XIV INTERNATIONAL SCULPTURE BIENNALE OF CARRARA

XIV International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara June 26 – October 31, 2010 Artistic director: Fabio Cavallucci c/o Teatro Animosi, Piazza Cesare Battisti, 54033 Carrara, Italy T/F: +39 0585 641477 biennaledicarrara.office@gmail.com http://www.labiennaledicarrara.it

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Fabio Cavallucci appointed as artistic director of the XIV International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara Fabio Cavallucci has been appointed as artistic director of the XIV International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara, which will take place from June 26th to October 31st 2010. Carrara, whose quarries produce the precious marble that has been used over the centuries by artists such as Michelangelo, Bernini, Canova and Moore, will once again be the meeting place for international artists. The fourteenth edition aims to position the Biennale among the leading contemporary art events in Europe. Some of the most internationally acclaimed artists together with a large number of emerging artists will be invited to create specific works. Over the years, the Carrara Biennale, which began in 1957, has hosted artists of international fame as Henry Moore, Robert Morris, Luigi Mainolfi, Jannis Kounellis, Richard Long, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giulio Paolini, Louise Bourgeois, Mario Merz, Stephan Balkenhol, Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, as well as some of the most significant Italian curators such as Luca Massimo Barbero, Bruno Corà, Enrico Crispolti and Francesco Poli. Fabio Cavallucci, curator and art critic, was director of the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento from 2001 to 2008 and coordinator of Manifesta 7 in Trentino Alto Adige. He is currently a member of the board of the International Foundation Manifesta. He has curated exhibitions and special projects of important artists such as Mario Merz, Joseph Kosuth, Cai Guo-Qiang, Maurizio Cattelan, Katarzyna Kozyra, Paul McCarthy, Santiago Sierra, Aernout Mik, Gillian Wearing, Wilhelm Sasnal. From 2002 to 2008 he was editorial director of the magazine “Work. Art in progress”. He is contributor to “Flash Art” and “Flash Art International”. The International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara is instituted by the Council of Carrara, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio of Carrara and the Cassa di Risparmio of Carrara; it is supported by Regione Toscana and Provincia di Massa Carrara, and is organized thanks to the collaboration with the Fine Arts Academy of Carrara, the Agency for Tourism Promotion of Massa Carrara and the Internazionale Marmi e Macchine Carrara Spa. Info: XIV International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara c/o Teatro Animosi – Piazza Cesare Battisti – 54033 Carrara, Italy T/F: +39 0585 641477 E: biennaledicarrara.office@gmail.com W: http://www.labiennaledicarrara.it

SOL LEWITT

“The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators.”

“The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.”

“Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.”

“Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”

Sol Lewitt © 2009

VANESSA BEECROFT

After researching Gillian Wearing and Vanessa Beecroft, it is easy to see the similarities in their work. Both artists employ real people for purposes of performance art along with advertisement. Although their work is unique, I feel it is difficult to find the meaning behind them.
Vanessa Beecroft employed models to pose naked in the form of the Luis Vuitton logo for the opening of his shop in France. Beecroft uses a lot of nudity in her art in order to portray her messages. Her work is similar to the clip we saw on class where people posed on a glacier to support environmentalism. Similar to Beecroft, Gillian Wearing also employs live models for her work.
Sixty Minutes of Silence includes an array of people in line to take a photograph. All are dressed in police uniforms and were told to stay still for sixty minutes. This naturally led to fidgeting and movement among the participants. Beecroft’s work can be related to Wearing’s and many other artists who employ human actors.
On a personal note, I do not enjoy the work of these artists. I would much rather prefer to look at and critique an original painting or piece of contemporary art. I do not feel Beecroft’s and Wearing’s works invoke a mental stimulation or struggle for a meaning behind the piece.

all images © vanessa beecroft 

PAOLA PIVI | INTERVIEW BY LINDSAY HARRIS

paola pivi, interesting, 2006, white animals
In 2007, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi organized “My Religion is Kindness. Thank You, See You in the Future,” an exhibition of work by Paola Pivi in an abandoned warehouse atthe Porta Genova train station in Milan. Throughout the long, narrow concrete space roamed pairs of live animals, such as horses, rabbits, llamas, and geese, all of them white. Behind the animals, a military aircraft stood upside down, poised in an unlikely position that negated the warplane’s function and rendered the sinister machine almost comical, typical of her penchant for the unexpected and the incongruous. She lived for a period on the island of Alicudi in Sicily, home to sixty-two people, and she currently resides in Anchorage, Alaska. Poetically working with the beauty of the everyday in a range of media, from performance and installation, to photography, sculpture, and drawing, Pivi uses her subtle wit to question attitudes and cultural mores.

Lindsay Harris: You’ve lived in several different places—from Alicudi, a small Mediterranean island, to your current home in Anchorage, Alaska—that are removed from the major urban centers of the art world. How did you choose to live there, and what impact does the place in which you live have on your creative process?

PAULA PIVI: I choose where I live following my desire to be in a certain place that excites, entertains, and intrigues me and in some way makes my life better. I moved to Alaska to have a wonderful life, and the work just happens wherever I am. Later on, my work naturally is influenced by what I see around me, but I don’t choose places with work in mind—quite the opposite. I was reluctant to move to Alaska at first as I thought, “How am I going to work there?” I've always liked places that inspire me—the nature, the mountains, the indigenous culture. The intense daylight in the summer and darkness in winter affect everything. In the summer, it’s not like a sunny day for twenty-four hours. It’s more like a sunset lasting for six hours and dawn lasting for six hours. The evening light is a spectacle. In the summer, everybody is so full of energy. And in the winter, it’s the opposite.

Harris: Have these qualities of life in Alaska informed the work you’ve produced while living there?

PIVI: Probably, yes, but that wasn’t my intention. Almost by default, the work absorbs something from where I am.

Harris: Your pieces involve everything from live animals to photography, to objects related to physics or chemistry. To what degree do materials inspire your work, or, rather, do your ideas determine your choice of materials?

PIVI: I don’t think that the materials inspire the work. Sometimes I see materials that are extremely interesting, and I wish I could incorporate them into a piece somehow, but it isn’t always possible. The materials are a necessity of the artwork.

Harris: In one of the more infamous exhibitions associated with Arte Povera in the 1960s, Jannis Kounellis presented twelve horses in an art gallery in Rome. You have included live animals in several of your own projects, either physically as part of an installation or performance, or as the subject of a photograph. Can you comment on this aspect of your work?

PIVI: I didn’t previously have any particular affinity for animals, but when I was living on the island of Alicudi in Sicily, a tiny island with sixty-two people and no cars because there is no flat land, there were two ostriches there. They were so incongruous. Yet, the fact that they were there held such significance. I ended up taking a photograph of them in a small boat. That approach began to multiply in my work, and now I’ve done several artworks with animals—alligators, polar bears, musk ox, leopard, just to mention a few. This all happened to my surprise. They’re the best characters—prima donnas without vanity.
paola pivi, untitled (ostriches), 2003

Harris: You’ve installed pieces in traditional art spaces, such as museums and galleries, and in public spaces, including an old warehouse in the train station Porta Genova in Milan, which reactivated an unused, urban space, a public square in Salzburg, and in photographic murals on building façades that people could see from the street. How do different spatial contexts affect your artistic production, and, as far as you can tell, shape viewers’ reactions to your work?

PIVI: The piece in which I was very conscious about the viewing space was one in which I installed a helicopter upside down in a public square in Salzburg in 2006. That was exactly what I wanted: a helicopter upside down in a public square, which meant that people driving in the car, riding the bus, or visiting that area of town would bump into a helicopter around the corner. That kind of unexpected encounter was really important to me. The major advantage of a gallery or museum is that the artist is protected by the architectural space and by the other people working there, like the curator or the director. That protection gives the artist a lot of freedom. The exhibition space is like a shield. When you work in a public space, you come face to face with people’s reactions. There is no filter. When I did the upside down helicopter, there was no protection there. It was in a public square, and the city of Salzburg went nuts about it.
paola pivi, a helicopter upside down in a public space, 2006, westland wessex helicopter

Harris: Your projects are often large in scale and seem to require a lot of hands, so to speak. Can you say something about the role of collaboration in your work?

PIVI: [I work with others], but at the same time, it is rarely a collaborative process because when I collaborate with the people who make things for me, I am, in a way, the boss of the final work. Yet, it is also very important to have them contribute their input into the work. So, the final product doesn’t come only from me. Right now, I’m involved in two real collaborative projects, and they’re much more complex because I am not the boss. When you really collaborate, when you create together, fifty-fifty, it’s challenging. The first project is Free Tibet Concert: A Big Dream, a free event with talks and musical performances to raise awareness about the lack of freedom in Tibet. I am organizing this together with Karma Lama in Alaska. The second one is “...And back again,” a show I organized with gelitin at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Miami. Rather than just having our solo shows, we invited five other artists, some of whom we had never talked to before, to create seven solo shows at once. Everyone can show what he or she wants, the only theme being that we invited the artists. The gallery gave the space to us, and we invited these artists to participate. But to agree on everything, to really collaborate, is very hard work.

Harris: You initially started out not in the arts, but in engineering. Could you comment on how you came to be an artist, given your background in a scientific field?

PIVI: In one summer, two things happened to me that led me to discover art. One was seeing a comic strip by Andrea Pazienza, who was amazingly good but died very young, so he didn’t produce much. I could see his images in my head, and I started copying his drawings. I began to see that in his drawings, there was something beyond, and I started to see art for the first time. Around then I also saw a show of works by Egon Schiele, the first show I had ever seen in my life, in which I could see beyond the image on the paper. At that same time, I met a boy who was studying at the art academy. I guess he was the first artist I met in my life. A few things like this happened in one summer, and I thought I would go to art school myself, just for fun, like a hobby, as if I were to go to a bowling class or something.

Harris: Both of the artists you mention, Pazienza and Schiele, made drawings. Drawing is also an element of what you do. Is that how ideas come to you, through sketching?

PIVI: No, the ideas come to me in the abstract. To go back to the point about collaboration, the collaboration I have with the photographer is very important. I rarely take my own pictures. Most of the time I collaborate with a photographer, either Hugo Glendinning or Attilio Maranzano. I didn’t know them personally, but I knew that I wanted to work with them after seeing only one of their pictures. I was sure about their aesthetics. And when we’re there, ready to make the work, I completely trust them. We don’t even have to talk to each other. That is the most wonderful form of collaboration that has happened to me. He’s doing his job, I’m doing my job, and we don’t need to talk.

Harris: So you don’t take the pictures yourself, but you come up with what should be represented and then the photographer decides how to show it?

PIVI: It’s more complicated than that. I decide how to show it in reality, in the real world, and in that moment, both the photographer and I are viewers of what is happening. Then the photographer takes the picture. His aesthetics intertwine with mine. The aesthetics of one person are like a fingerprint. But both Hugo and Attilio are extremely mature art lovers who have mastered the art of documenting art without needing to assert their presence in the photographs they take. Each enjoys being a viewer and is confident that his picture bears his own signature through his aesthetic fingerprint, so to speak, even if the image doesn’t say anything about him directly, but instead only conveys my work. So, the picture is a communication device. Taking the picture is very hard work. If I had to take the picture, I would not be able to see my work.
paola pivi, do you know why italy is shaped like a boot? because so much shit couldn't fit in a shoe, 2001, leather boot, 50 pins

Harris: My final question stems from Francesco Bonami’s current exhibition in Venice at Palazzo Grassi, “Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution 1968-2008,” which includes a piece of yours. To what extent do you consider yourself an Italian artist?

PIVI: I am proud of being Italian. When I was younger, I was ashamed of being Italian, and now I’m proud.

Harris: What changed your mind?

PIVI: Getting old.