“Dialogues” with Giorgione, Tiziano, Velázquez, Cagnacci, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Goya, Ernst, Macke, Picasso, de Chirico, Chagall, Dalí, Warhol, Bacon, Lucian Freud and Magritte, held through Gianfranco Angelico Benvenuto’s lenses.
A surprising mixture of the brushstrokes of the greatest painting Masters and the interpretative expressiveness of “common” women.

 

 

 

Venice’s Biennale, which is supposed to show new paths for art, cuts out Italian artists and puts emphasis on Francis Bacon, a great 20th Century Master, who passed away over thirteen years ago and should thus represent our past, not our present. Maybe this choice is a rushed counter-attack against the retrospective the Correr Museum in Venice dedicated to the main living figurative painter, Lucian Freud.
The Italian Minister for Culture Buttiglione observed that the Biennale is not facing present day problems, such as how embryos and foetuses are handled.
With the exception of a small number of artists, in the most qualified art critics’ opinion, the Biennale offers nothing more than dreariness. Not the aesthetics of dreariness, not the taste of its interiorized, mediated representation, just trite commonplaces.
At best it offers pieces of sense scattered without a sense, expecting to make you feel the inadequacy which is just theirs and which common people actually feel, and then feel they shame for their ignorance which is not real. The imperative is “get out of the work of art”. No, they, the housewives, they want to get in it. They can’t understand the autism of those who can no longer communicate and speak through colours. The idea, the emotion shouldn’t be drowned in installations, contusions, sanitized materials and waste, in the best case, not to speak of the use of organic matter. And this is not the baudelairian fascination with the repulsive as a way to beauty: instead of romantic self-mockery, which used to fill the distance between the sublime and the abysmal, we find self-referential cynicism.
It all started with a boutade by Marcel Duchamp, the great ironic iconoclast of the traditional ways for artistic expression. Duchamp tried unsuccessfully to become someone in neo-impressionism, fauvism, cubism and so on, and in 1917, under the pseudonym R. Mutt, he took part in an important exhibition displaying a urinal, which he called a fountain. Back then it was a scandal, but than somebody said “This is art!”. Duchamp seized the opportunity, he showed his face to the public and stated that for the mere fact that he, an artist, had chosen an object and taken it away from its traditional use, this object had become a work of art.
But this should have been an isolated witticism of a snobbish and provocative clash in the rearguard, “high-level fooling around”, as we would say nowadays. And nothing more than an isolated witticism should have also been the canning of Piero Manzoni’s Merde d’Artiste.
It is widely known that contemporary art got rid of the concept of beauty. Everything is art. But, more than democracy of beauty, we have now indifference to beauty. Talking about beauty in art nowadays means talking against contemporaneity.
After an art which had something to document followed the evolution of an art which had something to say, but the future of art seems to debase itself with “artists” who only have something to recycle and to sell in great quantities.
Housewives (here meaning women who have nothing to do with the more and more virtual world of fashion and show business) won’t accept it, they have left their everyday clothes next to the fire place (kitchenette) and gone off to meet colours.
Anything but housewives with housemaid’s knees! When asked “What will remain, in two hundred years, of this art, of a rusty iron wire dangling in the air?”, “Only trash…”, they answered sadly, with their wise long-sightedness of the age-old vision of the servant maid. Furthermore: “This can’t be the future of art. Maybe this is only mirroring the broken family values in the so democratic United States, where, while we have a family doctor, they seem to have a family psychiatrist, since people no longer listen even to those closest to them, and where collectors work who decide any further developments of the international art market.”
So with Gianfranco Angelico Benvenuto, who provoked them, directed them and took pictures of nudes of them while they were performing, these next-door women mixed and blended colour palettes and re-interpreted in their own way, with desecrating sarcasm, the Masters of the past, starting right from Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
Sure that the human presence, or, paradoxically, its absence, still represents art, armed with a good dose of irony (just enough), they also tried to hold “dialogues” with Giorgione, Tiziano, Velázquez, Cagnacci, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Ernst, Macke, Picasso, de Chirico, Chagall, Magritte, Dalí and Warhol. The result is a surprising and intriguing event-provocation, a work which deconstructs the pseudo-cultural servile disposition and which searches humbly in the art-humanity mystery.


Gianni Liani