| On day six of our visit to the Venice Biennale we made a special excursion to the highly publicized show Sequence 1, curated by Allison Gingeras at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi. It is a display of works from the museum’s private collection as well as additional pieces created on-site specifically for the show. It had been an exciting week in Venice, full of hybridized post-post-you-name-it work, from the digital work of the AES+F Group at the Giardini Russian Pavilion to the technological works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at the off-site Mexican Pavilion. | 
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Michelle Eischen + Jenn Gardner on Watching Watching
On day six of our visit to the Venice Biennale we made a special excursion to the highly publicized show Sequence 1, curated by Allison Gingeras at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi. It is a display of works from the museum’s private collection as well as additional pieces created on-site specifically for the show.
It had been an exciting week in Venice, full of hybridized post-post-you-name-it work, from the digital work of the AES+F Group at the Giardini Russian Pavilion to the technological works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at the off-site Mexican Pavilion, and the synthesized prints and painting/embroideries by Tracey Emin at the UK Pavilion.
The Sequence 1 brochure promised that the show would bear “witness to the renewal of the “traditional” disciplines of painting and sculpture,” a promise that at that moment, in the context of the Biennale, sounded so old-guard that it seemed almost novel. What we found was anything but a traditional outing to see some “painting and sculpture.”
As our vaporetto pulled up to Campo San Samuele we could see Subodh Gupta’s Very Hungry God posed on the Grand Canal outside the museum. The totemic volatility of the enormous stainless steel skull assemblage of pots and pans shined in the sun like a bauble fit for King Kong. It was both scary and fascinating.
Mike Kelley’s Double Contour w/ Side Bars surrounded by two large-scale wall pieces filled the floor space of the first of the two installation rooms. To describe the space as crowded would be an understatement. The wall piece was hung so closely to the last table that the only way to view it was either from across the room or by sliding between it and the last table. We opted for the latter, which placed us physically close to the work.
We tried to get as close as possible to the beads stuck in paper pulp and cement. Not so fast. Something was bothering us, nagging at us. We felt the hairs on our necks stand on end; it was as if someone was breathing on us. We asked each other, “Is this part of the post-Postmodern experience?” And then we realized, “No! There is someone breathing on us!” It was a young, futuristic museum guard in a Gucci suit. His insidious smile was mocking us. He followed us closely, two to three feet behind. Sometimes he was as close as six inches. “Would you please carry your bag in front of you?” he asked, his tone tinged with disgust. This caused one visitor to turn and yell, “Get away! Stop following me! Get away from me!” In contrast to years of immobile observation by less fashionably clad museum guards, this one had a new methodology.
The next room held a flat screen television showing Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene) and the entire stage set on which the video was filmed. As with the previous room, when we began to watch the video, the guard reappeared, staring at us.
We decided to try and escape by revisiting the first room. This time we strategized our approach. One of us entered the room first (Viewer A), to gain the attention of the guard. Then after half a minute, the other (Viewer B) slipped in. Viewer B quickly and strategically occupied the corner left vacant by the guard, who was now following Viewer A. Assuming her fiercest glare, Viewer B began watching the guard watching the viewer watching the art. The guard noticed, became visibly confused, and stopped. We enjoyed a brief moment of power ourselves.
Double Contour w/ Side Bars consists of four tables set very close together, two of which are very large. The two large tables are the Contours. One is a miniature grotto or landscape, with ceramic Buddhas in place of the expected statuettes of Christian saints. The other is a pristine foamcore cityscape.
The “contour” is a visible form in each piece echoing each other with a physical ascension at one end gradually dipping toward the rest. The Orientalist grotto, a performative, post-colonial meditation on the phallus as an emblem of regeneration, contrasts the white cityscape’s more sterile and ultimately “castrated” contour.
In front of these tables is a smaller table covered in glass. Under the glass are romance novels alluding to a different kinds of “-scapes.” Ah, the romance novel, not the Edward and Mac Ivor kind, but the kind once purchased at dime stores; books better known in their day as pulp fiction. Looking across all of the tables taken as a whole there is a suggestion of a progression from Romance to Realism.
The next room, as we had previously seen, held Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene). This room was very large. It took almost a full minute for the guard to appear once again from around the stage-set that filled the entire gallery. We began to question the surreal surveillance. “Could this be part of the piece?” we wondered. There are distinct similarities: the protagonist in the video is an artist-type, we are artistic types; the antagonist in the video wears a suit, the guards were wearing suits; there is a sculpture in the video, that same sculpture was in the gallery…. On some level it felt insane to imagine that the curator would have designed the installation to include gentle harassment by the guards. On the other hand, one has to wonder what the relationship was between the guard strolling across the video set in the gallery and the actor who was also wearing a dark suit in the video saying, “Don’t touch it!” over and over again.
The irony was almost painful. With the guards following us as we walked through the gallery the only thing we could enter was the spectacle. Likewise, the installation resisted absorptiveness in favor of theatricality via the guards. Their spectacle became part of the work. The objects were pushed into the background and a real-time theater took replaced them. Any attempt to reflect on the work was met with a guard clicking his well-shod heels at your back, snapping you to attention. We wondered if the guards notice this paradox.
Finally we decided to ask. “Are you part of the work?” The guard, Joe, humored us by responding to our questions. He seemed simultaneously baffled, flattered, and offended. “Of course not,” he retorted. “What kind of suit is that?” “Gucci.” “And shoes?” we continued. “Gucci. But I don’t like them,” he groaned. It went on until we pointed out that the artwork is about the very job he is performing. No, “The men in the video are lovers,” he corrected us. “Yes,” we said, “but there’s more.” He did not quite grasp it, but seemed open to the idea. Instantly he began to question us. His questions were strange and deliberate—he wanted to know where we were from and which part of the set was our favorite “sculpture.” When Joe started discussing his passion for American mafia movies, we decided it was time for us to part ways.
After talking with Joe, our suspicions had been confirmed. It appeared that on a subconscious level the guards themselves had the desire to become part of the artwork. It also seemed that something specific about Mike Kelley’s artwork almost encouraged this to happen.
Note: Next time wear Gucci to the Grassi.
