The Brooklyn Rail

When I went to Venice I found that my dream had

become—incredibly, but quite simply—my address.

–Marcel Proust

I had an unbelievably amazing experience having the opportunity to spend the entire month of September in Venice, thanks to the Emily Harvey Foundation.

I must admit, I didn’t do what I had proposed in my application, and it was the best decision I made. I had written that I would work on some of my video projects, which the residency time away from New York could have provided. But even before I left for Venice, I realized I needed to do some things that situated me specifically in the place—the uniqueness of Venice—rather than working on video footage that has nothing particular to do with this magical place that I could easily work on back in NYC. And so I began to envision how better to take advantage of being in Venice during that month.

Given my hybrid nature of being both an artist and a cultural worker, I decided on several different paths to take while there.

Cinema and Venezia

Venice International Film Festival
To begin with, I am both a filmmaker and also a media art curator. Most recently, from 2016–2020, I served as the Guest Curator for MoMA’s annual series, Documentary Fortnight. I realized that the Venice International Film Festival would be taking place during my visit, as it began a few days before my arrival on September 1. And so I applied for industry accreditation and was awarded it. (This actually took a second email, as I had a response asking me for a bit more information about my “involvement in the cinema sector.” I responded with enough additional background that accepted me in.) And so the accreditation gave me the opportunity to attend several film screenings during my first week in Venice.

I spent a lot of my first week on the Lido, seeing several films. The benefit of attending films at film festivals (versus streaming from one’s home) is that there is often a Q & A with the director and/or subjects in the film, which makes this a much more enriching experience. However, due to the screenwriters’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood, this was a reduced situation in Venice.

Films I saw while attending the Venice Film Festival were an impressive range of international films: Origin, Ava Duvernay; Memory, Michel Franco (Peter Sarsgaard won Best Actor award); Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi (this film won the Grand Jury Prize); The Dreamer, Anaïs Tellenne; Coup de Chance, Woody Allen; Hit Man, Richard Linklater; In the Land of Saints and Sinners, Robert Lorenz; Ken Jacobs – From Orchard Street to the Museum of Modern Art, Fred Riedel.

I also attended a special screening of an Italian film, Las Memorias Perdidas de los Árboles (The Lost Memories of Trees), presented by the Venice International Film Critics’ Week special programming at the festival that is dedicated to debut films. As a result of seeing this film, I contacted the filmmaker, Antonio La Camera (wondering if that’s his real name?) and sent a link of the film to colleagues at MoMA’s film department for consideration for the upcoming 2024 New Directors/New Films series. Time will tell, come March 2024.

Venice Immersive

Besides the regular film programming, as with most film festivals these days, there was also Venice Immersive, the “extended reality” section of the festival.

Having worked in media and the arts my entire career, and having been the director of Thundergulch, the arts & technology initiative of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council from 1997–2001, I’ve been paying attention to the evolving changes in the media arts, including “new media” developments for many years. More recently, I’ve attended international film festivals, serving as a juror or attending forums and giving these “new media” projects feedback. During my time with MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, I made sure that there was one program each year that presented non-fiction new media works. And in fact, in my final year as a Guest Curator for Doc Fortnight in 2020, I presented a “sidebar”—Non-Fiction+—that included a program on international interactive and immersive documentary art projects, presented by Caspar Sonnen (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam); Red Hero, an international collaborative online project devoted to the arts and culture of Mongolia; a live cinematic essay-performance by Tiffany Shlain; a hybrid film by Anamika Haksar; and Roger Ross Williams’s first venture into VR cinema with Traveling While Black.

And so I also spent time at the Immersive Island, which took place on Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio, in Lido. A little ferry took guests quickly across the water into a totally different world that included a diverse range of projects from twenty five countries—360 degree videos, including installations and VR worlds.

One issue with getting to experience these time-based works is that it was necessary to reserve a time slot, since most of the work is viewed with headsets in one-on-one immersive experiences. However, I was able to experience eight of these projects in the course of the festival: Letters from Drancy; Peupler; The Imaginary Friend; Flow (this short VR film received a “special jury prize”); Shadowtime; Gaudi, The Atelier of the Divine; Forager; and Over the Rainbow.

There were others I would have liked to have seen, but reservations were already booked. I missed seeing a work, Tulpamancer, by a former student, Matthew Niederhauser, from the School of Visual Arts in NY. It was getting a lot of “buzz” but he assured me that I could have a studio visit back in NYC to experience the work.

As of this writing, I’ve just been invited to experience the piece at ONX Studio here in NYC. Situated in the Onassis Gallery of the Olympic Tower in Midtown, close to MoMA, the hybrid space gives artists involved in extended reality projects the opportunity to create and present their work.

One added benefit of visiting the Immersive Island is there was an outdoor garden/café for visitors to meet and gather. And here I was able to reconnect with several people—artists and producers that I had previously met at other international festivals—as well as meet new colleagues focused in this new media realm. After the recent years of the pandemic, where practically everything was virtual, it was nice to have the in-person, real time physical experience with meeting people in relation to their works.

The Floating Cinema/Unknown Waters

An alternative to the Venice International Film Festival is Cinema Galleggiante - Acque Sconosciute, a cultural festival that takes place in the waters behind the island of Giudecca in the Venice lagoon. This was the fourth year for the project, conceived  by Edoardo Aruta and Paolo Rosso and presented by Microclima with the aim of shaping a collective vision. The audience is asked to enter the waters of the lagoon, giving life to an amphibious settlement in close contact with the natural elements.

Last year I had the good fortune of the festival selecting my very first video, Mixed Messages (1990). And so I visited Venice the last week of August to be present for the screening. That year’s theme was the surreal, dreamlike, absurd and hallucinatory visions, tied in to coincide with the theme of the Venice Biennale. In Mixed Messages, a video collage that examines gender stereotypes in popular culture, concluding with a post-modern version of the Pandora myth, I visualized a dream I had, along with interviews with little girls, performance, animation, found footage, and appropriated material from television. It was amazing to see the piece projected on the Venice lagoon with Italian subtitles.

Having been aware of this festival, it was a nice counterpart from the Hollywood-esque festival on the Lido, to be able to attend the fourth version right at the beginning of my residency since it ran from August 25 to September 10. Films, videos, performances, music, and theater involving both international and local artists were presented on a stage and screen in the waters behind the island of Giudecca. The audience was able to access and watch the programming either from their own boats or from a floating platform designed to accommodate spectators without a boat. Prior to being ferried out to the viewing platform in small boats, there was a wonderful “vibe” on shore, with tasty and affordable food and drinks being offered by an amazingly dedicated and fun group of people. I have to say, having seen my own work the previous year in this most unique setting, it has to have been the most memorable screening situation I will ever have.

EHF Residents Connection

By the end of my first week in Venice, all the September EHF resident artists had arrived. I had written to Silvia prior to my arrival as to who else would be in residence at the same time. They included: Phoebe Legere, Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong, Arnaud Labelle-Rojux (who was accompanied by his partner, Patricia Brignone), and Guy Mathieu (who was accompanied by his partner, Geraldine Schwemin).

So on Friday, September 8, there was a gathering of all the residents in the Emily Harvey Gallery (Archivo Emily Harvey) at around noon. I came to the gallery directly from my last early morning screening at the Venice Film Festival. Skip Blumberg was an “honorary EHF resident” who also had just arrived in time to join the group in the gallery. We all went around the room, telling a bit about ourselves to the group, as well as looking at the exhibit on view, Henry Flynt: Concept Art Architecture.

We all agreed that it would be great to try to get together another time for a more extended period and share more about ourselves and our work.

Thanks to having visited Venice several times and having friends who live there, I was able to borrow a projector from my friend, Paolo Rosso (one of the founders of the Floating Cinema Festival). We arranged to have an EHF soirée, a salon pot-luck dinner and show-and-tell of our work. I offered to do it in my apartment across from Caffe del Doge the following Tuesday, September 12. Everyone brought delicious food, and after having some prosecco/wine on the above terrace, we then moved downstairs for the tasty food, and then on to viewing each others’ work. It was a wonderful evening. We vowed to do it again the following Tuesday, but as it turned out, several others were not available then. But at least we did it once. Over the course of the month, some of us continued connecting in a range of ways.

Downstairs Neighbor leads to Collaboration

But the biggest connect with one of the September EHF residents was with my neighbor, two flights down—the amazing Phoebe Legere. I knew Phoebe from NYC, not all that well, but was aware of her performances, her amazing musicianship, etc. I had written an email to her prior to our arrival, saying I was looking forward to seeing her in Venice.

On my first day of arrival, after dropping my bags in the third floor apartment, I went down two flights and knocked on Phoebe’s door. (Silvia had told me she was in the same building as we ascended to my apartment). Phoebe invited me in, offered me a cup of coffee (which was most welcome as I had just arrived on an overnight flight), and we started catching up some. She told me about the plan for her work while in Venice. She was in the midst of writing a script for a short film—The Gender Symphony: Love and Laughter in the Grand Canal. Drawing inspiration from Venice itself, the concept for the film is a mash-up invoking the historical genre of commedia dell’arte sensibility but with a comedic lens on contemporary gender issues.

Phoebe had brought several of her instruments, costumes, props, art supplies, etc., and was also writing the music for film. But she didn’t know who she was going to have do the actual filming. Thanks to my history in Venice, I have friends in the cultural scene there. And so I connected Phoebe with my friend, Piero Muscara (also a filmmaker) and he then connected us to a team that he has worked with and highly recommended—cinematographer Riccardo Vaccaro and sound engineer Alessandro Brombin. Phoebe had to travel out of Venice for her initial meeting with the film team, but came back convinced she had a good crew for the two-day shoot that was planned for the final week of September. The next thing I knew, Phoebe decided to cast me in the film to play a sexy strega (Italian for “witch”), as I had told her that I had done a bit of performance in the past, including playing Karen Finley’s “slutty daughter” in a production of A Suggestion of Madness that was presented at San Francisco’s Life on the Water Theater back in the late 1980s.

Phoebe kept working on all the elements for the production and I continued plunging into more of Venice until shooting days the last week of September. More to come on that.

Media Art History Conference – RE: SOURCE 2023

The next serendipitous occurrence while I was in Venice for the month of September was the 10th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology that took place from September 13–16. The conference featured panels, workshops, performances, and keynotes in collaboration with the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities and the Ca’ Foscari University. Although I have my own media art history, I wasn’t officially registered for the conference but decided to “lurk around the edges” and did attend several events during the four-day event. It was like “old home week” as I kept running into so many people that I knew from several different times in my own media art history; Anne-Marie Duguet, from Paris, whom I had met in 1985 with Maryanne Amacher when I was Project Director of Capp Street Project; Luc Courchesne, from Montreal, whom I had met at Ars Electronica in 1999, and then connected with afterwards both in NYC and Montreal; Diana Domingues, a Brazilian artist who I had served with on a “new media” jury at VidArte in Mexico City in 2002 and then had as a guest in my Contemporary Voices class in the MFA Computer Arts department at the School of Visual Arts; Stephanie Owens, who I had known when she lived in NY, and who is now the Dean of Arts, Design and Media at Arts University Plymouth in the UK; Tamiko Thiel, an artist who lives in Germany, whose work, Beyond Manzanar, I presented at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in 2004; José-Carlos Mariátegui, whom I met in the early aughts in Peru through a family connection, along with an art-tech connection (he founded Alta Tecnologia Andina – ATA in Lima, Peru, an organization working at the intersection of art, science, technology, and society in Latin America). The list goes on, and besides reconnecting with folks from all over the globe that I had previously met, I also met so many other important international people in this media art realm, so many whom I had known of but never met until this gathering. It was like a love fest!

As part of the conference, there was an immersive exhibition, Sources@ RE:SOURCE, presenting evocative works by several artists addressing the climate crisis. A computer animation by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Acqua ma non troppo, was commissioned specifically for the Venice context and presented fragments from historical paintings, floating and dissolving into an aqueous landscape.

Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum, who I had collaborated with when I was Director of Thundergulch, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s new media arts initiative (from 1997–2001), was this year’s recipient of the Award for Contributions to the Field, and gave the final amazing keynote speech, The New Transmediality: Transformations in Digital Art.

There were impromptu lunches and dinners, as well as all the other organized events. It was a great gathering of the international media arts tribe, and Venice was a magical place for this to happen. One ripple effect that occurred at one of the dinners is that I met Gillian Rhodes, an American artist who’d been living in Pakistan for some time, who followed up after the conference and invited me to take part in a virtual conversation with her, sponsored by the school of Creative Arts at the University of Lahore.

Abundance of Art Viewing Opportunities

While everyone knows of the Venice International Art Biennale for amazing art viewing, Venice has many interesting venues all year round for viewing contemporary art. And so I took advantage of being there and attended some great exhibits throughout the month.

Icônes, a group exhibition featuring works from the Pinault Collection at the Punta della Dogana was conceived specifically for the location and the Venetian context, and featured work by a stellar list of artists from different generations. I was thrilled to find the work of James Lee Byars here (he spent quite a bit of time in Venice over the years), as I had worked closely with him back in 1987 when he created a site-specific installation at Capp Street Project, The Book for Question. He had an incredibly strong impact on my life.

James Lee Byars, The Golden Tower, 1974

Chronorama. Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century, an exhibition of photographs by more than 150 international artists recently acquired by the Pinault Collection from the Condé Nast archives, was presented at the Palazzo Grassi. The historical section was interspersed with Chronorama Redux, offering a current look at these images through the work of four contemporary artists—Tarrah Krajnak, Eric N. Mack, Giulia Andreani, and Daniel Spivakov.

As I moved through the exhibition, and came upon a room with one of the contemporary artists, I was astounded to realize that I had met one of these artists, Tarrah Krajnak, on an airplane some years back, and had subsequently seen her during a trip out in Los Angeles. What astounded me even more was her performative installation, RePose. For the latest iteration of her long-term project here, she created an on-site workshop presented as a photo studio, where she used many images from the Condé Nast archive of women posing, as well as other images from her own personal collection. Over the course of her live performances, she selected poses from these images to “re-pose” using her own body, slowly producing a series of new self-portraits in real time. At the end of each day, she developed and printed the exposed film in the on-site darkroom, and then hung the resulting prints next to the source image. One of Krajnak’s re-posed images was juxtaposed with Carolee Schneemann’s performative image, Interior Scroll (1975). This one really stood out for me among all the re-posings, as Carolee was a dear friend/neighbor. Plus, I have an extensive archive of footage shot with her over the years, that I had planned to work on as part of my residency in Venice. But as previously stated, I realized that being in Venice for a month, I needed to immerse myself more in things in Venice. I still plan to work on the Schneemann material. So it was a bit uncanny to experience this unusual coincidence/synchronicity of both having met Tarrah here in the US and then the Carolee connection.

There were several other art venues that I visited throughout the month. Of course there was this year’s Architecture Biennale, both at the Giardini, with the national pavilions, and then the curated Arsenale. While I’ve been to several Art Biennales this was my first time experiencing the Architecture Biennale. Its title, Laboratory of the Future, seemed an apt and appropriate thematic for the current times, confronting thematic subjects such as climate change, colonialism, and race. The New York Times called it “the most ambitious and pointedly political Venice Architecture Biennale in years.” The US Pavillion’s Everlasting Plastics exhibition, organized by the Cleveland-based alternative art organization, SPACES, explored the world’s complex relationship to plastics and featured commissions by five artists: Xavi L. Aguirre, Simon Anton, Ang Li, Norman Teague, and Lauren Yeager. A visiting architect friend from the US was in town for a few days, and visiting the Arsenale with him gave me added appreciation for the various installations by also experiencing the work through his architect’s eyes.

With this caption: Detail of Re+Prise by Norman Teague in U.S. Pavillion

There’s so much more that I saw within my month there, but a few other contemporary exhibits that I visited worth noting that also seemed to incorporate climactic and aquatic realms and critical issues included: Ocean Space’s Thus Waves Come in Pairs; Fondazione Prada’s Everybody Talks About the Weather, an exhibition taking weather as a starting point to underscore the urgency of climate change and underscores the precarious environmental future of Venice, and actually the entire planet.

Venetian Ceramics, Clay Among the Canals

By this point, I was into the third week of my month in Venice and the days were getting numbered. One thing I had decided before arriving in Venice is that I wanted to try to meet ceramic artists while there. I even brought some ceramic tools, hoping that I might get my hands into some clay while there. I think, like many, when the pandemic hit, I felt that I was spending too much time in virtual worlds on the computer—film editing, zooms, online teaching, etc.—and wanted to do something tactile, physical, with my hands. I had taken some ceramic classes at Greenwich House Pottery many moons ago. But recently I discovered a studio two blocks from where I live, La Mano, and I have been taking classes there since the pandemic began. So I was hoping to connect with ceramic artists while in Venice.

When I got to Venice, I asked someone if they were aware of ceramic artists that I might connect with, but the response I got was that Venice is known for its glass artists. The island of Murano is famous for this, and that there really aren’t ceramic artists there. I’m happy to report that thanks to my network of local artists/friends, this proved to be wrong. I was able to make studio visits with several ceramic artists, which took me to studios on Murano, Giudecca, Lido, as well as other areas in Venice. This was a very interesting and rewarding part of my time there. And so as my time was winding down, I was able to visit these artists and their studios: Nadia Saponaro, SVO Ceramic; Daniela Levera; Michele Hickey Gemin, LAM Ceramica; Adele Stefanelli; Lara De Sio; Gaetano di Gregorio. I also visited The Bochaleri, an association of Venetian ceramists, and spoke to some of the artists at work there, close to the Giardini. And Gaetano di Gregorio told me about the first edition of the Salone dell’Alto Artigianato Italiano, an exhibition of Italian crafts, that was taking place at the Arsenale my last weekend in Venice that I also attended. But I must say that I found the individual visits with the ceramic artists much more aesthetically pleasing and rewarding.

The Grand Finale—Participation in The Gender Symphony

Shooting Day #1

The last week of September it was finally time for the two-day shoot of Phoebe Legere’s film.

Two other actors had recently arrived from the states, assisting in various aspects of pre-production, rehearsals, and more. Ron Gustavson had come from Boston, and had a small role as Pantalone; and Ivan Galietti (originally from Italy) had come from NY and had the major role as Dr. Pants in constant engagement with Phoebe’s character, Columbina, his perky maid/servant. As previously mentioned, Phoebe had cast me as a “sexy strega” (witch) and I was set to have my interior scene shot on day two. But having worked on many other peoples’ films, I suggested that I could participate on the first day, taking production stills (“the making of” shots) and also throwing people their lines, if needed. And so it was. Day one involved shooting several scenes out in the streets of Venice. The challenge was to find some discreet cul-de-sacs where there weren’t too many tourists cruising by. We managed to get quite a lot done on day one.

Shooting Day Two

The second and final day of shooting began inside, in Phoebe’s apartment, two floors down from mine.

Here she was acting as make-up artist, both for me (Witchy Poo) and Ivan (Dr. Pants).

The first scene shot had Dr. Pants at his alchemical lab, where I come in and tell him about the true secret of being rich. The energy of the entire production was in true Fluxus spirit, where things were used as props and costumes as ready-mades; nothing special was purchased to create the settings. Phoebe had made her costume, made some of the props, and used what was available to create the scene.

The next interior scene presented Dr. Pants, singing a punk rock song in Latin, with Columbina (Phoebe) playing electric guitar.

And then it was back out into the streets of Venice, navigating and dealing with the ongoing presence of tourists watching the spectacle take place.

After their duel, Columbina who has transformed into Arlecchino, feeds Dr. Pants the magic potion that turns him into a woman. And now with their genders transformed into the other, and an empathic realization of “the other”, the two stroll off, arm in arm, into the Venetian sunset.

One concluding shoot took place on the terrace connected to my apartment, and featured Phoebe playing the concertina and singing one of her composed songs.

There were so many more amazing experiences during my time in Venice, but I thought that these experiences best reveal the range of how I made the most of the magical month of September, thanks to the opportunity provided by the Emily Harvey Foundation.

In honor of Emily Harvey’s memory and support for artists

Ars longa, Vita brevis

All photos by Kathy Brew except for the one of me in costume, which is by Phoebe Legere.