Questions

Albeit silly ones...

Today I worked audio-guida, which mean audio-guide - yes, I sat at the front desk and rented audioguides... all day. Might not sound like fun, but actually it's basically just 9 hours to hang with friends who are selling tickets and checking coats, and talk to visitors from near and far. Oh and make art, which I did a bunch of today! Anyway, the question of the day, as posed by Tuey and me is, "Why do 80% of people pay for their tickets and walk away before actually taking them?"

Thoughts?

New Rituals

Here are my two new rituals:

1. I will take photographs on the Academia Bridge each morning and evening on my ways to and from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. At the end of my stay here it will be interesting to view how the environment changed over the three months and recall the extraordinarily beautiful days. To the right is a photo I took while crossing the Academia this weekend - I have not altered the colors of the photo at all, the night was actually florescent blue!

2. I will take photographs of every Madonna and Child shrine I see here in Italy. From an artistic perspective it is amazing to view the many different interpretations of their image, from a sociological perspective it's inspiring to witness peoples' faith, and from a religious perspective it's beautiful to take part in peoples' prayer.

At the end of my stay here I will post albums with both logs.

Cake Parties!

Today I participated in my first Cake Party! Cake Party was invented by my roommate, Tuey, about two years ago. It’s essentially a monthly party in a public space, in honor of Cake who turns a year older at each party. Friends, acquaintances, and strangers are all welcome to join, as the point is to bring people together, to connect people for the sake of making friends and having interesting conversations with people you might not otherwise meet.

Each month people convene at a unique location and when enough people gather everyone sings happy birthday to Cake, who is baked, named, and brought by Tuey. And then the best part, everyone gets to eat Cake! Now you might wonder how Cake feels about being eaten given that it is his celebration and all, but you have to understand that part of the concept of Cake Party is that it’s a metaphor for the cycle of life – Cake is created, Cake develops a personality, Cake builds relationships, Cake brings people together, Cake feeds, Cake dies, Cake’s story is told, and ultimately Cake is reborn (the next month).

Here are a few last details about Cake Parties: 1. Tuey hides surprises in the cake, like phone numbers, coins, chocolates, etc, and each surprise has a positive symbolic meaning that is revealed upon being found! 2. Cake is made from different ingredients and has a different name each month. 3. Tuey designs and hand draws a different invitation, and story book, for each Cake Party. 4. Invitations arrive by word of mouth or through snail mail. 5. Everyone who participates is welcome to wear a party hat all day long!

Above is a picture of me eating Cake, to the right is a picture of Tuey in her party hat, and below is a picture of Cake Giovanni Smith at his 22 birthday! Oh, and to find out more about Cake Parties, visit Tuey and Cake’s website: http://www.youmecake.com/

Found Art

I've been waiting for the perfect moment to post this adorable bit of clip art I found on the internet, but it seems impatience has gotten the best of me. Or maybe it is appropriate at this moment in light of my previous post...

Learning from a Good Laugh

Umberto Boccioni, Materia, 1912, Gianni Mattioli Collectionon long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Recently I witnessed something particularly funny during my guarding shift at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: a woman, (not affiliated with PGC,) guided a group to the work Materia (1912) and said, “This is a fine example of a pointillist work owned by Peggy. Here Duchamp portrays his mother in a sauna: doesn’t she look hot?”

When I first overheard this, I nearly laughed out loud! After taking a moment to compose myself, I got down from my high horse, recalling that prior to working at the PGC, I myself knew very little about the seminal work. For fear of embarrassing the woman, I didn’t have the heart to tell her and her group that she was entirely mistaken regarding everything she said about Materia, however I figure that the story gives me a perfect excuse to deconstruct and reconstruct her statement for all of you!

1. Materia is not a pointillist work, but rather a futurist work. Pointillism is late 19^th century technique developed in France by George Seurat in which tiny purely colored dots of paint are applied to a canvas in such a way that they appear to blend, creating a cohesive image. Futurism is an early 20^th century Italian movement founded by F.T. Marinetti that is based on embracing technology and the mechanization of society, and celebrating war as a means of hygiene, all for the purpose of forgetting about the past and focusing solely on the future.

2. Peggy never owned Materia, but rather it is currently on long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection from the Gianni Matiolli Collection, a world-renowned collection of early 20^th century Italian art.

3. Materia is not Duchamp’s work, but rather Boccioni’s work. Marcel Duchamp was a French/American artist associated with the dada and surrealist movements; he was a dear friend of Peggy’s and probably best known for Fountain (1917), one of the most written about works in the entire history of art. Umberto Boccioni was a contemporary of Duchamp, however he was an Italian artist associated with the futurist movement, who is most famous for his work Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), which is on the Italian 20 euro-cent piece.

4. Materia is a portrait of the artist’s mother, but she’s not in a sauna!!! The large work depicts Boccioni's mother on a balcony in Milan, with the dynamism of the modern world behind her. Because of the dark and garish colors as well as the cubist inspired style, it is hard to distinguish between the background and foreground narratives. However, one clear element of the painting is the mother’s massive, gnarled hands that are locked together in a harsh, impenetrable way. Overall, the message does not speak positively about mothers, which is fitting in light of the fact that futurism was an excessively anti-women movement.

As you can see, I’m not a fan of futurism but I’m trying to learn more about the movement for the sake of understanding its positive qualities. So, more on futurism soon, and hopefully more in general soon, but I have many exciting guests visiting me in Venice over the next few weeks, so posting might be a bit slow…

Embracing Life's Paradoxes

Wim Delvoye, Torre, Cor-Ten Steel, 2009, Installation Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

I told you I’d return to the works I taught about on my collection tour!

This Gothic Tower called Torre, was created by contemporary Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. The piece was installed on the canal side of the palazzo this summer, just before the Venice Biennale, to draw people’s attention to the museum at a time when many other art related events might have distracted people from visiting the museum. One of the reasons I felt I had to briefly discuss the work is because it was actually supposed to have been taken down already, but the institution that is borrowing it next isn't quite ready for it, so we're fortunate enough to continue enjoying it here.

To me, the most interesting part of the work is that it is filled with contrasts. On the one hand it's modeled after a medieval gothic tower; on the other hand, it was made using lasers, a modern technology. Likewise, it's modelled after a medieval architectural tradition, yet it stands in front of the 18^th century palazzo, which houses 20^th century art. Additionally, the work is an architectural structure, however it’s openness makes it essentially useless as a form of shelter.

The theme of contrasts is prevalent throughout much of Delvoye's work. Perhaps most famously, or at the very least most comically, Delvoye made a poop machine, which he called Cloaca, (which is the Latin word for sewer). Essentially the machine simulates the natural process of creating faeces. Delvoye fed the machine real human food, in fact he even hired a chef to make beautiful meals for the machine, and through some sort of digestive process, the food would transform into poop that the machine would proceed to release. Thus, the machine begged questions such as where is the line between human and machine? And where is the line between art at shit? If you care to learn more about Cloaca take a peak at this funny YouTube clip:

As my father said to me just today, “it seems that great art is about inviting one to consider the paradoxes of life…to live more comfortably if not joyously with contradictions that are at the heart of our humanness…” And clearly, Wim Delvoye understands just that.

A Passionate and Compassionate Woman

To Peggy, art was an antidote to war, a palliative, a healer. –Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Peggy with her "baby" on the roof terrace of her home, late 1950's.

Having recently spent so much time with my new British friend Jessica Rolls, I’ve noticed that the voice in which I think is now speaking to me with an English accent. I realized this last night when I was lying in bed and began laughing out loud when the voice said to me “Gee, isn’t it a quite a shame that you haven’t written a bit on Peggy’s life yet?”

On that note, I want to begin this post by thanking a good friend Shifra Bronznick who gave me Confessions of an Art Lover, one of Peggy’s autobiographies, as a graduation and going away gift. Here are some of the facts and fun anecdotes that I learned from the autobiography, which I’ve already read twice. (By the way, for all of you art lovers and art lover wannabes out there, this book is a total must; it’s hilarious and it captures Peggy’s passion and spunk…)

Peggy was born in 1898 to what she describes as “two of the best Jewish families,” the Guggenheim’s, a metal owning family, and the Seligman’s, a banking family. Between loosing her playboy of a father to the Titanic catastrophe and having an entirely overbearing mother, Peggy claims to have had an excessively unhappy childhood. However, lucky for Peggy, at age 21 she gained access to her trust fund, making her financially independent and enabling her to move to Europe, where she took on the persona of the Peggy we now all know.

Upon moving to Europe, Peggy first settled in Paris where she met and married the American Dada writer and artist, Laurece Vail, with whom she had two children Sindbad and Pegeen, (to whom a small room in the PGC is dedicated). Through Vail, Peggy met Marcel Duchamp who became a lifelong friend and art advisor, helping Peggy to develop her artistic taste and build her tremendous collection. After seven years of marriage to Vail, Peggy and Vail divorced and she moved to London were she began a five-year relationship with English writer John Holmes, who died tragically young during a routine surgery. Peggy felt badly about his death throughout her life because he was her one true love and she knew that he passed because he was not sober during the procedure, due to their hard-partying ways.

After Holmes’ death Peggy opened her London Gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, with the help of Duchamp. (It was around this time that Peggy took British customs to court and won regarding the art case: see previous post.) After a year and a half Peggy closed Guggenheim Jeune because it proved to be much too expensive, as she ended up being the primary buyer of the exhibited works. In fact, Peggy anonomously purchased one work from every artist in every show at her gallery, in an effort to encourage the artists and support their movements.

After closing Guggenheim Jeune, Peggy decided to open a museum of contemporary art in London to house her collection and serve as an education forum. Given that art prices were good because of the economic hardships that lead up to WWII, Peggy determined that she would purchase one work of art a day until the opening of the museum, (which is when the Brancusi story comes in). Unfortunately, before the museum was able to get off the ground, Peggy was forced to hide her works in a barn in the South of France, (as the Louvre deemed her works too recent to be worthy of their storage space,) and seek refuge in the United States, so as not to be persecuted by the Nazis.

In 1941, Peggy arrived in New York, where she helped save a number of European Jewish artists, including Max Ernst, whom she married shortly after his arrival in New York. In New York, Peggy decided to open a gallery called Art of This Century. The gallery was unlike any other in terms of its interior decoration, which cost Peggy a fortune. Peggy says opening night was a real gala, “[I] wore one of my Tanguy ear-rings and one made by Calder, in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and abstract art.” The first show was dedicated to her collection and the second to the objects of Laurence Vail, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, (whose boxes, which I find to be some of the most fun art in the collection, are on the fireplace in Peggy’s living room). Her third show was dedicated to the works of thirty-one women artists—amazing for the time—but unfortunately lead to the end of Peggy and Earnst’s marriage, as Earnst began an affair with one of the women whose work was in the show.

After that, Peggy focused the gallery shows on rising American talent, which is when she became heavily involved with Pollock, (not romantically,) and held his first one-man show, (see Pollock/Peggy post). During this period she also staged the first exhibitions for a number of young American artists such as Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Clifford Still. Because of this, I like to think of Art of This Century as the launching pad for abstract expressionism and Peggy, the mother of the movement.

In her autobiography Peggy says that her gallery had gained so much popularity that she was working around the clock and began feeling like a slave, and moreover she says, “Much as I loved Art of This Century, I loved Europe more than American and… couldn’t wait to go back.” So, in 1948 when Peggy was invited to exhibit her collection in the Greek Pavillion of the Venice Biennale, as the Greeks were in the midst of a civil war and could not be present, she made her big move.

In 1949 Peggy purchased the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the home in which she spent the rest of her life. People were intrigued by Peggy and longed to visit her home, so in 1951 she began opening her home to the public during the summers for just a few hours a week. Of this time she joked, “Anyone is welcome to visit the gallery on public days, but some people, not understanding this, think that I should be included as a sight.” In other words, Peggy had become a full blown celebrity.

Despite having a tenuous relationship with her uncle Solomon Guggenheim and the staff of his museum, in 1969 Peggy graciously bequeathed her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, under the condition that it would forever remain in Venice.

In 1979 Peggy passed away, however just before her death, Gore Vidal asked her how she was doing, to which she responded, “Oh, for someone dying, not bad.” And that was Peggy, a woman who embraced every experience life threw her way…

1. Young Peggy, 1924.

2. Peggy with children Sindbad and Pegeen Vail, late 1930's.

3. Peggy's Art of This Century, 1942.

4. Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, 1990's.

5. Peggy in her home beside works by Calder and Picasso, 1964.

Smiling

Mitch just reminded me of the French photographer Robert Doisneau (1912-1994), whose works are perfect to check out when you need a little pick me up. Feel good photography, if you will...

Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville, 1950

Le remorqueur du Champ de Mars, 1943

Les Pains de Picasso, 1952

Sur les Quais, 1958

Teaching

Along with guarding the galleries and helping out with various administrative tasks, the interns here at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection have the tremendous honour of giving a variety of types of public lectures, from ten minute talks on specific pieces in the collection, to talks on the life of Peggy herself, to full tours of the collection, which I gave for the first time yesterday! I focused my tour on both indoor and outdoor sculpture – fortunately the weather pulled through, my adrenaline was pumping, (masking my terrible cold,) and overall my tour was a great success! Since all of you, my favourite people, couldn’t be here for the tour, I thought it’d be nice to run you through three of the six works I discussed. (I promise I’ll share the rest another time!)

I began the tour with Marino Marini’s The Angel of the City (1948), for three reasons: 1) It is a work that is emblematic of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection; people think of this work when they think of the PGC. In fact, often before walking around, tourists ask, “Where’s Marino Marini?” (Marino Marini has become synonymous with The Angel of the City in PGC-Land.) 2) The sculpture is located at the original entrance to the palazzo. The current entrance to the museum was actually the back entrance when Peggy lived there and only when her home became a museum did the onetime back entrance become the main entrance. Thus, this sculpture was the welcoming committee for Peggy’s friends upon their arrival at her home. 3) You guessed it! For obvious reasons it gives everyone a good laugh!

On a serious note, Marino Marini has a tremendous amount of art historical depth. For example, Marini drew on the Northern European tradition of depicting war heroes on horseback, but of course he updated the look! In other words, he parodied a traditional subject matter to make it contemporarily relevant, or at least interesting. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection Guide explains that the sculpture is typical of Marini’s work because it affirms the strength associated with sexual potency. However, I like to think of this sculpture in simpler terms – this guy is a sexual hero!

Now for the juicy details… In Peggy’s autobiography Confessions of an Art Addict, she has a fabulous description of her relationship to the work: “It was a statue of a horse and rider, the latter with his arms spread way out in ecstasy, and to emphasize this, Marino had added a phallus in full erection. But when he had it cast in bronze for me, he had the phallus made separately, so that it could be screwed in and out at leisure. Marino placed the sculpture in my courtyard on the Grand Canal… The best view of it was to be seen in profile from my sitting-room window. Often peaking through it I watched the visitors’ reactions to the statue. I’d always take the phallus off before I had to receive stuffy visitors, but occasionally I forgot, and when confronted with this phallus, I found myself in great embarrassment. The only thing to do in such cases was ignore it. In Venice a legend spread that I had several phalluses of different sizes, like spare parts, which I used on different occasions (130-1).”

After discussing Marino Marini, and being briefly interrupted by the loud sirens of a boat ambulance, which nearly knocked over a gondola boasting extremely loud Italian accordion music, causing the passengers, (and my tour group,) to yell, we headed back inside for a look at Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1932-40).

I began this segment of the tour by explaining why Peggy’s sculptures are so important to the collection: In the late 1930's when Peggy was importing sculptures to London, for a show Marcel Duchamp had coordinated for Peggy’s gallery The Guggenheim Jeune, British Customs stopped the works at the boarder claiming that they were not art but rather raw pieces of bronze, marble, wood, etc. that needed to be taxed. (Mind you, the works were predominantly by artists whom we currently consider to be the most accomplished and famous sculptors of the 20^th century, including Brancusi, Duchamp, Pevsner, Arp, Laurens, and Calder.) Peggy tried to get the director of the Tate to testify that her sculptures were in fact art, but he would not. Ultimately, Peggy took the government to the House of Commons, and won the case, thus legitimizing her objects as art. In her autobiography she notes that this was a great feat for foreign artists trying to send work to England because the case got marvellous publicity and was a great success. But it's important to note that she really helped the entire art world, and not just England; essentially, Peggy’s love for, and commitment to, modern art, was crucial to the 20^th century expansion of the definition of art to include abstraction.

As for some background on Brancusi, he was born in Romania in 1876 and moved to Paris as a young adult to become a sculptor. In Paris he met Duchamp and other important artists, all of whom were friends with Peggy, which is how Peggy learned of Brancusi and became interested in his work. In Peggy’s autobiography she shares a funny detail about Brancusi. She says that when they’d get together, Brancusi would dress up like a homeless person and take her to extremely fancy restaurants where he’d order the most expensive things on the menu. Apparently Brancusi always wanted to be with Peggy, romantically, but she was never interested. Nonetheless, Peggy thought that by befriending him she’d be able to get a sculpture at a discounted price, however she was wrong because ultimately he charged her $4,000 for the work, which Peggy deemed obscene, and he cried as she took it from his studio…

The work itself is supposed to depict a generic bird flying upward. Art historians have suggested that Brancusi was a spiritual person and who longed to transcend the material world and he saw birds as symbolic of that desire. Likewise, he strategically worked with brass because he liked the finely polished product, as its luminosity is reminiscent of heaven, the nonmaterial realm. Ironically, the base on which the sculpture is mounted, seems to aggressively anchor the bird in our world, which makes me think that perhaps Brancusi felt that he could not fulfil his desire to detach from the material world.

Onto Giacometti’s Woman Standing (1947)!

Standing Woman is located in the Nasher Sculpture Garden, (the current front entrance)… After Peggy’s palazzo had already been converted into a museum, the Nasher family donated funds to enable the back courtyard area to be used as a sculpture garden that can house works from Peggy’s own collection, the Nasher collection, as well as works on loan from other institutions and artists. With that said, Giacometti cast Woman Standing, specifically for Peggy…

As for Giacometti, he was born in 1901 in Switzerland. He was a student of Rodin, and if you are familiar with Rodin’s work, you can see the influence, in terms of material and style, as both artists have a sad way of depicting the human body. Woman Standing is typical of Giacometti’s style with its crusty surfaces and just smaller than life size scale, and also because of its complex range of possible interpretations, a few of which I will propose to you:

1. Some believe that Giacometti was influenced by the images of Holocaust survivors and victims, which were just being released at the time this became his token style. As you can see, the figure is physically frail, vulnerable, and alone. However it’s interesting to note that Giacometti himself never admitted to being influenced by the trauma of WWII.

2. Giacometti himself has claimed that his strangely tall and thin figures are supposed to represent a person’s shadow, as apposed to the person himself.

3. Along those lines, Dr. Rylands suggests that Giacometti intends portray his model at the fixed view from which he saw her when sketching.

4. Sartre, the philosopher and art critique, claimed that Giacometti made elongated and emaciated figures because “there is nothing redundant in a living man because everything is functional,” and thus Giacometti simplifies people to their most essential qualities.

5. I believe that Giacometti intended to use his sculpture to remind viewers that humans are not perfect, as classical sculpture suggests. In other words, we are filled with dings and dents, hence the rough texture of Giacometti’s bodies, in contrast to the smooth finish of classical sculpture.

6. My favourite interpretation of Giacometti’s sculpture is from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Guide, which says that Giacometti intends to capture the notion that even as we get older and the body begins to deteriorate, our essences are eternal and will continue to remain a part of this world.

And on that note, for the sake of ensuring that my body and spirit remain a part of this world for some time to come, I’m going to hit the sack at a reasonable hour so that I can recuperate from this cold and prepare for my talk on Peggy’s life which is coming up on Wednesday! Nothing better than being responsible for dispersing knowledge…

1. Marino Marini, The Angel of the City, 1948 (cast 1950?), Bronze, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

2. Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space (L'Oiseau dans l'espace), 1932–40, Polished brass, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

3. Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman ("Leoni"), 1947, cast November 1957, Bronze, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Perspective

Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi, 1573

“My art is joyous and praises God in light and color.” – Paolo Veronese on his work Feast in the House of Levi

Last week I went to the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, one of those stuffy museums filled with predominantly biblically themed art, in a stunningly beautiful building. The best part of the experience was that I sat for nearly three hours in front of one of the largest paintings of the 16^th century, a painting by Paolo Veronese called Feast in the House of Levi (1573), and sketched a contemporary version of the scene over several pages in my mini sketchbook, which Mitch gave me for the holidays. (One of these days I’ll learn to use the scanner at work and I'll upload some of my art to this blog…)

Feast in the House of Levi depicts a theatrical version of the story of the last supper, with Jesus, wearing a green robe, in the center, surrounded by a large number of strange people and animals who the artist captures in awkward moments as they interact with one another. The work was commissioned for the refractory of the Monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo to replace a version of Last Supper by Titian, which was destroyed by a fire. Nearly three months after the painting was completed, the Roman Catholic Inquisition set in and Veronese was tried for heresy because of the outrageous non-conformism of the work’s composition. Veronese was given three months to fix the work, however the only correction he made was the addition of an inscription on the top of the work, which reads, and I translate, “And Levi made Him a great feast in his own House.” In other words, Veronese cleverly ‘changed the subject of the painting,’ without actually changing the painting at all!

Sure Veronese's version of the narrative is unconventional, perhaps most obviously in that Mary is missing, but is that really grounds for a potential life sentence? To use a question my father asked me, what exactly did the church fear about this painting?

And I thought Prendergast was too traditional, or typical, imagine what the leaders of the Roman Catholic Inquisition would have thought of him! Just goes to show, perspective and historical context are everything!

Picking Up the Pieces

"'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.'" — Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

I’m sorry for my lack of updates in the past few days. Something devastating happened, my internet went out! Okay, I’m joking, my lack of internet was by no means devastating, and in truth I should be ashamed to use that extreme word in relation to my internet situation in light of the real catastrophes, such as the earth quake in Haiti, that are occurring around the world. Which reminds me, if you can, please match my donation of $25 to the earthquake relief fund of Partners in Health, http://www.pih.org/home.html, an organization that works to provide healthcare for needy people all over the world, founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, someone my dad calls “a genius and a hero,” whom he met in Rwanda on a Clinton Global Initiative Commitment.

With that said, not having internet for the past half a week, taught me some very interesting things about myself, the simplest of which is that I am far too reliant on the virtual world!

During my internet outage, I flipped open my roommate Tusana’s book When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron. (By the way, I’d like to mention that Tusana, or Tuey as I call her, is by far one of the most amazing women I have met in the past several years; she is theatrical and animated, soothing and relaxing to be with, insightful, emotionally and psychologically aware, and one of the kindest, most easy going people I know.) I opened the book to a page on loneliness, and there appeared a quote that was most perfect for the moment: “When we are lonely in a “hot way,” we look for something to save us; we look for a way out… our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair… It’s a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don’t have to feel any pain… Could we just settled down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? (57)”

I realized that for me, the internet has been my escape since arriving in Venice. With the internet, I can video-chat with my loved ones in the U.S. and pretend they are right here beside me, I can keep tabs on all my friends through the almighty Facebook, I can know what’s happening throughout the world in one quick click to the New York Times online, and worst of all I can distract myself from my loneliness by voyeuristically entering the lives of others through meaningless gossip websites. (Perhaps a side point, sociologist David Harvey, a specialist in urban culture, calls this concept, “annihilation of space through time,” also known as time-space compression. In other words, for better or worse, the rapid advancement of technology has eliminated spatial barriers by enabling the dissemination of information over vast amounts of space in a short period of time.)

Thus, I decided to try and forget about the internet for a bit, not have it fixed right away, and sit with the emotion of loneliness, allowing myself to fully experience it, without trying to mask it,in hopes that it would pass peacefully. I am still unsure of whether, or not, I was successful in that goal, however at least I had time to internalize an important lesson from my dad: I am not loneliness, in other words Gabi ≠ loneliness, but rather loneliness is an emotion that I am feeling now, and that is okay.

The exercise I just described turned out to be some sort of cosmic blessing because I ended up having the best few days I’ve had since I’ve been here. I spent even more time than usual developing relationships with the amazing women who are my fellow Peggy Guggenheim Collection interns and working toward the fulfillment of one of my primary goals upon coming here, which is to build life-long friendships. The current group of Peggy Guggenheim Collection interns is made up of approximately twenty women, (no men,) all from different countries and backgrounds; we all studied different types of art, we focused our studies on different historical periods, we have different hobbies, and yet we get along more amicably than any other large group of women I have been a part of. (By the way, at age 21, I am the baby of our Guggenheim family, which leads me to believe that the peaceful nature of this group is in part a product of maturity… Thank god Peter Pan doesn’t really exist.)

And so, yesterday I took my computer to Vodafone, where I met two lovely men who spent an hour getting my internet back up and running, I got lost for 45 minutes on my way home, I eventually met up with my PGC pals who had found a new, absolutely perfect apartment for Tuey and me, (another cosmic wonder, as I was just about to settle on a one bedroom, which most likely would have lead to increased loneliness,) and I began a whole new chapter of self discovery…

Knowledge, Passion, Persistence, Dedicated Mentors & Friends, and a Bit of Luck

This fall I “studied abroad” at Hunter College in New York City, after spending three academic years at the University of Michigan, the school from which I graduated with a B.A. in the history of art. At Hunter I took a basic sociology course and found that the differences between UMich and Hunter would make for an interesting sociological study in and of themselves… Regardless, among the many fascinating sociological concepts I learned are the ideas of social and cultural capital. In his 1986 work “The Forms of Capital,” French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claimed that cultural capital includes knowledge, skills, and education – essentially the advantages that give a person status in society. Social capital is a specific form of cultural capital in which a person develops, or inherits, relationships with others that serve as support in social, legal, and professional situations – in other words, social capital is a person’s “network.”

In 1943, Howard Putzel introduced Jackson Pollock to Peggy Guggenheim. At first, Peggy was not particularly fond of Pollock’s work, however a good friend of Peggy’s Piet Mondrian, who happens to be one of the most important 20^th century artists, convinced Peggy of Pollock’s brilliance. Peggy purchased several works from Pollock and even commissioned him to do a mammoth mural for her home, enabling him to support himself solely through his work as an artist for the first time in his life. As it happens, one of the paintings Peggy purchased from Pollock was The She-Wolf (1943), which Alfred Barr, who at one time was the director of the Museum of Modern Art, later bought from Peggy for the MoMA, making it the first Pollock work in a public institution. Overtime Peggy grew increasingly enthusiastic about Pollock’s work and in late 1943 she gave him his first solo exhibition, which she held at her New York City gallery, Art of This Century. In 1947, Peggy decided to move to Venice, but before doing so she convinced Betty Parson’s to represent Pollock in Parson’s successful New York gallery. In 1948, Peggy exhibited Pollock’s paintings at the Venice Biennale; this was the first time Pollock’s work was exhibited in Europe. By that point, Peggy had purchased so many of Pollock’s works that she began donating them to museums across the world to increase appreciation for the up and coming artist. In other words, Peggy was Pollock’s cultural capital – she gave him visibility by connecting him to important galleries and other prominent artists, in both the U.S.and Europe. Peggy facilitated Pollock’s fame, and in many ways nurtured the abstract expressionist movement.

However, Peggy’s success as an art aficionado was itself a product of cultural, and specifically social, capital… This week a brilliant consultant for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection by the name of Dario Pinton came to speak to the new PGC interns. Early in his three-hour tour of the PGC, Pinton discussed the difference between a “museum” and a “collection,” (as in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection). He stated that a museum is a survey of objects from a specific, or multiple, historical/contemporary periods, whereas a collection is works that represent the taste of a specific person. He went on to claim that “the secret to Peggy’s collection is the people with which she surrounded herself, including advisors and artist friends.” In addition to Putzel, Mondrian, and Barr, Peggy accrued a long list of famous friends to advise her on her collection, perhaps the most notable of which is Marcel Duchamp. Peggy and Duchamp met in the 1920’s when she first moved to Europe and began collecting modern art. They became quick friends and by 1938, when Peggy opened her first gallery, the Guggenheim Jeune of London, Marcel Duchamp was essentially her chief advisor, helping her do decide whom to exhibit at the gallery and which works to buy in order to boost her burgeoning collection. Though the list of important people who surrounded Peggy and helped make her the icon she is today, goes on forever, for the sake of holding your attention, I’ll leave you with this last thought: nothing better than knowledge, passion, persistence, dedicated mentors & friends, and a bit of luck – with those five ingredients we can truly do anything we set our minds to…

1. Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943, Oil, gouache, and plaster on canvas, Museum of Modern Art.

2. Photograph of Peggy Guggenheim with friends in her New York Apartment, 1942. Front Row: Stanley William Hayder, Leonora Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second row: Max Ernst, Amadee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp & Piet Mondrian.