Sometimes, when the world gets too noisy and crowded with ugly things, it’s good to talk about art, that most pleasing of activities, which explores what it is to be a thinking, feeling and emotional human.
Then you see a banana gaffer-taped to a wall of an art gallery. This particular banana is an artwork called Comedian by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, which forms part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial Exhibition from December. It was first shown in the United States in 2019 when many heads were scratched and chins stroked, trying to decipher its meaning.
All the artist had to say was that it had something to do with the grand tradition of Cezanne’s apples. It was then sold three times, with prices reaching $150,000. It became an international sensation, and to show just how important the funny banana is, it is now part of New York’s prestigious Guggenheim collection.
The funny banana has actually been eaten twice by naughty spectators during exhibition tours. It’s not the same banana, of course. The original banana came with 14 pages of instructions on how to display it, including a request to change it for a new banana every three or four days.
Thank goodness for that. Of course, this $150,000 artwork falls into the great tradition of the ‘my five-year-old could do that’ genre of art. Those who see nothing but a banana are the same people who look at Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles and see just a bunch of drunken scribbles.
But every piece of art has a ‘meta’ story that lives outside the frame or the gallery wall that holds it. The cave paintings of Lascaux and the rock art of the Kimberley are not just pretty leaping animals. They speak about the things central to humanity’s way of life back then, namely the hunt, sacredness, seasons and, of course, food.
The Greek and Roman statues of gods and emperors are examples of technical virtuosity, but they are also about order, hierarchies and power. Similarly, the religious paintings of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci are not simply exercises in beauty and perspective; their wider story is about the power of the church and man’s place in God’s world.
Landscape painters such as Turner and Constable didn’t just produce nice sunsets and meadows — they were reacting against the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution. Impressionists such as Monet, Van Gogh and Renoir were ridiculed for painting from real life and not finishing their paintings with varnish.
The ‘meta’ story of their art was that people’s everyday life was just as important and valuable as the great victories and aspirations of generals and nobles. By the time Picasso arrived, things were seriously out of hand, as artists deliberately provoked ordinary sensibilities by splintering perspectives and using flat planes and screaming colours.
This was all done during the rise of mass consumerism — motor cars, light bulbs and Coca-Cola. When World War I arrived, artists responded with anger and disgust. Frenchman Marcel Duchamp entered a porcelain urinal titled Fountain and signed R. Mutt into a 1917 Paris exhibition. Of course, it was labelled disgusting and immediately banned.
When abstract expressionism arrived in the United States in the late 1940s and ’50s, the wild, spontaneous gestures of Pollock and others fitted nicely into the ‘my five-year-old could do that’ genre of art.
But they were done during the rise of fascist and communist totalitarianism, and they spoke of the vitality of the human individual in the face of crushing political structures. So, what’s the ‘meta’ story of the banana? Is it a comment on how the mass production of throwaway food destroys the environment?
Yep, it could be. Or is it talking about the nonsensical world of modern art itself, where a simple banana is worth a six-figure sum just because an artist says so? Yeah, it could be that, too.
Or is it about the ridiculous comedy of life, with an allusion to the story of the emperor’s new clothes? It is, after all, called Comedian, and the banana skin is a symbol of balloon-pricking conceit.
Yep, it could be all of those things.
Basically, it’s a banana stuck to a wall that people pay to go and see and scratch their heads and maybe get angry about. If the purpose of art is to generate conversation and get people to think outside the frame, then the taped banana has done its job.
Right, okay, now back to the noisy, crowded world.
For a minute there, it was nice to escape.