Back, dammit
Jul. 6th, 2005 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaYeesh, it is bloody hard to be back. Rude, arrogant morons at US Customs and INS, despite huge signs promising "Vigilance, Integrity, Professionalism." Why do these signs immediately make me think of the inscriptions over German and Italian public buildings of the 1930s, e.g., Arbeit Macht Frei or Kinder, Kirche, Kuche or the ominous Questura buildings in Naples and Milan that promise Iustitia et Iure, but delivered quite another sort of experience.
Ask me again after Justice O'Connor's replacement is confirmed without a squeak. Me, I'm kinda hopin it'll be that clever Rodriguez fellow. It'll be fun explaining to the Other Democracies out there in the freeish world how we came to put the author of a memo justifying torture and imprisonment without trial on the fucking Supreme Court.
Important things that happened in the US while I was away:
~My kitchen got replastered & retiled, floor refinished, cabinet shelves replaced. Looks effing fabulous.
~One of my cats got thinner, one fatter. Am still worried about the thinner one,, but she seems perky enough, so go figure.
~Job got even more irritating.
~OTOH, West Side Stadium died with a stake through its heart. Yay.
~OTOH, basketball stadium and 17 highrise buildings approved for center of downtown Brooklyn. Conclusion: concept of a master plan for urban development still escapes the Great Minds running this city. Also, they are all on crack. Boo hiss.
~Last vestiges of civil society went to hell in a handbasket.
~End of democracy as we know it.
Things I did while I was away:
~No email, no internet for nearly 3 weeks: a record. Was remarkably pleasant not to turn on the computer the minute I walked in the door at night, because, of course, no computer. Read books instead, including a wonderful first novel called "16 Vitamins" which I hope will be published in English one of these days, several essays on the Black Death in Italy, a lot of indigestible twaddle in the 2005 Biennale catalogue, and a bunch of other novels. Also another chunk of Carolyn Walker Bynum's book on metamorphosis. Also saw some good theater.
~Saw "Batman Begins" in Italian. This unfortunately was not funny enough to rescue the movie from that filmy negligée condition known as Sheer Badness.
~Heard a charming lecture (with slides!) by the ever-delightful Umberto Eco.
~Saw lots and lots of art. Lots and lots and lots.
~Drove around the central Po valley with friends looking at derelict 16th- and 17th-century cascine, or stables, to refurbish into apartments. Not for us, as we are, regrettably, not planning to move to Italy anytime soon, but for the Milanese friends who were doing the driving.
~Best meal this time was just a plate of pasta and fried fish in an old, scruffy, cheap dive, once the hangout of the brilliant leftist leaders of the 1970s, Toni Negri and Adriano Sofri and the Lotta Continua radicals (not, please, to be confused with the Red Brigades), that has endured for generations in the glitzy heart of Milan, where a friend and I sat and ate and talked and talked, and then drank coffee and talked some more. I once saw Sofri come out of the nearby Gelateria Ecologica (best ice cream in Italy--alas, now gone) eating a double scoop.
~Biennale
Venice was hot, muggy, and hot. Also muggy. Cool in the churches, cool in the museums (some of them), cool on the ferry to S. Servolo, cool enough in the evenings, sitting in the courtyard with the cats and the flowering trumpet vine and the sound of water beyond the wall. Found a scorpion in the bathtub one morning. Scorpions in Venice? Who knew? Hot as a forge everywhere else, poor woobie scorp was probably just enjoying the relative cool of the bathtub, but I whacked him with a shoe just the same. Escaped to the beach once or twice.
Bought a life-size stick insect made of exquisite blown glass, and a praying mantis made of folded palm leaves. Bought some books. Bought porcini-flavor bouillion cubes (the risotto artist's friend). Bought malvasia and marsala and sangue di giuda and drank them after dinner in the warm evenings, dipping in the glass the fine thin barely sweet biscuits of 18th-century Venice, called baicoli. Bought a big jar of squid ink, bought figs and nespole and cherries, and tiny flavor-bomb tomatoes on the stem and the coarse thick-skinned rennette apples that taste like honey. Fat melons to eat with translucent slices of bresaola, baccala mantecato, more books. Did not buy the newspaper.
Biennale summary
Well in some ways, the pleasure of the Biennale is not in spurning weak work or admiring great talents or discovering fresh new visions, but in the absolute overall enthusiasm for art displayed in room after room, hall after hall, and from the oddest places and in the oddest ways.
Is the work of some national pavilions provincial? Yes, of course. But how wonderful that in Morocco someone is painting big post-AbEx canvases, full of paint and gesture and gold leaf. Did I like them? No, but I loved seeing them installed in the great neoclassical oval of the Church of the Pieta, with its Tiepolo ceiling and perfect acoustics, built to suit its choirmaster, one A. Vivaldi. And what was that giant bulb or globe thing hanging in the cloister at S. Francesco della Vigna? A sort of sub- or post-Lucio Fontana installation of torn paper. But the cloister in the piercing sunlight was beautiful, and the big white globe revealed the perfect blue square of blank sky above it, framed by a worn Renaissance colonnade.
Art I liked: the American pavilion (Ed Ruscha), Annette Messager at the French pavilion, Gilbert & George in the UK pavilion. Also:
Ricky Swallow, Australian, amazing fine hypernaturalistic wood sculpture, with a weird Baroque echo
William Kentridge, South African, a series of hand-drawn and live films even more brilliant, beautiful, wonderful, and accomplished than usual
Candice Breitz, South African, hilarious film installation
Francesco Vezzoli, Italian, also very funny film work: a trailer for a supposed remake of "Caligula" which I won't spoil by describing
Lovely textile work by an Afghan weaver whose name I didn't write down
George Hadjimichalis, Greek, wonderful installation about an imaginary hospital
Maxence Denis, Haitian, fucking brilliant video piece. Brilliant
Laura Ford, Welsh, odd lifesize figurative sculptures
Paul Granjon, also from Wales, small robots with odd sexual proclivities
Pretty nice Olafur Eliasson installation
Thomas Ruff's pixilated photos
Ishiuchi Miyako, Japanese, striking photographs of her mother and her mother's objects
Pipilotti Rist's hippie installation in the ex-church of S. Stae
A painter of brushy, colorful abstractions whose name I forget
The Arsenale section was mostly tedious and polemical. Do I really need to hear any more ranting about the corruption of art by the market? Is it really so terrible that people are interested enough to line up in the rain to pay $20 to get into MOMA? Well, yes, the $20 is bad, but the interest, surely, is a Good Thing. And the giant chandelier made of tampons (Joana Vasconcelos, Portugal), while clever, was not much more than that, and only made me remember Fred Wilson's black glass replica of a Venetian chandelier 2 years ago, with its beautiful craftsmanship and deep racial resonance.
Can't remember the rest. Will have to wait til the box with the 7 lb catalogue arrives. (Along with all the DVDs of obscure Italian comedies I bought, yay!)
Ah well. There was plenty of art of the older kind too. Spent a day in Mantua seeing Giulio Romano (http://www.itis.mn.it/palazzote/) and Mantegna frescoes (http://www.abcgallery.com/M/mantegna/mantegna14.html). Am disillusioned, however, to learn that the room with the ceiling painting of angels peering luridly over a balcony, http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/mantegna/mantegna_oculus.jpg.html, was not a wedding bedroom after all, and they are therefore not being prurient. And another day roaming round Vicenza and environs looking at wonderful Palladio buildings & eating ice cream. Yay for friends with cars and (apparently) no obligation to go to work. Also made a small pilgrimage to Asolo to see Carlo Scarpa's Brion memorial, which is beautiful the way Fallingwater is beautiful: with a kind of self-conscious, studied grace. The Luini frescoes in the church of S. Maurizio in Milan http://www.discountmilano.com/tour/SantAmbrogio/SanMaurizio/indexIt.html are being restored so I had to talk my way in to look at them. I can't decide which of Leonardo's followers I like best, Luini or the more delicate Boltraffio (http://gallery.euroweb.hu/html/b/boltraff/), but Milan museums are full of both.
The Museo Poldi-Pezzoli has excellent air conditioning, so I spent a long dreamy afternoon there, and found a Luini painting of Christ at Calvary, carrying the cross and looking wicked sexy, all shadowed cheekbones and heavy-lidded eyes, one fine brow arched quizzically, the crown of thorns curling among his vinelike locks of hair. Never has Christ shown his Dionysian character more seductively. Most fascinating were the marks on his body--meant, I assume, to be the scars of the scourge, but painted to look like lines of writing--indecipherable text messages inscribed by the violent hand of man, literally, on the divine body (divine indeed). I am not surprised to learn that this painting is based on a Leonardo drawing.
Ask me again after Justice O'Connor's replacement is confirmed without a squeak. Me, I'm kinda hopin it'll be that clever Rodriguez fellow. It'll be fun explaining to the Other Democracies out there in the freeish world how we came to put the author of a memo justifying torture and imprisonment without trial on the fucking Supreme Court.
Important things that happened in the US while I was away:
~My kitchen got replastered & retiled, floor refinished, cabinet shelves replaced. Looks effing fabulous.
~One of my cats got thinner, one fatter. Am still worried about the thinner one,, but she seems perky enough, so go figure.
~Job got even more irritating.
~OTOH, West Side Stadium died with a stake through its heart. Yay.
~OTOH, basketball stadium and 17 highrise buildings approved for center of downtown Brooklyn. Conclusion: concept of a master plan for urban development still escapes the Great Minds running this city. Also, they are all on crack. Boo hiss.
~Last vestiges of civil society went to hell in a handbasket.
~End of democracy as we know it.
Things I did while I was away:
~No email, no internet for nearly 3 weeks: a record. Was remarkably pleasant not to turn on the computer the minute I walked in the door at night, because, of course, no computer. Read books instead, including a wonderful first novel called "16 Vitamins" which I hope will be published in English one of these days, several essays on the Black Death in Italy, a lot of indigestible twaddle in the 2005 Biennale catalogue, and a bunch of other novels. Also another chunk of Carolyn Walker Bynum's book on metamorphosis. Also saw some good theater.
~Saw "Batman Begins" in Italian. This unfortunately was not funny enough to rescue the movie from that filmy negligée condition known as Sheer Badness.
~Heard a charming lecture (with slides!) by the ever-delightful Umberto Eco.
~Saw lots and lots of art. Lots and lots and lots.
~Drove around the central Po valley with friends looking at derelict 16th- and 17th-century cascine, or stables, to refurbish into apartments. Not for us, as we are, regrettably, not planning to move to Italy anytime soon, but for the Milanese friends who were doing the driving.
~Best meal this time was just a plate of pasta and fried fish in an old, scruffy, cheap dive, once the hangout of the brilliant leftist leaders of the 1970s, Toni Negri and Adriano Sofri and the Lotta Continua radicals (not, please, to be confused with the Red Brigades), that has endured for generations in the glitzy heart of Milan, where a friend and I sat and ate and talked and talked, and then drank coffee and talked some more. I once saw Sofri come out of the nearby Gelateria Ecologica (best ice cream in Italy--alas, now gone) eating a double scoop.
~Biennale
Venice was hot, muggy, and hot. Also muggy. Cool in the churches, cool in the museums (some of them), cool on the ferry to S. Servolo, cool enough in the evenings, sitting in the courtyard with the cats and the flowering trumpet vine and the sound of water beyond the wall. Found a scorpion in the bathtub one morning. Scorpions in Venice? Who knew? Hot as a forge everywhere else, poor woobie scorp was probably just enjoying the relative cool of the bathtub, but I whacked him with a shoe just the same. Escaped to the beach once or twice.
Bought a life-size stick insect made of exquisite blown glass, and a praying mantis made of folded palm leaves. Bought some books. Bought porcini-flavor bouillion cubes (the risotto artist's friend). Bought malvasia and marsala and sangue di giuda and drank them after dinner in the warm evenings, dipping in the glass the fine thin barely sweet biscuits of 18th-century Venice, called baicoli. Bought a big jar of squid ink, bought figs and nespole and cherries, and tiny flavor-bomb tomatoes on the stem and the coarse thick-skinned rennette apples that taste like honey. Fat melons to eat with translucent slices of bresaola, baccala mantecato, more books. Did not buy the newspaper.
Biennale summary
Well in some ways, the pleasure of the Biennale is not in spurning weak work or admiring great talents or discovering fresh new visions, but in the absolute overall enthusiasm for art displayed in room after room, hall after hall, and from the oddest places and in the oddest ways.
Is the work of some national pavilions provincial? Yes, of course. But how wonderful that in Morocco someone is painting big post-AbEx canvases, full of paint and gesture and gold leaf. Did I like them? No, but I loved seeing them installed in the great neoclassical oval of the Church of the Pieta, with its Tiepolo ceiling and perfect acoustics, built to suit its choirmaster, one A. Vivaldi. And what was that giant bulb or globe thing hanging in the cloister at S. Francesco della Vigna? A sort of sub- or post-Lucio Fontana installation of torn paper. But the cloister in the piercing sunlight was beautiful, and the big white globe revealed the perfect blue square of blank sky above it, framed by a worn Renaissance colonnade.
Art I liked: the American pavilion (Ed Ruscha), Annette Messager at the French pavilion, Gilbert & George in the UK pavilion. Also:
Ricky Swallow, Australian, amazing fine hypernaturalistic wood sculpture, with a weird Baroque echo
William Kentridge, South African, a series of hand-drawn and live films even more brilliant, beautiful, wonderful, and accomplished than usual
Candice Breitz, South African, hilarious film installation
Francesco Vezzoli, Italian, also very funny film work: a trailer for a supposed remake of "Caligula" which I won't spoil by describing
Lovely textile work by an Afghan weaver whose name I didn't write down
George Hadjimichalis, Greek, wonderful installation about an imaginary hospital
Maxence Denis, Haitian, fucking brilliant video piece. Brilliant
Laura Ford, Welsh, odd lifesize figurative sculptures
Paul Granjon, also from Wales, small robots with odd sexual proclivities
Pretty nice Olafur Eliasson installation
Thomas Ruff's pixilated photos
Ishiuchi Miyako, Japanese, striking photographs of her mother and her mother's objects
Pipilotti Rist's hippie installation in the ex-church of S. Stae
A painter of brushy, colorful abstractions whose name I forget
The Arsenale section was mostly tedious and polemical. Do I really need to hear any more ranting about the corruption of art by the market? Is it really so terrible that people are interested enough to line up in the rain to pay $20 to get into MOMA? Well, yes, the $20 is bad, but the interest, surely, is a Good Thing. And the giant chandelier made of tampons (Joana Vasconcelos, Portugal), while clever, was not much more than that, and only made me remember Fred Wilson's black glass replica of a Venetian chandelier 2 years ago, with its beautiful craftsmanship and deep racial resonance.
Can't remember the rest. Will have to wait til the box with the 7 lb catalogue arrives. (Along with all the DVDs of obscure Italian comedies I bought, yay!)
Ah well. There was plenty of art of the older kind too. Spent a day in Mantua seeing Giulio Romano (http://www.itis.mn.it/palazzote/) and Mantegna frescoes (http://www.abcgallery.com/M/mantegna/mantegna14.html). Am disillusioned, however, to learn that the room with the ceiling painting of angels peering luridly over a balcony, http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/mantegna/mantegna_oculus.jpg.html, was not a wedding bedroom after all, and they are therefore not being prurient. And another day roaming round Vicenza and environs looking at wonderful Palladio buildings & eating ice cream. Yay for friends with cars and (apparently) no obligation to go to work. Also made a small pilgrimage to Asolo to see Carlo Scarpa's Brion memorial, which is beautiful the way Fallingwater is beautiful: with a kind of self-conscious, studied grace. The Luini frescoes in the church of S. Maurizio in Milan http://www.discountmilano.com/tour/SantAmbrogio/SanMaurizio/indexIt.html are being restored so I had to talk my way in to look at them. I can't decide which of Leonardo's followers I like best, Luini or the more delicate Boltraffio (http://gallery.euroweb.hu/html/b/boltraff/), but Milan museums are full of both.
The Museo Poldi-Pezzoli has excellent air conditioning, so I spent a long dreamy afternoon there, and found a Luini painting of Christ at Calvary, carrying the cross and looking wicked sexy, all shadowed cheekbones and heavy-lidded eyes, one fine brow arched quizzically, the crown of thorns curling among his vinelike locks of hair. Never has Christ shown his Dionysian character more seductively. Most fascinating were the marks on his body--meant, I assume, to be the scars of the scourge, but painted to look like lines of writing--indecipherable text messages inscribed by the violent hand of man, literally, on the divine body (divine indeed). I am not surprised to learn that this painting is based on a Leonardo drawing.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 01:12 am (UTC)Liked the national pavilions, though, especially the historicity of the buildings themselves.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-09 01:24 pm (UTC)This year there were bars *inside* the Arsenal complex, which made the experience much nicer.