Loving Venice to Death

Imagine a parking lot of diesel cars idling outside your apartment on the Riva all day

The monsters have returned in full force.

No, I'm not talking about tourists, but about cruise ships. A recent article in the New York Times lays out some of the serious concerns over the number of cruise ships now passing through the Giudecca Canal and the Basin of San Marco and their potentially disastrous effects on the city, its foundations, and structures. Here is the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/world/europe/13iht-venice13.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

The massive stern of a cruise ship dwarfs the home (center) of the famous seafaring Cabots.

Additional information on cruise ships in Venice (among many other things) can be found in the excellent publication The Venice Report: Demography, Tourism, Financing, and Change of Use of Buildings (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). A must-read, as they say, for anyone interested in the challenges facing the city today. Among the most interesting statistics reported there:

The average stay of a cruise ship in Venice was 22 hours at the time the study was being prepared--but I strongly suspect that that amount of time has decreased to allow for more ships to pass through the ports. In other words, like the vast majority of visitors to Venice, the tourists off cruise ships are day-trippers.

In fact, of the 16.5 million total visitors per year who visit the city, 12.5 million are in town for just a few hours.

And according to the Venice Report, the average total expenditure in Venice of those here for a few hours is 19 euros.

19 euros.

To return specifically to those who visit on cruise ships, just over half of those 1.6 million whom the Times says visited last year bother to disembark at all. 60% according to the Venice Report.

Such statistics, along with information included in the Times piece, makes me wonder who exactly, aside from the infamously irresponsible cruise lines themselves (eg, http://www.foe.org/getting-grip-cruise-ship-pollution), is profiting from this huge and perilous increase in cruise traffic?

As various American cities have been plagued by drive-by shootings, so Venice is plagued by cruise-by tourism.

It's perfectly understandable that so many people around the world would wish to see Venice at least once before they die, but it would be awfully nice if they'd do so in a way that does not contribute to the death of the city itself.

Venetians have much more reason to fear cruise ships than cruise ships have to fear Venetians

Back Doors to the Biennale

The 54th Venice Biennale opens on June 4 and preparations now seem to be going on almost around the clock--at least in some pavillions. Below are photos (taken this evening) of the back doors of a large pavillion officially considered part of the "Giardini" venue, though it is located not in the public gardens themselves but across a little bridge on the island of Sant' Elena.

In a strange way the old graffiti I walk past nearly every day (& that you see below) seems to have suddenly become, even before the Biennale has opened, an integral part of the exhibition.

Every inch of this large exhibition space is as purple as its back door.

The glow of a painter's lamp seems to promise all the significance of a video installation.

A graffiti plant thrives among real ones; a real shirt hangs among paintings.

Found Still LIfe

Fresh from the Rialto Market

I doubt my wife, Jen, was thinking in terms of composition when she left these on the counter the other morning...

I'd never tasted Costoluto ("ribbed") tomatoes before and bought them only because Sandro and I both just liked the way they looked--but I know now that they're more than just picturesque.

I've seen references to both Costoluto Fiorentino and Costoluto Genovese varieties, but whichever these might be they were grown, I was told, in the south of Italy.

"Boy with Frog" as Installation

Detail from "Boy with Frog" installation

Ever since Marcel Duchamp first displayed a urinal in an exhibition a certain strain of art has asked us to think about how our sense of the "aesthetic qualities" of a work can depend as much upon the context in which we see something as on the object itself. It asks us to pay close attention to context, as in some cases the context is everything.

I don't think context is everything in the case of "Boy with Frog," but I now realize that, actually, it's far more interesting and suggestive than the sculpture alone.

One can say that the "Boy with Frog" subverts, through its subject matter and materials, the tradition of monumental marble public sculpture in Italy. But more simply it subverts this tradition far more thoroughly in another way: it is not a public sculpture.

It is a private sculpture, commissioned by François Pinault, displayed in one of the most prominent public spaces of Venice. It is a part of Pinault's massive and influential collection of contemporary art. Pinault also owns the art auction house of Christie's.

If people can debate the merit of the sculpture itself, there can be little debate about the work's value. That is, market value. We are reminded of that quite literally 24 hours a day. By the armed(!) guard stationed at the "Boy's" side while the Punta della Dogana is open; by the protective case that surrounds it after hours.

In contrast, say, to the Mona Lisa, whose fame (and value) long pre-dated her special security measures, Charles Ray's "Boy with Frog" entered the world with its security apparatus intact. The security insists upon (one could argue creates) the sculpture's worth right from the get-go. Which is what leads me to suggest that "Boy with a Frog" be considered not as sculpture but as installation.

The fact is, that armed guard and that large protective box are as integral to the work as the frog itself. (The boxing of the sculpture each evening and its unboxing each morning are as ceremonial, in their own their own small way, as the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace.) It is impossible to see the work without either the one or the other--and to ignore either guard or protective box is to miss what I now think are the most suggestive aspects of the work.

"Boy with Frog" as installation is an exemplary work of contemporary art precisely because of the way it foregrounds (among other things):

--the privatization of public space, and public works, and public welfare, that is occurring throughout the West. (Venice's Carnevale itself, to cite a fairly innocuous example, is now run by a private company.)

--the way in which the market value of a work of art is manipulated from the very outset by those who have the most to gain (quite literally) from it. 

--the way in which private interests require the constant surveillance of public space. (Imagine the auction house value of a sculpture displayed for years on such a prime Venetian spot.)

I'm generally no fan of graffitti, but in the case of Charles Ray's "Boy with Frog" installation, the first sign that the work has finally become an actual public part of the city in which it resides will appear with the sloppy spray of a paint can or scrawl of a marker.

You can see more on this sculpture here: http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2011/05/whats-that-boy-doing-here.html

What's That Boy Doing Here?

Art Appreciation (click for enlargement)

Considering Charles Ray's "Boy with a Frog" was commissioned especially for the site it now occupies at the Punta della Dogana the thing I find most striking about it is how very little it has to do with its place.

For one thing, in a city long committed to its own glorification, to awe-inspiring displays of wealth and power, it is a deflating piece of work. This is in no way a bad thing. In fact it may be just what is needed: a distinctly contemporary gesture in a city that trades on its past.

Except that the great old Italian figural tradition of public monumental sculpture to which it alludes is of very little importance here in Venice. Sure, there are Sansovino's figures of Neptune and Mars in the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale, but these big guys are far from the first, or second, or even seventh thing most people think of when they think of Venice.

Florence or Rome would provide the appropriate sculptural context in which the subversive intent of Ray's work would be foregrounded. Ray has added one more monumental figure for any tourist following the standard itinerary through Italy to photograph: Trevi Fountain (check), Michelangelo's David (check), and Venice's giant Boy (check). But of course there is nothing heroic about this last work, about the boy's accomplishments. He has the youth of David, and some of his stature, but in contrast to the public civic aim of David's act (and Michelangelo's work), Ray's physically immature boy is wholly absorbed in a conquest of only small, private and rather cruel interest.

In Ray's presentation there is perhaps a healthy skepticism about the public uses and abuses of heroism--but what it's doing in Venice I couldn't really say. As far as the subversion of heroism and certain inflated notions of masculinity goes, I'd suggest that Donatello's "David" in Florence was actually more immediately to the point. True, I suppose Ray's "Boy" in some sense conjures the Venetian sculptor Canova's "Perseus with the Head of Medusa" but that work, in addition to itself being a late and rather unconvincing example of heroic marble sculpture (heroism wasn't exactly Canova's thing), is also nowhere near Venice. I've seen it in NY's Metropolitan Museum--which I think might actually be a better venue for Ray's work as well.

For aside from the fact that while one can still see crabs, for example, in the waters of Venice--and any number of other salt-water creatures--that frog, and the boy who holds it, strikes me as thoroughly American born and bred. One can claim that Ray's large whiter-than-marble-because-it-ain't-marble work is the final step in the moribund tradition of Italian monumental public sculpture (dead boy walking), evoking David. But it's Huck Finn I've always seen when I look at the work and, gratifyingly enough, it was Huck Finn, according to an interview I've just found online with Ray, that the artist says he was actually thinking of as he created this figure.

He may also have had in mind the (rather cloying) work of American sculptor Edward Henry Berge (1876-1924) who crafted his own versions of a boy with a frog for public spaces in the early 20th Century.

Edward Berge's "Boy with Frog" in Baltimore

In any case, none of this is to say that I think it's a bad work. On the contrary, I think it suggests very interesting ideas about humanity's relationship to nature, contemporary notions of the self, of power, heroism, narcissism... Well, I have to stop myself from rambling on about it. It intrigues me to think of it located in New Orleans. Or, more pointedly, on the Mall in Washington DC.

But I don't know exactly what it's doing in Venice. Here it succeeds simply as big budget spectacle, and in the world of contemporary art I suppose that's considered enough.

You can see more on this sculpture here: http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2011/05/boy-with-frog-as-installation.html

Evening in I Giardini

The air around i giardini pubblici is fragrant with more flowers than I know the name of, so you don't even need to stop in order to smell them--but of course it doesn't hurt to.

What Do Gondoliers Daydream About?

guest photo by Larry Castek

Many of us whose work is done on solid ground (literally if not figuratively) find relief from our labor in daydreaming of languid hours spent in a gondola, being rowed through the quiet back canals of Venice. But what do gondoliers daydream about during their working hours?

Click on the below detail from today's guest photo by Larry Castek for one answer: