William Dean Howells--and Others--in Palazzo Falier on the Grand Canal

Taking the sun in one of Palazzo Falier's two projecting sun rooms

I should confess upfront that I went to Palazzo Falier yesterday with at least as much interest in the 19th-century American writer, critic and editor William Dean Howells, who once lived there, as in the installation (or "over-all intervention") by Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis that it currently houses. I also went simply to see the inside of one of the more charming facades on the Grand Canal, because, as every curious admirer of Venice knows, the various "collateral events" of the Biennale offer temporary access to buildings otherwise closed to such visits (or such snooping, as the case may be).

A view of one of Palazzo Falier's liatì (and the Grand Canal), as seen from the other

In addition to a fine location on the Grand Canal, a short distance from the Accademia Bridge, Palazzo Falier is notable for its two upper-story liatì, or what we might today call sun rooms, that project symmetrically from either side of its gothic-arched 15th-century facade to the very edge of the water. Its leaded windows (which evoke a distant century to us) are rather recent additions, but the wings themselves, which were for a time thought to have been 19th-century additions, are now believed to also date back to the 15th century.

And what marvelous spaces those two projecting windowed rooms are! I spent a long time admiring them, imagining (erroneously, as it turns out) that Howells had used one to write in. Then a white cat, whom I'd seen out in the back garden when I first arrived, sauntered in and made the more elaborate of the two liatì her own. And as I watched her arrange herself to best enjoy the sun, I realized that for the first time in my life I was seeing the grand hauteur evident in the attitudes of even the mangiest cats in the most humble contexts displayed in a room entirely appropriate to it. Forget about some old achey-backed, bleary-eyed, inky-fingered writer toiling away in a room like this--this room was made for the imperial and luxurious manner of a cat!

The interior of the second sun room

So it was just as well that Howells never actually spent a minute in this room or, as it turns out, even lived on this floor. The palazzo has gone through many renovations since the couple of years in the early 1860s that Howells spent here as US consul to Venice. The piano nobile presently serves as the headquarters of Veneto Sviluppo, and is largely devoid of charm. But Howells actually lived on the floor below, I found out when I returned home and began reading his book Venetian Life.

In this image and the one below: 2 views of Pedro Cabrita Reis's "over-all intervention" in Palazzo Falier

You see, I'd always known Howells only by reputation and association (Mark Twain was a long-time friend of his), and I found myself prodded into actually reading him only after seeing that I could visit the palazzo he'd once lived in. It turns out that, based upon the 25% or so of Venetian Life I've read so far, he's a great writer, with a gift for sharp description and a lively sense of paradox that makes him a particularly able observer not only of a Venice still in thrall to the hated Austrians--while the rest of newly-unified Italy struggles with the difficult (and, alas, ongoing) challenge of governing itself--but to the workings of his own mind as it reacts to this marvelous city. He's well aware of the seemingly irreconcilable distance between, on the one hand, the scenes of hopeless poverty he so vividly describes and, on the other, his ever-returning sense of the city as an incomparably beautiful dream realm. He's aware of his own romantic and even sentimental flights of fancy about the city (to a much greater extent than, for example, the young Jan Morris), and this self-awarereness--never obsessive, labored or indulgent (in the contemporary style)--is part of the drama in the book. And he presents the best all-around depiction of daily life in 19th-century Venice--how people shopped, how people heated (or didn't) their houses, how people dressed and worked (or didn't) and relaxed and interacted--than any I've read. Much more incisive and far-ranging, though I almost hate to admit it, than Henry James.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about Venetian Life after I've read it all, but for the moment I'll just present two of his own descriptions of Palazzo Falier as he knew it:

"We were not in the appartamento signorile--that was above--but we were more snugly quartered on the first story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut up, and suites of rooms had been broken according to the caprice of successive landlords, till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with time more than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they were humbly let at a price less than we paid: though we could not quite repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which we saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees."

"As for our Dalmation friends [a Dalmatian family that lived in the appartamento signorile], we met them and bowed to them a great deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving the noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling."

The complete text of Howell's Venetian Life (along with many other great titles) can be downloaded free-of-charge at the Project Gutenburg website: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7083

Autumn in the little garden of Palazzo Falier, as seen from the top of the outdoor stairs leading to the first floor

But what about the art installation? you may ask. Well it made me wonder if--just as there have been times (the 1970s, for example) and circles (eg, conceptual artists) in which the practice of painting was the object of such scorn as to make its adherents quite sheepish--there will ever come a day when installations of this sort, of "artless" everyday building materials arrayed artfully around gallery spaces will also come to be considered so played out, so easy, and even so sentimental as to be beneath bothering with?

Yes, as has by now been well-documented, even the most minimal "intervention" in a certain kind of space can radically alter our perception of it. But so can the unexpected appearance of a cat from outdoors. And though it's been a long time since anyone accused me of being a "cat person," yesterday I found myself preferring the cat.

A panorama of the garden of Palazzo Falier

Addio to Marc Quinn's Inflated Alison Lapper (aka "Breath")

When it first appeared beside the church of San Giorgio Maggiore last spring I was intrigued by the many questions raised by the artist Marc Quinn's large inflatable "sculpture" of Alison Lapper. It wasn't just that here was an example of the human form that would not have been treated monumentally and heroically in the past, but whether the whole sense of heroism that was present in Quinn's original Carrara marble version of this sculpture (displayed in Trafalgar Square) was lost in its translation to a material more evocative of the floating cartoon figures in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade than Michelangelo's David.

Additionally, the office of the Patriarch of Venice raised the related question of whether this inflatable version was more advertisement (for Quinn's show on San Giorgio Maggiore) than art. I wrote about all this last May, and wasn't really sure what to make of the piece, though the subject herself and importance of depicting a fuller range of the human form and manner of being inclined me to think this piece did at least potentially do one of the best things art can do by making us see and think about things we often overlook (http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/05/marc-quinns-alison-lapper-pregnant-on.html)

But after visiting the piece last week, I now think that it's time for it to go--as I suspect it soon will, as the Quinn show closed at the end of September.

Of course it's not that the subject of the piece has changed, but that the material in which it's embodied--always subject to questions about its suitability and the messages it carried--has now become so faded by exposure to the elements as to lose whatever capacity it once arguably had to convey heroic monumentality. Not only has the color of the piece changed from a vaguely marblesque mauve to a blotchy pink, but the seams in the figure have become so visible as to become themselves a primary focus of one's attention--which can't really be considered a good thing, unless somewhere in the world there's a culture whose heroic ideals are embodied by a beach ball.

A comparison of the appearance of Quinn's work at the end of May, left, and at the middle of October, right

Maybe I'm just being fussy, but if I were a visual artist I wouldn't want a work of mine to remain on display in such a compromised state.

And maybe I'm being unfair, but my visit to the inflatable piece last week reinvigorated all my doubts about an artist who bothered to produce a life-sized solid-18-carat gold sculpture of Kate Moss.

Description of Marc Quinn's large inflatable work attached to its large base

Just consider the description above now located on the base of the large inflatable figure. The idea that this depiction of Alison Lapper in Venice was in any way "held up by the breath of those talking about it" is both amusing and absurd to anyone who remembers reaction to the piece here last spring, when the only thing that both the Patriarch and the overwhelming majority of Venetian residents had to say about it was that it had no place on San Giorgio Maggiore. In fact, though I can't claim to have made a formal survey, I didn't speak to single person in Venice who liked it. I asked friends, acquaintances, and strangers: the most positive response I received was from a woman who lived on Giudecca and said that, though she was sympathetic to the subject matter, she didn't like the piece. Everyone else usually just said they hated it, it was ugly, and why did it have to be so damn purple?

The placard above states that "if people lose interest in [the work] and are unwilling to give it the attention and resources it demands the work will cease to exist in the physical world", but of course this is blatantly false. Venetians have had no more to do with the persistence of Quinn's sculpture in a place they don't want it, than they did with the long unwanted residence of Charles Ray's "Boy with Frog" at the tip of La Dogana.

In both cases I seemed to think the sculptures were of more interest and had more artistic merit than were generally accorded them by other residents of Venice, but it's the false self-congratulatory populist rhetoric by the artists of both works that finally irritates me. Neither "Boy with Frog" nor the pretentiously-entitled "Breath" depended upon the willingness of "people" to "give [them] the attention and resources [they] demand" (such as an armed guard), but on the largesse of private foundations who kept them in place in spite of Venetian response. And it's this in spite of that Venetians have gotten sick of: the billboards that remain for years on cherished monuments in spite of the fact that all work behind them is finished, the growing number of cruise ships and tourists who flood the city in spite of acknowledged dangers and damages....

Indeed, if "the collective consciousness" of the vast majority of Venetians were allowed to actually express its opinion of Quinn's work on San Giorgio Maggiore it would have done so long ago not by "holding it up" in any way, but in a simple quite literally deflating gesture. And but for the fact that the subject of the work merits thoughtful consideration, I'd almost be willing to say at this point that the artist's windy pretension might benefit from a good pricking--that would set it off on an appropriately frantic comic flatulent flight, like an overinflated untied balloon let loose over the basin of San Marco.

The World in a Drop of Water: Simon Ma at Palazzo Pisani

Part of the Chinese artist Simon Ma's selection of works at Palazzo Pisani--one of the "collateral events" at this year's Biennale--suffered from the success of another part of his works on display. At least for me. I found the way his six large stainless steel water drop sculptures reflected and distorted the grand (one might even say overweening) architecture of the palazzo's two large tall courtyards so compelling that I had little attention left over for his paintings displayed on the piano nobile (works on which he collaborated with Julian Lennon, whom I assume is that Julian Lennon, of the hits songs of the '80s and all the rest). Yesterday was a drizzly monochromatic kind of day whose flat light perhaps lent itself particularly well to an appreciation of the interplay between the sculptures and their architectural setting, while, inside and upstairs, the paintings seemed a bit dwarfed by their surroundings.

Of course my attention to the paintings wasn't helped by the fact that a small orchestral group of students from the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello was running through some pieces in the palazzo's androne, complete with a conductor perched on a step-stool and the brass section (as you can see in the photo below) divided quite picturesquely between two floors--the trumpets blaring bright and potent as the sun through windows above. I showed up at the palazzo intent only on looking, but was quite happy and grateful for the chance, all unexpectedly, to give myself entirely over to listening.

Don't Look Now...

Three visitors to the British Pavilion at the ongoing Venice Biennale ponder the program notes to the artist Jeremy Deller's work--one of which appears ready to catch them all unawares

...but starting tomorrow--jet-lag, internet connection, and other things willing--this Venezia Blog will return to something like its usual frequency of posts. After nearly four weeks of traveling, I'm finally back in Venice.

Sarah Sze's American Sublime at the 2013 Venice Biennale

It's easy to feel rather overwhelmed by Sarah Sze's elaborate and marvelous constructions made of every-day materials

If I weren't traveling right now the work of Sarah Sze in the US Pavilion at the Biennale would probably inspire any number of reflections on the nature of the sublime: from Longinus's first ancient formulation of it, through Kant's, to recent notions of it by the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard. In other words, Dear Reader, consider yourself quite lucky that I'm on the road.

The true experience of the sublime, according to all these folks, might in the loosest sense be termed mind-blowing. Whether experienced in Nature (amid, say, the Alps) or in a work of art (in, according to Lyotard, the most ambitious works of Jackson Pollock), we know that we stand before the Sublime when the magnitude, majesty, immensity, complexity and awe-inspiring beauty of what we're looking at seems to exceed our capacity to take it all in, to make sense of it according to our usual categories of thought.  

A universe of found objects

The marvelous thing about Sze's works in the Biennale is that this sense of the sublime is inspired in the viewer by complex constructions of the most common household items: a whole solar system, for example, as seen above, composed of Krispy crackers, bottled water, Pringles potato chips, rocks and yarn and hardware store items... Its concrete quotidian yet still remarkable beauty is very much in the tradition not just of artists such as Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns, but of a poet like William Carlos Williams.

The poet Charles Simic wrote a great little book about what he called the artist Joseph Cornell's Dimestore Alchemy. In these works of Sarah Sze we're introduced to a kind of Hardware Store Transcendence. 

All That Glitters: The Russian Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale

Three would-be Danaë stoop to gather up gold coins in part of Vadim Zakharov's work at the 55th Venice Biennale

I consider myself very lucky never to have had to try to see all, or even much of the Venice Biennale in just one or two days, as many visitors do. I can imagine that the experience of such abundance can be marvelous for some, but I can equally imagine it as a nightmare of overwhelming excess--and, either way, it must be exhausting. Like those runners who complete the New York City Marathon, people who manage to make it all the way through the two main sites of the Biennale (in the Giardini Pubblici and the Arsenale) in just 2 days should really get a commemorative medal.

People like to say that the very idea of the Biennale with its different national pavilions is quaintly old-fashioned, but in the staggering quantity of art on display I find something very contemporary. The Ancients used to say that Life is short, Art is long, but I sometimes think that in the case of most cultural products these days the saying might easily be changed to Life is short, Art is even shorter.

Unless we make a conscious effort to avoid our computers and televisions and hand-held devices, and even public spaces with their ever-present video screens, we're likely to see more images in a single day than many of us would have typically seen 20 years ago in what...? A week? A month? We don't need to compare our contemporary experience to those people who came to the first Venice Biennale in 1895 or make any other inter-generational contrast to see a stark difference in levels of visual experience and information, a consideration of about a decade of own lives will lay it bare.

So it's no longer a question of whether Art (great or otherwise) will "stand the Test of Time," as they used to say; it's hard enough for it to survive the all-annihilating crush of the Present. It's not that the work will, with the august passage of Time, become neglected. It's that the sheer incomprehensible volume of imagery in our daily lives will assure that it's forgotten practically as soon as it's seen.

At least that's what I find myself thinking sometimes, and if this is true, or partly true, or a little true, I wonder about the effect it has on the making of art. What kind of art must one make these days for it to hold some place, for however long, in the mind of a viewer? And--coming back to the Venice Biennale itself--I wonder as I crunch along its gravel paths in the public garden what kind of art best survives the cultural death march that a two-day pass to all the pavilions can easily become?

I suspect that the work of Vadim Zakharov in the Russian Pavilion provides one answer. The main part of the work is, well, fun. It requires audience participation, women visitors get to use specially-provided props and even receive a small durable shiny souvenir to take away with them.

The subject is mythological and announced in large letters in the main room of the pavilion: Danaë, the sequestered daughter of an ancient king who was impregnated by Zeus in a shower of gold (to give birth to Perseus). Though it's not mentioned anywhere in the explanatory--overly-explanatory, I'd say--text of the exhibition, the king isolated his daughter after being told by an oracle that a son born to her would kill him. Like nearly all attempts to outsmart one's Fate in myth, the king's ploy failed utterly.

Rembrandt's Danaë

It's been a popular theme in art, usually with luxuriously erotic overtones, and Titian, Correggio, Rembrandt and Klimt all famously painted it (at least 5 times in Titian's case). An image of Rembrandt's work, in its acid-damaged state after a madman attacked it at the Hermitage in 1985, is used in Zakharov's work--but it's easy to miss and, to be honest, contributed little to my sense of the piece, regardless of the insistence of the exhibition's official supporting materials that it should.

It's the simple experience of this work that one remembers. In an unlit room ("womb-like" the exhibition text tells us) of the lower floor of the pavilion, women (and only women) are invited by a female attendant to take an umbrella and venture through a rough-hewn doorway into a larger columned adjoining room lit by a large skylight high above. A mass of gold coins lies in the center of this room (as you can see in the photo) and more coins fall at irregular intervals and in varying amounts from what looks like a huge shower head attached to the center of the skylight.

But women aren't just supposed to stroll beneath the falling coins like Christopher Robin in Winnie-the-Pooh saying "Tut, tut, looks like rain," nor strike any of the alluring poses one sees in any of the famous painted versions of Danaë, but, rather, pick up some of the coins and carry them back out into the darkened first room, where a bucket at the end of a rope is waiting to receive them. A bucket that happens to be situated atop a dark circular monochromatic image of Rembrandt's damaged painting, which no one (including myself) notices, as it's really too dark to make it out unless you've read the school-marmish text and go looking for it.

Klimt's Danaë

Meanwhile, in the central room of the floor above, other visitors can kneel upon crimson kneelers that surround every inch of the altar-rail-like balustrade and look down upon the scene below. Yes, Zakharov is serious about reinjecting an air of religiosity back into this old myth in a way we contemporary folks can understand... I don't know how successful he is with most viewers on that score, but the way the light falls from above on the coins and the space and people below is nicely, memorably theatrical.

To one side of this central upstairs room is a stern fellow in a suit whose job it is to periodically haul the bucket with coins up from the darkened room directly below through a hole in the floor and pitch its contents onto a conveyor belt that carries them to the giant shower head.

On the other side of this central upstairs room is another stern fellow in a suit seated high in a saddle upon a beam who periodically lets peanut shells fall into a large pile below him. Occasionally he strikes a Thinker-like pose up there, and the exhibition text in fact straight out tells us that he is indeed a contemporary version of Rodin's celebrated Thinker, and instructs us on the meaning of this tableau, but I pretty quickly found myself sick of being bullied by the exhibition's official text and its blandly allegorical inclinations.

Saddled up for thought

Periodically, these two stern fellows upstairs switch positions in a serious militaristic changing-of-the-guards kind of way--if the changing of the guards was performed by two salesmen from a Hugo Boss boutique.

There are also a couple of large satellite dishes outside the front of the pavilion whose significance we are lectured about in the exhibition's supporting materials. None of which, you may have gathered by this point, I found very interesting, though the themes of the work (according to the materials)-- greed, lust, desire, the corrupting influence of money--certainly should be interesting. And, indeed, such themes are interesting--in other works of art. But in 3 visits to this pavilion on 3 different days, I've yet to find any of them particularly well-handled here. 

In an interview in the catalogue on display at the exhibition, I happened to flip to a page on which the artist states, "I have lived in the West for 15 years and in all that time have been understood by only five people." Though the artist is accomplished, well-respected, intelligent, I still found myself thinking of Chekhov's various self-proclaimed deep thinkers--Vanya, for example--misunderstood out in the sticks...

But though it did very little for me as a work of art, inspired (for me) none of the play of mind that I associate with really interesting and successful art, it gave every appearance of working quite well as spectacle and experience. I don't know how many others will find themselves moved by it, intrigued or provoked, incited or excited, but I suspect that even after a long day at the Biennale, when one's legs have gone all leaden and one's mind all cotton-wooly, it will be remembered. And perhaps, after all, regardless of any meaning--and the artist's insistence on it--that alone is sometimes enough.

Biennale 2013: Ai Weiwei in church of Sant'Antonin

In 2011 the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a frequent critic of his country's government and human rights abuses, was arrested under only the vaguest of charges (which were belatedly "explained" as being that of tax evasion) and held in a small room in a secret location for 81 days, during which time he was subjected to the most intimate and constant surveillance. For those 81 days he was never alone--two guards always beside him, always watching him--and the lights in his room were kept burning 24/7.

Ai's new work Disposition, on view until September at the usually closed church of Sant'Antonin in Castello, is his first detailed account of his days of captivity. Seeing it just a day after a poll was released in the US showing that a majority of respondents (56%) had no problem with unfettered government surveillance (in violation of the Constitution), I found it particularly troubling. 

The six detailed less-than-life-size dioramas are contained in an equal number of large dark weathered steel boxes, sharp-angled and blank except for the same identical door (with same room number), a small viewing window on one side, and one or two small rectangular viewing skylights on top. The work requires that each of its viewers indulge in a bit of surveillance him- or herself, peering through small openings to get a glimpse of what had been, prior to this exhibit, kept entirely out of sight.

Ideally, the boxes would have been made of lead, for its sense of heavy suffocating impenetrability, but the dimensions and surface of the boxes approximate a similar sense (with the obvious added advantage of being portable). The scenes inside of how Ai spent each of his days in detention are claustrophobic, and become more so the longer you look at them--and the longer you think about them after leaving the exhibit.

The work was created specifically for this site of Sant'Antonin, which remains--though closed and almost never the site of a mass--a consecrated church. And Ai makes explicit reference to the site with the acronym with which he describes the six scenes: Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy, Doubt. Perhaps he means to suggest that in a Surveillance State The Lives of the Artists are prone to become too much like The Lives of the Saints, with persecution and even martyrdom the common themes. However, I didn't find myself thinking of artists in particular while I peered inside the six boxes, but of all the anonymous others--who have never lived in New York City, as Ai did for 12 years, nor even left their home countries--who have been, and are, subjected to similar treatment or worse, and who disappear without a trace.  

Of course the treatment to which Ai was subjected in his 81 days hidden away in detention was not merely surveillance, but torture.

Unfortunately, too many polls of Americans in recent years have shown a majority of respondents have no problem with that either.   

Marc Quinn's "Alison Lapper Pregnant" on San Giorgio Maggiore

"Alison Lapper Pregnant" under the roseate sunset light of May 27

"Non ho parole" ("I'm speechless"), posted one indignant Venetian on Facebook beneath his own cell phone photo of the work you see above when the British artist Marc Quinn's "Alison Lapper Pregnant" first appeared a few days ago beside the church of San Giorgio Maggiore.

As this remark appeared on the anti-Gabbiotto-in-Piazza-San-Marco site, I think it expresses as much about how fed up Venetians are with the appropriation of their city (and its most famous sites) by commercial or outside interests as about the work of art in question. But it seems like an appropriate response to the work itself as well, and one that the artist himself would probably appreciate, as the piece requires us to confront in monumental and heroic scale an image of a human being whose form falls well outside what we usually talk about, much less see.

Under the dark stormy sunset light of the exhibition's opening on May 28 its purple tint is more pronounced

It's hardly a bold new gesture for an artist to foreground what a local newspaper had no qualms yesterday in calling "freaks", and such work is always going to raise questions (as it should) about the artist's motives, and sensationalism, prurience, exploitation. But as much as I sympathize with many Venetians' sense that their city is under attack by malignant forces from without and unscrupulous traitors within, part of me thinks that "Alison Lapper Prenant" really might work as art--that is, something with the potential power to incite thoughts, emotions, ideas, discussion--not just spectacle.

A little background is in order, though, especially for those of us who don't live in England, or London. The model for "Alison Lapper Pregant" is an English artist who was born without arms and with shortened legs. She was institutionalized by her family at an early age and grew up, as they say, "out of sight, out of mind" of both her immediate relations and society as a whole.

The original 3.55 meter (about 11.5 feet) sculpture of "Alison Lapper Pregnant" was made of Carrara marble, weighed 12 tons, and was displayed from September 2005 to late 2007 upon the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square.

Michelangelo's David is sculpted of Carrara marble, which has been used since the age of Ancient Rome for important public monuments (the Pantheon and Trajan's Column both use it): for the very embodiment of heroism and valor and beauty. To sculpt the figure of Alison Lapper in this material is a bold statement, and perhaps a rather obvious one as well in the way it simply inverts our typical hierarchy of value and moves someone whom society has long been intent on not seeing into the very center of the public gaze. But whatever its obviousness, I'm not aware of any comparable sculpture of such a subject in such material on such scale. The work incites us--or aims to incite us--not only to re-think our notions of what we are in the habit of recognizing as an "acceptable" human form, but what we think of as a life worth living, of heroism, and of motherhood.

Some of what's known as "the beautiful people" arrive in water taxis for the opening of the Marc Quinn exhibition

It makes me think of two books I've recently read: Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree, with its intelligent and compassionate examination of the challenges and pleasures of raising any child who for one reason or another falls outside society's narrow sense of what is "normal" (deaf, autistic, schizophrenic, or Down Syndrome kids, for example; prodigies or dwarves or children born of rape) and Barbara Taylor's and Adam Phillips's On Kindness. The latter title suggests, among other things, that one of the reasons the very notion of unsentimentalized kindness has fallen into such disrepute in our age of glorified Hobbesian competition is that we live in a culture that is terrified of vulnerability. Kindness, Phillips (a brilliantly literary psychoanalyst) and Taylor (a historian) suggest, rests upon our capacity to acknowledge that even the most robust of us has known helplessness and, if we live long enough, are likely to know it again. That vulnerability is an inescapable fact of human life, and is what unites each of us to the other. "Alison Lapper Pregnant" strikes me as a heroic image of both truly human vulnerability and strength.

Of course, everything I've written above has more to do with the original sculpture of "Alison Lapper Pregnant" than with the inflatable version (12 meters high/39 feet) that now sits beside the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. Does the piece still work as well if the material from which it is made suggests not Michelangelo and Trajan but some huge blow-up Paul Bunyan advertising a lumber yard?

The Patriarch of Venice certainly does not think so. In today's Gazzettino il direttore dell'ufficio Beni culturali del Patriarcato don Gianmatteo Caputo cites "Alison Lapper Pregant" as the prime example of works of art that do not fit into the sacred context in which they are placed and notes, interestingly enough, that the Church was misled into believing that it was the original marble version of the sculpture that would be placed beside San Giorgio Maggiore. The inflatable version he compares to simply a "banner" (his exact word), whose only purpose is to advertise the large exhibition of Marc Quinn's work (more then 50 pieces, 13 never before seen) put on by the Fondazione Giogio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

I think he has a valid point.

So, as I said, I'm of two minds about this work. After all, though I haven't yet seen the exhibition of Marc Quinn's work on the island, much of what I've seen of it online--from the solid 18-karat gold sculpture of Kate Moss (which manages to be both astonishingly crass and dull) to his transgendered Adam and Eve--seem as obvious as his work on Alison Lapper has always been in danger of being.

A second piece by Marc Quinn, a massive sea shell, can be seen at lower left of photo

To invert our culture's notion of beauty, to present a new vision of beauty and heroism, doesn't the piece itself have to be as beautiful as, according to The Guardian's Rachel Cooke, the original Carrara sculpture in Trafalgar Square was (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/sep/18/art)? A painter friend here in Venice exclaimed yesterday after seeing the current work up close that it was just plain ugly: the way the ears were formed (which are supposed to be, after all,"normal" human ears), and especially its purple tint. "Why that purple?" she asked me. "It's like he's trying to make you feel queasy."

I had no response. Carrara marble is white or blue-gray. Perhaps the makers of the blow-up version were aiming for blue-gray but ended up with purple? But the original marble work was, Rachel Cooke notes in her piece cited above, "white and dazzling". So, really, I have no idea, and am not sure, finally, quite what to think about the inflatable piece on San Giorgio Maggiore. Or at least, I can't give a single non-conflicted opinion.

I guess all I can ultimately say is that I suspect that the real work of art--that is, what it actually makes happen or accomplishes--occurs within each of us, and is unpredictable and unquantifiable, and can go forward long after we've left the presence of the piece in question. Some art does something, for some of us, sometimes, and if that's all we can finally say about it, it's still saying a lot. I'll be interested to see and hear and read if the piece on San Giorgio Maggiore works for anyone else.

Venice Biennale 2013: Portugal Pavilion

(photos compressed for page display: click on each for full resolution)

Although the 55th Venice Biennale hasn't yet opened, it's already possible to enjoy (at least partly) the entry from Portugal: a real cacilheiro, or Lisbon ferry, transformed by the artist Joana Vasconcelos with traditional Portuguese azulejos (hand-painted ceramic tiles) and docked at the Riva dei Partigiani near the Biennale's pavilions in the Giardini Pubblicci.

An excellent English-language description of the work (entitled Trafaria Praia) by Miguel Amado, which includes background on the materials used, a short biography of the artist, and a photo of the ferry before its transformation by Vasconcelos can be found here:

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/joana-vasconcelos-2/

I had the chance to take some photos of the floating pavilion/art work yesterday evening (while artist assistants looked to be firming up any tiles that may have come loose in transit) and early this morning when no one was around--except for two passing cruise ships, each spewing a large-parking-lot's-worth of exhaust into the air, the second less than a half hour after the first, slouching toward their berths. Against a backdrop of such mammoth indulgence and destructiveness the Trafaria Praia, humanly-scaled and hand-crafted, seemed very much like a gift, a token of sympathy and connection from one challenged sea-faring city to another.