Men in Orange Trousers
Words, Emma Geliot
After many sufferings, Emma Geliot launches herself on the opening week of La Biennale di Venezia.
33 hours on a bus – our gizzards dehydrated to biltong by the air con. Stops of indeterminate length every two and a half hours. Long enough to pee? To eat? Have a coffee? Sometimes enough to smoke three fags while weighing up what might be possible.
Every pit stop a generic, nameless service station. Only the language for “Shop”, “Cafe” and “Toilet” changes as we cross borders. Rain and dark with a few twinkling pinpricks of habitation in the landscape, which changes from flat to mountainous in the space of an uncomfortable cat nap.
It hadn’t started well. A violent incident at the Cardiff bus station, reported to the police by me whilst hiding behind a taxi to avoid the kicking that the victim was receiving. It tracked me across France with repeated missed messages from the police – would I give a statement? It was the same officer who’d asked me what I was doing at the bus station at 2am – was I “working”? (it took a while to work out what that actually meant). My suitcase pull along handle collapsed – this would be bad news later.
Venice at last, an hour early. The vaporetti are on 24 hour strike. They do it on purpose every time I come to Venice. Everything is, “over a leetle bridge, down a leetle alleyway, over another leetle bridge”. Shuffling across one final leetle bridge with my broken suitcase under a merciless sun, I am hot and full of foreboding. Had I slaughtered a chicken and spread its steaming entrails across the baking pavement, at that precise moment, the auguries would not have been good.
But pain before pleasure and the Welsh Pavilion hove finally into view with a glass of prosecco thrust into my exhausted hands I began to feel all would be well. Tim Davies’ offering looks good – the space works, the works fit. A shower, a cynar spritz, a pizza capricciosa and a few digestifs and Venice is back in my good books. Just as well. Tomorrow I hit the Arsenale and the Giardini for a cultural onslaught of my critical faculties...
Venice, during the biennale is mad, there’s no two ways about it, and it can drive you mad. After extensive non-clinical trials and research I can now confidently identify the disease known as Paranoia Venezia. Sufferers experience mood swings, panic and a general disquiet of spirit. Everyone is elsewhere seeing the right shows, going to the right parties/events/press conferences. VP (Venice Paranoia) victims are in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing and there’s no-one to tell them where to go or what to do, they just sit helplessly, listening to reports of all the things they’ve missed, nursing sunburn/sunstroke and mosquito bites (the little blighters can be relentless).
Although there was a moment of panic when I’d been cornered by the umpteenth press officer, wanting to bend my ear for half an hour about the special qualities of their own pavilion. Factor in the number of countries taking part (88 at the last count, not including collateral events and guerrilla interventions) and the panic begins to grow. But it’s just not possible to get around everything, be at one performance on the far side of Venice while everyone else seems to be at another a 45 minute yomp away (down a leetle alleyway, over a leetle bridge...)
Along with the geo-specific mental illness comes another specific characteristic of the biennale: the identification of the biennale types: curators, demure and knowledgeable in black Prada,; artists, also possibly wearing black or, in little spotty frocks; the collectors and oligarchs, looking for conversation pieces for yet another piece of real estate, wearing bright, easily-creased clothes that will be tended by the uniformed staff standing guard on their yachts all day. And finally there’s the press – wild eyed, hungover, burnt, battered, bedraggled, unkempt and worrying if their hot copy will make it to print before they get scooped.
Oh, and men in orange trousers (shh, there’s one sitting in front of me in the press room as I write this) working a look that is distinctly European and that has formed the basis for many hours of a spotting game, with no written rules but a strict code of conduct, to be played at all international contemporary art gatherings. A new inductee argued that russet wasn’t orange so we’re developing an phone app with orange Pantone™ as an aid de combat.
