I love you, Venice, I love you.

Hello You.

Its been a while since we spoke and the reasons for that will become clear. Hello to the new members of the congregation. Very happy to have you.

I watched an interview with Donald Glover where he broke down some of his performances, and he spoke about This Is America (2018) a song and video event that really carried a social weight when it was released. Its still got a lot to say about the treatment of Black Americans, the deification of gun rights, and the ambivalence to human slaughter that’s pretty prevalent… all the time. In the interview Glover talks about the idea of making a moment and how he looked to Thriller (1983) for inspiration on how to make moments happen. The above still comes from this discussion where he says: I feel like the internet kind of robs moments.

I can see what he means in terms of art and media. I think that the corporate world wants everything to be a moment, to go viral, to be under the internet’s spotlight. If any of you have worked any where near marketing or branding, you will have at least once been told to make something go viral, like its a large button you can press to instantly make your thing the feel good hit of the summer. But ultimately, I think the pursuit of making something into a moment instantly takes you out of the running unless you are willing to look at the art and consequence of what you do. This Is America worked right then and there because it was tapped into the zeitgeist, it was deep and rich and performative, it didn’t aim to be disposable but additionally it didn’t long for a creative immortality through merchandise, spin offs, hashtags, and all that. Being a moment it happened and then ended.

I think that the addition of the moment to the endangered species list extends beyond art and media into our lives. I think that we miss so much looking for the best photograph/video/vibe to feed into the internet. I think that because social media turns our actions into a timeline it ties us to our old selves. Seals our mistakes in amber for future archaeologists to discover. It doesn’t allow us to age and change without there being a catalogue of our existence behind us.

I think we should strive to be more temporary.

That being said, I do publish this newsletter.

I’m going to be straight with you, I’m going to write about the Venice Biennale here. There’s going to be lots and lots of discussion of contemporary art which will manifest itself as a direct result of you looking at my holiday photos. I will do a very quick run down of main events I have been involved in but primarily: Its art talk.

1) What I’ve been up to

2) The Venice Biennale 2024

3) Nick’s Music Corner.

That’s my promise to you.

So the primary reason for the absence of a newsletter last month was my huge trip to Venice. I’m not going to talk about that here because its going to have its own entire section next up, but getting prepared, travelling, returning, and then having to adjust back to daily life again was the whole of July for me.

The preparations for Stapled are also coming to a head. Two weeks from the release of this email the first day will be wrapping up, and we will have completed our comic book day. I appreciate that this is an INTERNATIONAL MAILING LIST™ but it would be nice to see as many of you there as I can. I know a lot of people who follow this have tables, but if you don’t please come by. Both days have a more or less different set of people and different workshops, and its free. You can find more information on the venue here.

TICKETS CAN BE SECURED HERE.

I was also on the Awesome Comics Podcast talking about Stapled, Mental Health, and comics. You can listen to that here. It was a fabulous experience. Vince, Tony, and Dan really care about comics and it was great to just talk tot hem and be open and honest. I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment about the gap between who we are, how we see ourselves, and who we want to be. I am doing my best at lining these three entities up, and going onto the podcast and being all three was great.

There has been lots of me talking to comics professionals and experts in the field of mental health. All these things will manifest in the near future, and I will be happy to talk about them then, but right now I’m making hay when the sun shines so to speak.

So what is the Venice Biennale? Good question, in essence its a giant international arts festival that runs every two years and covers contemporary visual art, theatre, cinema, music, and dance. Over a colossal programme of events spanning from the exhibition that runs from April to November and the Venice Film Festival. The main event is an exhibition that runs in the Giardini and the Arsenale areas of the city, where permanent pavilions are set up by participating countries. Each country will elect for an artist or group of artists to curate an exhibition showcasing the best work that country has to offer (or at least the best work they could get to participate) and alongside the permanent pavilions at the Giardini, lots of countries set up shop in galleries, churches, shops, and office spaces across the city as well. Some of the most interesting pavilions I saw weren’t in the official grounds and were free to enter. For me that was one of the most exciting things about being there; turning a corner and seeing the red logo showing off a pavilion and just not knowing what it was or what you were going to see. I’m going to talk now about some of the coolest stuff I saw and post so many photos that I am praying that your spam filter doesn’t stick me straight into the bin.

The theme for this years event was Foreigners Everywhere, a broad theme that Aims to explore “investigate the idea of living on the margins, whether as an outsider, a new arrival, or an Indigenous person”. There’s plenty of interpretations, some good others fucking awful and whilst some countries aimed to really shine a light on their indigenous populations, marginalised communities, or personal involvement in the history of violent colonialism, others decided to do none of these things. Here’s looking at you United Kingdom, whose pavilion was grandiose twaddle that mentioned vague themes like the Windrush generation in the curatorial statements and then failed to represent it in the artwork. Same for you France. Considering the amount of Africa you still squat in you’d think you might think about that instead of the impact of sea plastic. But, alas, I am here to talk about the Biennale, not the elements of it that myself and my girlfriend dubbed the “Bien-shitty”. So lets get to some of the winners.

Truth be told I’ve had to cut this section much shorter than I would have liked because the Newsletter was approaching novella length. I may put more together into a blog post and stick them on my website one day. Or I might not. I am unreliable like that.

• Belgium

Yeah you fucking heard me.

The second pavilion I went to was Belgium, which after an unsteady start in the low energy Spanish pavilion really introduced me to the idea this might be a fun day out and not a dry academic tour in BLISTERING HEAT. Seriously, it was humid enough to swim through the afternoon air. Belgium’s offering was a large white space that blasted out percussive dance music and gave every visitor a free newspaper explaining the artwork’s intentions that were being constantly printed off in the back of the gallery. It felt kinetic and energising for a mostly static work primarily made up of these huge puppets on a gantry above the the exhibition space which had seating a wall sized LED screen showing footage of a previous piece of performance art.

It used the language of folk art and ritual, creating a joyful community element that felt like we were participating in something even if that thing had happened long ago. The idea of looking up at the sculptures related to the event on the screen which happened on a frozen lake, so we were viewing it from within the ice on which the dance unfolded. Additionally this underline the nature of these huge puppets that usually someone would be inside them, so being able to see their hollow guts it puts the viewer in the role of participant. There were a bunch of parties for these giants, and the video showed their journey to the exhibition site, including footage of them standing figurehead like on the prow of boats headed to Venice. Communicating that atmosphere of something that happened elsewhere and telling you it was a good time had by all is a real challenge, but the Belgian pavilion did it and the artistic collective made a completely spectator driven artwork feel collaborative and participatory.

• The Netherlands

The Dutch pavilion was equally as bold in its staging but tackled its colonial roots head on by giving over control of the space to a Congolese artistic collective called Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC). This collective of plantation workers create sculptures which they then sell and use the funds to buy back their ancestral lands from the mega corporations use them for intensive farming. The exhibition entitled The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred was drenched in palm oil. Sticky yellow ooze dripped down the walls, and the exterior sign showing the Netherland’s ownership of the space. As one of the Congolese artists states in the video, the art world is already drenched in palm oil, as colonialism, the slave trade, and the ransacking of cultures constructed the world of galleries. The palm oil gave everything a hostile oppressive atmosphere as that stuff stinks, and reflected the bleak nature of the art.

The emotive sculptures showed images of greed, violence, and subjugation, telling the story of the Dutch abuse of the Congolese. It did not shy away from some horrifying stuff. As well as telling its story through the art there were two additional elements, the first being a video on the creation of the sculptures and the thoughts of the artists, and the other a live feed portal from the gallery to the Congo, where three works of art were being displayed in their country of origin.

It was a bold exhibition and one not afraid to confront the privileged attendees with the cruel reality of the art world because, as one of CATPC says in the video “the galleries already belong to us, because our labour and our suffering built them”.

• The United States of America

America kind of gave me hope that maybe the British Pavilion wouldn’t suck. Whilst that hope was short lived, the American Pavilion was one of my favourites and the only exhibition to make me cry.

A solo exhibition of work by Jeffery Gibson from the exterior decoration to the colouring of the gallery walls there was a complete creative focus on the bright, bold, and hopeful work. Gibson is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent but growing up in a variety of international urban centres has informed his practice in a contemporary direction intersecting with fashion and design. His work seeks to engage with the vibrant traditions and history of indigenous America and employs a lot of intertribal crafts and artisanship through beadwork and weaving. Its never not playful and joyous, genuinely feeling like a celebration of a culture and its place in the modern world.

The piece that really hit home for me and reduced my to a sobbing wreck was a video piece (pictured below) called She Never Dances Alone, which features Sarah Ortegon HighWalking, Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, dancing in her own Jingle Dress to music by a band called The Halluci Nation who are a First Nations electronic band. The work exudes strength, power, a resolve against erasure. It is about pride and community, with the dancer replicated over nine TV screens into a kaleidoscope of movement. As it continues there are fewer and fewer iterations of our dancer, until it reduces down to just one, and in closer up we see her face, her eyes in isolation, and silently her mouth as she breathes through the exhaustion of her dance.

To me it spoke about the exhaustive nature of survival. The toll that existing takes on you when to be alive is an inherent political act. A fitting end to the exhibition and the curators did a great job of taking you on a well considered and narratively strong journey through Gibson’s art.

• Poland

Poland’s pavilion was the only piece of work that encouraged direct audience participation, and as you would imagine from a very serious international art crowd, there was none. The artwork, entitled Repeat After Me II, shows interviews of refugees from Russian Invasion of Ukraine telling the stories of the violence and conflict they have witnessed through the onomatopoeic sounds of weaponry and munitions. We are introduced to each survivor through a brief description of a weapon or armament and then the survivor commiunicates to use what it sounds like using the human voice. The AK-47 is a ratt-a-tatt-a-ratt-a-tatt-a whilst the Hind Helicopter is a Rurrr-rurrr-takka-takka-rurr. The survivor introduces the sound with subtitles along the bottom of the screen, which move like karaoke words for us to sing along to.

The loudest part was the silence left over for us to join in. As the name suggests, we were encouraged to speak the sounds into a series of microphones and create our own choir of noise to replicate the sounds of war. No one participated. I had a stab and no one would join in with me, scared to approach the bank of microphones.

If anything the lack of interaction had a different weight to it than the intended impact. The fact that no one was speaking up, the fact we were watching without interacting, not saying anything, content to just be a spectator and not involve ourselves in the horrific experiences of the refugees was an undeniable parallel to the way many view refugees and victims of war. They told us their tale, they told us how we could join in, and the we sat in silence ignoring the person talking to us.

• Switzerland

Humour time as we come to Switzerland. A pavilion with such a barbed satire at its heart that was one of the most self analytical pieces in the Giardini.

Behind a rotating two faced water feature with laser eyes was a dome containing a projected video piece which you viewed by laying in comfortable loungers and looking up. The video piece told of an imagined set of deities that make up the swiss pantheon each one a searing analysis of the role that Switzerland has played in global colonialism. From tax haven, to private school incubator for the world’s elite. The visuals were wonderfully basic, having an early internet meme energy to them, sitting somewhere between collage work and a Tim and Eric sketch. A lady dangling from a roulette wheel on a golden chain shits shredded documents into the Alps. Monolithic religion oil rigs tower from cathedral spires. It was absolutely incredible, the perfect intersection of art and comedy that skewered the culture of wealth and privilege that fuels hostility and greed worldwide. The Swiss-Brazilian artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor who created the world is a master story teller, and creates a deep and interesting world which we travel through in the pavilion space. The pavilion was also giving out a newspaper style exhibition text which featured a six breasted elf like creature who appeared in sculpture form outside the pavilion, which I completely missed by not looking up in the right direction. However a humorous side effect of the size of the hand out was that I saw a lot of middle class families herding their children on and off boats and walking the narrow streets of Venice with a lurid green newspaper in their hands showing a powerful woman of colour with six bare tits.

• Bulgaria

One of the many uncomfortable and difficult to endure pavilions at the Biennale was Bulgaria’s entry The Neighbours. This immersive installation looked at the stories of survivors of Bulgaria’s communist eras, exhibiting abandoned rooms and ruined lives whilst you listen to the stories of political prisoners and those who lived through political oppressive and violence.

The interviews hammered home the idea of the oppression happening in secret. One story tells of a forced labour camp situated near a railway line that meant the prisoners had to hide whenever a train went past to ensure than no one outside the camp was to know what was happening. Scenes of forests and locations of isolation project over the dioramas of interrupted lives; Cigarettes sit in ash trays, draws are half open, pots sit on the stove. The rooms left behind when stripped of people are trying to be drowned out but they refuse to go. Each space is meant to represent a different type of survivor, those with stories, those terrified into silence and the forgotten. The work did a chilling job of communicating this and was genuinely a tough place to be in.

• Nigeria

The Nigerian Pavilion took over a whole building away from the Giardini, and across three floors and a garden offered an optimistic look at Nigerian futures whilst not being afraid to look back at the treatment of its people through out history and the shadow of oppression still present to this day.

The garden featured a sculpture slowly being overtaken by fast growing vines that acted as radio transmitter, aiming to take the impact of the artwork out from the gallery space into the world beyond and hopefully creating a link with Nigeria itself. The broadcasts from the sculpture were a series of confessions harvested from a recording booth where members of the arts community and “everyday voices” were encouraged to reveal their dreams and hopes, exposing them to the heavens as an act of manifestation.

The body of work aimed to look at representations of Nigerian Past, Present and Future, whether real or imaginary, and one of the most potent explorations of the imaginary was Yinka Shonibare CBE RA’s Monument to the Restoration of Mind and Soul, that featured a reproduction of every item looted by the British Forces during the Benin Expedition of 1897. This great pile of artefacts and treasures which are not in the hands of private collectors imagines what would have been retained if not for the three week massacre enacted by pillaging British Soldiers on the Kingdom of Benin.

Its a hard thing to wrestle with the optimism of the future and the nightmares of the past, but the Nigerian pavilion was a masterclass in curation. Everything merged together creating an experience of the whole, one that didn’t turn its back on the past, or the failures of the present in the form of the brutal Special Anti-Robbery Squad that terrorises Nigerian Citizens. Instead it looks inwardly and presents a collage of what it is to be Nigerian and what place the country holds in the world.

• Passengers In Transit

There was a second Nigerian Pavilion this one run by the Centre of Contemporary Art, Lagos. This showed off a great selection of contemporary Nigerian art and we a genuinely exciting display of artworks. The two artists that stood out for me were Thandiwe Muriu and Christa David. Muriu’s work, pictured above, come from a body of work called Camo, and feature models in heavily patterned tradition fabrics blending into backgrounds of the same materials. Serving as a deconstruction of Africa’s tradition of vibrant cultural traditions and beauty cultures, it is a bold statement on individualism against the background of cultural identity.

David’s use of collage and the cut up image to tell a story was something I found very inspirational. Whether as an adult or a child David puts herself at the centre of the images, a repeated character that looks to the individuals solitary practice of prayer and meditation. Using historic and easily recognisable source materials like the moon it conjures a narrative beyond the need of words. Its a fucking comic book isn’t it! A hieroglyphic series of images that serve to tell a single story through recognisable image.

Her larger collage works explore the individuals relationships with the divine and the elemental, especially in forging the identity of black women.

• Gabrielle Goliath

And finally I want to give an in depth look at one specific artwork that I found so thoughtful, so engaging, I would go as far as to say it was the best piece of artwork I saw. It did so much with so little that even though it was a stand alone artwork in the main Biennale building, it did more than some countries did with multiple rooms and huge budgets.

The artwork in question is called Personal Accounts and the artist Gabrielle Goliath describes it as a “transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair”. Filmed in cities across the world, Goliath interviewed women and gender diverse people about their personal accounts of survival and repair. Some participants revisited personal trauma whilst others sought to unpick the widespread societal norms that uphold and embolden the toxic structures of the patriarchy. The individual stories, the unique perspectives were then removed from the conversations, and then we are left with the para-linguistic spaces between. Humming, laughter, sobs, breaths, sighs, and swallows. This is then presented alongside the video footage as a collage of moments, spaces between the difficult words and moments that the interviewees are living through again.

Culturally, personally, societally, we are all different, and the patriarchy and toxic masculinity present itself in different ways for each of us. By taking the accounts of the individual and reducing it to the gestural moments between it creates an inescapable net of affinity. It is easy to listen to someone’s specificity and say “That’s not my experience” and dismiss it outright. But by creating a unifier between us all, the ums and ahs, the gasps and gulps, the language of humanity that we don’t need to learn, the feelings are immediately recognisable and concretely transmitted to the viewer.

There is a danger in using broad appeal communication method to talk about societal issues. In trying to reach out to as many individuals as possible by using blanket terms we dilute and dismiss the unique and specific stories of the individual. I can see why it is used in an age when people are happy to say things like “I don’t see any racism in my daily life, it cannot exist” broad appeal is an attempt at a counter point to this buffoonery. But to say there is such a thing as a “Trans experience”, or a “Queer Experience”, or a “Female Experience” is to complete ignore the intersectionality of our lives.

Goliath manages to find a core thread of the human experience and communicate it so outside of the spheres of language and taps directly into the experience of “Foreigners Everywhere”. She says on her website that the artwork “…calls for a different kind of relation, a politics of love and avowal that doesn’t disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.”

The staging of the artwork is also really bold and interesting. The TV’s are not wall mounted, but instead leant against the walls as if waiting to be put up. They’re at angles to one another and some being in portrait and others in landscape create a diversity of image, shifting and altering your focus through the fast past artwork, as the scenes chop and change from none gesture or hesitation to the next. The lighting in the room is provided by the bold blue background of the interviews, with generates a warm half light that invites you to pay attention to the things we usually ignore or take for granted.

It was immersive and inspiring. The sort of artwork I think needs to be made now more than ever.

If you ever have the opportunity to see this in person then I strongly suggest you do so.

Welcome back to music corner, a list of recommendations of music I have discovered during the month that you might like. But also written down in a place I won’t forget about it later on.

• The prolific Californian garage rock band and person obsession of mine Osees (or Thee Oh Sees, or simply Oh Sees, or Orange County Sound as there were once known) have a new album out called SORCS 80. The two singles hinted at a continuation of their proggy blend of rock and synths with the lead signer John Dwyer sticking with his shouting voice after years of doing what you imagine a Gremlin would do if given a microphone. I can imagine fans of their Psych era, of their kraut Rock era, would probably be disappointed, but I love it, especially the more meandering jazzy songs like Also the Gorilla… and Lets Ears that you could imagine being the music in a really cool 60s cop show.

• Similarly the prolific Australian garage rock band and personal obsession of mine King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have released their 26th album Flight b741. Stylistically this is a little less diverse than their previous couple of albums (no one raps on this one) and it sticks with a bluesy country theme throughout. This makes it a stronger album that say, Omnium Gatherum that I totally enjoyed but felt took a long time to not really go anywhere. My favourite songs are Daily Blues, Hog Calling Contest, and Antarctica.

• One New Years eve a long time ago I was watching Jools Holland’s Hootenanny (who’s host I can do a passable impression of and walked backwards into a fridge recently whilst pretending to be him) and the band Future Islands were on. Read I tell you, I fucking hated them based on that performance. Not a fan at all. Smash cut to this past month and one of their songs from their debut album Wave Like Home really got into my ear and I fell in love with it. Its worth a listen. Old Friend is the song that got me into it.

• If you’re looking for something way more ambient and calm, then please may I introduce you to Julianna Barwick. I have spent a lot of time listening to their 2020 album Healing is a Miracle over the past month. Its very textural music, wave after wave of soft gentle sound will lap over your toes and make you feel very relaxed.

It bothers me that more and more tech bros have beards like mine.

As always, please tell your friends about me, share the links, and just thank you for being here.

I hope this signal finds you Earthling.

As always, yours faithfully.

Nick Gonzo.

[email protected]