Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...theme of this year's Biennale-that vast, sprawling international conspectus of current art that opens at irregular intervals in the public gardens of Venice and is one of the city's main tourist attractions-is "Dalla Natura All'Arte, Dall'Arte Alla Natura" (from nature to art, from art to nature). Appropriately, then, the star of the 1978 press week was not an artist but an animal...
...half of Paradiso's artwork was a mucca finta, a fake cow, a four-wheeled chassis draped in a cowskin. It was to be wheeled into the pen, the deceived bull would mount it, and the results-as the Biennale catalogue noted, with the usual clarity of Italian art criticism-would touch "the central core of the present evolutionary-involutionary crisis." Finding the proposed event "degrading" (degrading, that is, to Pinco rather than art), one radical Italian journalist shot off a wire to the Italian equivalent of the A.S.P.C.A., demanding that the spectacle be stopped. It was, he said...
Since nothing in Venice goes down as well as a scandal, especially a sexual scandal, the corral soon drew a throng of artists, reporters, dealers, critics, museum folk and art groupies. As the massed cameras clicked and whirred, and the crowd of connoisseurs looked breathlessly on, the bull glared at his mechanical bride and abruptly scrambled up on her. Then, with the weary expression of Porn Star Harry Reems working off his debts, Pinco ejaculated on the ground. So ended Paradiso's work of art, which was, in its way, emblematic of the Biennale: a captive beast (Natura) struggling...
...mock primitivism was intended to say something about survival, in homage to the fishermen of the Po delta; but since the tuna was not caught by the artist but bought in the Venice fishmarket, the project looked vicarious, like Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess. What it had to do with art was anyone's guess. But then, art is a matter of context. It is what you find in a Biennale...
...motto for such work might come from one of Byron's letters from Venice in 1817. Painting, the irritable bard declared, was of all arts "the most artificial and unnatural... I never yet saw the picture ... which came within a league of my conception or expectation; but I have seen many mountains, and Seas and Rivers, and views, and two or three women, who went as far beyond it, besides some horses." Just so, all art is a lie told in the service of truth, but however feeble art may be in the face of nature, one still cannot...