Art Teacher in Paradise

So it turns out that blogging has become the thing I do when I can't sleep (my last post), or when I have a little extra time in the morning (this post).  I just looked at my "all-time" stats and it was kind of sad to see the downward trend of my hit mountain, but what can I say?  I got art shit to do.

One of the reasons my printmaking teacher, Subler, encouraged us all to participate in that study abroad in 2001 was because the Venetian Biennale takes place on odd-numbered years.  A biennale is an art event that takes place approximately every two years (literally it means every two years but has come to be able to fit other regularly spaced events), and the event that made it a thing all started in Venice in 1895.

Well, the 2015 Biennale was the fifty-sixth in the history of the event, but of particular note for me and Mongolians because this is the first year Mongolia has participated, and this helped to spur me on in my desire to make it back to Venice this summer.  I first learned this when an acquaintance posted their IndieGoGo campaign on Facebook.  I'll let you read the story yourself via the link...long story short, their goal was to raise $50,000; they only raised $820 and awareness, but sometimes awareness is what you really need, because somebody's fairy godmother got on the horn and made stuff happen.

I managed to locate Palazzo Mora (which hosted the Mongolian Pavilion as well as a couple of other national pavilions) fairly easily, one of my first days in Venice.  One of the great things about the Biennale is that there are all these palaces with doors wide open to let you see internationally renowned art FOR FREE.  I rushed through the door and up the stairs, past some really cool pieces of art (such as a hallway of shoes made of bullet casings and some really fascinating sketchbooks) til I made it to the Mongolian pavilion.  It featured the work of two artists, T. Enkhbold and Unen Enkh, and the installation, featuring rough materials such as felt and leather, reminded me so strongly of Mongolia that I might have felt a little homesick as I sat on the floor and watched one of the videos, in which Enkhbold sets up his ger on a faraway shore...in the Netherlands, if I'm remembering correctly, but it's been several months thanks to my computer problems, some laziness, and the fact that the Kawaii Kid keeps suggesting really interesting anime to me.

One of the things that blew my mind in 2001 was the insane variety of materials and creations on display at the Biennale.  I had forgotten how much of it there was until I made my way to the Giardini this summer - the main things I remember from the 49th was Ron Mueck's Big Boy, Do Ho Suh's floor of people, and (of course) all the video art (particularly the Bjork video with the robots...beautiful, in a weird way...)  Walking through the Giardini, I remembered more, but couldn't be distracted by ghosts of the past.  There was the artist who made swatches with different kinds of earth and an installation which read Peace, but could only really be seen from the right perspective.

I LOVED the Australian (I think - sorry guys, like I said, it's been a while) pavilion.  It had the feel of a crazy antiques shop where skulls had been painted on the cuckoo clocks while someone had defaced currency with swimming sperm.  I also appreciated the tree on wheels outside one of the pavilions (German?), but I think I loved the Japanese pavilion the most at the Giardini...

Chiharu Shiota's installation, "Key in the Hand," featured about a million keys (rough estimate) strung through the million miles of red yarn tangled throughout the space...and a few rustic boats.  I felt like one of those keys must be mine, and if I could grasp it I could untangle it's line from the others, finding my way back to...something.  I liked the feeling of possibility it invoked in me.

It was just after I'd purchased my vaporetto pass and was taking a ride somewhere (possibly to Murano) that I realized I recognized a name on one of the posters - Rashad Alakbarov.  As soon as I figured out why I knew his name I totally fangirled.  Alakbarov is an Azerbaijani artist who creates the most amazing installations using light and shadow.  I tracked down "The Union of Fire and Water" at the Palazzo Barbaro (which, I swear, would make a great haunted house.  It had some serious presence!) one afternoon to see his art in person, and it.  Was.  Fantastic.  Not only was his work even more amazing in person than it is on This Is Colossal but it fit perfectly into the mood of Palazzo Barbaro, particularly the message, "I WAS HERE," which was reflected off a grouping of mirrors.  But my personal favorite was "DO NOT FEAR," spelled out in the shadows of knives.

My last stop was the Arsenale.  I hate to admit this, but I was a little undone by the time I got there.  It was hot, the sun was shining, and I was thinking more about the dinner I was supposed to have that night with a Shanghai friend who happened to be in Venice at the same time (historic ravioli.  Need I say more???)  Also, the Arsenale always kind of strikes me as a madhouse - it's just sensory overload!  I took a good look around, and I liked what I saw, but by that point in time, I was a saturated sponge, and there wasn't much more art I could soak up, no matter how much I wanted to. Nevertheless, with everything there is to see, I'd love to take my kids to Venice for the 57th Biennale.  I can't even imagine some of the things they'd say about the art, but I'll probably have to, since I have no idea how I'd plan that and keep it reasonably priced.  Still, a girl can dream.

Oh, hey - I have one last thing to tell you (all six of you regular readers)!  Last fall I entered the Harmonic UB Tourist Photo Competition.  The original deadline was in September 2014 and I hit them with my best shots (yes, I live here, but I am still a tourist...or at least travel around Mongolia.  Details!), but then they decided they wanted to give more people a chance to compete, so they changed it.  To September 2015.  So I waited patiently for the next year for the damn thing to wrap up.  There was an exhibition of the best photos on the concluding weekend, but I didn't know about it until the photos were added to the facebook event, and although they said winners would be announced soon, none were ever posted on any of the associated pages...I would know, because I was watching and waiting.  My hopes were dashed while we were in Greece (I have a lot of writing to do...) and Engrish said she'd got an announcement that some Chinese woman had won the contest, but I was dubious, since there were supposed to be three prizes and c'mon, what the heck, why didn't I get an email, too?  Finally, one month and a week later, I get a short, very innocuous message in my hotmail account letting me know that I've won second place!  Honestly I was hoping for first place, because the prize was a trip to the Gobi and I've never been, but I don't mind going to Khuvsgul again, if someone else is paying.  So, yeah.  Another second place win for me.  Yay!

Dat Glass, Doe.

It's been a helluva long time since I wrote anything.  My guests from this summer are partly to blame, particularly Belynda...if she hadn't been here after I got back from Italy, I might have finished writing about my trip then.  Or maybe not - my laptop won't connect to my wifi at home so I have to type on my stupid little transformer, which is fine when I'm traveling but annoying any other time.  Also, there's the fact that I was at home for the better part of a month, and don't even get me started on what internet is like in the styx.  And now school's started, so I've been busy with other things...such as planning a trip for my students to Greece, which it turns out none of them are going on, because in spite of what I believe about them, they can't think for themselves.  But better late than never, right?

I have two things from Venice left to write about, and this is the first.  As per the fact that I've changed my reason to travel from phallic worship (having run out of sites to visit) to learning stuff, I put some serious effort into tracking down a place where I could start to learn how to work with glass.

When I was in Venice in 2001, I visited Murano, and loved it - loved being away from the main part of the lagoon and seeing the glassblowers work.  I think anyone who watches it finds glassblowing fascinating.  Dale Chihuly is one of my favorite artists of all time, and I had dreams of being able to sculpt glass like him.

Well, the course that Abate Zanetti, the workshop I found that offered beginner courses, had for that week was not "How to Blow Glass Like Dale Chihuly."  It was lampworking beads, and I figured it was better to start small, anyways.  I signed up, and when they reached their minimum number of students (2, it turned out) I paid my deposit and started getting stoked about the fact that I was going to making some stuff out of glass.  Yee.  Haw.

The first day of the course I rolled my sweaty ass out of bed and made my way to Fondamente Nove to catch the vaporetto (via the cafe where I bought my brioche and aranciata).  I was SUPER early, partly because I didn't want to be late, but also because I've become an early riser (NOT to be confused with a morning person...just because I'm up before the sun doesn't mean I want to talk to anyone - or hell, even see them...)  I strolled around the island, which was quiet, since most people were still asleep, and sat down to read for a while, until I got a gnat in my eye and had to go looking for a mirror so I could fish it out, which is the state I was in when I came to Abate Zanetti.

They have a showroom where they give a presentation of the noble history of glasswork in the lagoon as well as having a display of pieces of art that were created based on winning designs submitted by schoolchildren (which reminds me - I was going to have my brats enter...guess I need to go back and look at their website).  On one side of the showroom was the fornace, where hot (literally) men were making big, amazing things.  On the other side was the lampworking studio, where we bent the fires of creation to our whims and made stuff.

This is the "lamp" we used, and it felt like the blazing heart of the sun.  Lampworking basically amounts to melting the glass rods in a small, intense fire and shaping it around metal rods to create beads.  With a little practice, you could make other things, as well, and around day 3 (aka, when I realized that being precise and perfect wasn't really my thing), I started experimenting with putting petals and things on my beads, with limited success.  I had a lot of fun with that, but most of those beads didn't survive, as there are principles of heating and cooling at work that I either didn't understand or wasn't really aware of.  It DID make me think that I'd rather sculpt glass than blow it.

One of the techniques we learned was how to decorate our beads with thin rods we'd pulled out of the larger rods of glass.  You heated them in the fire, and just briefly touched them to the bead to get dots and - if you had enough control - swirls on your beads.

These are some of my finished pieces.  It was hard work, and scary at times - while you're heating a rod, sometimes it will crackle and even shatter.  We wore protective goggles and cotton clothing, but I still got a sliver of super-hot glass on my arm at one point.  I also came to have a new appreciation for my students - every time our teacher Diego came over to my side of the workspace I felt the impending judgement, sure that I was about to hear "Disaster!" which was one of his favorite English words.  But eventually I just decided I didn't care, and I was just going to have fun with it, and while my beads aren't masterpieces by any means, I really enjoyed the course.

Back to the Start

I can't even begin to name all the ways that my first trip overseas made me who I am, but nevertheless, studying abroad, even for only the month it was, had a huge impact on young, (relatively) innocent me.  Today I've come full circle, made it back to the beginning, and so I thought I'd write about it.  Venice was my first, unless you count Canada, which none of us do (sorry, Engrish), and even if we did, I didn't choose it.  In the fall of my fourth year of college I took printmaking and my professor, Subler, talked about a program that the University of Iowa did in the years of the Venetian Biennale (those would be odd-numbered ones), and I knew I had to do it.  I hadn't been obsessed with Venice the way I once was with Paris, but the thought wouldn't leave my head.  I HAD to do this.  That's how my dad ended up driving me to the Kansas City airport early in July 2001, slipping me a $100 bill when I was ready to go through security, "For emergencies" (he does that), and turning me loose on an unsuspecting world.

Well.  Not quite yet.  It takes a little more than an hour to fly from KC to Chicago, where I spent the night before my first trans-Atlantic flight, and maybe that long to get from Midway to O'Hare, which a number of people were very helpful in helping me to manage.  It's hard for me to believe this now, fourteen years later, but when I tried to figure out how to take the L between the two airports that day, I was made nervous by a single, simple transfer.  I've come a long way, baby.

Back in the day you could get some kickass deals on hotels with the right site - although I can't remember which one off the top of my head - and I stayed in the O'Hare Hilton for $35 bucks that night.  I got checked in and got my luggage to my room, sat on my bed, and basically burst into tears.  I should tell you (if you don't already know) that I cry at the drop of a hat, but even so travel's a big old ball of emotions, and fear and sadness factor into it at points.  You put yourself in a giant tin can and hurtle across distances that were imposing, less than a hundred years ago, and in the (relative) blink of an eye, you're a third of the way around the planet.  You've taken a machete to the jungle and cut it back.  "The world is not just books and maps, it's out there," at once much bigger than you could have imagined and much smaller than it used to be, because now you're in it.  That's cause to mourn, as well as to be a little bit afraid, because you don't know what's going to happen out there, and how it will change you, and when you get back, you won't be the same person you were before.  You can't say if you'll be changed for the better, but you will be changed for good.  Or at least you will if you do it right.

So I cried in the room and went to sleep early and managed to pull myself together for my first international flight from Terminal 5, where I met up with the crew from KC as well as the students from the U of I and wherever else we came from.  We had a layover, in Belgium, I think, and although I remember feeling like it took forever (7 hours was a lot of time for me then - now I think it's a short flight!) we eventually made it to Marco Polo airport, where we collected our luggage and were herded outside to get a water taxi to Campo San Maurizio.  I leaned over to look at the water, and promptly had my sunglasses fall in the drink, but hell, sunglasses are overrated.

We were whisked off to Campo San Maurizio, where the 20 students participating in the program were staying in two apartments.  It may have been crowded, but honestly I don't remember thinking so at the time.  During the days we were in the studio or scattered, doing stuff, and in the evenings the veterans of the group taught us newbies the game that would make a card shark out of me...Canasta!  Some of my flatmates cooked, but most of the time I was out eating pizza and gelato, and believe it or not, I lost 5 pounds that month.  Lots of bridges, 'nuff said.

The month was daily routines punctuated by activities.  The routines were my morning walk through campos still waking up, stopping to buy a croissant - some days crema, others cioccolata - at the bakery up the calle from the studio and a bottle of aranciata, before starting my artistic endeavors for the day (which did not amount to much - fiddling around in my sketchbook for the most part).  The activities ranged from the Biennale to a puppetmaker's workshop, a maskmaker's workshop to trips up the Brenta canal and to Padua.  There were the strains of the Brandenburg concerto (charming the first day or so, but they got annoying pretty quickly) from the guitarist who busked next to the well in our campo, afternoons on the beach at Lido, the night Piazza San Marco flooded and a couple of my classmates and I went to splash in water sparkling from the Plessi installation set up in the windows of the Museo Correr.  There was taking the vaporetto out to Murano and Burano and the Cimitiere, and the bus up to Mestre where I went to church a couple of Sundays.  And in the end there was my first art show, staged for one night only in the entry to our flat, just off the campo, for which one of the KC crew made tzatziki, which I'd never had but fell in love with that night.

It was over too fast, and while at the end of the month I was ready to go home, the magic of that month lingered.  Walking along the same routes each day convinced me that slow travel was the only way to go.  The lady I bought my croissants from knew me, knew I would be there every morning and what I would get.  I had a place I fit, and that set the tone for my future expat life.  As a high schooler, I was really disappointed that I didn't get to do the "grand tour" thing with a band group like my friend did, but who knows?  If I had, I might not have ended up coming at the world the way I have.