So far we looked at installations at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice that incorporated second-hand garments or dismissed clothes, but it is possible to spot also artworks integrating costumes.
In the Arsenale section there is for example a space - imagine a sort of cabinet - dedicated to "Old Food", a series of works by Ed Atkins that may actually result cryptic and rather cold to some visitors.
Quite a few works are computer generated videos with a male CGI figure (a surrogate for the artist himself) inconsolably crying in a heightened state of distress, or they show a deserted bucolic garden, while in another video there are sandwiches made with slices of human faces or other random human bits and pieces that are constantly being assembled and disassembled.
In the middle of the cabinet there is another installation - "Masses 9-10" (2019) - consisting of two large racks of opera costumes from the archive of the Teatro Regio in Turin.
There are all sorts of garments: from colourful tutus to white monastic robes, from peasant dresses to Elizabethan doublets, while Medieval capes and tunics hang next to thick woolen suits smeared with white chalk.
The artist didn’t do much to these costumes, they are indeed displayed in the same way as they were archived in Turin, on double-height racks, as if the artist had found the racks and had decided to incorporate them in his work.
The costumes in "The Masses" are juxtaposed to the computer-generated animations: they represent the physicality missing in the CGI animation.
At the same time, the costumes represent the loss of physicality as, without the performers who made them alive, they are ghosts made of fabrics hanging limp from the racks.
Besides, the opera costumes lose their storytelling value, as they hang limp and pressed one to the other, occupying a large portion of space.
So there is a lack of life in the "Masses" and in the videos comprising "Old Food", but there is also something else, almost a muted desire from the side of the CGI animation to get the life those costumes had and become operatic, even though for the characters trapped in the CGI loop there doesn't seem to be the same redemption there may be in an opera piece.
Comments