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.
Vaporettos make wonderful billboards; I don’t know if they auction off the space on their vehicles to the highest bidder, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I mean, why Azerbaijan on the #1, and not Tuvalu?
Despite the fact that “Biennale” literally means bi-annual (that is, every two years), this extravaganza of art has been broken up into so many different pieces — architecture, dance, music, etc. — that it has become, in some form or other, an annual event. Which means that at the beginning of June every year we live a week or so of intense spectatorhood at the swarming of the international art-scenesters.
For the brief period leading up to the inauguration (June 1 this year), we are entertained by an extraordinary spectacle of garb and behavior — I don’t mean this as a compliment — and the neighborhood businesses, especially bars and restaurants, get to earn some real money. If the visitors were the proverbial hay, the Biennale would be the proverbial sun, and the local merchants would be scything around the clock.
Short as this interlude may be, it causes all sorts of disorderly thoughts to rush into my brain — thoughts about art, thoughts about what it’s for and how it works, why or whether it matters, and thoughts about people (those are usually nasty, brutish and short — the thoughts, I mean, not the people).
I spent most of yesterday attempting to write them down and organize them so I could share their brilliance with you. But I gave up. Based on the art we see outside here, and the people who pursue it, art has become something so silly that to treat it as something serious has become an art form in itself.
The neighborhood is pulsating with journalists, art-watchers, art-commenters, and art-participaters. And I suppose also some lower-voltage art-perpetrators too, but I doubt that they are wandering around via Garibaldi, or blocking the streets drinking their spritzes where the space is narrowest (“You need to get through here? How quaint”), or leaning against things talking into their phones, drawing attention to themselves. My experience is that real artists rarely look all that important. Irving Penn looked like a vinyl-siding salesman.
Right on time, the gigantic luxury yachts have moved in for the big parties over the weekend. All 19 berths have been taken.These yachts redefine the term “party boat.” They’ll be gone soon. They’ll be back for the Film Festival and more parties.I love to look at them in the morning when nobody’s around. They’re like Gloria Swanson just getting out of bed.
Every year there is one major work of art that takes center stage, or tries to. They are always put out along the fondamente, obviously, where they can’t not be seen.
The first year I was here, it was a monstrous concrete hand, half-emerging from the pavement, fingers reaching upward in what might have been a metaphoric expression of yearning — or pleading, or grasping — for freedom. Another year it was a five-story-high sort of stele, glowing night and day with a violently-blue neon sort of waterfall. That blighted the landscape for quite a while. Then there was the decrepit traditional wooden sailing boat from the Comoro Islands, encumbered with two ponderous dumpsters, that floated for months tied to some pilings as it slowly came apart. Oh — and there was the tree, planted on a specially-constructed platform, in front of the Giardini where there are masses of trees.
The tree started out green in June, 2008, but by October it looked like this. That might have been the entire artistic concept. If I’d ever thought dead plants were art, I’d have saved all those doomed geraniums.
This year it is a gigantic figure on the island of San Giorgio sometimes known as “Alison Lapper Pregnant,” but at the moment called “Respiro” (“breath”). It is a portrait of English artist Alison Lapper, who was born as shown here (except obviously not 11 meters/33 feet high, purple, and inflatable). Don’t try to understand this by yourself; only Marc Quinn, the artist, and his assorted interpreters can tell you what it really means.
It’s actually very simple. I translate from a photo caption in Panorama.it: This handiwork “proposes a new model of feminine heroism in which love, maternity and vitality reach an unpredictable form and an unexpected peak.” It also is part of a “voyage from the origins of life” and “celebrates fear and wonder in the face of the world in which we live.” Other resonant phrases such as “the beauty and mystery of creation and life” defeat my capacity to link language to thought.
In case you might suppose that this artifact were some self-indulgent creation meant only to stupefy the Biennalists, or that the Palladian monument of the church of San Giorgio might be an inappropriate location for showing it (Peasant!), you should know that it has been exhibited at all sorts of places. It’s been in London since 2005 and was understandably given pride of place at the Special Olympics in London in 2012; other sites range from places associated with some sort of violence, such as a military training field in Tripoli, Libya; in Paris (protests against gay marriage); in Srinagar (protests in Kashmir); in Moore, Oklahoma (tornado tragedy), to more frivolous events which needed to draw more than usual attention to themselves, such as the competition in Berlin of “German models of the future,” to the beach at Long Branch, New Jersey, to Indianapolis, Indiana. She’s traveled more than I have.
With the deepest respect to the subject of this creation (I can’t call it a statue, but I can’t call it a balloon, either), the thoughts it inspires are not related to life, beauty, mystery, fear or wonder. Because I already know what it is. Like everything else on earth, it is a business. Or rather, part of a business. Mining mercury, molding ocarinas, feeding orphans, shoeing horses — all businesses.
Business is one of the fundamental building blocks of life, right in there with carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. And here at the Biennale we see the business of art, which — say what you will — has very little to do with life, beauty, mystery, or wonder, though maybe fear could be seen as playing a part.
Back to Alison Lapper as depicted by her plastic portraitist. I’m all for symbolism, but I am repelled by fabricated symbolism that is tacked onto an invention which is essentially intended to promote the inventor. Artists promote themselves because they want to sell you their stuff. Although Ms. Lapper collaborated in this work for her own reasons, she is merely the vehicle by which Marc Quinn intends to make you notice him. If all he wanted to do was show the beauty and wonder of life, he wouldn’t have put his name on it.
I’m not going to say any more, because this is the point at which my thoughts diverge from my ability to express them.
According to the Gazzettino, the director of the diocesan office of culture, don Gianmatteo Caputo, is not happy. For one thing, the Cini Foundation didn’t specify that the object wouldn’t be the original statue of marble, but this inflatable version (I guess that matters); for another, he denied the Foundation permission to place it in front of the church (I pause to let the idea settle that such permission was requested), so it was put BESIDE the church. That makes everything all right.
I felt disturbed when I thought she was made of stone. It was worse when I saw her like this. But she was evidently undergoing some repairs, because she was back up in almost no time.Large boulders (not genuine granite) have appeared around the neighborhood. The owner of this newsstand said such objects line the entrance to the United States pavilion. Maybe they had extras. Anyway, if you have to ask, I’d say that this little divertimento isn’t very effective as publicity. But wait! If you have to ask, you’ve just demonstrated that you don’t know anything about art! Peasant!The newsstand at the Giardini was similarly bouldered. Art is in the air…..As was Massimo and Luca’s vegetable boat. Perhaps there’s a good crop of boulders coming in this year.Yesterday evening we saw this unusual creation being rowed somewhat tentatively toward via Garibaldi. The hesitation wasn’t only because the man rowing wasn’t too good at it, but because the bridge he was about to pass under was too low.The problem is the ferro of the gondola sticking up in the middle of the boat: It’s too high to pass under the bridge.Hold everything. One suggestion: Wait till the tide goes out a little more (the Venetian equivalent of letting some air out of the tires).
A better suggestion: Dragoon a real gondolier who’s just walking by to row it the right way. Welcome aboard, sir.All the weight over on the right side, making the boat tilt just enough to slip beneath the bridge with no problem without capsizing. Pretty simple, as long as nobody breathes.Gondoliers do this all the time when the water’s a little high. The only reason you see the stern of a gondola sliced off is because the gondolier’s lazy. Or not very good.There was great applause from all the people who had stopped to watch. In my opinion, the gondolier was more of an artist than the person who put all the cut-up boat parts into the gondola.The boat didn’t have far to go; it was tied up just beyond the second bridge, under the banner announcing “Gondola.” I’m guessing the boat is the work of art, but in that case I’d have to give credit to the people in the squero who did the cutting and pasting, not the dude who thought it up. But what do I know about art.
I will help you understand what this boat full of what looks like mussel-shells actually means: Study the explanation given here, take two aspirin, or a large grappa, or stick your finger in a live socket, and call me in the morning. It’s all art. All of it. Everything. Even your dirty-laundry basket and your old broken bike. You’re wasting your time doing whatever you do — you could be here in Venice, making people admire you.
Speaking of which, there is a wonderful scene in an extremely wonderful movie called “Le Vacanze Intelligenti” (The Intelligent Vacation) with Alberto Sordi. He and his wife are a late-middle-aged couple, fruit-and-vegetable sellers in Rome, whose highly educated children organize their summer holiday for them. No going to the beach this year — the parents are going to learn something! So the itinerary sends them to tour Etruscan tombs, and go to avant-garde concerts in Florence, and they finally end up in Venice, at the Biennale.
It’s summer, it’s sweltering, they’re exhausted, and while he goes off in search of a cold drink for her, she slumps, comatose, eyes shut, into the only available chair, under a tree. And people stop to admire her, and talk about what the artist had in mind, and how skillful he was, and how much she might cost if somebody wanted to buy her. The moment she comes to and realizes she’s been seriously mistaken for art is something sublime.
