Aernout Mik Raw Footage, 2006 Still from digital video on DVD
This Fall (until late Jan 2010), Palazzo Strozzi offers two important exhibits on realism and art. The major show “Art and Illusions – Masterpieces of Trompe l’Oeil” has received a lot of attention from the press, including a long review in the New York Times. The show “Manipulating Reality” in the basement Strozzina area for contemporary art, on the other hand, has not been reviewed on an international scale, and yet it fully deserves a visit, a review, and consideration both on its own and in relation to the exhibit upstairs.
Palazzo Strozzi offers an annual “Palazzo Ticket” that gets you in to each exhibit once. I had been waiting ‘til 2010 to get mine, but learned last week that there is a holiday special: 20 euros gets you in to all the exhibits from December 5 2009 till January 23 2011 (the end of next Fall’s show on Bronzino that promises to be great!). This season’s ticket is an excellent Christmas gift for yourself or for a loved one who lives in or near Florence.
I started my visit at Palazzo Strozzi the other day with “Manipulating Reality”, a rare example of a contemporary show that is easily apprehensible and truly relevant to daily life. The exhibit consists of 23 photographic or video approaches to the theme of how these media convey reality. Each work closely relates to the title of the show – I asked myself “how does this piece ‘manipulate reality’” and found myself impressed by how accurately the curator has chosen pieces that fit this theme.
Presidency, 2008 Veduta dell'allestimento in mostra © Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra
In a world in which even my mom can use photoshop, we know better than to trust photos and video as “reality”, yet the large-scale glossy C-prints at the Strozzina, many in a journalistic style, both exude a sense of authority and demand to be closely questioned.
Three of the most important themes present are war, authority, and culture. War is an excellent topic to deal with as we are rather too used to being exposed to imagery of war on tv and in newspapers. The photographs of soldiers in Iraq by Paolo Ventura are faceless images of the desolation and horror of war, set up to be so strangely impersonal that you could project any person into them… then you read the wall text that explains that these are dummies set up in the artist’s New York studio. You realize that anything you see in the news could be set up this way; how do we know what we can trust? In a strange reversal, Aernout Mik’s Raw Footage is an assemblage of television footage shot for but discarded by television news agencies during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Normal people hurry across the screen on their way to work (?) through bombed out areas, body language exuding fear, while unknowing cows attempt to graze in what appear to be residential areas.
Hewlett and Kinsley for Google Street View
The theme of authority is present in almost all the works, but two stand out in particular. When you enter the exhibit you start in a room that contains life-sized images of the Oval Office. These photographs by Thomas Demand, upon closer examination, are not of the real office but of a paper model that he creates, photographs, and destroys, showing the transience of power. A totally different kind of authority is played with in the video art of Robin Hewlett & Ben Kinsley for Google Street View with the collaboration of the inhabitants of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh. Toying with the idea that Google’s photographic mapping gives us a reliable (and invasive) impression of spaces and what they contain, the artists manipulate that reality by staging a 17th-century sword fight, a gig by a garage band, and a big parade with a brass band and majorettes for the Google car. Set up in a room with two video projectors, you can interact with this pieces by controlling Google Street View with a mouse while watching a video of the actual performance piece organized by the artists.
Photo Album, 2006-2007 Vedute dell'allestimento in mostra © Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra
Culture, the third theme, is perhaps best exemplified by the luscious Australian forests photographed by Rosemary Laing, whose Groundspeed photos seamlessly merge woodlands with patterned Persian rugs. This grafting of culture on nature is an “explicit criticism of the appropriation of the Australian continent by European colonizers, a process underway for at least 200 years”. In a lighter project by Cody Trepte, 75 hand-made photo albums on a shelf have an objective description of a family photo (a cultural object we all know) on the front; you are invited to take one off the shelf and open it… and a surprise awaits you inside.
I left this exhibition feeling that every work deserved a mention. Together, they remind us of the “manipulated reality” in every moment of our life, not just in what is declaredly “art” but – almost more so – in media in a more general sense.
Weighed down by these conclusions, I tromped up the stairs to the more hyped “Art and Illusion” show. The paintings (and a few sculptures) here fit more easily into the category of “art” than the raw video footage below – even though some works, like the 18th century wax anatomical figures from La Specola, were in fact created for entirely other purposes. The show attempts to define trompe l’oeil, fooling the eye, but often deals with what I’d more accurately call just “realism”. With works that range from a 1st-century Roman fresco to Patrick Hughes’ three-dimensional “flat” painting of 2008, the exhibit successfully proves that the concept of illusion concerns artists throughout history (with the gaping hole of the Middle Ages not mentioned).
When Early Modern painters created these illusionistic pieces, were viewers asking similar questions about reality than those I asked myself upon viewing the contemporary photographs downstairs? or is our “manipulated reality” different thanks to the pervasiveness of digital media?
[Photo credits: all photos http://www.strozzina.org/manipulatingreality/ ]
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This article originally posted by me on Diari di Viaggio/ Turismo.intoscana.it.
