Puerto Rico | Venice: I am not making this up

It’s been several years since a boat featured in a work of art here. This construction was the first submission ever made by artists of Puerto Rico, an island whose patron saint is St. John the Baptist, as you know. Here’s what I can tell you as gleaned from an article on venezianews: “The exhibition…reunites some of the best interdisciplinary artists of Puerto Rico… Around the monumental sculpture ‘San Juan Bautista,’ potent symbol of the capital, San Juan, actions, works and performances come to life, incorporating the complexity and the resilience of the Puerto Rican spirit, confronting at the same time the persistent heritage of colonialism and urgent questions of urban injustice.”

The Biennale has opened several weeks earlier than usual this year, and the inauguration was Saturday, April 20. What remained usual, however, was the mass of international art(s) journalists and assorted contributors that swarmed the streets of Castello for the three preceding days.

I usually enjoy seeing the exotic plumage of these migrating creatures, not to mention their extraordinary behavior, but this year netted little. A good friend told me he saw a person in the street wearing a toilet on his head and I’m really sorry I missed that. Lino’s father-in-law was a plumbing contractor and was occasionally seen around town carrying a toilet on his shoulder — clearly he didn’t realize the artistic potential in his humdrum little existence and its porcelain trappings. I suspect that supporting four children during a world war might have limited his frivolous side, if he had one.

But such a jape would only have appeared frivolous back then, when life was real and life was earnest. Whoever porta’d that potty the other day was doing it seriously. To what end, I can’t say, but everything at the Biennale is done with a degree of seriousness denser than black granite. Along with the art we get diatribes and philippics and harangues, and also sermons and lectures and platitudes. Lots of words that labor to obscure rather than illuminate. Speaking of art — I mean, words — I’m remembering this self-portrait by Salvator Rosa (1645):

Translation: “Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence.” He would never make it at the Biennale.

Back to the bony statue on the boat. It has been moored alongside the fruit and vegetable boat at the bottom of via Garibaldi. It will be there till the Biennale closes in November.

After only two weeks he is beginning to fit right into the neighborhood. I’ve already come to like this little dude. Doesn’t bother anybody, doesn’t need anything.

But if you desire meaning, maybe the following will help:

The exhibition reflects the dissociation and exploitation of a colonial political system that has attempted to unravel the fraught complexities of contemporary Puerto Rican identities. The estrangement that is inherent to the colonial status is an extended act of violence resulting in a psychic malaise because of what Anibal Quijano has so aptly described and defined as “the coloniality of power”.

At the heart of the exhibition stands Celso González’ monumental Yola Sculpture, “San Juan Bautista,” a powerful symbol of Puerto Rico’s enduring spirit. This site-specific installation challenges the constraints of its political status, whil honoring the Island’s rich maritime heritage.

Remembering the little girl he had a crush on in 4th grade.

Trying to come up with a system for knowing which contact lens goes in which eye.

It’s like living with a floating room full of masks from Oceania.

Come to Venice, they said. You’ll have so much fun, they said.

Has just missed the next-to-last vaporetto to Sant’ Erasmo and has to wait an hour for the next one. Good thing he’s not hungry. And doesn’t have to go to the bathroom. And isn’t cold. Wishes he’d brought something to read.

St. John on the boat got lots of faces but they only gave her part of one. It’s pretty cool that she’s got those independent eyes, though, like a chameleon.

There have been boats at the Biennale before now. The water is evidently an element that helps some projects seem more interesting. Or important.

The Comoro Islands sent this in 2009. I can’t tell you anything about it, but then again, you know that if you have to ask, you shouldn’t be here.

In 2013, a boat overloaded with desperate migrants capsized on its way from Libya to Italy. “Migrants, hundreds dead” is the headline on the borrowed newspaper that reported the tragedy off the coast of Lampedusa in which 360 persons drowned. How audaciously droll to remind people of the catastrophe in such a blithe and child-like way. (uncredited photo)

Vik Muniz’s floating installation Lampedusa was launched during the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The article published in the Haifa Museum of Art publication stated that “the 14-meter-long (45 feet) paper boat was coated with a giant reproduction of the Italian newspaper that reported the tragedy. The gargantuan paper boat drifted along the Canal Grande, Venice’s main transportation route, docking near luxury yachts. As art critic Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian, “This art project has been overtaken by real-life horror. Perhaps, in theory, it seemed reasonable to make a vaguely thought-provoking, ‘playful’ piece about migration. But now the scale of our cruelty, the true consequences of all the rhetoric that dehumanises migrants, have become so lethally clear. Surely, art on such a theme should be less equivocal, more angry.”

Well said, Mr. Jones. But this is the Biennale, where scruples find little nourishment.

These objects are occasionally left behind, and Muniz’s has been here for nine years now. No idea who is paying mooring fees at the “Vento di Venezia” marina, or why. If its purpose was polemical it has lost whatever value it might have had; migrants keep drowning.

One critic explained that “Vik Muniz employs his traditional use of unlikely materials and scale manipulation to generate wonder from predictability. Contextualized in the naval environment of Venice, ‘Lampedusa’ is … built to scale of one of the town’s traditional vaporettos.”

I’m going to go back to floating St. John. Despite not being any closer to resolving urgent questions of urban injustice or the coloniality of power, I’m starting to feel that we understand each other.

boaty Biennale