Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Amie Siegel's Provenance
The very best piece in an exhibit I saw at the MAXXI (love the name) museum, the main contemporary art museum here, is a film by Amie Siegel, which slowly reveals, backwards, the story of chairs from the capitol building in Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier, as they are auctioned, as they are measured and packed, as they travel across the ocean, as they sit awaiting their fate in the chambers of Chandigarh. It is amazingly document about global trade, the art market, and the fetish for modernist design.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Memory as Shock Absorber
Near the end of her Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein turns to the power of memory in returning power to the people of Latin America and other places where the shock troops of free-market, privatization ideologies have left disaster in their wake. And one tool of the shock troops has been the "erasure-- of history, of culture, of memory" (p. 589).
All shock therapists are intent on the erasure of memory," she writes. "Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all" (p. 585-86).
This just about sums up the mission I have in arguing for public confrontation with difficult pasts. It is why I am excited about curating an exhibit at the American Academy next January, which will show artist proposals for a public art project in the Foro Italico, one of Mussolini's largest propaganda sites. It is why I believe the Buenos Aires grassroots memory movement is so important, and why the efforts in Berlin to demand the presence of the memory of Nazism in public places is so important.
Many have rightly asked How much power do these memorials really have? It is a good and worrisome question. But I am convinced that good history is invaluable in the struggle for justice, and against destructive political movements. But public memory -- in the form of public art, memorials, innovative informational panels, temporary interventions -- is equally important.
All shock therapists are intent on the erasure of memory," she writes. "Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all" (p. 585-86).
This just about sums up the mission I have in arguing for public confrontation with difficult pasts. It is why I am excited about curating an exhibit at the American Academy next January, which will show artist proposals for a public art project in the Foro Italico, one of Mussolini's largest propaganda sites. It is why I believe the Buenos Aires grassroots memory movement is so important, and why the efforts in Berlin to demand the presence of the memory of Nazism in public places is so important.
Many have rightly asked How much power do these memorials really have? It is a good and worrisome question. But I am convinced that good history is invaluable in the struggle for justice, and against destructive political movements. But public memory -- in the form of public art, memorials, innovative informational panels, temporary interventions -- is equally important.
The Eyes of a Lion: Venice at its Height and in its Decline
The lion of Venice growls at us, its rear feet in the water, symbolic of Venice's empire of water. Its left front paw is on land -- Venice's empire of lands across the Mediterranean. Its right paw holds open a book displaying the traditional inscription to the city's patron saint, whose bones they acquired: "Peace be upon you, O Mark, my Evangelist."The wings of the lion frame the full sails of ships entering the harbor; by its haloed head is the Doge Palace, San Marco, the tower. Here is Venice in 1516 at its height, unbowed despite attacks just a few years earlier by the League of Cambrai.
A few rooms later, in the Doge Palace, comes another painting, from two centuries later. The mighty are falling.
Mary McCarthy, in her Venice Observed, argues that "the Venetians (like the Americans) hated the idea of death" (p. 252). It may be, but in one of the very last images commissioned by the Venetian Republic, Tiepolo could not help but portray the impending end of the Republic, which was in the air, even if Napoleon would not finally conquer Venice until 1797. In Neptune Offering to Venice the Riches of the Sea, from somewhere in the 1740s or 1750s, Tiepolo seems to be showing the faithful Neptune continuing to share his riches with the queen of the lagoon. But all eyes are drawn to the eye of the lion, no longer walking on water and land at once, but wheezing under the hand of the queen. The postcard sold in the gift shop captures just this detail of the eye -- tired, cloudy, eyebrows raised to look at Neptune because the head is to heavy to lift.
Mary McCarthy, in her Venice Observed, argues that "the Venetians (like the Americans) hated the idea of death" (p. 252). It may be, but in one of the very last images commissioned by the Venetian Republic, Tiepolo could not help but portray the impending end of the Republic, which was in the air, even if Napoleon would not finally conquer Venice until 1797. In Neptune Offering to Venice the Riches of the Sea, from somewhere in the 1740s or 1750s, Tiepolo seems to be showing the faithful Neptune continuing to share his riches with the queen of the lagoon. But all eyes are drawn to the eye of the lion, no longer walking on water and land at once, but wheezing under the hand of the queen. The postcard sold in the gift shop captures just this detail of the eye -- tired, cloudy, eyebrows raised to look at Neptune because the head is to heavy to lift.
Monday, July 7, 2014
Mary McCarthy on Venice
On my quick trip to the architecture biennale in Venice, I read Mary McCarthy's breezy but highly entertaining book from 1961, Venice Observed.
Here are some of my favorite lines:
"The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous -- poets and honeymooners." (p. 173, Penguin Edition, 1972)
"Among Venice's spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic's breast. People of this kind -- dry, prose people of superior intelligence -- object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, int eh presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else." (p. 174)
"There is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities -- Rome or Florence or Naples. The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian's, Quadri's, Torello, Harry's Bar, Murano, Burano, the piegeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto. Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself." (p. 177)
"Nothing can be said here including this statement) that has not been said before.....One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jewelled pin." (p. 181)
"A commercial people who lived solely for gain. Ruskin tried to show that this started with the 'degenerate' Venetians of the Renaissance, who sold their birthright for a mess of architectural pottage. He pictured Gothic Venice as a holy city flowering in its churches and its convents, in its religious processions and ceremonies -- a sacred garden tended by humble artisans, supervised by upright doges, and defended by brave captains.....Poor Ruskin, with his slide-rule and his ladder, a worshipper of the pragmatic fact, who was always flying int eh face of the facts of life and of recorded history, for the sake of a vision." (p. 189)
"Venice, unlike Rome or Ravenna or nearby Verona, had nothing of its own to start with. Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes." (p. 194)
"But why should it be beautiful at all? Why should Venice, aside from its situation, be a place of enchantment? One appears to be confronted with a paradox. A commercial people who lived solely for gain -- how could they create a city of fantasy, lovely as a dream or a fairy-tale?This is the central puzzle of Venice, the stumbling-block that one keeps coming up against if one tries to thin about her history, to put facts of her history together with the visual fact that is there before one's eyes." (p. 195)
"A wholly materialist city is nothing but a dream incarnate. Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon." (p. 196)
Here are some of my favorite lines:
"The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous -- poets and honeymooners." (p. 173, Penguin Edition, 1972)
"Among Venice's spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic's breast. People of this kind -- dry, prose people of superior intelligence -- object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, int eh presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else." (p. 174)
"There is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities -- Rome or Florence or Naples. The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian's, Quadri's, Torello, Harry's Bar, Murano, Burano, the piegeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto. Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself." (p. 177)
"Nothing can be said here including this statement) that has not been said before.....One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jewelled pin." (p. 181)
"A commercial people who lived solely for gain. Ruskin tried to show that this started with the 'degenerate' Venetians of the Renaissance, who sold their birthright for a mess of architectural pottage. He pictured Gothic Venice as a holy city flowering in its churches and its convents, in its religious processions and ceremonies -- a sacred garden tended by humble artisans, supervised by upright doges, and defended by brave captains.....Poor Ruskin, with his slide-rule and his ladder, a worshipper of the pragmatic fact, who was always flying int eh face of the facts of life and of recorded history, for the sake of a vision." (p. 189)
"Venice, unlike Rome or Ravenna or nearby Verona, had nothing of its own to start with. Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes." (p. 194)
"But why should it be beautiful at all? Why should Venice, aside from its situation, be a place of enchantment? One appears to be confronted with a paradox. A commercial people who lived solely for gain -- how could they create a city of fantasy, lovely as a dream or a fairy-tale?This is the central puzzle of Venice, the stumbling-block that one keeps coming up against if one tries to thin about her history, to put facts of her history together with the visual fact that is there before one's eyes." (p. 195)
"A wholly materialist city is nothing but a dream incarnate. Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon." (p. 196)
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