Fred Wilson’s “Venice Suite” At Pace Gallery (2012)
In his first major exhibition in the United States since 2006, Fred Wilson is showing his Murano glass sculptures from the 2011 Venice Biennale. The show, titled “Venice Suite: Sala Longhi and Related Works,” features black and white chandeliers, black mirrors, and black droplets, which resemble pools of black liquid on the gallery floor. The glasswork is beautiful, but its beauty is almost irrelevant, except insofar as it represents a conscious choice on the part of the artist. Although he commissioned Venetian glassblowers to make his art for him, Wilson has done his half of the job: large wall texts from the artist provide us with much to muse over while we look at the pretty glass.
In a section of wall text bearing the header Chandeliers and Urinals, Wilson compares his commissioned glasswork to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, in that both were fabricated by someone other than the artist. While Duchamp poked fun at the art world by transforming a base and lowly urinal into high art, Wilson claims that he is doing the same thing with a luxury object. There is something suspect about this claim, but that is exactly what makes it interesting: Wilson is coyly acknowledging that he is playing us. Ornate glass chandeliers are an old world luxury good, and their artistic value has traditionally been tied to their craftsmanship and materials. With the rise of conceptual art, the work of even the most accomplished artisans using the finest materials has been rendered base and lowly in relation to the work of “artists”, in the contemporary sense of the term (like Fred Wilson, for example,) who’s lofty concept-based art is manufactured in limited editions and sold for soaring prices to the new aristocracy.
Wilson, being African American, references Othello and the moors of Venice through his use of black glass, rendering his mirrors opaque and creating a sharp contrast between his art and the gallery walls. His newest chandelier “To Die Upon A Kiss” (2011) is on display in the first room. A meditation on death (as well as race), the top half is white while the bottom half is black. The color seems to be draining downward through the glass, leaving a ghostly shell in its wake.
The next room contains his Sala Longhi pieces. Inspired by a set of paintings by the 18th century Venetian artist Pietro Longhi, Wilson has framed black glass mirrors with oblong holes cut into them, each hole corresponding to the face of a Venetian in one of Longhi’s paintings. In the center of the room, a strange white sconce is mounted on one of the mirrors, its branches drooping towards the floor with an organic languor, as if bending under the weight of its brightly glowing fruits.
Moving through an archway into the back room (Pace has constructed some fake walls which accommodate the exhibit nicely, infusing the white cube with hints of Venice Salon,) we encounter the glass droplets, as well as several ornate mirrors wrought entirely in black glass, and an all black chandelier. It is not entirely clear how the droplet sculptures tie into the conceptual scheme, but what they lack in theory they make up in expressiveness. Compared to the more stuffy chandeliers and mirrors, the droplets have a whimsical freedom, both in their globular forms and their loose distribution on several walls, above the archway, and on the gallery floor.
In a wall text in the second room, Wilson compares Venice during Longhi’s time (shortly before the Napoleonic take-over) to New York prior to the 2008 financial crisis:
“New York, like Longhi’s Venice, had been awash with excitement and excess- there seemed to be both endless money and opportunity. I remember that I felt a dark economic cloud loomed on the horizon. I wondered to myself if that cloud would engulf New York as well. I looked around me and no one seemed to notice the slow moving storm. So I put my mask back on and joined the crowd.”
What are we to make of the fact that he puts his mask back on and joins the crowd? If we apply this honestly to the art, it seems he is content to just keep giving the market what it wants: he has found his niche, and he is going to milk it for all its worth. But one has to wonder, will the art bubble ever pop? Maybe those droplets do fit into his conceptual framework after all: perhaps they are the first raindrops of a slow moving storm.
Fred Wilson, “Venice Suite: Sala Longhi and Related Works,” Mar. 17-Apr. 14, 2012, at Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York, N.Y. 1000
