Relate North - preparation

The international Relate North conference begins in two days time. I fly to Shetland tomorrow, and have a list of tasks from my arrival onwards. They include:

Monday - work on conference pack, helping to set up the Gutters Hut venue for the exhibition

Tuesday - Daytime - supervision of Lens Based Media students in the Gutters Hut. Evening - hanging the exhibition

Wednesday - attending the symposium as a 'student ambassador' and assisting with delegates' and artists' requirements. Finalising the exhibition hanging at the Gutter's Hut and hanging the exhibition at Mareel ready for Thursday's exhibition launch.

Thursday - attending symposium talks and helping visitors. The exhibition opens at 4pm.

It promises to be a great learning experience. I am looking forward to it.

Love is not enough...

All over Rome were posters for LOVE, a much-publicised show at the Chiostro del Bramante, a beautiful High Renaissance building in the centre that was built as a monastery by Donate Bramante, a fierce rival of Michelangelo. 

 This is how the show is glowingly described...

'From 29 September 2016 to 19 February 2017 Chiostro del Bramante in Rome hosts LOVE. Contemporary art meets amour, curated by Danilo Eccher.

Chiostro del Bramante is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an exhibition of international significance.
It has been years since Rome’s cultural landscape witnessed anything like this not-to-be-missed event, which endeavours to bring the city up to the level of the most respected international exhibition venues. For the first time, some of the most important contemporary artists will be shown together, including Yayoi Kusama, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Gilbert & George, Francesco Vezzoli, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Francesco Clemente and Joana Vasconcelos, with artworks that speak in highly experiential languages (Kusama’s All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is one of the most instagrammed in the world), created to engage visitors with different kinds of stimuli.
Art meets love.
The exhibition aims to tackle an emotion that is universally recognized and constantly studied and represented – Love – showing its various facets and its infinite manifestations: love that is happy, that is longed-for, misunderstood, hated, ambiguous, transgressive, or childish, love that unfolds along an unconventional exhibition route featuring visual and sensory input.
Love goes beyond the concept of the museum.'

The tickets were expensive, even for Rome, but with this hype, who could resist? The audio that accompanied the show was interesting - one could choose a range of male or female 'narrators', each with his or her own style, to talk you through the show. I had 'John' with a west coast US accent, who spoke like a character from On the Road.
The first rooms showed work from the 1960s, including Sunset Nude and other 'billboard' paintings by Tom Wesselmann. There was a 1976 film by Ragnar Kjartansson of a singer and orchestra repeating one line about love and opera in operatic style. Marc Quinn's large pieces and sculpture of 'The Kiss' between two disabled people were interesting. Vanessa Beecroft's life-sized photos of people holding babies of contrasting colours and ethnic backgrounds were probably innovative in the 1970s. Mark Manders' use of wood and clay to make half-formed bodies marked a contrast from the man-made materials of most of the exhibits. The huge, plastic-coated Gilbert & George wall pieces with plentiful crowns and British flags entitled 'Art for all' were, well, huge and shiny and didn't say much about 'art' or 'all', seeming to deny the possibility that the hoi poloi might be capable of emotional subtlety. But they were mildly humorous in a rather boring way.  

From then on the exhibition seemed to lose touch completely with the emotional content of its subject matter and embark on a series of intellectual games that were more about the artist than the work, and more about the superficiality of the love cliche than about any real emotion. Perhaps this was the intention. Tracey Emin's neon signs with love-related slogans like 'You saved me' summed the mood up perfectly. Joana Vasconceles' 'heart' made of plastic cutlery was well-crafted, but did not have a voice. After the first large hall, the venue had been adapted into small rooms with darkened cells and corridors, presumably to create a sense of intimacy. Instead they felt menacing and claustrophobic, and one had the uncanny feeling that the egos of the various artists were haunting the place and might jump out with a fitting sound bite at any minute. Tracy Moffat's film clips of physical violence between lovers, culled from various films, topped off the sense of unease.

Infinity Room

In the 'infinity room' a million golden 'pumpkins' were mirrored to infinite - reminiscent of a cheap circus show. 

The show wasn't about Love, that's for certain. What was it 'about'? Well, the take-home impression was a sense of the inherent lack of real emotional content in a particular art industry. On the plus side, we both went back out into the Renaissance cloister under the blue Roman sky with a sense of incredibly real deliverance. 

 
 

Contemporary art in Rome

Once we'd seen the 'sights' there was some time to have a look at more contemporary art galleries.
 

First stop was the Galleria d'Arte Moderna Roma, which has two current exhibitions. The first, Roma Anni Trenta, Italian art of the 1930s during the rise of Fascism, features a range of sculpture, painting, film and prints dedicated to the cause of 'making the Italians heroic again'. The rural idyll, idealised male bodies and maternal role models, futurist painting...there is a coherence to the work, but also something chilling about it, given the context, and its relevance to contemporary movements for national identity.

The second was a retrospective of Emma (Mimi) Quilici Buzzacchi (1903-1990), an eminent 20thC Italian artist who produced a range of paintings, sculptures, etchings and engravings. Although quite an eclectic mix of work, I was impressed by some of her prints and her use of colour.





Daniela de Lorenzo: L'identico et il differente 2003


The exhibition I took most from was Time is Out of Joint, running at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.


It is housed in a beautiful marble building in classical style, the Palazzo delle Belle Arti, designed by prominent Italian architect Cesare Bazzani. The light, high-ceilinged rooms are perfect setting for modern and contemporary art.

The title 'Time is out of Joint' references Hamlet and Derrida, and in the exhibition, 'time needs to be re-aligned or 'set to rights' by weaving new unexpected relationships in the symbolic space of the museum, in a sort of simultaneous co-existence'.

There is a good selection of 20thC artists, from Pollock and Morandi to Giacometti and Jean Arp.




Lucio Fontana: Concetto spaziale - Natura 1959-60


I was impressed by the breadth of work of the more contemporary artists, who are mainly Italian, but include other Europeans. In particular I was attracted by work by Alexander Calder, Daniela de Lorenzo, Lucio Fontana, Andrea Santarlasci and Marion Baruch. Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), an Italian-Argentinian artist and theorist, was the founder of Spatialism. He is best known for his slashed and cut monochrome canvasses. I was drawn to his sculptural forms in the Concetto spaziale series, which combine a range of media.  Baruch's large abstract textiles, using slashed and torn cascading fabrics, play with negative spaces, solids and voids, and speak of a beauty in found old materials that would have gone unnoticed. Born in Romania 88 years ago, she was working through much of the 20th C. movement and her works have the quality of abstract paintings. She feels that the compositions can have the elegance of an abstract painting - 'The first time I pulled one of these fabrics out from a plastic bag, I felt as if I were looking at a Klee'.





Andrea Santarlasci: Casa difesa 1992





Marion Baruch: Spirio della giungla 2015

Renaissance Rome

Last week I was taken on as a chaperone for two small boys to help their grandparents during a visit to Rome. As well as visiting the amazing sights of ancient Rome - the Roman Forum, Colosseum, Palatine Hill and Ostia Antica, Rome's historical port at the mouth of the Tiber - I had a wonderful opportunity to see some Renaissance masterpieces and contemporary art as well. 
 

Sistene Chapel

The Last Judgement - Michelangelo

The Vatican Museums were a highlight. I spent a long time in the Sistene Chapel examining Michelangelo's Last Judgement through binoculars, identifying the various saints and Biageo de Cesena, the artist's critic, whom he portrayed in hell wrapped in a serpent. I also particularly liked the Botticelli panels on the walls. The beautiful Raphael rooms (Stanze di Raffaello), were decorated with frescoes by the young Raphael for Pope Julius II in the early 1500s. What is still astonishing about them is the quality of light they seem to emanate. 

Trevi Fountain - Salvi & Bracci

The Bernini Fountains in Piazza Navona, and the Trevi Fountain are post-Renaissance - originally planned by Bernini in 1629, then designed and built by Salvi and Bracci between 1732 and 1762. They are imposing masses of marble, speaking as much about the power and status of the papal and aristocratic patrons as about art.  

St Peter's Basilica looked lovely from outside. Inside, apart from the stunningly beautiful cupola and the Pieta, both by Michelangelo, the place oozed with the power, money and implicit violence of the Catholic Church. Between the armed guards in force outside, and the hordes of visitors taking selfies despite the no-camera signs, it certainly did not feel like a sacred space.


Nevertheless, the money and power that built Rome certainly sponsored some wonderful art, and no one remembers who paid for it all, only the great artists.