- Venue
- la Biennale di Venezia
- Location
Outside the main Arsenale exhibition building in Venice stands a truck. Its colour is primarily a warm vivid red, approaching orange, but with yellow, also a warm version, bordering on ochre, used on the lower parts, on the bumper, around the headlights, and for an inverted triangle painted onto the front grill. Curvature around the cabin and the vehicle's general weightiness tell us that it is not modern. The truck is a simple object which cuts a block, a cuboid form, out of space. It appears full and dense, but because of the dampened corners just referred to which collude with the colour warmth, there is nothing intimidating in its presence. A person might feel affection for the thing in fact, the kind a child does for a toy. The stationary machine is like an enlarged plaything.
Trucks have been used before by artists. Sarah Lucas put a HGV tractor in Tate Britain for a show in 2004. That was amusing but also, on closer inspection, terrifying. Trucks maybe symbolise what is idiotic and awful about the things men do. This one in Venice has been tamed though, is harmless, an impression of something passed. Is it beautiful? Firstly is ‘beautiful' an acceptable word? The second question is difficult to answer, at least for me. Yes is my answer to the first. Certainly in the sunshine the truck draws a steady flow of interest and not just from those who have learned its story from watching a video projected inside the Arsenale exhibition space. On the back of the truck is contained a square section of wall, with edges about one metre in length, maybe twenty centimetres thick, its surface marked, on one side a damaged graffiti image. This object appears heavy too, impossible to remove but simultaneously separate from its host. The wall is from another place, not Europe, looked at naively it could belong in the film set for a Western.
Journeys are hugely interesting. A journey is a linear narrative. Regardless of breakthroughs and challenges by the likes of Joyce, Burroughs, Kurosawa, Tarantino and the invention of hypertext and the internet the ordinary sequential story remains embedded in our culture. This artist's documentary describes a phenomenal trip, providing explanations for the presence of the truck and the slab of wall in Venice. Without this background information though the solid three dimensional artefacts vibrate in a different way which has validity in its own right.
The work is called Auras of War. The artist's name is Ernesto Salmerón. He's from Nicaragua.
