Does everyone remember the gondola loaded with cut-up gondolas that was parked in our canal in the opening fervor of the Biennale?
The opening of the Biennale is, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, more like starling-swarming or the wildebeest migration than anything else. Dramatic for a short sharp moment, then it’s over and people forget about it.
By now the process is complete. The swarms began to depart the evening of June 2, and although fluttering shreds of tourists remain, the sort who seem to have come actually to look at the art and not each other (shocking, I know), life on the whole is back to its incomprehensible normality.
As everyone knows, the gondola assemblage was art. A week has passed, and this creation has been demoted to Private First Class, downgraded to Economy, put back a grade, however you want to put it.
Having fulfilled its purpose — whatever it was — the object has been removed from its watery pedestal, and taken far away. Not so far in geographic terms, but extremely far in terms of appreciation. You may have heard of “value added”? This is an example of “value subtracted.”
It is now resting quietly in the devastated territory of our rowing club. Evidently the squero here nearby that confected it didn’t want it back soon (or ever); anyway, I was told that in exchange for painting one of our boats, we agreed to let them stash it here.
I waited to tell you the bad news about Giulio Andreotti’s demise because I didn’t want my blog to turn into the obituary column. He entered the better life on May 6, and although he was 94, which means it was far beyond inevitable, I’m sorry he’s gone.
His CV tells you that he was important, among other reasons, because he was: Prime Minister (7 times), Minister of Defense (8 times), Minister of Foreign Affairs (5 times), Minister of Finance, Minister of the Budget, Minister of Industry (two times each), and Minister of the Treasury and Minister of the Interior one time each.
No need to ask what he did in his spare time — he couldn’t have had any. But if he’d ever written a book about his career, hardly anybody would have been left standing.
You need to know the above to have the rudiments of appreciation of what a master he was of the scintillating quip. First, he was Roman, and that gave him a huge headstart in the witticism department. While every region, town, hamlet must have its own type of humor, the Roman type is famously quick and piercingly irreverent.
Second, being a career politician meant that he had endless occasions for practicing his exceptional talent for quippery. Essentially he was Minister of Himself.
So it’s in that spirit that I offer you this glimpse of one of the pillars of 20th-century Italian politics. People who know more about it, him, or them, please don’t enlighten me. I want you to see his best side here. By which I don’t mean his turned back.
One of the many pages devoted to him on May 7, 2013.
From top to bottom, more or less, are the following observations:
Power wears out the people who don’t have it.
The wickedness of good people is extremely dangerous.
I know that I’m just of average height, but I don’t see any giants around me.
In politics there are more Draculas than there are blood donors.
It’s not enough to be right, you’ve got to have somebody who recognizes it.
Apart from the Punic Wars, they attribute everything to me.
Crazy people can be divided into two groups: Those who believe they’re Napoleon, and those who believe they can reorganize the state railway.
Humility is an amazing virtue, but not when it you use it in declaring your income.
You should always tell the truth, but except in the courtroom don’t ever tell the whole truth. It’s inconvenient and often causes pain.
I love Germany so much that I preferred two of them.
Being men of the middle class, the middle road is, for us, the most congenial.
I’m posthumous to myself. (This is the literal translation, but even Lino can’t make me understand what he meant.)
No, this reference isn’t to me or to my (or anybody else’s) oarage, or steerage, or careenage. I am referring to a modest work of Biennale art that I happen to LOVE— just in case anyone thought that I was against everything that had the slightest connection with this event. This little creation makes me smile.
Yes, it’s a little boat, 15 feet/5 meters long and made of plastic by Marco Tracanelli, a 57-year-old artist from San Vito al Tagliamento. It bobs around in the waves and is just as jaunty and blithesome as it can be.Hardly the battleship “Potemkin,” even if it does bear the famous name on its hull. I don’t know if this reference is intended to carry metric tons of deep significance, but I have to say that somebody who can think up something like this (and make it) can’t be up all night brooding on the unfairness of life, not to mention its deeper profundities. But what do I know.
I had intended my recent discourse on art and life as represented by the Biennale to be my only comment. There are so many other outlandish things which deserve to be brought forward for class discussion.
But a wander down via Garibaldi showed that there is an innocent, unoffending part of the neighborhood which has been artified by means of the incantatory power of the by-now impenetrable language of art. A newcomer identified as “Scatiggio” has chosen to chance his arm by decorating some store windows with brief descriptions of their merchants as artists and/or the merchandise as art.
This doesn’t mean that the thing described is art, but that it is intended to be regarded as art due to its (hopefully) convincing description. There is a case to be made that naming something gives it reality, but this isn’t the time or place to make it.
As a lover of language, and a huge fan of intelligent and original thought, all this seriously slowed me down on my way home from the post office.
I present for your consideration a few examples of this, um, art. And by the way, do not suppose that my disparagement of these shenanigans is due to ignorance. It seems to be a human tendency to ascribe power to inanimate objects — a case could be made for comparing tree-worship to calling pet-store wares “art.” Smart people for centuries believed that the drug-induced ravings of probably vitamin-deficient women, or the incoherent monologues of the mentally ill, were the utterances of gods. Otherwise well-balanced people have always been easy to seduce by the extraordinary assertions of snake-oil or diet-pill salesmen, and to believe all sorts of hoaxes ranging from the Fiji mermaid to dihydrogen monoxide.
People are susceptible in part because they believe that words mean something. Peasants! In the case of Scatiggio we have someone for whom English is not his first language using language to convince us that everyday commodities are art. This is by now a given in the world of art — nothing new here. But if, as the window of the tobacco-shop states, there might not be any boundaries dividing art and reality, it’s even clearer that the boundaries that keep language and thought in their proper relationship have become unreliable. Wow. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse.
The window of the pet-food-and-accessories store. Its contents are the “media” — and while I can believe that guts and blood are somewhere to be found inside, probably in cans of can or dog food, it’s a little startling to see them on the list. It sounds like a description of a neolithic kitchen midden. Your mind will have to be in at least state-championship form to grasp that the products on sale (squeak toys, poop bags) symbolize love. I haven’t been able to find “Scatiggio”” on the official list of participating artists, though there is a family doctor in Venice named Marco Scatiggio. Maybe this is his big break.Mr. Bianchi sells pasta and cheese and other comestibles. If he starts believing he’s selling art, none of us will be able to afford a handful of olives or a bag of sugar or any other emotive symbol he feels like sculpting.Emanuela, who recently expanded her shop, sells gewgaws of a better-than-average quality. Seashells rimmed with silver, ceramic geese, and so on. These may or may not be deep waters, Watson, but the artist is sure that her wares take us into unchartered (sic) territory. I know her in a casual way, and am not convinced that she has ever detected deeper profundity either in herself or her monthly gross income. But what do I know.Interesting question. This shop sells toys, cigarettes, candy, and lottery tickets. Which leads me to conclude that there is no border between art and this shop, just like there’s no border between Italy and Slovenia now that they’re all part of the EU.This is the shoe store. I don’t know if Agnese (presumably a woman) minds being called “his,” but linking understanding of the human psyche to a selection of flipflops is the first statement that makes sense.I wrote for an excellent editor who was implacable in his determination that “this” should clearly refer to something specific. Here, I’d have to ignore “concept” (which is easy enough to understand) but can’t see what “this” is. The window? The candy? The discounts? The writing itself? It’s true that a good question raises other questions, but they’re supposed to be good ones.
This isn’t such a hard game to play. Here are some of my own efforts, and I donate them to the stores that Scatiggio missed, or ignored. There are loads more, but while art may be long, life is short.
Essence of mountain soil, murdered beans of darkling aroma are resurrected in the elemental violence of water and fire, transformed from silent plant to music in humanity’s venous meanders.
E FIE, wine store. Mixed media: Grapes, water, plastic, glass
The vine submits to the fervor of fermentation, sacrificing sugar, soaking in its own lymph. How can joy and tears spring from the same tumultuous root, secret subjugation of sense and cogitation, and time relent only to destroy memory?
THE NEWSSTAND. Mixed media: cellulose, ink, vinyl, pigments, surfactants
Screaming paper, the multiple dimensions of life reduced to thin sheets of tree fiber, smeared with cruel dyes, and eager, jaws agape, for miniscule curiosity to enter its monstrous maw, consumed in the ephemeral tragedies of unceasing night and day.
Hey, this is fun. It’s even better than haiku — I don’t have to worry about grammar or meaning. It’s like playing Scrabble inventing words with whatever tiles you’ve got left. Maybe I’ll try it in Turkish next.
I’m going to stop now. I realize that I have left untilled great greenswards of fertile fields of potential: The post office, the barber, the dry cleaner, the jewelry store, the pharmacy, the cell-phone-and-computer shop, the doctor’s office….
But art has to go home now, because I’ve got to clean the bathroom and finish the ironing.
