Craftspersonship

We got home from a dinner party fairly late on Saturday night, I popped in my earplugs and was down for the count --Filippo was woken up by the sound of 'something exploding' in the middle of the night, and true to form as my Brave Protector, went straight back to sleep.

It wasn't until I wandered into the kitchen to cook up some coffee on Sunday morning that we saw the source of the noise: six tiles had come loose from their glued spots on the wall and crashed down onto the floor.

"Six?" you say, "But that wall looks completely naked!"

Oh yes; as we talked to neighbours who had experienced the same destruction and poked at the wall a little bit, loose tiles started falling into our hands --so we decided to strip all the wiggly ones rather than have them fall and smash at their leisure.

While cleaning up the big mess, why did I still get a thrill from seeing Made In Italy stamped on the back of every diabolical tile? It's not the fault of the tile designers that the muratori used cheap glue to fix them to the walls; my longstanding love of Italian art and craftsmanship (craftspersonship?) helped to keep me smiling while I swept, stacked, vacuumed, scrubbed and did it all over again as more tiles came tumbling down... To be honest, Filippo's freakish ability to sing and dance around no matter how ugly the situation had me laughing for a good part of the day.

Speaking of craftspersonship, two of my favourite girls in the world (and their respective boys) will be joining me at the Venice Biennale next weekend --every two years since 1895, the Venice has hosted contemporary artists from all over the world, organising works by country-themed pavilion in the two main venues: the Arsenale and the Giardini. Anju and Charlie will be there for 3 whole days, while Esther, Pablo and I are only darting out for the Saturday; I will have to spend this week working out a sophisticated Visit Plan because there are an insane amount of events sprinkled around town, and I want get the most out of our short visit.

I really hope they offer AudioGuides because I tend to have a hard time wrapping my brain around contemporary expression... Either way, I look forward to discussing everything with the girls --art appreciation is in Esther's genes: her mom works at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and we always got to use her free passes to visit the most exciting exhibitions in town. She once helped me debrief after my mind-blowing Mondrian encounter: I had gone to the Albertina to see "From Goya to Picasso", and with a few hours left on my admission, dragged myself down to see Mondrian --who up until that point I hated, and particularly associated with L'Oreal hair gel packaging.

My wrath increased as I came down the escalator into the exhibition hall, and heard the AudioGuide explain that the ideas behind the diamond-shaped painting hanging before me caused the end of Mondrian's lifelong friendship with painters in the De Stijl group --he dropped out when Theo van Doesburg dared introduce a diagonal line.

But in the end, Mondrian turned out a somewhat extreme version of my kind of guy: he was confident in his own principles, and trusted the ideals that guided his art. We should all be so lucky to have that kind of self-assuredness.

The point of that tangent, I guess, was to illustrate that I'm learning to search for meaning behind all pieces of art that are strewn across my path, and most importantly, am keeping like-minded friends close to help guide my process of discovery.