Cerise and I had just finished breakfast in bed at my place this morning around eleven, and we were sipping cappuccinos when the telephone rang. Caller ID showed nothing other than an Italian number. So, figuring it might be a relative, I answered. It turns out I was correct – my caller was a relative, but not some second cousin in Naples, from which my grandfather’s family hails. No, instead, it was my nephew, Hank Jr., my sister Rose’s son, calling from Venice.
Tom: And what in the world are you doing in Venice? Isn’t school still in session?
Hank Jr.: Yeah, but I got a note from my art teacher.
Tom: Your art teacher?
Hank Jr.: She arranged it so I can take four days off this week and come back on Friday the twelfth to make up a final exam and attend graduation next week. Then I’m moving my stuff up to Providence to get ready to start at Brown next fall.
Tom: So you’re going to spend the summer in Providence, Rhode Island?
Hank Jr.: Nah, I’m just going to put all my stuff in a storage locker and hit the road. I’ve got invitations to visit a bunch of artists’ colonies – Cape Cod, Vermont, upstate New York, Austin, Texas, Taos, New Mexico, Marin County, California, a whole bunch of places. It should be fun and I think I’ll learn a lot about art, too.
Tom: I see. And why, pray tell, are you in Venice?
Hank Jr.: To attend the opening of the fifty-third Venice Biennale, of course! It started today!
Tom: The Biennale is going to run all summer, Junior! Why did you have to go gallivanting over to Italy now? You could have gone to Venice and seen the show any time between your high school graduation and when you start at Brown.
Hank Jr.: Not if I want to meet the artists. Maybe their art is going to hang around Venice for months, but they won’t.
Tom: Junior?
Hank Jr.: Yes?
Tom: Can I ask you a serious question?
Hank Jr.: Sure, ask away.
Tom: You haven’t been dealing drugs or making, ah, smutty movies or, you know…
Hank Jr.: What! How can you even ask me a question like that?
Tom: Well, I was just wondering how a high school kid from Fairfax, Virginia could afford – let’s see now – a car, gas to drive all over the country for the summer, some sort of food for three months, I suppose, and, apparently, a round trip ticket to Venice with, presumably, some sort of hotel accommodations…
Hank Jr.: I’m staying at the Arlecchino.
Tom: Right, well, then, there you have it. What did you do, rob a bank?
Hank Jr.: I sold “Garage Floor Redux” for thirty-seven thousand dollars.
Tom: “Garage Floor Redux?”
Hank Jr.: Yeah, it’s the second in my series of garage floors. I think you must have seen it as a work in progress during that visit you made last November, when you and Mom snuck off into the garage for that mysterious conference you two had.
Tom: You noticed that?
Hank Jr.: Kinda, sorta, by accident, I guess. I had web cams set up in the garage.
Tom: You were making videos of your garage?
Hank Jr.: Yeah, as part of the artwork. “Garage Floor Redux” consists not only of the canvas on the floor, but also of over a hundred gigabytes of Flash videos, shot by three light-activated pinhole digital cameras placed strategically around the garage. So I couldn’t help but notice you and Mom having that discussion. And it’s going into the exhibition with the rest of the videos, of course – that’s a simple question of artistic integrity, as I’m sure you can understand.
Tom: Did you record sound, too, then?
Hank Jr.: No way. A sound track of what people said or the noises they made working in the garage would be far too obvious. The audio component of “Garage Floor Redux” is made up of ambient urban and industrial noises I recorded on my cell phone while I was walking around Manhattan, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia over a two year period.
Tom: Well, that’s a relief.
Hank Jr.: Huh?
Tom: Never mind. Hey, come to think of it, wasn’t your latest garage floor supposed to be shown at the Guggenheim?
Hank Jr.: Yeah, that would have been a great honor, but then this private collector came along and offered me real money for it. Is Cerise there?
Tom: As a matter of fact yes, she is.
Hank Jr.: Can I say hi?
Tom: Sure. I’ll do better than that, even. I’ll put you on speaker phone and all three of us can talk. Cerise, it’s Hank Jr. He’s attending the Venice Biennale and wants to say hello.
Hank Jr.: Hi, Cerise!
Cerise: Hi, Junior! How’s the art show?
Hank Jr.: It’s great. I’m learning a lot about art here.
Cerise: Really? Like what?
Hank Jr.: Well, there’s a piece here called “The Red and the Black” by Andrei Molodkin. He’s from Chechnya. There’s two glass replicas of the goddess Nike, one’s got real crude oil pumping through it and the other one’s got real human blood. He projects images of them on the wall. It’s way cool, no doubt about it – totally off the hook.
Cerise: Human blood? Ew, gross! What’s all that supposed to be about?
Hank Jr.: I asked him, and he said “It means people kill each other for oil, you ignorant, moronic, unforgivably decadent American; now go drive your huge, stinking, gas-guzzling, carbon-dioxide spewing SUV off a cliff, why don’t you?”
Tom: That sounds like an authentic foreign contemporary artist to me. Any other overtly political stuff?
Hank Jr.: Oh, yeah, sure, it’s all over the place. There’s Paul Chan’s “Sade for Sade’s Sake.” It’s a scathing indictment US torture at Abu Ghraib.
Cerise: So it shows pictures of the torture?
Hank Jr.: No, if it showed pictures of the torture, it would be journalism, not art.
Tom: So what does it show?
Hank Jr.: It shows people having sex, projected on a plain brick wall amidst a montage of severed body parts.
Cerise: Oh, well, sure, how artistic can you get?
Hank Jr.: Yeah, he’s a true genius, that Paul Chan. Then there’s Gonkar Gyatso’s “Reclining Buddha.” It’s a time line of Chinese-Tibetan relationships mashed up with cartoons of Americans and Europeans discussing fashion and the stock market.
Cerise: Portraying, I suppose, our unforgivable indifference to widespread global suffering?
Hank Jr.: Pretty much.
Cerise: Well, what does this Gonkar Gyatso fellow expect America and the EU to do about Tibet anyway? Invade it and kick the Chinese out? I bet if we did, he’d be creating something else criticizing how we went about it!
Hank Jr.: Well, art is supposed to make you think.
Cerise: Yeah? Okay, it makes me think, all right! It makes me think this Gyatso clown has his head up his…
Tom: And what else?
Hank Jr.: Moshekwa Langa, from South Africa, is exhibiting a mixed-media piece composed of thread spools, empty beer bottles and broken toys.
Cerise: Some kind of abstract art?
Hank Jr.: No, it’s supposed to be a protest against child labor in sweatshops, I think. It’s kind of hard to tell, actually.
Tom: But you’re pretty sure he’s protesting something, anyhow?
Hank Jr.: Yeah.
Cerise: Sounds like everybody there who doesn’t have a bone to pick has an axe to grind. Is it all political crap like that?
Hank Jr.: No, not all of it. There’s this British guy named Steve McQueen, for example, who’s exhibiting an art film. It’s called “Giardini.”
Cerise: What’s it about?
Hank Jr.: It’s not really “about” anything, I don’t think.
Tom: Okay, then, what’s in it?
Hank Jr.: Gardens in the rain. Also there’s dogs wandering around poking through garbage, and a couple of guys kissing.
Cerise: Oh, great. That sounds artistic as all get-out. Any idea what it means?
Hank Jr.: I think it means that political art is stupid and indifference is a rational coping mechanism in reaction to global suffering.
Cerise: Is that all it means?
Hank Jr.: Not really. I’m sure it has lots of other meanings, such as, for example, that gardens, like women and sports cars, look better when they are wet.
Cerise: Oh, they do, huh? Anything else?
Hank Jr.: Probably that the artist is gay.
Tom: Seems like a pretty safe bet.
Cerise: Did you learn anything else about art, then; besides, I mean, what you learned about color from that blood and oil thing?
Hank Jr.: Sure. There was “The Greater G8 Advertising Market Stand,” which I think definitely taught me a lot about how to use and extend Du Champ’s ideas of ready-mades and, what’s more, how to create successful performance art. It’s a real market stand, operated by the artist, a guy named Anawana Holoba, from Zambia. He’s got this collection of products from dirt-poor third world countries, and he sells them.
Cerise: Hey, wait a minute! There are hundreds of guys from Zambia selling shabby products made in dirt-poor third world countries from market stands and push carts in places like Adams Morgan, Lower Manhattan, and Central Square in Cambridge! What about them? Is what they are doing art?
Hank Jr.: No.
Cerise: Why the hell not?
Tom: Because they’re not doing it at the fifty-third Venice Biennale.
Cerise: Oh, really? And that’s all it takes?
Hank Jr.: Yeah, it’s sort of like, anybody can put together a room full of gilt-framed mirrors, but someone like this guy Pistoletto, who has an exhibit of them here, when he smashes a few of them and strews the shards all over the entrance to the exhibit…
Cerise: And then it’s art?
Hank Jr.: Exactly. Besides, what Holoba’s doing is nothing compared to the Thai Pavilion! The whole country is behind a mass of artworks protesting commercialism! They’ve transformed the entire exhibition space into a tourist trap, performing a complete deconstruction the travel agent’s vision of Thailand – they’re even selling tacky Obama T-shirts, like you’d see for sale on the streets of Bangkok!
Tom: Got to give the Thais credit for creative imagination there, I guess. What else has struck your fancy?
Hank Jr.: I really like what Tomas Saraceno did with “Galaxies Forming Along Planets Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web.”
Cerise: Holy Mother of God, what a ridiculous name. Galaxies don’t form along planets, either; that’s totally wrong, isn’t it, Tom? Galaxies formed before planets, didn’t they?
Tom: Scientifically speaking, yes, but artistically, nothing is incorrect.
Cerise: So what does it look like?
Hank Jr.: Huge, sort of cats-cradle spheres woven from black elastic rubber suspended from the ceiling, floor and walls. I can’t help thinking that one of my garage floors would be perfect underneath it.
Tom: In that case, you should definitely talk to him about collaborating in the future.
Hank Jr.: Yeah, I did, but all I got from him was something in Spanish about my mother.
Tom: Well, it’s his loss, then. What other exhibits did you find interesting?
Hank Jr.: The Nordic Pavilion is going to be hard to forget. It’s pretty disturbing. There’s one installation where a guy floats face down in a swimming pool, like he’s drowning; and everybody is supposed to ignore him. And then there’s another one where there’s this guy sitting in a fancy black leather chair, wearing headphones and reading a book.
Cerise: What so disturbing about that?
Hank Jr.: He’s naked.
Tom: So’s Michelangelo’s “David.”
Hank Jr.: Having seen both, I’d say there’s no comparison. This guy in the black chair, he’s hung like a…
Cerise: Junior! I’m surprised at you!
Hank Jr.: Well, hell, you just can’t help noticing…
Tom: Right. Any other interesting stuff?
Hank Jr.: Ivan Navarro’s “Death Row” is pretty good. It’s a cell block constructed entirely of neon lights. And there’s Haegue Yang’s “Condensation,” a composition of found objects and lights hanging on dry cleaning racks with wheels on their bottoms. It engages in a struggle for context through sensory stimulation and the viewer’s personal experience.
Cerise: It does? What makes you say that?
Hank Jr.: The plaque on the wall next to it.
Cerise: And you believe everything you read now?
Hank Jr.: Not everything, but it sure seemed like a reasonable explanation for a bunch of junk and colored lights hanging from old dry cleaning racks. Oh, and I really like Bruce Nauman’s “Fifteen Pairs of Hands.”
Cerise: Which is what?
Hank Jr.: Ah, fifteen pairs of hands. Um, sculptures of them, that is. Not floating in jars of formaldehyde or anything.
Cerise: Interesting. Fifteen pairs of hands?
Hank Jr.: Yeah, and Miwa Yanagi, from China, is exhibiting a group of portraits based on young women’s descriptions of what they think they are going to look like in fifty years.
Cerise: Intriguing.
Hank Jr.: Ah, hold on a second, I’ve got to check call waiting… It’s my parents… I guess I gotta go now.
Tom: No problem.
Cerise: Thanks for calling.
Tom: Be sure to tell your mother and father we say hello, give them our best wishes; and make it completely clear to them that we had absolutely nothing to do with you running off to attend the opening of the Venice Biennale.
Hank Jr.: Will do. Goodbye!
Cerise took a long sip from her cappuccino, then turned her huge blue eyes in my direction. “You know, Tom,” she mused, “those last two exhibits Junior told us about actually sounded like something worth seeing.”
“It’s statistically inevitable,” I observed. “Put enough contemporary art in one place, and some of it’s bound to turn out that way.”