The body and the shelter: respect for rights and contemporary art. A conversation with Berlinde De Bruyckere

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I would start by saying that talking about respect, when it comes to rights, is like talking about oxygen when it comes to breathe: indispensable. I would continue by saying that talking about art, when it comes to respect for rights, is like talking about mould when it comes to medicine: unexpected and enlivening (see under ‘discovery of penicillin’). Ossigeno‘s path in the defence of rights by contemporary art, this time, takes a more inclusive route. This time we do not walk in the furrow of a single right. This time we go to the lymph of each and every one: because every enshrined right, without respect, is but a dead letter. The view becomes panoramic, from the singularity to the plurality of rights and bodies, of all bodies. Universal Declaration of Human Rights: let’s broaden the field, let’s go beyond ‘human’. This time the pivot, as for respect, lies in ‘universal’.

And these lines speak of art. And contemporary art has found its most shining systematisation in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory according to which, since the barbarity of Auschwitz, to say nothing of some winds currently blowing from the west and impregnating storms, no return is possible, it isn’t, but an act of respect for universal life is: contemporary art then has a duty to become anti-art, magnifying through its gesture the aesthetics of discomfort, the sanctity of the different, respecting the call for a revolution gentle in its manners, but detonating in its aim of blowing up a conformism that is no longer admissible.

The above are the reasons why, when I was informed of the baptism of respect as the backbone of this issue of Ossigeno, I strongly wished for a name above all others as symbol-artist, because no one knows how to sing respect for the universal body more than she does; because no one, more than she does, leads an anti-rhetorical path made up of seductive, uncanny and constructive visions.
Berlinde De Bruyckere (Gent, Belgium, 1964), in the words of Eugenio Viola, «has developed over the years a distinctive stylistic research, based on an aesthetics of the laceration that draws on the mythology of a body placed at the crossroads of multiple referents, both cultural and aesthetic. Her sculptures act on a physical level on the skin of images, and on a psychic level on the dimension of the symptom, physical and mental, on the springs of the repressed. Any subject, in her sculpture, becomes an expression of a hallucinated and suspended physiology».

The first thing one has to define for a journey is the geography of places, and it is precisely in the geography of that suspension that Viola speaks of, in that terrain vague between beauty and disturbance, that Berlinde De Bruyckere chooses to steer this journey of ours as well. «What I want to achieve is for people not to look at my work as something beautiful» she says. «I want to touch them where they are afraid to be touched. To address those things they do not find the words for. I don’t expect that to always be a smooth process. Some people will take offense or will object to certain materials I employ. Take for instance the animal skins I source to mold. These hides come straight from the abattoir where the animals were flayed for mass meat consumption and their skins were thrown into large containers. In that moment they don’t belong to anyone; nor to the animals from whom they were robbed, nor to those who will gather, inspect and, by labelling, attribute value to them in the context of future leather production. This non-zone is interesting for me. Exactly because of the brutality of the act, I feel the need to somehow redeem what is considered worthless, disposable».

 

It is the non-zone of the margin, and of the marginalised, that which De Bruyckere identifies as her favourite terrain of exploration and most in need of respect, that Third Landscape theorised by Gilles Clément and made up of «undecided spaces which it is difficult to lay a name on. One point in common: they all constitute a land of refuge for diversity. Everywhere, elsewhere, this is driven out».
For Berlinde De Bruyckere, art is the dwelling able to give refuge, to give shelter, as in the title of these pas de deux between art and rights and in the very title of City of Refuge, the series of exhibitions named after a Nick Cave song that De Bruyckere brings around the world – third, current stop in the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, as part of the collateral exhibitions of the 60th Biennale of Contemporary Art – whose guardians are her transient Arcangeli, genderless icons from long before the word existed and figures equally suspended, on tiptoe, between collapse and decollapse, whose weight of their mission of shelter and comfort lies latent on their bruised bodies.

 

It is precisely in her bodies that lies a great lesson in respect.
A lesson I would like to introduce to you by telling you a story: when studying the Canaki population of New Caledonia colonised by France, the anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt (1878-1954) told of the time he asked a Canaki elder what was the most remarkable discovery that France had brought them and the elder, after much reflection, replied «The body». The Canaki felt that they belonged to the world without any separation from it to the extent that, at every birth, they buried the placenta of the newborn life under a newly planted tree: looking at a forest, thus, a Canaki saw not only trees but lives, regardless of their bark/skin.
It is the same attitude of respect for life, regardless of the body shell, that De Bruyckere puts into art. Her works come to light before our eyes. When all her sculptures – from the cages of the Closet Forms of the 1980s, to the more recent Arcangeli, to the skins of human of horse of tree cured by her anti-art – are placed next to each other, the perception of redemption and rebirth is impetuous. In her lacerated forms we recognise that fissure from which we ourselves are born, which allows birth to become an act of creation. Bodies with no beginning and no end, whose monumentality of volume is effective in becoming a greater sounding board of her message of hope, and her call for understanding and respect.
This is why De Bruyckere chooses horses, whose hides she retrieves from slaughterhouses and cures with wax and epoxy, entrusting their guiltlessness and stateliness with the need to stop all war.
This is why De Bruyckere chooses trees, the trunks and branches of which she salvages from disaster-stricken areas and cures with wax, cushions and velvets, entrusting their guiltlessness and stateliness with the need to actively arrest the climate crisis.
And this is why De Bruyckere moulds sublime bodies – sub-limen, on the threshold – unattributable to a specific gender or age, layering them in wax and supporting them with an invisible iron soul, entrusting their innocence and their 1:1 scale with the need to awaken in us the sharing of a human condition that may throw off exclusivist labels. By virtue of the universal nature of her bodies, her work has been read in turn as an anti speciesist, environmentalist, LGBTQIA+, childhood and old age, asylum and disability manifesto, which cannot but embody an absolute truth: in the detonation of the albeit legitimate claims that crowd an atomised and potentially deflagrating, like an atomic bomb, social fabric, the solution would simply lie in respect for life as such – which also means respect for the choice of self-determination – from the gender transition encapsulated in the words of Almodóvar’s Agrado in All About My Mother: «You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being,» to abortion up to the third month, when nerve cells begin to develop and existentially life can begin to be called life, to the euthanasia of a suffering body whose end it is not only disrespectful, but above all outrageous that anyone else may decree.

When I ask her if, among the claims for respect, there is a struggle she feels deeply about, De Bruyckere therefore chooses to go beyond the -ism suffix label of any specific s truggle: «I pay tribute to the people working in these arduous conditions, and to the material that inspires me».
Respect for labour in arduous conditions, then – I cannot help but think of Satnam Singh, who paid with his life the bloody price of black labour and agrarian caporalism. Of his arm amputated and thrown into a fruit box, and of the body fragments created and redeemed by Berlinde De Bruyckere. But the one on Singh’s body does not even come close to the function of sheltering rights proper to anti-art; the one on Singh’s body is the rotten and toxic fruit of what the preliminary investigation judge defined as «inhuman conduct detrimental to the most basic values of respect and solidarity». The one on Singh’s body is humanity’s darkest hour.
Respect for labour, we said, looking for a light again. From the industrial dynamics of the 20th century towards automation, up to the current AI drift all to be tamed, the tendency to set intellectual labour against manual labour has triggered a paradigm shift in the perception of the centrality of homo faber – including Cattelan-ian implications on who the real author of an artwork is, whether the artist who conceptually conceives it or the lender who materially realises it (and for the Supreme Court and for me, there is no doubt that it is the former). With De Bruyckere, the question does not even arise; her art means also her arm, the masterful manual gesture that leads her to sculpt the wax, to assemble the molds created, to melt them one on top of the other, to paint them layer upon layer.
And respect for the material, a respect that is also recovery (hence, also a practice of sustainability): of skins rescued from slaughterhouses, of trees salvaged from storms, of wax melted and melted again to minimise waste and scrap. Of textiles such as pillows, sheets and blankets, collected at every latitude, which in the name of anti-art have gone through an anti-rhetorical evolution on her way. Thus, if the Blanket women of the 1990s found shelter under dim blankets, decorated with familial patterns and symbolising the most intimate sharing, and if in works such as 0.28 (2007) the stacks of blankets in the lower shelf of the vitrine were almost in comfort of the trunks placed on top, today this no longer makes sense. From Calais, to Cutro, to Buča, to Gaza, the blanket, and the social fabric of the satiated part of the world, has failed – on any Thursday evening in the last, too many months, a reportage on the desperate escape of the surviving Palestinians from Rafah starts. The line of cars is thick, and on each of those cars, crammed with the faces of the vanquished, on each of those luggage racks I recognise distinctly the same, identical patterns of the blankets that, in her work, have failed to provide shelter. And I understood what De Bruyckere means by exhibiting today only ragged blankets, subjected to the wear and tear of the outdoors for months. And it was a blow to the heart.
Of second-hand furnishings that, from being a marginal function, become comprimariums. «It’s an intuitive and very physical process,» she explains to me, «of understanding what a work needs and what it might evoke in the viewer. In the studio, the works grow into their own habitat, they generate themselves in a way. Depending on how the sculptures evolve, for instance, it becomes clear what kind of habitat they require – whether it is a pillow or a table to support them, or a vitrine to encase them. This habitat is part of the work, it’s never just a means of presentation». To listen, even to that which has no capacity for speech. To try to understand its needs. In a word: to respect.

The anti-rhetorical ability of De Bruyckere’s art then passes through the anti-nostalgic and anti-romantic realisation that a large part of the world is artificial, with good grace to those who preach the anachronistic myth of a return to nature, but holding a smartphone as if it were a prosthesis. Naked bodies, logs, horses, everything that could evoke a virgin, wild nature, take their place on an artificial stage, that of their habitats, with the full knowledge that there is no other world outside this one. Tables, sideboards, disused beds, but above all vitrines, are embraced by her sculptures as an integral part of the work, as she herself explains: «For the series of wax sculptures Into One-Another, inspired by the cinema of Pasolini, I started from three vitrines that had previously been used in a natural history museum and are fully recognizable as such. It allowed me to address, in a brutally honest way, a very complex combination of topics I found in the work of Pasolini: the beauty and vulnerability, but also the destructive side of desire, the hunger to be absorbed by the other and the impossibility of it. Contorted bodies with rough edges, some hunched over as if consumed with pain. It’s not something I would have achieved outside the protective atmosphere of the vitrines. The vitrines, as you mentioned, are codified objects, they generate a specific perception, they define the communication with the audience, which allows me to be freer in the sculpture itself. The pillows have a similar effect: they soften the blow. A wounded or deformed body has a different impact when it’s gently supported by a soft cushion, or celebrated by placing it in a vitrine».

Berlinde De Bruyckere’s use of the vitrine is thus part of her anti-rhetorical strategy, because her vitrines hold a diametrically opposed meaning to the current social, selfie, vernissage and various event showcases, please enter miscellaneous photo opportunities. The contemporary pathological eagerness to showcase oneself often entails a kind of shamelessness that razes to the ground that sense of modesty, of awe, which in a way is the basis of respect between people – for, please allow me, I do not agree at all with the broken record that one is worth one, tag-line dripping from a distorted post-democratic rhetoric, and I have this habit of tending to respect and listen to those who have proven to be more competent than me.
Instead, although nude, De Bruyckere’s bodies in vitrine testify to a high dignity, a touching modesty, a fertile silence that overcomes any vulgarity overflowing from the contemporary imagery, doped up with exhibitionism and sick with what Bret Easton Ellis, in White (2019), called likeability: the like-addiction, whose prices to pay are the spread of a canon of mass pseudo-beauty, and the lack of respect towards the non-conforming to that lobotomising, imposed and impostor canon, whereby you only write say or wear something after having filtered it through the supposed approval of others. Respect for authenticity, crudely bartered with dummy thumbs-up and hearts. Imperfect bodies full of dignity in vitrines that protect them; vs. perfectly fake bodies in showcases that flaunt them. Respect for truth, for the depth of slowness, for reflective silence, for a suspension of judgement pregnant with wherewithal; vs. the frenzy of fiction, of the fake Instafilter despotism, of the speed of the virtual, of ferocious and unsolicited judgements – words are very unnecessary, Depeche Mode sing in that warning that is Enjoy the silence.
Sculptures of silence, De Bruyckere’s ones have been called. Of that fertile silence that guards the respect of doubt. Creating contemporary art means a question mark, not three exclamation marks and a fixed caps lock. Openness, not closure. Creating contemporary art means fighting in the trenches on the side of doubt, against the army of serial labellers, those with certainties in their pockets, because as chance would have it, fundamentalism and hardlinerism always go hand in hand with the defining arrogance of those who presume to be the keepers of the truth. Nobel Prize winner Goffredo Parise teaches us this: the cipher of the world we live in is complexity, and the most fertile attitude of those who respect the world is never to stop cultivating doubt.
However, as Raffaele Alberto Ventura recounts in the opening act of this issue of Ossigeno, respect has its etymological roots in the gaze of others, and therefore also in the acceptance of the judgement of others (a minimum of dutiful selection provided, I would like to say). Given, then, the sacrosanct freedom of the artists and their being immersed in a series of relationships (more or less sound, cf. an art system that all too often tends to contract to the dimension of the market, cf. the wild presentialism of that fauna that can be defined as the post-vernissage refreshment herd, cf. the toxic and immoral practice of artwashing), I ask her about her relationship with the gaze of others – that is, how much respect for the judgement of others counts in her art making: «In the creation process, it is certainly not my main concern – or at least it does not come in the shape of a set of conscious moral guidelines or limitations I impose on myself. But I do value the feedback of my audience. The process of translating the source of inspiration into an actual sculpture is marked by a great sense of responsibility that I feel towards the work itself and to the way I confront the viewer with it. The reactions of the people who reach out to me and share their experience to me can sometimes be confronting, but at the same time they strengthen my conviction to create. I see the work as a meeting point, a place where people are stimulated to get hold of things deep inside them, emotions that cannot be brought to the surface through words».

There it is, the sister of respect: responsibility.
Taking charge of the self, having self-respect. This is all the more true for an artist like Berlinde De Bruyckere, whose fame would have allowed her to rest on her laurels. Instead, as a painter, she felt the urge to make sculpture. As a sculptor, after having seen the staging of Pitié! by Alain Platel and his Ballets C de la B in 2008, she felt the need to investigate physicality in movement and co-signed with the same dancers powerful performances such as Romeu, my deer (2013) and Sybille (2014). As a leading figure in art venues, she entered the theatre, becoming a set designer for Platel’s latest productions. And when the s tylema of her sculpture seemed to be abstraction, she returned to the figurative with the Arcangeli – I am reminded of what Gilles Deleuze wrote in Proust and Signs: «There is no great artist who does not make us say: the same, and yet different».
And taking charge of the other from the self, paving the way with a willingness to confrontation and dialogue. Responsibility in presenting her work passes through respect for cultural diversity and public space: «In my own practice, I do reflect about how my work will be received in a specific context. Not as a restriction, but as a dialogue with the surrounding space, with the viewer. Public space calls for a different approach than museum space. In public space, people are involuntarily confronted with something they weren’t expecting and often don’t know how to contextualise. Cultural differences also make for different readings, a different understanding of what is presented. I will give you an example: in 2012, I had my first solo exhibition in Istanbul, at Arter, then located at Istiklâl Caddesi, one of the largest shopping streets in Istanbul. The space had a large window on the street side, allowing passers-by to see part of the exhibition. Putting one of my wax figures, a deformed naked body in this window, is something I would never do. Muslim culture has different sensitivities, and to brutally ignore them and set out to provoke is not my approach. When I am invited in a place like Istanbul, I consider it an honour to be accepted, to be given access to a new world. It inspires me and energizes me to create new works that can give something back. Accepting certain cultural boundaries can also be liberating; it allows you to question what you take for granted, and opens the gates to new insights. I find great value in that. This cross pollination of cultures is what interests me, and has long been a defining trait of the city itself. I will not shy away from the uncomfortable, the message will still be the same, but I try to make sure it is understood, rather than rejected».
In Berlinde De Bruyckere’s artistic history, respect for public space starting with knowledge of its history is a constant. Invited in 2013 as Belgium’s representative artist at the 55th Venice Biennale, in a space full of light, De Bruyckere totally obscured it to accommodate Kreupelhout – Cripplewood, co-curated with Nobel Prize winner for literature J.M. Coetzee, the trunk of a 27-metre elm salvaged from a storm and redeemed with wax shaded in flesh tones and textiles dyed Venetian red. It has been her homage to St. Sebastian, protector of Venice and religious icon (and contemporary queer icon, if only thinking of a masterpiece like Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane) most present among the city’s masterpieces, where the darkness of the mise-en-scène encapsulated the ever looming warning to Venice to take care so that the darkness of submergence might always be averted. Still in Istanbul, asking for reopening the 19th-century hammam of Çukurcuma, De Bruyckere installed Actaeon II (2012), a reinterpretation of the Greek myth of Actaeon’s metamorphosis by Artemis, caught naked bathing; enraged, the goddess turned him into a stag, unrecognised and mauled by his own dogs. Their sorrow was then soothed by the viewing of their master’s portrait – thus, by art, and in the (anti)rhetorical figure of metonymy created by the artist, Actaeon is a mass of wax horns resting on pillows. The Çukurcuma Hammam, a place of purification of the body and, in its more recent past, a well-known destination for gay cruising, thus accommodated a tale of desire and catharsis, purification and regeneration through art, like the purification of bodies that take place in hammams.
And it is she herself who tells me about respect for sorrow, recalling her solo exhibition Aletheia, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in 2019-2020, which grew out of her first visit to the slaughterhouse in Anderlecht. «The installation offered an immersive experience to the viewer, who was confronted with a reconstruction of a skin workshop in which wax casts of brine-soaked amorphous heaps of animal skins were stacked on large wooden pallets; a salt-covered landscape of anonymous death. The piled-up skins had a strong impact, but the salt was also a key element, salt in the wound, whose smell and dehydrating effect also make it painful to breathe. Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, the pandemic struck and hit this particular area, and the very act of breathing, very hard. We all recall the column of military trucks carrying out the dead from Bergamo. After the first lockdown, the museum decided to reopen and prolong the exhibition. It was a moment when I felt we had to tread carefully. The pandemic had created a context I was not prepared for, one that would have generated an entirely different experience for the visitors who, at that moment of travel limitations, were mainly local people. We decided to instruct the invigilators to offer some context to the visitors before they entered the space. It is not something I am generally fond of, but in that case it was a needed, and appreciated by many, act of respect. I think it allowed to not only be the brutal confrontation, but also the cathartic experience I intended it to be».

The management of brutal confrontation, and therefore of contrast, is crucial in an oeuvre such as De Bruyckere’s, which thrives on conceptual contrasts, resolved by the artist through the fecund welcoming of opposites, as she herself explains to me: «The materials I use, the topics I address, incorporate both the frailty and the brutality of things, the horror and the beauty. Never one without the other. Perhaps this layered approach, both material and conceptual, can raise questions, rather than inspire hostility».
Material layering involves fifteen to twenty layers of wax, hybridised again with skins, barks, torn textiles, sometimes lead – a perfect matter for her anti-rhetorical short circuits, among the heaviest but, once warm, perfectly malleable. Unlike what happens with a block of marble, De Bruyckere adds rather than taking away and, in so doing, she enriches – as in the layering of two horse bodies exceeding the volume of the vitrine for No life lost II (2015), for which a superficial glance is not enough to understand whether it is Eros or Thanatos.
Conceptual layering, on the other hand, sinks into a continuum of contemporary images, Greek myths, Christian martyrs and the work of European and Flemish masters such as Cranach, Caravaggio, Giordano, van der Weyden and Zurbarán. Icons layered on icons to give birth to bodies without connotations, belonging to no time and no place, which it is more immediate to activate a mechanism of projection on. «One of the things I enjoy most is bringing together things so that objects with different histories converge, producing an added dimension,» she said in 2021. I then ask her what lies in that added dimension: «I think the added dimension for me quite simply lies in the act of connecting, of subscribing as an artist to a bigger story, the story of humanity, which is as much about diversity and change, as it is about self-repeating dynamics».
I am thinking back to the very first document I consulted to prepare myself for this conversation: a PowerPoint edited by her in 2017, for a lecture on the theme of passions commissioned by LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, where flashes of her works flowed at schizoid speed, together with frames of Pasolini’s films and details of Cranach’s artworks, from Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Thanatos) to Emilia in Theorem (Eros), both with their mouths ajar, in their hunger for love. Icons made alive in their relationality, proximity and heterogeneity, in the lesson of respect for plurality, strengthened by a further unsettling clash: the choice of the accompanying track, Lou Reed’s Pumping Blood, deliriously and obsessively repeating Will you have mercy? while her Pietas were appearing. And here I was expecting, I dunno, Monteverdi. «Sometimes I think perhaps it’s time to make a new one,» she confesses to me, «many years later, many images later. The pace and nature of the images I am confronted with now, through different channels, have changed dramatically; they have become increasingly brutal, and impossible to escape».
Until recently, a large wall in her studio was thick with photographs taken from the most heterogeneous sources, evidence of his prismatic imagination. But she tells me that nowadays she can no longer keep up with that avalanche of images and she doesn’t pin them on her wall anymore, but only because «they are burnt on my retina, and they come to me all the time when I work. The image has this power. The image is a much more physical experience».

 

Nella chiusura del discorso che avrebbe dovuto tenere al Congresso del Partito Radicale, riferendosi agli artisti, Pasolini scrisse: «Contro tutto questo voi non dovete fare altro (io credo) che continuare semplicemente a essere voi stessi: il che significa essere continuamente irriconoscibili. Dimenticare subito i grandi successi: e continuare imperterriti, ostinati, eternamente contrari, a pretendere, a volere, a identificarvi col diverso; a scandalizzare».
Due giorni prima del congresso, Pasolini fu assassinato. Questo è l’ultimo testo scritto che ci resta di lui.
E contiene esattamente il dovere dell’arte, nella sua chiamata alla difesa del rispetto.

«Still, I managed to get about twenty photographs, and with bits of chewed bread I pasted them on the back of the cardboard sheet of regulations that hangs on the wall. Some are pinned up with bits of brass wire which the foreman brings me and on which I have to string colored glass beads. Using the same beads with which the prisoners next door make funeral wreaths, I have made star-shaped frames for the most purely criminals. In the evening, as you open your window to the street, I turn the back of the regulation sheet towards me. Smiles and sneers, alike inexorable, enter me by all the holes I offer. They watch over my little routines».
– Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 1943

The strategy of layering, her act of connecting as an artist to the story of humanity as she says, is the sworn and non-violent enemy of that sub-species of cheap purism (cf. totalitarianism) exclusive prerogative of those who do not know at all what to do with respect. De Bruyckere tells me this by going back in her mind to Istanbul, which she tells me she remembers «as one of the most memorable experiences of my career as an artist. All the more painful it was to read, in July 2021, that the Turkish government had decided to deprive Hagía Sophia, a former Byzantine cathedral, of its status as a museum and to convert it back into a mosque. From then on, Christian icons were to be covered during Islamic prayers. I recalled the moment I first visited that space, almost ten years before that. Alongside the soon to be covered Christian images, flanked by monumental Arabic calligraphic medallions, one could have found the seraphim, to me the most magnificent of all angels. How beautiful this unity: the seraphim from the Jewish scriptures, the Christian iconography and the Islamic medallions. They all shared the same space. That place, that melting pot of religions and cultures, that Byzantine monument, seamlessly merged with the minarets that were built much later, accessible to all, was for me a testimony to universal, deeply human desires. Desires that unite us all. To read that Hagía Sophia was showing blind spots felt like a painful denial of that alliance».

But there is a moment when contrast needs to manifest itself as such, in the demand for change of a worn-out status quo: this is what happens in the public space as a square, where people go to express their dissent. In a fulfilled democracy, respect for dissent should be is a right, respect for which is enshrined in the principle of free expression of thought and freedom of assembly. In a fulfilled democracy, the handling of dissent should be is mature and appropriate. In a fulfilled democracy, when the anger born of dissent is channelled into symbolic, non-violent actions, the government should know must know how to listen to it, as civil disobedience teaches and as narrated in Why we fight?, a 2022 documentary by Alain Platel and another soulmate of hers, photographer Mirjam Devriendt, in which De Bruyckere herself participated by talking about the lesson of universal respect in her anti-art.
For a fulfilled democracy is, without strikethrough conditionals, the land of respect. But the constatation that in the present everything burns is paradigmatic of the fact that democracy is not a proclamation which is sufficient to put in the Constitutions for it to be said to have been achieved, but rather a body to be respected and protected, it too, every single day. The constatation that in the present everything burns – like the title of Motus’ illuminating play from 2021, the synopsis of which says «In the actual Anthropocene era we can fight for the rights of our bodies, but the body has its own inescapable public dimension» – is paradigmatic of the fact that the anthropocentric paradigm has failed, as the equally illuminating group show Die intelligenz der pflanzen, at the FKV in Frankfurt in 2021-2022, in which a paradigm of interdependence and mutual aid such as that always implemented by plants was proposed – starting from the assumptions of plant neurobiology by the scientist Stefano Mancuso and the observations on mixture as respect for biodiversity by the philosopher Emanuele Coccia – setting aside progress to favour development, as Pier Paolo Pasolini taught; or, applied to economics, setting aside growth to favour prosperity, as Kate Raworth teaches. Berlinde De Bruyckere participated in the group show with her installation Embalmed Twins I and II (2017), two centuries-old oak trees grown up together, life companions, and fallen victim to Hurricane Kyrill in 2016, reborn in her artistic gesture.

A group show like that was based on respect for art and science as pillars in the reconstruction of a new paradigm, the ecocentric one, based on respect for the environment. However, the only ones who seem to have an urgency for a necessary paradigm shift – and the only ones who seem to have an awareness of art as a driving force for change – are the young, who however often handle all this with the rage of dissent and the clamour of the gesture, aware that they belong to the society of the spectacle. Movements such as Extinction Rebellion, Last Generation, Just Stop Oil thus hit priceless works of art by throwing paint and canned food – alright, but they do it on the outer glass that protects them, not really intending to disfigure them, but rather to convey in the most flamboyant and controversial way that art too won’t be able to survive on a burning planet.
Personally, I do not think these actions are disrespectful for art as a product; I think these are high forms of respect for art as a symbol. Berlinde De Bruyckere replies to me that she would prefer to leave the question open – and, I think, my position is probably due to the fact that I do not create art, so my love for art can never be comparable to the love of a parent for his daughter, because in the eco-activists there is in any case a form of instrumentalisation of art – but she tells me what she thinks about vandalism in art, which is different from the dissent of eco-activists because it is anonymous, therefore coward and unaccountable, sterile, not open to confrontation, violent and unmotivated: «I remember that in 2008 in Gent, where I live and work, a wax figure, one of the Schmerzensmann series that was on display at KASK, the Fine Arts Academy, was vandalized twice in the exact same spot; the foot of the figure was destroyed and, soon after restoration, destroyed again. I would like to quote Stefan Hertmans who described the incident in a striking way: “Twice, Schmerzensmann V, 2006 was damaged during the exhibition, each time in the same way and in the same place, resulting in its premature eviction. That act, and especially the almost ritualistic repetition, suggests a perverse awareness of the scope of the intervention. Ultimately, vandalism is always a double-edged sword. Where the work of art is violated, the anonymous perpetrator also inscribes his defeat: he has lost to the object that offered him a confrontation. He has driven the symbolic violence back to meager literalism and thus put himself out of the game. He ended up damaging his own field of vision and testified to an uncomprehended self-loathing. But there was more at stake. Aptly, the smashed foot of this artificial and headless body gave the impression of belonging to the artwork, as if the power of the sculpture was able to absorb the aggression and thus show the enormous potential of suffering through which it immediately transcended the damage into part of the presentation”».

Art capable of regenerating itself. Art capable of regenerating. Art capable of healing. In the documentary Louise Bourgeois. The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (2008) by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, on a piece of pink paper one can see, written in that immense artist’s handwriting, art is a guaranty of sanity. Her art was a mending of what was broken in her: her mother restored tapestries, and Bourgeois’ world-renowned, mammoth spiders paid homage to her mother, giving herself comfort. Respect for illness and disease, enshrined in charter (and lately only there, the writer herein lives in Calabria) through the right to health and care, found the most fertile shelter for De Bruyckere in that anatomical part able to give life: a vagina, sacred as a reliquia. I too return to Istanbul, in 2012, to tell you about Yara, wound in Turkish, a cycle of three sculptures that give body to as many vulvar forms protruding from the wall and in your face, as feminist art claimed. But their semantic encoding changes when these artworks are connected to their source of inspiration: a medical photo album from 1890, found in an Istanbul library, bearing portraits of women next to glass vases containing their removed ovarian tumour masses. The women, wrapped in burqas, reveal a flap of their bodies through an oval cut in the garment showing their scar, like a memento mori. From being a work of feminist denunciation, Yara thus expands to embrace the denunciation of a certain scientific-voyeuristic approach to illness, which tends to relegate the disease to an anatomical area without considering the body it belongs to, the person it belongs to, the context it belongs to.
And it is clear that they are somewhat scandalous images but, as Pasolini wrote, there is no sanctity without scandal.
«Reading the Bible is like watching Pasolini», Berlinde De Bruyckere once declared. Berlinde, whose name is borrowed from the saint Berlinde of Meerbeke.
Berlinde, whose studio is a building that once housed a Catholic male boarding school.
Berlinde, herself grown up in a Catholic boarding school.
Berlinde, who sculpts new martyrs in wax like votive candles, resemanticised Christian tópoi such as Saint Sebastian in a trunk, Ecce Homo in a horse, Pietas in the embrace of two mutilated bodies.
Berlinde, who through her anti-art, testifies the respect for the sacred and the right to freedom of belief.
Given the centrality of religious iconography in her life and work, I ask her what religion is – whether a notebook of poems, a breviary of good conduct, an epistolary entertained with a love lost because discovered to be a liar, an art history manual: «All of the above, and none of them fully. I was never religious, but the religious iconography I was surrounded by growing up in a Catholic boarding school triggered something deep inside me. Those images, as well as the stories from the Old and the New Testament, are part of my lexicon. Though likely intended as a breviary of good conduct, as you suggested, I think what really intrigued me was the brutality of it all. Suffering, death, carnal desire, conflict, the need for transcendence; the turbulent core of the human condition, it was all there. In a way, this helped me not to shy away from the unpleasant in my own practice and to address human nature in its full complexity. This childhood experience was as important as discovering Ovid’s Metamorphoses at a later age, or the cinema of Pasolini, or the work of J.M. Coetzee. I refer to it as a cumulative image/literary essay, an archive of impressions, and a universal experience that transcends the boundaries of time and space. That is why, in this sense, Pasolini is an interesting reference: because, like him, I try to envision what happens when the sacred enters the profane».
A Pasolinian sense of everything is holy, a spiritual journey focusing on the dimension of a transition for which there won’t be death, but continuous rebirth. I cannot help but think of God Save the Queer. Feminist catechism (transl., 2022) by Michela Murgia, one of the most luminous intellectuals we had in Italy, who as a profound and conscious believer – therefore, inclined to cultivate doubt – speaks of the practice of the threshold as a Christological practice, drawn from the Gospel of John (John 10, 1-10) at the moment when Jesus says of himself I am the door of the sheep, becoming for this very reason a queer icon: «It is as a woman, as a feminist and as a Christian at the same time that I can seek out, practise and protect the thresholds, the boundary places between the social cages in which it would be demanded that we all should stay. To accept queerness as Christian praxis is to recognise that the border does not surround us, but instead it passes through us, and that what we perceive as contradiction is actually a fruitful space».
The angels themselves, and thus her Arcangeli, go beyond gender binarism in the Christian narrative, but they are not the only ones: Palindroom, 2019 is the reproduction of a mare model used for breeding stallions that, while retaining a feminine nature, has a phallic aspect, just as the palindrome characterises a homophonic text, either reading it one way or the other way round. Penthesilea, 2015 evokes the queen of the Amazons killed by Achilles, and it mixes the phallic form of the structure with the vulvar form of the drapery of skins superimposed on it, similar to the forms of the Madonna del Parto (1460) by Piero della Francesca. The series Met tere huid (2014) is a powerful rendering of vulvar forms modelled on a stock of stallion halters.
And then there is It almost seemed a lily (2017), Ovid’s words to describe the flower Hyacinth turns into after his death, accidentally struck by a disc thrown by Apollo, his lover. And it is right from a bouquet of lilies about to wither, and from their drooping and decaying petals, that De Bruyckere moves her anti-rhetorical research using precisely the rhetorical figure of metonymy, a part for the whole, observing the resemblance of a petal to the texture of skin. So it was that De Bruyckere decided to transform skins into gigantic petals to be placed in imposing wall works, together with her other stylistic features, including gold dust as fertile pollen. This rendition is even more significant by virtue of her discovery, at the same time, of the enclosed gardens of the Mechelen monastery: small cabinets for private prayer, set up in their cells by the nuns of the convent. Mini wunderkammern filled with luxuriant silk flowers, relics, ribbons and polychrome sculptures, as their only form of worldliness and sublimation of sexuality, linked to the body of Christ not as ostia, but as husband. Purity and eroticism, the sacred and the profane, wrapped in a spiral. The archetype of the sacred in De Bruyckere recalls the same model taken up by Jean Clair in De Immundo (2005): «The sacer manifests the impossibility of separating the sacred, the saint, the sacrosanct just as it is commonly understood, from the impure, from the cursed, from the abominable. Sacer is that which, in a living being or in an object, simultaneously belongs to the field of the sacred and the filth, of taboo and untouchability, of consecration and outlawing, of a secret to conceal and the obscene to be abhorred».

Let us then speak of disrespect. Let us speak of obscenity.
«The artists, if they also take on ethics, must not necessarily be in the odour, but at least in the stench of holiness on the scene. They must feel like being in excess». It is through these words, a little traumatic as he had accustomed us, that Carmelo Bene described the responsibility of the artist and defined obscenity in art: ob-scene, outside the scene, outside the tyranny of the uniform mindedness, thus absolving obscenity in art with a full formula, as long as it is in the stench of holiness.
I smiled in finding out that Berlinde De Bruyckere’s first exhibition was a 1986 group show in her hometown, Gent, in a former factory renamed Fabriek voor Entartete Kunst, factory of degenerate art, a definition given by Nazism to denigrate the artworks it did not approve of – hence the free ones, the non-propagandist ones. Her chrysalid-bodies, Cronenbergian bodies with rough edges, are scabrous. They are offspring of Freud’s Unheimliche, of the uncanny, which in the hands of the anti-artist becomes a tool to attract us through the familiar factor – the skin whose bluish veins still seem to pulsate, the dimensions of bodies 1:1, her blankets with humble patterns, present in everyone’s home but preserving the disquiet of a latent repressed – to throw then us in front of the taboos of our limits, which we are called upon to elaborate; first and foremost, the taboo of death, which De Bruyckere sublimates through the ritual of her sculpture, wax and care, akin to the ritual of embalming (at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2015, her solo exhibition was precisely entitled The Embalmer).
Innervating them of both the fetish paraphilia of the bodily fragment and the sacredness of the relic, from fetishism to sanctity, De Bruyckere’s universal and disturbing bodies are conceptually monstrous – going along with the etymological root of monstrum which, like monumentum, derives from monere, to warn: monstrum is the sudden appearance of an anomaly that can be a warning for everyone, but which at the same time destabilises, upsets and scandalises. Yet scandal is a right for the artist, as well as a precise duty: «I think scandalising is a right, being scandalised a pleasure, and whoever refuses to be scandalised is a moralist, the so-called moralist,» Pasolini declared in one of his last interviews with Dix de Der in 1975.

Obscenity for moralists, then, is not the same as obscenity for artists and all those who thrive on art and culture. I ask De Bruyckere what obscenity in art is for her, what she finds so unworthy of respect as to be obscene. «Obscenity is a fluid concept, so is tolerance. We should question what defines them. It’s clear that what we perceive as obscene changes throughout time. The extent of disturbance it causes seems deeply connected also with the medium that conveys these so-called obscenities. When we look closely at the Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch, the level of disturbing sexual content and brutality is wild, but people still bring their children to see it without blinking. On the other hand, a movie like Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, already controversial in its time, would simply be inconceivable in the current climate. Cinema magnifies these sensitivities – and I don’t deny that the content of that movie is brutal to an extent that it becomes close to unbearable, but seeing it was essential and liberating for me, as an artist and as a person. In my own practice I have encountered moments when I have found myself questioning these boundaries. When I installed Aletheia, I felt the need to bring a bold and strong image. It was a moment in time where extremism and racism proliferated, where I felt compassion and solidarity had withered away, when I saw many resemblances to the restlessness of the late 1930s that preceded the real obscenities of the Holocaust, where, in addition, this defamation of civilisation was being questioned and denied by people with too much political power. To me, that is the real obscenity».

I totally agree. The real obscenity is the lack of respect for life.
And I totally agree: I think of Article 21 of our Constitution, lately as never before under attack – printed publications, shows and all other manifestations contrary to decency are banned – to reflect on the shifting boundaries of the concept of freedom itself. Freedom of expression above all, given the havoc that those same politicians with symptoms of omnipotence delirium are making in Italy of the public service.

Decency as a synonym for respect, it sounds so old fashioned; yet, in its name and like so many furious Torquemadas, we have been able to proscribe immense artists, from Pasolini to Genet, from Schiele to Caravaggio: guilty, the latter, of a pilgrim’s feet dirt in the presence of the Virgin Mary, guiltily forgetting that God was made Man. Censorship, and its ultra-toxic drift in cancel culture – precisely defined by Nick Cave as «Mercy’s antithesis, the unhappiest religion of the world» – is the mortiferous practice of the abuse of respect. In his recent essay The just statues (transl., 2024), Tomaso Montanari reflects on the fact that, given the renewal of values, it is right that material memories such as statues no longer representing shareable values should be at the centre of a conflict, but it would be a tragic mistake to erase them, proposing instead their resemantisation in situ.

I then put my final question to Berlinde De Bruyckere by asking her, given the uncomfortable and sacrosanct power of her anti-art, whether she has ever encountered that abuse of respect that goes by the name of censorship. Her words leave no room for misunderstanding. «I’ve never personally encountered it, but the current cancel culture is mortifying. Studying art history has taught us everything: how people lived, how they chose to communicate, what inspired them, their fears, desires and passions, unfiltered. I strongly feel that artists who serve the larger scope of things and focus on the human experience as a shared experience will always get recognition, as the questions their work raises – and the answers these questions may ignite – are universal. A powerful work of art is always a synthesis of society. Society is simply not a pretty picture; the future is not looking that bright, without the due respect for complexity. I think it’s an artist’s responsibility to address and capture this complexity. If this leads to challenging statements, or unseemly images, so be it. But to reduce reality to something that is containable, safe, straightforward and acceptable is to deny it. Censorship is nothing but the legitimisation of that denial».

In the closing of the speech he was to give at the Congress of the Radical Party, referring to the artists, Pasolini wrote: «Against all this you have to do nothing else (I believe) than simply continue to be yourselves: which means being continually unrecognisable. To immediately forget the great successes: and to continue undaunted, obstinate, eternally contrary, to demand, to want, to identify yourselves with the different; to scandalise».
Two days before the congress, Pasolini was murdered. This is the last script that we have left of him. And it contains exactly the duty of art, in its call to the defence of respect.

 

warm thanks to Silvia Pichini (head of communication) and to Margherita Tinagli (artist liaison) @ Galleria Continua