Spring 2019: Isaac Gorres

            I used the art history travel grants that I received to travel to Venice, Italy to visit the 58^thVenice Biennale in order to supplement a current collaborative research project with Dr. Susan Libby. Our research focuses on the diverse treatment methodologies employed when approaching contemporary art objects from an art conservation standpoint. Thus, visiting the Biennale, one of the largest and the oldest contemporary arts collectives in the world, was extremely beneficial to my research. Not only did I witness firsthand intriguing contemporary art objects that employed nontraditional media, but I was also able to spend time in the stacks of the Venice Biennale Library—Archivio Storico di Arte Contemporanea(Historical Archives of Contemporary Art), where I read numerous industry texts on the conservation of contemporary artworks. 

            Some of the artworks I encountered in the curated exhibition of the Biennale—May You Live in Interesting Times—remained tethered to traditional conceptions of what art is supposed to be: oil paintings, drawings, and stone sculptures. However, much of the artwork on display rejected these norms. One artwork—Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself (2016)—featured a large hydraulic arm that was programmed to perpetually shovel a thick, bloodlike liquid into a predetermined area. Another—Tomás Saraceno’s Oracle Readings, Weaving Arachnomancy, Synanthropic Futures: At-ten(t)sion to Invertebrate Rights! (2019)—was composed of a large network of fragile spiderwebs. Perhaps the most arresting encounter came in the form of Alexandra Bircken’s Origin of the World (2018)—an actual human placenta preserved in Kaiserling solution, a preservation agent found in anatomy labs. As these diverse media suggest, it is often difficult for contemporary art conservators to preserve the artworks with which they are entrusted, as contemporary art often approaches the bounds of materiality. Thus, visiting the Biennale provided me with multiple case studies of works that employ nontraditional media.

            In addition to visiting both exhibition venues of the Biennale and the Biennale Library, I also attended various affiliated exhibitions and other art events around Venice, including exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Punta della Dogana, and Palazzo Grassi. It was an extremely formative experience to visit the Biennale, and I would like to thank the generous donors who made it possible.