Watermarked

Abstract

Positioned somewhere between fiction and critical reflection, this piece draws inspiration, first, from Gonzalez-Foerster's 2008 Tate Turbine Hall installation TH.2058. In this she speculated upon London being subject over years to ceaseless rain and flooding. Projecting fifty years into the future, the Turbine Hall was turned into a Noah's Ark-style sanctuary and an archive of key cultural artefacts of western civilisation. Meanwhile, Alfred Jaar's installation Venezia Venezia for the Venice Biennale in 2013, presented an exact scale model replica of the Biennale's Giardini galleries complex, a lush neighbourhood of national pavilions laid out neatly like foreign embassies in a formation that exudes early 20^th century western colonialist power. Jaar's Giardini model lies sunken in a large square pool of murky green Venetian canal water, so there is no initial indication of the Biennale complex, only a deceptive calm. After a while a clunking mechanism kicks in and the gardens slowly emerge. They remain for approximately half a minute before receding again, leaving behind but a few air bubbles floating on the surface. Jaar's installation represents a critical engagement with the Biennale as highly-influential, long-standing global art-world event and the city of Venice as a whole, but also with the notion of a declining western civilisation.

Watermarked speculates playfully on the city of Venice sinking in the year 2017. As the Giardini site sinks into the lagoon for the very last time, traditional kitsch postcards of the city float to the surface, their waterlogged images still recognisable. In a sense the postcard encapsulates the state of the city: it is an anachronism, a ‘ruinous artefact’ clung to by visitors as an essential feature of a romantic ideal. But it also serves crucially as the comparative barometer for the tourist of a mediated beauty. Retrieved from the lagoon, the flipside of the postcards reveal a text whose style deliberately runs against the grain of communication clichés and perhaps amounts to something like a ‘last post’ from a sinking city.

Notes

1 Roberto Rossellini's film Germania, anno zero (1948), set in Berlin after the end of World War II, is one of the neo-realist classics of post-war Italian cinema.

2 With old Europe on its knees and the new world of the Americas waiting in the wings, Kapur also sees in the ambivalence of this threshold image the heralding of a new global order based on a blurring of borders: ‘Fontana's presence in this installation is emblematic: stretched between old and new worlds, he loosens the tensions of nationality’ (Kapur 2013: 62).

3 ‘Rupture’ is an interesting choice of word here, corresponding to the German Riss, which forms the stem for the architect's blueprint or Grundriss (ground sketch/imprint). So here it may be appropriate to talk of a ghostly Nachriss or post-sketch/imprint (in 3D) that emerges after the event. As Hou Hanru suggests: ‘Probably, only the image of a ghost can “represent” nation-states, as a kind of post-apocalyptic ruin’ (Hanru 2013: 50).

4 Significantly, as Adriana Valdés notes, the art historian Hans Belting draws a connection between the vanishing point perspective ‘invented in Renaissance times, and flourish[ing] in Venice’ (Valdés 2013: 100) and a colonialist outlook: ‘there can be no doubt that perspective functioned as an instrument of colonialism. Europeans considered it the “natural way of seeing”’ (Belting 2011: 45).

5 Hans Haacke's 1993 German pavilion commission saw fit to create a ruin within the building, prompting Hanru to ask: ‘Is it only with the “suicide”’ of national representation that the word ‘representation’ starts making sense?’ (2013: 51).

6 Bearing out the point: with exhibition space in the Giardini at a premium in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Israel caused some consternation – above all among certain South American countries – when, as a new nation, it appeared to be allowed to jump the queue in the allocation of permits to construct a pavilion. It duly nestled itself, so to speak, on a prime site directly under the protective shadow of the US pavilion next door (Martini and Martini 2013: 21).

7 As Martini and Martini explain: ‘Thus began the new system, now routine, of private owners, church authorities or the municipality renting out palazzi to countries’ (2013: 22).

8 As Valdés puts it ‘Not a lot of water has gone under the bridges of Venice, the spatial layout of the Giardini seems to say’ (Valdés 2013: 95).

9 The Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri), built in 1600 to join the Doge's Palace to the New Prisons (Prigioni Nuove) next door, is one of the most sought-out tourist sites in Venice. Myth has it that condemned prisoners’ sighs could be heard as they made their way to jail.

10 As Antonio Negri confirms: ‘All the national pavilions of the Giardini complex [are] drowned here, then, re-emerging not to show signs of life but to remind us what drowned bodies look like’ (2013: 74).

11 The gates of these one-time public gardens (inaugurated in 1797) remain locked and access denied outside of the period of the Biennale, supposedly leaving the Giardini to be ‘inhabited only by cats’ (Jacob 2013: 59). In fact, Steve McQueen's 2009 British entry, the film Giardini, focused on the ‘post-party’ life of the gardens out of season in which a fascinating natural wilderness reigns. Rather than cats, it is a pack of stray dogs that features, sniffing at piles of post-Biennale debris. As one commentator observes: ‘At times they appear to have become rooted to the spot, so absorbed are they in the detail of their activity. Then, all of a sudden, a hind-leg raises itself and the dog sprays its mark of conquest before moving on. Like tourists taking their pictures’ (Whybrow 2010).

12 For what it's worth, the Dutch architect Wouter Vanstiphout, who had collaborated on the British Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, was heard to quip at a conference themed Imagined Cities that the Giardini site was ‘the only part of Venice never to flood’ (Jacob, Long and Vanstiphout 2014).

13 Regarding Venezia, Venezia, Fassi states: ‘This very ambivalence, the impossibility of telling whether Jaar's work relates to a future prediction or an image of the past, places the ghostly apparition of the Giardini at an indefinable temporal boundary’ (2013: 42).

14 The web-link to view all 100 of Mir's postcards is: / www.aleksandramir.info/projects/venezia/venezia.html

15 Brodsky spent eighteen consecutive winters sojourned in Venice between 1972 and 1989 (resulting in the eventual publication of Watermark in 1992). When he died in 1996, the poet was buried in the cemetery on the Venetian island of San Michele. Luiselli conducted research into what turned out to be ‘an improbable future book on the periods Joseph Brodsky spent in Venice’ in which she revisited locations frequented by the poet, interviewed a string of his passing acquaintances and sought out his grave (2013:102).