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 Italy 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.

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 Venice entered into an agreement with Frangois Pinault, 70 ( owner of Christie's auction house and majority shareholder of luxury goods group PPR, whose brands include Gucci, Balenciaga and Stella McCartney), ranked as France's third-wealthiest citizen, with $14.5 billion in assets. The city will give him control of the Dogana di Mare, an ex traordinary Renaissance-era customs warehouse.

The location is a jaw-dropper. At the tip of the Giudecca, a few hundred yards across the Grand Canal from glittery Piazza San Marco, it stands adjacent to the iconic church, Santa Maria della Salute, the ultimate masterpiece of Venetian Baroque architecture.

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 Paris; but after spending $16 million on preliminary plans for the $195-million project, he failed to reach agreement with municipal authorities in Boulogne-Billancourt.

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 England's Tate Modern, France's Pompidou Center, Netherland's Stedelijk, Denmark's  the Louisiana,  Sweden's Modern Museum, Germany's Ludwig Museum,  Spain's Reina Sofia Art Center.

 

 

Italy's Art History, Present Tense

 

The culture-rich country lacks a major museum for contemporary work,

but in Venice, businessman-art collector Frangois Pinault sets out to correct that.

 

Los Angeles Times

By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer
July 15, 2007

 

 

Venice, Italy - TECHNIQUES of industrial fabrication and the appropriation of existing images have had a deep impact on artistic practice over the last 50 years. Take Laura Owens' big, lush, chromatically orgiastic painting of figures in a swirling landscape. It's one of seven works by the Los Angeles artist in a new exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi here.

In a glance your mind automatically riffles through a clotted image library - a jumble of Manet, Matisse, children's books, Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom," Hallmark greeting cards, Cizanne, textile designs, Mrs. Adams' third-grade art class and more. What you see is what you've already seen, reconfigured in surprising ways.

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. Italy, it seems, is getting its first major muse um of contemporary art.

England has Tate Modern, France has the Pompidou Center. In the Netherlands there's the Stedelijk, in Denmark the Louisiana. In Sweden it's the Modern Museum.

Germany can claim several important museums that do a good job with contemporary art, including the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Spain wriggled out of Franco's dark ages with a growing commitment to new art that, in 1992, was institutionalized as the Reina Sofia Art Center.

Western Europe is home to a remarkably large number of important museums focused on the art of the past 50 to 100 years. They actively collect and they mount significant shows. In fact, there are more such museums there than in any region of comparable size anywhere in the world.

Given such abundance, overlooking the national slacker in the bunch has been easy. But everybody knows that Italy has dawdled.

Yes, there are fine if comparatively modest outposts, such as Turin's Rivoli Castle. Nearly a decade after an international competition, Rome is finally building MAXXI, Zaha Hadid's slippery design for a 21st century museum (hence the MAXXI acronym, appending Roman numerals to museo dell'arte). The Venice Biennale, offering extravagant global displays of new art since its founding in 1895, is a dowager empress of temporary international surveys.

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' Pesaro, Venice's official Modern art museum, where the ragtag collection is mostly a sign of what might have been. Among the few notable works is a gilded, aromatic 1909 Gustav Klimt panel sh owing either Judith with Holofernes' severed head, or Salome with John the Baptist's. (No one's quite sure which.) The painting, acquired from an early Biennale when that show functioned as an international salon, shows the Viennese artist's affinity for Italian Byzantine mosaics, while nicely reflecting Venice's own overwhelming aura of luxurious decay. It feels like a remnant of a once lively intersection between art and life.

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 Venice entered into a renewable 30-year agreement with Frangois Pinault, 70, one of Europe's most active art collectors. Owner of Christie's auction house and majority shareholder of luxury goods group PPR, whose brands include Gucci, Balenciaga and Stella McCartney, the high school dropout is ranked by Forbes as France's third-wealthiest citizen, with $14.5 billion in assets. The city will give him control of the Dogana di Mare, an extraordinary Renaissance-era customs warehouse.

The location is a jaw-dropper. At the tip of the Giudecca, a few hundred yards across the Grand Canal from glittery Piazza San Marco, it stands adjacent to the iconic church, Santa Maria della Salute, the ultimate masterpiece of Venetian Baroque architecture.

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 Center of Contemporary Art at Punta della Dogana, represents a 21st century ideal of cosmopolitan cultural tourism.

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 Paris; but after spending $16 million on preliminary plans for the $195-million project, he failed to reach agreement with municipal authoritie s in Boulogne-Billancourt.

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 Italian-born, New York-based artist Rudolf Stingel is emblematic. Machine-stamped with repeated black-and-white images of a luxurious Persian rug, the carpet's pattern is slightly askew.

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" Venice is a tidy introduction to the show.

The atrium also features an enormous, three-story "tree of life" by young Swiss-born New York artist Urs Fischer. Thousands of framed reproductions of Fischer's rudimentary drawings  landscapes, still lifes, portraits and abstract doodles  are suspended from its dense network of iron branches and fluorescent tubes. But mostly the hybrid work accomplishes two things: It fills a lot of space, and it recall s the 1980s work of French Conceptual artist Annette Messager, similarly assembled from thousands of suspended, framed images of body parts.

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 Venice. When the protagonist tries to talk his used-up boyfriend into putting his head in the oven that  weirdly  occupies center stage next to their rumpled bed, you sympathize with the Freudian drama of sex and death, traced from the anonymous pages of youth.

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 Berlin's Anselm Reyle, 36, whose acid yellow wall mural is as spatially assertive as a Dan Flavin sculpture of fluorescent lights, and New York's Kristin Baker, 32, whose explosive, humongous abstract painting on cantilevered plastic panels makes the Las Vegas Strip look timid.

"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

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com [Formerly Italy at St Louis] (7 years)

Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com (3 years)

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net