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1) our starting point in Campo di Fiori

2) following the first dog we spotted in Campo di Fiori

3) Anna following a pigeon until it flies away as our directions say 

4) sitting on a bus for our designated 3 stops after following a tourist

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June 1: Dérive

          In Rome I feel like I’m always rushing everywhere, getting angry at the inconsistent public transportation, leaving forty minutes early to get anywhere and still having to run through the city to get to class on time. It was nice to wander, to wander with direction yet without a destination. However, it was hard to get out of the destination mindset – any turn we made I wondered what we were getting close to; where we’d go next. It was interesting, having been here for ten weeks, to hop on a random bus and take a pre-ordained number of stops and know generally where I was after I got off the bus. That’s a good feeling, to know that I can hop on virtually any bus and know where I am.           We began in the middle of Campo di Fiori – our stomping ground. We waited for a dog to show up, who we followed until we saw a pigeon. Rome is filled with pigeons but we followed this dog for a while. But alas, when the pigeon appeared we had to say goodbye to our doggie friend. The pigeon almost immediately flew away, which, as our plan told us, whichever direction it flew we had to walk in that direction to the nearest monument. The nearest monument was the National Monument of Victor Emmanuel II. Though we had all been living in Rome for 10 weeks and come to Piazza Venezia about every other day, none of us had ever been on that monument. We then waited until we spotted a tourist with Italian souvenir gear on, and we followed him out until we found the nearest transportation. It was nice not to have to rush to get on the bus, just to take whatever came. After getting off our designated three stops, I recognized exactly where we were and it was difficult not to think of a destination. We followed the first man who caught our eye, and followed him while walking on the other side of the street. We followed him until he turned, where our directions told us to turn the opposite way he did. I wanted to see where he was going, but our directions told us to turn. We then wandered, following the pull of whatever caught our eye. It was interesting to see where our pull led us: up stairs, by neon signs. It was nice to take in the street, though it was hard not to rush, to walk with brisk purpose, nice to let the mind wander, to go where we pleased.

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Tenching Hsieh, Time Clock Piece, 1980-81. Documentation of Performance: clothes, time stamps, polaroids, Taiwan Pavilion, Venice. 

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May 27: Biennale: Doing Time, Taiwan Pavilion

          Doing Time was a body of incredible, mind blowing work. We talk a lot about the commitment of the artist to the work, and Tehching Hsieh’s work took the idea of commitment to an entirely new level. The rigor and militancy of the work itself, the sparse, almost austere, low-tech presentation of the work made the German Pavilion almost look like an extravagant performance in comparison. The difference of this type of performance art and the performance art in the German pavilion is an issue of viewer and time itself. In the Taiwan pavilion, the viewer is distanced from the work, looking at documentation and artifacts from Hsieh’s performance art that he lived. In the German pavilion, that work engages the viewer directly – it is rehearsed and presented to the viewer body repeatedly, it exists in its own time, while Hsieh did his work in real-world time, out in the real world, he did not construct an insulated world as is in the German pavilion.           There is a tension in this work, between freedom and constraint. Hsieh frees himself from the performativity of daily life, from menial schedules, by imposing on himself an extreme schedule. He created a militant exaggeration of daily life in Time Clock Piece, martyring himself as the subject of this extreme schedule where he had to clock in every hour. What engaged me most in Doing Time was the recorded moments when Hsieh slipped from his self-imposed militancy. In Time Clock Piece, the moments most interesting to me were when his head was down, a red shirt peeked through his grey jumpsuit, when his hair seemed mid-flip, tossed into the air, wildly scattered around his face.

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Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017. Performance, German Pavilion, Venice Biennale. 

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May 26: Biennale: The German Pavilion, Faust

          As soon as I stepped into the German pavilion, my sense of hearing was overtaken. Outside there had been birds chirping, people talking and laughing, but in the German pavilion, though it was not a closed structure, I could hear none of that. There was an intense whirring in the entire pavilion, sounding like an airplane’s engine. This noise in the pavilion created a clear separation between the outside world and this new world immediately upon stepping into the building. As I moved through the space, I stared at the dripping water faucets, waiting for something to happen. There was no explanation inside the space – the only explanation was immersion. As I moved into the inner room, I looked around at the sterile walls, and when I looked down I jumped a little when I saw a person sitting under the glass. The people under the glass moved slowly, intertwining themselves in one another, dressed in dark, bleakly chic clothing. As the performers moved in the space, I became acutely aware not only of them, but how I was interacting with them, how the crowd of viewers moved through the space.           I waited in still anticipation for the tools I saw below my feet to be animated by the performers: the cotton balls, the lighter, a mangled pile of phone cords. I tried to anticipate the performers’ movement through the space to the other rooms. I was shocked when one of the performers appeared above the floor, piercingly staring at one of the viewers. The performers were at once asexual and degendered, in baggy dark clothes and limp hair, and yet there was a strange S&M vibe going on. At one point two men faced off and breathed heavily at each other, banging their heads in midair – a violent, desexualized orgasm.           The most impressive thing about the German pavilion was that it really makes the viewer feel something: unsettled – it puts you in a certain state of mind. It’s true world-making, art that gets into your head, controls how you move through a space. The German pavilion was not only a full-body experience: it was art that got into your head.

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1)   Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946. Oil and Enamel on canvas, Peggy Guggenheim collection, Venice.

2)   Lee Krasner, Noon, 1947. Oil on canvas, Spanierman Modern, New York.

The striking similarity between a work by Pollock and a work by Krasner, both done within a year of the other. If Peggy collected Pollock why could she not see the value in Krasner?

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May 25: the Guggenheim

          Peggy Guggenheim is figured as a woman who went against the grain and eschewed her life of luxury for a life as patron of the Avant Guarde art movement. However, I would argue that Peggy simply fell in line with a long tradition of noble women supporting the arts: Catherine Medici, Isabella d’Este, Queen Elizabeth. While it may have been out of line with Victorian sensibility for a woman to step into the public sphere as a patron not only of the arts, but of the Avant Guarde art movement, Peggy was engaging in a tradition that spans many centuries. There is nothing radical about a wealthy woman being a patron of the arts.           I was particularly struck in the Pollock room by an area where Peggy Guggenheim fell short. If she was indeed a patron of the Avant Guarde, who made a big deal by stating that she made no hierarchal distinction between the surrealist and abstract – a woman who supposedly broke the bounds of what was expected of her and engaged with a male-dominated sphere as a female, then why did she fail in collecting the work of female artists? As a woman who must have seen the marginalization of women collectors and women artists in the field, why did she not include them in a collection over which she had the ultimate say? The Jackson Pollock room was a disappointment in this regard. To see that one of the paintings on the far wall looked like a Lee Krasner, but in fact was a Pollock, was disappointing. Why did Peggy, who I’m sure visited Pollock’s studio or home where she would have seen Krasner’s work or at least Krasner herself, fail to include Pollock’s wife in her collection? That is not to say there isn’t any art by a female artist in the collection: there was work by Agnes Martin that I saw downstairs, and I’m sure there are a few more women artists in the collection; but on the Guggenheim intro page website, the twenty artists listed are all men. The collection is dominated by men.           As a well-respected female patron of the Avant Guarde movement, Peggy Guggenheim really had a chance to support female artists – to insert them into the movement that was run by men. She failed in this respect. Though I respect Peggy Guggenheim as a patron of the arts and an admirable woman, I want her to have done more for her own sex.

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1) Giorgine, La Tempesta, 1506-1508. Oil on canvas, Galleria dell’Academia, Venice. 

2) Titian, Pieta, 1575. Oil on canvas, Galleria dell’Academia, Venice. 

3)  Gentile Bellini, Procession of the True Cross in St. Mark’s Square, 1496. Tempera on canvas, Galleria dell’Academia, Venice. 

4) the reflection I saw of St. Mark’s Basilica in a “tidal pool” in St. Mark’s square at night. 

5) a small oil pastel I did of the incredible colors in a Venetian sunset. This is the sunset over the Giudecca. 

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May 24: What is Venetian Painting?

          The water of Venice looks at first to be a sparkling aqua – clean and glittering. Actually the water itself is opaque, milky with pollution and silt. It reflects the sky so that it appears in photos and from far away as a beautiful aqua color. This opaqueness makes the canal water into a mirror – it reflects and distorts more easily than clear water. This distortion and opacity lend mystery to the city. The city itself seems magical – a city rising from the water that one must navigate from island to island by boat. This mystery, distortion of reality, seemingly inspired by the mirror-like canals themselves, is to me what classifies Venetian paintings.           The colors that appear in Giorgione’s La Tempesta are colors that appear in my iPhone photos of Venice. While the colors in my photos are similar: the aqua, the sage green, the rich blues and jewel tones; he captures the mystery of Venice much better than I’m able to with a low quality photograph. La Tempesta, much like the city of Venice itself – is mysterious, unreadable - opaque like the canal. On the surface the painting seems simple: perhaps Mary breast-feeding the baby Jesus. But on closer inspection the painting reveals its mystery: why is there a man looking on, why is the woman unclothed, what are the two white column-like structures in the background? The viewer assumes the scene is set in Venice, though the pastoral landscape looks nothing like the urban cityscape of Venetian islands. It is an imaginary Venice. The mythology of the geography of Venice itself becomes injected into Venetian paintings.             While Venetian painters such as Giorgione do not cite the Venetian landscape exactly as it appears in life, the mythologized Venice appears in La Tempesta – Venice’s feeling of mystery, reflection, and distortion remains. Titian’s Pietà, though it is dark in color and has none of the jewel tones of a Venetian sunset – possesses an air of mystery. It has a murkiness that recalls the polluted canals. Titian’s hand and treatment of paint – the globs he dabs on Jesus’ form, his thick impasto, recalls angry swirls of water – ripples on his canvas. In his Procession of the True Cross in St. Mark’s, Gentile Bellini does not present a mystical imagined Venice – but rather he paints an accurate and identifiable jewel-toned depiction of St. Marks. There is seemingly no mystery or opacity in this painting. However, the mystical nature of this painting lies in its subject. Off center, a man kneels to the right. Set against a backdrop of the city of Venice, a man experiences a miracle. The mystical and godly placed in a Venetian piazza. Tintoretto’s ghostly forms fleeing the sight of the stolen body of St. Mark, Giorgione’s imagined and mysterious old woman – mystery abounds in these Venetian paintings.              I was walking through St. Mark’s piazza at night, where there were great pools of water all over the piazza. One lay right under St. Mark’s Basilica, so that the structure of the church reflected perfectly in the water. Tidal pools in a piazza! How could these artists not be inspired by the mystery of Venice – its reflections, its deceptively opaque canal, its narrow winding water streets? How could they not inject the air of the mystical into their paintings, when this reflective and mysterious magic was all around them?

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Berlinde de Bruyckere, We are all Flesh, 2012. Horse carcass, Galleria Nazionale d’arte Moderna, Rome. 

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May 18th: Galleria Nazionale d’arte Moderna: We are all Flesh

          I have never felt physically ill looking at a piece of art. I have felt unsettled and perhaps melancholy and reflective, but I have never felt hot in my body and nauseated, have never had to hold back tears while looking at something in a museum. It took a lot not to simply walk out of that room and throw up looking at that thing. I’m not going to call it a sculpture. Artists – well represented artists, are held in a place of privilege. These artists are imbued with a power: to send a meaningful message out into the world, for anybody who wanders into a museum or gallery to see and discover. Berlinde de Bruyckere has misused this power.          What is the value of displaying any dead body in this way? I looked up Berlinde’s work, and was sickened at the images I found. Mutilated headless white bodies intertwined with each other, draped on one another – a horse’s hide propped up on two stools, its hid cascading in glossy and ghostly folds over the stools. For a haunting minute, I thought that her human-like forms were made from human corpses. They are wax. Of course they are wax – it would be immoral to display a manipulated, mutilated human corpse in a museum. And yet she displays  a patchwork of headless horse corpses hung upside-down in this museum. I walked in that room and all I could think of was a lynching.           This image, this way of displaying a body, of hanging it, is inscribed with a violent past. The mutilated body of Emmet Till, his mother left his casket open for the world to see the violence done on his body – she displayed his mutilated body for a reason. To me, there is no reason to display a body like this in a museum. Berlinde de Bruckere has mutilated a corpse and displayed it. Critics of Bruyckere’s work call it disturbing, thought provoking, but do not call attention to the moral issues of displaying a body like this – to mutilating and disrespecting the corpse of a gentle creature – of making a dead thing into a spectacle. A sickening spectacle. Standing in that room I kept imagining my doggies cut open, hung like that in some museum room – just to get a rise out of a viewer, with no clear message, no wall text except to relieve the artist of any blame of harming the animal in life. God forbid she murder the animal to display its hide like this – it almost doesn’t matter how she got the corpse, what matters is the sick way in which she disrespects and mutilates it to her artistic advantage – an object with no clear message but to sensationalize and sicken. She has exploited the body of a gentle domestic creature for her own gain. This is not art – this is violence done unto a body. It is appalling that her work is accepted just for its sensationalist value, if there is value in that – she has gone too far.

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May 17th: The Borghese Gallery: Creative Vignette: Persephone’s Tear

          Every night, after everyone has left, after the security cameras are checked and triple checked to be working, when the moonlight streams through the crack in the shuttered window, some act of terrible magic happens in the Borghese gallery. Nobody is there to witness it. Frozen in a static theater of violence – a tear falls from Persephone’s cheek to the floor next to Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina, and another forms in its place. At this same hour, a purplish hue blossoms on her marble body, right under Hades’ fingertips – his fingertips which cut into her flesh, holding her tight to his body. This tear is her silent plea for escape, every night, that comes as sure as visitors do in the daylight.           As dawn’s first pale fingertips of light brush the sky, the tear that has fallen onto the floor turns to stone. A tiny marble pebble at the sculpture’s base, the dark bruise beneath Hades’ fingertips that flowers across her marble leg fades to white once more. As dawn begins to grab fiery hues from the sun and hurl them across the sky in a wild Roman sunrise, Persephone’s marble tear is easily caught under the first guard’s boot and ground to dust as he makes his morning rounds. Very few visitors in the daylight notice the tear that has re-formed on her cheek at dawn to replace the fallen one – they ogle at her creator’s skill in his sculpting of Hades’ fingertips pressing into her thigh. They do not acknowledge the pain it causes her – to be held like this, they cannot imagine the bruise that spreads under his grip every night.  They do not know that a new tear forms every night on her cheek – that the old one falls to the floor and is brushed aside in the morning. The visitors walk by the violence done unto her with indifference – they do not see, or do not want to see, a woman’s pain rendered invisible by her beauty. She is marble – what pain can she endure? But she is the most long-suffering of all – a rape lasting centuries. A fallen tear and a deep bruise hidden just as long.

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Michelangelo, Tomb of Cecchino dei Bracci, 1544. Marble, Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Rome. 

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May 11th: Tomb of Cecchino dei Bracci

          The Tomb of the Bracci is quiet, placed on a side entrance of the church. People walked right by it during our class and only glanced at it when they heard us say the name Michelangelo. I think it’s a heartbreaking portrait – for me it achieves the same quiet grandeur to which Winckelmann assigns the Apollo del Belvedere. Though it has the same composure and delicate beauty of the Apollo Belvedere, the portrait of Cecchino dei Bracci possesses more specificity of facial features.             In his bust, Bracci looks up and to the right, his eyebrows raised slightly, eyes wide. A portrait of hopeful youth. A beautiful boy with promise, cut down on the rise. His lips dimple at either crease. He is without wrinkles, his cheeks are not yet the chiseled ones of a man, but the slightly plump ones of a boy, his collar folding delicately on the left. This is a boy of a specific age, of specific features. He does not possess the general youth of a God, but he is the delicate likeness of an individual. It’s a melancholy rather than triumphant portrait, displaying specific beauty rather than generalized.            The bust, so delicate, seems to be out of place amidst the grand sculptural elements of the tomb itself – it dwarfs him. While the bust is scaled right for Bracci’s delicacy of features and youth, the tomb itself seems both clunky and spare. A pediment rises above Bracci, a large coffin-like structure protrudes below him – he becomes inset in the space, surrounded by ornamentation which dwarfs him. While the portrait is quietly lovely and sad, the tomb is awkward and bulky – the ornamentation scaled too big.  It is perhaps this issue of scale why people walk by this bust – a beautiful bust gets lost in the mundane and bulky ornamentation.

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Unknown artist, Villa of Livia Wall Fresco, 30-20 BCE. Fresco, Palazzo Massimo, Rome. 

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May 10th: Villa of Livia Wall Fresco at Palazzo Massimo

                  I was struck in the Naples Archaeological museum by the beauty and vibrancy of the wall frescoes – the imagination of the scenery, the modernity. But these were single panels that I saw in Naples – not a whole room. Stepping into the Villa Livia Fresco room in Palazzo Massimo was transportative. The fresco is delicately painted, vibrantly colored, and imaginatively composed. The branches of the trees are not scientifically accurate, the fruits and flowers would not all be in bloom at the same time as they appear in the fresco. The tree’s height in comparison to the fence is exaggerated, the birds’ size too is enlarged. These alterations, which defy nature, do not take away from the beauty of nature as depicted in this fresco – they enhance it. I noticed in the archaeological museum that the wall frescos have a very different artistic style than the style of the anatomically correct busts of Roman leaders as we saw downstairs in the Palazzo Massimo. The frescos are almost cartoonish, illustrative and fantastical rather than realistic.                   The Livia Fresco is a symphony of saturated aqua and deep green. Its playfulness is a welcome departure from the stern, colorless marble busts of the Roman senators displayed downstairs in the Palazzo Massimo. The fresco is indeed delicate and whimsical, but it accomplishes a great feat of illusion – it is painted with great technical skill. The trees fade into the background into a deep haze. The fence – though miniaturized, serves to contain the natural landscape and train the eye where to look, it’s a smart choice in illusionist painting to include that fence. I would not be so taken with the fresco – so engrossed in the scenery, if it did not accomplish such a feat of illusion. Though it is a warped, decorative world, it is believable and engrossing to look at, as if you could fall in and exist amongst the saturated forest. The modernity of the fresco is also incredible – it looks as though it could be a print on modern-day wallpaper. A beautiful, timeless, believable fresco – a whole other world encased in that museum.