80
JON BYWATER
... Venice, lost and won,
Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,
Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose!
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Soon after the 58th Venice Biennale opened this
year, a giant cruise ship lost control in the Giudecca
Canal, failing to stop and, with horns droning, glided
intractably into another boat and the dock. A tourist
from Aotearoa was one of five people injured. This
was all coincidence, of course; but I’ll come to that.
Cookies left by my travel plans may have fed
an algorithm. Within hours at home in Auckland I
viewed video online. Phones had captured multiple
angles on the accident. By the time I got to Venice
myself, an image of the collision lingered on
photocopied posters in the residential back streets,
urging a ban on the big boats. For the locals, it is a
real bind. At the same time that it sustains the place,
tourism is killing it.
I noticed an unusual number of empty storefronts
in the retail warren of San Marco this visit. A business
owner explained to me that, as in many places, budget
airlines and Airbnb mean more visitors come but with
less to spend. Two centuries ago, though, Byron was
already lamenting the city’s sad decay. While it would
be facile just to say that it was ever thus, Venice is
certainly a place charged by the complexities of loss,
Facts & Figures
Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc at Venice
the ostensible subject of Dane Mitchell’s work Post Hoc
for the 2019 New Zealand Pavilion.
Literally ‘after this’, the Latin phrase abbreviates a
name for a bad inference: post hoc ergo propter hoc, the
mistake of taking it to follow that one thing following
another means the former caused the latter. We cannot
infer that the boat crashed because of the Biennale, for
example. In Mitchell’s use, however, the allusion does
not settle as a clear diagnosis, but hangs obliquely, a
veiled accusation of muddled thinking.
Information, and what we might take from it, is
central to the project. Stored digitally on the black
boxes of a server in his exhibition’s main venue—the
Palazzina Canonica, the former home of a marine
research institute on the Grand Canal, near the
permanent national pavilions of the Giardini—voiced
by text-to-speech software, one by one for the duration
of the show, simultaneously printed onto rolls of
paper in another room in the pavilion, and, once read
and recorded, accessible as audio files through local
WiFi networks there and in other (institutional) spots
in Venice, at the core of the work lies a list of lists.
Mitchell’s work is pop conceptualism, in a local
lineage that might include the late Julian Dashper
and his senior Billy Apple. Clearly branded, visual
neatness is deployed to put a readily graspable idea
up for inspection. In this case, the starting point is the
artist’s consistent interest in the conventionally poetic
quality of intangible things like dust, sleep and magic