Signs

SIGNS. Ciao appiccicosine, da Venezia!¹ I am writing to you from a square in Venice – let’s say the Campo Santo Stefano near Accademia – which this year hosts its 60^th International Art Exhibition titled: ‘Foreigners Everywhere.’ Ha! or should I say, Ma! Where haven’t I been?

In this last week I have visited: the Piazza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge, Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Santo Stefano, San Barnaba, San Polo, Santa Margherita, de l’Arsenal, the maze of Calli and Rii leading in their characteristically Baroque fashion to the Canali and Ponti which criss-cross the Lagoon; and then, of course, the Giardini della Biennale (with its toy-town Padiglioni) and the Arsenale itself, the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, myriad Chiese, Basiliche and Duomoi (the mosaici and affreschi of these unmatched); followed by – where else? – the beaches of Lido di Venezia (from which our London pools get their name), the cemetery island of San Michele (resting place of Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky, the graves of whom are plagued by mosquitos), and the islands of Murano (home to what appears to be mille fabbriche di vetro, a thousand factories of glass). Each a foreign land to me, the amateur etymologist, in name and in carne e ossa! Which is to say, ‘in the flesh’.

And beyond these landmarks – in the pavilions and pop-ups – I have borne witness to the conceptual avant-garde of Croatia, Japan, Nigeria, Australia and South-Africa; the indigenous practices and lands of Hãhãwpuá (Brazil), Lusanga (a Congolese plantation formerly owned by Unilever), Aotearoa (New Zealand); the battle-grounds of Palestine, Ukraine… yes appiccicosine, in a short week I have travelled the world.

Easy, of course, as a British passport-holder, an anglophone for whom the press releases and subtitles are written, for whom the e-Gates of Heathrow and Marco Polo airport open, as if by magic. For whom the conceptual framework of art’s supposed autonomy and ‘national pavilions’ has been erected. For whom the timetables are duplicated, osteria menus re-written, classes prepared, taught and examined, all for the purpose of, in this moment, asking: “Excuse me, would you like anything else?” Sadly not, as it is time to leave Campo Santo Stefano, to pay however many Euros it was for our caffè and ‘shakerato’ and walk – circuitously I suspect – to some other square, in some other part of the city, as it has passed midday and is now time for a Spritz. “Bwon jor-narta, grrat-see”!

No, I haven’t forgotten that I am writing to you, miei amici appiccicosi, or that this is in fact a column about words – but right now I am looking for a way to the Ponte di Rialto. What a labyrinth! Even the salt climbs the walls looking for a way out, washed in along the current of a thick hazy air. I think about the paintings of Selwyn Wilson and the sculptures of Fred Graham in the Biennale. In the last week I’ve learned that the Māori haka is not about Rugby or War – is that what I’d thought? – but is instead quite simply a celebration of life; that the haka of Tāne-rore (son of the sun god Tama-nui-te-rā, and his wife Hine-raumati) and the wiri (its trembling hand gesture) is a personification of the quivering air on a hot, still day. I imagine Tāne-rore and the sale di Venezia dancing together, while I look for a sign.

Or maybe that was it? In the 13^th century the Republic of Venice began to develop a monopoly on the production and distribution of salt. The Magistrato al Sal administered an ordo salis (salt rule or tax) obligating exporting merchants to also import salt, which was then sold by the republic at a profit. In the mid-C15th around 15% of the income of the Venetian state was derived from its control over the salt market of the Mediterranean. But now the city is being eaten by this salt, the cycle of evaporation, concentration, dissolution and crystallisation – exacerbated by a warming planet – is eroding its foundations. Today, one can find up to 80kg of so-called ‘white gold’ in a cubic metre of Venetian wall.²

Now the mind is wandering too. And why shouldn’t it? All these signs point in both directions. The vandalism of local businesses displeased with the ‘official route’ seems to have taken me off-piste. Perhaps they know something I don’t?

What would it mean to follow that ‘official’ route? To say that the word sign ‘emerged’ in Middle English along with the ordo salis, during the C12-13th? That it is derived from both French (signe) and Latin (signum) and has held in each the meaning ‘miracle’ and ‘password’? What does knowing this do? The phrase ‘signe of þe croiz’ (sign of the cross) has been in use in Britain from the C13th onward and the performance (in Latin, signum crucis) attested, in writing, from the C7th. The phrase ‘sign of the times’ was not used until 1525, in William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible:

“Can ye not discerne the sygnes of the tymes?”

It’s well past midday miei compagni vischiosetto, and I am writing to you now from a fondamenta even I do not know the name of – but at last we have a spritz! Today one calls the act of ‘discerning signs’ semiotics, that is: ‘the study of signs and their use or interpretation.’ The Italian scholar Uberto Eco writes to us from the Milano of 1974 to explain the term:

“Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.”

For instance the word ‘spritz’ stands for the concept of a spritz on the table in front of me – or, it would if not for the fact that, as Eco adds:

“This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.”

Perhaps there never was a spritz, the make-shift sign ‘PER RIALTO’ another dead-end? Or maybe there was? Maybe I sat down in a wicker chair beside the water and nervously parroted ‘spritz’ to the attentive waiter, who proceeded to bring me a drink much darker, much more bitter than I had been expecting. Ah yes, how could I forget? ‘Select’ is the Venetian aperitivo, their answer to the Paduan ‘Aperol’... One of Eco’s chief insights was that “every act of communication to or between human beings [...] presupposes a signification system as its necessary condition” which he called a ‘code’. Evidently, the codes of London, Padua and Venice are not the same.

Out over the water I see people looking lost, wearing tote-bags which read ‘STRANIERI OVUNQUE’ or FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE. I’m lost too. What is this a sign of? The title refers to the biennale of course, the contemporary discourse – or ‘codes’ – of inclusion within the arts and beyond; the water level – 35cm higher than in 1897 – refers to the climate crisis. Eco agrees that nature can signify – that it is ‘a universe of signs’ in its own right. This is not news to Tāne-rore, of course, who whirls imperturbably on the horizon.

Semiotics eats its signs the way salt eats this city – each the vampiric legacy of an imperial process: classification and capitalisation. Eco is mindful of this ‘imperialist’ legacy, arguing that culture (the object of semiotics) should be understood – semiotically – in its multiplicity, as a “system of systems of signification”. An ecology of epistemologies, perhaps? Adriano Pedrosa, the first-ever Latin American curator of the biennale, similarly wrestles with the imperial legacy of the ‘Biennale model’ throughout the 60^th exhibition. How to ‘decolonise’ Venice, the heart of colonial Europe, whose national pavilions are its signature? This question is itself, you might say, a sign of the times.

Honestly appiccicosine, I’m trying to be less cynical. It’s summer after all, and I don’t want to begin another academic year burnt-out from the start. ‘Pedrosa did a good job.’ There, I said it! In their theory of language Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari encourage us to think not about the signification(s) of language, but instead its function(s) – what does a word, a phrase, a slogan do? Through their concept of ‘International Art English’ (IAE) Alix Rule and David Levine contextualise this idea within the art world: in a press release, for example, “[...what a word like] ‘dialectic’ actually denotes is negligible. What matters is the authority it establishes.” I guess cynicism is hard to shake without sounding like self-help.

I’m writing to you from a vaporetto (a water bus) as it cuts into the choppy lagoon. The salt leaps out of the water at me, clinging to my clothes as a souvenir. What does etymology do? What could it do? It’s obvious that something needs to change. I’m at an airport now – it doesn’t matter which – it’s one full of signs in various international languages, my travel documents are working their magic. “Signs make subjects”, I think, the ink drying on the picture of the plane stamped into my passport. We’re far from the route now. I’m writing to you from inside the stamp, from my seat in the plane, from the sky!

This is what a sign could be, what it could mean, what it could do. From up here I can’t help but think the words don’t matter. I’m writing to you as a speck in the clouds – the one you can see right now if you look – only it’s not me anymore, not really.

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Footnotes

1. Appiccicoso = sticky, -’ino’ is diminutive = Appiccicosino, ‘ines’ is plural ↩

2. This is how Venice will fall, Mario Piana, 29 October 2021 ↩