Piero Golia at Gagosian Beverly Hills

“The conundrum for artists in this day and age is to convince audiences that their intentions are a tad more credible than those of the endless scam merchants out there clogging the arteries of symbolic exchange.”

Piero Golia, Untitled #1, 2010-2011. Concrete, 3 ½ x 9 ½ x 9 ½ in. (c) Piero Golia. Photo Credit: Douglas M. Parker Studio. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Piero Golia at Gagosian Beverly Hills

Paul Foss

In the early evening of August 4, 2010, police were dispatched to Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills. As a local TV station reported the following day, a driver had crashed his taxi into a house following a disagreement with a pair of Italian honeymooners over the fare, leading to his arrest. In the clip we see the somewhat rattled homeowner, who was standing at the door welcoming his guests when the collision occurred, nursing an injured arm and gesticulating at the minor damage done to his home. Though unnamed in the news report, the victim was none other than Piero Golia.

Now almost a year later, Golia has reprised this alleged “assault with a deadly weapon” at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, with his so-called “Constellation Paintings”—eight debris-strewn black resin “pours,” whose rippling surfaces eerily resemble Leonardo da Vinci’s deluge drawings—and a dozen untitled cast-concrete “cakes” (all from 2011) on individual plinths, the triskaidekaphobic product of 13 commercial cake molds arbitrarily given to Golia as a gift. Also included, in an adjoining annex, was a scaled-down, fully operational “clone” of the luminous orb he placed on top of West Hollywood’s Standard Hotel late last year, triggered by phone to light up only when he is in town, and a few packs of playing cards contained in dutifully “catastrophic” cases. Somehow, he seems to be saying, the stars are trying to tell him something.

A resident of Los Angeles since 2002, Golia is renowned for start-up schemes and other conceptual “actions” of which the Naples-born artist is both the focus and medium. He rowed across the Adriatic in 2000 to become the “first” Italian illegal immigrant in Albania, reversing the usual tide of refugees. In 2005 he founded, with artist Eric Wesley, the Mountain School of Arts, in reality a series of non-accredited “classes” in the upstairs portion of a seedy Chinatown bar, attended by MFA dropouts and other anarchic types. That year also saw his famous vanishing act “after” Bas Jan Ader’s 1975 In Search of the Miraculous, in which Golia got an assistant to pose as his mother and report him missing to the Italian consulate in New York City, only to turn up three weeks later at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen, having bribed his way illegally though customs, so he says, with large wads of cash. Postcards from the Edge (2007), custom-made woven blankets depicting his untraceable trip across America, are the only evidence that remains of this fugitive journey. At Art L.A. in January 2010, he had a 35-foot bus crushed down to fit inside an exhibitor’s booth. And to finance the purchase of a gold mine in Nevada, he is reportedly planning to mount a Las Vegas musical with French artist Pierre Huyghe.

Piero Golia, “Cakes and Constellations,” 2011. Installation View. (c) Piero Golia. Photo Credit: Douglas M. Parker Studio. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

There’s a lot of Manzoni to Piero Golia. Last year he convinced a collector to withdraw one million bucks from the bank, have it delivered to his phony office in the Pacific Design Center, photographed and immediately returned, accruing in all $3,800 in bank fees—a cost, presumably to be offset against the one hundred percent profit yielded by the resulting diptych, now depicting (and probably priced at) two million dollars. Golia’s action apes Manzoni’s Declarations of Authenticity (1960-61), while also slyly inverting Yves Klein’s 1959-62 Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which required throwing half of the gold exchanged for empty space into the Seine. Among other Golia projects currently underway is building a $24 million wall between Los Angeles County and Orange County (“Walls keep people happy”), in mimicry of a long-standing move to form a splinter state in California. But in all likelihood none of these self-gratifying scams exist beyond the drawing board.

In material terms, the Gagosian show is too anticlimactic to expose the real shell game at its core. Just as the damage to Golia’s home was transparently exaggerated, so too is the conceptual clout of “Concrete Cakes and Constellation Paintings” (through August 5), which by and large looks like a slick refugee from a 1960s Nouveau Réalisme exhibition. It’s not that we haven’t experienced this brand of paranoia before. In his short story “Signs and Symbols,” published in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov describes “referential mania” as the belief that “everything happening around [the patient] is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. … Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.” The conundrum for artists in this day and age is to convince audiences that their intentions are a tad more credible than those of the endless scam merchants out there clogging the arteries of symbolic exchange.