Italica: "alla maniera italiana"

"Oggi, ch'indi riluce / languido lume é lacrimosa luce"

(Today, that begins to shine / languid flame and tearful light) ¹

A legend richly detailed in Anglo-American and German culture is that of Italy as other. Other than where you come from – a place where streets are named after artists, where life somehow seems more vital, where passion rules reason. The 17th century saw the romanticization of Roman ruins by the townscape painters and the 18th century saw the Germans Goethe and Burckhardt stirred by the Italic. E. M. Forster's Room With A View contrasted the vital character of Italy with puritan and mercantile Victorian England and articulated the aesthetic discontent of generations of young northern aesthetes. Italy as other in the 20th century was the backdrop for a postwar North American coming of age party featuring cheap wine and the loss of virginity.

Italy as the place where you come from is another story of course. To be of Italian heritage and living in North America has been a different experience for each successive generation. To the immigrant first generation, North America was the other, a place of exile and manual labour. To the bicultural second generation, North America was the scene of cultural conflict. To the third generation, Italy may become little more than a cultural memory – a family album.

Italy as a source of myth, Italy as an ancestral home: is there an intersection where these two Italys meet? Is there an intersection for the millions of Italy's of the mind, of individuals, who belong to the Italic family, either through birth or through adoption? This exhibition is the result of my working with a number of artists for whom the Italic has some significance. Sara Angelucci, Carlo Cesta and Dino Bolognone are second generation Italian-Canadians. Jane Buyers and Julie Voyce are Italophiles of British ancestry. As curator, I belong to the latter group. My observations on this theme, the theme of a culturally specific characteristic, are naturally coloured by the lens of my own ethnicity.

Italy has always been a giant theme park for the visual arts and its art history is an obvious answer to the question of why contemporary Canadian artists would find it a source of inspiration. This influence is undeniable for any artist because the very idea of Italian culture retains such a vivid visual character. But historical models and references are really not the concern of this group of artists and none would list the subject of this exhibition among their primary, personal or artistic concerns. In short, this is not a demonstration of ethnic pride and nationalism or cultural shangri-las. Italica exists in a subtler form. Italica becomes an issue as part of an investigation into personal identity, or a reference in the rhetoric of materials, or as the exotic site of experience.

My own associations with the Italic came about rather by accident in my late teens and early twenties. Having grown up in North America I was used to the idea of people of different cultures arriving here to become Canadians or Americans. Different people wanting to live with us, wanting what we want. It was great for national pride and propaganda: Complain? Hey this must be a great place if everybody in the world wants to live here! But where was here? My neighbours didn't speak much English, but for what they could, I admired them. I was never forced to learn a second language. However, not in school, no job prospects, no vehicle -- here in those years was hour long bus and subway rides, vast windswept parking lots and industrial parks on the edge of the city. Here wasn't so hot. A friend told me about Italy: The greatest place in the world, beautiful yes, but more important, there they respected artists. Art, adventure, romance, -- Ciao Canada.

The Italy of my mind is courtly, aristocratic and elegant, well groomed and well mannered. It is also ancient, dark and inscrutable. But the baroque and the antique force themselves upon the concept of the Italic as much as woods and snow are cited as typically Canadian. Therefore, when I think of the Italianate, I can't help but think of the Torquato Tasso's "languido lume e lacrimosa luce" – languid flame and tearful light.

The 16th century Italian poet's "lachrymose" religious verse was the counterpoint "heart" to the Jesuit "mind" in the battle for the hearts and minds of Europe during the Counter-Reformation. The passage above is deluxe - the dark Italian "L's" and the round, more resonant Italian vowels are like loops and swirls carved in cherry wood. The language is rich and ornate and sonoric, almost architectonic in its alliteration, yet, it describes pure liquid: the sticky nostalgic sentiment of the helplessness and dependency we associate with childhood. This contrast of form and content finds its ultimate and uniquely Italic expression in the cherub or "putto" whose soft rounded features are regularly plaster cast and gilded or marbleized or cast in bronze.

This is the Italica we have been taught to scorn. Modernism, rationalist architecture, form and function -- the international style declared war against the artifice of decoration in favour of modularity and practicality. Originally the modernist dream was a futuristic socialist vision of antiseptic cities and modular high-rise workers' housing. Unnecessary decoration was associated with barbarism1 and as modernism became associated with progress in North America, decorative artifice gradually came to signify lack of taste.

As an artistic canon modernism was insufficient because it was irrelevant. It was an academic game that did not address the questions of context and identity: e.g. race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality as determining factors in artistic expression. The relaxation of this modernist hegemony has allowed artists to explore areas of their visual cultural that were previously taboo. New liberties permitted the quotation of styles. The complex of feelings and ideas could be addressed through the juxtaposition of existing representations.

Thus when we look at the work of Carlo Cesta or Sara Angelucci, the form or content may be a quotation, specifically, to the architectural interiors and exteriors of their youth and by extension a reference to family and a complex constructed identity. In Sara Angelucci's triptych In Reverence, the architectural reference is like a fading memory; indirect, distant and blurry. Her hand held, available light photographs are taken on holidays, while travelling -- looking for the familiar in the exotic. Baroque palaces and churches such as Versailles and St. Peter's perversely become containers of intimate, domestic signs. Vaguely felt and complex feelings of "home" are given expression in unfocused, indistinct contours. Chaotic, apparently unintended views mimic the random associative character of stream of consciousness memory.

Carlo Cesta's Strongties rests on multiple references. It is a baroque, family coat of arms created with decorative motifs from the machine shop and the mechanic's garage with materials purchased at the Canadian Tire store. Strongties touches upon the material and formal character of the home and work of Cesta's youth. It is a meditation at once on the complex of abstract concepts and deeply felt identities of family, ethnicity and class.

The baroque reference may be more than just a nationalistic identifier. The amorphousness of the style, its organic model, its apparently irrational character, is like feeling itself – unbounded, incommensurable. The scrolls of Dino Bolognone recall the grand scale of the baroque – a virtual cascade of images and textures, thoughts and feelings. Direct Italic references and quotations are less important, mere backgrounds and facts, than the baroque richness of his diaristic tapestry. Like the oversized marble cherubs in St. Peter's basilica, Bolognone's scrolls are a large-scale intimacy.

Jane Buyers draws on the material culture of Italy to invest her sculptural metaphors with a hyper reality. Bronze and iron are employed to describe and magnify ephemeral and organic subjects. The material is more foreign than familiar, more exotic than domestic. The baroque rhetoric of material and scale Buyers uses in her work transports us from the here, to an ancient and aristocratic Italica.

Julie Voyce travelled to Italy to find hyper reality too, and documents it in a visual diary. I guess that her Italy of the mind may be similar to mine: courtly, aristocratic and elegant at least. Perhaps not dark, but certainly inscrutable. Her light filled images are visual information unbounded, uncontained, uncensored. The images posit the artist as a mirror onto the self and the society around her. Perhaps it takes the foreignness of the other to reflect adequately on the foreignness of the self.

Gordon Hatt, January 1995

Notes

1. Torquato Tasso, Alma inferma e dolente.

2. The modernist Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870 -1933) criticized ornamentation as primitive, associating it with body piercing and tattooing.

List of Works in the Exhibition

1. Sara Angelucci, In Reverence, 1994, silver print triptych, 52 x 37" each panel (framed).

2. Dino Bolognone, Untitled, 1994, engraver's printing ink and oil pastel on paper, 396" x 53".

3. Jane Buyers, Untitled, 1993, Cast bronze, painted iron, 35" H x 18 D x 21" W.

4. Jane Buyers, Giardino Ideale, 1993, ink on paper, 23 " x 31" (framed).

5. Jane Buyers, La Rosa Nel Giardino, 1993, ink on chine coll paper, 23" x 31" (framed).

6. Carlo Cesta, Strongties, 1991, Foil tape, midget louvers, rubberized undercoat on melamine, 59" x 49".

7. Julie Voyce, Paris, Venice, Rome, Naples, 1992-94, Watercolour on paper, enamel on plexiglass, 3 panels: 30" x 49", 40" x 55", 30" x 49".

Cambridge Galleries, 1995

Guelph: The City that Works

 Guelph "works" the way that people speak of cities as "working." The streets are clean and safe, it has a living downtown core of small business, well-preserved historic neighbourhoods and a variety of social and cultural amenities. The housing stock is moderately and stably priced. It also has a small, active and engaged art community. 

* * *
In the time that I have lived outside the urban core I have never felt that the culture surrounding me was anything else other than natural and logical. I have sometimes struggled to express myself. I have struggled to understand too, by listening carefully to patterns of language, by analysing publicity and by examining codes of dress and manners. I drive on highways, ride escalators, walk through malls. It is a life that I had previously seen only as a child at my parent's side. Now I am back, like a stranger in my home town. I recognize the place, the people, the streets, but I feel that I am anonymous. I really could be anywhere. 

* * *
I once sat in on a town council committee meeting in which a participant strongly insisted that the town "had to have a theme." "A theme," I thought to myself, "how could one theme possibly represent the stories of all the people in the town?" My mind drifts to a reverie, to the feeling of myself, dashing across the town's main street in a drizzling rain. I have a six-pack of beer under my arm. I'll trade it to the owner of the junk shop for a souvenir - a favour for some German tourists. Is this a theme or is it a nightmare? 

* * *
The city or town, large or small, was once simply a place in which to live and do business. It is now common for civic minded people to speak of municipalities as tourist attractions. Towns and cities marketing their communities as such will have to face a choice. They may decide that the cultural life of their community is unique and feature civic life as a consumer spectacle. Fundamental to the marketing of the spectacle will be the idea that there are unique experiences that can only be obtained by travelling to the place itself. It will be an experience unlike anything you can see on TV or buy at a shopping mall. Real people will be seen living authentic lives. Do you like to eat? It is guaranteed that the tourist destination will have absolutely unique eating establishments. Do you like pictures? It has the originals. Sports? The real thing, as seen previously only on TV! 

If it is agreed that there is nothing particularly unique about the community then it may be necessary to import a spectacle: Perhaps mud wrestling at the mall? Or, if that doesn't work, the business people could wear cowboy hats and pretend they live in Dodge City. 

* * *
We know that big cities and artists seem to go together. What other class of people could redeem the modern metropolis's transparent greed? Cities need artists to create the illusion that urbanity is about more than the axes of commerce and the accumulation of capital. The urban art community assures us that contemporary urban life is meaningful and that the manifest social and cultural forms of the city are rich and significant. Artists make their art at great personal sacrifice and their interpreters admonish the craven and the philistine to pay heed: "Think about what you are doing," we say. "Just think about it." 

* * *
The urban environment is dominated by the presence of the commercial, journalistic or popular entertainment references. The information culture now defines the community environment more significantly and has a greater influence on the course of North American life than do the cycles of nature. The view from my window is more likely to reflect the character of my cable feed than the weather. In this sense, the civic environment is no longer defined by physicality. It is virtual. The urbis is now a web of communications that connect our northern-most communities with the same product, information and entertainment culture as the South. One can no longer speak of a rural culture that is substantially different from any small city or from the suburbs of our big cities. Rather, rural culture has become sub-rural, reflecting as much the values and way of life of sub-urbanity. The battle lines of the 21st century already pit the culture of the urban media classes against the sub-urban and sub-rural image consumers for control of the language. 

Artists have traditionally gravitated to the centre of the production of images. Product advertising, news and journalism, popular entertainment - these fields of image making are evolutionary primate cousins to the fine arts and are central industries in the modern metropolis. The creation and exchange of images in the urban centre, the cross fertilization of arts and the intersection of the different fields breed a hardened, antidotal fine art culture highly resistant to commercial trivialization and banality. This culture is at once despised for its lack of enthusiasm for the commodity circus, and desired for the same reasons. Sub-urbanity typically resists the hardened urban culture. It is resisted because image producers play with written, oral and symbolic language - they subvert its authority by shifting contexts and suggesting the infinite plasticity of language and meaning. This formless language mocks earnestness and sincerity with irony. It undermines optimism with scepticism and casts doubt on fundamental beliefs of progress. 

* * *
The Install Art collective, representing a core group of Guelph artists, proposes that 25 artists from Guelph and from Toronto find their "niche" in the city of Guelph. In as much as a title can signify anything common about a diverse group of artists, the title, Niche, betrays a desire by the artists to fit in: "Our intention is to build connections between artists and their communities - whether that be other artists or the larger community..." (Niche statement p.1). These are not Dadaist, or Surrealist or Situationist interventions that challenge the prevailing idealogy or aim to disturb the functional surface of community life. This is post cold war art, stripped of its political ideology and agit-prop roots. This group of artists does not function as an avant-garde for a new society. They retain a strong belief in the self-evident necessity of the work they make: They make art as a strategy for survival in the present, as a way of attaining something real in a virtual world and as a balm to a bruised post-industrial psyche. The work does not intervene to change - it is necessary to survive. It fits in. The question is: Does it fit in Guelph? 

* * *
What and where is Guelph? Is it a city? Well, yes. Is it a town? Well, yes it is that too. We associate art with major cities (great art from great empires?), but historically, major art movements have also had roots in the country. Small villages such as Pont Aven and Collioure and Emma Lake have played specific roles in art history. Small cities like Bielefeld, Birmingham, Dijon and Baltimore, however, have never held much interest for artists. It would probably surprise no one that many successful and important artists were happy to have escaped such places. Can small cities such as these - university towns, mill towns, regional centres - support an art subculture? Do they even need one? 

It is possible that the proliferation of images has accelerated at such a rate in recent years that it is no longer necessary for artists as a group to live in the urban core. It may be that a component of the creative process, that of reflection, has been sacrificed in the recent past to reaction. The regional centre, the mill town or the university town can play a role, perhaps, as a place where images can more slowly coalesce and where ideas can anneal. Perhaps Guelph can support an art subculture, establishing roots for successive generations of artists or perhaps Niche is merely the result of the passage of a few remarkable people at this particular time. If the people who call Guelph home continue to demand more from their language and culture than what is offered to them, if people outside of the media industry and the urban core demand more from their culture and not less, then it is possible that a non-commercial, participatory art culture may yet become a part of the sub-urban fabric.

Gordon Hatt, 1995

Mary Catherine Newcomb: Corpus Delicti

“The stuff that is outside... is also inside.”

The body as a medium and subject of visual expression is as old as the history of art. The ancient Greeks and Romans idealized the body in their visual arts. The artists of the Italian Renaissance aspired to the same classical ideal. Medieval artists, however, lost the interest and perhaps also the ability to represent the body. Nineteenth century landscape painters and 20th century abstractionists denied the body entirely and championed a disembodied spirit and intellect. The body dominates the visual arts -- then it fades from view, only to appear again. Enchanted by progress, we are confident in our ability to transcend physical limitations and we scorn our fragile bodies. Sobered by experience, we meditate on our transient flesh. Are we primarily physical or mental beings? Are human beings, god-like creatures who appear on earth with physical bodies, or mere animals, differentiated from other life forms only by the certain knowledge of our own mortality?

Mary Catherine Newcomb is an artist who tells stories that reflect her interest in esoteric knowledge. The media, subjects and symbols in her work are determined by the stories she wants to tell. The scope of her art production is wide and has included found objects, conceptual and interactive constructions, painting and sculpture in papier mâché, concrete, wax and plasticine. Beginning with her papier mâché works and body castings of the mid-1980s, to the recent plasticine works, Mary Catherine Newcomb has consistently returned to the body as the dramatic site of interaction between thought and feeling. In wax, plaster, concrete and plasticine she has used the body as a symbol of consciousness and as a vehicle to express universal desires and fears. The body in her work is not a classical image of perfectibility to be feared and adored, rather, the body is located at the intellect's base, as the core and character beneath all knowledge. The body is a partner in a dialogue with the mind, providing a wealth of sensory information to the brain and providing abstract thought with an emotional and physical context.

Mary Catherine Newcomb's figurative work has developed and matured over the past ten years and can be roughly classified into three bodies of work. Narrative dominates the earliest work. Figures interact -- they illustrate a dramatic metaphor, or act out a personal passion play. In the late 80's she added gesture to her rhetorical repertory through the pose and repose of body parts cast in plaster, wax and concrete. This work isolates feeling as significant and meaningful in its own right. More recently Newcomb has been exploring the expressive qualities of unmediated, tactile sensation in a series of large-scale plasticine works. These three approaches rise, subside and interleave through the decade.

An early narrative work, such as Untitled ("Boat"), 1987, is almost entirely symbolic in character.¹Stylistically, it is stiff and lacking in formal expressiveness. The use of papier mâché as a medium around this time, however, provided the artist with a sensual counterpoint to the creation of representative narratives. Working with papier mâché was a low-tech process that afforded the opportunity for a material bridge to an elementary, repetitive form of material play, a quality she would seek to re-experience in the later plasticine pieces.

When the artist moved into the more industrial processes of body casting, engineering took over from exploration. Dramatic moments in the stories of godlike, mythological characters are represented in this series of work in an "archaeologically distressed" form. If the papier mâché works retained a stiff, archaic quality, the body castings have a flowing, dynamic Hellenistic character. In an apparent counterpoint to the new materials, the intensity of the artist's rhetoric heats up into more dramatic "events". We feel we have entered a pivotal moment in the course of a drama when looking at these works. The intensity of these images is heightened by bizarre juxtapositions with animals and the highly naturalistic postures and gestures of the human characters.²The figures in these pieces are, for the most part, castings taken from the artist's body. Newcomb is both the artist and the model -- both the director and the actor physically interpreting the script. Works such as Untitled ("Motley Pie"), 1989, and Untitled ("Twin Goddesses II"), 1990, in the exhibition are exemplary of this body of work.³

"Twin Goddesses II" is an image of two female figures, one with a head, one headless. The figure with a head is wearing swimming goggles around her neck and holds a towel to her chest. She appears to be emerging from a pool, perhaps a baptism. Her mouth is open as if to take communion. The headless figure holds a snake towards her. The piece recalls the ancient sculpture Laocoon and its depiction of the scene from Virgil's Aeneid where Laocoon and his sons are strangled by a sea serpent. Whereas the death of Laocoon and his sons was a sign of tragedy in foretelling the immanent fall of Troy, the "Twin Goddesses II" is an image from a personal creation myth. The artist has created an image of the dialogue between the mind and the body -- where the body presents the mind with an incontrovertible awareness. For the artist, it is a statement about truth itself -- the physical, emotional experience of how one perceives something to be true. Truth, the artist insists, is only partly intellectual. It is also something felt.

When the complex narratives, metaphors and parables of feeling became less interesting to the artist, what remained was gesture -- the physical expression of feeling. Untitled ("Worm Man"), 1991, is the last of the concrete body casts.⁴Unlike the interplay of figures of the earlier narrative work, this piece and the body casts that follow it are more likely to embody an undefined physical or emotional feeling rather than illustrate an event within a larger narrative. It is a transitional work marking the end of the dramatic mythological narratives and the beginning of works that are almost purely emotional feeling given form. The "Worm Man" is an image of a man with half a head emerging from a coiled shell. It can also be seen as a possible ironic reference to the image of Venus being born from a scallop shell.⁵Interpreted from a purely physical point of view the piece suggests confinement and embodies the emotional struggle to be free.

The artist's figurative work began around this time to resolve into simpler statements -- a gesture, a reference, a feeling rooted in the body. Untitled ("Foot"), 1990 is a forward-looking piece that takes an unconscious expression, such as how you position your foot, and turns it into a quiet reflection on security and vulnerability; the exposed underside of the foot being a very vulnerable place. In contrast to the heavy languor of the "Foot", Untitled, ("The Ascent of the Virgin I & II"), 1994, express an anxious feeling of detachment and up rootedness. The alternately relaxed and tensed postures of the legs may suggest peace and anxiety, acceptance and denial. Recalling the earlier work, the "Boat", and its cyclical voyages between the living and the dead, the "Ascensions" replay the drama of every artist's split personality; namely, the intense introspective personality and its alter ego, the extrovert. Untitled ("Whisper-ma-phone"), 1995, continues the theme of the artist's ambivalent participation in the world. The crouching position of the figure with its face on the floor and the hands covering the ears is an unambiguous rejection of everything exterior. Yet the playful, wildly curling horn connected to the figure's hip appears to confound the figure's rejection. The world, in its wild and willful unpredictability, comes in the side door.⁶

If the narratives eventually resolved into the gestural statements of bodies and their parts, perhaps the next logical step on the part of the artist was to strip the figures of their dramatic gesture. This move is already hinted at in the matter of fact, oversized rendering of the "Foot", which bears little of the dramatic expression of other pieces made around that time. The scale of the "Foot" is the dramatic rhetorical device that replaces gesture. The plasticine body parts Untitled ("Tongue"), 1995 and Untitled ("Ear"), 1995, retain the same dramatic proportions. These sense organs stand as symbols of stimuli processing, heightened awareness and sensitivity. The gooey, home-made plasticine from which they are made is like a raw flesh which has had its epidermis removed. It is an irresistible primal muck that recalls an infantile, uncensored exploration of the world through the senses.

The profound experience of creating images with her own hands is fundamental to Mary Catherine Newcomb's understanding of her own art. From the early papier mâché works, through the body castings and the large plasticine pieces, the artist has literally immersed herself in her materials. The images she creates represent at once her connection to the larger world and her distance from it. The artist's hands, in the work Untitled ("Blue Hands"), 1995, may be gestural devices, but they are surely symbolic on a deeply personal level as well. The blue wax hands, chewed off at the wrists, are a symbol of a singular struggle. An inversion of the myth of Pygmalion, the artist has not fallen in love with her work, but rather sees in it the devices of her own entrapment. To make art, to be an artist, is a calling and a fate. Mary Catherine Newcomb affirms that the practice of making sculpture is not an endless love song in clay. It is a rage against limitations on the spirit.

Notes

1.    In Untitled ("Boat") a female figure dressed as a warrior lies on a flat-topped boat. At the prow of the boat is a laughing hyena. The "Boat" makes reference to the Hades of Virgil and the barge that carries the dead across the river Styx. The hyena, according to the artist, makes a mockery of the fate of the warrior (the artist?) and anticipates many return trips between the world of the living and the dead.

2.    The artist's use of animals in her work is consistent throughout her career. These animals may be likened to the animals of aboriginal creation myths. Rabbits, as carriers and symbols of occult knowledge, frequently occur in her papier mâché and concrete casting work of the 1980's. Mice, snakes, a hyena, a fish, a sheep, and an alligator make appearances in the narrative work as symbols of esoteric knowledge.

3.    Untitled ("Motley Pie"), concrete, 1989, is a dramatic image of the head of a sheep licking the hip of a woman. The sheep's head is suspended in air, its sole support is a steel bar that connects the tongue to the torso. A propane torch, anchored in the hollow of the cast body, sends a lick of blue flame from the place where the tongue and the hip meet. The sheep was part owned by the artist and kept on the co-owner's farm. The genesis of the piece came with the slaughtering of Motley. For Newcomb, the piece recalls our guilty relationship to the animals we eat as well as making reference to biblical animal sacrifice. The image according to the artist, comes from a dream, generated by the confused emotions related to the animal's slaughter and butchering. In the dream the artist perceived the animal licking her hip and characterized the feeling as a cleansing -- "a cleansing burn."

4.    The "Worm Man" directly precedes the artist's first plasticine piece, the large Untitled ("Shell"), 1992. The shell functions here as a creation symbol. The dramatic narrative (e.g. the depiction of a birth) is displaced by the dramatic scale of the shell and the muddy tactility of the plasticine. Yet, as conceptually monolithic as this piece is, fresh rabbit tracks in the plasticine indicate the artist's reluctance to entirely dispose of the narrative thread.

5.    The ancient myth of Venus has it that she was born from sea foam, but the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli depicted her emerging from a scallop shell in his famous painting, The Birth of Venus.

6.    Then he grunts, "I will call you by Whisper-ma-phone for the secrets I tell are for your ears alone." The Whisper-ma-phone is inspired by the children's book author Dr. Seuss. See Theodore Geisel, The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, Random House, New York: 1971.