The concept of call and response evokes a dialogue rooted in musicality, a back-and-forth predicated on sharing and reflecting back, developing, and growing a conversation. #callresponse, co-presented by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre, is an ongoing project that developed out of Tarah Hogue’s research on Indigenous feminisms and artistic practice at grunt gallery in 2014.

In collaboration with co-conspirators Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard (their preference for “co-conspirator” or “accomplice,” a specific politicized alternative to “ally” inspired by Jaskiran Dhillon’s “On Becoming an Accomplice,” explained in the stunning exhibition catalogue), this traveling and ever-evolving collection reflects on the specifically institutionalized site of “the gallery,” a series of conversations and interactions with the physical land, its inhabitants and keepers. These conversations center Indigenous women and their practices.

Artists Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory collaborated and conspired with Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff & IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Meagan Musseau, and Tanya Tagaq to create a series of site-specific works that have continued to evolve as an ongoing project, and result in unique gallery exhibitions and across the country. Engaging with the hashtag #callresponse—perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of a modern form of conversational structure and organization—viewers are invited to peek into a much larger and more expansive meta-dialogue.

There is a sort of starkness in the placement of the various works in the gallery, and a bareness to some of the pieces themselves. This creates an intensity and offers a complex intimacy that permeates the entire exhibition. For example, Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch’s Reconciliation with the Land and Waters, is a physical record of ceremonies the artists led at gatherings on Indigenous governance across Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan in 2015 and 2016, and now exists in the gallery in absence. The robe was gifted to the artists, who are part of the Onaman collective, by the Grand Chief, and it was returned to the artists in support of their community work. 

The simplicity and deceptive familiarity of Ursula Johnson and Meagan Musseau’s collaborative audio-based endurance piece Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings belies the complexity and sheer breadth of the work. A map affixed to the gallery floor notes the “SMU Art Gallery, Halifax NS” as a sort of starting point for a journey charted across 13 maps tacked up along the gallery wall, which ends at “East Bay Beach, Cape Breton Island, NS.” Through a pair of headphones, the viewer is able to listen to Johnson’s “song from and for the land.”

Perhaps the most arresting pieces are Williamson-Bathory’s video-based works, which visually dominate the gallery with their size and activity, and are unflinchingly, almost confrontational, in their blend of intimacy and engagement. Timiga nunalu, sikulu (My body, the land and the ice) features the artist reclining nude upon a vast icy landscape, a classical art pose and composition which is disrupted by the artist’s use of “uaajeerneq,” a Greenlandic mask dance that plays “with elements of fear, humour, and sexuality.” The collaboration here features Inuk multidisciplinary artist Tanya Tagaq performing a contemporaneous vocalization, and in the moment a soundtrack of sorts for both the original video, and to Williamson-Bathory’s transformation into uaajeerneq, culminating in a physical performance between the women that exudes a sort of intimate kinship, and a demand to the audience to “actively experience, witness and remember.”

Maria Hupfield’s “call” to conversation is demonstrated simply by Bag, an industrial felt replication of Anishinaabe floral beadwork designs that the artist carried throughout a number of her performances. Post-Performance / Conversation Action is Hupfield’s adaptation of the highly institutionalized artist talk into a form of intergenerational community building, centering Indigenous women.

Feet On the Ground, the participatory group performance response developed with IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, challenges the viewer to examine their role in decolonization, explicitly asking “do you want to surrender or take action?” In the gallery, the physical evidence of this active collaboration (surveyor’s tape, tiny foam tools, stark black banners) lays on the floor, and the silence of the objects highlights the dynamic human component necessary to enact.

Tania Willard’s Only Available Light is perhaps most explicit in its confrontation of the manipulation and exploitation of Indigeneity by settler colonialism, something it achieves with brilliant simplicity. By placing selenite crystals in front of a projector, the silent 1928 film The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia, originally commissioned by the National Museum of Canada, Willard disrupts the transmission of the images and forces the audience to reconsider what they’re viewing. This disruption is underscored by Leela Gilday’s sound composition, and the placement of these crystals with a birch bark basket “rescued” from an antique store, and glass Listerine bottles salvaged from Willard’s reserve. The bottles are filled with seed beads and digital prints of the selenite windows of a Roman cathedral, and illustrate children on their way to residential school.

#callresponse cannot simply be understood as a response to reconciliation or a catalogue of resistance. Rather, it is an ongoing project of engagement that rejects marginalization in favour of an exploration and prizing of Indigenous women artists, and the impact of their work.

As Hogue explains, “We wanted to represent the fullness, the critical, vital abundance of Indigenous women’s artistic practices, who are leading conversations and actions for the future. It’s also important to say, however; that the invitations were all premised on a consideration of long-term engagement within the artists’ respective communities while recognizing that the ‘community’ would also be different in each case. It’s really that on-the-ground work that brings all of these artists together.”

Kathleen M. Higgins is a K’jipuktuk (Halifax) based arts writer, public servant, and dog aunt.

Detail of exhibition catalogue cover for “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia”

The exhibition We are the Griots—curated by Jade Peek—may have opened to the biggest snowstorm all season this past February at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, but it still saw a lot of press coverage. Jade was on the cover of The Coast weekly paper. The article billed We are the Griots as the first exhibition of “solely Black Nova Scotian artists in Halifax since the 1990s.” I was stunned — Had there really not been another exhibition dedicated to Black Nova Scotian art since the 90’s?

So I went digging, looking up the late 90’s in the Visual Arts Nova Scotia archives, and low and behold, it was on the cover of the Spring 1998 issue, Volume 20 Number 1: In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia. The cover image is bold, graphic and visually striking. It features a painting of three figures in simple, but expressive white lines on a black thickly textured background. Inside, there’s an article by curator/artist Pamela Edmonds, stressing the historical importance of the exhibition. “In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia represents the first-ever attempt to represent and contextualize the tradition of Black Nova Scotian art making in the province,” she writes. In my research since, I have learned that David Woods—who co-curated the show with Harold Pearse—represents just one individual out of just a handful of Black curators who have been working in Halifax to this day, continuing the push for the self representation of Black Nova Scotians in visual art.

“A great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia … of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” —David Woods

Volume 20 / Issue 1 / Spring 1998 / “In this Place” cover

Edmonds describes the exhibition as a “groundbreaking effort to provide a comprehensive overview of a sector of the art making community rarely shown or acknowledged.” She points to a history of exclusion and segregation in Nova Scotia. In the article she interviews the co-curators David Woods, a local artist and community organizer, and Dr. Harold Pearse, the academic dean at NSCAD, about their inspiration for the exhibit, their relationship and the project. As Woods explains, the title of the exhibition originates from his poem Abode, which references the experience of the early Black settlers and the land the government allotted them in Nova Scotia—described as
“barren, rocky soil or swampland.” For Pearse, MSVU Art Gallery’s 1983 show The Past in focus: a community album before 1918 : photographs from the Notman Studio served as his inspiration for the exhibition, as well as providing him with his first exposure to the depth of art created by Nova Scotia’s Black communities.

Pearse explains that even though many Black kids from the community spaces are very interested in visual art, their enrollment at NSCAD has always been very low. In the article, Pearse points to Woods, a self taught multi-disciplinary artist and an active community member, as the perfect link to try to bridge the two worlds of the Black art communities and the institutionalized White art world.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia” 

Pearse and Woods discuss how surprised they all were by the amount of Black Nova Scotian artists that they uncovered in their interview with Edmonds. When they began planning their exhibition, they were thinking about featuring only a few artists—but that all changed by the end of Wood’s research, which  consisted of his unorthodox, but essential curatorial method of driving to several rural Black communities around Nova Scotia and literally knocking on doors and asking questions. Woods brought back over 200 images of work, which they narrowed down to 100 pieces to show by 45 artists. As the exhibition grew, the curatorial team realized it deserved more than just a two-week show at the gallery. They decided to take the exhibition beyond Halifax, touring to three other galleries in the province.

In Halifax they planned several special events, connecting Black artists to the larger art community. These events included a panel discussion and performance event with guests including: Jim Shirley, one of the first Black artists to exhibit in Nova Scotia; Audrey Dear Hesson, the first Black graduate of NSCAD in 1951; local photographer and filmmaker Silvia Hamilton; and painter Crystal Clements. They also screened a film about celebrated African American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, gave youth workshops and tours of NSCAD, and provided a funding information session with the Canada Council and the Nova Scotia Arts Council (all made possible by $40 000 of grants obtained from the Nova Scotia Arts Council, Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts by Black Artist Network Nova Scotia (BANNS) and Peter Dykhuis, who was the director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the time). After the tour concluded, they were able to produce a full size catalogue from the NSCAD Press.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art In Nova Scotia”

Pearse’s curatorial statement in the catalogue includes well-researched tidbits of information about the experience of Black artists in Halifax, such as the fact that Hesson received the Lieutenant-Governor’s prize and “taught for the school’s Saturday morning children’s art classes, at the YMCA’s boys club and to an adult education group in Africville.” But he points out that due to a shortage of employment opportunities, Hessen could never obtain steady employment in the public school system. Pearse continues with a sparse, but steady history of Black exhibitions and artists in Halifax in the 80’s and 90’s, a time when NSCAD grads and Black artists like Donna James were showing black and white photographs (Eight Men in a Big House, 1989), Buseje Baily was making videos about the female black body (Body Politic, 1992) and Derril Robinson showed his pottery in a joint exhibition with Andrea Arbour (Facades, 1995).

Woods’ statement provides a much more sobering reflection on the presence of Black artists in Nova Scotia. He notes that “a great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia …the void of knowing that there were no exhibitions of local Black artists featured in the provinces’ major galleries; of knowing that Black artists were unfamiliar with each other’s work; of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” He wanted to challenge himself to try and fill that void with an exhibition that could change the status quo.

 Beverly Bowden’s “Picking Strawberries” (1997), oil on canvas

When I spoke with Woods, I asked him what he thought, almost twenty years later, about the impact that In this Place had made. He talked a lot about an increase of visibility. “All of the establishment galleries offered shows to the NSCAD people for the next four or five years,” he pointed out. Woods himself has continued curating and one of his longest touring exhibitions has been The Secret Codes, which started touring 2012, where he featured narrative and pictorial quilts exhibited quilts made by African Nova Scotian quilt makers. These quilts are the result of a collaboration of Woods’ drawings and the talent of quilt makers like Myla Borden of the Vale Quilters, a group from New Glasgow, who have been working together since In this Place showed the pictorial quilt Passages. As well,  he recalled MSVU Art Gallery invited Shirley back to the Mount to have a retrospective called Jim Shirley Returns: The Art of James R. Shirley (2000). Woods himself also worked as an Associate Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from 2006-2007, where he helped to develop the AGNS’ African Canadian Art Initiative. During his short time there he helped to bring Mary Bendolph: Gees Bend Quilts and Beyond to the gallery in 2007 and worked on acquiring work by early Black Atlantic painter Edward Mitchel Banister. He confidently states after all of this work things can “no longer go back to the status quo.”

I’d like to believe that the status quo has changed in the 19 years since In this Place opened. Researching this historically seminal exhibition in Halifax’s art history has opened my eyes to the work and struggle of Black visual artists and curators in the very White dominated art world of Halifax. A staggering number of galleries in Canada still almost exclusively give solo shows to white artists (according to statistics from a 2015 Canadian Art study). We are the Griots represents one in just a small fraction of Black artists and curators living and working in our province. In this Place blew the door open in terms of self-representation for Black artists in Nova Scotia, but that door is still there and it’s primed to be blown away completely.

In the next two parts of this series, I will be looking closer at the history and context of Black exhibitions in Halifax previous to In this Place, and report the prolific work of the author of the VANS article that started me on this journey, writer, artists, art administrator and curator, Pamela Edmonds in the years following In this Place.

More: Looking Back: Our version of “women in the arts” in the 70s

More: Get to know our research intern

KAYLEE MADDISON: What does the “house” personally mean to you?

PAM HALL: I use the word “house” as both noun and verb—as a noun, it signifies a specific place, location, site for home, for work, for play and from which to be in community. Most simply, it is a building to live in and at its most complex, it is something that must be built together with others, and that holds the history of all who have inhabited it. As a verb, to house means to give shelter to, to accommodate, to hold or contain its inhabitants, their memories, actions and histories.  The works in this show are in conversation with all of those meanings.

KM: All of the works being displayed have never been shown in St. John’s, Newfoundland, your home, before. What does it mean to you to bring these works home?

PH: It is profoundly meaningful to bring this work home, to share with others in the place I have been living and working for 40 years. When one works “away” as much as I do, unfolding stories and conversations in other communities across Canada or the U.S., many people at home have no idea about the work one is doing—the questions one is following. It matters deeply to me to open these conversations here—to step back into conversation with my own geographic community and those within it who have helped me make it home.

KM: Many pieces in the exhibit are created through collaborations with the public. Is there anything in particular that has surprised you about how people contribute and interact with your ideas?

PH: I have been working with others as collaborators and participants for many years, so am no longer surprised by the generosity, engagement and willingness of others inside and outside the art community to lean in to some of these projects as my partners. I am continually sustained by their contributions and am always reminded that there are many, many ideas that cannot be realized alone.  I am not surprised by the amazing contributions of others in these community-engaged projects, but am always profoundly grateful for their engagement and support. One of my favourite elements in HouseWork(s) is the names of contributors and collaborators listed on the walls throughout the gallery. They are all there in the space with me.

KM: You’ve noted before that the collaborative types of pieces you create are often an example of an artist having to let go from controlling the work. What do you find most difficult or challenging about not knowing what’s going to happen to your initial idea?

PM: Letting go of control is something most artists learn from working with unruly materials or in sites and locations where wind, water or weather are part of the environment. As someone who has worked outdoors on site for many years, I had been dancing with elements I could not “control” for a long time, so moving towards working with other people seemed like a natural evolution. The challenges of working with others, where your own decisions are not the only ones at play, keep me nimble, humble and responsive. It reminds me that I am not imposing my will on the universe, but rather am dancing with and within it. No matter how my initial idea evolves or transforms, I am always learning how to realize it as aesthetically, as effectively and as evocatively as I can.

KM: What do you most enjoy about collaborating with the public and those outside of the art community?

PH: The learning, the dialogue and the participation in conversations larger than those within the art world, these are what I most value in collaborative work with artists and non-artists. I adore people who know “stuff”—whether they are scientists or fishers, doctors or dancers, bakers, knitters, boat-builders, mapmakers or cooks. It is privilege and pleasure to work with other knowledge-holders. I also am deeply moved when total strangers in diverse “publics,” step into participation in a project where it is clear that I could not make the same work alone. It is a great gift as well as a significant responsibility to make visible and acknowledge the labour of others in the artmaking process.

KM: The exhibit includes works from the past 10 years. Over those years how has social media changed the way you engage with communities?

PH: There are three projects in HouseWork(s) that were enabled by social media and electronic communication and thus the internet has extended dramatically both my “communities” of conversation and also the locations in which I might put my work into encounter with others.  Over the last decade, social media in particular, has also enabled me to be in dialogue personally and professionally with a much larger and more diverse “village.” It allows me to live on an island in a very specific cluster of communities and to avoid feeling isolated, disconnected or out-of-touch. For someone like me, who is essentially a hermit—social media invites me into good company and reminds me I am living in a world bigger than my house and garden, my neighbourhood, my province, my nation or even my species.

KM: How do you believe the combination of creating both solitary and collaborative works has helped you grow as an artist?

PH: To quote two memory cloths from Marginalia (my four-year long collaboration with Margaret Dragu, represented in the show by The History House): “Solitude keeps her sane” and “Relation keeps her civil.” 

My solitary practice feeds me, keeps me fuelled.  It is the place I do my research, keep my material and conceptual investigations strong and nimble, and figure out how I want to materialize my meaning and where I want to set-it-to-work in the world. My community-engaged collaborations or social projects are where I try to open dialogues and step into conversations with a larger world than my own creative expression—where I try to make the meaning matter, or set it to work. Sustaining both types of practice has helped me grow immensely, not just as an artist but as a person who believes deeply in the work that art might do in a world that needs many voices engaged in building sustainable and inclusive futures for more than just some of the inhabitants of the planet that houses us all.

Both kinds of practice then, invite me to learn and listen deeply, to be in conversations across difference and discipline, and to remember that—whether in a single community or the larger world—we do not build the house alone.

Venice: “Kamikaze Loggia” at The Georgian Pavilion
Photo by Levan Maisuradze

I was introduced to a world I hardly knew, when I travelled to Italy for the 55^th Venice Biennale for the Spring media preview. Not that I was some country bumpkin when I stepped off the train in the Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia, but I sensed how much of a foreigner in a foreign land I was. To tell the truth, my first impression of Venice coming across the viaduct from the mainland was the clouds. The clouds and the sky—the tremendous, voluminous cumulus clouds lying on a distant horizon and silhouetted in the perfectly clear light blue of the sky. That natural beauty was truly breathtaking.

Very soon after, I had a laugh at the irony. Venice is a city of artifice, the social and cultural equivalent to Disneyland. Whatever its history, it is a truly unnatural place now functioning simply to entertain and delight. That’s probably not a bad thing in itself, and I can understand how Luigi Barzini in a New York Times article could describe it as “undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man”[sic]. It’s like a place constructed entirely for the benefit of our aesthetic sensibilities having banned most cosmopolitan realities to the mainland—well, they do pick up garbage but in a way that is so human scale that it’s more cute and entertaining than real.  In Venice, masks are like North American baseball caps and fantastical ones can be found in shops on virtually any Venetian street. Disguise and artifice abound. A city of sensory delight. Of aesthetic delight. It is little wonder that every other year it becomes the site of one of the biggest art shows in the world. Art and artifice are woven into the essential fabric of the city making it a high end Disney World!

I had three days to see the Biennale—that would seem enough time to see an exhibition if the Biennale were an exhibition, but it is a gaggle of exhibitions in a bunch of places. There is the historic Giardini section that houses many of the original national pavilions; thirty different buildings including a very huge one that housed Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, or, in English translation, The Encyclopedic Palace. Il Palazzo is the big transnational, trans-historical curatorial exploration by Massimiliano Gioni, the associate director of New York’s New Museum, who was picked by the Biennale’s powers-that-be to perform as the 2013 Biennale curator. Those power brokers, like most, are not entirely transparent, although hardly for a moment was I unaware that power and art are relatives and that money is a dear relative of both.

To recount. In the Giardini  there are 30 exhibitions. The Biennale continues down the tree-lined Viole Giuseppe Garibaldi and around a couple of Venetian corners to the truly spectacular, even in the rain, Arsenale where Il Palazzo continued in what seemed like a mile long building – and it may be! – as well as another sixteen national pavilions. The Arsenale spreads over 110 acres and was the historic heart of Venetian power and “one of the earliest large-scale industrial complexes in history”—in Venice! It continues today as a not-much-in-evidence naval base and, of course, a site for the Biennale every two years. Trying to find a bathroom in the rain did not leave me much space for reflection, yet I did wonder about art as perhaps a poor relation to spent power today. Whatever the answer, the Biennale’s sites enforced some reflection on the relationships of power, money and aesthetic objects. Real power is in evidence, but shadowy, and perhaps not really real.

To again recount, there are in the Arsenale another 17 exhibitions. At times any one “exhibition” seemed like it might actually be more than one and 17 certainly felt like an underestimation. There are so many hours of looking and so many miles of walking—the Biennale has a total of 47 exhibitions, which it’s easy to walk through without necessarily stopping to see. In fact, it was on the third day and several rooms into the Arsenale’s portion of Il Palazzo, when I found myself surrounded by a dozen large scale video projects, a swinging, hanging upside down large tree, and 30 or more small conic shaped piles of pungent, colourful spices—this is just one room albeit a very large one that I imagined once housed enough explosives to destroy every last thing in my New Brunswick hometown, maybe even my former hometown Halifax. It was here that I finally said “I QUIT” and sat down to watch a documentary video on feminism while trying to ignore all  the commotion of hundreds of passing people. I don’t know what I missed, how many rooms in Il Palazzo were yet to come. I felt like I were in a three round boxing match and knocked out two minutes into round three. But there may have been two and a half minutes left? In any case, I couldn’t look any further.

What I have passed over is that along with the 47 or so projects in the Biennale site itself, there are over 70 installations and exhibitions that are part of the 55^th Venice Biennale, scattered throughout Venice in galleries, storefronts, empty palaces. Art was everywhere and beyond. I never got there.

Performance by Raphaëlle de Groot at the 55th Venice Biennalle, 2013.
© Raphaëlle de Groot et Galerie de l’UQAM
Photo : Gwenaël Bélanger

I was never able to get, for instance, to the Terra Nova Art Foundation’s installation About Turn: Newfoundland in Venice, Will Gill & Peter Wilkins. How bad is that? How bad! But About Turn was just that little bit too much beyond my endurance, as it required crossing the Canal Grande to the Galleria Ca’Rezzonico after I’d spent hours walking in the rain. I did get to see momentarily the artist Canadian Art called “an artful wanderer in Venice,” Sobey Art Award winner Raphaelle De Groot. She designed a performance that would take her on a gondola ride. It was by chance that I saw the work. Actually, what I mostly saw was her entourage of documentarians running along a canal photographing and otherwise recording her intervention into Venice’s already artful spaces. It was this mass of people that brought my attention to the passing art endeavour. Honestly? It seemed silly. Whatever strength there may have been in the work was vitiated by the drive for documentary evidence.

(Parenthetically, I did see one art star, Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte a.k.a. Orlan. As a performance in and of herself, she stood out from the crowd.)

Unlike Newfoundland’s off site installation, New Zealand’s Bill Culbert was on one of the main travelled walks between my hotel and the Giardini. I passed it at least six times over the three days, but didn’t know about it until I got home. A friend had seen something about the exhibition on the Internet, liked the work and liked that the work of an older artist (Culbert is 78) was featured  in Venice. In my defence it was along this same walkway along the Canale di San Marco where the big private yachts are moored. Big is the wrong word. They were very big. It’s hard not to pay attention to conspicuous wealth when it is splashed in your face. As a result I missed Bill Culbert although perhaps this is a note-to-self that in an environment like Venice and a spectacle like the Venice Biennale, artists need to make more of a public spectacle of themselves—but more smartly than De Groot’s endeavor?  And certainly big, brash and extravagant are encouraged.

Not that Sarah Sze’s installation at the U.S. Pavillion is brash. In its small way, it is big and certainly extravagant, with a vast accumulation of seemingly random everyday things. Thousands of things, higgledy-piggledy, here and there through several rooms and spaces and outdoors, too. A New York Times writer thought it “wacky.” For me it was a matter of more is less, and in this instance so much more was so much less. With all the stuff of Sze’s Triple Point I came out wondering if the emperor had any clothes. I didn’t think so. The current issues of Art Forum and Art in America think otherwise. It’s online. You should see what you think.

Mike Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied After Composing ‘I can’t get not satisfaction’ is the title of one of the small unfired clay sculptures by Peter Fischli and David Weiss from their Suddenly This Overview which includes over 200 small sculptures from 1981 – 2012. I came across this on the second or third floor, one or the other I think, of the Giardini portion of Il Palazzo Enciclopedico.  The work is itself an encyclopedic representation of the world. It works because the artists’ intelligence and discrete humour are continually present. The objects are important not as things in themselves but as what they are, representations. The details were only present insofar as they were necessary. Here less was so much more, and more was so much more than the sum of its parts.

For me the Fischli and Weiss was one of the real highlights of curator Gioni’s otherwise unconvincingly arbitrary encyclopedic enterprise.  That said there were other highlights. Nikolay Bakharev (a Russian photographer showing once again that there are more known serious photographers than known serious photographers). R.Crumb (Crazy man, crazy! Check out R.’s 207-page  version of The Book of Genesis. ). Bruce Nauman (If I had seen it. I missed it!) Eliot Porter (Mainly because I would never have expected to find his nature pictures in this context. Odd but refreshing at a moment when I needed refreshment). Kohei Yoshiyuki (Truly creepy photographs making the case that voyeurism, sex, and photography are inextricably united). There were a few others but I didn’t make mental notes.

In a recent Art Forum I read an interesting article about Georgian artists– the country that was part of the Russia of my youth not the southern American home of CNN. I insisted on finding the Georgian Pavilion. Luckily I did insist because it was at the extremely far end of the Arsenale, the very last “pavilion,” I think. Uncertainty here because by this point I was convinced there was no end. I say “pavilion” because Georgia’s Kamikaze Loggia was a rough-hewn structure temporarily tacked onto the second floor of what seemed like one of the Arsenale’s abandoned buildings. Designed by the artist Gio Sumbadze, it mimicked makeshift housing “remedies” back home. When I first came on this country’s contribution, it was raining. I was beginning to despair as I came around another corner only to encounter a group of perhaps a dozen disheveled men in rough formation. They were doing calisthenics, an odd looking sort of calisthenics to be sure yet with all of the earmarks of group exercise. It was pouring by now, and, to be honest, the guys really looked pretty unathletic! Who knew it was an artwork, a performance, but for the context, the world’s most famous art adventure? They were in fact doing calisthenics with movements based on body motions associated with each of the many religions operating in Georgia. It was a funny sight to begin and with knowledge of its basis in conflicting religions, it became more humourous and sadly absurdist. The Georgians indicated that Dada’s impulses are alive and still effective. We just have to walk a long distance to find them.

The Georgian site had much more to its wildly disperse project. It suggested art energies that had been renewed in a world, perhaps too jaded for its own good? I’m not sure—it was refreshing, nonetheless.  The small DIY publication that accompanied the project was likewise refreshing, though as far as I could see, it was not for sale at the Biennale’s book emporium. I could hold it and read it, because it wasn’t slick in any respect and had a tactile DIY-feel.

Word had gone round, as it evidently does at every Biennale, about the “hot” artworks and artists, and I later found myself standing in line for 15 minutes at the French Pavilion next door to Shary Boyle’s installation at Canada’s Pavilion. It soon became obvious that it would be several hours in line—another day spent lining up in Disney World. Life is too short and, anyway, there was so much to see including a return visit to the Romanian Pavilion, the most unexpected highlight of the Biennale.

Still from An Immaterial Retrospective Of The Venice Biennale by Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş. Photo: John Murchie

The Romanian project by Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus was titled An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale and was accompanied by another modest publication which, sadly and unfortunately, the organizers ran out of on the first day—so unprepared were they for the tidal bore of us art lovers.  Living where I do, it was interesting to read curator Raluca Voinea’s observation in her introductory essay that “the discourse in Romanian culture revolves circularly around issues such as periphery, provincialism, lack of recognition and other complexes.”  It is an essay worth reading as well as the observations by the two artists Pirici and Pelmus especially if you are like I am and know so very little about Romania.

For The Immaterial Retrospective the artists hired performers to continuously present “enactments” of a selection of artworks from the past 100 years of the Biennale. Each day for the six months of the Biennale two sets of five performers will perform works that range from the famous – Picasso’s Guernica from the Spanish Pavilion in 1976 – to the infamous – Jeff  Koons’ painting from his Made in Heaven series from the international Future Dimension exhibition in 1990 – to the not so well-known – ‘an embroidery depicting a boy playing an instrument’ in the People’s Republic if China’s exhibition in 1980. The catalogue of works must number over 100.The performers would “enact” each work as tableaux vivants. Before beginning each, one or another of the five would, in their best English, give a factual description of what was to be presented next rather like a brief catalogue description.  The performers dressed liked the rest of us—casually, informally, each in their own outfit—would come from various parts of the large pavilion space, including from amidst the audience, to enact the artwork. There was no designated stage. There was one space and all of us were in it together. All of us watching, looking and seeing. All of us acting our various roles together.

And it was quiet. I wondered if I was a foreigner in a foreign land after all.