Florence Biennale Experience Now Live.

Posted in Random Reverie by Jake
Feb 10 2010
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So I came back from the 2009 Flo­rence Bien­nale, rolling into to Sky Har­bor shortly after mid­night Decem­ber 16 sicker ‘n a dog.  I spent the hol­i­days watch­ing Christ­mas shows, box of tis­sue in hand, my IQ hov­er­ing between PB&J and pot­ted plant.  Need­less to say work­ing on putting my pic­tures together in a photo album on line with a trav­el­ogue was the fur­thest thing from my mind.  The hol­i­days ended offi­cially for me on Jan­u­ary 9 when my last house guest left.  I had a lot to catch up on, but I have been work­ing steadily on crunch­ing down those pic­tures, putting on cap­tions and oth­er­wise mak­ing them suit­able for a web­site etc.  Early this morn­ing I posted the last of the pic­tures and went “live.”

Jake Beckman at entrance to Florence Biennale with Marina Abromovic billboard

Jake Beck­man at entrance to Flo­rence Bien­nale fea­tur­ing Marina Abro­movic photo

The link to the Flo­rence Bien­nale Expe­ri­ence is:  http://akajake.com/florence-biennial-experience.htm

Work­ing on the pic­tures brought back many fond mem­o­ries for me and had me doing things like see­ing how many peo­ple (that I befriended at the bien­nale) I could find on face­book.  I real­ized as I was going through the pic­tures that I didn’t get pic­tures of many peo­ple I talked to and I didn’t get pic­tures of their art — guess I was too busy being at the Bien­nale instead of doc­u­ment­ing it. I was in sev­eral group pho­tos but I didn’t force the cam­era off onto the ran­domly drafted pho­tog­ra­pher often enough either. So I do have a request… If you were a par­tic­i­pant in the Flo­rence Bien­nale and have other pic­tures you would like to add to this con­ver­sa­tion, please post them.

So far early com­ments have been pos­i­tive.  I hope you will enjoy it too,  Any­way, let me know what you think.  I would love to hear from you.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

Tagged as: 2009, artists, diary, Florence Biennale, photographs, photos, travelogue
Comments
  • kimberly berg:

    Hi Jake,
    Elisha Ben-Yitzhak tipped me off to your blog. He said he had seen my two Bien­nale paint­ings, EDEN REVISITED and MANDALA VIII, on your blog under “ran­dom art pics”. I decided not to make the trip to Flo­rence so it was a pleas­ant sur­prise to see indis­putable evi­dence that they actu­ally were able to sur­rep­ti­tiously slip through all the hoops and end up hang­ing on a wall.

    It is com­fort­ing to know that you rec­og­nize good art when you see it. Most of the art you selected to pho­to­graph was quite inter­est­ing. I enjoyed read­ing about your expe­ri­ences although I must say it con­firmed my deci­sion to not make the trip. It’s sad that so much work went into the event and so few peo­ple actu­ally found it impor­tant enough to view the exhibit. It’s too bad that many had to think of it as a vaca­tion rather than a seri­ous art event. What do you attribute to this state of affairs? What about the people/artists you talked to at the biennale?What did they think?
    How about open­ing your blog to such a discussion.

    Peace,
    Kim

    February 12, 2010 at 4:25 pm
    • Jake:

      Howdy Kim

      I have another blog topic that is open to peo­ple com­ment­ing about their prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence of the Bien­nale http://akajake.com/blog/2009/12/28/2009-florence-biennale-experience/. Only one per­son, Julien Cor­co­ran, chimed in with not one but two rather lengthy replies. After he wrote I pub­lished my civil­ity pol­icy, but I per­mit­ted his responses to post unedited. I have noth­ing against a lively dis­cus­sion about the pros and cons of the Bien­nale, but I do request that peo­ple stop short of name call­ing and be respect­ful of oth­ers in their replies. If any­one wants to talk about their feel­ings about the Bien­nale, good or bad, I think that blog post is the appro­pri­ate forum.

      I want this post to be about the art and cama­raderie and other pos­i­tive aspects of the show, the good stuff.

      As for the art that I pho­tographed, when I came home and down­loaded my pho­tos there were many artists whose work I admired that I failed to get shots of, but then again there were well over 500 par­tic­i­pants. I did post every pho­to­graph the art I did get pic­tures of, but the exclu­sion of other artists by no means reflects on the qual­ity of their work-it means I just didn’t get their pic­ture while I was there.

      As for me I didn’t view my par­tic­i­pa­tion as a vaca­tion, which is one rea­son I did attend the event every­day. As to con­jec­ture as to why the traf­fic was so slow, I did spec­u­late a lit­tle in my other blog, but also I don’t think we should dis­count the state of the econ­omy both in the US as well as in Europe.

      Any­way Thanks for stop­ping by and tak­ing the time to comment.

      Jake

      February 13, 2010 at 6:17 pm