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Dec 2010

Installation Art in Naples

The city of Naples—in its never-ending quest to bring art to the masses and especially to the masses who ride the subway to work—is not just going to spruce up the soon-to-be-finished university station at Monte Sant'Angelo with a few paintings or statues or even bronzed old jalopies disguised as installation art. They have hired British/Indian artist Anish Kapoor to turn the entire station, itself, into a work of art. The station will be among the deepest in Italy (about 40 meters) and—well, the area is in the Phlegrean Fields, not far from the mythological descent into Hades— so, says Kapoor: "We want to create the impression of a Dantean descent into the underworld." No one seems to know exactly what that means, and few are in a hurry to find out. It's hell getting to work, anyway. 

Neapolitans are most familiar with Kapoor from his gigantic site sculpture, Taratantara, originally created for the new Gateshead's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in England in 1999, but then set up in Piazza Plebiscito (photo) in Naples in December of 2000 as that year's contribution to the annual exposition of installation art of one sort or another. The title is meant to be echoic of the sound made by a trumpet fanfare, as in Roman poet Quintus Ennius' line, "At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit" — ("But the trumpet sounded with its terrible taratantara", the onomatopoeia usually left untranslated). Indeed, the sculpture suggests two funnel-like trumpet bells joined and flaring out to both ends, something like those strange geometric figures that scientists use to describe what sort of transdimensional hyperspace thing (a technical term) we shall have to traverse if we ever hope to reach the stars. Taratantara was made of a shiny red membrane, glittered in the sun, was about 50 meters long, 20 high and anchored in Piazza Plebiscito by steel columns at each end. While it was up, the columns were scaled by demonstrators. They weren't out to damage the sculpture—and didn't—but the offices of the Naples Prefecture bounds the north side of the square and that's always a good place to have a demonstration. 

I am reminded of a clipping I read once in the paper:   

An English art student's work was thrown out, literally, after an official at a Birmingham art center mistook it for trash from the opening day party.  Ceri Davie's "Piece de Resistance" involved red jellies displayed on plates and was intended as a metaphor of decay. ‘Months of hard work had just gone to waste,’ the artist said. "I was quite horrified.

Very few of us realize the tough row that artists have to hoe in dealing with Philistines such as that art center official. This is probably because practical hoes weren’t even invented until the Middle Ages. As far as we know, the Philistines just got down on all fours and grubbed their rows into shape with their hands. 

Many years before the Decadent Red Jelly affair referred to above, one of the artist’s earlier works, Empty Paper Picnic Plate—which consisted of an empty paper picnic plate— was not all well received by critics, who found the title too hard to say five times real fast and who also mistook "empty paper" as a metaphor of life instead of a Minimalist description of  paper picnics, the plate itself being just a secondary, but sardonic, appliquè —which is just as well, since it too was given the old heave-ho. Fortunately (maybe), it was saved, since the art center official who tossed it, threw it into what he thought was a trash bin, but which, in fact, was also past of the art show. 

And then there was the artist’s Hamburger, those little pointillist nibbles of semi-conceptualist cholesterol-laden ground Bœuf, a yummy but still youthful version of her later, futuristic, Quarter-Pounder With Cheese, in which patrons of the art show were required to flip burgers in the kitchen, then ask themselves in the drive-through microphone if they “would like fries with that?” and then—ah, the stochastic power of it all!—eat or not eat the work of art! How was the artist to know that they had scheduled the exhibit in the same hall as a dog show? It was to her credit as a resourceful master of Performance Art that she retitled the whole thing, Gone to the Dogs, A Metaphor. (Or Maybe It’s a Simile).

Davies is not the only artist who has had this trouble. Fortunately, I am in the possession of a section of the diary of Michelangelo (the National Library knows nothing about this):   

January 8, 1504. Dear diary. I’m ruined. After years of work in chipping away the pieces, I have finally figured out where  beauty is, and it’s not in chubby women with smiling faces. I busted my hump on this one, too! (Alas, even in a society where males with humps are considered good omens, there is not much use for a sculptor with a busted one, I’m afraid.)

I spent three years on this! A veritable mountain of chips, shards, bits, detritus, little stone chunks lying where they fell, all at different odd angles, each one with a special metaphor to it,  deconstructing, as it were, the sordid and complex confusion of our times. And in stone!—in Carrara marble as eternal as the plots, counter-plots and intrigues that surround us. I was going to call it something like Plots, Counter-Plots and Intrigues. (Ok, I hadn’t given it that much thought, yet.) I figured it was about time someone put it all into permanent artistic form. Why paint anymore?! The colors will just fade and then someone will come along and invent cartoonists and hire one of them to touch up my Sistine Chapel with paint-by-the-numbers Day-Glo!

So I finish it and  leave it outside. Where else am I going to keep it, in my living room? This morning it’s gone. Those morons took the waste rock and put it on display! ‘It looks just like a boy with a slingshot. Cool!’ they said. And my work of art? ‘Oh, that crap? We threw it away,’ they said.

I was talking about this with Leonardo From Vinci (man, what a one-horse burg that dump is!). He has strung an invention of his, a ‘talk gizmo’ between his house and mine —two ceramic cups and a very long thread. It works all right, except that since our houses are many miles apart, communication kind of breaks down when Tuscan peasant women somewhere in between start hanging  laundry on the line. He says he’s working on a very long thread on a spool, which would actually let you converse as you walk around the street. Like I’m going to hold my breath waiting for that one. He asked me what I was doing wasting my time with rocks, anyway, when I could building things he called ‘aeroplanes’. He told me he was undecided about what to paint on the part he called the ‘fuselage’ — an eagle carrying lightning bolts in its talons or a chubby women with a smiling face. I suggested a smiling woman holding lightning bolts. He was not amused. A weird man, Leo. Frankly, I don’t think the old geezer is  playing with a round boccie ball, anymore. But time will tell.

The large and spacious square between the main façade of the Royal Palace and the Church of San Francesco di Paola is Piazza del Plebiscito. It is ideally suited for outdoor concerts, street musicians, jugglers, and large groups of tourists to shuffle nervously as they are efficiently herded from statue to statue by stray dogs. 

The square also lends itself to modern sculpture of the kind that art critics call "installation art" and the rest of us rustic dullards call, "What in the world is that supposed to be?!"  Generally speaking, installation art requires some—well,installation—something in the way of mounting, draping, hanging, digging or soldering. The displays, themselves, may include ("...but are not limited to...," as lawyers so craftily hedge) metal, wood, plastic, rubber, and assorted minerals, fabrics and liquids.

And so, in past years, Piazza del Plebiscito has seen a gigantic mountain of salt dotted with pieces of machinery, apparently a metaphor of whatever it is that salt represents confronted with whatever it is that machinery represents—maybe life beset by technology. (Hmmmm, not such a "rustic dullard" now, huh?!) Then, one year, there was a large wooden replica of an ancient lighthouse that used to guard the harbor of Naples. Last year, there was a gigantic replica of the Angevin Fortress made entirely of soft-drink cans (photo). These exhibits go up in early December and are left in place for the Christmas holidays, at which time they are "uninstalled". Most of them are environmentally friendly enough to be dismantled easily or, in some case, vacuumed up. 

In December 2002, they tore up the paving stones in the square. According to the paper, no one in the city administration recalls giving the go-ahead for any of this digging, but the latest piece of ephemeral sculpture was duly installed. It is a work by German sculptor and film maker, Rebecca Horn. Her history includes mechanical and body-extension sculpture as well as installation art on the premises of an insane asylum in Vienna. Austria. Her work is often controversial.

The work consisted of a number of bronze skulls implanted in the pavement (photo). The work, thus, is Horn's tribute to—or variation on—the well-known Neapolitan "cult of death" (so-called by some) that centers on the vast collection of human skulls on the premises of the Fontanelle cemetery in Naples. The work is "site specific," a sub-genre of installation art, in that it makes sense only within the context of the place where it is exhibited—in this case, Naples. 

The Fontanelle cemetery is carved out of the tufaceous hillside in the Materdei section of Naples. The vast chambers on the premises served for centuries as a charnel house for paupers. At the end of the 19th century, Father Gaetano Barbati had the chaotically buried skeletal remains disinterred and cataloged. They then remained on the surface, stored in makeshift crypts, in boxes and on wooden racks. From that moment, a spontaneous cult of affection for, and devotion to, the remains of these unnamed dead developed in Naples. Defenders of the cult pointed out that they were paying respect to those who had had none in life, who had been too poor even to have a proper burial. Though the practice has largely disappeared, devotees used to pay visits to the skulls, clean them—"adopt" them, in a way, even giving the skulls back their "living" names (revealed to the caretakers in dreams). Yes, all that. 

In the church of Purgatorio dell'Arco
The display of skulls gives the whole thing a resemblance to the memento mori. This Latin phrase means "Remember you must die". As a noun, it thus means "a reminder of death". Historically, it recalls the slaves whose job it was in ancient Rome to ride in the chariot beside the conquering hero and whisper that single killjoy phrase ("Remember you must die") in his ear, just to keep Hero from believing his own press releases. In a Christian context, the "memento mori" plays a significant part in Neapolitan iconography. It is seen as a reminder to live the kind of life that will be judged worthy when that time comes. The courtyard of the museum of San Martino (an ex-monastery) displays carvings of skulls prominently, and a few churches in Naples  have depictions of them on the façades or within, most notably, the Church of Purgatorio ad Arco on via Tribunali.

As grisly as it may seem to outsiders, the Fontanelle cemetery is less a reminder of death than it is a popular manifestation of the desire to show affection for those who had so little of it in life. The point, then, of the work of art in Piazza Plebiscito dedicated to that bit of Neapolitan history is perhaps to connect the city a bit to its past, to its unusual—even bizarre—traditions, especially at this time of year.  Some have welcomed the display, sight unseen, as a way to force one to shake off, even for a moment, the great mid-December haze of globalized Christmas kitsch. After all, what better way to remember the birth of the Savior than with Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas" as he stands with his reindeer in the traditional Neapolitan manger scene, the presepe, with the Holy Family, the Three Wise Men, and the Redeemed Grinch, all of whom are watching the colorized version of It's a Wonderful Life on a new broadband palm computer? (Sigh. I've seen that one. The movie, too.)

3.

9.

Dec. 2010

This year's "installation art" is significantly different than most of the displays since they were first started over a decade ago in Naples. For the first time, the display will not be set up in Piazza Plebiscito. This is (1) bad in that not as many people will see it but (2) good in that there is much less chance of damage, accidental or otherwise, to the installation from Christmas and New Year's revelers. Also, the display will be "site specific" (much like Rebecca Horn's "skulls" exhibit—#2, above)from some years ago). This year, the venue will be the Piazza dei Martire, the monument column in that square includes four statues of lions at the base. The display could be set up nowhere else since it consists of six life-sized fiber-glass replicas of one of the originals, the "prowling" lion by Tommaso Solari. The replicas have just stepped off their monument pedestal, symbolizing, according to the artist, a "reawakening" of the city. The installation is the work of Neapolitan artist, Nadia Magnacca (b.1958). She has a degree in biological sciences and has studied and taught photography; since the early 1990s she has exhibted photography and audio-visual displays throughout Europe. That she is a local artist—while not unique—is the exception rather than the rule for these exhibits of installation art in Naples. Maybe that's a good sign, too.

As it turns out, there is nothing new under the sun. In 1972, a group of local artists calling
themselves the "non-existent gallery" installed a plaster lion in the same square near the memorial column. No one seemed to mind, so they graduated to trying to unload a whole parade of similar critters along the seafront leading from the Castel dell'Ovo to Piazza dei Martiri (more than a half-mile!). This time, the local gendarmes were not amused. The artists did get permission, however, to put a few in the square, itself. The display was called Hic sunt leones—"Here there be lions." And here they are again.

 

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