**Berlinde De Bruyckere at the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice**
**GoogleMaps of St Giorgio**

Two weeks, at Balse.

Cycle of life, is always amongst us, it was, it is, and it always will be

Life, so filled with wonderful mysteries.

The paths that cross, if open minded.

Our third year and fourth attendance at the Venezia Biennale Arte.

It is such a magical experience to attend, and we genuinely believe Venezia is our other home. The concentration of contemporary art in the context of the historical, in a majestic lagoon setting, albeit not so far ago. Truly unique. But most importantly community, the people that we meet and adore.

And the birds that sing. The marsh lagoon brings in many birds - indigenous and migrating- and they sing sing sing. The church bells and the birds.

Speaking of birds, I want to recommend this beautiful French film La Passion de Dodin Bouffant (2023), for some reason the singing of birds and the French culinary passion, must see.

Complete 180 - the Japanese film by Koereda is another must watch - Monster. The French film LE THÉORÈME DE MARGUERITE Bande Annonce (2023) Clotilde Courau was a fun watch as well. The usual catching up on films in the air.

Speaking of film, I want to give a big shout out to Alex Andre’s film Pratfall for the superb review on his film on the Film International, a prominent academic film communication.

One of the biggest findings at the Biennale was finding Berlinde De Bruyckere.

Berlinde De Bruyckere: City of Refuge III

Berlinde De Bruyckere: In the Studio

Berlinde De Bruyckere on ‘A simple prophecy’

To continue research her art.

The other is Ersan Mongtag with the Germany pavilion at the Giardini. If you have the chance to visit the Biennale Arte 2024, definitely have to go to the Germany pavilion on the weekends, when they have live opera performances throughout the day by Ersan. I have never experienced anything like it, let’s put it that way.

Inspiring outsider art from
The Imagination of Martín Ramírez

And the music from the French etno folk band San Salvadore was a powerful recommendation from our new best friend Emma in Venezia. Absolutely addictive sound of the deep south of France that is fully rooted in the culture, yet contemporary at the same time.

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

**Yoriyas (Yassine Alaoui Ismaili) "Casablanca Chess Cafe" Exhibition**

Words of Wisdom

[[A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART]], [[Koenraad Jonckheere]], page 15, introduction

The opening up of the discipline of art history in the twentieth century provides the basis for how this book is structured. Art history took off in the previous century, with increasingly frequent attempts to explain artistic developments from new and interdisciplinary angles. These innovations relied on a succession of big names: art historians who creatively scrutinised the history of their own field before thoroughly transforming it. Some of them - Heinrich Wölfflin or Max J. Friedländer, for instance - developed classic models for the study of style and authenticity, while others presented new interpretative concepts and structures. One such was Aby Warburg, who pioneered iconology - an innovative discipline that evolved out of iconography, with the goal of interpreting visual language within a broad context. Furthermore, the focus of art historiography has shifted in recent decades away from the relationship between artist and artwork toward reception aesthetic' (the way the work has been received by the public over the centuries) on the one hand and 'technical art history' (the study of the material and technical characteristics of the objects) on the other.
The fresh interest in an artwork's various layers of meaning ranged from the elementary analysis of their iconography through to their complex contextual interpretation. In pursuing that interest, the aforementioned art historians were among those who, from the twentieth century onwards, consistently drew on insights from other academic disciplines: economics, the history of science, neurology, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, chemistry, mathematics etc. As a result of this, art history is no longer purely 'historical' (based on source research) or formalist (stylistic history), but has transformed itself into a Bildwissenschaft, the study of visual culture. In this way, art has increasingly been examined from entirely new perspectives, with the emphasis in many cases no longer on aesthetic value but rather on the way in which its visual language functions within a given culture and context. This tendency has been reinforced by the steadily advancing visualisation of communication in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today's newspaper front pages are filled with photographs rather than text. Images capture the stories told on social media, with millions of photos and videos uploaded to the Internet every day. In this digital world, even the physical relationship with the material object seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic images flash by and seldom appear in physical form any more. Prolonged contemplation has given way to fleeting stimuli.
This book considers art as a catalyst. the object that absorbs meanings and history and drives the chemistry of thought processes. Separate from the aesthetic experience or intriguing concept alone, art is the materialisation of new technologies, the visualisation of new societal paradigms or even the financial valorisation of a perception. Art is the instrument of politics and religion, the pacesetter of revolutions and the spark that triggers extreme reactions, such as image-smashing. Art is a visual idiom, the vehicle of unlimited meaning but, above all, an exceptionally powerful form of communication, all with a touch of magic, as Johannes à Porta recognised.
The book does not agree in this sense with Ernst Gombrich's famous statement that 'There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists? To claim the opposite would be going too far, but the least we can say is that it is the works of art that call the shots. They are first and foremost wonderful objects in which an infinite number of stories that appeal to the imagination cohere. The upshot of this is also that beauty and taste are not the be-all and end-all either; they are merely one link in a complex of factors.