London Biennale Las Vegas 2020
Javier Sanchez, Venado Oro, 2020, video
by D.K. Sole
“London” is in the name, but satellites of this global Biennale project can happen anywhere. (The official website refers to the Filipino founder’s craving for “a viable and memorable platform for the world’s ‘marginal artists’.”) Las Vegas held its first London Biennale in 2010. After 2014 there was a gap. This year it returns. COVID-19 has driven it online. Going to the London Biennale Las Vegas site, you see the participating artists divided into alumni – people who took part from 2010 to 2014 -- and newcomers. The division is jarring but it gives you a sense of the past, a significant feature in a city whose art history is typically unrecorded or forgotten. (It’s startling to read the confident statements of purpose in catalogs from the departed Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art when the only people who seem to remember NICA now are the ones who were employed there).
The theme for 2020, Mask, Mirages, and the Morphic Mirror, was chosen last year in July, back in the days when everyone would still have expected the events to take place live. They explain it with a reference to a poem by Walt Whitman:
OUT FROM BEHIND THIS MASK. (To Confront a Portrait.)
Out from behind this bending rough-cut mask,
These lights and shades, this drama of the whole,
This common curtain of the face contain'd in me for me, in you
for you, in each for each,
(Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears-O heaven!
The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!)
…
Six years ago, you rolled up to somebody’s studio or home (or studio-home) and lived for an evening in the atmosphere of artists doing things. Shelbi Schroeder lay immobile on the carpet, Matthew Couper dragged a branch around a gravelled lot, and Jevijoe Vitug sat in a tiny hut by the side of Anthony Bondi’s swimming pool wrapping himself in a fire blanket and getting ready to take a mixture of medications because, he told us, a Filipino shaman will protect the group by testing materials to see if they are poisonous or safe. I wondered if he would die. The status of that memory as a memory is reconfirmed by his name here in the alumni section over a video of a Michael Jackson hologram playing while a Singaporean/Filipino vocal group sings a cover of Jackson’s Man in the Mirror and a figure dances in front of a diorama of hell, packing mask, mirror, and mirage into one place by creating a referential blur over a named absence, the figure that everyone knows can’t be replaced (Meme in the Mirror). Michael Jackson is dead but Vitug is not. He has only moved to Queens.
Art events have fallen away this year (although the number of online artist talks and exhibition walk-throughs has skyrocketed) and so you grab things like this, you clamp them around you like healing mud. What does it mean to have the work of twenty-six artists, mostly local, together like this? Without a lot of exhibitions to visit, it can be hard to figure out what the city, as a general artistic entity, is doing. The Biennale doesn’t answer that question, although, to be fair, it never promised to. It’s spearheaded by artists from the old Biennales, Vitug, Couper, and JK Russ, along with one of the newcomers, the UNLV MFA candidate Laurence Myers Reese. This seems to have skewed the selection process, since nine of the eleven names in the newcomer section are attached to UNLV, either as faculty or students. The other two are based in New York. The idea that the only worthwhile artists who have appeared in Las Vegas in the past six years are coincidentally all attached to the same university is loopy -- it’s not true. I began to feel curious about events behinds the scenes. Who was contacted? Who declined? How much time did they have? Holding that idea of limited time in my head I notice how many of the artworks are either pieces that the artists must have had on hand already (Couper’s Over, Over, Over, Over, Over & Over is a performance filmed at Sydney’s Carriageworks in 2015, while Shannon Stovall’s symbol-rich Gold:Milk:Dresser:Lampshade was posted on Vimeo a year ago), or things that could have been made quickly. Yasmina Chavez’s dialogue with Brent Holmes in What Else? could have been filmed in less than an hour. But what about Holmes’ own Abraxas, apparently a longer shoot, with a more sculpted, filmic outcome?
Almost all of the twenty-six artists have decided to make digital videos. In a field full of movement the few exceptions feel odd, as if the absence of an arrow on the image, telling you to click here to play, is somehow wrong. With a focus on video comes an interest in things that the medium’s strictures have historically steered it towards: the body, performance, time duration, privacy, and diaristic revelations. But even the non-video works share that interest in bodily closeness (Jung Min draws tape strapped across her face (The Beauty of Emptiness), alumna Schroeder photographs her breasts (Let Them Out)) so it might be better to think about it through the theme’s love of masks. Masks are close to bodies, both physically and conceptually, and they’re easily understood as metaphors for hiding, concealment, misrepresentation, and other ideas around the phenomenon of physical presence. The idea of something under a mask leads naturally to the conclusion that flaws are being disguised and the artist’s job is to illuminate them. Nobody here is solving problems, but they see them.
The figures in Stovall’s world have their actions undermined by persistently inadequate tools – keys that bend, mugs that don’t hold liquid – while Emily Sarten “wishes that anything was real anymore” as she lies on a bed in a flattened GIF-room, sighing under a fog of tearful emoji heads (Arts and Leisure (Crying)). Noelle Garcia is contemplating the gap between reality and pattern-saturated perception (Tree from Home). Ali Fathollahi doesn’t have a problem finding tools that work but he uses them too well, too much, and after tying a heap of perforated books over his face he crumples to the floor (Paper Glasses). Javier Sanchez stands out from the rest by locating his problem in historical and geographic space, protesting the suppression of Mexico’s indigenous folklore by wearing his own version of a traditional deer mask and “reenacting the Deer Dance ritual from the northern part of Mexico as a mock-up of reality” against a backdrop of theatrically pretty clouds (Venado Oro).
The most tender permutation of the mask theme comes from Chavez, who asks Holmes to tell the camera about himself while a caterpillar on a leaf flutters in front of his face. The casualness of it reminded me of Agnès Varda’s method of combining natural observation with blatantly inserted props, a technique that carries the implication of a wider, deeper outside world that ignores the wings of the screen, reminding you that the rectangular frame is also a mask. The caterpillar mask is so insubstantial that you realize (as Chavez insists on more information and Holmes’ initial confidence begins to shift into anxiety) that the real mask has to be the voice giving the responses. This feels like such a subtle and yet obvious reinterpretation of hiding that I admired them both for revealing it.
The other ‘dissolved mask,’ if I can put it that way, is the one that appears in Marcus Civin’s It Is What It Is. Civin repudiates the whole idea of concealment with a Trump mask so brutally ripped around the eyeholes and mouth that the clean line between the plastic and the human skin is disturbed. The non sequiturs he chuckles through his ink-dribbling mouth aren’t a joke about any Trumpisms we might recognise – there are no “Person, woman, man,” digs, or anecdotes about stern men calling the president “sir” --; the artist has suggested an infinite monster with no other presence behind it. Here Trump is sucked apart by the laity (I thought of Justin Favela’s method of possessing blue chip works of art by remaking them with cardboard), he is yanked from the specifics of political satire into the broadness of carnival.
Finally, I want to say something about the experience of watching these performances (they’re mostly performances, even if the performers are sometimes objects, as in Reese’s 鏡と窓 (El espejo y la ventana)) online. Staring at body after body performing in front of a camera I was conscious that I was feeling a different kind of patience to the patience I felt when people were acting live. As I watched Nanda Sharif-pour (DIY) tucking the first few leaves and stems into a stocking she had pulled up from her chin to her eyes, I thought, “She’s going to fill it with a screen of foliage. I already know what’s going on, I can click to the end and skip the next seven minutes,” and had to remind myself that the artist had given me the whole process to watch for a reason. Instead of good, fruitful, clear, patient boredom, I was swollen with frustrated pressure. I missed the experience of traveling to the real locations because they gave me relief from the effort of forcing myself to be bored. I hope we’ll be able to have a live Biennale again in two years to cater to my laziness.
Nanda Sharif-pour, DIY, 2020
Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.