“OPEN 10” by Edward Rubin
Lido, Venice ITALY 30 August · October 14, 2007
garden full of Christina Treppo’s phosphorescently colored
OPEN, the international sculpture and installation exhibition, is held each
fabric vines and flowers.
year on the island of Lido where the Adriatic Sea, the landscape, and the
The most philosophical, if scientifically based installaVenice lagoon combine to create one of the most unique, if not romantition on view was Republic of San Marino artist Leonardo
cally heady, outdoor/indoor art events in the world. Essentially a walking
Blanco’s Nature (2007). At first glance we see what
tour, the exhibition starts the moment the viewer disembarks from the
vaporetto onto the Piazzale St. Maria Elisabetta, continues along the lushly
appears to be nothing more than a forest of thickly planted,
planted walkways of Lungomare G. Marconi, the island’s main street, and
eight-foot-long vertical steel poles. After walking around
ends overlooking the beach at the very chic Westin Excelsior, the infamous
the 13-square-foot weave of vertical poles, we begin to
hangout of the Venice film festival crowd.
perceive—only barely and at certain odd angles—the
Celebrating its tenth year,
“OPEN 10,” under the guiding
hand of curator/founder Paolo
De Grandis and co-curator
Carlotta Scarpa, returned to
its roots by inviting a gaggle of
international art stars from earlier
installments to showcase their
work alongside the 47, mostly
younger, unsung artists. Strangely
(or not), the contributions of bigticket artists like Enzo Cucchi,
Sandro Chia, Christo and Jeanne
Claude seemed mainly lifted from
their trashcans. The sole exception was 85-year-old New York/Italian artist
Beverly Pepper’s astonishing Longo Monolith (2006), a two-pronged, curving
Corten steel sculpture that rivals Richard Serra at his very best.
The first work to catch and hold my eye, albeit for a few seconds, was
B.zarro’s ironically slick and oh-so-trendy Manifesto Postcomunista (19742005). Casually parked outside a luxury hotel, a shockingly shiny red Rolls
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21 N E W Y E A R 2 0 0 8
outline of what appears to be a
dog. The lesson the artist successfully demonstrates is that all reality,
whether visual or otherwise, depends
on where you stand. Those passersby
briskly taking in the air, perhaps lost
in their own thoughts, had no idea
what they were looking at. To most,
there was no forest and no treeloving dog.
On the portico of Hotel Des Bains,
the hotel where Death in Venice was
filmed, Dutch artist Jackie Sleper’s
exquisitely crafted, life-sized sculpture
Modesty (2007) was turning heads. It
features a bluish-purple horse grazing
in a bed of giant red porcelain roses,
mounted by a golden-haired boychild drinking in the beauty of nature.
Directly behind the sculpture hangs
an elegantly rendered painting of a
white horse standing in an Arcadian
field of clover. Across the right side of
a painted fiberglass duo by Chinese artist Xiang Jing. Tauntingly challenging the viewer, a widely
the canvas, written in her own hand,
smiling teenage girl is seen pointing her finger menacingly in gun-like fashion at the head of her
are the artist’s poetic reflections on
friend. While the scene can be read as two girls innocently playing, in actuality it is a chilling reenthe fragility of life.
actment of Eddy Adams’s famous 1968 photo of a South Vietnam general shooting a young Viet
In Psyche (2007), a series of white
Cong prisoner in the head.
plaster torsos, arranged like tombEnding the tour on a somewhat upbeat note is New York artist Carole Feuerman’s superstones in an abandoned cemetery,
realistic sculpture The Survival of Serena (2007). With simulated beads of water running down her
Italian artist Barbara Taboni offered
OPEN’s only interactive installation.
face, and tufts of real hair sticking out of her swim cap, we are relieved to see Serena, overwhelmed
People were given colored pencils
by life, if not nearly drowning as the title seems to infer, floating safe and sound on an inner tube.
so they could leave a sign of their
As is to be expected, Feuerman’s sculpture, always popular with the public, was the photo-op of
passing—some even drew little
“OPEN 10.” Feuerman, her decade-long career on an upswing, also had a small, but choice,
pictures—on the torso of their
exhibition of her early work (curated by John Spike, the former director of the Florence Biennale) at
choice. I could not help but feel a
the In PARADISO space across the lagoon in the Giardini. Here, too, the shutterbugs went crazy.
wave of melancholy wash over me
as I was reminded of Thomas Gray’s
1762 poem, “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard,” realizing
that no matter how colorful our
graffiti-filled lives may be, all paths
lead gloomily to the grave.
Unique, in material alone, if not
idea, was Swiss sculptor/engineer Heinz Aeschlimann’s darkly
mysterious Piramide Fuso (2007).
Experimentally cast in asphalt (a
possible first), the material used to
pave roads, and peppered throughout
with glass shards, the two pyramids,
appearing both wise and strangely
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