diary of a filmmaker

In 1987, Mass MOCA took a dormant factory and gave it new life as the nation’s largest center for Contemporary and Performing Arts. It is located in North Adams, Massachusetts.

It’s next time again.

A few years ago a sprawling factory in North Adams, Massachusetts was transformed into a gigantic museum for Contemporary Art, now called Mass MOCA.  The vast high-ceilinged rooms have bare brick walls, wooden floors and massive clear spans. The brute physicality of the spaces cause most artists to break a bit of a sweat in order to fill them with large scale, site specific installations. Maybe this is one reasons a visit to Mass MOCA is so entertaining; most of the art shown there is the result of heavy lifting.

Re-projection: Hoosac, 2010 by Tobias Putrih is made of monofilament and a spotlight.

One good example is a recent work created by Tobias Putrih (b. 1972, Kranj, Slovenia). In a room which stretched over half the length of a football field, the artist strung 50 yard long strands of monofilament and then lit them dazzlingly with a single spotlight, projecting a starburst of dots into the center of the stretch.

This work, of course, could have been installed on a lesser scale but where, other than Mass MOCA, can an artist like Tobias Putrih really push a good idea like this one into something breathtaking and unforgettable? The magnitude of Mass MOCA provokes artists into coming up with big ideas and if they work hard enough they can realize truly grand visions. Mass MOCA gave this ethereal work a proving ground born of monumental space.

Mass MOCA’s new show, Material World, showcases the works of seven artists who investigate the artistic use of materials from the “modest to the precarious.” There is nothing slapdash about most of these impressive works. The enormity of the venue allows the obsessive compulsive natures of many of these artists to loom large. The show itself is a shrine to a virtue I admire in great art – hard work.

Once again I credit the writer Charles Michener for articulating this idea better than I ever could. In helping me with this concept he reminds me of a quote which he credits to “a great American theater critic, Stark Young, in his review of O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape.’ ” Charles thinks the quote was originally from The New Republic, in the 1920s. Stark Young said, “What moved us was not so much the play itself as the cost to the dramatist.”  Charles finds this, “A very useful distinction and criterion for understanding certain problematic works of art.”

I’m sure there are great examples of artists who create spontaneously and quickly and perhaps without any effort at all. I just can’t think of any. Perhaps their art can be seen in a gesture like the elegant zen moment of an unpremeditated Japanese flower arrangement. However, I don’t look at the spontaneity in a Frank Gehry sketch or a Cy Twombly “doodle” as happening without effort and not without a lifetime of training and relevant experience. Sometimes, these days, and please forgive my crankiness here, art can be “found” in strewn garbage. It’s not the haphazard I mind, it is the apparent absence of effort that drives me nuts.

Do you think an artist’s effort should be factored in to your appreciation of the finished work? Or, does the finished work speak for itself? Do you feel what the artist went through to achieve it is perhaps irrelevant?

Thankfully for me, almost all the work I have ever seen at Mass MOCA has been overloaded with artistic effort. I admire this.

White Stag, 2009-20010, by Wade Kavanugh and Stephen B. Nguyen is constructed of wood and thousands of yards of paper

A wonderful example from the Material World show is a gargantuan, Baroque, obsessively-constructed forest of twisted paper conceived and realized by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen  (b. 1979, Portland Maine and b. 1976, Little Falls, Minnesota) Their creation is titled, White Stag. It is another site specific masterpiece where the interplay of Mass MOCA’s vast spaces contribute mightily to the effectiveness of the work.

Kavanaugh and Nguyen’s flowing convoluted river of paper defies all logic and any attempt to discern how it was made. It slaps you in the face from the first moment you see it and then it continues to confound you as you slowly try to grasp the impossibility of its construction. You follow in it’s mysterious flow through the rooms and up the stairs as it breaks through walls and the floor with its tendrils and roots.

In a short conversation with museum founding director, Joe Thompson, he let me know the foundation of the piece was a plywood armature which was then painstakingly covered with thousands of yards of rolled paper. He said while under construction one of Frank Gehry’s top designers, Edwin Chan, saw the overlapping “scales” of the plywood infrastructure and they both felt the sculpture, at its core, evoked the spirit of Frank Gehry.

I find most often the works of art I cherish and which pose great meaning for me in my life are works in which the artist has invested enormous time, profound sacrifice and painstaking craft. These traits can be found in all forms of art whether in film, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture or drama. I don’t mean to imply all work which results from Herculean artistic effort is good. Hard work by itself doesn’t guarantee anything. I sometimes think art is the evidence of an arduous artistic journey. When I sense in a finished work, an artistic odyssey filled with exertion, adventure and risk – the art grips my attention. So what do you think? Should the “cost to the artist” matter?

Untitled #1234 (Tom’s Twin), 2007 – 2008 by Petah Coyne.  Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, NY

The reason for the pilgrimage to Mass MOCA was a retrospective show on one of my favorite artists, Petah Coyne. The show was designed by her architectural collaborator Nate McBride who took full advantage of Mass MOCA’s gigantic opportunities. I’ve never seen her work look better.

Petah did not want her show at Mass MOCA photographed so most of the photos shown here are links from her gallery’s website: Gallerie Lelong.

Untitled #720 (Eguchi’s Ghost), 1992/2007 by Petah Coyne.  Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, NY

Every piece in Petah’s show, Everything That Rises Must Converge has a back story. The title is a quote from Flannery O’Connor. Petah invests all of her pieces with iconographic meaning. Some of this iconography is very Catholic. Other symbology comes from Dante or Pantheism or death rituals or Literature. One moody piece references an evocative Japanese novella  by Yasunari Kawabata: The House of Sleeping Beauties. The catalog to the exhibition explains “In this story men nearing death can sleep the night next to young unconscious women.” You don’t need to know the story to be moved by the work but you somehow sense it. You also don’t need to know that the sculpture is constructed from a shredded airstream trailer. The shredded trailer has become an industrial material called “car hair.” All of this back story is imbedded in the piece and its form and its power exude all this meaning which you mysteriously pick up in a visceral way.

Petah’s work often shocks you with a powerful sensuality or a brutal primitive uneasiness. You then get trapped in a whirlpool of meaning which sucks you into uncharted depths of artistic feeling.

Untitled # 1240 (Black Cloud) by Petah Coyne. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, NY

Much of the work in her show features taxidermy and often of birds sometimes trapped in wax flowers or pools of black or deep maroon velvet. It is hard not to make comparisons with disturbing memories of oil soaked wildlife struggling in the polluted Gulf. Most of this work, however, predates the oil spill. Joe Thompson, in his after dinner remarks, credited the depth of Petah’s work which makes it somehow relevant in any timeframe. Perhaps this is another hallmark of really significant art?

One of Petah Coyne’s waxed flowers which are strewn like rose petals around her installations.

There is unfathomable labor in every work birthed by Petah Coyne. Every meticulously waxed flower speaks of delicate craftsmanship. Taken on their own, each of these flowers is an exquisite creation. You try not to step on them as you explore the work because they are sometimes strewn on the floor surrounding the larger sculptures. But when you multiply the effort and the “cost to the artist” in that one flower and multiply it by the countless thousands it takes to create one of these large pieces, your mind and your heart just cracks open against the crushing tide of obsessive dedication that it took to bring this about. As you gape at her giant yet fragile hanging pieces you can’t imagine the logistics it took to install such a massive show; let alone how she painstakingly created the works. Given all this effort it is a comfort to know her show at Mass MOCA will remain open until March 2011.

Until next time with much love, I remain your,
Tommaso

It’s next time again.

Like many worthwhile things, it has taken some time to pull together the short film I told you about a few months ago on Jackson Pollock.

You may already know Smithsonian ran an article in December about Henry Adams’ book, Tom & Jack and the accompanying web story got over a million hits on the weekend it appeared! We can only hope this short little film gives the book an additional bounce.

This blog is supposed to be a diary. So what can I tell you about making this film? The big lesson for me is that content and story telling are the core of any decent cinema project. The production elements here are very simple. The charm is in the way the story is revealed.

This is the first video I have embedded into the blog and I hope it plays seamlessly for you. The full screen button is located right next to the word “Vimeo” on the video controls.

The Jackson Pollock Code from Thomas Ball on Vimeo.

Henry Adams has a marvelous way of telling a story with fascinating and amusing side trips. Like the great British travel writers of the 1930s, the destination of his plots seems only the excuse for the hugely entertaining ancillary excursions. Henry’s blithe transitions from topic to topic take you into totally unplanned territory sort of like a wandering day trip on a sunny spring day in Italy. This time you find yourself mesmerized by the work of Abbot Thayer who Henry tells us made important contributions to the development of camouflage. Then Andy Warhol appears, as if out of a dream, and by the time its all over, you are not sure what it all means but you know you had a great time.

This version of the now famous Google logo is an astonishing example of how ideas transmute themselves seemingly with a mind of their own. See the posting at the New York Times T Blog for the details.

Imagine my amazement when Marianne Berardi sent me an email about Google jumping on the Pollock band wagon. This is from The T Magazine Blog of the New York Times from February of this year – a couple of months after the Smithsonian article appeared.

So what do you think? Many in my office felt the letters in the painting could be anything. Some claimed they could find their own names in the Pollock painting. I was charmed by the whole idea and felt that anything which caused you to spend more time looking at a great work of art was a good thing. The interview with the beguiling Marianne Berardi, however, changed my mind. Her point about “reading the painting” with the rhythmic spacing similar to letters is a very compelling argument.

This painting by Jackson Pollock was painted in 1943 and is now worth a staggering amount of money. The painting was given by Peggy Guggenheim to the University of Iowa. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim 1959.6 / © 2009 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / ARS, NY

There is more collateral evidence. A recent acquisition of a Pollock by the Butler museum shows the letter forms as well. Henry also points out (after having fun with his 10 year old as they tried to paint their own Jackson Pollock) if you just drip and throw paint around it looks repetitive and boring. Making letters in the air gives your drips more personality and variety. All of this we hope to include in another short film as well as (if we can find the money) a full blown one hour documentary of Tom & Jack.

Henry gives a lecture about the book at the University of Iowa next week. I am hoping he will post a comment here on their reaction to his discoveries.

Until next time with much love, I remain your,

Tommaso

It’s next time again.

One of the most satisfying aspects of doing this Blog is getting great comments from extremely bright people who get turned on by the topic. This month, I’m delighted to say, the articulate Art Historian, Henry Adams, has discovered the under-appreciated  bounty in his own book collection! He took the time to share his renewed enthusiasm for the covers of these books with the rest of us.

Henry writes: I’ve often buy books simply for their covers.  Somewhat perversely, I suppose to justify the expense, I often then sit down and read what’s between the covers, but very often the cover is the thing that spurs me to make the purchase.  In part this is a result of my art historical interests.  For example,  I can’t afford a painting by Thomas Hart Benton or Grant Wood, but it’s fun to collect books for which they made cover designs.

One of my favorites is Benton’s paper cover for Thomas A. Edison: A Modern Olympian by Mary Childs Nierney, 1934.  I have a copy with a cover that’s completely untorn, although I suspect that the color that now reads a gray was one a rich indigo blue.   The design show’s Edison’s first generator, the “long-waisted Mary Ann,” next to a modern generator, and his first cylinder phonograph next to a “modern” disk phonograph.  The jazzy design closely relates to Benton’s famous mural of America Today and Benton clearly worked hard on it.

When he was done he commented that he would rather cover fifty feet of wall space than work again within book-jacket dimensions.

Grant Wood also did several  designs specifically to serve as book-covers.  My two favorites are Plowing on Sunday by Sterling North of 1934, with a farmer swigging from a jug; and O, Chautauqua by Thomas Duncan of 1935 by Sterling North, with a aerial view of a circus tent which is remarkably modern and reminiscent of the photographs of Moholy-Nagy.

Around the turn-of-the-century it was common to produce very beautiful cloth book covers, which are often wonderful works of art in their own right.

The tradition goes back at least to the work of the great English designer William Morris, who made a magnificently decorative cover for an edition of the Vollsunga Saga that he translated from the Icelandic in 1870.  As it happens, the birds and foliage on the cover have nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the book, but they a certainly beautiful in their own right. One of the most prolific cover designers of the 1920s was Margaret Armstrong, who did several striking designs for books by Henry Van Dyke, such as The Golden Key of 1926.  While her work was produced mostly in the ‘twenties, it’s basically art nouveau in character.

Perhaps the greatest master of this sort of design was Aubrey Beardsley, the great master of art nouveau, who made a number of remarkable covers.  My favorites are his wonderful creepy design of what I take to be poppies for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (first published, I believe in 1892, although my copy was printed in 1927; and possibly even better, his cover for the last book he illustrated, Ben Jonson’s Volpone of 1898.  The Volpone design I find particularly fascinating since it’s a wonderful example of art nouveau and yet at the same time, its free-form scattering of elements is strangely similar to the paintings of Jackson Pollock.  This is surely one of the great 19^th century designs, in any medium.

Some other enjoyable covers:

A book cover by the great English architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh for A Book of Sundials, by Launcelot Cross, published in Edinburgh in 1914.

An anonymous book cover for Robert Louis Stevenon’s Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893, which is modeled on a Polynesian tapa cloth and next to it wonderful multi-colored  design of a knight in armor by the noted illustrator J. C. Leydenecker,  created for a boy’s adventure book of 1926, The Crimson Conquest by Charles Bradford Hudson.

Finally, let me propose a candidate for the title of the greatest cover design ever.  It’s Matisse’s drawing of a ballerina for the cover of a book by Boris Kochno, Le Ballet, published by Hachette in 1954.  Kochno was the secretary and lover of Serge Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes; and he also had an affair with Cole Porter.  His text (in French, of course) provides an excellent survey of the history of the ballet, with an emphasis on the extraordinary achievement of Diaghilev and his troupe.  But what’s most marvelous about the book is the extraordinary photographs of dancers, and the wonderful costume and set designs by figures such as Picasso and Matisse.  It even has an original Picasso lithograph as a frontispiece.

Somehow my parents picked up a copy of this book during one of their trips to France in the 1950s, and it was a major influence on me: the book that introduced me to modern art.  I was particularly fascinated by the line drawings of Matisse and the idea of trying to make a completely satisfying work of art with the most minimal possible means.  The cover demonstrates Matisse’s mastery in accomplishing this.  While the drawing is not precisely accurate in a photographic sense,  it perfectly captures the physique and movement of a ballerina.  People often say that Matisse’s drawings are flat, but what’s interesting is that the effect is far from flat.  It captures the physicality of the figure; it nicely evokes a sense of movement; and of course it’s beautifully placed on the page—or perhaps I should say, on the cover.  As I’ve said, it’s my personal candidate for the greatest cover design ever.  In its way it’s a perfect work of art.

Henry Adams

The brilliant art directors at Penguin hired propaganda specialist and graphic wizard Shephard Fairey to illustrate the newly reissued editions of Orwell’s classics

It’s next time again
So what is it like for you? Do you buy books or CD’s based on the cover? I do. Probably you do too. I think of it like a code. Of course, the best is when you already know what you want and have heard a good recommendation. But when you’re just browsing, do you get sucked in the way I do with good graphics? One designer I really like, Hans Müller, called the book he edited about ECM’s cover art, Sleeves of Desire. Isn’t that perfect? I really enjoy the creative decisions that have gone into really great cover art and more often than not, I feel as though I truly can judge a book by it’s cover.

ECM Records (headquartered in Munich) brings out the very coolest jazz and compliments the music with gorgeous covers. Manfred Eicher founded the compamy in 1969. He is a genius at pairing visuals and music and he often features the graphic work of Barbara Wojirsh and Deiter Rehm. They define the most sophisticated of Europeaon graphic design.

I love it when a book just jumps out from the display and screams, “Buy me! You’ll love me!”  It is one of the things I miss about all the reading I’m doing on the Kindle. But you and I have been through all this before. Even if you are too young to have bought vinyl you must love those big graphic covers on LP’s. There was so much to like. First the big square format. Already a timeless symbol – the circle in the square. Just like the paving stones in front of the Pantheon in Rome. The large format gave the designer so much real estate to fill with good decisions and meaningfully coded content.

The Pantheon in Rome is based on the geometry of the circle and the square. You find this motif on the floors both inside and out.

One of my first jobs was in a record store. I discovered, almost without fail, if I really loved the cover – there was a pretty good chance I liked the music inside as well. I remember we all held our breath when the Beatles brought out a new album. In the wake of the uproar that happened after the dismembered babies on the British version of the Yesterday and Today album, we were certain their next album was going to be a shocker. It was. In a defiant gesture of zen bravado we laughed our asses off when we unpacked The White Album. It was designed by an artist friend of Paul McCartney’s, Richard Hamilton, who had curated exhibitions on Marcel Duchamp.

The Beatles butchering baby dolls was too contraversial and the album art was pulled. It is now worth a fortune. The White Album was designed by Richard Hamilton a collage artist and specialist on Marcel Duchamp.

CD’s shrank the LP graphic experience, and now with digital downloads cover art has become even less fun. I am so obsessed with CD’s and good cover art I spend a huge amount of time making sure all my iTunes albums have good cover art to go along with. If I hate the original cover I sometimes make my own. But how is the package a code for what lies within?

Two more of my favorite covers art directed by ECM’s Manfred Eicher. These were most likely designed by Barbara Wojirsch and Dieter Rehm. The black and white photo is by master photographer André Kertész (1894 – 1985).

These days I look at almost all art as the product of a series of decisions. Perhaps this not profound and completely self evident but I find the concept both restful and intriguing. As a filmmaker, I know a project breaks down into thousands of decisions. This is what a Director does – make decisions. “Not that way, it should be this way.” A great project is when there are more good decisions than mediocre ones. I think one of the ways to best appreciate a great painting, a great building, a beautiful couture dress, or a fabulous meal is to break the final product down into its component parts and look at the decision process that went into every detail. The process is endlessly fascinating and often frustrating. I love Woody Allen’s take on it. He says, “I conceive the film–I sit home and write it–and, when I conceive it, it’s brilliant. Everything is true Chekhov or Shakespeare: it’s great! And then, you start work, and the truck with fresh compromises drives up every day.”

A great book cover connects with the subject matter. This new series of Ian Flemming’s James Bond novels, by Penguin, not only evokes the sexy sophistication of the plots but also the times in which they were written.The paintings were done by Michael Gillette.

This is why the cover of a book matters to me. I see it as an extension of the artist’s decision making process. When well done, the cover is a talisman for the project. If the book is good the author hopefully found his or her way to a quality publisher. They decided to work together. Hopefully the publisher decided to hire a good designer and so on. In the design, I love to see intelligence connecting the major themes of the book.

Great graphic design signals quality. It doesn’t happen by accident. It costs money. It requires sophistication and judgement. It is a great joy in my life. I’d love to see some of your favorites. In your comments, if you send me a link or email a photo of something you really love I’ll get it posted on the blog. I can’t wait to see what you select. I bet this turns into a really rich experience.

Shepard Ferry, whose work you know from the famous Obama poster (and the subsequent legal troubles with the Assoc. Press) had a recent show at the wonderful new  ICA in Boston. He is a new Andy Warhol. Penguin recently hired him to do special edition covers for George Orwell’s classics (seen above) and he did minor masterpieces which evoke the paranoid oppression of Russian propaganda posters. Shepard Ferry is a genius at this totalitarian control freak world view. The decision to hire him for this project was inspired.

Two books I’m going to buy and read only because of the great covers!

In Filmmaking, and in Opera (and in most complex artistic endeavors of any sort), the number of decisions can be very overwhelming. I know I’ve hit the wall when I can’t make one more decision. This is why David Lynch (the guy who directed Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet) jokes that he orders the same thing for lunch every day. One less decision to make.
One of my favorite quotes is from the great film director Luchino Visconti. In his retirement, a journalist once asked him if he still went to the movies and what he liked? Visconti said something like, “I don’t go to the movies much any more. When I get in there and see all the decisions up there on the screen – it is just too exhausting.”

In the Woods is highly recommended. How would you like the assignment to design the cover art for a new edition of Harry Potter? I think, M.S. Corley did a damn good job!

What a triumph when the project is finally done and the creator still has a bit of strength left to decide upon (or at least approve) the perfect cover.

Until next time with much love,
Tommaso

For and easy to print version click: The Defeat of Time PDF

This beguiling hyper-realistic portrait of a cat must have been even more amazing when Cornelia Saftleven painted it in 1607. It would be two centuries before anyone could see a photograph.

It’s next time again.

What a profound joy it is to be provoked by Art. A new exhibition, in Florence, at the Palazzo Strozzi has me jazzed. It’s got everything I like; great craftsmanship, the sexy combo of old & new, a sense of humor, and huge ideas. In a burst of museum-quality genius the very smart curators at the Palazzo Strozzi decided to combine a painting show of Trompe l’Oeil, with a photography show of digital images. The exhibition titles connect the dots: Art And Illusions – Masterpieces of Trompe l’Oeil from Antiquity to the Present Day, and Manipulating Reality – How Images Redefine the World.

Tromp l’Oeil is one of those maddening, impossible to pronounce French phrases. As you undoubtedly know, it means “trick the eye” and as a genre of painting it is sort of like a Golden Retriever; completely adorable and hard to dislike. The show is about technical skill and clever painting effects but it is also about perception and well-intentioned deceit. It has the entertainment value of a really good magic show. It features not only the technically adept from past and present but also genuine Renaissance superstars including works by Titian, Veronese, Tiepolo and Tintoretto.

Renaissance master Titian shows off his skill painting translucent drapery in this portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto painted in 1558. Many believe this portrait influenced Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Pope” series.

There are many still lifes in the show. Most go beyond photo realism into more expressive realms. It is hard to remember many of them were painted before photography even existed.

Click the photo to go to a higher quality link for this gorgeously detailed still life representing the stock market crash of 1929. It was painted by Otis Kaye in 1937.

Art and Illusions took a good idea and made it great through the hard work of a talented curator, Annamaria Giusti, and a museum management determined to reach out to the public in highly creative ways. You were encouraged to find guards with special “Ask Me” buttons who acted as docents when you had a question. There was an acoustic guide for adults and another one for kids. The labels were in Italian and in English, and (this is the really hard part) all the people were friendly and seemed like they wanted you to have a great time! The curators cherry picked great paintings, sculpture and displays from all over the globe and combined them (not in chronological order) with wit and skill. The show was a delight. Be sure to check out the wonderfully done website.

This image feels uncomfortably strange because it was shot with “G. I. Joes” in Paolo Ventura’s New York studio instead of Iraq. Title: Iraq 2008, C-Prints 120 x 100 cm Courtesy of the artist © Paolo Ventura

It was, however, the companion, more contemporary exhibition on Digital Photography that put me on a fast train to Florence. I love the spanking new tech of it. What put the great in Manipulating Reality was the taste and reach of the curator, Franziska Nori (and her International team) combined with the big ideas of the top notch artists.

The curators seductively tossed out some intellectual catnip when they credited the French Philosopher, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and his famous book Camera Lucida in the introductions to the exhibition. Those of you who know me and are familiar with Roland Barthes are probably saying to yourself, “It’s about time . . . “ and so it is. The Defeat of Time is a quote from Mr. Barthes and the rest of this essay expresses my delight in just three of his amazing ideas.

French critic and philosopher Roland Barthes circa 1960. His controversial and provocative book on Photography, Camera Lucida, was published in 1980 shortly before he was killed in a car accident.

Roland Barthes wrote about still photography in a philosophical and experiential way. It strikes me that he, and many others before him who wrote about Photography in the twentieth century, were caught up in the fresh fascination of a new medium. Photography, for them, was a new art form exploring issues and ideas contemporary with their lives. Professor Harvey Buchanan (who posts here now and then when I’m lucky) often talks about contemporary artists (for him it was Jasper Johns) having special resonance with young people who are growing up at that particular time. This connection reminds me of nostalgic rush you get when you hear the music that was playing on the radio when you got your first car.

For the 21st century, Digital Media and the related arts is surely the new wave. Maybe it is not so new. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London is currently doing an exhibition Decode which examines Digital Art from the 60’s and 70’s. In a similar way, Photography was not really a new technology for Barthes and his contemporaries but, what was being done with it and the effect it was having on our world, was new.

Promotional still from James Cameron’s, 3D digital masterpiece: Avatar.

There is no doubt that Digital Art is now. Look no further than James Cameron’s new 3D blockbuster Avatar or the disturbing Chinese “news” animations of the Tiger Woods scandal which combine animated fabrications with real news footage. (Their creators defend these as trendy journalism because “young people don’t take the time to read.”)

What I find fascinating about the Strozzi show are the conceptual hooks – the curator’s connection to Trompe l’Oeil, the artistic manipulation of reality, the experiential nature of these art forms and the provocative ideas outlined so brilliantly through the (not new but new to me) ideas of Roland Barthes.

I need your help here. Barthes first idea is called studium. It is a Latin word and the translation of his French is so convoluted and confusing perhaps those of you who better know his work or know Latin can help us out. Barthes, in horribly stilted translation, explains:

“I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, “study,” but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity.”

Used in this way, Barthes seems to be saying studium is sort of like “field of study.” It is the ground on which the more interesting parts of his theory take place. His next idea, which he calls punctum, is much easier to understand and he describes it vividly.

“The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. . . it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, . . . for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”

Lucio Fontana’s sensuous and violent slash paintings make Roland Barthes theories tangible for me. Lucio Fontana – Concetto spaziale. Attese, 1959, private collection.

Both these ideas remind me of Lucio Fontana’s sexy and somehow violent slash paintings where he takes a canvas (perhaps the studium) and cuts through it or pierces it (which might be the punctum). Barthes is pointing to something that takes Photography beyond the documentary or reportage stage and propels into the realm of Art. Photography, in the 20th century, took over the burden of representation from painting. It then grew into something more mysterious.

This photo taken of would be assassin Lewis Payne by Alexander Gardner in 1865 haunted Roland Barthes.

Barthes then drives home his philosophical nail quite close to my heart as he describes his reaction to a photograph of a jailed young assassin. “I now know that there exists another punctum (another “stigmatum”) than the “detail.” This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation. In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die.”

If you love photography you will love his next part. “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. This punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them . . .” How gorgeous is that? All this stuff slays me.

In the Strozzi show time bends, breaks and stands still. Waking becomes dream. Reality gets twisted. Amazement turns to wonder and then blooms, first into a smile and then a thrill.

See now the carpeted forest of Rosemary Laing (Australia, 1959). Click the photo to go to a higher quality version.

Groundspeed (Red Piazza) #05, 2001, C-Print, 106 x 163 cm, Courtesy the artist: DZ Bank Kunstsammlung © Rosemary Laing: Galerie CONRADS, Düsseldorf.

I can’t be completely sure, but I think from reading the catalog perhaps this carpet is actually installed in the forest and then photographed. I suppose it is crazy to even care, digital or physical is not the issue – it is the graceful impact she creates. I don’t think this was her intent. Considering the work more thoughtfully, it is more of an environmental statement about Colonialism in Australia but I find the image restful. I could so easily live with this image and I would smile at it every day.

Mamma, Maura e Claudia – “20. 12. 53 – 10. 08. 04“, 2004-2009 Lambda Print, Aluminum, Courtesy of the artist; Galleria Alessandro De March, Milano, © Moira Ricci

The images in the show that really pierced me, however, were the poignant photographs of Moira Ricci (Italy, 1977). Moira (seen above in the green T shirt) decided to insert herself into her mother’s early life and she does so with the skill of one of the painstaking Trompe l’Oeil still life painters in the companion show. Her series is titled 20. 12. 53 – 10. 08. 04 ; the dates of her mother’s birth and premature death. Moira’s body language in all of the insertions has the expressive and haunting quality of certain figures in mannerist paintings; the ones who stare at you and make you uncomfortably aware of your observation.

Mamma sulla moto da nonna - “20. 12. 53 – 10. 08. 04“, 2004-2009 Lambda Print, Aluminum, Courtesy of the artist; Galleria Alessandro De March, Milano, © Moira Ricci

Fidanzati – “20. 12. 53 – 10. 08. 04“, 2004-2009 Lambda Print, Aluminum, Courtesy of the artist; Galleria Alessandro De March, Milano, © Moira Ricci

What started as an homage to her mother from a grieving and talented daughter turned into, for me, the talisman of the show. I found myself getting goose bumps as I felt the inherent loss in these photographs. As I marveled at her craftsmanship and thought about her core idea I could not help but think both her Mom and Roland Barthes would have been so proud.

Until next time with much love,

Tommaso