Conceptual Elegance Robert Storr

To say that the art of Paolo Canevari is stylish is to state the obvious. However, it may echo in the ear and mind of some as a double-edged form of praise. For we live in an ostensibly anti-aesthetic period when “style” is self-evidently suspect and having it—personally as well as overtly featuring and refining the most stylish aspects of what one makes “in all seriousness”—prompts anxiety if not hostility, so intent have people of critical sensibility become on resisting seduction in all its guises. I must confess that I am not among them. As a “consenting adult” I have come to trust my own instincts when the opportunity to seduce or be seduced spontaneously arises. And while I sometimes marvel at the confidence with which Canevari and his work go about the business of ensnaring and holding my attention, I am content to let that happen for the sake of the conceptual rewards and perceptual pleasures offered.

Which is not at all to say that his is easy charm school art. Often it is quite the opposite. Especially when it comes to the videos he has made. I chose one of them for the 2007 Biennale di Venezia of which I was the overall Artistic Director. Indeed, I was, so to speak, there at the creation of the work he premiered on that occasion Bouncing Skull (2006–2007). The context in which it was made is key to what it is and what it means.

As chance would have it both of Canevari and I were in Belgrade at the same time in 2006. A richly layered Balkan city with all that that entails of architectural diversity in terms of cultural origins and epochs, the recently embattled capital of Slobovan Milosevic’s Serbian nationalist enclave had also been deeply scarred by the United Nations mandated bombing of his military and governmental headquarters in 1999, an assault by American aircraft that resulted in Milosevic’s agreement to negotiate an end to the Serbians’ genocidal campaign against ethnic Albanians and Muslims in neighboring Kosovo. Most severely damaged during the attack was the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense building which still lay in rubble when Canevari and I visited six years later.

Impressed by the site and keenly aware that the war in the former Yugoslavia was the worst conflict within Europe since World War II, Canevari decided to shoot a video sequence there during which a solitary young boy dribbles a football as similarly energetic but otherwise idle boys do throughout the region, indeed throughout Europe and throughout the world. An “innocent” playing in the ruins with a childish game being at once the poetic parallel and the antithesis of adult war “games.” But for one added detail. The ball which one only vaguely perceived when the camera initially strives to capture the scene of self-aborbed, self-competition is revealed by the end of the shot to be a human skull. What is the conscience awareness of the boy as he toys with the head of a dead man?

Canevari is too wise an artist to ask such a bluntly editorial or rhetorical question and so draw an obvious moral from the image. Instead he just delivers that image to the viewer and effectively leaves that person holding the bag. If he can be said to have a consistent artistic strategy, his way of not explaining himself or his art would seem to be it. He has befriended enigmas and put them to work causing sympathetic, sometimes whimsical, sometimes aggressive bewilderment in others. Thus, in two other videos he sets on fire objects that do not normally burn—another skull and a pistol—having previously set a tire ablaze in Ring of Fire. For those familiar with news reporting of the rites of retribution during the slum riots of South Africa in the 1980s—the image will immediately recall the way “traitors” to the community were executed by the mob by having a tire doused with fuel tied around their necks and lit so that they were immolated in the radiant glow and fumes of burning rubber. One need not look to Italian Renaissance paintings for gruesomely graphic depictions of martyrdom and human cruelty; just turn on the television.

But video art is not television; rather it employs the same electronic medium to distill a new type of pictorial art, specifically a time based form unavailable to old masters such that when we watch one of the works just referred to we not only witness the horrible loveliness of the conflagration but experience its duration—the time it takes to consume the things upon which it feeds—thereby affording us an unwelcome period of reflection of how long the victims of so-called “necklacing” suffer.

Meanwhile, Continents (2005), made the same year as the previously discussed Ring of Fire, sardonically addressed geopolitical difference by tethering restive animals to labeled tires; a pig for Africa, a cat for Europe, a rabbit for Australia, a dog for the Americas and a rat for Asia. In contrast to the notion of universal harmony among all God’s creatures emblematized in the American primitive painter Edward Hicks’ visionary renditions of an Edenic “Peaceable Kingdom,” Canevari gives us a tragic-comic version of the world as divided up among essentially captive animals both domestic and feral, each with its own fierce territorial regard for the “ball” to which it has been chained.

Canevari’s objects have much the same quality of his videos. If anything they are literally as well as metaphorically “darker” and often quite simply black. Frequently rubber tires used both as ready-made elements or as raw material for the fabrication of forms have provided the basic optically opaque, tactilely off-putting ingredient, much the way Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz used beeswax as their signature substance, and David Hammons has also used inner tubes and basketballs as his. Thus Black Stone (2005) Rubber Car (2006) and Nobody Knows (2010) present monolithic, monumental enigmas—the first and last being “Platonic” geometric solids, the middle one a monstrous war machine—in a uniquely 20th century sculptural idiom.

There is, of course, something inherently absurd about all of these works and I take it that such absurdity is precisely the quality that Canevari wishes to foreground; that is to say a kind of alert and bemused alienation devoid of the sentimentally of distressed surfaces and eroded forms typical of existentialist/humanist art of the postwar years. Yet the minute I have typed that oft-employed term I am reminded—by Canevari’s work as by countless other indicators as well as by my own experience—that warfare has been the human condition for centuries and in our own period the constant preoccupation of much if not most of the world. In truth we have yet to enter a truly “postwar” era.

More than any animal species—more so, even than Canevari’s menacing dogs—we are our own worst enemies; homo homini lupus.

Which in a roundabout way brings me back to the appeal of Canevari’s stylishness. Or, dare I say—with all respect for Charles Baudelaire who is always there to instruct us in the unrelenting discipline required of this vocation and the profound philosophical resonance of the term—Canevari’s dandyism. Or at any rate its appeal to me, since others of a less worldly more puritanical bent are free to scold as they see fit—and I’ve no doubt that they will. For impeccable style and the self-consciousness and self-control necessary to maintain it are all too easily ignored or taken for granted signs of an instinctive drive to rise above the baseness of our innate bestiality. To be sure when that drive for formal perfection is overtly allied to such bestiality as it has been by Fascism, the consequences are ghastly and contemptible. But as Baudelaire, Georges Bataille and a host of others who have cultivated les fleurs du mal demonstrate, the capacity to explore the potentially sinister recesses of human nature does not automatically make one a criminal, nor even the moral accomplice of those who cause actual harm, the common erroneous assumption of people who so fear their own dark side that they choose blindness as a convenient way out of confronting themselves eyes wide open. To the contrary active curiosity about the things we fear, and above all those things in ourselves that we fear but know ourselves capable of just confirms that one is—we are—all-too-human. That Canevari does this both rigorously and with flare—the mark of a stylish man and a stylish artist—is the measure of his insight and his talent.