Who "Interferes" With Art? Is There Even Such a Thing as Interference in Art?

"Art & Exhibitions" is a new weekly column from QDaily. We're trying to show the art world as it really is — genuine, entertaining, and sometimes not entirely likable — from an independent point of view.

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Over the just-finished May Day holiday, French President Emmanuel Macron paid a visit to a historic site of his own: the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci in France's Loire Valley. On May 2, 1519, the Italian Renaissance master died while visiting France — this year marks exactly 500 years since.

But Macron's mood at da Vinci's tomb was probably not entirely relaxed. He was hoping the trip would win over a fellow leader he'd never crossed paths with before: Italian President Sergio Mattarella. Ever since Italy's election produced a political black swan last year, Europe's establishment has been wondering whether the populist-backed new government would still defend Europe's traditional values. That's exactly the point Macron wanted to make to the Italian president:

"The relationship between our two countries, our two peoples, is indestructible," Macron told Mattarella.

The Venice Biennale is everywhere in the news. The art world's biennial showpiece opens this weekend. If you're already booking flights to go see it, here's a news item that won't affect you either way: from September 1 through the end of November, when the exhibition closes, the city of Venice will charge day-trippers who don't stay overnight an extra 3-to-10-euro "access fee" to fund environmental initiatives. Previously, that cost was bundled into hotel room rates on the island.

Venice is one of the most visible victims of climate change. Rising sea levels and the constant arrival of giant cruise ships have left its fate hanging by a thread — last year, three-quarters of the city flooded. Staging a massive exhibition, and the crowds it draws, will inevitably add to that environmental burden, no matter how often artists invoke "sustainability." Little wonder Artnet asked: "Will [climate-themed work] actually improve things, or just make the problem worse?"

To be fair, some environmentally minded artworks really are well made and thought-provoking, and the Biennale's global reach gives discussions of environmental issues a genuine platform advantage. Still, some environmental consulting groups were disappointed to find that not a single exhibiting artist reached out to them to figure out how to minimize their work's impact on the city. What they got instead were requests for talks and symbolic partnerships.

This Week's Exhibition: Trial & Error 2: The Boundless Banquet

If you've seen Sleep No More, you won't find Trial & Error 2: The Boundless Banquet — which just wrapped at Shanghai's East Bund Minsheng Wharf art space — unfamiliar. This "immersive art" show combined installation, dance, theater, film, makeup art, multimedia, and sound, running two hours across the 1st, 6th, and 7th floors of a disused warehouse.

The exhibition ran for just 11 days. A QDaily staff member experienced this hard-to-categorize performance in person and spoke with the creative team. As in Sleep No More, visitors could choose their own path through the space, locking eyes and dancing with performers, listening to a ticking clock, the scratch of a record under a needle, footsteps crushing wheat stalks, and a women's chorus. In the final segment, visitors are guided to put on headphones and tune in to the sound of "themselves."

Cui Xiaohong, lead producer of Trial & Error 2, told us the team deliberately avoided modeling the show on Sleep No More, which "completely envelops you." Trial & Error 2 aimed instead to give visitors a sense of flow, with more emphasis on visitors' awareness of their own bodies. You don't need to buy a dozen tickets to follow a storyline as elaborate as Sleep No More's.

Using multimedia technology and curatorial design to break from the traditional way of viewing gallery-hung art isn't unusual among newer arts organizations these days. Trial & Error 2 goes a step further, giving visitors a chance to actually interact with performers — an intimate, relatively free-form experience, and a two-hour excuse to ignore your WeChat messages. That costs 228 or 288 yuan, well above what most exhibitions in China charge, but a city like Shanghai has no shortage of visitors willing to pay it.

Compared with Trial & Error 1, staged in Beijing in 2017, this sequel only keeps the immersive-art framing — the content and setup aren't otherwise connected. Sleep No More has now run more than 600 performances at the McKinnon Hotel; where the Trial & Error series goes from here is still an open question.

Artists Say

"The whole of America was built by refugees, and suddenly it's become a country that refuses them."

Marc Quinn, British artist

Later this year, British artist Marc Quinn will unveil a refugee-themed sculpture in New York made from real human blood. As planned, he has collected blood from more than 5,000 people, had it solidified, and packed it into two white containers to be displayed inside a giant "tent" in front of the New York Public Library.

The blood in one container comes from donors who are refugees, from Syria and elsewhere; the other comes from fashion and entertainment figures like Kate Moss and Paul McCartney. No label will indicate which side is which — a deliberate reminder that the blood flowing through all of our bodies is equal. Video interviews with the donors will also be screened on the streets of New York.

Born in 1964, Quinn began working with blood as a material early in his career. In 1991, he cast a sculpture called Self — a likeness of his own head — using 10 pints of his own frozen blood. What draws him to blood is its duality: it holds both life and death within it.

A Matter of Taste

The New York Times described the May 6 Met Gala red carpet with lines about Lady Gaga stripping down through four full looks as she walked, Katy Perry in a custom "chandelier" gown that turned her into a walking light fixture, Jared Leto in medieval scarlet robes cradling a replica of his own severed head, and Ezra Miller in seven extra eyes and red lipstick, dizzying from every angle.

Every year on the first Monday in May, stars from film, music, and fashion descend on the Met Gala like students walking into an exam, terrified of being anything less than outrageous, over-the-top — or, in this year's word, "camp." Also on display alongside the celebrities were roughly 175 paintings, sculptures, and fashion designs — clearly beside the point.

This year's theme was "Camp: Notes on Fashion," drawn from Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp.'" Sontag argued that the essence of camp was "a love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration," with the feminine man and the masculine woman as classic examples. The concept went on to inspire the later gay rights movement, and it has since piled yet another layer of postmodern verbiage onto the fashion world.

The Met Gala's curators conveniently ignored another line from Sontag: "Pure Camp is always naive... Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying." Her camp icons were Oscar Wilde, Greta Garbo, and Charles de Gaulle. Lady Gaga may well be a fitting camp icon for our era, but turning "camp" itself into a gala theme, trumpeted loudly for all to see, is nothing more than pure ostentation.

Market Makers

Frieze New York closed on May 5. Jay-Z and Beyoncé bought Derek Fordjour's portrait series Top-Ten ALLSTARS at the Night Gallery booth for $200,000 — not a huge sale, but the price was made public, and it gave the market something to talk about. Artsy argued that this edition of the fair "combined the aesthetics of a makeshift market stall, a new pricing model where galleries pay booth fees based on how much they actually sell, and a firm commitment to price transparency."

Beyond Randall's Island, which requires a ferry to reach, Frieze also drove foot traffic into galleries across Manhattan — this "art week" model has by now spread worldwide. Next week, Christie's and Sotheby's hold their New York spring auctions, where you'll see some genuinely expensive things change hands.

The Turner Prize, Britain's best-known art award, has dropped a sponsorship over the sponsor's controversial record on LGBTQ issues. The Turner Prize is run by Tate, which provides the exhibition space free of charge. LGBTQ rights groups discovered that one of this year's sponsors belonged to the transport group Stagecoach, whose chairman, Brian Souter, once campaigned against teaching about homosexuality in schools and has publicly opposed same-sex marriage.

According to Tate's statement, ending the sponsorship deal was a mutual decision. Stagecoach explained: "We are absolutely committed to diversity within our own company, but we also don't want anything to distract attention away from the Turner Prize artists and their work."

Tate's decision drew praise from many quarters, but how to fill the resulting funding gap remains a real problem. Awkwardly, Tate had just announced in March that it would no longer accept donations from the Sackler family, after artists and others fiercely criticized the family's pharmaceutical business over its ties to the opioid crisis. Against a backdrop of shrinking public funding, arts institutions are leaning ever more heavily on private sponsorship. Due diligence can lower the risk, but how much of the money flowing into the art world is really free of stains?

A Few Exhibitions

Sight, Island of Delos, Greece. In Greek mythology, the island of Delos is the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and it's a UNESCO World Heritage site. Now, 29 of British artist Antony Gormley's signature human-figure sculptures have been installed here, set in dialogue with the mountains, the sea, and the ruins — the first artworks to land on the island in thousands of years. Through October 31; opening hours may vary with weather. Accessible only by ferry.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England. Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was an American avant-garde artist, novelist, poet, feminist, and self-proclaimed "plagiarist" whose audacious work — sometimes involving her own body — explored contested themes of identity, sexuality, and plagiarism. The show's title nods to a view she held consistently: the "self" is never singular, but performed strategically in different guises depending on the social relationships and contexts at hand. The ICA is also running a series of performances, screenings, and talks alongside the exhibition. Through August 4; adult tickets £4.

snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks, SFMOMA, San Francisco, US. We may be witnessing photography's third great revolution: what matters isn't how a picture is taken, but how it circulates and spreads. At SFMOMA, you can trace decades of images made everywhere from the camera to the phone-plus-Instagram era, watching how their form and subject matter shift with the medium, and experience being drowned in images at Erik Kessels' "24HRS in Photos." Through August 4; adult tickets $25.

"Liangdeng: Paintings Grown From That Field," a solo exhibition by Huang Yugang, Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing. Since 2003, the young artist Huang Yugang has lived and worked for over a decade in a Miao village in western Hunan, using ink painting to record local life and customs. For this show, he "rented" a rice paddy from where he lives and laid it across the gallery floor, letting the soil and the paintings comment on each other. As one villager put it, "Not one person who's dug this soil has ever gone to Beijing — the soil's got a better life than we do," Through June 2; free admission.

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, Song Art Museum, Beijing. This is the second stop, following Shanghai's Long Museum, on a China tour for the late French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. Bourgeois is best known for her giant spider sculptures — emotionally charged works that distill her lifelong reflections on family, life, and the act of creation. Through June 23; adult tickets 200 yuan, student tickets 120 yuan. On the evening of May 12, the Central Academy of Fine Arts will also hold a screening of the documentary Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.

Cover image via: Élysée