PRESS

A Venezia il nuovo lavoro dell’artista concettuale multidisciplinare Lena Herzog

Incroci di civiltà, Festival internazionale di letteratura, fa un’incursione nell’arte, ospitando una preview
della mostra di Lena Herzog, Any War Any Enemy, progetto espositivo proposto in coincidenza con la 60a Biennale d’Arte

by Eugenio Giannetta
April 12, 2024

[translation]

In Venice the new work of the multidisciplinary conceptual artist Lena Herzog is presented

at the Crossroads of Civilizations, the International Literature Festival, making a foray into art and hosting a preview of Lena Herzog's exhibition, Any War Any Enemy, an exhibition project proposed to coincide with the 60th Art Biennale

Your project reflects on the theme of extinction after a possible and catastrophic nuclear war. How did the idea come about?
Today, three nuclear superpowers are clearly on the verge of a world war. They have invented and perfected a way to end humanity many times over. It seems as if the entire system is somehow geared to make it happen against all rationality of self-preservation. The world on the brink of omnicide has been industrialized, financialized and mythologized; and the logic of hatred underpins it all, making a global war inevitable.

Are we sleepwalking into a nuclear war? What will it be like? That end? I have thought about it when I was a child growing up during the Cold War. It all came roaring back several years ago as the tensions in world rose. Any War Any Enemy as a major project coalesced two years ago.

I am not a pundit, I am an artist. But I am not blind to the looming danger of the confrontation between United States, Russia and China, that can result in an omnicide. I articulate what it will be like with my tools, painting what haunts my imagination. Any War Any Enemy is both a depiction of any war and of the “last war.” My focus is on the human beings on the receiving end, which, in the next global war, will be all of us. The survivors will be all or none.

Your project includes murals, engravings, and an installation. How do all these artistic souls coexist?
The choices of media and process were intuitive. And, in fact, your heart sinks at the risk of mixing different media. Would it work? All these separate pieces, each on its own making sense, but would they dance together? … they come out of the same aesthetic and the same theme. They reinforce each other. When I was hanging the show today, I worried if ten mezzotints, three murals and a black mirror are enough for the big gallery I have. But when the work was up, I thought, it was just right. And I have a feeling that they all work together. Until you hang the show you just don’t know.

What is art for you?
It’s what I do.

Who are your teachers? Who inspires you for your work?
Among artists, it has been Goya—always. How raw and direct his graphic work is! And yet the beauty he mustered to get you through the toughest truths. Guernica by Picasso was crucial for this project in particular. Also, Matthias Grünewald, and Niccolò dell’Arca. Isamu Noguchi for his purity and perfection, and his extraordinary ability to exist simultaneously in the aesthetic of both East and West. And William Kentridge holds a special place among my heroes: he is unclassifiable in every respect: rooted in tradition and but utterly modern. Out of his operas and exhibitions, one comes out transformed yet unable to quite pinpoint why.

Is this work a continuation of Last Whispers? What are the common points and what are the differences?

“War is what happens when language fails.” Margaret Atwood succinctly said. Last Whispers is about language extinction, which necessarily entails an erasure of mutual understanding and comes out of a profound hubris—the same origin for most wars—a kind of a presumption of one’s superiority over another.

The global scale of linguistic extinction shows that we are living in a system that has no room for variety. It is as if we have no room for each other any more. That we can’t even conceive of another way of being. And of course, language is a way of being. We think with it, we understand the world with words. Do we even want to understand each other any more? If we don’t, hatred and war will be the way we are bound to make ourselves disappear, culturally and physically. Both Last Whispers and Any War Any Enemy are about extinction. That is the profound philosophical connection between the works. They form now a diptych, sharing a certain aesthetic as well as the theme. I hope to make it a trilogy, a triptych. The third piece will be about a reversal (also a working title). It will be a sort of ode to joy and an antithesis to the forces of extinction. 

I know that for this work you collaborated with the Tintoretto workshop in Venice. What does the collaboration consist of? How important is the preservation of the old artisanal part in this artistic work?
Funny enough, I began with cutting edge VR technology: posing my friends in a series of theatrical gestures and “scanning” them. Then importing thousands of pictures into an Unreal VR engine into Photogrammetry program with my brilliant team. Then, came creating a “brush stroke”, and highly stylizing the virtual sculptures, and making their screenshots. Afterwards, a selection of ten of these images were copied exactly onto the copper plates by Roberto Mazetto of the Tintoretto workshop. And last September Roberto and I worked hard for two weeks to get the perfect prints. I do not care what’s the date of the technology invention; it is ideas that guide me. If I had to make palm prints on the rock, I would gladly do that. And if I had to use a new AI algorithm and the concept asked for it, I would do that with the same enthusiasm. Ideas drive my processes, not trends.

Yours is a reflection on war and all conflicts, past, present and future. What is war for you?
War is the end of anything that’s good about us: end of love, hope, understanding. End of everything worth living for. And thus, people kill and die.

What role does science have in your approach to artistic work? And what role does the human being have? 
I am a daughter of great scientists who are, deep in their hearts, poets. I love the dynamic of a scientific inquiry and the faith in the process of constant questioning the fundamentals, the underlying concepts. At least, all the good scientists have that Socratic way of thinking. I try to apply it to process, to my understanding of the world of art and of trends, leading my skepticism towards accepted norms and especially trends.

People, on the other hand, are the subject of all my projects one way or another. I am always on their side. I never liked art that denigrated or condescended to human beings, I look away not because I am afraid or challenged, I just find it boring and not worth to be imprinted on one’s mind. After all, you see in people what you are and you become what you choose to see in people in a doomed dynamic. Maybe we should direct our outrage not against each other but the system that brings out the worst in us. I say, rebel, look for the best in human nature; and there in lies our chance. Perhaps we can make it then.