Alex Burger

My sister Natasha and I met up with two friends at the Venice Biennale.  Four days of delicious food, wandering through Venice, and some amazing art.

We saw an enormous wire head in a church (Jaume Plensa), an army of muslin and resin bodies (Magdalena Abakanowicz), found objects in Italy sculpted together by a Native American who lives in Paris (Jimmy Durham).

We saw copies of Greek and Roman statues tagged and displayed on boxes as if they were in storage (Prada Gallery), a man who recreates workshops were he manufactures futurist glow in the dark aardvarks (Mark Dion), and charcoal burnt city (Mathew Day Jackson.)

We saw an exhibit from an archeologist in the future who found old objects (from a time still in the future from our present) including a space suit (Arseny Zhilyaev), a Vietnams artist who made maps based on data from the Syrian war data (Tiffany Chung), and a Japanese artist who hung tens of thousands of keys on red strings (Chiharu Shiota).

And these were just a few of the objects and art we stumbled upon.  Our friends at dinner said that the purpose of great art is that you then see the world differently.  My world looks very different now . . . reveling in the unusual and unexpected.

A couple weeks backs I traveled down to East London, in the Eastern Cape in South Africa.  East London reminds me so much of Montgomery Alabama: the streets, old buildings, crowds wandering. Driving through East London I remembered how twenty years ago I arrived for the first time in Montgomery, all my possessions packed in my car, having never been there before.  I got to Montgomery in the evening, looked out the window, walked out on the brick street, smelled the evening air, and said, yes, I think I’ll live here.  ISetting foot in East London, I feel l could almost do the same. Here is East London

Sometimes I miss the intuitiveness with which I lived.  I used to be guided by smells, by the texture of light in the evening, by the way a building crumbled.  That’s how I ended up in Alabama, in Chad, even in a glass house in South Africa. This intuition is what I write from – I realize this more and more. I follow traces down narrow alleys, invite strangers for a drink wondering if they will become lovers, sit by women at bus stops, knowing they may change my life.