MONDO VENEZIANO

Art as a hospital?

What is Mondo Veneziano? A film? A documentary? A critical artwork? Art criticism? A pamphlet or manifesto? A summary of opinions and ideas about art from other than the author? …A plagiarism, then, or a postmodern pastiche? I think it is a little of all this.
When I first saw MV, I had the idea that it was a kind of “academic” or critical (theoretical and artistic) work performed by actors (bad actors or actors who play as bad actors), instead of been elaborated on a paper. Of course, Mondo Veneziano is both artwork and art criticism. As a critical piece, I think the advantage of doing criticism on such a way, is that the author, and so the public, have more possibilities of playing with different points of views through the interaction of personages and their own positions with respect to (western contemporary) art and society. The author offers a series of opinions, theories and questions about contemporary art but the conclusions must be made by the spectator self.
In any case, Mondo Veneziano is a metafilm and a meta-art work, a very usual practice in postmodern culture. It is a film about art, and also from the beginning we are shown a part of the process of making the film. For example, we know and see that the place where the actors play is not really Venetia, but a pastiche of it, a copy. We also see the actors getting ready before to play, we see the backstage, etc.

However, I think there is a central line in the film of Prum, and that is the concept of “ritual” and its relationship with art. Prum manage this subject both in a theoretical and practical way. Ritual as an artistic practice and also as a context and condition for communication between the sender and the receptor. We could even say that there are two parallel fields in the film: a more theoretical or philosophical one: when they are talking or reading their quotes; always during the daylight; and a “practical” one: the moments they commits the murders, always at night and in a very (religion based) ritual way.
I think one important point in this discussion is, for example, the idea of a lack of (religion based) ritual sense in contemporary art. Concerning to this, the curator affirms that ritual “binds the otherwise private experience of the individual to the experience of the community”. So this lack of ritual in making and presenting a piece of art will make communication between art and (a certain) public more difficult or even impossible, and also it could provoke a letdown in public (other than artists). And so concludes the painter at the end of the film:

Convivial Artist: Put your self in the role of an unprepared viewer.
Painter: The picture we are painting here, then, is not black –it is empty.

On the other hand, it is very significant how present is the religious (Christian) ritual, as a practice, in the whole film; for example, in the sacrifice of the curator on a table during a meal or the crucifixion of the painter.

Related to all this is the discussion about the goal of art, and the question if the process of making art can be already consider as art itself.

Finally, another point that I consider important in Mondo Veneziano is the debate around the artist as an individual “against” the community, and also about art as a “risk” or transgressor activity. This would be reflected for example in the sentence: “in art there no schools only hospitals”, and it is related with the question of a social or ideological roll of art. (It is also very ironic that at the beginning of the film we hear in the radio a list of hospitals and pharmacies on duty. Could be this taken as a metaphor?).

I think it is difficult to make conclusions from this film, but, in any case, Mondo Veneziano brings forward old questions about art and its position in society and also the debates about new forms and conceptions of modern (western) art:
Where are the limits between different genres of art? Where are the limits between art and politics, ideology, religion, etc.? What is the roll of art? Must art have any roll? Must art question the established system? Or, at least, must art be able to offer a cure or an answer for the individual or collective questions of every time? It is art really a hospital?