Hans van Meeuwen wins inaugural Boston Online Biennial

Well….when The Biennial Project began planning our fabulous trip to participate in the 54^th Venice Biennale we knew we would be successful—but who could have imagined the extent of our smashing success as The Biennial Project and their entourage of glitterati took the Big V by storm???!!!! Suffice it to say that we were surrounded by art rock stars of all shapes, sizes, and nationalities….but few could hold a candle to our own Hans van Meeuwen—the first place winner of the inaugural Boston Online Biennial.

Originally hailing from Rotterdam in The Netherlands, Hans moved to Germany in 1991 and then to New York in 2004—he currently lives in Brooklyn. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and in New York.

In 2008 he showed at New York’s Christinerose Gallery which was reviewed in (wait for it….) ART IN AMERICA, my bitches!!!!!! This alone officially make Hans Art World Royalty.

His work capitalizes greatly on elements of scale coupled with a deadpan dry wit. The pieces are often fanciful if not dreamlike, evoking a surreal and mysterious presence (giant CHICKEN FEET outside your tent, anyone???)

Though he has created public art pieces and installation, even his sculptures have an installation-esque quality. They seem like smaller parts of a larger whole which invites the viewer to interject his/her own narrative—explainations for what frequently appear to be extraordinary or paranormal phenomena.

HATS OFF TO OUR CHAMPION!!!

2011 VENICE BIENNALE: THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

By Bo Petran

I’m in Venice – at last – and, with its subtle mists and roaring crowds, it does not disappoint. I have seen my first ineffable sunset and have had the various parts of my anatomy shoved by an indifferent attendant into an impossibly packed vaporetto. So I’m in Venice and pretty indiscriminately happy, wandering around the ‘back-behind’ of mobbed St. Mark’s Square, escaping from the sun and heat and screaming masses of people, who, as Henry James observed a century ago, should immediately leave and let me properly enjoy all this alone, when I happen on the big red “Biennale” pennant outside an old building, church, whatever, and enter, mostly just to get a rest.

The place is dim, quiet, cool, and a bit of a ruin, stripped to its architectural bones, former function unrecognizable.  I climb the stairs to the loft and settle into a room-sized beanbag, and all I want or expect is about 15 minutes of peace.  Luckily not to be had.

As I become accustomed to the light, I see around me people transfixed by a large screen cycling into a new showing of Singapore’s ‘The Cloud of Unknowing,’ which turns out to be the trippiest experience one could possibly have without aid of hallucinogen or other radical brain alteration.  And no one already present is leaving.

The video cycles through six apartments in a low-rent neglected urban high-rise, showing its largish occupants, 4 men, one woman, and some vegetation, at various mostly ordinary occupations leading up to – what is this? — their envelopment by cloud emanating from various parts of their apartments, from the bookcases, appliances, furnishings.

It’s a wonderful set of contrasts between the ‘nothingness’ of the cloud and the persistent bulkiness of the humans (and possibly the plants as well), the mundanity of their quotidian existences and the magical things that happen to them as they’re being engulfed, the silence of the solitary, monastic modern high rise cells otherwise known as apartments, and the joyous uproar of a drummer exuberantly banging things from a zone somewhere between monastic gongs and pure rock and roll.

As the cloud descends, dreaming man is sucked into white-sheeted bed, drummer is subsumed by torrential rains, and moss-filled apartment just plain luxuriates … I think.

Giving away the end – since it’s not likely to be in the local multiplex any time soon – as the screen fills with luminous cloud turning to pure light, the dark-ribbed old wooden loft begins also to fill with all-obscuring cloud.

One other point, about going to Venice.  Getting there cost an obscene amount of money and was a hard thing to decide to do in these times.  For anyone who still contemplates the purchase of, say, that big i-thing, using the logic that these things are tangible and lasting whereas some vacation will be over in a matter of weeks,

my advice is to go for the real lasting thing, the trip.