Today I present to you one of my latest video portraits, I went to the artist’s house Giovanni BaiI made my video portrait, I returned home and had an information sheet sent to me which I report in its essential features: Giovanni Bai (Milan, 1952) is sociologist, artist and cultural agitator. In the 1990 he founded the cultural association Museo Teo, “museum without headquarters and without works”, an atypical institution for the diffusion of contemporary art which since 1991 publishes the magazine Teo Museum Artfanzine, of which he is director. His research is structured around the problems of metropolises and communication and the functioning of the media. In his artistic production he uses the technique that he has developed over the last thirty years, called video painting, based on videophotographic and information technologies. You have exhibited in the main Italian cities and in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo and Shanghai. She taught History of sociological thought (State University, Milan).
Here, this is the information sheet, Now I’ll have my say. Giovanni Bai is handsome, plumply handsome. Giovanni Bai is intelligent, cheerfully intelligent. Giovanni Bai is a cultural agitator, but I think he doesn’t mind shaking a zerozerosettesque Martini too. Giovanni Bai is erotic, childishly erotic. He has an immoderate and modulated passion for Japan. He emanates anarchic photon rays, a kaleidoscopic anarchy which reveals the contradictions of society. He likes to play, and I always get along well with people who love playing. Giovanni Bai is light, but in the spiritual sense, in fact the Teo museum has no location and no works, it can be anywhere, in any place, but above all it finds its home in our mind.
He often exhibits in a room of his beautiful Milanese house, the artists lend their works, then we meet for thehome vernissage, everyone brings something: a homemade tart, a bottle of sparkling wine or prosecco, a red or white wine, a savory tart and so on. You eat, you drink, you chat, you walk around the house, with the room used as a museum that is always ready to welcome you like a friend who whispers art in your ear, this is culture! Without the pompousness of certain art, the Teo museum always talks about the present, it is on the side of those who fight for civil rights, it shuns the palace of power, its fight is wide-ranging, free, light, intolerant towards every form of institutional plastering, is instead articulated in the experience of each of us, placing our daily life on a flowing pedestal, evoking the infinite possibilities of the imagination, it is no coincidence that on the entrance wall of Bai’s apartment there is a suspended table football, a metaphysical table football, with the little men upside down, in the absence of the game ball, but after a while you understand that the meaning is this: the ball is there and it is simply our imagination. Above his workstation is a photo of an immense nipple that Bai calls “my moon”.
I have a passion for nipples too, ever since I was born! The nipple is life, nourishment, pleasure. Every artist cannot do without the nipple, be it symbolic or real. The nipple is everything. Giovanni Bai is a child who always renews his childhood with the awareness of an adult. He likes to experiment, he highlights the distortions of the metropolis through his art, because art is a complex communicative act which has the task of revealing our shortcomings, our distortions, in fact. The human being is precisely that animal that has this neo-Promethean ability to distort its own nature through technique, but if you take away the lightness of play and freedom from technique, all that remains are psychic extermination fields.
The Teo Museum is therefore a friendly museum, a friend of humanity (the name Teo derives from the surname of a dear friend and collaborator of Giovanni Bai), it is a museum that talks about the present but which is already projected towards a cosmic future of total annihilation, all the museums in the world, from the Louvre to the Hermitage, will become museums without headquarters and without works, annihilated by man’s nuclear madness or by the implosion of this star that has fallen on us: the sun. In the meantime however, like in a film Woody Allenwe must think about playing, having fun, imagining, because the sun is still far from imploding and perhaps there will be no nuclear war, man cannot be so stupid as to reduce this crunchy and tasty earth’s crust to ashes.
In any case, as Bai’s pocket-sized and personal Ecclesiastes would say: there is a time to be born and a time to be reborn with a new colored tie, never to die.
