In the first gallery at the
Galleria Borghese, the audio guide tells the story about a famous horse and
rider sculpture, Marco Curzio a Cavallo, which was mounted on the wall, the most visible sight for those
entering the Gallery up the main front steps.
It is a Greek sculpture of a horse that has lost its rider. Cardinal Borghese, the maker of this great
collection and gallery, hired Pietro Bernini (father of the soon-to-be more famous son, Gian Lorenzo Bernini) to create a new rider. It is
impossible to tell, from a distance, that this is an ancient and a modern
sculpture combined. It was common to provide a prosthetic arm or leg to ancient
sculptures, to complete that which was lost, in the hopes, through repair, to
regain that apparent heroic clarity of the ancient heritage.
The first gallery currently
also has four Giacometti figures, originally commissioned by Chase Bank for its
plaza in Manhattan. The whole room here
is filled with Greek and Roman statuary of the noblest kind. But I find Giacometti’s figures to be much
more noble than the Greek and roman – Jove, Dionysus, the satyr, and other
Roman VIP’s.
Walking Man, has a scarred
heart, almost as if someone had tried to break it open and sliced it in the
effort. I did not notice the last time I was at the Gallery that the figures
have large, heavy feet. The sculptures
are thin, rail-like figures but they are nonetheless rooted firmly in the earth
– they look like the heavy basis of Egyptian mummies, or, with feet together, as some are, like angels in the Torah.
Fragile, strong, but also
sad. They seem to be distrustful of heroic ideals, and the kinds of ideals
propagandized by the Greek and Roman sculptures in the gallery.
I have been thinking and writing about
the basic tension in art and architecture between the pure and convincing, the
stalwart and principled versus the “complex and contradictory” as Venturi would
say, the unresolved, the questioning, the cautious. There is our nearby to the Academy one of the greatest examples of the former – Bramante's Tempietto,
so uplifting in its proportions and solidity and clarity. And then, at San Pietro in Vincoli, there is Michelangelo’s Moses, not still, but a figure in
motion, Freud argued, insecure and unresolved.
I have always thought that I gravitated toward the Woody Guthrie and
Pete Seeger, those who sing with conviction, the ballad and the soaring
melody. I have gravitated toward the proud
principles of the play, Inspector Calls, which has these lines near the end:
Inspector: But just remember
this. One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions and millions
of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes
and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our
lives, and what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of
one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will
soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they well be taught it
in fire and bloody and anguish. Good night.
But I have been questioning
this of late. I think of the Michael Frayn
play Copenhagen, and the instability and memory and meaning, and about John
Cage’s pieces, Imaginary Landscape IV and 4’33”
composed while he was living on Monroe Street on the Lower East Side, and where
he opened his
windows to mingle the city’s music and his own. In came the indeterminate sounds
of this immigrant neighborhood and the still-vibrant industrial waterfront
nearby. I think about the essay about the British scientist, Jacob Bronowski and his call – while standing in one
of the pools
of mud at Auschwitz – to resist certainty and the kind of conviction that ends up killing people.
And
I think of the book I read twenty years ago, but has remained in the back of my
mind, a touchstone -- Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. Becker makes the
uncompromising argument that we seem doomed to make mayhem and start wars and
kill others in pursuit of victories and achievements that will make us feel
like death can be kept at bay, or that life is in fact meaningful. Are our convictions more frightening because they
are more violent in direct proportion to their clarity of purpose?
And
then I think of my favorite piece from the Cinque Mostre exhibition at the
Academy in the spring of 2014. Mimmo
Jodice’s Demetra Opera 1 is a
photograph of a broken bust of Demetra – the left half of her check and jaw
were gone – which is completed by a white mold, held together by a person’s –
the artist’s? -- hand, as if he was giving Demetra a warm squeeze, perhaps a
prelude to a kiss.
It is a sweet gesture – an
effort to repair the damage and then bring the sculpture alive. But there is
something not quite right: the cast the artist made to fit the face, doesn’t
quite match, so the lips don’t meet and the face as an awkward skew to it. Perhaps it was meant for a different repair
job. Or perhaps it is simply impossible
to go back. We try to repair, to bring
back the past, to make the past whole again, but like the photograph of the
repair, it doesn’t quite fit. Jodice’s
photograph doesn’t have the existential weight of the Giacometti but it too
holds its distance from the certainty of marble, and the certainty of ideology.
And now I feel myself
swinging back again. I think of Tony Kushner’s character, Prelapsarianov – “the
oldest living Bolshevik” – who declares, with great vehemence and sadness in Perestroika:
How are we to proceed without theory? Is it
enough to reject the past, is it wise to move forward in this blind fashion,
without the cold brilliant light of theory to guide the way?... You who live in
this sour little age cannot imagine the sheer grandeur of the prospect we gazed
upon.
Can we act with conviction without
a coherent analysis of the world and its ills?
When does that conviction become destructive?
Simone Martini and Lipp Menni (1333), Florence, Uffizi
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