The bell performance at the Austria Pavilion that everyone is talking about? At the Venice Biennale, Florentina Holzinger ’s work Seaworld Venice attracted everyone’s attention from day one, mainly because of the flashy action that, at the stroke of every hour, takes place right in front of the pavilion: a nude performer hoists herself inside a bronze bell from a church in Venice and then transforms into a large human clapper, ringing the bell’s chimes upside down.
This stunt has already caused endless queues in front of the Austria Pavilion in preview days, but those familiar with art history have noticed that Holzinger has not... fully declared his figurative sources. In fact, two antiquarians familiar with Flemish and Dutch art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Massimiliano Caretto and Francesco Occhinegro, point out that the human clapper inside the bell is not really Holzinger’s gimmick: it recurs in several works by Hieronymus Bosch, who was famous for the whimsical, monstrous inserts with which he filled his scenes. Indeed, in the 1486 Triptych of the Last Judgment preserved at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges and in a drawing, known as the Hellscape, kept in a private collection, one sees a performance identical to Holzinger’s, five hundred years ahead of its time.
Nowhere, however, did Holzinger declare the debt. Perfect coincidence, implicit homage, conscious but unstated quotation, or an attempt to pass off as original, without saying so openly, something Bosch had thought of in the late fifteenth century? It would be worth asking the Austrian artist...
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| Other than the Pavilion of Austria! Bosch invented the human bell in the 15th century |
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