Assignment: Postmodern Object: Greek Pavilion
The visit to the Venice Biennale was one of the most formative experiences of my time in Italy. It’s no surprise to anyone that I love art, so it would make sense for me to love an international art festival. However, the experience in the Biennale was radically different from any art museum I had been to in the past.
The day began in the Uffizi gallery, where we travelled from the Byzantine era of art through the 17th century. While beautiful, these artworks were separated from us behind glass and frames. This is how artworks had been displayed to me previously: with a barrier. Oftentimes, there were even multiple barriers, including a rope encouraging you to stay even further away from the piece. The Biennale completely broke that stigma, as I was interacting with many of the modern artworks.
The artwork that truly stuck out to me was Andreas Angelidakis’s Escape Room located in the Greek Pavilion. The exterior of this pavilion was rather plain, but it created a sense of doom and curiosity in the viewer. With two illuminated circles above the entrance, the viewer feels as if eyes are watching them enter the pavilion. Long cushioned cylinders erupted out of the exhibit, flowing over the steps. Upon further inspection, these cylinders had images of chains wrapped around them. People sat on these cylinders as if they were bean bags. I remember asking myself, “Is this part of the exhibit?”
When I entered the installation, I truly entered the artwork. There was a distinct change in scent within the pavilion, which we later found was created by incense in the corner. The scent allowed me to fully understand how immersed I was in this artwork. I was no longer looking at a painting behind a glass; there was no separation between myself and the work of art.
I walked along the glowing squares and noticed more of the cylinders from outside connecting each part of the interior. In front, a large screen repeated a story read by an owl with the word “escape” spelled out in a neon sign above. This surprised me because I was witnessing contemporary technologies, such as digital screens and video projection, being incorporated directly into an artwork. The digital age was very recent, and artists are already using these technologies in their artworks because they relate art to the world we live in.
Wandering throughout the pavilion, I was engulfed in the neon lights and the synthesized sounds that I nearly forgot I was in Venice. To the left, there was a wall of MAGA hats, which surprised me greatly as it was in the Greek pavilion. Due to technology and the media, cultures are incredibly connected to each other in the postmodern present. European artworks in the Byzantine era were not influenced by art from the Americas simply because they were not in contact at that time. The increase in technology allows so much connection throughout the world to the point that a Greek artwork in Italy can comment on American politics. After researching the pavilion further, I found this piece is a discussion about the fascist regime. The Greek pavilion began the same year Hitler and Mussolini met and toured the Venice Biennale. Angelidakis is making a statement about MAGA’s similarity to fascism and warning against this type of government.
At this point, I was convinced that I was inside of this artwork. However, when I turned around and saw myself projected on the distorted camera screen, I realized that I was no longer simply viewing the artwork; I was participating in it. The other side of the pavilion was a distorted camera that displayed a real-time recording of the people within it as if they were in a fun-house. I saw myself walking and moving within the artwork, connecting me to the piece. Rather than simply seeing my reflection, I saw a manipulated digital version of myself. This reflects a postmodern condition in which people increasingly encounter themselves through screens, cameras, and social media rather than through direct experience.
This was a drastic difference to the previous artworks that were physically disconnected to me, only to be seen by my eyes. Not only that, but we sat on the cylinders, connecting us to the artwork on a physical level as well. Baudrillard describes postmodern culture as a “production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production” where representations become increasingly intertwined with lived experience (Baudrillard, 7). The installation blurred the boundary between reality and representation by transforming visitors into elements of the artwork itself. Rather than depicting an idea from a distance, Escape Room created an immersive environment that temporarily felt more immediate than the world outside the pavilion.
The Greek pavilion truly altered the way I viewed art in our postmodern condition. While artworks in the past (Byzantine and Renaissance eras) have focused only on sight, the postmodern world is emphasizing as many senses as they can. In the Greek pavilion alone, I was hearing, smelling, and touching along with seeing. I was a part of the artwork, not just a viewer. While Renaissance artists such as Andrea Mantegna in his Lamentation of Christ acknowledged the viewer through perspective, the viewers were never a part of the work itself. Postmodern art is breaking that barrier.
I find postmodern art, like Escape Room, to be less focused on the art itself and more about the label. As we ventured through the Biennale, Dr. Felluga encouraged us to find meaning in the pieces and compare our interpretation to the artist’s. This made me realize how dependent meaning is within postmodern artworks. Since many people were illiterate in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, artworks needed to display a clear subject matter. Now, since literacy is widespread, artworks have the ability to be more ambiguous, heavily relying on labels to provide a fixed meaning. However, as Gombrich mentions, people “often made use of photographs falsely labeled to accuse or exculpate one of the warning parties” (Gombrich, 68). Escape Room would have meant something entirely different had I not learned about its references to fascism and contemporary politics. While the sensory experience of the installation was powerful, much of its significance came from the context surrounding the work.
Our postmodern present is shaped by our desire to attribute meaning to the world in order to distract ourselves from it. Postmodernism is all about questioning the current paradigm. Postmodernists aren’t completely satisfied with our current world, and they are making an effort to highlight its shortcomings. This is an era overwhelmed with individual thought and interpretation. Humans want to find a meaning in artworks because at a larger scale, we want to find a meaning in life.
Escape Room demonstrates how postmodern art no longer asks viewers to observe from a distance. Instead, it immerses them within systems of technology, representation, and interpretation. By transforming visitors into participants and blurring the boundary between reality and simulation, Angelidakis reveals a defining characteristic of our postmodern present: we increasingly experience the world through mediated images, shifting meanings, and an interconnected globe.
Citations:
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra." Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.
Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Bollingen Series 5. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969.
“Lamentation of Christ (Mantegna).” Wikipedia, 22 Feb. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamentation_of_Christ_(Mantegna).
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