Simon Denny: Secret Power, New Zealand Pavilion in National Library of St Mark, Venice Biennale 2015
Two installations that form Simon Denny’s Secret Power exhibition are in the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. Simon Denny’s project for the New Zealand pavilion is split across two spaces—the arrivals areas of the Marco Polo Airport and the Monumental Rooms of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Piazzetta San Marco. The installation at the airport is situated within the airside area, unmissable for passengers arriving within both the Schengen and non-Schengen arrivals halls.
Sculptor and installation artist Simon Denny is one of the most high-profile New Zealand artists working in the international contemporary art world today. His work is rich, intelligent, challenging and political. Denny’s work has explored the culture of internet-technology firms, the obsolescence of analogue technology, corporate culture and contemporary constructions of national identity.
He is interested in information technology, for instance the ‘familiar-yet-strange’ conventions used in computer programs and interfaces. He plays with these conventions, in installations that combine sculptures, graphics, and moving images. Referring to new and obsolete digital technologies, he questions how information is controlled and shared.
In recent years, Simon Denny’s research-based art projects have explored aspects of technological evolution and obsolescence, corporate and neoliberal culture, national identity, tech-industry culture, and the internet.
His Biennale Arte 2015 project, Secret Power, was partly prompted by the impact of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks of PowerPoint slides outlining top-secret US telecommunications surveillance programmes to the world media, which began in 2013. These slides highlighted New Zealand’s role in US intelligence work, as a member of the US-led Five Eyes alliance. Now in the open, the slides have come to represent international surveillance work and its impact on individual privacy.
In the Library, Denny has installed a server room, with server racks and a workstation. In addition to holding computer equipment, the server racks and workstation double as vitrines, displaying a case study in NSA visual culture, consisting of sculptural and graphic elements based on the work of a former NSA designer and Creative Director of Defense Intelligence David Darchicourt and the Snowden slide archive, suggesting links in iconography and treatment. The server room resonates with the Library’s decorated Renaissance-period interior, with its maps and allegorical paintings—Denny’s inquiry into the current iconography of geopolitical power being framed within an obsolete one.
The Airport terminal—a busy hub for millions of travellers—incorporates restricted spaces, surveillance spaces, and interrogation spaces, and is equipped with high-tech security systems. Denny has ‘dragged-and-dropped’ two actual-size photographic reproductions of the Library’s decorated interior across the floor and walls of the arrivals lounge, traversing the border between Schengen and non-Schengen space. The installation incorporates plaques that reproduce examples of early maps from the Library’s collection, which could be mistaken for advertisements for what’s currently on show there.
Secret Power is site specific, exploring La Biennale Arte di Venezia, the Library, and the Airport as media. Denny hints at geopolitical imperatives that cross-reference and distinguish these frames. Completed in 1588, the Library represents the Republic of Venice as a wealthy world power during the Renaissance. Established in 1895, La Biennale is premised on a model of national representation that seems obsolete today, in a time of cosmopolitan global art. Completed soon after 9/11, the Airport represents a new era of global security.
Denny’s project is a complex puzzle. Each element is nested in and reframed by other elements in an expanding allegory, making interpretation potentially interminable. And yet, despite this, Denny gets us close to his ostensible subject—the visual language of western intelligence agencies. Paradoxically, he places himself and us (as artist and viewers) in positions oddly analogous to these agencies, as we trawl through data and metadata, engaging in analytics, pattern recognition, and profiling, trying to make sense of things.
Secret Power takes its title from investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s 1996 book, which first revealed New Zealand’s involvement in US intelligence gathering.
Secret Power addresses the intersection of knowledge and geography in the post-Snowden era. It investigates current and obsolete languages for describing geo-political space, focusing on the roles played by technology and design. The contexts and histories of both venues provide highly productive frameworks for Secret Power, and have been directly engaged with through the work.
Secret Power has been an incredible success. It has drawn unprecedented international critical reception and media coverage and been a catalyst for discussion about evolving patterns of surveillance, geopolitical power and agency, and the visual language and management cultures of both state and corporate agencies.
Secret Power has raised the profile of contemporary New Zealand art on the international stage. Visits and special tours by major art institutions have been a standout success of this exhibition.
Biography
Simon Denny was born in Auckland in 1982 and is based in Berlin. His work has explored technological obsolescence, the rhetorics of Silicon Valley and tech start-ups, and technology’s role in shaping global culture and constructions of national identity. He is interested in the role of design in communication, particularly in user-interfaces. His exhibitions combine sculptures, graphics, and moving images.
Denny studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, graduating in 2009. His work is regularly exhibited in New Zealand and is held in its major public and private collections, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, and Dunedin Public Art Gallery. His work is also held in major international collections, including MUMOK in Vienna, the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Denny’s solo exhibitions include All You Need Is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference Redux (Kunstverein Munich; Petzel Gallery, New York; and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2013); and The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom (MUMOK, Vienna, 2013; and Firstsite, Colchester, 2014). These exhibitions were positively reviewed in the The New York Times, Focus, Frieze, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. In 2014, Denny presented New Management at the Portikus, Frankfurt, and showed a new version of The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington.
Denny’s work has also been included in group shows at the ICA, London; Kunsthaus Bregenz; KW Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Fridericianum, Kassel; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. He was the only New Zealand artist invited to exhibit in the curated show at the 2013 Venice Biennale. In 2012, Simon Denny won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. A solo survey exhibition at MOMA PS1, New York for early 2015.Secret Power was unanimously selected from eighteen high-calibre proposals. Chaired by Arts Council Chairman, Dr Dick Grant, the selection panel included Heather Galbraith, Commissioner; Alastair Carruthers, patron; Anne Rush, Arts Council member; Blair French, Assistant Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Brett Graham, artist; Caterina Riva, Director, Artspace, Auckland; Dayle Mace, patron; Helen Kedgley, Arts Council member; and Judy Millar, artist.
The Exhibition
The New Zealand pavilion is split across two state buildings: the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Marciana Library), in Piazzetta San Marco, in the heart of the city, and the terminal at Marco Polo Airport, on the outskirts.
Secret Power in Marciana National Library
In the Marciana Library, Simon Denny has installed a server room, with server racks and a workstation. In addition to holding computer equipment, the server racks and workstation double as vitrines, displaying a case study in NSA visual culture, consisting of sculptural and graphic elements based on the work of a former NSA designer and Creative Director of Defense Intelligence David Darchicourt and the Snowden slide archive, suggesting links in iconography and treatment. The server room resonates with the Library’s decorated Renaissance-period interior, with its maps and allegorical paintings—Denny’s inquiry into the current iconography of geopolitical power being framed within an obsolete one.
This half of the pavilion is in the Monumental Rooms at the Marciana Library in Piazza San Marco, designed by Jacopo Sansovino during the Renaissance. Decorated with paintings by artists including Titian and Tintoretto, depicting philosophy and wisdom, the Library is an allegory for the benefits of acquiring knowledge. It also houses historical maps and globes, including Fra Mauro’s early world map, containing information obtained by travellers, merchants and navigators including Marco Polo. It is one of the first European maps to depict Japan, for example. Here, Denny’s installation will draw analogies between this spectacular but obsolete map and the way the world is mapped and managed today.
David Darchicourt is an illustrator, graphic designer, prepress designer, and marketing consultant based in Maryland, in the United States. He worked for the NSA as a graphic designer from 1996 to 2001 and as Creative Director of Defense Intelligence from 2001 to 2012.
GCHQ slides, ‘The Art of Deception’, published by The Intercept, 24 February 2014. An internal training presentation for online covert operations aimed at intelligence gathering by human contact and social network analysis.
Wizard Wonderland: An online club for the mystic arts featuring Merlin’s Mystical Magic Tour, Merlin’s Message, Ask Merlin, and the Creating Camelot Club. The image of Merlin used to illustrate the NSA’s MYSTIC program is from this site, with a flip phone added to the head of Merlin’s staff.
MYSTIC: NSA codename for a voice interception surveillance system. It can record and store a country’s entire telecommunications and review them for up to 30 days afterwards. The countries targeted are under dispute, but Afghanistan, the Bahamas, Iraq, and Mexico have been named.
TREASUREMAP: NSA codename for the NSA/GCHQ capability to ‘map the entire internet—any device, anywhere, all the time’. With TREASUREMAP, Five Eyes intelligence agencies have a bird’s eye, 300,000-foot wide view of global data traffic in real time.
T_800 Endoskeleton: In the Terminator films, the Series 800 Terminator is a cybernetic organism combining living tissue with a metal endoskeleton. Its skull contains a neural net processor making it a learning computer and an efficient killer of the human race. A similar skull is used in the TREASUREMAP logo. The main antagonist in the series, and master of the T_800, is Skynet. This synthetic intelligence is often cited in debate about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the end of the human era.
Secret Power at the Marco Polo Airport
Simon Denny is the first Biennale artist to use the terminal at Marco Polo Airport, designed by architect Gian Paolo Mar. Here, people converge from all over the world. For most visitors, it is their first point of contact with Venice. Extending through the arrivals lounge, Denny’s installation will operate between national borders, mixing the languages of commercial display, contemporary airport interior design, and historical representations of the value of knowledge. The Airport terminal—a busy hub for millions of travellers—incorporates restricted spaces, surveillance spaces, and interrogation spaces, and is equipped with high-tech security systems. Denny has ‘dragged-and-dropped’ two actual-size photographic reproductions of the Library’s decorated interior across the floor and walls of the arrivals lounge, traversing the border between Schengen and non-Schengen space. The installation incorporates plaques that reproduce examples of early maps from the Library’s collection, which could be mistaken for advertisements for what’s currently on show there.
Marciana National Library
The Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (English: National Library of St Mark) is a public library in Venice, Italy. It is one of the earliest surviving public libraries and repositories for manuscript in Italy and holds one of the greatest collections of classical texts in the world. It is named after St. Mark, the patron saint of the city. In historical documents, it is officially Bibliotheca Aedis Sancti Marci but commonly Pubblica Libreria di san Marco.
The library was founded in 1468 when the humanist scholar Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, titular Latin patriarch of Constantinople, donated his personal collection of Greek and Latin manuscripts to the Republic of Venice with the stipulation that a library of public utility be established. The collection was the result of Bessarion’s concerted effort to locate and acquire rare manuscripts throughout Greece and Italy as a means of preserving the knowledge of the classical Greek world after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. His choice of Venice was primarily due to the city’s large community of Greek refugees and its historical ties to Byzantium. The Venetian government was slow, however, to honor its commitment to suitably house the collection with decades of discussion and indecision, owing to a series of military crises and the resulting climate of political uncertainty. The library was ultimately built during the period of recovery as a part of a vast program of urban renewal aimed at glorifying the republic through architecture and affirming its international prestige as a center of wisdom and learning.
The original library building is prominently located in Saint Mark’s Square, Venice’s former governmental center, with its long façade facing the Doge’s Palace. Constructed between 1537 and 1588, it is considered to be the masterpiece of Jacopo Sansovino and a key work in Venetian Renaissance architecture. Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio described it as “perhaps the richest and most ornate building that there has been since ancient times up until now” (“il più ricco ed ornato edificio che forse sia stato da gli Antichi in qua”). Art historian Jacob Burckhardt regarded it as “the most magnificent secular Italian building” (“das prächtigste profane Gebäude Italiens”), and Frederick Hartt defined it as “surely one of the most satisfying structures in Italian architectural history”. Also significant for its art, the library houses many works by the great painters of sixteenth-century Venice, making it a comprehensive monument to Venetian Mannerism.
Today, the historical building is customarily referred to as the Libreria sansoviniana and is largely a museum. Since 1904, the library offices, the reading rooms, and most of the collection have been housed in the adjoining Zecca, the former mint of the Venetian Republic.
Interiors
The actual library was always only on the upper floor with the ground floor being let to shops and, later on, cafes as a source of revenue to the procurators. The gilded interior rooms are decorated with oil paintings by the masters of Venice’s Mannerist period, including Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and Andrea Schiavone. Some of these paintings show mythological narratives, principally drawn from the writings of classical authors: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, Martianus Capella’s The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, and the Suda. In many instances, these stories of the pagan divinities are employed in a metaphorical sense on the basis of the early Christian writings of Arnobius and Eusebius. Other paintings show allegorical figures and include Renaissance hieroglyphics which reflect the renewed interest in the esotericism of the Hermetic writings and of the Chaldean Oracles that impassioned many humanists following the publication in 1505 of Horapollo’s Ἱερογλυφικά (Hieroglyphica), the purported key to unlock the mysteries of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The iconographic sources vary and include Pierio Valeriano’s dictionary of symbols, Hieroglyphica (1556); popular emblem books such as Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1531) and Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere (1555); Francesco Marcolini’s divination game Le ingeniose sorti (1540); as well as Vincenzo Cartari’s mythographic manual for painters Imagini colla sposizione degli dei degli antichi (1556). The “Mantegna Tarocchi” were used as iconographic sources for the depictions of the liberal arts and the muses in the staircase.
Although several images have a specific pedagogical function aimed at forging temperate and stalwart rulers and inculcating qualities of dedication to duty and moral excellence in the noble youth who studied in the library, the overall decorative program reflects the Venetian aristocracy’s interest in philosophy as an intellectual pursuit and, in a broader sense, the growing interest in Platonic philosophy as one of the central currents in Renaissance thought. It is conceptually organized on the basis of the Neoplatonic ascent of the soul and affirms that the quest for knowledge is directed towards the attainment of divine wisdom. The staircase largely represents the life of the embodied soul in the early stages of the ascent: the practice of the cardinal virtues, the studious contemplation of corporeal matters in both their multiplicity and harmony, the transcendence of mere opinions through dialectic, and catharsis. The reading room corresponds to the soul’s subsequent journey within the intellectual realm and shows the culmination of the ascent with the awakening of the higher, intellective soul, ecstatic union, and illumination. The program culminates with the representation of the ideal Platonic State founded upon a transcendent understanding of a higher reality. By association, it is implied that the Republic of Venice is the very paradigm of wisdom, order, and harmony.
Staircase
The staircase consists of four domes (the Dome of Ethics, the Dome of Rhetoric, the Dome of Dialectic, and the Dome of Poetics) and two flights, the vaults of which are each decorated with twenty-one images of alternating quadrilinear stuccoes by Alessandro Vittoria and octagonal frescoes by Battista Franco (first flight) and Battista del Moro (second flight). At the entry and on the landings, Sansovino repeated the Serlian element from the façade, making use of ancient columns recuperated from the sixth-century Byzantine Church of Santa Maria del Canneto in Pola (Pula, Croatia).
Vestibule
The vestibule was originally a lecture hall for the public school of Saint Mark which had been founded in 1446 to train future civil servants of the Ducal Chancery. The initial curriculum, focusing on grammar and rhetoric, was expanded in 1460 with the creation of a second lectureship for poetry, oratory, and history. Over time, it evolved into a humanistic school principally for the sons of the nobles and citizens. Among the Italian humanists who taught at the school were George of Trebizond, Giorgio Valla, Marcantonio Sabellico, Raphael Regius, and Marco Musuro. The vestibule also briefly (1560–1561) hosted the meetings of the Accademia veneziana before its failure for bankruptcy. During this period, the room was lined with wooden benches, interrupted by the lectern which was located under the central window of the western wall.
Beginning in 1591, the vestibule was transformed into the public Statuary Hall by Vincenzo Scamozzi in order to display the collection of ancient sculpture that Giovanni Grimani had donated to the Venetian Republic in 1587. Of the original decoration, only the ceiling remains with the illusionistic three-dimensional decoration by Cristoforo and Stefano De Rosa of Brescia (1559). Titian’s octagonal painting in the center (c.1560) has been alternatively identified as Wisdom, History, or The Soul.
Reading Room
The adjacent reading room originally had 38 desks in the center, arranged in two rows, to which the valuable codices were chained according to subject matter. Between the windows were imaginary portraits of great men of Antiquity, the “philosophers”, each originally accompanied by an identifying inscription. Similar portraits were located in the vestibule. Over time, however, these paintings were moved to various locations within the library and eventually, in 1763, to the Doge’s Palace in order to create the wall space necessary for more bookshelves. As a result, some were lost along with all of the identifying inscriptions. The ten that survive were returned to the library in the early nineteenth century and integrated with other paintings in 1929. Of the “philosophers”, only Diogenes by Tintoretto has been credibly identified.
The ceiling of the reading room is decorated with 21 roundels, circular oil paintings, by Giovanni de Mio, Giuseppe Salviati, Battista Franco, Giulio Licinio, Bernardo Strozzi, Giambattista Zelotti, Alessandro Varotari, Paolo Veronese, and Andrea Schiavone. They are inserted into a gilded and painted wooden framework along with 52 grotesques by Battista Franco. The roundels by Bernardo Strozzi and Alessandro Varotari are replacements from 1635 of earlier roundels, respectively by Giulio Licinio and Giambattista Zelotti, which were irreparably damaged by water infiltrations. The original roundels were commissioned in 1556.
Although the original seven artists were formally chosen by Sansovino and Titian, their selection for an official and prestigious commission such as the library was indicative of the ascendancy of the Grimani and of those other families within the aristocracy who maintained close ties with the papal court and whose artistic preferences consequently tended towards Mannerism as it was developing in Tuscany and Rome. The artists were mostly young and innovative. They were primarily foreign-trained and notably non-Venetian for their artistic styles, having been influenced by the new Mannerist trends in Florence, Rome, Mantua, and Parma. The roundels that they produced for the ceiling of the reading room are consequently characterized by the greater sculptural rigidity and artificial poses of the figures, the emphasis on line drawing, and the overall dramatic compositions. They nevertheless show the influence of local painting traditions in both the coloring and brushwork.
For the single roundels, various and conflicting titles have been proposed over time. The earliest titles that Vasari suggested for the three roundels by Veronese contain conspicuous errors, and even the titles and visual descriptions given by Francesco Sansovino, son of the architect, for all 21 roundels are often imprecise or inaccurate.
Venice Biennale 2015
The 2015 Art Biennale closes a sort of trilogy that began with the exhibition curated by Bice Curiger in 2011, Illuminations, and continued with the Encyclopedic Palace of Massimiliano Gioni (2013). With All The World’s Futures, La Biennale continues its research on useful references for making aesthetic judgments on contemporary art, a “critical” issue after the end of the avant-garde and “non-art” art.
Through the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, La Biennale returns to observe the relationship between art and the development of human, social and political reality, in the pressing of external forces and phenomena: the ways in which, that is, the tensions of the external world solicit the sensitivities, the vital and expressive energies of the artists, their desires, the motions of the soul (their inner song).
La Biennale di Venezia was founded in 1895. Paolo Baratta has been its President since 2008, and before that from 1998 to 2001. La Biennale, who stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends, organizes exhibitions, festivals and researches in all its specific sectors: Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934). Its activities are documented at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) that recently has been completely renovated.
The relationship with the local community has been strengthened through Educational activities and guided visits, with the participation of a growing number of schools from the Veneto region and beyond. This spreads the creativity on the new generation (3,000 teachers and 30,000 pupils involved in 2014). These activities have been supported by the Venice Chamber of Commerce. A cooperation with Universities and research institutes making special tours and stays at the exhibitions has also been establihed. In the three years from 2012-2014, 227 universities (79 Italian and 148 international) have joined the Biennale Sessions project.
In all sectors there have been more research and production opportunities addressed to the younger generation of artists, directly in contact with renowned teachers; this has become more systematic and continuous through the international project Biennale College, now running in the Dance, Theatre, Music, and Cinema sections.