English to Italian Art/Literary Art, Arts & Crafts, Painting

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In the 1991 film LA Story, the American actor Steve Martin plays a confused and depressed weatherman who, at his lowest ebb, begins to receive helpful messages from some benevolent higher agency via the changeable pixels of a Los Angeles freeway sign. Martin’s character isn’t looking for communication from the ethereal realm, but he gets it, and, after a few time-consuming twists, all ends fairly well. Here is the Hollywood dream machine, straying far from plausibility in the service of distraction and temporary consolation (and, of course, financial gain). We need some such diversion, because in reality it is hard to sustain belief in illuminations from a superior intelligence, whether on a signboard or not; and if there are to be any, it already feels awfully late in the day.

Kris Martin’s Mandi III (2003) is, if you like, *a bulletin from this endless belatedness*, one that withdraws a sign’s communicatory powers rather than delivering them. The piece is a flip-over departure board of the type found in train stations, blanked into blackness on all its flaps. Now, the metaphor of a train headed to heaven is part of the common culture, emanating from gospel music in particular (consider Sister Rosetta Tharp’s paradigmatic This Train [1943]). Here it’s not certain that there are no trains – there is a departure board, at least – but there is also an evacuation of expected communication: the hour a vehicle will arrive, the hour we will depart. It is a voiding designed to put one in mind both of time, and, in metaphorical terms, of a silence from above that has echoed down the years.