Dane Mitchell in Venice
Behind the scenes at Post hoc by Dane Mitchell, New Zealand’s representative at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Behind the scenes with our Biennale representative
Over the past 20 years, Dane Mitchell has established himself as one of our most intriguing contemporary artists.
He is known for his rigorous conceptual thinking, but also his deep interest in how spiritual and unseen forces shape our experience of the world. He is New Zealand’s official representative at the 58th Venice Biennale, and his exhibition, Post hoc, is a monumental exploration of the unseen. At its heart is an enormous list of “things” that have disappeared from our world – not just physical objects and species, but esoteric energies, meteorological events, languages and ideas. These lists are then broadcast around the city from a central venue, the Palazzina Canonica, via cell towers designed to look like pine trees. Anthony Byrt was at Post hoc’s opening in May, and spoke to Mitchell about his ambitious exhibition.
I was very interested in how Post hoc seemed to expand and clarify some of your central interests – particularly about memory, loss and the unseen. How did the idea evolve?
What really started this for me was a consideration of the invisible forces that churn and move around us – how they have a kind of seething presence. The invisible impinges on our lives in all kinds of ways, be it technological, spiritual, or through language. The borders or boundaries of objects, which transmit immaterial forces, are always more slippery or blurred than their visible edges suggest. For me, this is an interesting sculptural proposition.
I came to this thinking in quite a formal way, considering what kinds of forces extend objects outward from themselves to touch us in ways both
real – or physical – and poetic. For instance, when I work with fragrance, I’m thinking about how objects penetrate the body through the nose. When we experience smell we’re also encountering objects – having an experience with a molecular form – and I’m interested in how these molecular sculptures might become holographic shapes inside the brain. I also think the unseen often has a political weight; it has a social dimension, or a social quality.
Compared to other recent projects, I really noticed a subtle political dimension in Post hoc. A lot of reviewers have read this as ecological politics. But it felt wider to me – something poetic about loss and obsolescence, which seemed relevant in a city like Venice, which is so layered and ancient, but also threatened by climate change in a very real way.
I was really interested in thinking about both the physical and philosophical weight of all these gone “things”, and there’s certainly an ecological dimension to this. Venice is a slowly vanishing place; it’s being lost to the lagoon, so in this way it was the perfect context for Post hoc. But the lists also include things like cured diseases and obsolete scientific theories, so they’re not reproaches against humanity’s impact on the planet – the work isn’t a moral lesson. They’re too varied and complex to be assigned to a singular cause. And they’re also being broadcast from quite toxic, fake trees. But, the lists do testify to a growing lack of faith in the notion of ‘progress’ – the history of which looks more like a history of obsolescence.
Post hoc is a kind of invasion – maybe even a colonisation – of Venice. You’ve got the main venue at Palazzina Canonica, in the heart of Biennale territory, near the Giardini. But your creepy ‘pine tree’ cell towers are dotted throughout the city. Talk me through the location choices.
With the trees, I was thinking a lot about the Giardini della Biennale – one of the Biennale’s main venues – which is a garden. A garden is a kind of fiction; it’s not strictly nature. Of course, nature grows there, but it’s a fabricated environment. The Giardini in Venice is also interesting for its political level of fabrication. With its national pavilions for art, it’s a geopolitical map of 20th-century cultural politics and diplomacy. New Zealand doesn’t have a pavilion there; we are a kind of absence. That got me thinking about what a hidden pavilion in the Giardini could look like: it would be a tree, it would mimic nature.
There are seven trees and the sites I’ve engaged across the city are active players in the work’s conceptual framework. One of the trees is situated at the University of Architecture, which relates to the way telecommunications infrastructure has become part of our built environment; there’s one situated at the hospital, which is as a place where we confront mortality, as well as a place of naming, and of the microscopic; and there’s another tree in the aptly named Park of Remembrance.
The tree-cell towers are kind of hideous – especially for you, given your work often has a very precise and considered beauty. How did you get the idea to work with them?
I first encountered a ‘stealth cell tower’ in Los Angeles, which I’d seen as a palm tree on the side of the freeway. Humans are hardwired to mimic, but in the case of these cell towers disguised as trees, the attempt to conceal actually does the opposite – the object becomes more conspicuous. In seeking to be nature, they displace it.
The trees are resource-heavy: they’re made of steel and plastic in China. They’re also very deliberately pine. In New Zealand, pine isn’t actually treated as nature – it’s a technology and a form of capital. We grow pines faster and more aggressively than anywhere else in the world, and it’s a huge part of our economy. Already, we have a strange relationship to them – even in their natural state, they’re wildings – an invasive species to be culled.
I thought the most troubling thing about the trees was that they speak to us, reading your lists, forcing us to think about things that have past. What’s the significance of the lists for you personally?
The lists began growing through an intensive process of meandering. That was a really exciting part of the project and it’s the heart of the work for me. Some of those lists are deeply sad. Islands, for instance feature prominently, particularly in the extinction of birds, lost environments and collapsed oceanic habitats. One conclusion I’ve come to is that the work is also a product of my own filter bubble. The lists are the size of my world, through the language I speak, my geographical location and the predominance of Western thought and belief systems. So some of the lists can be seen in a dual way – as lost and withdrawn things, but also evidence of who has more prominence in the knowledge economy, and who has less.