Walking around Venice during biennale events, it is easy to spot projects that blur the line between art and architecture. At the moment there is an exhibition at Palazzo Franchetti that successfully manages to do so.
Presented by Lisson Gallery in collaboration with Berengo Studio, "Genius Loci" (Spirit of the Place; until 23rd November 2014) invites visitors to ponder on the relationship between art and the public realm.
Works of art represent common symbols that help people to identify with a place: sometimes these works enhance or complement a location, becoming in some cases unofficial emblems describing a city.
The works featured - sculptures, photographs, videos, models, drawings and proposals for public projects - tackle the theme of the Latin genius loci, a guardian and protective spirit of a place. The artists involved in this event previously exhibited pieces in public contexts, encountering their audiences and interacting with them while responding to an architectural or urban condition.
Some of the pieces on display at Palazzo Franchetti are symbolically dis-placed and dis-located from the original places where they were first installed and this allows visitors to contemplate and experience the essence of a specific work in another location, Venice.
Each of the 19 artists involved chose their own medium, technique and material to express this relationship with the public realm.
"Genius Loci" opens outside with Daniel Buren's "4 Colours at 3 Metres High" (2014), a walkway inspired by a pergola that plays with colours and outdoor light.
Upstairs there is another work by Buren, "A White Triangle for a Mirror" (2007), that questions identity issues by engaging the spectator and the space, and prompting visitors to see better and more and explore what would not be visible at all.
Further Buren's works in photograph - including the 100 flagpoles with windsocks on the beach promenade of Nieuwpoort, his work at the Grand Palais for Monumenta and for La Capilla in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the geometric set design commissioned by Benjamin Millepied to Buren for a production of Daphnis et Chloé - can be explored in the laboratory room.
Two futuristic tower sculptures by Shirazeh Houshiary - "Spin" (2011) and "Glass Tower" (2014), the former made in anodised aluminium, the latter in lead glass - welcome visitors on the first landing.
Houshiary' largest pieces such as the distorted east window for St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London, made in collaboration with architect Pip Horne, can instead be admired via pictures and models in the laboratory room.
Glass is also the main material employed by Tokujin Yoshioka, Koen Vanmechelen and Joana Vasconcelos.
While Yoshioka's "Rainbow Chair" (2007) is suspended between an interior design piece and a prism-like sculpture emitting a rainbow coloured light, the Belgian conceptual artist came up with a series of glass eggs ("In Captivity - C.C.P.", 2014) produced at Berengo Studio in Venice, that he caged in a steel frame.
Vasconcelos injected all her dark humour in a piece installed outside the main entrance of the exhibition on the first floor. "Glasshouse" (2014) represents indeed a classic plastic playhouse for children, but, being entirely made with Murano glass, the piece loses all its protective and sheltering qualities assuming a new life and meaning, and making visitors stop and ponder about architecture and the public Vs private dichotomy.
Different artists employed different materials: Richard Long opted for mud made with white Cornish clay and tidal river mud from the banks of the Avon in Bristol, Lee Ufan for natural stone and iron, and Lawrence Weiner explored instead a rather ethereal component - language. His experiments with language deconstruction can be admired in one of the main rooms of the exhibition: Weiner uses language as a sculptural material, and, in this case, his words and broken sentences are applied to the ceiling to create a site-specific impalpable architecture.
While Weiner worked with words, Richard Wentworth collected a series of images from his own explorations in Istanbul, Beijing, Spain and London, and occupied his own space by building a makeshift wall.
Visitors more interested in architecture and large public interventions, should allow enough time to walk around the laboratory room, a place where large projects or models of projects like Dan Graham's "Two Cubes/One Rotated" (1985-86) are explored and analysed.
Anish Kapoor's "Non-Object (Door)" (2008) can be admired in another section of the exhibition, but this room features photographs and explanations for a series of projects including "Ark Nova" (2003), the mobile concert hall designed in collaboration with architect Arata Isozaki, the stainless steel sculpture "Cloud Gate" (2004) and "Taratantara" (1999-2000), a PVC sculpture with two funnel-like trumpet bells joined and flaring out at both ends.
One of the works showcased in the laboratory room that could be considered as a piece of performance art with a great impact on society is Pedro Reyes's "Palas por Pistolas"(2008).
Documented via images and a video, the project revolved around Reyes melting down 1,527 guns into 1,527 shovels. Though the project was based in Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with the highest rate of handgun deaths, the shovels were intended to plant 1,527 trees in cities all over the world.
Some pieces by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon and Ai Weiwei are documented via images in the lab room, but selected works can be seen in other spaces inside (and outside...) the palazzo.
Tony Cragg's totemic stainless steel sculptures and towers can be admired via pictures, but his "Hedge" (2010) occupies almost an entire room. The sculpture was inspired by agricultural fences and countryside hedges, and features fiberglass elements recreating sinuously flexible shapes and forms that make it look like an alien organism.
Quite bizarrely the texture of this piece is uncannily similar to the fabric wallpaper of the palazzo and will make many visitors wonder if they restored the entire palazzo to make sure these works perfectly matched with their surroundings.
Images of Richard Deacon's more severe geometric and architectural sculptures - such as his polygonal frames and the staircase-like piece for the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland - are featured in the lab room.
Deacon works with a variety of materials, including wood, steel, marble, clay, vinyl, foam and leather.
His explorations with clay can be admired in his ceramic pieces characterised by softer and flowing shapes that question interior and exterior boundaries.
Many works by Deacon are cast, modelled or made by hand, but the artist likes to reveal in his pieces the logic behind their construction.
Ai Weiwei is the star of the exhibition: images of trees in the laboratory room introduce visitors to the astonishing "Tree" (2009-10), a monumental wooden sculpture that created quite a few problems when it was installed in the room inside the palazzo, but that looks awe-inspiring and goes pretty well with the intricate wooden ceiling inside the room. The sculpture is assembled from trunks, branches and roots of dead trees collected in the regions of southern China.
Weiwei's "Forever" (2014) complements instead the exterior of the palazzo: this modular structure is made with layers of geometrically stacked stainless steel bicycles that hint at the Forever brand of bikes mass-manufactured in Shanghai since 1940 (ths sculpture is also visible from the Accademia bridge).
Ai Weiwei's works aren't the only controversial ones included in this exhibition that also call for social change: Santiago Serra's "World's Largest Graffiti" (2012) comprises a video and a print and represents an act of protest. Sierra engraved with a road grader the letters S.O.S. into the desert outside the Smara Refugee Camp in Algeria to protest at the conditions of the people who have been living in tents for years. This symbolical action was a way to ask for help coming from above rather than from terrestrial forces, and in particular from the Ikonos III Satellite.
The installation is showcased in a room lit up by a monumentally grand Murano glass chandelier in beautiful pastel shades that contrast with the beige of the desert and with the conditions of marginalisation and poverty of the people living in the camp.
Visitors who are into technology and light installations will find a few works to their tastes. Spencer Finch's clever "Night Sky, Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, 1/9/04" (2004) represents through 401 incandescent bulbs a series of molecules of a pigment mix (iron oxide, manganese violet, cobalt blue and titanium white) that matches the colour of the night sky over the Painted Desert.
Tech-expert Tatsuo Miyajima, famous for incorporating light-emitting diodes in his works since the late '80s, employed LEDs, sensors and microcomputers in "Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 15" (2013). The result of a collaboration with artificial life expert Professor Takahashi Ikegami, this work consists in a computer programme generating number sequences that create intelligent "living" organisms.
LEDs were also used by Julian Opie to animate two female figures - "Jennifer Walking 2" (2010) and "Tina Walking 2" (2010).
Though this technology is usually employed for signs and billboards, Opie's characters evoke real people in constant movement around the gardens of the palazzo ("Jennifer" is also visible from the Accademia bridge and the figure looks as if she were going to get a water taxi, a gondola or a vaporetto).
In his seminal volume Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture Christian Norberg-Schulz investigated the presence of the genius loci in three cities, Rome, Prague and Khartoum, and highlighted how they had all managed to preserve it. Quite often the author illustrated his point with external images of buildings, highlighting in this way the aerial view and perspective. "Spirit of the place" invites instead visitors to get within a place or a work of art, discovering through the various forms, materials and media employed the core messages at the bottom of these artistic and architectural interventions.
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