A FRIEND once likened my opening of a gallery in an inner city suburb of Melbourne as being a bit like the wholesale import of culture into the area. Given that he is an urban planner, I thought about the remark somewhat. The said suburb already had a reasonably well developed cultural scene, but I think the particular stretch of the high street I opened was regrettably a bit like the no-man's-land my old tennis coach used to warn me about steering clear of on the court. But we live and we learn, but the high cost of rent in the world's major cities dictates. I live in, let's say, an economically challenged area of Rome, many of whose inhabitants are not known for their sophistication. I particularly hate a lot of the people in the neighbour hood if you want me to be honest. Last night, a new nominee for my Dislike campaign received my vote; the woman who lives on the third floor in the building opposite mine. She routinely clears her table each night, and bats her tablecloth out of her window, letting the debris (including paper serviettes) simply fall to the street (our street) below. She watched with the kind of detatched fascination that most people watch snow falling as the grubby bits of paper simply floated down onto the street. These two analagies came to mind when I got to thinking about one of the things that I actually do appreciate about my area. The Wunderkammern, a groovy little artspace that opened on the otherside of the tracks, about a five minute walk from my place. I've seen a few interesting shows there; not an easy feat in a space that has very limited opening hours; but increasingly, I am growing to love the approach and the program that seems to be unfolding. Click on READ MORE to continue the post.
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Although I mostly love the time I have in Rome, I often find myself reminiscing about my motherland. Anyone who knows me well, knows that regardless of where I am, I have a bit of a restless streak that not even a fulfilling life seems to cure for very long. When these restless periods arise, I find myself thinking of the things that I don't like about wherever it is that I am. And then mentally juggling them with the things that I do. Invariably, the dichotomy doesn't really resolve anything. If anything, it becomes a bit of a way to pass the time. Like many people here, one of my major issues is that Italy has major problems with transparency. In Australia recently, political coverage shed light on the faceless men behind the political parties and how they inevitably steered much of the direction the parties were taking. In Italy, I think it is fair to say that the society is mostly steered by the faceless. There is a sense of helplessness here when compared to other Western and Northern European countries where freedoms and transparencies are almost a given. In comparison to other nations, the freedom of the press here is limited and highly stratified, steps are being taken slowly to weed out nepotism which is endemic and nero, which is basically like the black market has created a sub economy with its own set of unwritten rules and etiquette. Professional guilds control sectors and pricing and are incredibly influential and powerful, as are the splinters of labour unions who seemed to be involved in a revolving run of strikes and public campaigns in protest against the country's substandard wages, austerity measures and the imbalance between political and individual power. Italy modernised in the 1950s after being decimated in the second world war, and has experienced varying degrees of acculturation and economic prowess in the decades that have followed, but since the 1990s has been in a slump in comparison to most of its neighbours. I recently spent a few days in Shanghai, a place I had not visited for about five or six years. Revisiting, I noticed there were a few more skyscrapers than I remembered, that the place seemed less like the dusty western frontier I remembered it being back in 2005. Click on READ MORE to continue reading the post... As part of my continuing work with Kunstpedia, a non profit organisation whose mission is to encourage greater public engagement with the arts, I will be visiting a number of exhibitions across Rome over the coming weeks. Kunstpedia has a number of correspondents across major European cities and in New York and spotlights the historical arts (basically pre-1960s). I have been covering exhibitions in Rome in recent months and I have generally sought out exhibitions which are a little off from the Italian mainstream, including visiting exhibits from Russia and a recent exhibition focusing on Orientalism. Upcoming exhibits will be a little more standard fare by Italian standards, but Rome's exhibition scene is constantly evolving, so hopefully there will be some interesting intercultural exhibitions on the horizon in 2012. I'll be posting soon, but in the meantime you can visit kunstpedia by way of my column page here. Now that the weather is finally on the up in Rome, I'm starting to wake from my winter slumber and slowly getting out again and rediscovering the city. The thing that I am finding interesting is that now that I have woken from my winter slumber, the places that are more enticing to me are places that seem to be screaming mid twentieth century; 1950s-1970s. Rome's deeply layered evolution is well known, but we tend to focus on its Roman era or simply limit ourselves to the centro storico which never ceases to amaze. But to me, part of Rome's charm is that its strata includes places that are only a few decades old; intact, unrefurbished. Once upon a time the idea of wood panelling would give me the creeps. And true, I never want to see them in my apartment, but, in order to successfully capture the progressive development of design and the ambience of a city, its important that even the unappreciated design elements are left standing. This is something that is a bit of a taboo area, particularly in my home country of Australia, where we for years, have been consumed with the idea of continual renewal, refurbishment and redesign. The unfortunate side effect of this is that it seems to wipe out entire decades that we consider unfashionable from the cities that we live in, leaving something of a gap and creating something artificial instead. Throughout Italy's cities, big and small, establishments that have never been redecorated stand proudly and are frequented based on reputation, on familiarity, on the quality of the products they offer. When I think of a city like Melbourne, which has a relatively short history in comparison, ''hokiness'', that is the idea of something a little outdated and unfashionable sometimes is appreciated in this sense. Think of the fab Vietnamese restaurants on Victoria Street and how after refurbishment and gentrification how they lose something of their charm. Then apply that idea large scale to a city of four million and you get the idea of how charm and heritage are endangered species, that are as succeptable to extinction as any every entity in the natural world. A few years ago I lived in Kyoto, a city which remains firmly entrenched in my heart. For most Westerners Kyoto is the picturesque Japanese city of dreams, rich in history, steeped in tradition, the home to much of the soul of Japanese culture. When I first visited Kyoto, the city centre struck me as incredibly dated, like something out of the 1960s, full of brass and chrome and windows tinted brown. I didn't initially appreciate it, but once I moved there I did, and I came to love the city as much for its Heian heritage as I did its more challenging legacies. So now, in Rome and Italy in general, I am back on the appreciation bandwagon. I'm digging places that I will never find in Wallpaper or Architectural Digest, partly because I feel like I am being let in on a secret past, and partly because these are still functional places that pull people in and don't leave any doubts or gaps in my understanding of how the city might have looked thirty or forty years ago, classical and historical buildings not withstanding. So next time you look for a new place to champion, look beyond the usual deck outs and seek out something a bit more real. You might find a new level of appreciation and perhaps encourage others to make do, rather than encourage them to rip the heart and soul out of their spaces in an attempt to stay relevant. Lawrence Goldhuber: cold up there? Jan Fabre's Prometheus-Landscape II is one inflammatory son of a bitch. Here, spectacle is more important than content; the idea flashed out from the Grecian tale of Promotheus who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the people (and was punished by Zeus for his naughty behavior) is fleshed out visually (and at times, rather literally). When it comes to staging, its hard to imagine seeing anything as innovative as this; its a mix of pyromania, bondage, Dionysian free for all, and occassionally, utterly disturbing kind of stuff. Fire is the key element in this show, but I would say that the underlying theme of bondage (be it of the hero or those bound to their eternal suffering) is more substantial. The narrative won't help you along much, but there is so much to see and to take your breath away, that the chilling, haunting landscape, a kind of Hades, will burn enough of an impression into your soul. Heroes, psychiatrists or gods aside. Visitors to the FotoGrafia festival at Macro Testaccio would be best advised to visit the international pavillion after the Italian, for it is here that the unfortunate disparity between the local and the international offerings are most evident. Here, photography is again exciting, moving, and artists use it as a medium to tell stories, share experiences and clearly articulate concepts in a way that unfortunately doesn't happen often enough in the adjacent pavillion. Willem Popelier's __and Willem (2010) gets the ball rolling in a complicated, yet visually simplistic style. Here, Popelier constructs a photographic genealogy of twin brothers separated at birth. Relationships become hard to follow, convoluted and impossible to keep track of; its a conceptual process brought to life in a cold, scientific, yet graphic way, augmented by the more thorough accompanying book which further delves into the subjects and takes you beyond the often hilarious headshots that you cling to as you try to follow the upheaval of relationships and family over the years. Mizu no Oto (The Sound of Water), curated by Rinko Kawauchi, features the work of Japanese artists, broadly linked by a tribute to the power and symbolism of water. Beyond the catastrophic potential of water which we have seen the worst of in the past year, Asako Narahashi delves into a world in which sight is still possible, but sound is distorted by submergence in water; images in which the photographer documents the shore from deep water are powerful and atmospheric where the horizon line is no longer relevant, orientation is distorted and our sense of involvement is heightened. Elsewhere, Kawauchi's Illuminescence images seem to be in line with this year's theme at Venice, though thankfully they seem to belong here. Elsewhere The Place Where I Belong, curated by Marc Prust convincingly spells out the dualities and difficulties of those who have grown up in bicultural environments. In particular, Katherine MacDaid and Rania Matar's photo essays on life in the Middle East are beautiful excursions into texture, pattern and design, whilst at the same time offering up intimate portraits of life and the subjects that make up their second worlds. Datascapes by Matthieu Bernard Raymond switches the direction around, using GIFs to integrate our obsession with graphs and charting into environmental settings. Here natural phenomena become living charts plotting everything from productivity to profit; in these modified black and white images we are forced to contemplate our modern life and its often diammetric opposition to the environment and our surroundings. The temptation to fill the large space with an elongated series is resisted; the point is clearly made with the half dozen or so images that are chosen for the exhibition. Leaving this second pavillion with the same friends I left the first with, the conversation became one of confused jubilation. This is what a good international photographic festival should leave you feeling. Here, the objectives of the exibits were clear, their execution sharp, and the images varied and compelling. In short, this half of the festival was a celebration of photography and not an excuse to be self indulgent or to treat audiences with a form of contempt in which its simply enough to plaster walls with images as if they are some kind of wallpaper. Exhibition runs into October, so if you are in Rome, make sure you head there, but follow my advice! FotoGrafia, the International Photography Festival is on again at Macro Testaccio in Rome. This is the tenth edition of the event, presented at one of Rome's most evocative exhibition spaces, Macro being the site of the ex slaughterhouses of the city. As I am an absolute sucker for good photography, I felt I simply had to attend, pushing aside the underlying concerns I have in regards to photographic festivals that seem to be in every city, every town, every village of the world these days. My initial concern that such a spread of events spreads the talent even thinner seemed to be borne out at first when I visited the first of the two pavillions, that being the work with predominantly Italian pieces in them. It was a sense of dejavu that made me recall my visit to the Venice Biennale where the Italian pavillion left me decidedly underwhelmed, and a little frustrated. Here again are works which may be occasionally strong at a technical level, but in terms of aesthetic and ambience are lacking. There are two overwhelming problems in the Italian pavillion; the separately curated exhibits don't sit well with each other and there seems to be no interplay here; the exhibits make for uncomfortable bedfellows. The other problem is editing. Unfortunately, even the curated pieces here are lacking in editing; curators in this section of the festival seem unwilling to help their artists in thinking about what is vital, what fits, what will a viewer need to walk away with visually? In one exhibit, Giorgio De Finis gets so caught up in his concept of the Space Metropoliz that we are left with eighteen (!) images that even in their entirety fail to capture the heart and soul of the project's stated aims. The project instead relies on the didactic text to explain that the photos were taken at a centro sociale on the Casalina, a district in the impoverished Eastern region of Rome, in a bid to document not only the trying conditions in which the immigrant subjects of this piece live, but to also achieve the photographer's aim of bringing the (faded) lustre of space iconography to the commune in order to elevate their spirits. What we are left with are too many large format images on a single wall that are only linked because of their repeated use of the lunar icon and a few well placed astronaut outfits. What's lacking are real studies of the subjects and a visible documentation of the effects of the visit, and what could have been better said with perhaps six images is instead spread too thin across eighteen. Much better in this pavillion is Salvatore by Lorenzo Maccotta (curated by Giovanna Calvenzi). Here, an attempt by Maccotta to better understand his father, with whom he has a strained relationship, takes him on a six month journey to the north of Africa, across Sicily and the southern islands of Italy. At the end of this, Maccotta and Calvenzi choose no more than eight or so images, each striking, simplistic and evoking the dry, arid areas in which Salvatore's life has played out, and the gradual warming of the air between father and son. It's a well thought out and deeply personal project which bears real fruit. An underwhelming series by Pablo Lopez (in Rome) and a hit and (mostly) miss affair by Alec Soth compound that tendency to over populate exhibitions, but the same approach is more successful when adopted by Valentina Vannicola, whose elaborately staged and produced L'inferno di Dante, imaginatively brings to life fifteen of the differing hells espoused in Dante's Inferno, a text with which all Italians are familiar with due to the required reading and study courses that even elementary school students here have to take. Overall that first pavillion is very underwhelming. As I left it with friends, they told me that they didn't know how to feel, given that they normally were accustomed to visiting artist specific exhibitions. I explained, a good collective exhibition should leave you feeling challenged; challenged in the sense that your feelings should be competing with each other to help you determine which works you felt most strongly about, rather than leaving you feeling tired, apathetic and wondering why you mostly bothered when there were a handful of really touching and provocative works in a stable full of otherwise voiceless images. Kunstpedia is an online resource run by a Dutch based not for profit organisation. The goal of the organisation is to help stimulate the public interest in art and organisations with the hope of raising consciousness and public participation in the artworld.
To this end, Kunstpedia have a number of correspondents in different parts of the globe who cover events, exhibitions and related literature and share their experiences with readers in the hope that it inspires them to visit a gallery or pick up a book or basically reconnect with the cultural heritage. The first of my pieces was published last week on the website which you can check out here. I'm being trialled out for a new gig here in Rome, acting as a sort of Rome correspondent for a European website. It's a good opportunity for me to seek out and explore some of Rome's more under rated and lesser known art spaces. Last week, I met with one of the curators of the Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale who is charged with the management and promotion of one of Rome's little gems. It's a small collection, a boutique kind of space, but one of the very few in all of Italy to focus on international art. There are a handful of boutique spaces that grew out of private collections in Genova, Milan and the North East of Italy, but this space is the only one that I know of in Central or Southern Italy which is completely comprised of Asian Art (it too began as a private collection which was later bequeathed to the state). It's a little bit of an underdog, competing with other Roman spaces; oriental art is not something you probably have in mind during a visit to Rome, but its well worth a visit, especially as a respite to the endless array of Roman art and archeological sites that are already on offer in the city. As far as underground acts go, Blonde Redhead read like something out of a rock bands 101 class. Pair a couple of very good looking Milanese twins, obviously very talented musicians, with a kooky Japanese art school graduate and hey presto, you have a band. Blonde Redhead are full of surprises though. They evolved in the 1990s and continue to play full houses, releasing music that is equal parts poppy, electronic, with a touch of underground sass. Every time you hear an interlude you think you know what to expect, but then they just seem to have this knack for adding the unexpected into each song. Check them out as I did last night at Rome's Piper Club. |
Dave
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Dave Di Vito is a writer, teacher and former curator.He's also the author of the Vinyl Tiger series and Replace The Sky.
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