I did manage one night to catch the latest show at the Strozzina, Portraits and Power, as well as to stumble across the delightful Biagiotti contemporary art gallery. The first was perfectly satisfying, if not the best show I’ve seen in that venue. I just love the way Strozzina shows are curated. Their explanatory panels are so well-written, lacking as they do that awful, pretentious kind of art-speak that is only understandable to a pitifully small number of people. (Note to self: find out who’s responsible for this approach there.) The second is a gallery that I clearly should have known already and look forward to knowing a lot better.

I don’t know when I’ll be back into a major swing here, but I did want to reach out to whoever is still out there to let you know that I am not abandoning you forever! Just taking things a bit easy for now.

Also, if you happen by some crazy chance to want to email me, please know that I check this account rather infrequently right now, so please be patient waiting for my response.

Happy holidays and catch you again sometime in 2011.

Ricci removing pollution from the Florence duomo

The next time you see someone who seems to be cleaning the marble exterior of a Florentine monument, look closer. It is likely vigilante ‘smog artist’ Alessandro Ricci collecting material for his next artwork.

Born in Florence in 1968, Ricci has been creating his ‘paintings’  using the thick black pollution that coats the city’s statues and buildings since about 2003. It’s his personal form of environmental protest. ‘Smog destroys buildings and people,’ he laments. ‘The streets of this city are so small; they were never meant to host all these cars and buses.’ In fact, Ricci says, in all the other European cities he has visited, he has never collected dirt as black as what he finds here.

Read more at The Florentine

What is an image, anyway? And in the context of art, can it ever really ‘disappear’? These and other provocative ideas are at the heart of the current show at the Centre for Contemporary Culture La Strozzina, the Foundazione Palazzo Strozzi’s younger, hipper cousin located in the cavernous spaces below its ground floor.

Continuing in the expertly curated and art-star-laden vein of the centre’s last show, Manipulating Reality, this show, Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art, similarly addresses art’s central role as translator of the human experience. Richter, who is arguably one of the world’s most important living artists, has made a career out of questioning our relationship with visual forms of representation-our perception and manipulation of them; their intrinsic nature and value-and he has inspired a generation of younger artists in the process.

Read more at The Florentine.

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Grow-homes

Finally, Florentines no longer have to trek all the way to Prato to see cutting-edge art of all shapes, sizes and mediums in a present-day architectural setting to match. The new EX3 Contemporary Art Center in Florence’s east-end Gavinana neighborhood (beside the Coop ‘mall’ on Viale Giannotti) features a cavernous 700-square-meter central hall that would set any installation artist’s heart aflutter. Indeed, the center’s purpose is to function as a type of kunsthalle, that is, a venue meant strictly for temporary exhibits and works designed specifically for the site, rather than to house a permanent collection. This site-specific aim is also reflected in the center’s name, a combination of the words ‘exhibit’ and ‘Quartiere 3,’ where it resides.

EX3′s current double bill, which runs through April 11 and is curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Arabella Natalini, showcases the work of Italian Eva Marisaldi and Swiss-born duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. Both exhibits include pieces designed specifically for the center’s spaces as well as older work. The artists also share a propensity for experimenting with a variety of 2-D and 3-D mediums involving predominantly inexpensive or everyday, found materials.

Read more at The Florentine.

Eva Marisaldi, grigio nonlineare

I’ve always associated the word “biennial” with a wide-ranging, prestigious, cutting-edge art exhibition that takes place bi-annually and exposes you to the latest in contemporary art from all over the world. A lot of people who aren’t even into art know about the one in Venice, which closed less than a month ago, or the one hosted by New York’s Whitney Museum (on next year).

It turns out there are actually quite a few of them around the world now, with the quality, size and scope varying considerably (Vancouver has what seems like an awesome public-sculpture version for example). I’m not sure how recent this trend is, though I suspect that it developed over the last couple decades at most. It seems like a smart marketing gimmick to make what could be just another enormous group art show appear serious and authoritative.

I kind of feel sorry for Florence’s version though. By following so closely on the heels of such a legendary older cousin, it seems doomed to an unflattering comparison. I wonder why the founders chose to schedule (and name) it that way. Maybe they were thinking they could capitalize on the contemporary art pilgrims here for Venice, although I’m pretty sure they were no longer around. Certainly adopting the same funding structure as Venice (making participant artists pay their own way) works to their advantage.

At any rate, I was still quite excited and intrigued to see what Florence’s own stab at a biennial would be like. And I can honestly say that I wasn’t disappointed, though unfortunately I wasn’t surprised either. One reason I enjoyed it so much is because I’m a big fan of good old-fashioned painting, which you might say has a love-hate relationship with the contemporary. Over the last 50 years or so, pretty much since the birth of conceptual art in the 1960s, plenty of artists and smart art experts alike have rung painting’s death knell. I certainly get the impression that some snooty artsy-fartsy types barely take painting seriously as a contemporary art form if it’s not by, say, Gerhard Richter. I overheard a young Polish painter at the Florence show say how refreshing it was to see so much painting, since these days the big art shows tend to be dominated by installation and video art.

Which brings me to why I was also left somewhat uninspired. I saw a lot of pretty things, to be sure, but nothing that shocked me or challenged the way I look at the world or grounded me to the spot in utter adulation or made me angry or gave me shivers or moved my insides all around because of its sheer audacity, its absolute uniqueness or its ability to totally nail an aspect of living in the world today. There were maybe four videos and a couple installations, with the rest predominantly filled out by those art-medium canons of painting and sculpture.

But that’s Florence for you, isn’t it? This is the kind of “contemporary” art this city tends to prefer—the tasteful, relatively innocuous kind that would look lovely in your living room. Alright, I’ll concede there was one major exception—Marina Abramovic, the “grandmother of performance art” who turned her acceptance speech for this year’s outstanding-career award into another one of her pieces.

Marina Abramovic performing her acceptance

For the rest, the best stuff was all pretty tame. My favourites were: Kateryna Kosianenko for her whimsical Ukrainian take on Botticelli’s Primavera; Dutchman Reinder Ourensma’s stark yet intimate scenes of the Irish countryside; the totally classical, naturalistic painting of British resident Annelies Clarke, whose style belies her 4 years of training at the Florence Accademia; the funky neon sculptures of Italian Christian Gobbo; the ennobled and vaguely-Giottesque figures in the paintings of Canadian Diana Dean; and Brit Lee Campbell’s luminous landscapes.

The major thing going for Florence’s “biennial” is its association with the United Nations “Dialogue Among Civilizations” program and the recognition it has received from Artists for Human Rights. In fact, being so liberal in terms of style and quality certainly gives it a more democratic feel, like even if you’re not a big art star, you can still take part in an international exhibition set in a beautiful, historic city.

This “city” (which sure doesn’t feel like your average metropolis) is also paradoxical for how ungratefully her natives treat the foreign residents and visitors upon which their livelihoods are based. It’s one more example of how Florence feels stuck in the Renaissance: her native sons and—I’m sorry, I’ve got to say it—especially daughters still consistently greet outsiders with the same disdainful and conceited sprezzatura that emanates from the portraits of Ginevra de’ Benci and Lucrezia Panciatichi.

It seems however that Florence just might be on the verge of some big changes. One thing grounding her firmly in the 21st century, whether she likes it or not, is the rapid growth of her visible minorities. In the last 10 years, the city’s face has had a considerable make-over in this department. But there’s also something harder-to-pinpoint in the air these days that could finally shake Florentines out of their centuries-old Renaissance stupor.

Certainly, the founding of the Contemporary Art Biennale in 1997 and the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation in 2006 did a lot to fertilize the soil, and now little signs seem to be popping up everywhere. In June, there was the election of whipper-snapper Matteo Renzi as Florence’s mayor. His gender-balanced crew of ministers includes boy wonder Giulano Da Empoli, an Italian writer, journalist and Venice Biennale board member, as head of culture. By October, Da Empoli had already published an ambitious report online: “Florence is the next Florence – Una strategia per il contemporaneo a Firenze (A strategy for the contemporary in Florence).”

The city’s main problem, which it shares with Rome and Venice, is summed up thus:

The epicenter of Italy’s cultural crisis is found more in these cities than elsewhere: the laurels of the past that overwhelm the present and the future, the splendour of our heritage that renders institutions and citizens lazy, like so many dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.

As the report rightly points out, however, Rome and Venice have been far more successful than Florence at swimming against this formidable tide, and should be looked to for guidance and inspiration. Toronto is another city that’s mentioned as an example to be emulated for being the first to create a “fashion incubator.”

Then there’s also the Toscana in contemporanea initiative launched by the region of Tuscany in October involving tons of events and continuing until June 2010. And more recently the delightfully baffling “not-quite-a-prank”/artistic intervention/futuristic map Firenze 2059, organized by the region’s culture and tourism minister Paolo Cocchi and Florentine artist Pablo Echaurren. I was on the verge of actually reporting on these faux future plans for the city, as other journalists have, before I figured out what was really going on. Whether you like them or not, Da Empoli and Cocchi are at least causing a stir and getting people to talk.

Hip new venues on the outskirts of the city are also stepping in to properly showcase and create contemporary art, like the cavernous concrete spaces of EX3 in Gavinana or the Warhol-inspired Florence Art Factory in Osmannoro. Global art stars like Mark Lewis (Canada’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale) and Cindy Sherman are showing up in gorgeous, expertly curated shows staged in evocative settings. The latter is of course Florence’s main attraction when it comes to exhibiting new art: the irresistible charm of her Renaissance stage set, a theater within which the living and the dead can dialogue.

The Robert Mapplethorpe show at the Accademia, though technically pairing two dead artists and disappointingly tame, still shows the mainstream potential for placing the new alongside the old, not to mention how such an approach can even appeal to classical art connoisseurs. On the other hand, I happen to know one for whom the experiment did not sit well. The friend in question was visiting Florence with a very specific agenda to see the city’s antique masterpieces unencumbered, and resented being forced to share her view of Michelangelo’s David with the Mapplethorpe nudes at his feet.

This highlights the challenges facing those of us who want to promote and exhibit contemporary art in this city. While the conversation it sets up between the past and the future can be fascinating for progressively-inclined residents who get tired of the old stuff on its own, there will be visitors who fight alongside traditionalist Florentines to keep things just the way they are. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all plays out.

There will also surely be some pessimists who scoff at my suggestion that things are really changing. They will remind us that plenty of innovators have launched forward-looking experiments here before (um, Futurism anyone?)—freak occurrences after which Florence quickly reverted to her comfortable old Renaissance self, if she paid any attention at all. Such spoiled sports might even be right, but that kind of attitude won’t get you anywhere. Especially not if you wish the situation were otherwise.

I hereby put a call out to fellow residents of Florence who share my desire to see this city exploit its vast stores of potential and truly embrace the 21st century. Let’s take Ghandi’s advice and “be the change we want to see.” I am making this commitment to you, cari lettori, and I warmly invite you to do the same. Even if you don’t live in Florence, your outside encouragement and examples are integral for enriching the conversation and inspiring us with what’s possible.

I, for one, am going to do my part by probing Florence’s vulnerable avant-garde underbelly and laying bare her under-publicized pockets of contemporary art and culture.