Caravaggio on the Beach:  Essays on Art in the 1990’s (art criticism)
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  January 2001.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
136 pages, with a 2-color gatefold cover, a portfolio of black and white portraits of the artist by the author, Joy L. Glass, and Michaela Langenstein, a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece by Michaela Langenstein, 32 color reproductions
8 x 5 in., printed, sewn, and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN:  1-893207-06-4.
Tangiers, Morocco:  Editions d’Afrique du Nord, 2001.

RETAIL PRICE: $20.00 (includes postage and handling)

Richard Milazzo’s selection of essays, Caravaggio on the Beach:  Essays on Art in the 1990’s, adapt a variety of forms — travelogue, exhibition and symposium statement, letter, obituary, meditation, as well as the formal essay — to document equally the phenomenon of abstraction as the basis of the groundlessness of all values and as a viable mode in our culture, and the noumenon of soul as a possible threshold moment of meaning in art and as an incontrovertible void.  The author analyzes from this diastolic point of view the work of the artists from his generation in the 1980’s — Ross Bleckner, Allan McCollum, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Jeff Koons, Philip Taaffe, Robert Gober, Annette Lemieux, Saint Clair Cemin — and also the work of Sal Scarpitta, Frank Stella, William Anastasi, Richard Serra, Malcolm Morley, Bill Rice, and that of a younger generation in the 1990’s, such as Vik Muniz, Lawrence Carroll, Fabian Marcaccio, Jessica Stockholder, Julian Trigo, Elliot Schwartz, Michel Frère, and Alessandro Twombly.

He examines also the devastating effect ideology has had on art in the last decade, and tries to determine, in the spirit of Goya, what the sleep of monsters (rather than that of reason) has produced during this period.  While some artists, in his view, dangerously condense the threshold of an undifferentiated figure/ground relation, others continue problematically to widen it to create the New Plasticity in abstract painting.  He asks:  “Do the ‘disasters of war’ — the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, AIDS, the corporate exploitation of Third World labor markets, income inequality, and their complements, seemingly inextinguishable poverty and irreversible environmental apocalypse — promote the ‘disasters of painting’, i.e., a kind of exaggerated glorification of the material and ideological values of art without a true formal or spiritual dimension?  And conversely, can the anguish of a Francis Bacon figure be related to the anxiety generated by the incompleteness of a Sol LeWitt cube?”  The author also looks at the critical methodology of exhibition-making; Ross Bleckner’s underexpressionism; and Abraham David Christian’s abstract sculpture, with its Third World architectonic exploiting “the libidinal disorders of an ungraspable universe.”

While speculating about the new Body Art generated by the rhetorical moralism of the New York art world in the 1990’s, the author postulates in a perambulatory way the undifferentiated truth of art, which would return world to (the mirror of) representation as the synthetic experience of abstraction and soul.  Commentaries on Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Récamier, the cemeteries of Cairo, Jackson Pollock’s studio floor, Velasquez’s dwarfs, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the Baptistry in Florence, and Freud’s apartment in Vienna fuel the book’s post-Postmodernist atteggiamento.  And there are more private ruminations on the destruction of the Barceloneta (the old port) by reason of the 1996 Olympics and on the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s apartment rooms at No. 4, Sharia Sharm el-Sheikh in Alexandria (Egypt), as well as reflections on the “green nights” or impenetrable images that were used to transmit anaesthetically to us the bombings of Belgrade conducted under the cover of night and on the Plaça Reial in Barcelona, with its elegant syntax of tall palm trees and engorged street lamps designed by Antonio Gaudí.  In the end, Caravaggio on the Beach is not unlike the boat that Michel Frère left behind at Chelsea Pier on the Hudson River after his recent death or the vessel at Port’Ercole (near Rome), itself afflicted by pun and apocrypha, which ultimately precipitated Caravaggio’s death from sun stroke as he (already debilitated by previous wounds and misfortunes) ran up and down the beach trying desperately to retrieve his effects under the hot July sun:  it (this book as boat) is an inconsolable abstraction that impossibly and ironically carries with it like death itself the soul of a fragment of earth destined for no known port of call.