Simon Denny shows us how to still believe in the Venice Biennale despite its controversies

After exactly a month from its opening, the feeling is that this year Venice Biennale has been in the news more for its often political controversies than for the quality of its exhibitions. Christopher Buchel’s The Mosque managed to split up the art world commentators as rarely before and the withdrawals of Syrian Film Collective Abounaddara came after tough accusations of censorship. Even before the opening, the Biennale made some noise for the pull out of some national representations (Kenya and Costa Rica) under the pressure of alleged wrongdoing by their organisations. Without dismissing the important debates around these controversies and indeed not willing to play the role of the devil’s advocate (we also accused Biennale of questionable political choices in our article about Azerbaijan’s presence), we feel the presence of this old institution still fruitfully serves the discussion around contemporary art and, especially when the specificity of the city of Venice itself is used by contemporary artists, exhibitions of international importance are indeed made in its context.

 

One example is indeed the extraordinary Simon Denny’s Secret Power at Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the New Zealand Participation. Not often before visiting this exhibition had we been so amazed by how ancient art history could be bluntly given new voice by contemporary practices. Only one half of a two-location project – the second one being the Venetian airport, which we found less interesting on a general level – Secret Power at Marciana is such a content-loaded show that perhaps the best way to comment on it is to simply describe our visiting experience, a journey through a site-specific AND internet-based show (is this an oxymoron?) where ancient and recent histories collaborate strictly to teach us both our present and possible future.

 

Entering the space, one is greeted by two maps: on the left is the globe created by Fra Mauro, the monk who lived in the 15th century, never left Venice and intended to translate the (or his) whole knowledge about the known (by him) world in a map. In his view, Africa stands at the top (north), Scandinavia is a deep south region, the far east is Portugal and the western world is Asia.

 

Across the entrance hall is a similar attempt to grasp totalities, though the one by 16th century Ottoman cartographer Hacı Ahmet: words are in turkish instead of latin and the world is not “up side down” but shaped as a heart. Leaving these two objects behind, we enter the main exhibition room looking for more distorted images of our planet and in some way we won’t be disappointed.

 

What faces us are vitrines, the kind normally used for computer stacks, filled with what appears to be a collection of tacky miniatures, texts printed on slick surfaces and characters from comic books.

 

More globes stand next to the vitrine, 17th century wooden ones, on which the painted shapes of lands and the grotesque marine monsters in the oceans are slightly fading away from their surface. They are illuminated by the cold electronic light coming from the vitrines and that of another globe, a contemporary version of the Earth as we know it today, matching what we have seen many times through the eye of sophisticated satellites. This Earth is wrapped in ropes and is being carried by a bald eagle headed to an invisible destination, a bird we are also very familiar with since it is symbol of that world’s superpower called America.

 

That superpower we probably got to know through its typical films, Hollywood products like Terminator whose red-eyed slick metal skull we also find in Denny’s show. That image scared a generation of kids in the 1980s though excited the adults who, like we are told, decided to make logos for secret agencies out of them. Perhaps the power is not that secret as the exhibition titles says, it just doesn’t like to speak but in flamboyant images.

 

Today’s most powerful country sure loves popular culture and being exposed to its state official designs (this is what mostly Denny shows us) seems to inspire a question: are those people surveilling and controlling the world really using films and comic books in their job? At least that’s what David Darchicourt must have thought they should do.

 

Darchicourt, the NSA (American National Security Agency) illustrator and graphic designer whose “corporate-looking animals” we see explaining team-work and intelligence strategies, fantastically tacky creatures that frighten us way more than the lethal marine monsters swimming in the oceans of the ancient globes next to them.

 

Mr. David Darchicourt, the embodied found online object, exposed by Edward Snowden and reframed by Simon Denny, the designer whose visual creations now speak fundamentally about the world we live in. His self portrait as a cartoonish caricature stands at Biblioteca Marciana next to his diligently updated Linkedin profile printed in plastic. Shame no self portrait by Tintoretto could be borrowed and placed close to this cutting-edge form of self-representation.

 

Though Tintoretto and other old masters are there anyway. Asked to give shape to the virtues of humanist knowledge, those Renaissancers decorated one of the earliest surviving public manuscript depositories in Europe also known as Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the specific site for universalist exhibitions. And to do so, those artists used mythologies from classic Greece, references that just like today’s American pop culture were the most fashionable source of images.

 

Paintings of statuary virtues and muscly bearded philosophers along with flashing computers, robotic logos and infographics about surveillance: haven’t they all served unquestioned systems of power? Don’t they together speak about the end of those systems?

 

October 27, 2015