At this year’s Venice Biennale, Scotland was represented for the first time by an official pavilion.  As well as the three artists featured there – Claire Barclay, Simon Starling and Jim Lambie – several other Scottish artists took part in the related ‘Zenomap’ project.  One was Orcadian COLIN KIRKPATRICK. This is his story…

Thanks to a generous HI~Arts travel grant I was able to fly out to Venice on Monday 9th June with slightly less worries than I’d anticipated.  We arrived in good time for my travelling companions to get their Biennale passes etc. and headed off to check in at the Scottish pavilion, or at least the “Zenomap” office.  There I was able to view for the first time the four postcards of my work that were to be distributed in their thousands across Venice and the Biennale, announcing details of the Zenomap video artist’s screening times and information on the project website.   The next day back at the Biennale Office at the Arsenale, we met a young mohicaned Italian handing out these images of the Orcadian wild west.

I was able to surreptitiously observe the reactions of the international art-going public to my postcards as they battled against the crowds and the 40 degree heat.  The one, “Buffalo Haddock HQ”, was just the right shape to be used as a makeshift fan, so seemed particularly popular amongst the dozens of free handouts.  Unfortunately I don’t know if Nigella Lawson or Charles Saatchi actually got one or not, but we did glimpse them eyeing up some pigeons on St Mark’s Square.  These people we were to learn later are referred to as “A – List Celebrities”, but we were unable to judge as they didn’t turn up at The Zenomap Party…

Prior to the party I attended an “artist’s dinner” where all the Scottish artists participating were able to meet and get to know each other a bit.  This was most enlightening and enjoyable and some strong friendships for the future were forged.

The party itself was one of those rare opportunities for an Island artist like myself to indulge in the phenomenon known as “networking”, and I made the most of the free drink’s effect on the gathered “Art Establishment’s” ability to be able to speak fluent Orcadian.  It was a great advantage being in the company of people like Neil Firth and Cathy Shankland, as the stream of visitors was constant.

We met a helluva lot of people whom I actually knew and had met at The Pier Arts Centre, but also met even more people I’d heard of but hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting before.  The Highlands were very ably represented by the delectable Cathy and Lucy, and it was most gratifying to learn that my fellow northerners would be exposed to the same array of international contemporary art as I would.  It’ll be interesting to hear what inspired them in that very un-Highland heat.

We spent our first day going round the Giardini perusing the various international pavilions.  The home team’s pavilion carried an array of established international stars and I was delighted to be able to stand in front of my first Richard Prince “Marlborough Man” photos which were stunning in  their editing and selection, as well as their general nicotine cowboy fantasy.

Dinh Q. Le’s woven photographic images merging Hollywood’s depictions of the Vietnam war with real journalistic images were both seductive and beautiful with even closer inspection revealing the true horror of human conflict.  A difficult trick to carry off well but done to perfection by this Vietnamese artist, revealing yet more insights into the power of film and the potential responsibilities of the film director.

Other intrigues included an early Warhol film, a Hirst mirrored drug cabinet, Gabriel Orozco’s take on the heavenly Scarpa garden, and a beautiful little twin video projection depicting two civilian street relay runs with a red flag, one in 60’s Berlin the other in present day Stockholm, which some would have you believe is “The Venice of the North”.  As we all know that accolade truly belongs to my home town of Stromness.

Outside the Italian Pavilion there were the usual cross section of pavilions from across our little planet.  The architecture of some of these pavilions was amazing, and the Nordic, and a lot of the former iron curtain countries had done a good job in comparison to some of their more imperialistic neighbours’ stabs at neo-classical immortality.

The Icelandic Pavilion housed new work by native artist “Rhuri” whose wall of light boxes depicting various wilderness waterfalls was strategically placed opposite a wall rack of “book cased” pull out vertical trays with the name of each river etched into the “book end” end facing the viewer.  Each tray framed a huge transparency of one of the waterfall images and burst forth a deafening, location specific audio when pulled out to be viewed.   In the heat this particular space was a luscious oasis of Nordic cool.

It was very appropriate that here we bumped into an Orcadian exile on holiday from his new home in Switzerland.  Like an episode from some modern Icelandic Saga.

Back at the Scottish Palazzo we attended the opening of the three featured Zenomap artists: Claire Barclay, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling and listened to various speeches celebrating the visual art scene in Scotland and our first national platform at the Venice Biennale.  There were more introductions and “networking”, despite the afternoon heat.

We visited the Arsenale the following day and were totally overwhelmed by the amount of art either side of what seemed like two miles of exhibition space.

We strode forth regardless and were immediately struck by the political yet poetic humour at play in the Iranian artist, Ghazel’s triple video screening.  Amongst a sea of “Fluxus” style art, this piece, despite its three screens, was captivating in its ability to tell simple stories, with big punchlines for the audience concerning the ironies and drawbacks of being a woman in modern Iran.   Among other highlights in the Arsenale were Simon Starling’s flag-like Fiat mounted on the wall and charting an iconic car journey across post iron curtain Europe.

Again the heat did not make for comfortable viewing but it did help certain pieces stand out.  Like Yang Zhenzhong’s “Let’s Puff” video placed on two opposing screens in a narrow corridor between one huge space and another.  On one side the oriental girl repeatedly leans towards the viewer and through pursed lips exhales a little “puff”, and on the other a film of busy, congested city traffic rapidly accelerates for the duration of each outward breath.  In the heat this piece some how brought back memories of the cooling sensation to be had in the Icelandic space, and I could have let that charming young lady blow a cool breeze in my direction all morning.

Sense prevailed, and after what seemed like days of art bombardment in a narrow dark stone oven we retreated back to the light and space of the Giardini.

This time, on revisiting the Icelandic pavilion we were lucky enough to actually meet the artist and swap books and anecdotes about Iceland and Orkney, providing the type of neighbourly cultural encounter that can only lead to mutually beneficial exchanges in the future.

It was a pleasant surprise after a disappointing American pavilion, to find humanity live and well in the hands of an Israeli artist, filling her nation’s space with a plethora of moving human figures, filmed in a way that suggested chromosome-like shapes and displayed at one point as if these apparent building blocks of life were wriggling around in actual petri dishes on a table inside the dimly lit space.   They revealed themselves slowly to be the dancing silhouettes of mankind.

The upper space had perpetual queues of linked figures walking, in real time, round and round the walls by some trick of projection.  All this suggested to some, echoes of the holocaust, but to me just spoke simple volumes about us all sharing, fundamentally and biologically the same human condition.  This of course provided hours of debate over pizzas later in the day.

Chris Ofili’s show was a fantastic and sumptuous collection of red, green and black textures that would have truly enthralled if it hadn’t been for the microwave effect of carpets on the walls, floors and ceilings, yet again intensifying the unbearable heat and musking up the elephant spoor.

After some mixed pavilions on the last day the actual highlight of the Giardini was two simple films.  One by Canadian video artist Jana Sterbak, with a triple projection of a contemporary sub arctic journey, with lots of nice skies, log cabins and snow.  In the heat the snow scenes became particularly attractive and I was amused to learn later that a couple of broad sheet critics who’d initially been intrigued by the unusual camera angles employed in the video had subsequently dismissed Ms Sterbak’s beautiful images, on learning that she’d made them by strapping a special camera to her dog’s head.  One up for contemporary art and canine collaborations I say.

The other film was shot in panoramic format by young Italian filmmaker Carola Spadoni and featured an apparently wounded cowgirl figure, walking towards the camera, through a twilight illuminated gravel path and wooden bridge somewhere in the expansive rural Italian landscape.  This potentially quiet scene was projected onto another emotional level by a very crisp soundtrack that threw the near deafening noise of dragging cowboy boot and spurs right through you.   Instead of watching a person’s slow descent to mortal departure you felt that you were somehow part of the heightened sensory experience of approaching an ironically peaceful death through a recent act of violence.  Despite the lack of twanging and hammered Spanish guitar, the Sergio Leone spaghetti was there in spoonfuls.  For this Orkney Cowboy it was hypnotically captivating, nostalgic, tragic, poignant, mystifying and uplifting all at once, much like the entire week had been.

In that respect it was a fitting way to end a week at the world’s biggest contemporary art circus.  I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, witnessing more art and ligging than you could shake a stick at, and experiencing a growing realisation that contemporary Scottish art is in a fairly healthy state at the moment.   It is poised to thrive, especially if its new, young and emerging artists continue to get the sort of support and encouragement provided by the Zenomap team.  This feeling was confirmed by the many excellent reviews that the Scottish pavilion received from the Glasgow, Edinburgh and London press, both broad sheets and specialist magazines.

I’m sorry I haven’t touched on the gory details of how the Henry Moore Foundation opening ran out of drink in an hour, not having counted on the raging thirst of the marauding cultural Celtic hordes.   Nor how the Welsh pavilion understood the likelihood of such a phenomenon implicitly.  Neither have I had time to thoroughly cover every thing seen or explain that you’d need three months and a steady cool breeze from the nor wast to really be able to take in all that was on show.  And of course I’ve left out the details of the painfully romantic, moonlit gondola ride complete with thunder and lightning, and cool, wet, wet, rain.