I'm in a former convent in Venice
looking at a Monmouthshire wood, there are numbers painted on the trees, and
this is intercut with a young woman in a red dress circling the trees, her hand
reaching out for the trunks. After a while I realise the numbers are counting
down, and I start to intuit the meanings behind these images.
Helen Sear's “the rest is smoke...”
is a rumination, a distillation on the temporary nature of existence which is
currently being exhibited at Santa Maria Ausiliatrice for Wales at the Venice
Biennale. The title comes from an a tiny Latin inscription circling a recently
snuffed out, still smoking candle in a painting of St Sebastian by Andrea
Mantegna that hangs in Ca’ d’oro on the Grand Canal. Roughly translated as
“Nothing is stable if not divine, the rest is smoke”.
It starts with a big flashy (in both
senses of the word) video installation entitled “In the company of trees”.
Visit a beech wood on a sunny day and you'll recognise that flickering, as the
light penetrates the canopy of thin-fingered branches their leaves forever
moving on the breeze.
Life is embodied in the form of the
young woman in a red dress circling trees in a wood. The red numbers on tree trunks
counting down to zero are marks for felling, the death of the trees. Stills of
the young woman, the trees and the red painted numbers are interwoven in a
palimpsestic projection. It hints at and builds to a bigger picture of
something concerned with our own and our environment’s temporality. And that's
perhaps another concern of the former ’temple’ in which it is situated.
In the Pre-Raphaelites, who’s work
Sear’s has been likened, red is the colour and symbol for lust. That's not the
case here. Sear’s use of red symbolism indicates youth and vitality and perhaps
the freedom of liberation, which is in stark in contrast to the inherently male
gaze of those ’crazy’ Victorians.
All photography is perhaps a ghost
story. The effect here is something akin to a multiple exposure broken down to
its constituent parts and reassembled to merge and flicker in unexpected ways.
That figure ghosts in and out of the frame, merges with it and, at times
disappears in a calming, natural interlude. Yet the inexorable path to zero, to
our and the trees’ imminent demise, soon resumes to haunt us once again.
The exhibition is made up of five
rooms, some of which feel like an afterthought. I don't necessarily mean that
as a criticism; although it doesn't hold together as a complete whole, it does
represent the piecemeal way the human mind works. Sear talks about breaking the
narrative to form a greater whole. This isn't storytelling, that's not complete
story of the way visual art works, we are dealing with ghosts after all.
As we exit the first room with the
main video projection there's a fine quote on the wall of an anteroom by John
Berger relating to how people have historically measured themselves against trees.
In height for example or in the mimicry of trees in columns and there's plenty
of the latter in Venice and supposedly in the building which houses the
exhibition (it was too dark to see them).
The next room, perhaps the least
convincing, contains the fairground like attractions of a (computer generated?)
reflection of trees moving in a pool and a video diorama of birds feeding at a
bird-table. This small scale acted as something of a relief after the big brash
projection, but I found myself wanting to move on, perhaps too quickly. Size
subconsciously imparts importance and even if we know better, we sometimes
accept its message.
Next, a spectacular sized black and
white photograph of trees stacked-up horizontally after felling. It's the end
of their existence as living things and it is printed onto perhaps fifty narrow
metal strips leant against the wall of an otherwise monochrome room. We’re
reminded of Berger’s words once again as the plates represent upright, vertical
trees or perhaps planks in both size and scale. The focal point is always on
the cut part of the trees, and it's as if the trees have left an impression on
the metal that felled them.
Anyone who's used ’layers’ in
Photoshop will also know a ’stack’ as an inherent part of that process of
creation, this also relates to the video editing process of ’In the company of
trees’ and indeed the creation of this piece itself. The city of Venice is also
built on piles of wood, trees driven into the mud to form its precarious
foundations, so another link becomes apparent.
The penultimate room has photographs
of greened, mossy stumps and that final number zero rendered as a red circle.
At first it feels like a full stop and unconvincing as either document or
commentary. But after a short while I realised that it works in contrast to the
monochrome stack in the previous room and that the colours seem to hum in
relation to one another.
It's in the final room where the
exhibition becomes whole again. A single image backlit in yellow illuminates
the small room. It's an image of a field of oil-seed rape, clear felled of
trees, that has been overlaid with a second image of twigs which we are told
mimic the arrows piercing Saint Sebastian in the painting by Mantagne. Those
twigs are red again, referring back to the red dress of youth and vitality and
the numbers in the video projection. But these are now the red of pain and
suffering, the canonisation or sanctification of the trees and hints at a
possible afterlife in the religious sense. It’s an image that illustrates
absence more than the substance of what it depicts. We’re in the realm of
phantoms, ghosting again.
Before I conclude I have to admit to
feeling somewhat conflicted by the sheer expense of this enterprise. Wales’
funding of £400,000 seems like a lot of money for one photography exhibition in
the context of the generality of public funding for photography in my home
country.
The (otherwise excellent) book
accompanying the exhibition credits the involvement of 38 people other than the
artist. I certainly don't believe either artists or curators or gallerists
should be compelled to work for free, far from it, but I do question a cast of
that size and the funneling of so much funding into one event.
How do we measure the efficacy of
arts spending if it's not either in support of individual or groups of artists
and the community in which they work? I’d question if it is “of contemporary
relevance to Wales", that oft repeated line, a catch all for rejection of
public funding with which so many artists are painfully familiar? Of course it
isn't, it’s universal, it is addressing the bigger picture, and is probably
better for it.
It should be noted that much of the
funding will come from the British Council and presumably European sources.
It's not from the photography budget per se, but has gathered around itself
funding from other sources. Maybe this is more of an illustration of how
generally photography is treated as a second-class citizen in public funding,
but I seriously doubt any of the other arts are accustomed to such generosity.
The exhibition will tour Wales after it has completed its six-month run in
Venice. Also - and this is important - it is free to enter, unlike the eye
watering €25 a head to enter the main Arsenale/Giardini sites of the Biennale.
We also shouldn't forget that the
main curators Ffotogallery (the “national development agency for photography
and lens based media in Wales”) are, for once, promoting an artist working in
Wales, something they have been widely criticised for failing to do with
sufficient frequency.
The Venice Biennale seemingly
attracts funding like almost nowhere else. To put Wales’ £400k into context;
the brand new building for the Australian Pavilion alone cost an astonishing
AS$7million from “philanthropic sources”. The exhibition inside was excellent,
incidentally, but have we gone a little mad?
That main Giardini/Arsenale area is
only a tiny fraction of what comes under the umbrella of the Biennale; the
whole city is seemingly one big gallery (and this in a city already stuffed
full to overflowing with galleries and churches bursting with old masters).
From opulent palazzos on the Canale Grande to disused churches and little rooms
off little explored ’calle’, almost all of the remaining Biennale is entirely
free to enter. And it is a wonderful thing, if only more cities had so much
ambition. For that reason I'm pleased the Wales ’pavilion’ is on the outside of
the main site, it's more democratic, more accessible and free.
Having said all that Sear’s “the rest
is smoke...” is another wonderful thing. It is compelling, intriguing,
perceptive and profound in a way that so much of the other art I saw at the
Biennale simply wasn't (though not all). So congratulations should properly be
made to those involved.
I'd urge you to go and see it when it
returns home. Sear’s “the rest is smoke...” genuinely steps up to the big table
of the arts. If it sometimes fails to measure up to its own ambition, this is
perhaps because that ambition is so great. And I'm not about to criticise that
when we need more work with eagerness and commitment to stretch our minds and
helps us see anew. Sear brings a depth to her rumination on the landscape and
our relationship with it that I can barely remember encountering before. It should
be on your must see list if you have any interest in art, the landscape and our
short stay on this little blue planet.
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| St Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna, courtesy of Wikipedia |
