Tag: Art

The Pocket Gallery reopens with “I’m Happy To See You”

The Pocket Gallery, a contemporary artspace, has reopened with an exhibition by the Italian artist Marzia Gallinaro. This gallery, situated within the two drawers of a renovated screw-tip box, offers contemporary artists an alternative to a traditional, fixed location gallery and the complete ephemera of an internet exhibition.

Marzia’s opening was held at the popular Paduan summer night-spot, Il Chiosco (The Kiosk) on Wednesday evening. The event was well attended, and not only by the friends of the artist and gallery owner and curator, Matthew Broussard. With a sly nod to the idea of a ‘peep show’ small groups of 4 to 6 people filed in to an intimate viewing room to see the more than 100 erotic drawings that Marzia had created for the lower drawer of the gallery while many others hovered around the door craning their necks to try and see over the hunched shoulders of the chosen viewers. In the upper drawer of the gallery the ‘floor’ had been replaced with a magnifying glass marked with centimeters (never ask a carpenter how long 15 cm is). Within the span of a few hours well over 60 people had viewed the works. Four of the drawings were purchased for private collections the night of the opening.

The exhibit will be available for viewing throughout July and August both by appointment within Italy and on the Pocket Gallery website (available July 28th) which can be accessed by clicking on the link located above and to your right. Click below to watch my video of the exhibition opening…

“Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you glad to see me?” With a one-liner Sophie Tucker turns the most intimate of situations into a worldwide cultural icon. Contemporary art often plays with the tension between private and public,exhibiting as “product” the most intimate emotions: a (sometimes) refined variation on the most common marketing ploy of all. Marzia Gallinaro acknowledges this specific aspect of the Pocket Gallery and makes it her own: an art gallery is a public viewing space; but when it’s hidden…?…down there, in your pocket…? It becomes a symmetrical mirror of the tendency of contemporary are to trumpet private sentiment in public. She pokes fun at those who become voyeurs under cover of culture, and who slip into small private places (art galleries?) like pre-teens to peek at dirty pictures. Her nervous line drawing which smacks of graffiti (another public venue for private eroticism) creates a tension well suited to the paranoia (of lots of guys) at having to use a magnifying glass or a ruler… the gallery isn’t the only place where size matters.”

-Matthew Broussard owner and curator of the Pocket Gallery


What am I doing with my life? (The importance of glass cherries).

The poet, Eugino Montale says, “The ancients always said that poetry / is a stairway to God”. Montale doesn’t specify if that stairway is for the reader or for the poet…he only maintains his sense of self-irony, “perhaps not if you read mine.” The thing that I take from the poem is that Montale has found (or rediscovered) that stairway through an act of intense observation, of which the writing is only a record.

Everyone has to find their own ‘why’ in their own way for how they’ve chosen to spend their life. I wonder if it isn’t even more difficult for people who have chosen to spend their lives working a 9-5 office job? I spent a lot of time trying to answer that question myself and here are the best of the many ideas I came up with.

I think that in the contemporary world acts of intense observation and consideration are few. Our world is scanned and channel surfed, flickered but not ‘seen’ in any real sense. My idea of what the artist’s job is, is to catch people’s eye for long enough that they see below the surface flood of sound and colour and scent. Even if it is only 30 seconds instead of 15 to say to themselves, “look at how intense that red is!” at least they’ve finally seen red for a half a minute instead of it not registering at all…and I, if I’m the artist, have had the pleasure of figuring out something about red in the process.

Maybe this is a stupidly simple idea of things on my part and of course has nothing to do with the practical aspects of making a life as an artist. Perhaps also hopelessly broad as it implies that anything done with attention is art (although I have to admit that I find that idea very attractive). It reminds me of the time I visited Hawaii (Kauai); there were two kinds of flower necklaces…the ones made of orchids that smelled of nothing but looked beautiful for days and the ones made of fragipani which were fabulously fragrant but brown and falling apart by the end of the day though they still smelled like heaven…two completely different ways that I experienced what flowers are, that made me ask myself questions about the nature of permanence/impermanence and beauty. What fun to ask these questions and without worrying about how many different answers there might be.

Nature has something of the same drive as artists :

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age;” (- Dylan Thomas).

The world creates and destroys in profusion and some people find a need to transform that frantic transience through observation. Our perceived world won’t hold still so artist’s give us talismans, little (or big) anchors to hold on to…others use these moments/observations a way back to or out of themselves, or to god, as they choose.

Aristotle says, “All Art is concerned with coming into being.” though I have not read enough Aristotle to say if that coming into being is the art or the artist or why either should be important…but it sure sounds nice.

Martha Graham, an early icon in modern dance said something more direct:
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”

What informs our vision of past cultures of the history of the human race? Art, architecture, literature, historic chronicles, music, clothes, jewelry…all acts of observation in some sense, interior or exterior, profound or frivolous. My own experience of art is that it is more of a bridge than a stairway, and the bridge is one that is in time: from the past to me the work of other artists known and unknown speaks to me through architecture, through poetry, and yes, even through a brooch made of glass cherries…someone sat and drew, designed, that brooch in austria in the 30’s?…maybe that person is even still around? but this little piece of them has made its way into my life…it holds my shirt closed, it makes my daughter smile, it tells me something about a time when ‘beautiful’ meant something different from what i see now. Not better or more beautiful, just different. It makes me smile, it makes me think.

Google Translator vs. The poet.

Obviously translating into one’s mother tongue is easier (and hopefully more accurate) than translating into a language that you’ve studied in adulthood. My daughter will be truly bi-lingual, growing up with the two languages simultaneously. I will never be, even learning Italian from the ground up with the aid of her children’s books. But I have to ask, what’s a ‘serious’ translation? Signs, labels, menus, operating instructions for military equipment, legal documents? One you’re getting paid for?

Poetry is pretty serious business language wise; a distillation of the heart of a language that stretches sense and usage to its limits, layers multiple meanings, half-meanings, wry jokes, and rhythms into the briefest possible space sometimes into a single word. For this reason poetry is almost untranslatable; a poetic translation of the work is often a re-composing in a different language that strives to maintain the tone of the original, a literal translation can easily miss the nuances of individual words (see Robert Pinsky’s translation of ‘The Divine Comedy’ vs. the classic scholastic text of Mandlebaum). Translating instructions, menus, and traffic signs is comparatively straightforward (it is perhaps because of this that overconfidence or laziness causes so many charming and laughable errors).

The wonderful thing about translating is that it opens a door between two cultures. Grazie to all those who studied Russian so that I could read “The Idiot”  and “Crime and Punishment”. Despite the challenges, as a poet and a translator I take the work seriously and have had wonderful moments when my American friends read (and are interested in and excited by) the work of an Italian (or French) poet they might never have  otherwise encountered and when my Italian friends start asking me who William Carlos Williams is.

I do have to extend my sympathy to Google Translate, at least they offer (along with the unintended comedy) the option of suggesting a better translation.
My desktop widget translator is worse. If I translate from English to Italian “I’m a big fan of Mike!” (even with the proper name capitalized) it becomes: “Sono un ventilatore grande del microfono!” I have now become a large exhaust fan for a microphone…pazienza