This short article is written in response to the constructive review of my exhibition published in The Malta Independent on Sunday of 24 April by Marika Azzopardi, and is a subjective critique of the ideas behind the exhibition.
Like other European states, Malta is passing through a bizarre and fateful evolution: the more that art education and art itself establish their domain democratically at the heart of our society, the more mediocre and superficial are the results. So, I, a 21st century Don Quixote, have decided to confront this question head on, like a matador and his bull, and to campaign against the Maltese windmills, mounted on my own Rozinante.
In my last, and I hope final, exhibition entitled HOME at the National Museum of Fine Arts, I decided to tackle the issues of Modernity and Modernism, giving a nod towards the preposterous evolution of Post-Modernism, and − to borrow Clement Greenberg’s phrase − Post-Post Modernism. Aware that today modern museums are no longer the ‘embodiment of art history’, but instead have become institutional powers engaged in creating art history, as Harold Rosenberg noted, I decided to attack the first windmill. Does the Maltese Fine Arts Museum agree with Rosenberg’s acute perception? Is the museum an embodiment of art history, or is it today rather a creator of art history? Is it simply reflecting yet another mediocre situation, without embodying anything, without trying to create anything? Unfortunately, and I say this with great regret, I would say it is the latter.
And so, in order to test out these questions, I gave the spur to my steed Rozinante, heedless of the cries my squire Sancho the Good sent after me, warning me that most certainly they were windmills and not giants I was going to attack. However, I was so positive that they were giants that I neither heard the cries of Sancho, nor perceived, near as I was, what they were, but made at them, shouting, “Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you” (with apologies to Cervantes).
My attack against the second windmill concerned the segregation of life and art. My exhibition HOME concerned me, my life, and my very existence. Prof. Paul Sant Cassia, in his compelling opening speech, declared that Giuseppe’s work is autobiographical. This is only true in one respect, since what I was trying to do was to make my own life the subject matter of my art. I myself became the object of my own art. However, this aim had nothing to do with my autobiography, since it involves the artistic dilemma between art and life, with me as the subject matter. In Modernist philosophy art is equated to life, sometimes even in its most raw empirical form. In this way, Damien Hirst’s real pharmacy becomes a work of art within a museum space, consequently art. There is a total breakdown of the barriers. The contemporary Serbian-American artist Marina Abramovic shows herself physically, and sometimes naked, as a work of art. The artist him/herself becomes the subject matter, the object of art. In Herbert Marcuse’s words, this breakdown of the barriers between art and life can be defined as an onslaught on the bourgeois system. However, just as the Maynard Keynes pothole theory saved the bourgeois system from the Marxist revolutionary righteousness of economic theory, so this Marcusian breakdown of bourgeois culture was saved by co-opting the very same breakdown by the system itself. Thus an anti-bourgeois avant-garde ambush was transformed into an avant-garde establishment within the very same system it had tried to subvert. Playing off reality against life is no longer subversive. It now forms part of the bourgeois system of artistic values, and has become the dominant suppressive wave against the rise of any opposing cultures. This recalls Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism and Infantile Disorder (1922), which underlined the ability of the bourgeois system to assimilate within itself the very germs that are attacking it.
So I introduced my doors in my exhibition. They were real doors, from real spaces, of real moments of my ‘me’: two doors from Mellieha and one door from Paris. My doors became DOORS. This was the third windmill. And this windmill was one of the strangest and strongest giants. I was perplexed as to whether I should retain their door-ness. Should they remain my Mellieha/Paris doors? Or should they be transmogrified, and transcend their own essence? Is Marcel Duchamp’s urinal a lavatory, or a fountain, as the title suggests? Did the museum space succeed in transforming the lavatory into a fountain, as the artist desired? Did my doors change their materiality and their essence, exactly a century after Duchamp’s urinal? While wanting them to retain their Mellieha/ Paris presence, at the same time I insisted that the museum space must transcend their empirical objectivity. And by titling my doors Backdoor to Hell, Gates of Heaven, and Home as Passage, I felt like King Canute, waving back the waves of time.
So saying, and commending myself with all my heart to my lady Darling Lemon Child, imploring her to support me in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by my buckler, I charged at full gallop and fell upon this third windmill standing in front of me. But as I drove my lance-point into the sail, the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping away with it both horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to my assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found me unable to move, with such a shock had Rozinante fallen over with me.
Me has become the subject matter. And me as jigsaw-puzzled through my life of interrelationships with my loves, my family, my intimacies. These took the forms of photographs, with the most minimal intervention possible, except where I wanted to accentuate a hidden feeling. In fact, the whole installation was based on the very modernist act of non-intervention. These objects were brought in the exhibition gallery tale quale. However, their independent mutual interaction with the doors created an artistic act of its own. Mintoff’s 1950s legacy, together with my father’s saxophone, simultaneously integrated their forces with the juxtaposition of the Strada Stretta dinner and the London lunch, the former recreating my Macbeth relationship with dark Goxwa and the Hamletic latter, entitled Beginning of a Home, with bewitching Alice. In the midst, Vera in a crepuscule texture hovers and disappears within and behind the walls. However, are these representations representing copies, or are they images of me? I dived towards the next windmill, and opted for the latter.
This is me.
Scent of mown grass, together with the swing hung from a far off time with rusty hinges, in the back garden of adventures made real. Father, aloof and dream-like far away, feeding the croaking ravens and crows, which by now had become accustomed to their daily one o’clock grubs from the remnants of yesterday’s groceries. Father, in a mist of memory, harbouring aborted dreams of far away, virtual, unrealised triumphs. We, sitting on boxes and trunks, excited at the thought of our imminent departure, closing doors to open others already closed, intimidated by stories of child abductions, rapes and sharkish mutilations.
Scent of Dettol, perfumed with cigarette smoke, drenched in the fragrance of beer, under the dark lights of brilliant red shadows, hovering between the doors of hideouts and Caravaggesque escapes. Uncle Censu finding me under his bed, usurping his multilayered comics and childish erotic scenes, such as those common advertisements: a woman dressed in black, tied to a tree, with a devilish creature lurking behind, proposing some remedy as a cure for something, now long forgotten. My awkward feelings, vaulting into my mama’s lap, protesting my strange sensations, so near to the feeling of pissing, and yet stronger: a smile of surprise.
Scent of salty seas, with Monica’s promise of marriage, the dummy exchanged as a token of our future love, yet to be beheld, by the surprise of none. The police station, with adjacent moulded doors, right by the roadside, wedging the sea from the lake, became the site of a magical intercourse, my parents oblivious to our ritual of marriage solemnity, sworn beneath their very eyes.
Scent of oven-baked potatoes, colonising the whole street, competing with the Imqarrun cunningly baked simultaneously. Street clatter with church gossip, checkmating grave sinners and the doors of Hell opening up for the unforgiven, to be henceforward slammed shut forever more. Hiding behind doors, hearing the tension between sinners sitting round a table with a grandfather’s clock with two Moors ready to knock down the bells, amid the crying of five gridel mewed up in coloured cages.
Scent of oil and paint, wine and vodka. Andrei and a new evil baptism in caves, under trees, beneath the red bridge of Suicide Lane.
Scent of crispy snow, two snows, five thousand kilometres apart: a re-homing.
The crunchy crystal scent battered by a sea of firewood burnt for love. Slaps enjoining hinged roots to close open doors, leaving ajar the earrings in the grass. Gozo ghosts roaming and musing round in museums, which are manipulated for a latent love. Alice in Wonderland passing through real and virtual doors that open onto nothing, until the final access flaps our way through: face to face.
Homecoming
As for the works of my colleague and collaborator Michael von Cube, I decided to leave the text written by Dr Detlef Bluemler intact, as received. This text, texture and deconstructed translation, sometimes barely comprehensible to my mind, reflects the macabre joie de vivre of Michael’s Bavarian homeland. The chance distortions of the received text are in fact a direct continuation of his watercolours. His words are thus made to form an integral part of the exhibits, as much as my price list, and the hidden home caption fundamentally fashioned mine.
“… But, just nevertheless, then these looks at a Hohlheit (be hollow) bordering in debility are shown: in these drawings and pictures. Where Pygmalion is afraid of incarnate Aphrodite, Michael von Cube to her still gives blood. A little only, but the life flows! And in spite of a remarkable Flächigkeit (flatness in this painting (however, absolutely also in the Zeichung). The faces also still concise in their(her) ‘colorlessness’ only state that they state nothing.
“‘With apparently light hand,’ writes Andreas Kühne, ‘signs, one paints and aquarelliert from Cube physiognomy, meetings and interiors with malice, baseness and banality contaminated world.’ Nevertheless, from Cube is nunmal realist. The reality already exists − he (it) does only visibly by his (its) specific abstraction. In old pictures and writings trained science historians and art historians Andreases Kühne Lessing, Lichtenberg and Hogarth troubles: the rationalistic Impetus ‘from Cubes to pictures refers to them(her,it) do not want to inform us, but reproach with the distorting mirror’.
“After David Low, William Hogarth (18th century) was the grandfather of the satire. Therefore, Michael von Cube is his (its) grandson. And so detail-crazy Hogarth a world has drawn which would not have had the idea approximately where the pictures would run once, Michael von Cube stops ebendiese pictures, she(it) freezes how one says in the electronic media, piekst (needles) in this balloon… filled up with warm air, they is produced from them thousand times 24 hours the day… The subject has not changed which Michael von Cube treats since (more than) to twenty years from and. Colours and forms absolutely a little. Where earlier, today, first of all, in the beginnings of the early eighties years which dominated now and then caricatural line the sheet(leaf) filling he(it) steps back in favour of a more laminar characteristic. The allegory of the respective quite special (mental) condition of the separate needs no more Ziselierung. There Michael von Cube takes(accepts) absolutely the ‘entertaining’ commenting 19th century, in fine neighbourhood to the Don Quixote of Honoré Daumier.”
Dr Detlef Bluemler, art historian
Mr Schembri Bonaci is an artist and lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta