Letter From CroatiaI II: Balkan Ghosts

“Fortress,” watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Croatia is geographically the heart of Europe. Historically, at different periods, it was the buffer between the Habsburgs on the Northwest and the Ottoman empire on the Northeast. Robert D. Kaplan wrote a famous book called Balkan Ghosts which dealt with centuries old conflicts in the region, a festering cancer that metastasized during the wars that erupted in the former Yugoslavia during the l990’s. The Serbian controlled JNA or Yugoslav People’s Army tried to take over Croatia, but Croatia eventually prevailed. However, how do the legacies of the past continue today? Though based on ancient conflicts (like the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 which is still a hallmark for many Serbs) the 90’s wars created a whole new slew of unforgettable atrocities. Still when one is faced with the red roof tiles, white limestone and clear blue azure sea, the prospect of strife dissolves from the pristine world that characterizes the Dalmatian Coast. Enter the harbor of Hvar (whose name comes from the Greek for lighthouse, Pharos) one is confronted by the carnival like atmosphere created by the yachts of the super rich for which this has become a Balkan Juan Les Pins. Yet on a hill overlooking the harbor a brooding ancient fortress shadows the festivity as a reminder that the past is never far away.

Letter From Croatia I: Brac

“Croatian Cloud,” watercolor by Hallie Cohen

There is a rumor that stone from Brac was used in the making of the White House pillars. In any case the largest island in Croatia (there are over a thousand of them) noted for its beaches and its rocky beauty, still houses Croatia’s only stonemasonry school, where students can learn an age old trade for free. The quarries of Pucisca, Postira and Selca still produce stone that is sought after for its facility in producing a clean polished surface. Brac is reached by boat from Split (where Diocletian’s Palace still stands as a monument to Bracian stone) and its geography gave it a certain immunity from the turbulence that swept the country during the The Croatian War of Independence which was fought from l991-5. Flying from Rome to Split, you enter a new time zone. In Rome stone is a tourist attraction. On Brac, it’s an industry. Yet the sleepy villages, whose hotels with their spare socialist realist style décor still cater to Russian tourists (along with throngs of Italians, English and Americans) as they did when Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia was allied, albeit ambivalently, with the Soviet bloc, are firmly a part of Marshall McCluhan’s Global Village. Unlike their cousins in Bosnia, the Croats (who historically braved the Ottomans from the northeast and the Habsburgs from the northwest) have emerged as intact from the strife of the past as the tidy red stone roofs visible from an airplane (in July they joined the EU). Even the Croatian clouds seem to prosper outlandishly, being so fluffy as to look like gigantic self-satisfied wads of cotton, or even snow that’s developed an immunity to heat.

Citizen Bezos

The Times ran a piece about the acquisition of The Washington Post by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The price was $250,000,000. “The purchase price of $250 million is a pittance for a man who ranked 19^th on the Forbes Magazine list of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of more than $25 billion (“A Mogul Gets a Landmark in the Capital,” NYT, 8/6/13), the Times noted. Communication makes for strange bedfellows. The Washington Post was once the proud fiefdom of the Graham family, whose prominence like that of the Sulzberger clan derived from the creation of a great journalistic enterprise. Now The Washington Post is a mere plaything for one of the most prominent of the new generation of super magnates who have landed on earth from cyberspace. Star Wars has overtaken the Fourth Estate. Just when everyone is thinking the newspaper business has become moribund, it becomes apparent that the seemingly arcane world of print journalism still catches the eye of modern moguls, who possesse a level of wealth never dreamt of even by Citizen Kane, aka William Randolph Hearst. Warren Buffett is another billionaire who dabbles in newsprint (and in the same price range as Bezos, his holdings valued at approximately $344,000,000 too). On a lesser scale the Han Solos of high finance like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have snared small though prestigious catches like The New Republic. How long before The NewYork Times and prestigious Conde Nast publications like The New Yorker become the trophy wives of billionaires?

Venice Journal II: Il Palazzo Enciclopedico

Photograph of Il Enciclopedico Palazzo Del Mundo by Hallie Cohen

Il Enciclopedio Palazzo Del Mundo was a creation of Marino Auriti an Italian immigrant who ran a auto body shop in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It was basically an architectural model which would become a literal reality maybe not in the form he envisioned but as the theme for the current Venice Biennale, Il Palazzo Enciclopedio. It also became a de facto reality considering the tsunami of data that is now the condition of man. As the current Biennele attests art is produced with such ferocity that the invasion of imaginative works is like that of some form of killer bee in a Roger Corman movie. For all the brilliance of the works, walking through the Arsenale, where part of the Biennale takes place, in the middle of an August heatwave, is Auschsvitz. You are dripping wet when you're finished and almost numbed by everything from video works by Steve McQueen to R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis which fills a wall. Many of the artworks are self-referential to the extent they are about the profusion of art. They are about plethora itself. The Spanish Pavilion boasts a huge mound by Lara Almarcequi, 500 square meters of rubble composed of 225 square meets of brick and mortar, 152 square meters of cement and concrete, amongst other ingredients. You wander next to the Belgian pavilion to find “Cripplewood," a monumental wounded tree which is a collaboration between the South African writer J. M. Coetzee and the artist Berlinde de Bruyckere. The Japanese artist KoheiYoshiyuki captures voyeurs in a Tokyo park—a bit of one-upmanship of Thomas Struth's capturing the more innocent voyeurism of museum goers. And you relive the epistemological argument between Andre Breton and Roger Caillois over what makes a Mexican jumping bean jump. A series by the Australian anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik, who died in l953, offers “graphic works of Southeast Asia and Melanesia” by indigenous peoples. The artist Sarah Sze, represents the U.S. with her lo-tech collages of cultural detritus that are permeated with epiphanic moments in which the artist’s  esthetic seems to rise Phoenix-like from her own rubble. Imran Qureshi creates Persian miniatures of contemporary figures. No Palazzo Encliclopedico would be complete without some mention of Carl Jung and the original of his Red Book graces the exhibition.There is a model of Auriti’s Palazzo at the entrance to the actual Biennale. He’d hoped it would stand at the center of the Washington Mall as the highest building of its time, a Tower of Babel that wouldn’t fail. The curators describe Auriti’s Palazzo as being  “Designed to show the entire range of humanity’s achievements—from the wheel to the satellite and from ancient artifacts to the most vanguard art.” The current Biennale takes up where Auriti left off. “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate,” "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" were the words Dante famously coined on the way to hell. The same might be said parsing so much art. But it’s a heavenly kind of hell.

Venice Journal I: Roberto Matta and Sons

“Spitting” (1974) by Gordon Matta-Clark

The Fondazione Querini Stampalia is an inauspicious structure that houses great beauty inside, both architecturally (due to the contributions of the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa) and in the works it displays. Now it’s exhibiting a show devoted to the Chilian artist Roberto Sebastian Matta and his two sons,  Gordon Matta-Clark and Pablo Echaurren. Roberto Matta was befriended by Dali and Breton and he brought the surrealist impulse to South America—something which uniquely complements, the literary work of Marquez and the magical realists. His son, Gordon Matta-Clark was associated with a whole new generation of avant-gardists amongst them the performance artist Joan Jonas and choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown, but when you see the photograph of his famed work “Splitting,” a conceptual piece in which a house is literally cut in two from l974 or his “Conical Intersect” (1975), a huge hole in a wall, you realize that the Matta-Clark the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. In this case a surrealist gave birth to a conceptualist. Echaurren is the only member of the family who is still alive and his “Wall of Fame and Shame” (2012), displayed in the current show, is a monumental panel that seems to create its own language out of language. Echaurren is now the sword bearer of the family. Is it oxymoronic to discuss a tradition of avant-gardism?