'TV Dinner' is a feast for the senses
Maurizio Cannavacciuolo disapproves of TV dinners. So why has the Italian artist named his show at the Gardner Museum after what he scornfully describes as "compartmentalized, pre-packaged meals, consumed in front of a television, which flickers with its own menu of distracting colors and images"?
This condemnation -- did we mention the artist's opinion that "TV dinners negate conversation, engagement, and thought"? -- would not seem to bring us any closer to the answer. But hold on; there's a link here.
"Art can, similarly, be compartmentalized and reduced," he goes on, in comments the museum made available to reviewers. The culprit, in Cannavacciuolo's fertile and eccentric mind, is labels -- which both he and the Gardner abhor. The museum (following the preferences of its founder) doesn't do wall texts or "chat" labels; you're lucky if you find the name of the artist somewhere in the vicinity of the art. Labels, Cannavacciuolo believes, "provide a prescribed explanation about a work of art and the meaning of all its parts, resulting in a 'tasteless' experience that leaves visitors unengaged and unchallenged."
Challenged is how visitors are going to feel these days as they enter the Gardner's temporary-exhibition gallery, where "TV Dinner" is installed until Aug. 15. At first there seems to be nothing but the glare of strident colors -- red, yellow, blue, green, one per wall. More than one visitor with eyes burning from the blast of color has turned around and walked away.
Those who linger become engaged. Three other walls -- two long, one short -- at first seem blank white. Hang around a bit, though, and faintly penciled images pulse their way out of the "emptiness."
What's going on here? Those colored walls are the ultimate in monochromatic, reductionist painting; perhaps they're a pun on this century-old form that's still regularly ridiculed. The drawings, on the other hand, are the ultimate in traditional craftsmanship. Content is another story. They're as jammed with weird stuff as Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." They follow no linear narrative. They're full of clashes of cultures, eras, and scale: In Cannavacciuolo's world, an insect can be bigger than a church. They're also the work of a master draftsman whose control is such that by bearing down slightly harder on the wall, he can orchestrate a surge of energy. In addition to everything else, the drawings are beautiful.
"TV Dinner," organized by Gardner contemporary curator Pieranna Cavalchini, is not fast food. It takes time and thought. The instant punch of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing, or the clearly feminist content of a Nancy Spero -- that's not for Cannavacciuolo.
His wall works are far more sly. As an artist-in-residence at the Gardner, he's looked long and hard at the idiosyncratic institution. He's absorbed its form and its contents, then digested and transmitted what he's seen to those white walls: a view of the famous garden courtyard here; another of the Titian gallery there. The images displace or overlap each other. The frames in the Titian gallery image are empty, as if the congested decor were the primary point.
Cannavacciuolo and Mrs. Gardner share a "more is more" aesthetic: It takes as long for your eye to absorb the detail in one of the Gardner's famously packed rooms as it does to unravel Cannavacciuolo's crowded scenes that overlap and upstage each other. They're knitted together by obsessive patterning, including Celtic interlace, stylized floral motifs, and friezes from antiquity. Nothing stands in isolation.
In the anteroom to the gallery is a prelude to the show in the form of one of Isabella Stewart Gardner's travel journals, open to a page with old black-and-white photos of landmark architecture in Havana. She was a passionate world traveler; so is Cannavacciuolo, who has also spent time in Cuba. Gardner was equally passionate about collecting images of the places she visited; Cannavacciuolo, too, is an image junkie.
The travel journal does have a wall text, the only one in the show. It offers a single clue about the dizzying drawings in the room you're about to enter: Cannavacciuolo, it says, has incorporated an image of Havana's Palacio del General, based on one of Gardner's photos. Fortified by this scrap of information, you enter the gallery, and once you survive the color assault, you hunt down the Palacio -- an exercise somewhat like the one posed by the "Where's Waldo?" series of children's books.
Anyone familiar with the Gardner will eventually recognize rooms and individual works of art in the museum, roped-off antique chairs and paintings of the Madonna and Child. (If you've never been to the museum, a careful exploration of its contents and style of display will help enormously before visiting "TV Dinner.") Architecture plays a big part in Cannavacciuolo's cosmos, as it did in Gardner's -- especially Italian architecture. So there's a scene of Venice's Grand Canal, lined with the palazzi where Gardner herself stayed, and which inspired her to build her own version of Venice in Boston.
A theatricalized religion was also one of Gardner's interests, acknowledged in the drawings by an elaborate pulpit, Baroque church facades, and domes. One dome is seen from the inside, from below. At the top, where you'd expect to see an allegorical painting on the ceiling, there is instead a naked baby boy so big he fills most of the space. The babe floats between heaven and earth. Is he perhaps a reference to Gardner's only child, a son who died at age 2?
The imagery that has to do with Gardner, either directly or indirectly, is easier to untangle than the imagery that you assume comes from Cannavacciuolo's personal visual vocabulary. An example is the vacant but cheery 1950s-looking comic-book character whose focus is entirely on her wardrobe options; I'm at a loss as to its meaning.
This is Cannavacciuolo's first solo show in a US museum. Although widely known in Europe, for most Americans he'll be a discovery, and a delightful one.
And at the very least, "TV Dinner" won't leave you hungry.
Christine Temin's Perspectives column appears on Wednesdays. 
