It’s next time again.

Don’t you love it when an idea just sort of  grabs you and will not let go? I suppose, if you know me, the attraction of the following idea is sort of a no-brainer. Of course I would love this concept to death. It is in my nature to glom onto the seduction of visual paradox.

The idea comes simply stated. An innocent little phrase masquerading as not much. It comes from Andy Grundberg who is the chair of Photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and also a columnist for the New York Times. He has a new book out (Crisis of the Real) and this quote was slipped into a review of it in the Weekend Arts section of the Financial Times (which is a newly found highly recommended love).

“The most intriguing contemporary photographs are those where everything is ‘simultaneously true and false, authentic and artificial’.“

So what’s the big deal? We’ve all sort of heard this before, haven’t we? We are blase to the miracles of Photoshop. No one believes centerfold skin is real. Avatar in 3D is yesterday’s news. With enough time and money you can pretty much do anything you want. The Lord of the Rings on film comes to mind. Special Effects have become so perfect who knows anymore what is “special” and what is real?

The paradox Andy Grundberg states so clearly cuts deeply into the core of art itself and I found myself thinking about it for most of the summer.

I know you love this idea as much as I do. When you think about the photographs you really love you undoubtedly find Truth in them. Photography can be a billboard for deception and it can also be a preserved moment of reality. But we know there is Art lurking back there behind the shutter in the genius of the photographer or behind the gaussian blur of the skillfully applied Photoshop layer. If all Art is magic, surely  photography is the trickiest art form of them all.  Does the seductive clutch of this idea go beyond Photography?

One of the doorways in the the Grimani Palace in Venice. This palazzo was closed for 25 years and has now re-opened. The precious marbles are worked into the architecture and displayed like abstract paintings.

The adventure, for me, started in an incredible time machine of a 16th century palazzo near the church of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice. The Grimani Palace, after being closed for 25 years, is newly restored and open only by appointment. I was lucky enough to tour it with a hugely impressive Venetian decorative arts specialist and although most of the discussion with one of the tour guides happened in Italian so far above my linguistic clearance that it made my head swim; just seeing their excitement and feeling their focus made the tour unforgettable.

Detail of a marble cornice inside the Grimani Palace

In one of the many splendid rooms, the discussion turned to the precious nature of marble. This room was a treasure vault but all the treasure was stuck on the walls in roundels and mantles and figureheads. This marble was from all over the world and it was treated architecturally like a holy relic.

Venice is home to some of the most significant marble in the world. The interior and exterior walls of the church of San Marco are festooned with Byzantine marble brought back from many Crusades. The most valuable marble, I think, is a deep purple and is called porphyry. Once you start to see this, you see it everywhere in Venice and it is so valuable they build (usually round) frames for it and work it into the architecture of the building.

You know how when something finally gets on to your radar screen and you suddenly see it all over the place? Well, marble on this trip was like that for me. Later in the summer we went to Germany and toured many churches and palaces of the German high Baroque and Rococo. Marble is everywhere in this and the exotic colors and their splashy, over the top use of marble pretty much blows your mind.

The bland exterior of the Weiskirche south of Munich, Germany surrounds a creamy Rococo filling

The tiny Weiskirche is a Rococo masterpiece designed by Dominikus Zimmermann in the late 1740s. It is located way out in the forest in southern Germany and gets over a million visitors a year.

I was jaded by the splendors of Venetian marble in Grimani palace, and then the legendary Rococo splendor of the Bishop’s palace in Wurtzburg and the masterpiece of the Weiskirche south of Munich so when my jaw hit the floor in the Wiblingen Abby Library outside the city of Ulm, I thought I had finally gone to heaven and it was not paved in streets of gold but in old books and exotically colored marbles.

The ornate library of the Wiblingen Abbey near Ulm Germany is a bibliophile’s flamboyant dream. It has been included in a few of the top ten lists of the world’s most beautiful buildings. The Benedictine monastery of Wiblingen describes its famous library as a glorification of human knowledge and heavenly wisdom.

I was photographing like a mad man with this huge grin on my face and finally put the camera down. Since we were in this incredible room totally by ourselves I just could not help it. I know you’re not supposed to but I reached out to feel the cold marble of a particularly gorgeous round piece of porphyry and as my fingertips caressed the surface, the dream I had been living was suddenly shattered. It was completely fake! It was just painted wood! Was everything in this room phony? Yes it was. It was all painted wood and only because we were in there alone and could get so intimately close did we realize the deception. I was duped. Or was I?

An allegorical goddess of Architecture holds a golden compass under a frescoed ceiling painted by Martin Kuen around 1750.

We’ve all seen faux marble. I have some in my living room and I thought the guy who painted it was never going to leave. But this marble painting was on another level. It was outrageously risky. There was nothing tentative about it. It carried off its illusory mission with a bravado that left you gasping.

Oliver Stone had to defend his artistic vision of current events in his 1991 film JFK. On the right is a painting by the cubist painter Georges Braque – Man with a Guitar [Ceret, summer 1911] Oil on canvas 45 3/4 x 31 7/8 in. courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I remember the uproar about Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. People were screaming, “But young people are going to think this is what actually happened!” Well, guess what? It’s a movie. It’s not a history book. What also comes to mind is that great quote of perhaps Gertrude Stein?  When someone complained that a newly painted modern painting didn’t even look like a woman, she said something pithy like, “Well, it’s not a woman – it’s a painting.”

Where does this leave the search for Truth in art? Where is that positive core that seems timeless and reaches for something universally authentic? I can’t wait to hear your thoughts about this. I prefer the real marble in the Grimani Palace to the fake marble in the intricately painted Wiblingen library. I like the real Venice – which everyone complains is a “stage set” to the modern replica Las Vegas. But one of the most fascinating things about Art is after all the artifice. The cubist painter George Braque maybe said it best: “Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”

Until next time with much love,
Tommaso

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

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

Jackson Pollock trickles house paint for a legend-making story as it appeared in LIFE magazine in the summer of 1949. Time magazine would later call him “Jack the Dripper” © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, Photographer Martha Holmes, Image Courtesy: Peggy Guggenheim Collection

It’s next time again.

True to the title of this Blog I am beginning a new project and I can’t wait to tell you about it. In an exciting collaboration with the Art Historian, Henry Adams, we are about to produce some films to promote his new book on Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton. The book is called: Tom & Jack – the Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. This project, I am happy to say, is headed for greatness and you, dear reader, are about to get an exclusive preview.

The cover of Tom & Jack to be published in November by London’s Bloomsbury Press (who also published Harry Potter).

This project has it all. It is filled with provocative ideas and I can’t wait to hear your reactions and insights. Let me give you some background.

Jackson Pollock needs no introduction. He is such a larger than life American icon. In fact, one of the reasons he became larger than life is because of LIFE – the magazine. In 1949 there was a big spread on JP and this pop culture exposure coupled with his unique slapdash style and his tragic drunken high-speed death made him an American icon. We know why Jackson Pollock crashed and burned but I’d like to know what the hell ever happened to LIFE magazine? It was great! Some of the world’s best photographers. Stories told largely through pictures. Why do you think it is not on your coffee table any more? What changed?

“Cut the Line”painted for the U.S. Navy in 1944 by Thomas Hart Benton. Henry explains that although Benton was the son of a U.S. Congressman he liked to present himself as a “crude, uneducated hillbilly.”

Thomas Hart Benton you know as well. You know his style and his work but he remains sort of like one of those great character actors whom you love but you can never remember his name. This is a great example of a picture being worth a thousand words. What you might not know, I sure didn’t, is that Benton was Pollock’s teacher. Henry’s story of their relationship reads like a thriller. Without giving too much away here is Henry’s description of the plot:

“The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton’s highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and charged relationship dating from Pollock’s days as a student under Benton. Pollock’s first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock. In true Oepidal fashion, Pollock even fell in love with Benton’s wife. Pollock later broke away artistically, rocketing to superstardom behind his stunning drip compositions. But he never lost touch with Benton or his ideas—in fact, his breakthrough abstractions reveal a strong debt to Benton’s teachings.”

Henry Adams, the Art Historian and provocateur is caught here probably girl watching somewhere in Italy.

Henry Adams, shown here, looking young handsome and frisky on an Italian street someplace, is one of the foremost Benton scholars in the world. In fact, he appears in a wonderful Ken Burns movie about Benton. I am really excited to work with Henry. His book on the American painter Thomas Eakins, Eakins Revealed got rave reviews. Andrew Wyeth called this book “The most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an artist.” Booklist called it, “Cogent, Exhaustive, Incendiary and Daring.” Henry and I collaborated on the film about the artist Christopher Pekoc, with the great title conceived by Henry, The Beauty of Damage and we are working together on the Extreme Visions documentary – a film about architecture, patronage and creativity at Princeton.

Click on the above picture to play with an interactive slide show brilliantly executed by the talented art directors at Smithsonsian.

This past week both Art News and Smithsonian did stories about Tom & Jack on the web. Check out the Smithsonian article – Decoding Jackson Pollock. This may be the spark that ignites a national news story. The enthusiastic comments there (some pro and some con) indicate Henry has touched a raw nerve. Many of the opinions there are not new but it is great to read people thinking and feeling so passionately about art. These articles do great job of explaining “the name in the painting controversy.” Henry’s Smithsonian article tells the story of how his beguilingly beautiful wife Marianne Berardi (who is also a distinguished Art Historian) discovered hidden treasure in a fifty year old 140 million dollar masterpiece. As if that weren’t enough, consider this provocation that directly relates to the discussions here on music.

Old Art = Literature? New Art = Music?

Henry’s brilliant book shines fresh perspective on some classic arguments. One of these was put forth by the journalistic art historian Clement Greenburg in a breakout essay published in 1940. Henry explains,
“Greenburg’s idea was that certain art forms become particularly popular in a period and then set the pattern for other arts. For example, he felt that nineteenth century painting and sculpture imitated literature because it told a story. Greenburg was interested in the idea that modern art had moved away from literature and instead was working in abstract terms more similar to music. He proposed that shifts of this sort were due to the imperatives of history, that in the modern age it was impossible to make representational art without making a “surrender to images from a stale past.” With abstract art, “there is nothing to identify, connect, or think about, but everything to feel.”

The analogy is fascinating. The spectrum of old and new literature and old and new music fits in here as well. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on all of this. The short films we are about to create will explore many of these topics and, as always, your insights will help enormously. Stay tuned.

Until next time with much love I remain your,
Tommaso

Promotional still from the bacchanalian art installation: Unconditional Love by the technically brilliant and fashionable Russian team AES+F at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

It’s next time again.

You gotta love the Biennale. It’s an orgy of creativity. All this art, great and small, was imported to tiny Venice. I love to think about how all this weird and wonderful stuff cleared customs?

Art is supposed to impact you in some way. Isn’t it? It should make some difference in your outlook. If it’s good – it should somehow touch you. With this in mind, and with some trepidation, I beg your indulgence for the second part of the remembrance of the 53rd Biennale. Remembrance is the key. I want to remember these highlights and if I write about them, I will. I realize this is a personal motivation and I will strive to make it as interesting as I can and raise some issues that will hopefully take this beyond a travelogue.

The first issue concerns the idea of memory itself. One of my favorite comments about any Biennale came from my friend Howard Freedman. When some were complaining, a few years ago, that this Biennale was not as great as that Biennale, Howard said, “Sure it is, you just remember all the great stuff from that Biennale. You’ve forgotten about all the crap you saw and you are only remembering the really good parts.” This strikes me as a perceptive truth and it connects to the core of what art is supposed to do. What you “take away” from an art show like the Biennale is only a small part of this larger story.

This idea was further described by the great landscape architect Peter Walker. I interviewed him for a program done about Cleveland Clinic’s new expansion and landscaping which includes a minimal-art-inspired fountain. Peter Walker said his goal was to create a project that would, “Live in memory.” How erudite is that! He was incredibly articulate about this and I feel as though it is a core principal of his art. How significant this idea must particularly be for him since we are surrounded by landscape all the time and yet the medium of his art is to somehow take the everyday landscape and make it special. He said, “We see stuff all the time but much of it is just stuff. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t stick.”

Do you see the “memory test” as any sort of significant criteria as you evaluate art? It has been a life changer for me. Now I think about this all the time. This is much more than just the aftershocks of “the shock of the new.” What lives in memory may indicate something very elusive and profound about the nature of art. It certainly impacts the fields of advertising and modern politics. I’m extremely curious about what you articulate souls have to say about this? Do you artists think about this (as Peter Walker does) when you create?

For what’s its worth, here is what I remember from this summer’s Biennale as so many artists fought to claim a little piece of memory among the brain clutter.

Is it a forgettable swamp or is it artistic genius? Lara Favaretto brings artful mud to the Biennale and makes it totally provocative.

See now the sprawling swamp of Ms. Lara Favaretto. She lives and works in Treviso which is a handsome town built around a slow river and charming canals. It looks nothing like her work. Lara’s awful garden is hiding in plain sight just outside the China pavilion in the Arsenale. The gardens themselves, in this part of the Arsenale, are overgrown and a bit mysterious. I wouldn’t blame you if you walked right past Ms. Favoretto’s work, after all, you might not have been here before and there is a really good chance you would just assume this part of the garden is in total disrepair and sort of a brackish mess. Not at all. She likes it like that. She imported all this slime! It took a ton of careful work for her to get it to look like something most people would ignore.

She describes her work evocatively: “A graveyard of the missing ones, that holds and hides objects, memorializing such infamously “lost” figures as writer Ambrose Bierce, artist Bas Jan Ader and chess champion Bobby Fisher.”

It’s the rare person who would actually see this art. It is a bog of woes. It speaks to the filters we all use to screen ourselves from ugliness as we stay on the lookout for beauty. I wonder what in the world Peter Walker would think? My gut tells me there is something profound going on. Maybe you can tell me what it is?

Trickster mastermind Hans Peter Feldman delights with an orgy of shadows.

I have followed the work of Hans Peter Feldman for several years. He has haunted me from a show he did in New York, where he pinned up tacky color Xeroxes, all the way to Muenster, Germany where he refurbished a public underground toilet with brightly colored tiles and Venetian chandeliers. Hans is one-half trickster, one-half conceptual artist, and wholly unforgettable. The question is, would I have loved his Biennale piece if I had not known it was his? The answer is yes! I loved the piece before I saw his name and when I did, I confess I loved it more. See now turntables filled with esoteric and iconic junk. Marilyn Monroe. The Empire State Building. A toy gun. Gnomes. A plastic clown. A pitchfork. A fake banana. Spotlights shine on the junk-filled slowly spinning turntables and cast a chaotic orgy of shadows. It is simple magic. A flickering shadow puppet of memory.

Mona Hartoum’s floating cube of taught, straight and suspended barbed wire.

There is a lot of bad art at a show like this and it can wear you down. You start to wonder if your perceptions have dulled and if your cranky mood is skewing your judgment. At times like these, when you then see something transcendent, your heart just wants to burst. The courage and nobility of the contemporary artist shines bright. Mona Hartoum to the rescue. Take 700 eight foot pieces of barbed wire stretched taught and perfectly straight. Dangle each one vertically, a few inches apart, from a grid in the ceiling until you have a cube eight feet square on all sides. Suspend the cube two feet off the floor.  It reminded me of a treacherous forest of birch trees. It was breathtakingly fragile and completely vicious.

Giacomo Costa’s “Private Garden” defies attempts to figure out how he does it? The answer is simple: very carefully.

Another uplifting and memorable piece was composed from Giocomo Costa’s back lit Sci Fi landscapes. The piece is a hallway of back-illuminated panels titled, Private Garden. It employs the display technology you see in airport advertising. Giocomo lives and works in Florence. Private Garden has the rich texture of Angkor Wat set in an overgrown future.

Detail from Costa’s “Private Garden.” It looks like the spaceship Nostromo from the movie Alien crash landed in Cambodia.

This incredibly detailed landscape foreshadows a time when electronics and technology no longer function and unbridled nature is in a lengthy process of reclamation. The imagery is part architecture and part rain forest. Saying it is computer generated doesn’t mean it is somehow automated. This is masterful technical painting worthy of a Dutch still life.

Dario Escabar slashes bicycle tires and hangs them like really creepy Spainish moss.

Dario Escabar from Guatemala took bicycle tires and, in an orgiastic fit of creative frenzy, strips them lengthwise in half and hung them like gigantic tangled tresses from the 20 foot ceiling of the Arsenale’s stone space. If you’ve ever changed a bicycle tire you know how tough they are and you also know that pungent and distinctive rubber smell. Dario’s installation reeks of it. He slices through the mental clutter with a great idea. His redolent rubber tentacles grab you and won’t let go.

“From the Feet to the Brain” is a massive series of installations by Jan Fabre.  They must have woken him in the night like nightmares from Gulliver’s Travels.

Jan Fabre gets the tenacity prize. I’ve shot large scale installations and I know how much work they are to create. The amount of work and effort which went into these monumental pieces in these soaring monumental spaces is astonishing. I loved the theatricality. You came up a large brick stairway and this gargantuan archeological dig smacked you right in the face. Seeing the artist himself in his black trench coat was a total shock. Don’t walk on the art for god’s sake! Is he real or is he a hyper-realistic manikin?

A life size hyper-realistic replica of the artist Jan Fabre digs up a massive decomposing skull

I don’t know if this art is good or bad. I do know it sticks in my mind. Does that make it great? I don’t think it does. I’m not saying memorability defines great art, I’m saying it is one characteristic. I’m also fascinated by the idea that an artist would consciously use the idea of memorability and attempt to “imprint” their work with this in mind. Jan Fabre seemed to me to be working very hard to accomplish this. Judged only by memorability – he succeeded, but I still have some reservations.

One final piece I have to mention was an orgy on film created by a team from Russia. The team fell in love with a clever quote:

“If somebody says, ’I love you,’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head”
  –  Kurt Vonnegut

They used this quote as their mantra and created a wild party of a piece titled: Unconditional Love. This work is really hard to describe. Let me quote from the press release.

Unconditional Love by AES+F plays on gigantic curved screens creating a theater in the round. Balletic sexy imagery cut to blaring Tchaikovsky.

AES+F
 (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes)
 Russian, live in Moscow
Unconditional Love will feature the premiere of The Feast of Trimalchio, a new video project by the Moscow-based collective AES+F. The work updates and abstracts the story of the Roman plutocrat Trimalchio from Petronius’ Satyricon, transposing the orgies of masters and servants to the setting of a modern-day luxury hotel. The Asian maids perform services for their white male clients, and then the clients return them the favours. The loop of reciprocity suggests the frozen temporality of glamour, where only the present moment of youth, beauty, and hedonistic pleasure is valid. The Feast of Trimalchio caresses the contours of ephemeral passion, and in doing so it throws into relief the profundity of unconditional love.

AES+F imagines the impossible, films it, and then edits it together with computer generated architecture and landscapes. They then present their high fashion orgy on curving screens of the highest quality. Ideas are one thing. Exquisite execution is another.

I loved this piece because it was so well made. So much video art is slapped together and badly done. Many of the video installations in this year’s Biennale only worked for the first week and then broke down. It was a professional thrill to see an installation so artfully constructed. Unconditional Love surrounded  and smothered you with competence. It was like a finely photographed Prada billboard come to life. It was perhaps too slick, maybe it was too self consciously  fashionable, but it certainly was not boring. It put you inside a voyeuristic orgy of sight of sound with eight channels of Dolby Digital audio (expensive speakers blaring Tchaikovsky) and super high quality High Definition video projected on to theater quality curved screens. You sat on the floor in this theater in the round. It was sensuously made, wondrous and never to be forgotten.

As my friend Henry Adams muses – the artists in the 53rd Biennale created “meditations on Beauty, Danger, and Serenity.” Henry is an Art Historian and he likes to use the word instinctual as he describes the nature of art. He connects something powerful, something archetypal in the Jungian sense, with the power of Art to tap into the innate urges of our collective past. He believes the pre-historic cave paintings (which he has actually seen and not just read about) demonstrate an evolutionary survival mechanism of jaw-dropping force: imagination. What concerns me is how and why some art jangles this nerve and some art does not? By what primordial magic does art stick in your mind and yet become more than just a token souvenir?

Until next time with much love, I remain your,

Tommaso

A gripping and edgy double screen projection by the Milan-based team MASBEDO

It’s next time again.

A man in a black suit and tie has landed by parachute in a snow covered mountainous landscape. A roaring wind buffets and violently twists his billowing parachute. He grimaces in pain as he tries to control it before it kills him. Will he survive? On the adjacent screen, a striking woman with long hair in a water logged black coat is almost drowning. The half submerged camera is bobbing with her in the water as she gasps and screams. The water is choppy and treacherous. The loud music (mostly plaintive guitar and deep booming percussion) makes these scenes tense, elegiac, and somehow heroic. Welcome to the 53rd Venice Biennale of Art.

Almost every other year since 1895, the art community, like an invading armada in search of a new world, has voyaged to Venice. This year, a new young director, Daniel Birnbaum, 46, has declared a sort of war of the worlds. “A work of art is more than an object, more than a commodity. It represents a vision of the world, and if taken seriously must be seen as a way of ‘making a world.’” This is his theme: Fare Mundi – “Making Worlds.” Over 90 artists in the main exhibition will make their worlds at this years Biennale. They are in a war for your attention. To cover the battlefield over 6,000 journalists have invaded the city. Total attendance is expected to be over 300,000. Venice is well prepared and uniquely situated for this onslaught. Always a crossroads of people and ideas, Venice has seen everything. Nothing surprises her. What I adore the most is new art in an old town, and the old town is well-armed, primped and primed.

See now the newly restored Peggy Guggenheim Museum. The facade has been completely cleaned. Viewing it from a small boat in the middle of the grand canal my friend tells me they had watered the plants on the upper party deck with fertilizer containing copper sulfate. This made ugly green stains all over the white Istrian stone facade of the building. Now the stone is blinding white and looks years younger. But the Peggy Guggenhiem is not the only building refreshed by a face lift. The Palladian church of San Giorgio Maggiore has been polished with money from Prada. The scaffold on the Ducal Palace has been removed. It preens with wonder-of-the-world status. My favorite church here, San Salute, a billowing ship of a building, is now out of restoration and her abundant domes gleam. Even the old customs house, one of the most famous landmarks in the world, The Dogana, has been completely refurbished by Japanese master architect, Tadao Ando, and has become a new contemporary museum funded by the king of the French luxury brands, François Pinault.

The domed church of San Salute and the newly restored Customs House (Dogana) at the mouth of the Grand Canal. The Dogana has become a new museum of Contemporary Art featuring works collected by François Pinault.

Traditionally, the Biennale has been held in specially made gardens (the Giardini) which contain small permanent buildings built in the 1920‘s by the participating countries. In more recent years, as the Biennale has grown, new venues for art are scattered all over the city. This year 70 countries participate with over 40 collateral events. Half the fun, in this palazzo-filled half sunken paradise, is a scavenger hunt as you consult your map to try to discern where the art has been tucked away.

A behemoth military building of legend – the Arsenale has now become a massive gallery of art. Traditionally, this fortress protected and defended all of Venice’s treasures and created her world-renowned fleet. Guarded by a diverse collection of stone lions brought back from the crusades, the Arsenale, at the height of its powers in the 1500s, was a bustling shipbuilding complex of 16,000 workers. They churned out a massive warship every day through perhaps the largest and most audacious assembly line ever constructed. For the next several months, the vast high-ceilinged and brick columned spaces will crank out an endless stream of art enthusiasts. Mostly dressed in black, they come by the thousands to be transformed.

The Arsenale in Venice now builds art memories instead of ships.

Being here is an overload of the senses. The old city captivates you with a timeless beauty you feel in your bones. Then you enter into the mouth of this international art factory and are slowly chewed and processed by clever artists all of whom want to blow your mind. Some of them assault, some seduce, all are craven for attention.

I think it is fair to say, when the Biennale began over a century ago, art all over the world was easier to recognize. It was often picturesque. It was delivered in a gilded frame and it usually involved the representation of a narrative. I’m thinking of Greek myths or Bible stories. Often the art was judged by how well and convincingly the artist depicted nature. In the 20th century, some artists found it more fun to hide the art. To use the metaphor of this years director, some artists make their world with a handy map and others don’t. Some art sticks out its hand with a smile on its face and seems to say, “It’s so nice to see you. Welcome to my world!” Other artists deliberately put up barriers to keep you at bay. You don’t get in without a visa. It feels more like an airport screening. “Take off your belt and your shoes. Is this your passport? Where is your boarding pass? Take that change out of your pocket. Open your luggage and let me paw through it. What’s wrong with you? You can’t take that bottle of water in here!”

Some art is wide open. Other art is closed and secretive and it is next to impossible to find your way in. Some of it is like a puzzle and too often a one trick pony. Once you get the trick – the mystery evaporates and takes the art along with it.

How appropriate the Biennale’s two major venues here are an arsenal and a garden. One, the Arsenale, was all about protect, defend and attack. The other, the Giardini, was a refreshing green foliage labyrinth promising a playful game of hide and seek. Today, art of all kinds is contained in both and overflows into the rest of the city. The world makers have taken over. Getting lost in Venice takes on a whole new meaning.

What happens to you when you look at art, especially contemporary art? How do you separate the good from the boring? How do you get through security? Do you use a process? Do you have a litmus test? What have you found that is helpful to the rest of us?

Fiona Tan’s elegant video portraits are in a small corner of the Dutch pavilion.

There are far too many worlds to explore here and there is much to tell. I will do this Blog in two parts. I feel like Marco Polo. In fact, the artist for the Dutch Pavilion, Fiona Tan, used Marco Polo’s diaries in a large video projection piece. In her installation we watch well made video scenes of exotic Asian treasures as a bored male voice reads Marco Polo’s stream of consciousness memories of his far flung journey. While I liked her projected installations, what caught my eye even more were her small elegant black and white portrait videos. They are made from long anticipated miracles of technology. Thin black wooden frames hang on the wall. The video picture inside on a LCD screen is slowly alive. The technology is invisible. The execution is perfect. They are filled with magic.

The best video, warring for recognition among several hundred here, I would give to the Milanese artist team of Nicolo Massazza and Jacopo Bedogni who call themselves, MASBEDO. The work is described above. It passed all my tests for video art. Is it well made? Is it something I can’t see on TV or in a normal theatre? Does it grab me? Does it in any way astonish? MASBEDO gets A++ on all accounts.

Paintings by Wade Guyton and Kelly Walker make up an installation at the Biennale Pavilion (formerly the Italian pavilion) at the Giardini.

See now the somewhat baroque but curiously processed paintings of another team, Guyton and Walker, based in New York. Their paintings, filled with fruit and op art checkerboards are beguiling smart and fun – a combination I find very sexy.

One of two giant mollusks by Huang Yong Ping are composed of a material resembling moon rocks.

Maybe its the water logged venue but I adored the giant mollusks of Huang Yong Ping from China. The moody tentacles of these pieces pulled you into a scary water world and slowly engulfed you by their size, their spooky material and their suspense.

In the Japanese pavilion artist Miwa Yanagi combines drama and humor to make a feminist statement.

Japan’s Miwa Yanagi created a queasy brothel in her exhibition: Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe. Gigantic black and white photos, of busty strip teasers, tower above you in heavy black ornate frames. They bump and grind and their heavy breasts, in each successive photo, become progressively more distended and grotesque. What starts as an easy seduction has gone completely creepy. Then Miwa delivers a knockout punch. There is a black shrouded yurt over to the side, the size of child’s playhouse. You just know there is a naughty peepshow in there. Voyeur that you are, you have to get down on all fours to peek inside. Inside is a video. What sort of weird Japanese freak show porn will this be? It is a video of a black shrouded yurt (with the troupe inside) scurrying across a white barren landscape like a comical black spider on newly sprouted legs! She did it. She charmed and transformed me. Imagine my delight when the next day Catherine pointed out the entire Japanese pavilion was shrouded in a giant black yurt! How did we miss this? Superb!

I will end part one by inviting you into the larger discussion. This will make part two much more interesting. The problem with writing about this art is it is so “you had to be here.” But isn’t that usually the case with all art? Back to the theme of exploring worlds – how do you prepare for such a journey? This metaphor begs to know your travel style. The humorist Robert Benchley said, “There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” When it comes to art “voyages” which are you? Do you plan and prepare for a trip or do you just wing it? When you look at art do you let it just wash over you or do you analyze? What hints do you have, especially for the enjoyment of contemporary art, which you find useful? What gives you the most pleasure and what drives you nuts? Where do you draw the line (if you do) and say, “This isn’t art, this is just crap!” In the new art worlds, where the criteria are so much more difficult to define, how do you get your bearings?

I so look forward to your insights.

Until then I remain, happily bewildered and your,
Tommaso

Newton speculated harmonics in music were organized like the color spectrum in light. Manuscript of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784) © The British Library. Prism photo © by Adam Hart-Davis

It’s next time again.

What are the characteristics of sound? Sounds can be soothing, shrieking, harmonious, sweet, thundering, the list goes on and on – but in talking with Joshua Smith, of the Cleveland Orchestra, he said that sound can sometimes be characterized by color. I’m curious about what he means? And so the investigation continues, and this quest becomes more fascinating with every unexpected turn.

Sound is incredibly revealing. We know this. A tone of voice becomes as communicative as the words themselves. Secrets are revealed in the intimate breath of a whisper. The ears are an early warning system, constantly on patrol, looking for spatial cues. Often, as I am editing an interview to tell a story in a program, I am equally concerned with the emotional tone of a comment as I am with its intellectual flow. But, I think musicians perceive much more than the rest of us when it comes to the more elusive qualities of sound – which must be part of what Josh means by color.

Turns out, Sir Isaic Newton, who was looking for unifying principles in the universe, not only broke light into the colors of the spectrum but also tried to apply color to the harmonic relationships in music. Newton’s spectrum of light remains – but his ideas about color and music never quite fit together, and were ultimately ignored.

To find out more, I wrote to David Breitman who directs the Historical Performance Program at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. David explains,

“Musicians operate with metaphors all the time — we use space a lot (music goes up, down, forwards, back, gets wider or narrower) — that’s so we can talk about motion, which I think is a feeling we get from the music’s rhythm.  Color is a property of the sound itself: really, the composition of a tone as a result of the overtone series.  Usually this is along one dimension: brightness/darkness, but the more elaborate sensations carry the visual metaphor further, i.e. a “silvery” tone.  Color is used rather generically (strings have a “color” and winds have a “color”) so an orchestration that takes advantage of these sounds and contrasts/combines them would be said to be “colorful” as opposed to using only one “color” (the actual color is rarely specified!)  There is also a history of associating colors with individual keys (C major might be red, for example, in someone’s scheme.  There was lots of this discussion in the 18th century — but people’s assignments rarely agreed.”

Color for Joshua Smith, however, has a personal and perhaps even more compelling meaning. Josh is the Principal Flutist of the Cleveland Orchestra and we hope to do a film project together. Josh started playing the flute when he was eight and by the time he was twelve he was proficient. He first spoke to me about the word color when he described one of his great teachers. When I do an interview, I have an ear which listens for glistening moments. I had the idea, as I listened to Josh’s tone of voice, that when his teacher brought up “the color of sound”, it was like a gate-keeper in a mythic story pointing out a secret door to an unfathomable new world.
Josh explains,

“I can remember my teacher saying, ‘OK, so this sounds beautiful but how can we go beyond just making it beautiful?  What does this sound really mean?’ And then, he started talking about the idea of color in music; the idea that music can create different moods, or different atmospheres or different colors.  When I think about it now, and when I try to teach my twenty year old students about this it can be challenging for them, and can sound completely arbitrary and whacko – even to fairly advanced musicians. When I was getting this first lecture, I think I was twelve.”

It is so fitting that this “call to adventure” (more about this later) happened for Josh with the flute. The flute is such a beguiling and powerfully-loaded mythic instrument. Pan, the Pied Piper, Krishna, all use their flute in spellbinding ways. Mozart’s famous opera, The Magic Flute also comes to mind. It is famous for many things, but one of the most outstanding is its magnificent opportunities for a role known in operatic circles as a colortura soprano.

Could finding out more about coloratura explain what Josh’s teacher really meant by color?

Looking this up in the dictionary I found that coloratura has several meanings. “The word derives from the Italian colorare (to colour; to heighten; to enliven) or colorazione (colouring, coloration). The term normally refers to a soprano who has the vocal ability to produce high notes (above high C).  It is also applied to a voice-type, the coloratura soprano, most famously typified by the role of Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. This type of soprano has a high range and can execute with great facility the style of singing that includes elaborate ornamentation and embellishment, including running passages, staccati, and trills.”

There are many recordings of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but this one, with Diana Damrau as the Queen of the Night is amazing. Click the picture for a taste the publisher put on YouTube – then get the film on Blu Ray from Amazon or Netflix.

Those of you who know the opera are now humming the famous aria in your head. But, I don’t think, coloratura, used in this way, is what Josh’s teacher meant at all.

The project Josh and I are developing will explore the power of music including this idea of color.  The potential film is the brainchild of Charles Michener. who (for a decade) was senior editor for cultural affairs at Newsweek and became a senior editor at The New Yorker, where he wrote a recent profile of the Cleveland Orchestra. Color is a mysterious metaphor when applied to music. Surely, Charles, can point the way out of the wilderness. He writes about all this very subtle and elusive stuff with astonishing clarity.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson epitomizes color in music. These recordings are need to be heard to be believed. Click the covers for an Amazon link.

Hear that magic flute now in Charles’ descriptions of the sublime vocalist, Lorraine Hunt Leiberson, from a profile of her written for the New Yorker:

“Hunt Lieberson told me that for her the staging and the singing were “inseparable,” and on the recording she seems almost visibly present. The opening aria of the first cantata is a kind of call-and-response for oboe d’amore and voice, and the reed instrument’s plaintive, slightly distant timbre is the perfect foil for the singer’s intimate, darkly gleaming mezzo, which has a vitality beyond the capacity of any wind player. With many singers of comparable virtuosity, one hears the words as something of an afterthought; musical ravishment comes before dramatic sense. With Hunt Lieberson, the two are joined, so that the sentiment of the words—by turns yearning, reflective, and joyous—gives the vocal line its urgency and its shape, each note a specific emotional character in the gentle undertow of Bach.”

Is that great or what!? I can see Josh and his teacher, in my mind, nodding their heads in agreement. This is what goes on in a musical performance drenched in color. I may not be using the term properly but, for me, it becomes a metaphor for the creative spirit which animates great art. Something more mystical.  Sound as a container for an emotional, perhaps spiritual, essence? I think the role of sound in a good film should add this elusive but powerful property of color. The music and the pictures should blend together with the chemistry and color typified by Hunt Lieberson’s  perfect union of music and lyric.

This is what is interesting about all the arts. The homework is done, the lines are learned, the craft part of the work is over and now you are reaching for something beyond your grasp. Hear the flute? Will the call to adventure (in the way Joseph Campbell would describe it) be acted upon or ignored? There is a moment of vertigo when you lose your balance and you can defy gravity for a moment or two – and if you are lucky you can catch hold of something truly surprising. I’m excited and inspired by this.

If you are willing to share, and there are some very impressive readers here who hopefully will take the time to write, I’d like to hear your thoughts about color in music or even about a moment in your more creative life, when you felt that you were reaching beyond the ordinary into something deeper, something more colorful, something more profound.

Until next time, with much love,
Tommaso