, artists were invited to create new works and dispatch them electronically to a central site where they would be printed as art banners. The central site was that of the Israeli printing firm ‘Aboudi Print’. A professional team was set up in Venice headed by the art historian Giancario Viannello and the poet John Gian. They established connections with the Venice City Council who reacted with enthusiasm from their Department of Youth and Peace Education. The project received business sponsorship through the Israeli Merhav Group of companies.

In relation to the ‘Banners’ exhibition, the Guggenheim invited poets in convocation. The images involved world renowned contemporary artists such as Sol Lewitt, Dani Karavan, Rune Mields, Leon Golub, Laurence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Newton and Helen Harrison and poets such as Thomas Clark, Anselm Hollow and Alan Ginsberg and lesser known poets such as Mahmoud Abu Hashbash from Palestine and Humberto ak’Abal from Guatemala. There were artists from Croatia, Palestine, Israel, South Africa, the Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, China, Yugoslavia, Vojvodina, representing areas of recent conflict.

Sonia Rolak was present at my meeting with Harald Szeemann, to speak to him about her own concerns as an artist domiciled in Venice, regarding how exhibitions can reflect the needs of modern society embattled by the combined onslaught of materialism, environmental pollution and now terrorism. Sonia Rolak’s exhibition exists to remind us that Ruskin spoke not just to Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites but also to Tolstoy and Ghandi. I urged Harald Szeemann to consider the need for the spirit of his Biennale to bless the Edinburgh Festival, as well as the spirit of next year’s Commonwealth Games to help express the fact that the British Commonwealth is evidence of the international brotherhood of mankind, and, indeed, represents an important aspect of the Christo-Islamic cultural, social and political family.

This October, Venice still has many exhibitions to inspire the gallery-goer. Therefore, it is possible to consider Sonia Rolak’s homage to Ruskin and the Venice Biennale in relation to the current exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi – the largest and most comprehensive devoted to the genius of the self-taught artist that the world has come to know as Balthus. His complex but compassionate view of the human condition managed to personify the great tradition of European painting so that it could be identified with that of the age of Modernism. In his 93 years, he contributed more than his fair share to what the world regards as Western civilisation born of the concept of democratic government and the freedom of the individual.