Installed at the Whitney in a carpeted gallery outfitted with vintage theater seats, his "Caligula" has all the glamour and bombast of a trailer for any other sword-and-sandal epic, except for one thing: it advertises a film that doesn't exist.
The artist makes an appearance in the video to underscore his intent: "I hate being in my work," he said, "but I think it is more meaningful if I become the subject of my own critique." He paid the trailer's $120,000 cost himself, he said, "to protect the project's integrity." Vezzoli said in a recent interview in Manhattan. "For me, the art world has become a place that has turned itself, willingly or not, into some sort of entertainment industry," Mr. Vezzoli takes aim at the lust for power - what he defines as a "desire for visibility" - that he sees afflicting contemporary art these days as well as politics and religion. And at its core is a political satire in which Mr. Vezzoli in a cameo) who sleeps with his sister, executes his critics and presides over a crowd of ambisexual extras dressed only in the occasional accessory. Vezzoli does not live in the United States, his trailer was filmed at a neo-Roman villa on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.Ī five-and-a-half-minute, 35-millimeter video, the short ostensibly promotes a film about a mad Roman emperor (Mr. The biennial, titled "Day for Night" - evoking, like the 1973 Truffaut film of that name, a perceptual twilight zone - is already being called the "post-American" biennial, for its inclusion of foreign-born artists. It will be screened in New York beginning this week as part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, opening on Thursday at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Vezzoli, a 34-year-old artist from Milan whose videos have featured international stars like Catherine Deneuve, Helmut Berger and Sonia Braga, lined up Benicio Del Toro, Helen Mirren and Karen Black, among others, to appear in a fake promotional short, "Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's 'Caligula,' " complete with togas by Donatella Versace. When movie stars agree to work without payment, accept equal billing and happily follow the bidding of a conceptual artist, it must mean that Francesco Vezzoli has come to call.
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