The Ninth iDisplacement
Netted in shadows (or alternatively, pools of light), fragments of fleeting landscapes and sampled skies were caught in the glass of four devices. Two glowed a borrowed white. Stunted concrete pedestals backed the off-center geometric slips of color and light, transformations punched from the bisected pebbles.
Do these reflections actually manage to capture a something? Aesthetically, they echo the painting genre in the pleasant middle of the historical art salon hierarchy: landscape painting—under history, above portrait. Caught in the surface of the iPhone and tablet, where one is accustomed to finding the posed/composed selfie/scene snapped and posted in a preoccupied instant as a mediated “moment,” these chance landscapes collapse the adjacent genres. In doing so, do these slivers attest to an entangled, interdimensional, contemporary rethinking of landscape, one that surpassing its classical conceits as a two-dimensional surface presented as an illusionary window or screen that directly translates the three-dimensional?
Smithson writes on the groundlessness that marks the act of writing about mirrors: “a memory of reflections becomes an absence of absences,” he pens with syntactically looping verbal flourishes. The reflected presence of a decipherable scapes—or the marked absence of unadulterated white light—invite congealed permutations of interpretations. The reflected blue-grey of sky designates one device as itself alone.
At the iDisplacement’s found and displaced plinth, pebbles meet common concrete. The latter is an aggregate, grinding and binding the former with a paste into the forms that ground our built environment. It is a static, worldwide connective tissue: our most widely used manufactured material.
While the deployment of iDisplacements at the Biennale omitted sites physically far afield from the Giardini—such as the white marble quarries of Car in northwest Italy—these external references remain nonetheless narratively embeddable. Cut, sliced, and graded for centuries into a giant, exploitable bridal cake, the quarry provides the substance with which both Michelangelo rendered his David and luxury interior designers outfit kitchen islands around the world today.
These historic—yet continued and expanded—networks of international trade in concrete material reflect the overlapping constellations of art, capital, and people to and from the Biennale. Networks of international trade in concrete material reflect the overlapping constellations of art, capital, and people to and from the #Biennale. Over six hundred thousand people visited the art-and-nation-occupied Giardini and Arsenale campuses in 2017. After they re-disperse around the globe, leaving the dust outlines to memorialise plinths and frames and the call of the cicadas to reverberate between the oak canopy and the pebbles, the goers’ filtered, suspended glimpses of the six-month affair still mingle together under shared location tags on social media, blurring into a commonly mediated, synthetic buzz.
If you visit the sites (a likely probability, if you have stumbled across this travelogue) you find nothing but memory-traces, for the iDisplacements were dismantled right after they were photographed. The devices are distributed across disparate somewheres, of disparate somebodies, internationally. Charging, appending, extending. The reflected light has been erased. Remembrances are but numbers on a map, vacant memories constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinities. It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found. The expunged color that remains to be seen. The fictive voices of the totems have exhausted their arguments. Biennale [Giardini] is elsewhere.*
*Italics directly lifted — as well as the structure of this segment and the project’s overarching conceit — from Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” published in ArtForum in 1969.
This post concludes a series that narrates nine iDisplacements implemented at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Explore the iDisplacements publication on Medium and/or the iDisplacements hashtag on Instagram to read and see previous instalments.
