Lindsay Lohan inspires artwork in Venice

Even though she's under house detention in Venice, Calif., Lindsay Lohan will be on display in Venice, Italy, Wednesday.

Lohan is the subject of an art piece by painter-turned-filmmaker Richard Phillips that will be showing on a giant JumboTron floating down the Grand Canal from Wednesday through Sunday. The stunt coincides with, but is not officially part of, the illustrious Venice Bienniale art exhibition.

Titled simply "Lindsay Lohan," it looks something like a perfume commercial, with Lohan confronting a turbulent sea, emerging dripping wet from an infinity pool and sunning herself on the deck. Dramatic, almost portentous rock music plays throughout.

"Lindsay Lohan" borrows from the experimental French cinema of the 1960s, a favorite source of inspiration for perfume commercials over the decades. Just as the Calvin Klein Obsession ads in the 1980s directly mimicked Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad," and Chanel's Egoiste ads in the '90s went for a general Nouvelle Vague look, so "Lindsay Lohan" imitates Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt," in which Brigitte Bardot did the swimming and the sunning.

Phillips explains the film this way in a news release:

"Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability, while harnessing the power of the transcendental -- the moment in transition. She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence."