Thursday, April 22, 2010

Punta della Dogana



Our first stop was Francois Pinault's new contemporary art museum at the Punta della Dogana. It's extraordinary. The building alone is worth the admission fee. It started life as the customs house, and the renovation did it proud. The brick glows, the wooden ceiling beams impress, and the new concrete is so smooth it feels like marble. The art looks fantastic in this place too, as you enter grand spaces or catch a glimpse of sections of artworks through a gap in the wall.

The standout piece was by Jake and Dinos Chapman, called "Fucking Hell." It's composed of 9 dioramas shaped in the form of a swastika with incredibly detailed scenes that combine Hieronymous Bosch with model train sets. But imagine scenes of nazis and skeletons both killing each other and morphing into each other. The imagination is baroque and gruesome; the effect is to create a sense of wonder at how fucked up life has gotten for humans, and it doesn't look like it's going to be a good afterlife. Luckily we saw this last because we would have had as much interest in the other artworks after this. It trivialized the other art, which may not make a lot of sense for a museum.


But we did enjoy the show and the museum and it was a terrific introduction to Venezia. The picture of the frog is part of a Charles Ray sculpture. After the art we took the vaporetto to San Marcos and sat in the big campo there and ate ice cream.



1 comment:

cgbikes said...

Aren't you cute!