About Con-Temporary Art?

Simone Lalongo is a young Italian artist whose work was featured at a show titled Emerging Talents: New Italian Artists that I attended this past April at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina in Florence, Italy. He may have been among the young very hip people drifting through the gallery, but if so, we were not introduced.

Simone, may I speak frankly? Thank you.


Simone, I suppose you are too young to have read Marshall McLuhan. Canadian media theorist – very big in America in the 1960s? Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Trust me, you guys are cut from the same bolt of cloth. Huh? Oh, it’s an American idiom – it means you see the world in the same way. You see it was McLuhan who said, “Art is anything you can get away with.” Seriously, Simone, when I saw your – ah, exhibit? That tiny glass bottle filled with some water and your fingernail clippings? The plexiglass box with the stark lighting? Amazing, amazing, bella, bella bellissimo! I could not believe that you got away with it!


But then, of course, I read the display card, and bada bing, it all made sense! Bada bing? Oh, there is this TV show, The Sopranos, about these Italian-American mafia types . . . ah, it’s not important. Your card though, that was brilliant. No, no really. “The artist’s work becomes an angst filled vortex spinning in on it- and him-self searching for a potential solution, or what we might even call a cure.” I thought I would die! Hilarious! They’re fingernail clippings for god’s sake. You prankster you, I can’t believe they bought it! But wait, there is one part here I don’t understand. Where is it? Oh, yeah here: “His gramme of anxiety is the gramme that each of us consumes every day . . .” The Oxford English Dictionary defines gramme as “a unit of mass equal to 1/1000 of a kilogram.” Are you saying we eat that much in fingernails everyday!? Kinda gross. Simone, hey, Simone, where ya goin’ kid? Come on back! Was it something I said? Gee, kinda touchy. . .


We could, I suppose, blame it all on photography. Before photography art was all about realism. You tried to paint a realistic bison on the cave wall. Maybe you were going to feed a young hunter some mushrooms, spin him around a few times and flash a torch up on the painting so the kid would freak out there and not when the bison was actually charging you. Maybe you wanted to show the god of the hunt what you were after – sort of a magical “call ahead for faster service.” Who knows, but you wanted a real looking bison. Back in the 16th or 17th century you got hired to paint the Burgermeister’s daughter. That’s a little tougher. The idea was not so much to paint exactly what the Burgermeister’s daughter looked like, as it was to paint what the Burgermeister thought his daughter looked like. But it was all about shades of reality. Then in the mid-1800s photography made it’s debut. Point a camera, push a button. There was the Burgermeister’s daughter – as she really looked. Which created other problems that are part of another story.


The point is this; the best artist was no longer simply the person who captured reality most accurately with a brush. The camera did that. The best artist slowly became the one who captured the essence of the moment – the purest impression of the moment. Bada Bing – Monet, Manet and every other way. Now what is on the canvas is only part of art. What is said about the canvas, what is written about the canvas, how the artist explains the canvas – these become increasingly important issues. Which eventually lead to McLuhan’s observation and Simone’s fingernails in a bottle.


So is that such a big deal? A kid cons his way into a temporary exhibit? It may well be. I have two problems. Simone’s exhibit wasn’t the only simplistic construction at that show masquerading as art. Nor is the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina the only gallery playing along. I remember being at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago a few years ago, a show featuring the “best young artists in America.” It was equally unimpressive. Large photos mostly out of focus. Rambling erotic journals “framed” as art.


I have no problem with young people taking their adolescent works seriously. I certainly did. When I was a sophomore a buddy of mine and I presented a one-act play in the coffeehouse at college. The first line was “Name names now Norris, near Nancy’s nice nifty new newly named nuisance.” We thought it was deep, meaningful. Go figure. Then after graduation I applied for a job as a photographer with National Geographic magazine – without benefit of portfolio. They gently suggested more experience. Every young artist should take his or her work seriously. That doesn’t mean that major galleries should aid and abet them. There should be more of a leap between the refrigerator door and national venues. It seems however that a generation of indulgent parents now doubles as the art establishment and feels compelled to gush over the works of their real and surrogate children.


Equally problematic is this love affair with the banal. Simone’s fingernails partner easily with a work I saw at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. several years ago. Three blank white canvases in a corner – each, oh, maybe two feet square. One lay flat on the floor, snugged into the corner. The other two completed the walls so that the three canvases essentially replicated the floor and the two walls behind and beneath them. The title: Exploded Box. Being a Philistine, the inner meaning escaped me. Are we really so blind to the tiny doors on the fascinating that open around us everyday that someone needs to haul them into a gallery?


I walk down the street during a downpour. Flash flood in the gutter. A huge drain at the corner swallows it up and flings it off toward the ocean. Sweet. But should I head out to the junkyard, score a surplus drain and enter it in a major show? Title: Urban Seascape. Maybe. Maybe contemporary art is anything you can get away with.