Boy with frog
Sculpture by Charles Ray
Italian version: Charles Ray at the 53rd Venice Biennale
The statue entitled
“Boy with frog” is at Punta della dogana and has been the cause of a lot of constroversies.
The Italian newspaper "Corriere
della Sera" said:
“«Yes, the statue by Charles Ray — says
Miracco. It's beautiful but I think that
leaving it there forever won't be right. It has to be an ephemeral work and stay there
just during the Biennale. Anyway, why should we remove the Russian submarine from the Canal Grande?».
But the mayor Massimo Cacciari reassures us about that
«The Boy with Frog by Charles Ray won't stay in Punta della Dogana forever, it will be
removed as soon as the Biennale will end».
Maybe. But in the meantime there is somebody who would like the artwork to stay.
For example, a curator of the Pinault exhibition: «Ray conceived it for this place»
says Francesco Bonami, so suggesting an hypothesis he likes. Anyway, as long as it's going
to stay there it must be kept under surveillance against vandalic acts.
So white and isolated, it would be an easy target. «I hope it won't be, - says Miracco -
and actually I don't believe so».”
The matter of
discussion is the "meaning" we want to extract from this work.
One says that
the statue is beautiful but should be moved; another says that it has been conceived fot that place.
Cacciari himself said that the statue will be removed at the end of the exhibition.
A statue isn't simply an object
like any other object; it's the representation of an emotional impulse that the artist
expresses through symbols. What the artist expresses is not a rational expression.
It's not like in the movie "Angels & Demons", in which symbols communicated a
material condition (the way of the Illuminati); here there is the communication of what the
individual is in front of the world. When the artist conceives his statue (or picture),
he doesn't conceive it in relation with the emotions he wants to communicate, but what he likes
is what his emotions want to communicate to the world.
The statue
“boy with frog” hasn't been sculpted 200 years ago. It has been made now.
It's in the present time that Charles Ray liked to make it for that place and to
expose it in that place. And if Charles Ray liked to make it and we liked to look at it,
this is not because of its technical characteristics, but because when we looked at it the
emotional breath of people get around territories as broad as the life itself.
That statue hasn't been
sculpted 200 years ago. It doesn't represent symbols of thirty or fourty years ago, but
today symbols, the needs of nowadays men, in the culture in which they now live and act.
Let's start from
the frog: what does the frog communicate us?
The frog communicates us
that it went over the tadpole stage. Predators didn't eat it while it was swimming,
but it managed to become a frog. It became an adult, it has had tadpoles and now,
in the hands of the boy, it's dead.
It's dead like in
the tarot card: the hanged man!
The life cycle of the
frog ended
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What's the relation
between the frog and the boy? |
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The boy is going to
begin his life cycle as an adult; the frog ended its own cycle in his hands.
The boy is the tadpole of the human species and could end (or will end) his life like the frog.
This is the meaning
of the statue called "boy with frog".
When the visitor
looks at the statue he can't avoid to notice two things: the boy is naked and his eyes are
closed (the way he tilts his head makes him looking like meditating on the frog).
The visitor looking at the boy may think that the boy is meditating on his capture.
On his ability.
Why is he naked
and why are his eyes closed?
The visitor
imagines what the boy is thinking about, how he captured the frog, what he's going to do with it.
So the boy's eyes don't communicate and his nakedness appears like
something shameful that the artist could have avoided.
But this is not correct, because the visitor doesn't understand the location of
the statue in the place it has been located: the visitor looks at the boy, but not at the
place of the boy in the world. These two things can't be separated if we don't want to
miss the meaning of the emotional communication.
Instead of looking
at the "boy with frog", the visitor should try to understand the relation with
the world of the boy who condemned the frog like the tarots' "hanged man".
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Looking at the world
through the boy's eyes. |
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Therefore
I took a picture of the statue from behind and this is the way we can understand the meaning
(at least, one meaning) of the statue "boy with frog" by Charles Ray. In front
of the "boy with frog" there are the space and the time: his space and his time.
The space he's going to walk through and the changes he will undergo while acting in that space.
We are naked while facing our space and our time: nobody gave us the tools to do that.
We are naked like the frog in the boy's hands and the boy is naked because nobody gave him
clothes made with the tools with which he can face the contradictions in his existence.
Every child of the
human species is a "boy with frog" who meditates on the experience he made in
capturing the frog and on the many others who are bigger and smarter than him, and who stay
in the space and in the time, ready to turn him in the hanged man of the tarots.
To take a photo
of the boy from behind allows us to see the immense that stays in front of him: the immense
that we must face during our life. And, in this immense of our life, there is no owner god
and no providence, but there are many subjects that can turn us into the hanged man!
It's the meaning
of modern art that emerges from symbolic categories that the christian religion and, more generally,
monotheism, imposed. To represent the man in the world doesn't mean to depict the world around
the man, but it means to perceive the relations of the emotional world that link
every Living Being thorugh the tension that characterize its existence.
This is understanding the crucible of the emotional ensembles that shape our living in the world,
in order to manage to represent them through an image that can awake the emotions
of its relations in every visitor's world.
While the
representation of life in the world emerges in art representation, in the Human
society lacks the art of personal discipline, which can turn the emotional tornado we are inside
into the individual's Power of Being.
So we like to imagine that the "boy with frog" meditates doubtfully on his frailty
in a world that could turn him into a hanged man if he won't be prepared enough to
face if. He's a boy thinking about the need to look for the tools, the psycho-emotional
instruments to face the world in a suitable manner.
It's the sense of the Pagan Religion that emerges from the art. This doesn't mean that
the artists call themselves Pagans, but it's because Paganism is the way we have to face life
as subjects that claim their being in the world. Subjects that carry their tensions,
needs, wishes in everyday life, looking to satisfy them.
While doing
that, every artist becomes in fact a Pagan that frees himself from the tiranny of the shape
to use the shape as a symbolic representation of his emotional perception.
I don't know if that statue will be moved from that place to others. I know that the
society in which I live has lost much of the meaning of the existence to turn into a
superficial "aesthetic matter". Anyway, the emotional message communicated by
Charles Ray can't be separated from this interpretation. If this hasn't been true, the art
would cease to be a channel of the perception, given by Father Zeus, through his daughters he had
with Mnemosyne, to the Human Beings, so that they could find heroic ways to reach the Olympus
of the infinite of changes.
Marghera, 09th June 2009
Claudio Simeoni
Mechanic
Apprentice Sorcerer
Keeper of the Antichrist
E-MAIL:
claudiosimeoni@libero.it
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