Where Am I?

Chihuly Glass Garden
Padiglione di Venezia
Biennale, 2009
Venezia

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

There is a vacuum
in the center
where great men
once stood.
They cannot be replaced,
though others,
maybe greater,
may arise and
eclipse them.
Perhaps not.
The small man
makes the world
seem heavy and
dangerous, proceeding
from fear and sanctifying
ignorance.
The great man
makes the ship of state
seem small and yar,
stalwart and invincible,
and the sea, so vast,
navigable.

Larry Mellman
26.VIII.2009
Venezia

VENICE, 1906. WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, A 14-YEAR-OLD LACEMAKER'S LIFE IS CHANGED FOREVER.

Fortuna dancing

Fortuna dances
atop the Dogana
plump and sassy
with her sea-spray plume;
she holds her
wing-like sail
to the wind
which spins her
round
from east to west
from north to south
from up to down
and all points
in between,
and when the air
is still
she stands poised
and expectant
waiting for everything
to change
once again.

21.VIII.09
Venezia

Ferragosto

According to the Italian tourist industry:

"August 15 is Ferragosto in Italy, the day when Roman Catholics believe the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven, and a major Italian holiday. Even before the time of Christ, however, Romans honored the gods on August 15 with a celebration they called Feriae Augusti [because it was created by the Emperor Augustus, so clever at providing bread and circuses]. So while the Catholic church might have co-opted the day for their own religion, they kept something of the ancient tradition in the modern name."


I have three things to say:

1. All Christian holidays were superimposed on existing "pagan" holidays, just as the pagan Roman holidays coincided with the ancient Jewish and Pre-Islamic eastern holy days. They are rooted deep in the brain stem along with a lot of other information our conscious minds find it difficult to decode. It was clever to superimpose Mary's assumption on pre-Christian harvest rituals and celebrations, rooted in fertility festivals, in the dog days of summer, when the bountiful crops are winding down.

2. According to the tourist guides, Italy shuts down for Ferragosto. Most people take their vacations in August anyway, and on the weekends surrounding Ferragosto everyone goes to the seashore, or to the lake, or to Venice. Venice never really shuts down; it has one game only, tourism, and plays it when the rest of Italy shuts down because the rest of Italy, like the rest of the world, comes to Venice to escape reality.

3. Today, the streets were uncannily deserted, or as close to it as they get here. Restaurants were open but not particularly crowded. A herd of cruise ships was parked at Tronchetto, but there were not many long lines of tourists with headphones following somebody holding up an umbrella or a penant to give them something to follow. The vaporettos weren't particularly crowded. Nothing was.

I know this because I took my new favorite short walk, along the Zattere and around the Punta della Dogana. The sky was clear, the sun extraordinarily bright, so I celebrated the assumption of Mary into the Cosmic Womb of Creation by documenting this most beautiful of walks.

You are welcome to come along.

An Open Letter to John Pull

Dear John,

I have a confession to make. I was less than candid. When I sent you off to see Peter Greenaway's Le Nozze di Cana I was operating on hearsay; I hadn't seen it yet. When you live here you have a slightly different attitude toward these things. I had already studied the brilliant recreation of the painting, and I had, I thought, plenty of time.

When you were blown away by it I of course knew I had to see it sooner rather than later and when I looked at your brochure I realized it would be closed most of August and open only a couple weeks in September, so I decided to get my ass over there; which I did today, after you left.

So here's what I have to say about it. You listened to what I had to say on just about everything else, so bear with me just a little bit longer.

It was a great pleasure to have you in Venice again. I hope you enjoyed sharing La Biennale with me as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you.


Le Nozzi di Cana / The Wedding Feast at Cana

The view from San Giorgio, across St. Mark's Basin is the Pomp and Circumstance splendor of San Marco: the Zecca and the Biblioteca, the Campanile, the Clock Tower, the Basilica and Doge's Palace, the Piazzetta and the Molo all in the proper distance across the water to appreciate their scale and mad splendor.

Up close Palladio's Church of San Giorgio is too big to see. It looks better in full frontal from the Punta della Dogana, which is the perfect spot from which to appreciate the mass and volume of its superimposed facades. The adjacent Benedictine monastery is apricot, reminiscent of the Spanish baroque palazzi of Naples, stone cartouches on pastel stucco.

The show is in the Refectory Palladio created for the monastery. You enter through twin cloisters. The first is pink, perfect high renaissance. The rear cloister, pale lemon with deep green cypress trees, shows its Byzantine and Gothic origins clearly. You can stand in the center, between them, and see both through elaborate stone arches. The symmetry and simplicity is peaceful and in no way prepares you for the vestibule into the Refectory.

The vestibule is Roman in its grandeur and in its scale and in it you can see the origins of the style which was appropriated by, and became associated with, Napoleon, conflated with the impact of his Egyptian campaign. On either side of the central stairway leading into the refectory is a dry fountain of highly polished marble the color of blown roses; each basin resembles a sarcrophagus set in a niche of awesome proportions, its lion spouts ready to pour into the dry pool below. The doors are impossibly high and ascending the stairs you feel like a Roman senator stepping into an idealized antechamber.

This is where the monks ate. The room is rectangular, its proportions Palladian proportions, Vitruvean proportions. These relationships change our appreciation of the space around us and our place in it. It is like walking into Valhalla. You feel like a god.

Veronese's Le Nozze di Cana, on the far wall, is the size of a classic movie screen. As I wrote about before, this Nozze di Cana is a hightech recreation of the original which cut out and taken to Paris by Napoleon, and which the Louvre would not return to Venice when the refectory was restored. The magic of digital technology recreates it and raises the question of what it means to be a reproduction to profound new heights.

Because the space was designed by Palladio to embody Renaissance ideals, it is monumental and symmetrical, with four perfectly shaped, majestically simple windows on each side as suited to the humble monks as St. Peter's is suited to the poor carpenter's son from Bethlehem.

Renaissance chant begins the show: a capella voices on an organ ground. I don't know what it was but it sounded like Gabrielli to me. In addition to the light show that brings the painting to life in ways we never dreamed possible, projections are repeated in the smooth spaces between the windows, details blown up large, with subtitles of the spoken dialog in both English and Italian.

This work is sui generis. Looked at simply as the anatomy of a great Renaissance masterpiece it is revelatory. But it is so much more. It is a fantasia on a theme by Veronese, and opens up the world of the painting for us to inhabit and experience. Faces are pin-pointed, the painting is flipped and revealed in three dimensions, the light changes from velvety night to radiant day, from clear sunlight to driving rain. The Tinkerbelle light that leads our eye through the crowd of characters leaves a trail like a firefly on a hot summer night.

The drama of the moment when Jesus transforms water into wine is refracted through multiple prisms. There are 125 individuals in the painting, and every one has a face and a story; we hear what they are thinking and saying about the astonishing moment they are experiencing. The banquet is treated as a Venetian banquet of Veronese's time. Typical of the genius and wit are the comments by the rich and elegantly robed oenophiles: -- "the color is good. Is it safe? It has almost a smart sparkle..."

The water having been transformed to wine, and everyone having registered their opinion upon the circumstances, the vision silences their voices in a brilliant lightning and thunder storm accompanied by a crescendo of Gabrielli splendor.

As brilliant in conception as in execution, it is about as good an intellectual and artistic orgasm as there is to be found these days.

Le Nozzi di Cana was preceded by a groundbreaking project using Rembrandt's Nighwatch and another with Leonardo's Last Supper. Other shows planned include Valasquez's Las Meninas, Picasso's Guernica, Jackson Pollock's Echo: Number 25, Monet's Waterlilies, Seurat's La Grand Jatte, and will culminate with Michelangelo's Last Judgment.

It's a lot to look forward to.

And the winner is...

My old friend Johnny, a brilliant autodidact, had an interesting theory about Renaissance art which we discussed over way too many drinks in the bars at the Danieli and the Gritti, at Caffe Florian, and assorted enotecas around Venice one long-ago weekend in 1993.

The theory went roughly like this. The greatness of the artist could be indexed to the beauty of the babies in the Madonna's arms. There are more beautiful Madonnas than truly beautiful babies; the baby was the acid test. Without fail, the greatest artists, Rafaello, Lippi, Bellini, painted the most beautiful babies. In other paintings there were admirable qualities, but the babies were unappealing, unconvincing, and certainly not truly beautiful. They were truly beautiful only when painted by the few, the best.

The other day I stopped by the Mestrovich Collection, scarecely more than a score paintings, each one outstanding, in the "Browning Mezzaine" of Ca' Rezzonico, the Museum of the 18th Century. It was here that I happened upon the "Sacra Conversazione" of Bonifacio De' Pitati (Verona, 1487 - Venezia, 1553).

I would never argue that De' Pitati is the greatest of artists, although he exists in rarified company. But he painted what is arguably one of the most beautiful babies anywhere.

John Wesley Retrospective

John Wesley Retrospective
San Giorgio Maggiore
presented by Prada Foundation

In 2009 the earliest works, from the early 60s, look visionary. Seen in retrospect it is an uncanny mirror into a future that has already passed.

He is a symbolist in the true sense. He uses symbols iconographicallyl-- a post office badge (for years his "day job" was at the Post Office), a profile line of large-breasted women, Whoopee! girls who look like their ubiquitous echoes seen on the mudflaps of tricked out trucks and muscle cars. The part speaks for the unseen whole. The images are nostalgia-filled and makes one better understand the beginnings of the sensibility that made Warhol a very rich man.

The cow framed by a repeated pattern of naked dancing ladies (1964) predates the Warhol cow wallpaper by two years. By 1969 the Mod Gernreich vision is explicit. He works in a consistent style that is witty and elegant, with a restrained palette always colored within the lines. Although they lack the bite of the best contemporary work they are beautiful in the Japanese manner ("Tour de France," "Egg"), as flat formal compositions. "Good Appetite" and "Gluttony" are sly. In "Plague," a naked woman in the Drop Drill position is rained upon by a deluge of bouncing diapered babies.

I prefer the lurid hot house of medieval frescoes and the complexly imagined dreams and nightmares at the Punta della Dogana. But each of Wesley's works are painted with a masterful stroke that is entirely controlled, not filled with drama.


An electric charge enters the show with the late erotica, Blondie giving Dagwood a blow job in bed or Dagwood's wet dream of a libidinously drunk geisha ("Utamaro Washing, Dagwood Sleeping).

In the vast and quiet almost deserted space, Wesley makes comic book pop into a John Updike erotica, pastel and clean and explicit. The erotica is late, closing the show, like Picasso's minotaurs or Yeats's Crazy Jane poems. Does this happen to all men if they live long enough, the late blooming of a wild and mature sexuality, the autumnal exaltation of physical passion?

ITHACA
A STORY

The Most Beautiful Song in the World

Is this the most beautiful song in the world?



Poem by Friedrich Rückert
Music by Gustav Mahler


It certainly is in my book. In fact, it stands alone. There are plenty of beautiful songs in the world, but there is nothing else quite like this.

It is frequently referred to at the saddest song ever written, but I think that is based on recent performance practice, and not on the essence of the song. The poem which Mahler set to music is simplicity itself and yet easily misread:

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!

It is often sung in a valedictory manner, a sad farewell to life, but that also misses the point. The poet is describing an ecstatic state, in which the noise and vanity of the world ceases to matter and all that matters is his heaven of love and song. It is a farewell in the same way awaking is a farewell to a troubled sleep. Good bye, yes, but to everything that doesn't really matter in order to embrace what really does. That is why the music is quiet, intensely spiritual in character, as simple as sunlight on water and as gorgeous. It is so beautiful it makes us cry.

Deby once wondered aloud why beautiful music that is not dramatically sad makes us cry. I suggested that it is because it plugs us directly into that which is greater than ourselves and our consciousness, with other worlds if you will, what the Romantics referred to the Sublime. We are humbled and exalted in the same moment, and that moves us to tears just as an intense orgasm can move us to tears, and certainly not from sadness. We experience ecstasy.

When Nature, the foremost teacher of all great art, presents us with the sublime -- the first glimpse of the waterfalls tumbling into Yosemite Valley, the extraordinary blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea seen from Tiberius's villa on Capri, Big Sur or the Dolomites at dawn -- it is without affect; it has no emotional content. It is a pure expression of the beauty and majesty of creation. It takes your breath away but does not necessarily make you cry.

To the pure light of Nature's beauty, Art applies the prism of human consciousness and emotion; the beam is refracted into its component colors and woven into patterns for particular effect. Humanity is added to impersonal nature and it is this experience of our humanity, of or our common emotional life, that is so particularly powerful and touching. We know, in that instant, that others have trod the same path, that our planet is inhabited by others with hearts like our own, that we are not alone in the universe. The message makes our souls dance.

Recently this song has been sung very slowly. The mournful oboes and clarinets against the soft harp arpeggios, the muted strings, are elegiac, quietly dirge-like. Jessie Norman and Zubin Mehta take an inertial 8 minutes. Janet Baker clocks in at 6:47, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson at 7:13.

An earlier generation of artists took a faster tempo. Kathleen Ferrier's version is 5:38. That seemingly slight change of tempo changes the entire mood of the song.

Irmgard Seefried clocks in at a mere 5:10 in a performance that is a revelation. From the opening bars the song has more in common with the innocent rapture of the last movement of the Fourth Symphony, where the light childlike soprano sings Das himmlische leben (Heaven's life), than it does with the truly mournful Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, its twin sister in line and orchestral texture.

Seefried's voice is immediate and unaffected; she is in touch with the source of this music and she is clearly on a spiritual journey as she sings. At the end she is not sad at all; she is filled with radiant joy. Her smile says it all.

So why do I cry?

An exquisite flower fills me with joy and does not make me cry. But at the end of the song I am filled with joy and I am crying. It is because this heady emotional cocktail is suffused with gratitude and wonder at being alive and able to experience such beauty. That is what the song is about: being set free from the squalor and the madness of the world so you can experience its beauty and express that joy.

As the poet says,

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!