The Big Show
Venice in the pouring rain. Forget the Venice of Caneletto and Monet. Think Turner and Whistler. Sometimes it stops for a while. The birds chirp tentaively. Then the skies open again. Myself and the rest of the Migratory Art Herd all huddle under our umbrellas, trying to keep our catalogues dry.
The Biennale was founded in 1895 as an international exhibition. This year it's more international than ever, with 76 participant nations, 34 at the Arsenale and the Giardini, the main locales of the Biennale, and the rest scattered around the city. There's a heavy emphasis on non-Western nations. The idea that France, Germany, the U.K. or the U.S. are the centers of the art world is being put away. On Sunday, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will be awarded to Malick Sidibe, the photographer from Mali, whose wonderful studio portraits and pictures of people getting ready for a night on the town I first started to notice in the 90s. He's one of those inspired portraitists of ordinary people, like James van der Zee or Mike Disfarmer, who combine a fine eye wth a very at ease sense of the people they look at (and live among.) He's a good choice.
At a press conference this morning, Rob Storr, the first American to run the show, talked a bit about his ambitions for his own show, the big international exhibition at the Arsenale called Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind. He's been billing it as a show about the convergence of conceptual work and work that emphasizes material. That's true as far as it goes, but I have a somewhat diffferent take on it. More on that later.
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Hadn't heard of Malick Sidibe, so checked him out on artnet.com. Wow. In that small selection, in addition to the uncanny studio portraits are two pictures of people dancing that are as sharply observed as Garry Winogrand or Larry Fink, but less tilt-a-whirl than the former and infinitely more merciful than the latter.
One picture, dated 1963 and called "Christmas Eve," is of a couple dressed in white, the woman barefoot, their bodies almost mirroring each other, both of them smiling as they look down at each other's feet, their heads almost touching. It is sweeter than anything by Fink and less envious or astonished (or maybe, as you say, more involved, more belonging among its subjects) than anything by Winogrand.
The other, "Dance The Twist," from 1965, is one of the best and funniest dancing pictures I've seen. There are participatory figures in the background, but the main action is a couple in the foreground. The man has his back to the camera, and he is deep in one of those Twisting squats that I couldn't do then, let alone now.
His body language, with the flap of his suit jacket elongated as he thrusts out his left leg, reminds me of those Lartigue pictures of the guys in the open wheel race cars, time smeared as they speed by. The Twist photo is not blurred in that way; it just feels like a warp.
Also wonderful is a picture called "During The Great Heat," from 1976, in which Sidibe seems to have waded into a lake or body of water to photograph an archipelago of 10 people up to their necks in the water, cooling off.
They are all entwined, arm in arm. All you see is their heads, one woman's head and shoulders--and one guy's toes, bobbing in the water. You can see relief and pleasure on a few of their faces, but surprisingly not on all of them.
The rest are looking at Sidibe with that combination of formality and disarming ease that, as you note, is so striking in his studio portraits.
The link is both lines of the following:
http://www.artnet.com/Artists/ArtistHomePage
.aspx?artist_id=15531&page_tab=Artworks_for_sale
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