Before going on this OCS trip, I have never taken an art history class, despite being an artist and having a great interest in looking at art.
Towards the beginning of the program, reaching Venice, I was definitely in awe of the sights and the surroundings as a first time tourist in Europe. The Biennial itself felt like a tourist attraction that inspired awe in me during my first visit. However, there’s something about staying in this tourist trap for too long that turns you cynical.
As I sat through my first art history classes, finally gaining a deeper understanding of the modern art pieces that I’ve looked at (that used to make me roll my eyes and mutter “Fuck modern art”), I felt myself getting cultured. Wow, I was a changed person! Then as modern art made more sense to me and as I navigated through the narrow streets of Venice, trying to get to as many collateral sites as I could, I realized that I was separating myself from the rest of the crowds of tourist – I was an art tourist, pretentious as I could be.
As an art tourist, I had different destinations and priorities than the hordes of confused tourists stalling by San Marco. I had to be efficient with my time, I had things to do, unlike those people who want to be here for the entire day to look at two sites and spend the entire day with their selfie sticks! The longer I was in Venice, the more I felt like (or at least, wanted to pretend that I was) a local. I became more assertive in pushing my way through crowds, taking strides and rolling my eyes at how slow-moving the foot traffic was.
As an art tourist, I became more immersed in the art that I was seeing, proud that I was among the first to see the latest works in contemporary art. I was impressed and stricken with the different political issues brought up by such pieces, learning more about them than I ever knew of. Being plopped in the middle of Europe, the refugee crisis felt closer to me than ever than when I was in the Carleton bubble.
However, going from Carleton to Europe as an art tourist is moving from bubble to bubble of privilege. The art world is one for the elite. It is one for people who can afford to take time off their jobs, to pay for the air tickets and living expenses for days just to look at art. I’m imagining, fancy people sipping on their expensive wine at the dinner table, chatting about their favorite new works at the Biennale. Art tourists form a bubble around themselves, hovering on the main islands of Venice, while working class Venetians stay on Giudecca.
Even when artworks address political issues, they are in a bubble. Days after seeing all the artworks at the Biennale addressing the refugee and migrant crisis, I read on the news about Italy’s threat to close its borders to refugees. It seemed like not a lot of people heard about it, however. Then I came across a migrant strike, not knowing what the strike was about, because it was the first time in Venice that everything was completely in Italian, compared to the art world’s lingua franca of English.
These events started to make me question the purpose of political art. Despite addressing timely, wordly issues, despite curating to site-specific characteristics, they still exist in a vacuum, to a specific group of people. How much change are they making? Would a lot of the pieces be considered performative activism?
Not everything is cynical to me, however. Seeing the activist artworks, I have become more fired up, more ready to work towards changes. And with the potential of having activist artists coming to Carleton through the grants. I’m hopeful that the bubble of art tourism and the Carleton bubble will slowly merge and pop.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/overwhelmed-by-migrants-italy-threatens-to-bar-the-door-to-rescue-ships/2017/06/30/348794b0-5c23-11e7-aa69-3964a7d55207_story.html?utm_term=.e3240bdfbdc7