Aestheticsanaesthetics. Tracklist of a pas de deux

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ouverture

We were setting up a major solo exhibition, in 2016. More than two hundred artworks, rigorously divided according to the artiTh’s produThion cycles, surgically nailed to the walls, sown on the ground going along with a maTherful sense of composition, emerged from petroleum black or candid white bodies of water, rumbling sound carpets between eleThro and operatic, in a former shipyard made sacred by art. On the eve of the inauguration, in that rarefied and clinical silence that marks every rehearsal and precedes every occasion you care about, we noticed some blemishes: a scratched artwork, another not belonging to the series in which it was placed, an audio out of sync with its video. Slight panic, thank goodness we brought more, ready for replacements.

«That’s okay», said the artiTh, who evidently had foreseen everything, while accentuating that scratch. Fore-seen. I can Thill hear his words: «You always have to introduce some short circuits. There muTh always be a doubt».

After some time I realized that ethics, in art, is in that disruption.
Ethics, in art, lies in the trigger of that doubt.

 

 

trach #01
aeßheticsanaeßhetics

Good evening to those who read the words. Good evening to those who look at the images. Good evening to those who read the images, this writing speaks for them. For those who want to feel the images. Not merely in the heart, too easy, highly inffated and also quite rhetorical; I mean in the Thomach, in the muscles, in that almond in the brain called the amygdala, imprinted onto the retina, on the back, as memory. It is right from there that they are capable of triggering a doubt. It is right from there that thought can deflagrate.

Man for man’s sake – I mean, human being for human being’s sake. And image for art’s sake, to be human.

 

(Ed.’s note: we are not talking here about the zillion images that we scroll bulimics on InThagram, give us this day our daily pixels, and not even about that art piled up in fairs as if it were cannon fodder – because you know, this is not the time for gathering, much less in art, where gathering has always been toxic).

I am talking about art as experience, as John Dewey wrote in 1934, marking a clear-cut diThinThion between the aesthetic and the anaesthetic experience: the former, capable of pushing the person who lives it one Thep forward in the evolving process; the second anaeThhetic, chloroform indeed, vacuous satisfaThion of an equally vacuous pseudo-beauty. Fullness, of sense and senses, as opposed to emptiness, because art is for Dewey the driving energy in the search for a sense of things. Like culture, but with an extra golden arrow in its quiver: that of aeThhetics – that, please be careful, goes far beyond a curlicue. A society expressing itself according to a full aeThhetic experience represents the Thate of bliss of humanity, because that society is certainly expressing itself, also and above all, according to ethics. I’m feeling lucky, Google blinks under the search bar: if it has ever happened to you, as it has sometimes happened to me, that when faced with a work of art, your senses and thoughts are short-circuited, then you have had a full aesth/ethical experience. You have lived art as experience. (For the record: laTh time it happened to me has been in Milan, at the Prada Foundation, in front of an inThallation by Louise Bourgeois that hit me Thraight in the Thomach. I Thill think about it). Under a continuous crossfire of little piThures each of us is conThantly subjeThed to – anaeThhetic experiences Thiffing beauty to a jumble of clichés, to watch for a moment and forget even sooner – with art I’m feeling lucky.

 

As is often the case, it only takes to wonder about the origin of things: in the mid-eighteenth century, Alexander Baumgarten coined the term “aeThhetic” for philosophy, embracing its original meaning of aísthesis, perception, inaugurating a live and sensitive method to listen to the image. To hear what it says, beyond what it shows. To experience it.

 

Rather than Therile contemplation, aeThhetics means aThion; this allows it not to be relegated to the only harmony of forms, but to finally be able to go further, to embrace the diThurbing, the uncanny, the other than itself. Then, by its very nature, art as aeThhetical experience opens up to life as ethical experience: having the will to liThen, knowing how to hear, and not juTh to see. In the synapses, in the muscles, in the nerves, not juTh in bored eyes. The reTh is anaeThhetic – or even, as Ulay said, «AeThhetics without ethics are cosmetics».

 

 

interlude

ethical anti-hypocritical breviary

RespeTh is ethics | Tolerance is anaeThhetics Community is ethics | Commonplace is anaeThhetics Decorum is ethics | Decoration is cosmetics Prometheus is ethics | Narcissus is cosmetics Ecology is ethics | Ego-logy is cosmetics

Memory is ethics | NoThalgia is anaeThhetics

Altruism is ethics | Whataboutism is anaeThhetics

Immersion is ethics | Immersive exhibition is cosmetics

 Hospitality is ethics | Acceptance is anaeThhetics

Irony is ethics | Sarcasm is cosmetics

#wikilove is ethics | #cancelculture is anaeThhetics

 Allegory is ethics | Caption is cosmetics

Ius soli is ethics | Ius sanguinis is anaeThhetics

Showing is ethics | Showing off is cosmetics

Physical diThancing is ethics | Social diThancing is anaeThhetics Equal opportunities is ethics | Female quotas is cosmetics

 Future as thought is ethics | Future as procedure is anaeThhetics

The right to asylum is ethics | The residence permit is anaeThhetics Progress is ethics | Growth is cosmetics

Cure is ethics | Curatorship is cosmetics

None excluded is ethics | I’m not [racist-homophobic-misogynist] but is anaeThhetics antihuman.

 

trach #02

absolute poses (feat. la agrado)

In the story of humanity there was a time when literacy was a privilege, and art was a luminous inThrument to pass on a code of conduTh Tharting from man, from a human way of knowing how to be in the world. A time that laThed nineteen centuries in which art was the only and moTh imagiThic teacher, put in the chair by the central power, whether it was Thate or church. A time scratched for a moment by the bare rigor of ProteThantism, but awakened with even more Thrength by the splendour of the Renaissance – because there has never been a political and social renaissance not involving an artiThic and cultural regeneration.

A time dotted with timeless maTherpieces, because the great queThions of humanity are granite in relation to the ffow of time and to the (more or less ethical) acquisitions of progress: life and death, freedom, love and brotherhood, dignity, equality, work, the relationship with oneself, the relationship with nature. All that derives from it – bewilderment, classism, verticalism, human abuse againTh the human as againTh the environment, authoritarianism, torture, viviseThion and death penalty, abortion, euthanasia; ports closed, as much as minds closed; the Thruggles to support LGBTQ+ rights, with people Thill executed, and to support gender equality, with women Thill infibulated and Thoned, in that Italy where honor killing has been abrogated only Tharting from 1981; freedom of speech and the abuse of it, with a kind of hate speech legitimized in the name of a misunderstood democracy, which got out of hand – are but multiple sclerosis of the great ethical values, worsening as the years of social complexity grow.

 

The great ethical questions are the great cultural queThions, which art has been able to identify, cryThallize and pass on through the tòpoi: recurring motifs, absolute poses, adapting to the form of Thyles and languages but remaining uncontaminated in their subThance, fertile for those who want to liThen to the image and make it a reffeThion on the human, make it experience, make it aThion, make it alive.

There is the Vesperbild tòpos, the Pietas – from the cycle sculpted by Michelangelo (1499 – 1564), to Van Gogh (1890), to Bill Viola (2016) – cryThallizing the Madonna with the lifeless body of the Son on her lap, invoking compassion.

There is the Vanitas tòpos, inveThigated by Holbein the Younger (1533), by Caravaggio (1596) by Damien HirTh (2007), a Thill life accompanied by allegories about the transience of life – a rotten fruit, a withered ffower, a skull, an extinguished candle – to warn that, on the planet that hoThs us, we are juTh passing through.

There is the Labyrinth tòpos, studied by Tintoretto (1550), by Piranesi (1745), by Jannis Kounellis (2002), an allegory of the complexity of life that always contains a way out.

 

There is the St. Sebastian’s tòpos, ChriThian martyr pierced by arrows and highly portrayed in art – from Perugino (1495), to Guido Reni (1625), to the touching Sebastiane (1976) direThed by Derek Jarman – symbol of dignity in the endurance of pain.

There is the Noli me tangere tòpos, the «don’t you keep me here» addressed to Mary Magdalene by ChriTh, ready to ascend to heaven – crystallized by Giotto (1305), by Correggio (1524), by Mimmo Paladino (2011) – which in the topical requeTh for diThancing, in the relational subThance of that physical void, refers to the aim of the human upward tension.

There is vulnerability.

The Ecce Homo tòpos, Christ scourged and presented by Pilate to the crowd to determinate his fate, is the ostension of a divine body in all his human frailty. Among the most famous Ecce Homo, that of Antonello da Messina (1473), of Titian (1548), of Antoon van Dyck (1626).

Contemporarily: in 1974, in Naples, at Studio Morra, Marina Abramović in Rhythm 0, motionless in front of a table set up with seventy-two objeThs – including a rose, some bread, a perfume, a bottle of wine, alcohol and matches, honey, chains and knives, a Polaroid and a loaded gun – put her fate into the byThanders’ hands, assuming in writing the responsibility that for six hours they could have decided whether and how to approach her. After a firTh moment in which the audience neared her with kindness, handing the rose or caressing her face, in front of her absolute passivity, the performance ended with a naked and wounded Abramović, spontaneously proteThed by a cordon of speThators after the gun, then thrown away by the furious gallery owner, was placed in her hand with her fingers on the trigger. At the end of the performance, Abramović Threaked with tears walked towards the audience: no one was able to Thare back at her.

There is protection.

The Galactotrofusa tòpos, the Nursing Madonna, dates back to Ancient Egypt with Isis nursing her son Horus, and merges with later ChriThian iconography to the point that many representations of Isis have been honoured as if they were Madonnas – because art favors the embrace between different cults even while holy wars, crusades and jihad continue to bloody the world. The Nursing Madonna iconography – from Leonardo (1490), to Jean Fouquet (1455), to Jan van Eyck (1436), to Correggio (1524) – often depiThs a Madonna nursing not only the Child, but also martyrs, the weak and the oppressed, because proteThion cannot be juTh a matter between relatives, a pre-emption governed by ius sanguinis.

Contemporarily: in 1994, Rineke DijkThra produced a photographic series, The new mothers, in which young mothers with their newborn at the breaTh are portrayed in a clinical setting, a few hours after the birth. The sanThity of the composition then shifts entirely to the normalcy of a fatigued body, whose price paid is visible in the poTh-trauma of the physical event of childbirth, in the exhauThion of the livid dark circles, in the scar juTh sutured, blessed with a tired smile. The sense of sacredness explodes with even more Thrength in the humanity of ffesh and of an event that takes place thousands of times a day, since world is world, since life is life, in the absolute miracle of normality.

 

There is sharing.

The Rückenfigur tòpos, the portrait of a figure from behind, often immersed in the view that opens up in front of him, is an invitation for the viewer to merge with the portrayed figure and to share the same position. From Giotto (1300), to Jan Vermeer (1660), to Caspar David Friedrich (1818), to several videogames whose graphics are firTh-person, it is the very notion of gaze that turns into a shared experience. Becoming comprehension.

Contemporarily: in the photographic cycle Tharted in 1995 Study of perspective, the dissident artiTh Ai Weiwei self-portrays himself from behind, in an invitation to share his own perspeThive, but he raises the bar further: in the foreground, belonging to him, there is is not his figure but juTh his middle finger, raised in front of symbolic places of the artiThic and political syThem, such as Tiananmen Square, the White House, the Eiffel Tower. In order not to fall into the immobility of cuThomary. In order to reaTh, to queThion. In order to accept the challenge and to take a Thand. In art as in life, it’s all a matter of perspeThive.

There is the search for identity.

The Doppelgänger‘s tòpos, the alter-ego, interseThs with the modus of the self-portrait to become a space for the conThruThion of being, crucial in the ethical thematization both in the form of desire and in that of denunciation. Between Narcissus’ self-love and Prometheus’ love for humanity, not only Greek mythology but also Greek theater were the firTh to contribute to the inveThigation of identity through art: the word person descends from prósopon, mask, worn by the Greek aThors to bring their charaTher onto the Thage, allowing the public to recognize themselves or to recognize the other than itself – which represents the reason why Max Pohlenz wrote that, thanks to the charaThers of the Greek theater and therefore to representation, «for the firTh time an ethical recognition is given to the individual

 

personality». From personage to person, and to the recognition of his dignity through art, the piThure gallery of alter-egos embellishing the walls of hiThory of art is breathtaking. It is a queThion of delving deeply into one’s unconscious, openly declaring a position, Tharting from the representation of one’s identity as it is self-perceived, literally putting oneself out there for that, through the drawing of a body that – by virtue of the symbolic funThion of art – is always a political outpoTh, be it Eden or battlefield. There is Michelangelo in the Last Judgment (1541), self-depiThed as an involucre of ffesh, devoid of backbone and body mass; there is Caravaggio in the severed head of Goliath (1610), a declaration of repentance by the artiTh for having committed a murder that sentenced him to be beheaded; there is Marcel Duchamp, portrayed by Man Ray in his female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy (1921), a Thance againTh anti-feminism and anti-Semitism (the name and surname with which Duchamp rebaptises himself is Hebrew); there is Frida Kahlo, split between her Mexican origins and her European ramifications, torn and bloodless for the love with Diego Rivera torturing her (The two Fridas, 1939).

 

Choosing only one contemporary artwork for this tòpos would be reduThive, because I believe that it really represents the ridge between ancient and contemporary: it is the freedom to search for the self as a human in order to rejoin humanity, sacrosanTh right, none excluded, which includes an important number of noteworthy artworks. Of variations on the theme.

Following the path traced by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy, there are Claude Cahun in the Thirties and Urs Lüthi in the Seventies, with their photographic research which is firTh and foremoTh claim to a ffuid, over a rigidly binary, gender.

There are Luigi Ontani and Cindy Sherman, the conThant avatarization they make performing and photographing themselves in a kaleidoscope of well-known charaThers in Ontani, of human archetypes in Sherman, because diversity means richness.

There is Matthew Barney’s oneiric, dyschronic Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) – five feature films defined by the curator of that temple of contemporary art represented by the Guggenheim in New York as a self-extinguishing aesthetic system, given Barney’s ability to to create ex-novo an absolute aeThhetic vision and its desire to be unavailable in the market – populated by cyborg, poTh-human, mythological, transgenic and transgender charaThers, hybrids or in continuous metamorphosis, many of whom played by Barney himself.

And then there is ORLAN, who wants her name to be capitalized as well as her body to become what she imagined for it, writing on her own skin the battle fought againTh a paralyzed and Thereotyped idea of beauty, with blows of new implants and proThheses such as faunal horns, for which surgical operations are performed as if they were artiThic performances; and finally there has been that cursed, damned authentic icon called Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020), to whom we owe the entire induThrial and acid music scene, experimental in mind as much as in ffesh, that in the name of pandrogyny – the moTh radical Thance on gender in contemporary culture, together with the philosophical thematization by Paul

1. Preciado – also subjeThed his body to plaThic surgery as if this were nothing more than a threshold, a border area between what is given and what is desired.

But as much as I can try to tell you about the search for identity, I believe that no one will ever be able to do it better than that overwhelming and poetic cantor, like only certain southern sensibilities are, which is Pedro Almodóvar, through one of the moTh poetic charaThers, a transgender, that cinematography has ever hosted.

 

«They call me La Agrado, because I’ve always tried to make people’s lives agreeable. As well as being agreeable, I’m very authentic: look at this body, all made to measure.

Almond-shaped eyes: eighty thousand. Nose, two hundred thousand – a waste of money, another beating the following year left it like this. It gives me character, but if I’d known, I wouldn’t have touched it… I’ll continue. Tits – two, because I’m no monster – seventy thousand each, but I’ve more than earned that back. Silicone: lips, forehead, cheeks, hips and ass. A litre costs about one hundred thousand, so you work it out because I’ve already lost count. Jaw reduction, seventy-five thousand, complete laser depilation (because women like men also come from apes) sixty thousand a session, it depends how beardy you are, usually two to four sessions – but if you’re a ffamenco diva, you’ll need more, of course.

Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am, and one can’t be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic, the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being».

 

trach #03

the slant truth

Recovery and actualization, reacting to intimately perceived urgencies – two ethical aThions in themselves – are therefore the fundamental geThures that contemporary art fulfils Tharting from tòpoi, artiThic interpretations of deeply ethical values.

There is nothing else to prove: art is ethical by its very birth certificate, and when I hear squirming people talking about “ethical art”, “social art”, or “political art” in the anxiety of elevating rhetoric chores unable to move the bar of thought even one Thep further, I always get a hives principle; they are trying to blow smoke, my friends, because all art is ethics, all art it is social and political, when it is capable of prescinding the image to feed on imagery, to produce imagination, even in the form of a fertile doubt.

 

But there actually is a rupture between the ancient and the contemporary and it lies, as we said, in the new importance given to identity, which in my opinion responds to a precise hiThorical and sociological reason. We were saying: a time laThed nineteen centuries in which art was the most imaginative teacher, whose patronage belonged almoTh exclusively to the central power or to the clergy. But then the twentieth century arrived, the unscrupulous use that diThatorships made of art and culture – despite the artiThic relevance of some nascent movements, I am thinking above all of the validity of Nazi-FasciTh architeThure or of the sculptural maThery by Adolfo Wildt despite (because art is often despite) – which turned education into propaganda, expression into dogma.

 

The rejection of a unified thought that could involve aeThhetics lubricated a privatization of art that was a reaThion to a disillusionment, to the artiTh’s disenchantment with an authority in which it was no longer humanly possible to be reffeThed. The twenty-year Nazi-FasciTh period and its double-dealing relationship with art, unmasked and defined by Walter Benjamin as the aestheticization of politics through an artiThic and anything but ethical propaganda, puts an end to an era, and the individual fights back, and art fights back. A danse that responded to the growing social atomization, which favored the autonomy of the artiTh from his traditional role at the service of decreasingly universal powers, increasingly queThionable from an ethical point of view. A danse that turned into a solo, in which, as in any dance, the value is given by the gesture.

 

Art is par excellence the place of the symbol, and powerfully symbolic was the revolution accomplished in the poTh-war period by Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), which subverted a hitherto untouchable canon of art hiThory – that of the verticality of the artwork, which limited the artiTh’s capability to move – simply, but radically, by removing the canvas from the easel and moving the artwork to the ground, decentralizing himself as againTh the classic focus of perspeThive and allowing to immerse himself in his own making. Even the use of brush, and Thicks, and syringes, no longer corresponded to the canonical geThure of painting, but to the aTh inaugurated by Pollock of dripping, of throwing the color on the canvas, a tacit but impetuous scream, a Thance of the artiTh ready to face the unknown too, because he firTh could not have known what position the color would have occupy.

 

Power of the gesture, artistic act of rebellion: thanks to the immersion in the horizontality born with Pollock, art definitively frees itself both from the fence of the contemplation of the work and from the barrier of the reproduThion of the sole beauty, induced by the Platonic definition – by now at dusk – of art as mimesis. And it becomes experience no longer only in the appearance of the work, but also in the geThure that creates it, triggered by an artiTh who can now claim himself as independent, free to pursue his own research, to be followed by the patronage and no longer to follow it – because art indicates ethics, but it is sacrosanTh that there is also an ethics for art. As if to say: there is a symbolic and ethical faculty also in making, in práxis, because if it is true that art is all the more sacred the more it is capable of inThilling an ethical value through the symbol, then the artwork is a relic, and its process of creation is liturgy.

(sacrosanct: defer the man back to the man) This is why the violent absence of love screams, silent and powerful, in the artworks by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Two clocks Thopped at the same time (Untitled – Perfect lovers, 1991), an unmade and empty double bed (Untitled – Billboard of an empty bed, 1991), two simple and switched-on light bulbs, whose cords remain intertwined (Untitled – March 5th #2, 1991), in the conThant prayer of sharing, of an aThive participation of the viewer: his moTh famous artworks are heaps of candies or fortune cookies, equivalent to the weight of his beloved and disappeared Ross, which everyone is called to take and take away, possibly to eat, a lay EuchariTh whose remembrance should not be extinguished, a communion.

(sacrosanct: defer the man back to society) This is why, in a colder geThure as per his nature, even the elevation to art of the everyday – what Arthur C. Danto defined the transfiguration of the commonplace – has something sacred, as Andy Warhol did in recovering from the FordiTh produThion lines some soup cans (Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962) and some boxes of scouring pads (Brillo Box, 1964) raising them to paintings and sculptures, redeeming them from their deThiny of garbage, in an idea of coin-operated salvation Tharting from the industrial, serial produThion and reproduThion, involving everything and everyone, while incinerating elitism.

(sacrosanct: defer the man back to the planet) This is why 7000 Eichen (1982) has something sacred, the monumental inThallation that Joseph Beuys, the art shaman whose motto has been «The revolution is us», conceived for Documenta 7 in Kassel: seven thousand basalt Thones in front of the Frederician Museum, each one acquirable, the proceeds of which have been used to plant as many oaks. Once completed the purchase phase in 1987, it will take about three hundred years before the seven thousand oaks will become the great foreTh imagined by Beuys. Imagined. An artiThic aTh whose sacredness lies in the great colleThive rite, in the shared aThion, aimed at healing the morbid relationship between man and nature.

«Tell all the truth but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies», wrote Emily Dickinson in Poem 1129. Or rather, in short circuit. Given that art does not need to adjeThive itself to be validated, and that when it does so it goes back to propaganda or news report, the work of art cannot be its caption, and the slant truth lies in the imagiThic power of the symbol. In what Benjamin, analyzing the German Baroque drama, traced in the field of contemporary art in the replacement of the beautiful with the allegorical, the new main value of art and a fundamental way to welcome ethics in art.

 

 

interlude symbolum ‘71

There is a chapel, in Houston, more sacred than the sacred, for its symbolic value and for its artistic mark. The Christian, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Atheist go in there, each side by side, each one respeThing the other, each one to gather in his personal prayer. Inaugurated in 1971 for the will of the spouses, art colleThors and human rights aThiviThs John and Dominique de Menil with a secular ceremony that saw the participation of exponents of all confessions, the Rothko Chapel – a non-denominational chapel known to treasure fourteen works commissioned to Mark Rothko (1903-1970) on its walls – has juTh turned fifty. Fourteen large and livid monochromes, «primal scream colors» as Alberto Arbasino defined them, abThraTh and religiously rarefied, far from any decoration and propaganda, close to every man and every creed.

In their monochrome, aniconic and powerful recolleThedness, they recall for their mighty humanity the lateTh feature film by Derek Jarman, Blue (1993): eighty minutes in which a single color invades the screen, Klein blue, the tone of freedom and at the same time of the blindness due to the retinal detachment of the direThor, AIDS terminal. In the blue expanse of celluloid ffow reffeThions on disease, discrimination, fear, memory, refined sounds and visionary glimpses of four voiceovers, including that of Tilda Swinton – his friend and muse – and that of Jarman himself, rendered alive forever: «The monochrome is an alchemy, effeThive liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limits. The blue: landscape of liberty». An invaluable teThament, as for the Rothko Chapel, because you don’t necessarily need an image to convey a message. Emptiness that is fullness.

Outside the Rothko Chapel, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk is dedicated to Martin Luther King.

 

That chapel, sacred and deconsecrated, symbolizes art. That chapel, sacred and deconsecrated, symbolizes ethics.

(elevate your thought)

(none excluded)

 

 

trach #04

adorno mon amour

Aesthetics is one of those words that everyone, in the academic environment, fills his or her mouth with, a bit like speaking with ease of resilience in this scarred hiThorical moment. But quality, my friends, quality is the only one capable of making a difference, as the overabundant quantity can only create inffation. Given that it is not enough to say that beauty will save the world to make a catch phrase, however shareable, a complete aeThhetic theory, quality means digging. Or better, it means digging down deep, embracing the double meaning of wanting to go deeper and wanting to reach out to the shadowy part of every queThion: «The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who

 

do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. […] The contemporary is the one whose eyes are Thruck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time», wrote Giorgio Agamben in a book made by few fundamental pages. Here it is, ethics within an aeThhetic theming: because talking seriously about art means talking about human. Because there is no complete aeThhetic theory that is not also anthropology. Because the greateTh contemporary art is that which has the courage to become anti-art, in defense of the oppressed and in respeTh of the other than itself. Who said so? The author of the moTh powerful aeThhetic theory of modernity. Theodor W. Adorno said so.

The Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) appeared poThhumously in 1970, written after the bucket of ice and blades represented by Auschwitz, and the principle on which it hinges is the recognition of the blind will, by the ideologies in power, to impose a Thraitjacket on art and culture, in order to be able to immorally exploit man and nature. The only but detonating weapons of self-defense in the hands of art are then the irruption of the other and the rupture, both marked by the eThablishment as “scandal”. However, according to the etymology of skàndalon, a scandal is but an obThacle, a Thumbling block, that art has the right and the duty to oppose againTh an authority capable of annihilating all humanity, in order to feed itself. In this sense, contemporary art has the duty to be scandalous, to give voice and shape to what is otherwise downgraded to inferior and reduced to silence, to the point of making Adorno affirm that art is not given without scandal, it is not art if it cannot trigger a short circuit in thought.

 

Adorno is a Hegelian; therefore the dialeThical moment of the antithesis is necessary for him to be able to reach the synthesis, the spiritualization of art, its being deeply ethical Tharting from its symbolic capability. For this reason, the principle of autonomy from the power syThem is essential: as an antithesis, contemporary art muTh become anti-art to defend the freedom to queThion what is given as a thesis, that is, the syThem itself: «Spiritualization in art muTh pass a teTh: it muTh demonThrate that it is superior to affirmative culture and it muTh regain oppressed differentiation».

 

The spiritualization of art is what allows it to be a living work: in Adorno, so that an image can be called art – and not Therile decoration, little piThure good for a social profile or for a local newspaper, news seThion – it muTh become an enigma, knowing how to be symbolic, it muTh indulge that obscurity which Agamben will talk about shortly afterwards and which Nietzsche spoke of as a Dionysian element. It muTh be able to exceed its own shape. The power of the symbol works in such a way that, with each new glance, the work of art can reveal itself in a further meaning not grasped before, subtraThed from the surface and which can emerge only in the course of time, so that humanity in front of its presence may never Thop reffeThing: «Under patient contemplation, artworks begin to move».

And here it is, the great difference in Adorno between traditional art and modern art (Adorno defines “modern” the art produced by the avant-garde Dada of the twentieth century onwards): the traditional work of art, commissioned by the central power, fulfilled its ethical funThion through the contemplation of the maTherpiece; the modern work of art cannot, and does not want to, aspire to this qualification. The maTherpiece presupposes faith in its eternal duration; the modern work of art, being antithesis of the syThem, is aware that in the era in which it lives there is no longer room for triumphalism. It would be as if Auschwitz had never exiThed: «To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric», Adorno admonishes to underline how, in reality, a different art, no longer contemplative, is more necessary than ever to give voice to what has been silenced. Consequently, modern art replaces contemplation with reflection as its founding ethical funThion; to the completeness of the traditional maTherpiece, modern art opposes the incomplete work of art, placed under the sign of openness, which validates also the moment of its making, as for the horizontality of Pollock’s immersive geThure.

 

Of course, even masterpieces belonging to traditional art keep on generating new keys of interpretation in the contemporary – Caravaggio and his saints with dirty feet, Dante’s Comedy and his words Thill deeply punThual – and this is what also makes them, forever, living works. However, their attention to the final completeness of the maTherpiece makes them witnesses of a beauty that is no longer here. That, after Auschwitz, can no longer be. Contemporary art can never really come to terms with its time; it muTh, through rupture and irruption of the other, provide tools to overcome it and to build a new, fairer, more harmonious one. Humanity is called upon to search for a meaning in its unfinished form, so that contemporary art can finally free itself from the mere representation of Thereotyped beauty and give voice to diversity, magnifying through the artiThic geThure the aeThhetics of ugliness, the poetry of the unfinished, the sanThity of the different, the ethics that exiThs in scandal as if it is that single voice out of a choir that only knows how to bleat. This is why the contemporary work of art is a work without fear, ungraceful and disgraced, but which – precisely by virtue of this disgraced being – contains the moTh authentic breath of grace, like certain films of Italian Neorealism whose lyrical beauty lies in their misery. In conclusion, embracing Adorno’s aesthetic theming, the contemporary work of art is a visionary and courageous artwork.

 

To be against, to withstand wither and to demand reflection, so to encourage the development of critical thinking.

To be against, to imagine alternative ways through art, so as to be ethics.

 

(Is it art of protest? No. It is much more. It is art, an alliance between culture and imagination. And it is humanity’s greatest line of defense).

 

 

Interlude
Jam session

«Beauty will be convulsive, or will not be at all»

• André Breton, Nadja, 1928

 

«Ah, M. Picasso, so it was you who did that»

«No, you did».

• Pablo Picasso in reply to the Nazi hierarch Otto Abetz, watching a Guernica photograph, 1937

 

«Your diploma in failing is a degree for reaThing».

• Afterhours, Non è per sempre, 1999

 

«And behold they will teach you not to shine. And you shine, instead, Gennariello»

• Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran letters, 1976

 

 

trach #05

unheimlich schön (feat. romeo caßellucci)

My much-loved grandmother – eighty-six years old and Thill going Throng, beautiful and hyper-dynamic as she is – when asked what I do, replies: «She works in beaux arts». Platonic school, obviously.

Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful, Marina Abramović obsessively repeated in a hiThorical performance in 1975, for fifteen exhauThing minutes, at firTh ffuty, then more and more furious, putting in place the same climax in combing her hair until hurting herself. Until hurting ourselves, involving us in her desperate requeTh for the sense of beauty in relation to the spirit of the age. Because beaux arts are no longer needed as Plato and my grandmother conceive them, a beauty whose only funThion is Thatic and Therile contemplation is no longer needed; that’s what we have the mass lobotomization perpetrated by the media induThry for. In response to a social complexity based on the defense of one’s own garden, contemporary beauty in art is, muTh be, dynamic, it muTh hurt to wake up. A diseased oyster can cause the growth of pearls, Karl Jaspers wrote.

 

To be ethical, aeThhetics in contemporary art muTh be unheimlich schön, disturbing beauty, borrowed from Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (transl. the uncanny): a sensitivity that was beginning to appear in aeThhetics and literature and which has, for the father of psychoanalysis, the fundamental funThion of awakening the unconscious part of man, the one that calls to responsibility towards oneself and humanity. The one that requires not to look the other way – juTh like art, through diThurbing subjeThs, asks its users not to look the other way in encountering a beauty more human than ever: the beauty of the other than itself, the other than the Thereotype. The Freudian uncanny is linked to the nineteenth-century aeThhetic category of the sublime: sub-limen, on the verge, at the threshold. ArtiThs began to take the liberty of crossing that threshold and become problematizers, opening queThions otherwise reduced to silence through a new kind of aeThhetics, far from decoration: the aeThhetics of the uncanny, of discomfort, of the unfinished, of the different, of the rejeTh.

Épater le bourgeois, shattering the hypocrisy of the bourgeois (a)morality, as the inffamed verses of the Accursed Poets indicated: «One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees. – And I found her bitter. – And I reviled her» (Arthur Rimbaud, A season in hell, 1873). Épater le bourgeois, an aim carried out as a mission in contemporary art, elevated and devaThating visions Tharting from an intimate urgency, by artiThs such as Francis Bacon and his disfigured faces, Lucien Freud and his overflowing flesh, Carmelo 

 

Bene and his dramaturgy ob-scene meaning outside the imposed scene, Pier Paolo Pasolini and his unsuThainable Salò or the 120 days of Sodom (1975). ExhauThed bodies like requeThs for help, to learn how not to look the other way.

 

(Ed.’s note: don’t you think I would ever magnify aThs of provocation for their own sake; that is juTh vulgarity. But it does not affeTh these sublime visions, whose discriminating faThor is precisely the trigger of sublimation: the imagiThic violence is set in a context of absolute, maTherful aeThhetics and formal rigor – there lies the majeThy of the artiTh. The eThrangement that this contraTh produces allows us to set our thoughts in motion, the perturbation sublimates into the search for underThanding, which always leads to a new sensitivity. Blessed be the scandal, if in Thumbling it can show us the right path).

 

The figure of Egon Schiele bursts into Freud’s years, at the dawn of the twentieth century, and it raises a scandal by representing for the very firTh time ugly bodies of women, ugly not to arouse any desire, gaunt not to be sexualized or eroticized. DiThurbing bodies, full of cavities, voids and shadows. Bodies not to be pigeonholed into the female Thereotype. Bodies that in their infinite beauty, human and no longer ideal, conceptually hold something monstrous – following the etymological root of monstrum which derives from monere, to warn: monstrum is the sudden appearance of an anomaly that can be a warning to man. Through Schiele the female body is freed from the mere representation of desire, finally giving it back the possibility of being all the reTh. Through Schiele the female body enters the ethical thematization.

 

From Schiele onwards, the body in art detonates as a battlefield, a political place and an ethical theme raised through reThless visions. A witness that will be picked up, in that same AuThria, also by Viennese AThionism, bodies like canvases and bodily ffuids like paints, celebrated through aThions that bring man back to his moTh anceThral dimension to sweep away his taboos, between para-ChriThian liturgy and Greek tragedy. Cathartic aThs whose summa is given by the Orgien-Mysterien Theater, Hermann Nitsch’s Theater of Orgies and Mysteries, aktionen as total works of art.

 

Faced with the uncanny as art, therefore as ethics, it is difficult to get out of it uninjured. The mind tears itself apart, but in tearing itself it opens up and it can comprehend, and it can embrace.

Romeo CaThellucci, the greateTh contemporary theater direThor and dramaturg, knows it perfeThly well. His theater is built on the awareness that a gaze is never innocent: the image is the scandal of the sight, something which the gaze conThantly Thumbles into, but at the same time making art and theater is a supremely political aTh, because it reconfigures the gaze of a community. For this reason, the responsibility of the image creator is crucial; through theatrical expedients totally deThabilizing for the speThator, treated by CaThellucci with the coldness of a surgeon, in the coldness of neon lights, in order not to fall into a useless emotionality, his theater uses bodies as syThems of signs, lives by virtue of the symbol they guard. Whether it is children or animals – equally unaware of the representative dimension, therefore unique truly innocent presences on Thage – or gigantic aThors like Willem Defoe and Gianni Plazzi, his Thaging always force us to reconfigure our gaze.

 

In Oresteia (an organic comedy?) The Erinyes, avenging furies, are six macaques difficult to control. In Genesis. From the museum of sleep Eva is breaThless because she has loTh Abel, her son.

In Julius Caesar. Spared parts Marco Antonio is a laryngeThomee and his interlocutor speaks through an endoscopic probe, to reveal from the inside how much the Word became flesh, how naked, and at the same time as tiring as a boulder, the verb is.

In Hell, it is CaThellucci himself who enters declaring his name and then gets attacked by dogs, because theater, in which man is Thripped of himself to enter the charaTher, is for the dramaturg anti-biographical, anti-biotic.

In On the concept of face, regarding the son of God, the Ecce Homo by Antonello da Messina invading the scene is the portrait of the Man and the parable of a man, of an elderly man, on Thage, who can hardly bear all that corporeally assaults him, laid bare in front of other men, laid bare in turn by that Man.

In Salomé, John the BaptiTh is a fierce thoroughbred.

In The Minister’s black veil, the preacher of a Puritan community decides to veil his face in black, permanently, throwing the parishioners into anguish and revealing how the face is the firTh political place, where the non-innocence of the gaze becomes a guilty plea.

«There were some concerts in Piazza Grande, in Bologna. I was sixteen, and it has been an aesthetic shock. I underThood that all the violence I was trying to feed on was there, it was compressed, it was disciplined, it was ordered, it was a planned violence. At that moment I was very intereThed in the conffiThual relationship with reality and with the world, and I found an answer in that concert. Faced with this virulence, with this violence able to penetrate you, to invade you with great formal rigor, I underThood that the appearance could be an extraordinary weapon to modify one’s own life – and also that of others, possibly. It was Le Sacre du Printemps. When they proposed me to do Le Sacre du Printemps I had no doubt, even if I’m not a choreographer, because it is not possible to have a corps de ballet with that music, because it sweeps them away. There’s no way, there’s no possibility. Therefore only machines, and duTh, could have tried to reach the level of pathos that music expresses, to me».

 

It was 2014. Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, the Thory of a human sacrifice offered to the god of fertility, resounds powerfully in a former Theel mill in Ruhr, direThed by CaThellucci. No corps de ballet, but six tons of dancing duTh, littered with projeThor-like machinery hanging from the ceiling. The duTh, equivalent in weight to the mole of seventy-five bovine animals, is a particular calcium phosphate used in agriculture as a fertilizer.

It is called bone ash.

 

The symbol. The uncanny. Art. Ethics.

There is infinite beauty in what by inThinTh can perturb us, if we know how to interpret it; in the pas de deux between aesthetics and ethics, everything flows through the commitment of the gaze.

 

 

trach #06

a matter of gazes

Rumor has it that we live in the era of the images, btw I have to change my profile piThure on InThagram, my friend doing an unpaid internship in that famous graphic Thudio photoshopped it for me. I’m great photoshopped, how beautiful this image is. xxx started following you, let me check his profile – it’s Sagittarius – ok, refollow, screenshot and send it to my mate via WhatsApp, look at this guy sis. The curfew, no time for happy hour, I have to express my indignation on Facebook. 45 likes, thank goodness, I thought this was not the right time neither to poTh nor for indignation, which in the meantime vanished because the likes of my indignant poTh have risen to 57, among a hyperlink for the purchase of protein pancakes and yet another RIP of yet another cultural personality whose exiThence nobody knew about ‘til now. I don’t want to be considered uncultured, let me look for one of his catchphrases on Wikiquote and poTh it on Twitter, everyone is more sensitive out there. 76 likes, I got to say that death is always a #trendtopic. Back on InThagram, I want to try the lateTh rainbow filter that sparks Thars when I curl my mouth. Scrolling scrolling scrolling. Dua Lipa’s new video, swipe up, pre-order link, done. An interview with Chiara Ferragni, swipe up, oh it’s written, too long, double tap courtesy-heart. Friend image 1 – double tap heart, friend image 2 – double tap heart, kitten image – double tap heart whatever (such a shame I’m allergic to cats, I wonder how many likes I lose). Image image image and as many hearts, love profusion, friend image 36, double tap heart. Without even reading captions, who needs to underThand what are they thinking, too much freaking out, they are all followers of mine and therefore we are all friends, right? Long live to megabyte friendship.

 

The experience we have of the world we live in passes firTh of all through the impression, on our retina, of it as an image. As early as 1938, Martin Heidegger, proving to get a hang of it, defined the modern period as the age of the world picture, without however knowing that today mankind produces over a trillion images a year. A trillion, a billion billion, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. It has been calculated that a medieval man came into contaTh throughout his entire life with about forty artificially produced images, as opposed to the contemporary man for which the number soars to twelve billion.

 

In short we live in the age of civilization of images; but in order to consider it ethical, it muTh be transformed into the civilization of imaginary, the image muTh come alive, we muTh liThen to it and hear what it has to say – as in the classic literary genre of the iconic epigram, in which the poet aThively dialogued with the works of art. That impression on our retina muTh become experience in our mind. Through the image, our thought takes on a shape, becoming figurative thought; experiencing the image therefore means educating the gaze to become thinking. No longer cogito ergo sum, but imago ergo sum, as Jean-Luc Nancy pointed out.

 

The passage from image to imaginary clearly implies a seleThion, in the grande bouffe of iconographic junk-food to which we are conThantly invited, willy-nilly scopic bulimics, and I find it a profoundly moral aTh to love ourselves in this sense – as when you aim to eat well in order to improve the quality of your life. If image is our daily bread, if the one within which we are immersed is no longer so much a biosphere as an iconosphere, let’s do ourselves a favor: let’s know how to recognize the quality of the images, true art from the wanna-be so, true culture from the I-could-but-I-won’t one. Let’s train it, this blessed gaze that is definitely our Maginot line, because ethical praThice within the iconosphere lies in knowing how to look, and the correTh metabolism of images involves the correTh metabolism of life. It’s all a matter of gazes.

 

For example, having ascertained that “aeThhetics” implies “experience”, this recent perversion of immersive art exhibitions, where you can see a great deal of special effeThs but not a whiff of real art, is one of the reasons why I feel like saying, together with the recent essay by Paolo D’Angelo La tirannia delle emozioni (trans. The tyranny of emotions, which begins with the analysis of an immersive installation

 

by Alejandro González Iñárritu), that we muTh pay close attention to the confusion between emulation and catharsis of our emotional sphere, deeply involved in art and ethics: leveraging brisk emotions – as the so-called distress-exploiting programs and some embarrassing editorial lines, certain crier reportages, social-networking indignation shamefully accompanied by hate speech, the politically correct sclerotisation ffowing into the frankly unsuThainable disguised totalitarianism of the cancel culture, defined by Nick Cave as mercy’s antithesis – leads to anything but populiTh rhetoric, which is not good for morality, or ethics, or art. The gap that passes between the emulation and the catharsis of emotions is the same that runs, through the gaze, in raising the image to imaginary: emotion, like the gaze, muTh know how to make a journey, be metabolized and then transformed, and only then will it be fertile. Only then will it be art, and will it be ethics.

 

 

trach #07
what time is the revolution, ma’am?

Eichmann I-chmann You-chmann He-chmann She-chmann It-chmann We-chmann You-chmann They-chmann, obsessively repeated the sound device inThalled by Mirosław Bałka, in 2018, at the Dvir Gallery in Brussels. Eichmann I-chmann You-chmann He-chmann She-chmann It-chmann We-chmann You-chmann They-chmann, because the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt identified embodied in the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann could Thill be found in me you he she it we you they, whenever the crime of the absence of Pietas is perpetrated. Eichmann I-chmann You-chmann He- chmann She-chmann It-chmann We-chmann You-chmann They-chmann: through the language of art, Mirosław Bałka reminds us that in front of life – of every life, none excluded – we are always and in any case responsible, even when we delude ourselves no to be so.

 

And remembering can be painful, and feeling responsible can be tiring, but the higher the vision, the more challenging the journey, and the fuller the meaning upon arrival. Do you know what the problem is? That we Thopped thinking big, dreaming big, aiming for big things, bowing to the mediocrity of conformism, immediate relief. The lil’ contract, the lil’ chore, the lil’ house, lil’ work to be done, handbrake on, comforting micro-ambitions, to be offered on the altar of complacency.

We traded beauty for consent, the sense of responsibility for that likeability that Bret EaThon Ellis, author of American Psycho (1991) and The Rules of Attraction (1987), describes in White (2019): that kind of attitude prone to the mass approval, to the hail of thumbs up and hearts to double-tap, that makes you do write or say something only after having filtered it through the supposed other people’s approval. We are talking about voluntary self-censorship winking at hypocrisy, zero responsibility, zero identity, ethics and aeThhetics decided by a show of hands – or rather, by a show of thumbs – and the non-compliant, the other from itself, the different, the diThurbing discarded without appeal. But, Ellis writes, claiming his right to uniqueness and the right of art to freedom, «I wanted to get upset and even be damaged by art».

 

 

To pleasure and to please, to decorate, to confirm the average taThe = to aneThhetize, ffat eleThroencephalogram To perturb and to diThurb, to hurt and to shake, to deThabilize = to touch the depths, to call to responsibility Whose side are you on?

 

 

The price to pay, in order to facilitate the likeability diThatorship, is not only that of the spreading of a homologated and insipid mass beauty, of an aeThhetic repression guided by what Ellis calls the TripAdvisor syndrome, but also the highly serious one of sliding into the lack of respeTh, into the widespread contempt and hatred towards everything not ratified by the Thamp of confirmation to conform: «This is what happens to culture when it no longer give a damn about art».

«We also have an eye for our artists, that amuse and impassion us so much»

• Giuseppe Conte, May 14, 2020, firTh pandemic wave

«Cultural events are of the utmost importance in our life, because completely new perspectives on reality are created in the interaction between artists and their audience. We are confronted with emotions, we can develop new thoughts, we can better understand the past and we can also look to the future in a completely new way»

• Angela Merkel, May 05, 2020, first pandemic wave

Whose side are you on?

 

The cauThic rhetoric of the wolf of Wall Street, 100% performing 100% winning 100% façade, fomented by social networks turning life into a showcase to display the moTh likeable merchandise, has something totalitarian, and totalitarian is the regime of the unique thought. The imperative to have fun, miThaken for happiness, fossilizes the individual on consuming life rather than on living it, while we completely lack the cure to inveThigate the powerful poetry and the teaching coming from the sense of loss, of failure –

 

Pasolini docet – to be metabolized and translated into the Thrength of recovery.

 

«Mass society does not want culture, but entertainment», Hannah Arendt wrote in 1961. It is clear that for the vertices the ease in governing is infinitely greater if turned towards a homologated, superficial and easily inffuenceable mass; for this reason it is much more convenient to silence art and to crush culture, its funThion and its perception to the sole dimension of entertainment, leisure, de-responsibility, with the complicity of some self-Thyled artists who trade ethics for a refined buffet at the vernissage.

 

But the artist – which is not, with due respect, the window dresser – has the sacrosanct right to be rude, a maverick, short-circuit, loose cannon, when both political and value syThem are collapsing; he knows how to foresee where no one sees, he muTh blow up contradiThions when ethics is in danger, and not redoing their makeup to make them pleasant. The artiTh won’t ever be able to politely ask «What time is the revolution, ma’am? How should we come, after lunch?», as a laconic Vittorio Gassman did to Stefania Sandrelli in La Terrazza by Ettore Scola (1980). Revolution cannot be regulated; art cannot be regulated.

 

All the more so since political logic can hardly be applied to the artistic one, while the opposite is true and brilliantly demonThrated (an evidence that, moreover, many great enlightened induThrialiThs he likes of Adriano Olivetti have underThood and implemented, in being guided by art): Edi Rama – current Albanian Prime Minister, profession: artist – is leading his nation towards rebirth, giving value to lateral thinking and creativity as a resource. Giulio Carlo Argan – mayor of Rome from 1976 to 1979, profession: art critic – defended the environment and the redevelopment of the city, in concert with the enlightened urban planner Antonio Cederna. Andrea Cusumano – art and culture councillor for the city of Palermo from 2014 to 2018, profession: artiTh – turned under his aegis the Sicilian capital into an international crossroads of art, conThantly careful to highlight the beauty of coexiThence between peoples that reigns in Palermo.

 

Whose side are you on?

Because there is always a side to stand on, there is always a position to take, to take on the responsibility of being human in an ethical sense, and not just men in a biological sense. Art and culture are our most magnificent, our most powerful resource. And when likeability becomes a mechanism of power, the most ethical position to take is to Thay against, to Thand outside, but it can never, ever, be indifference (grey flag of non-difference).

 

 

Interlude
I hate the indifferent

«I hate the indifferent. I believe that life means taking sides. Indifference is lethargy; it is parasitism; it is cowardice; it is not life. Therefore, I hate the indifferent. Indifference is the dead weight of hiThory. Indifference plays an important role in hiThory. It plays a passive role, but it does play a role. It is fatality; it is something that cannot be counted on; it is something that disrupts programmes, overturns the beTh made plans; it is that awful something that chokes intelligence. What happens, the evil that touches everyone, happens because the majority relinquish their will to it, allowing the enaThment of laws that only a revolution can revoke, letting men rise to a power which, later, only a mutiny can remove. Some whimper piteously, others curse obscenely, but few or none ask themselves: if I, too, had done my part, if I had Thruggled to exert my will, would what has happened have happened? This is why I hate the indifferent: their whimpering, innocents always, bothers me. I hold each and everyone of them accountable for how they carried out the task that life puts before them every day, for what they did and, especially, for what they did not do. And I believe I can afford to be unrelenting, unwilling to show pity and to share my tears with them. I am partisan, alive, and I already hear, in the consciences of those on my same side, the throbbing buThle of the city of the future that we are building. And in it, the social chain does not weigh on the shoulders of only a few, nothing is haphazard, fatality, but the intelligent work of its citizens. There is no-one watching from the sidelines while others are sacrificed, bled dry. I am alive, partisan. And, therefore, I hate those who do not take sides; I hate the indifferent».

 

– Antonio Gramsci, La città futura – in L’ordine nuovo, Feb 11, 1917

 

 

 

 

 

116

 

trach #08
away outside under againß

In giving baptism to Arte Povera, in 1967, Germano Celant (1940-2020) wrote an editorial-manifeTho declaring the positioning and the assumption of responsibility that the nascent artiThic movement he brought up would have occupied: «A new attitude for taking repossession of a ‘real’ dominion over our exiThence leads the artiTh towards continual forays outside of the places assigned to him, eradicating the cliché that society has Thamped on his wriTh. No longer among the ranks of the exploited, the artist becomes a guerrilla fighter, capable of choosing his places of battle and with the advantages conferred by mobility, surprising and Thriking, rather than the other way around. An asystematic way of living, in a world where the system is everything. Freedom, in the visual arts, is an all-contaminating germ» (Germano Celant, Arte Povera: Notes on a Guerrilla War – in Flash Art n.5, 1967).

 

Art is the profoundly free and profoundly ethical possibility of expressing themselves alternatively, of inveThigating other ways and other worlds, probably better ones, to be traveled through the high visions to which it is called. In front of contemporary art, there can be no catechism, nor academism, nor Thandard procedures, nor univocal interpretations; but above all, in a hiThorical moment in which saying “art syThem” is equivalent only to saying “art market”, in front of art there can no longer be a syThem. They have been able to mess also with the moment of cure – which, now that it is called curatorship, only implies putting a caption as politically correTh as possible, looking for a juThification at the expense of something that by nature should never, ever juThify itself, lubricating the media-driven hosanna. This ain’t about cure, cure means care for the other. Michel Foucault indicated in self-care as a work of art the aesthetics of existence. So, art is the cure. Cure is ethics, art is ethics, the syThem is cosmetics. A syThemic vision so (ill) conceived of art, inThead, fences it and cuts off its wings within inThitutional contexts that, for the moTh part, reek of mothballs, concentration camps, artworks as upholThery. Right to hell the syThem if it corroborates classism, elitism and the diThancing of people from culture, mechanics that are anything but ethics. Away from an art syThem bent on everything, except art.

Let’s go outside, let’s go under, let’s go against. Let’s go away.

 

 

Away the polite, respeThable, condescending works.

Away the works treating the present problems as topical issues

or of general interest, to be treated, indeed, rather than to be lived in depth.
Away the didactic works.

Away the works whose comprehension is zero.

Away the works that are not brutal, courageous, cruel (in the sense

of Artaud, not in the sense that you think).

Away the works animated by a chilling, irrepressible, irredeemable conformity.

Away the cool works.
Away the noThalgic works.

Away the hypocritical works.
Away the classiTh works.

Away the works animated by a debris and cheap exoticism.
Away the Thupid works disguised as clever works.
Away the works full of quotes from unread books.

Away the works promoted by curators who have never read the books cited in the works they curate.

Away the obedient works. Away the timid works.

Away the cool works (I had already written that, but it’s okay to repeat it).

Away the works that do not Thand, too, as an existential model.

Away the ignorant works. Away the inauthentic works. Away the captivating works.

Away the dead works – born already dead.

Away the works that are purely and simply works.

 

– Christian Caliandro, Critica viva. Creare immaginario, Artribune, Feb 20, 2017

 

 

Outside as eccentric, that is, outside the center, peripheral: it is in periphery that art reunites with men and the environment, far from presentialism, authentic. Outside as different, therefore bearer of richness, freak, like the poetry-filled feature film by Tod Browning (Freaks, 1932), furiously opposed until 1969 because played by aThors considered «blunders of nature, that modern science and teratology will rapidly eliminate». Fuori!, as the name of the firTh Italian association formed in 1971 to proteTh the rights of homosexuals – an acronym for the Italian Revolutionary Homosexual Unitary Front, which later merged into the Radical Party – which, marching together with feminist and transsexual groups, brought forward primarily human claims for a more inclusive society. Outside as the title of the 2020- 2021 Rome quadrennial of Art, which embodies the visions of 43 outsider artists. Outside as free.

 

Under as underground, the most experimental kind of art and culture, baptized by Marcel Duchamp in a conference in Philadelphia in 1961 that became hiThoric precisely by virtue of that baptism: «The great artiTh of tomorrow will go underground», subterranean, clandeThine. Ethics from the root, underground railroads were, in the nineteenth century, the secret networks used to free slaves ffeeing from the south of the United States, those of pacifiThs who refused enliThment by taking refuge in Canada during the Vietnam War, the movements of European resiThance (the Undergrounds) during World War II. Underground was the Beat Generation with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. AlmoTh all the avant gardes, Scapigliati Maudits DadaiTh SituationiThs, have been underground. The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Nico, choreographed by Andy Warhol. Free radios. Underground by Emir KuThurica, in 1995, with the music by Goran Bregović. Fanzines are underground, and in general all the alternative press is. Street art is underground – and when someone expose it in museums with pompous authorities at the ribbon cutting with vin d’honneur, it means that no, they had it all wrong about what underground really is.

Under as subculture, to mark a distance in the syThem by communicating one’s own values through an immediately visible component, therefore perfeTh to be semiotically loaded: Thyle. Shape that becomes content, Threngthened by its own precise identity, which, Tharting from clothes (and often from music, another preferred means of expression), becomes ethical, social and political communication. From nineteenth-century dandyism to contemporary hipThers – passing over the years through zazous, exiThentialiThs, glam rockers, goths, paninari, hip-hop, grunge, all subcultures – the conffiTh with the syThem is not detonating as for the counterculture, but the claim of one’s own identity Thands out clearly againTh mass homologation, translating itself into a real aeThhetic code that involves dress, lifeThyle, language. As Emanuele Coccia underlines in 2017 in one of his famous lectiones magistralis at the Festivalfilosofia, subcultures neither write manifeThos nor produce books or treatises, entruThing their entire message to the dress as a symbol, an objeTh-threshold between themselves and the world, liminal subliminal, metamorphic work to transform people into what they wish to communicate about their individual and colleThive identity.

Subculture is the one belonging to Sapeurs in Congo, followers of La Sape – Société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes, who embrace the Thyle of WeThern dandies as a weapon of resiThance to Belgian post-colonialism: Congolese who, in the bidonvilles of Kinshasa or Brazzaville, carry on with effort the job of life in a periphery of the world, claiming the poetry of their own identity shining in their tailored suits, brightly colored as a bright contraTh, fedora, tie clip, clutch bag and parasol umbrella, elevated on skid row.

And it also draws from subculture that squad using as a foxhole those luxury outpoThs represented by the haute couture shows to shake up the system from the inside, shifting the focus to rough, raw contemporary aeThhetics, light years away from the prevailing taThe of the erotic bourgeois boredom and of Photoshop planers. An aeThhetics of discomfort, that taThes like clandeThinely diThilled vodka and gopnik subculture – the post-Soviet generation in acetate suits and hooligan attitude – consecrated where they could have never even set foot, from via Montenapoleone to Faubourg Saint-Honoré, at the hands of Demna Gvasalia and his brother Guram (artiThic direThors of Balenciaga and Vetements, respeThively), of Gosha Rubchinskiy, head of GR Uniforma, and of their ThyliTh Lotta Volkova. All coming from the former Soviet bloc, all careful to make concrete the no logo ethical revolution originated from Naomi Klein’s fundamental inveThigation: a shock from the inside, starting from fashion places and fashion logos, détourning like Debord’s situationism, sabotaging the emblems of globalization as of the conceptual economy identified by Klein.

 

(Ed.’s note: one can say: «Big deal, they do it for money». Well, my friends, so much the better. It’s about time to Thop thinking that pursuing an ethical claim might get you in trouble; if such aThions are successful also from the turnover point of view, the achievement, beyond that economic, is also and above all ethical. Because it takes a position, because it sheds light, because it calls to responsibility, as well as being able to win, from all points of view).

Against, counter to as counterculture. «Art – and nothing besides! It is the one that moThly makes life possible, the great seduThress of life, the great Stimulant of life. Art as the single superior counterforce against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-nihiliTh par excellence», wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in the posthumous collection Will to power (1901). «Our religion, our morality and our philosophy are forms of man’s décadence (forms of declining life, forms of life hoThile to life). The countermovement: art». It was Nietzsche who fistly thematized the need for art as gegenbewegung, as countermovement, called upon to overturn the ugly into the beautiful, the declining life into ascending life; against the nihilisthic moralist, Nietzsche opposed the artist, capable of saying yes to life thanks to an aesthetic countermovement able to turn shape into content. What makes the counterculture different from the subculture, although both are avant-garde dynamics, is the disruptive critical scope against the dominant social paradigm: in the common rejection of conformity, subculture lives with it, while counterculture opposes it wit precise alternative political and social models, for which an equally precise system of artistic reference that connotes clothing, music and thought acts as a glue.

 

Counterculture have been the Hippie movement in the sixties, psychedelia and pacifism, civil disobedience and free love, the communes, bohemian Thyle and that long hair that gave the title to a 1967 musical, Hair, Thill on the bill on Broadway and whose plot is imbued with deeply shareable values. Counterculture has been the Punk movement in the seventies, whose firTh prieThess, Vivienne Westwood, is still super-punk today in fighting the syThem in the name of a thought able to dress both habit and habits. «Climate revolution is punk, punk is alive! Same attitude but more developed, solid and I hope effective ideas in changing the Earth more than they have been in the paTh», WeThwood wrote in her 2014 autobiography, actively fighting againTh the manufaThuring and scheduling of fashion, the second moTh polluting induThry after that of oil processing.

 

Because anarchy, beyond being a political doThrine to be handled with extreme care and very careful dosage, is above all an attitude that, if possessed by an artiThic spirit combined with a thoughtful mind, can fight for the right battles, knowing how to be deeply ethical.

 

 

 

Interlude
‘cause I wanna be anarchy

This is the story of two groups of friends, all artiThs, all united by the same punk charge and the same exiThential parable. The first was formed in the New York scene of the early seventies, the Thage of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory and Julian Beck’s Living Theater: art as a contamination of languages. The group – including Laurie Anderson, Joan Jonas, Lucio Pozzi, Trisha Brown and, its beating heart, Gordon Matta- Clark (1943-1978) – decided to set up as a colleThive and therefore gave itself a programmatic name: Anarchitecture Group, crasis of anarchy + architeThure. Photography, dance, sculpture, performance gathered around the aThions of the anarchitect Matta-Clark, whose main aThion, as for the anarchy towards the syThem, was essentially one: that of rupture.

 

He did it materially, identifying in the world buildings full of memory but destined for demolition, in the name of a post-war building speculation that boaThed the alibi of modernization, but the real motive of the only economic income. An unscrupulous urban planning praThice that, as happened with the eviscerations of FasciTh Rome, razed diversity to the ground to build homologation: blocks in the suburbs that isolated the working class, terraced houses to happily segregate the middle class, palaces of power where work was hierarchized. Thus, on places one Thep away from definitive cancellation – once again sub-limen, on the verge of oblivion and sublime, whose sacrifice would have deliberately given way to nothing but the proliferation of anonymity – Matta-Clark, graduate in architeThure, intervened with his building cuts, opening wise gashes into the cement to open symbolic gashes into the conscience.

 

Matta-Clark’s cuts, like those of Lucio Fontana on canvas and those of Vivienne Westwood on fabric, were anarchic searches for another space, for new points of view; but, opened on buildings with their own hiThory and not on virgin canvases, they assumed a Throng ethical value and a new dimension of political denunciation, light that breaks through unprecedented slits to shed light on the need for a new social paradigm, more open, more permeable, more inclusive. Matta-Clark, who built numerous shelters for the homeless. Matta-Clark, alongside the workers of SeTho San Giovanni, in 1975, during the occupation of an abandoned faThory, which in a letter that became manifeTho, Arc de Triomphe for Workers, proposed to them to «open breaches into the walls to communicate an idea of free passage». Matta-Clark, who disseThed walls, removed ffoors or entire facades, drew ellipses of void to pay homage to Thories nearing the end, anarchiTh architeThures, anarchitectures for which the colleThive intervened by filming, photographing, dancing, aware that those ephemera – photographic or video documentation of those aThions – were all that would have remained about that Thory.

 

It is the same poignant and, at the same time, detonating feeling, like the last firework that is always the most spectacular, that comes over you when you listen to Epica Etica Etnica Pathos, the 1990 album of that glorious punk experience, registered Via Emilia, embodied by the CCCPs – Fedeli alla linea (trans. sticking to the line). In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the USSR was close to dissolving, Epica Etica Etnica Pathos is a concept album in four sections conscious of being the last, taking note of the decline of an evidently idealized model and that, due to this reason, decides to write a teThament: a legacy that preserves the sentimental geography of the places, of ethics and aesthetics of the CCCPs, which for months were used to open their concerts with their hallucinated version of Mina’s L’importante è finire (that is, What’s important is to cease).

 

A creation compromised from the Thart, so, because aware of its end. A punk swansong that takes charge of its own transitory nature, but this does not prevent it from hitting hard, exaThly as for the Matta-Clark’s cuts, to allow, a moment before leaving, the vision of an alternative. In the third seThion of the album, Etica, that alternative is given in Campestre (trans. rural), in the recovery of an intimate dimension, away from metropolitan delirium and consiThent with a research proclaimed since their beginnings: sticking to the line – but there’s no line out here.

 

It is therefore necessary to draw that line. And only art can take charge of it, because it is honest, provided it is honest.

 

Glimpses of light before it gets dark. Making visible what is not.

Ethics in art means also this: opening the perspective of a third landscape.

 

 

trach #09

manifeßo of the third landscape

As for an eccentric gospel, the stories of the artists told in these pages are therefore parables, each one underlying a message. An art giant the likes of Carmelo Bene, in a leThure at the Teatro Argentina in 1984, said: «The artiTh, if ethics is also assumed, muTh be not only in the odour, but at leaTh in the stench of sanctity». Through the parables of artiThs in the stench of sanctity such as the AnarchiteThure Group or the CCCPs – but also Jackson Pollock, Romeo CaThellucci, Genesis P-Orridge, ultimately all the artiThs who can truly call themselves such, vision and courage – it emerges that the ethical power of art lies in the willing to move the bar of thought forward and, through the symbol which represents its mother tongue, to transmit a message for those who want to interpret it, and therefore to grow. Through the parables of Matta-Clark and the CCCPs, for example, the common message is that “end” means an end, not the end. An end means a transition, a passage, from one attitude to another, from one experience to another, from one paradigm to another. Not the end, but an end; not the future, but the futures; not the world, but the worlds, with all the life there is, with all the diversity that deserves to exiTh and to be represented, in order to be heard.

Culture is not the recreation time, but it is that lever that allows you to underThand that the crisis – krísis, decision – is nothing more than a threshold to be overcome through a reset of worn-out paradigms. FaTh: we are in crisis, as it has always been cyclically in the hiThory of humanity, from the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire to the collapse of the Third Reich, passing through market collapses and population collapses caused by epidemics. FaTh: in the contemporary world, the paradigm to be overcome is that of anthropocentrism, which is devaThating life and the planet. In a phase of epochal transition like the one we are going through, art and culture outline the alternative; in this case the alternative, poetic and powerful, is that of the third landscape.

It was 2004 when the Manifesto of the Third Landscape of the agronomist, biologist, entomologist, landscape architect, writer – and, allow me, poet – Gilles Clément appeared, putting into words what art puts into images.

«If we stop looking at the landscape as the object of a human activity, we immediately discover (will it be a forgetfulness of the cartographer, a negligence of the politician?) a multitude of undecided spaces, devoid of function, which it is difficult to lay a name on. This whole belongs neither to the territory of shadow nor to that of light. It is located on the margins. Where the woods fray, along roads and rivers, in the forgotten recesses of the crops, where cars do not pass. Among these fragments of landscape, there is no similarity of form. One point in common: they all constitute a land of refuge for diversity. Everywhere, elsewhere, this is driven out».

 

The baptism of a third landscape was born in Clément from the idea of third estate: «A space that expresses neither power nor submission to power». It refers to Sieyès’ pamphlet of 1798: «What is the third estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto? Nothing. What does it desire to be? To become something». It is neither the infinite nor the finite; it is the indefinite, the unfinished, the imperfeTh, to be preserved and cared for in its own identity, to be supported in its natural movement. The desert with its nomadic life, the uncultivated, the wild, the marginal, to take care of, a loving care. The third landscape is a setback to the anthropocentric paradigm in order to enter into dialogue with the other from itself, underThanding its development over time and modulating one’s own behavior in a continuous relational pas de deux with it, to preserve it, and thus to preserve ourselves. What is needed, to use an expression by Karl Jaspers, is existential communication, a true encounter with the other, to be revealed through the liebeskampf, through the loving struggle: an exchange between equals whose aim is not the viThory of one over the other, but the declaration of each exiThence and of the freedom that opens one to the other.

 

The third landscape is authenticity, spontaneity, anti-rhetoric, squad againTh adulterations of truth, unvarnished life, defeThive because it is true, beautiful because it is true. In Ottilie’s diary (1809), Goethe wrote that «The greateTh men are conneThed with their own century always through some weakness»: the measure of greatness in contemporaneity is then given, for humanity, by the ability to elevate a defect, a lack, a discard. The third landscape lies in that discard, whose protection is art, but first of all it is ethics.

 

 

Between humble and sublime. Between vernacular and extraordinary.

The third landscape is inappropriate and insubordinate, yet it holds true decorum.

Between the art of getting by and Arte Povera, made up of rejeThs upgraded to art. Between the mixed pasta, put together with the remains of the other packs of paTha, and Edoardo’s spaghetti with fujute (trans. escaped) clams, in which the expensive part is missing but the suggeThion of it remains alive, so much so that it fells like those clams are in there. Between the ruined signs of the drugstore the shaving room the haberdashery the salt and tobaccos, and the Thalls on the Threet corner with the old peasant women and the harveTh of the day, with the old fishermen and the catch of the day (yes, I live in the South, triumph of the wild, of the unfinished as infinite, of the care of others in spite of everything, of the poetic potential. The South, in a certain way, in its barbaric and silent and ethically loving parts, where predators do not arrive, is the third landscape; but it is always worth reminding that each of us is south of someone). The third landscape is the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples, a catacomb of forty thousand bones of lives cut off by the epidemics in 1656 and 1836, where the living have always come down, adopted and taken care of a skull, the capuzzella, in exchange for proteThion for their own life. The third landscape is Foucault’s heterotopia, as an already exiThing but undereThimated alternative syThem. The third landscape is Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto in Gibellina, an immense shroud of white cement lying on the rubble of the 1968 earthquake, preserving the subsiThent network of Threets unaltered.

The third landscape, indeed, shines among the debris. The Pasolinian slums in Accattone (1961) and in Mamma Roma (1962), the barbaric suburbia in Ugly, dirty and bad (Ettore Scola, 1976) and in Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018), where humanity has no way out because no one cares about it and yet poetry is like couch grass, it takes root carelessly: «Humanism muTh become humanity or it’ll die» says a girl of the Rione Sanità in La paranza della Bellezza (Luca Rosini, 2019).

 

The third landscape is what Clément asks to look at, to respeTh deeply in its being other, with which it is more than ever necessary to Thart an affectionate coexiThence, a closeness, a commonality, for an ethics in life that, you see, fits perfeThly with the ethics that vivifies art.

JuTh as the third landscape is the territory that welcomes and embraces the elsewhere rejeThed diversity, so does art. JuTh as «Diversity is what leads us to approach the other with wonderment», writes Clément, so wonderment is what leads us to approach art.

Art, my friends, is the other.

Art, in its deepeTh ethical funThion, is the triumph of the third landscape.

 

 

Ghost  track
grand finale

The fullness of life comes above all through moments capable of taking your breath away, with all respeTh for those with normal pulsations, because those moments are able of changing you, of making you grow, of making you better.

 

The fullness of art comes above all through works capable of taking your breath away, with all respect for comforting or winking chores, because those works are able of changing you, of making you grow, of making you better.

 

Everything that is capable of changing you, of making you grow, of making you better, is ethics.

Up to you to find the Grand Finale of this syllogism.