20 April, Venice

More art, more mushrooms and a playlist!

Here’s a playlist of music I liked in April — lots of Rosalia, who I fell rather in love with, accordion music from Lesotho, folk, country, jazz, baroque.

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We take mushrooms in the flat, then to the Communists to drink 70cent glasses of warm white wine beside the canal. It looks like milk. Air smells of horse manure, not unpleasant. When I was ten or eleven I took classes at a stable. At the end school I’d change from my uniform into tight beige jodhpurs and sharp riding shoes, the only boy to do so. I quite liked the confusion between masculinity (an officer on his horse) and emasculation (girlish trousers and shoes) this represented. I also liked how vicious a weapon the shoes were when delivering a kick in a scrape. I liked the messiness of the stables and how feral the girls I rode with became, kicking manure at one another.

On the way to the Giardini we find P., C., and M. sitting in the sun, all languorous. M. is wearing a sort of shimmery jester’s outfit with bare legs and very high heels, a shock after so many black coats, suits, t-shirts. A woman in a hat and a face mask, her partner and grown-up child pass and say hello to P., who gets up, and as we move to get up too says “don’t get up, it looks lovely down there” so we don’t and she steps over to shake our hands and introduce herself, “Tilda.” We joke about dogs, children and I think what a nice rich woman and then realise who she is.

I help find M.’s friend, a Russian. “She’s left now, because...” I think about the wave of Russian emigre creatives/thinkers and think how much they did to enrich (Nabokov) and harm (Ayn Rand) art in the Anglosphere. The Georgians I know are complaining that the influx of Russians to Tblisi is putting rents up, as they have so much more money. Though they are careful to make distinction between different Russians, between those who miss creature comforts and those fleeing for political reasons.

*

We spot a table of drinks being set up beside the Finnish Pavilion and wait for them to be poured. A woman asks me “Are you Finnish?” and I say, “What, am I finished?” and then realise and say, “Yes, I am Finnish.” She nods. “I could tell from your eyes.” I am not Finnish.

Lo is talking to the Georgians, I’m looking at the serene blue of the ‘pretend’ canal.

We walk through a rooms which are bright white, shoes in hand: in one room a woman sits, her feet in mud. She looks very upset and isn’t real. In another room there is water. In the last room the floor is dirt and we put our shoes back on to cross it.

Inside the Milk of Dreams and Lo’ is very moved by the surrealist room, even having me take a picture of her beside a Leonor Fini. I’d never taken a picture of someone beside a painting in a gallery before and feel odd. I always mock people who do it, almost shove them out of the way. Lo is holding a beautiful flower she found beside the Korean Pavilion.

We leave another pavilion full of very textural art. “Why?” “Why indeed. Why can’t they make things that look nice or move onee?” “Why do they make art that’s trying to write an essay, why not write an essay?” “Perhaps they’re not smart enough?” “Perhaps. Perhaps when the philosophers ignored them they started.” “More money, though.” “Sometimes.” A block of wall text had been taller than me (though I am not very tall). So much description. Does describing matter?

We stand in the Ukrainian intervention — burnt wood, posters by Ukrainian artists on the pillars, a pile of sandbags in the same manner of those used to protect statues in besieged cities. We are moved, Lo’ takes photos for her mother. A Ukrainian woman gives an interview to a camera crew, tall and very striking. I. said the Ukrainians she’s working with are finding being in Venice very strange. One of them, a young man, has special dispensation and, after the Biennale will have to return to fight. I think of the ‘30s, of the gasp before.

*

Down a tiny alley in Cannaregio and run into Gv. outside the house where the Georgians are staying. A big room with fires and a bar in the middle, a tall Georgian manning it. Gv. says “that’s the king of Kakheti” and grins. She introduces us and he says he loves my cooking, is incredibly sweet. People are speaking their hushing creeping-through-the-reeds-language, which dives between Slav and Arabic and Persian.

At a table a pretty woman sits down beside E. and I say hello, and she says “oh, this is my mother” and without meaning to I blurt out “your mother! not your sister?” I talk to the mother and her friend for most of the evening, about food, London. The friend shows me her Instagram which is made up of pictures of her putting her middle finger up to Putin. I am somewhat surprised by the positive light she holds my PM in, saying she hates him for Brexit but thinks he has performed better than any other European when it comes to Ukraine. I am invited to dine with both of them, and the friend’s mother, when I return to Tblisi. Someone hooks up the sound system, I chat to a Georgian with a thick South-London accent who points to an older man who has been half asleep in an armchair all evening. “My father, an artist.”