'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.
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| Infinity Room |
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.
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