I was running to the meeting with the art director and manager of Florian's Bar. Right off the Accademia, across the bridges, squeezing and elbowing my way through the million tourists and art addicts who had landed in Venice for the Biennale opening—like me.
I was very nervous. Within myself, I was praying to the angels, to God, to the Goddess, to give me a hand, to help me convince Florian’s Bar to allow me to carry out the performance I had seen in a vision a couple of months earlier and was now here to do.
The performance was a matter of life and death for this artist.
I was either going to succeed or fail. If I failed, I would go back to Split and stop being an artist altogether.
I would get a normal job, as my husband's family had envisioned for me and as I had fought against for years—on a reception desk.
The vision of this performance came to me in a flash while painting the Argentine artist Ernesto Morales through a video call. I shared the idea with him right than, and he thought it was impossible and stupid.
I shared the idea with Marina in Los Angles, and she said, "Go do it," and held my hand metaphorically with messages all the way from Split, via Slovenia, to Venice on the million-hour coach journey, where my body was stiff with adrenaline and fear.
Dakis Joannou, whom I had the honor of meeting and painting—also via a video call from his office in Athens—said to me, "Do it. Don’t ask permission from anyone. Italians are so bureaucratic that if you start, it will take forever, and in the end, they might say no. This way, at least no one has told you not to do it."
Antonio had a house in Venice and aunts there, I remembered, and I asked to him to figure out who the mysterious owner of Florian’s Bar was. I appealed via Instagram for permission to do the live painting performance in the bar in the most desperate way, giving so many reasons, for i simply had to do this performance, and I was in Venice already.
My vision connected the eons of artists in Florian’s Bar with those of today. I wanted to be the artist who paints the artists arriving to present at the Biennale. Artists sometimes fall into the shadows of their work, and I wanted them to feel like muses for a moment—in Venice, at the Biennale opening, at the most romantic and oldest café on St. Mark’s Square, where the Biennale was conceived. With the big band playing movie classics, and the delicious coffee and cake rituals, I wanted them to have that moment, to bee seen, valued and relish it. My life is a movie moment.
I had managed to convince my husband to support the idea and invest in it. I had 12 days in Venice booked. My 1.5-year-old baby Flori was at home with him and the nanny, who was helping, and in this way, weaning her off breastfeeding. And I had enormous, full breasts, leaking milk through my clothes, as I, too, had to be weaned off the baby.
Three women designers decided to support me. I had written to them with the concept, and each one of them sent me their art to dress me for the role. Anamaria Asanović equipped me with a series of dresses, Tamara Bombardelli lent me a huge number of her bags, and Victoria Grant sent over a hat she had selected for me to wear for this performance, which I picked up in Venice—except it was not a hat; it was a black, beautiful crown. I did not really know these women well at the time, and their support not only surprised me but made my flighty intention seem more serious, making my performance real and my obligation to actually do it undeniable, even though the whole time I almost disbelieved I could.
Running to the meeting I had managed to arrange by sheer miracle, I saw a monk ahead of me. By his attire, he looked like a Buddhist monk. For an instant, something in my body engulfed him, recognizing him as a sign from the divine.
From the biography of Marina Abramović, I had gathered that whenever Buddhist monks appear and pray in her house, miracles and blessings seem to follow. So, while I had not touched on Buddhism, to me, this man was a sign—or so I hoped, in this moment of nervous adrenaline. Just as I was about to pass him, the monk grabbed my hand, placed a wooden bracelet upon it, and a little golden badge into my palm, closing my fingers over it. He asked me to write my name in his prayer book so he could pray for me. So I did.
Bundling past the elegant stores, nearing St. Mark’s Square, I looked into my hand to see what he had placed there. In my palm was a golden badge upon which was written:
"Work and find peace."
I smiled, put on my black high heels, and click-clacked trough the chessboard stone paving into Florian’s Bar.
There, the management of Florian’s listened to my idea. They decided not only to allow me to paint and realize this performance for the entire pre-opening Biennale week while the art world was in Venice, but they also solved the scariest element—the most expensive coffees I had ever had on this planet, which I wasn’t sure I could cover for all the artists, were going to be sponsored by Florian’s Bar, along with anything my artist muses wanted to drink.
It was a coincidence that this was the single Biennale for which Florian’s had not commissioned an artist intervention—because the institution was celebrating its 370th anniversary and was preparing to make a movie in the autumn. So for this Biennale opening in Florian’s, there was simply Sunci. Seeing as Florian’s only worked with pedigree artists, this blessing was quite a platform.
In the days that followed, I painted many artists who were thrilled with the experience of being served silver-service coffee and treated delightfully by white-suited waiters as they had their portraits painted in the heart of bustling, dreamy Venice.
I met the artist Tomás Saraceno, who was a star of that Biennale, and for whom Florian’s held a little breakfast party—complete with tarot readings of his spider tarot cards—while I carried on painting, right in the middle of the party, capturing a number of his guests from life on canvas.
I arrived in Venice completely alone, on a guerrilla art mission, petrified.
While painting, I made many friends—the best of them being the Viennese artists Lua Mua and George M. For the next few days, the three of us became the Gate Crasher Collective, entering many art parties with random princes, diplomats, and artists—uninvited but welcomed upon arrival. I even entered the Biennale gardens themselves, for which I had no pass until my arrival in Venice, but I ended up getting in with an invitation bearing my full name.
I saw another guerrilla artist posing as an old man painter—Banksy—selling paintings of Venice. Of course, I only figured it out after reading about it in a magazine later.
There were a lot of people I knew from my past life as an Italian artist who were present, as ever, in the Biennale hallucination—where, as far as my subconscious is concerned, they all reside permanently. By seeing it all existing—the people, the art, the world art tribe gathered—it helped to decalcify the crust of disbelief that I had developed in the Balkans, where it’s so easy to doubt that an art scene exists where art is appreciated, where artists are valued and honored, and where they can actually make a living from it.
The Balkan artist is plagued by terrifying self-doubt, frequently questioning whether they are mad for carrying on . Society is so materialistic, living in a permanent state of scarcity and mere survival, so anti-artist in its mechanical, material function. Artists are crucified again and again—by neighbors, family, and society—who don’t understand them and just want them to shut up, get a hair cut like everyone else, get a safe job all the way to retirement, and be a cog in the post socialist- system that runs well enough -if only they would stop glitching.
Even Marina Abramović said to me, "I left the Balkans when I was 29, and even that was too late," when I asked her how to do it here.
The Venice Biennale does exist, however, and it is the closest sense of heaven on earth for an artist. The things that can be experienced in the pre-opening days of the Biennale in Venice are as bizarre, magnificent, beautiful, and delightful as they are filled with an enormous amount of serendipity—actually, pure magic. But it works on trusting the magic—it all happens to you if you dare, if you go, if you jump. I suppose the magic is even augmented, the miracles all the more palpable and frequent, because enough believers find themselves in the same place at the same time.
The whole week, everywhere I went, everybody in the streets and at the parties—because of my headpiece—called me La Regina. But what I had done was prove to myself that I am and continue to be, and that it is worthy to be, despite the context—where it is difficult as a mother of two, a wife, and with the expectations of my husband’s family and a Balkan society that has little art industry—to carry on being myself, an artist, something I keep having to remember.
No comments:
Post a Comment