Reblogged Reflections on the Venice Biennale

The Climarte team (the Australian arts organisation rather than the Climart research network recently highlighted) covered environmental work presented at the recent Venice Biennale in <a href="http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=29a210c8ac479a21fe27cfac3&id=c4fdb34ce1&e=[UNIQID]“>their newsletter. Climarte particularly focus on the non-European pavilions.
“In the South Korean Pavilion, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho invited us to visit Venice in some future time in which “the city that we used to know, along with the other glories of past civilization, no longer exists. The only visible vestige of the Giardini’s rich history is the Korean Pavilion—the last national pavilion to have been established within the garden…. The site no longer serves as a place for art. The pavilion is now a laboratory for archaeological investigation of the past civilization.”
Once again the subject of the aesthetics of uncivilisation emerges as important, with Enwezor, the curator, referencing Paul Klee’s image of the angel looking over its shoulder and Benjamin’s description of history piling up driving the angel into the future,
“The face of the angel of history is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage … A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence…. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”