Punta Della Dogana - 0 - 1 - Peggy Guggenheim
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
La vita a Venezia
Judging of my non existing following post about my pretending innocent side of life, huge changes were expecting.
Dirty laundry bag behind, I've moved to Venice La Sérénissime or City of waters, I've swop my underground tube against the vaporetto and my rue Mouffetard appartement for a beautiful palace above charming canals.
On mornings, opera' singers woke me up peacefully as they entertain chinese tourists gondola' stroll and disapperared in the haziness behind punto dei Tolentini.
My lectures at the Ca'Foscari university occupying 90% of my time, I spend my free hours between the - oh god - palaces (where I've already pictured myself a hundred times in ten years with a diamond tiara, a long black dress and high red gloves) of the Gran Canal, the many art exhibitions and other cultural events of the city.
Let's have a look:
Palazzo Grassi - Punta Della Dogana website
These two magical places (the first is an 18th century jewel and the other an industrial heritage storehouse at the crossroad between the Giudeca's canal and the Gran canal) present the François Pinault collection.
As I drive a group study on it I had the chance to meet yesterday all the staff and do a much more detailed visit.
Two years ago I visited Sequence 1 exhibition and it was already amazing. The creme of contemporary art from one room to another, Urs Fischer monumental installation on the centre , Anselm Reyle's fluorescent monochrome and Mike Kelley installation.
The foundation has now taken its legitimacy in the Venitian landscape and won the concession of Punta Della Dogana last year. Mapping the studio is the binary exhibition that the two institutions are sharing, it is supposed to feature the work-in-progress of the world's famous contemporary artists...bla-bla-bla.Most expensive and less risky works of art that's it.Even if there is no link between pieces, the collection is as rich as its owner.You can dance on Nazy's on Piotr Uklański piece and pass through the red blood cell pearls of Felix Gonzales Torres. As you immerse yourself into the superflat painting technique of Takashi Murakami, two steps after you enter into the night life of Bruce Nauman studio. On the first floor of the Punta Della Dogana the Fucking Hell installation of the Chapman brothers bring you back to your childhood with 30 000 nazis plastic soldiers and a Charly to find between them (look for him, he is at the top of a hill painting a naive landscape while facing the horror of the war). Oh and yes I forgot, if you look with caution there is a dinosaur gaving birth to siamese brothers...does that make sens?
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Since I red her biography 5 years ago I have always been fascinated by PG. She was a visionary in her time, she kept falling in love with complicated artists, she got the palace life and the wardrobe I dream every night of and overall the funky sunglasses EVER. After one week in Venice, I run to buy them...ok people look at me like I am some kind of stranger here (Venice is a small small town) but I cannot tell that I am not used to or that I don't like it
Wearing this glasses while I was visiting the collection made me meet the director who thanks me for promoting PG around
A Brancusi bird sculpture, a Duchamp studiocase and a Renée Magritte Empire of light were my top three works. I've never been a big fan of Magritte and I've seen copies of Empire of light a thousand times in books, art history lectures but the real canvas is beyond comparison. The artifical and natural lights struggling in such a poetic way that you never know where Magritte let you: in the darkness of the first plan or in the cloudscapes of the second
Biennale of Architectura
I don't know anything about architecture and if there is one place in the world to appreciate it it should be the Biennale. No hindsights on it I can only tell that contemporary artists should learn from architects how to manage spaces.
Top three:
cloudscape made by german climate engineering firm and japanese firm tetsuo kondo architects explores the poetic nature of artificial cloud
Dancing waters as I nicknamed the work (I can't remember who did it) are a series of hoses dancing with the water pression in the dark. With a beam of light the waterdrop turn into diamonds and the magic occured
The Forty- Part Motet is an immersive sculpturally-conceived sound piece made by Janet Cardiff. She used 40 separately recorded voices played back through 40 speakers. Using recordings of the Salisbury Cathedral choir singing Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (1573) by Thomas Tallis, one of England's most influential Renaissance composers.
It is probably the room where I stayed the longer in the Biennale, I've closed my eyes in the centre of the speakers and let the sound create an architecture around me.
Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti - Stanley Kubrick Photography
Long before he became the filmmaker we all know, Kubrick was a photographer. Starting as the teenarger the exhbition traces how he captured the mood of his times. The exhibtions shows 200 pictures (and is really small) but no fault. Every series underline how Kubrick was meticulous and how he framed his visions.
Two series were stunning: the first was on a 12 years old shoe-shine boy in NY and the other one on the dark side of the circus industry
The Biennale du Kitsch
The first sense of the Kitsch word is representation. Thus the exhibition organizes along the real nature of the concept 30 figurative artists.
Odd Nerdrum and Helene Knoop entered in my A-list of favourite figurative painters directly!
Many other exhibitions done, I have also attend two operas at la Fenice and one classical concert, being to Murano, San Michele cimetry, visited Scuolas and churches... but I am tired to write it down
With the gap between my last post and this one, the suspens lies in what will be the next one.
Maybe I will be the first astronaut riding the Mars Dunes or just an alcoholic surviving in a flat her brother and sister are sub-leasing for her.
Aliénor.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Images of summer 2010
July 2010: a cocktail of trips with friends
Let's have a look!
+ Flower power party
For this event I borrowed my mother dress (my favourite shop!), a lagon blue Tara Jarmon two-pieces dress. I remember spending hours looking at it without the courage to try it on; with my aspirin-tablet-skin-color I must avoid these fantasies but with one week of complete cooking in the South of France it was perfect!
+ Ibiza for 24 hours (again)
There is something special about Ibiza, as soon as you touch the ground (After one hour of total fear as I am a plane-phobic and an even more jet-plane-phobic combined with a strong claustrophobia) you entered in another dimension. Somewhere between the hippie era and the seventies. People are relaxed, often drunk and social links interweave as spiderwebs as you toast your glass with a total stranger. We went to La Leche party at the Amnesia Club, slept at the Ocean drive hotel (just to remind I am David Lynch first fan) and spent the day at the Blue Marlin Beach before taking our plane where I had the nicest discussion ever with a german pilot who explained me eveything I need to know about 'these strange noises in the rear-end'
+ St Tropez
As I was writing my thesis during the summer, I avoided St Tropez from the to-do list but at the last minute I changed my mind and packed my stuff. This changing mind was helped by a text message from my german ex-boyfriend who was at St Tropez for the weekend. The weekend was great, Caves du Rois on saturday night and Nikki Beach the next day where I, as I did last year, customized the Nikki Beach shirts for my friends. My german thing was totally disappointing. It is strange how you can transform a standard tasteless guy into a zouper (as german likes to say) man-to-have with only memories. Eurk!
Oh God!! I really look like a superficial slut, I will try to be a better girl in my next article helped with family weekends, and working hours that constituted the august days I have been through...
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Yesterday night I had to leave early my class of Sex, Violence and politics- while very interesting- to run to the theater to see the most famous piece of Samuel Beckett : Waiting for Godot. Considered as the most prominent work in the Theatre of the Absurd movement I never had the chance to see a representation. And I quickly realized how lucky I was - once again- to see it in London with amazing actors such as Ian Mc Kellen. Oh god!! that's how you distinguish a good performer everytime he plays a role in the Lord of Rings, in X-men or Estragon in Beckett's he is his character, his spectrum of representations is so large that he is never assigned to one kind of character.
Synopsis: Waiting for Godot is a two acts piece and tells the history of Estragon and Vladimir waiting for someone named Godot. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide.Their waiting is interrupted by the passing through of Pozzo and his heavily-laden slave Lucky. At the end of the act , a boy arrives, purporting to be a messenger sent from Godot, to advise the pair that he will not be coming that evening but surely tomorrow. During Vladimir's interrogation of the boy, he asks if he came the day before, making it apparent that the two men have been waiting for an indefinite period and will likely continue to wait ad infinitum. After the boy departs, they decide to leave but make no attempt to do so, an action repeated in Act II.
Throughout Waiting for Godot, Beckett introduces religious, philosophical, classical and biographical references. The play is a mix of comedy and pathos which I found the most interesting feature of the piece. People in the audience had strange attitudes especially when came the time to laugh, sometimes they just laugh when I woud never think about it. While watching the piece you are torn between laughable scenes and dramatic ones. For example when Estragon and Vladimir think about suicide at the end of Act II by hanging themeselves on the tree (only piece of the deco) but have no rope, Estragon undoes his belt and looses his pants. The only people I sw laughing felt quickly guilty to do so. I had this impression that everyone was waiting for a signal to express their emotions.
Aliénor.
Brighton ruby clouds
I was in Brighton this saturday for the second time since I live in London( it's only at one hour by train) and I have to tell that this city has an inexplicable charm. I was with Nina and her cousin, two angelic swedish beauties, that probably have bewitched Apollo and forced him to wake up his erratic sun.
Thus, a beautiful day with creamy clouds and big blue sky windows under which we strolled all day long.
After taking a breath on the beach face to sea (I haven't seen it since 1month and a half what a releif!!)that looked like silver films we entered in the old town. What is amazing there is that it can look like all those murky sea side stations, empty by the winter but, on contrary, we find an authentic atmosphere very popular and bohemian.
From one lane (name of the streets) to another we can hear an handsome twenty years old singer with a magical voice, teenagers with their own personal styles (very cultivated in Brighton), little shops of vynils,candies, lomography, books, secret markets at the end of small blind alley and above all fabulous vintage shops.
In London vintage shops or antiques markets are often very expensive and sometimes a little bit fake as they present stands or product that come directly from India or Taïwan, in Brighton you don't have any doubts about it and you can buy a trendy 60's coat (as my friend Nina did) for almost nothing.
If one day I have enough money to buy secondary houses everywhere, I will invest in a tiny colour house on the top of Brighton's hill which I will furnish with antiques Bazaaar and not even one same object.
Aliénor.
Andrew Wyeth : the floating dream
Day Dream (1980)
Otherworld (2002)
Wind from the Sea (1943)
Christina's World (1948)
Andrew Wyeth is an american painter.
Wyeth’s style and subject-matter changed little throughout his career: he mostly painted farms, rural landscapes of the deepest villages of the world most powerful nation.
Travelling very little, he spent his life almost entirely in the Maine and Pennsylvania regions of the USA. Althought he is very popular in the USA, he is not really represented in European museums. But even for us, that have been raised with the little house on the prairie or Dr Queen Medecine woman, these accessible paintings evoke some mythical rural dreamed past, striking a powerful chod in the collective pysche.
I like painters that are interested in recatching the past, Wyeth was (he died last year) a contemporary but seems to have painted this scene a century ago. I don't want to make any stupid reference but sometimes in his way of presenting human body in a contorted nature he reminds me Caspar David Friedrich.
Frau am Fenste (1822)
There also something poetic in the fact that the people, the farms, the field he have chosen to paint are always the same through his life, the process is very slow. Sometimes he choose not to represent human figures but just traces or represent them turning their backs to the viewer.
To see Wyeth's work : Moma Museum New-York and Philadephia Museum of Art's have the two biggest collections.
Aliénor.
As One at The Royal Ballet : Who said going to the Opera was boring???
Leaving in London since september and using the tube in my almost everyday-run to-the-university, I was kind of attract with the sexy visuals -I recognize few times later- of the Royal Opera house. I am not used to go to the opera, although the concept is really classy and trendy I decided then to see what it was all about.
Few informations taken before going there As one is the latest work of The Royal Ballet's young choregrapher Jonathan Watkins. It is a 30-minute piece that had its premiere on 19 February 2010 just two days after my birthday and what a gift!!!
As one has a specific narrative outline that anchors the action in the contemporary urban landscape. One scene takes place in a domestic kitchen. Another in a sitting room as a dysfunctional couple drearily watches television, arguing over the remote control.
Another is an urban 'dance off' with a pairs of trainers thrown up onto telephone wires
The choregrapher says that he was inspired by watching a bloc of flats from the outside, witnessing so many people inhabiting in separate places, side by side, without connections.
The action is divided into five 'slices of life' representing typical urban living patterns : from the sociable to the isolated.
Obviously that lise-en-scène clearly reminded me the video I made last year, and what is funny is that I used the same explanation to describe my inspiration and it's perhaps why I was so emotionally touched.
Covent Garden, London WC2E9
19 february - 4 march 2010
Aliénor.
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