Gelsomina in Fellini’s La Strada

One of the great pleasures of being out in a city after dark, anywhere in the world, is the ongoing show called Shadows — open to all, free of cost (though not of hazard), permanently installed, yet continually changing. Stretches of wall, house-fronts, hoardings, signboards, and hanging cloth, canvas or plastic become screens and surfaces on which Night — the global curator who is always local and contemporary — places, with some help from electricity or the moon, works of a beauty that is as enduring as it is mysterious, the opposite of substance.

Shadows mock and blur some of humankind’s most cherished distinctions: light and darkness, depth and surface, absence and presence, something and nothing, single and double, art and nature. They mark a bringing into line of three separate elements: a source of light, an object in the path of the light, and a surface that catches this silent drama of obstruction. And there has to be a viewer, of course. So, the forming of a shadow by nature or chance, be it leaves trembling on a wall or a solar eclipse, becomes a prototype for the making of those kinds of art that most define our modernity: photography and cinema. It is this sense of their trafficking with shadows (a word used by Shakespeare for both ghosts and actors) that gives to photographs and films the thrill of the supernatural. That is what Proust’s narrator or Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander felt when they sat up with their magic lanterns in the nursery at night.

Not just the thrill of the supernatural, but also the menace of the inward. We often use the word, projection, for the mechanism by which we throw shadows on the wall. Etymologically, to pro-ject is to throw forward, to sub-ject is to throw under. Projection suggests a process by which we cast internally created forms upon an external ‘screen’. These forms can be memories, thoughts, fantasies or images that become real only when externalized upon somebody or something else. So, what is projected is never of a place or person, but endlessly catapulted towards an elsewhere or other that keeps dodging its arrival.

We might call this process subjective not only because it begins in the mind, imagination or memory, but also because it subjects somebody to the role of being a screen for another person’s projection. We could end up burdening other people with the weight of our own shadows. Soon, it becomes difficult to tell whom the shadow belongs to. Who owns it — the light-source, the object, or the screen? Or is the shadow nobody’s double, but its own master, “mine own and not mine own”?

It is because shadows reign supreme in the kingdoms of art and fiction that they become the symbols of lies and illusion in the stonier worlds of Western philosophy. In Pliny, drawing and relief originate in a young girl tracing the outline of her lover’s profile, cast as a shadow on the wall by lamplight, before he departs on a long journey. Then her father, a Corinthian potter, turns this drawing into relief in fired clay. But in Plato, to live in ignorance is like being doomed to looking forever at shadows flickering on the walls of a cave — rather like being hooked to television for life. The shadow-watchers in Plato’s Cave of Illusion have their legs and necks fastened to stop them from turning around and looking out towards the light.

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The Venice Biennale, which opened in the summer last year and closed late in the autumn, recedes in my memory like one of those phantasmagoric banquets in the Arabian Nights. “Was it too much or too little?” one wonders about such shadow-food, “And did one quite manage to eat?” For it isn’t just art that one has to consume these days, there’s also always that other thing called the ‘art world’, which buzzes like a huge cloud of flies around art’s head with its own irrepressible life. Walking in the Gardens among the pavilions, queueing outside the umpteenth palazzo-turned- museum, wandering inside the cavernous Arsenale where Bice Curiger had installed her grand exhibition called ILLUMInations, stampeded out of the bellini-bar at an opening, or resting on a bench in the avenue of linden trees with a Russian tycoon’s yacht looming above us all like a gigantic phantom (as Europe lay in economic smithereens around this slowly sinking city), I would find myself wondering what a Martian would make of all this. A line from a Cole Porter song, with one word changed, went round and round in my head in Ella’s voice: “What is this thing called art?”

Departing from usual practice, Curiger had hung four great Tintorettos on the walls of the central pavilion, and they stood like dread beacons beaming their light on the sea of contemporary art swirling around them. Beneath the ceiling and above the Tintorettos lurked 2,000 dead, stuffed pigeons — Maurizio Cattelan’s Shadows, which one had to look long and hard in order to notice in the gloom of the central pavilion.

From a distance today, which are the works that flash upon my inward eye as I write? All of them happen to be monuments to time.

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour-long film about time lost and found, playing on a loop on a huge screen in a dark room full of deep sofas that demanded total surrender. It is called The Clock, and is made out of seamlessly joined clips from older films — everything from Buñuel to James Bond. In every clip, there is a clock showing the time somewhere in the frame, or somebody talking about time (or the time). Marclay’s work unfolds in real time. When it is 3.23 pm in the real world, the clock in the clip also shows that time. So, if you’re watching the film and have an appointment to keep at 5.30 pm, then the film will tell you when to get up and go. But you won’t want to get up and go.

Dayanita Singh’s File Room — an immense grid of black-and-white photographs covering two long stretches of wall in the Arsenale. The photos are all of pre-digital, but live, archives of public records. File Room is an elegy on the fragility and unruliness of paper, a homage to the chaos of human life and to the equally human attempt to order that chaos into forms of knowledge. But you have to look really hard to find a human being in the photographs.

One of Louise Bourgeois’s Cells — those rooms of the memory, each revisiting a primal scene of childhood. A cell is both a room in a prison and a unit of life. In each enclosure of wooden screens and windows, Bourgeois gathers mysterious objects, at once mundane and, one imagines, full of secret, and somehow painful, meaning. Installed in a palazzo almost impossible to find, her Cell in Venice was hung with empty clothes and faceless dolls. Peering in through one of the little windows, I chanced upon — like the shepherds in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego — these words stitched into a hanging chemise: The cold of anxiety is very real.

Yet, the gift from this city of art and death that I will carry most deathlessly in my memory has nothing to do with the biennale. It was a concert of film-music by Nino Rota at the Teatro La Fenice, the opera-house that keeps getting burnt down and rising from the ashes in fragile splendour. The concert celebrated, not the opening of the biennale, but the centenary of a strangely self-effacing musician who had composed the scores of some of the greatest works of cinema — almost all of Fellini, Visconti’s The Leopard, and most of The Godfather. When Rota died in 1979, Fellini wrote a piece in remembrance of his most cherished collaborator after his wife, Giulietta Masina, in which he calls Rota “L’amico magico” — the magic friend.

As the summer’s night deepened in the square outside, filling up with people hungrily looking for a table under the twisted creepers of jasmine, the music inside was the polkas and mazurkas from The Leopard, the heartbreaking tune that Masina learns to play as the saint-clown Gelsomina in La Strada before it drowns in the roar of the sea, and the Love Theme from The God- father, a serenade to doom, at once high tragedy and schmaltz. It was music that cut straight to the gut, where all the ladders start, and that shimmering rococo roomful of slightly pickled art-world Botox suddenly found itself wondering whether to waltz or to weep.