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daughter, who has seen the light of day in Europe, in Paris, or from
the Hindu goddess who protected the birds. I have wandered the
exhibition in vain looking for the three birds promised in the title.
I knew that, in 1926, the maharajah had bought from a Parisian art
dealer the Bird in Space, a work of Brancusi famous ever since. Later,
he also bought the white and black marble versions of this work.
Brancusi had made a total of sixteen variations on the same theme,
seven out of marble, and seven out of bronze. From the site of the
Deluxe magazine (http://www.deluxe.hu/cikk/20060329/a_ket_
legdragabb_muveszeti_alkotas) we may also find out that one copy
of this work has been sold last year as the second most expensive
artwork of all times.
Instead of the birds taking off and disappearing, what we are
offered in space is the possibility of the projection of a marble bird.
Perhaps the most beautiful collection of objects in the exhibition
consists in these three marble blocks apparently unworkable
– a black and neat one, an interveined Indian one and an Italian
white marble –, which offer a completely unlikely image, almost from
another world. It is like some UFO’s have left them on the museum
floor. Even the material itself is marvelous: the Belgian black marble
of a miraculous purity, out of which Brancusi had sculpted the various
versions of the Bird in Space, has been used quite often during
the Renaissance, in Firenze, but it also appears in the intarsia of the
Taj Mahal. The mystery consists not in the material, but in the
Compaq nk 7000 computer, which is also placed in the exhibition,
respectively in the software maintaining the scanning and the digitalization
of the information, as well as the guiding of a milling
machine with the help of which a natural crack in one of the marble
block may be copied inch by inch to another block. It is as if the
massive stone has been copy-pasted from one corner of the hall to
another.
The sense of fullness offered by the trinity doesn’t just greet us from
the laptop left open and on the edge, but also from the triangular
building installed in the centre of the exhibition hall. Elegantly,
Starling’s logic turned, for the first time, into an artwork exactly
where he found his starting point for his inspiration, where
“he caught the end of the thread” – in Turin. In this city he found
an exhibition space worthy of his work, Fetta di Polenta, the House of
Polenta in Turin, built by Alessandro Antonelli on via Giulia di Barolo,
in 1840, one hundred years before the palace ordered by the
maharajah was finished. The seven storey building, today hosting
Franco Noero’s gallery, became famous due to the architect’s
designing it on a small piece of land with a maximum width of 3.5
meters. Even if we hadn’t seen the place, http://travel.yahoo.com/
p-travelguide-2885215-palazzo_fetta_di_polenta_turin-i informs us
that if we go up the street, the triangular body of the building
becomes almost invisible from a certain perspective; it just disappears
from our sight.
This is how the spirituality of the maharajah returned to Europe; the
story which imbues the Italian gallery takes it from here. The effect is
so strong that two years later, when Starling exhibits at the Ludwig
Museum, along with the work, he also teleports to Budapest the
exhibition stage. The fifth floor built is almost the shadow, the ideal
occurrence of the original. Due to the artificial lighting of the reflector
placed outside, the structure of the windows and balconies is
being projected on the walls, fulfilling the geometry of the photography
exhibited within the replica. Temporal layers are being projected
one over another: the 2008 replica of a 1860 building makes way
for the photographs of a palace built in 1933.
During such a journey in time and space, we are not surprised even
by the fact that the story was born neither in Starling’s subconscious,
while watching some photographs in Turin, nor in the young maharajah’s
mind in 1929. In fact, Ráo Hólkár Bahadur was only 13 when
a young girl and her boyfriend, who used to be a movie director,
wrote a similar story in Germany, in 1920, entitled The Eschnapur
Tiger – The Hindu Grave. In the script imagined by Thea von Harbou,