PRESS
SUNDAY CULTURE SECTION
CULTURA: Lena Herzog. Siavvicina l'omnicidio
by Annachiara Sacchi
April 7, 2024
[translation]
Russian-born American artist bringing her apocalyptic work to Venice (for Incroci di Civiltà).
Lena Herzog
Omnicide approaches
By Annachiara Sacchi
They call them "apocalyptic films." The end of the world averted at the last minute by a perfectly coiffed hero, possibly with a beautiful girl in his arms. "But those are survivalist movies," and the “good guys” saving Earth and defeating the “bad guys.” No, they have nothing to do with the Apocalypse. Mine is, in fact, an apocalyptic work." The meaning of this sentence, uttered by Lena Herzog, is even clearer when one sees the images of her new work, Any War Any Enemy, curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, which will be on preview in Venice from April 11 (at Ca' Foscari Zattere, while the official opening will be held on the 18th, coinciding with the Biennale) and which the artist will talk about again on Thursday 11, special guest of the literature festival Incroci di Civiltà.
Here then is apocalyptic art. Three murals printed on canvas, ten mezzotints (an ancient technique made possible through collaboration with the Bottega del Tintoretto, in Venice) and a black mirror show humanity on the brink of omnicide, extinction. "The logic of hatred has prevailed making a global war inevitable." The last. The nuclear one. At "the Reading," the 54-year-old Russian-born American conceptual artist, married to the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog, previewed the significance of the project. "Bringing to the Lagoon my outrage against all forms of war.
A multimedia work about humanity doomed to extinction. Lena Herzog's works depict faces deformed by fear and awareness of the end, bodies folded in on themselves, enveloped in fire, the last moments of life, the ultimate explosion that will turn us into a supernova. They are human, hyper-real faces: they are born from thousands of shots taken by the artist (of flesh-and-blood subjects) that formed the database on which Herzog intervened with virtual modeling techniques until she created three-dimensional digital sculptures: the images were then captured by a virtual reality program, transposed onto copper plates and hand-printed on paper.
Interview:
Two years ago you brought "Last Whispers," a poignant catalog of endangered languages, to the Venice Biennale; is "Any War Any Enemy" a continuation?
L: "Yes, they are part of a diptych. As Margaret Atwood says, war is what happens when language fails. “Last Whispers” is the end of communication and understanding of the world. Not understanding each other leads to hatred, and thus to war. It took two years to develop the new work. The project also includes a 17-minute "virtual reality" video; it will be ready in September. There will be eventually also a third part."
So it is a trilogy?
L: "Yes. A trilogy of extinction. I so wish I could stop it. The only way I can do that is - I'm not a dissident or an activist – for me, it's art."
"Any War Any Enemy" is a mix of hypertechnology and ancient techniques. Why?
L: "We need to connect with the past and project ourselves into the future, that's why I love to combine art and science. Also, for Any War Any Enemy I wanted something more material than photography. Crucial were curators Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri with Angela Bianco and Giulia Gelmi, sponsors Marilyn Simons, Francoise Stoll-Lepercq and Thomas Riboud-Seydoux: they believed in the project. And I was lucky enough to meet Roberto Mazzetto and the Bottega del Tintoretto, with those mezzotints so powerful they reminded me of Edward Munch."
There is also a scream in your mezzotints.
L: "Yes, I wanted to make those works "audible," as if we could hear them."
The black mirror? What does that mean?
L: "It's an ancient Venetian invention considered somehow diabolical. 'Mine' is human-sized and deforming. Anyone who stands in front of it will ask himself: who is my enemy? The answer is in one's own darkened reflection. We may be the witnesses of our own demise, but also the perpetrators."
Is it true that the desperate faces in the mezzotints are those of your friends?
L: "Yes, they are my neighbors in Los Angeles. Photographed for hours, forced to hold their positions..."
Their poses look like those of a "compianto sul Cristo morto."
L: "And in fact I was very inspired by the sculptural group of Niccolò dell'Arca in Bologna."
Religious intent?
L: "The religious, almost mystical connotation is there. These are gestures that our cultural DNA can see, metabolize and understand better. Among the engravings is the one of the man-it's my friend Nigel-with his hands on his face: I imagined someone like Pontius Pilate at the moment when he says to himself, what have I done? But he could also be the leader of a global, nuclear power who has just pushed the button. He realizes there is no going back. It is the moment of omnicide.”
The figures of lovers also appear in the mezzotints.
L: "Among the victims of extinction are them, because when hatred commands there is no place for love. Mine is also a reference to the lovers in Dante's Blizzard."
Who are your sources of inspiration?
L: "Francisco Goya's Los desastres de la guerra and Pablo Picasso's Guernica. Also indispensable because there is so little in classical art about the horror of war. Usually in paintings conflict is exalted and horror reserved for defeated enemies. As philosopher Jacob Rogozinski says in his very recent book (“The Logic of Hatred”), we are addicted to hatred. There is a cultural, financial, and industrial mechanism of mythologizing violence that has been normalized. Just look at the streaming platforms: obscene images follow one another. And meanwhile we eat popcorn...."
Have you seen the film "Oppenheimer"?
L: "Yes. It is masterfully directed by Christopher Nolan. But what is it about? About the “hero” who created a weapon of mass destruction. He is the subject; and our empathy is for him, not for those who were annihilated by his invention. And the paradox is that we don't even notice! This thing is screaming in our faces and we don't hear it!"
Did your husband see it?
L: "No, Werner doesn't watch many movies and neither do I. We read a lot."
A monograph on your artistic journey, written by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri for Skira, is forthcoming.
L: "We will present it on Thursday the 11th in Venice-I am very excited. The book also contains over two hundred images."
You were born in Russia, how do you feel about the war in Ukraine?
L: "I left Russia when I was 20 years old, I'm now also an American. I love the United States and Russia, the two are not incompatible. What do I think about the war-when it broke out: I was completely devastated. It should never have started, like any other conflict. There was only one thing to do and that was to communicate to avoid it."
After all this suffering and threats do you still have hope?
L: "Yes, and in fact the third part of my work will be called Reversal: we need hope and love which are the antidote to hate. I'm working now on that third piece."
Is art the answer?
"No, the answer is demilitarization, the answer is peace. We desperately need to turn things around. The video will end like this: All or None."
Box:
Private Ghosts and Public Spectres by Davide Ferrario
When I visited Werner and Lena Herzog at their Laurel Canyon home in Los Angeles last August to interview them for "la Lettura," they told me the story of how they had ended up there. It was 2001 and they were running away, so to speak, from San Francisco, a city they thought was now lost to the new Silicon Valley rich and tourists. They were looking for a house in the hills but had no money when they came across this house, put up for sale by the owners who, in turn, wanted to flee California. It had been a few months since the attacks on the Twin Towers and it was vox populi that the next attack would take place in Los Angeles with a bacteria bomb. The hosts intended to leave the city and go holed up, to the Herzogs' knowledge, on a far out farm in Utah, twenty miles from the nearest town. The story brought a smile to my face. Today the ghosts that frightened the former owners of the Laurel Canyon house are here, conjured by every current news story, in a run-up to catastrophe in which words echo that seemed confined to the days of Dr. Strangelove. I believe now that Lena sensed those ghosts daily, even amidst the ease and sweetness of California life, as they now appear to all of us. Every time we close our eyes we hope they are gone. But they, undaunted, always remain there.