A huge incense stick burns in a former
sawmill between a dangling effigy
of Mao and a supine statue of
Lenin, 20th-century icons spilling
over into the present. It is a monument
by Daniel Knorr who, along
with another 33 contemporary artists
and an ample selection of dead bodies,
opened the 14th International
Sculpture Biennale in Carrara on 26
June entitled "Post Monument".
The Carrara Biennale finally returned
to the international biennial
fold in 1996, 23 years after its 1973
event. The story of its host city, Carrara,
unfolds along two imaginary paths
– one of anarchism and one of
marble quarrying. It was here, in the
early 20th century, that the quarrymen's
anarchic and trade union battles,
led by the anarchist Alberto Meschi,
reduced the working day to six
and a half hours for the first time in
Italy. But Michelangelo and Canova
were also visitors to these butchered
and flaking mountains, which stand
strong despite centuries of quarrying.
The obelisk erected in homage
to Mussolini at the Foro Italico in
Rome in 1932 was sculpted here and
then transported by sea. The city
continues to live in the perpetuation
of a legend and an identity, around
which the Carrara Biennale has tried
to reopen a debate by questioning
the topos of the monument-form
and addressing more general issues
on the future of sculpture.
One of the exhibition's characterising features lies in the choice of locations,
pursuing a strategy recently
adopted by Manifesta and the 2006
Berlin Biennale. A scattering of spaces
creates a territory within disused
sites linked to marble processing.
Places shrouded in the white dust raised
by the leftovers from processing
illustrate the life but also the twilight
of an industry that has marked the
city's history. Carrara boasts a proud
craft tradition of stonemasons, sculptors
and engravers, nearly always true
to the classical idea of sculpture but
who, for the biennial, placed themselves
at the service of great international
names such as Cai Guo-Qiang,
Antony Gormley and Paul McCarthy.
Fabio Cavallucci, the biennial's curator,
posed them a question: where
does the future of sculpture and monuments
lie? The same question was
addressed to entrepreneurs, marble
workers and local public opinion,
which, for example, was divided for
months over Cattelan's proposal to
replace the Mazzini statue in Piazza
dell'Accademia with a copy of a statue
of Bettino Craxi discovered in a
workshop. In the late post-modern
era, however, after the collapse of the
Wall and the toppling of Saddam's
statue, what is left for the
monument?
Someone who contributed to this immense
change, Mikhail Gorbachev,
when interviewed by Cavallucci in
the culture pages of The Times, sees
it like this: "I have never praised the destruction of monuments. It is a silly,
anti-historical act, which is like expecting
you can annul the past. The
past can never be erased from the
memories of those who have experienced
it."
Today, the monumentform
seems to have disappeared in
favour of great architecture, public
works and more ambitious urban-regeneration
projects. The monument
conserves its elevated and celebratory
dimension in Eastern Europe,
where the sense of amazement at the
destruction of the symbols of dictatorship
is still felt. One thinks of Deimantas
Narkevicius, who has urged
onlookers to listen to the voice of an
imprisoned anarchist, sounds that
go straight to the heart, as a ray of
light filters through a window on the
other side of the wall. Nemanja
Cvijanovic, a Croatian artist who has
always explored the Socialist past,
presented a monument in music
form: a music box playing the Internationale
amplified and worked by
the visitors. Artur Zmijewski's videos
illustrate normality via routine actions
by following a day in the life of
two marble workers.
The further we
travel from Eastern Europe, the more
the monument is de-monumentalised
and, if anything, turned into a
poetic, anti-sculptural gesture. One
example is the work of the young
Giorgio Andreotta Calò, who removed
a block of marble using the old
quarrymen's technique – creating a
monument to those lost in the quarries
– and installed it in the ascetic
surroundings of an abandoned 18thcentury
church. This sense of catharsis,
of an end to the concept of monument,
leads to the work of Rirkrit
Tiravanija, who turned a local city
square into a field of human relations
by installing a large screen in
marble that shows projected historical
films about stone processing on
one side and the World Cup football
games on the other. Someone, however,
looked at the majestic mountains,
stripped bare by centuries of
quarrying, and the dazzling white ravaneti
(mounds of marble debris) reflecting
the light of the Tyrrhenian
Sea and thought he would take home
what had been wrenched away
over the centuries. Cyprien Gaillard
decided to pay homage to Carrara's
mountains by uncovering one of the
marble tiles that lined the lobby of
the World Trade Center until 9/11.
The promise is that it will always stay
there, buried in the square at the highest
point of the city and turning
the gaze to the blinding gleam of the
landscape and history.
Post Monument: XIV Biennale di Carrara
Fabio Cavallucci, curator of the biennial running in Carrara until October 31, asked the invited artists whether there is still a future for sculpture and monuments.

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- Martina Angelotti
- 28 September 2010
- Carrara