Author Archive for SanSuzie

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New feature: Ask the Art Nurse.

By SanSuzie on August 17, 2009 in Ask the Art Nurse and San Suzie. 2 Comments


Second Chance Nurse, by Richard Prince.

As part of the expanding line of services here at C-Monster.net, we are debuting a regular new feature called Ask the Art Nurse, which will be headlined by the extraordinary San Suzie (who has written on conservation issues on this blog in the past). A sculpture and architectural conservator with 20+ years of experience, San Suzie has restored everything from Civil War firearms to sculptures by Claes Oldenburg to John Lautner’s Chemosphere house to a steel mill’s worth of abstract public art works. As part of her daily grind, she regularly treats pieces that are battered, bug-eaten, cracked or poorly made to begin with.

To help all you genre-busting artiste-types avoid the latter category, she has kindly agreed to let C-Mon‘s readers pick her highly knowledgeable brain. So, if you are in the process of creating a piece, and you don’t know your polymers from your Pearoefoam or want to try welding beer cans or casting in lard, now would be the time to submit your technical questions – before some budget-strapped museum has to contend with your disintegrating piece of brilliance. If sculpture or installation isn’t your specialty, no worries. San Suzie will consult with her extensive cabal of conservator-colleauges, who can let you know what that coat of varnish will do to your oils.

E-mail all queries to suzie [at] c-monster [dot] net. (Do not leave them in the comments below.) San Suzie will choose the best questions and answer them, at periodic intervals, on the blog. If you so desire, your identity will be kept in the strictest confidence.

xox,
C.

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A Day at Cinecittà: San Suzie visits fake Rome, fake Assisi + fake NYC.

By SanSuzie on July 29, 2009 in Film, Italy, San Suzie and Travel. 3 Comments


Rome, recreated: The set for the HBO series Rome at Cinecittà. (Photos by San Suzie)

In 1937, everyone’s favorite Fascist, Benito Mussolini (he’s actually the guy who coined the term) founded a movie studio to create propaganda films for his Nazi-sympathizing regime. Dubbed Cinecittà (‘Film City’), the studio was heavily bombed by the Allies during the war, and afterwards, its soundstages were used to house thousands of Italians who had been displaced by the war. By the 1950s, however, Cinecittà had turned into the hub of La Dolce Vita of Italian filmmaking, serving as the set for most of Federico Fellini’s films, and even American blockbusters such as Ben Hur.

Getting a tour of Cinecittà is about as easy as getting a private audience with the Pope. But, with a few well-placed phone calls by C-Monster.net‘s high-powered Hollywood agent, we managed to wrangle our way into a guided tour of the studio’s incredible backlot on a positively sweltering summer day. We saw everything from the satanic-looking sculptures that appeared in Angels and Demons to a recreation of the hilltop town of Assisi where St. Francis received the stigmata (“it’s too steep and inconvenient to film there,” said our guide of the real Assisi). Most significantly, we got to see the house where Grande Fratello, Italy’s version of Big Brother is filmed. The highlight, however, was walking through the $20 million dollar set for HBO’s Rome, a sprawling set of painted temples and forums that gave us a far better sense of the Imperial City than a year’s worth of trudging through ruins.

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Pave the Planet: San Suzie reports on Alberto Burri’s land art installation in Sicily.

By SanSuzie on July 9, 2009 in Architecture, Art for stoners, Italy, Land Art and San Suzie. 4 Comments


Yes, this is real. (Photos by San Suzie.)

If there’s one thing that abounds in Sicily – more than orange groves and vineyards – it’s concrete. True to stereotype, there are cement plants all over this Mafia-riddled island. And its once-beautiful capital, Palermo, is rife with hideous concrete buildings that hover next to Baroque palazzi. (These soulless structures are often constructed using pilfered funds intended to restore buildings bombed in WWII). Amid all of these mind-numbing edifices, we found what is considered the largest work of land art in Europe. And guess what? It’s made of the same poor-quality concrete as the buildings in Palermo.

Only here, it works. Titled Grande Cretto, by postwar Italian artist Alberto Burri, the piece commemorates the destruction of the Western Sicilian town of Gibellina in a catastrophic 1968 earthquake. In 1980, roughly twelve years after residents rebuilt their town 18 km away, Burri covered the hillside town’s streets and ruined buildings– an area roughly 900 x 1200 feet and about 5′ in height, with white concrete.  The streets look like the crackle pattern on Burri’s fabled paintings, only you can walk through these.  Or skate through them. (Not to give anyone any ideas.) But if you were to, no one would know: it’s in the middle of nowhere, a two hour drive from Palermo – and just a short stop from Castellammare del Golfo (birthplace of Joe Bonanno and Frank Stallone, Sr., father of Sly), where you can go for a swim at one of the pristine beaches at the nearby Zingaro nature preserve and then feast on a plate of pasta with sardines, pine nuts and raisins.

Find more information on Burri’s installation here.

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Sardinia Dispatch: San Suzie examines abandoned coastal Modernism; eats fish roe.

By SanSuzie on July 7, 2009 in Architecture, Graffiti, Italy and Travel. 4 Comments


Every beach needs a building like this: The abandoned Ospedale Marino in Cagliari, Sardinia. (Photos by San Suzie.)

There are two things we can’t get enough of here at C-Mon: Abandoned Modernist structures and graffiti. Which is why the Ospedale Marino, above, an old seaside hospital in Sardinia is such a find. The Ospedale appears to be a late or mid ’50s work of Sardinian architect Ubaldo Badas, considered one of Italy’s premier architects in the middle of the last century. It lies on Poetto Beach, an 8km Copacabana-style expanse of powdery white sand and clear water that is reachable by bus from the port of Cagliari. (The locals say the beach is no longer what it used to be, but our bar is not so high.) Badas’s graceful building is now in advanced stages of concrete and rebar decay. It was originally clad in plain, matte grey tile, which has partially fallen off.

Like most places in Italy, people here believe that taking the sea air is good for one’s health. And the sea air here is definitely pretty awesome. Sardinia is at the center of the Mediterranean and is generally considered to be the sunniest spot in Europe. On the day I took these pictures, it was about 90 degrees and I almost burned my corneas. But I quickly made up for the near-blindness by taking a dip in the cool, clear, Mediterranean, then heading off for a plate of octopus and pasta with fish roe, a glass of Vermentino, a scoop of ginger-pineapple sorbetto, and then a nap.

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4:20 Video Break: Venice Biennale style.

By SanSuzie on July 2, 2009 in Art for stoners, Installation, Italy, San Suzie and Video. 2 Comments


Piotr Uklanski’s Dancing Nazis at the Palazzo Grassi, during the Venice Biennale. (Surreptitious video by San Suzie.)

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The Good, the Bad, the Rude & the Toxic: San Suzie presents the 1st Annual C-Monster.net Venice Biennial Awards.

By SanSuzie on June 12, 2009 in Art, Italy, San Suzie and Venice Biennale. 7 Comments


Obey Biennale: Taste the hype. (Photos by San Suzie.)

We are just back from the City of the Doges where this summer’s artapalooza kicked off with the 53rd Prosecco-soaked edition of La Biennale di Venezia. The show, which bore the very important title Making Worlds consisted of 38 exhibit spaces in the Arsenale and Giardini, plus a whopping 45 collateral event sites scattered throughout the city’s labyrinthine streets. This was in addition to numerous must-see museums, including the fabulous Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi and its new contemporary art venue at Punta della Dogana.

We spent at least a third of the preview days simply trying to get from one place to another, searching the maze of alleys and canals for obscure out-of-the-way locales like the Palazzo Rota Ivancich, the official venue of the Mexican Pavillion. But, all in all, we we were nicely surprised by the offerings: free food, art swag, yacht-and-people-watching, and, oh yeah, the city itself, which was once the wealthiest in all of Europe — and is therefore filled with masterpieces by 16th century heavyweights such as Titian, Veronese, Bellini and Palladio.

Of course, no artapalooza comes without annoyances, ironies, ridiculosity and even a few moments of sheer, breathtaking joy. Therefore, we present you with the First Annual C-Mon awards to celebrate the mother-of-all biennales, highlighting the good, the bad, the ugly, the incomprehensible and the just plain too damn much.

The envelope please…

Continue reading ‘The Good, the Bad, the Rude & the Toxic: San Suzie presents the 1st Annual C-Monster.net Venice Biennial Awards.’

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Jeff Williams at the American Academy in Rome.

By SanSuzie on June 2, 2009 in Installation, Italy and San Suzie. Closed


A site-specific installation titled Studio, 2009. (Photos by San Suzie.)

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MAXXI Padding: San Suzie’s preview of Zaha Hadid’s upcoming Rome museum.

By SanSuzie on April 3, 2009 in Architecture, Incisive Reportage, Italy, Museums and San Suzie. 4 Comments


The smart museum comes with louvered ceiling panels that open and close automatically with changes in the sun’s position. (Photos by San Suzie.)

Ever since the Guggenheim and Frank Gehry managed to turn a not-particularly-interesting regional capital into a must-see art destination, cities major and minor have been clamoring for their own contemporary art palace designed by a starchitect. Rome’s contribution to the trend is the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, or MAXXI, a colossus of glass, steel and concrete designed by the prima superstar del momento, Zaha Hadid. Several weeks ago we were fortunate to horn in on architecture writer and Rome Prize winner Cathy Lang Ho‘s tour of the unfinished building. The 20,000 square meters of exhibit space (more than 200,000 square feet) were still full of forklifts, cables, and bellissimi Italian construction workers; nonetheless, we have to admit that we were head over heels for the clean, open spaces, curved walls, and louvered ceiling panels of Ms. Hadid’s “Cultural Space for the [sic] 21st Century Arts.”

The only problem, as we can see it, is that the museum doesn’t have much 21st century art. Or much art of any century for that matter; its collection is tiny. We are hoping that the €80,000,000 price tag (that’s $108 million greenbacks) of the building hasn’t eaten up the entire art budget. If it has, they might consider turning the museum — chock full of graceful ramps — into the world’s most spectacular skatepark.

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Naples: Where low climbed out of a volcano and whupped high upside the head.

By SanSuzie on March 3, 2009 in Art, Italy, San Suzie, Sculpture and Travel. 6 Comments


Pan and the Goat: The Romans had remarkable taste in garden statuary, such as this 24″ high marble depiction of Pan getting frisky with a member of the genus Capra at the National Archaeological Museum. (Photos by San Suzie.)

Despite warnings in every Italian guidebook that we would be pick-pocketed, run over by a motorino, threatened by camorristi, or just plain hosed by restaurant owners and taxi drivers, last weekend we decided to go to Naples to pay homage to the birthplace of the pizza and the baba au rum. A 2,800 year-old seaport founded by the Greeks, conquered by the Romans, Spaniards and Bourbons (the Neapolitans are quick to tell you that they are a thousand years older than Rome), Naples is the veritable promised land of high and low culture. It’s a place where you can see two of the greatest Caravaggio masterpieces (1 and 2) within a stone’s throw of graffiti-covered baroque buildings whose stucco is literally falling to the ground.

Our plan was to grab a few of the sublime slices at the nearly 300-year-old Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba and then head over to the archaeological museum to ogle the Roman pornographic art — contained in a titillatingly hilarious permanent display known as the Secret Cabinet. (Boy, did we get an eyeful!) In addition to admiring all the ancient erections, there were plenty of other things to take in during our visit to Naples as well: the glittering Mediterranean, the medieval castles (complete with round turrets and crenelated tops), the volcano that destroyed Pompeii and the hundreds of cioccolato caldo stands where you can stuff your face with sfogliatelle, ricotta cheesecake, and mini-babas for about $2.

In Naples, you can not only see the life-sized bust that houses the actual lopped-off head of San Gennaro (a.k.a. Saint Januarius) at the Duomo, but also admire a vial of his blood that miraculously liquifies at various times of the year. All this in a city where motorino drivers, piled three to a bike, drive so unnervingly fast, you are encouraged to look both ways even when crossing the sidewalk — or face a martyrdom of your own.

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Nature break.

By SanSuzie on February 27, 2009 in Italy, Nature Break and San Suzie. Closed


The art of mating butterflies.

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