Discovering John Latham's art at Venice Biennale

Books, both as physical as well as conceptual objects, can be a part of an art installation, and can express ideas about different things including memory and knowledge. A Zambia born British artist, John Latham (1921-2006) is known for his art installations in which books played a central role. In Venice Biennale this year, different installations of Latham were brought together in a special exhibition.

This post is about the art of John Latham, as well as a few other art works related to books from Venice Biennale 2017.

Art and books

Books have been around us for a relatively short time but they have deeply affected and changed the way we think about and understand the world. Art was a precursor of writing and became an integral part of the books, as can be seen in a medieval manuscript in the image below (from the medieval art museum, Bologna, Italy).

Democratisation of reading books occurred mainly in the 20th century with increases in literacy. Thus books were seen as repositories of knowledge, memories, histories and cultures, leading to the consolidation of languages and loss of "dialects". In the 21st century, technological advances have completed this circle and we seem to be going back towards a world dominated by visuals (video along with virtual realities and artificial intelligence), as primary medium of human expression.

It is possible that in the human future, with increasing spread of videos, reading books may again become a marginal activity, no longer necessary for learning or communication. But for us old timers, books still continue to be an important part of our communication. 

John Latham's art installations

Latham became known for his use of spray-paint as his primary art-medium in the 1950s. In the 1960s, he started using books in collage art works. For these collages, he tore books into pieces, cut them into different shapes, burnt parts of them, creating specific objects which represented shapes and colours, as well as our ideas and feelings about role of books in the society.

Together with other artists, he created events of "Performance Art", during which they brought together art, creativity and the sensibility of theater performances.

His use of books and related materials in the art works was called "Skoob" (Books written backwards). From creating collages, he moved to creating book-structures such as towers, which were then burnt during performances, creating a transitory art which could evoke deep feelings in the audience because of the way they perceived the sacredness of books.

In 1966, Latham invited a group of art students to chew the pages of an art book taken from the library. Later all those chewed pages were put into a phial and returned to the library. This exercise was supposed to express the concept of "destruction is an equal and opposite process of creation". Such "performance art" created his image as a firebrand revolutionary artist. Latham's influence can be seen from the 2016 album of Pink Floyd, which had a previously unreleased song titled "John Latham".

Among all the works of Latham presented in the Venice Biennale, I personally liked the round ball like sculptures hanging from the roof, in which books or parts of books were placed/collated in different ways. They made me think of books and knowledge as a new born bird, breaking out of the egg and growing up as an independent and interconnected idea.

Among Latham's ideas, I find intriguing those on the "flat time" and moving away from "space-based art" to a "time-based art".

Other book-based art works

Near the John Latham exhibition, around the Venice Biennale library there were some other art works in which books played a central role. For example, there were different paintings by the Chinese artist Liu Ye such as "Books on books" shown in the image below.

Then there were the works of Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan, who had used all the art works from a book to create his collage of sketches on a single sheet. His work shown below has a collage of sketches from all the paintings from a book on Tretyakov Gallery.

Finally there was the installation "Al Saadi's diaries" by Abdullah Al Saadi from United Arab Emirates. This installation had 39 metal boxes, each containing a canvas with drawings, notes, pictures.

Conclusions

Venice Biennale had a lot of stimulating and interesting art works. Among them was the John Latham exhibition. I have a long-standing interest in different uses of books in art and art-installations, thus it was wonderful to discover his works. It was a wonderful opportunity to see the different works of John Latham in one place.

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The wonderful world of Steam-Punk

Steam-Punk is a fashion, literature and art movement inspired from the innovations in the 18th century which led to the industrial revolution. Recently I saw some steam-punk enthusiasts dressed in their costumes.

It was my introduction to the steam-punk movement - I had never heard of them before. All the images in this post are of the persons from the Italian "Steam-Punk Nord-est" association.

Costumes and make-believe worlds

People have always loved dressing up in costumes, for example, in the Venice carnival.

The Punk style with striking costumes and colourful spiked hair styles made their appearance in the 1970s. In the 1990s, imaginary worlds of science fiction and fantasy, led to different movements like cyber-punk and diesel-punk. For example, during the 1990s, while living in Bologna (Italy), I came across groups of young persons, living as homeless urban vagabonds, with long matted hair and dogs. They were known as Punkabestia (beast-punk). The Steam-Punk movement also started in those years.

In more recent years, role-play games and fantasy worlds have become popular and are called Cosplay. I love the colourful Cosplay costumes.

Steam-Punk Philosophy

Steam-Punk ideas were influenced by writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Scientific advances made in the 18th century such as the steam-ship and steam-engines play an important role in Steam-Punk.

The term "steam-punk" originated in the late 1980s as a variant of "cyber-punk". Science-fiction writers of Steam-Punk, imagined alternative worlds based on coal and steam power. For example, American writer Paul di Filippo wrote a trilogy of steam-punk novellas in 1995.

Steam Punk is a retro-futurism - a retro (old) technology imagined as a future. It can mix digital technology with handmade art. For example, look at the amazing old rusty-looking digital camera used by the Steam-Punk enthusiast in the image below.

Steam-Punk Costumes

The steam-punk brings together modern costumes and some elements from Victorian era such as corsets, gowns and petticoats for the women, and waistcoats, long coats, top hats and bowler hats for the men.

The costumes are accompanied by accessories such as old airplane goggles, parasols, stylish guns and sling bows.

Many well known fashion brands such as Prada, Versace and Dior have come up with clothes inspired by Steam-Punk. However, the real steam-punk enthusiasts invest a lot of resources and personal imagination in creating their costumes. For example, check the beautifully made complex hats worn by the two persons in the image below!

Steam-Punk Nord-Est Association

The Steam Punk association of the north-east of Italy, whose members are featured in this post, came to Schio, where I live, during a recent cultural festival called the British Day. Among the group, they even had a look-alike queen Victoria (in the image below).

The members of this association design and wear steam-punk costumes and show them off during the different cultural festivals in the region. They also organise symposiums to present their "steam-punk" inventions and creativity.

Conclusions

As our societies become more developed and as we have more free time, I think that movements like steam-punk will become even more common. They are a way of having fun. They are also a way of organising smaller communities around a common-interest, to escape from the anonymity of the modern urban life.

For me, it was an opportunity to learn about their striking and colourful world. That day, my favourite costume was a photographer with an ancient looking camera (in the image below) though I am not sure if it worked!.

Using your fantasy, if you could create an imaginary world based in your own cultural ethos and history, what kind of worlds would you like to imagine?

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Mario Converio and his iron sculptures

Italian sculptor Mario Converio is known for his sculptures in wrought iron. Though iron has been known to humanity at least for a few thousand years, its use for creating sculptures is not very common as it is difficult to work with. Mario manages to creates poetry with the metal.

Recently an exhibition of his works, "Metal Fantasies" was organised in Schio (VI, Italy), where I had an opportunity to talk to Mario. This post presents the artist Mario Converio and some of his sculptures from this exhibition.

Mario Converio

Mario lost both his parents early - his mother died when he was 2 and his father, when he was 12. His artistic journey started when he was 14 and decided to make a sculpture of his father (in the image below, Mario Converio with the bust of his father).

Mario did not attend any art academy. He was interested in art and started learning it by himself, experimenting with different materials and techniques, starting with clay and stone. He visited different parts of Europe and was inspired by ice-sculptures, after which for a period he worked with ice and glass, and participated in many international art events. One of his first metal sculptures was that of a female-butt made from a grass-cutter. Since then he likes to experiment with butts and this has brought him fame.

In 1976 he was one of the founders of artists' group of Schio. The group organises street events in which he demonstrates his wrought iron sculpting skills. They had also started some art courses.

Over the past decade he has participated in different events about wrought-iron sculptures in Italy and in different parts of Europe. He has won awards in some of them. He feels that this has been a great learning opportunity for him to see the techniques others were using and sharing his own experiences. Apart from iron, he sometimes also uses bronze and stones in his works.

He told me, "Making art is a process of trial and error. Some times, it works and I am happy with my creation. Other times, I feel that it was a mistake and it did not come out as I had imagined it."

Working with iron is hard and tiring work. Mario said, "I am 73 years old and I start to feel that I can't go on doing it for very long. It requires strength and energy of a younger person. When I was younger, I didn't use proper protections like using gloves to protect from vibrations, so that has created some complications for me."

About the sculptures in the exhibition, Mario explained that some of them were things that he had made many years ago, while others are more recent. Making of these sculptures requires time. The simple ones can be completed in a couple of weeks while big sculptures, require months of work.

Creating sculptures in wrought iron

To create the sculptures, the artist needs to choose the iron sheets which then have to be forged at high temperature. While a sheet is red hot, its shape can be molded. The iron cools quickly and thus time for shaping it for creating sculptures is short.

Mario first creates a model of his sculpture in clay, which is much easier to work with. This allows him to think of the shape he wants to create in iron and plan the process.

Though iron is a difficult metal to work with for an artist, Mario's long experience and ability makes him bring out a kind of dynamism in his sculptures, making them come alive. Beaten iron can assume different hues, from a cold bluish grey to a warm burnt sienna. These chromatic variations add to the beauty of his work.

Apart from working with sheet metal, Mario has also experimented with perforated metal sheets for creating his sculptures. Creating a sculpture with such nets, requires additional care as it needs to be shaped delicately. Some of his most suggestive works have been created in this way.

Now, let me briefly present some of his works from his "Metal Fantasies" exhibition.

Nature sculptures

Mario likes to sculpt animals and birds, with an occasional flower or a plant. Among his animal sculptures, I especially liked animals frozen in action. Among these, my favourite was a running dog, its whole body lifted in air with only a paw touching the ground. I loved this dog's expression and I could almost see its saliva drooling down its mouth.

Female form

Mario's sculptures of the rounded female buttocks are famous. He had a large number of them in the exhibition. I liked the ones where the metal's shape suggested the roundness and the female form, rather than the more explicit ones showing genitals.

My favourite among his female butt-sculptures was the one shown in the image below, made from a perforated thick iron sheet. Compared to the legs that are lateral, the upper part of the body is turned forward at an impossible angle.

Another of his sculpture, which is well known, had a nude woman wrapped around an old TV set.

Among his full body female nude sculptures my favourites were those where the body was shown frozen-in-action, like the girl doing acrobatics with a ribbon in the image below. Like the frozen-in-action animals, in all these sculptures, only small parts of the bodies were anchored to the base while most of the sculptures were in the air.

Male form

There were occasional sculptures of male nudes, buttocks and genitals among his work but they were not a prominent part of his work. Among these, my favourite was one in the image below, of a guy with a six-pack abdomen and once again, frozen-in-action body.

Conclusions

I loved Mario Converio's sculptures. I liked the way he combines abstract unformed metal, as if being torn away from its roots, and how it gently transforms into a shape, hinting at something instead of being explicit. I also liked his ability to freeze a moment in time in the metal, catching the dynamicity of an action-charged moment. They are full of drama and emotions, something which you do not expect to be so strong in a metal sculpture.

To conclude, below you will find the thumbnails of some other sculptures by Mario - click on them for a larger view. Do tell me which of Marios's sculptures presented in this post did you like the most and why!

Note: Some of the images of his sculptures presented with this post, have been modified with photo-effects and are therefore, different from how those works actually appear.

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Meet the artist and sculptor: Corrado Meneguzzo

Some months ago I visited the house of an Italian artist and sculptor called Corrado Meneguzzo. It was an opportunity to look at some of his works and to talk to him about his art.

The above image shows one of Corrado's art installations. The art does not arise in a vacuum, it is molded and guided by the life-experiences and living-contexts of the artists. I love visiting artists in their homes and to listen to them talk about their works.

Visit to Corrado Meneguzzo

Corrado lives and works at the top of a hill in a relatively isolated area of a small alpine commune called Priabona, a few km from Schio in the north-east of Italy, where I live. The visit to Corrado was organised by a friend, Roberto, for a local cultural group. We were a group of about 15 persons. (In the image below, Corrado, wearing blue jeans and blue shirt, is in the centre)

When we reached his home, Corrado was waiting for us with an illustrator friend, Luca.  From his isolated and drenched-in-silence home-studio on the top of a verdant hill, we could see the houses and the church in the tiny commune of Priabona far below us. Except for an old abandoned church with a bell tower, there were no other buildings or people living nearby.

Corrado explained that archaeological objects from the neolithic and from the Lombard invasion periods (6-7th century CE) have been found in the area around his house. He said that this idea of living in area which is on a continuum of ancient human settlements for thousands of years, is very important to his sense of being an artist.

Corrado's artistic background

He explained, "I grew in a house in the valley below with my grandfather who used to make wooden objects. My step-father used to decorate churches. My uncle Giobatta brought artists to our town and I had been visiting his museum ever since I was young. All this sparked my interest in art. When I was seventeen, I took part in a collective exhibition in the Casabianca museum. I did a diploma in architecture focusing on old painting techniques. But studying art was more of a personal endeavor."

One of his first works as a sculptor-artist was to find and renovate an old house on the top of the hill, that was a crumbling ruin, and make his studio-home in it. He says that he did almost all the renovation by himself, one step at a time (Corrado's home in the image below).

Just outside his house there are displayed different old art installations including a few wooden sculptures and some chairs made of different materials including old truck tyres, mostly from 2005-06.

Corrado explained that in the 1990s he used to work more with stones. Then he shifted to cement. Around 2006-07 he did a lot of work with old tyres. Now he likes to work with wood. In between he also does paintings. He feels that each material has its own voice and it tells him what it wishes to communicate.

He took us to a short visit to some of his installations spread out in the open areas and grassy slopes around his house.

The Confessional

Corrado's home is located behind an old abandoned church with a bell-tower on a hillock rising behind it. From the hillock, you can look down on the other side of the hill in the valley below towards Malo and the road going towards Vicenza 25 km away.

He started the visit to his works by taking us up the hillock, behind the bell-tower. This brought us to an art installation called "the Confessional". Built in wood and painted in black, the confessional looks more like a pulpit. Personally, its design made me think of a guillotine where they could behead persons.

Corrado explained that as a child, his mother took him regularly to the Catholic church. He was a three years old child and was supposed to confess his sins to the priest. Since he was tiny, sitting at the confessional he could only see the legs of the priest sitting inside.

He didn't seem to have pleasant memories of those visits and through this installation made in 2011, evoked the feelings of dread and sadness that the confessionals represented for him. His religion related experiences seemed to play an important influence on his art.

Feeding trough for birds

It is an installation made from an old feeding trough that was used in the past for giving hay to the cows. Corrado had turned it in a standing position and then fixed a small red cup to the top, which holds water for the birds. It was an installation on the transformation of objects, that he had made some 10-11 years ago.

Suitcases

The concrete moulds of the old suitcases were made for a project called "Interpreting America" in 2011. These represented the emigrants who used to leave Europe with with their belongings closed in old suitcases, leaving their homes to search for a new and better life somewhere else. Today, the emigrants from Africa and from the different wars, are a new version of the age-old search for security and well-being.

The cement moulds of the suitcases were brought back to Corrado's home after the end of the exhibition, and were left out in the garden. With time, moss and grass has grown in those molds, giving an idea of decay and at the same time, bringing them to life.

The Womb Window

For me, this installation of a vaginal opening made in dark concrete and fitted with a red grill was the most provocative sculpture of Corrado. When I saw it, I thought that it symbolised the violence against the women and the horrible practice of female genital mutilation, still common in some communities/countries especially in Africa and Middle east. It is also prevalent among the Bohra community in India.

However, Corrado gave a completely different interpretation of this work. He said that it represented his mother. The red grill was supposed to be his window, behind which he used to stand as a child and look out at the world from the safety and the security of his mother's protection.

The Angel Chairs

Over the past couple of years, Corrado has been sculpting chairs, especially the "angel chairs" or the chairs with wings. He has been experimenting with different kinds of materials and techniques for making these chairs.

One of the chairs that he was working on, was placed in the veranda of his studio. It was huge and made with rough wood. It was shaped like a broken angel, a kind of Milo's Venus transformed into a chair. I really loved this sculpture.

Inside the studio, there were different chairs in wood, lacquered with a shining red paint, that he was completing for an exhibition to be held in Los Angles. He explained that making of each of these chairs took around 400 hours of work. These are part of his "Seat Art" project.

There was many other chair-sculptures in his studio including a more traditional looking wooden chair painted in red and with the sign of cross on its back, with a rosary wrapped on its back; and another made with wood and an old tyre.

Paintings

The studio also had different paintings by Corrado. One of his old paintings had a woman dressed in black standing near a lake.

A lot of his paintings were about female genitals dripping blood. This brought back to my mind our discussion in his garden about the sculpture of the vagina with the red grill. Though he had explained that sculpture in more happy terms, I think that his art represents some unresolved issues with women and sexuality.

Another of his paintings was a nude self-portrait (click on the image below for a larger view).

Conclusions

If I had seen any one of his art works displayed in an art gallery or in a museum, it would have given me a certain idea about Corrado as an artist and as a person. Looking at his home and at the different works he has done over the past 20 years and listening to him talk about them, gave me a different kind of understanding about his art.

Of all his artistic works, the one which I would like to own, if I had sufficient space to display it properly, would be the "Broken angel" chair. I think that this choice represents my own preference for romantic and good-looking art. In terms of emotional impact, I think that my vote will go to the "Womb Window" or the "Suitcases", though I wouldn't like to own them, as I found them disturbing.

I had asked Corrado, which of his art works was the one that he felt closest to his heart. He had answered that probably it was the Confessional or perhaps the painting of the woman in black.

If you could choose only one of his art works, which one would you choose and why?

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