The Roman summer was marked by burning cars. As the season became hotter and the skies cleared, a person or persons unknown randomly set parked cars ablaze across the city. The sound of fire engines racing through the capital’s congested streets quickly became unremarkable and as black smoked curled over the city’s rooftops and across the face of the rising moon, native Romans sat back at their café tables completely unconcerned. Some of Rome’s newspapers had suggested a political motive, others a rash of copycat anarchists who had aimed their ire at everything from battered Quintacentros to BMWs, while right wing op ed writers blamed the Italian youth for their well dressed but politically apathetic indolence.
We asked Marcello who he thought was responsible. He shrugged and said “boh” – the all purpose Italian expression that means both ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t care’. Marcello was our Art Life contact in Italy. A middle aged, married man with two children, he lived in an unremarkable part of town that’s typical of life outside the city walls. His neighbourhood was a cluster of high rise buildings – all more or less the same height – situated between playing fields and across from a small square. In late afternoon with golden hour light on the orange sides of the apartment buildings, the suburb looked just like a Jeffrey Smart painting, [but without the moody skies]. It was a sun blasted development with tree lined streets and cars jammed into every available parking space. Although the streets were apparently two way, the view from Marcello’s rooftop apartment was a ring side seat on stand offs between cars wanting to go in different directions.
Marcello is a member of The Art Life affiliated La Società per la Unificazione Delle Arti e Della Vita. Back in 68, during the Art & Life schism, the Italian branch maintained its Communist/Anarchist roots fighting on against The Spectacle. Some 37 years later, La Società maintains a relaxed and ironical distance to its Australian cousins. Marcello is a political street fighter, a diffident gourmand and a lover of post modernity and the utopian modernist ideals of the original Art & Life Manifesto. It’s a peculiar local mix and one that only Italians can understand. In his living room, crowded with ornate furniture, scattered kid’s toys, a map of the world on the living room wall and a mountain of international art magazines that spill from coffee tables to the floor, Marcello also proudly hangs a Men of The Vatican calendar, an official Vatican publication that reveals that although they’re priests, they’re also all-Italian boys.
Marcello organised a contemporary art tour of Rome for us, heading off in his beaten up car towards the old city. Rome’s city walls – which date from between 378BC to 271AD – are a demarcation point between the lived-in heritage park of the inner city and the wide open spaces of the outer city.
The outer city – which we travelled through at break neck speed – is a modern European metropolis which occasionally slips into an alternative universe as imagined by Benito Mussolini. The district known as EUR – the site of a proposed universal exposition for 1942 – is an amalgam of Fascist architecture, modernist office blocks, big parks and open spaces. In The Guardian, Matthew Kneale described the area:
“EUR, the new Rome that Mussolini began constructing south of the capital, is largely fascist. So are Rome University, Termini station, and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation offices, which were originally intended for administrators of Italy’s African empire. The huge Foro Italico sports complex, built to inspire lazy Romans from their lethargy, is covered with fascist heroic athletes. More surprisingly, Mussolini’s propaganda has been preserved in stone. High on the façades of ministry buildings you can still read fascist catchphrases about glory and the Patria, and see statues of patriotic peasants, workers, and mothers of the warlike generation to come (as Mussolini hoped). There is even a large obelisk proclaiming “Mussolini Dux”.
From this brightly lit nightmare, you travel through the city walls into the old districts. Inside it’s all narrow cobbled streets, absurd juxtapositions of Roman ruins, churches and government buildings, insanely crowded tourist districts of the Pantheon, the Forum and the precincts of the Vatican, and a city map so jumbled with streets and back alleys – and so out of scale – you need years of experience to navigate around it. Marcello, an old hand, parked in a zone clearly marked NO PARKING and pointing across the Tiber to the Galleria Lorcan O’Neill. We set off.
As we crossed the river – and saw cormorants drying their wings on the broken marble pillars of an ancient bridge – we asked Marcello if it wasOK to park in a no parking zone. He told us that Italy is the freest country in the world because it is the most heavily governed. There is a rule for everything, yet no one, not even the police or the carabinieri, enforce the rules because no one knows what they are. In practice, this means you can park wherever you like or ride on the bus without buying a ticket. It’s all good. We soon discovered that galleries – perhaps accepting this lackadaisical attitude – did not necessarily follow their own advertised exhibition dates and opening hours. Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, one of the city’s leading contemporary galleries, was only technically open.
Manfredi Beninati, work in progress.We had come to see the work of Manfredi Beninati. Born in 1970, Beninati is part of the younger generation of Italian painters, and he makes pictures in a style that plugs right into the international contemporary aesthetic. Featured in this year’s Venice Biennale, Beninati is the kind of artist who a lot of younger Australian artists could identify with. His paintings are loose and washy figurative dreamscapes that make the viewer feel as if there’s a thick gauze on the surface of the painting and a story book world floating behind it. Imagine a figurative Maria Cruz painting with a good dose of Neo Rausch mixed into a Trans Avant-Garde soup. It’s crazy, but it works.
Inside the gallery, the art was leant up against walls, a few canvases hung and boxes stacked up with sculpture that looked like garden gnomes designed by Yoshitomo Nara. A tall man with a sweater and an immaculately manicured beard asked us what we wanted. To see the art. Yes, one moment he said, and got a gallery assistant. It became apparent that despite the clearly advertised dates on our official Art Guide, the exhibition was yet to open. The glimpse of the art was tantalising but also mildly infuriating. The gallery staff were helpful and Marcello left his postal address with an attractive female assistant asking to be notified of any forthcoming parties.
Having a coffee down the road at a local café, Marcello examined the art guide for new exhibitions. The Gagosian Gallery from New York had an address in Rome. Perhaps we should see it? Marcello’s hands were in constant motion, feeling inside pockets of his loose fitting suit, inside his jacket, in the shirt pocket of his 3€ shirts proudly bought from a local market. He is always searching for an elusive lighter to light his hand rolled cigarettes. Eventually he finds the lighter on the second time around his pockets – it was in his pant pocket all along. He drags on his cigarette, squints his eyes and says, finally, yes, the Gagosian.
There had been talk that Gagosian was building a new art gallery on the outer edge of Rome after making a big splash in Venice with a show by the official American artist Ed Ruscha. The talk went that more American galleries would set up shop in Rome and bring an already ‘vibrant’ scene to international prominence. There was yet more talk, perhaps inevitable, that it was just another case of American cultural indifference to the local scene, and it should be resisted at all costs. Whatever would happen, we were keen to see the gallery and what it had to offer.
With map in hand Marcello led us back across the Tiber and into the city centre. Passing Hadrian’s Column of Trajan and down some narrowing side streets it soon became obvious that we were lost. We emerged into a large square that was part parking lot, part open air market specialising in art prints of birds and fish. Parts of Rome seem to be over specialised, perhaps in keeping with the medieval ambience of the old city. At one point in our long walk around the side streets, Marcello pointed at a shop and said, “That store specialises in repairing briefcase lids.” Marcello checked the map and read the street sign ‘Via F. Borghese’. He shrugged. Asking a woman at the market, we were directed to a large building on the other side of the square. Police stood around cradling machine guns and chatting. Marcello led us straight past the police and to a door at the far corner of an indoor square. On a buzzer on a nondescript door was ‘Galleria Gagosian’. Marcello pressed the buzzer. A few second passed and a striking looking Asian woman opened the door, her eyebrows raised quizzically. “Galleria Gagosian?” asked Marcello. “Yes,” said the woman. “Exhibition? Here?” “No. This is just an office.” Marcello quizzed her. There was no gallery here. The woman was in Rome to put together a catalogue raissoné on the works of Cy Twombly. And what of the talk of opening a gallery. The woman denied everything but added cryptically “We have plans to do many things.”
We walked away, our guide grumbling into his hand. Marcello had an idea. “The Il Ponte Contemporanea is the best gallery in Rome, follow me.” And so we did, along cobbled streets, down steep alleys until we found ourselves on the chic and expensive Via di Monserrato. The gallery looked closed with a workman out the front and up a ladder attacking something with a screwdriver. We stood back but he waved us in when he saw us.
Gianni Piacentino’s show with Il Ponte Contemporanea is a retrospective of work from 1966 to 2005. Piacentino was one of the Arte Povera generation of the 1960s, but where many other leading lights of the movement stressed the formal poetry of found materials, Piacentino’s work was more in line with emergent styles in radical minimalism. This work, the stuff from the 1960s, is a shiny, sleek and internationalised version of minimalism. One piece from 1966 in the show was a U-shaped construction that hung on the wall like a door frame. It was painted in a ravishing blue and could have been made yesterday. Around 1970, Piacentino broke with Arte Povera and started getting interested in F1 racing cars, downhill skiers and aircraft emblems. He famously stated that his break with his former colleagues was based on his conviction that “art had to have something to do with beauty and decoration, even when taken to extremes.” Instead of a horse in an art gallery, Piacentino looked to the machine.
The shadow of the Futurists falls across Piacentino’s art. He loves the styling of the machine, the surfaces of the racing car, and his abstractions of the lines and forms suggests a fetishist’s love of detail. It was said of Piacentino’s early work that he conformed to the notion of radical minimalism as a parenthetical quotation of painting, but the work seemed to also suggest a love of decoration which his later defection from AP seemed to confirm. The recent work doesn’t need much justification beyond the fact that is beautifully made. In one work, a long blue steel car with wheels tucked out of sight as though it was about to make a land speed record attempt, sat next to a work that was a frame like a painting, but was made of metal and had large clasps on it like a ski boot. The whole series of works, stretching back to the 60s pieces, had some suggestion of art forms but also referred to things from the world. The work was remarkable in both its precise and unwavering consistency and its wilful eccentricity. It would perhaps be no surprise then that Il Ponte Contemporanea also represents Australian artists Paul Ferman, Selina Ou and Tracey Moffatt.
Heading back to the car, Marcello talked excitedly of his plans to open his own art gallery. It sounded like a pipe dream, but he was so enthusiastic it was hard not to get excited for him. As we walked, he explained that there were many opportunities in Rome for the adventurous contemporary artist. Sure, there was plenty of bad art, but there was a margin to be filled, a possibility of something new. As we walked, we seemed to have gone a long way further than we had gone in the morning. Marcello stood in the street and scratched his head. He shrugged and said “The car must have been towed”. We asked a group of parking police who were standing around smoking and chatting where the car would be and were directed to a car impound yard down near the old Olympic Village. We took a cab to the other side of town, past the obelisk commemorating El Duce and found a large yard full of cars and motorbikes behind a line of fir trees. Marcello had left the house without his ID and asked us to show our membership card for La Società per la Unificazione Delle Arti e Della Vita. The woman behind the glass smiled and pointed at the cash register: 190€.
