THE PYRAMID OF VENICE

By Marco Baravalle

7 August 2020

Marco Baravalle, core member and founder of S.a.L.E. docks - Venice’s only large-scale art space programmatically committed to perversions of the power vertical - reflects on the city’s many pyramids: old and new, visible and hidden, actual and metaphorical.

Venice has pyramids too, the most famous being the marble memorial to Antonio Canova in the church of the Frari. The cenotaph (based on a model for a monument to Titian, conceived by Canova himself) was realized by seven Venetian sculptors who had been close to the Neoclassical master during his life: Antonio Bosa, Giuseppe De Fabris, Bartolomeo Ferrari, Rinaldo Rinaldi, Domenico Fadiga and Luigi Zandomenighi. The monument, unveiled in 1827, revealed itself as a massive marble pyramid face, 11 meters tall, with a side of 8,8 meters, standing on a stone base 10,45 meters long. In the middle of the pyramid face there is a bronze door; just below it, three long stairs provide a cascading stage for the various mourning characters of this sculptural group. First on the left, a winged genius with an extinguished torch (representing the death of inspiration); next, a very sad looking Lion of Venice. A medallion with the effigy of Antonio Canova is placed above the door. On the right, in the act of entering the tomb through that entrance, a procession of three women (the three sister arts of sculpture, painting and architecture). The first of them, sculpture, holds a funerary urn containing the sculptor’s heart.

Yes, his actual heart. In fact, the corpse of Canova was treated almost like that of a saint. Since everybody wanted a piece of it, a relic, it was dismembered. The heart went to the church of the Frari, the hand was kept for decades at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, while the rest of his body (now joined by the hand) rests in Possagno, his hometown. Are these macabre act of ritual butchery and the pyramid preserving the memory of it a good metaphor for the present predicament of the city of Venice? A present characterized by the dismembering of Venice’s housing, its public spaces and its peculiar amphibious form of life to satisfy tourist demand. Everybody wants a piece of it, not just to buy but also to sell.

So, who will be able to survive the possibly impending years-long serious crisis of the tourist sector, caused by the pandemics? Even if they complain, cruise companies (and the semi-private company managing the city docks) certainly will; so will real estate funds, landlords or agencies owning dozens of apartments rented through Airbnb, hotels run by multinational companies, not to speak of art foundations that are the cultural expression of big financial private capital. All these subjects are close to the top, and – just like with the collapse of a pyramidal marketing scheme – they can run away with the money, leaving those at lower levels to deal with their own losses. Even worse, some of these players could choose to invest, hoping to buy more pieces of the city at cheaper prices, or intercepting some public financial aid for their own sake.

Further, the pyramid marketing model is useful because it describes without romanticism something that is a fact. The conflict between the current neoliberal use of Venice and an opposite possible use based on care and commons, can’t simply be described as an antagonism between a few Goliaths at the top and a multitude of Davids at the bottom. Before the temporary collapse due to Covid 19, the ever-expanding lower levels of the pyramid demonstrated the existence of a molecular fabric (made of landlords, retailers, corporations, guilds, cultural entrepreneurs) sharing the values of the higher levels and not remotely interested in turning the pyramid upside down. Still, if there is a moment that could be favourable to rethink the socio-economic model of the city, a moment in which energies should be spent trying not to go back to normal, that is now. If we focus on the microcosm of Venice, the recent lockdown (with the consequent halting of water traffic) was populated by images suggesting an atmosphere of speculative fabulation, such as the video of an octopus of considerable dimensions spotted in the usually troubled waters of the historical city.

Is this an anticipation of a city to come? An element of a political program where the pyramid of profit is substituted by the idea of a community which abandons anthropocentrism, where a non-extractivist ecology of relationships between humans and non-humans is set in place? Well, to think now of the success of such a program could be labelled as an experiment in speculative fabulation in itself. But this would be true only if I were writing in the void, that is in a space-time devoid of those social players that could make this program their own. In any case, from the local to the global scale, the situation is fortunately far from being pacified. Climate justice, feminist and indigenous people’s movements are struggling all over the world, and Venice is no exception. A global generation is growing and coaleascing; and as it coalesces its members live and experience the deep feeling that the normality of neoliberalism is the problem.

Speaking of movements and going back to where I (we) started, Black Lives Matter has recently put a spotlight (or rather, a noose) on monuments. It helped everyone to become conscious of the fact that a monument is often a topographic expression of defined relations of domination and that to tear It down has nothing to do with the idea of erasing history. On the contrary, such an act desires to shed new light on it. It aims, for example, at decolonizing nationalistic memories.

Well, maybe the pyramidal shape of the Monument to Canova inspired art historians to investigate the financial operation behind its material construction. In fact, we know now that the cost of the monument was covered thanks to an international subscription through which 118.038,45 Austrian Liras where collected. Donations came from Europe and beyond, but the most generous contribution arrived from the Emperor and Empress of Austria. It must be recalled that, at the time of Canova’s death, the region of Veneto was a province of the Austrian Empire and that the sculptor himself, before dying, realized another pyramid, the funerary monument to Marie Christine of Austria that was installed in the Augustinian Church, in Vienna, in 1805.

This little story shows one more time how art often becomes an ornament to power and how close it is to capital. The present of Venice is no exception, and this ambiguous relationship to power is not even hidden by more sophisticated dispositifs. If the funerary monument is no longer the favourite form of art patronage, today Venice is punctuated by art foundations connected to international aggregations of private capitals: The Pinault Collection, the Ocean Space and the V.A.C are each paradigmatic examples of the proximity of art with the global financial oligarchy.

A few years ago, Mr. Francois Pinault, a tycoon of the luxury industry who owns both Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, two of the most prestigious Venetian exhibitions venues, was interviewed by the New York Times. In a burst of rhetorical horizontality, he declared that despite his age, he did not see his private museums as mausoleums and that his design “is exactly the opposite of a pyramid”. Indeed, one of the criticisms levelled at museums and exhibition spaces (be they private or public) in our networked society, is that the strict application of managerial criteria to art has transformed any quality into quantity, imposing flatness on a realm that was supposed to deal with verticality, namely with the depths of history (be it past or future). Now we know how problematic the relationship of the modern museum with history was (producing Eurocentric, patriarchal, classist, and nationalist narrations), still the explicit rejection of the “pyramid design” by a multi-billionaire art collector should not surprise us.

Probably the point is not only about verticality or horizontality, flatness or depth, private or public. For many of the oligarch art lovers “donating” their “museums” to our communities, the words of Douglas Crimp (referring to Walter Benjamin’s writings on collecting) could come in handy: «The contemporary private collection, as opposed to Benjamin’s personal collection – is amassed by those “stupid and passive” collectors whose objects exist for them only insofar as they literally possess and use them. (1) ». But Benjamin’s criticism implicates public museums too, guilty of producing the illusion of a universal knowledge stemming from a historical continuum driven by progress. As Crimp notes, the German Jewish philosopher suggests that through the act of collecting, an alternative to both private appropriation and the institutional historicism of public museums emerges. This alternative is called historical materialism, in the words of Benjamin himself (quoted by Crimp): «The task of historical materialism is to set to work an engagement with history original to every new present. It has recourse to a consciousness of the present that shatters the continuum of history. (2)”

The problem looks the same today, whether your vantage point is in front of a nineteenth century marble pyramid; or looking at a contemporary installation on display in a private collection. We need to train our “critical consciousness of the present”.

1. D. Crimp, This is not a Museum of Art, in D. Crimp, On The Museum’s Ruins, The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 1993, p.203

2. Ibidem, p. 204-205