Sunday,
July 15,
Italy Awash in Historical Art - Now to have
Contemporary Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi
The
ANNOTICO Report
Of
course the entire country of
Some even wondered whether Contemporary Art needs a major permanent home
in a place otherwise that loaded.
Yes,
there are fine if comparatively modest outposts, such as Turin's Rivoli
Castle, and there is the The Venice Biennale, offering
extravagant global displays of new art since its founding in 1895, Rome's MAXXI, (Zaha Hadid's slippery design for
a 21st century museum, hence the MAXXI acronym, appending Roman numerals to museo dell'arte , and handsomely
renovated Ca' Pesaro,
Venice's official Modern art museum, .
But until now, there has been the absence of a High-Profile contemporary art
museum. This spring, the city of
The location is a jaw-dropper. At the tip of the Giudecca,
a few hundred yards across the
In return, Pinault has engaged Japanese minimalist
architect Tadao Ando to renovate the unused,
37,000-square-foot customs house - suitably topped by a gilded globe that
sports a windblown weather vane in the figure of Fortune. Pinault
has also pledged a core group of 141 international works for a permanent
installation. (His collection numbers more than 2,000 paintings, sculptures,
installations, photographs and other works.) The prospects for an
impressive contemporary art museum look quite good. (It's scheduled to open in
2009, in time for the next Venice Biennale.)
The church of the Salute, constructed in a superstitious effort to ward
off a devastating plague, was built as an emblem of the city's 17th century
piety. Its imminent new neighbor, the Center
of Contemporary Art at Punta della Dogana,
represents a 21st century ideal of cosmopolitan cultural tourism.
That should make his French countrymen wince. Pinault
had planned to build a museum on an island in the Seine just outside
So, two years ago the collector acquired the 18th century Palazzo Grassi,
the last residential palace built on the Grand Canal before the fall of the
Venetian Republic, which had functioned as an art center under its prior owner,
Italy's Fiat group. Pinault's plan is to organize temporary
exhibitions at the Palazzo Gra ssi
and install long-term exhibitions of contemporary art at the Punta della Dogana.
These
should strike envy in
The
culture-rich country lacks a major museum for contemporary work,
but in
By
Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer
July 15, 2007
In a glance your mind automatically riffles through a clotted image library -
a jumble of Manet, Matisse, children's books, Edward
Hicks' "
The inescapable tension between hand-crafted uniqueness and machine-made
repetition is one current that buzzes through all 34 rooms of the provocative
show. Another is more peripheral, but just as significant.
Given such abundance, overlooking the national slacker in the bunch has been
easy. But everybody knows that
Yes, there are fine if comparatively modest outposts, such as
And of course the entire country is practically one gigantic live-in museum,
groaning under the historical weight of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and
Baroque art. Those fields offer more satisfactions than anyone could experience
in a lifetime.
So one might even wonder whether contemporary art needs a
major permanent home in a place otherwise that loaded.
Wonder no more. Visit the handsomely renovated Ca'
The absence of a high-profile contemporary art museum has been keenly felt, not
least of all by Italian artists. As one just emerging into prominence said to
me, without a major contemporary art museum, Italian artists suffer the lack of
a window on the larger world and a mirror of their own engagement with it. Both
are essential to any nation's healthy cultural life.
Now, the wait might be over.
In the spring, the city of
The location is a jaw-dropper. At the tip of the Giudecca,
a few hundred yards across the
In return, Pinault has engaged Japanese minimalist
architect Tadao Ando to renovate the unused,
37,000-square-foot customs house ? suitably
topped by a gilded globe that sports a windblown weather vane in the figure of
Fortune. Pinault has also pledged a core group of 141
international works for a permanent installation. (His collectio
n numbers more than 2,000 paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and
other works.) Oddly, the identity of those works remains secret.
The church of the Salute, constructed in a superstitious effort to ward off a
devastating plague, was built as an emblem of the city's 17th century piety.
Its imminent new neighbor, the
If the current exhibition featuring Owens' paintings and drawn entirely from Pinault's collection is any indication, the prospects for
an impressive contemporary art museum look quite good. (It's scheduled to open
in 2009, in time for the next Venice Biennale.) That should make his French
countrymen wince. Pinault had planned to build a
museum on an island in the Seine just outside
So, two years ago the collector acquired the 18th century Palazzo Grassi, the last residential palace built on the Grand
Canal before the fall of the Venetian Republic, which had functioned as an art
center under its prior owner, Italy's Fiat group. Pinault's
plan is to organize temporary exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi
and install long-term exhibitions of contemporary art at the Punta della Dogana.
An in-depth exploration "SEQUENCE 1," organized with savvy insight by
the Palazzo Grassi's young American chief curator,
Allison M. Gingeras, is the fourth show under Pinault's aegis and initiates a systematic analysis of the
collection. (It continues through Nov. 11.) Beginning at the beginning, so to
speak, the show loosely examines the persistence of painting, sculpture and
drawing amid the welter of recent art.
As Owens' painting shows, the handmade versus the mass-production is a
leitmotif.
In the sumptuous palazzo atr ium,
a wall-to-wall carpet by
The woven designs appear fuzzy, the pictorial edges don't quite match up and
the represented rugs, drained of color, don't line up in an exact grid. The
floor visually wobbles as you traverse it, not unlike being on a vaporetto chugging along the lagoon out the window.
Disorienting visitors to "oriental"
The atrium also features an enormous, three-story "tree of life" by
young Swiss-born
Fischer's "Jet Set Lady" is a gimmicky map of the artist's mind, in
much the way Messager's is a map of the body. But
little is added to the already established mix, especially given the work's
evident effort, bulk and expense. The sculpture is grandiose, symptomatic of an
element of empty showiness endemic to art today.
By contrast, Fischer's modest "After Jugendstil comes Rococo" is a witty riff on loopy intersections
between nature and design, art and mystery, pleasure and loss. A crumpled Camel
cigarette package skitters around a gallery floor, like so much urban trash
blown by an idle breeze.
Closer inspection (and a nervous-looking security guard) reveals that it is
being pulled along by monofilament attached to a motorized mechanism on the
ceiling. Round and round it goes. Fischer doesn't hide the rickety lit tle trick, which makes the abject sculpture even more
appealing.
Fischer's piece dates from 2006, as does Stingel's
"magic carpet" and Owens' chockablock painting, while the iron tree
was completed in 2005. Of seven dozen works by 16 artists, two-thirds were made
in the 21st century.
The knockout example is Mike Kelley's room-size stage set from 2000, which
reconstructs the strange scene he found in an old, black-and-white yearbook
photograph of a high-school theater club production. Kelley made up a scenario
to fit the odd picture, which hangs on the wall next to a video screen.
Given adolescent American cultural assumptions, his imaginative performance
posits a tortured male artist and his lay-about boyfriend at a point of
relationship crisis. (We're talking high school theater
here, so art's gay subtext gets pushed to the surface.) Pivotal to the action
is a lumpy sculpture that looks rather like "The Maltese Falcon."
The homosexual undercurren t in John Huston's
baffling 1941 movie of Dashiell Hammett's more
explicit 1930 novel jumps the rails in Kelley's video, when the
artist-protagonist refers to his sculptural masterpiece as "Tender
Buttons." Suddenly a lesbian scenario of Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas is layered into the domestic drama.
Kelley's big stage set is rendered in a range of bleak grays, which seem even
more desolate than usual amid the splendid rainbow hues of
Has any other found-photograph ever yielded such dizzyingly acute social and
cultural richness as this?
There are earlier works by artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, such as
Martial Raysse and David Hammons, and many from the
1980s and 1990s, includ ing
Franz West, Richard Prince, Robert Gober and Louise
Lawler. Younger artists include
"Sequence 1" is very much about now. Partly that means everything
looks very expensive and probably
was.
Any new single-collector institution must suffer the sobriquet of "vanity
museum," at least until such time has passed that it can prove its
ambitions are larger than the merely personal. When Pinault's
impressive collection arrives beneath the gilded globe of fortune at the Punta della Dogana, expect the fun to
begin in earnest. Meanwhile, at the Palazzo Grassi
the collector seems to be engaged in enlightened play.
christopher.knight@latimes.com
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