Sept 14th, Naples MADRE Art Museum

9/14     Saturday

We always enjoy a good contemporary art museum, and in Naples, it’s the Madre Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum is new, only opened in 2005, but set in a historical building that contains beautiful arched ceilings and grand spaces. It’s on a modest back street, and we have a little trouble finding it. When we pass a set of massive bright yellow doors opening onto a courtyard, where a gigantic plastic raincoat is suspended from the ceiling on a huge hanger, we deduce that we’ve arrived.

The museum has several rooms of permanent site-specific installations by major artists, including Jeff Koons, and lots of video work tucked into alcoves here and there. We watch a mesmerizing film describing a Mexican artist, Mario Garcia Torres, investigating the story of a small hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, One Hotel, owned by an Italian artist, Alighiero Boetti, in the 1970’s. It goes on and on, but we can’t stop watching it. Another room is covered with tiles, made by Francesco Clemente. They are intricate, Escheresque designs, making a bright crazy-quilt of the floors and ceilings.

One floor is dedicated to a Thomas Bayrle Exhibit, a major artist in the pop art movement of the 1960’s, a contemporary of Andy Warhol and Gerhart Richter. He is still active today, and we see a career in art embracing media from pencil on paper to digital video.

Back home, we find our apartment courtyard strangely quiet. As we have our dinner, though, we heard a certain murmur in the air. Suddenly, there’s a great roar of a cheer. There’s a big soccer game on tv, and everyone is watching it, even the shouting angry man. The collective ooooohs and yeeeeeaaahs signal good and bad passes. At the end, there’s another massive groaning, cheering noise of such emotional complexity that we can’t exactly tell if there’s been a win or a loss. But there was just somewhat more anguish than triumph in the sound, so we’re guessing it was a loss.

1 Video Included

 Naples MADRE Art Museum